It’s just straws in the wind so far. India’s Ministry of Culture announces that foreign tourists can no longer pay in dollars when visiting the Taj Mahal and other heritage sites; they have to pay in good, hard rupees. Iran and Venezuela call for a joint OPEC statement on the weak US dollar. Rap star Jay-Z’s latest video shows our hero flashing a wad of euros, not dollars. Only straws in the wind, but all in the past couple of weeks. For the majority of Americans who do not travel abroad, the only visible effect so far of the dollar’s steep fall has been higher fuel prices at the pump. The Chinese imports that fill the big-box stores still cost the same, because the Chinese yuan is still pegged to the American dollar. But that may be about to change, along with many other things. At the beginning of 2003, one euro bought one US dollar. Eighteen months ago, it bought $1.20. Now it is pushing $1.50, and there is no reason to think that it will stop there. Three of the world’s biggest oil exporters, Iran, Venezuela and Russia, are demanding payment in euros rather than dollars. […]
The only known recordings of a brilliant physicist who predicted the existence of parallel universes have been found in the basement of his rock star son’s flat. The tapes document how Hugh Everett, a quantum physicist, developed his idea at the age of 24, while a graduate student at Princeton University in 1957. Everett’s theory gave rise to the concept of a multitude of universes, or a ‘multiverse’, where all life’s possibilities play out. It means that somewhere Elvis is still rocking, the Nazis won the second world war and England qualified for Euro 2008. The recordings are believed to have been made in 1977, after a physics conference at which Everett’s parallel worlds theory was resurrected after being shunned for two decades. The tapes were thought lost after his death at the age of 51 in 1982. They were found during the making of a TV documentary in which Mark Everett, the physicist’s son and lead singer of the US band Eels, attempts to understand the work that consumed his father. The programme, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, airs on BBC4 this evening. The tapes record a conversation between Everett and Charles Misner, a physics professor […]
WASHINGTON — Saudi Arabia’s participation in the U.S.-sponsored talks on Middle East peace was seen as a diplomatic coup for the Bush administration but the kingdom has made clear there will be no handshakes with Israeli officials. ‘We are not here for theater. We are here for the serious business of making peace. We are not here to give an impression that everything is normal,’ Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal told reporters on Monday, on the eve of the conference to be held in Annapolis, Maryland. ‘We will not do anything that will divert from the seriousness of the occasion, (such as) shaking hands to give an impression of something that is not there,’ he said. Saudi Arabia had been noncommittal until last week over whether it would attend the Annapolis conference. The kingdom, which is the birthplace of Islam, has no diplomatic relations with Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert suggested he would not be offended by the lack of handshake, nor would he push the issue. ‘I won’t extend my hand to whoever isn’t ready to shake the hand of the people of Israel,’ Olmert said, referring to the Saudi foreign minister. […]
MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin on Monday accused the United States of trying to taint the legitimacy of next week’s Russian parliamentary elections by pressing a group of prominent independent election observers to abandon efforts to monitor the campaign. Mr. Putin contended that the monitors, who are deployed by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, had halted plans to appraise the parliamentary balloting at the urging of the State Department in Washington. Mr. Putin’s statements in recent weeks have taken on an increasingly nationalistic tone as he has sought to muster support for his party in the elections on Sunday. Speaking to reporters on Monday in St. Petersburg, he once again criticized what he suggested was foreign meddling in Russia’s affairs. ‘According to information we have, it was again done at the recommendation of the U.S. State Department, and we will take this into account in our interstate relations with this country,’ he said. ‘Their goal is the delegitimization of the elections. But they will not achieve even this goal.’ If Russia maintains a robust military, Mr. Putin later added, ‘we will not allow anyone to poke their snotty nose into our affairs.’ […]
A Food and Drug Administration panel on Tuesday will review reports of abnormal behavior and other brain effects in more than 1,800 children who had taken the flu medicine Tamiflu since its approval in 1999, including 55 in the USA. Twenty-two of the U.S. reports were considered ‘serious,’ with symptoms such as convulsions, delirium or delusions, says Terry Hurley, spokesman for drugmaker Roche Laboratories. None of the U.S. cases resulted in death. But in Japan, Hurley says, five deaths have been reported in children under 16 as a result of neurological or psychiatric problems. ‘Four were fatal falls, and one was encephalitis in a patient with leukemia,’ he says. In addition, in people ages 17 to 21, there were two deaths in Japan, one a ‘fatal accident with abnormal behavior,’ Hurley says, and the second as a result of encephalopathy, a brain infection. Seven adult deaths attributed to neuropsychiatric problems also have been reported in Japan. But Hurley says there is no evidence Tamiflu caused the episodes and notes that similar symptoms have been reported in flu patients who had not taken Tamiflu. He says clinical studies have found no increased risk for psychiatric or neurologic […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
