As our nation prepares to ring in the new year, the U.S. Census Bureau today projected the Jan. 1, 2008, population will be 303,146,284 — up 2,842,103 or 0.9 percent from New Year’s Day 2007. In January, the United States is expected to register one birth every eight seconds and one death every 11 seconds. Meanwhile, migration is expected to increase in the total U.S. population of one person every 13 seconds.
Three hundred and fifty years ago today, religious freedom was born on this continent. Yes, 350 years. Religious tolerance did not begin with the Bill of Rights or with Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom in 1786. With due respect to Roger Williams and his early experiment with ‘liberty of conscience’ in Rhode Island, this republic really owes its enduring strength to a fragile, scorched and little-known document that was signed by some 30 ordinary citizens on Dec. 27, 1657. It is fitting that the Flushing Remonstrance should be associated with Dutch settlements, because they were the most tolerant in the New World. The Netherlands had enshrined freedom of conscience in 1579, when it clearly established that ‘no one shall be persecuted or investigated because of his religion.’ And when the Dutch West India Company set up a trading post at the southern tip of Manhattan in 1625, the purpose was to make money, not to save souls. Because the founding idea was trade, the directors of the firm took pains to ensure that all were welcome. For example, while the Massachusetts Bay Colony was enforcing Puritan orthodoxy, there were no religious tests in the Dutch colony. So […]
The future political map of America is likely to look a lot different, with much of the so-called ‘red’ state region either gone or depopulated. Say what you will about the looming catastrophe facing the world as the pace of global heating and polar melting accelerates. There is a silver lining. Look at a map of the US. The area that will by completely inundated by the rising ocean-and not in a century but in the lifetime of my two cats-are the American southeast, including the most populated area of Texas, almost all of Florida, most of Louisiana, and half of Alabama and Mississippi, as well as goodly portions of eastern Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. While the northeast will also see some coastal flooding, its geography is such that that aside from a few projecting sandbars like Long Island and Cape Cod, the land rises fairly quickly to well above sea level. Sure, Boston, New York and Philadelphia will be threatened, but these are geographically confined areas that could lend themselves to protection by Dutch-style dikes. The West Coast too tends to rise rapidly to well above sea level in most places. Only down in Southern […]
WASHINGTON — With virtually no oil or natural gas resources of its own, Germany relies on Russia for 20 percent of its oil and one-third of its gas imports. But with Russia displaying a willingness to use oil as a political weapon, Germany is placing new emphasis on achieving energy independence – especially by developing alternative energy sources. As part of his series on the politics of oil, VOA’s Brian Padden reports how German efforts to reduce pollution have led to new ways to produce energy. Wind turbines dot the landscape in rural Germany. In some regions, wind energy produces up to 20 percent of the electricity used in German power grids. Engineer Hendrich Ziese says how much a single turbine can produce depends on the weather. ‘When we have good days, we can [produce] 20,000 kilowatts per hour,’ Ziese said. ‘On bad days we make nothing.’ Germany began investing heavily in alternative energy to meet the targets set out in the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 global environmental agreement to reduce greenhouse gases. Germany has achieved a 19 percent reduction in CO2 emissions, in part by […]
CAIRO, Egypt — In Iran, a large red icon pops up on computer screens. In Syria, there’s a discreet note from the filter. Other Arab nations display ‘blocked’ in bold lettering or issue crafty ‘page not found’ replies. However the censors put it, the message is clear: You’re not permitted to see this Web site. Governments in the Middle East are stepping up a campaign of censorship and surveillance in an effort to prevent an estimated 33.5 million Internet users from viewing a variety of Web sites whose topics range from human rights to pornography. As a result, millions of Middle Easterners are finding it harder by the day to access popular news and entertainment sites such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr. Five of the world’s top-13 Internet censors are in the Middle East, according to the most recent report from Reporters Without Borders, the journalism advocacy group that lobbies against Web censorship. ‘The Web makes networking much easier, for political activists as well as teenagers,’ Reporters Without Borders said in its annual report for 2007. ‘Unfortunately, this progress and use of new tools by activists is now being matched by the efforts of dictatorships […]
