LONDON and BANGKOK — Rice prices jumped 30 per cent to an all-time high on Thursday, raising fears of fresh outbreaks of social unrest across Asia where the grain is a staple food for more than 2.5bn people. The increase came after Egypt, a leading exporter, imposed a formal ban on selling rice abroad to keep local prices down, and the Philippines announced plans for a major purchase of the grain in the international market to boost supplies. Global rice stocks are at their lowest since 1976. On Friday the Indian government imposed further restrictions on the exports of rice to combat rising local inflation, with traders warning that the new regime would de facto stop all India’s non-basmati rice sales. The measures include raising the minimum price for selling abroad non-basmati rice by 53 per cent to $1,000 a tonne. Exports of premium basmati rice are likely to continue, although volumes could also suffer as the government also increased the minimum export price and scrapped export tax incentives. While prices of wheat, corn and other agricultural commodities have surged since late 2006, the increase in rice prices only started in January. The Egyptian export […]
CHICAGO — Older Americans have more money and are expected to live far longer than prior generations, U.S. government researchers said on Thursday. They said the average net worth of older Americans — those 65 or older — has increased almost 80 percent over the past 20 years. And those who reach the age of 65 are now expected to live an average of 19 more years, or seven years longer than people who had reached age 65 in the year 1900. The findings are part a report released on Thursday called Older Americans 2008: Key Indicators of Well-Being, which features data from 15 federal agencies on trends in population, economics and health issues. ‘It gives you a status report of the older population,’ said Richard Suzman of the National Institute on Aging, a part of the National Institutes of Health. ‘We’ve seen significant improvements in poverty. The percent of those with low income has gone down, education has increased, life expectancy has increased,’ Suzman said. ‘But there are some notes of concern. Obesity has gone up quite significantly. And there are some large disparities. The life expectancy gap between whites and blacks has […]
SAN ANTONIO, Texas — The head of the top U.S. phone company AT&T Inc (T.N) said on Wednesday it was having trouble finding enough skilled workers to fill all the 5,000 customer service jobs it promised to return to the United States from India. ‘We’re having trouble finding the numbers that we need with the skills that are required to do these jobs,’ AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson told a business group in San Antonio, where the company’s headquarters is located. So far, only around 1,400 jobs have been returned to the United States of 5,000, a target it set in 2006, the company said, adding that it maintains the target. Stephenson said he is especially distressed that in some U.S. communities and among certain groups, the high school dropout rate is as high as 50 percent. ‘If I had a business that half the product we turned out was defective or you couldn’t put into the marketplace, I would shut that business down,’ he said. Gone are the days when AT&T and other U.S. companies had to hire locally, he said. ‘We’re able to do new product engineering in Bangalore as easily as […]
Since 2006, when the insurgency in Afghanistan sharply intensified, the Afghan government has been dependent on American logistics and military support in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur. With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces. Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed. In purchasing munitions, the contractor has also worked with middlemen and […]
As if the science of how genetics leads to disease isn’t already complex enough, researchers in Seattle and Long Island, N.Y., say individuals appear to develop schizophrenia from a varying smorgasbord of bad genes rather than common genetic flaws. Scientists at the University of Washington and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory report in Friday’s edition of Science magazine that multiple errors or deletions in a person’s genetic code, or DNA, can lead to schizophrenia — a psychiatric illness characterized by delusions and disordered thinking that today affects one out of every 100 people. The finding that multiple genes are involved is, by itself, not surprising since other diseases or disorders are, or strongly appear to be, the result of many flaws rather than just a single bad gene. That fits nicely within the standard dogma of genetics. What is surprising, challenging to the dogma and perhaps confusing to many experts who study the interplay between genetics and neuroscience, is that the UW-Cold Spring Harbor team found strong evidence that it’s usually not the same set of genes going bad in a person who develops schizophrenia. ‘It’s different genes in different people,’ said Dr. Jon ‘Jack’ McClellan, a […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
