The US Treasury said Thursday it had struck a series of agreements with big sovereign wealth funds based in Abu Dhabi and Singapore on investments in US markets. The agreements covering investment principles were hammered out following a meeting here between US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and Abu Dhabi and Singapore government officials. ‘We had a good discussion today on the issues surrounding sovereign wealth funds. Singapore and UAE have long-established, well-respected funds and are showing real leadership by joining with us today,’ Paulson said. The agreements encourage sovereign wealth funds to be more transparent and to base their investment decisions on commercial grounds among other measures. ‘The US welcomes sovereign wealth fund investment and looks forward to continuing to work with these two countries and others to support the initiatives underway at the IMF and OECD to develop best practices for sovereign wealth funds and recipient countries,’ the US Treasury chief said. The agreements governing sovereign wealth funds were released by the Treasury after Paulson met Singapore’s finance minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam, government of Abu Dhabi executive council member Hamad Al Hurr Al Suwaidi and other officials at the Treasury. The International Monetary Fund […]
ATLANTA , Georgia — If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, then Mars is a land where the refrigerators are stocked with meat and frozen pizza and Venus has a bounty of yogurt, fruits and vegetables, a new study suggests. art.asparagus.jpg Men in the survey were much more likely than women to eat asparagus; researchers don’t know why. The study of eating habits of American adults — called the most extensive of its kind — was a telephone survey of 14,000 Americans. It confirmed conventional wisdom that most men eat more meat than women, and women eat more fruits and vegetables. But there were a few surprising exceptions: Men were much more likely to eat asparagus, brussels sprouts, peas and peanuts. They also were bigger consumers of frozen pizzas, frozen hamburgers and frozen Mexican dinners. Women are more likely than men to eat eggs, yogurt and fresh hamburgers. Men also showed a little more of an appetite for runny eggs and undercooked hamburgers — two foods that health experts say carry a higher chance of contamination that can make you sick. Women were more likely than men to eat only one […]
Scientists monitoring sea ice around the high Arctic and glaciers on the world’s highest mountains are detecting ominous new changes linked to the warming global climate, they reported Tuesday. The Arctic’s thin and salty seasonal sea ice that freezes and thaws in the far north every year actually spread more widely this past winter, but the team of NASA scientists keeping watch over the ice by satellite said the much thicker perennial ice that normally remains throughout the Arctic summer has grown much thinner and some is already melting and drifting southward as winter ends. In a related development, scientists at the World Glacier Monitoring Service, based at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, reported that some 30 major glaciers around the world are shrinking fast, threatening to increase floods in some regions and to decrease precious water supplies in others. The extent of total sea ice – both thick and thin – around the North Pole reached an all-time low last year – nearly 25 percent less than the record low set two years earlier. This winter, the area of short-lived thin seasonal ice increased due to an episode of somewhat colder-than-average sea surface temperatures, but […]
Science and religion have often been at loggerheads. Now the former has decided to resolve the problem by trying to explain the existence of the latter By the standards of European scientific collaboration, €2m ($3.1m) is not a huge sum. But it might be the start of something that will challenge human perceptions of reality at least as much as the billions being spent by the European particle-physics laboratory (CERN) at Geneva. The first task of CERN’s new machine, the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to open later this year, will be to search for the Higgs boson-an object that has been dubbed, with a certain amount of hyperbole, the God particle. The €2m, by contrast, will be spent on the search for God Himself-or, rather, for the biological reasons why so many people believe in God, gods and religion in general. ‘Explaining Religion’, as the project is known, is the largest-ever scientific study of the subject. It began last September, will run for three years, and involves scholars from 14 universities and a range of disciplines from psychology to economics. And it is merely the latest manifestation of a growing tendency for science to poke its […]
About 60 percent of married individuals received financial support from their parents or their spouse’s parents over the past year, a survey has found. The survey, conducted by Nihon University Population Research Institute between April and July last year, covered 9,000 married people aged between 20 and 59 across the nation. Of them, 4,624 responded. Surprisingly, more than half of married people in their 50s (51.2 percent) said they were financially supported by their parents or their spouse’s parents. ‘Once you reach your 50s, your income peaks out, while you have more expenses for ceremonial occasions such as weddings or funerals. Therefore, many people turn to their parents — who have income from pensions and investments — for financial support,’ said Naohiro Ogawa, head of the research institute. ‘The results of the survey seem to imply that families still support one another despite the increase in nuclear families,’ Ogawa said. By age, couples in their 20s received the most financial support from their parents, at 65.8 percent, while more than half of couples aged between their 30s and 50s also received economic assistance from their parents, the survey has found. Overall, 56.1 percent said […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
