Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll. In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed that ‘things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,’ up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2003. Although the public mood has been darkening since the early days of the war in Iraq, it has taken a new turn for the worse in the last few months, as the economy has seemed to slip into recession. There is now nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems. A majority of nearly every demographic and political group - Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school - say that the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off. The dissatisfaction is especially striking because public opinion usually hits its low […]
EUGENE, Ore. — Researchers recovered human DNA dating back 14,300 years from dried excrement found in Oregon’s Paisley Caves. Anthropologist Dennis Jenkins of the University of Oregon said the DNA is the oldest ever found in the New World, the university said Thursday in a release. Jenkins and an international team of scientists said the DNA has apparent genetic ties to Siberia or Asia. The findings are published online in Science Express. ‘The Paisley Cave material represents, to the best of my knowledge, the oldest human DNA obtained from the Americas,’ Eske Willerslev, director of the Centre for Ancient Genetics at Denmark’s University of Copenhagen, said in a statement. ‘Other pre-Clovis sites have been claimed, but no human DNA has been obtained, mostly because no human organic material had been recovered.’ The DNA testing indicated that the feces belonged to humans in haplogroups A2 and B2, haplogroups common in Siberia and east Asia.
BAGHDAD - More than 1,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen either refused to fight or simply abandoned their posts during the inconclusive assault against Shiite militias in Basra last week, a senior Iraqi government official said Thursday. Iraqi military officials said the group included dozens of officers, including at least two senior field commanders in the battle. The desertions in the heat of a major battle cast fresh doubt on the effectiveness of the American-trained Iraqi security forces. The White House has conditioned further withdrawals of American troops on the readiness of the Iraqi military and police. The crisis created by the desertions and other problems with the Basra operation was serious enough that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki hastily began funneling some 10,000 recruits from local Shiite tribes into his armed forces. That move has already generated anger among Sunni tribesmen whom Mr. Maliki has been much less eager to recruit despite their cooperation with the government in its fight against Sunni insurgents and criminal gangs. A British military official said that Mr. Maliki had brought 6,600 reinforcements to Basra to join the 30,000 security personnel already stationed there, and a senior American military official said that […]
NEW YORK — Corn prices jumped to a record $6 a bushel Thursday, driven up by an expected supply shortfall that will only add to Americans’ growing grocery bill and further squeeze struggling ethanol producers. Corn prices have shot up nearly 30 percent this year amid dwindling stockpiles and surging demand for the grain used to feed livestock and make alternative fuels including ethanol. Prices are poised to go even higher after the U.S. government this week predicted that American farmers — the world’s biggest corn producers — will plant sharply less of the crop in 2008 compared to last year. ‘It’s a demand-driven market and we may not be planting enough acres to supply demand, so that adds to the bullishness of corn,’ said Elaine Kub, a grains analyst with DTN in Omaha, Neb. Corn for the most actively traded May contract rose 4.25 cents to settle at $6 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade, after earlier rising to $6.025 a bushel — a new all-time high. Worldwide demand for corn to feed livestock and to make biofuel is putting enormous pressure on global supply. And with the U.S. expected to plant less […]
WASHINGTON — The notion that guzzling glasses of water to flood yourself with good health is all wet, researchers said on Wednesday. Dr. Stanley Goldfarb and Dr. Dan Negoianu of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia reviewed the scientific literature on the health effects of drinking lots of water. People in hot, dry climates and athletes have an increased need for water, and people with certain diseases do better with increased fluid intake, they found. But for average healthy people, more water does not seem to mean better health, they said. Their scientific review, published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, is the latest to undercut the recommendations advanced by some experts to drink eight glasses of 8 ounces (225 ml) of water a day. Dr. Heinz Valtin of Dartmouth Medical School in 2002 also put those recommendations to the test, finding them to be more urban myth than medical dogma and lacking in scientific basis. Goldfarb and Negoianu examined what Goldfarb called ‘four major myths’ regarding claims of a benefit for extra water drinking: that it leads to more toxin excretion, improves skin tone, makes one less hungry and reduces headache […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
