Liberal and progressive religious voices have become increasingly prominent in the 2008 presidential campaign. To complement a recent Forum-sponsored panel discussion on the ‘religious left,’ Associate Director Mark O’Keefe asked Senior Fellow John Green to define the various groups that make up the religious left movement and talk about implications for the ‘religious right.’ Featuring: John Green, Senior Fellow in Religion and American Politics, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life Interviewer: Mark O’Keefe, Associate Director, Web Editorial, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life For years we have been hearing about the ‘religious right’ and its impact on American politics, but liberal and progressive religious voices are becoming increasingly prominent in media reports and at campaign stops. What is happening? There is considerable evidence that the group often called the ‘religious left’ is more active in the 2008 presidential campaign than in the recent past. There has been a spate of books talking about religion and progressive politics, such as Jim Wallis’ God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, Michael Lerner’s The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right and Marcia Ford’s […]
MIAMI — From ‘Scarface’ to ‘Miami Vice,’ Florida’s drug problem has been portrayed as the story of a single narcotic: cocaine. But for Floridians, prescription drugs are increasingly a far more lethal habit. An analysis of autopsies in 2007 released this week by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission found that the rate of deaths caused by prescription drugs was three times the rate of deaths caused by all illicit drugs combined. Law enforcement officials said that the shift toward prescription-drug abuse, which began here about eight years ago, showed no sign of letting up and that the state must do more to control it. ‘You have health care providers involved, you have doctor shoppers, and then there are crimes like robbing drug shipments,’ said Jeff Beasley, a drug intelligence inspector for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which co-sponsored the study. ‘There is a multitude of ways to get these drugs, and that’s what makes things complicated.’ The report’s findings track with similar studies by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which has found that roughly seven million Americans are abusing prescription drugs. If accurate, that would be an increase of 80 percent in six years […]
The company’s plan for what it calls the world’s ‘highest-performing, lowest-cost’ sun-energy system is being tested in Israel. By Richard Boudreaux Los Angeles Times Staff Writer DIMONA, ISRAEL – On the scorched floor of Israel’s Negev Desert blooms a field of 1,640 robotic mirrors that behave like sunflowers. Slightly larger than pingpong tables and guided by a computer, they turn imperceptibly to follow the sun and focus its rays on the pinnacle of a 200-foot tower, where a water boiler will soon start producing high-pressure steam. This futuristic assembly is Arnold Goldman’s scale model and testing ground for five larger solar fields his company plans to build in the Mojave Desert to supply up to 900 megawatts of clean energy to California in the next decade. Goldman is a UCLA- and USC-schooled Israeli entrepreneur who built the world’s leading solar thermal power company, Luz International, in the 1980s, then watched it go bankrupt in 1991 as oil prices dropped and California decided not to renew property tax credits for solar producers. Now he’s a player again, and his comeback illustrates the extent to which solar thermal power is regaining favor with policymakers and […]
NEW YORK — Corn prices climbed further into record territory Thursday after more rain doused the Midwest, leaving flooded corn crops deeper underwater and threatening livestock owners who depend on the grain to feed their herds. Other commodities traded mixed, with crude oil ending slightly higher and gold, silver and copper all declining. Heavy showers pelted parts of the Corn Belt on Wednesday, dumping a half inch to 2.5 inches of water over already-flooded parts of Iowa, Nebraska and Minnesota. ‘It was even more devastating. It drowns out more corn and doesn’t help the corn that didn’t drown out,’ said Jason Ward, analyst with Northstar Commodity in Minneapolis. Six weeks of rain have flooded untold acres of corn and soybean fields in the U.S. heartland, forcing farmers to abandon their crops and sending international food prices skyward. More bad weather is expected for Illinois, Indiana and Ohio on Thursday, forecasters say, meaning prices may could climb higher. Corn for July delivery rose 5.75 cents to settle at $7.09 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade, after earlier rising to a new all-time high of $7.25 a bushel. It was corn’s sixth straight trading […]
PARIS — There is good news and bad news for President George W. Bush as he pursues his valedictory tour of Europe this week, according to a new worldwide study by the Pew Global Attitudes Project. On the one hand, the image of the United States has improved slightly in many countries over the past year. On the other, the new optimism appears to be driven largely by the fact that Bush will soon be leaving office. In addition, while the prospect of Bush’s departure and the excitement of the U.S. primary contest have helped the image of the United States, a worldwide surge in concern about slumping economic conditions and a widespread view that the U.S. economy is harming local economies may tarnish it. Survey respondents also tend to see the United States as the main offender in global warming, Pew said. ‘There has been no sea change in world views of the United States,’ Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, said of the results, which were issued Thursday. ‘Europeans are still much more negative than they were at the beginning of the decade, and highly negative views prevail in the Muslim world. […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
