NEW YORK (AP) — Add an extra zero to the ranks of the millionaires club. The number of people around the world with at least $1 million in assets passed 10 million for the first time last year, according to a new report. And their bank accounts are growing even faster. The combined wealth of the globe’s millionaires grew to nearly $41 trillion last year, an increase of 9 percent from a year before, Merrill Lynch & Co. and consulting firm Capgemini Group said Tuesday. That means their average wealth was more than $4 million, the highest it’s ever been. Home values were not included in asset totals. ‘The growth of their wealth is outpacing the growth of their population, and that’s a trend that’s going to continue in coming years,’ said Ileana Van Der Linde, a principal with Capgemini. The ranks of the wealthy are growing fastest in the developing economies of India, China and Brazil. The number of millionaires in India grew by about 23 percent. The United States still reigns supreme when it comes to fat wallets, though: One in every three millionaires in the world lives in America. Combined, Africa, […]
WASHINGTON — The Everglades of southern Florida, which have been under siege from development and farming for more than a century, have been offered a new lease on life with a plan to restore large areas to a natural, swampy state. Some 187,000 acres of sugar plantation will be gradually returned to nature under the plan. The hope of environmentalists is that the slow-moving ‘river of grass’ will flow north to south once again, restoring a delicate ecosystem that supplies fresh water to the aquifers of southern Florida. Yesterday’s deal was described as ‘an unprecedented opportunity to completely rewrite the course of Everglades,’ by Jeff Danter of the Nature Conservancy. The long-planned restoration effort is the largest of its kind in the world, an attempt to undo and reroute decades of flood-control projects that have diverted water to make way for growth. Until yesterday, the prohibitive cost meant the plan was moribund. According to the author Michael Grunwald, half of the original Everglades has been lost, and the rest is polluted and no longer flowing naturally. Just 100 years ago southern Florida was America’s last frontier, a watery wilderness of slow-moving, shallow rivers. It had the […]
Battered by soaring fertiliser prices and rioting rice farmers, the global food industry may also have to deal with a potentially catastrophic future shortage of phosphorus, scientists say. Researchers in Australia, Europe and the United States have given warning that the element, which is essential to all living things, is at the heart of modern farming and has no synthetic alternative, is being mined, used and wasted as never before. Massive inefficiencies in the ‘farm-to-fork’ processing of food and the soaring appetite for meat and dairy produce across Asia is stoking demand for phosphorus faster and further than anyone had predicted. ‘Peak phosphorus’, say scientists, could hit the world in just 30 years. Crop-based biofuels, whose production methods and usage suck phosphorus out of the agricultural system in unprecedented volumes, have, researchers in Brazil say, made the problem many times worse. Already, India is running low on matches as factories run short of phosphorus; the Brazilian Government has spoken of a need to nationalise privately held mines that supply the fertiliser industry and Swedish scientists are busily redesigning toilets to separate and collect urine in an attempt to conserve the precious element. Dana Cordell, a senior researcher […]
Google Inc., owner of the world’s most popular search engine, said it’s on schedule to deliver the first mobile phones that run its Android operating system to customers by the second half of this year. Momentum for the project is building from carriers, handset makers, developers and consumers, Mountain View, California-based Google said today in an e-mailed statement. Google is developing Android — which will let users check e-mail, search the Web and watch videos on their phones — to compete with systems offered by Microsoft Corp., Apple Inc. and Research In Motion Ltd. Online advertising on phones in the U.S. may jump to $4.8 billion by 2011 from $1.6 billion this year, according to New York-based research firm EMarketer Inc. “They look at mobile as one of the emerging, multi-decade opportunities,” Scott Kessler, an analyst with Standard & Poor’s in New York, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “This is about market share for Google right now.” Google fell $1.22 to $545.21 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The stock has dropped 21 percent this year. The Wall Street Journal reported today that Android is experiencing delays as wireless […]
For newspapers, the news has swiftly gone from bad to worse. This year is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in advertising revenue, raising serious questions about the survival of some papers and the solvency of their parent companies. Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding two years ago, and as hiring freezes turned to buyouts and then to layoffs, the decline has only accelerated. On top of long-term changes in the industry, the weak economy is also hurting ad sales, especially in Florida and California, where the severe contraction of the housing markets has cut deeply into real estate ads. Executives at the Hearst Corporation say that one of their biggest papers, The San Francisco Chronicle, is losing $1 million a week. Over all, ad revenue fell almost 8 percent last year. This year, it is running about 12 percent below that dismal performance, and company reports issued last week suggested a 14 percent to 15 percent decline in May. ‘Never in my most bearish dreams six months ago did I think we’d be talking about negative 15 percent numbers against weak comps,’ said Peter S. Appert, […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
