LOS ANGELES — Another day brings another funeral in Mexico. The death toll from violence has already passed 2,700 this year Another day brings another funeral in Mexico. The death toll from violence has already passed 2,700 this year Eleven decapitated bodies have been found outside the city of Merida on the Yucatan peninsula, heightening fears that Mexico’s recent descent into violence has reached even heavily protected tourist areas. All the bodies showed signs of torture and were tattooed with star signs and the letter ‘Z’, suggesting that they had fallen victim to the country’s growing drug war, which has left more than 2,700 dead so far this year. Merida is a popular stop-off point for tourists on their way to visit the Mayan pyramids at Chichen Itza. On the other side of the Yucatan peninsula is Cancun, a Las Vegas-style holiday destination popular with US tourists; an hour or so farther south of Cancun is the resort town of Playa del Carmen, where many US hotel chains have built five-star properties. Perhaps inspired by the insurgency in Iraq, Mexican drug gangs have started to use mass beheadings as a macabre public relations tool. […]
In the wake of the first Gulf War, the U.S. Army assessed Saudi Arabia’s solar energy resource potential in a classified effort to determine how oil fires had affected the region. The results were clear and surprising. In addition to being a vast petroleum repository, the desert nation was also the heart of the most potentially productive region on the planet for harvesting power from the sun. In other words, Saudi Arabia was the Saudi Arabia of solar energy. Sitting in the center of the so-called Sun Belt, the country is part of a vast, rainless region reaching from the western edge of North Africa to the eastern edge of Central Asia that boasts the best solar energy resources on Earth. With the cost of oil skyrocketing, this belt is attracting the attention of a growing number of European leaders, who are embracing an ambitious proposal to harvest this solar energy for their nations. The irony is inescapable and the story a familiar one, as the developed world again turns to the less developed countries in hopes of powering their economies. More important, it highlights an unappreciated implication of a solar-powered economy: The end of the oil […]
POTI, Georgia - Weeks before Russia invaded Georgia earlier this month, excavators in this key Black Sea port began to lay the ground for a $200 million tax-free zone to triple the port’s capacity and create, Georgian officials said, the Dubai of the Caucasus. Some of that soft green earth now is occupied by Russian tanks and soldiers camped behind huge, freshly dug trenches, within firing range of ships approaching the port. A second Russian checkpoint is about a mile away, along a river that’s sometimes used to ferry goods into eastern Georgia. The Russian presence is a stark illustration of how this 150-year-old port, which handles millions of tons of cargo moving between Europe and Central Asia, is now a key pressure point in the standoff between Russia and the West. The port is functioning normally again, despite numerous news reports to the contrary and the claim by Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili - most recently in Thursday’s Financial Times - that Russia continues ‘to occupy’ Poti. The Persian Gulf-funded expansion project is now on hold, however, and major questions remain about the Kremlin’s intentions here. On Wednesday the United States shelved plans to unload 38 […]
Psystar representatives said they filed a countersuit against Apple on Thursday, arguing that a market could exist for third-party Mac clones, if not for the legal and technical barriers that Apple has set up. Psystar charged Apple with restraint of trade, unfair competition and other violations of antitrust law in a 54-page complaint filed in the Northern California Division of the United States District Court and emailed to reporters. In April, Psystar began selling the so-called OpenMac, a name that was eventually changed to the ‘Open Computer’. The Open Computer uses a modified version of Apple’s OS X, according to Apple’s suit, and provided unauthorized patches that Apple claimed were simply copied from its own Web site. A similar Openserv server sold by Psystar allegedly used the Mac OS X Server edition. In a suit filed July 8 in a California district court, Apple charged Psystar with eight claims of copyright infringement, breach of contract, trademark and trade infringement, and unfair competition. But Psystar shot back this week, arguing that Apple itself should be forced to allow competition. Psystar argued that a third party, like itself, could build a generic computer that used the Apple OS, […]
WASHINGTON — Personal incomes plunged in July while consumer spending slowed significantly as the impact of billions of dollars in government rebate checks began to wane. The Commerce Department reported Friday that personal incomes fell by 0.7 percent in July, the biggest drop in nearly three years and a far larger decline than the 0.1 percent decrease analysts expected. Consumer spending edged up a modest 0.2 percent, in line with expectations, but far below June’s 0.6 percent rise. When the impact of rising prices was factored in, spending actually dropped by 0.4 percent in July, the weakest showing for inflation-adjusted spending in more than four years. The July performance for incomes and spending reinforced worries that the economy, which posted better-than-expected growth in the spring because of the rebate checks, could stumble in coming months as their impact fades. Some economists worry that overall economic growth, which rose at a 3.3 percent annual rate from April-June, could come in at less than half that pace in the current quarter, and could actually dip into negative territory in the final three months of this year and the first quarter of 2009. Back-to-back declines in the gross […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
