WASHINGTON — James L. Jones, a retired four-star general, was among a mostly Republican crowd watching a presidential debate in October when Barack Obama casually mentioned that he got a lot of his advice on foreign policy from General Jones. ‘Explain yourself! some of the Republicans demanded, as General Jones later recalled it. He did not. A 6-foot-5 Marine Corps commandant with the looks of John Wayne, General Jones is not given to talking about his political bent, be it Republican or Democrat. And yet, he is Mr. Obama’s choice for national security adviser, a job that will make him the main foreign policy sounding board and sage to a president with relatively little foreign policy experience. The selection of General Jones will elevate another foreign policy moderate to a team that will include Robert M. Gates, a carry-over from the Bush administration, as defense secretary and Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state. By bringing a military man to the White House, Mr. Obama may be trying to cement an early bond with military leaders who regard him with some uneasiness, particularly over his call for rapid troop reductions in Iraq. But General Jones will […]
LONDON — Mice fed junk food for nine months showed signs of developing the abnormal brain tangles strongly associated with Alzheimer’s disease, a Swedish researcher said on Friday. The findings, which come from a series of published papers by a researcher at Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet, show how a diet rich in fat, sugar and cholesterol could increase the risk of the most common type of dementia. ‘On examining the brains of these mice, we found a chemical change not unlike that found in the Alzheimer brain,’ Susanne Akterin, a researcher at the Karolinska Institutet’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, who led the study, said in a statement. ‘We now suspect that a high intake of fat and cholesterol in combination with genetic factors … can adversely affect several brain substances, which can be a contributory factor in the development of Alzheimer’s.’ Alzheimer’s disease is incurable and is the most common form of dementia among older people. It affects the regions of the brain involving thought, memory and language. While the most advanced drugs have focused on removing clumps of beta amyloid protein that forms plaques in the brain, researchers are also now looking at therapies to […]
Barely a couple of weeks ago my stepsister, Shalaka, got married at the Taj hotel in Mumbai. Last Wednesday night my stepfather, Ajit, called to pay the bill. When he arrived home 10 minutes later he realised he had left his mobile phone charger behind, so he called Mandira, the Taj banquet manager. ‘I can’t speak now, sir, she said. ‘We’re under attack. Ajit lives in a building next door to Mumbai’s other big hotel, the Oberoi. Within a few moments, he heard gunshots from there too. In the 48 hours that followed, his neighbourhood was sealed off and his building came under attack. In the windows of the Oberoi he saw deserted rooms, half-drawn curtains, fires, brown smoke and gunmen moving from floor to floor. By Friday, he knew that three chefs who had worked at his daughter’s wedding and the family of the Taj’s general manager were dead. Friends of his sisters had also been killed. As terrorist attacks went - and Mumbai has known several in the past few years - it didn’t come much closer to home than this. My stepfather’s reaction came in the form of a text message the […]
The green view based on small sources and market power will give way to one based on scale and subsidies. The winds of economic destruction are flattening not just retirement accounts but also naive visions for a green economy. Public support for costly new green mandates is weakening, and government budgets to fund them are bleeding red ink. Plummeting prices of oil and other fossil fuels have made it harder for green to compete in the marketplace. IPOs of firms working on ‘clean tech’ green energy that have fueled fantasies of the coming energy revolution have crashed to a halt. In all the bad economic news, a new face of green is coming into focus. Whereas the old view of green tech was based on many small, decentralized sources of power and a green economy that harnessed the power of the marketplace, the new version will rely more heavily on regulation and subsidies. It will also embrace the wisdom, true in most of the energy business, that bigger is better for weathering economic storms. The market, it’s now clear, is not a reliable force for driving the adoption of green technologies. Just as the role of government is rising […]
World financial systems took extreme risks that stunned us all. We will pay the consequences. We react with alarm to the collapse on Wall Street, but the collapse of our ecosystems often receives only passing consideration. We will all pay the consequences of this, too, now and in the future. Accustomed to the availability of our natural resources, we think of them as free and take them for granted. But, a decade ago, the World Resources Institute estimated an annual global price tag of $33 trillion dollars for ecosystem services. These services would be expensive, difficult or impossible to obtain without functioning ecosystems. We rely upon them to provide clean water and air, cycle carbon and other nutrients, and decompose wastes. We have squandered these valuable resources. Between 40 and 50 percent of the Earth’s ice-free land surface is damaged by human activity. Carbon dioxide emissions increased 3.1 percent per year between 2000 and 2006, more than twice the growth rate of the 1990s, despite unambiguous evidence that it was causing climate change and disrupting ecosystems worldwide. Utah can expect to warm faster than other parts of the world, a trend that would result in decreased […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
