NAROK, Kenya — More than 200 of Ole Saloli’s cows have died, ruining his children’s inheritance and his safety net for old age. Now he wanders miles seeking pasture for the surviving animals, his bare feet as cracked and dry as the Kenyan earth he sleeps upon. Saloli, who estimates he is around 80 years old, has seen many droughts. But he says they have gotten much, much worse since the devastation of the Mau Forest began. ‘Mau Forest was created by God to make it rain and now people are destroying it,’ Saloli said bitterly as he watched his 50 remaining cows searching for forage in the dust. The United Nations Environment Program estimates 10 million Kenyans depend on the rivers that flow out of the Mau Forest to irrigate their crops, provide electricity through hydroelectric dams, or supply water for the wild animals that draw hundreds of thousands of cash-flush tourists. But charcoal burners, loggers and farmers are felling the forest’s trees. A quarter already has been cut down, and long-simmering tensions over land, water and politics complicate the struggle to save the rest. The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that more […]
PARIS — Not war but drought has forced more than 100,000 people in northern Iraq to abandon their homes since 2005, with 36,000 more on the verge of leaving, UNESCO said Tuesday. The four-year drought and excessive well pumping have led to the collapse of an ancient system of underground aqueducts, or karez, as they are known in Iraq. Only 116 of 683 karez systems are currently operational, according to a study by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. The study says 70 percent of active karez have dried up. The Paris-based organization says the study, the first to research the effects of the droughts on the system of underground aqueducts, concludes that ‘swift and urgent action is needed to prevent further population displacement.’ UNESCO said it considers the plight of the karez system and the migration as an early warning sign for the future of water in the area. The study provides the Iraqi government with its first inventory of karez, UNESCO said, 84 percent of which are located in Sulaymaniyah and 13 percent in Erbil province. A karez can produce enough drinking water for 8,640 people and 1,440 households, UNESCO said. The technology […]
Armed violence is now flaring on several fronts in Pakistan: the government is fighting the Taliban in the West, militant groups in the Punjab region are collaborating on attacks in the East, and everyday Pakistanis are caught in the middle. And in Washington, President Barack Obama is deciding whether to escalate the war next door in Afghanistan. To make sense of the increasingly perilous situation, NEWSWEEK’s Andrew Bast talked to former CIA officer Bruce Riedel, who is now a senior fellow at the Saban Center, part of the nonprofit Brookings Institution. Excerpts: Stability in Pakistan is an elusive reality. But can we put this in perspective? How bad is it? This is the worst political violence we’ve seen in Pakistan in decades. You say that without qualification? Unqualified. The only time that was worse was in 1971, when half the country broke apart in a civil war. But in practical terms, all of that political violence took place in what is now Bangladesh. We’ve never seen levels of political violence in the cities of Pakistan itself of this caliber since partition in 1947. Our correspondent reports that violence today stems not just from Waziristan in the west […]
The maxim Islam din wa-dawla (Islam is religion and state) is often said to describe a distinguishing mark of Islam — the suggestion being that Islam is a religion with a political mission at its core. Both those who repeat the mantra with approving fervor and those who worry about it assert its essential truth and suggest that all Muslims must make it a part of their worldview. Some go so far as to claim that this axiom calls for a particular form of state structure or political behavior. And yet, of course, the statement is nothing more than a political slogan — an artifact of its time, its meaning contingent on the setting in which it is used, like any other rallying cry. This quality does not make the slogan any less meaningful for the Muslims who subscribe to it; what it does is highlight the fact that this saying reflects a preoccupation with state power in the modern world. The Muslims who adhere to it, no less than those who do not and no less than non-Muslims, are both the products and the makers of that world. This point is worth stating since much of the present […]
Last May in Denver, CO the Vice President asked the White House Council of Environmental Quality (CEQ) to report back to the Middle Class Task Force with a plan to make sure that the unprecedented Recovery Act investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy lay the groundwork for a self-sustaining home energy efficiency retrofit industry — which will create good, green jobs and save middle class families money on their energy bills. CEQ answered this call by bringing together eleven Departments and Agencies and six White House offices to develop today’s report. The report identifies three barriers that have prevented a national market for home retrofits from taking off. First, consumers don’t have access to reliable information about retrofits. Second, the upfront costs of home retrofits can be high but consumers don’t have access to financing. Finally, there aren’t enough skilled workers to serve a robust national retrofit market. Recovery Through Retrofit is an action plan to address these barriers without new money and by using authority the federal government already has. Here’s how we will take steps toward breaking down each barrier: First, to give consumers the information they need, […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
