Archive for the 'Politics' Category
90 billion barrels
Today the news was out that the US Geological Survey has provided new estimates for the nautural gas and oil reserves in the Arctic.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080724/ap_on_go_ot/arctic_oil
http://www.france24.com/en/20080724-arctic-vast-oil-reserves-energy-environment-gas-study-usgs-billion-barrels&navi=SCIENCES
Enough oil to cover demand for three (3!), yes, three whole years! Of course the irony of it all is that global warming caused — at least for an important part — [...]
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O tempora, o mores
I quote from a BBC News item (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7473303.stm): ‘Jack Straw has said laws in England and Wales to let witnesses give evidence anonymously will be rushed through Parliament as this was “an emergency”. The law lords’ ruling last week that defendants needed to know who was testifying against them has already led to one £6m [...]
Filed under: History, Politics, Rome | Leave a Comment
War profiteering
(Almost) everybody will be aware of the war profiteering that has been going on in Iraq, the beneficiaries being American firms, large and small, some of them, like Halliburton’s, intimately linked with the White House. But it is always a bit worse than you expected: in a BBC programme (below) we get the figures — but also [...]
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Extinct is forever part 2
There was a lot of attention in the media for the past few days being paid to the existence in the furthest reaches of the Amazon forest, on the border of Brasil and Peru, of Indian tribes which have lived there ‘isolated’ for many centuries at least. This is not true of course: they were [...]
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One sits behind one’s desk
This week an agreement was reached on a treaty banning cluster munitions. See Cluster Munition Coalition: http://www.stopclustermunitions.org/ and Human Rights Watch: http://www.hrw.org/doc/?t=arms_clusterbombs. Being a pessimist — as far as the future of our society and our world is concerned – I don’t think this means that cluster munitions will soon be a thing of the past, and if [...]
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Blasko Gabric for president
In a BBC special report titled “What happened to Yugoslavia?” there is a short interview with Blasko Gabric, the man who runs the theme park (well, a very large word for a couple of billboards in a meadow) Yugoland. Hear and see the man at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7416069.stm. Being asked what he liked about the old Yugoslavia, Blasko [...]
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PVV shows racist face
The Dutch right-wing party PVV, whose leader Wilders drew international attention with his anti-Koran movie Fitna (the stupidity of which was so glaring that even a majority of Muslims did not waste their anger on that, in spite of the insults), now shows its true face: they protested against the commemoration of North-African soldiers who [...]
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Extinct is for ever
The BBC World Service today quoted the Living Planet Index of the WWF and the Zoological Society of London as saying that between a quarter and a third of the world’s wildlife has been lost since 1970. Well within my life time, so the speed at which this is happening is truly staggering. The losses [...]
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Hey, there are some guys stealing all this old stuff in Iraq, should we do something about it?
I quote from Peter Tompa’s web log Cultural Property Observer (post of April 30, 2008): “In an announcement presumably timed to coincide with the 5th Anniversary of the looting of the Iraq Museum, US Customs belatedly published “emergency import restrictions” on Iraqi archaeological and ethnological artifacts. The Federal Register notice that includes a designated list [...]
Filed under: Archaeology, Politics | Leave a Comment
My Lai Tapes
Missed the BBC World Service programmes about the My Lai tapes? The My Lai tapes are the recordings made during the enquiry into the massacre that took place forty years ago at My Lai and other villages during the Vietnam War. These 400 hours of recordings had gone missing in the US National Archives, until found [...]
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