New Delhi is famous for its snarled traffic and infamous for its unruly drivers —
aggressive rule-breakers who barrel through red lights, ignore crosswalks and veer into bicycle or bus lanes to find open routes.
Now, the city’s overburdened traffic police officers have enlisted an unexpected weapon in the fight against dangerous driving: Facebook.
The traffic police started a Facebook page two months ago,
The Russian government, which just a few years ago was salting away billions of dollars in oil revenue,
is now confronting such a gaping budget deficit that ministers approved a wide-ranging plan to sell off state property, senior officials said.
It would be, by some estimates, the largest privatization program in Russia since the post-Communist sell-off of the 1990s.
Still, the government plans to sell only minority stakes in the companies,
The rapid growth of wind farms, whose output is hard to schedule reliably or even predict,
has the nation’s electricity providers scrambling to develop energy storage to ensure stability and improve profits.
As the wind installations multiply, companies have found themselves dumping energy late at night,
adjusting the blades so they do not catch the wind, because there is no demand for the power.
Americans have always assumed that wealth comes and goes.
A poor person can work hard, become rich and pass his money on to his children and grandchildren.
But then, if those descendants do not manage it wisely, they may lose it.
“Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,” the saying goes, and it conforms to our preference for meritocracy over aristocracy.
This assumption is now being undermined, however, through the increasing use of so-called dynasty trusts.
From the moment, George W Bush and his controller, “Vice-President” Dick Cheney began the post 9/11 drumbeat for war against Iraq,
we argued it was NOT about oil – everyone knew the post-insane Kuwait invasion of 1990 sanctions had been a “success”,
at least in crippling the Iraqi oil industry for years, as well as millions of Iraqis, above all children –
but, even worse, about no-bid contracts for the former and future employers of Cheney and Bush,
Great sweeps of Guatemalan rain forest, once the cradle of one of the world’s great civilizations, are being razed to clear land for cattle-ranching drug barons.
Other parts of the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Central America’s largest protected area, have been burned down by small cities of squatters.
Looters and poachers, kept at bay when guerrilla armies roamed the region during the country’s 36-year civil war, ply their trades freely.
Losses at Greece’s national Hellenic Railways are mounting at the rate of 3 million euros ($3.8 million) a day.
Its total debt has increased to $13 billion, or about 5 percent of Greece’s gross domestic product.
Now, as a condition of Greece’s financial rescue, the International Monetary Fund is demanding that a solution be found.
The fund and the European Union, which also chipped in to provide the bailout, are requiring that the debt of Hellenic Railways,
Loans to European companies fell in June – a sign that economic expansion remains tepid,
according to data issued by the European Central Bank in July.
Growth in so-called M3, a measure of bank deposits, short-term debt and other elements of the money supply, rose at an annual rate of 0.2 percent in June after declining 0.1 percent in May.
The average growth for the last three months was zero, the E.C.B. said.
The economic insecurity of the American families is greater than at any time on record, according to a new report from the Rockefeller Foundation.
One in five Americans, the report found, has experienced a decline of 25 percent or more in available household income in the past – Cheney / Bush / Obama – decade.
The typical American experiencing such a plunge will require six to eight years just to climb back to previous levels of income.
In a laboratory where almost all the test tubes look green, the tools of modern biotechnology are being applied to lowly pond scum.
Foreign genes are being spliced into algae and native genes are being tweaked.
Different strains of algae are pitted against one another in survival-of-the-fittest contests in an effort to accelerate the evolution of fast-growing, hardy strains.
The goal is nothing less than to create superalgae,
highly efficient at converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into lipids and oils
