Asian-Americans are finding it harder to compete with foreign students, mainly from China, for a place in the college of their choice, with more US colleges opting to admit foreign students due to the higher tuition fees that they pay.
Iran will form a blockade to stop the supply of oil through the strategically important Strait of Hormuz if the West decides to impose economic sanctions on the country, warned the Iranian Vice-President on Tuesday.
“If they (the West) impose sanctions on Iran’s oil exports, then even one drop of oil cannot flow from the Strait of Hormuz,” said Iran’s Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi to the Iranian news agency IRNA, as cited by Reuters.
The world’s major 3,000 corporations are responsible for a third of global environmental damage, but economists are divided in their views of how to stop them polluting. Some say government regulation, allied to promoting the business case, is the answer. But other experts say we need a new type of capitalism, which allows our economies to stop growing, or even to shrink.
A study by London-based consultancy Trucost has shown that the world’s top 3,000 public companies are responsible for a third of all global environmental damage.
How reliable is the latest survey or “research has found” article you’ve just read? While we tend to implicitly trust the expert power that scientists and academics present, the truth is a large number of researchers often lie about their experimental results.
Shady scientific research is more rampant that we imagine. It goes beyond the unethical methods such animal testing, and includes the deliberate omission or alteration of information to skew research results to create more convenient “findings”.
Powerful and unpredictable synthetic drugs that mimic the effects of marijuana, cocaine, and other illegal substances, are leaving a trail of paranoia, hallucinations and death across the US.
Dr Mark Ryan, the director of the Louisiana Poison Centre, has never seen a worse drug crisis than the one which has gripped the United States over the past two years. Dr Ryan, who has been at the frontline of the drug war for 20 years, says the rise of the synthetic drug trade poses unprecedented problems.
Top US weapon companies will need to cut production costs, increase export sales, and acquire more commercial contracts over the next few years, as uncertainty continues to mount over the extent of any US defense budget cuts.
The costs of services need no longer be linked to the cost of goods. A sharp decline in the costs of health care, education, and other services is now possible, thanks to the ongoing revolution in information and communications technology. Consequently, the world’s economies, both rich and poor alike, have much to gain from accelerated innovation in the information age.
Since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the nations that border the Caspian Sea – namely Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan – have quarrelled over how to properly divide its waters. With as much as 250 billion barrels of recoverable oil, 200 billion barrels of potential reserves and 9.2 trillion cubic meters of recoverable natural gas, at stake, tensions have risen over recent moves by Russia to develop its offshore resources.
The US Federal Reserve will conduct a stress test for 6 of the largest banks in the country, with the aim to assess the relative health of the banks as well as for the entire financial system in the event of a possible global market shock in the future.
The six banks that have been targeted for the test include the Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo.
The latest report from the IEA is not going to please environmentalists. Accordingly, the IEA admonishes governments for not fully embracing renewable energies – including nuclear energy. But to be fair, there is a desperate need to focus on nuclear power if we are to meet growing energy demand. The only question then that remains is whether governments have the cash and political will to consider embracing nuclear.
The good news is that on 8 November the International Energy Agency released its 2011 “World Energy Outlook.”
