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China river contamination illustrates paralysis in crisis By CHING CHING NI Los Angeles Times 12/5/2005 BEIJING - The long-term environmental impact of last month's chemical explosion in northern China that left millions of people without safe drinking water remains to be seen. But the political fallout has begun. Beijing sacked its top environmental official Friday in an effort to show accountability for the mishandling of the crisis. More heads are likely to roll, possibly including local party leaders in Jilin province where an accident at a petrochemical plant spilled 100 tons of benzene and other cancer-causing chemicals into the Songhua...

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean has declared it "plain wrong" to think of achieving victory in Iraq, prompting President Bush, and some fellow Democrats, to flatly disagree. "The idea that we're going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong," Mr. Dean said Monday on WOAI Radio in San Antonio...

Hi, all, I'm posting here because I know that this place is the one place to get good advice in a hurry. I called on you all recently when my Chrysler Minivan wouldn't start. Long story--but once again, Freepers came through. So now.. My husband is totally stressed. He has a MAJOR job interview tomorrow. He doesn't expect to get the job (there's already someone there and in the Cdn. government sometimes you have to re-apply for your job). However, tomorrow is part one of the interview. There will be actors bringing him problems and he has to basically demonstrate...

Large populations of deer are edging out forest birds in North America, report scientists in this month's issue of the journal Biological Conservation. The study is the first to evaluate the impact deer grazing can have on nest quality and food resources in areas unaffected by human activities such as forestry or hunting. It also offers general rules for predicting the influence these animals could have on bird ecosystems in the future. The decline of forest birds has been blamed mostly on such factors as disease, loss of habitat and an increase in the number of animals that prey on...

A relative of mine, immediately after graduating from college, went to work for a bank. Even though he had a university degree, he was assigned the job of repossessing cars. We kidded him a lot about that. He eventually ended up a vice president, but his entry into the banking industry was about as low as you can get, and we never let him forget it. In similar fashion, the Enterprise car-rental firm goes to college campuses to recruit management trainees, but among the first jobs these trainees handle is washing and cleaning cars coming off rental. When I moved...

The word "reinvent" is a dumb term, having an overtone of redundancy. After all, when you have invented something, it exists. You can revise it or change it, but you can't "reinvent" it after you have already invented it. I never heard the term when I first entered the workforce. But somewhere in the 1970s or so, corporate executives-began using the word, and using it a lot. Then as now, the nation had its usual economic ups and downs, but suddenly after one downturn, our nation was heavily laden with companies that had reinvented themselves. What happened is that after...

US president George Bush's promise to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf coast "higher and better" has triggered a wave of anxiety among conservatives in his own party, who are shocked at the expansion of the federal role in disaster relief. Yesterday Mr Bush led the country in a day of prayer for the victims of Hurricane Katrina in Washington's national cathedral, declaring: "The destruction of this hurricane was beyond any human power to control, but the restoration of broken communities and disrupted lives now rests in our hands." But his ambitious pledge the night before to lead "one of...

There is something troublingly self-indulgent and slothful about America today - something that Katrina highlighted and that people who live in countries where the laws of gravity still apply really noticed. It has rattled them - like watching a parent melt down. ...snip...Singapore pays its prime minister a salary of $1.1 million a year. It pays its cabinet ministers and Supreme Court justices just under $1 million a year, and pays judges and senior civil servants handsomely down the line....snip...Janadas Devan, a Straits Times columnist, tried to explain to his Asian readers how the U.S. is changing. "Today's conservatives," he...

U.N. reform agenda watered-down General Assembly adopts wording stripped of details UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- The U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday adopted a watered-down draft document on poverty, human rights and reform for this week's summit of world leaders to consider, shedding many of Secretary-General Kofi Annan's ambitious goals after weeks of bitter debate. The compromise 35-page document is supposed to launch a major reform of the United Nations itself and galvanize efforts to ease global poverty. But to reach a consensus, most of the text's details were gutted in favor of abstract language. A definition of terrorism and details...

BENTONVILLE, Ark. (AP) -- The chief financial officer of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has completed half of a 24-hour jail sentence for speeding and is to return this weekend to complete the other half. Thomas M. Schoewe, 52, pleaded guilty Aug. 5 in Rogers District Court for reportedly driving 110 mph on Interstate 540. A state trooper stopped Schoewe in his red Corvette at 1:30 a.m. Jan. 1. District Judge Doug Schrantz sentenced Schoewe to a day in jail.

Give Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger credit for not rushing to follow his counterparts in Arizona and New Mexico by declaring a state of emergency over illegal immigration. No doubt the anti-immigration zealots would be encouraging such a move. Schwarzenegger surely knows, as all Californians do, that illegal immigration has an enormous impact on the state. There are an estimated 2.4 million undocumented workers working on the state's many farms, in restaurants, on street corners and in homes. This shadowy and unknown subculture - the largest of any state in the union - causes uncountable impacts on the state in terms of...

Anyone who's ever temporarily "lost" a car in a parking garage - and that's most people - would surely be understanding if the state government "misplaced" one of its thousands of fleet cars occasionally. But 30,000? A recent audit of the state fleet of 70,000 vehicles, as part of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's push to aggressively manage the government's assets, found that as many as 30,000 can't be accounted for. Five or 10 missing would be simple mismanagement. Losing track of 30,000 cars would require a remarkable feat of negligence, ineptitude or corruption - or some combination thereof. Not only does...

Your company's chief executive might be a pretender, and that may be a good thing, according to Stanford University Professor of Management Science and Engineering Robert Sutton. Sutton, the author of a 2001 study of corporate innovation, "Weird Ideas that Work," says that a close look at the evidence shows that chief executive officers (CEOs) probably deserve less credit for their company's fortunes than they receive, and that the best of them manage a tough balancing act: secretly aware of their own fallibility, while also realizing that any sign of indecisiveness could be fatal to their careers. "In just about...

WASHINGTON, July 21, 2005 – The European Union lifting its arms embargo against China would bring "serious and numerous" consequences, according to a Defense Department report released this week. The European Union has embargoed arms sales to China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. In the past year China has run an intense lobbying effort to have the ban lifted, a move strongly opposed by U.S. officials. "We think the Chinese would be able to obtain in Europe a lot of military or dual-use technologies that would be of great qualitative benefit to them," a senior DoD official said July...

Despite new law, banks lose data on 2 million customers07/02/2005 The Asahi Shimbun Banks have lost information on more than 2 million customers in the three months since a law went into effect calling for stricter protection of personal data. The figure was compiled from reports of financial institutions submitted to the Financial Services Agency by Thursday. Many of the companies announced the results of their internal investigations. The agency will make a formal announcement of the results of the reports in the near future. The agency may also issue recommendations for revisions or orders to improve business operations at...

Odds are you've run across one of these characters in your career. They're glib, charming, manipulative, deceitful, ruthless -- and very, very destructive. And there may be lots of them in America's corner offices. ...The standard clinical test for psychopathy, Robert Hare's PCL-R, evaluates 20 personality traits overall, but a subset of eight traits defines what he calls the "corporate psychopath" -- the nonviolent person prone to the "selfish, callous, and remorseless use of others." Does your boss fit the profile?

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Suppose you could eliminate the factors often blamed for the shortage of women in high-paying jobs. Suppose that promotions and raises did not depend on pleasing sexist male bosses or putting in long nights and weekends away from home. Would women make as much as men? Economists recently tried to find out in an experiment in Pittsburgh by paying men and women to add up five numbers in their heads. At first they worked individually, doing as many sums as they could in five minutes and receiving 50 cents for each correct answer. Then they competed in four-person tournaments, with...

BOSTON -- NStar has canceled the health benefits of more than 1,900 striking workers -- a tactic one labor expert called unusually aggressive and an indication that the electric and gas utility is digging in for a long strike. NStar linemen, engineers and other workers walked off the job Monday after a five-year contract expired and negotiations toward a new agreement collapsed. That same day, the company canceled union members' medical, dental and vision benefits through Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Massachusetts, NStar spokeswoman Caroline Allen said Wednesday. SNIP "When employees do not report for duty and instead strike the company,...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The United Nations chose a State Department finance expert as its new management chief Tuesday and announced a series of reforms in response to the oil-for-food and sexual exploitation scandals and staff concerns about the organization's leadership. The package announced Tuesday includes protection for whistleblowers, an anti-fraud and corruption policy, a unified standard of conduct for peacekeepers to prevent sexual abuse, and expanded financial disclosure requirements for senior officials. Christopher Bancroft Burnham, currently acting undersecretary of state for management, was hired as the world body's management chief and charged with strengthening "accountability, ethical conduct and management...