Free Republic

Creating opportunities for future generations From the Atlantic to the Gulf, people —-women, men and children—- are the real wealth and hope of Arab countries. Policies for development and growth in the Arab region must focus on freeing people from deprivation, in all its forms, and expanding their choices. Over the last five decades, remarkable progress has been achieved in advancing human development and reducing poverty. However, much still needs to be done to address the backlog of deprivation and imbalance. Looking forward, much also needs to be done in order to empower the people of the Arab region to...

China knows the future is space and will do whatever is required to enable it to challenge US dominance of the high frontier. China can allocate 30,000 engineers to its space program and all it really needs to do is feed and house them and supply them the energy and raw materials to design and build. This is where a command economy with 1.5 billion people has the potential to blitz the West within a century. This is an excerpt. Actually, it is the blurb under a photo in the article.

Time for a Nobel Prize for Sustainable Development The Nobel Prizes were, in 1901, the first international awards for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace. In 1968 one addition has been made: the 'Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel'. Since then, nothing has changed. The world has undergone considerable changes since the 1960s. Concern about the darker side of mass consumption and the use of fossil fuels has grown since the Club of Rome published its reports on global environmental pollution in the early 1970s. By awarding them who show the leadership to really solve...

<p>LEWISTON, Maine (AP) A woman whose parents were immigrants and who was a multicultural officer for Canada starts her work Monday helping Maine's second-largest city adjust to the arrival of about 1,100 Somali refugees.</p> <p>The atmosphere has gotten tense in the city of 36,000 since February 2001, when Somalis started arriving from other U.S. cities.</p>

Issue 5.12 - Dec 1997 The Future Ruins of the Nuclear Age By Masha Gessen In pursuit of superpower status during the Cold War, the Soviet Union built 60 science boomtowns. Then in 1990, the Soviet Union collapsed, and funding for the cities ended. Masha Gessen reports from Russia on this grand experiment in failure. When two protons collide in an accelerator, they are transformed into muons and other particles. One Russian physicist offers this analogy: it's like two Soviet Fiats colliding to produce a bus and a Mercedes Benz 600. That's the thing about high-energy physics: the total...

ANKARA, Turkey -- The leader of Turkey's winning party refused Wednesday to commit to allowing U.S. warplanes to use Turkish bases in any war with Iraq and declined to say whether his country's close military ties with Israel will be maintained. In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party said Turks consider Israeli policies toward Palestinians to be "terrorism," but added that Turkey would not link its close economic relations with Israel to popular anger.

Enron was one of the early members of the Global Climate Coalition, a group formed in 1989 by corporations concerned about the likelihood of global regulation of energy production by a United Nations bureaucracy. Such concerns emerged from growing global warming hysteria, which were fanned by then-Sen. Al Gore. But in the mid-'90s, Enron, along with Shell and British Petroleum, pulled out of the coalition and began plotting a new strategy. Did Enron see the light, and decide that global regulation was required to save the world from catastrophic global warming? Or did they see the wisdom of owning ...

World's Tallest Peaks Face Climate, Human Threats LONDON, England, October 24, 2002 (ENS) - The world's mountains and communities who have lived on them for centuries are increasingly under siege by a variety of environmental, demographic, and economic threats, according to a report released Wednesday by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Conservation Monitoring Centre. CAPTION Experts fear that rapid ice melt in the Himalayas and other mountain areas may cause major flooding downstream. (Photo courtesy DEP Kumar/UNEP/Topham) Global warming, which is melting mountain glaciers and snowfields all over the world at an astonishing rate, is...

A long-planned October rally in Collier Country, Florida calling itself the "Sawgrass Rebellion" to support property rights, imploded and was cancelled in the face of a determined effort to deny it the right to meet anywhere. You could almost hear the cheering in the offices of the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, the Army Corp of Engineers, the Fish and Wild Life Service and the National Park Service. Will the juggernaut of environmental organizations and federal government agencies that have mounted an attack on the most fundamental right of an American citizen, the right to own property, succeed? If it...

Saddam Hussein's Meetings with Nuclear Energy Agency In recent months, the daily Babil, which is owned and published by Saddam's Hussein's eldest son, Uday, has reported on a number of meetings between Saddam Hussein and Dr. Fadhil Muslim Al-Janabi, the head of Iraq's Nuclear Energy Agency, and a number of nuclear scientists. The following are excerpts from the articles: In the most recently reported meeting last July, Al-Janabi told Saddam of the nuclear agency's scientists' "commitment to climb a new peak in the many peaks of the scientific progress and development which has a beginning but has no end... as...

As a veteran of too many United Nations environmental mega-conferences, I arrived here a week ago for the World Summit on Sustainable Development in dread of the usual -- a festival of anti-U.S. vituperation dominated by greens and global bureaucrats, with the shameful collusion of pandering businesses. But surprisingly, Johannesburg turned out just fine. Indeed, it may be looked back on as a watershed event, the place where world leaders penned the epitaph to extravagant, unworkable and often damaging multilateral agreements. Serious Business The radicals were sent packing. Their pet issue, global warming, was barely mentioned. They were trounced on...

For good or ill, the WSSD did achieve something. After days of wrangling, negotiators reached agreement on improving sanitation around the world, protecting fisheries, promoting so-called renewable sources of energy, defending biodiversity and improving access to clean drinking water, among other lofty goals. But most of the language was left vague, with a few firm targets, such as promises to somehow halve the number of people without toilets by 2015 and to establish protections for fisheries by 2012. That vagueness is probably a good thing. Commenting on the agreement's endorsement of renewable energy without setting any timetables, James K. Glassman...

NASA to Select New Space Telescope United Press International - September 3, 2002 CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Sep 03, 2002 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- Hoping to peer much farther than ever into space and back in time, NASA this week is expected to choose the design and builder of its Next Generation Space Telescope. The two competitors for the project are Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company of Fort Worth, Texas, and the tandem of TRW's Space Systems division, of Redondo Beach, Calif., and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo. NASA plans to build and launch the successor to...

The third world hates Americans because we have made the best use of our resources and have become very well off because of that. Yes we have electricity and running water and air conditioned homes and to the third world I must tell you that it is indeed very nice. And you should have the same stuff.

September 5, 2002 Lame-Duck Sec Gets Enviro-Raspberry Why disappointed ecomaniacs booed Powell By Ronald Bailey Johannesburg—"Shame on Bush," chanted 40 or so "delegates" from Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth as they attempted to disrupt United States Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD). For those of us watching the speech in the Summit Media Center, it appeared through the distorted lens of TV as though some of the delegates representing national governments were actually heckling Powell; subsequent checking revealed that the hecklers were ideological environmentalists who had decided in advance they...

September 4, 2002 Greens Wilt Chastened Environmentalists Leave Joburg Summit Empty-handed By Ronald Bailey Johannesburg—"It's clear that we've suffered a number of major defeats in the last 10 days," declared Andrew Hewett, a spokesperson for Oxfam. Hewett was not the only ideological environmentalist to express dismay over the results of negotiations at World Summit on Sustainable Development. The Plan of Implementation negotiated by the summiteers in Johannesburg is like "putting a Band-Aid over a gaping wound," maintained a glum Melanie Steiner from the World Wildlife Federation. Greenpeace climate director Steve Sawyer commented with regard to setting goals and timetables...

September 3, 2002 Reality Check for Redistributionists Why property rights are environmental rights By Ronald Bailey Johannesburg—Forward to Socialism," "W$$D Stop Bushing People," "Don't Owe, Won't Pay," "Israel USA UK—The Toxic Axis of Evil," "Osama Bomb Sandton Kill Bush and MBeki," and "No to Neoliberal policies and Capitalism" were just a few of the slogans that adorned banners and posters in Saturday's march on the World Summit on Sustainable Development. None of the banners or chants in the demonstration of more than 10,000 people mentioned any of the conventional environmental issues like climate change, population control, renewable resources, or...

Poverty today is truly miraculousBy Leon Louw(Filed: 01/09/2002) Mud oozed between the village woman's toes, as she made her way between the shanty houses. Not plain mud, but mud containing rotting garbage, human and animal faeces, urine, and years of decaying vegetation. She milked an emaciated cow.The stench in this small village in north India was appalling. A gaunt man vomited from the window of a dilapidated bus. Children sat in wet dung and urine making dung pats to dry for fuel; a man rummaged in a garbage heap, like the pig and goat nearby, for whatever might be edible.This...

THE Earth Summit in Johannesburg approached collapse yesterday when European Union officials walked out of talks after failure to agree with the United States on the 14 pivotal issues, and the coalition of charities involved in the negotiations pulled out. Tempers among delegations were fraying last night, and there was growing speculation that the summit was in peril. Developing nations said that they would prefer not to sign any accord rather than agree to what was on offer. Charities said that the agreement being negotiated was a step backwards, and urged European governments not to sign. After negotiations between officials...

Aug. 29, 2002 Hanegbi: Anti-Israel protests threatening to 'explode conference' By GIL HOFFMANIsrael responded when it was attacked for the first time on the floor of the World Summit on Sustainable Development's plenary session in Johannesburg on Thursday. But due to Shabbat, the Israeli delegation will be prevented from reacting to an anti-Israel march set to take place tomorrow during the conference's officially sanctioned day of protests. The Palestine Solidarity Committee of South Africa, which has been coordinating anti-Israel activities at the conference, received a commitment Thursday from several South African ministers that they would attend their event, which is...