By Phil Sands, Foreign Correspondent psands@thenational.ae Last Updated: February 10. 2010 12:20AM UAE / February 9. 2010 8:20PM GMT DAMASCUS // Free market economic reforms have helped create a “catastrophe” in eastern regions of Syria, greatly exacerbating the effects of a devastating drought, according to leading critics of government policy. Speaking at a weekly meeting […]
Associated Press • February 2, 2010 More Michigan counties are returning stretches of previously paved roads back to gravel to save money. The County Road Association of Michigan said Tuesday that 35 miles were returned to gravel in 2009. Thirty-eight counties have combined to pulverize about 100 miles of pavement and lay down gravel in […]
By Michael BoothThe Denver PostPosted: 01/31/2010 01:00:00 AM MSTUpdated: 02/03/2010 04:39:29 PM MST COLORADO SPRINGS — This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric. More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark […]
Boa Sr, the last speaker of ‘Bo’, one of the ten Great Andamanese languages, died last week, according to an indigenous rights group. She was 85. Her death marks the extinction of the Bo, a group thought to have lived on the Andaman Islands for as long as 65,000 years, “making them the descendants […]
By NATION CorrespondentsPosted Monday, January 25 2010 at 20:00 Kenya Forestry Service guards burnt 10 houses belonging to settlers evicted from Mau after they went back to the forest to harvest their maize. One of the houses was full of maize when the guards struck on Saturday evening. The families, which had been camping at […]
By Jeremy Hance, www.mongabay.com January 28, 2010 Sometime around 2050 researchers estimate that the global population will level-out at nine billion people, adding over two billion more people to the planet. Since, one billion of the world’s population (more than one in seven) are currently going hungry—the largest number in all of history—scientists are […]
By Khaled Yacoub Oweis, DAMASCUSWed Jan 27, 2010 1:54pm EST DAMASCUS (Reuters) – Syrian officials addressing a rare public forum have revealed the full impact of a drought that ravaged the 2008 wheat crop and displaced hundreds of thousands of people in the east of the country. The officials recommended diversifying the eastern Syrian economy […]
DAMASCUS, Syria, January 27, 2010 (ENS) – A severe shortage of rainfall that has lasted more than three years has crippled agriculture in northeastern Syria, where residents say conditions are still deteriorating in the absence of economic alternatives and an adequate government response. People’s living conditions in the area are dire, said Ahmad al-Salem, an […]
By Staff WritersParkes, Australia (AFP) Jan 18, 2010 Torrential rains in Australia have failed to quench the country’s “Big Dry”, a decade-long drought that has driven farmers to the wall and shows no signs of abating. While the rains flooded many areas in recent weeks, made parched rivers flow again and even halted the iconic […]
From Calculated Risk: The underlying details of the employment report are mostly weak. A couple of exceptions are the manufacturing diffusion index has increased significantly over the last couple of months (see below), and temporary help hiring has been strong (see previous post). Otherwise this report was grim: Average weekly earnings declined. Average weekly hours […]
