Aljazeera.Net - Small changes separate man from ape: "Genetically, chimpanzees are 98.5% identical to humans. But the differences between the species are clearly profound and geneticists have been labouring to find out how such subtle variations in DNA can be so important.
'Clearly, the genomic differences between humans and chimps are much more complicated than conventional wisdom has portrayed,' Asao Fujiyama of the RIKEN Genomic Sciences Centre in Japan, and colleagues in Japan, Taiwan and China wrote."

People's Daily Online -- US global strategy foiled: "The world multi-polarization trend continues to develop in a zigzagging process. Domination and anti-domination, and uni-pole and multi-poles are and will be a focus of international trial of strength for a considerably long period of time to come. "

People's Daily Online -- US global strategy foiled: "The global neocolonial system formed in the early 20th century was disintegrated in the latter half of the said century, this represents an epoch-making great development in the century. Nowadays, the United States, flaunting the banner of counter-terrorism and taking Afghanistan and Iraq as breaches, attempts to control and Middle East and proceed to control the Eurasian continent and establish a 21st century global empire. "

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Chinese lesson in how to put food in the mouths of millions: "According to the World Bank, the number of Chinese people subsisting on less than $1 a day has fallen from 490 million in 1981 to 88 million. During this period the country's output has increased more than eightfold and the average income has risen by 7% a year, passing $1,000 (currently �551) for the first time in 2003. "

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Chinese lesson in how to put food in the mouths of millions: "China offered the world a lesson in how to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty yesterday at an international conference which underlined its emergence as a powerful alternative to the western model of development.
Putting to one side their concern about human rights, several presidents, a British minister and the heads of numerous international institutions paid homage at the Shanghai conference on poverty reduction to China for its unprecedented successes. "

SABCnews.com - economy/business: "Trevor Manuel, the finance minister, yesterday called for the reform of the 'attitudes' of multilateral institutions to allow for the participation of developing countries. Addressing delegates at the African Development Bank (ADB) meeting in Kampala, Uganda, Manuel said the lack of progress in 'participation and voting power of developing countries in the IMF and the World Bank is disappointing and is holding back the creation of productive global partnerships'."

:: New Statesman - NS Essay - 'Everywhere, even in Africa, the world is running out of children': "In his 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, Paul R Ehrlich warned: 'The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines - hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programmes embarked upon now.' Fortunately, Ehrlich's prediction proved wrong, perhaps in part because so many people believed it would come true. But having averted the perils of overpopulation, the world now faces the unexpected challenge of population ageing and decline. We are in many ways blessed to have this problem instead of its opposite, but a problem it still is."

:: New Statesman - NS Essay - 'Everywhere, even in Africa, the world is running out of children': "So where will the children of the future come from? Some biologists speculate that modern human beings have created an environment in which the 'fittest', or most successful, individuals are precisely those who have few, if any, offspring. As more and more humans find themselves living under conditions in which children, far from providing economic benefit, have become costly impediments to success, those who are well adapted to this new environment will tend not to reproduce themselves. And many others who are not so successful will imitate them."

:: New Statesman - NS Essay - 'Everywhere, even in Africa, the world is running out of children': "It is easy to explain why children have become scarce in developed countries. In today's advanced economies, many people are not even done with school, much less established in a career, before their fertility (or their partner's) begins to decline. Then there is the rising cost of raising children. A recent survey found that parents in Britain spend on average �164,000 on each child, including the cost of university. As women have gained new economic opportunities, the costs in the form of foregone wages and compromised careers can often be even higher. Meanwhile, although social security systems around the world, as well as private pension plans, depend critically on the human capital created by parents, they offer the same pension benefits, and often more, to those who avoid the burdens of raising a family."

:: New Statesman - NS Essay - 'Everywhere, even in Africa, the world is running out of children': "This means, strange as it may sound, that all subsequent population growth will be due to increases in the numbers who survive to older ages. By 2050, there will be 35 million fewer children in the world than today, and 1.2 billion more people aged over 60."

:: New Statesman - NS Essay - 'Everywhere, even in Africa, the world is running out of children': "Why is this happening? The primary reason is a dramatic fall in birth rates that began in western Europe in the 1930s and is now spreading to every corner of the globe. Since the start of the 1970s, while fertility rates were falling by 27 per cent in the industrialised countries, they were plummeting by 46 per cent in what the UN terms 'less developed nations'. The average woman in the world now bears just 2.69 children, down from more than 4.48 in 1970. That change is sufficient to cause rapid ageing of the population, particularly in regions where fertility has fallen most dramatically, such as the Middle East. If fertility rates continue to fall, as nearly all demographers believe they will, global population decline becomes almost inevitable."

Foreign Affairs - Book Review - Inevitable Surprises: Thinking Ahead in a Time of Turbulence - Peter Schwartz: "This engaging romp through the future of the world (or at least the next several decades) takes on the big picture, from science and technology to economic and political developments. There is some good news: we can look forward to a long economic boom, the development of noncarbon energy sources, and a cleaner environment. There is also some bad news: terrorism will continue and 'disorderly' countries ruled by criminals will proliferate. Other developments are more ambiguous, such as increased longevity -- raising the prospect of working centenarians -- and massive migration within and between countries. Schwartz's premise is that we can learn a lot about the future from a close and thoughtful examination of current trends and recent developments, even though details will ultimately depend on proximate events. Some of the predictions run against current conventional wisdom -- for example, that Russia will likely join the EU. And there are inevitable glitches, such as identifying Iran as the most promising country in the Arab world -- unless Schwartz knows something about the future he has not revealed."

Foreign Affairs - Book Review - 20:21 Vision: Twentieth-Century Lessons for the Twenty-first Century - Bill Emmott: "Like most books about the future, this one is mainly about the past. The author, editor of The Economist for the past decade, has an easy, informal, gently ironic style, is good at asking questions, and provides at least hints of the answers. He notes the remarkable progress of much of the globe since World War II and asks whether it can be continued for another 25, 50, or even 100 years. His explanation for the success is twofold: U.S. leadership in the world and the vitality of capitalism as a mechanism for organizing production. The book sketches possible future challenges to both: European envy, Japanese vulnerability, Chinese ambition, and widespread political turbulence in the first case; economic instability, inequality, and environmental degradation in the second. The author concludes on a note of paranoid optimism -- that the challenges will be serious and will require skillful management, but that they will not in the end be devastating to continuing economic and political progress. The book offers cautious optimism about the outlook for the twenty-first century."

The British diplomat Harold Nicolson once noted that ‘although you cannot acquire prestige without power, yet you cannot retain prestige without reputation.’This is why reputation is so central to power....The US today is finding it difficult to balance the exercise of its power with the retention of its prestige. Achieving that balance is essential to maintaining its capacity both to do good in the world, and create international security.
The present US administration is becoming acutely aware of the fact that reputation, prestige and power can easily be squandered through mismanaged interventions and peacekeeping operations.The US is realising the awful truth that the first law of peacekeeping is the same
as the first law of forensics:‘every contact leaves a trace.’ Unfortunately, too many bad traces have been left recently, and many good ones will be needed for the US to recover its reputation, its prestige and therefore effective power.

Recruitment and motivation It is likely to accelerate only with currently elusive political developments that would broadly depress recruitment and motivation, such as the stable democratisation of Iraq or resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Al-Qaeda Al-Qaeda must be expected to keep trying to develop more promising plans for terrorist operations in North America and Europe, potentially involving weapons
of mass destruction.Meanwhile, soft targets encompassing Americans, Europeans and Israelis, and aiding the insurgency in Iraq, will suffice.

The International Institute for Strategic StudiesOverall, risks of terrorism to Westerners and Western
assets in Arab countries appeared to increase after the Iraq war began in March 2003. With the military invasion and occupation of Iraq, the United States sought to change the political status quo in the Arab world to advance American strategic and political interests. Al- Qaeda seeks, among other things, to purge the Arab and larger Muslim world of US influence. Accordingly, the Iraq intervention was always likely in the short term to enhance jihadist recruitment and intensify al-Qaeda’s motivation to encourage and assist terrorist operations.

BW Online | May 25, 2004 | When Business Imitates Life: "How will management change to incorporate these developments?

In the Industrial Era, we used the technology that was creating the change to manage the change. Engineering approaches to organization used the same physics-based ideas that shaped the assembly lines to construct organizational structures and processes. Likewise, we are now using information technology -- e-mail, workflow, CAD/CAM, ERP -- to manage the networked organization that has emerged in the early phases of the information economy. As the industrial technologies of energy led to cities, labor unions, and suburbs; as the information technologies of networks are leading to business alliances, chat rooms, and global English; the insights of evolution will shape our society in the first half of the 21st century. Because the challenge is adapting to accelerated change and volatility, the concepts of evolution -- tuned by nature over four billion years to cope with environmental change -- are just what's needed to create the next generation of organization: the Adaptive Enterprise."

BW Online | May 25, 2004 | When Business Imitates Life: "Anyone trying to run a business -- or live a life, for that matter -- over the next ten years will be dealing with two major forces: first, an environment in which change has doubled its pace and volatility has increased, creating the imperative to adapt. And second, the beginning of a new economic life cycle, in which the makeup of our GDP, which has in the past migrated from agriculture to manufactured goods, from goods to services, from goods and services to information, shifts again, this time to value created by molecular technologies."

BW Online | May 25, 2004 | When Business Imitates Life: "Even as the pattern repeats, something unprecedented is happening. Because the molecular economy is arriving before the information economy has fully matured, the two economic waves are converging. What we learn about evolution (in this second quarter of the molecular economy) will change the way the information economy is managed in its fourth quarter. Conversely, advances in information technology, such as simulation, will accelerate our learning about evolving systems of molecules."

BW Online | May 25, 2004 | When Business Imitates Life: "That will come, but today, we can see the molecular economy taking off by looking at the growth of resources devoted to it.
� Biologists have replaced physicists as the leading users of supercomputers, according to IBM's Life Sciences group.
� In just ten years, employment in the biotech sector has more than doubled, rising to 191,000 in 2001.
� Biotechnology has attracted more investment in 2001 and 2002 -- two off years following the 2001 zenith -- than in the entire five-year period of 1994-98, which included the previous peak in 1996.
� The number of biotech patents filed each year has increased fivefold in the past ten years.
� The National Nanotechnology Initiative's budget has surged nearly sixfold in the past six years, with over $700 million allocated for 2003."

BW Online | May 25, 2004 | When Business Imitates Life

BW Online | May 25, 2004 | All Volatility, All the Time: "IBM has devised a solution to the impossibility of forecasting demand. The new approach is to stop guessing about the future, and to build so as to adapt to it by creating a diverse set of capabilities. The intent is to deal with a volatile market, protect IBM from flux in demand, and build an adaptive factory, one that can manufacture a diverse portfolio of chips for everything from mainframes to cell phones to video game consoles."

BW Online | May 25, 2004 | All Volatility, All the Time: "Businesses spent the twentieth century squeezing the fat out of industrial production, tuning processes to accomplish fixed tasks ever better, faster, and cheaper."

BW Online | May 25, 2004 | All Volatility, All the Time: "At some level, volatility has always been a part of the human condition, but our worldview and our business models belied that. We tried to forecast, always looking for the perfect plan. Then we acknowledged that there was no single best way, only probabilities and the art of decision-making under uncertainty.

Now we need to change our framework again, from one in which even these uncertain decisions are permanent, to one in which the costs and implications of continuing change are integral. This will take us from physics to biology, from engineering to evolution, from the top-down to the bottom-up, and from narrow efficiency to adaptability."

BW Online | May 25, 2004 | All Volatility, All the Time: "The increased rate of change in the economy poses the 'adaptive imperative.' To survive, business must learn to adapt as fast as the business environment changes. According to futurist Paul Saffo, 'Business as usual has become business as unusual: unpredictable, unplannable, and above all, unmanageable.... the stately equilibrium of Keynes has yielded with a vengeance to the unnerving creative destruction of Schumpeter.'"

BW Online | May 25, 2004 | All Volatility, All the Time: "When networks become intensely connected, they start to become 'nonlinear.' Small changes can lead to disproportionately large effects. In short, they make our world more volatile. The huge power blackout that struck the northeastern United States on November 9, 1965, was caused by a single circuit breaker in Ontario, Canada, that was functioning normally. It did its job, which was to shut down power on a segment on the network. As expected, this caused a power surge that propagated to the parts of the system connected to it. What was not understood at the time was that the configuration of that network would amplify that surge, eventually leaving 30 million people in eight states and Canada in the dark. Today, it might be possible to simulate that network suficiently to have found this glitch, but the principle remains: The more connected any system becomes, the harder it is to anticipate all such risks."

BW Online | May 25, 2004 | All Volatility, All the Time: "Connectivity between ideas creates the next new product, and connectivity of companies creates the next merger and change in industry structure. Connectivity between buyers, sellers, supply chains, and financial institutions shortens both the marketing cycle ('awareness, interest, purchase' is as fast as 'see the ad, go to the website, research it on the Web, and order online'), and the order-to-cash cycle.

Connectivity is clearly a root cause of the acceleration of change, but in a more subtle way, connectivity must also be held accountable for increased volatility. "

BW Online | May 25, 2004 | All Volatility, All the Time: "Connectivity and the Change in Change
What could cause a permanent increase in volatility and the rate of change? While no single answer provides the whole explanation, one clear cause is connectivity. Without belaboring the well-known point, connectivity has transformed our world:
� In the six years starting in 1996, the percentage of the U.S. population online grew from 14 percent to almost 52 percent.
� The maximum speed of connection in 1940 was about 1,000 bits per second; by 2000, it had reached 10 trillion bps.
� The number of Internet hosts -- important as a measure of the information a person can connect to -- rose from several hundred in 1981 to about 100 million in 2001, while the cost of ISP service fell by a factor of 10 million.
� The cost of a three-minute phone call between New York and London fell from $300 in 1930, to $60 in 1960, to about $1 today (in constant dollars).
� In 2002, the number of mobile phones worldwide reached one billion.

These leaps in the mobility of information make it possible to disseminate new ideas more quickly and cheaply than ever before. When information is codified and information technology modularized, upgrades, add-ons, plug-ins, and innovation can all happen quickly. The ease of adopting (or copying) software drives the pace of change, as does the ease of global communication, which enables rapid learning and transfer of know-how."

BW Online | May 25, 2004 | All Volatility, All the Time: "We need to stress that our argument here contains two distinct points. The first is that change has accelerated. That means whatever trend you look at will be proceeding more rapidly. Volatility is the degree of variability around a given trend. Our second point is that volatile events are of greater magnitude and occur more frequently. These reinforce each other, but they're not the same thing."

BW Online | May 25, 2004 | All Volatility, All the Time: "Accelerated Change
� The number of Fortune 300 CEOs with six years' tenure in that role has decreased from 57 percent in 1980 to 38 percent in 2001.
� In 1991, the number of new household, health, beauty, food, and beverage products totaled 15,400. In 2001, that number had more than doubled to a record 32,025.
� From 1972 to 1987, the U.S. government deleted 50 industries from its standard industrial classification. From 1987 to 1997, it deleted 500. At the same time, the government added or redefined 200 industries from 1972 to 1987, and almost 1,000 from 1987 to 1997.
� In 1978, about 10,000 firms were failing annually, and this number had been stable since 1950. By 1986, 60,000 firms were failing annually, and by 1998 that number had risen to roughly 73,000."

BW Online | May 25, 2004 | All Volatility, All the Time: "An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common sense, 'intuitive linear' view. So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the twenty-first century -- it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate).
-- Ray Kurzweil in The Law of Accelerating Returns, March 7, 2001"

BW Online | May 25, 2004 | The New "Molecular Economy": "In the mid-twentieth century, a new economic life cycle started. The information theory of Claude Shannon and the silicon semiconductor developed by William Shockley (both scientists from Bell Labs) gave rise to a new set of possibilities. Technology built on Shannon's and Shockley's insights enabled the manipulation of large quantities of data at high speed, building an infrastructure for providing cheap computer hardware, then software, then communications networks, and currently, an explosion of wireless devices. Today, we're in the middle of the third quarter, the Growth phase, when every kind of business incorporates the new technologies to improve their value, cost, and quality performance (e.g., through mass customization, online order confirmation, and mobile connectivity), and to launch entirely new businesses based on real-time information like Yahoo!, OnStar, and Travelocity. "

BW Online | May 25, 2004 | The New "Molecular Economy": "The pattern is straightforward: The economy transforms science into useful technology; business determines how to use the technology and then optimizes the resulting tasks organizationally. Society's trendsetters, decision-makers, and managers -- sometimes unconsciously, sometimes deliberately -- incorporate the concepts that bubble up and migrate out from these more fundamental, technical disciplines. Exposure to new technological capabilities alters the way we think. In the process, society, language, and politics change, too. In the industrial economy, this meant the shift of rural populations to cities, the shift of economic power to corporations, which led to the labor movement and antitrust laws, and so on. The incoming mind-set not only expands what is possible -- it redefines our views of what will be possible next. The Maturing Information Economy"

BW Online | May 25, 2004 | The New "Molecular Economy": "We can use this simple four-quarter model to parse the Industrial Revolution:
Q1: Gestation. The Industrial Revolution began with scientific breakthroughs such as Maxwell's equations, which describe electricity, and Boyle's law, which taught us about heat and pressure, the beginning of thermodynamics.

Q2: Growth. These scientific advances translated directly into the technologies that powered the industrial economy: electrical networks, steel mills, and oil companies. These technologies were the basis of enormous fortunes -- the equivalent of the high-tech industry in the subsequent life cycle, the information economy.

Q3: Maturity. Entrepreneurs of the industrial economy then organized around these new capabilities, recombining them with new management concepts such as the assembly line and interchangeable parts. Expanding by way of the growth-phase industries such as railroad, petroleum, electricity, and telephone, they went on to build national, then global, firms such as General Electric, General Motors, and General Foods.

Q4: Decline. These enterprises required a new form of organization -- a steel mill employed thousands, while its predecessor, a blacksmith shop, employed only a handful -- and billions in capital. New ways of organizing work arose, leading to the now-familiar functional and divisional structures first observed in the railroads and at DuPont and General Motors. Even though these companies continued to thrive for a time, the period of exuberant growth ended, and industries consolidated into markets served by two or three companies, profitable not because of their growth or innovation but through their oligopoly power and their organization skills. "

BW Online | May 25, 2004 | The New "Molecular Economy": "The economy of the future derives from the science of today.

It happened this way in the information economy, and in the industrial economy before that, and it will happen again in the molecular economy. A new economic life cycle begins as science learns something new about the way the world works. Next, technology shows us how to turn new science into new productive capabilities. As a life cycle reaches maturity,every business employs the new technology to improve its performance. Ultimately, as an economy ages and the once-new technology becomes a commodity, we encode the deeper lessons from science and technology and apply them to the way work gets done and the way society is organized "

BW Online | May 25, 2004 | The New "Molecular Economy": "the toughest problem business faces today: the inability of most companies to adapt to changes in the economic environment as fast as those changes occur. "

BW Online | May 25, 2004 | The New "Molecular Economy": "In 1984, a multidisciplinary group formed the Santa Fe Institute and began a research program based on a really big idea: that biology is not the only system that evolves, and that the concepts of evolution help to explain the process of change in any connected system, be it an ecology or an economy. Since then SFI has extended its work to other social systems -- a business, a tribe, a crowd, a stock market, or a political party. Their work (and similar work at the University of Michigan, IBM, and many other places) has created some early tools, and a point of view that lets us see the economy as an ecology, and an organization as an organism, at the level of rigor needed to do empirical science. That's the level at which you begin to use evolutionary concepts to schedule factories. "

Trade One of the outstanding developments of 2003 was the sharp rise of China’s trade. As imports surged by 40%, China became the third largest merchandise importer in the world, ahead of Japan and only behind the EU and the United States.

TradeAfter the lacklustre growth of the first half of 2003, global output and trade accelerated in the second half, largely due to developments in East Asia and the United States.World GDP and world trade expanded by 2.5% and 4.5% respectively, in real terms. Although the trade expansion in 2003 exceeded that of the preceding year, it remained well below the average rate of 6.5% recorded in the 1990s.

Universe Measured: We're 156 Billion Light-years Wide!: "The universe is at least 156 billion light-years wide.... The universe is about 13.7 billion years old. Light reaching us from the earliest known galaxies has been travelling, therefore, for more than 13 billion years. So one might assume that the radius of the universe is 13.7 billion light-years and that the whole shebang is double that, or 27.4 billion light-years wide.
But the universe has been expanding ever since the beginning of time, when theorists believe it all sprang forth from an infinitely dense point in a Big Bang.
'All the distance covered by the light in the early universe gets increased by the expansion of the universe,' explains Neil Cornish, an astrophysicist at Montana State University. 'Think of it like compound interest.'
Need a visual? Imagine the universe just a million years after it was born, Cornish suggests. A batch of light travels for a year, covering one light-year. 'At that time, the universe was about 1,000 times smaller than it is today,' he said. 'Thus, that one light-year has now stretched to become 1,000 light-years.'
All the pieces add up to 78 billion-light-years. The light has not traveled that far, but 'the starting point of a photon reaching us today after travelling for 13.7 billion years is now 78 billion light-years away,' Cornish said. .."

International Arms Sales Total $30 Billion a Year -Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "By country, the United States has been the top supplier of weapons since the end of the Cold War... Excluding small arms, the United Kingdom was the second largest exporter of weapons at $4.7 billion in 2002; Russia followed at $3.1 billion; France at $1.8 billion; and China at $800 million rounded out the top five. "

The Hidden Veto - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council: "Hidden vetoes usually do not make the headlines, so the public tends to believe that the veto is a problem of the past. Permanent members continue to keep the Security Council under intense political pressure, shaping Council action according to their own national interests. Only abolishing the power of veto can resolve the problem of the hidden veto. But permanent members oppose any reforms of the voting system. Eager to keep their absolute prerogative, the P5 will rule out any attempts to eliminate the veto - even proposals aiming at limiting the use and the scope of the veto. Permanent members concede that the veto should remain a �last resort,� but in fact they use the hidden veto constantly. Their abusive use of this privilege bedevils the Security Council, making it undemocratic, lacking in legitimacy and often sadly ineffective. "

The Hidden Veto - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council: "Early in their term, elected members learn the topics they cannot raise without risking a very high price. Increasingly discouraged after facing one hidden veto after another, they stay away from these topics, creating what can be considered a �double hidden veto.� In addition to P5 threat of veto, then, elected members� self-censorship paralyzes the work of the Council. When determined ambassadors challenge the veto system, they are quickly put in their place. Past the middle of his term in the Security Council in 1999-2000, Ambassador Peter Van Walsum of the Netherlands interjected a statement about Chechnya in a Council debate on another subject."

The Hidden Veto - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council: "The veto has always loomed over the work of the UN Security Council. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union often brandished their prerogative publicly in Council meetings. Overall, the five permanent members cast 199 vetoes between 1946 and 1989 (1) - well over four per year - preventing the Council from taking action on many important matters. Since the end of the Cold War, however, the formal use of the veto has diminished dramatically. Between January 1990 and March 2004, the Permanent Five (P5) cast 17 vetoes - only about one per year. In spite of this new appearance of restraint, the P5 continue to pressure the Security Council through a 'hidden' veto - the quiet threat of possible veto use. As Ambassador Patricia Durrant of Jamaica put it, 'the mere presence of the threat of the veto � determines the way the Council conducts its business.' (2)"

Asociaci�n de Historia Actual. Article: "During the 1890's the United States became the leading industrial economy. Even if the US began her imperialist expansion toward the Pacific at the turn of the century and participated in the First European Civil War in its later stages, she did not turn into a heavyweight global political power until the Second European Civil War[24]. This latter conflict especially was essential for the global emergence of the United States as her major capitalist competitors in Europe and Japan effectively caused their own destruction and became de facto satellites of the emerging Empire of Right and Justice. During the Third Eurocentric Civil War the colonies of the previous European colonial masters became formally independent and were re- categorized as developing countries. The Soviet Union, which had emerged as a challenger in the context of the approaching end of the previous intensive phase of capitalist globalization and during the ECW I, collapsed. After the ECW III in the 1990's the US emerged, or remained if you choose, as the lone superpower. Despite of the fact that the US was no longer as central in the world economy as in the late 1940's and 1950's, her economic expansion was impressive during the 1990's. Moreover, during the 1990's the European Union emerged as a credible political competitor though it still remained under the political patronage and mental tutelage of the United States, especially through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Culturally the US remained hegemonic, even if many others began to emerge as at least regional challengers within the global cultural industry. However, the US was a truly hegemonic superpower only in the field of military technology, military spending and global military capabilities, even if her ruling classes -and, more interestingly, substantial parts of the subordinate trilateral ruli"

Domestic rivals Finally, there are early signs (Kaul, 2004, forthcoming) that some other forms of international cooperation, such as cross-border assistance to the judiciary, or carbon trading, are starting to escape the purview of aid agencies and ministries of foreign affairs. If these trends continue and increase, the aid system will have serious (official) domestic rivals not only for its own budget – which is not in itself a new phenomenon – but also for the attention of its client countries.

Aid spending priorities in the North shift every time a credible new threat to its security, either natural or manmade and unrelated to basic poverty, emerges from a Southern quadrant.

Private capital flows Before the Asian crisis the share of aid in overall flows fell steadily, and some predicted the terminal decline of public aid, eclipsed as it was then by private capital flows already six times as large as ODA. The latter’s importance has changed since the Asian crisis: 2002 net private flows did not reach levels achieved in 1993 and afterwards.

In 50 years of aid no major institution has exited the market through closure or merger,3 with considerably more in existence today (over 40 bilateral agencies of which 23 DAC members, 15 UN system agencies, and 20 global and regional financial institutions: Besanzon, 2003) than when the share of aid in GDP was a third larger.

The International Aid System 2005–2010: Forces For and Against Change Today’s international aid ‘market’ has too many providers to operate as an effective cartel, yet suffers from a lack of client information and voice, weak ownership, and other restrictions on competitive discipline. Despite persistent criticism from different points in the ideological spectrum, these imperfections help to explain why no major aid institution has been closed in 50 years, whereas many have been created, even as aid’s share of world income has shrunk.

Israel21c: "China has had 9% growth a year for 25 years. It's GDP doubles every seven years. Direct foreign investment in China totals $1 billion a week. "...Business Week reports that if India succeeds in achieving rapid growth, it will become the first developing country to do so using brainpower, rather than natural resources or the musclepower of its factory workers.

Israel21c: "the first industrial revolution was driven by steam, pure and simple. The second was driven by the electrical dynamo, assisted by modern industrial R&D. The third is driven by microelectronics, computers and software, advanced materials, biotechnology, robotics, and telecommunications. He says some countries are leading the revolution, leaving the others behind. "

Historia Actual. Article.. The purpose of this global exercise is to inhibit the rise of any competing state or group of states capable of challenging the US global hegemony. According to the century-old geopolitical doctrines -adopted and updated by various key players in the US foreign policy establishment and inside the PNAC- the control of Eurasia or certain Central Asian countries would be essential for that purpose. Direct or indirect control, for example, of the oil resources would give the US ruling classes a possibility to exert control over the future development of the European Union, Russia and China, not to mention the Islamic countries of that area inhabited by "some stirred-up Moslems"

trend : The trend of international interdependence and integration.

Driving Forces: "Generally a listing includes 5-7 driving forces and each is made up of a cluster of trends that make it important to consider (more than 5-7 is too difficult to understand and breaks the categories into too many smaller groups). Commonly they are categorized by science and technology, economics, demographics, political and social and then some that focus on your particular interest area (e.g., environment, education). There is no one right answer for selecting the components of driving forces. These few examples are for helping you define your own. These are the forces that allow change to occur. "

Natural Sciences and EngineeringSource: National Science Board, Science and Engineering Indicators-2002

World History Connected | Vol. 1 No. 2| William Everdell: How to Use the Theme of Technology in Teaching the World History Survey Course Technology is the making and social use of tools—extensions of mind and body. It is a primary category for the anthropological study of cultures.

Asia-Europe ties good but not passionate - MAY 17, 2004: "I perceive a significant nuance in strategic assessments of America's global role. In Asia, as in Europe, discomfort over America's overwhelming global dominance and its inclination towards unilateralism is high. But at the same time, I sense that there is a sharper awareness in Asia than in Europe of the vital and irreplaceable role that America plays in maintaining global stability.
Perhaps this is because unlike in Europe, where the threat of war has never been lower in modern history, Asia still faces many serious security challenges. North Korea, Kashmir and cross-strait relations between Beijing and Taipei are real potential flashpoints. If things go disastrously wrong, nuclear conflict is not inconceivable. This focuses Asian minds. The US is critical to the management and resolution of all three potential conflicts."

Asia-Europe ties good but not passionate - MAY 17, 2004: "Regionalism and globalisation are not alternatives but different aspects of the same phenomenon. They are driven by the same market forces. I believe that the two great strategic issues of the 21st century are consequences of this phenomenon. How to deal with the marginalised? Not all regions or every country in these three regions have been able to cope with the relentless competitive pressures of the new world that is emerging. And how will the Americas, Europe and Asia relate to each other?"

Asia-Europe ties good but not passionate - MAY 17, 2004: "Europe's experience in regional integration is unique. Never before in the history of the modern state system has there been such a bold experiment in the pooling of sovereignties. Yet Europe's expansion and integration is also in line with the principal trends of the post-Cold War world.
The Americas are coalescing. North and South America are being drawn together by the powerful gravitational attraction of the United States economy; firstly, through the North American Free Trade Agreement and, eventually, through the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
A new hemispheric history is being written. In a different way, East Asia is being woven together by a web of bilateral and plurilateral free-trade agreements (FTAs), centred on the Asean Plus Three process. Eventually, India too will be integrated into East Asia, changing conventional geographical concepts of regions in Asia."

Gmail - Press Review for May 17, 2004: Trade Talks Focus on Tariffs Dispute: "if one billion people has access to 80 percent of resources, and the other five billion have only 20 percent, then our problems won't change. We spend almost one trillion dollars per year on weapons, but only 50 billion on development aid. And when one thinks that $300 billion go into agricultural subsidies, and then one has to say: We aren't spending our money very wisely."

ScienCentral: Hydrogen CarsSummer's almost here—time for family road trips, and soaring gas prices. Cars that run on hydrogen would solve that problem, and end our dependence on imported oil as well. As this ScienCentral News video reports, one engineer says nanotechnology could help make hydrogen cars affordable.

The truth about the Iraq war: "And so we find an interesting fact: those who live in democratic nations, who uphold democracy as the only honourable form of government, are not really true democrats after all. They have little or no interest in global democracy, in a nation of nations, in seeking the common good of the whole of humanity."
And it is this single fact, more than any other, this inequality of wealth and privilege in our shrinking global village, that will make it more likely that our future is dominate by terror groups, freedom fighters, justice-seekers, hell-raisers, protestors and violent agitators.

The lesson of history is that tyrannies and dictatorships get overthrown, that the will of the majority eventually finds a voice and freedom.

And that is exactly what will eventually happen in our non-democratic, dysfunctional, unjust, global village.

The truth about the Iraq warEconomically, the world is already operating as a single closely inter-related organism. The problem is that mechanisms for governance, law and order are still primitive – feudal or medieval in nature. We have yet to grow up.

The truth about the Iraq warThe inescapable fact is that we are moving further every day to a one–world economy without a one–world government or legal structure.

Gmail - The Power of Love - BBC Science & Nature Newsletter** THE POWER OF LOVE **
What makes you fancy someone? Can love drive you mad? Discover the science behind love. http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/hottopics/love/

Jonathan Power, India overtaking China: "Moreover the massive flows of foreign investment into China are a two edged sword. It has become a substitute for domestic entrepreneurship. Few of the Chinese goods we buy are in fact made by indigenous companies. And the few that exist are besieged by regulatory constraints and find it hard to raise domestic capital. Its remaining state owned enterprises remain massive but bloated and possess a frightening number of non-performing loans from China's vulnerable banking system. It is India that has created world class companies that can compete with the best in the West, often on the cutting edge of software, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology. India's trump cards are its language, English, its emphasis on maths in its schools (begun in Indira Gandhi's time), and the talents of its diaspora. For decades China has benefited from the wealth and the investment potential of its diaspora and the economic energy of Hong Kong and Taiwan. After years of ignoring its diaspora India is now welcoming them back- and they have much more 'intellectual capital' to offer than China's, much of it coming from Silicon Valley where the Indian contribution has shone. Watch the tortoise continue its course as the hare starts to lose its breath."

The ethanol program in Brazil

One of the most striking successes of renewables, and its spin-offs,
is the ethanol program in Brazil, where it is produced from sugarcane
and has replaced one half of the gasoline that would otherwise be
consumed in the country (using roughly 4 million hectares of land). In
this case, most of the energy needed for the processing of the raw
material to the final product comes from the bagasse (sugarcane
residue after the crushing process), requiring very little "external"
sources of supply in the form of fossil fuels (in agricultural part of
sugarcane production). This is the reason why the energy balance for
ethanol production in Brazil is 10:1 (Macedo and Koller, 1997) and the
production of ethanol from corn in the United States has an energy
balance of approximately 1.24:1 (Shapouri, Duffield and Graboski,
1995). The technological progress in this area, both in the
agricultural and industrial sectors is striking and in Brazil,
together with increased production, they led to the impressive
reduction of costs in ethanol production, which is presently
competitive with gasoline in Rotterdam (Figure 1). This has led to
intensive research to produce liquid fuels from cellulosic materials,
which is very promising since the resource base of biomass is so
widespread all over the world. Developed countries have a significant
role to play introducing biofuels in their energy systems, either
directly or blended with gasoline or diesel.

Flow of Gulf Oil Supplies (2010)

Almost two-thirds of the world's oil resources are in the Middle East,
mostly in the Gulf region (the Islamic Republic of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait,
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates). Although these six
countries now account for only 27 percent of global crude oil
supplies, they are expected to double their share to 53 percent in
2010 [UNEP, WEC and UNDESA, 2000]. All OECD countries are expected to
increase their dependence on oil imports over the next few years.
Their imports, 56 percent of their energy requirements in 1996, are
expected to rise to 76 percent in 2020. Asia-Pacific countries crude
oil imports are expected to increase to 72 percent of their
requirements in 2005 (up from 56 percent in 1993). The Middle East is
expected to account for 92 percent of the region's imports. The Gulf
region is expected to supply 18 million barrels a day to Asia-Pacific
countries in 2010.

Biomass

A small part of the solar energy reaching the Earth is converted by photosynthesis into biomass (organic matter). Part of such matter was buried in the distant past (hundreds of millions of years) by sediments and earthquakes and transformed by bacterial action in coal, oil and gas which constitute present fossil fuels resources (which are not renewable). Biomass is usually used as a renewable energy except when leading to deforestation.

Energy used

All energy used by man originates in one of the following sources: (a) radiant energy emitted by the sun (solar energy); (b) geothermal energy from the interior of Earth; (c) tidal energy originating in the gravitational pull from the moon; (d) nuclear energy. The dominant is solar energy, thousands of times larger than all the others and inexhaustible as long as the sun shines (approximately 4.5 billion years).

Renewable energy

Renewable energy is inexhaustible and abundant. Ultimately it was the origin of fossil fuels which became the basis on which the Industrial Revolution was built. These sources of energy however will not last forever and have proven to be one of the main sources of our environmental problems. It is clear therefore that in due time renewable energies will dominate the world´s energy system, due to their inherent advantages such as mitigation of climate change, generation of employment and reduction of poverty, as well as increased energy security and supply.
http://www.renewables2004.de/pdf/tbp/TBP01-rationale.pdf

Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Cars Business :: H2CARSBIZ NewsWhilst this edition of the Hydrogen Cars Business Magazine is being prepared, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has released an Analysis of the Impact of High Oil Prices on the Global Economy. The fact is that oil prices still matter to the health of the world economy. The report states that “Current market conditions are more unstable than normal, in part because of geopolitical uncertainties and because tight product markets – notably for gasoline in the United States – are reinforcing upward pressures on crude prices. Higher prices are contributing to stubbornly high levels of unemployment and exacerbating budget-deficit problems in many OECD and other oil-importing countries.” The results of the sustained higher oil price simulation for both the OECD and non-OECD countries suggest that, as has previously been the case, the net effect on the global economy would be negative.

Why - and How - Companies Must Go Global - AME Info Business News: "Asking, 'how do companies globalize?' he answered that most of them go through four stages in their development of international markets. First, they take what they already produce for their national market and export it to overseas markets where there may be an appetite for such products or services. Next, they start to tailor their offerings for the offshore market. Third, they begin using domestic infrastructure in the offshore country to create products for that market. And finally, he says, they establish a deep enough presence in the offshore market that they can use it as a sourcing base to make products that are imported back to the home country.

As a result, companies are being forced to look outward in a way that they never did before. "

Why - and How - Companies Must Go Global - AME Info Business News: "Parsons described how just as changes in transportation and communications led to regional and national markets in the last century, transformations in technology are now leading inevitably to a global market that will be served by large, global companies such as Time Warner. 'We've gone from a place where 200 years ago your market was where you could walk in a day, to a place where your marketplace is the whole globe"...Better communications and transportation have largely eliminated distance as a constricting factor for business, according to Parsons. 'It always amazes me when you're traveling in Japan, and they have less than 24-hour-old langoustines from Scotland on the menu...There is no place you can go in the world where you can't get almost anything from any other part of the world,' he said. "Business has to scale up to meet the demands of this global market. The scaling-up process is ineluctable." ...Parsons noted that technological advances, the emergence of global markets and the relentless drive for growth have critical implications for managers, and they are also driving the trend towards consolidation in the media industry. "

Why - and How - Companies Must Go Global - AME Info Business News: "Globalization is often presented by its foes as some kind of corporate plot, but Richard Parsons, the CEO and chairman of the board of Time Warner, describes the trend toward worldwide business consolidation as the product of a number of different economic, demographic, and technological forces."

Global Waste Management Market Report 2004 - Research and Markets: "We estimate that, between 2004 and 2008, global generation of municipal waste will rise by 31.1%. In the future, trends in global waste management depend on each major country and its state of development. In the EU, there is a wide range of legislation and programmes that are designed to dispose of waste in a more environmentally acceptable manner. Eastern European countries, especially those that are preparing to join the EU, are falling in line with the goals of EU policy. The US also has legislation and targets for waste management. For the majority of countries, waste generation continues to grow and even in developed economies where comprehensive strategies have been developed, the amount of waste generated rises with GDP. The regions facing the greatest waste management challenge are developing economies that have high GDP growth rates and industrial facilities that now produce a number of the world's goods. "

NOVA | World in the Balance | Human Numbers Through Time | PBS: "For millions of years, our distant ancestors led a precarious existence as scavengers, hunters, and gatherers, and there were fewer than 10 million human beings on Earth at any one time. But over the last two centuries, the world's population has skyrocketed. By October of 1999, some crowded cities had more than 10 million inhabitants each, and six billion people shared space on the planet. Trace the dramatic growth and spread of human populations on our global map, and see where on Earth as many as three billion more people may live by 2050."

What is global development? :
Development refers to improvements in the conditions of people’s lives, such as health, education, and income. It occurs at different rates in different countries. The U.S. underwent its own version of development. When it became an independent nation in 1776:
■ The average American earned about $1,000 a year in today’s dollars, compared with $30,000 today.
■ One in five children died before their fi rst birthday, compared with about one in 143 today.
■ Less than 50% of white children, and almost no black children, went to school; today almost all American children fi nish primary school.
■ On average, Americans were about four times richer than the people of the world’s poorest countries; they are 100 times richer today.
Poor countries have experienced improvement as well. Over the past 50 years, there has been more progress in reducing poverty and improving health and education than at any other time in history. Over this period:
■ Diseases such as smallpox and river blindness that formerly afflicted millions of people a year, have been virtually eradicated.
■ The average life expectancy worldwide has increased from 44 years to 59 years.
■ Many more children attend school—for example, the average number of years of schooling has risen from 3 to 6 years in Latin America and from 3 to 9 years in Asia.
■ Incomes in poor countries have tripled (compared with a 13-fold increase in Western Europe and a 17-fold increase in the United States).

OECD Observer: Pertinent to our future: "'... ever since the first century of our era, the dream of unity has hovered over the scene and haunted the imagination of statesmen and peoples. Nor is there any question more pertinent to the future welfare of the world than how the nations of Europe, whose differences are so many and so inveterate, may best be combined into some stable organisation for the pursuit of their common interests and the avoidance of strife.'"

IIASA, World Population Project publications: Books: "This book provides new ways of thinking about population in the 21st century. While the 20th century was the century of population growth - with the world's population increasing from 1.6 to 6.1 billion - the book shows that the 21st century is likely to see the end of world population growth and become the century of population aging. At the moment, we are at the crossroads of these two different demographic regimes, with some countries still experiencing high population growth and others facing rapid aging. The new demography of the 21st century produces a new set of challenges for forecasting and understanding the consequences of population changes."

baltimoresun.com - The effects of global graying: "If global fertility rates converge with those seen today in Europe or among native-born Americans, by 2200 world population could shrink to half of what it is today even without any major wars or pandemics, according to U.N. projections. The only precedent we have for such a decline in population is the period of late antiquity, when falling birthrates helped bring about the collapse of the Roman Empire. "

baltimoresun.com - The effects of global graying: "Between 2000 and 2050, Mexico's median age will increase 20 years, leaving half the population over age 42 and making the country older than its northern neighbor. On current trends, 30 percent of China's population will be over 60 by mid-century. Even Africa is aging at nearly double the rate of the United States. Countries such as France and Japan at least got a chance to grow rich before they grew old. Now, most developing countries are growing old before they get rich. "

baltimoresun.com - The effects of global graying: "Iran, for example, is aging four times faster than the United States. It took 50 years for the United States to go from a median age of 30 to today's 35. It would take another 50 years for the median age here to reach 40. But while the median age in the United States will be increasing by just five years, the median age in Iran will be increasing by 20 years, reaching 40.2 by mid-century, according to U.N. projections. Similarly, Egypt is aging at three times the rate of the United States, and Iraq nearly 2 1/2 times faster. Virtually anywhere one looks in the developing world, the pattern is the same. "

Expert 'teleports' into conference - BreakingNews - http://www.theage.com.au: "It took half a century for the phone to be adopted by a quarter of the US population, but the mobile phone took only eight years to achieve that level of use, he said.
He suggested the near future would see not only gene therapy advances to overcome disease and ageing, but also nanotechnology enabling tiny computer 'nanobots' to enter our bloodstreams on health missions."

Foresight for Innovation - thinking and debating the future: shaping and aligning policies Space - and in particular land use - forms the geographical projection of the dispersion of human activities and spatial processes are of enormous relevance to sustainable development, as the three dimensions of sustainability (economic, social, environmental) are closely interlinked in spatial planning. Consequently, spatial development policy must achieve an equal balance between spatial conditions for business, efficient infrastructures, an economical use of land and the protection of natural resources, and social and geographical cohesion.

Chimps Belong on Human Branch of Family Tree, Study Says: "A new report argues that chimpanzees are so closely related to humans that they should be included in our branch of the tree of life. Chimpanzees and other apes have historically been separated from humans in classification schemes, with humans deemed the only living members of the hominid family of species. "

Battelle - Technology Forecasts: "Worldwide Inexpensive and Safe Water. Within the next 20 years, clean drinking water could become an expensive commodity around the world. However, before water shortages become critical, technology will answer the challenge, with advanced filtering, processing, and delivery of potable water. Desalination of water and water extraction from the air are two possibilities.
'Our most important technological challenge of the next two decades may be developing new ways to make clean water plentiful and inexpensive around the world,' Kopp says"

MSN Hotmail - Message: "The risk is that a year from now, lower grain stocks and soaring food
prices could destabilize governments in low-income grain-importing
countries on a scale that would disrupt global economic progress. If this
lowers the Nikkei stock index, the Dow Jones 500, and other key
indicators, we may realize that our economic future depends on a worldwide
effort to stabilize population, raise water productivity, and stabilize
climate--and at wartime speed."

State of the World Trends and Facts: Moving Toward a Less Consumptive Economy: "From the standpoint of global justice and equality, the solution cannot be a system of consumer apartheid that upholds western binge habits but denies the poor a decent standard of living. Instead, the rich need to curb their outsized material appetites. Rough calculations suggest that in order to accommodate the twin imperatives of environmental protection and social equity, the rich nations may need to cut their use of materials by as much as 90 percent over the next few decades.
To support the move toward a less consumptive economy, consumers and producers will need to pay close attention to the full lifecycle of products. This means they need to concern themselves not just with the characteristics of the product itself, such as how much energy its use may require, but also with the materials and production methods used to manufacture the product and the kinds and types of wastes generated in the process. In addition, both consumers and producers need to consider how effectively goods actually deliver wanted services and comforts, how long products last, and what happens to them once they reach the end of their useful life.
A range of tools is at the disposal of governments, companies, and individual consumers to make progress toward the overall goal of a less consumptive economy. To make a difference, however, these efforts will need to be scaled up considerably, and political and structural barriers to change must be struck down."

State of the World Trends and Facts: Moving Toward a Less Consumptive Economy: "Endless economic growth driven by unbridled consumption has been elevated to the status of a modern religion. Modern economies are capable of producing huge quantities of goods at very low cost. This leads both producers and consumers to regard more and more products as little more than commodities that can be discarded relatively quickly rather than items that embody valuable energy and materials and that should be well maintained and designed for long life spans. "

World Watch Magazine: May/ June 2004: "Currently, the company is testing rice that has been genetically engineered with human genes to make two proteins found in human breast milk, lysozyme and lactoferrin.

World Watch Magazine: May/ June 2004: "A California company is introducing human genes to open-field rice crops. Echoing the warnings of Rachel Carson a generation ago, environmentalists now worry that the unanticipated consequences of such biopharmed crops could lead to a twenty-first century “Silent Winter.”

U.S. Is Losing Its Dominance in the Sciences: "More troubling to some experts is the likelihood of an accelerating loss of quality scientists. Applications from foreign graduate students to research universities are down by a quarter, experts say, partly because of the federal government's tightening of visas after the 2001 terrorist attacks. ..Shirley Ann Jackson, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, told the recent forum audience that the drop in foreign students, the apparently declining interest of young Americans in science careers and the aging of the technical work force were, taken together, a perilous combination of developments."

The New York Times > Science > U.S. Is Losing Its Dominance in the Sciences: "More troubling to some experts is the likelihood of an accelerating loss of quality scientists. Applications from foreign graduate students to research universities are down by a quarter, experts say, partly because of the federal government's tightening of visas after the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Shirley Ann Jackson, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, told the recent forum audience that the drop in foreign students, the apparently declining interest of young Americans in science careers and the aging of the technical work force were, taken together, a perilous combination of developments."

The New York Times > Science > U.S. Is Losing Its Dominance in the Sciences: "China represents the next wave, experts agree, its scientific rise still too fresh to show up in most statistics but already apparent. Dr. Simon of Rensselaer said that about 400 foreign companies had recently set up research centers in China, with General Electric, for instance, doing important work there on medical scanners, which means fewer skilled jobs in America....Ross Armbrecht, president of the Industrial Research Institute, a nonprofit group in Washington that represents large American companies, said businesses were going to China not just because of low costs but to take advantage of China's growing scientific excellence"

The New York Times > Science > U.S. Is Losing Its Dominance in the Sciences: "But the edifice is less formidable than it seems, in part because of the nation's costly and unique military role. This year, financing for military research hit $66 billion, higher in fixed dollars than in the cold war and far higher than in any other country."

The New York Times > Science > U.S. Is Losing Its Dominance in the Sciences "The United States has started to lose its worldwide dominance in critical areas of science and innovation, according to federal and private experts who point to strong evidence like prizes awarded to Americans and the number of papers in major professional journals.

May 2004: "Concentration of ownership in the media has a global impact. Media ownership concentration is increasing, with fewer and fewer companies at the top. Big media raises the concern of narrower view points, increasing influence and power of fewer entities, and most fundamentally, limiting democracy as the diversity of information (crucial to a functioning democratic system) reduces further. The media ownership page has been updated slightly."

May 2004: "We spend more to destroy ourselves than to solve issues and problems or to provide basic human rights. Some additional statistics have been added reflecting global priority in spending. While for 1998, the items on the list reveal a lot regarding our priorities. Military spending (just under $800 billion) and drugs ($400 billion) top the list, followed by alcohol ($105 billion) and cigarettes ($50 billion), both in Europe alone. Things like world spending on education ($6 billion) and health ($13 billion), in comparison, are far lower down the list."

Conflicts in Africa -- Introduction: "According to research from media organization Media Tenor, from 1 January 2002 until 30 June 2003, ?September 11 has turned the watch back to the pre-1990's, virtually eliminating all events and issues that are not related to either the United States or its coalition partners - especially when reporting on conflicts.... conflicts and wars played the most important role in all analysed television stations in Britain, Germany and the United States. But subtracting from this coverage Iraq and Afghanistan, only 0.2% (n=507) of all reports (N=23587) focused on conflicts in Africa. Wars without the involvement of the Western nations, do not seem newsworthy enough to appear on international TV news agendas, and the little coverage given only focuses on the brutality of the conflict and not on possible solutions.?"

The US and Foreign Aid Assistance: "Aid appears to have established as a priority the importance of influencing domestic policy in the recipient countries"