The US has said the world's largest economies should focus on maintaining growth to avoid a double-dip recession.
As the G20 summit begins in Canada, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Europe and Japan should boost domestic demand instead of cutting spending.
European leaders have said reducing government deficits is key to setting long-term growth on track.
But Brazil warned that steep budget cuts could harm emerging economies.
Speaking in Toronto, scene of the summit, Mr Geithner said the global economy was still emerging from its crisis and "the scars of this crisis are still with us".
He said: "This summit must be fundamentally about growth."
Cut or spend?
Emergency assistance that G20 leaders agreed on at previous summits at the height of the economic crisis must not be withdrawn too soon, he said.
"We're going to avoid that mistake by making sure that we recognize that it's only been a year since the world economy stopped collapsing," he said.
Europe and Japan should do more to stimulate domestic demand to make it easier for other countries to export to them.
With countries emerging from the global downturn at different speeds, splits have emerged in how to proceed.
Spooked by attacks on the euro currency prompted by Greece's debt crisis, European governments have focused on cutting spending to reduce their deficits.
A draft version of the summit's communique suggested the Group of 20 richest and emerging economies was nearing a compromise, Reuters news agency said.
This would see an agreement to halve budget deficits by three years and toughen banking regulations.
Brazil said the focus on cutting deficits could harm emerging economies.
"If the cuts take place in advanced countries it is worse," said Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega.
"Because instead of stimulating growth they pay more attention to fiscal adjustments, and if they are exporters they will be reforming at our cost."
North Korea warming
Thousands of demonstrators marched on the G20 summit on Saturday in what is being reported to have been a largely peacefully rally that saw outbreaks of violence on its edges. These saw groups of young men scuffle with riot police and set fire to at least two patrol cars.
The G20 meeting follows the summit of the G8 group of industrialised nations, which met at a lakeside resort outside Toronto.
They condemned North Korea for the sinking of a South Korean warship in March.
The G8 leaders also criticised North Korea - and Iran - over their nuclear activities, and they described the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip as "not sustainable".
And they admitted that the global financial crisis had compromised efforts to meet UN targets for reducing world poverty.
On Friday, they agreed to donate $5bn (£3.3bn) over five years towards improving the health of mothers and young children in the developing world.
source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/us_and_canada/10426747.stm
domingo, 27 de junho de 2010
domingo, 20 de junho de 2010
Where Gulf Spill Might Place on the Roll of Disasters
From the Oval Office the other night, President Obama called the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico “the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced.” Senior people in the government have echoed that language.
The motive seems clear. The words signal sympathy for the people of the Gulf Coast, an acknowledgment of the magnitude of their struggle. And if this is really the worst environmental disaster, the wording seems to suggest, maybe people need to cut the government some slack for failing to get it under control right away.
But is the description accurate?
Scholars of environmental history, while expressing sympathy for the people of the gulf, say the assertion is debatable. They offer an intimidating list of disasters to consider: floods caused by human negligence, the destruction of forests across the entire continent and the near-extermination of the American bison.
“The White House is ignoring all the shades and complexities here to make a dramatic point,” said Donald E. Worster, an environmental historian at the University of Kansas and a visiting scholar at Yale.
The professors also note the impossibility of ranking such a varied list of catastrophes. Perhaps the worst disaster, they say, is always the one people are living through now.
Still, for sheer disruption to human lives, several of them could think of no environmental problem in American history quite equaling the calamity known as the Dust Bowl.
“The Dust Bowl is arguably one of the worst ecological blunders in world history,” said Ted Steinberg, a historian at Case Western Reserve University.
Across the High Plains, stretching from the Texas Panhandle to the Dakotas, poor farming practices in the early part of the 20th century stripped away the native grasses that held moisture and soil in place. A drought that began in 1930 exposed the folly.
Boiling clouds of dust whipped up by harsh winds buried homes and cars, destroyed crops, choked farm animals to death and sent children to the hospital with pneumonia. At first the crisis was ignored in Washington, but then the apocalyptic clouds began to blow all the way to New York, Buffalo and Chicago. A hearing in Congress on the disaster was interrupted by the arrival of a dust storm.
By the mid-1930s, people started to give up on the region in droves. The Dust Bowl refugees joined a larger stream of migrants displaced by agricultural mechanization, and by 1940 more than two million people had left the Great Plains States.
However, the Dust Bowl lasted a decade, and that raises an issue. What exactly should be defined as an environmental disaster? How long should an event take to play out, and how many people have to be harmed before it deserves that epithet?
Among sudden events, the Johnstown Flood might be a candidate for worst environmental disaster. On May 31, 1889, heavy rains caused a poorly maintained dam to burst in southwestern Pennsylvania, sending a wall of water 14 miles downriver to the town of Johnstown. About 2,200 people were killed in one of the worst tolls in the nation’s history.
At the time it happened, that event was understood as a failure of engineering and maintenance, and that is how it has come down in history. Perhaps a one-day flood is simply too short-term to count as an environmental disaster.
On the other hand, if events that played out over many decades are included, the field of candidates expands sharply.
Perhaps the destruction of the native forests of North America, which took hundreds of years, should be counted as the nation’s largest environmental calamity. The slaughtering of millions of bison on the Great Plains might qualify.
Craig E. Colten, a geographer at Louisiana State University, nominates “the human overhaul of the Mississippi River Valley,” which destroyed many thousands of acres of wetlands and made the region more vulnerable to later events like Hurricane Katrina.
However, those activities were not seen as disasters at the time, at least by the people who carried them out. They were viewed as desirable alterations of the landscape. It is only in retrospect that people have come to understand what was lost, so maybe those do not belong on a disaster list.
Oil spills, too, seem to be judged more by their effect on people than on the environment. Consider the Lakeview Gusher, which was almost certainly a worse oil spill, by volume, than the one continuing in the gulf.
In the southern end of California’s San Joaquin Valley, an oil rush was on in the early decades of the 20th century. On March 14, 1910, a well halfway between the towns of Taft and Maricopa, in Kern County, blew out with a mighty roar.
It continued spewing huge quantities of oil for 18 months. The version of events accepted by the State of California puts the flow rate near 100,000 barrels a day at times. “It’s the granddaddy of all gushers,” said Pete Gianopulos, an amateur historian in the area.
The ultimate volume spilled was calculated at 9 million barrels, or 378 million gallons. According to the highest government estimates, the Deepwater Horizon spill is not yet half that size.
The Lakeview oil was penned in immense pools by sandbags and earthen berms, and nearly half was recovered and refined by the Union Oil Company. The rest soaked into the ground or evaporated. Today, little evidence of the spill remains, and outside Kern County, it has been largely forgotten. That is surely because the area is desert scrubland, and few people were inconvenienced by the spill.
That sets it apart from the Deepwater Horizon leak. The environmental effects of the gulf spill remain largely unknown. But the number of lives disrupted is certainly in the thousands, if not the tens of thousands; the paychecks lost in industries like fishing add up to millions; and the ultimate cost will be counted in billions.
Even with all that pain, can it yet be called the nation’s worst environmental disaster?
“My take,” said William W. Savage Jr., a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, “is that we’re not going to be able to tell until it’s over.”
But is the description accurate?
Scholars of environmental history, while expressing sympathy for the people of the gulf, say the assertion is debatable. They offer an intimidating list of disasters to consider: floods caused by human negligence, the destruction of forests across the entire continent and the near-extermination of the American bison.
“The White House is ignoring all the shades and complexities here to make a dramatic point,” said Donald E. Worster, an environmental historian at the University of Kansas and a visiting scholar at Yale.
The professors also note the impossibility of ranking such a varied list of catastrophes. Perhaps the worst disaster, they say, is always the one people are living through now.
Still, for sheer disruption to human lives, several of them could think of no environmental problem in American history quite equaling the calamity known as the Dust Bowl.
“The Dust Bowl is arguably one of the worst ecological blunders in world history,” said Ted Steinberg, a historian at Case Western Reserve University.
Across the High Plains, stretching from the Texas Panhandle to the Dakotas, poor farming practices in the early part of the 20th century stripped away the native grasses that held moisture and soil in place. A drought that began in 1930 exposed the folly.
Boiling clouds of dust whipped up by harsh winds buried homes and cars, destroyed crops, choked farm animals to death and sent children to the hospital with pneumonia. At first the crisis was ignored in Washington, but then the apocalyptic clouds began to blow all the way to New York, Buffalo and Chicago. A hearing in Congress on the disaster was interrupted by the arrival of a dust storm.
By the mid-1930s, people started to give up on the region in droves. The Dust Bowl refugees joined a larger stream of migrants displaced by agricultural mechanization, and by 1940 more than two million people had left the Great Plains States.
However, the Dust Bowl lasted a decade, and that raises an issue. What exactly should be defined as an environmental disaster? How long should an event take to play out, and how many people have to be harmed before it deserves that epithet?
Among sudden events, the Johnstown Flood might be a candidate for worst environmental disaster. On May 31, 1889, heavy rains caused a poorly maintained dam to burst in southwestern Pennsylvania, sending a wall of water 14 miles downriver to the town of Johnstown. About 2,200 people were killed in one of the worst tolls in the nation’s history.
At the time it happened, that event was understood as a failure of engineering and maintenance, and that is how it has come down in history. Perhaps a one-day flood is simply too short-term to count as an environmental disaster.
On the other hand, if events that played out over many decades are included, the field of candidates expands sharply.
Perhaps the destruction of the native forests of North America, which took hundreds of years, should be counted as the nation’s largest environmental calamity. The slaughtering of millions of bison on the Great Plains might qualify.
Craig E. Colten, a geographer at Louisiana State University, nominates “the human overhaul of the Mississippi River Valley,” which destroyed many thousands of acres of wetlands and made the region more vulnerable to later events like Hurricane Katrina.
However, those activities were not seen as disasters at the time, at least by the people who carried them out. They were viewed as desirable alterations of the landscape. It is only in retrospect that people have come to understand what was lost, so maybe those do not belong on a disaster list.
Oil spills, too, seem to be judged more by their effect on people than on the environment. Consider the Lakeview Gusher, which was almost certainly a worse oil spill, by volume, than the one continuing in the gulf.
In the southern end of California’s San Joaquin Valley, an oil rush was on in the early decades of the 20th century. On March 14, 1910, a well halfway between the towns of Taft and Maricopa, in Kern County, blew out with a mighty roar.
It continued spewing huge quantities of oil for 18 months. The version of events accepted by the State of California puts the flow rate near 100,000 barrels a day at times. “It’s the granddaddy of all gushers,” said Pete Gianopulos, an amateur historian in the area.
The ultimate volume spilled was calculated at 9 million barrels, or 378 million gallons. According to the highest government estimates, the Deepwater Horizon spill is not yet half that size.
The Lakeview oil was penned in immense pools by sandbags and earthen berms, and nearly half was recovered and refined by the Union Oil Company. The rest soaked into the ground or evaporated. Today, little evidence of the spill remains, and outside Kern County, it has been largely forgotten. That is surely because the area is desert scrubland, and few people were inconvenienced by the spill.
That sets it apart from the Deepwater Horizon leak. The environmental effects of the gulf spill remain largely unknown. But the number of lives disrupted is certainly in the thousands, if not the tens of thousands; the paychecks lost in industries like fishing add up to millions; and the ultimate cost will be counted in billions.
Even with all that pain, can it yet be called the nation’s worst environmental disaster?
“My take,” said William W. Savage Jr., a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, “is that we’re not going to be able to tell until it’s over.”
domingo, 13 de junho de 2010
monty phyton's flying circus
Today, you'll know a little bit about the most famous comedy group of our time called MONTY PHYTON!!
'Monty Python' was created in the late 1960s by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. The six members of the team had got to know each other gradually in the preceding years, firstly through university - Graham, John and Eric were at Cambridge together, while Terry Jones and Michael were at Oxford - and later through their work on various television comedy programmes, most notably The Frost Report.
In 1967, John and Graham co-wrote and starred in At Last, the 1948 Show, which also starred Marty Feldman, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Aimi MacDonald, with occasional appearances by Eric. The following year, Eric, Michael and Terry J wrote and starred in the children's show1, Do Not Adjust Your Set (DNAYS), which also featured David Jason2 and the Bonzo Dog (Doo Dah) Band3, who enjoyed chart success with 'I'm the Urban Spaceman'. Importantly, the series also featured animations by Terry Gilliam.
In early 1969, Michael and Terry J wrote and starred in a short-lived series called The Complete and Utter History of Britain, in which they presented various periods in British history as though television cameras had been there. The series was seen by John, who decided that he would like to work with Michael. A similar thought was had by Barry Took, a producer at the BBC, and he arranged a meeting between the two. John brought writing partner Graham along, and Michael brought DNAYS colleagues Terry J, Eric and Terry G. The six of them hit it off, sharing a love of The Goons and Spike Milligan's Q5 television show. With no questions asked, the BBC gave them a budget to produce 13 television shows...
The Flying Circus
The first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus was broadcast on October 5, 1969. The show was buried late at night and was moved round the schedules to make way for other programmes. Occasionally it was dropped altogether4, while certain regions of the UK never got to see it at all. Despite all this, the show developed a significant word-of-mouth following; enough for the BBC to commission a second series in 1970.
After the second series, the Pythons branched out into the world of film, with the release of And Now For Something Completely Different. Envisaged as a way of breaking Monty Python into the American market, it wasn't as successful as they'd hoped and the team returned to television. The third series of Flying Circus was shown in 1972-73, at the end of which, John decided that he'd been with the circus long enough. The fourth series, renamed simply Monty Python was shown in 1974. Having only six episodes, it is generally considered to be the weakest of the four television series, with John's departure unbalancing the group. Fortunately, John wasn't gone for good...
The Films
Learning from their experiences on And Now For Something Completely Different, the Pythons were determined to keep control of their next film.
Decamping to Scotland between the third and fourth series of Flying Circus, the group filmed Monty Python and the Holy Grail on a tiny budget, with Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam directing. Despite some hardship during the filming process - the Scottish weather proving typically unfriendly - the team managed to put together a highly successful film. In a fortunate piece of timing, the release of Holy Grail coincided with the time that Python was first becoming popular in the USA, further boosting the success of the film and convincing the team that cinema was the way forward for Monty Python.
The next Python film was the highly controversial Monty Python's Life Of Brian, released in 1979. The idea came from an off-the-cuff comment by Eric Idle, claiming that their next film would be called 'Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory'. After many rewrites, including a working holiday to Barbados, the final script had almost nothing to do with Christ at all, and simply told the story of a man mistaken for the Messiah - the eponymous Brian. For a while, it seemed as though the film would not be made, as the original funding was withdrawn. Fortunately, George Harrison, a Python fan, was desperate to see the film and set up a production company, 'Handmade Films', for that purpose. On its release, the film was attacked by fundamentalist Christians who campaigned, successfully in some areas, to have the film banned. Despite (or perhaps because of) this, the film went on to be an enormous success. Simultaneously hilarious, intelligent and thought-provoking, it is possibly the Pythons' finest hour.
After Brian came a recording of their 1980 stage performance at the Hollywood Bowl. The group performed some favourite sketches, while the crowd, many of whom were dressed in Python costumes, shouted the words along with them - the comedy equivalent of a rock concert.
The Pythons' next film was, as it turned out, the final true Python project. Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life was released in 1983 and was another financial and critical success, winning the Jury Prize at the Cannes film festival. The film contains some of their most outrageous material, including an attack on Catholic birth control policy in 'Every Sperm is Sacred', a live sex-education lesson in front of some bored schoolboys, Graham Chapman being chased off a cliff by a group of near-naked women, and, of course, the all-vomiting, all-exploding Mr Creosote. A fitting way to bring the Python era to a close.
During the Meanwhile...
In between the television series and films, the Pythons also worked on other projects, particularly a series of books and records. These were as innovative as their other material, with The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief being the world's first 'three-sided' record - a second groove was cut into side 2 of the album so that the sketches heard depended on where the needle fell.
In good Python tradition, both the books and records also managed to cause some controversy, Monty Python's Brand New Bok5 in particular causing consternation in book shops with some realistically dirty fingerprints on the white cover. Monty Python's Instant Record Collection also caused problems for shopkeepers, as it was originally packaged in a Terry Gilliam-designed fold-out cover which could be assembled to look like a stack of records. The complicated package kept breaking open in shops, and later versions were released with a much more simple cover. Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album managed to cause offence in a different way, with one item - 'Farewell to John Denver' - being deleted from later versions, and a second item - 'Sit on My Face' - threatened with deletion.
Python continues to exist today in the form of the official website: Pythonline. This is very much Eric Idle's project, but the other Pythons have occasionally been known to drop in.
Of course, Python also lives on in the many references to it that can be found in popular culture and elsewhere. Phrases such as 'this is an ex-parrot' or 'nudge, nudge, wink wink, say no more' have entered the English language, and the word pythonesque is defined in Chamber's English dictionary as:
Pythonesque, adj. of humour, bizarre and surreal, as in the BBC television comedy programme Monty Python's Flying Circus.
Scientists (computer scientists in particular) often look to Python for inspiration when naming things: the net term 'spam' takes its name from a Python sketch, while the programming language 'Python' is a direct steal. In 1985, a giant fossil snake was discovered and was given the Latin name Montypythonoides riversleighensis6.
The End
Although Meaning of Life was the last genuine Python project, there was talk all through the 1980s about a Python reunion, another stage show, another film, another television series... The problem was that all the individual Pythons were too busy with their own (and each other's) projects to find the time to get all six of them together. Then, in 1988, Graham Chapman was diagnosed with cancer and, despite claiming to have beaten it, died on 4 October, 1989, one day short of the 20th anniversary of the Flying Circus.
The Python team were reunited in 1998 for a stage appearance in Aspen, Colorado, USA, with British comedian Eddie Izzard making a brief appearance claiming to be one of the team. Graham also 'appeared', in an urn, which was 'accidentally' kicked over and spilt by Terry G. After the event, there was again talk of a new film or stage show, but it failed to materialise. The team also got together for a 30th anniversary celebration on the BBC in 1999. The sad fact is that, although they remain friends, they are all too busy and successful to ever co-ordinate their efforts into a joint production. Besides, without Graham Chapman, it just wouldn't be Python anyway...
source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/A687945
domingo, 6 de junho de 2010
do you like football? and world cup?
Next week, the world cup will start. For almost 50 days, people around the world will be connected with the same feeling... passion for football. I won't post anything but you going to tell me what is you opinion about the games. If you support Brazil or other countries, if you pay attention to the beatiful players (rsrs) or the event is just... an event and you don't really care about. Wathever. Tell me your opinion. For the ending, I found an interesting site talking about the history about the world cup, sometimes is important to know because we had important issues and how the games chance the destiny of one nation.
history of the world cup
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