...s. The increasing inflow of foreign money is also unlikely to halt within the next few years. The military officers who planned the Rodovia Transamazônica highway, which connects large empty areas to each other throughout the Amazon rainforest, hardly knew their country would win bids to host both the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. Brazil is also a pioneer in offshore oil drilling, and the recent discovery of massive deep-water reserves along...
The men behind Google and Avatar want to mine asteroids. Elon Musk, a co-founder of PayPal, is scheduled to send the SpaceX Falcon 9, the world’s first commercial launch vehicle, to the International Space Station (ISS) on May 7. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has a rocket company of his own. Hotel magnate Robert Bigelow is developing inflatable space habitats for use by private companies and government agencies. And the chief executive of Virgin...
...rcibly removed for this project, and countless archaeological and cultural sites were buried forever. The effects of damming the Xingu River are in some ways no less drastic: It will flood an estimated 140 square miles of the Amazon rainforest and risk the extinction of hundreds of species endemic to this area, the most ecologically diverse on Earth. The impact on local indigenous tribes should not be neglected: Traditional lands will be permanen...
...skinned” African American “with no Negro dialect.” Eager readers have made Game Change the best-selling book in America for four weeks straight, according to The New York Times, as well as the best-selling nonfiction title on Amazon. But although Game Change is indisputably entertaining, its unsourced nature has grabbed negative attention, too. Clark Hoyt of The New York Times notes that while Bob Woodward also used deep background interviews in...
...es, “Military history has never had a respected place in the American academy.” This fact, he points out, is striking given that there is a larger public interest in military history than in almost any other historical field. Amazon’s online list of most popular history books more than confirms this, and one is left to wonder about some of the larger implications of the disconnect between commercial and academic interest in military history. Whil...
...any South American nations. While the numbers of indigenous communities are small, a million or so in Mexico – a million or so in Venezuela, their impact on countries’ “founding stories” is irreplaceable. In many parts of the Amazon and Tierra del Fuego, some tribes of indigenous people have never encountered Western civilizations. Experts estimate that more than a hundred such tribes may exist in South America alone, representing tens of thousan...
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