Healthcare Law Might Be Gone?

Facebook Creator Donates Millions

"The 26-year-old tycoon is pouring $100 million of his staggering fortune into Newark's blighted school system after hitting it off with the mayor of the poverty-stricken city."

The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, is donating $100 Million to the school system in Newark, New Jersey. This school system has a very low graduation rate, they have low test scores and there are numerous other things that make it a not very good school system. 


"Zuckerberg is ranked by Forbes magazine as the 35th wealthiest American, with a net worth of $6.9 billion. That makes him richer than Apple's Steve Jobs and News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch. Facebook has 500 million users and is valued by Forbes at $23 billion"

Original Article 

Natural Distaters can be so Devistating

Now that the flood is over, it's really big impact is starting to show

"Experts doubt that the situation will improve in time for the fall wheat-sowing season, which if missed would trigger massive food shortages in 2011."

Click HERE for full article

        No one really knew what would happen once the Afghanistan floods were over. People knew that the result would be devastating, but they did not know to what extent. As a result, over 10,000 schools and 500 hospitals were whipped away. Millions of people are now homeless and are living off practically nothing. Due to the flood, the farming land has been completely destroyed, but if the people want things to get better, the farmers need to start farming as soon as they can. It is estimated that their next harvest will not be till August of 2011.


      

13 Months Later

       13 months ago, three UC Berkeley graduates were hiking and apparently crossed the boarder into Iran. Now, due to the end of Ramadan, Sarah Shourd, will be released.

       "Bak Sahraei, the second counselor of Iran's UN mission, sent an e-mail confirming the release of Shourd, following up an earlier text message from the Culture Ministry telling reporters them to come to a Tehran hotel on Saturday morning to witness the release.
        The site is the same one where the three were allowed the only meeting with their mothers since they were detained in July 2009."
Original Article

      There is no real way to determine if they really crossed the boarder but the three students have been held as prisoners for the past 13 months, under the suspecting of being spies. Sarah Shourd is now going to be released. She told her mother that she is sick and that they have denied her any medical help. Good thing she can get help as soon as she gets released. The fate of the other two hikers, Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer, is unknown. Hopefully they will be released soon as well.

Quran Burning Cancelled

As a "compromise", the Quaran burning was called off and the mosque in New York will be moved.

"The anti-Muslim leader of a tiny Florida church backed off his threat to burn the Quran, defusing an international firestorm Thursday after he said he was promised that a planned Islamic center and mosque would be moved away from New York's ground zero. The imam planning the center, however, quickly denied such a deal."
Original Article


       If Pastor Terry Jones had continued with his decision to burn the Quaran, no one would be able to predict the outcome of his action. The agreement to not burn the Quarn also came with a result of changing the location on the mosque. On Saturday, Jones and Imam Muhammad Musri, the president of the Islamic Society of Central Florida, will be meeting with the imam who is making the plans to build the mosque.
      As a response to Jones' announcement:
"We are not going to toy with our religion or any other. Nor are we going to barter. We are here to extend our hands to build peace and harmony." -Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf (Leader of the Islamic center project)
      Many things are at risk with the entire situation. If the Quaran burning does end up happening, our troops could be in danger and no one knows what the rest of the world would do in response.

When Will We Wake Up?

"My friend Rob Watson, the environmental consultant, likes to say, 'You know, if you jump off the top floor of an eighty-story building, you can actually feel like you're flying for seventy-nine stories. It's the sudden stop at the end that gets you.' If we don't wake up, that is where we're heading-toward a sudden stop at the end."
-Thomas L. Friedman (Author of Hot, Flat and Crowded)

The population has grown very swiftly in the past 20 years. As of 2009, the estimated population of the world was 6.8 billion people. It is estimated that by 2050 there will be 9.4 billion people on our planet. This is what is going to destroy the planet and all of its resources. I do not think there is no real practical way to solve this problem, but I do believe that it is possible. No one has simply come up with the solution yet. It is very hard to believe that so many people in the world do not believe that we have a problem and that they do not realise that we need to figure out a way to fix the problem we have.

http://wps.prenhall.com/esm_hamblin_eds_10/12/3275/838447.cw/index.html
Population Growth:
http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm

The New Generation

         "Our parents' generation had to be the Greatest Generation, 'because the threats they faced were real, overwhelming, immediate, and inescapable-the Great Depression, the Nazis, and the nuclear-armed Soviet Communists,' said the Johns Hopkins foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum. 'That generation was ready to fight the Korean War and mobilize for the Cold War, precisely because it had been through the Depression and World War II. That generation understood how bad things could get."
-Thomas L. Friedman (Author of Hot, Flat and Crowded)

        Although the generation that experienced all of those historical events were ready for anything, it is up to my generation to either fix or completely destroy our world. My generation has such a huge effect on the world, and we do not even realised it yet. We could be the ones to solve all of the economy's problems and figure out a way for the world to not run out of resources. It is estimated that the world will run out of it's resources in my life time and it will be my generation's job to make sure that does not happen.


When will the earth run out of resources and what is causing this to happen?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/jul/07/research.waste

The Gas Guzzler

       "Detroit introduced the sport-utility vehicle and successfully lobbied the government to label these as light trucks so they would not have to meet the 27.5 miles per gallon standard for cars, but only the light truck standard of 20.7. So we became even more addicted to oil. When i asked Rick Wagoner, the chairman and CEO of General Motors, why his company didn't make more fuel-efficient cars, he gave me the standard answer: that GM has never succeeded in telling Americans what cars they should buy. "We build what the market wants," he said. If people want SUVs and Hummers, you have to give them what they want.
       But what the Detroit executives never tell you is that one big reason the public wanted SUVs and Hummers all those years was that Detroit and the oil industry consistently lobbied the Congress against raising gasoline taxes which would have shaped public demand for something different. European governments imposed very high gasoline taxes and taxes on engine size-and kept imposing them-and guess what? Europeans demanded smaller and smaller cars. America wouldn't impose more stringent gasoline and engine taxes, so American consumers kept wanting bigger and bigger cars. Big Oil and Big Auto used their leverage in Washington to shape the market so people would ask for those cars that consumed the most oil and earned the companies the most profits-and out Congress never got in the war. It was bought off."

- Thomas L. Friedman (Author of Hot, Flat and Crowded)

         At first, the Hummer was a good idea, but the idea was very short sided. It was not a very well constructed business plan. They planned on everyone wanting one because of the look and the luxury of the car, but it seems as if they did not think of the other half of the equation. The company did not think of the fact that their car only got about 12 miles to the gallon and after a while, this would become very undesirable to many people.

Interested in Thomas L. Friedman's book?
http://www.amazon.com/Hot-Flat-Crowded-2-0-Revolution/dp/0312428928/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1283486975&sr=8-1