The two largest oil-producing countries in Latin America, Mexico and Venezuela, sold petroleum to Nicaragua at concessional rates for several years beginning in 1980. The program was curtailed because Nicaragua could not make even reduced payments.
I think archaeologists are stuck, and we are losing our past at a very rapid rate. Tens of thousands of sites will be lost, and we've only unveiled a tiny percent of the past.
I'm not a fan of giving a website a simple number like an IQ rating because like people they can vary in all kinds of different ways. So I'd be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways.
Crime is actually less in places where people own guns. Washington, D.C., is a case in point. It has the strictest gun laws, but who has the highest crime rate in the country? Washington, D.C.
Political corruption is endemic all over this country, in some places worse than others, right? On crime, you have all the major American cities where the crime rates at different points in their histories, have spiked dramatically.
The Obama administration deserves credit for quickly ending the housing free fall. In particular, Obama empowered the Federal Housing Administration to ensure that households could find mortgages at low interest rates even during the worst phase of t...
On the other hand, it is not fair to say that changes in federal policy have caused our tuition to rise faster. Every economic argument imaginable would indicate that we should raise tuition at a faster rate than we do.
The United States consumes power per land-area at a rate three times the average. Even though they are more energy efficient, densely populated industrial countries like Germany, Britain and Japan have even bigger power consumption per area.
That's the power behind a tool like Facebook Connect. It is making a Web without walls. Facebook allows you to go to other sites to comment, rate, etc., without having to set up a new profile for that site.
What we have is a pay structure that, on basic wages, is higher than market rate, as a general statement. When you look at other forms of retail, whether they be food or non-food, we pay more. If you look at our health care benefits, we pay a lot mor...
We have the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. 'America, land of liberty and freedom?' You know, that's baloney. More than 2 million Americans are behind bars now. Communist China has four times the population and they have 1.5 m...
African Americans make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population but comprise 32 percent of patients treated for kidney failure, giving them a kidney failure rate that is 4.2 times greater than that of white Americans.
We can't just rail against crime. We must speak of the root problems - devastating family breakup, an insidious culture of violence that cheapens human life, skyrocketing prisoner recidivism rates that rob our communities of husbands and fathers - an...
Obama wants to take the individual small business tax to 44 percent, and the corporate rate - he says - down to 28 percent or whatever. But that really damages the small businesses. And it doesn't make us competitive. You got to take them both down t...
The reality is that business and investment spending are the true leading indicators of the economy and the stock market. If you want to know where the stock market is headed, forget about consumer spending and retail sales figures. Look to business ...
We all know that China is industrializing at a growth rate of 8 to 10 percent per year. China is on track to pass the U.S. as the largest economy in the world in 20 to 25 years, and China is determined to give its people a chance at this high standar...
There are philosophical issues involved in that about choosing the right discount rate, the value, the future, and things like that which drive it. But its start with the premise that global warming is real and if you're a denier of that fact, then y...
I'm carded for R-rated movies. And I get talked down to a lot. When I try to go rent a car or buy an airplane ticket or other stuff adults do, I get 'Okaaaaaay, honey.' I remember when I was 18, getting crayons in a restaurant.
If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or both. Anarchy is one of the main reasons for violence, and it may be the most important.
It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per batt...
Life holds one great but quite commonplace mystery. Though shared by each of us and known to all, seldom rates a second thought. That mystery, which most of us take for granted and never think twice about, is time.
