“As near as we can tell looking at the historical record, there’s been ice in the Arctic in the summer for at least 16 million years”, Don Perovich, a geophysicist with the US army’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, told the August 4 Four Corners program. Arctic ice melt over this year’s northern summer has been at record levels, leaving the amount of ice remaining alarmingly low.
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The Beijing Olympic games, which began on August 8, are shaping up to be a perfect reflection of our times — taking place against a backdrop of human rights abuses, terrorism scares and under a blanket of chemical smog.
Much of the world is fascinated by the US presidential election campaign.
In August 2004, around the same time as the Howard Coalition government banned same-sex marriage, the religious right held an anti-gay marriage forum at Parliament House in Canberra. It was attended by about 2000 people.
Like the good Count of Transylvania, the so-called Doha Round of trade negotiations of the World Trade Organization (WTO) collapsed twice — in Cancun in 2003 and in Potsdam in 2007 — only to come back from the dead.
Hydrologists such as professors Peter Cullen, Richard Kingsford and Derek Eamus, speaking at public forums in NSW earlier this year, warned that Australians are extracting water from stressed rivers and artesian systems faster than it is being replenished.
The conservative Christian group Hillsong has launched a controversial new youth program “Shine”, aimed, it says, at “promoting self-esteem” in teenage girls considered to be “at risk”, due to personal problems or behavioural issues.
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