When Dade County relocated its public library to a new building in 1985, the last several hundred books were moved by a human chain. The Everglades: River of Grass, the last of them all, was carried by a runner like a torch.
Buried in a recent National Science Foundation report is an eye-opening piece of news: The University of Florida has jumped 10 spots among top academic research institutions in research and development spending.
Absent from last week’s headlines about Gov. Charlie Crist’s veto of a 5 percent tuition hike for universities was an important piece of good news: The governor let stand $20 million for a new biofuel pilot plant to be built by the University of Florida.
Environmentalists whine a lot. I whine mostly about biodiversity loss, global warming and mismanagement of ecosystems. As an environmental scientist, I whine with copious data, stultifying statistics and assumed authority. Even friends get tired of my harping and ask for solutions, not more details about the problems.
For nearly 20 years, I’ve studied radical environmental movements. Fifteen years ago, I met with a small group of them in a forest in Tennessee. One among that group now faces sentencing before a federal court in Oregon for crimes attributed to the Earth and Animal Liberation fronts.
The fire season has barely started, but the costs of wildfires in Florida are already soaring. Few homes have been destroyed so far, but with more dry weather likely, more will probably go up in flames before the summer rains start. Given that the disastrous fires of 1998 didn’t get cranking until June, 2007 is likely to go down as the costliest fire season on record.
Durham police report that the lacrosse players presented neither a special nor unique case.
The recent firing of eight U.S. attorneys illustrates the fine line between politics and policy in our democracy. Whether the Bush administration did anything wrong depends on which side of the line its conduct fell. Because the evidence indicates the possibility of political manipulation of the prosecutorial function, Congress must persist in ferreting out the truth.
BOTH the House of Representatives and the Senate have recently passed bills raising the minimum wage. The Senate bill includes tax breaks for businesses, based on the following logic: While a minimum wage increase is popular, the resulting higher labor costs will translate into fewer jobs, more expensive products or both. The solution, the senators concluded, was to subsidize companies that hire disadvantaged workers, in order to reimburse them for these higher wage costs.
Last time the public was tuned in, the Justice Department was vigorously prosecuting corporate giants such as Enron for massive frauds committed during the waning days of the stock bubble. Assisted by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, government lawyers were racking up victories in the battle against white-collar crime. One recent highlight was the October sentencing of former Enron chief executive Jeffrey Skilling to 24 years in prison.