the year 2000, Australia is expected to ship 136 million tons of coal abroad, surpassing the United States as the world's leading exporter.
The half million tons of uranium oxide discovered in Australia since 1970 represent about 20 percent of known world reserves. During 1972-75, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam's Labor government blocked most mining and prevented exports. Both aboriginies and most labor unions shared his concerns over environmental and safety hazards. But Liberal Malcolm Fraser,...
the 1890s, the Alliance persuaded the Kajar Shah to order a halt to all mistreatment and discrimination. But then the monarchy had little control over the clergy or local authorities. It was not until the last Shah's father, Reza Pahlavi, began a new dynasty in 1925 that religious tolerance became the law, strictly enforced.
Looking Beyond 'Disunity Africa Africa" by Anthony J.
Hughes, in in EastReport (Nov.-Dec. 1979), Idim ~r~nsaction, State
Inc., Rutgers-The
University, New Brunswick,...
such books as The Complete Book of Running (772,000 copies sold) and the American Heart Association Cookbook (400,000)-should help dispel them.
Some other statistics may seal the argument. During the 70s, 18 medical schools opened, and total enrollment jumped from 35,000 to nearly 64,000. The number of persons employed in "health services" grew from 4.2 million to more than 7 mil- lion. In terms of total spending, health care became the nation's third largest "industry" (after...
lth is as much a cultural value as an objective state of being. Among the Indians of one South American tribe, reports mi- crobiologist Ren6 Dubos, a skin ailment called pinto, is so pre- valent that the unaffected are considered to be ill. In China. health (jian-kang) is regarded as a matter of physical and psy- chic harmony. In France, santk is a quality one "possesses." Americans are of two minds. Since Colonial days, health has been associated with purity: of the soul, of food, of...
There is a certain cachet in the term "American doctor," much as there is in "Swiss banker," "French chef," or "Soviet dissident." Hardly a month goes by without a team of U.S. physicians flying off to perform delicate surgery on some ailing international celebrity. The Nobel Prize in medicine has long been dominated by Americans. A large share of the science news chronicles the achievements of our physicians. There is nothing wrong with such eminence. But...
A friend of mine, a biomedical scientist with responsibilities for the future of one of the country's major research institutions, sent me a memorandum recently containing a set of questions about the application of biological science to medical problems.
Heading the list was the hardest and the most embarrass- ing: What are some examples, he asked, of the usefulness of the biological revolution itself, beginning with the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA in 1953 and culminating...
historians, and few good general histories exist today.
One of them is A Short History of Medicine (Oxford, 1928; 2nd ed., 1962). Author Charles Singer reckons that not until the 1500s did Euro- pean medical science attain the level of sophistication reached the Greeks in the 6th century B.c., nota-bly in their studies of anatomy and physiology.
When Europeans ventured to the New World, they brought their med- icine (as well as smallpox and measles) with them.
In a well-written textbook, Public...
, "capital- ism has disappeared from a large part of the earth." Gone, too, is the capitalist's euphoria-and clear conscience-of the early 19th century. Is capitalism an endangered species? What kind of animal is it? What are its origins? In his monumental Civilisa- tion Matirielle, Economic, et Capitalisme, completed in late 1979 and published in France earlier this year, Braudel describes to- day's capitalism in terms of the big banks, big financiers, and multinational corporations that...
"The present," writes Fernand Braudel in the third and final volume of his Material Civilization and Capitalism, "is largely the victim of a stubborn past bent on self-preservation." That remark is one key to a broad vision of history.
When Fernand Braudel became an editor of the French his- torical journal Annales: Economies, Sociitis, Civilisations in 1948, and when in 1956 he was named director of the 6th Sec- tion of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, France's most...
Long Life
Capitalism as a potential force emerges from the dawn of history, developing and perpetuating itself over centuries. Well in advance, there were signs heralding its arrival: the take-off of cities and exchanges, the appearance of a labor market, popula- tion density, the diffusion of money, long-distance trade.
When India, in the first century of our era, seized the far-off Indies, or at least penetrated it; when Rome held the entire Mediterranean and more under its sway; when China,...