Malaysia plane search enters third week |
The country asks the US for underwater surveillance technology after no debris from missing flight MH370 is found.
Last updated: 22 Mar 2014 05:37
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The hunt for the Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 has entered its third week, with the country asking the US to provide undersea surveillance technology and search efforts continuing thousands of kilometres off the coast of Australia.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority said it would send six aicraft throughout the day on Saturday.
Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysia's defence minister and acting transport minister, on Friday asked the US for underwater technology.
Chuck Hagel, the US defence secretary, told Hussein that he would contact Malaysian authorities after considering the matter.
Five planes were sent to the southern Indian Ocean on Friday to look for objects that may be from the missing Malaysian jet.
And an Australian official said the hunt would be extended for another day after nothing had been found in the area, about 2,500km southwest of Perth, according to the AP news agency.
"Something that was floating on the sea that long ago may no longer be floating," said Warren Truss, who is the acting Australian prime minister while Tony Abbott is in Papua New Guinea. "It may have slipped to the bottom," he added.
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Why water could decide the Indian elections
India is the world's second largest country by population (1.2 billion) and tenth largest by GDP ($1,842bn), yet the national election next month could be decided by a simple issue – water.
Mechanically pumped groundwater now provides 85% of India's drinking water, and is the main water source for all uses. North India's groundwater is declining at one of the fastest rates in the world, and many areas may have already passed "peak water". The World Bank predicted earlier this year that a majority of India's underground water resources will reach a critical state within 20 years. Groundwater use still falls under an 1882 colonial law, but the reasons behind its dramatic decline are more to do with the local and international politics of water management.
The Return of Terror: Violence Rocks Iraq as Elections Approach
With just six weeks to go before parliamentary elections in Iraq, sectarian violence has once again gripped the country. Car bombs have become a regular occurrence and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is under fire.
His life could have turned out differently. Very differently. It could have ended long ago.
The young Maliki, born in 1950, was a dissident in the central Iraq city of Hilla. He wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein and liberate the Shiites, but he was captured by Saddam's henchmen. A judge ordered his release, but then the judge himself was executed. Maliki fled on the evening of Oct. 19, 1979. The next day 16 vehicles arrived at his house to conduct the next raid. They were looking for Maliki.
He remained in exile for 24 years, in Syria and Iran. Maliki learned how power and powerlessness worked, how it felt to lose friends and how it felt to be betrayed by them. When he returned to Iraq after the American invasion in 2003, Maliki knew exactly what he wanted.
Kenya legalises polygamy without wife's consent
Kenya's parliament has passed a bill allowing men to marry as many women as they want, prompting a furious backlash from female lawmakers who stormed out, reports said Friday.
The bill, which amended existing marriage legislation, was passed late on Thursday to formalise customary law about marrying more than one person.
The proposed bill had initially given a wife the right to veto the husband's choice, but male members of parliament overcame party divisions to push through a text that dropped this clause.
"When you marry an African woman, she must know the second one is on the way, and a third wife... this is Africa," MP Junet Mohammed told the house, according to Nairobi's Capital FM.
As in many parts of Africa, polygamy is common among traditional communities in Kenya, as well as among the country's Muslim community, which accounts for up to a fifth of the population.
In Colombia, cows, crops and timber coexist
An ambitious program in Colombia shows that mixing grazing, agriculture, and trees can coax more food from each acre, boost farmers' incomes, restore degraded land, and make farming more resilient to climate change.
Over the last two decades, cattle rancher Carlos Hernando Molina has replaced 220 acres of open pastureland with trees, shrubs, and bushy vegetation. But he hasn’t eliminated the cows.
Today, his land in southwestern Colombia more closely resembles a perennial nursery at a garden center than a grazing area. Native, high-value timber like mahogany and samanea grow close together along the perimeter of the pasture. The trees are strung with electric wire and act as live fences. In the middle of the pen grow leucaena trees, a protein-packed forage tree, and beneath the leucaena are three types of tropical grasses and groundcover such as peanuts.
The plants provide his 90 head of cattle with vertical layers of grazing, leading to twice the milk and meat production per acre while reducing the amount of land needed to raise them. His operation is part of a trend globally to sustainably coax more food from each acre — without chemicals and fertilizers — while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, increasing biodiversity, and enhancing the land’s ability to withstand the effects of climate change.
New in Town: Megacities May Be the Norm by Mid-Century
Millions of people around the world are heading toward cities at an unprecedented rate –- and it’s going to be a crunch.
Many of those new arrivals will find a better life. Others won’t. For governments, businesses and policymakers trying to manage that explosive growth, the pace of this mass urbanization presents an epic challenge.
"The urbanization that happened after the industrial revolution in the highly-industrialized countries was much, much more gradual than urbanization is now," said Janice Perlman, an author and founder of the Mega-Cities Project. "Still, there was a lot of chaos and difficulty and a lot of environmental problems. But now it's just accelerated exponentially."
Today some three dozen cities around the world make the megacities list of more than 10 million population, including Tokyo, Beijing, São Paulo, New York, Mexico City, Mumbai and Dhaka, according to data compiled by Oxford Economics. By 2030 more than a dozen more cities will be added to the list.
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