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From his Cessna a mile above the southern Amazon, John Carter looks down on the destruction of the world's greatest ecological jewel. He watches men converting rain forest into cattle pastures and soybean fields with bulldozers and chains. He sees fires wiping out such gigantic swaths of jungle that scientists now debate the "savannization" of the Amazon. Brazil just announced that deforestation is on track to double this year; Carter, a Texas cowboy with all the subtlety of a chainsaw, says it's going to get worse fast. "It gives me goose bumps," says Carter, who founded a nonprofit...
...Amazon was the chic eco-cause of the 1990s, revered as an incomparable storehouse of biodiversity. It's been overshadowed lately by global warming, but the Amazon rain forest happens also to be an incomparable storehouse of carbon, the very carbon that heats up the planet when it's released into the atmosphere. Brazil now ranks fourth in the world in carbon emissions, and most of its emissions come from deforestation. Carter is not a man who gets easily spooked--he led a reconnaissance unit in Desert Storm, and I watched him grab a small anaconda with his bare hands...
That means easing restrictions on how downloads can be used, and on what kind of devices. You'll still need a whizzy Apple gadget to hear most of the music available from iTunes, but Amazon last September began selling tracks in the U.S. in a format compatible with most digital music players. Its catalogue of 3 million songs - culled from all four majors - will be available outside the U.S. later this year; European music fans unable to wait can from this month download such unrestricted tracks by Warner Music and EMI artists from 7digital, a U.K. music site...
...potency is probably due to its unusual habitat. "It's unique to the Amazon," notes Alexander Schauss, senior scientist at AIBMR Life Sciences, a contract research organization in Washington. "The palm tree that has the açaí berries is the canopy, the very top of the rain forest. Its berries are strongly exposed to ultraviolet radiation and have had to develop chemical strategies to deal with it." Which makes them an invaluable resource for skin health...
...example, A Dolce & Gabanna woman's watch marked down on Amazon.com France to 192.72 euros - or $300 - is hardly a bargain compared to the same watch on Amazon's U.S. site selling for $225. Why should dollar-spenders even think of shopping Europe? On the other side, the profits European companies make on dollar sales are shrunken by the time they get converted back to euros. For the euro-zone economy with a projected growth rate of only around 2% in 2008, the upshot is a major pinch on export revenues threatening to stunt growth even more...