Word: bear
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...made about Americans today. We can debate the toxic consequences of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, but an equally troubling and potentially more lasting question is the effect of the Iraq occupation on U.S. soldiers. The dreadful nature of that conflict hasn't touched most Americans. Its troops alone bear the scar of war; they carry it home with them - if they come home - and those nightmares may never end. Waltz With Bashir is about the cold fingers of memory that clutch the heart. Forman's exemplary film says that only by exposing the wounds can they begin to heal...
...similarity in the two films: to this adult's eyes, they were of only middling quality. The Golden Compass was middling-good, with a beguiling central performance by 13-year-old Dakota Blue Richards, a slinky turn by Nicole Kidman as an evil-stepmom type and a nifty polar-bear fight. But the film never cohered, and at the end it trailed off into a preview of the two sequels that now don't look as if they'll be made. The first Narnia movie was middling-bad, its four lead child actors displaying little charm, their world holding lesser...
...Many green groups, which had fought for more than three years to get the polar bear listed, were unimpressed with the decision. "This changes nothing," says Carroll Muffett, deputy campaign director for Greenpeace. "They simultaneously acknowledge that global warming is likely to lead to polar bear extinction, while ruling out any action to address that problem." There had been hope that, as the bear was threatened because of global warming, its listing might offer a new way to fight fossil fuel projects in the U.S. Kassie Siegel, director of the Climate, Air and Energy program for the Center for Biological...
...That seems disingenuous: more emissions mean more warming, more warming means less sea ice, less sea ice means less polar bears. Green groups are likely to challenge Kempthorne's ruling in court, so the struggle over the polar bear is far from over. But the Administration's hair-splitting highlights just how difficult it will be to adapt existing environmental legislation to protect species in a warming future. In the past, an endangered species was usually threatened by specific human action in a limited geographical area - say, logging in the Pacific Northwest destroying the habitat of the spotted owl - that...
...decision to list the polar bear shouldn't be entirely dismissed - it is, after all, the first animal to be listed by the Administration under the ESA in more than three years, the longest gap in Presidential history. "This is a huge victory for polar bears," says Siegel. "It's the clearest acknowledgement by the Bush Administration of the urgency of global warming." But once again with this White House, it may be too little, too late...