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This might seem like little more than a tantalizing mystery for entomologists, except for one fact: honeybees provide $15 billion worth of value to U.S. farmers, pollinating crops that range from apples to avocados to almonds. Any number of possible causes for CCD have been put forward, from bee viruses to parasites to environmental triggers like pesticides or even cell-phone transmissions. Despite the Department of Agriculture's allotment of $20 million a year for the next five years to study CCD, it's still a mystery - and the bees keep dying. (Read "Why We Should Care About Dying Bees...
...Deal focused on infrastructure at a time when there were not a lot of lady dam builders around. (Salam might also have mentioned the GI Bill, the most effective instrument ever devised for giving a leg up to males in universities and workplaces.) Salam sees Obama's $787 billion stimulus package as a break with the New Deal. It spends relatively little on infrastructure and relatively much on female-friendly sectors like health care and education. Not to mention aid to state and local governments, where 3 in 5 employees are women...
Mounting demand for congressional travel may help explain why the House initially ordered the Pentagon to buy two more $65 million Gulfstream V jets as part of the $636 billion defense budget, along with a pair of $70 million military-grade Boeing 737s...
...Philippines and Taiwan before slamming into China's southeastern coast, flooding thousands of acres of farmland and forcing a million people to flee Fujian and Zhejiang provinces. Beijing estimates that the storm--the ninth in this year's Pacific typhoon season--destroyed 6,000 homes and inflicted $1.3 billion in damage. Morakot also breached dikes in the northern Philippines, flooding several villages (above), and walloped Taiwan with 74-m.p.h. winds, killing at least 62 people and causing the island's worst floods in 50 years...
...rural subsidies. In his Independence Day speech to the nation on Aug. 15, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh promised to postpone the date for repayment of farmers' bank loans and to give breaks on interest payments for short term crop loans. This comes on top of last year's $14 billion farm loan waiver program, price supports for agricultural products and an ambitious jobs scheme, which guarantees 100 days of work to the poor in rural areas. "There's only so much that any government can do," says Indranil Sengupta, an economist at Bank of America/Merrill Lynch. "When you look...