Word: humanness
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...answers is that there are plenty of people who don't want change. Libya's powerful security organizations - often fingered by human-rights groups for conducting arbitrary arrests and torture - are resisting reforms. Also opposed are members of the revolutionary committees, who have garnered wealth and political benefits through their close association with Libya's leader. "There are a lot of people for whom reform is not in their personal interest," says Shukri Ghanem, a former Prime Minister who heads the Libyan National Oil Corporation. "It will not be a walk in the park...
...post. "I would not accept [a position] because you need to have a constitution," Saif says. "You need transparent political rules of the game." He's also prepared to test the system. Tensions erupted into full view last December after Saif invited the Washington and Middle East directors of Human Rights Watch to launch its report on Libya's human-rights violations at a press conference in the heart of Tripoli. Few groups had ever been allowed to speak out publicly against the government, and security forces attempted to disrupt the event. Some Libyans scheduled to attend were blocked from...
...dark side of the moon - McEwan gives the lie to vain hopes that the planet will be saved by a sudden outbreak of environmental virtue. If we're going to avoid choking on what McEwan calls the "hot breath of civilization," we're going to have to harness human nature, in all its selfishness, mendacity - and occasional genius...
...Technology - busy working on the same topic - might wonder if he's nicked their notes. But where Solar really succeeds - beyond the dark comedy, too long missing in McEwan's gentler recent work - is the author's ability to reveal the nature of the climate conundrum in the very human life of his protagonist. Beard is a Nobel Prize - winning mess, an obese man who can't stop eating, a serial adulterer who takes up with a lusty New Mexico waitress named Darlene while keeping a family back in London. Even his clean-tech business plan is touched by corruption...
...Beard is far too human to be the hero they'd hoped for, well, climate scientists should still take heart. At least McEwan - steeped in scientific inquiry and accustomed to facing hard truths in his fiction - is no climate-change denier. "Here's the good news," Beard tells a business partner who is worried that climate doubters will hurt their business. "The U.N. estimates that already a third of a million people are dying from climate change. Even as we speak, Bangladesh is going down because the oceans are warming and expanding and rising." In other words, says a jovial...