Word: oil
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Obama is stuck in the New World's new paradox. Latin America today is less dependent on Washington, and less tolerant of its interventionism, than it has been for decades, thanks to the counterweight of rising star Brazil and the anti-U.S. gospel of Venezuela's oil-rich leftist President, Hugo Chávez. Yet for all that newfound self-reliance, Latin America still looks to the U.S.'s superpower leadership to put the squeeze on rogues like the Honduran coupsters. No other force in the western hemisphere, not Brazil, and certainly not the Organization of American States, wields...
...Still, the Libyans have good reason for wanting to satisfy Western concerns. Ghaddafi badly wants to break out of the U.N. sanctions regime that has been in place since 1992. Modernizing his oil fields depends on access to Western technology currently denied him by sanctions. In fact, the only reason the Libyans handed over the two agents named in the Lockerbie indictment was the prospect of closing the matter and to allow the lifting of U.N. sanctions against Libya. Even then, it took eight years of coaxing by the Saudis and South Africa's then-president Nelson Mandela to persuade...
...Obama's ambitious plans will ultimately depend on politics, and most scientists are about as adept at Beltway Kabuki as most politicians are at freezing atoms. Chu has already created a miniflap by telling reporters it wasn't his job to badger OPEC about oil prices, and he has struggled to explain why he once called coal a "nightmare." Several of his scientific initiatives have stalled on Capitol Hill, victims of lackluster salesmanship. He got his unofficial welcome to politics in February, during a tour of the University of Pennsylvania's operations facility, when a snippy Vice President Joe Biden...
...well with Americans. They ranked global warming last in a national survey of 20 top priorities; in a global poll, only 44% of them wanted action to be taken on the issue, vs. 94% of Chinese. Most Republican leaders flatly reject prevailing climate science, while many Democrats from coal, oil and farm states are equally protective of the fossil-fuel status quo. This is why the American Clean Energy and Security Act - a far-reaching Democratic bill that would cap carbon emissions - has been marketed to a confused public on the basis of issues that poll far better: gas prices...
...electron spectrometers, gamma rays, polymers and other gee-whiz stuff few of us can understand; he once accidentally discovered an important pulse-propagation effect. But even his most obscure technical work had practical applications; his Nobel-winning breakthrough - supercooling atoms into "optical molasses" - inspired improvements in GPS data and oil exploration. "He's a real-world scientist," says physicist Carl Wieman, who won a separate Nobel using techniques that Chu pioneered. "He's very, very intense, and he's very, very good at solving problems...