The key to success in business is making products that beat the competition. Government just makes rules, and drives up costs for competitors.
A wit once observed a persistent truth: "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." That has been especially the case with respect to "space weather" - a phenomenon associated with intense solar activity, known by scientists as coronal mass ejections and popularly as solar flares.
An early morning gas line explosion on Tuesday sent residents of one Louisiana community packing, as emergency responders rushed to extinguish the flames and contain the fire.
Islamist militants have pushed out 19,000 rice farmers from their northeastern Nigeria properties, at the peak of the harvest season and at a time when the government has declared a food emergency.
Firefighters are working to get more people back into their homes after authorities lifted evacuation orders prompted by the wildfire near Colorado Springs.
A strong 6.5-magnitude earthquake was registered off the Pacific coast of Nicaragua around midday Saturday, the U.S. Geological Service said.
A Colorado sheriff said the two deaths reported in the Black Forest Fire that has raged in recent days are now being treated as homicides.
When Hurricane Sandy flooded the New York City subways, I remember thinking to myself, "Gee, the city should spend a couple of million dollars upgrading the air-ventilation shafts and subway entrances to prevent this from happening again." Now, we see that the mayor proposes a nearly $20 billion program to solve this problem ("NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to spend $19.5B to fight hurricanes," Web, June 12). Mr. Bloomberg's plan includes building walls around lower Manhattan to keep out rising waters owing to global warming. But melting ice packs will only raise sea levels one inch per decade at most, so this is hardly worth building ugly walls that would destroy views from places like Battery Park. Surely, it would be better to simply protect air-ventilation shafts and subway entrances from the once-a-century Sandy-type storm.
Forecasters issued a severe thunderstorm watch on the D.C. area through 7 p.m., with residents warned to brace for power outages and dangerous conditions from a system heading for the mid-Atlantic region.
