GAR-PAL



The Columbian Exchange at a glance

Countless animals, plants, and microorganisms crossed the Atlantic Ocean with European explorers and colonists in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. This chart lists some of the organisms that had the greatest impact on human society worldwide.

| |Old World → New World |New World → Old World |

|Domestic animals |horses |turkeys |

| |cattle |llamas |

| |pigs |alpacas |

| |sheep |guinea pigs |

| |goats | |

| |chickens | |

|Crops |rice |maize (corn) |

| |wheat |potatoes |

| |barley |sweet potatoes |

| |oats |cassava |

| |coffee |peanuts |

| |sugar cane |tobacco |

| |citrus fruits |squash |

| |bananas |peppers |

| |melons |tomatoes |

| |Kentucky bluegrass |pumpkins |

| | |cacao (the source of chocolate) |

| | |sunflowers |

| | |pineapples |

| | |avocados |

| | |vanilla |

|Diseases |smallpox |syphilis (possibly) |

| |measles | |

| |mumps | |

| |malaria | |

| |yellow fever | |

| |influenza | |

| |whooping cough | |

| |typhus | |

| |chicken pox | |

| |the common cold | |

Killer bee season underway with a vengeance

August 07, 2013|By Michael MuskalSummer’s here, bringing climbing temperatures, rising humidity in some areas and the renewed threat from killer bees.

So far this season a colony of 100,000 Africanized honeybees have taken up residence in a Houston home and a similar sized swarm attacked two park workers in Florida. At least one death has been reported in Central Texas as well as attacks on humans and animals elsewhere.

[pic]

“It’s nearly impossible to put a number on the deaths,” Kim Kaplan, speaking for the Agricultural Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture said on Wednesday. “It is minuscule. The Centers for Disease Control doesn’t find enough to even make a separate category” for killer-bee-related deaths.

Still, a very minor level of danger doesn’t mean there is no danger at all.

In recent years the areas where killer bees have been spotted have been increasing, and parts of the Southern and Southwestern states have reported incursions.

First-tier states like California and Texas have reported incursions, as have some second-tier states like Oklahoma and Nevada. No states in the third tier -- those that lay north of the first two tiers -- have reported any incursions, said Kaplan, who has been handling killer bee issues since before the first identification in the United States in 1990.

The killer bee phenomenon began with an accidental release of Africanized queen bees in 1957 in Brazil. The Africanized bees had been brought to South America to breed a bee by crossing them with local bees. The idea was to create a bee that was more tolerant of hot conditions and would produce more honey.

Once the African bees got into the wild, they began to mate and spread north. Among their less desirable traits, Kaplan said, is that Africanized bees are more defensive of their hives and quicker to swarm than the Western honeybee known in most of the country. A mild provocation is more likely to be met with a more violent response because they can attack in greater numbers and pursue potential victims for a longer distance.

The venom in killer bees is no stronger than what is found in the Western honeybee species, making it difficult even for experts to identify which variety of bees is the culprit in any incident. For someone allergic to bees, the sting from either one is equally harmful. For non-allergic people, the greater number of stings from a swarm of killer bees is more dangerous than the stings of a few Western bees.

Some people have tied the growth of the killer bees to climate-change factors, but Kaplan said the issue seems to be more complicated. Killer bees had been expected to reach the United States in the 1980s, but it took a decade longer for them to arrive because of drought conditions south of the U.S. border, she said.

“It’s not just temperature,” Kaplan said. “It’s humidity, rain and temperature. We don’t know for sure, but it seems to be some combination of temperature, humidity and rainfall is needed for their spread.”

If the cause of the spread of the killer bees is still a bit up in the air, the recommendation of how to deal with them in very much on the ground: run.

Four ways 9/11 changed America's attitude toward religion

By John Blake, CNN

(CNN) - David O'Brien couldn't help himself. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, he became obsessed.

O'Brien read the stories of 9/11 victims over and over, stunned by what he was discovering.

He read about the firefighters who marched up the smoke-choked stairwells of the World Trade Center, though many knew they could die; the beloved priest killed while giving last rites as the twin towers collapsed; the passengers on hijacked planes who called their families one last time to say, "I love you."

"I was obsessed with these stories," says O'Brien, a Catholic historian at the University of Dayton in Ohio. "There were so many stories of self-sacrifice, not just by the first responders, but by people fleeing the building. There was this revelation of goodness."

O'Brien saw an Easter message in 9/11 - good rising out of the ashes of evil. Yet there were other religious messages sent that day, and afterward, that are more troubling, religious leaders and scholars say.

September 11 didn't just change America, they say. It changed the nation's attitude toward religion. Here are four ways:

1: A chosen nation becomes a humbled one.

One man died because he arrived early to work. A woman died because she decided to take a later flight. The arbitrary nature of some of the deaths on 9/11 still sticks with many Americans today.

Yet this is what life is like for billions of people on the planet today, some religious leaders say. A random event - a car bomb, a stray bullet - can end their lives at any minute.

Most Americans had not lived with this vulnerability until 9/11, says Mathew Schmalz, a religion professor at the College of the Holy Cross  in Massachusetts, who once lived in Karachi, Pakistan.

"We had this sense of specialness and invulnerability that 9/11 shattered," he says. "Given that a large section of the world's population deals with random violence every day, one of the outcomes of 9/11 should be a greater feeling of solidarity with people who live in cities like Karachi in which violence is a part of everyday life."

Recognizing that vulnerability, though, is difficult for some Americans because of how they see their country, Schmalz and others say.

They say Americans have long had a triumphalist view of their place in history. Certain beliefs have been engrained: Tomorrow will always be better; we're number one. The term "American" even reflects a certain arrogance. It casually discounts millions of people living in Central and Latin America.

The 9/11 attacks, though, forced many Americans to confront their limitations, says Rev. Thomas Long, a nationally known pastor who has been active in post 9/11 interfaith efforts.

"We're losing the power of the American empire and becoming more a nation among nations," says Long, a religion professor at Emory University in Atlanta. "The world is a much more dangerous and fragile place economically."

How Americans cope with their loss of power is ultimately a theological question, Long says. It's the same question the ancient Hebrews confronted in the Old and New Testaments when they faced national calamities.

The chosen people had to learn how to be humble people, Long says. Americans face the same test today.

"The challenge for every faith tradition is going to be helping people grieve the loss of an image of America that they once had," he says, "and acquire a modern understanding of ourselves on the world's stage."

2: The re-emergence of "Christo-Americanism."

Before 9/11, if you asked the average American about Ramadan or sharia law, they probably would have given you a blank look.

Not anymore. The 9/11 attacks prompted more Americans to learn about Islam. Books on the subject became best-sellers. Colleges started offering more courses on Islam. Every cable news show suddenly had their stable of "Muslim experts."

More Americans know about Islam than ever before, but that hasn't stopped the post-9/11 Muslim backlash. The outrage over plans to build an Islamic prayer and community center near ground zero; the pastor who threatened to burn the Quran; conservative Christian leaders who called Islam evil - all occurred as knowledge of Islam spread throughout America, scholars says.

"One of the sobering lessons of the decade since 9/11 is that religious prejudice is not always rooted in raw ignorance," says Thomas Kidd, author of "American Christians and Islam."

"Some of America's most vociferous anti-Muslim critics know quite a lot about Muslim beliefs, but they often use their knowledge to construe Islam in the worst possible light."

Many of these public attacks against Islam were encouraged by conservative Christian leaders such as Rev. Franklin Graham, the son of Rev. Billy Graham, who called Islam "wicked," and Pat Robertson, the Christian broadcaster who declared that "Islam is not a religion," says Charles Kammer, a religion professor at the College of Wooster in Ohio.

Kammer says Graham and Robertson helped fuel the rise of "Christo-Americanism," a distorted form of Christianity that blends nationalism, conservative paranoia and Christian rhetoric.

"A segment of the religious community in the United States has been at the forefront of an anti-Islamic crusade that has helped to generate a climate of hatred and distrust toward all Muslims," says Kammer.

Other strains of Christo-Americanism have swept through America before.

After 9/11, some political leaders said terrorists hated the U.S. because of "our freedoms." But America's record on granting those freedoms to its citizens is mixed, says Lynn Neal, co-editor of the book, "Religious Intolerance in America."

In the 19th century, the U.S government passed numerous laws preventing Native American tribes from practicing their religion. Mormons were persecuted. Roman Catholics were once described as disloyal deviants, Neal says.

"Religious intolerance is not a new feature of the American landscape. Despite being the most religiously diverse nation on earth, despite having a first amendment that protects religious rights...we as a nation and as citizens have often failed to live up to those ideas."

3: Interfaith becomes cool.

Interfaith dialogue - it's not the type of term that makes the heart beat faster.

Before 9/11, interfaith efforts were dismissed as feel-good affairs that rarely got media coverage. The 9/11 attacks changed that.

Interfaith events spread across the country. Mosques and temples held joint worship services. Every college campus seemed to have an interfaith dialogue. The Obama White House launched a college interfaith program.

Becoming an interfaith leader is now hip, some say.

"A generation of students is saying that they want to be interfaith leaders, just like previous generations said they wanted to be human rights activists or environmentalists," says Eboo Patel, who founded the Interfaith Youth Core in 2002.

Patel says at least 250 colleges have signed up for the White House interfaith program, which he helped design. The program encourages students of different faiths to work together on service projects.

"These young leaders will make interfaith cooperation a social norm in America, similar to multiculturalism and volunteerism," Patel says.

These new leaders include people like Sarrah Shahawy, a Muslim-American medical student at Harvard University and the daughter of Egyptian immigrants.

After 9/11, Shahawy says she felt the responsibility to educate people about Islam. She became an interfaith leader at the University of Southern California,  where she noticed a steady increase in student participation in the years after the attacks.

Shahawy says her generation is drawn to interfaith efforts because 9/11 showed the destructive potential of any exclusive claims to religious truth. The 9/11 hijackers carried out their attacks in the name of Islam, but Muslim religious leaders and scholars said that the terrorists' actions did not reflect Islamic teachings.

"For one religious group to claim a monopoly on truth should be obsolete," she says. The interfaith movement doesn't teach people that all religions are the same, she says.

Shahawy calls herself a proud Muslim. "But for me, there's beauty and truth to be found in many different religions."

4: Atheists come out of the closet.

There's one group, however, that sees little beauty in any religion.

Before 9/11, many atheists kept a low profile. Something changed, though, after 9/11. They got loud.

Atheist leaders such as Richard Dawkins, author of "The God Delusion," and Sam Harris, author of "The End of Faith," wrote best-selling books. Atheist groups launched national media campaigns with bold billboard messages such as "Christmas is a myth."

The pugnacious journalist Christopher Hitchens became the public face of a more combative form of atheism as he went on talk shows and lectures to defend not believing in God.

Criticism of all religion, not just fanatical cults, was no longer taboo after 9/11, says Daniel Dennett, a philosophy professor with Tufts University in Massachusetts.

"Atheist-bashing is now, like gay-bashing, no longer an activity that can be indulged in with impunity by politicians or commentators," Dennett says.

Atheists were driven to become more vocal because of the 9/11 attacks and America's reaction, says David Silverman, president of American Atheists. He says many atheists were disgusted when President George W. Bush and leaders in the religious right reacted to the attack by invoking "God is on our side" rhetoric while launching a "war on terror."

They adopted one form of religious extremism while condemning another, he says.

"It really showed atheists why religion should not be in power. Religion is dangerous, even our own religion," Silverman says.

Atheists are still the most disparaged group in America, but there's less stigma attached to being one, he says.

"The more noise that we make, the easier it us to accept us," Silverman says. "Most people know atheists now. They knew them before, but didn't know they were atheists."

Many Americans knew the people who perished on 9/11 as well, but they didn't know they were heroes until later, says David O'Brien, the Catholic historian who compulsively read the 9/11 obituaries.

O'Brien was so moved by the stories he read that he decided to write an essay for America magazine, a national Catholic weekly, entitled, "9/11 Then and Now."

He wrote: On 9/11, "Our people, my people, were tested and, for a shining moment ... they were found worthy."

He said many 9/11 victims didn't panic as their end drew near. They "thought not of themselves, but others ... when the chips were down." They saw themselves not as individuals, but as members of a "single human family."

So should we, he says, as we face new challenges 10 years later. The 9/11 victims aren't just heroes; they're our guides for the future, he says.

"The story is not over, not by a long shot," O'Brien wrote. "Look at all the love that day. Love can still write another chapter and keep hope alive for a better future. The meaning of 9/11 lies ahead, and it's in our hands, and maybe in our hearts.'

Mercantilism in the 21st Century; What Makes a Nation a Superpower? By Jeff Wilser

These nations have been dismissed as underdogs and weaklings. But like budding superheroes, they’ve been sitting on hidden talents. And now they’re about to fly.

1. FINLAND: SUPERPOWER: INVINCIBLE TEACHERS

If you’re a kid in Finland, you don’t start school until you’re 7 years old. There’s almost no homework until you’re a teenager. You don’t wear a uniform, you can call your teacher by his first name, and you can attend class barefoot if the mood strikes you. It’s always casual Friday, and you spend fewer hours in the classroom than students in the rest of the developed world.

Despite—or because of—this leisurely approach, the Finnish educational system is one of the world’s finest. Finland’s literacy rate is 100 percent. When the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development administers its standardized reading and math exams to students from around the world, Finnish pupils regularly come out at or near the top.

What makes these results more amazing is that just four decades ago, Finland’s academic record was a mess. In the 1970s, though, the government did something extraordinary to combat lax education: It mandated that every teacher earn a master’s degree, even agreeing to foot the bills for the extra schooling. Teaching’s prestige skyrocketed; becoming a teacher in Finland is now as tough as becoming a lawyer. Only one in 10 primary school applicants makes the cut! Today, the rest of the world is scrambling to follow Finland’s example as its hyper-educated population continues to boost the country’s productivity. Maybe we should all kick off our shoes and learn a few things.

2. NIGERIA: SUPERPOWER: VERY LIQUID ASSETS

At first glance, Nigeria doesn’t look like it’s poised to become a world player. More than 80 million Nigerians live on less than $2 a day, 40 percent of the country has never been to school, and half of Nigerian women are illiterate. Throw in the growing threat of terrorism in Africa, and the situation looks pretty grim.

That is, until you look deeper. Nigeria has two things going for it: a large population (162 million) and lots of oil. Nigeria says it pumps out 2.53 million barrels of crude every day, which is up there with heavyweights like Kuwait and Iraq. All this oil is cycling cash into the Nigerian economy and minting new tycoons, which probably explains why more than 100 Nigerians have purchased private jets since 2007. Analysts from Pricewaterhouse-Coopers say that if Nigeria can beef up its schools and technology, it could balloon into the world’s 13th largest economy by 2050, nestled between Turkey and Italy. As if that’s not reason enough for unbridled optimism, Nigeria’s president also has the sunniest name of any world leader: Goodluck Jonathan.

3. MONGOLIA: SUPERPOWER: THE GOLDEN TOUCH

Mongolia knows a thing or two about being a superpower. In the 13th century, Genghis Khan united Mongolian tribes and conquered parts of China. His grandson Kublai Khan kept the family business humming and finished the job. But the tables turned when the Ming Dynasty struck back a century later. China continued to keep Mongolia under its thumb until Russia began aiding its independence movement in 1921.

Today, however, Mongolia’s prospects are looking up because the country is literally sitting on a gold mine. The deposit, Oyu Tolgoi, will roar to life later this year and is full of enough precious metals to build several Xanadus; estimates peg the reserves at 82 billion pounds of copper and 46 million ounces of gold—that’s a little less than a third of the gold in Fort Knox. But the riches don’t end there: A second new mine, Tavan Tolgoi, may boast the world’s largest untapped supply of coking coal, a key ingredient of steel.

And there’s no shortage of demand. Mongolia’s neighbors are dying for coal and copper. Both Russia to the north and China to the south have big appetites for construction that will gobble up plenty of steel, and the new mines have investors drooling. Citigroup predicts that over the next 20 years Mongolia will have the highest growth rate of any Asian country, including China. Genghis would be proud.

4. VIETNAM: SUPERPOWER: SAFE HARBORS

A funny thing happened while the global economy was sputtering last decade. Vietnam’s GDP soared by 6 percent per year. As rice paddies have given way to factories, unemployment in Vietnam has plunged to around 4.5 percent.

What’s Vietnam’s trick? It’s ready to work. China’s laborers aren’t as cheap as they used to be, which makes Vietnam a relative bargain for companies that need new factories abroad. Up until now, though, there’s been a tiny problem: roads. Or the lack thereof. While Vietnam has a terrific labor force, its transportation infrastructure is nearly nonexistent. The country has almost no railroads, its highways are clogged, and its largest metropolis, Ho Chi Minh City, boasts just one airport, which was built before the Vietnam War. Motorcycles and bicycles are popular, and some of its 91 million citizens still travel by rickshaw. What’s the use of cranking out export-ready goods if there’s no convenient way to ship them?

To address the problem, the Vietnamese government is doubling down on investment in infrastructure’s three R’s: railroads, roads, and rivers. Officials are widening highways and building a new airport. There’s a new deep-water port at Cai Mep-Thi Vai with ship-to-shore cranes that will enable companies to haul more inventory out of the country. The investments don’t sound sexy, but they should start bearing fruit. According to consulting firm A.T. Kearney, “Logistics is the only barrier keeping Vietnam from becoming the next China.”

5. SWITZERLAND: SUPERPOWER: NEXT-LEVEL NETWORKING

Switzerland used to be mocked for its lack of innovation. Peaceful, yes. Creative, no. As Orson Welles put it in The Third Man, “In Italy, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Welles wouldn’t recognize today’s Zurich. The UN’s Global Innovation Index ranks Switzerland as the most innovative country on the planet. What stirs these creative juices? The Swiss government has perfected a system that allows academic research to flow from the ivory tower into private companies. The Swissnex network—with offices from Boston to Singapore to San Francisco—is a system of idea hubs, conferences, and networking events that connect lab coats with investors. The program helps academics, artists, and inventors with promising research hook up with private companies that can turn those visions into reality.

Introducing the brainy to the wealthy is paying dividends. Consider what’s happening with the Solar Impulse project, a company that’s designing a solar-powered plane that can fly around the world without using fuel. Think that sounds farfetched? The amazing aircraft has already completed an all-night journey!

6. BANGLADESH- SUPERPOWER: DEMOGRAPHIC SORCERY

Bangladesh is about the size of Iowa and has a larger population than Russia. It’s the most crowded country on the planet; as a result, containable problems often become huge disasters. Floods kill thousands. Infectious diseases can sweep through the close quarters.

There also aren’t enough jobs. The country’s main export is knitted clothes, and its GDP is just $743 per capita, less than 2 percent of the United States’. For years, Bangladesh has simply been too crammed to support a viable economy. But thanks to some clever policies implemented by the government in the 1970s, Bangladesh is about to make a major leap.

In 1975, the average Bangladeshi woman was bearing 6.3 children. Only 8 percent of women used contraception, and the population was exploding. All these new babies were cutting an already tiny economic pie into too many slices. So the government got proactive. To combat the baby boom, officials trudged from village to village handing out free birth control to rein in the growth.

The plan worked. The birth rate plummeted to 3.4 children per woman in 1993, and now it sits at a sustainable 2.3. And here’s where the economy comes in. Bangladesh is about to enjoy what analysts call a “demographic dividend.” All those babies born in the 1970s and ’80s are entering their prime working years, but because this generation is supporting only two kids instead of six, the demographic math is finally tilting in Bangladesh’s favor. That spells good news for the economy, and investors have taken notice. No wonder Goldman Sachs named Bangladesh a “Next 11” nation, predicting the country’s ascendance as an economic tiger.

7. NEW ZEALAND-SUPERPOWER: VANISHING RED TAPE

Let’s say you’re starting a new company. In the United States, you’ll need to conquer a punishing stack of forms for the IRS, labor boards, and state and federal agencies. By the time you’re finished with your 1040, Schedule C, and Form 720, you’ll feel like you’re choking on red tape.

In New Zealand, things are different. The government created a one-stop shopping approach for new businesses. Every form, application, and license an entrepreneur needs is part of a unified online portal. The info feeds into a single shared database, which further slices down processing time. Even for the offline hassles of starting a business, all the relevant agencies are physically clustered together, trimming even more bureaucratic fat. So far, 83 countries have similarly streamlined, but New Zealand is still the king, which is why Forbes placed it at the top of its Best Countries for Business rankings. With so little paperwork, what’s to stop you from starting your own Hobbit-themed diner that serves only second lunch?

8. TAIWAN-SUPERPOWER: OMNISCIENT DOCTORS

Back in 1995, Taiwan’s health care system was broken. Nearly half the country was uninsured, and citizens weren’t as healthy as they should have been. So the government turned to Harvard economics professor William Hsiao to gut the system and start fresh. Hsiao adopted a universal coverage model similar to Canada’s, but his more revolutionary innovation was small enough to fit in patients’ wallets.

If you lived in Taiwan, you would carry a digital card that keeps track of your medication, test results, medical history, and relevant records. Anytime you went to the doctor, you would just pop the card into a computer without cobbling together paperwork from all your hospitals and specialists. Not only is the system blissfully convenient for patients, but it helps doctors and hospitals get paid faster with less waste while reducing their billing and clerical expenses.

In 2009, Taiwan’s administrative costs for health care were just 2 percent of overall expenditures. To put that in perspective, slashing American health care’s administrative costs to 2 percent would save more than $100 billion over 10 years. The Taiwanese system saves even more money by helping regulators pinpoint fraud more readily. National health care may be a contentious debate in the U.S., but if there’s one thing the left and right can agree on, it’s that less paperwork is better.

9. LATVIA-SUPERPOWER: ENCHANTED FORESTS

In Latvia, every day is Arbor Day. As possibly the greenest country on Earth, more than 40 percent of Latvia is covered in forests, and all this thick vegetation makes it a net reducer of greenhouse gas emissions. It’s not just woodlands either. Latvians have nearly stopped importing coal. They’re heavy recyclers who create Europe’s smallest amount of waste per person. And the capital, Riga, is one of the continent’s cleanest cities.

Even with such impeccable credentials, Latvia decided to up the environmental ante. In 2010, the state forest department launched a sprawling media campaign that called on all citizens to plant even more trees. To help boost volunteerism, the ad campaign targeted students, teachers, families, companies, and Latvian musicians. The government distributed free packets of seed and launched an interactive website where citizens could post videos of their plantings. It also held tree-sowing events throughout the year to sustain the buzz.

By the end of the campaign, Latvians had planted 2,278,234 firs, pines, and oaks, just over one tree for every Latvian. Best of all, the cleanliness hasn’t held back Latvia’s business. After having a hard time during the recent global collapse, the country enjoyed strong growth in 2011 and 2012. As countries around the world scramble to kick-start their economies while remaining green, they’ll be looking at Latvia to lead the way.

10. CHILE-SUPERPOWER: A THRIVING METAL SCENE

Pipes, computers, motors, and your microwave all have one thing in common: They’re made with copper. Gold and diamonds may get all the publicity, but copper makes the world go round. And lucky for Chile, it’s got about a third of the planet’s copper supply. It just needs a way to dig it up.

The Chilean government knows that leveraging this copper could transform its economy into a juggernaut. So President Sebastián Piñera’s administration is pouring investments into the country’s mines. The first big project: converting the world’s largest copper mine, Chuquicamata, from an open pit into a safer, more efficient underground mine. (Open-pit mines become unprofitable once miners dig too deep, as trucks have to drive miles up and down for each load of metal and are prone to collapse.)

Converting the mine should extend its life by 50 years, while helping to improve safety and profitability. Che Guevara may be rolling in his grave—Chuquicamata is the very mine he criticized in 1952, sparking his activism—but that same tantalizing copper reserve led Bloomberg analysts to rank Chile as the world’s number eight emerging market. Once Chile taps that copper, they’ll be making a lot more than pennies with it.

Russia Claims the North Pole

By Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow Thursday, July 12, 2007

President Vladimir Putin has long promised to restore Russian greatness and build an "energy empire." But until now, his empire-building had been confined to taking control of corporations operating on his turf, buying into businesses abroad, and blackmailing former Soviet Republics who dared vote against Moscow-backed candidates, moved to join NATO or acted in otherwise uppity ways. But Putin's imperial ambitions have recently added an element of classic 19th century-style territorial expansion: Late last month, Moscow signaled its intentions to annex the entire North Pole, an area twice the size of France with Belgium and Switzerland thrown in — except all of it under water.

The ice-frozen North Pole is currently a no man's land supervised by a U.N. Commission. The five Polar countries — Russia, the U.S., Canada, Norway and Denmark — each control only a 200-mile economic zone along their coasts. And none of these economic zones reach the North Pole. Under the current U.N. Maritime convention, one country's zone can be extended only if it can prove that the continental shelf into which it wishes to expand is a natural extension of its own territory, by showing that it shares a similar structure.

So, the Russians claimed a great scientific discovery late last month. An expedition of 50 scientists that spent 45 days aboard the Rossia nuclear ice-breaker found that an underwater ridge (the Lomonosov ridge) directly links Russia's Arctic coast to the North Pole. This, they insist, surely guarantees Russia's rights over a vast Polar territory that also happens to contain some 10 billion tons of oil and natural gas deposits.

Russia's first attempt to expand beyond its Arctic zone was rebuffed by the U.N. Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, but Moscow hopes that its "latest scientific findings" will produce a different outcome when the Commission next meets, in 2009.

Besides risking the defacing of the pristine beauty of the North Polar cap by oil rigs and pipelines, some believe Russia's planned expansion will threaten their own interests. In May, U.S. Senator Richard Lugar told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Russia claiming the hydrocarbon-rich area would be to the detriment of U.S. interests. Unless Washington ratifies the U.N. Maritime Convention, pending since 1982, the Senator explained, the U.S. will have no say whatsoever in the dispute — it won't even have a seat on the International Seabed Authority that monitors nations' compliance with the U.N. Maritime convention, controls activities beyond the national jurisdiction limits and currently administers the area around the pole.

The North Pole isn't the only prize in the eyes of the resurgent Russian empire — Moscow is also looking to restore control over a 47,000 sq. km (18,000 sq. mile) piece of the Bering Sea separating Alaska from Russian Chukotka. The territory was ceded to the U.S. in 1990 under the U.S.-Soviet Maritime Boundary Agreement signed by Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. While the deal may have helped ease Cold War tensions, some Soviets always opposed giving up a piece of territory rich in sea life and oil deposits, and they and their buddies prevented the agreement's approval. Today, the Agreement still operates on a somewhat legal basis, waiting for its support by the Russian parliament.

But that once far-out concept is now how most Russians think it should be. In recent weeks, Kremlin-controlled media have slammed the Agreement as a treasonous act by Shervardnadze (who later became the pro-NATO President of Georgia). Now, leading members of the Russian government are publicly demanding that the Agreement be reviewed, with the aim of recovering the country's riches.

Meanwhile, on the morning of January 7 this year, the rotor blades of a Russian Mi-8 helicopter shattered the divine silence at the opposite end of the Earth, disgorging a group of top Russian dignitaries led by none other than FSB (the former KGB) Director Nikolai Patrushev, to proudly raised the Russian flag over the South Pole. At the time, it might have looked like a stunt. But back in 2004, Patrushev landed at the North Pole in much the same fashion. Stay tuned.

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