The minimum wage helped deal with insufficient low-end wages and inequalitythrough the late 1970s.
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It took nine years from the time the Danish and Swedish governments agreed to build a fixed link between their countries to the time the first car, train, truck and bicyclists crossed the Oresund Bridge.
Construction of the bridge, including design and cornerstone, began in March 1991 and was completed in July 2000. Today, it is the longest stone-stayed road and rail bridge in the world. At approximately 10 miles （16 kilometers), including the tunnel, it is an engineering and architectural marvel. But as time has proven, the bridge is a cultural and economic boon as well. The sleek span of concrete whose design typifies Scandinavian minimalism has contributed greatly to the development of the Oresund region: the eastern part of Denmark, including Copenhagen, and the southwestern part of Sweden, including Malm？and Lund.
The level of commuting between Malm？and Copenhagen has quadrupled since the opening of the bridge in 2000, and the number of Danes moving to the south of Sweden has increased sixfold. The Oresund region has become a cultural and economic powerhouse, considered a model region by the European Union. Work on the bridge began in 1995, and was undertaken by a team of international consulting and construction companies.
From the beginning, construction of the bridge complied with some of the world？ s toughest environmental regulations, as well as many advanced design and construction details. The Mexico-based CEMEX, one of the world？ s largest producers of Cement and ready-mix concrete, was awarded a contract to deliver tons of high-quality cement to help build the main part of the bridge, the two approach bridges and the tunnel.
When it opened in July 2000, the Oresund Bridge consisted of a 3.5-kilometer immersed tunnel, the largest of its kind in the world, a 4-kilometer long artificial island （made from mud dug out from the bottom of strait to make space for the tunnel) and a 7.8-kilometer cable-stayed bridge, the world？ s longest bridge including both a highway and a railroad.
Though just half of the total construction, the actual bridge span, is visible above water, the overall architecture was designed to please the eye from both the Danish and Swedish sides of the strait.
The four 204-meter （670 feet) tall pillars carrying the bridge have a simple Scandinavian design. To drivers and passengers crossing the bridge, the pillars provide a visual, as well as actual, impression of stability and calm.
The two-level structure is made of steel and concrete. Along tile two approach bridges, tracks are placed in concrete troughs that turn into steel decks on the bridge. The bridge？ s upper deck carries cars and trucks, while the lower deck accommodates the railroad. The four pillars are grounded in giant cement boxes placed at the bottom of the strait, about 18 meters below sea level.
Last year, an average of 13,600 vehicles and 17,000 passengers crossed the bridge everyday, and traffic continues to increase by 10-20 percent every year.
Throughout the construction process, the Danish and Swedish environmental agencies have surveyed but found no changes in the wildlife, birds, fish and vegetation surrounding the bridge. In addition, the chemicals used in construction and the percentage of waste materials have been kept to a minimum, as required by both Danish and Swedish laws.
In 2003, the Oresund Bridge won the IABSE （International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering) Outstanding Structural Award for its innovative design, planning and construction management, as well as its strict compliance with the time schedule, budget and environmental requirements. -
A year ago, this lush coastal field near Rome was filled with orderly rows of delicate durum wheat, used to make high quality Italian pasta. Today it overflows with rapeseed, a tall, gnarled weedlike plant bursting with coarse yellow flowers that has become a new manna for European farmers: rapeseed can be turned into biofuel.
Lured by generous new subsidies to develop alternative energy sources - and a measure of concern about the future of the planet - European farmers are plunging into growing crops that can be turned into fuels meant to produce fewer emissions than gas or oil when burned. They are chasing after their counterparts in the Americas who have been cropping for biofuel for more than five years.
"This is a much-needed boost to our economy, our farms," said Marcello Pini, a farmer, standing in front of the sea of waving yellow flowers he planted for the first time this year. "Of course we hope it helps the environment, too."
In March, the European Commission, disappointed by the slow growth of thebiofuels industry in Europe, approved a directive that included a "binding target" requiring member states to use 10 percent biofuel for transport by 2020 - the most ambitious and specific goal in the world.
Most EU states are currently far from achieving the target, and are introducing new incentives and subsidies to boost production.
As a result, bioenergy crops have now replaced food as the most profitable crop in a number European countries. In this part of Italy, for example, the government guarantees the purchase of biofuel crops at €22 per 100 kilograms, or $13.42 per 100 pounds - nearly twice the €11-to-€12 rate per 100 kilograms of wheat on the open market last year. Better still, European farmers are allowed to plant biofuel crops on "set-aside" fields, land that EU agriculture policy would otherwise require them to leave fallow to prevent an oversupply of food.
But an expert panel convened by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization this month pointed out that the biofuels boom produces both benefits as well as tradeoff and risks - including higher and wildly fluctuating global food prices. In some markets grain prices have nearly doubled because farmers are planting for biofuels,
"At a time when agricultural prices are low, in comes biofuel and improves the lot of farmers and injects life into rural areas," said Gustavo Best, an expert at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. "But as the scale grows and the demand for biofuel crops seems to be infinite, we&39;re seeing some negative effects and we need to hold up a yellow light."
Josette Sheeran, the new head of the UN World Food program, which fed nearly 90 million people in 2006, said that biofuels created new dilemmas for her agency. "An increase in grain prices impacts us because we are a major procurer of grain for food. So biofuels are both a challenge and an opportunity." In Europe, the rapid conversion of fields that once grew wheat or barley to biofuel oils like rapeseed is already leading to shortages of ingredients for making pasta and brewing beer, suppliers say. That could translate into higher prices in supermarkets.
"New and increasing demand for bioenergy production has put high pressure on the whole world grain market," said Claudia Conti, a spokeswoman for Barilla, one of the largest Italian pasta makers. "Not only German beer producers, but Mexican tortilla makers have see the cost of their main raw material growing quickly to quickly to historical highs."
For some experts, more worrisome is the potential impact to low-income consumers from the displacement of food crops by bioenergy plantings. In the developing world, the shift from growing food to growing more lucrative biofuel crops destined for richer countries could create serious hunger and damage the environment in places where wild land is converted to biofuel cultivation, the FAO expert panel concluded.
But officials at the European Commission say they are pursuing a measured course that will pre -
One of the biggest decisions Andy Blevins has ever made, and one of the few he now regrets, never seemed like much of a decision at all. It just felt like the natural thing to do.
In the summer of 1995, he was moving boxes of soup cans, paper towels and dog food across the floor of a supermarket warehouse, one of the biggest buildings here in southwest Virginia. The heat was brutal. The job had sounded impossible when he arrived fresh off his first year of college, looking to make some summer money, still a skinny teenager with sandy blond hair and a narrow, freckled face. But hard work done well was something he understood, even if he was the first college boy in his family. Soon he was making bonuses on top of his $6.75 an hour, more money than either of his parents made. His girlfriend was around, and so were his hometown buddies. Andy acted more outgoing with them, more relaxed. People in Chilhowie noticed that.
It was just about the perfect summer. So the thought crossed his mind: maybe itdid not have to end. Maybe he would take a break from college and keep working. He had been getting C&39;s and D&39;s, and college never felt like home, anyway.
"I enjoyed working hard, getting the job done, getting a paycheck," Mr. Blevins recalled. "I just knew I didn&39;t want to quit."
So he quit college instead, and with that, Andy Blevins joined one of the largest and fastest-growing groups of young adults in America. He became a college dropout, though nongraduate may be the more precise term.
Many people like him plan to return to get their degrees, even if few actually do. Almost one in three Americans in their mid-20&39;s now fall into this group, up from one in five in the late 1960&39;s, when the Census Bureau began keeping such data. Most come from poor and working-class families.
That gap had grown over recent years. "We need to recognize that the most serious domestic problem in the United States today is the widening gap between the children of the rich and the children of the poor," Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, said last year when announcing that Harvard would give full scholarships to all its lowest-income students. "And education is the most powerful weapon we have to address that problem."Andy Blevins says that he too knows the importance of a degree. Ten years after trading college for the warehouse, Mr. Blevins, 29, spends his days at the same supermarket company. He has worked his way up to produce buyer, earning $35,000 a year with health benefits and a 401（k) plan. He is on a path typical for someone who attended college without getting a four-year degree. Men in their early 40&39;s in this category made an average of $42,000 in 2000. Those with a four-year degree made $65,000.
Mr. Blevins says he has many reasons to be happy. He lives with his wife, Karla, and their year-old son, Lucas, in a small blue-and-yellow house in the middle of a stunningly picturesque Appalachian valley.
"Looking back, I wish I had gotten that degree," Mr. Blevins said in his soft-spoken lilt. "Four years seemed like a thousand years then. But I wish I would have just put in my four years."
Why so many low-income students fall from the college ranks is a question without a simple answer. Many high schools do a poor job of preparing teenagers for college. Tuition bills scare some students from even applying and leave others with years of debt. To Mr. Blevins, like many other students of limited means, every week of going to classes seemed like another week of losing money. "The system makes a false promise to students," said John T. Casteen III, the president of the University of Virginia, himself the son of a Virginia shipyard worker. -
Freed by warming, waters once locked beneath ice are gnawing at coastal settlements around the Arctic Circle.
In Bykovsky, a village of 457 on Russia&39;s northeast coast, the shoreline is collapsing, creeping closer and closer to houses and tanks of heating oil, at a rate of 15 to 18 feet a year.
"It is practically all ice - permafrost - and it is thawing." For the four million people who live north of the Arctic Circle, a changing climate presents new opportunities. But it also threatens their environment, their homes and, for those whose traditions rely on the ice-bound wilderness, the preservation of their culture.
A push to develop the North, quickened by the melting of the Arctic seas, carries its own rewards and dangers for people in the region. The discovery of vast petroleum fields in the Barents and Kara Seas has raised fears of catastrophic accidents as ships loaded with oil and, soon, liquefied gas churn through the fisheries off Scandinavia, headed to markets in Europe and North America. Land that was untouched could be tainted by pollution as generators, smokestacks and large vehicles sprout to support the growing energy industry.
Coastal erosion is a problem in Alaska as well, forcing the United States to prepare to relocate several Inuit villages at a projected cost of $100 million or more for each one.
Across the Arctic, indigenous tribes with traditions shaped by centuries of living in extremes of cold and ice are noticing changes in weather and wildlife. They are trying to adapt, but it can be confounding.
In Finnmark, Norway&39;s northernmost province, the Arctic landscape unfolds in late winter as an endless snowy plateau, silent but for the cries of the reindeer and the occasional whine of a snowmobile herding them.
A changing Arctic is felt there, too. "The reindeer are becoming unhappy," said Issat Eira, a 31-year-old reindeer herder.
Few countries rival Norway when it comes to protecting the environment and preserving indigenous customs. The state has lavished its oil wealth on the region, and Sami culture has enjoyed something of a renaissance.
And yet no amount of government support can convince Mr. Eira that his livelihood, intractably entwined with the reindeer, is not about to change. Like a Texas cattleman, he keeps the size of his herd secret. But he said warmer temperatures in fall and spring were melting the top layers of snow, which then refreeze as ice, making it harder for his reindeer to dig through to the lichen they eat.
"The people who are making the decisions, they are living in the south and they are living in towns," said Mr. Eira, sitting inside his home made of reindeer hides. "They don&39;t mark the change of weather. It is only people who live in nature and get resources from nature who mark it."
A push to develop the North, quickened by the melting of the Arctic seas, carries its own rewards and dangers for people in the region. The discovery of vast petroleum fields in the Barents and Kara Seas has raised fears of catastrophic accidents as ships loaded with oil and, soon, liquefied gas churn through the fisheries off Scandinavia, headed to markets in Europe and North America. Land that was untouched could be tainted by pollution as generators, smokestacks and large vehicles sprout to support the growing energy industry. -
提起东盟国家，我就想起去年在东盟会议上，马哈蒂尔先生和吴作栋先生曾经形象地把中国比喻成一个友好的大象。
他们说，中国的崛起不会对其他们存在任何威胁。中国有5000年的文明史，有过辉煌的过去，也有过屈辱的往事。中国的崛起是多少代中国人的梦想。中国和平崛起的要义在什么地方？
第一，中国和平崛起就是要充分利用世界和平的大好时机，努力发展和壮大自己。同时又以自己的发展，维护世界和平。
第二，中国的崛起应把基点主要放在自己的力量上，独立自主、自力更生，艰苦奋斗，依靠广阔的国内市场、充足的劳动力资源和雄厚的资金储备，以及改革带来的机制创新。
第三，中国的崛起离不开世界。中国必须坚持开放的政策，在平等互利的原则上，同世界一切友好国家发展经贸往来。
第四，中国的崛起需要很长的时间，恐怕要多少代人的努力奋斗。
第五，中国的崛起不会妨碍任何人，也不会威胁任何人，也不会牺牲任何人。中国现在不称霸，将来即使强大了也永远不会称霸。