International Herald Tribune

My friend Rob Watson, the head of EcoTech International, has a saying about Mother Nature that goes like this: "Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics.

The food crisis has reinforced two things about the future of agricultural trade.

Symbols matter, especially when they proclaim a sense of identity. This is why lifting a ban on head scarves for women in Turkey has been so contentious for secularists and observant Muslims alike.

Europe will get a new state, Kosovo, on Sunday and the long, bloody unraveling of Yugoslavia will be concluded 17 years after the first war of its dissolution broke out in Slovenia.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd opened a new chapter in Australia's tortured relations with its indigenous peoples Wednesday with a comprehensive and moving apology for past wrongs and a call for bipartisan action to improve the lives of Australia's Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

As U.S. home prices fall and banks tighten lending standards, people with good, or prime, credit histories are falling behind on their payments for home loans, auto loans and credit cards at a quickening pace, according to industry data and economists.

We don't yet know exactly how Jérôme Kerviel, the 31-year-old junior trader at the French bank Société Générale, managed to run up $7 billion in bad trades, but - and this is not good news - we suspect it did not take the evil genius that so great a sum suggests.

Skeptics about global warming often point to Antarctica to show that Al Gore and others who worry about climate change have exaggerated the dangers greatly. They may concede that the Arctic is melting and even that Greenland is beginning to appear a bit shaky.

Scientists have been warning for years that overfishing is degrading the health of the oceans and destroying the fish species on which much of humanity depends for jobs and food.

At first the violence seemed as spontaneous as it was shocking, with machete-wielding mobs hacking people to death and burning women and children alive in a country that was celebrated as one of Africa's most stable. By Jeffrey Gettleman

Although Congress and the courts have largely frustrated the Bush administration's efforts to open up Alaska to oil and gas drilling, Vice President Dick Cheney and his industry friends remain determined to lock up as many oil and gas leases as they can before the door hits them on the way out.

Virgin Atlantic said Monday that it would conduct a demonstration flight next month of one of its Boeing 747 jets using biofuel - the first airborne test of a renewable fuel by a commercial jet. By Nicola Clark

In a sign of shifting attitudes toward biofuels, European Union officials are proposing to ban imports of certain fuel crops whose production could do more harm than good in fighting climate change, according to a draft law seen Monday. By James Kanter

Signs that the United States is facing a hard landing from a serious housing industry crisis multiplied Wednesday as forecasters at a prominent bank said that the world's largest economy was in or near a recession. By Carter Dougherty

Near the vestiges of the first sugar factory in Brazil, built in 1877 with a sign in Latin over the entrance saying "Sweet is the Reward of Work," Danuza Gomes Da Silva swings a glinting knife as she makes her way down the length of a field cutting cane. By Roger Cohen

The terrorist car bombing that killed five people and wounded 68 last Thursday in southeastern Turkey was a local event with larger meaning.

The murderous tribal violence that has spread through Kenya in recent days would be horrifying anywhere. It is particularly tragic to see this happening in a country that seemed finally to be on the path to a democratic and economically sound future.

To mathematicians, 32 is an interesting number: It's 2 raised to the fifth power, 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2. By Jared Diamond

The overriding environmental issue of these times is the warming of the planet. The Democratic hopefuls in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign are fully engaged, calling for large - if still unquantified - national sacrifices and for a transformation in the way the country produces and uses energy.

In recent years, Pakistan has provided banks that wired money for the 9/11 plot, been the chief source of illicit nuclear proliferation, offered a tribal-area haven for planners of worldwide terrorism, abetted the reconstitution of the Taliban and educated many a suicide bomber in Islamic religious

Now that the price of coal is at a historic low relative to oil, there is no stopping consumers and producers alike from embracing Al Gore's nightmare. By Christopher Martin

The Arctic is rich in natural resources, including hydrocarbons, and rapid thawing due to global warming could make exploiting those mineral resources feasible relatively soon. By Patricia Brett

During the early 1930s, when oil prospecting in the Gulf was in its infancy, George Lees, chief geologist for the Anglo Persian Oil Company, proclaimed that he would drink all the commercial oil that might be discovered in Bahrain. By Matthew Saltmarsh

In booming economies from Asia to Eastern Europe, cement is the glue of progress. The material that binds the ingredients of concrete together, cement is essential for constructing buildings and laying roads in much of the world. By Elisabeth Rosenthal

Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist, cannot bear to listen to the stories his patients tell him anymore. By Jeffrey Gettleman

Backed by the White House, corn-state governors and solid blocks on both sides of Congress' partisan divide, the politics of biofuels could hardly look sunnier. The economics of the American drive to increase ethanol in the energy supply are more discouraging.

In recent days Turkey's citizens have been carefully watching the reactions of politicians across Europe and the United States to the memorandum by the Turkish military issued on April 27. In these fraught circumstances, it is vital to send an unambiguous message to Turkish society.

The CIA and the Pentagon would for the first time be required to assess the national security implications of climate change under proposed legislation intended to elevate global warming to a national defense issue.