Over the weekend, voters in Colombia stunned their president and pollsters by narrowly rejecting a peace deal with the country's FARC rebels. Some have speculated that Hurricane Matthew was at least partly to blame: Matthew brushed Colombia's northern coast immediately before the voting, destroying homes, roads, and polling places. This map shows that the provinces sustaining the most damage from Matthew -- Magdalena, La Guajira, Bolivar, Atlantico, and Sucre -- all supported the peace deal. img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_1484w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2016/10/03/Foreign/Graphics/2300-colombia1004-v2.jpg
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This recent piece by Daniel Byman at the Brookings Institution provides a nuanced look at terrorism and the complex choices governments, including U.S. allies, make vis-à-vis terrorism:
www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2016/09/20/a-convenient-terrorism-threat/ ~~~ I am teaching "Mission Possible: Global Issues, Leadership Choices," my world affairs class/simulation for 7th-12th graders, by special arrangement this fall. If interested, please contact me. Ethiopia has one of the fastest-growing populations on the planet, roughly doubling every 30 years. But its agricultural productivity has not kept pace. Last week Ethiopia announced that it's nearly done with a digital soil mapping project that will allow farmers to identify specific fertilizer blends best suited to their soil conditions and crops, a step that may enable Ethiopian farmers to triple grain yield. www.reuters.com/article/us-ethiopia-climatechange-agriculture-idUSKCN11Z197
A recent Wall Street Journal article featured a series of maps, by county, based on data from the Centers for Disease Control that gave graphic testimony to the rise in fatalities due to drug overdose (primarily opioids) in the U.S. from 1999 to 2014 (blue=20+ deaths per 100,000; yellow=<2 deaths per 100,000). si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-QA059_backgr_3_20160927154156.jpg
Even if you don't know anything at all about Aristotle, you can learn a few new things by taking this short quiz, courtesy of Oxford University Press, "How well do you know Aristotle?" http://blog.oup.com/2016/09/aristotle-quiz-philosophy/
An unusual "swarm" of more than 200 earthquakes hit southern California earlier this week, near the southern end of the San Andreas fault. Seismologists are concerned this swarm suggests an increased risk of a major earthquake in the complex fault zone shown on this U.S. Geological Survey map. http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/graphics/Fig35.gif
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