Due to a large aging population, 34 million out of the 143 million Russian citizens lived on pensions in 2005. Prior to 2005, a typical Russian pension consisted of just over $70, which central and regional governments supplemented with free public transportation, housing subsidies, and for some pensioners, free prescriptions and telephones.
On 8 August 2007, Columbia Riverkeeper, a group dedicated to the environmental restoration of the Columbia River, launched a protest against the proposed plant. Two hundred protesters picketed on the beach at the proposed site and sailed into the river in kayaks holding signs and banners.
In the state of Kentucky, specific breastfeeding laws exist in order to protect women while breastfeeding their babies. Section 211.755 mandates that “a mother may breastfeed her baby or express breast milk in any location, public or private, where the mother is otherwise authorized to be.” Furthermore, women seen in the act of breastfeeding will not be considered for “indecent exposure, sexual conduct, lewd touching, or obscenity.”
On 10 June 2014, the Guatemalan Congress approved Decree 19-2014, more commonly known as Plant Varieties Protection Bill or the Monsanto Law (because of Monsanto’s, a multinational company, promotion of the law) and it was planned to take effect on 26 September 2014. The Monsanto Law outlawed the replanting, transportation, or selling of privatized seeds without permission, and made these actions punishable by one to four years in jail and a fine of 1,000 to 10,000 quetzals (130 to 1,300 US dollars).
Texas has consistently ranked poorly among other states with regard to education. In 2010, Texas ranked dead last in the percentage of adults with high school diplomas and ranked very low in spending per student in public schools, a problem that became exacerbated in 2011. During the Great Recession in 2007, Texas was able to avoid the housing industry meltdown and soaring unemployment rates that plagued the rest of the United States due to its booming oil and gas industries.
Language is an important aspect of culture as it communicates and preserves heritage, ideas, and identity. Pakistan and India became independent from British rule in August of 1947. The British Imperial Government, the Indian Muslim League, and the Indian National Congress split the region based on religious lines of Hinduism and Islam. Large regions that were majority Muslim became Pakistan, and regions that were majority Hindu became India. Pakistan was geographically separated into East Pakistan (modern day Bangladesh) and West Pakistan (modern day Pakistan).
In July 2007, the Ministry of the Environment, Physical Planning and Public Works published the “General Spatial Planning and Sustainable Development Framework” with no plans for new coal plants in Greece. A month later, the Ministry of Development published the “1st report on the long-term energy planning of Greece, 2008-2020,” stating that 5.6 to 21 percent of Greece’s energy would come from coal in the years 2008 to 2020.
In January of 2011, reports began to circulate at the University of Glasgow that massive cuts were coming to academic programs, staff employment rates and student services. Student activists targeted the abandoned Hetherington Research club, a former post-graduate club that had been shut down in January of 2010 due to a previous round of budget cuts, as a potential place of occupation from which protesters could issue demands against austerity. The university was beginning renovations on the building that appeared geared towards the university selling it as private office space.
Rosia Montana is a small group of villages in Alba County, Romania rich in minerals, especially gold and silver. Various groups have mined Rosia Montana for centuries. The area has a vast network of pre-Roman Empire gold mines, which serve as historical and archeological resources and cultural heritage sites.
In fall 1958, Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker agreed to house 56 American Bomarc missiles in North Bay, Ontario and La Macaza, Quebec, in keeping with the terms of the NORAD agreement. The American manufacturers designed the Bomarc missiles to be fitted with nuclear warheads, but when the missiles arrived in Canada, the nuclear warhead parts had not yet arrived.
The Earth Quaker Action Team’s first campaign, BLAM! (Bank Like Appalachia Matters!) began on 18 February 2010. Ingrid Lakey, Board Member of EQAT, sent a letter to PNC Vice President Jean Caulfield, which described the health and environmental dangers of mountaintop mining and requested a meeting. Shortly after Lakey wrote her letter, three EQAT members met with J. William Mills (the president of the Philadelphia Regional PNC banks) and relayed their expectations of PNC Bank to him. Less than a week later, PNC Bank sponsored a flower show on 9 March 2010.
On 14 October 2007, citizens of El Alto, Bolivia demanded that all bars and brothels facilitating sex work be located at least 3,200 feet away from schools, because they believed that the establishments were facilitating crime in the area. They then began a three-day rampage of the bars and brothels in the impoverished red-lights district of El Alto. These El Alto citizens, primarily parents and students, burned or destroyed at least 50 brothels, burned sex workers’ belongings, and beat sex workers.
Following President Lee Myungbak’s inauguration in February 2008, media workers criticised his policies on the press. The workers accused Lee of attempting to exert greater control over the media by handpicking the chair of the national broadcasting committee and YTN, a prominent television network in South Korea, and by pressuring the executive of the Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) to resign.
On 6 June 2013, developers Carlos Beruff and Larry Lieberman asked
Florida’s Manatee County Commission for environmental exceptions and
zoning changes to Long Bar Pointe, a 523-acre area of land along
Sarasota Bay. In 2012, Lieberman, the land’s owner, as well as the
president and founder of Sarasota’s Barrington Group, partnered with
Beruff of Medallion Homes to complete the development project. Beruff
and Lieberman aimed to build a 300-room hotel, two retail centers, a
convention center, 1,086 single-family homes, 1,587 low-rise multi
In 2013, Newark, Delaware, USA, was a town of 30,000 and home to the University of Delaware. Local citizens felt great concern about job creation to recover from the losses resulting from the worldwide financial crisis of 2007-2008, and they pressured their politicians to bring job creation opportunities to Delaware. In June of 2013, a representative of a company called The Data Centers, LLC, contacted local leaders of the Delaware Sierra Club asking for their support to build a data center to provide retail IT services on property owned by the University of Delaware.
On 1 January 2012, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan abruptly removed
the fuel subsidy provided to citizens by the government. Finance
Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala championed the decision and the country’s
citizens received no prior warning. The government argued that the
removal of the heavy subsidy would free up funds for other public
services, including health and infrastructure projects, and that the
liberalization of the fuel industry would benefit the economy. They
also argued that the primary beneficiaries of the subsidy were the
Before Booker Grammar School, Sarasota’s first Black public school, was established in 1925, Black students received their education at home or in churches. The establishment of three other schools for Black students -- Amaryllis Park for first through third graders, Booker Junior High, for seventh and eighth graders, and Booker High School, for ninth through twelfth graders -- followed. These schools, located centrally within Sarasota’s African-American community, Newtown, became deeply rooted institutions within the community.
Abdoulaye Wade became the democratically elected President of Senegal in 2000. The country was one of Africa’s most stable democracies, and had never experienced a coup. During his term as President, the Constitution was changed to limit Presidents to two terms. In 2009, Wade announced that he would not run for a third time. However, his government still suffered from low popularity. Frequent power outages, government scandals, and economic problems bred popular discontent.
Neo-liberalisation policies were central to the economic development
plans of El Salvador since the 1980s. In the mid 1990s, the El
Salvadoran government agreed to allow greater privatisation in basic
social services in return for loans from the World Bank and the
Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). In the late 1990s, El Salvador
introduced the Salvadoran Institute of Social Security (ISSS) as part of
the second phase of El Salvador’s liberalisation policies. In response,
the public sector doctors’ part of the ISSS (SIMETRISSS) conducted
Casco Viejo, a historic district of Panama, was designated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a World Heritage Site in 1997. The popular cultural destination had long sustained a modest infrastructure, until the Panamanian government proposed to extend a national revitalizing plan known as “Cinta Costera” to the district in 2010.
Hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” injects a mixture of water, sand and
chemicals under high pressure into dense shale rock formations to crack
the rock and release oil and/or natural gas. Oil companies began using
the process around 1950, but only in the mid 2000’s did it become a
widespread environmental issue as energy companies began developing new
ways to find oil and gas as the cheaper, easier sources were depleting.
One geologic formation, called the Marcellus Shale, included about 1/3
of southern New York state, including the Catskill mountains and the New
Prime minister John Key and his National Party emerged victorious in the election of 2008 against the incumbent Labour Party on promises to revive the struggling economy. In August 2009, his Energy Minister Gerard Brownlee hinted at changes to the Crown Minerals Act, which protected conservation lands from mining. His speech also included possible plans to allow mineral exploration in lands overseen by the Department of Conservation. Public interest in these proposed changes were low.
The campaign began 6 June 2013, and ended 21 July 2014, with the South Portland City Council vote to ban the export of unrefined crude from its port.
In 2008, when plans were made public to open the Las Brisas Refinery in Corpus Christi, the city’s residents felt the pollution produced by a refinery using petroleum coke, an abundant byproduct of oil refining, was simply too much in addition to the pollution produced by the refineries already there. The proposed refinery would potentially provide 80-100 permanent jobs and 1,300 jobs during the construction phase, and produce 1,200 megawatts of lower cost electricity. Las Brisas’ parent company, Chase Power, stressed these positive results when introducing their building plans.
