By Patrick Cockburn in Mosul
Published: 08 August 2007
As world attention focuses on the daily slaughter in Iraq, a devastating disaster is impending in the north of the country, where the wall of a dam holding back the Tigris river north of Mosul city is in danger of imminent collapse.
"It could go at any minute," says a senior aid worker who has knowledge of the struggle by US and Iraqi engineers to save the dam. "The potential for disaster is very great."
If the dam does fail, a wall of water will sweep into Mosul, Iraq's third largest city with a population of 1.7 million, 20 miles to the south. Experts say the flood waters could destroy 70 per cent of Mosul and inflict heavy damage 190 miles downstream along the Tigris."
Wait, what????? Rewind. "As world attention focuses on the daily slaughter in Iraq..."
World attention?
Not here in Uhmerhika, where we have better things to do with our time than think about some dusty heathens getting shot, bombed, or having their infrastructure fail! Geez, I reckon we might have to be tryin' to figger out how to fix those dad-burned bridges and such back here at home. Why, you might almost think that all our doggone taxes are going somewhere else, like, mebbee, for killin' heathens, for all the guvment keeps talkin' like it's far to pricey to fix up those levees'n'such. Uh'm just not sure, see. Mebbee I'll jest have me a Big Mac and put lil' Billy in front of one of those baby genius video shows.
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""We found no association with language acquisition and TV watching -- even adult programming seemed to have no effect," Zimmerman tells WebMD. "But there was one quite large effect -- from baby videos like the Baby Einstein and Baby Genius products. These kids were 17% slower in language development than the kids who didn't watch such videos.""
LINK to story re: 'baby genius' videos decreasing vocabulary for every hour spent watching.
LINK to story re: the failing dam- this is serious, sad shit.
LINK to story re: how kids think everything (even carrots, milk) taste better in a McD wrapper
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