Good evening, thanks for joining us. There is now a deal in place to force syrian president Bashar Alassad to get rid of allhis chemical weapons by the middle of next year. That means a military strike is unlikely any time soon. After three days of marathon talks in switzerland, they announced the agreement. The United States and russia eliminating chemical weapons in the soonest and safest manner. We agree that syria must submit within a week, not in 30 days, but in one week a comprehensive listing and Additional Details will be addressed regarding that in the coming days. There can be no games, no room for avoidance or anything less than full compliance by the assad regime. Under the deal, International Inspectors would be on the ground in syria in november and almost immediately begin destroying equipment used to produce chemical weapons. One potential complication is how to enforce the inspection agreement when the country is in the midst of a civil war thats resulted in more than
Darwin discovered that evolution proceeds with neither direction nor purpose. The natural world is largely indifferent to plan or plot. Yet we, story-seeking creatures that we are, see the world around us as more completed, more accomplished, than what came before. Tom Comitta’s The Nature Book explores these tensions by stitching together hundreds of fragments in the history of literary writing about the natural world—this excerpt alone is a collage of ninety-seven novels ranging from Hawthorne to Arundhati Roy. Though the text of The Nature Book is a polyphonic effort of writers, humans are absent from the actual story. In this seamless anthology, we forget that the experience of reading about nature is mediated by human voices and, when suspended in the text, succumb to the magical illusion that we are perceiving the world in itself.