| The Big Thirst: The Great American Water Crisis
Here in scenic southern Tennessee, the drought is adding to the problems of extreme rural poverty. At a highway rest stop for tourists - near a bridge named for Senator Albert Gore Sr, a Tennesseean and father of Nobel laureate Al Gore Jr - the toilets are closed for lack of water. In a nearby town, the mayor orders the grass regularly mown on the exposed banks of a reservoir that until recently was below water. From the air the impact of the drought is most obvious. The mighty Tennessee and Chattahoochee rivers have been reduced to narrow channels of muddy brown water. Sandbanks and islands have appeared and old tree stumps now poke out of lakes and reservoirs as the water level falls. The government's "drought monitor" says that 32 per cent of the region is in "exceptional drought", its most severe designation.
Controversy over cutting of ‘Boondocks’ episodes
Sooner or later, any satirist who wins a Peabody Award for re-animating the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and having him denounce "Soul Plane" runs the risk of upsetting corporate America. That's one theory being floated this week as "The Boondocks" creator Aaron McGruder informs faithful viewers of his edgy, irreverent Adult Swim series that Cartoon Network has unexpectedly shortened the 'toon's second season from a planned 15-episode run to 13. Fifteen episodes were in fact produced but two, titled "The Huey Freeman Hunger Strike" and "The Ruckus Reality Show" aren't currently scheduled to air, allegedly due to controversial material targeting Black Entertainment Television executives. On his Myspace.com page, McGruder has posted the following message to fans: "Okay, so … maybe it's a 13-episode season." More cryptically, links to YouTube clips said to contain content from the episodes posted on McGruder's Myspace page have been mysteriously taken down (when users click on the links to the clips to view them, a "We're sorry, this video is no longer available" message pops up instead).
Tata unveils £1,300 car set to drive down prices
India's Tata Motors has unveiled the world's cheapest car in a move expected to force other manufacturers to develop ranges of cheap and cheerful compact vehicles. The latest news from the transport and automovitve industriesThe four-seater, 100,000-rupee (£1,300) Nano is in sharp contrast to the prestige UK brands Jaguar and Land Rover, which Tata is close to buying from Ford. .
In Harford County, trash has a bright future
The air inside the Harford County Resource Recovery Facility in Joppa is filled with an ever-present stench of trash. "That's the smell of money," said Frank Henderson, Harford's deputy director of environmental affairs, as he took a deep breath at the plant that residents call simply "the waste-to-energy." .
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