Down-to-earth spending priorities?
There's some interesting juxtaposing of issues going on over at the
BBC News Online website.
In a pro-human space exploration piece, their science editor,
Dr. David Whitehouse, strongly praises
"inspirational" US plans to spend (only!) $86 billion on NASA over the next 5 years...
While the more down-to-earth environment correspondent,
Alex Kirby, reports on the
World Economic Forum's
Global Governance Initiative, which has concluded that
the world's governments are failing to do nearly enough to fight global poverty - in terms of their own
Millennium Developments Goals.
These, goals aim to
halve the number of people living in poverty by 2015, and were signed up to by
leaders from 189 countries, just over three years ago.
Unfortunately,
governments are currrently spending only 1/3 of what is necessary in order to achieve these goals, and progress -
as measured against a range of key indicators - has been depressingly
meagre + patchy. This is especially the case given the
scale of the task at hand, and the amount of
time that has already elapsed...