| Chapter : | Introduction |
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Introduction
Today we live in a new era, and the world has been increasingly ravaged by disasters such as acts of terror, war, disease, change of climate, and earthquakes. Our global media brings daily images and reports of such events into our consciousness and our home. On September 11, 2001, the United States was attacked by terrorists. Angered Americans attacked Afghanistan and Iraq, which they later occupied, while the North Korean nuclear crisis escalated. President George W. Bush applied the term “the Axis of Evil” to describe Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, a term which had not been used since President Franklin D. Roosevelt applied it to enemy powers during World War II. Islamic nations, along with Communist North Korea, are still reacting with antagonism against the religiously oriented term “evil.” During the summer of 2002, many European cities were flooded, and more than 14,000 people died as a result of extremely hot weather. In February 2003, in the Middle East, heavy snow caused the collapse of the Wailing Wall, a sacred place to Judaism and Islam. The Larsen Ice Shelf at the Antarctic Pole collapsed and 7,000 tons of ice melted and flooded into the sea. Seventy meters of the Argentine glacier collapsed. A report, dated October 2003, by the U.S. Department of Defense,