On the same day the Export-Import Bank approved the Chernogorskoye loan, it signed a memorandum ofunderstanding with Russia to secure a "framework agreement" for oil and gas-related lending to that country.
Thomas Nagel, a distinguished American philosopher, once remarked that to say now that consciousness is a physical state of the brain is to be in the position of an ancient Greek who proclaims that matter is energy: what he says is true, but there is no understandingof how it can be true, no framework into which to fit the discovery.