Archive for May, 2008

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Afghan student in torture claim

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

– I wrote about this case previously back on February 1st, 2008.   I said then, and remind you now, that this is the government we (the US) put into power and are supporting in Afghanistan.

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An Afghan student journalist who was sentenced to death for blasphemy has told an appeals court that he confessed after being tortured.

Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh was convicted in January of insulting Islam.

But at the appeals court in Kabul the 24-year-old insisted he was innocent of all the charges.

He said he was tortured into confessing that he had disrupted university classes by asking questions about women’s rights under Islam.

He was also convicted of distributing an article on the same subject, and adding three additional paragraphs.

He told the crowded, hour-long appeal hearing: “As a Muslim … I never allow myself to do such a thing. These are totally lies.”

Kambakhsh’s death sentence was handed down during a closed-door trial, which drew condemnation from parts of the international community.

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Why Grassroots Initiatives Can’t Fix Climate Change

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

A grassroots approach alone won’t make the earth stop warming

by the Editors (Scientific American magazine)

Have you heard enough already about global warming? It’s so … last year’s news! Plenty of people are “doing something” about it. Becoming carbon-neutral has gone as mainstream as Girl Scout cookies; help is on the way. Can we move on, please?

Unfortunately not. For all the consciousness-raising value of grassroots initiatives,  the world is still far from squarely facing up to the issues. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama promise on their Web sites to reduce carbon emissions to just 20 percent of 1990 levels by 2050—a laudable goal. But because what matters is the load of greenhouse gases in the entire atmosphere, reaching those numbers would be hard, to say the least, for the U.S. to do alone. John McCain’s Web site simply offers “commonsense approaches to limit carbon emissions by harnessing market forces that will … see to it that … all nations do their rightful share.”

If the candidates’ statements—perhaps out of political necessity—are short on specifics, the reason is partly that much of the electorate still finds it hard to grasp the size and urgency of the problem. Like the naive passengers on board an ocean liner, who lean carelessly over the rail as their ship drifts into an iceberg, most of us are oblivious to the magnitude of the impending disaster. The separation closes too slowly for us to appreciate the force of the coming crunch.

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NEW ELEMENT DISCOVERED

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

Government Research has led to the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to  science. The new element, Governmentium (Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant  neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert; however, it can be detected because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A minute amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second to take from four days to four years to complete.

Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2- 6 years; it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause  more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass.

When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.

– research thanks to Gertraude K. 

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Racist Incidents Give Some Obama Campaigners Pause

Saturday, May 17th, 2008

– One would hope that after all the years of racial strife in the U.S. that we might be beyond stories such as this.   But, alas, it isn’t so.

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Danielle Ross was alone in an empty room at the Obama campaign headquarters in Kokomo, Ind., a cellphone in one hand, a voter call list in the other. She was stretched out on the carpeted floor wearing laceless sky-blue Converses, stories from the trail on her mind. It was the day before Indiana’s primary, and she had just been chased by dogs while canvassing in a Kokomo suburb. But that was not the worst thing to occur since she postponed her sophomore year at Middle Tennessee State University, in part to hopscotch America stumping for Barack Obama.

Here’s the worst: In Muncie, a factory town in the east-central part of Indiana, Ross and her cohorts were soliciting support for Obama at malls, on street corners and in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and they ran into “a horrible response,” as Ross put it, a level of anti-black sentiment that none of them had anticipated.

“The first person I encountered was like, ‘I’ll never vote for a black person,’ ” recalled Ross, who is white and just turned 20. “People just weren’t receptive.”

For all the hope and excitement Obama’s candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed — and unreported — this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They’ve been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they’ve endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can’t fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.

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West told to brace for flood of refugees

Saturday, May 17th, 2008

As many as a billion people could lose their homes by 2050 because of the devastating impact of global warming, scientists and political leaders have been told.

Delegates at a climate change conference hosted by a top British think tank heard last night that the steady rise in temperatures around the planet could trigger mass migration on unprecedented levels.

Hundreds of millions could be forced to move because of water shortages and crop failures in most of Africa, as well as in central and southern Asia and South America, the conference in London was told. There could also be an effect on levels of starvation and on food prices as agriculture struggles to cope with growing demand in increasingly arid conditions.

Rising sea levels could also cause havoc, and coastal communities in southern Asia, the Far East, the south Pacific islands and the Caribbean could be submerged.

North and west Africans could head towards Europe, and the southern border of the United States could come under renewed pressure from Central America.

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Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Financial melt-down, Food Shortages, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, Terrorism, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages | No Comments »

Nuclear Fuel Recycling: More Trouble Than It’s Worth

Saturday, May 17th, 2008

Plans are afoot to reuse spent reactor fuel in the U.S. But the advantages of the scheme pale in comparison with its dangers

Although a dozen years have elapsed since any new nuclear power reactor has come online in the U.S., there are now stirrings of a nuclear renaissance. The incentives are certainly in place: the costs of natural gas and oil have skyrocketed; the public increasingly objects to the greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels; and the federal government has offered up to $8 billion in subsidies and insurance against delays in licensing (with new laws to streamline the process) and $18.5 billion in loan guarantees. What more could the moribund nuclear power industry possibly want?

Just one thing: a place to ship its used reactor fuel. Indeed, the lack of a disposal site remains a dark cloud hanging over the entire enterprise. The projected opening of a federal waste storage repository in Yucca Mountain in Nevada (now anticipated for 2017 at the earliest) has already slipped by two decades, and the cooling pools holding spent fuel at the nation’s nuclear power plants are running out of space.

Most nuclear utilities are therefore beginning to store older spent fuel on dry ground in huge casks, each typically containing 10 tons of waste. Every year a 1,000-megawatt reactor discharges enough fuel to fill two of these casks, each costing about $1 million. But that is not all the industry is doing. U.S. nuclear utilities are suing the federal government, because they would not have incurred such expenses had the U.S. Department of Energy opened the Yucca Mountain repository in 1998 as originally planned. As a result, the government is paying for the casks and associated infrastructure and operations—a bill that is running about $300 million a year.

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Posted in CrashBlogging, Nuclear Waste, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Yellow River

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

Bitter Waters

Can China save the Yellow—its Mother River?

Not a drop of rain has fallen in months, and the only clouds come from sandstorms lashing across the desert. But as the Yellow River bends through the barren landscape of north-central China, a startling vision shimmers on the horizon: emerald green rice fields, acres of yellow sunflowers, lush tracts of corn, wheat, and wolfberry—all flourishing under a merciless sky.

This is no mirage. The vast oasis in northern Ningxia, near the midpoint of the Yellow River’s 3,400-mile journey from the Plateau of Tibet to the Bo Hai sea, has survived for more than 2,000 years, ever since the Qin emperor dispatched an army of peasant engineers to build canals and grow crops for soldiers manning the Great Wall. Shen Xuexiang is trying to carry on that tradition today. Lured here three decades ago by the seemingly limitless supply of water, the 55-year-old farmer cultivates cornfields that lie between the ruins of the Great Wall and the silt-laden waters of the Yellow River. From the bank of an irrigation canal, Shen gazes over the green expanse and marvels at the river’s power: “I always thought this was the most beautiful place under heaven.”

But this earthly paradise is disappearing fast. The proliferation of factories, farms, and cities—all products of China’s spectacular economic boomis sucking the Yellow River dry. What water remains is being poisoned. From the canal bank, Shen points to another surreal flash of color: blood-red chemical waste gushing from a drainage pipe, turning the water a garish purple. This canal, which empties into the Yellow River, once teemed with fish and turtles, he says. Now its water is too toxic to use even for irrigation; two of Shen’s goats died within hours of drinking from the canal.

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Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Deforestation, Desertification, Food Shortages, Pollution, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages | No Comments »

Food Prices See Greatest Monthly Increase in Nearly 20 Years

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

Rising global grain prices helped spark the largest increase in monthly food costs in nearly 20 years, as consumers paid more in April for cereals, baked goods, and the dairy, meat and other animal products that rely on feedstocks, the government reported today.

Food prices have risen 6.1 percent in the past three months on a seasonally adjusted annual basis. The one-month rise between March and April of 0.9 percent was the biggest since January 1990, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The rise in prices covered all categories of food but was most severe among such staple goods as grains and oils — goods where inflation has touched off food riots in some less developed countries and led to concerns about supply shortages.

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State moves to ban fake testicles on vehicles

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

TALLAHASSEE, Florida (Reuters) – Senate lawmakers in Florida have voted to ban the fake bull testicles that dangle from the trailer hitches of many trucks and cars throughout the state.

Republican Sen. Cary Baker, a gun shop owner from Eustis, Florida, called the adornments offensive and proposed the ban. Motorists would be fined $60 for displaying the novelty items, which are known by brand names like “Truck Nutz” and resemble the south end of a bull moving north.

The Florida Senate voted last week to add the measure to a broader transportation bill, but it is not included in the House version.

In a spirited debate laced with double entendre, Senate lawmakers questioned whether the state should curtail freedom of expression in vehicle accessories.

Critics of the ban included the Senate Rules Chairman, Sen. Jim King, a Jacksonville Republican whose truck sported a pair until his wife protested.

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Files released on UFO sightings

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

Secret files on UFO sightings have been made available for the first time by the Ministry of Defence.

The documents, which can be downloaded from the National Archives website, cover the period from 1978 to 1987.

They include accounts of strange lights in the sky and unexplained objects being spotted by the public, armed forces and police officers.

One man explained in great detail his “physical and psychic contact” with green aliens since he was a child.

The writer said that one of them, called Algar, was killed in 1981 by another race of beings as he was about to make contact with the UK government.

The letter’s author said he visited their bases in the Wirral and Cheshire, while his wife reported seeing a UFO shot down over Wallasey on Merseyside.

The eight released files are part of almost 200 files set to be made available over the next four years.

These documents will be available to download for free for the first month.

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