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[Biography of the Day] from [Britannica]
June 17
Igor Stravinsky
Composer Igor Stravinsky, whose work had a revolutionary impact on the musical world just before and after World War I and whose compositions remain a touchstone of modernism, was born in Russia this day in 1882.

[On This Day] from [Britannica]
June 17
1994: Arrest of O.J. Simpson
On this day in 1994, American gridiron football hero O.J. Simpson was charged with the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, though after a sensational trial he was acquitted the following year.

1972: The Watergate, an office-apartment-hotel complex in Washington, D.C., and the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, was broken into by five men who were later arrested, prompting the Watergate Scandal that upended the administration of U.S. President Richard M. Nixon.

1944: Iceland declared itself a republic.

1940: The Soviet Red Army invaded Latvia, which led to the incorporation of the country into the U.S.S.R.

1930: The United States imposed the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff, raising the average tariff by some 20 percent and making worse an already beleaguered world economy.

1871: James Weldon Johnson—a poet, diplomat, and anthologist of African American culture—was born.

1775: In the Battle of Bunker Hill, American colonial revolutionaries clashed with British regulars during the Siege of Boston.


[Today's Word] from [Dr. Kazuo Iwata]
June 17
"The more art is directed, limited, and worked upon, the freer it becomes."
Igor Fiodrovich Stranvinsky
（芸術というものは、監督され、制限され、加工されればされるほどいよいよ自由になるものである。）
(Geijutu-to-iumono-wa, kantoku-sare, seigen-sare, kako-sarere-ba-sareru-hodo iyo-iyo jiyu-ni-naru-mono-de-aru)

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[TODAY'S TOP STORIES] from [The Japan Times]

[NATIONAL NEWS]
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Tokyo bolsters sanctions on Pyongyang
（日本 北朝鮮に制裁措置を強化）
By JUN HONGO
Staff writer

The Cabinet approved new sanctions Tuesday against North Korea that reinforce previous restrictions on financial and people exchanges with the hermit state.

The measures, which follow the adoption of a U.N. Security Council resolution last week, prohibit all Japanese exports to North Korea and restrict foreign nationals held liable for breaching the sanctions from entering Japan.

The measures, valid until April, are in concert with U.N. Resolution 1874, Foreign Minister Hirofumi Nakasone said.

Japan initially imposed sanctions against Pyongyang in 2006 after it fired a missile and conducted its first nuclear test. They included bans on port calls by North Korean-registered vessels, all imports from North Korea and curbs on cash transfers to the country.

The government will continue to "work firmly and urge North Korea to take specific actions that will resolve ongoing issues," Nakasone said.

In addition to hardening its stance against Pyongyang, the government is looking to submit a bill to allow the Self-Defense Forces or the Japan Coast Guard to inspect North Korean ships at sea in line with the UNSC resolution to prevent weapons shipments.

Under the current law, the SDF and coast guard can only inspect cargo ships in international waters under circumstances that pose a national threat, and only after the suspect boat agrees to allow Japanese to board. New legislation is expected to allow greater flexibility and enhance the rules of engagement.

"We must prepare swiftly since the U.N. resolution has already been agreed on," Nakasone said of the new bill.

Japan's sanctions have been extended and expanded since 2006, most recently in April when the North launched a Taepodong-2 long-distance ballistic missile over the Tohoku region. That sanction was centered on a tighter monitoring of financial transactions to the North, including a requirement that people carrying ¥300,000 or more to North Korea file prior notification, instead of ¥1 million.

But Tuesday's additional ban on exports could be the final measure because the government is running out of effective options, said Shunji Hiraiwa, a professor at the University of Shizuoka.

"Without any cards left in its hands, Japan's only choice will be to push for a stronger resolution from the U.N. if the North conducts another nuclear test," the expert on North Korean issues told The Japan Times.

Many analysts said Tuesday's sanctions will have a limited impact and a Foreign Ministry official acknowledged that effective sanctions must be a joint effort.

"Obviously, not imposing further sanctions against North Korea is not an option for us," but almost 80 percent of North Korea's trade is with China, the ministry official said earlier this month.

"There are things that China can do," he said. "Sanctions against the North should be carried out globally."

On the North's response to continued global condemnation, Hiraiwa said Pyongyang could still return to dialogue instead of carrying out a nuclear test.


[NATIONAL NEWS]
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
7,300 schools highly vulnerable to quakes
（7,300の校舎 地震で倒壊の危険性）

(Kyodo News) More than 7,300 school buildings are at high risk of collapse in the event of a powerful earthquake, the education ministry said Tuesday.

A survey by the ministry on the nation's 124,976 public schools also found that the quake resistance of 41,206 buildings is insufficient.

The ministry said 7,309 could crumble if hit by a quake measuring upper 6 on the Japanese seismic scale of 7.

The number of school buildings at risk of collapse declined by 3,347 from a year earlier, while the ratio with adequate quake resistance rose 4.7 percentage points to 67.0 percent, the ministry said.

The government has provided more subsidies to local authorities to work on schools since a major quake leveled a huge number of school buildings in Sichuan Province, China, last June.

The ministry plans to provide subsidies to make 16,000 school buildings quake-resistant in the current fiscal year. The ministry also expects to eliminate school structures at risk of collapse by March 2011 and raise the quake resistance ratio to around 78 percent.

Of the 83,770 buildings proven to be fully quake resistant, 50,180 were built under newer quake-resistance standards adopted in 1982, the survey found.

By prefecture, Osaka had the most high-risk school buildings at 527, followed by Hokkaido with 438 and Hyogo with 351. Okinawa had the least at 15.

Kanagawa had the highest percentage of safe buildings at 93.4 percent, followed by Miyagi and Shizuoka at 90.1 percent. Nagasaki was the lowest at 46.6 percent.

Municipal governments are required by law to disclose the results of quake-resistance inspection of the schools in their jurisdiction, but 320 of the 1,880 municipalities, or 17 percent, did not do so, the ministry said.

"It appears that those municipalities failed to disclose the results because they want to avoid causing a panic. School facilities can be evacuation destinations," an official said, adding the ministry will start pushing the municipalities to disclose the results.


[NATIONAL NEWS]
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Legal pros expecting a lot from lay judges
（法律の専門家 裁判員制度に期待）
By SETSUKO KAMIYA
Staff writer

Videotaping interrogations of criminal suspects could have prevented a man recently effectively exonerated by a DNA test from being convicted of murder, but the result of his trial might not have been any different if lay judges had been on the bench, legal professionals said Tuesday.

Toshikazu Sugaya spent 17 years in prison after being convicted of kidnapping and murdering a 4-year-old girl in Ashikaga, Tochigi Prefecture, in 1990 but was freed this month after recent tests indicated his DNA did not match traces found on the victim's clothing. Initial tests had led to his getting a life sentence.

But having lay judges, or "saibanin," participate in the criminal trial to weigh the evidence and reach a verdict should lead to fewer miscarriages of justice, because the fresh eyes of the public will be involved in the trial process and they will try to do the right thing, the lawyers said.

"I can't say firmly that lay judges could have prevented Sugaya's conviction, because forensic evidence and a confession were submitted, and there is no proof the lay judges would not have been swayed into believing them," Makoto Miyazaki, president of the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, said at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo.

Taping the entire interrogation process would have been the primary means of preventing his conviction, he said.

Miyazaki also criticized the Utsunomiya High Court and the Supreme Court for not wanting to reopen the case immediately despite new DNA results submitted by Sugaya's defense team.

Satoru Shinomiya, a lawyer and professor at Kokugakuin University law school, said the courts failed to listen to Sugaya's attorneys, who argued that the accuracy of the early DNA tests were problematic because the sample was collected long after the crime and was not properly stored.

"If the lay judges had been there, at least they would have listened to the argument carefully," Shinomiya said.

Speaking to foreign reporters regarding the May 21 debut of the lay judge system, former Supreme Court Justice Kunio Hamada said public participation will have a positive impact on how professional judges operate.

"Career criminal trial judges are so accustomed to their methods and precedents, but now they have to deal with lay judges. They will have to go back to principles like the presumption of innocence," said Hamada, who served on the top court for five years from 2001. "So from this point on, the conduct of criminal trial judges will improve."

Under the saibanin system, six randomly chosen voters will sit on the bench with three professional judges to try serious crimes, including weighing the evidence, reaching a verdict and deciding a sentence.

Lay judges are bound by confidentiality and banned from disclosing details of their deliberations, but Miyazaki said there needs to be a system to allow them to speak so they can check whether their actions were fair and impartial.

Asked about the risk of prospective lay judges being influenced by media reports that often portray suspects as already guilty, Miyazaki said he believes professional judges are already prejudiced in this regard.

The Tokyo District Court is expected to hold its first trial involving lay judges in early August.

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[Today's Newspaper] from [The New York Times]

[Middle East]
Bracing for New Protests, Iran Tightens Crackdown
By NAZILA FATHI and ALAN COWELL
Published: June 17, 2009

TEHRAN — In the face of a growing official campaign to block channels of dissent with arrests and restrictions, Tehran braced for a third day of mass defiance by opposition supporters on Wednesday after Iran’s leaders failed to halt demonstrations against last week’s disputed election results.

Thrown on the defensive by the biggest demonstrations since the Islamic revolution in 1979, the authorities on Tuesday offered a concession to the sustained rage here, saying they would allow a limited recount of the vote — an offer that was resoundingly rejected as opposition leaders sought to maintain the impetus of the protests.

In a message on a Web site associated with him, Mir Hussein Moussavi, the main opposition candidate in last Friday’s contested vote, called on his supporters to stage a further mass rally Thursday, and to go to their local mosques to mourn protesters killed in the demonstrations, officially numbering seven. His call directly challenged Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had urged Mr. Moussavi to work through the country’s electoral system.

Iranians using the Internet messaging service Twitter had already spread the word that another silent demonstration was scheduled for 5 p.m. Wednesday and called on protesters to wear green, the signature color of the opposition.

One day after the government revoked press credentials for foreign journalists and ordered journalists not to report from the streets, there were increasing signs Wednesday that the authorities were preparing further restrictions on opposition figures and on news about the protest. Government officials telephoned or sent faxes Wednesday to reporters in Tehran working for foreign news organizations telling them not to venture outside to cover events being held without an official permit. That included rallies by supporters of Mr. Moussavi and news conferences or other public events held without the government’s approval, reporters in Tehran said.

Government officials told journalists that they were at risk on the streets following an incident on Tuesday when a photographer was stabbed and wounded while covering a rally. Two well-known analysts, Sayeed Leylaz and Mohammad-Reza Jalaipour, were detained Wednesday and were likely to be held for several days, associates and family members said.

The A.P. reported that the powerful Revolutionary Guards threatened restrictions Wednesday on the digital online media that many Iranians use to communicate among themselves and to send news of their protests overseas. In a first statement since last Friday’s vote, the Revolutionary Guards said Iranian Web site operators and bloggers must remove content deemed to “create tension” or face legal action, The Associated Press said.

Defying the restrictions, new amateur video surfaced outside of Iran on Wednesday, apparently showing a government militia rampaging through a dormitory area of Tehran University late Tuesday or early Wednesday.

There were indications that the authorities were using more sophisticated measures, putting out misinformation on a popular opposition site, Persiankiwi. The site warned its followers in a series of posts to ignore instructions from people with no record of reliable posts.

But there were other, older reflexes. Reuters reported that Mohammadreza Habibi, the senior prosecutor in the central province of Isfahan, had warned demonstrators that they could be executed under Islamic law.

“We warn the few elements controlled by foreigners who try to disrupt domestic security by inciting individuals to destroy and to commit arson that the Islamic penal code for such individuals waging war against God is execution,” Mr. Habibi said, according to the Fars news agency. It was not clear if his warning applied only to Isfahan or the country as a whole, Reuters said.

In Paris, Soazig Dollet, a spokeswoman for Reporters Without Borders, a press freedom advocacy group, said at least 11 reporters had been arrested since the elections and the fate of 10 more was unclear since they may either be in hiding or under arrest.

On its Web site, the organization said Aldolfatah Soltani, a lawyer and human rights activist, had been detained along with “10 or so opposition activists, politicians and civil society figures” in Tehran and three other cities — Tabriz, Isfahan and Shiraz.

The developments came a day after supporters of Mr. Moussavi jammed into a line more than a mile long in Tehran. They marched mostly in silence, some carrying signs in English asking, “Where is my vote?”

Despite the media crackdown, extraordinary accounts about the protests in Tehran and other cities have reached the outside world. On Tuesday, many Web sites posted a wrenching video that purported to show the death of a student in Isfahan in a shooting by pro-government militia members. Other videos showed limp and bleeding demonstrators in Tehran after the unprecedented protests on Monday.

The numbers of opposition protesters did not match those on Monday, when hundreds of thousands of Iranians joined the demonstrations, enraged that the conservative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was declared the winner of Friday’s election with 63 percent of the votes.

“Nothing will change if we don’t come,” said one protester, Madjid, 26, an employee of the Foreign Ministry who was afraid to give his family name. “We need to become a big force to achieve what we want.”

There were reports that at least two moderate politicians, Mohammad Ali Abtahi and Saeed Hajarian, as well as two other activists, were arrested on Tuesday. The government arrested more than 100 politicians and activists on Sunday. Some have been released.

The English-language Press TV wing of state-owned television said Behzad Nabavi, another reformist politician, had also been arrested. The detainees include politicians, intellectuals, activists and journalists, the A.P. reported.

Worry over the future of Iran, a country crucially important for its oil, its proximity to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, its nuclear program and its ties to extremist groups, spilled over its borders.

In Washington, President Obama said that it would be counterproductive for the United States “to be seen as meddling” in the disputed presidential election. He dismissed criticism that he had failed to speak out forcefully enough about the growing unrest in Iran.

“I have deep concerns about the election,” Mr. Obama told reporters at the White House. “I think that the world has deep concerns about the election.”

In Vienna, Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the United Nations atomic energy watchdog, said in a BBC interview that he believed Iran wanted to develop nuclear weapons technology “to be recognized as a major power in the Middle East.”

As the confrontation inside Iran continued to build momentum on Tuesday, each side laid down more cards.

Reformers, with substantial popular support but without the power of the state, worked to gain religious backers, urging clerics to break with the government. “No one in his sane mind can accept these results,” a senior opposition cleric, Hassan-Ali Montazeri, said in a public letter posted on his Web site.

Supporters of Mr. Ahmadinejad — though apparently fewer than 10,000 of them — marched through Tehran’s streets proclaiming their candidate the election’s fair winner and chanting, “Rioters should be executed!”

The Guardian Council, the watchdog body that must certify the results, said it was willing to conduct a partial recount of the votes, the IRNA news agency reported. Ayatollah Khamenei, who had urged the council on Monday to examine the vote-rigging claims, said Tuesday that the candidates needed to resolve the issue through legal channels.

Mr. Moussavi’s representative, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, said a recount would not meet the demands of the protesters, Ghalamnews, a Web site linked to Mr. Moussavi, reported.

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[Today's Newspaper] fom [The Washington Post]

[Politics]
CIA Fights Full Release Of Detainee Report
White House Urged to Maintain Secrecy
By R. Jeffrey Smith and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 17, 2009

The CIA is pushing the Obama administration to maintain the secrecy of significant portions of a comprehensive internal account of the agency's interrogation program, according to two intelligence officials.

The officials say the CIA is urging the suppression of passages describing in graphic detail how the agency handled its detainees, arguing that the material could damage ongoing counterterrorism operations by laying bare sensitive intelligence procedures and methods.

The May 2004 report, prepared by the CIA's inspector general, is the most definitive official account to date of the agency's interrogation system. A heavily redacted version, consisting of a dozen or so paragraphs separated by heavy black boxes and lists of missing pages, was released in May 2008 in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

After an ACLU appeal, the Obama administration promised in May to review the report, which consists of more than 100 pages of text and six appendixes of unknown length, and to produce by Friday any additional material that could be released.

CIA spokesman George Little said the agency "is reviewing the report to determine how much more of it can be declassified in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act."

An administration official said the CIA has not yet forwarded the document to the White House or the Justice Department for final review.

A senior intelligence official who has studied the document defended the CIA's redactions. "There is a lot about how the CIA operated the overall program of detention and interrogation -- not just about how they used techniques -- that would be sensitive and rightly redacted," the official said. "I think the Obama administration has made the correct decision that transparency only goes so far on the national security side."

Some former agency officials said that CIA insiders are fighting a rear-guard action to prevent disclosures that could embarrass the agency and lead to new calls for a "truth commission" to investigate the Bush administration's policies.

Two former agency officials who read the 2004 report said most of its contents could be safely released and, if anything, would seem familiar. General information about the agency's interrogation program has already been made public through the Obama administration's release of memos by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel authorizing the harsh CIA techniques and through the earlier leak of a 2005 report on CIA interrogations by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The broad conclusions of the inspector general's report, as well as its specific assertion that some interrogators exceeded limits approved by the Justice Department, have previously been disclosed.

"[CIA Director] Leon Panetta has been captured by the people who were the ideological drivers for the interrogation program in the first place," said a former senior officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity when discussing the still-classified report.

But one intelligence official countered that Panetta "was never a fan of the interrogation program."

"He's reached his own independent decisions on these issues. He's standing up for people who followed lawful guidance" issued to the agency during the Bush administration, the official said.

The report was based on more than a year of investigation, including more than 100 interviews and a review of 92 interrogation videotapes -- which the CIA later said it had destroyed -- as well as thousands of internal CIA e-mails and other documents. Then-Inspector General John L. Helgerson and his team of investigators traveled to secret CIA prisons and witnessed interrogations firsthand, making them the only observers allowed into the detention sites who were not participants in the program, officials said.

The report's critical comments helped prompt a suspension of the interrogations for several months, until the agency received fresh affirmations of their legality from President George W. Bush's appointees at the Justice Department. The CIA's lawyers and its counterterrorism center also prepared detailed written rebuttals, which the CIA is considering releasing alongside the censored report this week.

According to a summary of the report incorporated in a declassified Justice Department memo, its authors concluded that some useful information was produced by the CIA program but that "it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks" -- the principal justification for using harsh techniques.

The report also expressed particular concern that questioners had violated a legal prohibition against "degrading" conduct by stripping detainees, sometimes in the presence of women, according to a source who has read it. The report said waterboarding, meant to simulate drowning, was used more often than had been proved effective, and it quoted CIA doctors as saying that interrogators from the military's survival school who took part in the sessions had probably misrepresented their expertise.

The report further questioned the legality of using different combinations of techniques -- for example, sleep deprivation combined with forced nudity and painful stress positions, according to sources familiar with the document. While Justice Department lawyers had determined in August 2002 that the individual techniques did not constitute torture, the report warned that using several techniques at once could have a far greater psychological impact, according to officials familiar with the document.

"The argument was that combining the techniques amounted to torture," said a former agency official who read the report. "In essence, [Helgerson] was arguing in 2004 that there were clear violations of international laws and domestic laws."

Another former official who read the report said its full text laid bare "the good, the bad and the ugly" and added that "I believe that some people would find offensive" what was done, because it was "not in keeping with American values."

At the CIA, the report was welcomed by some lower-ranking officials who were privy to what was happening at the prisons and had complained to Helgerson's office about apparent abuses, according to an official familiar with the study. But it provoked immediate anger and resistance among the agency's top managers, lawyers and counterterrorism experts, who charged that Helgerson had overstepped his authority and that the report contained factual inaccuracies and a misreading of the law.

A former intelligence official said that at the time, Helgerson seemed to be on a moral crusade: "He was out to prove a theory, and it came across as simply 'You're wrong,' " said the official, who cited the report's secrecy in speaking on the condition of anonymity. "He was calling in officers willy-nilly and then bringing them in a second time. It was like he was conducting his own interrogations." Most of those involved in the program felt at the time, and still do, that they took great pains to follow the law, the official said.

After the report was issued, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet demanded that the Justice Department and the White House reaffirm their support for the agency's harsh interrogation methods, even when used in combination, telling others at the time, "No papers, no opinions, no program." At a White House meeting in mid-2004, he resisted pressures to reinstate the program immediately, before receiving new legal authorization, according to a source familiar with the episode.

The Justice Department subsequently sent interim supporting opinions to the CIA, allowing the program's resumption after Tenet's departure, and went on to complete three lengthy reports in 2005 that affirmed in detail the legality of the interrogation techniques with some new safeguards that the CIA had begun to implement in 2003.

Helgerson, who retired from the agency this year, declined to comment for this story. A former CIA employee familiar with Helgerson's views said he has advocated for the release of the whole report, with minimal redactions, so that interested parties can see the context. "The report says a number of things positive about the agency as well as raising some serious questions about the legal underpinnings of the program and the way it was carried out," the official said.

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[Environment] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Solar Power]
German blue chip firms throw weight behind north African solar project
Siemens, Deutsche Bank, RWE and E.on ready to invest in ambitious plan to power Europe with clean electricity from Africa
Kate Connolly in Berlin
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 16 June 2009 18.16 BST
Article history

Twenty blue chip German companies are pooling their resources with the aim of harnessing solar power in the deserts of north Africa and transporting the clean electricity to Europe.

The businesses, which include some of the biggest names in European energy, finance and manufacturing, will form a consortium next month. If successful, the highly ambitious plan could see Europe fuelled by solar energy within a decade.

The consortium behind what would be the biggest ever solar energy initiative will first raise awareness and interest among other investors for the project, known as Desertec, which is estimated to cost around €400bn (£338bn).

Torsten Jeworrek, board member of Munich Re, the German reinsurer which is leading the project, said: "We want to found an initiative which over the next two to three years will put concrete measures on the table."

Like other reinsurers, Munich Re has said it is expecting to face mounting claims in the coming years for damage caused by climate change.

The companies – including Siemens, Deutsche Bank, and the energy companies RWE and E.on – will meet on July 13 in Munich to draw up an agreement. German government ministries as well as the Club of Rome, a Zurich-based NGO of leading scientists, managers and politicians which advocates sustainable development, are also expected to be present.

It is seen as particularly significant that the companies aim to start the expensive initiative in the midst of a financial crisis. But although none of the companies is keen to go into detail yet about their involvement, they stress that the project is a chance for them to drive forward the fight against climate change and in doing so to position themselves at the top of the green technology industry. Germany, despite its relative lack of sun, has become a leader in solar energy.

The energy potential in the deserts south of the Mediterranean is enormous.

According to the European Commission's Institute for Energy, if just 0.3% of the light falling on the Sahara and Middle Eastern deserts was captured, it could provide all of Europe's energy needs.

The Desertec project aims to build solar power plants in several locations in north Africa. Jeworrek said the "most important criteria" was that the locations were "situated in politically stable lands". Morocco, as well as Libya and Algeria have been cited as potential sites, where land is also cheap.

The technique called "concentrating solar power" or CSP, uses banks of mirrors to focus the sun's rays in a central column filled with water. The rays heat the water, vaporising the it into a steam which is then used to drive turbines which generate carbon-free electricity.

The energy would then be fed via high-voltage direct current (DC) transmission lines over thousands of miles to Europe - traditional AC lines are far too inefficient.

Hans Muller-Steinhagen of Germany's Aerospace Centre, said it was technically possible, albeit expensive, to transport the energy over thousands of miles. He said solar energy from the desert is already being harvested but only in isolated plants. CSP plants are operational in the American west, including in California and Nevada, while independent plants are currently being set up in Spain, Morocco, Algeria and the United Arab Emirates. But the projects have suffered from investors' nervousness due of the vast expense of the required grid infrastructure, as well as the cheapness of fossil fuels.

German representatives of environmental groups yesterday widely welcomed the news that big businesses were prepared to give the project a backbone for the first time.

"Businesses have finally recognised that renewable energies belong to the future, and in times of economic crisis this also sends out an important signal for economic growth," said Andree Bohling of Greenpeace.

WWF Germany's climate expert Regine Gunther said while the initiative was a "step in the right direction", it was important to ensure that Africa benefited from the project. "They want to and indeed must profit from this solution as much as us," she said. Previous suggestions have included allowing host countries to retain a proportion of the electricity for free, in return for providing sites for the solar farms.

The €400bn investment would be enough to cover 15% of Europe's electricity requirements, according to Jeworrek. He added "in technical terms this project can be realised" but stressed in order for it to be sustainable it would have to finance itself in the long-run and be competitive within 10 to 15 years.

But German MP Hermann Scheer, president of Eurosolar, the European Association for Renewable Energy, called the Desertec project "highly problematic".

He said costs would be vastly higher and deadlines would be missed due to logistical problems such as sand storms and dealing with many different countries. "I would urge the investors to stay clear of it," he told The Guardian.

Scheer was also critical of the fact that the project would "duplicate the current system" whereby energy distribution is concentrated in the hands of a few multinational companies. "We should be looking instead at decentralising the system, and looking closer to home for our energy supplies, such as solar panels on homes or harnessing wind energy on the coasts, or inland," he said.

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[Environment] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Climate Change]
Obama targets US public with call for climate action
Climate impacts report warns of flooding, heat waves, drought and loss of wildlife that will occur if Americans fail to act on global warming
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 16 June 2009 21.36 BST
Article history

The Obama administration unveiled the most authoritative report to date on the effects of global warming in America today in an effort to persuade the public of the need to act now to prevent the sweeping and life-altering consequences of global warming.

Americans have been living with the heavy downpours, rising sea levels, and blistering summer heat waves produced by man-made climate change for 30 years said the report, which was produced by more than 30 scientists working across 13 government agencies.

The effects of climate change will be even more severe by the end of the century.

"The projected rapid rate and large amount of climate change over this century will challenge the ability of society and natural systems to adapt," the report said.

Today's release of the study, titled Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, was overseen by a San Francisco-based media consulting company, and was part of a carefully crafted strategy by the White House to help build public support for a climate change bill that has run into opposition from some Democrats as well as Republicans in Congress.

The nearly 200-page study was scrubbed of the usual scientific jargon, and was given a high-profile release by Obama's science advisor, John Holdren, and the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Jane Lubchenco.

"I really believe this report is a game changer. I think that much of the foot-dragging in addressing climate change is a reflection of the perception that climate change is way down the road in the future and it affects only remote parts of the world," she told a press conference today. "This report says climate change is happening now. It is happening in our own back yard."

Average temperatures in the US have risen by1.5F (-17C) over the last 50 years, the report said. Rainfall in major storms has increased 20% over the last 100 years - with the heaviest downpours in the north-east. Sea levels have risen up to eight inches along some parts of the east coast.

The consequences of those changes are rippling through every region of the US between Alaska and Hawaii - from the disruption of salmon stocks and shift in butterfly migrations to rising incidence of asthma and now well-documented signs like increasingly deadly hurricanes and melting icecaps in the Arctic.

If today's generation fails to act to reduce the carbon emissions that cause global warming, climate models suggest temperatures could rise as much as 11F by the end of the century.

That translates into catastrophic consequences for human health and the economy such as more ferocious hurricanes in coastal regions - in the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, punishing droughts to the south-west, and increasingly severe winter storms in the north-east and around the Great Lakes.

The majority of North Carolina's beaches would be swallowed up by the sea. New England's long and snowy winters might be cut short to as little as two weeks. Summers in Chicago could be a time of repeated deadly heat waves. Los Angelenos and residents of other big cities will be choking because of deteriorating air quality.

Future generations could face potential food shortages because of declining wheat and corn yields in the breadbasket of the mid-west, increased outbreaks of food poisoning and the spread of epidemic diseases.

The physical infrastructure could also be threatened with storm surges and sea level rises engulfing 2,400 miles of road and other key infrastructure on the Gulf coast. Airports built on permafrost in Alaska will need to be relocated, the electrical grid will strain to meet the increased demand for air conditioning in summer, and ageing sewer systems will be brought to bursting point by heavy run-off in 770 American cities and towns.

"The most important thing in this report is that the impacts of climate change are not something your children might theoretically see 50 years from now," said Tony Janetos, one of the study's authors and a director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute at the University of Maryland.

"The thing that concerns me the most is that we have a whole host of impacts that we now observe in the natural world that are occurring sooner and more rapidly and that appear to be larger than we might have expected 10 years ago. If anything we might have underestimated the rate and the impact of changes in the climate system."

The study initially got under way when George Bush was president as part of a regular exercise mandated by Congress. It was finalised in late April, but Obama administration officials spent several weeks planning today's release, honing the language and graphics to make it accessible to non-scientists and to sharpen its core message: America must take action on climate change.

As part of the PR surrounding the release of the report, the administration approached the San Francisco consulting firm, Resource Media, which specialises in environmental campaigning, to produce a shorter and more digestible brochure of today's report for wider public distribution.

On the morning of 16 April, at a meeting in Washington, more than 30 NOAA scientists, climate change experts from a number of universities, environmental activists and media strategists discussed how to engage various communities with the findings of the report - town mayors, religious groups, even kindergarten pupils.

"The implied message here is that we can either pay in a more controlled way to bring about changes in our energy system which we can do in a way which will [have] benefits for jobs ... or we can do nothing now but we are still going to have to pay in the longer term and the damages are far less controllable," said Richard Moss, a former director of the US climate change science programme and vice-president for the World Wildlife Fund.

The release appeared timed to help Democratic leaders in Congress meet an ambitious target of passing a climate change bill through the House of Representatives by 26 June. The Democratic speaker, Nancy Pelosi, wants to hold a vote before the House breaks up for the 4 July Independence Day holiday.

But the bill has been opposed by some Democratic members of Congress, especially those from agricultural states who say that putting limits on greenhouse gas emissions will hurt farmers' economic interests.

news20090617SAM

[Environment] from [Scientific American Magazine]

[Environment]
June 16, 2009
How the Loss of Peat Lands Affects Greenhouse Gas Buildup
What impact does burning peat and draining wetlands have on releasing stored CO2?

Dear EarthTalk: Is it true that the loss of the world’s peatlands is a major factor in the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. If so, what can be done about it?
-- Larissa S., Las Vegas, NV

Peatlands are wetland ecosystems that accumulate plant material to form layers of peat soil up to 60 feet thick. They can store, on average, 10 times more carbon dioxide (CO2), the leading greenhouse gas, than other ecosystems. As such, the world’s peat bogs represent an important “carbon sink”—a place where CO2 is stored below ground and can’t escape into the atmosphere and exacerbate global warming. When drained or burned, however, peat decomposes and the stored carbon gets released into the atmosphere.

A 2007 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) study of the role peatlands play in human-induced climate change found that the world’s estimated 988 million acres of peatland (which represent about three percent of the world’s land and freshwater surface) are capable of storing some two trillion tons of CO2—equivalent to about 100 years worth of fossil fuel emissions.

As such, the widespread conversion of peat bogs into commercial uses around the world is serious cause for alarm. In Finland, Scotland and Ireland, peat is harvested on an industrial scale for use in power stations and for heating, cooking and use in domestic fireplaces.

But the problem is most urgent in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, where economic hardships force people to drain peatlands to create farms and plantations. Marcel Silvius of the Dutch non-profit Wetlands International says that “annual peatland emissions from Southeast Asia far exceed fossil fuel contributions from major polluting countries.” He adds that Indonesia, now ranked 21st in the world in greenhouse gas emissions, would move to third place (behind the U.S. and China) if peatland losses were factored in.

Wetlands International estimates that CO2 emissions from drained or burnt Indonesian peatlands alone total some two billion tons annually, equal to about 10 percent of the emissions resulting from burning coal, oil and natural gas. Similar amounts of CO2 are likely coming out of Malaysian peatlands as well.

The problem has worsened in recent years as surging global demand for timber, pulp and biofuel speeds up the conversion of otherwise-ignored peatlands to intensively managed tree farms and palm oil plantations. Silvius says that a ton of palm oil—Indonesia’s top export and the key ingredient in biodiesel fuel—grown on drained peatlands emits 20 times more CO2 than a ton of gasoline. Yet, he says, protection of peatlands may actually be one of the least costly ways to mitigate global warming, as it would cost less than seven cents ($US) per ton of avoided CO2.

“Just like a global phase out of old, energy guzzling light bulbs or a switch to hybrid cars,” says UNEP head Achim Steiner, “protecting and restoring peatlands is perhaps another key ‘low hanging fruit’ and among the most cost-effective options for climate change mitigation.” For its part, UNEP is stressing that countries should be allowed to count protecting peatlands as among their creditable efforts to reduce their carbon footprints as the world braces for global warming.


[Space]
June 15, 2009
NASA Return to Lunar Orbit Will Scout for Future Human Exploration
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, launching this week, will set the stage for the planned U.S. return to the moon by surveying locations and resources
By John Matson

Atop an Atlas 5 rocket at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida sits the first step in what will surely be a long and arduous task for NASA—returning humans to the moon. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, set to lift off this week, will orbit the moon in search of potential landing sites and useful resources, such as water ice, that would facilitate a long-term human presence.

For starters, LRO will improve maps of the moon, says astrophysicist John Keller of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., deputy project scientist for the $500-million mission. "A point I like to make about LRO," he says, "is that when it comes to the shape of the moon, we actually know the shape of Mars much better than we do of the moon." Three-dimensional laser-altimetry data taken by LRO will help to close that gap.

Planetary scientist David Kring, a senior staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, sounds a similar tone, noting that the orbiter "will be exploring regions of the moon that have been fuzzy or completely invisible to us in the past."

The satellite's polar orbit will allow it to focus on especially desirable regions for human activities. At the moon's poles, Keller explains, the fairly consistent low angle of the sun makes available essentially constant access to solar power and, potentially, stores of water frozen in permanently shadowed craters. (A companion spacecraft to LRO will seek out direct evidence of that water ice in October.)

Among the orbiter's seven scientific instruments is one with a distinctly human-focused assignment: The Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation (CRaTER). It will seek to characterize and assess the physiological effects of high-energy cosmic rays. Earth's inhabitants are largely protected from cosmic radiation by the planet's atmosphere and magnetic field, but long-term residents of the moon would be exposed to potential cellular and genetic damage without proper shielding.

CRaTER has cosmic-ray detectors separated by a material known as tissue-equivalent plastic. That plastic mimics how biological tissue absorbs radiation, and the LRO mission is the first time it will find use outside Earth's protective influence, Keller says. "By looking at the difference" between the radiation registered by the detectors, he explains, "you can say something about how much [energy] was deposited into that plastic."

The LRO mission springs from NASA's Vision for Space Exploration, the Bush-era plan to return humans to the moon by 2020 on board Ares rockets currently in development to replace the space shuttle, which retires next year. But while the lunar timeline and the Ares program are under scrutiny by a blue-ribbon panel of independent experts convened by the White House, the robotic precursor to human exploration continues apace.

Kring says that even given the uncertainties in the future of manned spaceflight in the U.S., the lunar orbiter is a mission whose time has come. "Not only is this the right time to launch LRO, the LRO spacecraft should be the first in a small fleet of missions that expand our horizons and, simultaneously, provide opportunities to enhance our nation's technological capabilities," he says.

news20090617NTR

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[News and Views]
Nature 459, 781-782 (11 June 2009) | doi:10.1038/459781a; Published online 10 June 2009
Planetary science: The Solar System's extended shelf life
Gregory Laughlin1
Simulations show that orbital chaos can lead to collisions between Earth and the inner planets. But Einstein's tweaks to Newton's theory of gravity render these ruinous outcomes unlikely in the next few billion years.

In the midst of a seemingly endless torrent of baleful economic and environmental news, a dispatch from the field of celestial dynamics manages to sound a note of definite cheer. On page 817 of this issue, Laskar and Gastineau1 report the outcome of a huge array of computer simulations. Their work shows that the orbits of the terrestrial planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars — have a roughly 99% chance of maintaining their current, well-ordered clockwork for the roughly 5 billion years that remain before the Sun evolves into a red giant and engulfs the inner Solar System.

The constant interplay of gravitational attractions between planets acts to degrade their repetitive and predictable motions. Over time, a system of orbits can become increasingly disordered, and, like a poorly balanced tyre that tears itself off the axle of a moving car, planets might fling each other out into space or into their parent star, or collide with each other. The census of extrasolar planets has revealed instances (such as the outer two planets orbiting the nearby star Upsilon Andromedae) where we seem to be observing a system in which one of the original planets has been ejected, leaving evidence of the catastrophe in the form of an ongoing back-and-forth exchange of angular momentum between the survivors2.

To all appearances, our Solar System seems a model of stability. Phenomena such as eclipses can be pinpointed over the millennia, and the motions of the planets themselves can be charted with confidence tens of millions of years into the future. An ironclad evaluation of the Solar System's stability, however, eluded mathematicians and astronomers for nearly three centuries.

In the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton was bothered by his inability to fully account for the observed motions of Jupiter and Saturn. The nonlinearity of the gravitational few-body problem led him to conclude3 that, "to consider simultaneously all these causes of motion and to define these motions by exact laws admitting of easy calculation exceeds, if I am not mistaken, the force of any human mind".

During the 1700s, Continental mathematicians, including Leonhard Euler, Joseph-Louis Lagrange and Pierre-Simon Laplace, developed elegant perturbative methods to describe long-term orbital evolution. Their approach met notable success with Laplace's demonstration that the so-called grande inégalité in the motions of Jupiter and Saturn could be attributed to the fact that the orbital period of Jupiter is close to two-fifths that of Saturn, resulting in a near 5:2 orbital resonance between them. Laplace believed that the planetary orbits would be stable and predictable for all time, an attitude that probably contributed to his formulation of a rational determinism4 — the belief that initial conditions and physical laws precisely determine the future.

By the 1850s, however, it was recognized that the higher-order terms in the planetary 'disturbing function' could not be neglected, and consideration of these terms revived the question of orbital stability. In 1889, Henri Poincaré demonstrated that even the gravitational three-body problem cannot be solved by analytic integration, thereby eliminating any possibility that an analytic solution for the entire future motion of the eight planets could be found. Poincaré's work anticipated the now-familiar concept of dynamical chaos and the sensitive dependence of nonlinear systems on initial conditions5.

In recent decades, computers have reinvigorated celestial mechanics. Orbital predictions obtained from numerical integration of the planets' equations of motion demonstrated that the planetary orbits will indeed become chaotic, with typical Lyapunov times — the time required for chaos to significantly degrade the predictability of a system — of the order of 5 million years. Statements regarding the stability of the Solar System must therefore be expressed in terms of probabilities. Computers are now fast enough to be able to produce forward models of the Solar System throughout the Sun's remaining 5-billion-year hydrogen-burning lifetime. One insight that has emerged is that, from a dynamical point of view, the Solar System is effectively two systems of planets. The gas giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — constitute an extremely stable constellation, whereas the rocky terrestrial planets are on a far less solid footing. Were one to eliminate the Sun's eventual mass loss and its damaging encounters with passing stars in the far future, the outer planets would evolve with substantially unaltered orbits for about 1018 years before succumbing to a weak orbital resonance, in which the perturbative attractions between Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus would generate large-scale instability6.

Laskar and Gastineau's work1 is the culmination of a long-running effort to establish a probabilistic assessment of the orbital stability of the terrestrial planets. They report highly detailed numerical simulations of the evolution of the whole Solar System using the most accurate available planetary ephemeredes (a table of the precise positions and velocities of the planets at a specific time). The simulations indicate that Mercury, in spite of its diminutive size, poses the greatest risk to the present order. In a small but disturbing subset of possible future trajectories, Mercury becomes trapped in a 'secular resonance' with Jupiter, a state of affairs in which the elliptical figure of Mercury's orbit rotates in synchrony with Jupiter's orbital precession (Fig. 1). If the Jupiter–Mercury resonance is established, Mercury's orbital eccentricity will increase to the point at which it intersects the orbit of Venus, setting the stage for catastrophe.

But the odds of Mercury entering a secular resonance are greatly reduced by the small modifications that Einstein's theory of general relativity imparts to the planetary motions. Famously, 43 arcseconds per century of Mercury's total precession is due to the effect of general relativity. This correction effectively detunes the Mercury–Jupiter interaction, and decreases the chance that resonance will occur in the next 5 billion years to roughly 1%. This is fortunate indeed, as the Laskar and Gastineau paper1 also relates the precise and grisly details of one case in which Mercury's destabilization leads to a wholesale exchange of angular momentum between the inner and outer Solar System. (Readers of the paper can see for themselves the consequences of this, but suffice it to say here that Earth does not fare well in the resulting interplanetary melee.)

Laskar and Gastineau's work brings closure to one of the most illustrious and long-running problems in astronomy, and in a sense the result is as satisfying as one could wish. With 99% certainty, we can rely on the clockwork of the celestial rhythm — but with the remaining 1% we are afforded a vicarious thrill of danger. What now remains is to understand the extent to which the hand of dynamical chaos that so lightly touches our Solar System has moulded the Galactic planetary census.


References
1.Laskar, J. & Gastineau, M. Nature 459, 817–819 (2009). | Article |
2.Ford, E. B., Lystad, V. & Rasio, F. A. Nature 434, 873–876 (2005). | Article | PubMed | ChemPort |
3.Cohen, I. B. & Smith, G. E. The Cambridge Companion to Newton (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002).
4.Laplace, P. S. Traité de Mécanique Céleste 5 vols (Gauthier-Villars, 1799–1825).
5.Poincaré, H. New Methods of Celestial Mechanics Vol. 1 (Gauthier-Villars, 1892).
6.Murray, N. & Holman, M. Science 283, 1877–1881

news20090617SLT2

[Today's Paper] from [Slate Magazine]

Obama Throws Gays a Crumb
By Daniel Politi
Posted Wednesday, June 17, 2009, at 6:37 AM ET

CONTINUED FROM news20090617SLT1

The WP fronts news that Republican Sen. John Ensign of Nevada admitted he had an extramarital affair with a former member of his campaign staff who is married to a former Senate staffer. The affair apparently began in December 2007 and lasted until August 2008. Neither the husband nor the wife has worked for Ensign since May 2008. The WP notes Ensign was "considered a rising star" in the party and had recently made a visit to Iowa in what many saw as an attempt to test the waters for a presidential run.

The NYT and WP front, and everyone covers, Obama's plan to overhaul financial regulation, which he will officially release today. The administration's proposal doesn't really contain any surprises as most of the big elements had already been covered by the papers. The NYT once again informs readers that Obama listened to a wide variety of voices before coming to a decision. Many have been complaining that the final product doesn't go far enough, and Obama pretty much admitted that his administration was careful not to be too ambitious when he chatted with CNBC yesterday. "We want to do it right. We want to do it carefully. But we don't want to tilt at windmills," he said.

The NYT reports that Cave Creek, Ariz., selected its newest town council member with a deck of cards. Two men received the same number of votes for a seat on the council, so a game of chance was used to select the winner. This is all apparently allowed by the state's Constitution, and "a handful" of local elections in Arizona have been decided with the help of cards or dice. "It's a hell of a way to win—or lose—an election," said the 64-year-old retired science teacher who lost his seat on the council when he selected the six of hearts.