news20090824gc1

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Activism]
Minister met BAA chief executive before Climate Camp to discuss tactics
> Activists say memos point to culture of collusion
> Whitehall worked with 'key parties' on 2007 event
Rob Evans and Paul Lewis
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 23 August 2009 22.07 BST Article history

A government minister met the chief executive of the UK's largest airport owner in private to discuss how to "limit" the impact of climate change protests directed against the firm, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.

Jim Fitzpatrick, then a transport minister, met the head of BAA a week before Climate Camp protesters held peaceful demonstrations at Heathrow airport.

At the time Fitzpatrick was receiving regular "situation reports" about the protesters. In one, he was told: "It is thought that key members of the camp are getting more frustrated as things are not going as they would have liked. The landowner is against them. The police are frustrating the movement."

The memos and other Department for Transport (DfT) documents, released under freedom of information law, show the Metropolitan force discussed plans to police the camp with BAA and civil servants. When Fitzpatrick met BAA's chief executive at the time, Stephen Nelson, "the minister was assured that BAA and [the] Met had been working closely to limit any disruption to the airport".

Environmental campaigners said the disclosures were further evidence that the government, police and big business had conspired against their activities.

"These documents reveal that BAA and the transport department agreed a joint communications strategy before the Heathrow camp, begging the question – just what part did Whitehall play in the smear campaign that sought to undermine the protest? A picture is emerging of an extraordinary and unhealthy culture of collusion between a government department, private companies and the police," said Ben Stewart, of Greenpeace.

The Guardian revealed in April how, before last year's Climate Camp against the proposed coal-fired power station in Kingsnorth, Kent, civil servants from the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform handed confidential police intelligence on activists to E.ON, the owner of the plant.

The latest disclosures include internal DfT documents on the Heathrow protest in 2007 – after which activists complained of "heavy-handed" policing – and reveal that meetings took place at the highest level of business and government before and during that Climate Camp.

The DfT drew up plans to deal with the event weeks before it began, on 14 August 2007. Senior officials were told in July that "regular communication was being maintained with key parties". Internal reports reveal, further, that the Met tried to use "the current terrorism threat" to persuade activists to cancel the event.

When it was realised the event would go ahead, corporate interests in the airline industry, including British Airways, Virgin and BMI, were invited to comment on the policing plan. The transport minister was assured that police and BAA executives had collaborated "closely" to contain the demonstrations; his department was "in regular contact … with BAA and police and discussed their operational plans for the duration of the camp".

A BAA spokesman has told the Guardian: "I think most observers would think it entirely right and sensible that we discussed [Heathrow's] … uninterrupted operation with government and others."

The DfT stated: "It is nonsense to suggest that the DfT influenced the policing of this demonstration."


[Business > Oil]
Native Americans to join London climate camp protest over tar sands
Canadian First Nations seek to highlight UK's 'criminal' role in CO₂-heavy oil schemes
Terry Macalister
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 23 August 2009 16.14 BST Article history

Native Americans are to join the Climate Camp protests in the City of London this week in an attempt to draw attention to corporate Britain's "criminal" involvement in the tar sands of Canada.

Five representatives from the Cree First Nations are coming to co-ordinate their campaign against key players in the carbon-heavy energy sector with British environmentalists.

Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, from Fort Chipewyan, a centre of Alberta's tar sands schemes, said: "British companies such as BP and Royal Bank of Scotland in partnership with dozens of other companies are driving this project, which is having such devastating effects on our environment and communities.

"It is destroying the ancient boreal forest, spreading open-pit mining across our territories, contaminating our food and water with toxins, disrupting local wildlife and threatening our way of life," she said.

It showed British companies were complicit in "the biggest environmental crime on the planet" and yet very few people in Britain even knew it was happening, said Deranger. She was speaking ahead of an annual Climate Camp that will be held for one week somewhere in Greater London from this Thursday.

The exact site of the camp has not been revealed as green organisers are worried that the police might move to thwart their plans if they are notified in advance.

BP and Shell are two of the major oil companies extracting oil from the tar sands. The thick and sticky oil can only be removed from the sands by using a lot of water and power as well as producing far heavier CO2 emissions.

RBS, now partly owned by the British government after its financial rescue, is also a target of environmentalists and aboriginals because it is seen as a major funder of such schemes.

The Climate Camp concept started with a protest outside the Drax coal-fired power station in North Yorkshire and was followed up by similar protests at Heathrow – against the proposed third runway – and Kingsnorth in Kent, where E.ON wants to construct a new coal-fired power station.

There was also a Climate Camp in April at Bishopsgate inside the City of London, which became linked with bad policing after a bystander died following a clash with a constable.

The tar sands are seen by many as a particularly dangerous project providing enough carbon to be released in total to tip the world into unstoppable climate change. Shell was the first major European oil company to invest in the Canadian-based operations but BP followed under its chief executive, Tony Hayward.

The oil companies both dispute the amount of pollution caused by tar sands and insist they must be exploited if the world is not going to run out of oil.

But George Poitras, a former chief of the Mikisew Cree First Nation, said the so-called heavy oil schemes were violating treaty rights and putting the lives of locals at risk. He said: "We are seeing a terrifyingly high rate of cancer in Fort Chipewyan, where I live. We are convinced these cancers are linked to the tar sands development on our doorstep."

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font size="3" color="#2f4f4f" face="Georgia">[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Land rights]
Blocked rivers threaten livelihood of Brazilian tribes
Plans to build more than 200 hydroelectric dams bring prospect of cheap electricity but destruction of Amazon habitats
Tom Phillips in Pavuru, Xingu national park
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 23 August 2009 22.11 BST Article history

Once they were threatened by wildcat gold-miners and a measles epidemic that slashed their population to just 56. But now the Ikpeng, a proud tribe of Amazon warriors, say a new catastrophe looms over their future: the damming of the rivers they depend upon for food.

Across Brazil alarm bells are ringing over plans to build at least 229 small hydroelectric dams, known as PCHs, which the government hopes will generate electricity and drive economic development.

Opponents say they will damage the environment and destroy the livelihoods of thousands of Brazilian tribespeople.

There are 346 PCHs in Brazil, with another 70 under construction and 159 awaiting licences. If the construction of dams continues, "the fish will run out and the waters will start to go down," warned Komuru Txicao, a local tribesman. "Here in the forest we don't need electricity. We need fish, water and land."

Other hydroelectric projects planned by the government are huge — the $4bn Belo Monte dam further north along the Xingu river from Pavuru would be the third biggest plant of its kind on earth, producing over 11,000 megawatts of electricity. While Belo Monte has been described by the government as a "gift from God", critics say it will destroy lives, homes and traditions.For Komuru and his neighbours, the immediate concern is the construction of a network of PCHs around the Xingu national park in Mato Grosso state. Komuru fears the dams will block the tributaries of the Xingu, itself the largest tributary of the Amazon.

According to the National Electric Energy Agency (Aneel), four PCHs – the Paranatinga II, Culuene, ARS and Ronuru – operate near the reserve; another, Paranatinga I, is waiting for its licence. Aneel says 13 PCHs are being built in Mato Grosso state, while another 19 projects are awaiting licences. The government says such dams will help power the agricultural revolution that is sweeping Brazil's mid-west and bring electricity to small towns.

Recent years have seen the Ikpeng, a proud tribe of Amazon warriors, embrace many of the comforts and distractions of the outside world.

Three months ago wireless internet was installed here in Pavuru, one of over 30 villages located in the Park — a vast, 2.8 million hectare indigenous reserve home to some 5,000 Indians from 14 different ethnic groups. Today Ikpeng teenagers spend their afternoons downloading tracks by artists such as Enrique Iglesias and the US rapper 50 Cents while many of the tribe's hunters use shot-guns rather than the traditional bow and arrow to hunt spider monkeys and wild-boar in the surrounding forests.

"Things are changing," admitted Karane Txicao, 28, sat behind an HP laptop in the village's concrete internet cafe. "Now people never leave the front of the computer screen."

Several of the traditional huts – or owros – also shelter large television sets, powered by a diesel generation which is switched on at 9am each day and turned off at 9pm.

But unlike the telenovelas and MP3s, government plans for PCHs around the Xingu Park have met with a furious reception.

"It is very worrying," said Kumare, a resident who is the local head of Funai, Brazil's indigenous agency. "This will directly affect us. They are damming all of the rivers." Kumare said the dams would make it impossible for the fish to migrate upstream thus decimating the main source of food for the reserve's Indians.

Last March the conflict escalated when eight staff from the electricity company responsible for one PCH spent five days held "hostage" near Pavuru. They were released only after the president of Brazil's indigenous agency, Funai, personally intervened. "We didn't kill them, we 'arrested' them," recalled Komuru.

Similar battles are raging across the Amazon region, where plans to build roads, hydroelectric dams and other major infrastructure projects have triggered a conflict between those who want to protect the world's largest tropical rainforest and its indigenous tribes and those wishing to drive development and relieve poverty. A dispute over the Belo Monte dam turned violent in May when an engineer from the Brazilian power company Eletrobras was attacked during a presentation about the plant. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has sought to allay fears over the dam, vowing that it "would not be shoved down anyone's throat".

But concerns grew in July when a federal court lifted an embargo on the Belo Monte licensing process, clearing the way for a bidding round later this year.

Having witnessed the Ikpeng's plight in the 1960s, Melobo, an Ikpeng shaman, who says he is around 60 years old and wears 15 shell ear-rings in each ear, fears history may be repeating itself. "The farmers ruin the Indian's things," Melobo said, in heavily accented Portuguese, standing on the banks of the Xingu river. "They ruin the Indian's water. They ruin the Indian's land.""We don't want to negotiate," added Komuru. "We don't want money. We don't want things that are worth nothing. We want our land."


[Environment > Insects]
Fifth of UK honeybee colonies died last winter, says beekeeper association
Figure is improvement on previous year, but mortality levels still double acceptable level, warns British Beekeepers Association
Press Association
guardian.co.uk, Monday 24 August 2009 10.00 BST Article history

Nearly a fifth of the UK's honeybee colonies died last winter, figures from the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) revealed today.

The figure is an improvement on the previous year when almost a third of hives did not make it through the winter, but is double "acceptable" levels, the BBKA's president Tim Lovett warned.

Across the country an average of 19.2% of colonies died over winter, with the highest losses in the north of England, where 32.1% perished, and the lowest in the east of England, where just 12.8% did not survive.

According to the BBKA, the period of really cold weather in the winter encouraged the bees to "cluster" together, helping them to survive, while good weather in early spring enabled them to forage for nectar and pollen.

The association also believes beekeepers took more care to feed colonies where necessary to prevent them starving.

But there was still a "worrying and continuing high level of colony loss" which the BBKA put down to diseases threatening the bees.

Lovett said: "The improved figure is very welcome, compared with the 30.5% for winter 2007-2008, but is way short of the 7% to 10% which until the last five years has been considered acceptable.

"It underlines the need for research into the causes and remedies for disease in order to ensure that our principal economic pollinator, the honey bee, can survive the onslaught of the threats it currently faces.

"Also, it still shows that there is a worrying and continuing high level of colony loss which we have to attribute to disease and for which we currently have few answers in terms of husbandry or medication.

He said similar levels of losses in other areas of farming would be considered "disastrous" with dramatic effects on food prices, and answers through research were urgently needed.

"These ongoing losses in the pollination army of honey bees cannot continue if we are to secure food supplies," he warned.

Bees are estimated to be worth around £200m to the UK economy each year, as they pollinate many of the food crops grown here, such as apples and oilseed rape.

But in recent years they have been hit by agricultural changes which have reduced the availability of the wildflowers that are so important in providing food for the insects.

Diseases such as the varroa mite have infected hives, killing the bees, while climate change and pesticide use have also been suggested as possible factors in the insects' decline

A report by the parliamentary accounts committee last month warned the government was giving "little priority" to the health of the nation's bees despite their importance to the agricultural economy.

Honeybee colonies are disappearing at an "alarming" rate and ministers have until recently taken little interest in the problem, the report claimed.

The cross-party public accounts committee wants the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to ring-fence research spending on bee health and not allow it to be diluted by looking at other pollinating insects — a call backed by Lovett today.

news22090824nn1

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[Nature News]
Published online 24 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.857
News: Q&A
The science of Google Wave
How an online application could change research communication.
Richard Van Noorden

Web-savvy scientists gathered at the Science Online London conference in London on 22 August to explore how the Internet is changing the communication, practice and culture of science. Biochemist Cameron Neylon, of the University of Southampton, UK, was one of a few scientists at the conference who have been given pre-release access to Google Wave — an online collaboration and communication tool announced with great fanfare on 27 May. Nature spoke to Neylon about how Google Wave could transform the way that scientists work.

What is Google Wave, and how might scientists use it?

It is a communication tool that is essentially e-mail crossed with an instant messenger. You can think of each 'wave' — or e-mail thread — as a flexible document, which allows collaborators to chat and edit the same version in real time. You can also easily drop rich media — such as sound files, charts and videos — into the document. So Google Wave could be used for collaborative authoring, to speed up writing papers and grant applications, for example.

However, it is also possible to create automatic programs that buzz around the document, annotating it in ways that are hidden from the human reader. The automated programs, or 'robots', make it possible to link to related scientific documents; mark up text so that, for example, protein names are automatically linked to a protein database; or pull in data from elsewhere and create live graphs that update as the data change.

Might this change the scientific manuscript?

Yes, in several ways. Documents created in Google Wave would be much richer, and one could convert them to the format of a published paper and retain all that annotation.

The real-time authoring and date-stamped recording of contributions also makes for an obvious way to create papers that aren't static, that are updated over time, perhaps in combination with one or many frozen versions of record.

How else can you see Google Wave affecting scientists?

I can imagine that the robots could really come in useful in a laboratory notebook. For example, as data come off a laboratory instrument via a computer, a program could insert them straight into the document. You might have another program that visualises those data for you. These widgets would help you control, monitor and observe an experiment, and even share that wave with someone else as a template for their experiment. Scientists could share their experimental processes in a way that's hard to do at the moment.

What have you actually done with the tool so far?

Relatively few people, perhaps 10,000, have had access to the developer sandbox so far, and perhaps only 100 of those are scientists. It is early days — we're at the playing stage.

I have made a robot that recognizes chemical names when triggered by the right text input, searches for information about them on ChemSpider [an open-access search for chemical information such as molecular structures], and can turn weights into molarities. Euan Adie, a product manager in Nature's web publishing group, has developed a 'references' robot that can search the PubMed archive of journal papers for related terms, and turn that text into correctly formatted citations.

Is this going to be too complicated for most scientists to bother learning?

At the moment it feels very complicated. A lot of people who have looked at it have been scared off by that fact. But the potential is enormous. The kind of functionality demonstrated here is what the web will look like in a couple of years' time.

However, the level of interest of the original announcement among most scientists was probably close to zero. It generated a lot of excitement among tech-minded people, though, and I can see it being adopted rapidly by some scientists for certain tasks, in much the same way that e-mail spread through academic research group in the 1980s and 1990s. But it is by no means certain that will happen.

The Google team is very supportive of our efforts, but they aren't, as far as I'm aware, thinking specifically about scientists using Wave as a tool. I don't think we really figure on their radar. It is up to us to work out what the potential is.


[naturenews]
Published online 24 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/4601070a
News
Canada assumes weighty mantle
Instrument to help redefine the kilogram makes a transatlantic move.
Nicola Jones

{Ian Robinson might be able to tweak Canada’s watt balance to increase its accuracy.NPL}

In the mission to define the kilogram more sensibly, only two of the instruments known as 'watt balances' have proven good enough to tackle the job. And one of them is currently in pieces, having been sold and shipped from the United Kingdom — the birthplace of this type of device — to Canada.

The move has some UK scientists saddened by their loss, and Canadians excited by their gain. It also has metrologists around the world holding their breath. "Taking it all apart, shipping it, putting it back together — the worrisome thing is that something will break," says Richard Steiner, who works with the other top watt balance at the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. "It's very fragile, and a lot of it is pretty old." The Canadian lab expects to receive the package by the end of August.

The kilogram is the only unit of measure still defined by a single object — a lump of platinum-iridium held in a vault near Paris. Over time, as atoms accrete or fall off this particular kilogram, its mass changes. Metrologists are thus aiming to redefine the kilogram on the basis of something more stable — such as Planck's constant, the value that quantifies the relationship between the energy and frequency of light, and which can be related to mass through equations of quantum physics and electromagnetism.

The best way to pin down the value of Planck's constant is with a precision watt balance. Canada's device, which is about the size of a minivan, contains a metre-long balance beam, with a precisely known mass at one end and a 30-centimetre-wide metal coil in a magnetic field at the other. Running a current through the coil creates an electromagnetic force that balances the gravitational force on the other side. Further measurements are made to eliminate hard-to-measure factors and produce a value for Planck's constant.

{“If anyone was going to bust it, it had to be me.”}

The watt balance was thought up in 1975 at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington, UK. Ian Robinson, who helped to develop that first instrument and worked with its successor for more than 30 years, disassembled his life's work this summer. More than 500 items, including the 1-tonne magnet, were stowed in some 50 wooden crates to be shipped. Robinson packed the precision coil himself: "If anyone was going to bust it," he says, "it had to be me."

NPL research director Kamal Hossain says they decided to discontinue the watt-balance work because they already had some good results from the device and wanted to focus on more practical areas, such as nanometrology.

"It was a bit of a surprise when the NPL decided to roll this up," says Alan Steele, head of metrology for the Institute for National Measurement Standards in Ottawa, Ontario. The machine will both stretch the metrological science done in the lab and give Canada an entrée into the kilogram scene.

Pursuit of accuracy

Another approach to redefining the kilogram involves more accurately calculating the Avogadro constant — the number of atoms or molecules in one mole of a substance — by determining the number of atoms in a near-perfect silicon sphere. Should the watt-balance project win out, national labs with watt balances will have an advantage in measuring exact masses and maintaining mass standards. Watt balances are being built and tested in Switzerland and France, but have not produced published results to prove their precision.

Thus far, the NIST watt balance and the one from the NPL do not quite agree on the value of Planck's constant. Although each has an uncertainty of tens of parts in a billion, the difference between the two most recently published values is ten times larger than that. The team working on the silicon-sphere approach, meanwhile, say they have data that are in fairly good agreement with NIST's value for Planck's constant, although these have not yet been published. The goal is to iron out discrepancies in time to redefine the kilogram in 2011.

Steele says his team plans to start reassem­bling the watt balance this October, with Robinson's help. They hope that the Ottawa lab, which is vibration-free and shielded from magnetic interference, will prove an ideal spot for the sensitive instrument. Moving the device should help to create a third, independent, set of data to help pin down Planck's constant, says Steele: "The equipment is so complex, just taking it apart and reassembling it is equivalent to doing a novel experiment." Robinson says he has possibly identified a small flaw in the experiment that he intends to fix once it is reassembled. If that creates agreement with the NIST value, then consensus should be easy.

CONTINUED ON newsnn2

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[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 24 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/4601070a
News
Canada assumes weighty mantle
Instrument to help redefine the kilogram makes a transatlantic move.
Nicola Jones

CONTINUED FROM newsnn1

Robinson, whose work was plagued by magnetic interference from a train line near the NPL, agrees that the Canadian lab is a real improvement. Although he says he is sad not to be able to continue his work in Britain, he adds that the important thing is that someone — anyone — will keep it running: "The main thing is that it doesn't get thrown away."


[naturenews]
Published online 24 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/4601069a
News
FDA narrows drug label usage
Cancer treatments limited to specific gene variants.
Elie Dolgin

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has altered the usage labels on two cancer drugs on the basis of a re-evaluation of clinical data.

The agency introduced the change last month after its Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee (ODAC) recommended that the drugs Erbitux and Vectibix — approved in 2004 and 2006, respectively, for patients with advanced-stage colorectal cancer — should now be prescribed only to individuals with a certain gene variant. To reach the decision, the agency reviewed seven randomized clinical trials, all of which showed that only the 60% or so of patients whose tumours harbour the non-mutated or 'wild-type' form of a gene called K-RAS responded positively to the drugs.

Ideally, the FDA would want to do these kinds of genetic-marker tests for patient response in a well-designed, forward-looking experiment, says ODAC consultant Richard Simon, chief of the National Cancer Institute's biometric research branch in Rockville, Maryland. "But cancer biology is very complex, and I think we're going to find that it's not always possible to have [all the answers] figured out beforehand."

Erbitux is made by ImClone Systems and marketed by Bristol-Myers Squibb, both based in New York. Vectibix is made by Amgen, headquartered in Thousand Oaks, California.

{“Obtaining tissues and having them available in the future is critical.”}

Analysts and scientists are split on whether to expect after-the-fact label adjustments for other drugs. "The FDA will certainly become more open to these types of changes over time," says Bruce Booth, a pharmaceutical analyst with Atlas Venture in Boston, Massachusetts.

ODAC member Gary Lyman of the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center in Durham, North Carolina, says that revisiting drug efficacies could become so widespread that the FDA should at least encourage companies to bank tissues from finished trials for unanticipated post-hoc tests.

David Reese, Amgen's executive director of oncology, says that some of the retrospective analyses would not have been possible had the company not banked tissues. "Obtaining tissues and having [them] available in the future is really critical," he says.

But David Harrington, a statistician at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, and another ODAC member, says future calls for retrospective analyses will probably be considered on a case-by-case basis. "It was the striking nature of the data that led to the recommendation" to change Erbitux and Vectibix labelling, he says, "and it's unlikely to happen very often in the future".

Indeed, many argue that the conditions surrounding the label change were unique and won't set a precedent. The American Society of Clinical Oncology and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network had already recommended that doctors test for K-RAS variants before treatment. Moreover, the drug companies themselves had asked for restricted use after learning about the K-RAS results. In announcing the change, the FDA affirmed that both drugs are "not recommended for the treatment of colorectal cancer with [ K-RAS ] mutations".

Doctors are now advised — but not compelled — to test for K-RAS before administering the drugs, notes Stephen Little, chief executive of DxS, a diagnostics company in Manchester, UK, that markets a K-RAS mutation test kit. He says that most drug companies now conduct diagnostic screening during clinical development.

In Europe, Erbitux's label changed more than a year ago to reflect the K-RAS status, and Vectibix won approval only for those patients with non-mutated K-RAS. "Europe has been more inclined to look at retrospective data if otherwise those data are robust and reflect the general population in that trial," says Hagop Youssoufian, senior vice-president of clinical research and development at ImClone in Branchburg, New Jersey.

Both drugs are currently being tested for use in combination with chemotherapy; data on this will be presented next month at a joint meeting in Berlin of the European Cancer Organisation and the European Society for Medical Oncology. These tests include two phase III trials, of roughly 1,200 patients each, that show Vectibix in combination with chemotherapy kept tumours in check for significantly longer in cancer patients with wild-type K-RAS, and a similar trial — details of which are not yet public — involving Erbitux.

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[One-Minute World News] from [BBC NEWS]

[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 02:27 GMT, Monday, 24 August 2009 03:27 UK
China tries 200 for Xinjiang riot
More than 200 people will be prosecuted on charges of involvement in the Xinjiang disturbances of last month, the China Daily has reported.

The trials are expected to start this week in Urumqi.

Charges include vandalising public property and transport, organising crowds to cause bodily harm to others, robbery, murder and arson.

Chinese police detained more than 1,500 people after violence between ethnic Uighurs and Han Chinese left 200 dead.

The China Daily that most of the arrests were made in Urumqi and Kashgar, a southern Xinjiang city with a heavy concentration of Uighur people.

The newspaper did not give a breakdown on how many Uighurs and how many Han would go on trial, but it said more than 170 Uighurs and 20 Han lawyers had been assigned to the suspects.

More security?

The newspaper reported last week that more than 3,300 items of physical evidence had been collected, including bricks and clubs stained with blood.

The evidence included 91 video clips and 2,169 photographs, it said.

Although security in Urumqi is already high, "a drastic increase in security is expected in the whole city," the newspaper said, especially around the Urumqi Intermediate People's Court.

Armed police are already conducting around-the-clock patrols in the area.

The riots broke out July 5 after police stopped an initially peaceful protest by Uighur youths, apparently prompted by an earlier riot in a factory in southern China.

The government has insisted the violence which followed was engineered by Uighurs in exile, led by Rebiya Kadeer.

It has been pursuing vigorous diplomatic complaints against countries such as Australia and Japan which gave visas for Ms Kadeer to enter and speak.

Many Uighurs want more autonomy, and respect for their culture and religion - Islam - than is allowed by China's strict centrist rule.

The violence in Xinjiang was the worst ethnic unrest in China for decades.

The government says 197 people died in the ensuing violence, and more than 1,700 were injured.

The government says most of the dead were Han Chinese, but the World Uighur Congress claims many Uighurs also were killed.


[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 14:41 GMT, Sunday, 23 August 2009 15:41 UK
Soldiers killed in south Thailand
Two soldiers have been shot dead and three people injured in a gun attack on an army checkpoint in south Thailand.

The pre-dawn attack, near the southern border of Narathiwat province, has been blamed on Islamist insurgents.

At least 10 rebels are reported to have opened fire on the checkpoint before fleeing in pickup trucks.

The five-year insurgency by Muslims seeking greater autonomy in the southern regions of Thailand has so far cost more than 3,000 lives.

Thailand annexed the three southern provinces - Narathiwat, Yala and Pattani - in 1902, but the vast majority of people there are Muslim and speak a Malay dialect, in contrast to the Buddhist Thai speakers in the rest of the country.

Insurgents usually target people they perceive to be collaborating with the Bangkok government - using bomb blasts, beheadings and shootings.

They have also tried to force Buddhist residents from the area, with the aim of ultimately establishing a separate Islamic state.


[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 00:01 GMT, Monday, 24 August 2009 01:01 UK
Indonesia thieves loot tiger body
Thieves have killed an endangered Sumatran tiger in an Indonesian zoo and stolen most of its body, officials say.

Only the intestines of the female tiger were left, staff at Taman Rimba Zoo said. Police believe the thieves intend to sell the animal's fur and bones.

The World Wildlife Fund estimates that fewer than 400 Sumatran tigers remain in the wild.

Despite laws against the sale of tiger parts, wildlife groups say they are sold openly in several Sumatran towns.

A 2008 study by British-based wildlife trade monitoring network, Traffic, showed that tiger bones, claws, skins and whiskers were being sold openly in eight cities on the island.

Traffic says tigers are killed to supply parts for souvenirs, Chinese medicine and jewellery.

The Sumatran tiger is listed as critically endangered, the highest category of threat.

They are on the brink of extinction because of rapid deforestation, poaching, and conflict with humans.


[Americas]
Page last updated at 00:37 GMT, Monday, 24 August 2009 01:37 UK
Castro 'healthy' in media images
A new picture of Fidel Castro has been published in a state-run newspaper, apparently showing Cuba's ailing former leader in much better health.

Mr Castro, 83, was dressed more smartly than in other recent photos, wearing a white shirt rather than a tracksuit.

Later he appeared on television for the first time in 14 months, chatting to Venezuelan students, in a meeting which reportedly took place on Saturday.

He has not been seen in public since undergoing an operation in 2006.

Mr Castro stepped down and his younger brother, Raul, took over his various offices.

Since then he has undergone a series of major intestinal operations, although the state of his health and whereabouts remain state secrets.

Neatly combed

The photograph in Juventud Rebelde, the Communist Youth newspaper, showed Mr Castro talking to Ecuador's left-wing President, Rafael Correa.

There was speculation that Fidel Castro's health had deteriorated significantly at the end of last year in the run-up to the 50th anniversary of Cuba's revolution, says the BBC's Michael Voss in Havana.

But his health does appear to have visibly improved in recent months, our correspondent adds.

In the latest photograph Mr Castro appears stronger: his greying, almost white hair is neatly combed back and even his trademark beard appears to have grown a little.

He remains an influential figure behind the scenes in Cuba and publishes regular editorials in the state-run media.

Occasional photographs of him are published, usually showing him greeting visiting dignitaries.


[Americas]
Page last updated at 02:25 GMT, Monday, 24 August 2009 03:25 UK
US murder suspect 'dead in motel'
A man suspected of murdering his wife near Los Angeles has been found dead in a motel room in the Canadian province of British Columbia, police say.

Ryan Jenkins, 32, had been the subject of a massive manhunt after the naked body of Jasmine Fiore, a 28-year-old former model, was found in a suitcase.

He had reported his wife missing, and then disappeared himself. His boat was was found near the US-Canada border.

Police said it was unclear how long Jenkins' body had been in the motel.

Sgt Duncan Pound of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police says investigators were alerted after police had responded to a call about a dead person at the Thunderbird Motel in Hope, east of Vancouver.

"Preliminary evidence suggests that he took his own life," said Sgt Pound.

A police source in California said that Jenkins had hanged himself and was identified by his fingerprints.

Mangled body

Jenkins had been taking part in the show Megan Wants a Millionaire. Described as an investment banker, Mr Jenkins was one of several wealthy young men trying to win the affections of a young woman in the show.
The TV channel VH1 cancelled the series after he was identified as a suspect.

Ms Fiore had no connection with the show, but she and Mr Jenkins had married in Las Vegas in March.

Her mangled body was found in a suitcase in a metal rubbish bin in Buena Park, south of Los Angeles, on 15 August. She was identified by a serial number on her breast implants.

After several days of searching, police found Jenkins' boat more than 950 miles (1,500km) north of Los Angeles - in the town of Point Roberts on the Canadian border.

"We continue to believe that Mr Jenkins was solely responsible" for the murder, said a spokeswoman for the Orange County District Attorney's Office in California, after his death was announced.

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[One-Minute World News] from [BBC NEWS]

[Europe]
Page last updated at 03:42 GMT, Monday, 24 August 2009 04:42 UK
Six wildfires ring Greek capital
Thousands of residents of Athens' northern suburbs have spent the night away from their homes as wildfires continue to threaten the area.

At least six major blazes are reported to be still out of control, and strong winds are continuing to fan the flames.

As the fires raged for a third day, they burnt dozens of homes and large areas of forest near the Greek capital.

To the north, the town of Marathon, with important archaeological sites, was said to be encircled by fires.

More than 90 fires are thought to have started since Saturday and more than 37,000 acres of land have been burnt.

While no casualties have been reported, a regional Athens governor, Yiannis Sgouros, has called the fires an "ecological disaster".

'Begging for help'

{ AT THE SCENE
Malcolm Brabant, BBC News, Drafi, Athens
In leafy suburbs like Drafi, barely a tree has been left standing. A once beautiful green valley has been turned into a giant ash bowl. But almost all the expensive houses somehow survived.
We had to leave our modest home just before dawn as fire raced up the hill, but the flames stopped at the back garden wall. Many residents have similar narrow escapes to recount.
But the biggest casualty has been the environment. The loss of so much foliage is going to have an enormous negative impact on air quality in Athens. The wooded hillsides on the outskirts of the capital acted as its lungs and air conditioning units, providing much needed oxygen and cooler air.}

Almost the entire population of Agios Stefanos, 23km (14 miles) north-east of Athens, fled on Sunday by vehicle or on foot.

But others refused to leave, carrying out a desperate defence of their homes with garden hoses, buckets, and shovels, the BBC's Dominic Hughes reports from Athens.

Overnight, the town of Marathon found itself threatened with flames reported to have raced down a hill, with ancient monuments and museums in danger.

Some residents have complained there is a shortage of fire crews, as they were spread thinly trying to tackle blazes that almost ring the Greek capital.

The mayor of Marathon, Spyros Zagaris, said he had been "begging the government to send over planes and helicopters" to no avail.

"There are only two fire engines here. Three houses are already on fire and we are just watching helplessly," he told a Greek television channel.
'Difficult fight'

Mayor Zagaris was among several local leaders who accused the government of having no plan to fight the fire.

But Finance Minister Yiannis Papathanassiou dismissed the claims.

"This is not the time for criticism under these tragic conditions," he was quoted as saying by AP news agency. "We are fighting a difficult fight."

Ground crews worked through the night to to create fire protection zones after planes and helicopters stopped flying as darkness fell.

At first light on Monday, water-dropping aircraft are resuming operations, assisted by aircraft from France, Italy and Cyprus.

Nearly 2,000 firefighters and soldiers are engaging the blaze on the ground, together with hundreds of volunteers.

Multiple fires have been burning across an area some 50km wide, fanned by strong and unpredictable winds.

Dozens of homes were burnt down and a state of emergency was declared in the Athens area, which was shrouded in smoke.

The fires began late on Friday in Grammatiko, near Marathon. They spread rapidly through forests, and by Sunday morning, were closing in on the Athens suburbs of Drafi, Pikermi and Pallini.

The fires are the worst since those in 2007 which killed about 70 people.

In July, dozens of fires burnt through thousands of hectares of land in other parts of Greece, Spain, France and Italy.

According to the conservation group Greenpeace, heat waves and drier conditions are leading to larger and more uncontrollable forest fires across the whole Mediterranean region.

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[Today's News] from [CNN.com]

[Technology]
'Green goo' biofuel gets a boost
>Oil companies have been investing in algae as next generation of biofuel
>Algae biofuel could be more cost effective than crop-based biofuels
>Benefits of co-products from algae could make them even more attractive
>Some still criticize biofuels as not really being 'green'
By Steve Mollman
For CNN

CNN) -- Three years ago many would have dismissed the notion that a significant supply of the world's automotive fuel could come from algae. But today the idea, while still an adventurous one, is getting much harder to ignore.

Back then there were only a handful of companies seriously focused on producing algae fuel. Now there are well over 50, according to Samhitha Udupa, a research associate with Lux Research.

The number should double within the next year or two, she adds, and private investment in algae fuel ventures has at least doubled every year since 2006, a trend likely to continue.

Last month ExxonMobil-- which has been publicly skeptical of other biofuels in the past -- invested up to $600 million into a collaborative R&D program with Synthetic Genomics, a startup founded by J. Craig Venter.

Venter's previous firm, Celera Genomics, was a key player in sequencing the human genome. Synthetic Genomics is looking at, among other approaches, the use of tweaked metabolic pathways in algae to boost the plant's oil production. The startup received an earlier investment from BP a few years ago, but this one by ExxonMobil has raised eyebrows both for its size and because of the giant's track record.

"ExxonMobil has always been like the grinch that stole clean tech," says Udupa. "And then all of a sudden they're investing a lot of money in this one algae company."

The company kept enthusiasm tempered at a press call last month. "We need to be realistic," said Emil Jacobs, vice president of R&D at the oil giant's research and engineering unit. "This is not going to be easy, and there are no guarantees of success."

But after years of careful research ExxonMobil concluded that algae, among all the alternatives, has the most potential in terms of scalability and fitting into the vast infrastructure of existing refineries and filling stations. (It can also produce far more fuel per acre than palm, sugar cane, or corn.) Other big oil companies have recently invested into algae ventures as well, including Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell.

The airline industry, plagued by high jet-fuel prices, is also investing and testing, with players including Boeing, GE Aviation, Virgin Atlantic, Japan Airlines and Continental Airlines, among others. (Algae fuel has already helped power planes, cars, and other vehicles in various tests and demonstrations.)

Yet the idea isn't new. From 1978, the U.S. Department of Energy's Aquatic Species Program focused on it before closing down in 1996 in the face of persistently low petroleum prices and the relatively high cost of making algae fuel.

Making it economically competitive

Economic competitiveness remains the key challenge, and the hunt is on to find the best strains of algae for producing oil, as some are better than others. But it does appear that algae fuel, once an idea limited to mostly academic circles, will now get the kind of funding and attention that would be needed to turn it into a competitive industry.

A wide variety of approaches are being tried by different ventures to make algae fuel cost competitive -- and it's no easy task.

A startup near San Francisco called Solazyme (whose investors include Chevron) is growing algae in big dark tanks and feeding them sugar. Another in Israel called Seambiotic is growing marine microalgae using smokestack flue gas (or more specifically its carbon dioxide, which algae feed on) from a coal-burning power plant.

NASA and Google have invested in an effort using semi-permeable membrane enclosures of sewage floating in the ocean. Only clean water leaks out, and the algae feed on the nutrients. Other methods range from growing algae in bioreactors to open ponds.

One environmental advantage of algae over other biofuel sources -- like palm for biodiesel, or sugar cane or corn for ethanol -- is it doesn't have to be grown in places that can otherwise serve for food production or endangered species habitat. This helps it skirt the "food vs. fuel" debate.

Algae can be fed sewage and carbon dioxide and grown in many places, including deserts, ponds, and oceans.

Algae fuel fits relatively easily into the vast infrastructure of refineries and distribution channels that already exists for fossil fuel. Ethanol by contrast is more corrosive and thus requires flex-fuel cars and costly system-wide modifications.

How "green" is it?

But algae fuel is not environmentally perfect. It still creates pollution when burned, like regular fuel. Its marketing as a "green" energy source rankles some environmentalists, who prefer a more profound switch to cleaner options like solar and wind. Algae fuel, they note, requires far less change from Big Oil.

"This is a nice way to say, 'Oh don't worry, you don't have to change anything -- we're just going to make a new way to make the existing system work," says Gillian Madill at Friends of the Earth.

Algae fuel does burn cleaner than fossil fuel, according to J.B. Hunt, a large U.S. trucking company that's looking to go greener. It recently tested a fuel blend containing algae fuel from a California startup called SunEco and found an 82 percent reduction in particulate emissions with no loss of power. The company says it might soon become a significant purchaser.

Huge sales of algae fuel are unlikely, though, over the next few years. ExxonMobil says its project is five or ten years away from producing large quantities of fuel.

And like forgotten startups of the dot-com boom, many ventures of this "algal bloom" will surely not survive. A high-profile one called GreenFuel Technologies -- which took the approach of pumping carbon dioxide into bioreactors -- went out of business this spring after costs and technical problems spun out of control.

But there's another way for algae companies to thrive before the industry scales up to massive fuel production, if it ever does: co-products. These include things that consumers are hardly aware of but that can be higher-value products, like excipients used in pharmaceutical products: Seambiotic make food additives in addition to biofuels; Solazyme has made nutraceuticals, additives and soaps using algae.

"The possibilities are endless," says Udupa. "I think the overall benefits of using algae technology initially will be realized through the co-products."

By contrast, the ethanol industry doesn't have a similarly wide range of fall-back alternatives, she notes. The ethanol industry in the U.S. has long been subsidized by the government, and some lawmakers are fighting to redirect that funding to next-gen biofuels instead.

Meanwhile ExxonMobil seems prepared to spend substantially more on its algae project once certain benchmarks are met. The initial $600 million would help the project get to "a certain level of completion in the work," said Jacobs in the press call last month.


But much more will be needed for final development and early commercialization, he added: "That could amount to, you know, billions of dollars after that."

That's small change for the likes of ExxonMobil, but it represents a big change for the status of algae fuel.