news20100113jt1

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

[BUSINESS NEWS]
Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2010
Bankruptcy plan gets JAL creditor nod
Hatoyama sees delisting; cuts in pensions OK'd
Kyodo News

The government said Tuesday it effectively got Japan Airline's creditor banks to agree to let JAL file for bankruptcy and undergo court-led rehabilitation, while Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama indicated the carrier will be delisted.

Japan Airlines Corp. meanwhile said it succeeded in securing approval from two-thirds of its retirees to have their pension benefits slashed. Tuesday was the deadline to gain the OK of two-thirds of some 9,000 retirees to cut their pensions by more than 30 percent. About 67 percent of them had agreed to the pension cuts as of 1 p.m., JAL said.

Hatoyama signaled that the delisting of the airline's stock may be inevitable during the restructuring process, stressing "shareholders bear a certain responsibility."

Meanwhile, the government-backed Enterprise Turnaround Initiative Corp. of Japan and Development Bank of Japan are planning to extend JAL a credit line totaling ¥600 billion to avert a severe cash drain as they finalize the court-led rehabilitation plan, sources said.

Transport minister Seiji Maehara met earlier in the day with executives of JAL's commercial creditor banks and gained their tentative approval for the prepackaged bankruptcy option, other sources said. Mizuho Corporate Bank, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp. are expected to give official replies by Thursday.

Maehara said the government will make an all-out effort to achieve JAL's rehabilitation without any interruption to its operations.

He added the government will issue a message of full support for JAL's turnaround once ETIC compiles the rehabilitation plan.

The government was aiming to clinch approval from the main creditor banks and their pledge to continue financial support for the cash-strapped airline before the ETIC pursues the court-led restructuring.

The government-owned Development Bank of Japan, JAL's biggest creditor bank, has already agreed to the bankruptcy option.

The three commercial banks had earlier sought out-of-court restructuring out of concern they would incur losses from holdings in JAL's preferred shares.

But the sources said they basically accepted the prepackaged bankruptcy because the airline will need access to massive government-guaranteed funds that only ETIC can provide.

ETIC had reportedly planned to dissolve JAL's corporate pension fund if the airline failed to achieve the benefit cuts.


[NATIONAL NEWS]
Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2010
Foreigner suffrage bill said in the offing
Kyodo News

Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's Cabinet plans to submit a bill to the regular Diet session that begins Monday to grant local voting rights to permanent foreign residents, ruling party sources said.

The move, however, will likely draw fire from Kokumin Shinto (People's New Party), one of the junior partners of the Democratic Party of Japan, the sources said, while the other partner, the Social Democratic Party, will probably support the bill.

Hatoyama said he believes he can win support from within the ruling bloc.

"While I believe I can gain understanding, this is something we are in the middle of considering within the government now," Hatoyama said Tuesday in front of his official residence.

"It's my understanding that various things are being considered because (this year) marks 100 years since Japan annexed Korea," he added.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano said the government is considering the bill as one of those that should be submitted during the 150-day Diet session.

Asked which foreign residents would get the right to vote in local elections, Hirano said, "That is an extremely important (aspect) to point out.

"We will be considering the content of the bill, including that point," he said, adding the government will also carefully consider the constitutional ramifications.

Strong reservations remain within the DPJ-led coalition about giving permanent foreign residents the right to vote, a right DPJ Secretary General Ichiro Ozawa — the ruling bloc strongman — also advocates.

Shizuka Kamei, the financial services minister and head of Kokumin Shinto, has said he will oppose the bill.

Tadamori Oshima, secretary general of the main opposition Liberal Democratic Party, took a cautious stance on the planned legislation.

"Many opinions opposing the move have been issued by prefectural assemblies," he said. "We must debate the matter, while respecting such opinions."

Some critics say people affiliated with North Korea, which lacks diplomatic relations with Japan, should not be given the right to vote in local elections even if permanent residents are granted local suffrage.

Japan does not allow permanent residents with foreign nationalities, including those of Korean descent, to vote despite strong calls from among such residents on the grounds they pay local taxes.

Residents of Korean descent comprise most of the permanent foreign residents because Japan grants special permanent resident status to people from the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan who have lived in Japan from the time of its colonial rule over those territories and their descendants.

This year marks a century since Japan's annexation of the Korean Peninsula in 1910. The colonial rule ended with Japan's World War II defeat in 1945.


[BUSINESS NEWS]
Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2010
Daimler eyes alliance with Nissan, Renault

DETROIT (Kyodo) The head of Daimler AG says the German carmaker is considering forming a partnership with Nissan Motor Co. if it can reach a deal on a proposed technological tieup with Renault SA.

"We have confirmed that we are in discussions with Renault. It is not just discussion, but there are other discussions going on as well," Daimler Chairman Dieter Zetsche said Monday at the North American auto show in Detroit.

"If the discussions (with Renault) would come to any results, then obviously the potential expansion with Nissan is something to consider," he said.

Zetsche said Daimler wants to strike a deal with Renault in the first half of this year.

Nissan and French maker Renault formed a capital tieup in 1999. If Daimler ties up with Nissan, the two are likely to work together on environmentally friendly vehicles, including electric cars, according to industry watchers.

Earlier in the day, Ford Motor Co. Chief Executive Officer Alan Mulally said his firm will maintain the current capital and business alliance with Mazda Motor Corp.

"We treasure our relationship with Mazda. It's been very useful and beneficial for both of us even though we had to take down our equity position," Mulally said.

Ford has had an 11 percent equity stake in Mazda since selling part of its shareholding in fall 2008.

The share sale was due to Ford's financial plight amid the recession, Mulally said.

"Our relationship with Mazda will keep going," he added.

news20100113jt2

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

[EDUCATION AND BILINGUAL]
Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2010
BILINGUAL
O-shōgatsu can really test a woman's endurance
By KAORI SHOJI

Here's my take on the Japanese o-shōgatsu (お正月, New Year's) holiday week: I am, like, so ecstatic the whole thing is over.

For me, o-shogatsu means family gatherings, shinen no goaisatsu (新年のごあいさつ, exchange of New Year's greetings), endless preparations of huge, elaborate osechi (おせち, ritualized New Year's food dishes), monumental loads of washing up, and having to part with one's hard-earned cash in the form of o-toshidama (お年玉, New Year's allowance) distributed to legions of nephews, nieces, second cousins and the occasional, timely new-born (blessed are the sibling-less during the holiday season). The entire package never ceases to leave me feeling suicidal and wanting to quote Karl Marx . . . something about the number of females powering the kitchen being unequal to the number of large males lolling in front of a television screen bigger than my bathroom, all swigging beer and clamoring to be fed.

But the nightmare is over and I am a free woman . . . for another 12 months, anyway.

My grandmother used to say she didn't want to die in January because it'll look like o-shogatsu killed her. She also said that compared to ekiden (駅伝, marathon relay) runners, working long hours in the holiday-season kitchen was nothing ┄ "konnano kurou towa ienai (こんなの苦労とは言えない, you can't call this suffering)" ┄ and she would proceed to plunge her red, raw hands into a bowl of ice cold water where prawns had been left to defrost, to shell each one before deep-frying them. (Cooking tip: Do not microwave frozen prawns to defrost them; it will damage the texture and flavor [Grandma's advice, not mine].)

At some point I would pop into the living room to check on the ekiden on TV and steal a treat before my brothers demolished them entirely ┄ then return to the kitchen, where the scant female members of the family continued to toil. Frankly, the suffering in the kitchen and on asphalt seemed about equal, but at least the guys on TV had the whole nation cheering them on.

Ekiden is a quintessential Japanese sport: It's long, it's hard, it's done as a team and it's aggressively jimi (地味, unglamorous). The formal English translation is "road relay" or "marathon relay," but the phrase has crossed the Pacific to appear in a number of dictionaries. Ekiden has a history of some 1,000 years. The first ekiden runners carried messages from the Emperor in Kyoto to various parts of Japan, and many died in the process. In 1917, ekiden became a sponsored and media-publicized sports event, and the runners — bowing to tradition — started off from Sanjo Ohashi (三条大橋) in Kyoto and reached Ueno, Tokyo, after two and a half days and a distance of 508 km.

Currently, the Hakone Ekiden (箱根駅伝）is the most popular ekiden event — and a must-see o-shogatsu pastime. Every shōgatsu futsuka mikka (正月２日３日, Jan. 2 and 3), 20 universities in the Kanto（関東）region bring their best runners to race a total distance of more than 200 km, starting from Otemachi (大手町) in Tokyo and stretching to Lake Ashinoko （芦ノ湖）in Hakone and back to the city. Hakone is mountainous, and the best and most experienced runners are given the most difficult stages, such as lung-ripping 10-km sprints up torturously steep hills.

On the whole, the Japanese are pretty athletic, but even people who have never run in their lives love to lose themselves in the low-profile romance of the Hakone Ekiden.

In my family, the event has always been on par with a particularly religious experience (St. Paul traveling to Damascus comes to mind), and it's certainly the closest my brothers ever got to God. Through the years, they've all sat glued to the TV screen ┄ shouting, groaning, cheering. Or more often, just silently and sincerely praying.

Personally, I've always suspected the Hakone Ekiden is held the day after New Year's to goad us all into guilt-induced stoicism. After the mochi (餅, sticky rice cake), osechi feasts and many, many rounds of beers, the ekiden jolts us back to reality as those skinny guys clad in shorts and tank tops in sub-zero temperatures, moving up mountain paths at speeds of less than 3 minutes per kilometer. It's no wonder a daily regimen of running is on the national priority list of shinnen no hōfu (新年の抱負 New Year's resolutions), along with yaseru (やせる, weight loss) and gaikokugo wo masutā suru (外国語をマスターする, master a foreign language).

As for myself, I'm off to celebrate my liberation from o-shogatsu on the sofa, with a secretly hoarded box of chocolates. Akemashite omedetougozaimsu (皆さん、明けましておめでとうございます Happy New Year, everyone)!"?

news20100113jt3

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

[COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY NEWS]
Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2010
IGADGET
Kindle upgrades, but DX e-reader is just the start of a boom
By PETER CROOKES

E-inking a deal: Ghosts of U.S. TV makers past would find it amusing. Sony produced the world's first e-ink device for reading books, some six years ago. While Sony is still in the e-ink reader game, U.S. giant Amazon now leads the global market. Amazon is set to land a second blow against Sony in the form of its much-anticipated Kindle DX.

Already released in the United States, Amazon is putting out a global version of the DX and its 9.7-inch e-ink screen on Jan. 19. The release follows the arrival last year of an international version of the 6-inch version of Amazon's popular U.S.-based book-reader, the Kindle. Although the DX must be ordered from Amazon in the U.S. and delivered from there it will be usable in Japan, allowing wireless downloading of electronic books over 3G networks, reputedly in 60 seconds. Amazon claims a library of some 400,000 books for its various species of Kindle, but just how small a fraction of those are in Japanese is unclear.

Apart from more expansive screen real estate, the DX also boasts larger storage capacity with its 3.3 gigabytes of memory sufficient for up to 3,500 books. The extra memory is important, as there is no provision for augmenting it with flash memory cards. The all-important screen is 1200 × 824 pixels at a resolution of 150 ppi with a 16-level grey scale. The unit measures 264 × 183 × 9.7 mm and weighs a not-featherweight 540 grams. Despite the extra size compared to the regular Kindle the DX has a smaller keyboard, with the separate number keys ditched in favor of sharing duty with the QWERTY keys. The keyboard is useful for bookmarking and dictionary abilities. The format choice is reasonable but the PDF rendering precludes zooming and the increasingly popular and widespread ePub format is not supported.

The Kindle DX will set you back $459, a bit over ¥40,000 at current exchange rates. This is not much more than Sony's groundbreaking Librie e-book reader cost some six years ago, indicating that while such devices have improved in size and ability, prices have not undergone a similar change. At that price the Kindle DX remains just for serious book readers, particularly as its ability to surf the Internet is limited as it doesn't do color or video. Those into magazines and/or newspapers can also use the DX, but only if their favorites are suited to it. In fact that is one of two key questions for a prospective buyer: Is there enough content available to justify the purchase? Only personal research will answer that query. A similarly individualistic approach is needed for the other question ┄ does an e-ink screen suit you? These screens are not common enough in Japan and prospective customers may have to rely on Internet research. The basic story is these screens replicate paper to an extent, they are easier on the eyes than regular screens and can be read in daylight.

If you can find enough reasons to read electronically and like e-ink, then the Kindle DX is a good choice. Be aware, though, that the e-ink market is young and rapidly evolving. Better devices are coming on the market all the time with color e-ink devices, and perhaps even video, on the way in the next year or so. www.amazon.com/Kindle-Wireless-Reading-Display-Generation/dp/B0015TG12Q/ ref=kinww-ddp

Lifeline for mini DV: Not so many years ago mini DV cassettes were a popular method of recording digital video footage. Now, flash-memory cards and hard disks built into camcorders rule. The problem is that the cassettes were only ever intended as temporary storage, so if you have footage on such tapes and haven't transferred it to DVDs or something else contemporary, your time is running out. JVC has produced a solution with the SR-DMV700.

The all-in-one device can record, play and transfer a wide range of media. In particular it can use mini-DV tapes and DVDs. The idea is you insert a cassette and copy the footage on it either to the device's included 250-gigabyte memory or a DVD for more portable storage. The SR-DMV700 can also be used to play video off the cassette on to any connected TV set. DVDs can be used the same way.

The JVC all-rounder is not built for displaying it under the TV set, its poor looks preclude leaving it in public when not in use. It beauty is in its versatility as it can record to or play from DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD-RAM DVD+R types of DVD and play only from DVD+RW, CDDA, VCD, CD-R/RW (JPEG, MP3, WMA) type disks. It also offers a selection of recording options, naturally offering more capacity at lower quality settings. The hard disk can take about 18 hours of video from DV tapes at maximum quality, or up to nearly 500 hours at the bottom-drawer level. The device also comes with an impressive range of connection options, although JVC does skimp a tad on the included cables. Considering it sells for \208,000, you would think the company could have thrown some more in the box.

The price is the biggest drawback of an otherwise impressive bit of kit. If you have a decent library of video footage to preserve, particularly on mini DV cassettes, the extra expense might be justified. This is especially so as decent options are scarce. www.jvc-victor.co.jp/press/2007/sr-dvm700.html

news20100113lat

[Today's Newspaper] from [Los Angeles Times]

[Environment> Business]
By Jerry Hirsch
January 13, 2010
NORTH AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL AUTO SHOW
Toyota plans to turn Prius into a sub-brand
Next up in the line will be a compact version of the popular hybrid mid-size.

Reporting from Detroit - Toyota calls the lemon-lime-colored hybrid vehicle a concept, but shoppers can expect to see a version of this compact car -- kind of a svelte version of the Toyota Matrix -- in showrooms in several years.

This is Toyota channeling Apple Inc. Just as Apple has built a family of products around its original iPod -- from the tiny Shuffle to the Wi-Fi-enabled iPod Touch -- Toyota plans to build its Prius into a sub-brand.

The concept it unveiled at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit is labeled the FT-CH dedicated hybrid concept, but Toyota executives acknowledge that it will become the Prius compact car offering. Because of its interior space, the current Prius is considered a mid-size car.

The FT-CH was styled at Toyota's European Design and Development center in Nice, France, and is 22 inches shorter than the Prius.

Building a family of vehicles around the Prius name leverages the brand equity of the vehicle, said Don Esmond, senior vice president of automotive operations for Toyota Motor Sales USA Inc. in Torrance.

"It's a more efficient way to market. When you say 'Prius,' you don't have to educate anybody," he said. Indeed, there are already 815,000 Prius cars on the road.

The FT-CH, which stands for Future Toyota-Compact Hybrid, could be the first of the line's extensions, which might eventually include a dedicated hybrid crossover vehicle or a van.

Esmond said that in addition to the Prius, Toyota has sold almost 400,000 other hybrids in the U.S., all hybrid versions of existing Toyota and Lexus vehicles such as tpinionhe Lexus RX 450h SUV. But the plan is to develop more "ground up"-designed hybrids.

In other green technology,o Toyota plans to introduce plug-in hybrids and battery electrics in model year 2012.


[Environment> Opinion]
By Luis Alberto Moreno
January 13, 2010
Opinion
Latin America's water needs could foster collaboration to curb global warming
The region's droughts may serve as a catalyst for reconciling the conflicting priorities of poor and wealthy nations when it comes to the issue of addressing climate change.

Ask the mayor of a city in the Andes mountains about the outcome of December's climate negotiations in Copenhagen, and you will probably receive a perfunctory reply. Ask about the plummeting levels of local freshwater reservoirs, and you will get an earful.

The reason goes to the heart of the disagreements that split the industrialized and developing countries and prevented a long-term, binding agreement to curb global warming. But it also offers a path toward a more productive approach to north-south collaboration on climate change.

In Latin America, water is more tightly linked to human potential and economic competitiveness than in any other part of the world. The region has roughly 31% of the planet's freshwater resources, while being home to only 8% of its population. This huge water advantage has enabled Latin America to get 68% of its electricity from hydroelectric sources, compared with a global average of less than 16%.

The region's key commodity exports -- in agriculture and mining -- depend on extraordinary quantities of water. About half the world's beef exports and nearly two-thirds of all soya come from Latin America, where they are produced cheaply, thanks to typically abundant rainfall.

But after the severe droughts of recent years, this water advantage has become a stark vulnerability. In 2008, Argentina lost 1.5 million head of cattle and nearly half its wheat crop to drought, while hydroelectric output in the most populous part of Chile plunged by 34%.

More recently, vast regions in Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, Paraguay and Mexico have been forced to ration water, cut power or both. These strains deepen the gap between people with in-home water connections and the millions of poor Latin Americans who must resort to informal water vendors or expensive bottled water.

The latest droughts are believed to stem from cyclical weather phenomena such as El Niño. But they are also an omen, because climate scientists agree that extreme fluctuations in rainfall will be among the first and most dramatic consequences of rising temperatures in Latin America.

The intersection of water and climate could serve to reconcile the conflicting priorities that hobbled negotiations in Copenhagen. First, as they look for the best ways to spend the billions in aid that have just been pledged for climate adaptation in the developing world, industrialized countries should focus on projects that resolve near-term, climate-related problems such as water supply and sanitation.

Such pragmatism would acknowledge the pressure felt by leaders in countries where essentials such as healthcare, food and education are still not available to many citizens -- and where the goal of reducing CO2 emissions continues to seem like a luxury. It would also convince people in the developing world that rich countries are as concerned about the near-term survival of children as they are about the long-term health of the planet.

These objectives need not be mutually exclusive. Spain, for example, has become a leading international promoter of wind and solar power as part of its climate policies. But last year the Spanish government also created a $1.5-billion grant fund that is financing water and sanitation projects in the poorest communities in Latin America and the Caribbean.

These grants are helping to jump-start critically needed infrastructure projects in countries such as Haiti, Guatemala and Bolivia. They have also leveraged hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funds from the Inter-American Development Bank and other donors.

Latin American governments, for their part, must start treating water as a truly strategic resource instead of a free and limitless one. In the short term, this means prioritizing investments and reforms in basic services in order to reduce waste, closing the coverage gap and eliminating waterborne diseases among the poor. But it also requires a willingness to make concessions in pursuit of global emission reductions that, in time, could be crucial to ensuring reliable supplies of water.

The highland city of La Paz, Bolivia, is a case in point. International donors are helping to finance the expansion of water and sanitation networks to low-income neighborhoods inhabited by primarily by Aymara Indians. The glaciers that supply the city with water are melting rapidly, however, so some of the aid will be used to secure new sources of water.

As a country with large tropical forests, Bolivia may help to lower the risk of catastrophic climate change by joining programs to cut deforestation caused by CO2 emissions. But Bolivians are more likely to support such measures if they see evidence that the industrialized world is committed to helping them achieve a dignified quality of life.

Luis Alberto Moreno is president of the Inter-American Development Bank, the main source of multilateral development funding for Latin America and the Caribbean.


[Environment> Business]
By Jerry Hirsch
January 13, 2010
NORTH AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL AUTO SHOW
Toyota plans to turn Prius into a sub-brand
Next up in the line will be a compact version of the popular hybrid mid-size.

Reporting from Detroit - Toyota calls the lemon-lime-colored hybrid vehicle a concept, but shoppers can expect to see a version of this compact car -- kind of a svelte version of the Toyota Matrix -- in showrooms in several years.

This is Toyota channeling Apple Inc. Just as Apple has built a family of products around its original iPod -- from the tiny Shuffle to the Wi-Fi-enabled iPod Touch -- Toyota plans to build its Prius into a sub-brand.

The concept it unveiled at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit is labeled the FT-CH dedicated hybrid concept, but Toyota executives acknowledge that it will become the Prius compact car offering. Because of its interior space, the current Prius is considered a mid-size car.

The FT-CH was styled at Toyota's European Design and Development center in Nice, France, and is 22 inches shorter than the Prius.

Building a family of vehicles around the Prius name leverages the brand equity of the vehicle, said Don Esmond, senior vice president of automotive operations for Toyota Motor Sales USA Inc. in Torrance.

"It's a more efficient way to market. When you say 'Prius,' you don't have to educate anybody," he said. Indeed, there are already 815,000 Prius cars on the road.

The FT-CH, which stands for Future Toyota-Compact Hybrid, could be the first of the line's extensions, which might eventually include a dedicated hybrid crossover vehicle or a van.

Esmond said that in addition to the Prius, Toyota has sold almost 400,000 other hybrids in the U.S., all hybrid versions of existing Toyota and Lexus vehicles such as the Lexus RX 450h SUV. But the plan is to develop more "ground up"-designed hybrids.

In other green technology, Toyota plans to introduce plug-in hybrids and battery electrics in model year 2012.

news20100113gdn1

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Geo-engineering]
Climate scientists convene global geo-engineering summit
Meeting in California in March will discuss possible field trials of schemes that would tackle climate change by reflecting sunlight or fertilising the ocean with iron
David Adam, environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 12 January 2010 16.58 GMT Article history

Scientists are to hold a high-level summit to discuss how the world could take emergency measures such as blocking out the sun to slow dangerous global warming.

Experts from around the world have been invited to attend the meeting in March in California, which will examine possible field trials of so-called geo-engineering schemes, such as pumping chemicals into the air and oceans to combat climate change.

The move follows the failure of the recent Copenhagen climate talks to set meaningful carbon reduction targets, and comes amid mounting concern that such controversial techniques may be the only way to curb rising temperatures.

Mike MacCracken, a global warming expert at the Climate Institute in Washington DC, who is organising the conference's scientific programme, said: "Most of the talk about these geo-engineering techniques say they should be saved until we get to an emergency situation. Well the people of the Arctic might say they are in an emergency situation now."

He added: "It is hard to see how mitigation [carbon cuts] can save the Arctic and losing the Arctic is a tremendous risk, not just for the region but for the rest of the world. So are there other ways to save it?"

Without significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, scientists say global average temperatures could rise by 4C within many of our lifetimes, which could devastate wildlife and threaten the water and food supplies of hundreds of millions of people.

Geo-engineering techniques, such as filling the sky with shiny dust to reflect sunlight, could curb such temperature rises without the need to restrict greenhouse gas emissions. The meeting aims to assess risks and benefits, establish ground rules for research and plan experiments that would be needed before a full scale geo-engineering attempt.

Calls for such research have increased as pessimism grows about the likely course of global warming.

In an influential report last year, the Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific academy, concluded that geo-engineering methods that block out the sun "may provide a potentially useful short-term back-up to mitigation in case rapid reductions in global temperature are needed". The society stressed that emissions reductions were the primary solution, but recommended international research and development of the "more promising" geo-engineering techniques.

Bob Watson, chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, told the Guardian in November he backed such research. "We should at least be looking at it. I would see what the theoretical models say, and ask ourselves the question: how can we do medium-sized experiments in the field," Watson said. "I think it should be a real international effort, so it isn't just the UK funding it."

MacCracken said: "If there is going to be funding for this kind of research and you are someone in the UK government, then what kind of safeguards do you want to have in place that nothing can go wrong? Because if something does go wrong then you could be up before parliament or worse."

He added: "We also have to be mindful about how we communicate these ideas to the public because some of them can sound a little like Doctor Strangelove."

He said the March meeting was based on a landmark gathering of scientists involved in research with genetically modified (GM) organisms in 1975, which established voluntary guidelines to protect the public, and paved the way for breakthroughs such as the mass production of synthetic insulin in GM bacteria. The geo-engineering conference will take place at the same Asilomar centre, on the Monterey Peninsula.

Some scientists have criticised the upcoming conference because its funding is being arranged by a US group called the Climate Response Fund, which promotes geo-engineering research, and is run by Margaret Leinen, a marine biologist. Leinen's son, Dan Whaley, runs a firm called Climos, a company set up to profit from geo-engineering by selling carbon credits generated by fertilising ocean plankton with iron. Leinen was formerly chief scientific officer with Climos, but told Science magazine she has taken all possible steps to avoid a conflict of interest, and no longer holds a position, shares or intellectual property in the firm.

MacCracken said one aim of the conference was to judge which techniques could work on a global scale, which could count against ocean iron fertilisation. "We don't want to go out and test approaches that could not be scaled up enough to be useful. Would we risk doing anything in the ocean that would only have a small effect? Almost certainly not."

The push towards geo-engineering research has not pleased everyone. A recent report (pdf) for the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation by the ETC group called geo-engineering an act of "geo-piracy" and warned that the "the world runs a serious risk of choosing solutions that turn out to be new global problems".

There are also concerns about how to regulate geo-engineering and whether its techniques could be developed and unleashed by a single nation, or even a wealthy individual, without wide international approval.

The House of Commons science and technology committee will tomorrow open an inquiry into the regulation of geo-engineering, with David MacKay, chief scientist at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, among those due to give evidence.

From artificial trees to giant space mirrors: Possible geo-engineering solutions

Stratospheric aerosols

Spray shiny sulphur compounds into the high atmosphere to reflect sunlight. Relatively cheap and easy to do, though the chemicals gradually fall back to earth. The most likely option, though possible side effects include changes to global rainfall.

Ocean fertilisation

Dump iron into the sea to boost plankton growth and soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Hard to do on a significant scale, and doubts about how deep the plankton would sink have raised doubts about how long the carbon would be secured.

Cloud whitening

Fleets of sailing ships strung across the world's oceans could spray seawater into the sky to evaporate and leave behind shiny salt crystals to brighten clouds, which would then reflect sunlight back into space. Could be turned off at any time, but might interfere with wind and rain patterns.

Space mirrors

A giant orbiting sunshade in space to block the sun. More likely to be a collection of millions or even trillions of small mirrors rather than a giant orbiting parasol. Very expensive and impractical with current technology.

Artificial trees

Devices that use a chemical process to soak up carbon dioxide from the air. Technically possible but very expensive on a meaningful scale.

news20100113gdn2

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Climate Camp]
Police prepared to admit Climate Camp 'stop and search' was unlawful
Eleven-year-old twins and a long-standing campaigner travelling to a Kingsnorth protest seek judicial review of police tactics
Press Association
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 12 January 2010 16.13 GMT Article history

Police are prepared to admit that the "stop and search" of 11-year-old twins and a veteran environmental campaigner going to a climate camp protest was unlawful, the high court was told today.

The twins were stopped while attending a demonstration against the proposed Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in Kent in August 2008.

The energy company E.ON owns the power station on the Medway estuary, but in 2006 sparked a long-running campaign by environmental activists by announcing plans to build two new coal-burning units at the site. Last October, the German company postponed the plans, citing the economic recession.

Lawyers for the twins, referred to as girl E and boy T for legal reasons, said they had been intimidated and shaken.

The children and David Morris, from north London, a long-standing environmental campaigner who said he was forcibly searched against his will, are seeking judicial review – and potential damages – against the police.

All three were searched under section 1 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which requires officers to have "reasonable suspicion" that an individual is carrying prohibited weapons or articles that could be used for criminal damage.

Today two judges heard that the three cases could now be settled following admissions by the police that section 1 powers were wrongly used.

Climate campaigners and reports by the National Policing Improvement Agency and South Yorkshire police have been highly critical of the policing operation at Kingsnorth. Commanders, the South Yorkshire force's review reveals, initially told officers that "personal grounds must be justified and no blanket power approach is to be taken" when searching under section 1 of Pace. But they were then told "that the camp is illegal and the intention of the camp is to commit damage, hence the grounds for searching attendees to the camp is made", which resulted in almost every activist being searched multiple times.

Hundreds of other similar cases are in the pipeline. The cost of the legal action to the public purse has been described by one lawyer as "staggering".


[News > World news > Haiti]
Heavy death toll feared in Haiti quake
> UN headquarters and hospital collapse
> Tens of thousands lose homes in 7.0 magnitude quake
Rory Carroll and Haroon Siddique
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 13 January 2010 09.22 GMT Article history

A huge rescue operation is under way this morning after a powerful earthquake hit Haiti, toppling buildings in the capital, Port-au-Prince, burying people in rubble and triggering repeated aftershocks in what is feared to be a major catastrophe.

A 7.0-magnitude quake – the biggest recorded in this part of the Caribbean and the largest to hit Haiti in more than 200 years – rocked Port-au-Prince last night, collapsing a hospital and sending houses tumbling into ravines.

The five-storey UN headquarters was destroyed and the UN peacekeeping chief, Alain Le Roy, said late last night that many people remained unaccounted for. "As we speak no one has been rescued," he said.

No estimate of the death toll inflicted by the quake has been possible but fears are rising that it could run into thousands. It was clear tens of thousands of people had lost their homes in Port-au-Prince, which has a population of about 1 million, and that many had perished.

Dead and injured lay in the streets even as strong aftershocks rippled through the impoverished country. Women covered in dust crawled from the rubble wailing as others wandered through the streets holding hands. Thousands gathered in public squares late into the night singing hymns. There are almost no emergency services to speak of and many gravely injured people were still sitting in the streets early this morning, pleading for doctors.

"Everything started shaking, people were screaming, houses started collapsing, it's total chaos," said Joseph Guyler Delva, a Reuters reporter. "I saw people under the rubble and people killed. People were screaming 'Jesus, Jesus' and running in all directions."

With telephone services erratic, much of the early communication came from social media such as Twitter. Richard Morse, a well-known musician who manages the famed Olafson Hotel, kept up a stream of dispatches on the aftershocks and damage reports. Belair, a slum even in the best of times, was said to be "a broken mess".

Raymond Joseph, Haiti's ambassador to the US, told CNN from Washington: "I think it is really a catastrophe of major proportions."

The quake was shallow, with a depth of 6.2 miles, and struck at 4.53pm local time with the epicentre 10 miles south-west of Port-au-Prince, according to the US Geological Survey. It was said to have lasted around a minute and was quickly followed by two strong aftershocks of 5.9 and 5.5 magnitude. The last major quake to hit the capital was of magnitude 6.7 in 1984.

The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said: "My heart goes out to the people of Haiti after this devastating earthquake. At this time of tragedy I am very concerned for the people of Haiti and also for the many United Nations staff who serve there. I am receiving initial reports and following developments closely."

Before telephone lines were broken, Karel Zelenka, a Catholic Relief Services representative, told US-based colleagues that "there must be thousands of people dead", the aid group reported.

The Pacific tsunami warning centre ruled out a major tsunami but said coasts up to 60 miles away might be affected, prompting alerts in neighbouring Dominican Republic, Cuba and the Bahamas.

Haiti, a former French colony that forms half of the island of Hispaniola, is especially vulnerable to natural disasters. Most of the capital's 3 million people live in hillside slums made of wood, tin and cheap concrete.

"Everybody is just totally, totally freaked out and shaken," said Henry Bahn, a US agriculture official visiting Haiti. "The sky is just grey with dust." He was walking to his hotel room when the ground began to shake. "I just held on and bounced across the wall. I just heard a tremendous amount of noise and shouting and screaming in the distance."

A local employee for the US charity Food for the Poor reported seeing a five-storey building collapse in Port-au-Prince. A colleague said there were more houses destroyed than standing in Delmas Road, a major thoroughfare. Taiwan's foreign ministry said its embassy was destroyed and the ambassador was in hospital with injuries.

The quake crumbled Haiti's presidential residence, the National Palace, but Haiti's ambassador to Mexico, Robert Manuel, said the president, Rene Preval, and his wife had survived. He had no details.

The hospital in Petionville – a wealthy neighbourhood home to diplomats and expatriates – was wrecked. As darkness fell survivors filled the streets trying to dig people from rubble with their bare hands and improvised tools.

The United States would provide military and civilian disaster assistance, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, said in Hawaii.

The US president, Barack Obama, issued a statement sending his "thoughts and prayers". "We are closely monitoring the situation and we stand ready to assist the people of Haiti."

Bill Clinton, the UN's special envoy for Haiti, said his office would do whatever it could to help the country recover and rebuild. "My thoughts and prayers are with the people of Haiti."

The quake was felt in the Dominican Republic, sending people running on to the streets in the capital, Santo Domingo. Houses shook in eastern Cuba but no major damage was reported. "We felt it very strongly and I would say for a long time. We had time to evacuate," said Monsignor Dionisio Garcia, the archbishop of Santiago.

Felix Augustin, Haiti's consul general in New York, said: "Communication is absolutely impossible. I cannot get through."

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[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Copenhagen climare change conference 2009]
Last-minute agreement at Copenhagen marks turning point for the world
Dramatic finish to summit has radically changed approach to tackling global warming and indicates accord will succeed
Jonathan Lash
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 13 January 2010 07.00 GMT Article history
　
Spin is the political language of Washington, but I have never encountered such conflicting currents of hype as those that have swirled around the globe since the gavel fell on the Copenhagen climate summit. Depending on whether you live in Beijing, Berlin or Boston the assessment ranges from catastrophe to success to somewhere in between. But what lies ahead?

First let us take stock. In important ways the Copenhagen accord signals significant and promising changes in the world's approach to global warming under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, not just in what it says, but also in how it was negotiated.

The dramatic story of a last-minute agreement fashioned in a meeting among the leaders of the "Copenhagen 5", Brazil, China, India, South Africa, and the United States reveals a profound change in global politics. One in which, for the first time, the rapidly developing giants of Asia, Africa, and Latin America emerged as key to the solution.

The ad hoc leadership by the so-called Copenhagen 5 (C-5), representing 45% of the world's population and 44% of global greenhouse gas emissions, constitutes a new and potentially historic alliance, a symbol, perhaps, of a new world order.

The Copenhagen accord signals other changes as well. It sets a goal of limiting global warming to 2C, and was accompanied by a requirement for explicit, quantitative pollution reduction commitments across the world.

The key obstacle that was overcome in the C-5 negotiations was the United States' insistence that all parties agree to verification of fulfillment of their carbon-cutting commitments. When the major developing economies agreed to a form of verification, they set in motion a process can be the basis for building the trust necessary ultimately to strengthen the accord.


Finally, the fact that the accord was negotiated by heads of state, and the way it became the Copenhagen accord, may be a significant step toward overcoming a dysfunctional negotiation process which requires that decisions be reached by consensus among all 190+ parties to the UNFCCC. Despite opposition from a small minority of countries, heads of state found a way to move the accord ahead without unanimity. By doing so they demonstrated their seriousness and exerted the capacity of the majority of nations to move forward when they agree.

However, unlike the Kyoto protocol, the accord is not legally binding, and provides neither rules to structure international carbon markets, nor means to enforce compliance. This creates daunting uncertainties about how nations and markets will interact over greenhouse gas reductions.

Europe, which was not part of the C-5 meeting from which the accord emerged, but endorsed it almost immediately, faces important decisions. First, what is the future role of the KP? Will Europe pursue two paths, both a second commitment period under the KP, and participation in the accord? Second, will Europe which has led the world toward collective action on climate, put aside disappointment about how the Copenhagen process played out, and seize the lead in creating a process to implement the accord?

The next few months will offer strong indicators of whether nations whose heads of state endorsed the accord will treat it as binding. Various signposts will suggest which way the road is heading. The first deadline to watch for is January 31. By then, developed countries must register national commitments — and developing countries national plans of action — to reduce greenhouse gases. Major defections at this point would doom the accord, but early indications are that countries that offered commitments coming into Copenhagen will register them.

A second key indicator that the accord has legs will be how fast and effectively key countries seek to implement its terms. It remains unclear who "owns" the Copenhagen accord, who staffs its implementation and even who has the authority to convene the next meeting to keep the process going. Will negotiations around the accord's implementation be included in the next UNFCCC meeting in late May, or does it require an entirely separate process? The accord includes promises of adaptation assistance, a green climate fund, and forest protection and technology "mechanisms". The question of who moves the process forward needs to be resolved in the next few months.

China has already invited the other emerging countries behind the accord, India, Brazil and South Africa, to meet this month to devise a united front on a way forward. Will Europe take the initiative to define a workable process?

There will be two more important signposts during 2010, from the two largest emitters. China will launch its 12th five-year plan, and much will ride on the strength of the measures they include to improve energy efficiency, and develop low-carbon sources of energy. Already since Copenhagen they have adopted new measures requiring electric utilities to purchase wind and solar energy.

Similarly, the US Congress will decide whether to complete action on legislation to reduce US emissions, as a bi-partisan trio of Senators — John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman — strive to find an acceptable compromise bill that addresses both climate and energy security.

One last hope. Because the accord may reflect a reordering of global political dynamics it may make possible a profoundly important shift in which action on climate change is no longer seen as a threat, but rather the key, to development and the future of poverty eradication is recognised as low carbon development. That would be an historic achievement.

> Jonathan Lash is president of the World Resources Institute (WRI)

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[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[News > Science > People in science]
Jane Goodall: 'My job is to give people hope'
It is half a century since she began her seminal work studying chimpanzees in Africa. But Jane Goodall says her work is far from finished
Stephen Moss
The Guardian, Wednesday 13 January 2010 Article history

Jane Goodall, grey in complexion but resplendent in a red shawl, is sitting on the sofa in a dimly lit room in west London. The scientist-turned-environmentalist has just arrived from Bournemouth, had a rotten journey, has a hacking cough, but accepts it all stoically, rejecting the suggestion that the heating be turned up.

She is here with her talisman, a stuffed monkey called Mr H, given to her by the blind magician Gary Haun ("the Amazing Haundini"), who thought it was a chimp. Goodall, who has a childlike quality, sees a metaphorical significance in a blind magician who is able to pull the wool over the eyes of the sighted. The letter H, standing for Hope, also attracts her.

The world seems to divide into people who are besotted with Goodall and people who have barely heard of her. She is more prominent in the US, where the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) is headquartered, than in the UK, despite being born here in 1934 and, after half a lifetime spent documenting the lives of chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream National Park overlooking Lake Tanganyika in the far west of Tanzania, now living with her sister Judy in their old family home in Bournemouth.

Our meeting takes place at a flat in Notting Hill that belongs to Mary Lewis, a JGI employee with a cut-glass English accent who appears to run Goodall's life as if it were a military operation. The trigger is a book Goodall has written with two fellow environmentalists: a collection of stories of survival called Hope for Animals and Their World, the written-by-committee feel of which must of course be forgiven because of its subject matter.

Even I, an intermittent eco-worrier, was moved by the battle to save the California condor, and I feel doubly guilty for criticising the book because at the end of the interview she insists on signing it for me: "For Stephen. ­Together we can make this a better world for all. Thank you for helping." Can is underlined, all is both underlined and capitalised.

These days, in her mid-70s, Goodall is more shaman than scientist. She has set aside a planned companion volume to her seminal study The Chimpanzees of Gombe, and instead tours the world preaching the need for sustainability, harmony and respect for the natural world (this makes me worry about the size of her carbon footprint).

It was in 1986 that, at a conference on chimps, she realised the extent of the crisis affecting them across Africa and determined, overnight it seems, on a life as an environmental evangelist. One journalist who has followed her career likens her to a "peripatetic Mother Teresa", and it's a good description: she combines stateliness with a kind of holiness, her religion a predominantly green one.

The message of her new book, with its stories about black-footed ferrets, American crocodiles and whooping cranes, is surprisingly upbeat. "My job seems to have increasingly become giving people hope, so that instead of doing nothing and sinking into depression, they take action," she tells me. "It's very clear to me that unless we get a critical mass of people involved in trying to create a better world for our great-grandchildren, we'd better stop having children altogether."

Goodall has chosen to focus on the heroes fighting – and occasionally winning – individual battles, in the hope of attracting others to participate in a war she does not yet accept is lost. "I've seen areas totally despoiled that have been brought back to life. Animals that were almost gone have, with captive breeding or protection in the wild, been given another chance. If we stop now, everything's going to go. So we have to keep on doing our best for as long as we can, and if we're going to die, let's die fighting." The apocalypse is conjured up in a croaky and curiously detached monotone.

Do governments understand the scale of the crisis? Goodall argues that many are still in hock to "dark forces" – vested interests such as the fossil fuel industry and agribusiness. Politicians, she says, should stop parroting the myth of limitless expansion. "Unlimited economic growth on a planet of finite resources is not possible; it doesn't make sense. I thought this financial ­crisis would help people realise that, but it seems very much like, 'Oh, let's get back to business as usual.'"

Much of her evangelising is directed at the young. Her institute – set up to protect chimps and their habitats ­almost 10 years before that Damascene moment in 1986 – has a dynamic youth wing called Roots and Shoots, which started in 1991 when 16 young Tanzanians met on the porch of her home in Dar es Salaam to discuss environmental issues affecting their lives. Twenty years later, there are groups in 114 countries, with hundreds of thousands of youngsters involved in community projects. After a slow start, it has taken off in the UK in the past couple of years, with 700 groups now participating. But apart from the HQ in Arlington, Virginia, which has 20-plus staff, most of the JGIs that coordinate these projects are shoestring operations, and the institute has been hit hard by the credit crunch. "We're in a financial hole in the US because of the downturn," Goodall admits. "Money that should have come in has been cut."

The organisation had just held a meeting in Belgium to discuss how to dig itself out, and one priority is to recruit an executive director. Is that recognition of a time when someone will need to take over from her? "Of course," Goodall says. "It will probably be a collection of four people taking over from me." Despite the holiness, she is not guilty of false modesty.

The institute today is not just concerned with her beloved chimps. "To me, it was obvious to grow from wild chimps to saving their forest to seeing about their conditions in captivity to working with local people and kids," she says. "You can kill yourself saving forests and chimps, but if new generations aren't going to be better stewards there's no point. That's why I'm so ­passionate about Roots and Shoots."

Until the 1986 conference, she had assumed she would spend her life studying chimps. "It was wonderful out in the forest collecting data and ­analysing it, giving a few lectures, writing books." In her 1999 book, Reason For Hope: A Spiritual Journey, she says that as a Bible-reading teenager, she "fantasised about becoming a martyr". In a way she has achieved that ambition, sacrificing the paradise of Gombe for a succession of airport lounges.

When I ask if she is still a Christian, she gives a somewhat ­ambiguous ­answer. "I suppose so; I was raised as a Christian." She says she sees no contradiction between evolution and a belief in God. Nor does she blame the Bible and the idea in Genesis that man has dominion over plants and animals for our exploitation of the natural world (she says "dominion" is a mistranslation; what is meant is "stewardship"). These might seem academic points, but perhaps they are a key to understanding her transition from scientist to eco-evangelist – and the resonance of her message in the more spiritually aware US.

"I realised that my experience in the forest, my understanding of the chimpanzees, had given me a new perspective," she writes in Reason for Hope. "I was ­utterly convinced there was a great ­spiritual power that we call God, Allah or Brahma, although I knew, equally ­certainly, that my finite mind could never comprehend its form or nature."

This year is significant for Goodall and her institute, marking 50 years since she began studying chimps at Gombe. As well as the new book, there will be a BBC documentary in the spring and a German-made film, Jane's Journey, to be premiered at Cannes, in which Angelina Jolie has a walk-on part. It is indeed a remarkable journey, from a middle-class home in Bournemouth to secretarial work in London and then, thanks to the patronage of paleontologist Louis Leakey, to Gombe and beyond.

"I loved animals as a child, read the Tarzan books, and decided at the age of 11 that I would go to Africa, live with animals and write books about them," she says. "Everybody laughed at me except my amazing mother, who said, 'If you work hard and really want something and never give up, you will find a way.'"

In 1957, after earning the money for the boat fare by working as a waitress and a secretary, Goodall went on an extended visit to a schoolfriend in Kenya. Someone suggested she get in touch with Leakey, a formidable figure who was then curator of the Coryndon museum of natural history in Nairobi. He barked at her down the telephone when she called on spec, but she kept her nerve, got an appointment to see him, was given an admin job and, in 1960, was given the chance to move to Gombe to start collecting data on chimps. Leakey also despatched Dian Fossey to Rwanda to study gorillas and Birute Galdikas to Borneo to observe orangutans; the three women were patronisingly known as Leakey's angels or Leakey's trimates, but each made significant contributions to primatology.

What did Leakey see in Goodall that made him choose her for Gombe? "I think he was amazed that a young girl straight out from England with no university degree knew so much," she says. "I'd spent hours in the Natural History Museum in London, and could answer most of his questions."

CONTINUED ON newsgdn5

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[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[News > Science > People in science]
Jane Goodall: 'My job is to give people hope'
It is half a century since she began her seminal work studying chimpanzees in Africa. But Jane Goodall says her work is far from finished
Stephen Moss
The Guardian, Wednesday 13 January 2010 Article history

CONTINUED FROM newsgdn4

Goodall had planned to spend only a year in Africa but was there more than 30. She still has a home in Dar es Salaam, and makes the long trek to ­Gombe when she can. She learned her science in the field, but Leakey was keen for her to get academic training and, in the mid-60s, she did a PhD at Cambridge in ethology, the study of animal behaviour. She needed the qualification to counter critics who attacked her approach as unscientific and anthropomorphic – she gave the chimps she studied names, and prided herself on getting to know them as individuals.

"I was told at Cambridge I shouldn't have named the chimps and that they should have had numbers," she says. "I wasn't allowed to talk about them having personalities, and certainly not about them thinking or having ­emotions. But then I thought back to my childhood teacher who taught me that this wasn't true – my dog."

The scale of Goodall's observational data eventually silenced her critics. She was the first scientist to observe an animal, her favourite chimp David Greybeard, not just using a tool (a stem of grass poked into a termites' nest to dig out the insects) but fashioning it for that purpose. When she telegraphed a report of what she had seen to Leakey, he replied: "Ah! Now we must redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human."

We haven't quite accepted chimps as human, but the work showed that the distance from one to the other was far less than previously thought. In his introduction to a revised edition of Goodall's most famous book, In the Shadow of Man, the biologist Stephen Jay Gould called her work "one of the western world's great scientific achievements".

In 1964, she married the Dutch-born wildlife photographer Hugo van Lawick, and their son (also called Hugo, but known as Grub) was born three years later. In her books there are several sweet pictures of Grub growing up at Gombe, but the relationship of mother and son has not always been smooth. At one point he was engaged in commercial fishing, of which she as a committed vegetarian disapproved, but is now developing an eco-tourist project in Tanzania and they are getting on much better. Goodall and Van Lawick divorced in 1974 and she married Derek Bryceson, director of national parks in Tanzania, who died of cancer in 1980.

Is she one of those naturalists, as Fossey supposedly was in her dark ­final years, who prefers animals to ­people? "I'm not one of those people who says let me go and live with chimps for ever or dogs for ever," she says. "I certainly prefer a lot of animals to a lot of people, but then I prefer some people to some animals too."

And does she miss the chimps? "All the chimps I knew so well have gone now," she says sadly. "Fifi, the last of the real old-timers, died four years ago. It's not the same as it was." But she still enjoys returning to Gombe. "When I get up on to my peak where I sat for so long, I can get back into the skin I had and remember just what it felt like – the excitement of never quite knowing what you'd see and what you'd find."

Hope for Animals and Their World is published by Icon Books (£17.99). For more information see janegoodallhopeforanimals.com or janegoodall.org


[Environment > Climate change]
US cult of greed is now a global environmental threat
Suzanne Goldenberg US environment correspondent
The Guardian, Wednesday 13 January 2010 Article history

The average American consumes more than his or her weight in products each day, fuelling a global culture of excess that is emerging as the biggest threat to the planet, according to a report published today. In its annual report, Worldwatch Institute says the cult of consumption and greed could wipe out any gains from government action on climate change or a shift to a clean energy economy.

Erik Assadourian, the project director who led a team of 35 behind the report, said: "Until we recognise that our environmental problems, from climate change to deforestation to species loss, are driven by unsustainable habits, we will not be able to solve the ecological crises that threaten to wash over civilisation."

The world's population is burning through the planet's resources at a reckless rate, the US thinktank said. In the last decade, consumption of goods and services rose 28% to $30.5tn (£18.8bn).

The consumer culture is no longer a mostly American habit but is spreading across the planet. Over the last 50 years, excess has been adopted as a symbol of success in developing countries from Brazil to India to China, the report said. China this week overtook the US as the world's top car market. It is already the biggest producer of greenhouse gas emissions.

Such trends were not a natural consequence of economic growth, the report said, but the result of deliberate efforts by businesses to win over consumers. Products such as the hamburger – dismissed as an unwholesome food for the poor at the beginning of the 20th century – and bottled water are now commonplace.

The average western family spends more on their pet than is spent by a human in Bangladesh.

The report did note encouraging signs of a shift away from the high spend culture. It said school meals programmes marked greater efforts to encourage healthier eating habits among children. The younger generation was also more aware of their impact on the environment.

There has to be a wholesale transformation of values and attitudes, the report said. At current rates of consumption, the world needs to erect 24 wind turbines an hour to produce enough energy to replace fossil fuel.

"We've seen some encouraging efforts to combat the world's climate crisis in the past few years," said Assadourian. "But making policy and technology changes while keeping cultures centred on consumerism and growth can only go so far.

"If we don't shift our very culture there will be new crises we have to face. Ultimately, consumerism is not going to be viable as the world population grows by 2bn and as more countries grow in economic power."

In the preface to the report, Worldwatch Institute's president, Christopher Flavin, writes: "As the world struggles to recover from the most serious global economic crisis since the Great Depression, we have an unprecedented opportunity to turn away from consumerism. In the end, the human instinct for survival must triumph over the urge to consume at any cost."

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[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 13 January 2010 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2010.7
News
Bisphenol A link to heart disease confirmed
Second study supports an association between the chemical and cardiovascular problems.
Brendan Borrell

{{Bisphenol A, which is present in some plastic bottles, has been linked to heart problems.}
clix/stock.xchng}

Scientists have once again found that people with higher levels of bisphenol A (BPA) in their urine are more likely to have heart disease than those with lower urinary BPA levels.

Used to make some plastic drinks bottles and the inner coatings of food cans, BPA can mimic the effects of oestrogen and has been associated with a number of conditions in animal studies, including low sperm count, prostate cancer and fetal developmental problems. In 2008, researchers first linked BPA to diabetes and heart disease in humans¹, but industry lobby groups such as the American Chemistry Council in Arlington, Virginia, have vigorously disputed those findings.

Now, the same researchers are back with a second report in PLoS ONE², which uses an independent data set to come up with broadly similar, if weaker, results. "It's only the second data set from a big population to be released," says lead author David Melzer of the Peninsula Medical School at the University of Exeter, UK. "It shows that our first paper wasn't a statistical blip."

Divided opinion

Melzer and his co-authors analysed data from the 2005–06 US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey of 1,493 adults, who provided urine samples and completed questionnaires about their health. Higher concentrations of BPA in the subjects' urine were associated with cardiovascular disease, but not with diabetes or high levels of liver enzymes, which indicate liver damage. However, BPA concentrations were 30% lower in this survey than in the 2003–04 survey used in the team's previous study, although when the two samples were pooled, diabetes and liver-enzyme associations remained statistically significant. Based on the data, a 60-year-old man with the lowest levels of BPA in the survey had about a 7.2% chance of developing cardiovascular disease whereas a similar subject with levels three times higher faced about a 10.2% risk.

The results add to a limited number of human studies on the effects of BPA, but are unlikely to bring together the two sides of the highly charged debate on the chemical's safety. Toxicologist Frederick vom Saal of the University of Missouri in Columbia, a long-time critic of the regulations governing the use of BPA, says that identifying such an association from epidemiological data is alarming. "The important issue is there have got to be 100 plus factors involved in any one of these diseases, and you are looking at one chemical, one time in a spot urine collection, and it's popping up as a significant variable," he says, "That's impressive because that's something you can do something about."

But Steven Hentges of the American Chemical Council says that the fact that some of the team's original results were not independently supported raises more questions than it answers. "The weight of scientific evidence continues to support the view that BPA is not a health concern," he says. "If you think that this study raises a hypothesis – fair enough – but the fact that they have not been able to replicate most of what they reported before is very telling."

Missing mechanism

Indeed, other scientists agree that what is still missing from the research is a demonstration of the mechanism of action. "Association studies show something really is going on, but getting to a definite mechanism of cause and effect is what we can add with animal studies," says Scott Belcher of the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, who has begun a series of studies on mice and rats funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

Scientists have long known that oestrogen has the potential to affect heart function through the oestrogen beta receptor, and Belcher is looking at how BPA affects calcium levels, which control heart contractions. His early results show that BPA, like oestrogen, causes an irregular heartbeat in female rats, which could increase the risk of a heart attack. Belcher is planning further studies in rodents to look directly at the risks of heart attack, obesity and changes in the cardiovascular system.

The policy on BPA in the United States seems to be caught in a loop. The Food and Drug Administration has delayed a promised 'update' on its position that the chemical is safe. "We'll be making an announcement soon," says agency spokeswoman Meghan Scott, although she was unable to be more specific about the timing of the announcement.

References
1. Lang, I. A. et al. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 300, 1303-1310 (2008).
2.Melzer, D. et al. PLoS ONE 5, e8673 (2010).


[naturenews]
Published online 13 January 2010 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2010.8
News
Parasitic larva ditches doomed host
A cunning insect detects when its host is under threat from predators to make a timely escape.
Lucas Laursen

Attack by predators prompts Endaphis fugitiva to emerge from its host.Muratori et alA recently discovered fly, Endaphis fugitiva, may be the first known parasitic insect that is able to escape a host that is under attack from predators. When researchers injured the fly's host — called the banana aphid — or let brown lacewings attack the aphids, the fly larvae broke out of the aphid's body (see video).

Many animals change the niche they occupy in an ecosystem during their development — a process called heterokairy. In some cases, animals can respond to environmental factors by adjusting the time at which heterokairy starts. Frogs' eggs, for example, can hatch early if they come under attack from leeches, wasps or snakes. But E. fugitiva, a 'parasitoid' that kills its host when it leaves, may be the first such insect that can tell when its host is about to be overwhelmed by a predator, says Frédéric Muratori, a behavioural ecologist at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium. Muratori and his colleagues reveal their results in a study¹ published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B today.

Whereas E. fugitiva larvae that abandoned their aphid hosts grew to about the same adult fly size as those that grew in healthy hosts that were not attacked, Muratori and his colleagues report that the early escapers spent slightly longer in the vulnerable stage of pupation than other larvae.

"I think the main issue that comes out of this is that organisms are willing to sacrifice some minor fitness in order to survive," says parasitoid ecologist Jeffrey Harvey of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology in Heteren, who was not involved in the study but peer-reviewed the work.

The extra danger of the prolonged pupal stage may be why the fly normally stays inside its host. Harvey explains that in most parasites he's worked with, it's "game, set and match" if the host is eaten by a predator, as both parasitoid and host will die. But in this case, he says, "When the jaws of a predator clamp around the host, the fly larva detects that and pops its way out."

Stay or go?

The ability of E. fugitiva larvae to shift niches adaptively may help them to avoid being killed along with their host, but it comes at the cost of having to devote resources to detecting and avoiding threats, write Muratori and his co-authors. The researchers speculate that the larvae detect their host's imminent demise either by sensing chemical cues, such as stress factors in the aphid's blood-like 'haemolymph', or by perceiving the mechanical pressure of a predator's attack on the aphid.

Muratori began looking at this particular fly parasitoid while working for the United States Department of Agriculture in Hawaii, where entomologists use organisms similar to E. fugitiva to biologically control foreign pests such as aphids. Parasitoids, unlike true parasites, spend some stages of their lives inside their hosts but other stages are completed as free-living organisms outside the host. In the case of E. fugitiva, the larvae are born on leaves, then identify nearby vacant host aphids and climb inside, via the joint between the aphid's leg and its body. After growing by eating the aphid's body tissue, they emerge and go through a pupal stage in the soil while they metamorphose into flies.

Muratori would like to repeat the experiment with other parasitoids in which multiple individuals occupy a host's body to learn if any stressors prompt just a few of them to escape and to understand at what point individual larvae decide to leave.

To understand the trade-offs between the fly larvae hanging on or abandoning ship, Harvey suggests that the researchers could also compare the behaviour of larvae inside host aphids that are at a high risk of predation — such as those on exposed leaves — with those that are more hidden away. "We don't know the mortality risk of the larvae outside of the host," Muratori agrees. "This is a really key question."

References
1. Muratori, F. B., Borlee, S. & Messing, R. H. Proc. R. Soc. B advance online publication doi:10.1098/rspb.2009.2029 (2010).

news20100113nn2

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 12 January 2010 | Nature 463, 142-143 (2010) | doi:10.1038/463142a
News
Publish or perish in China
The pressure to rack up publications in high-impact journals could encourage misconduct, some say.
Jane Qiu

Under pressure: one-third of researchers surveyed in China admit to plagiarism, falsification or fabrication of data.K. Brofsky/GettyThe latest in a string of high-profile academic fraud cases in China underscores the problems of an academic-evaluation system that places disproportionate emphasis on publications, critics say. Editors at the UK-based journal Acta Crystallographica Section E last month retracted 70 published crystal structures that they allege are fabrications by researchers at Jinggangshan University in Jiangxi province. Further retractions, the editors say, are likely.

Chinese universities often award cash prizes, housing benefits or other perks on the basis of high-profile publications, and the pressure to publish seems to be growing. A new study from Wuhan University, for instance, estimates that the market for dubious science-publishing activities, such as ghostwriting papers on nonexistent research, was of the order of 1 billion renminbi (US$150 million) in 2009 — five times the amount in 2007. In other studies, one in three researchers surveyed at major universities and research institutions admitted to committing plagiarism, falsification or fabrication of data.

"The extent of the misconduct is disturbing," says Nicholas Steneck, director of the Research Ethics and Integrity Program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "It highlights the challenges China faces as it struggles to rapidly improve the research capacity of a very large system — with significant variations in quality — to be a world-class player in science."

Two weeks ago, reacting to the retractions of the crystallography papers, Jinggangshang University fired the correspondent authors, Zhong Hua and Liu Tao. It is unclear whether their co-authors, who include researchers from other institutions in China, will also be investigated.

{“Counting the number of publications becomes the norm.”}

The journal's editors say that the discrepancies came to light during tests of software designed to flag possible errors and unusual chemical features, such as abnormal distances between atoms. The software identified a large number of crystal structures that didn't make sense chemically; further checking, the editors say, suggests that the authors simply changed one or more atoms of an existing compound of known structure, then presented that structure as new. Zhong and Liu could not be reached for comment.

Editors at the journal are now checking the authenticity of other published crystal structures, including all submissions from Jinggangshan University.

Half of the 200,000-odd crystal structures published by the journal during the past five years have come from China. William Harrison, a chemist at the University of Aberdeen, UK, who is one of three section editors for the journal, would not discuss the ongoing investigation but says that the generation of large numbers of structures by one group would not necessarily raise questions, because diffractometers can easily collect a couple of data sets a day. "In terms of papers submitted to Acta E, the vast majority coming from China are correctly determined structures, and they make a valuable contribution to science," he says.

Nevertheless, the Wuhan University study suggests that misconduct could be widespread in many fields. The team, led by computer scientist Shen Yang, used website analyses and onsite investigations to identify a wide range of dubious publishing activities. These include ghostwriting theses and academic papers on fictional research, bypassing peer-review for payment, and forging copies of legitimate Chinese or international journals.

The researchers analysed the most popular 800 websites involved in such activities — which together rack up 210,000 hits a day — and found that the cost of each transaction is typically 600–12,000 renminbi. Three-quarters of the demand comes from universities and institutions, says Shen. "There is a massive production chain for the entire publishing process," he says.

Concerned by such trends, China's science ministry commissioned a survey of researchers, the results of which remain under wraps. However, several sources revealed to Nature that roughly one-third of more than 6,000 surveyed across six top institutions admitted to plagiarism, falsification or fabrication. Many blamed the culture of jigong jinli — seeking quick success and short-term gain — as the top reason for such practices, says Zeng Guopin, director of the Institute of Science Technology and Society at Tsinghua University in Beijing who was involved in running the survey.

The second most-cited cause is bureaucratic interference in academic activities in China. Most academic evaluation — from staff employment and job promotion to funding allocation — is carried out by bureaucrats who are not experts in the field in question, says Fang Shimin, a US-trained biochemist who runs a website called 'New Threads' that exposes research misconduct in China. "When that happens, counting the number of publications, rather than assessing the quality of research, becomes the norm of evaluation," he says.

Cao Nanyan, a colleague of Zeng's at Tsinghua, conducted a similar survey commissioned by the Beijing municipality, which surveyed 2,000 researchers from 10 universities and research institutions. It, too, found that roughly one-third of respondents admitted to illegitimate practices.

To critics such as Rao Yi, dean of the life-science school at Peking University in Beijing, the lack of severe sanctions for fraudsters, even in high-profile cases, also contributes to rampant academic fraud. Many researchers criticize the fact that Chen Jin, a former researcher at Shanghai Jiao Tong University who is accused of falsely claiming to have developed a series of digital signal-processing chips, was fired with no other repercussions. Meanwhile, others involved in the scandal have gone unpunished.

"You send out a very wrong signal when such high-profile cases are not dealt with properly," says Rao.

news20100113nn3

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 12 January 2010 | Nature 463, 145 (2010) | doi:10.1038/463145a
News
Trace that metal
Collaboration launches effort to track marine nutrients.
Mark Schrope

A project sampler takes the plunge.G. CutterOcean life, like human life, needs trace metals to stay healthy, and in some cases even to survive. But although the cycles and concentrations of the ocean's superstar nutrients — phosphorus and nitrates — are relatively well understood, a clear global view of trace metals has remained elusive.

Next month, however, an international team will formally launch a major research programme to obtain measurements of trace metals throughout the world's oceans. Potential pay-offs range from improved understanding of the role of ocean plankton in regulating climate change, to better studies of the geological history of the oceans.

"We're completely missing information about iron and other metals which are really important to life, and that renders our current understanding of the nutrient system incomplete," says the project's steering committee co-chair Gideon Henderson, a geochemist at the University of Oxford, UK.

The programme, called GEOTRACES, involves more than 30 countries and will span the next decade. More than a dozen cruises are planned — the first returned to port on 9 January after sampling in the Indian Ocean — and at least ten more are being discussed. All told, the programme will cost US$100 million to $200 million.

GEOTRACES' primary mission is to analyse water samples from various depths, recording levels of trace elements such as iron and cobalt that are hard to measure because the sampling apparatus must be carefully cleaned to avoid contamination. The data should allow investigators to model the sources and cycles of these elements in comparable detail to the current understanding of phosphorus and nitrates. That, in turn, should help to improve the Earth-systems models being developed for the next assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2014.

Iron, for instance, is a well-studied trace element because it is involved in regulating phytoplankton production, which anchors the oceanic carbon cycle. But even so, researchers aren't sure of the iron's main sources or the key areas where it upwells from the deep sea. And less-studied elements such as zinc and cobalt could be equally important in some cases in regulating plankton growth (M. A. Saito et al. Limnol. Oceanogr. 53, 276–290; 2008).

Another project focus is the isotopes of trace metals, which can aid studies of past climates and ocean currents. For instance, changes in neodymium-isotope levels and in the ratio between the isotopes of protactinium and thorium over time offer independent measures of the historical strength of deep-ocean currents, which are thought to selectively deplete or enhance particular isotopes in sediments.

So far, the records of these 'proxies' seem to agree in what they say about flows during some periods, such as over the past 12,000 years, but they disagree about certain events before then, during the last ice age. "The fact is, we could argue for years, but we need more data to resolve the argument," says steering committee co-chair Robert Anderson of Columbia University in New York City.

Geochemist Wallace Broecker of Columbia University, who isn't involved in GEOTRACES, calls it "a very healthy programme". Broecker, who led a landmark sampling programme in the 1960s and '70s focusing on the major nutrients, adds: "If they don't know what's really going on today, then of course you're going to make big mistakes in how you read the palaeo records."

Although trace metals can be essential for marine life, at high levels metals such as cadmium and copper can be lethal, and others including lead and mercury can become concentrated in ocean food chains.

And the GEOTRACES data could be used to address various environmental questions, including how ongoing changes such as the acidification of the oceans might affect trace-element cycling. "We need to understand the baseline biogeochemical cycles," says Anderson, "before we can say anything meaningful about how global change is going to affect them."

news20100113bcc

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

[Science & Environment]
Page last updated at 18:25 GMT, Tuesday, 12 January 2010
By Mark Kinver
Science and environment reporter, BBC News
Puffins' winter odyssey revealed
Puffins from the North Sea's largest breeding colony venture much further afield during the winter than previously thought, a study has shown.

More than 75% of the seabirds fitted with "geolocator" tags headed for the open waters of the Atlantic Ocean, rather than staying in the North Sea.

Until now, very little was known about where puffins went during the winter as the birds spent the entire time at sea.

The findings by British researchers appear in the journal Marine Biology.

Writing in the journal, a team of researchers from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology said: "The finding that more than three-quarters of the birds made a major excursion into the Atlantic was entirely unexpected."

They added it challenged the previous view that puffin populations on the east and west of Britain remained separate from each other, during both the breeding season and during the winter.

"What we were completely unprepared for was that they made a one-to-three-month trip into the Atlantic and then came back to the North Sea," said lead author Mike Harris.

He said the development of geolocators - small location loggers that weigh 1.5g, which are fitted to birds' legs - allowed the team to track the puffins movements for the first time.

"One of the big gaps in seabird biology is what do they do during the winter," Professor Harris explained.

"So, it's fantastic when all of these problems that you thought you would never solve, but then a technology appears that allows us to get somewhere at last.

"Up until now, the devices that have been available to fit on birds have been too heavy for puffins, which only weigh about 400g.

"So once these (geolocator) tags became available and were working well, the puffin was an obvious choice to use them on."

Tagging puffins is tricky - Richard Bevan shows the BBC's Rebecca Morelle that you have to dodge tern attacks and puffin pecks to fit the devices

During the 2007 breeding season, the team fitted 50 birds on the Isle of May, off the east coast of Scotland, with geolocators.

The loggers work by measuring light levels, recording when dawn and dusk occurs each day.

With this data, researchers can calculate day length, when midday occurs, and the daily longitudinal and latitudinal co-ordinates for the individual bird.

The researchers retrieved 14 devices during the following spring, and were able to download data from 13 of the tags.

Migration mystery

Professor Harris, who has been studying puffins for 37 years, said that it was too early to suggest why the puffins were making the extended journey to the Atlantic Ocean.

{{PUFFINS IN DETAIL}
> Lifespan: more than 30 years
> Females lay just one egg a year
> Puffins live in metre-long burrows
> Both parents incubate the egg
>Chicks are mainly fed sandeels
>They reach sexual maturity in one year, but tend not to breed until year five or six}

"At the moment, we are trying to get more information on what they eat," he told BBC News.

"We do not really know what species of fish or crustacea they eat during the winter; the suggestion is that they eat less fish and more plankton.

"The problem has been that until we know where they go, we cannot know what they are eating and whether there has been a change in [food availability].

Adverse conditions that limited the birds' access to food was one hypothesis for why there was a dramatic fall in the population of North Sea puffins between 2003 and 2008.

Puffin numbers on the Isle of May had been increasing for half a century, with the population reaching about 69,300 pairs in 2003.

Yet a survey in 2008 recorded 41,000 pairs, less than half of the 100,000 pairs that would be expected if the previous rate of increase had continued.

A similar decline in puffin numbers has also been recorded on the Farne Islands off the Northumberland coast, England's largest breeding colony of the seabirds.

A survey in 2008 recorded just 36,500 puffins, down from a record high of 55,674 in 2003.

Female puffins only lay one egg a year, so a high mortality rate among adults across a few years can quickly destabilise the population.


{Geolocators have offered biologists an insight to where puffins go in the winter}

Professor Harris said that the population crash was unexpected.

"Puffins normally survive very well, and suddenly we had two years when they did not," he said.

Over the winter, the birds undergo their main moult in which they lose their wing feathers, making them flightless and vulnerable to adverse conditions, such as storms or poor food supplies.

Researchers are not sure how long puffins are left flightless, so the CEH team had hoped that a device on the tag that measured when the birds' feet were in seawater would provide an insight.

"What we didn't realise then but now know is that when puffins sleep they often tuck their feet into their plumage," Professor Harris revealed.

This behaviour meant that the tag dried out, recording an "in flight" reading when the bird in fact was still on the water.

"So we succeeded in one of our objectives, which was to find out where the puffins were going, but we failed on the other, which was to find out when the birds were flightless."

The team plan to continue fitting geolocators on puffins over the coming years, enabling them to build a better picture of the behaviour and movements of the birds during the winter months.


[Science & Environment]
Page last updated at 17:56 GMT, Tuesday, 12 January 2010
Nasa check for 'unlikely' survival of Mars lander
Nasa's Mars Odyssey orbiter is set to listen for possible radio transmissions from the Phoenix Mars lander, to check if it has survived the Martian winter.

The agency said that communication from the lander was "extremely unlikely".

Phoenix's last communication was on 2 November 2008, after it completed its study of an arctic Martian site.

Since then, this landing site has gone through autumn, winter and part of spring, and Phoenix was not designed to survive such temperature extremes.

Its electronics are likely to have broken up as temperatures plummeted.

But, just in case, Odyssey will pass over the Phoenix landing site approximately 10 times each day during three consecutive days of listening, beginning on 18 January.

It will undertake two longer "listening campaigns" in February and March.

Chad Edwards, chief telecommunications engineer for the Mars Exploration Programme at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, US, said: "If Phoenix is transmitting, Odyssey will hear it.

"We will perform a sufficient number of contact attempts that if we don't detect a transmission from Phoenix, we can have a high degree of confidence that the lander is not active."

Dr Tom Pike from the UK's Imperial College, in London, led the development of Phoenix's microscopy station, one of the only instruments that will still be functional if the lander comes back to life.

He told BBC News that the major concern was that the batteries would "not have held out through the winter".

Dr Pike explained that temperatures had plummeted as low as minus 120C during the winter - cold enough to form a carbon dioxide snow.

"The batteries were not designed to withstand those temperatures," he said. "I think it's highly unlikely they have survived, and I think that's going to be the break point.

"If it does come back up, I will be very surprised - very pleasantly surprised. I think we will beg, steal or borrow the money to get back out to Arizona, into mission control and back into our old seats to get the show on the road again."

The solar-powered Phoenix landed in May 2008, in the middle of the Martian summer, when the Sun never set at its polar landing site.

During its ground operations, the robot dug up and tested the Martian soil to see whether it had ever been capable of supporting life.

Probably its biggest achievement was in becoming the first Mars mission to "touch water" in the form of the ice it found just below the topsoil.

news20100113cnn1

[Top stories] from [CNN.com]

[World]
January 13, 2010 -- Updated 1035 GMT (1835 HKT)
Haitians wait for daylight for full look at quake devastation

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
> Authorities bracing for major casualties after Haiti earthquake
> The 7.0-magnitude quake struck near capital Port-au-Prince shortly before 5 p.m. Tuesday
> No major damage reported at Haiti airport; U.S. to start sending aid on Wednesday
> Twitter, YouTube being used to report aftermath of quake

(CNN) -- After the earth shook more violently in Haiti than it has in two centuries, its citizens hunkered down for the night, awaiting daylight Wednesday to ascertain the full scope of death and devastation.

The United States and global humanitarian agencies said they would to begin administering aid on Wednesday amid fears that impoverished Haiti, already afflicted with human misery, was facing nothing short of a catastrophe.

No estimate of the dead and wounded was given Tuesday evening, but the U.S. State Department had been told to expect "serious loss of life," spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters in Washington.

"The only thing I can do now is pray and hope for the best," the Haitian ambassador to the United States, Raymond Joseph, told CNN.

The grim list of Tuesday's destruction included the U.N. peacekeeper compound, a five-story building where about 250 people work every day.

Three Jordanian peacekeepers died and an additional 21 were injured, according to the state-run Petra News Agency.

Limited communications hampered reports of casualties and destruction. But the quake had reportedly brought down The Hotel Montana, popular with foreigners visiting Port-au-Prince. French Minister of Cooperation Alain Joyandet expressed concern Wednesday for the approximately 200 French tourists staying there.

Night fell a few hours after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Tuesday, reducing buildings as grand as the National Palace to rubble and knocking down phone and power lines.

The wounded, white with dust, filled the streets. Women clutched their babies, desperate to find help. Others stretched their arms skyward, calling out Jesus' name.

Communication with people in Haiti was, at best, sketchy and achieved mainly through social networking sites such as Twitter and YouTube and via Internet phone.

Are you there? Submit an iReport

"Everybody is camping in the streets of Port-au-Prince sleeping under the stars to wake up from an awful nightmare," photographer Frederic Dupoux wrote in a Twitter post early Wednesday.

"It's really ugly, just like in a bad dream," he had written earlier. "People need help, get out and help!"

The faithful prayed late into the evening -- for relief, for mercy, for safety -- as at least 28 aftershocks of magnitude of 4.0 or greater rumbled across the country. The quake was centered about 10 kilometers (six miles) underground, a depth that can produce severe shaking, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

With darkness, an uneasy quiet descended.

"The singing and praying I was hearing earlier has died down," Richard Morse, hotel manager at the Oloffson Hotel in the capital, Port-au-Prince, wrote in a Twitter post.

"No helicopters. No sound of ambulances. ... When my batteries die, I will no longer be able to communicate. Looks like it's going to be a long night."

Several witnesses reported heavy damage and bodies in the streets of the congested capital, where concrete-block homes line the steep hillsides leading inland from the city's waterfront.

Yvonne Trimble, who has worked as a missionary in Haiti for more than 30 years, said the quake rattled the walls of her three-story home. She sat frozen in her chair as glasses crashed to the floor from her china cabinet, she said in a post to iReport, the CNN Web site that allows people to submit pictures and videos.

"I have been a missionary since 1975 and have been through coup d'etats, revolution, civil war and never been so terrified in my life," she said.

The quake hit shortly before 5 p.m., and was centered about 15 km (10 miles) southwest of Port-au-Prince, the USGS reported. It could be felt strongly in eastern Cuba, more than 200 miles away, and resulted in a tsunami watch being posted for Haiti and parts of Cuba, the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas, but the watch was canceled about an hour after the quake.

American Airlines Flight 1908 took off from Port-au-Prince shortly after the quake with a fraction of its passengers, many people choosing to stay behind. Those who arrived in Miami, Florida, on Tuesday night described fellow passengers as being in a state of shock and an airport that was badly "cracked up."

However, the State Department's Crowley said the U.S. Embassy reported that the airport was in good enough shape for the United States to start sending teams and assistance Wednesday.

"We have some assets ready to go," Crowley said.

The U.N. World Food Programme also planned to send a plane with 87 metric tons of high-energy biscuits, said spokeswoman Bettina Luescher in New York. That's enough to feed 30,000 people for a week.

The agency regularly feeds more than 1 million people in Haiti and has food stored in warehouses. The WFP feared looting because people are desperate, Luescher said.

At the United Nations, a top official said "a large number" from the U.N. peacekeeping mission, MINUSTAH, were unaccounted for after the headquarters of the 9,000-member force suffered serious damage in the quake. The world body "is still in the process of gathering information on the extent of the damage and the status of U.N. personnel," said Alain Le Roy, the U.N. undersecretary-general for peacekeeping operations.

The Brazilian led-mission includes about 2,000 police and nearly 500 civilians.

Mike Godfrey, an American contractor working for the U.S. Agency for International Development, said "a huge plume of dust and smoke rose up over the city" within minutes of the quake -- "a blanket that completely covered the city and obscured it for about 20 minutes until the atmosphere dissipated the dust."

Witnesses reported buildings collapsed throughout Port-au-Prince, including the president's residence and century-old homes nearby, but President Rene Preval was safe, Joseph said. An official from Preval's government said houses had crumbled "on the right side of the street and the left side of the street."

"He said it is a catastrophe of major proportions," Joseph said.

In the Port-au-Prince suburb of Delmas, Bernice Robertson said there was little visible damage, but water service was out, and "Power is out as far as I can see," she told CNN via e-mail. Police were trying to keep order and direct traffic "as panic broke out," she wrote.

Frank Williams, the Haitian director of the relief agency World Vision International, said the quake left people "pretty much screaming" all across Port-au-Prince. He said the agency's building in Petionville, one of the city's suburbs, shook for about 35 seconds, "and portions of things on the building fell off."

"None of our staff were injured, but lots of walls are falling down," Williams said. "Many of our staff have tried to leave, but were unsuccessful because the walls from buildings and private residences are falling into the streets, so that it has pretty much blocked significantly most of the traffic."

Teams from Doctors Without Borders, or Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), on the ground said they witnessed significant damage to the organization's medical facilities, injuries to patients and staff, and an influx of wounded toward hospitals in the capital.

MSF said its Trinite trauma center hospital, a 60-bed structure and one of the only free-of-charge surgical facilities in Port-au-Prince, was seriously damaged by the quake.

Outside the capital, several people were hurt when they rushed out of a school in the southwestern city of Les Cayes, said the Rev. Kesner Ajax, the school's executive director. Two homes in the area collapsed and the top of a church collapsed in a nearby town, he said, but he did not know of any fatalities.

Cayes is about 225 kilometers (140 miles) southwest of Port-au-Prince.

{{It felt like our whole house was balancing on a beach ball.}
--Luke Renner, American staying in Haiti}

Many of the concrete-block homes in Port-au-Prince are built "helter-skelter all over the place," Joseph said. That construction is "a recipe for disaster" when an earthquake strikes, said Kate Hutton, a seismologist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In Washington, President Obama said the U.S. government would "stand ready to assist the people of Haiti."

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters that Washington is offering "our full assistance" to Haiti, "And our prayers are with the people who have suffered, their families and their loved ones."

The deputy chief of the U.S. mission in Haiti, David Lindwall, told Clinton that he saw "significant damage" from the quake and said U.S. officials there expect "serious loss of life," Crowley said.

The disaster is the latest to befall the country of about 9 million people, roughly the size of Maryland, which is the poorest in the Western hemisphere and among the poorest in the world.

Eighty percent of Haiti's population lives under the poverty line, according to the CIA World Factbook.

With people stripping trees for fuel and to clear land for agriculture, the mountainous countryside has been heavily deforested. That has led to severe erosion and left Haitians vulnerable to massive landslides when heavy rains fall.

CONTINUED ON newscnn2

news20100113cnn2

[Top stories] from [CNN.com]

[World]
January 13, 2010 -- Updated 1035 GMT (1835 HKT)
Haitians wait for daylight for full look at quake devastation

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
> Authorities bracing for major casualties after Haiti earthquake
> The 7.0-magnitude quake struck near capital Port-au-Prince shortly before 5 p.m. Tuesday
> No major damage reported at Haiti airport; U.S. to start sending aid on Wednesday
> Twitter, YouTube being used to report aftermath of quake

CONTINUED FROM newscnn1

Carel Pedre, a radio and television host, was driving home from work when the earth began convulsing. He thought he had been struck by another vehicle, until he saw people all around him falling to the ground.

Pedre's biggest fear now is that his homeland is not equipped to deal with a disaster of this magnitude.

He recalled a school collapse in November 2008 that killed more than 90 people -- a disaster authorities blamed on poor construction. That was one school, and the response was inadequate and tardy, he said.

Now, he said, it's every building on the block.


[Tech]
By Jeanne Meserve and Mike M. Ahlers, CNN
January 13, 2010 -- Updated 1106 GMT (1906 HKT)
Google reports China-based attack, says pullout possible

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
> Google says an attack originating from China targeted its infrastructure
> The attack occurred last month and targeted Chinese human rights activists, the company said
> Google says 20 other companies were also targeted

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Google said Tuesday the company and at least 20 others were victims of a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack" originating in China in mid-December, evidently to gain access to the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

"Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective," according to a statement by David Drummond, senior vice president of corporate development and chief legal officer for Google, operator of the most popular Internet search engine.

Drummond said that as a result of the attacks, Google has decided it is no longer willing to consider censorship of its Google site in China and may have to shut down its site and its offices in that nation.

"These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered -- combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the Web -- have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China," Drummond wrote.

"We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.

"We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China," Drummond's statement reads.

A Google spokesman said the targeted human rights activists were in the United States, Europe and China.

Efforts by CNN to reach the Chinese Embassy in Washington Tuesday evening were not successful.

Google, perhaps best known for its search engine, also provides other computer services, including e-mail, online mapping and social networking.