news20090831lat

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

[World > Asia]
Japanese voters reject longtime ruling party
The untested Democratic Party of Japan defeats the Liberal Democrats on a wave of public anger over high unemployment and fraying social services.
By John M. Glionna and Yuriko Nagano
August 31, 2009

Reporting from Tokyo and Seoul - Japanese voters on Sunday handed a humiliating defeat to the Liberal Democratic Party after its half-century of nearly unbroken rule, opting for an untested opposition party that pledged to revive the nation's ailing economy.

Signaling frustration over a declining quality of life, a record-high unemployment rate, unraveling social services and political scandals, voters rebuked Prime Minister Taro Aso and a party that had dominated national politics here since the Eisenhower administration.

In landslide numbers, they turned to Democratic Party of Japan leader Yukio Hatoyama, the wealthy grandson of a former prime minister, who left the Liberal Democratic Party and in 1996 helped found a now-thriving opposition movement. His party won 308 seats in parliament's 480-member lower house, according to the final tally reported by Japanese news media, assuring that he will be elected prime minister in the coming weeks.

The Kyodo News Agency reported that Hatoyama, 62, has begun talks early today on forming a new government.

Still, questions remain about how Hatoyama and his Democratic Party will fulfill their campaign promises in the face of an entrenched and often unwieldy bureaucracy and a stagnant economy. The strength of the party's mandate also is unclear, despite the numbers -- some experts believe that many voters were more intent on defeating the Liberal Democrats than putting the opposition party in power.

Despite Hatoyama's campaign assertions that his government would reexamine Japan's policies toward the United States, few expected any major changes between the two allies.

In a speech carried nationwide, Hatoyama said he would form a coalition government with the Social Democratic Party and People's New Party, acknowledging that he rode a sentiment of public anger against the Liberal Democrats.

"We have felt this great need to change things to make life better for the public," he said. "We have been vowing to change the government in this election. It feels very likely that that is the situation that is unraveling."

In a hastily called news conference this afternoon, Aso announced his resignation as party leader. Late Sunday, the prime minister had taken responsibility for the LDP's defeat. "The outcome of this election has been a very tough one. I am taking what the Japanese public is saying sincerely," he said.

Throughout the campaign, the Democratic Party of Japan, or DPJ, echoed the promise of change that propelled Barack Obama last year to the U.S. presidency. Although experts say there was jubilation among many voters Sunday, they believed that those high spirits were tempered.

"People feel better and lighter because the LDP is gone, but there is not the same jubilation felt in America after Obama's election," said Masaru Tamamoto, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute. "Obama told America where he was going. But the Democratic Party really hasn't told us where it and we are going."

The Democratic Party's campaign platform pledged to wrest control of government from bureaucrats who it says have failed to fix the nation's ailing pension system. Hatoyama said he would form a National Strategy Bureau comprising both the public and private sector to advise the government.

The platform included child allowances for middle-class families and assistance for struggling farmers. The party promised to bolster the economy, which is suffering its worst recession in six decades and in July saw a record 5.7% jobless rate.

In the past, Hatoyama has also emphasized that Japan must develop a more "independent" stance from the U.S. But as prime minister, many believe, he will not immediately risk upsetting the status quo with his nation's most crucial security ally.

"He's not going to rupture the relationship, but I do think he will try to have a somewhat more Asia-centered than U.S.-centered policy," said Ellis Krauss, a professor of Japanese politics and policymaking at UC San Diego.

One stumbling block will be Japan's role refueling U.S. ships in the Indian Ocean carrying war materiel to Afghanistan, a mission Hatoyama opposes.

"He's going to pretty quickly confront some realities of Japan's situation and find it might be a little difficult at times," Krauss said. "I mean, he's in a hard place. This isn't a great way to start off a relationship with the Obama administration."

Under Hatoyama, Japan will probably shift toward friendlier relations with China, Krauss said.

The Democratic Party leader has already indicated that, unlike some past prime ministers, Hatoyama will not visit the Yasukuni war shrine where many of the nation's veterans are enshrined -- including convicted war criminals. Such visits have angered Japan's Asian neighbors.

"All the bad memory stuff will go away," Krauss said. "It will be an immediate improvement."

The untested Democratic Party of Japan defeats the Liberal Democrats on a wave of public anger over high unemployment and fraying social services.

This is the first election in which the Democrats represented a viable alternative to the ruling party, which has become isolated from voters after a series of scandals and leadership gaffes by Aso.

Voters were derisive of Aso's often stumbling use of the language. His finance minister was forced to resign this year after he appeared drunk in public at a conference in Rome.

Sunday's results represent stinging defeats to politicians, including at least one former prime minister, unaccustomed to losing elections.

One was Liberal Democrat Toshiki Kaifu, who served as prime minister from 1989 to 1991. At 78, he lost his bid for a 17th term in parliament.

Yoshio Tezuka was one benefactor of the power shift. He regained a seat in Tokyo's 5th District that he had lost to a Liberal Democratic opponent in 2005 after two terms in office.

Tezuka, 42, said before Sunday that he sensed change was in the air. Still, he wasn't taking any chances. Forsaking the election vans that candidates often use to cover more ground, broadcasting their message to voters via loudspeakers, Tezuka campaigned on foot between train stations to meet voters up close.

"Japan has never gone through a real political power shift. I think voters are feeling the possibility of the regime change being real," he said. "I feel a lot of sense of anticipation that may come from something like that. I've never gotten this much response in my career as a politician."

Still, many voters struggled in their choice.

"I gave quite a lot of thought about whether to vote for the LDP or the DPJ candidate," said homemaker Fumie Nakasone, 56, on Friday as she cast an early ballot. "I don't think the LDP has given enough effort [to serve the public] in the last few years."

Not everyone fed up with the Liberal Democrats chose the Democratic Party. "I don't think we can really rely on the DPJ. I don't think their policy issues are on the right track," said student Masayuki Sato, 22. "They also don't have the track record to prove they can lead."

Even in defeat the Liberal Democrats kept some loyalists.

"I've always voted for the LDP," said Tazuko Sakamoto, 75. "I think they have taken care of me well enough. Mr. Hatoyama is promising many big things, but I wonder if he will be able to actually deliver those promises. That's questionable."

news20090831nyt

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

[Asia Pacific]
With Bold Stand, Japan Opposition Wins a Landslide
By MARTIN FACKLER
Published: August 30, 2009

TOKYO — Japan’s voters cast out the Liberal Democratic Party for only the second time in postwar history on Sunday, handing a landslide victory to a party that campaigned on a promise to reverse a generation-long economic decline and to redefine Tokyo’s relationship with Washington.

Many Japanese saw the vote as the final blow to the island nation’s postwar order, which has been slowly unraveling since the economy collapsed in the early 1990s.

In the powerful lower house, the opposition Democrats virtually swapped places with the governing Liberal Democratic Party, winning 308 of the 480 seats, a 175 percent increase that gives them control of the chamber, according to the national broadcaster NHK. The incumbents took just 119 seats, about a third of their previous total. The remaining seats were won by smaller parties.

“This has been a revolutionary election,” Yukio Hatoyama, the party leader and presumptive new prime minister, told reporters. “The people have shown the courage to take politics into their own hands.”

Mr. Hatoyama, who is expected to assemble a government in two to three weeks, has spoken of the end of American-dominated globalization and of the need to reorient Japan toward Asia. His party’s campaign manifesto calls for an “equal partnership” with the United States and a “reconsidering” of the 50,000-strong American military presence here.

One change on the horizon may be the renegotiation of a deal with Washington to relocate the United States Marine Corps’ Futenma airfield, on the island of Okinawa. Many island residents want to evict the base altogether.

The Democrats, who opposed the American-led war in Iraq, have also said they may end the Japanese Navy’s refueling of American and allied warships in the Indian Ocean.

The White House issued a statement on Sunday saying it was “confident that the strong U.S.-Japan alliance and the close partnership between our two countries will continue to flourish” under the new government. “President Obama looks forward to working closely with the new Japanese prime minister on a broad range of global, regional and bilateral issues,” the statement said.

Political analysts expect Japan to remain a close American ally, but one that is more assertive and less willing to follow Washington’s lead automatically.

“This is what happens when you have a government in Japan that must be responsive to public opinion,” said Daniel C. Sneider, a researcher on East Asia at Stanford University. “It will end the habits from decades of a relationship in which Japan didn’t challenge the United States.”

At the same time, the Democrats want to improve relations with other Asian countries, including on the touchy issue of history. Analysts say the party seeks to reverse Japan’s growing isolation in the region under decades of right-wing Liberal Democratic rule.

Such changes are not likely to come quickly. Diplomatic analysts expect the Democrats to steer clear of security issues for the time being because they could prove too divisive for a party dependent on a broad ideological spectrum.

And some analysts have played down the rhetoric of Mr. Hatoyama, a bushy-haired former management professor, as a nod to his party’s left-leaning base rather than a firm pledge to alter dealings with the United States drastically. In recent interviews, Democratic leaders have insisted there will be no major changes in that relationship.

“It’s complete nonsense that a non-Liberal Democratic government will hurt U.S.-Japan relations,” said Tetsuro Fukuyama, a Democratic lawmaker who oversaw production of the campaign manifesto. “But there are many things left unchanged from the last 50 years that need to be re-examined.”

Analysts, however, saw the vote less as an embrace of the Democrats than a resounding rejection of the incumbents. The conservative Liberal Democrats, who with their precursors have held or shared power for 62 of the past 63 years, led Japan from bombed-out rubble to economic miracle, while keeping it firmly in Washington’s camp.

But the party has appeared increasingly exhausted and directionless, and Japan’s traditionally apolitical electorate, in a rare display of popular democratic muscle, firmly blamed it for the decline of this former economic superpower and its increasingly cloudy future.

“We have been trying to outgrow this old one-party system ever since the collapse of the Berlin Wall,” said Takeshi Sasaki, a political expert and former president of the University of Tokyo. “It took two decades, but we finally made it.”

Prime Minister Taro Aso told reporters that he would take responsibility for the defeat, and stepped down Monday as head of the party.

The exhilarating sense that Japan had reached a turning point drew long lines of voters to polling stations in Tokyo, where they braved darkening skies from an approaching typhoon. About 70 percent of eligible voters cast ballots, according to NHK, the highest turnout in nearly two decades.

“I want the Democratic Party to have a go at running the country,” said Akiko Tanaka, a 34-year-old nursing home care worker who voted at a junior high school in the Tokyo suburb of Sayama. “If we keep going like we’ve been, nothing will get better. We need a new government.”

A top priority for the new government will be simply maintaining the unity it achieved on Sunday. The largely untested Democrats, a broad coalition of former Socialists and Liberal Democrat defectors, hope to avoid the mistakes of the only previous non-Liberal Democratic government, in 1993, which collapsed in just 11 months because of infighting and defections.

That imperative virtually assures no sudden, radical departures in foreign policy. Rather, analysts expect the Democrats to focus at least initially on their more ambitious domestic agenda.

The party has pledged to change the postwar paradigm here as well, promising to ease growing social inequality by handing more money and social benefits directly to residents rather than to industry or other interest groups.

It has promised to strengthen the social safety net and raise the low birthrate by giving families cash handouts of $270 per month per child. And the party has said it will rein in the powerful central ministries in Tokyo, which have run postwar Japan on the Liberal Democrats’ behalf.

But even here, most people have not embraced the party’s platform with much enthusiasm, nor are they optimistic about the Democrats’ ability to solve looming problems like the growing government debt and a rapidly aging population.

To many voters, the most important fact of this election was that they finally had a choice.

“This vote is about making a system where parties that fail get kicked out,” said Yoshiyuki Kobayashi, 40, one of the white-collar corporate workers known here as salarymen. “We need to teach politicians to be nervous.”

news20090831wp

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

[Asia/Pacific]
Ruling Party Is Routed In Japan
Lagging Economy Cited for Vote Ending 54 Years of Dominance
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 31, 2009

TOKYO, Aug. 31 -- Breaking a half-century hammerlock of one-party rule in Japan, the opposition Democratic Party won a crushing election victory Sunday with pledges to revive the country's stalled economy and to steer a foreign-policy course less dependent on the United States.

But it was pent-up voter anger, not campaign promises, that halted 54 years of near-continuous dominance by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The party had become a profoundly unpopular, but deeply entrenched, governing force that so feared it would be swept from power that it had put off a national election for nearly three years.

In a record landslide on a rainy day, voters awarded 308 seats in the powerful 480-seat lower house of parliament to a slightly left-of-center opposition party formed by disaffected LDP veterans. It is led by Yukio Hatoyama, 62, a Stanford-trained engineer who will probably be chosen prime minister in mid-September.

"I believe all the people were feeling a great rage against the current government," Hatoyama said. "Everything starts now. We can finally do politics that the people are building their hopes on. My heart is too full for words."

The grand strategist behind the win was Ichiro Ozawa, a former LDP power broker. He was the Democratic Party's founding leader until he was forced to resign this year in a campaign finance scandal.

Hatoyama thanked Ozawa on Sunday night for engineering the victory and said he wants Ozawa either to serve in his cabinet or to continue as campaign manager for the party.

"Frustration against the LDP, which ignored people's lives and favored the bureaucracy, has been felt nationwide," Ozawa said, explaining his party's win.

Japan was the postwar wonder that grew into the world's second-largest economy. But it became enfeebled and directionless in the latter years of the LDP's long watch, with stagnant wages and sputtering growth, the worrying rise of the world's oldest population, and a monstrous government debt that will soon double the gross national product. Unemployment set a record last week, and the economy shrank for much of the past year at nearly twice the U.S. rate.

For these failings, voters seemed eager to punish the LDP and its unpopular leader, Prime Minister Taro Aso. On Sunday, Aso called his party's defeat "very severe."

"I think it is a result of the people's dissatisfaction and distrust towards LDP's leadership," Aso said, adding that he takes responsibility for the loss and will step down as party leader.

Judging from polls and voter interviews, the opposition won not because of its attractive policies or charismatic leadership. There is skepticism about how sound those policies are and doubt about how capable the party's unproven leaders will be. Instead, the Democratic Party won by default, as the only available means by which voters could wrest power from the LDP.

"It is not really that I am voting for the Democratic Party," said Atsushi Neriugawa, 49, owner of a consulting company, after voting in Tokyo. "I simply want power to change. If the Democratic Party happens to be no good, then I will revert back to LDP."

Hatoyama said the party will meet Monday to form a coalition with two smaller parties. The coalition would give the Democratic Party and its allies more than a two-thirds majority in the lower house, enabling it to control legislation in parliament and pass into law any bills rejected by the upper house.

The election marked the first time in postwar Japan that an opposition party seized power with a majority in a national election. The Democratic Party's capture of 308 seats was a record in the lower house. Final turnout was projected by the Kyodo news agency to be 69 percent, highest since the current electoral system was introduced in 1996.

The upper house is controlled by the Democratic Party, but that could change after an election next year if the new ruling party stumbles.

A stumble is probably likely, given the severity of Japan's economic problems. By the go-go standards of Asia, this country's economy is dead in the water -- averaging about 1.09 percent growth since 2000. In the past two decades, Japan has skidded from fourth to 14th among industrialized nations in per-capita gross domestic product.

On Monday, the Nikkei 225 Stock Average slid 0.4 percent after climbing as much as 2.2 percent.

Growth is desperately needed to pay for pensions, health care and other costly social services for a fast-aging population, 40 percent of which will be 65 or older by 2050. Accelerated growth is also needed to raise enough tax revenue to begin reducing a public debt of $9.14 trillion, the heaviest debt burden in the industrialized world, measured as a percentage of the country's economy.

The Democratic Party says increased growth will come through higher domestic consumption. It says it will give parents $276 a month to raise children, and will also eliminate highway tolls, increase support for farmers and raise the minimum wage.

"We'll make sure the economy recovers by providing benefits to households," Hatoyama said in a speech last week.

But analysts say his party's plans do not add up to a credible strategy for reinventing Japan's export-addicted economy. Voters, too, are skeptical, telling pollsters they do not understand where money will come from for $178 billion in new spending. The party is promising not to raise the public debt or increase consumption taxes for the foreseeable future.

"The Democrat Party actually has no economic policy," said Minoru Morita, a political analyst. "They have no systemic proposals, no New Deal. Without a plan, they cannot overcome the crisis left to them by the LDP. If they drive the economy recklessly, then they could lose big-time in the upper house election next year."

The new government will probably be formed by mid-September, after a meeting of parliament that will pick Hatoyama as prime minister.

One of his party's first priorities is to shake up the elite bureaucracy that has long dominated the government, often molding policy to fit the needs of the country's largest companies.

Hatoyama has said he will dispatch 100 members of parliament to seize decision-making authority in the bureaucracy and bend it so that it serves the needs of citizens.

The Democratic Party has also pushed for greater independence for Japan from the United States, which has about 50,000 military personnel stationed here and is treaty-bound to defend the country from attack.

"Until now, Japan has acted to suit U.S. convenience," Hatoyama said in a TV appearance last week. "But rather than doing so, Japan-U.S. relations should be on an equal footing so that our side can strongly assert Japan's will."

Japan helps pay for the cost of stationing U.S. forces on its territory, a policy the Democratic Party has questioned. It says it wants to rethink the entire agreement that keeps U.S. soldiers here.

Hatoyama has spoken of adjusting the focus of Japan's foreign policy to create stronger trade and diplomatic ties with China, South Korea and other countries.

But in recent weeks he and other party leaders have said they will not seek major changes in foreign policy. Hatoyama said the U.S.-Japan alliance would "continue to be the cornerstone of Japanese diplomatic policy."

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[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[World news > Japan]
Japan awakes to new era as opposition sweeps into power'
We have reached the starting line,' says new PM Yukio Hatoyama after election landslide redraws political landscape
Justin McCurry in Tokyo
guardian.co.uk, Monday 31 August 2009 12.44 BST Article history

Japan's new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, began the delicate task of forming a new government this morning, hours after inflicting a devastating defeat on the ruling Liberal Democratic party [LDP].

The euphoria of the night before, when his Democratic Party of Japan [DPJ] secured 308 out of 480 seats in the lower house, quickly gave way to the business of addressing record unemployment and deflation as Japan struggles to emerge from its worst recession since the second world war.

Questions are already being asked about his government's ability to end the bureaucracy's stranglehold on economic policy and to focus on the interests of consumers rather than those of powerful corporations.

"It has taken a long time, but we have at last reached the starting line," Hatoyama told reporters at his home in Tokyo. "This is by no means the destination. At long last, we are able to move politics – to create a new kind of politics that will fulfil the expectations of the people."

His opponent, Taro Aso, resigned as president of the LDP, which now has just 119 MPs in the lower house compared with 300 before the election.

Hatoyama has about two weeks to put together his administration. Elite bureaucrats and business leaders will use that time to prepare themselves to work with a different ruling party for only the second time since 1955.

Japan's parliament will look radically different when it formally elects Hatoyama as prime minister at a special session in the middle of next month. The lower house will contain 158 first-time MPs, just over 90% of them from the DPJ, and a record 54 women, 40 of them from Hatoyama's party. The chamber's 480 MPs have an average age of 52, with the youngest aged 27.

The LDP's depleted ranks will be missing several senior politicians, including the current finance minister, Kaoru Yosano. Over 46% of its remaining MPs are "hereditary candidates" who inherited their seats from their fathers or mothers, compared with just over 10% among DPJ MPs.

The financial markets reacted positively to the prospect of a new government, with the Nikkei benchmark index rising to a near-11-month high before retreating slightly as a stronger yen pushed down shares among exporters.

The DPJ's honeymoon period promises to be shortlived amid nagging concerns about its ability to fund spending pledges that are expected to reach 16.8tr yen over the next four years.

The party has vowed to end wasteful spending and invest heavily in welfare, to introduce a child allowance and to raise the minimum wage while keeping the consumption tax unchanged at 5% for the next four years.

But despite disquiet about Hatoyama's recent attack on "unrestrained market fundamentalism", business leaders offered him a cautious welcome.

Fujio Mitarai, chairman of the Japan Business Federation, said the DPJ had made a "genuine transition of power" possible for the first time in Japan's postwar history.

Kaoru Yano, president of the electronics firm NEC, said the result was "an expression of the people's call to break out of these tough economic and stagnant social conditions".

The US president, Barack Obama, said he looked forward to working closely with Hatoyama, who has promised to end Japan's "subservience" to US foreign policy. In recent days, however, Hatoyama has toned down his rhetoric, pledging that the bilateral alliance would remain the "cornerstone of Japanese diplomatic policy".

"The people of Japan have participated in an historic election in one of the world's leading democracies," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said in a statement. "President Obama looks forward to working closely with the new Japanese prime minister on a broad range of global, regional and bilateral issues."

The new US ambassador to Tokyo, John Roos, said: "The challenges we face are many, but through our partnership our two great democracies will meet them in a spirit of cooperation and friendship."

news20090829nn1

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 28 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.873
News: Q&A
Top scientist's industry move heralds stem-cell shift
Stephen Minger tells Nature why he is leaving academia.
Daniel Cressey

Stephen Minger is one of the leading stem-cell scientists in the United Kingdom, known for his work both as a researcher and as a high-profile public advocate for the field. He gained one of the first UK licences for the derivation of human embryonic stem cells, and generated the first human embryonic stem-cell line in the country.

In September, he will leave his post as director of the Stem Cell Biology Laboratory at King's College London to take up a new role at GE Healthcare, the medical technologies company headquartered near Amersham, UK.

GE Healthcare announced on 30 June that it had struck a deal with biotechnology company Geron, based in Menlo Park, California, to develop drug-screening tests using cells derived from human embryonic stem cells. The project was widely touted as proof that the burgeoning field of stem-cell research was ready for broader applications in industry. Minger, who will lead that effort as head of GE Healthcare's Research and Development for Cell Technologies division, spoke to Nature about the job — and the future of stem-cell technologies.

Why are you making the move to industry?

I decided to move from King's to GE for the simple fact that it was a tremendous opportunity to take our academic, basic science research and really move it to a completely different level — to take stem cells and actually make parts from them, but also at the same time to avail myself of all the technology within GE.

Tell us more about the work you hope to be doing at GE Healthcare?

The basic idea initially is to develop cell lines derived from embryonic stem cells for drug screening and predictive toxicology.

One of the problems with big pharmaceutical companies and their development pipeline is that a number of compounds can go fairly far, even into clinical trials and in some cases even into licensing, where those drugs can begin to show unpredicted toxicological effects in humans. Most of the screening is done using animal cells — for example, rat liver cells — or is done using human tumour-cell lines that don't faithfully represent true primary human cells. In many cases, even if the screens do use human primary cells there are huge problems with the inconsistency of results.

The power of using embryonic-derived cells is consistency, both in terms of quality and genetic background. It allows you to reproducibly use the same population of cells week in, week out.

If you take a drug into the clinic and then it has to be withdrawn either from clinical trials or from licensing, you're looking at losing hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. So we're really trying to reduce the costs of drug development.

Isn't this work that you could have done in an academic environment?

It's not so much that the work couldn't be done academically. It's about trying to garner the resources to be able to scale the work up, and to work more efficiently, running a very large group of scientists, engineers and cell biologists. It would be very difficult to do within an academic setting. I had no real interest in leaving academia but when you weigh everything up, it became almost impossible to say no.

Do you think your move is part of a growing trend towards commercializing stem cells?

It is clear that the field is maturing. If you look at the number of academic research groups who are pursuing this work, it's ten times what it was five or six years ago.

Whether or not other academic researchers will want to do what I am doing is really an individual decision, but I think it does represent a slight shift away from the research being at a really basic level, and moving towards commercial and clinical applications.

Do any of your colleagues think you're selling out by making this move?
I've yet to hear anyone say, "I think you're selling out". If anything, I feel like I'm taking advantage of an opportunity that will hopefully enhance the field and help develop tools that will support the entire stem-cell community.


[naturenews]
Published online 27 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.864
News
Human mutation rate revealed
Next-generation sequencing provides the most accurate estimate to date.
Elie Dolgin

Every time human DNA is passed from one generation to the next it accumulates 100–200 new mutations, according to a DNA-sequencing analysis of the Y chromosome.

This number — the first direct measurement of the human mutation rate — is equivalent to one mutation in every 30 million base pairs, and matches previous estimates from species comparisons and rare disease screens.

The British-Chinese research team that came up with the estimate sequenced ten million base pairs on the Y chromosome from two men living in rural China who were distant relatives. These men had inherited the same ancestral male-only chromosome from a common relative who was born more than 200 years ago. Over the subsequent 13 generations, this Y chromosome was passed faithfully from father to son, albeit with rare DNA copying mistakes.

The researchers cultured cells taken from the two men, and using next-generation sequencing technologies found 23 candidate mutations. Then they validated twelve of these mutations using traditional sequencing techniques. Eight of these mutations, however, had arisen in their cell-culturing process, which left just four genuine, heritable mutations. Extrapolating that result to the whole genome gives a mutation rate of around one in 30 million base pairs.

"It was very reassuring that our application of the new sequencing technologies seems to give a reliable result and that the number we've been using for the mutation rate is pretty much the right one," says Chris Tyler-Smith of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, who led the study, published today in Current Biology¹.

Tyler-Smith says that direct measurement of the mutation rate can be used to infer events in our evolutionary past, such as when humans first migrated out of Africa, more accurately than previous methods. But before that's possible, researchers will need a more precise estimate, notes Laurent Duret, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Lyon in France. "The confidence interval for the mutation rate is still quite wide," he says. Sequencing more pairs of Y chromosomes from distant male cousins in other families should provide a more robust measurement and reveal how mutation rates vary between individuals, Duret adds.

Most of the Y chromosome doesn't mix with any other chromosomes, which makes estimating its mutation rate easier. But the mutation rate might be somewhat different on other chromosomes, points out Adam Eyre-Walker, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. Other projects that involve sequencing parents and their offspring, such as the 1000 Genomes Project, should start to illuminate how DNA changes across the rest of the genome.

"I'm sure this is just the first of many papers that will be doing the same sort of thing," says Tyler-Smith.

References
1. Xue, Y. et al. Curr. Biol. 19, 1-5 (2009). | Article | PubMed | ChemPort |

news20090829nn2

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 28 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.870
News
Human-chimp interbreeding challenged
Mutation rates may be explained by differences in female promiscuity.
Elie Dolgin

A genetic analysis has called into question the controversial claim that early humans and chimpanzees interbred before splitting into separate species.

"Many evolutionary biologists were pretty sceptical" about the interbreeding scenario, says evolutionary geneticist Soojin Yi of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. She argues that her explanation — which stems from promiscuity differences among primate species — is "simpler and hence more likely".

In 2006, David Reich and his colleagues at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, compared the genomes of humans, chimps and three other primate species, and found that the separation of ancient humans from our closest cousins was more complex than a clean break. The time from the beginning to the completion of human-chimp divergence ranged over more than four million years across different parts of the genome, and the X chromosome seemed youngest of all, they reported in Nature¹. The authors argued that there were in fact two splits — an initial divide, followed by interbreeding, and then final separation in which only a young X chromosome was retained.

Many researchers took issue with this interpretation, arguing that large ancestral population sizes could explain the wide range in genetic divergence times, so there was no need to invoke a complex speciation process. But these critiques still could not account for the youth of the X chromosome.

Now Yi, together with Daven Presgraves of the University of Rochester in New York, have reanalysed the data and suggest that species differences in the levels of female promiscuity can account for the chromosomal inconsistency. The original hypothesis is "way more of a headache for evolutionary biologists", says Yi. The data "can also be explained very well by well-established ideas in molecular evolution".

Relationships matter

Males competing for mates produce different amounts of sperm depending on the mating habits of the species. Chimps are highly promiscuous, humans less so and gorillas not much at all. As such, male chimps face the stiffest competition, so they have the highest sperm counts and the largest testes of the three species. That means that they also undergo more rounds of sperm cell division and make more DNA copying mistakes, leading to higher mutation rates in males than in females. Reich and others had assumed that all primates had the same mutation bias, but Yi and Presgraves argue that mating relationships should be taken into account.

Because females have two X chromosomes and males have only one, the X spends more of its evolutionary history in females, whereas non-sex chromosomes split their time evenly between each gender. Thus, a male-biased mutation rate will lead to proportionally fewer genetic changes on the X and will seem to be younger when using a molecular clock, even if all the chromosomes diverged at around the same time, the researchers argue. Complex speciation is therefore unlikely to be the cause, they report in an invited opinion article in the October issue of Trends in Ecology & Evolution².

"This elegant and simple explanation will be the last piece of the puzzle," says Hideki Innan, a population geneticist at the Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Kanagawa, Japan.

The X factor

But Reich is not convinced. Yi and Presgraves' model "is an exciting hypothesis, but it simply can't explain the data", he says. Their model predicts that chimps should continue to accumulate more mutations on the autosomes compared to the X chromosome even after the species split. But even when Reich reanalysed 30 times more sequence data than his team considered in the original paper, he could not find any difference between the human and chimp lineages.

What's more, only the double-split scenario could explain why genes shared by humans and gorillas, but not chimps, are found everywhere on the non-sex chromosomes but are largely absent on the X. Complex speciation "remains a far-out hypothesis", admits Reich. "But no one has come up with an alternative explanation for the data that holds water."

Presgraves counters that when he included orang-utan data in the analysis, he found that humans and chimps had similarly strong male-biased mutation rates, so he wouldn't expect differences between the two species. What matters, he says, is that both species are more biased than gorilla, which makes the divergence seem younger than when compared to the older primates. In addition, he says, humans share genes with gorillas — albeit at lower levels — which is consistent with his expectations.

Nicholas Barton, an evolutionary geneticist at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria in Klosterneuburg, says that the new theory has the advantage that it is testable. Researchers can survey more species to confirm whether male-biased mutation rates vary with sperm competition. Reich's idea, however, cannot be disproved.

Indeed, in 2003, Hans Ellegren, an evolutionary biologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, calculated the mutation bias in 31 bird species, and found that those with higher rates of extrapair paternity also had higher male mutation rates³.

Yi concedes that she can't definitively invalidate Reich's model. "Proof is very hard to come by in evolution biology, unfortunately," she says.

References
1. Patterson, N. , Richter, D. J. , Gnerre, S. , Lander, E. S. & Reiche, D. Nature 441, 1103-1108 (2006).
2. Presgraves, D. C. & Yi, S. V. Trends Ecol. Evol. advance online publication doi:10.1016/j.tree.2009.04.007 (2009).
3. Bartosch-Härlid, A. , Berlin, S. , Smith, N. G. , Møller, A. P. & Ellegren, H. Evolution 57, 2398-2406 (2003).

news20090829bn

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

[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 08:44 GMT, Saturday, 29 August 2009 09:44 UK
N Korea frees S Korea fishermen
North Korea has freed four South Korean fishermen and their boat, the South Korean Coast Guard has said.

Two Coast Guard vessels had retrieved the fishermen and their boat, a Coast Guard spokesman told the media.

North Korea seized the fishermen and their boat last month when they strayed into their waters after their satellite navigation system malfunctioned.

On Friday, the two sides agreed to resume family reunions called off by North Korea two years ago.

"We have taken over the Yonan," a Coast Guard official said, referring to the name of the boat.

In recent weeks, South Korean activists have held protests, demanding the return of the fishermen as well as an end to nuclear and missile tests.

The release of the boat, which was captured on 30 July, is perceived by analysts as a conciliatory move by the North Korean government and the latest sign of tensions easing between the two Koreas.

Relations between North Korea and the rest of the world were extremely strained earlier in the year.

The North was heavily criticised in May for conducting its second nuclear test and a series of ballistic missile launches, after which the UN Security Council agreed to tighten sanctions.


[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 11:11 GMT, Saturday, 29 August 2009 12:11 UK
Voters wooed on eve of Japan poll
Candidates across Japan have made their last pitches to voters ahead of Sunday's election, which is expected to herald a rare change of power.

Most polls suggest the ruling LDP will lose to the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), amid disaffection about the recession and high unemployment.

The Liberal Democratic Party has ruled for more than 50 years, with just one single break of less than one year.

DPJ leader Yukio Hatoyama said that this election could change history.

"At last, it is the election tomorrow, one that we will be able to tell the next generation changed Japanese history," Mr Hatoyama told crowds in Sakai in the west of Japan.

The DPJ wants to shift the focus of government from supporting corporations to helping consumers and workers - challenging the status quo that has existed since the end of World War II.

'Experienced'

But Taro Aso, the prime minister and leader of the LDP, questioned if the opposition, with little experience of power, could really run the country.

"I beg you to give power to the LDP so we can complete the recovery," he told a rally in Tokyo.

In Oyama, north of Tokyo, he added: "Can you trust these people? It's a problem if you feel uneasy whether they can really run this country."

Many voters are likely to use the election to voice their frustration with the government's handling of the economy during the global recession.

Figures released on Friday showed that the jobless rate was at a record high of 5.7% last month. In July, 3,590,000 Japanese were out of work, over a million more than a year ago.

While its economy grew by 0.9% between April and June, the latest unemployment figures cast doubt on the strength of the recovery.

Eager for change?

Turnout is expected to be high, with roughly 10% of the country's eligible voters expected to cast early ballots.

Some voters simply want to ring the changes after almost a half century of LDP rule.

"The government now is just not effective. I am not sure if the Democratic Party is good or bad, for now I just want change," Kotaro Kobayashi, a 75-year-old in Tokyo, told the Reuters news agency.

In fact, one analyst argued, few voters are paying close attention to the rival parties' policies.

"The election is more about emotions than policies," said Takashi Mikuriya, a professor of political science at Tokyo University.

"Most voters are making the decision not about policies but about whether they are fed up with the ruling party."


[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 01:43 GMT, Saturday, 29 August 2009 02:43 UK
Suu Kyi visitor tells of 'sorrow'
The man who swam to the lakeside home of Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has spoken of his sorrow that his action led to her arrest and trial.
John Yettaw told the BBC that he had a dream that Ms Suu Kyi was going to be murdered, and swam to her home wearing home-made flippers to warn her.

Mr Yettaw was sentenced to seven years in prison but is now back home after US Senator Jim Webb intervened.

Ms Suu Kyi was sentenced to 18 months' further house arrest.

Mr Yettaw, a devout Mormon from Falcon, Missouri, told the BBC's Newshour programme that he had had many strong visions or dreams which he called "impressions" or "camcorder moments".

In one he says he foresaw an official plot to murder Ms Suu Kyi and this prompted him to swim twice to her home to warn her of the danger.

On the first occasion he says he left some Mormon scriptures for her but did not enter her home.

As he left he was challenged by an armed guard. He says he shook hands with the guard who then walked away and he took a taxi away from the scene.

Another dream

But he again swam to her house in May after another dream.

"I had been researching Myanmar (Burma) and researching about the internally displaced families and about the numbers of people who had been murdered and then about the numbers of people through the Cyclone (Nargis) and then about Aung San Suu Kyi's release date and I went to sleep that night and I had a dream that when she was released she was going to be murdered and I saw a plot," he said.

He said that he believed the inevitable publicity surrounding his trips would make it impossible for the Burmese military authorities to carry out their alleged plan to assassinate her.

"When I was in the water the first time... I had seen myself returning to the house and being in her house two days. When I had the dream of the assassination I thought: OK, I'll go back and I will share with her this message.

"I shared with many people that I had this overwhelming feeling that I was going to be imprisoned and become a political prisoner. The theme was that the eyes of the world would be on Aung San Suu Kyi and that this would spare her life, that the junta (Burma's military government) would not dare try to assassinate her."

Mr Yettaw, 53, said that when he arrived at Ms Suu Kyi's home for the second time she was "shocked" to see him.

"When I got in to talk to Aung San Suu Kyi I said there's a plot to assassinate you," he said. "She said: 'If I die I die.' I said no way, Burma needs you."

Both Mr Yettaw and Ms Suu Kyi were arrested and the pro-democracy leader was charged with breaking the terms of her house arrest by sheltering Mr Yettaw.

Mr Yettaw, who suffered ill health during his detention, spoke of his sorrow that his actions had led to Ms Su Kyi's arrest.

"I was sorrowful that she was arrested," he said. "I had impressions that I would be on trial and that Aung San Suu Kyi would either testify for or against me but not that she would be placed on trial because I think that if I had seen that I wouldn't have done it."

news20090828gc

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Climate change]
Leave population out of climate talks, Indian minister saysJairam Ramesh claims there is a move among western countries to bring India's rapidly growing population into climate change negotiations
Randeep Ramesh in Delhi
guardian.co.uk, Friday 28 August 2009 17.10 BST Article history

Western nations are trying to use India's "profligate reproductive behaviour" to force Delhi to accept legally binding emission reduction targets, India's environment minister said today.

Speaking at a conference in the Indian capital, organised by Delhi's Centre for Science and Environment, Jairam Ramesh said there was a "move in western countries to bring population into climate change [negotiations]. Influential American thinktanks are asking why should we reward profligate reproductive behaviour? Why should we reward India which is adding 14 million people every year?"

Ramesh's speech comes as the 100 day countdown begins to the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen, which will agree on a successor to the Kyoto agreement, due to expire in 2012. Developing nations such as India and China were not constrained by the Kyoto agreement, and western nations now argue that these rapidly growing economies should sign up to legally binding emission targets.

India's population of over 1 billion means that while it is the world's fifth biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, its per capita emissions are just one-twentieth of the United States. However, its population is rising quickly and the United Nations predicts India will have 1.7 billion people by 2050 – while China will by then have a population of 1.4 billion.

It is understood that American diplomats had raised the issue of overpopulation with the Indian delegation during talks when US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, visited New Delhi earlier this year.

Ramesh said that at "today's state of development" India could not and should not accept "legally binding reduction targets". The minister added that the Indian government saw per capita emissions rising from one tonne of carbon dioxide to "three or four" by 2030.

"For us this is about survival. We need to put electricity into people's homes and do it cleanly. You in the west need to live with only one car rather than three. For you it is about luxury. For us survival."

The Indian government – along with 37 other developing nations – has argued that rich nations such as the US should set a goal of cutting emissions by 40% from 1990 levels by 2020.

"Once developed countries have shown demonstrable proof of their seriousness then India can think of going to next stage. At a time when every (rich) country is in violation of the Kyoto protocol obligation to ask China and India to take on legal targets smacks of hypocrisy."

Finance is one of the key sticking points, as poorer nations demand huge amounts of cash to buy technologies and adapt their nations to climate change. Richer nations have proved reluctant to commit. One recent estimate, highlighted by Pakistan's chief Copenhagen negotiator, Farrukh Iqbal Khan, who has worked closely with Indian counterparts, put the cost at £265bn a year.

Asked what he might say to the UK climate change minister, Ed Miliband, who arrives next week, Ramesh said pointed out that the only leader to come up with a "concrete offer (of money)" was Gordon Brown. "He said earlier this year that there should be a fund of $100bn (£60bn). We don't know if that is every year or what. But it is an offer on the table."

Ramesh, who has just returned from Beijing, said that India and China had agreed to "coordinate all actions" before multilateral meetings. He said that the only difference was that a Chinese thinktank had called for Beijing to "peak emissions" by 2030. Ramesh said the Chinese chief negotiator on climate change had assured him that this was "thinktank policy not government policy".

news20090828nn1

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 27 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.871
News
Climate change exacts a high price
Costs of adapting to a warming world could be much greater than expected.
Anjali Nayar

The global cost of adapting to climate change has been grossly underestimated, according to a study published this week.

Although it doesn't provide concrete new estimates, the report suggests that the total cost of adapting to climate change could be at least 2–3 times more than the previous estimate from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). That figure, published in 2007, suggested that the annual cost from 2030 would be between US$49 billion and $171 billion.

The main difference, the study says, is that the UN number did not account for climate change's effects on key sectors such as energy, manufacturing, tourism and natural ecosystems.

"The UNFCCC's estimations were made in a few weeks and weren't independently reviewed," says the study's lead author, Martin Parry, a visiting research fellow at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London and a former co-chair of a working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Negotiators will be converging on Copenhagen in December to forge a new international climate deal to take over from the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012. The question of how to finance adaptation will be at the heart of the discussions. "There will be negotiations about how much will be needed, how to raise it and how to spend it," says Saleemul Huq, a climate expert at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), who was not involved in the study.

Parry says that negotiators should be wary of using the earlier numbers. "There are dangers in having apparently low estimates for the cost of adaptation, which would make adaptation seem like a cheap alternative to mitigation," he says. "Sceptics could argue we should just walk into the future adapting as we go."

Starting point

The UNFCCC numbers were initially intended to come from a literature review of other economic studies, says Sudhir Sharma, manager of financial cooperation and capacity building at the UNFCCC secretariat in Bonn, Germany. But the team working on the estimates soon realized that there were massive gaps in the information needed. The cost of adapting to climate change requires knowledge about what effects climate change will have, what the options are for responding to those changes, and how much those options will cost, he says.

Sharma argues his group's estimates weren't intended to be the final word, but rather a ball-park figure to get the negotiations rolling. "We clearly indicated that this was not an exhaustive study," he says. "Our objective was to kick-start the process of putting numbers on the cost of adaptation so that other groups could pick up the baton and refine them."

The latest study, published by the IIED and the Grantham Institute, has picked up that baton. It suggests that the UNFCCC estimate of $11 billion per year for adapting to changes in water supply overlooks the expenses of floods and of transporting water from areas of plenty to areas to that need it. In health, the UNFCCC figure of $5 billion per year considered changes only in malaria, diarrhoea and malnutrition in developing nations and excluded the health burden of climate change in developed nations. The new report also points out that the UNFCCC estimates excluded the costs of protecting ecosystems and the services they provide; on its own this sector could cost well over $350 billion per year, says Parry.

But although the report says previous estimates for adaptation are too low, it doesn't provide numbers, he admits. "We didn't try to come up with new numbers — we pointed out the gaps," he says.

In the months before Copenhagen, other organizations will be piecing together some of these costs. In mid-September, the Economics of Climate Adaptation Working Group, a consortium of researchers, consultants and economists from around the world, will release a report on the costs of adaptation through case studies in China, Mali, Florida, Guyana, India, Samoa, Tanzania and the United Kingdom, according to New York-based McKinsey & Company, one of the consulting firms involved. And on 29 September, the World Bank is expected to launch its own study on the economics of adapting to climate change, using case studies from throughout the developing world.

But a price tag on adaptation will not be realized in the near future, says Huq. "If in Copenhagen we can agree that we need a few tens of billions of dollars to provide countries with sufficient means to start evaluating and working on what's needed now, then over time the longer-term costs will become more clear," he says. "Copenhagen will not be the last word."

news20090828nn2

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 27 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.858
News
Ozone threat is no laughing matter
Nitrous oxide poses a growing atmospheric problem.
Lizzie Buchen

Nitrous oxide (N₂O) has become the greatest threat to the ozone layer, a new analysis suggests. The ozone-destroying abilities of the gas have been largely ignored by policy-makers and atmospheric scientists alike, who have focused on the more potent chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) — historically the dominant ozone-depleting substances in the atmosphere.
But CFC levels have been falling since the 1989 adoption of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, an international agreement that mandated the phasing out of CFCs, and more recently hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs). Meanwhile, nitrous oxide levels have been climbing as a result of increased emissions from agricultural fertilizers, biomass burning and animal waste.

Atmospheric chemist A. R. Ravishankara and his colleagues at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, Colorado, have now used a chemical model of stratospheric ozone to calculate the ozone-depleting potential (ODP) of nitrous oxide. That provides a measure of how much ozone is depleted by a particular gas, relative to that destroyed by the same amount of trichlorofluoromethane (CCl₃F, also known as CFC-11), one of the most significant ozone-depleting substances.

"We wanted to see how nitrous oxide stacked up as an ozone-depleting gas," says Ravishankara. "People haven't looked at it this way before."

Feeble punch

They computed the ODP of nitrous oxide at 0.017, or about one-sixtieth of that of CFC-11. This seems like a pretty feeble punch, but when the authors took into account the large scale of human-related emissions of nitrous oxide — as estimated in the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — they found that nitrous oxide has the greatest impact of the ozone-depleting substances emitted by human-related activities today.

Nitrous oxide is also a major greenhouse gas which is controlled under the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, although emissions are not currently expected to fall significantly in the coming century. The authors project that if nitrous oxide emissions are not reduced, they could be 30% more destructive to ozone in 2050 than the combined CFC emissions from 1987, when these were at their peak (see 'The threat of nitrous oxide'). The team's results are published online by the journal Science¹.

"This is the first time someone has dealt with nitrous oxide in isolation like this," says atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon of the NOAA, who was not involved in the study. "It's one of those things that has simply been overlooked."

Atmospheric scientists have known since the 1970s that nitrous oxide depletes the ozone layer, but did not group it with other ozone-depleting substances because it seemed to be impotent relative to CFCs.

Atmospheric scientist Don Wuebbles at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign agrees that nitrous oxide deserves more attention. "In a sense, nitrous oxide is almost a forgotten gas. When we talk about ozone, we talk about halocarbons. When we talk about climate, we talk about carbon dioxide and methane. We forget that nitrous oxide is the third largest-growing gas in the atmosphere."

No surprises

The findings won't come as a surprise to most atmospheric scientists, says Ravishankara. "Everyone's going to say they knew it. But that's not the same as showing it."

That distinction has important implications for policy-makers, who use the ODP to make quantitative comparisons between ozone-depleting substances. "Without this information, decision-makers do not have the tools to evaluate the role of nitrous oxide in ozone-layer depletion. In that sense, we have bridged the gap between policy relevance and atmospheric science," says Ravishankara.

But not everyone is concerned about nitrous oxide's impact on the ozone layer. "Nitrous oxide sort of died out as a problem [for the ozone layer] in the 1970s, because we knew it was increasing at such a slow rate," says atmospheric chemist Richard Stolarski at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "In our chemical climate models, where nitrous oxide increases by 15 or 20 per cent by 2100, we still end up with more ozone than we had in 1960 [before mass production of CFCs]."

Ravishankara notes that ozone-depleting gases should still be a cause for concern. "Now it's up to the decision-makers on how they're going to deal with this," he says. "This is just one piece of information to feed into the discussion."

References
1. Ravishankara, A. R., Daniel, J. S. & Portmann, R. W. Science advance online publication doi:10.1126/science.1176985 (2009).


[naturenews]
Published online 27 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.869
News
Sunspots stir oceans
Variations in the Sun's brightness may have a big role in Pacific precipitation.
Geoff Brumfiel

Computer simulations are showing how tiny variations in the Sun's brightness can have a big influence on weather above the Pacific Ocean.

The simulations match observations that show precipitation in the eastern Pacific varies with the Sun's brightness over an 11-year cycle. However, the model does not indicate a relationship between solar activity and the rise in global temperature over the past century.

"This is not a global warming thing," says Gerald Meehl, a modeller at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and first author of the study. "But it does indicate that the Sun has a measurable impact on Earth's climate." The research is published this week in the journal Science¹.

Although the Sun burns steadily, its shifting magnetic fields can lead to cooler, darker spots on the Sun's surface. The edges of these sunspots are much brighter than the rest of the Sun, and although this causes only a tiny increase in the Sun's total output of light over the 11-year cycle, researchers believe that it can influence Earth's climate. Many scientists think that a cold snap between 1645 and 1715, for example, may have been caused by an unusually spotless Sun. Researchers had also noticed that precipitation patterns in the Pacific Ocean seemed to vary with the 11-year sunspot cycle, with the average rainfall in the eastern Pacific seeming to drop during periods of high solar activity.

Solar puzzle

But how could such a tiny change in brightness influence weather over the world's largest ocean? Two theories have circulated in recent years. The first is that an increase in ultraviolet radiation associated with the brighter Sun changes the temperature of the upper echelons of the atmosphere. Those changes alter the winds over the tropics, and eventually lead to a drought in the east.

The second theory is that the increased brightness is heating the Pacific itself. The heating intensifies evaporation and rainfall in some regions, but creates cooling winds in the eastern part of the ocean, which prevents rain clouds from forming in those eastern areas.

Both theories seemed plausible, but when they were inserted separately into the models, neither produced an effect that was big enough to explain the observations, Meehl says. So he and his colleagues tried combining the two into a single model. "Sure enough, we got a much bigger response," he says.

The work is a good piece of modelling, but not all parts of the puzzle are in place, says Drew Shindell, a climate modeller at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. Combining the two theories does seem to produce a model that replicates the magnitude of the sunspot cycle's impact. But the results of the simulation are far from being a perfect geographical match for real observations (see 'A model forecast'). "I think it's a nice step," Shindell says. "But there's clearly still a long way to go."

"I don't think we're claiming we've solved the problem," Meehl says. But he maintains that the model clearly replicates the general trends seen in the Pacific. He expects that as atmospheric scientists, oceanographers and others combine their different models in the coming years, their predictive power will only improve.

References
1. Meehl, G. A., Arblaster, J. M., Matthes, K., Sassi, F. & van Loon, H. Science 325, 1114-1118 (2009). | Article | ChemPort |

news20090828bn

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

[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 11:10 GMT, Friday, 28 August 2009 12:10 UK
Japan jobless rate hits new high
Japan's jobless rate hit a record 5.7% in July and consumer prices fell at a record pace, figures released days before a general election have shown.
By Roland Buerk
BBC News, Tokyo

Companies are continuing to lay off workers even though the economy has returned to growth after the most bruising recession for decades.

The state of Japan's economy is the key issue in the election campaign.

Opinion polls show that the governing Liberal Democratic Party faces defeat in the election.

It has held power for 53 of the past 54 years.

Recovery doubts

In July, 3,590,000 Japanese were out of work in July, over a million more than a year ago.

Japan's economy grew by 0.9% between April and June, but the latest figures cast doubt on the strength of the recovery.

"The recent growth was mainly due to government spending and was not a self-sustaining recovery in the Japanese economy," said Hiroshi Watanabe at Mizuho Investors Securties.

"We're unlikely to see a swift recovery for the time being," he added.

News that the unemployment rate has risen to the highest since World War II is a blow for the Prime Minister Taro Aso.

Opinion polls show his Liberal Democratic Party was already on course for defeat on Sunday for only the second time in more than 50 years.

'Deflationary pressure'

Other figures released in Tokyo show core consumer prices fell by 2.2% in July from a year earlier, the fastest pace on record.

And analysts expect prices to fall further.

"Domestic demand is pretty weak. We expect deflationary pressure to increase," said Naoko Ogata at the Japan Research Institute.

Japan is particularly sensitive to falling prices.

The country was stuck in a deflationary spiral for years after an asset price bubble burst at the start of the 1990s.

Shoppers put off purchases in the expectation of prices falling further, causing the economy to stagnate.


[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 10:28 GMT, Thursday, 27 August 2009 11:28 UK
Australia discovers new dinosaur
Australian palaeontologists say they have discovered a new species of dinosaur on a sheep farm in the northern state of Queensland.

The fossil remains of the large plant-eating sauropod, nicknamed Zac, are about 97 million years old.

They were found near the town of Eromanga, in a fossil-rich area that was once covered by a vast inland sea.

Palaeontologists say the find confirms Australia's importance as a centre for dinosaur discovery.

The country's largest dinosaur, Cooper, was found on the same sheep farm in 2004.

Cooper was almost 30 metres long and was a new species of titanosaur - enormous, armour-plated creatures.

'Dinosaur rush'

Queensland Museum palaeontologist Scott Hocknull said Zac's skeleton was smaller than Cooper's, but more complete.

Zac, in common with other sauropods, had a very long neck, a small head and blunt teeth, and a long tail to counter-balance the neck.

Mr Hocknull said the find was part of a new "dinosaur rush" in Australia.
"We have got dinosaurs coming out of all parts of Queensland, and so Australia is really becoming this centre for dinosaur discovery."

He said much of Zac's remains were sticking out of the ground, but there are further excavations planned in this dinosaur-rich area.

"There will be hundreds of skeletons underneath the ground. The bone beds are so dense, you can hardly move for a dinosaur bone."

Three new dinosaur species were found in the same area earlier this year, all dating to the same period as Zac - about 100 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous period.

[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 13:32 GMT, Wednesday, 26 August 2009 14:32 UK
China admits death row organ use
China is trying to move away from the use of executed prisoners as the major source of organs for transplants.

According to the China Daily newspaper, executed prisoners currently provide two-thirds of all transplant organs.

The government is now launching a voluntary donation scheme, which it hopes will also curb the illegal trafficking in organs.

But analysts say cultural bias against removing organs after death will make a voluntary scheme hard to implement.

Thriving black market

About 1.5 million people in China need transplants, but only about 10,000 operations are performed annually, according to the health ministry.

The scarcity of available organs has led to a thriving black market in trafficked organs, and in an effort to stop this the government passed a law in 2007 banning trafficking as well as the donation of organs to unrelated recipients.

But in practice, illegal transplants - some from living donors - are still frequently reported by the media and the Ministry of Health.

Human rights groups have often criticised China for its lack of transparency over organ donation, but critics have focused particular concern on the use of body parts from executed prisoners.

In a rare admission of the extent to which this takes place, China Daily - citing unnamed experts - said on Wednesday that more than 65% of organ donations come from death row prisoners.

China executes more people than any other country. Amnesty International said at least 1,718 people were given the death penalty in 2008.

The China Daily quoted Vice-Health Minister Huang Jiefu as saying that condemned prisoners were "definitely not a proper source for organ transplants".

The new scheme is therefore designed to reduce the reliance on death row inmates, as well as regulating the industry by combating the illegal trafficking of organs.

The system will be piloted in 10 provinces and cities, and a fund will be started to provide financial aid to donors' families.

news20090827gc

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Climate Camp]
Climate Camp activists launch direct action on City of London
Campaigners set up Climate Change Casino outside carbon trading exchange
Peter Walker
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 27 August 2009 10.41 BST Article history

Environmental activists from the Climate Camp protest today launched their first direct action in the City of London since setting up a temporary base in a park overlooking Docklands and Canary Warf.

Around a dozen people from the group, who yesterday took over part of Blackheath common in the south-east of London, occupied the entrance to the Climate Exchange on Bishopsgate.

Wearing evening dresses and dinner suits, the protestors unrolled a Climate Change Casino board along with fake banknotes and over-sized playing cards in the columned entrance gate to the exchange's courtyard.

Staff were not prevented from entering or leaving, and – in keeping with promises for a "community-style" approach at the Climate Camp following complaints of heavy-handed and violent policing during April's G20 – officers from the City of London force made no initial attempt to break the event up.

Activists stood on the pavement outside the exchange, yelling, "Roll up to the Climate Change Casino!" bringing the occasional toot of support from cars, but mainly looks of bafflement from passing office workers.

Leila Deen, one of the protesters, who is best known for throwing green custard over Peter Mandelson as an anti-airport expansion stunt, said this year's Climate Camp had long planned to target the exchange.

"I think a lot of people inside here believe they're doing something good for the environment, but our message is that they're not," she said. "Too many governments are using carbon trading as an excuse not to cut emissions. People are making a lot of money on this, but nothing is really being done."

Up to 2,000 people are expected to stay at the Climate Camp site at any one time from now until the end of Tuesday, when it closes. Volunteers spent much of yesterday unpacking tents, marquees, composting toilets and communal kitchens from trucks to cope with the numbers.

As well as a base for direct action, the camp is intended to be a focal point for activists to meet and exchange information and learn protest techniques. It is also intended as a place where local people and the curious can see environmental methods at work, and how a community can organise itself in a non-hierarchical way, with decisions taken by consensus.


[Environment > Ceo-engineering]
Fake trees, algae tubes and white roofs among UK engineers' climate solutions
Report from Institute of Mechanical Engineers calls for £10m to develop geo-engineering ideas that would be 'an integral part' of the solution to global warming
Alok Jha, green technology correspondent
The Guardian, Thursday 27 August 2009 Article history

Artificial trees and tubes of algae on the sides of buildings could absorb most of the UK's annual carbon dioxide emissions, according to a report from engineers that will be circulated at party conferences in the autumn.

In research examining the role that geo-engineering could play in tackling climate change, a 12-month study by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers (IME) also found that painting city roofs white could also prove to be a simple but effective way to curb excessive global warming.

Geo-engineering is a set of technologies that could prevent or slow global warming - it includes everything from sending mirrors into space to reflect away sunlight to dumping iron into the oceans to encourage the growth of algae, thereby removing atmospheric CO2. For their study, the IME searched for ideas that were most practical and could have impacts on CO2 or global energy use levels as soon as possible.

Setting out their recommendations in a report published today, the IME called on the British government to put up £10m aimed at turning the three most promising ideas into reality. They advocate this being part of a £100m global fund for geo-engineering research.

"Geo-engineering is no silver bullet, it just buys us time," said Tim Fox of the IME, who led the study. "We're not proposing that geo-engineering should be a substitute for mitigation [but] should be implemented alongside mitigation and adaptation."

Top of their list of practical solutions that would be low-carbon to build and require only existing technologies were artificial trees. These units, invented by Columbia University scientist Klaus Lackner, would be the size of a standard shipping container and could remove CO2 directly from the atmosphere. "100,000 trees would take up an area of around 600 hectares, which is less than 10% of the surface area of the Firth of Forth, and that would be able to absorb the CO2 emissions of the UK's non-power sector annually," said Fox.

Currently the UK produces 556 megatonnes of CO2 per year and the 100,000 trees could absorb around 60% of that amount. The engineers calculated that forests of artificial trees powered by renewable energy and located near depleted oil or gas fields, where the trapped CO2 could be buried, would be thousands of times more efficient than planting trees over the same area.

Making each artificial tree would require energy and materials but this would only account for 5% of the CO2 that the device could capture in its lifetime. On a global scale, between 5-10m artificial trees could absorb the CO2 emitted from all sources other than power stations.

Another geo-engineering solution highlighted by the engineers was attaching tubes filled with algae to the sides of buildings. "Algae is a naturally-occurring eco-friendly biomass that tends to have a high level of CO2 use in photosynthesis," said Tom Bowman of IME. The algae that grows can be collected and turned into charcoal, which can be buried so that the CO2 it has captured is locked away from the atmosphere.

Painting roofs white was recommended by the engineers to counteract the urban heat island effect, where major cities can be up to 4C hotter than their suburbs. This means more use of air conditioning or other cooling methods and it also speeds up the formation of smog. The IME said that reflective roofs can reduce the energy use of a building by up to 60%.

Fox said that global carbon emissions had continued to rise despite two decades of attempts at mitigation, so geo-engineering should not be regarded by policymakers as a plan B, but an integral part of the solution to global warming. "£10m would get us significantly far forward in terms of sorting out the wheat from the chaff in this debate," he said. "The government can then look at piloting them and testing them in the field and then making decisions about their deployment."

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[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[Nature News]
Published online 26 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.866
News: Q&A
Sweden outlines its research ambitions
Research minister Tobias Krantz talks to Nature about the nation's vision for science.
Marta Paterlini

It is a busy time for science in Sweden. Last year, the government committed to its largest-ever investment in research, with plans to increase annual funding from 25 billion kronor (US$3.52 billion) in 2008 to 30 billion kronor in 2012.

In May, the country claimed victory in the hard-fought battle to host the European Spallation Source (ESS), a €1.4-billion (US$2-billion) facility that will produce beams of neutrons to study the structure and properties of materials.

Then, on 1 July, Sweden took up its six-month presidency of the European Union, giving it an opportunity to shape the research agenda. Just over a week later, at a science-policy conference at Lund University, about 350 scientists and policy-makers called for a new deal on the way that funding is distributed under the framework programmes for research and technological development — Europe's main route for science investment.

The resulting 'Lund Declaration' says that European research should focus more on "grand challenges" and less on the "rigid thematic approaches" of the current funding round. At the conference, the declaration was handed over to Tobias Krantz, who took up the post of Sweden's Minister for Higher Education and Research in June. Nature spoke to Krantz about Sweden's research ambitions, and its vision for Europe.

What are the most pressing issues you face?

Increasing financial support for academic research and strengthening emphasis on quality are very important issues. But more pressing is the future of European research policy, defining the priorities for the next framework programme.

The new thinking about this is that we should take national budgets into account, and not just consider European-level budgets and the framework programmes.

There is an urgent need for more coordination and cooperation but it is also necessary to safeguard academic freedom and pluralism — we do not want to have a situation where everything is dictated from Brussels. Based on the Lund Declaration, I feel that this is an opinion shared by European researchers as well as politicians.

How do you respond to scientists in Sweden who say that too much funding is channelled into large grants, and not enough to individual researchers?

It is important to have different kinds of funding and government spending for research. As politicians, we learn from the scientific community itself what areas should be pursued more than others, which topics should be focused on, which institution or network should have the money. So, I believe there is space for both big networks and for more individual projects.

Some people think strategic funding won't work, but I am confident that this approach will be successful. There is, for example, a growing problem with diabetes in Sweden. Therefore I do not think it is so strange that the government gives an extra injection of money to it, while giving the research community the freedom and independence to direct its own work in the area.

Do you have any plans to save the Institute of Genetics in Lund, which is being disbanded due to financial problems? (see 'Deficit dooms Swedish gene institute')

I should not comment on this specific event. It is up to the university and its administration to decide how to organize itself and, as a minister, I should not intervene on such aspects.

There are also complaints about the bureaucracy that pervades the management of Swedish research. What's your view?

When I was a scientist myself, I remember complaining about it as well. Of course, the process of applying for funding could be made more transparent and simpler in many aspects. In fact, we increased the funding that goes directly to universities to 1.6 billion kronor — that cuts bureaucracy simply by removing the need to apply for those funds at all.

Relatively few senior foreign scientists consider coming to work in Sweden. Do you see that as a problem and, if so, do you have a plan to tackle it?

This is a very important issue and Sweden still has a lot to do. There is definitely a need to stimulate more available positions at the senior level in Swedish universities, but we have to take measures in different policy areas to make Sweden more attractive. The ESS project may test how Sweden can be effective in recruiting foreign specialists.

How much will the ESS drain Swedish research spending?

We are negotiating the exact final figures, but the original Swedish bid was to fund 30% of the €1.4-billion cost of the ESS. It's a very exciting project because it can show that Sweden is a good country to establish infrastructure and locate important international projects.

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

[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 11:45 GMT, Thursday, 27 August 2009 12:45 UK
Young Guantanamo Afghan to sue US
One of the youngest detainees held at the US detention centre in Guantanamo Bay will sue the United States for compensation, his lawyers say.

Mohammed Jawad was released and arrived in his native Afghanistan earlier this week. His family says he was 12 at the time of his detention in 2002.

He was in custody for seven years. The Pentagon, however, disputes his age.

Mr Jawad had been accused of injuring two US soldiers and their interpreter by throwing a grenade at their vehicle.

Much of the case against him had been ruled inadmissible by a US military judge in 2008.

Mr Jawad's release was ordered last month by US District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle, who described the US government's case against him as "an outrage" that was "riddled with holes".

US government lawyers had said they were considering pursuing a criminal case against Mr Jawad, but no charges were filed.

US President Barack Obama has pledged to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay by January 2010.

'Unacceptable'

Mr Jawad's lawyers said his family would sue for compensation in US courts, but added that he needed as much financial assistance as possible in the short term.

{There is no difference between being confined in Guantanamo Bay or being left out in the wild
Major Eric Montalvo}

"The way forward right now is to avail the Afghanistan government and the US government of funding to help train him and get him back to normalcy," Mr Jawad's lawyer Major Eric Montalvo was quoted by the Associated Press news agency as saying.

"So to not give him any compensation - any way to help him back to civilisation - this is unacceptable," Mr Montalvo told a press conference in the Afghan capital, Kabul.

"There is no difference between being confined in Guantanamo Bay or being left out in the wild without assistance," he said.

Mr Jawad's family say he was 12 when he was arrested in 2002.

The Pentagon says a bone scan showed he was about 17 when taken into custody.

Mr Montalvo, a US military lawyer, says Mr Jawad, who does not have a birth certificate, was between 12 and 15 years old at the time of arrest.

"I was an innocent child when they put me in prison," Mr Jawad told The Associated Press in an interview.

His family and lawyers say Mr Jawad was subjected to torture while in detention.


[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 11:47 GMT, Thursday, 27 August 2009 12:47 UK
'Militants die in drone attack'
At least four suspected militants have been killed in a US drone attack in north-west Pakistan, officials say.

A militant hideout was targeted in the South Waziristan tribal region, Pakistani intelligence officials said.

A similar attack in the same region in early August killed Pakistan's top Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud.

Hundreds of militants and civilians have been killed in dozens of drone attacks in the past year, chiefly in North and South Waziristan.

See a map of the region

The attack took place in the Tapar Ghai area in the Kanigram district in South Waziristan. The area is a remote and mountainous part of the region, out of the reach of the local authorities.

Local residents told BBC Urdu that the target was a house occupied by militants.

It was not immediately clear if the strike targeted a particular Taliban leader, officials said.

But the house was said to be close to an area where Pakistan's security forces clashed with militants loyal to Baitullah Mehsud on Wednesday evening.

"I saw drones flying over the area and then there were two huge explosions," resident Mohamad Omar told the Reuters news agency.

Pakistan has criticised drone attacks, saying they fuel support for the militants.

The US military does not routinely confirm drone attacks but the armed forces and the Central Intelligence Agency operating in Afghanistan are believed to be the only forces capable of deploying drones in the region.

On Tuesday two senior Taliban commanders confirmed that their leader, Baitullah Mehsud ,had died of injuries sustained in a US missile strike on 5 August.

The confirmation came after weeks of intense speculation about the fate of the Taliban leader following the attack.


[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 07:20 GMT, Thursday, 27 August 2009 08:20 UK
Bollywood star 'wants IPL team'
Bollywood star Salman Khan is interested in buying a team in the India Premier League (IPL) cricket tournament, IPL authorities say.

The actor met IPL chairman Lalit Modi and showed interest in a "new team", Mr Modi said.

Bollywood stars Shah Rukh Khan, Preity Zinta and Shilpa Shetty already own or jointly own IPL teams with partners.

IPL will expand the competition from eight to 10 teams for 2011, when a fresh player auction will take place.

Mr Modi told reporters that Khan had been in talks about buying a team for a number of months.

"He was interested in knowing what it takes to own a team and the process involved - when his move could be initiated and how long it would take. I think he is a serious buyer," Mr Modi was quoted as saying by The Times Of India.

A member of the IPL governing council Rajeev Shukla said there would be "other bidders [for teams] as well along with Salman Khan".

"And whosoever comes up with the maximum bid will win a team."

Mr Modi said "over 20 celebrities" were interested in buying new IPL teams.

Shah Rukh owns the Calcutta team, while Preity Zinta and Shilpa Shetty co-own the Punjab and Rajasthan teams.


[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 13:37 GMT, Thursday, 27 August 2009 14:37 UK
China angry at Dalai Lama invite
China has criticised an invitation from Taiwan to the Dalai Lama, calling him a separatist who wants to sabotage improving cross-strait relations.

Taiwan's president granted opposition requests for Tibet's spiritual leader to comfort victims of Typhoon Morakot.

But a statement from Beijing's Taiwan Affairs Bureau said the Dalai Lama was not a "pure religious figure".

"Under the pretext of religion, he has all along been engaged in separatist activities," the statement said.

Beijing was "resolutely opposed" to the visit," China's state-run news agency Xinhua reported.

The authorities in Beijing said Taiwan's pro-independence opposition had ulterior motives in asking President Ma Ying-jeou to approve the Dalai Lama's visit.

"Some of the people in the Democratic Progressive Party use the disaster rescue excuse to invite Dalai to Taiwan to sabotage the hard-earned positive situation of cross-straits relations," the statement said.

"He raises the religious banner and continues to carry out attempting to split the country."

China considers the exiled Dalai Lama a dangerous separatist and self-governed Taiwan to be part of its territory, and usually reacts angrily to nations that welcome the Dalai Lama.

Comforting victims

Under Taiwan's previous pro-independence administration, the Dalai Lama visited the island several times - most recently in 2001.

But President Ma, who came to power in 2008, is much closer to China than his predecessor Chen Shui-bian.

{Cindy Sui, BBC News in Taipei
Allowing the Dalai Lama's visit is being seen as a politically-calculated move by President Ma Ying-jeou aimed at avoiding further public criticism of him and his administration.
The president cannot afford to have his approval ratings, already at a record low, plunge further for being seen as bowing to pressure from Beijing. And analysts said he would face a public backlash if he did not let the visit go ahead.

Mr Ma's office sounded confident ties with China will not be damaged.}

Last year he refused to grant permission for a visit by the Dalai Lama, saying the timing was not right as his government was working to improve relations with Beijing.

But the typhoon and its aftermath have left Mr Ma in a difficult position.

The Chinese government considers Mr Ma's administration far easier to deal with than the island's previous pro-independence leadership.

However, an estimated 500 people were killed by severe flooding and mudslides caused by the typhoon - the worst Taiwan has suffered for 50 years - and Mr Ma's administration has been criticised for its slow and inefficient response.

His popularity has plunged to a record low of 20% over his handling of the disaster.

According to the BBC's Cindy Sui in Taipei, the president needed to give the green light to the Dalai Lama's visit because he could not afford to hurt his and his party's image any further.

So after a five-hour meeting with security officials, he chose to allow the trip.

Correspondents say that harsh Chinese criticism might play into the hands of Taiwan's opposition by reducing Mr Ma's popularity even further.
The Tibetan spiritual leader is due to arrive on 31 August and to stay for four days, with the focus of his trip being entirely to comfort those affected by the typhoon.

The Dalai Lama has long been eager to visit Taiwan, and is looking forward to the trip, his aide told Reuters news agency.

Taiwan is home to a large exiled Tibetan community, and millions of Taiwanese are Buddhists.

A spokesman for Taiwan's Presidential Office insisted "cross-strait relations will not be negatively affected" by the decision.

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

[Africa]
Page last updated at 12:49 GMT, Thursday, 27 August 2009 13:49 UK
War in Sudan's Darfur 'is over'
The six-year war between forces loyal to Sudan's government and rebels in Darfur has effectively ended, the UN's military commander in the region says.

General Martin Agwai, who is leaving his post this week, said the vicious fighting of earlier years had subsided as rebel groups split into factions.

He says the region now suffers more from low-level disputes and banditry.

The UN says 300,000 people have died in Darfur, but the Sudanese government puts the figure at 10,000.

Almost three million people are said to have been displaced by the fighting.

Oppression claims

Gen Agwai, who commands thousands of troops from the UN and African Union, said the region now suffered more from "security issues" than full-blown conflict.

"Banditry, localised issues, people trying to resolve issues over water and land at a local level. But real war as such, I think we are over that," he said.

Gen Agwai said only one rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement (Jem), posed a real threat.

Sudan analyst Gill Lusk said his comments were "unhelpful" because they could lead people to believe that Darfur's problems had been solved.

"There has been a large decline in fighting in Darfur, and that is undoubtedly a good thing for the people," she told the BBC.

"But it is the government that turns the tap on and off - they can restart the violence whenever they want."

'Strong foundation'

The war broke out in the arid and impoverished region early in 2003 when rebel groups including Jem attacked government targets, accusing Khartoum of oppressing black Africans in favour of Arabs.

Pro-government militiamen hit back with brutal force, which the US and some rights groups have labelled genocide.

Khartoum denies supporting the militias, but the international court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant earlier this year for President Omar al-Bashir accusing him of war crimes.

Although the intensity of the violence has reduced, there is still little prospect of a peace deal.

Last week, US envoy to Sudan Scott Gration said the existence of 26 different rebel factions was a major obstacle to reaching a peace agreement with the government.

He brokered talks which led to four groups agreeing to work together, calling the deal a "very strong foundation for rebel unification".


[Europe]
Page last updated at 13:38 GMT, Thursday, 27 August 2009 14:38 UK
Merkel warns Iran on sanctions
Iran could face new sanctions if it does not show a willingness to negotiate on its nuclear programme, the German chancellor has said.

Angela Merkel was speaking after talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Berlin.

She also called on Israel to freeze its settlement construction for the sake of progress in peace talks.

In London on Wednesday, Mr Netanyahu suggested Israel was close to an agreement on settlements.

During his visit to Germany, the Israeli prime minister has also been given original blueprints of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.

The plans, which date from 1941-2, were found in a Berlin flat last year and include technical drawings for a gas chamber and crematorium - a symbol of the difficult history which connects Germany with the Jewish state created after the Nazi Holocaust.

'Further measures'

US President Barack Obama has warned that harsher penalties could be imposed on Iran if it does not take up an offer of talks on trade benefits in exchange for shelving its nuclear programme.

"If there is no positive answer by September we will have to consider further measures," said Mrs Merkel.

Speaking at a press conference after their talks, Mr Netanyahu called for "crippling sanctions" against Iran to stop its disputed nuclear programme.

"It is possible to put real pressure, real economic pressure, on this regime if the major powers of the world unite," he said.

On the settlement issue, Mrs Merkel said a freeze in construction would push forward the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

"Progress on the issue of settlements - a freeze on settlements - is an important building block and a prerequisite for a restart of the Middle East peace process," said Mrs Merkel.

After Wednesday's talks in London, the Israeli prime minister said the US and Israel were "getting closer" to a "bridging formula" on the settlement issue, according to his spokesman.

The US wants Israel to comply with Palestinian demands that it halt all building before peace talks can start.

The Palestinians have refused to resume peace negotiations unless Israel stops all settlement building.

Chancellor Merkel has shown herself a staunch supporter of Israel and received a standing ovation in parliament last year when she pledged that her country would stand by Israel's side against any threat.

But, says the BBC's Steve Rosenberg in Berlin, she is ready to criticise when she sees fit.

Tensions

During his visit to Germany, Mr Netanyahu was also due to visit a villa from where senior Nazis planned the extermination of the Jews.

He is the first Israeli prime minister to visit since the site, on Lake Wannsee on the outskirts of the capital, was opened.

The meeting comes a week after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said Germany was involved in efforts to secure the release of the captured Israeli soldier Gilat Shalit.

Sgt Shalit is due to mark his 23rd birthday - his fourth in captivity - on Friday, amid a wave of fresh speculation in the regional media about progress towards a deal.

Hamas wants several hundred Palestinan prisoners, including the popular and potentially unifying leader Marwan Barghouti, to be released by Israel in exchange for Sgt Shalit's freedom.

Germany has helped to negotiate Israeli-Lebanese prisoner swaps in the past.


[Science & Environment]
Page last updated at 00:33 GMT, Thursday, 27 August 2009 01:33 UK
'Artificial trees' to cut carbon
Engineers say a forest of 100,000 "artificial trees" could be deployed within 10 to 20 years to help soak up the world's carbon emissions.
By Judith Burns
Science and environment reporter, BBC News

The trees are among three geo-engineering ideas highlighted as practical in a new report.

The authors from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers say that without geo-engineering it will be impossible to avoid dangerous climate change.

The report includes a 100-year roadmap to "decarbonise" the global economy.

No silver bullet

Launching the report, lead author Dr Tim Fox said geo-engineering should not be viewed as a "silver bullet" that could combat climate change in isolation.

He told BBC News it should be used in conjunction with efforts to reduce carbon emissions and to adapt to the effects of climate change.

Many climate scientists calculate that the world has only a few decades to reduce emissions before there is so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that a dangerous rise in global temperature is inevitable.

The authors of this report say that geo-engineering of the type they propose should be used on a short-term basis to buy the world time, but in the long term it is vital to reduce emissions.

They define two types of geo-engineering. Nem Vaughan of University of East Anglia said: "The first category attempts to cool the planet by reflecting some of the sunlight away. The problem with this is that it just masks the problem."

"The other type of geo-engineering is to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it."

Hundreds of options

The team studied hundreds of different options but have put forward just three as being practical and feasible using current technology.

A key factor in choosing the three was that they should be low-carbon technologies rather than adding to the problem.

Dr Fox told BBC News: "Artificial trees are already at the prototype stage and are very advanced in their design in terms of their automation and in the components that would be used.

"They could, within a relatively short duration, be moved forward into mass production and deployment."

The trees would work on the principle of capturing carbon dioxide from the air through a filter.

The CO2 would then be removed from the filter and stored. The report calls for the technology to be developed in conjunction with carbon storage infrastructure.

Dr Fox said the prototype artificial tree was about the same size as a shipping container and could remove thousands of times more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than an equivalent sized real tree.

Another of the team's preferred methods of capturing carbon is to install what they term "algae based photobioreactors" on buildings. These would be transparent containers containing algae which would remove carbon dioxide from the air during photosynthesis.

The third option focuses on the reduction of incoming solar radiation by reflecting sunlight back into space. The report says the simplest way of doing this is for buildings to have reflective roofs.

The authors stress that all of these options will require more research and have called for the UK government to invest 10 million pounds in analysis of the effectiveness, risks and costs of geo-engineering.

Dr Fox said: "We very much believe that the practical geo-engineering that we are proposing should be implemented and could be very much part of our landscape within the next 10 to 20 years."