Why the white wilderness needs our care

The number of ships visiting the Antarctic is growing; and that brings an increasing risk of accidents that could pollute the coastline and the Southern Ocean. In the Green Room this week, James Barnes says that governments must act now to protect the White Continent.

Antarctica and the Southern Ocean constitute the planet's last great wilderness; yet even that far-away region is becoming increasingly overcrowded. There are fishing boats, both legal and illegal, including a new breed that vacuum krill from the sea...news.bbc.co.uk

Heal the world with meditation and Action

You can make all the difference in the world today when you help balance the incoming energies of transformation by using the technique of meditation. Reconnect with your spiritual source daily.

Ending your meditation session by spending time in gratitude for life, nature and the infinite being from which you materialized. Let a sense of gratitude for everything in your life fill your heart.

Then, intend world peace and enlightenment. Send this intention out into the world as love energy, only love can go from your soul to every being all around the world.

Civil Libertarians See a Hopeful Dawn in 2009 ...

Some civil libertarians are hopeful that if Barack Obama wins the presidency, the government will move toward more openness; others aren't convinced anyone can turn back the tide of secrecy wrought by George W. Bush. Warrantless wiretaps. The Patriot Act. Presidential secrecy. For seven years, civil libertarians and open-government advocates have felt they've been wandering in the wilderness, with few allies in Congress and a White House that only gets bolder in its contempt.

But now, with "change" the watchword in both Democratic presidential bids, and top committee heads in Congress flexing forgotten oversight muscles, activists are daring to look to 2009 as the Promised Land, where a new president joins with a fed-up Congress to lead America into a new era. "A lot are talking about the post-Watergate Congress of 1974," said Marc Rotenberg, who heads the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "There is a real feeling we may have proposals for the kind of sweeping government reform that Congress pushed through after the Nixon impeachment in July 1974."... www.wired.com

HOW DENMARK LEARNED TO REAP THE WIND

TheStar.com | Earth Hour | Embracing a clean green dream

Embracing a clean green dream

COPENHAGEN – An inner-city harbour with water so clean the fish are for eating and the beaches for swimming. Offshore wind farms in the waters beyond, piped to the power grid on two generations of Danish brainpower. Underfoot, a district heating network that squeezes every possible joule of warmth from some of the world's most efficient electricity plants, keeping 97 per cent of Copenhagen toasty. And here on the ground, a city where cyclists outnumber motorists during the downtown commute on close to 400 kilometres of dedicated lanes so safe that the vast majority don't even bother wearing helmets, which aren't mandatory anyway.

At first glance, Copenhagen is everything the brochure says: a hand-shaped city where each finger of suburb is separated by green space and in each fingerbone, a transit corridor of trains and buses, car and bike lanes to the central palm, where many of the globe's deepest environmental thinkers can be found.

Or so it all seems, through North American eyes... www.thestar.com

Those who control oil and water will control the world

History may not repeat itself, but, as Mark Twain observed, it can sometimes rhyme. The crises and conflicts of the past recur, recognisably similar even when altered by new conditions. At present, a race for the world's resources is underway that resembles the Great Game that was played in the decades leading up to the First World War. Now, as then, the most coveted prize is oil and the risk is that as the contest heats up it will not always be peaceful. But this is no simple rerun of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, there are powerful new players and it is not only oil that is at stake.

It was Rudyard Kipling who brought the idea of the Great Game into the public mind in Kim, his cloak-and-dagger novel of espionage and imperial geopolitics in the time of the Raj. Then, the main players were Britain and Russia and the object of the game was control of central Asia's oil. Now, Britain hardly matters and India and China, which were subjugated countries during the last round of the game, have emerged as key players. The struggle is no longer focused mainly on central Asian oil. It stretches from the Persian Gulf to Africa, Latin America, even the polar caps, and it is also a struggle for water and depleting supplies of vital minerals. Above all, global warming is increasing the scarcity of natural resources. The Great Game that is afoot today is more intractable and more dangerous than the last.

The biggest new player in the game is China and it is there that the emerging pattern is clearest. China's rulers have staked everything on economic growth. Without improving living standards, there would be large-scale unrest, which could pose a threat to their power. Moreover, China is in the middle of the largest and fastest move from the countryside to the city in history, a process that cannot be stopped... www.guardian.co.uk

The Borrowers

Over the past 15 years, individuals and businesses in both Britain and the United States have taken on too many loans. The punishment for their recklessness is only just beginning

In November last year, Louis Bacon, one of the cleverest American hedge-fund managers, paid $175m (£88m) for the Trinchera Ranch, which covers 250 square miles of Colorado. It was the US's largest-ever private property transaction.

At the time, this was viewed as just another example of hedge-fund excess, like the bottles of Petrus blithely downed in Mayfair each night. But, in retrospect, it may have been one of Bacon's smartest investments.

When the rest of the financial world goes to hell, good ranch land holds its value. You can see it, touch it and even live off it if you have to. That is more than can be said for a collateralised debt obligation, one of the gimcracks causing Wall Street's current woes.

It has been a breathtaking few weeks to be in New York. Whether you work in financial services or not, Wall Street dominates the city, its economy and its culture. It was on Wall Street that the downfall of Eliot Spitzer, New York's governor, was greeted with the greatest rapture. Spitzer had made his name punishing bankers for their actions during the 1990s boom, so for them his humiliation was delicious... www.newstatesman.com

Bush Makes ‘Free Trade’ National Security Issue

The standoff in the Andes ended like a sappy Latin American telenovela with stiff hugs and handshakes at a March 6 summit. But that’s not stopping the Bush administration from using the conflict to ram Colombia’s pending “Free Trade Agreement” (FTA) through Congress.

Almost a week after the summit held in the Dominican Republic, President Bush cited the crisis, saying, “The Colombia agreement is pivotal to America’s national security and economic interests right now, and it is too important to be held up by politics.” Democrats have opposed the plan over concerns about labor rights and violent attacks on unionists in Colombia.

In fact, in just the six days between the summit handshakes and Bush’s appeal for Congress to set aside “politics,” four more Colombian unionists were murdered—two teachers, a banker, and a hospital worker. This adds to more than 2,500 unionists murdered since 1986—more than those killed during the same period in the rest of the world combined. A report by Human Rights Watch published last year blames “the majority” of these killings on illegal paramilitary groups.... news.nacla.org

Earth Hour Goes Global

Breaking... Fed, central banks act on credit needs

The U.S. Federal Reserve prepared to pump $75 billion into frozen credit markets following moves by European central banks on Thursday to help lenders who scrambled to meet quarter-end funding needs.

The Fed was ready to exchange billions in low-risk U.S. government bonds for underperforming mortgage investments from primary dealers as part of steps announced this month to help them raise capital and to encourage broader lending.

Banks are clamoring for extra cash to meet capital requirements ahead of Monday's quarterly book closing, reducing their willingness to lend and adding to strains in crisis-hit markets... biz.yahoo.com

If your dog is chubby, your not getting enough exercise
- anonymous

On March 29, 2008, cities across Canada, and around the world will turn off their lights for Earth Hour, a WWF event to raise awareness about climate change and symbolize that, working together the people of the world can make a difference in the fight against climate change.

Earth Hour has grown from a single event in Sydney, Australia in 2007 to a global phenomenon that will occur across six continents and in as many as 20 cities in 2008. Toronto was the flagship Canadian city to commemorate Earth Hour 2008 but dozens of others including Ottawa, Vancouver and Montreal have already joined!

Our goal is to get thousands of businesses and individuals to participate in this historic event, so we can show the nation and the world that Canadians are leaders in addressing climate change, one of the most critical issues facing our world today.

Don't stop at Earth Hour - live The Good Life everyday! The Good Life is WWF-Canada’s new campaign that helps Canadians track the actions they are taking for the planet so you can actually see how your actions add up to help fight climate change.

Antarctic ice shelf collapses

WASHINGTON – A chunk of Antarctic ice about the size of Manhattan suddenly collapsed, putting an even greater portion of glacial ice at risk, scientists said today.

Satellite images show the runaway disintegration of a 414-square-kilometre chunk in western Antarctica, which started Feb. 28. It was the edge of the Wilkins ice shelf and has been there for hundreds, maybe 1,500 years. This is the result of global warming, said British Antarctic Survey scientist David Vaughan.

Because scientists noticed satellite images within hours, they diverted satellite cameras and even flew an airplane over the ongoing collapse for rare pictures and video. "It's an event we don't get to see very often," said Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. "The cracks fill with water and slice off and topple... That gets to be a runaway situation." While icebergs naturally break away from the mainland, collapses like this are unusual but are happening more frequently in recent decades, Vaughan said. The collapse is similar to what happens to hardened glass when it is smashed with a hammer, he said.

The campaign grinds on

Hillary Clinton has few weapons in hand to win the Democratic nomination for president

“I THINK it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country.” So said a former president, Bill Clinton, on Friday March 21st, apparently suggesting that Barack Obama, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, is insufficiently patriotic.

Such an attack seems unusually mischievous, even for a former president who is desperate to bolster the chances of his wife, Hillary Clinton, in the nomination. She has enjoyed a good spell recently, shifting momentum away from Mr Obama, the result of doggedness and hard work on her part and of a scandal of sorts that lingers over him. But the prospect of a Clinton returning to the White House remains dim. Mr Obama has a commanding lead over Mrs Clinton in votes, in Democratic delegates and in states won. He is beating her, and his leads are most unlikely to be overturned in the few Democratic primaries that remain.

Last week Mrs Clinton did get some fleeting hope. Mr Obama's preacher and “spiritual adviser”, Jeremiah Wright, had been taped saying some grossly anti-American and paranoid things. Mr Obama responded with a long and thoughtful meditation on race and America that tickled the country's elites, further proving his eloquence and touch. It remains unclear, however, how the rank-and-file might have been affected or how this might influence the forthcoming primaries... www.economist.com

Introducing The Plants And Animals Of The Wet Tropics

About 3,000 plant species from 210 families are found in the Wet Tropics. Twelve out of the world's 19 families of primitive flowering plants grow here and within these families, there are at least 50 species found only in the Wet Tropics. While many of the plants in the rainforest have been around for millions of years, learn about ferns that have been around for much longer than that. Learn how the Area provides an unparalleled living record of the ecological and evolutionary processes that shaped the flora and fauna of Australia over the past 415 million years.

Learn more about the mammals, reptiles, freshwater fish, birds and frogs of the World Heritage Area. This area is home to about a third of Australia's 315 mammal species - 13 of these species are found nowhere else in the world. They include unique green possums, ringtail possums, fierce marsupial cats, rare bats, tree-kangaroos, a rat-kangaroo, a melomys and an antechinus. There are many spectacular insects to see in Australia's Tropical Rainforests. Do you know what a peripatus is? Read on to find out about the invertebrates that inhabit these forests including, crustaceans, worms, beetles, ants, spiders, mites, scorpions, amblypygids, centipedes and millipedes, not to mention the snails and slugs. While the Wet Tropics region is home to a quarter of Australia's frogs and a little over a third of the country's freshwater fish, it is also home to nearly half of Australia's birds - that's more than 370 different species... www.wettropics.gov.au

Sabbath...

By Allyson Guidry In a world full of noise and busyness, we all need a place to sit and take a moment to rest. These photographs seem to reflect human docking stations...places to recharge. They reflect the sacredness of solitude and silence. Each one draws you to stillness, beckons you to sit and rest. When I look at them I am reminded of the joy in simplicity. These are safe places to ask deep questions and discover the answers within yourself. They provide retreat and renewal. They remind me to embrace life as I sit and rest awhile... www.jpgmag.com

The woman who nearly stopped the war

Of all the stories told on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, there is one important episode that took place during the build-up to the conflict that has gone largely unreported. It concerns a young woman who was a witness to something so outrageous, something so contrary to the principles of diplomacy and international law, that in revealing it she believed war could be averted. That woman was Katharine Gun, a 29-year-old Mandarin translator at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham.

On Friday 31 January 2003 she and many of her colleagues were forwarded a request from the US government for an intelligence "surge" at the United Nations (with hindsight, an interesting choice of words). In essence, the US was ordering the intensification of espionage at the UN headquarters in New York to help persuade the Security Council to authorise war in Iraq. The aim, according to the email, was to give the United States "the edge" in negotiations for a crucial resolution to give international authorisation for the war. Many believed that, without it, the war would be illegal... www.newstatesman.com

Tibetans Expect Little Help From World

Nearly six decades of struggle against the might of China has taught the Tibetans one thing: Ask the world for little, expect less. As Tibetans rose up in recent weeks against China's harsh rule over the Himalayan region and China sent forces to quell the protests, Tibet's government-in exile-sent its envoys to far-flung capitals with appeals for help. But guided by the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, they kept their requests modest. They know few countries have the appetite to cross China, particularly at a time the world is counting on the emerging superpower to keep the global economy ticking as the United States appears headed into a recession. "His Holiness says we have to be realistic," said Tenzin Taklha, a senior aide to the 72-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner who has come to embody the Tibetan struggle since he fled to India in 1959 in the wake of a failed uprising against China... hosted.ap.org

Water will be source of war unless world acts now

The world faces a future of "water wars", unless action is taken to prevent international water shortages and sanitation issues escalating into conflicts, according to Gareth Thomas, the International Development minister.

The minister's warning came as a coalition of 27 international charities marked World Water Day, by writing to Gordon Brown demanding action to give fresh water to 1.1 billion people with poor supplies. "If we do not act, the reality is that water supplies may become the subject of international conflict in the years ahead," said Mr Thomas. "We need to invest now to prevent us having to pay that price in the future."... www.independent.co.uk

Star explodes halfway across universe

The explosion of a star halfway across the universe was so huge it set a record for the most distant object that could be seen on Earth by the naked eye.

A star 7.5 billion light years away exploded, giving off the brightest gamma-ray burst afterglow ever seen. The aging star, in a previously unknown galaxy, exploded in a gamma ray burst 7.5 billion light years away, its light finally reaching Earth early Wednesday.

The gamma rays were detected by NASA's Swift satellite at 2:12 a.m. "We'd never seen one before so bright and at such a distance," NASA's Neil Gehrels said. It was bright enough to be seen with the naked eye.

However, NASA has no reports that any skywatchers spotted the burst, which lasted less than an hour. Telescopic measurements show that the burst -- which occurred when the universe was about half its current age -- was bright enough to be seen without a telescope.

"Someone would have had to run out and look at it with a naked eye, but didn't," said Gehrels, chief of NASA's astroparticles physics lab at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md... www.cnn.com

Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen

and the Truth of Global Warming

Dr. James Hansen is widely regarded as the leading climate change scientist in the country. For the past twenty-five years, he has headed NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Just over a year ago, Dr. Hansen went public with a charge that made headlines around the world—that the Bush administration had been trying to silence his warnings about the urgent need to address climate change. Dr. Hansen joins us in our firehouse studio. His story is detailed in a new book by author Mark Bowen titled Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming.

Fed Bailout of Bear Stearns First of its Kind

Since Great Depression

The nation’s fifth largest investment bank Bear Stearns nearly collapsed last week. It was saved only after the Federal Reserve took extraordinary measures to help JPMorgan purchase the eighty-five-year-old firm. The Fed has become the lender of last resort for other investment banks in a move that marks one of the broadest expansions of the Fed’s lending authority since the 1930s. We speak with Nomi Prins, an author and former investment banker at Bear Stearns, and Max Fraad Wolff, an economist and writer...

www.democracynow.org

Economist: Copyright is dead

No wonder they call Economics the Dismal Science. At the Internet Video Policy Symposium in Washington yesterday (co-sponsored by Content Agenda), a chorus line of academic economists postulated that content owners face a far more difficult challenge than they know in monetizing their content on the Internet, and that the odds that we can build our way out of the current debate over how to manage scarce online capacity are virtually nil. The most enthusiastically glum was Gerry Faulhaber, a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and the former chief economist for the FCC. According to Faulhaber, copyright is a dead letter. "Copyright is a very big issue in the legal world today, but in the business world, when you talk to consumers about protecting copyrights, it's a dead issue," he said. "It's gone. If you have a business model based on copyright, forget it." According to Faulhaber, the "world of open piracy," created by digital technology will always thwart content owners seeking to leverage the monopoly granted to them by copyright law... www.contentagenda.com

The Truth About Tibet

Lindsey Hilsum

The last thing China wanted, in the year it is to host the Olympic Games, was the world watching its army brutally suppressing protesters

Things are not going as planned. The emblematic images of China in 2008 were supposed to be the magnificent "Bird's Nest" sports stadium, and millions of proud Chinese applauding their country's success in hosting the Olympic Games. Instead, the world is seeing gangs of angry Tibetan rioters attacking their Han Chinese neighbours, and Buddhist monks demonstrating against Chinese rule.

Since the 1989 unrest, which centred on Tiananmen Square but spread to Tibet, any protest has been suppressed quickly and effectively. But this time, initially, the Chinese hesitated. The government knew that nothing could be worse for China's reputation in this Olympic year than Tiananmen-type images of the soldiers of the People's Liberation Army firing on Tibetan demonstrators. So it flooded the streets with armour, in the hope that intimidation would do the trick. By Monday, Beijing had moved troops and paramilitary riot police into all sensitive areas, hoping to quash protest with a show of strength.

On Tuesday, the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, accused the Dalai Lama of orchestrating the unrest, saying that the protesters wanted "to incite the sabotage of the Olympic Games in order to achieve their unspeakable goal". That goal is independence for Tibet, but it is the social rather than the political motivation that has disturbed the Chinese authorities... www.newstatesman.com

The Subprime Crisis is Just Starting

Daniel R. Amerman, CFA

Overview: As the author of three books on mortgage finance and related derivative securities, and speaking as someone who first turned mortgages into rated securities in 1983, I’m going to let you in on an unfortunate little secret – the real subprime mortgage securitization crisis may not have even started yet. But, there is a good chance the real crisis will arrive soon.

This assertion that the crisis could just be getting started may seem absurd and extraordinarily out of touch. What about the approximately 45,000 homeowners losing their homes to foreclosure in the United States every month? What about the 8.9% plunge in nominal housing prices in 2007, the largest decline in over 20 years? What about Bear Stearns losing 94% of the value of its stock in 2 days, with even the remaining 6% in value being based on an unprecedented loan from the Fed before JP Morgan would agree to the acquisition? How much worse could it get?

To understand the full extent of the danger requires moving beyond current headlines to take a brief and simple look at how mortgage securitizations actually work. These securitizations are based on what are known as “stress tests”, or the ability of a security to withstand an adverse economic change and still pay principal and interest on schedule. The heart of the subprime problem is that no major stress tests happened in 2007 – and the market still blew up. Which brings up the question of what will happen to subprime and other mortgage derivative securities in 2008 if actual stress tests do occur in such possible forms as recession, increases in interest rates, or a further plunge in housing values? Given that the safety margins have already been stripped bare? As we will explore, should one of those stress tests occur – or worse, if two or three occur together – then we may look back at 2007 as being a mere stroll in the park in comparison... www.financialsense.com

HOW YOU, TOO, CAN BE A GENIUS

By FARRAH WEINSTEIN

THOMAS EDISON

AS you prepare to open those college rejection letters, or worry about having to take summer school classes, fret not - being brilliant is not in the numbers.

A roundup of IQ studies from Cambridge University Press, called the "Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," proves that Thomas Edison was right all along: Genius is 99 percent perspiration.

"There are international chess masters that have below-average IQs," says Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University in Tallahassee, who edited the handbook.

"Basically, there is no indication that people with higher IQ are able to reach the top faster. We are finding people who meet the criteria for being skilled surgeons, chess masters, athletes or magicians. Once you start looking at what makes them successful, IQ doesn't make any difference."

The 918-page book raises the question of whether we should eliminate the idea of determining one's potential through IQ altogether. Instead of accepting a child into an elite school for a number they scored on a test or scouting a CIA recruit because of his IQ score, we might "speak instead of expertise, talent or even greatness," Ericsson says.

Writes British journalist David Dobbs in New Scientist magazine: "Examine closely even the most extreme examples - Mozart, Newton, Einstein, Stravinsky - and you find more hard-won mastery than gift.

"Geniuses are made, not born."... www.nypost.com

Beijing 2008, sadly...

Starbucks must pay $100m in tips

Starbucks said the ruling was "fundamentally unfair"

A US judge has ordered Starbucks to repay its California coffee-makers more than $100m (£50m) in tips that were paid to shift supervisors.

San Diego Superior Court Judge Patricia Cowett said the coffee-makers - "baristas" - were entitled to $86m in back tips, plus interest.

She issued an injunction banning supervisors from sharing future tips.

She said the practice broke a state law barring managers and supervisors from obtaining a share of employee tips.

A Starbucks spokeswoman, Valerie O'Neil, said the company planned to appeal against the ruling, which she described as "fundamentally unfair and beyond all common sense and reason".

The lawsuit was filed in October 2004 by Jou Chou, a former Starbucks barista in La Jolla, California.

In 2006 the suit was granted class action status, allowing it to go forward on behalf of as many as 100,000 former and current baristas in the chain's California stores.

cow-sitting on the bruce...

web.mac.com/tomadickson
click below for more of Tom Dickson's great illustrations...

web.mac.com/tomadickson

I started reading Six Degrees this morning, it's disturbing to say the least. Sometimes the truth is...

Six Degrees - Our Future On A Hotter Planet

By the end of the century, the Earth could be more than 6C hotter than it is today, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We know that would be bad news - but just how bad? How big a rise will it take for the Alps to melt, the oceans to die and desert to conquer Europe and the Americas? Mark Lynas sifted through thousands of scientific papers for his new book on global warming. This is what the research told him ...


Nebraska isn't at the top of most tourists' to-do lists. However, this dreary expanse of impossibly flat plains sits in the middle of one of the most productive agricultural systems on Earth. Beef and corn dominate the economy, and the Sand Hills region - where low, grassy hillocks rise up from the flatlands - has some of the best cattle ranching in the whole US. But scratch beneath the grass and you will find, as the name suggests, not soil but sand. These innocuous-looking hills were once desert, part of an immense system of sand dunes that spread across the Great Plains from Texas in the south to the Canadian prairies in the north. Six thousand years ago, when temperatures were about 1C warmer than today in the US, these deserts may have looked much as the Sahara does today. As global warming bites, the western US could once again be plagued by perennial drought - devastating agriculture and driving out human inhabitants on a scale far larger than the 1930s "Dustbowl" exodus.

On the other side of the Atlantic, today's hottest desert could be seeing a wetter future in the one-degree world. At the same time as sand dunes were blowing across the western US, the central Sahara was a veritable Garden of Eden as rock paintings of elephants, giraffes and buffalo, also dating from 6,000 years ago, attest. On the borders of what is today Chad, Nigeria and Cameroon, the prehistoric Lake Mega-Chad spread over an area only slightly smaller than the Caspian Sea does now. Could a resurgent north African monsoon drive rainfall back into the Sahara in a one-degree world? Models suggest it could.

Also in Africa, Mount Kilimanjaro will be losing the last of its snow and ice as temperatures rise, leaving the entire continent ice-free for the first time in at least 11,000 years. The Alps, too, will be melting, releasing deadly giant landslides as thawing permafrost removes the "glue" that holds the peaks together. In the Arctic, temperatures will rise far higher than the one-degree global average, continuing the rapid decline in sea ice that scientists have already observed. This spells bad news for polar bears, walruses and ringed seals - species that are effectively pushed off the top of the planet as warming shrinks cold areas closer and closer to the pole.

Indeed, it is the ecological effects of warming that may be most apparent at one degree. Critically, this temperature rise may wipe out the majority of the world's tropical coral reefs, devastating marine biodiversity. Most of the Great Barrier Reef will be dead...

books.guardian.co.uk
Mark Lynas site:www.marklynas.org

Investors warm to water as shortages mount

Summary: In business-speak, the millions of people living in slums across the world who are facing epochal water shortages as climate change bites are an “unadressed need [and] an enormous opportunity for investment.”

Investors are now weighing up the population to water resources ratios of nations. In China, for example, which “has a fifth of the world’s population but just 7 percent of the water…Most of the length of the country’s five main rivers is unsafe for direct human contact, and the country will have to build 1,000 wastewater treatment plants between 2006 and 2010 to meet national pollution targets, Citigroup analysts say.”

For Citigroup, this looks like a dream come true. Captive markets, rising commodity prices, environmentally induced scarcity of something that everyone needs – the challenge now is gaining control of the infrastructure and extracting a rent.

That means defeating plans for public ownership and provision – which will be one of the key battle aims for the environmental justice movement in coming years.

As water becomes more scarce, so it becomes a more attractive business proposition

As liquidity is drained from credit and money markets and pours into oil and gold, another asset class that could offer long-term returns to the discerning investor is water.

Water shortages are on the rise — stemming from soaring demand, growing populations, rising living standards and changing diets. A lack of supply is compounded by pollution and climate change.

Investors are mobilising funds to buy the assets that control water and improve supplies, especially in developing countries such as China where urban populations are booming, further tightening supply.

[end excerpt]

Click here to read the rest of the article

City of Seattle Gives Bottled Water the Boot

Photo credit: LeeBrimelow

First San Francisco banned it. Then Chicago started taxing it. Now, the city of Seattle is taking action against bottled water; last week, Mayor Greg Nickels signed an executive order to stop the city from buying bottled water. That means no more bottled water at city facilities and events, which may sound like a small step, but it'll make a big difference; last year, the city spent $58,000 on the stuff (and that's not including the true cost and carbon footprint of bottled water). We're willing to bet that the city's taxpayers can probably think of about 58,000 ways to better spend that money.

The move isn't just an issue of saving money, though that is a nice ancillary effect. It's also a strong vote of confidence in the city's municipal water supply and treatment systems; in light of the fracas about prescription drugs in our water last week, it's good to see the city standing behind its tap water and encouraging its employees and citizens to drink up.

Read more: "City of Seattle Gives Bottled Water the Boot"

Click to enlarge...

Then ask yourself if your breathing, good to quiet the mind once and a while.

Rainbow iceberg in the Antarctic

By Laura Clout

Resembling a strange creature from the deep, this rare marbled iceberg was spotted in the waters of the Antarctic by a Norwegian sailor.

Oyvind Tangen, 62, was on board the research ship G O Sars when he photographed the unusual ice formation, floating a few miles off the coast of the frozen continent.

While most icebergs are white due to tiny bubbles trapped inside, which scatter the light in every direction, some pick up a multitude of colours due to various natural phenomena.

Green stripes are the result of algae growing in the ice, while brown, black and yellow lines form as the ice sheets from which bergs are formed pick up layers of sediment.

Deep blue lines can also appear when the air bubbles are squeezed out due to rapid melting and re-freezing of the ice.

CBC To Release TV-Show via BitTorrent, For Free

CBC, Canada’s public television broadcaster has plans to release the upcoming TV-show “Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister” for free via BitTorrent. This makes CBC the first North-American broadcaster to embrace the popular filesharing protocol.

According to an early report, high quality copies of the show will be published the day after it aired on TV, without any DRM restrictions.

CBC is not alone in this, European broadcasters, including the BBC, are currently working on a next generation BitTorrent client that will allow them to make their content available online. The benefit of BitTorrent is of course that it will reduce distribution costs.

The popularity of movies and TV-shows on BitTorrent hasn’t gone unnoticed. We reported earlier that some TV-studios allegedly use BitTorrent as a marketing tool, and others leaking unaired pilots intentionally.

It is safe to say that BitTorrent is slowly replacing Tivo. Approximately 50% of all BitTorrent downloads are TV-shows, and some episodes of popular shows such as “Lost”, “Prison Break” and “Heroes” get up to 10 million downloads per episode, spread over thousands of sites.

It is good to see that broadcasters slowly start to realize that they can benefit from sharing their content via BitTorrent. Last month Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) made the popular TV-show “Nordkalotten 365″ available in a DRM-less format. This experiment turned out to be a huge success, while the distribution costs were close to zero.

France raises idea of boycotting Olympics

ceremony over Tibet

Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner of France said Tuesday that the European Union should consider punishing China's crackdown in Tibet with a boycott of the opening ceremony of this summer's Olympic Games in Beijing.

His comments followed an appeal by the press advocacy group Reporters Without Borders to governments across the world to shun the highly symbolic ceremony during which the Olympic flame is lighted.

European leaders have been conspicuously quiet since protesters and the Chinese police first clashed in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, a week ago.

China on Tuesday called for an international investigation of the Dalai Lama, who condemned the violence that has erupted from the Tibetan demonstrations. He threatened to resign as leader of Tibet's government in exile "if things become out of control."..

www.iht.com

Glacier melt hits record rate, UN says

Huge losses in Europe spark renewed climate change fears

A thaw of the world’s glaciers has accelerated to a new record with some of the biggest losses within Europe, in a worrying sign of climate change, the UN Environment Programme said Sunday.

“Meltdown in the mountains,” UNEP said in a statement, saying that a retreat of glaciers from the Andes to the Arctic should add urgency to UN negotiations on working out a new treaty by the end of 2009 to combat global warming.

“Data from close to 30 reference glaciers in nine mountain ranges indicate that between the years 2004-2005 and 2005-2006 the average rate of melting and thinning more than doubled,” it said.

Chinook Salmon Vanish Without a Trace

The Chinook salmon that swim upstream to spawn in the fall, the most robust run in the Sacramento River, have disappeared. The almost complete collapse of the richest and most dependable source of Chinook salmon south of Alaska left gloomy fisheries experts struggling for reliable explanations — and coming up dry.

Whatever the cause, there was widespread agreement among those attending a five-day meeting of the Pacific Fisheries Management Council here last week that the regional $150 million fishery, which usually opens for the four-month season on May 1, is almost certain to remain closed this year from northern Oregon to the Mexican border. A final decision on salmon fishing in the area is expected next month...

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