Armies must ready for global warming role: Britain

Mon Jun 25, 2007 3:23PM EDT
REUTERS

By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON (Reuters) - Global warming is such a threat to security that
military planners must build it into their calculations, the head of
Britain's armed forces said on Monday.

Jock Stirrup, chief of the defense staff, said risks that climate
change could cause weakened states to disintegrate and produce major
humanitarian disasters or exploitation by armed groups had to become a
feature of military planning.

But he said first analyses showed planners would not have to switch
their geographical focus, because the areas most vulnerable to climate
change are those where security risks are already high.

"Just glance at a map of the areas most likely to be affected and
you are struck at once by the fact that they are exactly those parts of
the world where we see fragility, instability and weak governance today.

"It seems to me rather like pouring petrol onto a burning fire," Stirrup told the Chatham House think-tank in London.

British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett chaired the first debate
on climate change at the U.N. Security Council in April this year. She
argued that the potential for climate change to cause wars meant it
should be on the council's radar.

Stirrup said the unpredictability of the immediate effects of global
warming on rainfall patterns and storms meant flashpoints could be
advanced by years without warning.

He did not identify the problem areas, but Bert Metz of the U.N.'s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change told the meeting they
included Central America, the Amazon Basin, large parts of north,
central and southern Africa and swathes of Asia.

Scientists say average temperatures will rise by between 1.8 and 4.0
degrees Celsius this century due to burning fossil fuels for power and
transport, melting ice caps, bringing floods, droughts and famines, and
putting millions of lives at risk.

Stirrup said the security threat was far more immediate than those figures might suggest.

"If temperatures rise towards the upper end of the forecast range we
could already start to see serious physical consequences by 2040 -- and
that is if things get no worse."

"If things do get worse you don't need to come very much forward
from 2040 before, in my terms at least, you are talking about the day
after tomorrow," Stirrup said.

He said the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington
showed the devastation that attacks fuelled by political, economic and
social deprivation could achieve.

"Now add in the effects of climate change. Poverty and despair
multiply, resentment surges and people look for someone to blame," he
said.

Even if the world agreed quickly on a way of equitably tackling the
climate crisis -- which was far from sure -- the nature of the problem
meant a significant degree of adverse change was already in the
pipeline.

"That rapidity, alongside the size of the global population and the
complexity of today's society, leaves us particularly vulnerable,"
Stirrup said. "It is bound to present substantial security challenges
of one kind or another."

Asked on the margins of the meeting if that meant military planners
should opt for preemptive action where they saw a security crisis
emerging, he said: "Only in the sense of building governance.
Recognizing the problem is the first step."

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'Mile-wide UFO' spotted by British airline pilot

ThisIslondon.co.uk

One of the largest UFOs ever seen has been observed by the crew and passengers of an airliner over the Channel Islands.

An official air-miss report on the incident several weeks ago appears in Pilot magazine.

Aurigny Airlines captain Ray Bowyer, 50, flying close to Alderney first spotted
the object, described as "a cigar-shaped brilliant white light".

Aurigny Airlines captain Ray Bowyer, 50, described what he thought to be a UFO
as 'a cigar-shaped brilliant white light', similar to the image
supplied by Dennis Plunket of the British Flying Saucer bureau

As the plane got closer the captain viewed it through binoculars and said:
"It was a very sharp, thin yellow object with a green area.

"It was 2,000ft up and stationary. I thought it was about 10 miles away,
although I later realised it was approximately 40 miles from us. At
first, I thought it was the size of a [Boeing] 737.

"But it must have been much bigger because of how far away it was. It could have been as much as a mile wide."

Continuing his approach to Guernsey, Bowyer then spied a "second identical object further to the west".

He said: "It was exactly the same but looked smaller because it was
further away. It was closer to Guernsey. I can't explain it. This was
clearly visual for about nine minutes.

"I'm certainly not saying that it was something of another world. All I'm saying is that I have
never seen anything like it before in all my years of flying."

The sightings were confirmed by passengers Kate and John Russell. John, 74,
said: "I saw an orange light. It was like an elongated oval."

The sightings were also confirmed by an unnamed pilot with the Blue Islands airline.

The Civil Aviation Authority safety notice states that a Tri-Lander aircraft flying close to Alderney spotted the object.

"Certain parts of the report have not been published. I cannot say why," said a senior CAA source.

Earlier this year, however, the MOD declared its intentions to open its UFO files to the public.

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Vice President Exempts His Office from the Requirements for Protecting Classified Information

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Administration Oversight



The Oversight Committee has learned that over the objections of the
National Archives, Vice President Cheney exempted his office from the
presidential order that establishes government-wide procedures for
safeguarding classified national security information. The Vice
President asserts that his office is not an “entity within the
executive branch.”




As described in a letter from Chairman Waxman to the Vice
President, the National Archives protested the Vice President's
position in letters written in June 2006 and August 2006. When these
letters were ignored, the National Archives wrote to Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales in January 2007 to seek a resolution of the impasse.
The Vice President's staff responded by seeking to abolish the agency
within the Archives that is responsible for implementing the
President's executive order.




In his letter to the Vice President, Chairman Waxman writes:
"I question both the legality and wisdom of your actions. ... [I]t
would appear particularly irresponsible to give an office with your
history of security breaches an exemption from the safeguards that
apply to all other executive branch officials."




A fact sheet prepared by Chairman Waxman describes other
instances in which the Vice President's office has sought to avoid
oversight and accountability.

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'Earth Mother getting angry'

American Indians fight climate change

The Associated Press

June 18. 2007 8:00AM



From New Hampshire to California, American Indian leaders are speaking out more forcefully about the danger of climate change.



Members of six tribes recently gathered near the Baker River in the White Mountains for a sacred ceremony honoring "Earth Mother." Talking Hawk, a Mohawk Indian who asked to be identified by his Indian name, pointed to the river's tea-colored water as proof that the overwhelming amount of pollution humans have produced has caused changes around the globe.



"It's August color. It's not normal," he said.



"Earth Mother is fighting back - not only from the four winds, but also from underneath," he said. "Scientists call it global warming. We call it Earth Mother getting angry."



At a United Nations meeting last month, several American Indian leaders spoke at a session called "Indigenous Perspectives on Climate Change." Also in May, tribal representatives from Alaska and northern Canada - where pack ice has vanished earlier and earlier each spring - traveled to Washington to press their case.

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Things Your Media Momma Didn't Tell You

Friday, June 15, 2007

FMNM

Free-Market News Network, Corp.

The fact that most Americans oppose the war in Iraq, and want the
president impeached, is testimony to the native intelligence and common
sense of the citizens of this nation.

It sure isn't thanks to the quality of the news we're getting here in America.!

Here are some of the things you don't know if you just depend on the corporate media for your information:

1. Most Americans would like to see this
   president and vice president impeached and removed from office.
   Newsweek magazine published a scientific poll last October showing that
   51 percent of us favor impeachment (including 29 percent of
   Republicans!), but the corporate media, which normally hasn't met a
   poll it won't publish, didn't publicize this one. And now, when the
   numbers supporting impeachment are surely even higher, you can't even
   pay a polling outfit to ask the question. No wonder most people who
   favor impeachment still think they're odd ducks.
2. There is a bill, filed in the House of Representatives on
   April 24 by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), calling for the impeachment of
   Vice President Cheney. Since it was filed, it has gained six
   co-sponsors, including a member of the House Democratic leadership,
   Rep. Janice Shakowsky (D-IL). Most major media have ignored this
   important story completely. Most Americans also don't know that the
   Vermont State Senate voted overwhelmingly this spring to call on
   Congress to impeach the president.
3. The president has been declared a felon in federal court.
   Yet even after Federal District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled last
   August that President Bush and the National Security Agency were
   committing serial Class A felonies and were violating both the First
   and Fourth Amendments by spying on Americans' communications without
   first obtaining warrants, Bush continued ordering the NSA to continue
   the patently illegal program for at least half a year. In reports on
   the spying program, the corporate media never mention that it has been
   declared a felonious activity by the federal court.
4. Fifteen Democratic Party state organizations have passed
   impeachment resolutions calling on Democrats in Congress to initiate
   impeachment proceedings against the president and vice president. The
   most recent of these, the Democratic Party of Oklahoma, passed its
   resolution at the party's annual convention on May 19. Other Democratic
   Party conventions, in states from Nevada and California to
   Massachusetts and North Carolina, have passed similar resolutions. Most
   have been ignored by the corporate media even in their own states.
5. Bush's so-called "coalition of the willing" is not so
   willing and is not really much of a coalition either. When's the last
   time you've heard how many countries are on board with the US in the
   war and occupation of Iraq? The reality? Britain, the only significant
   contributor of combat troops besides the U.S., is pulling out, as did
   Italy and Spain, and many other countries, like Denmark, Lithuania and
   others, plan to be out of Iraq by August or at the latest December. One
   indication of the seriousness of situation: The Pentagon no longer
   lists the countries that are members of the "coalition." The only
   mainstream report I've seen laying this out this collapse in
   international support for Bush's war was in USA Today last February.
6. The Homeland Security Department last year awarded
   Halliburton $385 million in a no-bid contract to construct prison camps
   designed to hold tens of thousands of unspecified prisoners in the
   event of domestic unrest. Meanwhile, President Bush has signed a bill
   altering the insurrection act so that he can declare martial rule and
   order active duty troops to take charge anywhere in the domestic US in
   the event of "public disorder." No one in the corporate media has
   reported on these developments or asked the White House to explain what
   it's all about.
7. There is evidence that Cheney, as CEO of Halliburton, was a
   patron of the Washington Madam whose client book of high-class
   call-girls is causing many in Washington political circles-mostly
   Republicans it appears, who apparently need to pay for their sex-to
   sweat. So far no mention of the Cheney angle in the corporate media,
   though they've been having fun with the broader story of a political
   sex scandal. No mention either of how a brave West Point cadet refused
   to shake Cheney's hand on stage when the vice president was handing out
   this year's diplomas at the Army's premiere academy.
8. Among the "worst of the worst" of the "evildoers" captured
   and held as "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo were children, some of
   them preteens and kids who were under 15 when captured and brought to
   Cuba-so many in fact that the military had to set up a special
   facility, called Camp Iguana, just for adolescent and pre-pubescent
   "fighters." The corporate media have barely reported on this atrocity
   (the New York Times ran only one article mentioning child captives, in
   June 2005). The only wider coverage of this outrage came recently when
   the government tried to prosecute one such alleged child
   "terrorist"-Omar Khadr-only to have the military judge in charge toss
   his case out because the government had misclassified him. Khadr, we
   learned, was captured in 2001 in Afghanistan at the ripe age of 15,
   making him one of the older child captives brought to and interrogated
   at Guantanamo. Under international law, the U.S. was supposed to treat
   this and other child soldiers as victims, not as war criminals. Khadr,
   a Canadian by birth, instead has spent five years doing hard time in US
   captivity.
9. Well-researched reports on the rampant theft of both the
   2000 and 2004 elections, and on Republican plans for theft of the 2008
   election, such as Mark Crispin Miller's Fooled Again, have gone
   unmentioned in the corporate media. Books on the subject, like Miller's
   and like Greg Palast's best selling Armed Madhouse, have never been
   reviewed.
10. And of course, there's my own book. The Case for
    Impeachment, despite its having sold over 20,000 copies in hardcover,
    and despite its having now come out in a mass-market paperback edition,
    in both cases printed by a mainstream publisher, St. Martin's Press,
    has not received a single review in the corporate media. In this, my
    co-author Barbara Olshansky and I are not alone. None of the books on
    the impeachable crimes of this administration, including one by
    Nixon-era impeachment panelist and former congresswoman Elizabeth
    Holtzman, and one by Judiciary Chair Rep. John Conyers, has been
    reviewed by a mainstream media outlet.

What we're talking about here is a media blackout of important stories and news.

Thanks to the internet and to the grapevine, and thanks to their
basic native intelligence, most Americans seem to understand that we're
being lied to and cheated. What the media blackout of important news
does manage to do, however, is keep us all thinking that we are in a
minority in opposing things like illegal wars, a trampled Constitution,
and stolen elections.

In fact, however, we're actually the majority.

Once we realize this, maybe we will have a movement, instead of a just nation of isolated cynics and complainers.

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Native hum

As honeybees vanish, farmers turn to the wild pollinators in their back yards

In 1940, alfalfa-seed farmers in the desert of central Utah made an
interesting discovery: The primary pollinator of their crop was not the
honeybee, but the alkali bees that nested in the region’s salt flats.
For all its status as the workhorse of American agriculture, the
European honeybee didn’t really like foraging in alfalfa. But alkali
bees loved it, pollinating some 5,500 flowers daily. Farmers lucky
enough to live next to them were raising three times more alfalfa seed
per acre than those who didn’t.

From Utah to Washington state, farmers started transplanting thousands
of cubic feet of soil with alkali bee nests to aid in the production of
alfalfa seed — a hugely important crop because the alfalfa grown in
hayfields produces almost no seed on its own. The largest managed
alkali bee nesting bed is now five acres in size and is home to more
than 5 million bees.

“It gives me conniptions, it’s so big,” says Jim Cane, an entomologist
at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Bee Biology and Systematics
Laboratory in Logan, Utah. “It’s just roaring with bees. The ground is
shimmering for several acres.” Cane says these farmers harvest at least
20 percent more seed than needed to break even.

The humble alkali bee had turned the attention of a whole sector of
commercial farmers away from the European honeybee. It was the first
time this had happened. It would not be the last.

While honeybees spent thousands of years honestly earning their
place in our hearts with their honey production, easily manipulated
colonies, generalist pollinating tendencies and heroic work ethic,
their wild cousins lived in obscurity. As the pioneers swarmed this
country, dubbing Utah “The Beehive State” and opening newspapers with
names like The Sacramento Bee, 3,000 to 4,000 species of wild bees
buzzed the landscape, largely unnoticed.

Native bees do not typically share the desire of the honeybee to live
in a small space with 10,000 members of the family. They do not produce
honey to keep their colony fed through the winter. These bees have
different habits, some of them so singular that they make scientists
laugh out loud with puzzlement. The female of one species likes to
burrow nine feet under a sand dune to lay a single egg. Another chews
away at sandstone walls to make its tiny nest. Yet another hangs on the
stalks of dead plants at night, alone and balled up, resembling a
berry. Some develop fabulous coloration — one orchid bee is metallic
gold with a blue abdomen and a red and gold thorax.

And they pollinate plants, often better than European honeybees. The
natives’ pollinating abilities are attracting more attention because
the honeybee on which most American agriculture depends has run into a
series of problems: It started mating with aggressive Africanized bees
that swept over the border from Mexico in 1990, rendering its children
often impossible to work with. It is vulnerable to parasitic mites and
fungi, weakened by insecticides and disease. In the past several
months, headline after headline has announced a dramatic drop in
honeybee populations due to a mysterious malady called Colony Collapse
Disorder.

Wild bees don’t mate with Africanized bees, nor do they suffer from the
same diseases and mites that afflict honeybees. There has never been a
better time to develop wild bee pollination talent for use in American
agriculture. The bee lab in Logan — one of five federal research labs
devoted to bee research, and the only one that doesn’t deal in
honeybees — is doing just that.

“There’s no real danger of the honeybee going extinct,” said Jamie
Strange, an entomologist who is preparing to spend the afternoon
trapping bumblebees near his lab in Logan to study for use in
greenhouses and tomato production. “But it’s like investing. Diversify
your portfolio. Diversify!”



Source

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US to Meatpackers: Don't Do Mad Cow Test

By MATT APUZZO

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to
keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease.

The Agriculture Department tests less than 1 percent of slaughtered
cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted
beef. But Kansas-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to test all
of its cows.

Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone tested
its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the
expensive test, too.

A federal judge ruled in March that such tests must be allowed. The
ruling was to take effect June 1, but the Agriculture Department said
Tuesday it would appeal - effectively delaying the testing until the
court challenge plays out.

Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is linked to more than 150 human deaths worldwide, mostly in Britain.

There have been three cases of mad cow disease in the U.S. The first,
in December 2003 in Washington state, was in a cow that had been
imported from Canada. The second, in 2005, was in a Texas-born cow. The
third was confirmed last year in an Alabama cow.

The Agriculture Department argued that widespread testing could lead to
a false positive that would harm the meat industry. U.S. District Judge
James Robertson noted that Creekstone sought to use the same test the
government relies on and said the government didn't have the authority
to restrict it.

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Algae Biodiesel May Soon Be Reality

by Green Options Blogger Clayton Bodie Cornell. Originally published May 24, 2007.



The biodiesel community has always been marked by spirited enthusiasm, a clear sense of mission, and the dream that biodiesel could one day play a significant role in our energy future. That dream may soon be a reality. Researchers at Utah State University say that farming algae, with reported oil yields of 10,000 gallons per acre, could become an economically feasible biodiesel feedstock by the end of the decade.



This is the Holy Grail of biodiesel: an oil source that could make a serious dent in our fossil fuel consumption. Our most productive feedstock today, the oil palm, doesn’t even come close with yields of 635 gallons/acre, and is followed distantly by the U.S. standard, soy, at 48 gallons of oil/acre.





More

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Pentagon Limits Troops' Web Access...

Yahoo News

WASHINGTON - Lt. Daniel Zimmerman, an infantry platoon leader in
Iraq, puts a blog on the Internet every now and then "to basically keep my friends and family up to date" back home.

It just got tougher to do that for Zimmerman and a lot of other U.S. soldiers. No more using the military's computer system to socialize and trade videos on MySpace, YouTube and nine other Web sites, the
Pentagon says.

Citing security concerns and technological limits, the Pentagon has cut off access to those sites for personnel using the Defense Department's computer network. The change limits use of the popular outlets for service members on the front lines, who regularly post videos and journals.

"I put my blog on there and my family reads it," said Zimmerman, 29, a platoon leader with B Company, 1st Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment.

"It scares the crap out of them sometimes," he said.

"I keep it as vague as possible," he said. "I'm pretty responsible about it. It's just basically to tell a little bit about my life over here" he said.

He's regularly at a base where he doesn't have Defense Department access to the Internet, but he has used it when he goes to bigger bases. He'll have to rely on a private account all the time now.

Memos about the change went out in February, and it took effect last week. It does not affect the Internet cafes that soldiers in Iraq use that are not connected to the Defense Department's network. The cafe sites are run by a private vendor, FUBI (For US By Iraqis).

Also, the ban also does not affect other sites, such as Yahoo, and does not prevent soldiers from sending messages and photos to their families by e-mail.

Gore sees 'spiritual crisis' in warming

Playing equal parts visionary, cheerleader and comedian, Al Gore brought his message of how to fight global warming to a capacity crowd of receptive architects Saturday in San Antonio.

The former vice president referred continually to a "new way of thinking" that is emerging in the country and offered hope in the battle to control the effects global warming will have on the planet.

"It's in part a spiritual crisis," Gore told the crowd in the Convention Center at the American Institute of Architects national convention. "It's a crisis of our own self-definition — who we are. Are we creatures destined to destroy our own species? Clearly not."

Full Article

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S Pacific to stop bottom trawling

BBC News



A quarter of the world's oceans will be protected
from fishing boats which drag heavy nets across the sea floor, South
Pacific nations have agreed.

The landmark deal will restrict bottom trawling, which
experts say destroys coral reefs and stirs up clouds of sediment that
suffocate marine life.

Observers and monitoring systems will ensure vessels remain five nautical miles from marine ecosystems at risk.

The South Pacific contains the last pristine deep-sea marine environment.

It extends from the Equator to the Antarctic and from Australia to the western coast of South America.

The high seas encompass all areas not included in the territorial sea or in the internal waters of a country.

'Precautionary measures'

The agreement reached in the coastal town of Renaca in Chile will come into force on 30 September.

It will close to bottom trawling areas where vulnerable
marine ecosystems are known or are likely to exist, unless a prior
assessment is undertaken and highly precautionary protective measures
are implemented.

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Memo to media and pundits:

The public wants Dems to be confrontational with Bush and the GOP.



TMP Cafe



"...the choice the public faces isn't between "fighting" and "gridlock" on the one hand, and "bipartisan cooperation" on the other. Rather, it's between (a) accepting the disastrous Bush/GOP status quo; and (b) backing Democratic efforts to change it. And the public supports the latter. Even though those efforts are partisan and confrontational. Is that really so hard to fathom?



In a front page Washington Post article today by Jonathan Weisman and Lyndsey Layton about how the Democratic Congress is faltering, the reporters quote Leon Panetta making the case that  Dems had better watch out and not be too confrontational with the White House:



    "The primary message coming out of the November election was that the American people are sick and tired of the fighting and the gridlock, and they want both the president and Congress to start governing the country," warned Leon E. Panetta, a chief of staff in Bill Clinton's White House. "It just seems to me the Democrats, if they fail for whatever reason to get a domestic agenda enacted ... will pay a price."



Panetta, it appears, has become the go-to person for reporters eager to make the case that Dems are at risk of overreaching or failing. Indeed, it just so happens that this is the second time in just over a month that WaPo has gone to Panetta to get a quote arguing this. Funny coincidence, that.



But let's put that aside and ask a larger question: Is it really true that the public is fed up with partisanship and "sick and tired of the fighting," as Panetta says, and as David Broder and Joe Lieberman keep lecturing?



No doubt one could dig up polls showing that people don't like generically defined "fighting" or "gridlock." But here's another way to look at this: The polls show clearly that the public strongly supports efforts by Dems to confront Bush both on Iraq and on corruption. Check out the numbers in this recent Pew poll:

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