A view of the Bushehr nuclear power plant in southern Iran (file photo)
Sat Feb 23, 2013 11:41AM GMT
Following months of efforts, 16 new sites for nuclear power plants have been designated in coastal areas of the Caspian Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Sea of Oman, [southwestern province of] Khuzestan and northwestern part of the country.”
The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI)
The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) announces that the Islamic Republic has designated 16 nuclear power sites.
“Following months of efforts, 16 new sites for nuclear power plants have been designated in coastal areas of the Caspian Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Sea of Oman, [southwestern province of] Khuzestan and northwestern part of the country,” the AEOI said on Saturday.
New research into the impact of climate change on Chinese cereal crops has found rainfall has a greater impact than rising temperature. The research, published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture found that while maize is sensitive to warming increases in temperature from 1980 onwards correlated with both higher and lower yields of rice and wheat.
The study was carried by Dr. Tianyi Zhang, from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, and Dr. Yao Huang, from the Institute of Botany, both at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The paper is part of a special collection of free articles on the links between climate change, agriculture and the function of plants.
“China has experienced significant climate change over the last century”, said Zhang. “The annual mean air temperature increased by 1.1 degrees C from 1951 to 2001, rainfall in Western China increased by up to 15% per decade and decreased in the North.”
“Projections from climate models predict that mean temperature could rise by 2.3-3.3 degrees C by 2050 while rainfall could increase by 5-7%,” said Huang. “This could have a major impact on China’s agriculture which accounts for 7% of the world’s arable land but feeds about 22% of the global population.”
The authors turned to China’s provincial agricultural statistics and compared the data to climate information from the China Meteorological Administration. They focused their analysis on China’s main cereal crops, rice, which is grown throughout China, as well as wheat and maize, which are mainly grown in the North.
The results show a significant warming trend in China from 1980 to 2008 and that maize is particularly sensitive to warming. However, they also found that rising temperature collated with both higher and lower wheat and rice yields, refuting the thoughts that warming often results in a decline in harvests.
“Of the three cereal crops, further analysis suggested that reduction in yields with higher temperature is accompanied by lower rainfall, which mainly occurred in northern parts of China,” said Zhang. “This suggests it was potentially droughts, relative to warming, that more affected harvest yields in the current climate.”
“It is often claimed that the rising temperature causes a decrease in the yields of Chinese cereal crops, yet our results show that warming had no significant harmful effect on cereal yields especially for rice and wheat at a national scale from 1980 to 2008,” concluded Zhang and Huang. “However, warming may still plays an indirect role, like the exacerbated drought conditions caused by the rising temperatures.”
Iran on Monday officially launched a $1-billion first phase of an ambitious project to pump water from the Caspian Sea to a city in its vast and expanding central desert, state media reported.
The initial phase will see a desalination plant and pipes built over the next two years to supply water to the desert city of Semnan, population 200,000, according to officials.
“The desert is growing… therefore we need to control its growth,” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a speech in the northern city of Sari, near the Caspian shore.
The first phase would see water for drinking, irrigation and industrial use taken from the Caspian, treated to rid it of salt, and pumped to Semnan, 150 kilometres (90 miles) away to the south.
The first desalination plant to be built would have a capacity of 200 million cubic metres per year, or 548 million litres a day, according to Energy Minister Majid Namjou.
Khatam al-Anbiya group, the industrial arm of Iran’s powerful military Revolutionary Guards which has interests in key economic sectors, is handling work on the project.
Later, two other phases are planned that would pump more water into desert areas from the Caspian Sea and from the Gulf, the media said.
Iran has operated several other desalination plants for decades for other regions.
Such seawater treatment facilities are also in use in other wealthy and arid Middle East countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Israel, to augment scarce water supplies.
Tirana (AFP) April 17, 2012 – The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has signed a deal with Albania to help destroy communist-era chemicals often stored in bad conditions, Tirana said Tuesday.
Under the agreement the OSCE will help Albania’s defence ministry to safely dispose of some 80 tonnes of chemical products kept in army depots.
The project is largely financed by the Czech Republic and Turkey but the OSCE is looking for additional donors, the ministry said.
Albania, which joined NATO in 2009, has also committed itself to destroying some 40,000 tonnes of surplus and out-dated ammunition by next year.
In 2008 a blast in a communist-era ammunition disposal facility in Gerdec killed 26 people and wounded 302. Since the explosion the OSCE presence in Albania stepped up its efforts to help Tirana to dispose of surplus ammunition and dangerous toxic chemicals.
Lawmakers are proposing changes to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, that would help prevent the government and businesses from running amok with personal data.
CISPA is an amendment to the National Security Act of 1947 that would allow the U.S. government and businesses to more easily share information about cyberattacks. The government would be able to share what it knows about security threats with businesses, including Web services such as Facebook. Those businesses would be able to share their own information with the government, though doing so would not be mandatory.
Critics, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and American Civil Liberties Union, have argued that the bill’s broad language opens the door for censorship — for instance, by defining intellectual property theft as a type of cyberattack — and doesn’t put any limits on the sharing of personal data. Also, the bill supersedes any other privacy laws, and information sharing would be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.
An Occupy Wall Street organizer I know — one of the original ones, from the planning meetings before the occupation began last September 17 — has a striking banner atop his Facebook Timeline. It’s from the History Channel series Life After People, an artist’s rendition of a cityscape after which all the humans in it somehow disappear. It’s quiet, and still, with trees growing out from the sides of crumbling towers.
To say that this image has anything to do with the movement’s plans for May 1, which the person who posted it is involved in making, might cause both paranoid-style right-wing radio hosts and the most anarcho- of primitivists to froth a bit at the mouth. And so they should. Ever since the idea of working toward May Day started catching on in Occupy Wall Street last January, it has been infused with the impulse of creating the vision of a radically different kind of city.
The visionary impulse, however, has also mixed with things more mundane. Over the course of the May Day planning process in New York, in at least two meetings each week, OWS organizers have been patiently patching together an historic joint rally and march with labor unions, immigrants’ rights groups and community organizations, many of which were invited to participate in the planning process since the beginning.
The members of this tenuous coalition, however, have refused to demand the impossible together — which is to say, a general strike. Instead, the coalition speaks of “a day without the 99%” and the slogan, “Legalize, Unionize, Organize.” But at just about every other opportunity, people from OWS have been echoing the call for a general strike on May Day, which originated from Occupy Los Angeles’ General Assembly in December. During the April 4 press conference announcing the New York coalition’s plans, the OWS representative avoided saying those words, but after his speech he stripped down to an undershirt with “general strike” scrawled on it in red.
Farmers defend their right to grow food: Appeal filed in family farmers vs. Monsanto case
By Ethan A. Huff, April 15 2012
(NaturalNews) The plaintiffs in a case seeking protection from Monsanto’s predatory patent lawsuits have filed a Notice of Appeal challenging the case’s recent dismissal by Judge Naomi Buchwald of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA) and dozens of other food freedom advocacy groups and family farmers originally filed the suit on behalf of small growers everywhere in order to defend them against Monsanto’s crusade of…
NaturalNews exclusive: Michigan government unleashes armed raids on small pig farmers, forces farmer to shoot all his own pigs
By Mike Adams, April 16 2012
(NaturalNews) NaturalNews can now confirm that the Michigan Department of Natural Resources has, in total violation of the Fourth Amendment, conducted two armed raids on pig farmers in that state, one in Kalkaska County at Fife Lake and another in Cheboygan County. Staging raids involving six vehicles and ten armed men, DNA conducted unconstitutional, illegal and arguably criminal armed raids on these two farms with the intent of shooting all the farmers’ pigs under a bizarre new “Invasive Species…
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Lawmakers are proposing changes to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, that would help prevent the government and businesses from running amok with personal data.
