WASHINGTON – If al-Qaida acquired nuclear weapons it “would have no compunction at using them,” President Barack Obama said Sunday on the eve of a summit aimed at finding ways to secure the world’s nuclear stockpile.

“The single biggest threat to U.S. security, both short-term, medium-term and long-term, would be the possibility of a terrorist organization obtaining a nuclear weapon,” Obama said. “This is something that could change the security landscape in this country and around the world for years to come.” Read the full story

Confidential intelligence documents obtained by The Times show that Iran is working on testing a key final component of a nuclear bomb.

The notes, from Iran’s most sensitive military nuclear project, describe a four-year plan to test a neutron initiator, the component of a nuclear bomb that triggers an explosion. Foreign intelligence agencies date them to early 2007, four years after Iran was thought to have suspended its weapons programme. Read the full story

Feds reject Army snub of Texas plant

GAO decision buoys Sealy plant’s effort to keep truck contract Read the full story

Signs of what could be a previously unknown ancient civilisation are emerging from beneath the felled trees of the Amazon. Some 260 giant avenues, ditches and enclosures have been spotted from the air in a region straddling Brazil’s border with Bolivia.

The traditional view is that before the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th century there were no complex societies in the Amazon basin – in contrast to the Andes further west where the Incas built their cities. Now deforestation, increased air travel and satellite imagery are telling a different story. Read the full story

By Ori Lewis

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel triggered a fresh rift with Washington over settlement building on Tuesday by approving the building of 900 homes for Jews on West Bank land it occupied in a 1967 war and annexed to its Jerusalem municipality.

The Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth said U.S. President Barack Obama’s envoy, George Mitchell, had asked an aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at a meeting in London on Monday, to block the proposed construction at the settlement of Gilo.

But a government planning commission approved the addition of 900 housing units at Gilo, where 40,000 Israelis already live.

The Israeli decision drew an unusually sharply worded rebuke from the White House, which said it was “dismayed” and accused Israel of undermining Obama’s efforts to resume peace talks with Palestinians stalled since December. Read the full story

2009-11-12

MADRID — Spain wants EU naval forces to blockade three Somali ports used to launch pirate attacks against ships in the Indian Ocean, Defence Minister Carme Chacon said Wednesday.

She said Spain will call on European Union foreign and defence ministers to concentrate military efforts on blockading the ports at a meeting next Monday and Tuesday.

“We know that it is from these three ports that most, if not all, ‘mother ships’ used by pirates reach up to one thousand miles away from the coast — as they did yesterday — and carry out kidnappings far from the coast,” she told RNE public radio.

Chacon also said the pirate gangs “have ties to sophisticated law firms in London,” and she called for the international community to do more to track ransoms given to pirates to release hostages.

Several law firms in London, business capital of the world’s maritime industry, have handled piracy kidnap and ransom cases in recent years.

They help ship owners deal with the legal aspects of paying a ransom and engage private security contractors to negotiate with pirates and carry out the ransom drop.

Pirates on Monday launched their longest range hijack attempt to date by opening fire on the Hong Kong-flagged oil tanker BW Lion 1,000 nautical miles east of Mogadishu, the EU naval force in the region said.

The next day pirates attacked the Danish-flagged container ship Nelle Maersk, also some 1,000 nautical miles east of the Somali capital.

Both ships escaped their attackers but the incidents demonstrated how beefed-up security off the Somalia coast appears to be leading pirates to move deeper into the Indian Ocean and its shipping lanes linking Asia and Europe.

Chacon said the attacks so far from the Somalia coast were a “giant step” for the pirates who she said were becoming bolder.

The pirates usually use “mother ships” to sail hundreds of miles out to sea and then attack in small skiffs, sometimes using high-grade weapons such as rocket-propelled grenades.

“These are not romantic pirates which some may be led to imagine, they are authentic criminal organisations which are focused on kidnappings of all types merchant ships, fishing trawlers, ships belonging to the World Food Programme,” said Chacon.

The minister said Somali pirates were currently holding 12 boats and their crews hostage, including the Spanish trawler Alakrana which was seized with its 36 crew on October 2, as well as vessles from Britain, China and Malta.

The pirates are demanding four million dollars (2.6 million euros) ransom as well as the release of two suspected pirates who were detained a few days after the trawler was seized and brought to Spain to face trial.

The Spanish government has ruled out freeing the two suspects but Chacon said they could serve their sentence back in Somalia if found guilty of any crime.

A lawyer for one of the two detained suspected pirates, Javier Diaz Aparicio, told Spanish daily newspaper El Mundo he was trying to reach a plea bargain agreement with Spanish prosecutors.

In an interview with news radio Cadena Ser on Tuesday he suggested that his salary was being paid for by the interior ministry.

http://www.google.com/

British scientists are examining samples of a strain of swine flu behind a deadly Ukrainian outbreak to determine whether the virus has mutated.

Fans at the Champions League match between FC Dynamo and Inter Milan in Kiev

More than 80 people have died in Ukraine in the last two weeks and there have been 450,000 cases of respiratory illness.

The World Health Organisation has sent an emergency team to monitor the epidemic and says it assumes most of the illness in the country has been caused by H1N1 swine flu. Read the full story

478,456  Influenza/ARI

24,003  Hospitalized

60  Ventilators

81 Deaths

The above numbers are from the latest update from Ukraine.  The number of infected patients has almost doubled to just under ½ million, compared to the report two days ago (see map).  Hospitalized patients also have spiked higher, to 24K from 15K.  ICU cases are not listed, but 60 on ventilators are.  However, most (37) of those on ventilators are Chernivisti Oblast, but Lviv, which has the most fatalities and cases, has none, suggesting the data is incomplete or there are significant shortages of ventilators.  The number of dead has risen to 81, but media reports describe additional fatalities, include those in the Kiev Oblast. Read the full story

Nigeria’s space agency is no joke. It has launched satellites and aims to put Africans into space.

LONDON, U.K. — Recently I received an email labeled “Strictly Confidential” from Dr. Bakare Tunde, who said he was astronautics project manager at Nigeria’s space agency. He also told me he was the cousin of the first African in space, Air Force Major Abacha Tunde, and that this poor intrepid astronaut had been stranded on a secret Soviet military station ever since the Soviet Union dissolved in 1990.

“He is in good humor,” read the email, “but wants to come home.” No wonder he was keen to hurtle back earthwards, Tunde told me his cousin had accumulated almost $15 million in pay. For the price of my bank account details, I could claim 20 percent and fly the brave chap home to collect my portion of the earnings and transfer the rest on to him like the good space-supporter that I was.

This classic 419 scam is indeed far-fetched but one aspect of it is true.

Nigeria really does have a space agency. The west African nation’s National Space Research and Development Agency is already celebrating its 10th anniversary. And as America and Europe’s space agencies set their sights on joint exploration of Mars, Nigeria has big plans of its own: It wants to send a Nigerian up into space in 2015, making Nigeria home to the first black African astronaut.

Sitting across from Gerald Okeke, it’s hard to fathom that the quietly spoken fellow might one day fly beyond the earth’s atmosphere. Okeke, 28, is one of 27 Nigerian engineers being trained how to design and build an earth observation satellite in the U.K., at private British company Surrey Satellites Technology in Guildford, southeast of London. We are sitting in the canteen of the spacecraft-mad company, from whose ceilings dangle silver starburst lights and whose rubbish bins are shaped like shiny rockets.

“There is much to learn but we are coping,” says Okeke, whose father was also a scientist. “It’s a big challenge. Talking about space in Africa is kind of a new field but it’s a very big opportunity for us to explore.”

He says it would be an honor to be picked as Africa’s first black space sailor — who must be aged 27 to 37 at the time of lift-off and whose selection will begin next year ahead of four years of training. Okeke has already spent several years studying in the U.K., which he says is challenging. “The weather can be trouble and we try to cope with the food even though it’s not what we eat in Nigeria,” said Okeke.

His is not the only sacrifice in an expensive and widely questioned mission. Nigeria spends $20 million a year on its space program, in a country in which for every thousand children born, 137 will die before they are five years old. A collapse in the value of Nigeria’s naira currency — in part attributable to the global downturn — has meant the costs of its payments in U.S. dollars have also rocketed by a third.

“Even in the U.S. some people are opposed to the space program so we are not surprised this happens here,” says Seidu Onailo Mohammed, CEO of the Nigerian space agency. “But we want to assess the problems that have devastated this land. We need to monitor our environment, assess problems of flooding, deforestation — all this can only be done if we have a viable space program. Plus after so many years it’s a good idea to think of an astronaut.”

The country jetted up a $13 million earth observation satellite, made in the U.K. and launched from Russia, in 2003. A much more expensive communications satellite, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, was launched from China in 2007. It failed within 18 months but a replacement is due to be propelled into space by 2011, paid for by insurance.

But still the Nigerian agency wants more money. The government believes it will all pay off in the end.

Already the earth observation satellite has taken some pretty impressive snaps including pictures of poppy growing in Afghanistan, the state of cyclone damage after Myanmar’s authorities restricted access to international rescue teams in 2008 and, closer to home, identifying the whereabouts of illegal tankers parking far out at sea to steal Nigeria’s oil supplies.

Nigeria has managed to sell about 1,000 of its satellite images and hopes over the course of each satellite’s lifetime such data sales will cover the costs of manufacture and operation.

“We are bringing down space to apply it on the ground,” says Francis Chizea, Director of the Nigerian space agency. “It’s going to be very very important for the economy. We can map the wetlands and advise on areas very good for rice production; monitor desertification in the north; find the best place to locate dams; assess the environmental impact of oil drilling; locate oil spills and track movements on the border.”

It’s all been made possible by a new approach to space science that has let developing nations in on the extra-terrestrial act.

“We’ve been able to shrink a satellite from a double-decker bus down to the size of a TV set,” says Martin Sweeting, the British founder of Surrey Satellites Technology, a radio fanatic as a child who decided space shouldn’t be the privilege of the rich nations. “It’s now possible for an African country to have its own satellite for $10 to $15 million. It can yield real benefits at the right price.”

South Africa, Algeria and Egypt are all marshaling their own satellite facilities, so there’s no question Africa’s scientists are reaching for the stars.

http://www.globalpost.com/

The tropical rainforest in the eastern lowlands of Ecuador assaults the senses: the sunlight dazzles the eyes, the heat is so fierce that within seconds one’s clothes are soaked in sweat. Then there are the sounds: a hypnotic symphony of frogs, crickets and other insects and birds which continues unabated day and night. There are sudden glimpses of the jungle’s abundant wildlife: a spectacular flash of a blue morpho butterfly at the river’s edge, a flock of green parakeets screeching.

This stunning region, which covers more than a third of Ecuador’s area, almost the size of England, and which is one of the world’s richest biospheres, with a huge diversity of animals and plants, some found nowhere else on Earth, faces a double threat: from the logging industry, which would strip it bare, and from the oil industry, which for nearly 40 years has been exploiting the huge resources of crude beneath the soil. Now, however, Ecuador is betting it can keep what is left of the oil in the ground and hang onto its biosphere into the bargain.

The South American country has learned the hard way that oil brings human misery and environmental devastation along with billions in export earnings. Every new oil field is an invasion that brings tens of thousands of outsiders into the forest’s heart, polluting the air, soil and water, destroying wildlife, and assaulting the support systems of indigenous tribes, which can lead to their extermination. And the damage is not confined to the immediate vicinity of the wells.

The Via Auca is the main highway cutting through the Ecuadorean Amazonia region, and it has been a lifeline of the oil industry for nearly 40 years, slicing through the countryside like a badly healed wound, the roadside lined with hellish flares, murky waste pits and corroded pipelines. Accidents involving the pipelines are frequent, and their consequences harrowing. On the far side of the town of Dayuma, which sprang up as an oil workers’ shantytown and is still riddled with crime and prostitution, one of the ageing pipelines has ruptured, sending a jet of oil shooting 30 metres into the air, staining the vegetation black all around.

The sickly stench of crude oil is overwhelming in the midday tropical heat. A house and a field across the road have also been soaked by the filthy gusher. Sebastian Ortiz, whose elderly father owns the simple wooden house by the roadside on the edge of the jungle, points out where the oil has drenched the field and seeped into the ground. Petrobel, one of many oil companies now operating in the region, has said it will pay his father US$5,000 (£3,000) towards the clean-up costs. But Ortiz says: “I don’t know when he will be paid, or even if it is still safe for him to carry on living here.”

Pollution is only one of the many ills that the oil business brings with it. Fernando Moreno, an anthropologist with the Ministry of the Environment, has been monitoring the oil industry’s effect on the local community for years. “The people have become beggars” he says. “They have become accustomed to demanding whatever they need and more from the oil companies, just because they are in the same territory. Weighing up the benefits and drawbacks of the oil companies, I think it would be better not to have them. They lead to many bad habits, they make people avaricious, they increase the differences between people – and they are a source of contamination: for the land, the water and the people themselves.”

For the last 16 years Ecuador has been embroiled in a bitter battle over a huge $27.3 billion environmental damages claim brought against US oil giant Chevron by 30,000 Amazonian inhabitants. The plaintiffs accuse Texaco (which Chevron acquired in 1993) of dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the rainforest between 1964 and 1990, and claim that 1,400 deaths occurred in the region as a result of the contaminated soil and water, which brought unaccountably high levels of cancer, skin and breathing conditions. The Amazon Defence Coalition, which represents the plaintiffs, says the scale of the pollution makes it the biggest environmental disaster in the world, dwarfing the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and leading some experts to dub it “South America’s Chernobyl”. It is certainly shaping up to become the world’s biggest environmental lawsuit.

Chevron robustly refutes the allegations. It says Texaco spent US$40 million on a clean-up before it handed over operations to the state oil company in 1992. Ecuador’s government then signed a release freeing Chevron from any liability for subsequent damages from potential oil contamination.

Whatever the outcome of the legal battle Ecuador is now banking on a new idea to help it shed its poisonous dependency on oil. The Yasuni-ITT Initiative aims to keep the region’s remaining oil reserves untapped and underground, in return for financial compensation from the international community and carbon offsets from the carbon markets.

The crux of the scheme is simple: to keep the oil beneath the Yasuni National Park where it is, in perpetuity. Covering nearly 2.5 million acres of primary tropical rainforest, Yasuni is the ancestral territory of the Waorani people and two other tribes, the Tagaeri and the Taromenane. It was named a Unesco biosphere reserve in 1989, and scientists regard it one of the most biodiverse places on earth.

It is also the home of Ecuador’s largest oil reserve. But by not extracting the estimated 846 million barrels of oil in the reserve, Ecuador will keep an estimated 410 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere, makinga big contribution to the fight against global warming.

It will also pledge to respect the territories of the indigenous cultures living in the national park, as well as protecting its flora and fauna. In return, the Ecuadorean Government has asked for compensation of $350 million a year for 10 years, which would be invested in environmental and social development programmes, helping the country move towards a sustainable economy.

After a slow start the plan has begun to attract serious promises of commitment. Amazon Watch, an organisation dedicated to protecting the rainforest and its indigenous inhabitants, calls it “a landmark proposal … a precedent-setting effort by an oil-exporting nation to preserve a global biodiversity hotspot, protect indigenous rights and set the stage for its own economic and energetic shift away from fossil fuels”.

Some big international players agree: Germany has offered $50 million on condition that other nations stump up similar sums. Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, and Yolanda Kakabadse, a senior member of the Yasuni commission, have been in London and continental European capitals this week spreading the word. And in December Ecuador’s former chancellor Francisco Carrión, the Government’s envoy on the initiative, will present it at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

Among Ecuadoreans themselves, the initiative is welcomed particularly by the flourishing tourist industry. With a spectacular range of natural attractions, from the Galapagos Islands to the snow-peaked Andes, Ecuador has long been a pioneer in ecotourism.

Fander Falconi the foreign minister and one of the founders of the initiative, says the scheme will work on the basis of shared responsibility, locally and globally. “What we are aiming for is global sustainability, but with a distinction drawn between those who harm the environment and those who suffer the consequences of this harm.”

Luz Coloma, Yasuni-ITT’s press officer, added, “Ecuador has had sad experiences with the exploitation of oil and no one wants any more environmental disasters like the Chevron-Texaco case.”

On the banks of the Shiripuno river, to the west of the Yasuni National Park, is the Huaorani Ecolodge run and owned by formerly nomadic hunters who only came into contact with the outside world 50 years ago. Omene Paa, a tour guide at the lodge, tells how oil has been a curse for his people from the time “the path-cutters” first arrived. The “petrolera” companies brought disease and contaminated the water, he claims. One of his cousins died of a lung infection. Now Omene says his people, who first fought off the US oilmen with axes, just want to be allowed to live in peace. “Our battle should continue; we the Huaorani must look after our territory.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/

Trafigura chartered the Probo Koala to take the waste to Africa. Photograph: Raigo Pajula/AFP

The British oil trader Trafigura has offered to pay out in a historic damages claim from 31,000 Africans injured by the dumping of toxic waste in one of the worst pollution disasters in recent history, the Guardian can reveal. Read the full story

The Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, said he was hoping to ‘challenge the ban by Carter-Ruck on reporting parliament’. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

The Guardian is seeking an urgent court appearance this afternoon, to challenge a ban on it reporting the proceedings of parliament. Read the full story

Google lets you custom-print millions of books

• Story Highlights
• Google Book Search is letting readers turn digitized texts back into paper copies
• Google scans millions of books and turns them into searchable documents
• Books can be printed on demand by a special machine in about 4 minutes
• The machine is only in a few dozen bookstores so far Read the full story

U.S. to push for new economic world order at G20

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States will urge world leaders this week to launch a new push in November to rebalance the world economy, but there are doubts national governments will bow to external advice. Read the full story

WASHINGTON: An angry, humiliated, and wounded A.Q.Khan has finally made public and official what has long been suspected: his nuclear proliferation activities that included exchanging and passing blue-prints and equipment to China, Iran, North Korea, and Libya was done at the behest of the Pakistani government and military, and he was forced to take the rap for it. ( Watch Video ) Read the full story

by Hazelnut

Crawling around in the back of my mind is a question I’ve often wondered about. How did the insurance industry begin, when and why. Are we not seeing the impact of an insurance mega-industry which has taken control of our freedom to be self-sustaining in every aspect of our lives? Do we not consciously consider our responsibilities and repercussions thereof in a mature way because we must purchase an insurance “policy” to protect us from poor choices, accidents, and ignorance?

If in the beginning, insurance policies were in fact, to spread the risk, then how did that practice become commonly accepted Law around the globe? These days, it is illegal to perform certain activities without purchasing insurance policies. The concept of “insurance” is to spread the risk.

What if I don’t want to buy insurance, what if I want to maintain my own responsibility in everything I do? Too bad for me. The only choice I have is to buy the insurance or pay the penalty for not having it. Risk is a part of life. Is it not an illusion to believe that purchasing insurance policies keeps risk low for the policy holders? IMO, the law demanding insurance be maintained for certain activities prevents freedom of choice. Or at the very least, inhibits those freedoms.

The History of Insurance

Does anyone remember when apprenticeships were commonplace and why the practice has become a relic of the past?

Insurance replaced apprenticeships. Nowadays, we are expected to go to college to learn our trades. The practice of paying a guild fee has become the practice of paying college fees.

Insurance and the Stock Exchange

Having recognized the extreme profitability and power of issuing maritime insurance, fire and plague became the next lucrative reason for requiring insurance. This practice began here:

America takes a little longer to play the insurance game and with great reluctance. Insurers were not prepared to “protect” against the “risks” inherent in establishing a new world. Until a profit could be realized, insuring against the inherent risks were taken by pioneers and colonists. For over a hundred years, the colonists managed their risk without mandatory (or even optional) insurance coverage

.

Insurance should be optional, not mandatory. Insurance companies are the giants of the monetary world. Its no wonder why.

So, now I know when, why and how the insurance industry began.

http://www.investopedia.com/

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/

History of insurance refers to the development of a modern laws and market in insurance against risks. In some sense we can say that insurance appears simultaneously with the appearance of human society. We know of two types of economies in human societies: money economies (with markets, money, financial instruments and so on) and non-money or natural economies (without money, markets, financial instruments and so on). The second type is a more ancient form than the first. In such an economy and community, we can see insurance in the form of people helping each other. For example, if a house burns down, the members of the community help build a new one. Should the same thing happen to one’s neighbor, the other neighbors must help. Otherwise, neighbors will not receive help in the future.

http://en.wikipedia.org/