Home Minister decided on the 50% discount |
- Home Minister decided on the 50% discount
- A small leak can sink a great ship
- Qatar's winning World Cup bid
- Saudi king to go undergo more surgery on Friday
- South Korea "will bomb North" if attacked again
- Japan confirms 1st high-risk bird flu on farm since '07
- No conflict with Sultan: Indonesian president
- South Korea “will bomb North” if attacked again
- Saudi king to undergo more surgery today
- Food versus biofuels debate continues
- Wikileaks revelations put pressure on Justice officials
- Month-old giant panda cub at US zoo
- 3 December 2010
- Removing public prejudices against AIDS patients
- Europe's contrasting weather patterns
- Ivory Coast army closes borders
- Wikileaks exposes Helmand operations
- Malaysia to deport Indonesian terror suspect
- American west's forests face troubling carbon trend
- Indonesia downgrades Mount Merapi volcano alert
| Home Minister decided on the 50% discount Posted: 03 Dec 2010 12:33 AM PST The decision to give 50% discount to traffic summons was made by Home Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin.
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| A small leak can sink a great ship Posted: 03 Dec 2010 12:10 AM PST We are a nation boasting one of the world's tallest buildings (with another monstrosity on the way) and yet we have a legislative house that leaks more than a BP oil well.
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| Posted: 02 Dec 2010 09:11 PM PST Thousands celebrated in the streets of Qatar after it defeated bids from South Korea, Japan, Australia and the United States to host the World Cup in 2022.
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| Saudi king to go undergo more surgery on Friday Posted: 03 Dec 2010 12:46 AM PST DUBAI (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's elderly King Abdullah will undergo surgery on Friday to stabilise vertebrae in his spinal column, the kingdom's royal court said in a statement carried by the state news agency. 
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| South Korea "will bomb North" if attacked again Posted: 03 Dec 2010 12:46 AM PST SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea said on Friday it would bomb North Korea if it tries a repeat of last week's attack, with the United States warning of an "immediate threat" from Pyongyang. 
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| Japan confirms 1st high-risk bird flu on farm since '07 Posted: 03 Dec 2010 12:10 AM PST TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's farm ministry on Friday confirmed the country's first outbreak of the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain of bird flu at a poultry farm since 2007. 
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| No conflict with Sultan: Indonesian president Posted: 03 Dec 2010 12:15 AM PST JAKARTA, Dec 3: Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono says he has no personal issues with Yogyakarta Governor Sri Sultan Hamengkubuwono X despite media reports to the contrary.
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| South Korea “will bomb North” if attacked again Posted: 03 Dec 2010 12:02 AM PST SEOUL, Dec 3 ─ US and Japanese forces began military manoeuvres today, heaping pressure on North Korea which US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said posed an "immediate threat" to the region and a long-term threat to the world. South Korea, which joined US forces in military drills this week days after North Korea shelled a South Korean ...
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| Saudi king to undergo more surgery today Posted: 03 Dec 2010 12:01 AM PST DUBAI, Dec 3 — Saudi Arabia's elderly King Abdullah will undergo surgery today to stabilise vertebrae in his spinal column, the kingdom's royal court said in a statement carried by the state news agency. The king, thought to be 86 or 87 years old, underwent surgery on his back in New York last month after a blood clot complicated a slipped spinal ...
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| Food versus biofuels debate continues Posted: 02 Dec 2010 03:30 PM PST
Makama is worried about one particular proposal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions: biofuels. She feels industrialised countries are promoting the production and use of biofuels to fulfill their energy needs, but this will leave more people in the developing world without food. "We face the danger of growing food for the machines instead of our stomachs," Makama told IPS. Swaziland faces serious shortages of food, with 170,000 of it's million-strong population in need of food aid this year. Makama and Friends of the Earth campaigned hard against a project to establish biofuels production from jatropha in Swaziland. A UK-based company called D1 Oils signed contracts with the farmers to grow jatropha for them. An initial agreement with the government planned to put 20,000 hectares into biofuels production, possibly expanding to 50,000. The company website states that there are millions of hectares of marginal land in developing countries that cannot effectively be used to grow food. "Much of this land is suitable for growing energy crops such as jatropha," says the company, which planned to establish its operations in drought-stricken areas of Swaziland. FoEI spoke to many of the farmers involved with the project. One of these, Sam Dube, told the environmental campaign group he had devoted all three of his fields to the energy crop, where previously he was growing food on two of his plots, and cotton for a cash income in the third. He faced a three-year wait while his jatropha matured and he could begin to make a profit. He could be in trouble. D1 Oils pulled out of the project before it properly took off because, according to the company's CEO in Swaziland, Gaetan Ning, the Swazi government was unwilling to support the project with necessary legislation. "They wanted us to do a national strategy on biofuels, yet it's not our job to do this but government's," said Ning. After spending more than $8 million over five years cultivating this crop on private farms, the company called it a day. "We had hired 500 people to work on these farms and we had to retrench them," said Ning. Gcina Dladla, spokesperson for the Swaziland Environment Authority, said it was a pity that D1 Oils abandoned the project after being asked to do the Strategic Environmental Assessment. "We wanted to ascertain factually the impact of jatropha on food security, quality of the soil in response to the outcry by civil society organisations," said Dladla. Prudent, but environmental consultant Rex Brown, who was working with D1 on the jatropha project, argues that food insecurity cannot be blamed on biofuels. The reasons why people in Swaziland and elsewhere go hungry may include inadequate food policies, food availability, market forces, distribution and logistics and suitable climates. "What is often critical is a person's ability to pay for his food," said Brown. Cultivating jatropha on marginal land in arid Swaziland, he argues, could provide a steady income for rural people either as farm labour or growers in their own right. Brown says the jatropha-based biofuels project D1 Oils proposed had the added benefit of capturing and storing atmospheric carbon. "The role of agriculture, and tree crops in particular, in mitigating climate change revolves around the capacity of the plant to store carbon for extended periods of time," said Brown. Defending biofuels against charges that widescale cultivation will displace farmers and food crops, Brown said it was a case of criticise one, criticise all. "Rubber, cotton, cocoa, sisal, for example, are crops grown on large plantations globally," said Brown. "Using the argument put forward by biofuel opponents, we should also question the food security of these crops." No doubt Elfrieda Pschorn-Strauss, from GRAIN, an international NGO that supports biodiverse, community-based food systems, would question the role played by plantation farming of any type. Pschorn-Strauss says that biofuels - which GRAIN prefers to call agro-fuels - have already displaced farmers from their land, negatively affected food production and caused the destruction of forest. "So many promises of agro-fuels like jatropha have not materialised," she said. She does not want to see biofuels gain wider acceptance as part of a mitigation strategy negotiated in Cancún. "[The industry] has managed to develop mechanisms and agreements that will allow them to legitimately exploit the environment and people for financial gain," said Pschorn-Strauss. The answer may lie somewhere between the opposing positions. Researcher David Tilman, from the University of Minnesota in the United States, was the lead author of a paper that outlined the potential bases of sustainable and responsible biofuels production. To gain the maximum carbon emissions reductions over fossil fuels while conserving forest cover and biodiversity, biofuel feedstock should come from municipal and industrial waste, residues from crops and sustainably harvested wood, and from perennial plants grown on degraded land - already abandoned from agricultural use. - IPS
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| Wikileaks revelations put pressure on Justice officials Posted: 02 Dec 2010 03:27 PM PST
Deputy Gaspar Llamazares, parliamentary spokesperson of the United Left coalition, told IPS that lawmakers would continue to demand that Attorney General Cándido Conde-Pumpido appear before Congress to explain why the legal proceedings against the three accused soldiers have stalled. "It can't be left like this. It is a matter of justice and of responsibility to our citizens, which no government body should ignore, much less Congress," he said. The pressure on the Attorney General's Office, the government and Congress to take action comes from different sectors, including Couso's family, while the main force of political opposition, the right-wing Popular Party (PP), looks the other way. The PP's parliamentary spokesperson, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, has argued that the content of the leaked documents about the killing "has not been confirmed" and therefore her party will abstain from taking a position on the matter. She also suggested that the international community should respond jointly to the 250,000 secret or confidential documents made available online by Wikileaks, and beginning on Nov. 28 were published by five major global newspapers published on their websites -- including the Spanish daily El País. Most of the texts were cables between the US State Department and its embassies around the world. "The documents could affect important aspects of diplomatic and international relations," said Sáenz. PP leader José María Aznar was Spain's prime minister from 1998 to 2004 and brought the country into the Iraq War, which began in March 2003. He did so despite strong opposition from the majority of the Spanish public and other political parties. Couso, who was covering the war for the commercial Telecinco TV channel, was killed one month after the U.S.-led invasion. At a press conference, Couso's family expressed indignation that both the Attorney General's Office and the government, "rather than defend national sovereignty and investigate what happened, act in the service of a foreign power and then hide the truth." The family members said they are planning further legal actions. Spokespersons for the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and his Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), did not respond to IPS's questions on the matter, and instead referred to recent statements by Foreign Minister Trinidad Jiménez. On Tuesday, Nov 30, Jiménez underscored that "in Spain the judiciary is independent and acts with great seriousness... it is unthinkable that it could be pressured in any way to close a judicial proceeding." At the Dec 1 weekly plenary session in which the prime minister reports to Congress, during the breaks Zapatero and Jiménez answered reporters' questions with only silence and smiles. But the commotion has not ceased in Spain since El País began publishing -- in digital and print editions -- the texts that refer to the Couso case included among the secret U.S. documents released by Wikileaks. According to those documents, the current government supported everything the U.S. embassy in Madrid did to prevent the case against the soldiers from moving forward. Operating a tank, the US soldiers fired shells at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, the known residence of foreign journalists covering the war. Couso was on the balcony of the 14th floor filming the action alongside other colleagues. In one of the documents, sent in May 2007 to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. ambassador in Madrid, Eduardo Aguirre, assured her that the Spanish government had "helped in the wings" so that the judge's decisions would face appeal and end the investigation into the reporter's death. The appeal "will go to the same court which originally dismissed the case (in 2006) on procedural grounds," wrote Aguirre. Two years earlier, in October 2005, Judge Santiago Pedraz, of the Audiencia Nacional (a federal court), had issued an international arrest warrant for the three U.S. soldiers who fired at the hotel in Baghdad. The warrant failed, primarily due to Washington's refusal to recognise it, but also to the passive stance of the Spanish government. The State Department papers disclosed by Wikileaks, already dubbed "Cablegate," show that Spanish officials collaborated to prevent international arrest warrants for the U.S. soldiers from being finalised, just as Aguirre had assured his superiors in a cable. Among those involved, the document mentions Spain's then-secretary of state for foreign affairs and current presidential secretary-general, Bernardino León, as well as Miguel Ángel Moratinos, who served as Zapatero's foreign minister from 2004 until October 2010. In another cable the ambassador sent to the State Department on May 14, 2007, he states, "While we are careful to show our respect for the tragic death of Couso and for the Spanish judicial system, behind the scenes we have fought tooth and nail to make the charges disappear" against the U.S. soldiers who fired on the hotel. The powerful vice-president, María Teresa Fernández de la Vega, who also served until October 2010, held a meeting around that time with the ambassador. She told him that Attorney General Conde-Pumpido had remarked on the excellent cooperation from the embassy and U.S. authorities in helping to conclude the case. This "excellent cooperation" was referred to this Tuesday, Nov. 30, by the Attorney General's Office in a statement which underscores that its actions are based on strictly legal criteria, with no external interference. But the statement also assures that the office maintains a close and productive relationship with its U.S. counterpart and with similar entities in other countries, primarily in the area of the fight against international terrorism, drug-trafficking and organised crime. But it did not clarify if the Couso case is included in that "area." Following several starts and stops in the court case, on Jul. 30, 2010, a Spanish judge ordered the arrest and detention of the three U.S. soldiers implicated, but Interpol did not process the arrest warrants and the United States has refused to accept them because the events involved a "military crime" under its own jurisdiction. - IPS
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| Month-old giant panda cub at US zoo Posted: 02 Dec 2010 11:22 PM PST A one-month old giant panda cub has his weekly medical check-up at a Zoo in Atlanta.
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| Posted: 02 Dec 2010 11:16 PM PST
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| Removing public prejudices against AIDS patients Posted: 02 Dec 2010 11:14 PM PST Before his exposure to AIDS patients, Dr. Huang Kai Xing used to be a very demanding person. This trait made him unable to relieve the invisible pressure building up in him.
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| Europe's contrasting weather patterns Posted: 02 Dec 2010 02:14 AM PST Snow and freezing temperatures in parts of northern Europe are blamed for several deaths, while major travel disruption continues.
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| Ivory Coast army closes borders Posted: 02 Dec 2010 06:18 PM PST The military in Ivory Coast has announced the closure of the country's land, sea and air borders, amid confusion over the result of Sunday's presidential election run-off.
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| Wikileaks exposes Helmand operations Posted: 02 Dec 2010 03:02 PM PST The latest US cables revealed by Wikileaks expose Afghan and American criticism of British forces and strategy in Helmand in 2008.
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| Malaysia to deport Indonesian terror suspect Posted: 02 Dec 2010 10:30 PM PST KUALA LUMPUR, Friday 3 December 2010 (AFP) -- Malaysia confirmed Friday it has detained an Indonesian terrorist suspect linked to the Jemaah Islamiyah outfit, and will deport him as soon as possible.
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| American west's forests face troubling carbon trend Posted: 02 Dec 2010 10:29 PM PST WASHINGTON, Friday 3 December 2010 (AFP) -- Crippled by drought, scorched by wildfires and dying from beetle infestations, forests in the American west are struggling and in some states they now exude more carbon than they absorb, experts say.
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| Indonesia downgrades Mount Merapi volcano alert Posted: 02 Dec 2010 10:27 PM PST YOGYAKARTA, Friday 3 December 2010 (AFP) -- Indonesian scientists Friday downgraded the alert status of Mount Merapi from its highest level after it killed more than 350 people in a series of violent eruptions that started in late October.
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By Mantoe Phakathi
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