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Great Britain
Oct 28, 2015 Abbott, ousted Australian leader, urges Europe to take hard line on migrants warning in London that the continent risked “fundamentally weakening itself” through “misguided altruism” as large numbers of asylum seekers arrive. Mr. Abbott backed an aggressive policy on migration during his two years in office. The Australian authorities turned away boats and refused to accept asylum seekers intercepted at sea, instead sending them to offshore camps. Prime Minister Turnbull, who replaced Mr. Abbott in September in a party coup, has announced no change to those policies. Mr. Abbott recommended the same approach for Europe. “This means turning boats around, for people coming by sea,” he said. “It means denying entry at the border, for people with no legal right to come. And it means establishing camps for people who currently have nowhere to go.”More than 600 people are still being detained on the small Pacific island nation of Nauru, and more than 900 remain in a camp on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. As public criticism of the camps has increased, the Australian government has tried with little success to resettle asylum seekers in third countries. After just four people were sent to Cambodia under a $29 million agreement reached last year, Australia said this month that it was in talks with the Philippines.His remarks came hours after the president of the Philippines, one of several countries where Australia has hoped to send asylum seekers, said the country would not accept them for permanent resettlement. His comments were later endorsed by Farage, leader of the right-wing U.K. Independence Party, which is known for its anti-immigration stance. Mr. Farage told the Australia Broadcasting Corporation that the former prime minister was “heroic” and “absolutely right.” In his London speech, Mr. Abbott argued that the people arriving in Europe should be considered economic migrants, not refugees, even if they were fleeing war in Syria or elsewhere, because they were no longer in immediate danger. “In Europe, as with Australia, people claiming asylum invariably have crossed not one border but many, and are no longer fleeing in fear but are contracting in hope with people smugglers,” he said. (Source: The New York Times): http://tinyurl.com/p7zkz3e
European Union
Oct 28, 2015 EU lawmakers block opt-out from GMO rules. European Union lawmakers have rejected a draft law that would have allowed countries to ban certain genetically modified food and animal feed even if the produce was authorized by EU authorities.Lawmakers fear the move could force a return to border controls to keep GMO produce out of some countries. The decision to reject the law was taken by an overwhelming majority. (Source: AP): http://tinyurl.com/omjllge
India
October 28, 2015 Weather on demand: making it rain is now a global business. Welcome to the strange world of cloud seeding. Kyathi Climate Modification Consultants, the cloud-seeding company based in Bangalore 24 cylinders resembling sticks of dynamite wired to racks on the plane’s wings, 12 on each. The flares are filled with combustible sodium chloride—pulverized table salt mixed with a flammable potassium powder. When the switch is flipped, the end of the flare shoots orange fire and trillions of superfine salt particles are released into the cloud. Water molecules are attracted to salt, so they bond to the particles and coalesce into raindrops. It’s early September, still monsoon season in this southwestern region of India, yet the clouds haven’t done much more than drizzle. Maharashtra is one of the largest and wealthiest of India’s 30 states, with 110 million residents. It encompasses Mumbai and other large cities, plus vast swaths of farmland. Like other agricultural regions of India, it’s in its third consecutive year of drought. More than 80 percent of its farms depend on rain for irrigation, and agriculture production has dropped by almost a third since 2013. The human impact has been severe—1,300 debt-trapped farmers have committed suicide in Maharashtra in just the past six months. Weather Modification Inc., the world’s largest private aerial cloud-seeding company, based in Fargo, N.D. is training Indian pilots, meteorologists, and Doppler radar technicians to seed clouds. Cloud seeding has been controversial since it was invented by Schaefer in 1946. A chemist for General Electric, Schaefer made the first snowstorm in a laboratory freezer. In India, I witnessed “hygroscopic” or water-attracting cloud seeding, which is used in warm-weather regions to enhance rain, disperse fog, and clean dirty skies. Snow-enhancement projects are often commissioned by water managers and power companies with hydroelectric plants; for decades, Pacific Gas & Electric has spent millions annually on cloud seeding in the Sierra Nevadas. Cold-weather seeding is done at the core of snow clouds that can reach altitudes as high as 60,000 feet: Flares filled with tiny flakes of silver iodide are ejected into the clouds’ centers. Silver iodide has a molecular structure similar to that of ice. As the silver particles drift down through the clouds, water gloms onto them as it would to ice, and snowflakes grow. This method is also routinely used for mitigating hail storms, especially in Canada: When silver iodide particles are injected into a hail-producing storm cloud, there are suddenly more nuclei for the ice to cling to. Smaller ice pellets, or “graupel,” form rather than large hail stones. Silver iodide in large concentrations can be harmful, but the concentrations found in snowpack after cloud seeding are often so low as to be undetectable. Breed’s NCAR study in Wyoming found that there was less silver iodide in snow and soil samples in areas where clouds had been seeded than there had been before the campaigns What we do know is that no two clouds are alike.” This makes it difficult to control and replicate the results of cloud-seeding studies. Despite the uncertainty, the industry is on the rise. According to the World Meteorological Organization, more than 52 countries have active cloud-seeding operations—up from 42 four years ago. In the U.S. last year, 55 cloud-seeding projects were reported to NOAA. There’s even a luxury cloud-seeding market emerging—one European company, for instance, charges a minimum of $150,000 to guarantee good wedding weather by forcing clouds to rain in the days before the event. Sweeney’s mechanics equip and service the more than 100 WMI cloud-seeding aircraft—Cessnas, King Airs, and Bombardiers—they operate or have leased and sold worldwide. Sweeney also built ICE (Ice Crystal Engineering), a company that makes cloud-seeding chemicals and supplies flares to 25 countries. It customizes and operates the planes and radars, manufactures the flares, and flies the missions. There are 34 private companies worldwide that do weather modification, but there’s no bigger rival in aerial cloud seeding than the Chinese government, which spends hundreds of millions a year seeding clouds in 22 of its 23 provinces, both to clear pollution above cities and to enhance rainfall for farming. China has yet to allow private companies to enter its market, but Sweeney is making inroads; he sold his first cloud-seeding plane to Beijing last year. Thailand’s government has a Bureau of Royal Rainmaking, with hundreds of employees that WMI helped train, though the program’s still using old technology—releasing mounds of table salt from trap doors in the bellies of its planes. And when the Argentine government took over the cloud-seeding program WMI built for the country, it cut costs. Soon after, two pilots died seeding clouds above a mountain, and the project was suspended. a huge white orb, about 80 feet in diameter, on top of a scaffolded tower. This is the latest in Doppler radar, a technology that’s improved significantly over the last decade, along with satellite data and computing power. It helps the government make sure it’s getting its money’s worth. The office of disaster management in Aurangabad, at the center of Maharashtra’s farming region has an orb which sends out electromagnetic waves that travel hundreds of kilometers; when the waves hit rain droplets and ice crystals, they bounce back and create an image of the cloud contour. The stronger the signal, the denser the cloud and the more intense the rain. (Source: Bloomberg): http://tinyurl.com/o8fmwdn
Globalization
28 October 2015 Forget X-rays, now you can see through walls using WI-FI: device called RF Capture, developed by researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) captures silhouettes and can even identify people when they're stood behind concrete.The RF Capture device was developed by researchers at MIT. Wireless signals travel through the wall and reflect off the body behind it. This creates a silhouette from which body parts can be identified. Silhouettes can then be compared to a database of bodies to identify who they belong to - and it can even identify which hand their moving. The team continued that the emitted radiation is approximately 10,000 times lower than that of a standard phone. The researchers said the technology could have major implications for everything from gaming and film-making to emergency-response and elder-care. (Source: DailyMail): http://tinyurl.com/okea2ap
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