Wednesday, February 27, 2008

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a vault containing millions of seeds from all over the world, saw its first deposits on Tuesday. Located 800 kilometers from the North Pole on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, the vault has been referred to by European Commission president José Manuel Barroso as a “frozen Garden of Eden“. It is intended to preserve crop supplies and secure biological diversity in the event of a worldwide disaster.

“The opening of the seed vault marks a historic turning point in safeguarding the world’s crop diversity,” said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust which is in charge of collecting the seed samples. The Norwegian government, who owns the bank, built it at a cost of $9.1 million.

At the opening ceremony, 100 million seeds from 268,000 samples were placed inside the vault, where there is room for over 2 billion seeds. Each of the samples originated from a different farm or field, in order to best ensure biological diversity. These crop seeds included such staples as rice, potatoes, barley, lettuce, maize, sorghum, and wheat. No genetically modified crops were included. (Beyond politics they are generally sterile so of no use.)

Constructed deep inside a mountain and protected by concrete walls, the “doomsday vault” is designed to withstand earthquakes, nuclear warfare, and floods resulting from global warming. Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg called it an “insurance policy” against such threats.

With air-conditioned temperatures of -18 degrees Celsius, experts say the seeds could last for an entire millennium. Some crops will be able to last longer, like sorghum, which the Global Crop Diversity Trust says can last almost 20 millenniums. Even if the refrigeration system fails, the vaults are expected to stay frozen for 200 years.

The Prime Minister said, “With climate change and other forces threatening the diversity of life that sustains our planet, Norway is proud to be playing a central role in creating a facility capable of protecting what are not just seeds, but the fundamental building blocks of human civilization.” Stoltenberg, along with Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai, made the first deposit of rice to the vault.

“It is very important for Africa to store seeds here because anything can happen to our national seed banks,” Maathai said. The vault will operate as a bank, allowing countries to use their deposited seeds free of charge. It will also serve as a backup to the thousands of other seed banks around the world.

“Crop diversity will soon prove to be our most potent and indispensable resource for addressing climate change, water and energy supply constraints and for meeting the food needs of a growing population,” Cary Fowler said.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

British comedian Eddie Izzard has completed a series of 43 marathons in just 51 days to raise money for Sport Relief, a charity based in the United Kingdom.

The marathons covered a total running distance of 1,100 miles (1,700 kilometers) across the United Kingdom. He ran from London, England, to Cardiff, Wales, to Belfast, Northern Ireland, to Edinburgh, Scotland and back to London again. Izzard carried a flag of each of the four countries depending on which one he was running in.

Eddie is 47 years old and had spent just five weeks training for the event. He crossed the finish line on Tuesday in Trafalgar Square in London during a rainfall. He said to waiting journalists: “I feel dead.”

In an interview with BBC News, he commented: “I don’t know what the hell I was doing at the end but it must have been way faster than I was doing the rest of the time. So I feel exhausted now, but you know, it’s over. Being here is very nice because, when I left here seven-and-a-half weeks ago, there was nothing here, it was just a cold morning and now there’s a lot of people here, even in the rain.”

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Virginia is poised to become the first U.S. state to require convicted sex offenders to report e-mail addresses and on-line identities to the state’s sex offender registry.

Attorney General Bob McDonnell said Monday that he supports new reporting requirements of a legislative proposal expected to be introduced by Senator Ryan McDougle (Republican Party–Hanover County) for consideration by the Virginia General Assembly when it convenes in January. The legislation would help on-line social networking communities popular among youth groups, such as MySpace and Facebook, prevent sex offenders from using their sites.

“This legislation is an important recognition that the Internet has become a community as real as any other neighborhood and is in need of similar safeguards,” officials of MySpace said in response to the announcement. Chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam of the 125-million-user MySpace site said the law would be “a landmark moment in the history of Internet safety.”

A U.S. national blacklist will be used by MySpace to ban registered sex offenders. A database called “Sentinel Safe”, under development by Sentinel Tech Holding Corp., will be used to check national and state records. Nigam said, “Sentinel Safe will allow us to aggregate all publicly available sex offender databases into a real-time searchable form making it easy to cross-reference and remove known registered sex offenders from the MySpace community.”

Saturday, September 27, 2008

The plan to incinerate over 200 years’ worth of archived newspapers at the University of Oslo was paused this week, following an article by the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten publicising the intended destruction.

The unwanted archives take up 3 kilometres of shelf space, and neither the University nor the National Library are interested in retaining and storing the years of history any more.

The collection consists of both Nordic and non-Nordic newspapers, including Manchester Guardian, New York Times, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Le Figaro.

A planned incineration of them in 2002 was avoided by moving them into a warehouse owned by Nils Christian Bang at Follum Grend, near Ringerike. Edgar Learn Borg, retired supervisor of the collection, continues to be involved in the preservation of the collection which hasn’t been accessed by researchers since its move.

The order came again to clean up the store. Frode Meinich, technical director of the University, says that the collection is not unique, and indicated that the University needs temporary storage for some antiquarian furniture during renovation of a music facility of the University.

In 2007, Frode Meinich told Aftenposten that a national program of infrastructure modernization was desperately needed. “For the time being we are managing to keep the ship afloat, but if something serious isn’t done in the next few years we have a major problem”.

Saturday, March 1, 2008

Wikinews held an exclusive interview with Max Riekse, one of the candidates for the Constitution Party nomination for the 2008 United States presidential election.

Riekse is a retired decorated United States Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army who served in both the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. He is also a former public school teacher and Assistant Professor of Military Science at Western Michigan University. He has a B.A. in Political Science and International Relations from the University of South Florida as well as two M.A.s, one in Political Science and International Relations, the other in Eductaion and History. Both are from Western Michigan University.

We asked him if he thinks he has a good shot at winning the Constitution Party nomination and ultimately the presidency. He replied, “I will give it my best shot because I think I can do better then all previous Constitution Party presidential candidates….As to being in the White House in 2009, realistically, its a long shot; but so was Abe Lincoln in the new Republican Party.”

When asked about America’s public school system he said, “Local school boards and the people they are responsible to are the best judge of what is needed; this with state oversight, will help boost public school quality & education.”

Riekse is running for president because he has been “very tired of our Republican and Democratic choices for president for many years. With a population of some 300 million people to draw from, I would think we could do much, much better then we have been doing in regards to having a choice for president.”

Monday, June 23, 2008

2008 COMPUTEX Taipei, the largest trade fair since its inception in 1982, featured several seminars and forums, expansions on show spaces to TWTC Nangang, great transformations for theme pavilions, and WiMAX Taipei Expo, mainly promoted by Taipei Computer Association (TCA). Besides of ICT industry, “design” progressively became the critical factor for the future of the other industries. To promote innovative “Made In Taiwan” products, pavilions from “Best Choice of COMPUTEX”, “Taiwan Excellence Awards”, and newly-set “Design and Innovation (d & i) Award of COMPUTEX”, demonstrated the power of Taiwan’s designs in 2008 COMPUTEX Taipei.

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Two powerful suicide attacks struck different areas of northwestern Pakistan on Saturday, apparently targeting the country’s security forces. In the first attack, a bomber killed at least six people and wounded more than 60 others outside a police station in Bannu.

Shortly thereafter, in Peshawar’s commercial district, another attacker blew himself up outside a bank affiliated with the Pakistani army, killing ten people and wounding more than 70 others.

Authorities in Bannu said the suicide bomber exploded a small truck full of explosives, destroying the police station and surrounding buildings.

District Police Officer Iqbal Marwat said nearby civilians were wounded, but most of the casualties were police officers. He said the attacker tried to ram the vehicle through the main gate, but then detonated the bomb after police opened fire.

Local media are quoted a representative for the outlawed Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan as taking responsibility for the bombing.

In a telephone call, Taliban spokesman Qari Hussain Mehsud warned civilians to keep away from security checkpoints and other police installations, saying that “we have broken the silence as the government did not understand the pause in attacks, and from now there will be an increase in the number of suicide bombings.”

This is the first time the alliance of more than a dozen militant groups with links to al-Qaida has claimed responsibility since its former leader Baitullah Mehsud was reportedly killed in a U.S. missile strike. Analysts had suggested the group was in disarray following Mehsud’s death.

Hours later in Peshawar, officials say an attacker in a parked car threw a grenade at a crowd of people outside the Askari Bank before detonating a bomb in his car.

“Ten people have been killed and 71 wounded, five of them critically,” said the chief government administrator of Peshawar, Sahibzada Anis, to the Reuters news agency.

“It was terrible. My children are very frightened. All the windows of my house are broken. It was very frightening,” said Beenish Asad, a witness to the event, who lives near where the explosion took place.

No one has claimed responsibility for that particular attack. Senior police official Ghafoor Afridi told Voice of America that the bomber had managed to bypass multiple security checkpoints. “There was checking all around. But somehow, it is not possible to check all vehicles, so they might have slipped a vehicle inside and exploded it,” said Afridi.

North West Frontier Province’s information minister, Mian Iftikhar Hussain, said that the recent violence would not discourage government forces from fighting the rebels. “It is not only our duty […] to fight this menace of terrorism, it is a responsibility of the whole world. We are on the front line today, that’s why our blood is being shed.”

Hussain also said “we are not scared of these people and we have to extend our operations wherever these terrorists are operating,” adding that forty suspected would-be suicide bombers had been apprehended within the past several months.

The U.S. Embassy in Pakistan released a statement in which it condemned the bombings. “[The attacks] highlight the vicious and inhuman nature of this enemy whose true target is the democratically elected government of Pakistan and the security of all Pakistanis,” the embassy said.

Saturday’s attacks come as the Pakistani military works to expand its offensive against the Taliban from in and around Swat Valley to the north to South Waziristan.