Saturday, February 24, 2007

Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota signed a bill into law on Thursday that requires the state to generate a significant amount of its energy needs from renewable sources.

The amount of power generated by wind turbines in the state stands now at 895 megawatts. An additional 5,000 megawatts of energy from renewable sources will need to be added to Minnesota’s electricity resources, which is roughly eight times more than the amount that currently comes from renewables.

The bill signed by the Governor requires energy companies to provide 25 percent of power from renewable sources by 2025.

Xcel Energy, which supplies approximately half of the electricity in the state, is required to provide 30 percent from renewable sources by 2020.

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Beijing’s utilities are cracking down on manhole cover thefts by removing the incentive to steal them. A pilot program is using a new material with negligible recycling value in over 2,921 installations of various types.

“We are still looking for the perfect substitutes for the manhole covers,” said city spokesman Wang Xin.

Over 240,000 covers were stolen from Beijing’s streets in 2004, nearly half of the 600,000 installations scattered throughout the city.

The high recycling value of the metal used to manufacture the previous models led to a crime wave of thefts, driven by illegal scrap metal dealers who purchased them for approximately US$2.4 dollars.

The covers cost between US$145 and US$182 to replace.

Thursday, June 1, 2006

A mine accident killed at least nine miners in a coal mine in western Turkey. A methane explosion collapsed a mine shaft about 150 meters below the town of Odakoy, in Bal?kesir Province, near the border with Bursa Province. Rescue work was slowed by the presence of gas, with rescue workers having to be hospitalized for methane poisoning.

Turkey suffers relatively frequent mine accidents, especially due to methane pockets either igniting or poisoning miners. Some observers fault old & untrustworthy equipment, or a disregard for safety regulations.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Voters in Botswana will head to the polls this Friday to vote in parliamentary elections. The incumbent Democratic Party, in power since 1966, is expected to win the vote.

Some voters left their homes as early as 04.00 local time to be in time for the opening of polling stations two hours later, and voters moved through polling stations at a steady pace throughout the day.

About 700,000 residents are registered to vote. Joseph Gaie, lecturer in political ethics at Botswana University in Gaborone, told the Voice of America news agency that a good turnout had been expected.

“Well a lot of people, elderly people take this as a duty – every five years they have to go and vote,” he said. “And then a lot of youth that have just come, this will be the first time that 18-year-olds vote, so they are very excited about it.”

Voting had proceeded without incidents or violence at polling stations, officials said. “We have not received any complaints of intimidation from any of the political parties,” said the head of the Southern African Development Community observer mission Francisco Madeira.

The two major opposition parties, the Botswana National Front and the Botswana Congress Party, are hoping to do much better this time than in previous elections and have indicated they may cooperate in parliament after the poll.

Botswana is a democracy that has seen consistent economic growth in the 43 years since it won independence from the UK. That growth is largely due to exports from the country’s diamond industry, which suffered dramatically in the global economic crisis. The net effect of that has seen an 11.5% contraction of the economy in the year that ended in June. The election results will be known on Saturday.

Monday, November 2, 2020

The following is the sixth and final edition of a monthly series chronicling the 2020 United States presidential election. It features original material compiled throughout the previous month after an overview of the month’s biggest stories.

This month’s spotlight on the campaign trail: the Free and Equal Elections Foundation holds two presidential debates, three candidates who did not participate in those debates give their final pleas to voters, and three political pundits give their predictions on the outcome of the election.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

The European Commission currently has proposals on the table to extend performers’ copyright terms. Described by Professor Martin Kretschmer as the “Beatles Extension Act”, the proposed measure would extend copyright from 50 to 95 years after recording. A vast number of classical tracks are at stake; the copyright on recordings from the fifties and early sixties is nearing its expiration date, after which it would normally enter the public domain or become ‘public property’. E.U. Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services Charlie McCreevy is proposing this extension, and if the other relevant Directorate Generales (Information Society, Consumers, Culture, Trade, Competition, etc.) agree with the proposal, it will be sent to the European Parliament.

Wikinews contacted Erik Josefsson, European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (E.F.F.), who invited us to Brussels, the heart of E.U. policy making, to discuss this new proposal and its implications. Expecting an office interview, we arrived to discover that the event was a party and meetup conveniently coinciding with FOSDEM 2008 (the Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting). The meetup was in a sprawling city centre apartment festooned with E.F.F. flags and looked to be a party that would go on into the early hours of the morning with copious food and drink on tap. As more people showed up for the event it turned out that it was a truly international crowd, with guests from all over Europe.

Eddan Katz, the new International Affairs Director of the E.F.F., had come over from the U.S. to connect to the European E.F.F. network, and he gladly took part in our interview. Eddan Katz explained that the Electronic Frontier Foundation is “A non-profit organisation working to protect civil liberties and freedoms online. The E.F.F. has fought for information privacy rights online, in relation to both the government and companies who, with insufficient transparency, collect, aggregate and make abuse of information about individuals.” Another major focus of their advocacy is intellectual property, said Eddan: “The E.F.F. represents what would be the public interest, those parts of society that don’t have a concentration of power, that the private interests do have in terms of lobbying.”

Becky Hogge, Executive Director of the U.K.’s Open Rights Group (O.R.G.), joined our discussion as well. “The goals of the Open Rights Group are very simple: we speak up whenever we see civil, consumer or human rights being affected by the poor implementation or the poor regulation of new technologies,” Becky summarised. “In that sense, people call us -I mean the E.F.F. has been around, in internet years, since the beginning of time- but the Open Rights Group is often called the British E.F.F.“