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- Reuters: Rising US food inflation, now a 25-year high, is reminiscent of the 1970s and will continue for the next five years due to growing world economies, increased food demand and a sharp expansion of corn-based ethanol production, a top food economist said Friday. "What happened in the early '70s and what is happening today is that we have moved food input price to a new plateau. Ultimately, the consumer is going to have to absorb those increased costs," |
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- Guardian: 'After 11 days of negotiations, governments have come up with a compromise deal that could even lead to emission increases. The highly compromised political deal is largely attributable to the position of the United States, which was heavily influenced by fossil fuel and automobile industry interests. The failure to reach agreement led to the talks spilling over into an all-night session." |
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- Reuters: Australian researchers have begun an aerial count of whales in the Antarctic ahead of the yearly Japanese hunt as Australia's government mulls a legal challenge to halt the yearly slaughter. A team from the new Australian Centre for Applied Marine Mammal Science will spend several weeks flying over 150,000 square km (58,000 square miles) of pack ice off eastern Antarctica to count minke whales from the air. "Ships can't survey through the ice. |
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- Age: ALL roads lead to Copenhagen. After two weeks of negotiations, arguments and compromise, the 188 nations who met in Bali agreed at the weekend to begin negotiations (and, although not stated, the arguments and compromises) to meet a 2009 deadline, to be adopted in the Danish capital, for a treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol. It would have been overly naive or optimistic to have expected a major breakthrough, but the mere fact that the Bali talks on climate change did not collapse ... |
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- Australian Broadcasting Corporation: The new treaty to tackle climate change signed in Bali at the weekend has been welcomed by Australian scientists as a "step in the right direction" and a vindication of their work in the field. The 13-day United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change delivered a deal that sets the framework for a long-term agreement on emissions cuts to succeed the Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012. |
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- Asia Times: In the end, every side blinked. The European Union and developing countries decided that they had more to gain from a Bali road map climate change agreement including the United States, than one without the world's top greenhouse gas emitter. The US decided that it wanted to remain in the conversation rather than be isolated and vilified for preventing an agreement. The Bali road map agreed to Saturday by delegates to the United Nations Framework Conference on Climate Change ... |
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- Reuters: High altitude glaciers in China's remote west have shrunk by up to 18 percent over the last five years due to global warming, state media said on Friday, citing preliminary results from an on-going survey. The shrinkage was most evident in two areas in the far Western region of Xinjiang and in part of Tibet, the official Xinhua news agency said. "The change of glaciers is in fact a manifestation of the pressure upon China's environment from global warming," |
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- Nation: The year 2007 has been the hottest ever in the history of climate record-keeping, according to a Japanese weather monitoring agency. It is now nearly universally accepted that the rise in global temperatures is caused by an increase in carbon dioxide that traps heat in the atmosphere. A lot of that colourless, odourless, incombustible gas has been pumped into the atmosphere by industries, particularly those in rich, developed countries. Industrialising developing countries such ... |
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- Guardian: EU plans to slash carbon dioxide emissions from all new cars and impose savage penalties on manufacturers failing to meet binding targets are in disarray, it emerged at the weekend. The plans are part of the EU's ambitious campaign against global warming. The 27-strong European commission, which set out a mandatory target of 120g of CO2 per km from 2012, is to hold a series of emergency top-level meetings over the next two days in an effort to agree its proposed legislation in time ... |
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- Inter Press SErvice: Despite scepticism about the 'Bali roadmap', the international community has come a long way in hammering out a truly global response to the serious threat posed by climate change. But the global climate diplomacy is faced with several hurdles that must be overcome in the next two years. These involve changing the hearts and minds of the ruling elite in both the developed and developing countries. As UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said, while the developed countries need to ... |
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- AAP: Australian Greens leader Bob Brown says his party is turning its attention to stopping the proposed Gunns pulp mill in Tasmania. Senator Brown, unhappy with the new federal Labor government's failure to support fixed carbon emissions targets at the Bali climate change conference, said allowing the pulp mill to go ahead would be a greenhouse gas disaster. The previous coalition government approved the mill, subject to numerous conditions, after receiving a report from the ... |
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- Christian Science Monitor: Correspondent Mariah Blake in Hamburg, Germany, talked with Hans Joachim Schellnhuber upon his return this weekend from the Bali talks, where he was a member of Germany's negotiating team. Below are excerpts from the interview. Q: Emotions were clearly high in Bali. |
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- Bloomberg: Japan's government omitted a proposed carbon tax from its latest list of measures to curb pollution and will instead intensify appeals for voluntary reductions from homes, utilities and factories. Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda's Cabinet today reviewed alternative strategies to meet the nation's Kyoto Protocol target on carbon emissions, Hiroshi Kamagata, a counsellor in the Cabinet Secretariat, told reporters in Tokyo. Media handouts omitted earlier proposals for a carbon tax on fossil ... |
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- Financial Times: The White House sought to reassure its global partners yesterday that it was committed to the climate change agreement reached in Bali at the weekend, following an early statement that voiced "serious concerns" about the accord. The decision in Bali paved the way for negotiations to start on a new global warming treaty that is to be agreed by 2009. |
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- Globe and Mail: In the end, the much-anticipated "Bali Road Map" was disappointingly vague and unenforceable, weakened by politics and self-interest. Yet beyond the words of its compromised text, the Bali agreement could still herald a new era of tougher action against global warming. |
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- Reuters: Climate talks in Bali, Indonesia, agreed on Saturday to start two years of negotiations to seal a broader pact to fight global warming. As part of the meeting among 188 nations, a range of other pressing issues to aid the developing world were discussed. Following is what has been agreed, or not agreed, at the talks. TWO-YEAR DIALOGUE Negotiators agreed to start two years of talks on a new climate deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, the main deal for fighting climate ... |
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- Bloomberg: Australian pension funds may be among the first in the country to invest in international carbon markets and commit to buying emissions credits from overseas projects, Credit Suisse Group's head of carbon trading said. Pension funds are examining investments in the carbon market to broaden their portfolios, partly driven by a trend away from credit market investments, New York-based Paul Ezekiel said today in an interview in Sydney. Utilities such as AGL Energy Ltd. and Origin Energy ... |
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- AAP: THE Bali climate change meeting was a success because it provided the world with a guide for future negotiations on binding emissions targets, the Federal Government said. "What we have come together and agreed (on) is a road map to help us on our way," Climate Change Minister Penny Wong told ABC radio today. |
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- Reuters: The Chinese government is investigating reports that villagers were persuaded to hunt down giant pandas and trade their pelts, the official Xinhua news agency reported. A spokesman for the State Forestry Administration told Xinhua that local forestry police had detected several cases of such illegal activities around Ya'an City in the southwestern province of Sichuan. "We have sent a working group to supervise the investigations and we will prosecute anyone ... |
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- Reuters: Industrialised countries have a moral responsibility to help Africa mitigate the effects of climate change, Kenya's Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai said on Friday. "For the global South, especially Africa, environmental issues are not a luxury," the environmental activist said in an article in Kenya's Business Daily newspaper on the final day of climate change talks in Bali. |
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- Telegraph: Environmental campaigners fear the Bali climate change plans are "fatally flawed", as the dust settles on last week's international talks. As the finer details of the Bali negotiations emerge, conservationists say the so-called international " |
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- Agence France-Presse: If the most dire climate forecasts come true the tourism industry in Europe's far north, already feeling the effects of global warming, may find itself promoting a Santa in shorts and a camel-drawn sleigh. Each year at the end of autumn, residents, shopkeepers, travel agencies, reindeer herders and even politicians in the Finnish Arctic town of Rovaniemi -- home to Santa Claus' Village, one of the biggest tourist attractions in Finland -- look to the skies in the hopes of a snowy ... |
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- Daily Yomiuri: The conflict of views between the United States and European nations in the latest U.N. climate conference essentially reduced Japan to a peripheral role in the meeting in Bali, Indonesia. If Japan is to bring the Group of Eight summit meeting in Toyakocho, Hokkaido, next year to a successful conclusion, it must try to go beyond attempts just to mediate among participants and play a more active part in resolving the conflict of opinions about how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in ... |
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- Agence France-Presse: Japan on Monday welcomed a deal fixing a 2009 deadline for a new treaty to tackle global warming, rejecting criticism from environmentalists that it had not done enough to help broker an agreement. The Bali accord launches a two-year round of negotiations for the most ambitious treaty ever attempted to tackle greenhouse gas emissions. "The deal is in line with the proposal of Japan," |
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- Australian: AS representatives of the world's peoples wrestled in Bali with the greatest challenge to human co-operation we have ever known, different ideas of what was fair and what wasn't threatened to tear them apart. They still do. Environmental lobbyists keep insisting we can't make progress without goodwill. True enough. |
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- Reuters: More than a million people in the southwestern Chinese region of Guangxi have been hit by drinking water shortages in the worst drought since 1951, the official People's Daily said on Monday. In the last three months, Guangxi, the country's main sugar-growing region, had had less than half the normal amount of rain, the report said, while other parts of the region had seen almost no rain at all. The government has earmarked 2.29 billion yuan ($310. |
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- Guardian: The US backtracked yesterday on the climate change agreement reached after marathon talks in Bali, saying it had "serious concerns" about the new global consensus and that developing countries had to do far more if there was to be any pact in two years' time. The reality check followed the drama and euphoria of the weekend when the US was shamed into joining the rest of the world in working towards a new climate change agreement to come into force after 2012. |
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- Reuters: UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Saturday that visiting Antarctica and the Amazon had brought home to him personally the critical need to tackle climate change. Nearly 200 nations meeting in Bali reached a deal to launch talks on a pact to fight global warming, but only after a reversal by the United States allowed a historic breakthrough. Ban, who has made climate change a priority, went last month to the tip of South America to see melting glaciers and the ... |
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- Ka?dý rok sa na ne te?ia Ferove deti. Aj Ferova ?ena ich víta a má z nich dobrý pocit. |
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- Niektoré pocity sú nevysvetlite?né, ale sú. Dokonca ve?mi intenzívne... |
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(Dec 17 2007 06:00 GMT) - Autor: Mario Benedetti La esperanza tan dulce, tan pulida, tan triste,la promesa tan leve... no me sirve. No me sirve tan mansa la esperanza, la rabia tan sumisa, tan débil, tan humilde, el furor tan prudente... no me sirve. |
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(Dec 17 2007 06:00 GMT) - Pero vengo (Mario Benedetti) Más de una vez me siento expulsadoy con ganas de volver al exilio que me expulsay entonces me parece que ya no pertenezco a ningún sitio,a nadie...¿Será el indicio de que nunca más podré no ser un exiliado?¿Qué aquí o allá, o en cualquier parte,siempre habrá alguien que vigile y piense,éste a qué viene?Y vengo sin embargo,tal vez a compartir cansancio y vértigo,desamparo y querencia.También a recibir mi cuota de rencoresmi reflexiva comisión de amor... |
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- Definiendo el amor Autor : Francisco de Quevedo Es hielo abrasador, es fuego helado.Es herida que duele y no se siente.Es un soñado bien, un mal presenteEs un breve descanso muy cansadoEs un descuido que nos da cuidado,un cobarde con nombre de valiente,un andar, solitario, entre la gente,un amar solamente ser amado.Es una libertad encarceladaque dura hasta el postrero paroxismo. |
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- Trova (mis preferidas)David Filio: Claro queAlejandro filio: DespiertaSilvio Rodriguez: |
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- Paskong Pinoy In Second Life The Filipino Second Life Community will have a Christmas Celebration in-world, Pinoy style! The preparation is being spearheaded by Isadora Fiddlesticks, publisher of HodgePodge Magazine. |
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- Filed under: ?????????????????????????????? Server Virtualization?????Windows Server 2008 RC1??????????????????????????? Server 2008????????? |
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- (TrendHunter.com) The Twike is the world's first pedal-powered human electric hybrid car. The company says this car can get up to speeds of 15-45 mph, with a 5 speed electric motor. The unique aspect about this car is that it can run only with the pedal power provided by your feet, much like the Flinstone mobile. ? |
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