Read the rest...Some 99% of South Sudanese voted to secede from the north, according to the first complete results of the region's independence referendum.
A total of 99.57 percent of those polled voted for independence, according to the referendum commission. Early counting had put the outcome of the ballot beyond doubt, indicating Southern Sudan had secured a mandate to become the world's newest nation.
The poll was agreed as part of a 2005 peace deal to end two decades of war.
Final results from the 9-15 January vote, which Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has said he will accept, are expected early next month.
If the result is confirmed, the new country is set to formally declare its independence on 9 July.
‘I passionately disagree. It’s these values that create the climate for innovation. Look at where the big ideas come from – the Facebooks and the Spotifys – and the vast majority are from open societies,’ the PM told businessmen, economists and world leaders gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.Black's blog entry summarises and links conveniently to five or six separate studies, each worrying by themselves, but which together add up to no small concern for the stability of the northern polar zone. Why not spend some time this weekend exploring a selection of the links?If the Arctic really is the "canary in the coal mine" for climate change impacts, as it's often been labelled, then it's a canary about which we know a little more following a spate of scientific papers coming out over the last week or so.
And looking at what they say, as well as readings from instruments monitoring the canary's heath, the signs of sickness appear to be stronger and more certain than before.
There are several distinct symptoms that need monitoring here: sea-ice area and volume, air temperature and wind, water temperature and currents, and the state of the Greenland icecap.
Along with all this is the constant effort to interpret new data and see whether long-term beliefs about how Arctic weather works still hold true, or whether - as with the El Nino Southern Oscillation, for example - the sustained rise in global temperatures may change mechanisms people thought they understood.
Western capitalism survives, but limping, wounded, carrying a heavy load of debt, inequality, demography, neglected infrastructure, social discontent and unrealistic expectations. Meanwhile, other variants of capitalism – Chinese, Indian, Russian, Brazilian – are surging ahead, exploiting the advantages of backwardness, and their economic dynamism is rapidly being translated into political power. The result? Not a unipolar world, converging on a single model of liberal democratic capitalism, but a no-polar world, diverging towards many different national versions of often illiberal capitalism. Not a new world order, but a new world disorder. An unstable kaleidoscope world – fractured, overheated, germinating future conflicts.The BBC equally has excellent coverage of Davos, with a dedicated page:
Make an effort to read the rest of the article.Is the U.S. drone war in Pakistan putting the squeeze on al-Qaida’s safe havens? It’s not a question that lends itself to easy answers, given the difficulties of reporting from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas where al-Qaida’s top leaders are believed to be. But a new statistical analysis by researchers at Harvard finds that the deadly robots overhead are reaping modest “counterterrorism dividends” — something that al-Qaida itself is complaining about.
Ustadh Ahmad Farooq, a leading al-Qaida propagandist in Pakistan, says in a new audio message that the terrorist network is “losing people” and “facing shortages of resources” in the area, thanks in large part to the escalated U.S. drone campaign. And he indicates the safe havens aren’t as safe as they once were.
“There were many areas where we once had freedom, but now they have been lost,” Farooq laments in a January 23 audio message obtained by the terror-trackers at the SITE Intelligence Group. “Our land is shrinking and drones are flying in the sky.”
Another suicide bomb reflects the Kremlin’s difficulties with the north Caucasus
A useful article as regards the motivations and methods of terrorism in the Russian Federation. A prime current example which you should read!Half past four in the afternoon is peak time for international arrivals at Domodedovo, Moscow’s busiest and most efficient airport, favoured by foreign airlines. Several European flights land then. As passengers leave the baggage area, they are greeted by taxi touts. On January 24th they were met by a suicide bomb that killed 35 people and injured more than 100. It was designed to cause maximum damage and to kill foreigners and Russians alike.
This was the deadliest attack on any international airport. Nobody has claimed responsibility, but the assumption is that it is the work of Islamist fundamentalists, related to Russia’s troubled north Caucasus—though Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s president, and Vladimir Putin, its prime minister were careful not to say so publicly.
The details remain hazy, but a male suicide bomber seems to have entered the airport building from the car park, avoiding metal detectors on his way to the arrivals area. A source close to the investigation says CCTV picked up the bomber entering the building just over an hour before the explosion. Intriguingly, the footage suggests he did not look north Caucasian.
The attack was condemned around the world yet greeted with an air of resignation in Moscow, partly because suicide bombings have become tragically common. Last March two female suicide bombers blew themselves up on the Moscow metro, killing 40 people.
The UN's World Meteorological Organisation said Thursday that 2010 was the warmest year on record, confirming a "significant" long-term trend of global warming. The trend also helped to melt Arctic sea ice cover to a record low for December last month, the WMO said in a statement.It could be worth reading the original press release from the World Meteorological Organisation as well!
Last year "ranked as the warmest year on record, together with 2005 and 1998," the WMO added, confirming preliminary findings released at the global climate conference early December that were based on a 10-month period.
"The 2010 data confirm the Earth's significant long-term warming trend," WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said. "The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998."
In 2010, the global average temperature was 0.53 degrees Celsius (0.95 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1961 to 1990 mean that is used as a yardstick for climate measurements, according to the WMO. That exceeded 2005 levels by 0.01 C (0.02 F) and was 0.02 C (0.05 F) above the 1998 mark, but within a margin of error that made the difference between the three years statistically insignificant, according to the WMO.
"Arctic sea-ice cover in December 2010 was the lowest on record" for the month, the WMO said.
Sea ice around the northern polar region shrank to an average monthly extent of 12 million square kilometres, 1.35 million square kilometres below the 1979 to 2000 December average, according to the UN weather agency.
Over past decade, global temperatures have been the highest-ever recorded for a 10-year period since the beginning of instrument-based climate records. Last month, even before the year was over, Jarraud confirmed that 2001 to 2010 set a new record as the warmest decade ever.
The WMO says that the temperature observations on their own do not pin the cause on man-made greenhouse gases, although it believes this is confirmed separately by other research into carbon emissions in the atmosphere.
The world's deadliest pollution does not come from factories billowing smoke, industries tainting water supplies or chemicals seeping into farm land. It comes from within people's own homes. Smoke from domestic fires kills nearly two million people each year and sickens millions more, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).Read the whole article—it conveniently provides an example that crosses a number of our sub-topics (perfect synopticity!—look at the labels below that I have applied to it...)
A new UN project has now been set up to try to reduce this appalling toll. It aims, over the next nine years, to put 100 million clean cooking stoves into homes in the developing world.
The WHO ranks the problem as one of the worst health risks facing the poor. In low-income countries, such as those in Africa and Asia, indoor smoke from cooking has become the sixth biggest killer. Globally, it kills more people than malaria, and nearly as many as Aids – and far more insidiously than either.
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| A Bhutan family gathers for a meal around their improperly ventilated home fire, fueled by yak dung and wood. |
HISTORY—NOT TO MENTION DIFFERING LANGUAGES, CULTURES, AND VALUES—CAN MAKE PEACE DIFFICULT TO ACHIEVE. SCIENCE IS A COMMON GROUND UPON WHICH NATIONS CAN COLLABORATE TO IMPROVE OUR WORLD.Whilst the article does not deny the scientific and technological advances promoted by war, author Daniel Zajfman is keen to remember scientific cooperation after WWII between Germany and Israel that subsequently helped to forge the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1965. If these two actors can forge a new relationship, he suggests, we all can—and cites several modern examples to back his case. Worth a read.
One has to acknowledge that journalists love puns, even bending stories, to fit a headline. So I’m a bit cautious about chucking the phrase “Great Stall of China” into public discourse, but it seems appropriate, in the circumstances.
Sino-sceptics, like me, have long worried wondered whether the hype about China taking over the world was really that well based, given all the distortions in her economy. It’s quite reminiscent of the alarmist, overblown stuff being written about Japan in the mid 1980s, before she succumbed to a 20 year slump. The latest Chinese data support that sort of scepticism.
Specifcially, if you think Britain has a problem with inflation take a little look at China where shop-price inflation has just eased back but will accelerate again soon to 6% or more, and, more worrying still “asset price inflation” – house prices really and shares to an extent – have been in a bubble for many months now. It is only matter of time before the Chinese real estate bubble bursts, and loud popping noise form the east seems more likely than not in 2011. That is a grim prospect.
The consequences are unknowable but might include; a mass sell off of dollar assets, causing chaos sin currency markets as the Chinese repatriate their assets; alternatively a renewed effort to return to export lead growth which would mean flooding markets with more Chinese Yuan, equally destabilising and another ratchet up in the US-China currency war; big losses for Chinese banks, and thus the state that owns them, who lent into the real estate boom; losses for western investors in emerging market funds and companies directly involved in the Chinese economy; general collapse in global investor confidence and “risk appetite” ; slower exports form the west to China, damaging our recovery.
The point is that we can see this crisis coming; we can’t do anything to stop it, but what precautions are the UK authorities taking for the inevitable Great Stall of China?
Come this fall, there will be a new and extremely powerful supercomputer in Afghanistan. But it won’t be in Dave Petraeus’ headquarters in Kabul or at some three-letter agency’s operations center in Kandahar. It’ll be floating 20,000 feet above the warzone, aboard a giant spy blimp that watches and listens to everything for miles around.
Iran has hanged almost 50 people during the past three weeks, according to human rights groups.
The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran (ICHRI) said 47 prisoners, or an average of about one person every eight hours, have been put to death since the beginning of the new year. Most of the executions are believed to be related to drug-trafficking crimes, although at least two were of political activists.
The news came as it emerged today that Iranian officials had apparently suspended the sentence of hanging for Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, a 43-year-old woman whose sentence of death by stoning for adultery sparked an international outcry....
.... According to the ICHRI, Iran executes more people per capita than any other country, and in absolute numbers is second only to China. Iran executed at least 179 people in 2010 and 388 in 2009.Read the whole article.
The two known political activists hanged recently were Ali Saremi, accused of waging war on God, and Hossein Khezri, a Kurdish prisoner accused of belonging to the Pejak, an armed Kurdish opposition group.
Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the ICHRI, said: "There are many questions about proper legal proceedings, charges against executed people, and even their identities. There are serious concerns about the abuse of the judiciary by intelligence and security forces to push their agenda through such widespread executions."
Worth a read: proof positive that the environmental movement is truly global and no longer the domain of the 'lunatic Left'...
Later this year – on 31 October, to be precise – a boy will be born in a rural village in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. His parents will not know it, but his birth will prove to be a considerable landmark for our species as his arrival will mark the moment when the human population reaches 7 billion.This ominous event outlined, Hickman proceeds to outline the various shades of opinion surrounding it, ranging from the pessimistic—Ehrlich, The Population Bomb and James Lovelock, proponent of the Gaia Theory—to the optimistic, as represented by delegates to the launch of Future Agenda (authoured by Brit Dr Tim Jones) in Istanbul. Carl Haub is offered the final voice in Hickman's survey... His analysis is mixed, but probably more realistic.
"American critics of the United Nations often zero in on its lack of serious military capacity, citing peacekeeping failures in Bosnia and more recently in central and west Africa as examples of ineffective do-goodery gone wrong. Imagine their surprise, then, to learn that the UN was born amid nude scenes in a White House bathroom and that its primary purpose was as a war-fighting machine."As ever, worth a read...
BBC News Online, courtesy of its environment editor Richard Black, has published a survey of current scientific thought on the topic of global warming:
China has gained a sliver of ground in its ancient battle against the desert sands, the government announced today, though it warned another 300 years may be needed to solve "the most serious ecological problem facing the country".Read the other half of the article as well...
A survey showed more than a quarter of China's land remained either degraded or lost to sand and gravel due to a combination of a naturally dry climate, centuries of over-cultivation and decades of excessive demand on water and soil from the world's biggest population and fastest growing economy.
Unveiling the results, state forestry officials said desertification had been stabilised, but recovery efforts would have to be stepped up. Despite the world's biggest tree-planting campaign, the relocation of millions of "eco-migrants" and restrictions on herding and farming, the report noted the "desertification trend has not fundamentally reversed".
There were small signs of improvement. In the five years to 2010, the authors estimated the area of desert had shrunk by an annual average of 1,717 square kilometres. This was 40% better than the results from 2000-05, the first in China's history to ever show a gain.
But 1.7m hectares - more than six times the area of the UK - is still covered in sand dunes or gobi gravel desert. An even wider swathe of land is plagued by wind and water erosion or salination. The report said desertification continued to pose a "serious hidden danger" to China's security and its capacity for economic development.
Sudan - Africa's biggest country - seems to be on the verge of splitting in two. Southerners will vote on Sunday whether or not to leave the north. These maps show the extent to which Sudan is already two nations - a richer, Arabic-speaking, Muslim north and a poorer south devastated by years of conflict and neglect.The internet provides any number of convenient resources for this important event. Wikipedia, of course, represents a convenient starting point:
