C-Questor sponsorship helps to create a larger canvas for Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation for the Environment

The C-Questor Group (“C-Questor”) today announced that it has agreed to extend its sponsorship of the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation (“the Foundation”) through the Eco-Art Parade, a cultural initiative where themed works of art are auctioned for the benefit of the Foundation. The deal will help Eco-Art Parade to roll out a new series of auction events around the world, increasing the funds available to the Foundation to promote sustainability and support projects and solutions within the environmental sector.

This new commitment extends C-Questor’s links with the Foundation. C-Questor was one of the main sponsors of the first Eco-Art Parade auction event in Monaco on Saturday 10th October 2009. Sponsorship included providing all guests with a certificate giving them 100 Platinum Standard bio-diversified carbon credits in order to neutralise their carbon footprint and render the evening a carbon free event.

C-Questor, a worldwide organisation dedicated to solving the problems of global warming and climate change through the application of leading edge technologies, has developed a range of financial products. These are best exemplified by the integration of carbon credits with environmental benefits and biodiversity support through the launch of their new Platinum Standard carbon credit, developed in partnership with the Carbco Corporation.

The Eco-Art Parade was attended in Monaco by decision makers, influencers and VIPs. While fundraising is a key objective – the Auction raised around 700,000 Euros for the Foundation – C-Questor also views these events as important opportunities to educate business and opinion leaders about climate change. C-Questor intends to continue to sponsor the Eco-Art Parade fund raising initiative as it rolls out to other countries as part of an ambitious programme to support cultural initiatives that help to combat climate change.

The auction was followed by a dinner hosted by Prince Albert II at which a number of Awards were presented to outstanding young scientists for excellence in the field of environmental research. The Awards are designed to provide practical financial support to allow the winners to continue carrying out vital research into climate change and other environmental issues.

Michael Chambers, CEO of The C-Questor Group, commented: “Tackling climate change can only be achieved by educating and engaging business, government and opinion leaders, supporting research and innovation that provides the knowledge and tools for tackling climate change and enabling workable and cost-effective strategies to be implemented at a local level. A cultural initiative like the Eco-Art Parade can play a valuable role in this process. It captures the interest of art lovers and exposes them to the topic of climate change, while simultaneously raising funds for the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation, which recognises and funds, amongst other initiatives, scientists who are at the cutting edge of climate change research in sectors such as Marine and Polar – both of which we have considerable expertise and interest in. We are delighted to be involved with such an august and innovative organisation and look forward to supporting similar events in the future.”

London, 13th October 2009

Prosecutor of International Criminal Court looking into recent events in Guinea

The International Criminal Court (ICC) confirmed today that its prosecutor is looking into last month’s events in Guinea, where at least 150 people were killed when security forces opened fire on an opposition rally.

Fiji Times (the creative satire) offers an optimistic message

Judge Imposes 22-Year Sentence on Cuban Five Political Prisoner AntonioGuerrero

Havana. October 14, 2009

Judge imposes 22-year sentence on Antonio Guerrero

THE United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida imposed a new sentence on Antonio Guerrero, unjustly imprisoned for more that 11 years in Florence, Colorado, a prison dubbed by the Guinness World Records as the most secure prison in the world, with inmates isolated in solitary confinement for the majority of the day. It is labeled by some as the “Alcatraz of the Rockies” and has been called “a living tomb.”

As it is known, Antonio had been initially sentenced by that same court to a life sentence plus 10 years. That sentence was considered excessive, contrary to the legal rules currently in force, and was thrown out by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which decided that the defendant did not gather or transmit any information related to U.S. national security.

The new sentence of 262 months (nearly 22-years) of prison time is the result of international solidarity movements and tenacious efforts by his defense counsel, Leonard Weinglass, and although it is not as absurdly excessive as the previous one, it is also unjust. It is time to intensify the struggle for the immediate freedom of our five compatriots.

This episode is one of many pieces of evidence confirming the absolute injustice of the process faced by these men, imprisoned in the United States only and exclusively for fighting anti-Cuban terrorism promoted by U.S. authorities. The irrational disproportion of the originally imposed sentences was one of the issues revisited by the defense, and in this respect, it was possible to reach a partial, limited and contradictory accomplishment. In 2008 the Court of Appeals in Atlanta ratified the unfair guilty verdicts of the Five, annulled the sentences of Antonio, Ramón and Fernando and remanded them for re-sentencing.

As an expression of the strange way of doing justice in that country, the Court of Appeals recognized the fact that, although Gerardo Hernández Nordelo deserves to be re-sentenced, they decided not to do just that and instead upheld his cruel sentence of two life sentences plus 15 years.

Gerardo, Ramón, Antonio, Fernando and René are innocent and should never have been deprived of freedom. Every day that they remain in prison will be a shameful confirmation of the U.S Administration.’s complicity with terrorism.

Translated by Granma International

Global warming ‘to triple rain over Taiwan’

Global warming will cause the amount of heavy rain dumped on Taiwan to triple over the next 20 years, facing the government with the urgent need to beef up flood defenses, a scientist warned Tuesday.

The projection is based on data showing the incidence of heavy rain has doubled in the past 45 years, coinciding with a global rise in temperatures, said Liu Shaw-chen of Taiwan’s leading research institute Academia Sinica.

The estimate comes two months after Taiwan was lashed by Typhoon Morakot, the worst to hit the island in half a century, leaving more than 600 deaths in its wake.

“The government will need to enhance its land planning and flood prevention measures since we’ll be seeing more and more Typhoon Morakots in the future,” said Liu, who heads the institute’s Research Center for Environmental Changes.

The island’s temperature has also been going up, reflected in figures from the capital city Taipei, where the number of days with “excessive heat” over 36 degree Celsius (97 degrees Fahrenheit) has doubled since 1961, he said.

Morakot struck Taiwan in early August, unleashing a record three meters (10 feet) of rain, triggering widespread flooding and massive landslides.

The island’s government faced a wave of public anger over its handling of the disaster, plunging President Ma Ying-jeou into his worst political crisis since taking office in May 2008.

Source:
Google News, “Global warming ‘to triple rain over Taiwan‘”, accessed October 13, 2009

Resource-Hungry China Heads to Afghanistan

Resource-hungry China heads to Afghanistan

Posted: Wednesday, October 14, 2009 2:01 PM
Filed Under: Kabul, Afghanistan
By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer

LOGAR PROVINCE, Afghanistan – Early on a recent morning we were driving to a shoot when an astonishing sight loomed up ahead of us. NBC News cameraman Steve O’Neill exclaimed, “It’s the Great Wall of China!”

The “wall” snaking before us, easily several miles long, was made of Hesco sandbags and circled a camp for Chinese workers. Though not permitted to enter the site, we could see rows and rows of neat white buildings with blue trim; the temporary structures looked exactly like the migrant workers’ housing at construction sites all across China.

Size apart, it was all somewhat unremarkable, except for the fact that we were in eastern Afghanistan.

“It’s the Great Wall of China,” said NBC cameraman Steve O’Neill when we saw the Hesco sandbags surrounding the Chinese workers camp at the Aynak copper mine in Afghanistan.

The Chinese workers – several hundred technicians – are part of a multibillion-dollar Chinese investment in Afghanistan’s largest-ever infrastructure project, the Aynak copper mine.

Discovered in 1974 but virtually dormant since the start of the Soviet War in 1979, the Aynak mine is believed to contain the world’s second-largest untapped copper deposits and could propel Afghanistan into the ranks of the world’s top 15 copper producers.

After wooing Afghan officials from as early as 2001, a Chinese mainland joint venture finally won the rights in 2007 to develop the site over 30 years. So far, it has sunk more than $4 billion into the project.

The joint venture – between majority partner China Metallurgical Group Corp. and Jiangxi Copper Corp. – expects production to begin by the end of 2011 with an initial annual output of 180,000 tons of copper that will eventually grow to 320,000 tons. China will have rights to half that output, which it needs to fuel its own massive economic growth.

But the mine is just outside Kabul, in Logar Province, where there has been heightened insurgent activity. Some 1,500 Afghan police are stationed on site with a new police barracks in the works. And although they say they are not attached to the project, the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division occasionally sends units to patrol the area. China – of course, not being a member of NATO – has no troops on the ground in Afghanistan.

It’s this set-up that’s feeding a percolating debate about China’s role in Afghanistan.

America fights, China profits?

In making the case for converging U.S. and Chinese interests in 3Afghanistan, Robert Kaplan wrote last week in a New York Times opinion piece that, “The problem is that while America is sacrificing its blood and treasure, the Chinese will reap the benefits. The whole direction of America’s military and diplomatic effort is toward an exit strategy, whereas the Chinese hope to stay and profit.”

In the op-ed, titled “Beijing’s Afghan Gamble,” Kaplan also noted, “China will find a way to benefit no matter what the United States does in Afghanistan. But it probably benefits more if we stay and add troops to the fight.”

No doubt the discussion will boil over after James Yeager, an American geologist, and former congressman Don Ritter, who has an advanced degree in metallurgical engineering and studied in Moscow, hold a press briefing in Washington on Thursday. The event is provocatively titled, “Report on the Aynak Copper Tender in Afghanistan: How China Won and the West Lost.”

Ritter, now president of the Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce, called the Aynak bidding process flawed and colored by the fact the Bush administration “didn’t have the capacity or the competency to understand the importance of [Aynak].” Speaking from his home in the Washington area, he said: “We’re giving tens of billions of dollars in assistance to Afghanistan, and we’re getting no credit.”

Ritter said the report to be presented Thursday was not done under the Chamber’s auspices.

NBC News asked the U.S. Embassy in Kabul for comment, but the mission was unable to provide anyone for us to interview in time for this article.

Ritter says the bottom line is: “We need a policy on developing mines and minerals and oil and gas in Afghanistan. Otherwise, it will be dominated by Chinese, who are wired to the Iranians through their oil investments, and the Pakistanis, because of the China-India competition.”

It all sounds like some postmodernist version of the Great Game, with the players this time being the U.S., China and India instead of Britain, Russia and France.

But an Afghan businessman who runs a construction outfit subcontracting with the joint venture, MCC-JCL Aynak Minerals Co. (also known as MCC), sees the situation differently.

‘Poverty is the problem’

“This project will benefit Afghanistan and bring jobs,” said Nurzaman Stanikzai, a 44-year-old native of Logar Province. His company has been helping build some of the roads at the copper mine as well as the dormitories for Chinese workers. “The American troops should start projects like this copper mine.”

In addition to setting up the copper production infrastructure, which includes a smelter, power generation station, coal mine and groundwater system, the Chinese joint venture is also building roads, Afghanistan’s first national railway, new homes for villagers who will be resettled from the immediate area of the mine, hospitals and schools.

Government officials expect the copper mine to earn hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and royalties as well as provide jobs – direct and indirect – for nearly 40,000 people.

And in contrast to many Chinese investments on the African continent, where Chinese labor is typically brought in, most of the jobs from the Aynak copper mine project are designed to go to the Afghan people.

Under the contract terms, initially some of the workers, including the mine technicians, will be Chinese, but over time training will be provided to the Afghan workers so they can take over more skilled jobs.

“The instability in our country today is due to joblessness. Poverty is the problem,” said Stanikzai as he warmed to his theme one afternoon in the spartan comfort of his home in central Kabul.

“President Obama should not make a decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. If the U.S. wants to help, it needs to provide more jobs or invite foreign investment into our country.”

The trick, of course, is how to court foreign investors while the country is still in the midst of a war.

‘They benefit … but we do, too’

When we visited the Aynak copper mine to shoot a story about landmine detection, everywhere we looked security was at the forefront.

We drove through two checkpoints just to get onto the main road leading to the copper mine. Afghan police manned tents on nearby hills. A green chain-link fence provided the outer limit to the site. And of course there were those huge Hesco sandbags that ring the police camp and the Chinese workers camp.

It turns out those buildings did come from China. Stanikzai imported most of the equipment and materials for constructing the dorms. “This was at the request of the MCC,” he said, adding that he would have preferred to contract everything locally because it would have cost less.

But this was Stanikzai’s only hint of criticism of Chinese management. Otherwise, he admires China for coming into Afghanistan and rejects charges that it’s merely satisfying its voracious appetite for natural resources by exploiting Aynak.

“The Chinese are not doing this illegally,” he said. “They have a contract with the Afghan government. They benefit, of course, but we do, too. We don’t have the skills or the companies or the expertise to develop a project like this.”

Two of China’s bigger telecom equipment manufacturers, Huawei and ZTE, have helped develop cell phone technologies and Internet expansion equipment in Kabul and several other Afghan provinces. In previous years, the Chinese have also been involved in the Parwan irrigation project and rebuilding public hospitals in Kabul and Kandahar.

China is certainly well-positioned to help develop Afghanistan’s infrastructure. In addition to having the experience developing their own vast country, the Chinese have also aggressively pursued opportunities across the African continent, from oil production in Angola and the Sudan, to copper mining in Zambia, forestry in Mozambique, and building roads and railways in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Security risks

While the Chinese may be benefiting from projects such as Aynak, they also face grave risks. Eleven Chinese construction workers were killed in their sleep by insurgents in Kunduz in 2004. At the time it was the deadliest attack of foreigners in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. The workers were building a road from the Tajik border to Kabul.

“Where Chinese companies seem to be building public infrastructure, they’re seen as proxies for the Afghan government so they are easy targets,” said Ben Simpfendorfer, author of “Silk Road Economy: How a Rising Arab World is Turning Away from the West and Rediscovering China.” As a result, “Chinese companies are consistently raising security issues,” he said.

How they navigate unsafe waters is also still a work in progress. Though the Chinese are known for investing in troubled or violent countries, particularly in Africa, they are relatively new to Afghanistan.

“[The Chinese government] only wants to negotiate with governments,” Simpfendorfer said. “It doesn’t talk to opposition groups or civic groups, so until recently that was very difficult in a place like Afghanistan. That meant there is not a history of engagement there.”

While Stanikzai admits insurgents may want to target Aynak, he thinks security does not pose as great a threat as some think. “If you don’t have the support of the local villagers and the local community, you can’t get security,” he said. “But everyone supports this copper mine project.”

Himalayan sherpas bugged by the sight of house flies at 5,000m

Earlier this year Dawa Steven Sherpa was resting at Everest base camp when he and his companions heard something buzzing. “What the heck is that?” asked the young Nepali climber. They searched and found a big black house fly, something unimaginable just a few years ago when no insect could have survived at 5,360 meters.

“It’s happened twice this year - the Himalayas are warming up and changing fast,” says Dawa, who only took up climbing seriously in 2006, but in a few years has climbed Everest twice as well as two 8,000m peaks in Tibet.

“What I do is climb. It’s a family business. And what we see is the Himalayan glaciers melting. It’s not a seasonal thing any more. It’s rapid. It’s so apparent.

“Look at the walls and slopes of the Khumbu glacier [which flows 1.5 miles down from an icefall on the southern flanks of Everest]. “You can see a clear line where the black rock becomes white. That’s where it’s been exposed to the sun. That means meters of thick ice have melted in just a few decades,” he says. (Khumba glacier right)

Dawa was born in Khumjung, a village just 12 miles from Everest which lies at 3,500m above sea level. His father used to climb with British mountaineer Chris Bonnington, and his grandfather, a yak trader who toured the world with Everest’s first summiteer, Sir Edmund Hillary.

All three generations of Dawa’s family testify to major climate change taking place today. “Grandfather used to take yaks to a place called Gokio which was on the other side of the Ngozumba glacier (left), Nepal’s longest. He could walk them over the ice but now it’s just not there – it’s a stony wasteland. The whole thing has melted,” he says.

He lists some of the physical changes he has seen and their effects on local communities. “The permanent ice above our village now melts at about 5,500m, but it used to be 3,750 metres. Our village is seeing prolonged droughts. They used to last a few months. Now we can go seven months without rain. We have less water now and erratic weather patterns.

“The young girls must now walk two hours to fetch water. Tourism, too, is being hit because villages like Khumjung, which used to have a lot of water for trekkers now don’t have it. The villagers lose their business.

“All the Himalayan glaciers are melting, an average of 10-20m a year,” he says.

One of the most obvious changes, he adds, is the growth of what are known as glacial lake outburst floods (glofs). (right)

“A glof happens when a glacial lake is created by a melting glacier and it then bursts. Imja lake (below left) is the most dramatic example of a potential one. It is growing 74m a year. When it bursts its banks, we will have a mountain tsunami. Billions of gallons of water will be released and it could wipe out about 70% of the trekking trail to Everest base camp. Not only will that destroy our homes and potentially kill people, but it will wipe out the jewel in the crown of Nepal’s tourism industry,” he says.

Last year villagers got an early warning of what they might expect. A very small lake at the edge of the Khumbu glacier burst and it washed away four bridges on a track up to Everest base camp.

Dawa, now 25, has a Belgian mother, a degree in business management from Heriot-Watt university in Scotland and he speaks five languages. He is a WWF ambassador on climate change and runs major expeditions into the Himalayas, climbing with his friend Apa Sherpa, who has climbed Everest 19 times - the world record. .

Everest itself is changing, he says. “Apa says there was running water on the surface of the South col [a saddle at 7,920m between Everest and Lhotse mountain] this year,” says Dawa. “Also the summit is getting smaller. You used to be able to get 50 people on the ridge to it. Now there’s room for 18 people at most. The cornice is breaking off. A big crevasse is opening. It never used to exist. It seems nothing is safe anymore.”

Nothing compares with the beauty of standing on the summit of Everest and seeing far over the mountains, he says. But finding a fly buzzing thousands of meters up is horrifying

Source:
The Guardian, “Himalayan sherpas bugged by the sight of house flies at 5,000m“, accessed October 13, 2009

Getting U.S. Troops Into Afghanistan Poses New Challenge

Getting U.S. Troops into Afghanistan Poses New Challenge

By MARK THOMPSON, WASHINGTON POST
Washington Wed Oct 14, 10:05 am ET

President Obama will again huddle with his national-security team on Wednesday to decide how many more troops - if any - to send to Afghanistan. But making the decision will be the easy part, the real challenge will be getting those extra boots onto the ground. If he ends up embracing Army General Stanley McChrystal’s call for 40,000 more soldiers, deploying them in Afghanistan will take up to a year.

The first bottleneck between the Oval Office and Afghanistan is the country’s lack of sea ports (the nearest harbor is some 400 miles away) and a dearth of airports. Beyond geography, the flow of troops is limited by the U.S. military’s requirements for training and dwell time - R&R at home, between deployments. And then, perhaps most critically, there is the enemy. The Taliban’s lengthening shadow across Afghanistan is making it increasingly difficult to supply the 65,000 troops there now or to send in reinforcements.

“We’re resupplying between 30% and 40% of our forward operating bases by air because we just can’t get to them on the ground,” says a senior Army logistician, speaking on condition of anonymity, referring to the roughly 180 U.S. outposts around the country. That’s because the Taliban control much of the “ring road,” a circular route that links Afghanistan’s few major cities.

“Trucking contractors trying to supply some of them aren’t making it,” he adds. “The Taliban are just wiping them out.” Such constraints will limit the flow of troops to Afghanistan to about one brigade - some 4,000 troops - a month.

Most U.S. troops arrive in Afghanistan via air, largely through the Manas air base outside Biskek, Kyrgyzstan. But little of their gear gets there the same way. Instead, it’s crammed aboard ships, departing primarily from U.S. ports for the 45-day voyage to Karachi, Pakistan. Then there’s at least two weeks of ground travel into Afghanistan.

The challenge, says one Marine officer preparing to head to Afghanistan if Obama gives the order, is to marry up his unit’s 5,000 troops with their gear, including 2,000 vehicles, somewhere in the middle of Nowhere-istan at the same time. “There’s a lot of physics you can’t overcome when it goes by sea,” he says. All his gear, except for vehicles carrying top-secret communications gear, will get there by ship. “You don’t want those,” he notes, “going by container ship through Karachi.” (See pictures of Afghanistan’s dangerous Korengal Valley.)

Defense Secretary Robert Gates calls Afghanistan’s infrastructure “primitive,” while the officer who coordinated shipping war material to Saudi Arabia for the first Gulf War says its mountains make things worse. “The terrain in Afghanistan is so much tougher than in either Iraq or Saudi,” says William (Gus) Pagonis, a retired Army lieutenant general. “You could film a biblical movie in Afghanistan without props.”

The U.S. has been improving Afghanistan’s meager road network to enable farmers to ship perishable crops - other than opium paste - to market, and to deter IEDs, which are easier to detect in fresh pavement. The current U.S. ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, emphasized the importance of roads during his service in Afghanistan as a U.S. Army general. “Where the roads end,” he’d say, “the Taliban begin.”

Logistical woes persist even once U.S. troops are at their assigned outposts. Private truck drivers “strike often, delay delivery of fuel or arrive at destinations with fuel missing,” the Government Accountability Office reports. In June 2008, 44 trucks and 220,000
gallons of fuel were lost to enemy attacks or plunder.

Beyond the convoy attacks, the U.S. has used Russian aircraft to fly armored vehicles into the country, and is seeking private contractors to defend U.S. bases and convoys across the entire country.

The Pentagon’s pending solicitation says interested companies must be capable of preventing “any intrusion by unauthorized personnel, theft, destruction of, or damage to property within the secured boundaries, and the facilities themselves.” That’s a tall order that even the U.S. military hasn’t been able to fill.

The Pentagon’s reliance on an army of logistical and other support forces was made clear Tuesday, when the Washington Post reported that the 21,000 combat troops ordered to Afghanistan by Obama would be accompanied by an additional 13,000 so-called “enablers.”

While that doesn’t change the current authorized U.S. force level of 68,000, it did reveal, according to the White House, that not all of the support troops ordered to Afghanistan by President Bush had arrived by the time he left office. Such forces can literally be lifesavers.

Before this year, there were so few rescue helicopters in Afghanistan that it averaged two hours to get wounded troops to medical care - double the desired “golden hour.” “We had not had a double amputee survive those wounds in Afghanistan until this kind of additional air power came along,” Gates noted recently. “Now they are being saved.”

Jittery over repeated attacks on its supply convoys traveling through Pakistan, the Pentagon wants to shift much of its resupply effort to its new Northern Distribution Network, which runs through several central Asian states, including Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. “They’re a pretty dodgy bunch of allies,” said Paul Quinn-Judge, Central Asia director of the nonprofit International Crisis Group, from the Manas air base in Kyrgyzstan.

More significantly, he fears that such stepped-up U.S. shipping will lead to attacks on convoys by terrorist groups including the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and the Islamic Jihad Union. “The problem with the Northern Distribution Network is obvious,” he says. “It turns Central Asia into a part of the theater of war.”