The United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) today called on Iran to immediately suspend the construction of a recently-disclosed uranium enrichment facility, and cooperate more fully to resolve all outstanding issues related to its nuclear programme.

The momentum for a deal at next month's United Nations climate change summit is strong and growing, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today, urging world leaders to make the extra push to achieve a firm foundation for a legally binding treaty as early as possible in 2010.

Today’s stories on newscientist.com, at a glance, including: the first basic blueprint for bacteria, the high-carbon future, and how the hammerhead got its hammer

The problem of food insecurity is growing inside the United States. In Seattle, food banks are using high-tech methods to track need and distribution. Despite claims of an economic recovery, working people are still suffering immensely.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos

Food banks go high-tech to feed the hungry

By GEORGE TIBBITS, Associated Press Writer

SEATTLE – Food banks across the country are undergoing a high-tech revolution, adopting sophisticated databases, bar coding, GPS tracking, automated warehouses and other technologies used in the food industry that increasingly supplies their goods.

It’s a long way from handing out macaroni and canned soup from a church basement.

While more people can be fed through these innovations, food bank directors say it’s also a sad acknowledgment that hunger has become a huge and seemingly unending problem.

“What we tell people a lot is that we are a food distribution business wrapped in an altruistic skin,” says Jan Pruitt, president and CEO of the North Texas Food Bank in Dallas.

Her food bank, along with Food Lifeline in Seattle and the Food Bank of Central New York in East Syracuse, are testing a $60 million effort by Feeding America, an umbrella organization for about 200 U.S. food banks, to create a state-of-the-art national computer network that will greatly automate services.

The Athena Project, which started rolling out this summer, will let food banks upgrade and standardize accounting, inventory and donor software, take full advantage of the Internet, and manage pickups and deliveries much the same way FedEx or UPS track packages. Chicago-based Feeding America is installing the systems at no charge and separately from its operating budget, thanks in part to financial and in-kind donations, says Kevin Lutz, vice president for technology.

For local pantries and kitchens — and the people at their doors — it should mean more food and the kind they actually like and need, Pruitt and others say. Donors, from agribusinesses to the 10-year-old collecting cans at a birthday party, can be assured that less is being spent on overhead and more on helping the hungry.

“We are going to gain so much efficiency,” says Linda Nageotte, Food Lifeline’s president and CEO. “We’re going to be able to provide so much better accountability, and this also really increases our credibility.”

Lutz says that when the project is completed in five years, it could save food banks up to four times its $60 million cost — money that could go toward food and other services.

Since the first food bank, St. Mary’s in Phoenix, opened in 1967, many in the movement hoped they would soon work themselves out of business, Pruitt said. Instead, most agencies have become mainstays of their communities, supplying tons of food to pantries, soup kitchens and other local programs.

“In 1982, when this food bank opened, their first year of distribution was 400,000 pounds,” Pruitt said, of her Dallas-based organization. “We now do that in one day.”

The recession has only made things worse. Pruitt estimates food demand in her area has grown by a third in the past year. Nationally, Feeding America says the 63,000 local agencies served by its food banks aid more than 25 million people annually.

Without the new technology, “We just simply couldn’t do what we do,” says Carol Schneider, spokeswoman for the Food Bank For New York City.

In 2002, the food bank, which handles about 60 million pounds of food each year, replaced its paper system with a bar code system and wireless network at its 90,000 square-foot warehouse in the Bronx.

Food banks are trying to provide more fresh meat and produce, much of it gathered unsold from supermarkets. Pruitt says that means her 17 trucks have to quickly reach 126 individual stores in addition to distribution centers and scores of food drives each week — almost impossible without computer scheduling.

Besides New York, some larger food banks, including St. Mary’s and, not surprisingly, Silicon Valley’s Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, have already embraced technology. The problem, Lutz says, has been making it widespread, standardized and interconnected.

For Nageotte, it can’t come soon enough. In September, Food Lifeline received all new computers and enterprise management software — a huge change, she said, from years of making do.

“We had a cobbled-together system — some new computers, some old, some worked well, some were barely limping,” she said. Records were in five separate databases “and none of them talk to one another.”

Athena, she and others say, opens a world of possibilities:

• GPS tracking and instant communication to send trucks on the most efficient routes. Lutz says this alone can cut transportation costs by 40 percent. Food Lifeline is equipping drivers with smart phones that eventually could scan in donations as they are picked up.

• Inventory management systems to track every food item, from truckloads of potatoes to individually donated cans. This not only saves time and reduces waste, but is a safeguard for product recalls.

• Generating lists of food, money and volunteer hours for donors, handy at tax time.

• Common software and backup computer servers, allowing agencies to trade or divert food, share donor information or step in if a food bank is overwhelmed by a disaster.

Such innovations aid a strategy that “needs to be twofold,” she says. “It needs to be about feeding the people who are standing in line better and it needs to be about making the line shorter.”

The 1996 claim that a meteorite contains microbe fossils from Mars has been boosted by the rejection of a non-biological explanation for the minerals

An independent United Nations human rights expert today condemned the series of stonings that have been taking place in Somalia, and called for an urgent end to such “cruel, inhuman and degrading” practices.

The Commission has just published the new list of EU Commissioners and their responsibilities for the next five years.

It looks like the paper obtained by Jean Quatremer which we reported on yesterday got it quite wrong.

Here’s our initial reaction:

1) It looks as though France’s Michel Barnier gets the financial services portfolio as well as internal market after all. Right up to today (Times) reports said that Barroso would remove responsibility from the internal market portfolio and either make a whole new Financial Services post, or put it in with the Competition or Economic & Monetary Affairs briefs. Clearly this is not now going to happen and controversially, the protectionist Europhile Michel Barnier will gain control over financial services regulation. This is a major blow to the UK, in particular the City, which is currently fighting against misguided protectionist proposals for new EU rules over financial services, such as the proposed AIFM Directive (on alternative investment funds). British diplomats have been lobbying behind the scenes to stop this from happening – but they have obviously failed.

2) Also very interesting that they now have a brand new “Home Affairs” portfolio – previously this job was called Freedom, Security & Justice. With all the new powers given to the EU in this area by the Lisbon Treaty, this signals a clear intention to basically create an EU Home Office.

3) Interesting that they’ve got rid of the EU Commissioner for Communications post – it looks like DG Communication will still exist, but there will no longer be a Commissioner dedicated purely to that. Instead it comes under Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth. That’s a bit embarrassing for the outgoing Communications Commissioner Margot Wallstrom who has spent the last five years trying to sell the EU to people with this post – and failing. However, no doubt the EU propaganda machine will continue under these other portfolios.

By swapping our influential trade portfolio for External Affairs (Cathy Ashton), the UK’s influence in the EU has arguably taken a step backwards. We’ve missed out on all the important economic portfolios, and handed responsibility for the internal market and financial services to a French protectionist – which is the worst case scenario.

This is a bad time for a major nuclear crisis, as Americans are busy with Thanksgiving weekend.

By JEFFREY BALL and SHAI OSTER
The world’s top two greenhouse-gas-producing countries for the first time offered specific targets for controlling their emissions, but their broad promises ahead of a United Nations climate summit merely set the terms for a high-stakes struggle over money and future economic growth.
China kicked off the latest round of global climate poker Thursday when it announced the country would aim to cut its “carbon intensity” — or the amount of greenhouse gas it emits per unit of gross domestic product — by 40% to 45% below 2005 levels by 2020. The plan is fundamentally different from those offered by the U.S. and the European Union in that it doesn’t pledge to reduce emissions, but rather to slow the rate at which emissions grow.
The move came a day after President Barack Obama announced he would travel to the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen on Dec. 9 to deliver a pledge that the U.S. will cut greenhouse-gas emissions 17% from 2005 levels by 2020 and 83% by 2050.
Left unanswered were a host of questions, most notably how both nations will achieve their cuts at a time when industries across the world are reeling from the recession and in no mood to sacrifice further economic growth in the name of the environment.
The proposals by the U.S. and China — which together account for 40% of the world’s total emissions — don’t address one of the most contentious issues in the climate-change debate: Which countries and industries in the West will pay, and how much they’ll pay, to help finance a clean-energy revolution in the developing world, home to many of their toughest competitors.
Journal Community
Vote: Do you think the Cophenhagen climate change summit will produce meaningful accomplishments?
China and other developing countries say they want the U.S. and other industrialized nations to pay 1% of their yearly gross domestic products to help the developing world finance emissions reductions.
China notes that the U.S. and Europe developed in an era without constraints on greenhouse-gas emissions, which are produced when fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas are burned. Per capita incomes in China are less than a tenth of those in the U.S., despite the dramatic surge in wealth in the country’s coastal cities.
If the rest of the world wants China to shift its economy toward a cleaner path, China says, the rest of the world is going to have to help China pay for that transformation. India and other developing countries make a similar argument.
U.S. officials have said they expect to offer some financial assistance to developing countries, but have not specified how much. U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern has said the request for 1% of GDP, which would translate to more than $140 billion for the U.S. alone, is “untethered from reality.”
Many U.S. lawmakers and leaders of major U.S. industries are concerned that if the U.S. agrees to hard caps on emissions, and China agrees to become more energy efficient without a cap on growth, U.S. industries will be saddled with higher costs and become less competitive.

The National Association of Manufacturers said Thursday in a statement that it wants additional details on the Obama administration’s pledge: “As we evaluate this proposal, we will do so with an eye toward its impact on American jobs, our economic recovery and long-term growth.”
Beneath the green rhetoric, the actual promises from the U.S. and China don’t appear to go far beyond near-term environmental improvements that the two economies already are on track to achieve, several analysts said. The recession has crimped industrial activity, and both countries have been improving their energy efficiency, because that cuts energy costs.
Enthusiasm for tough climate action has also waned in the U.S. as the economy has soured. The U.S. House passed a climate bill with limits similar to those Mr. Obama will propose in Copenhagen. But the Senate has put off action until spring.
The White House said Thursday that it welcomes “China’s intention to cut the growth of their emissions,” adding that the “international community will be closely analyzing this proposal.”
Neither the Chinese nor the U.S. proposals may satisfy the EU, which has been well ahead of the U.S. in pledging cuts. The bloc’s 27 nations have agreed to lower greenhouse-gas emissions 20% below their 1990 levels by 2020, or the equivalent of a 14% cut from 2005 levels. They have also agreed to a larger reduction, equivalent to a 24% cut from 2005 levels by 2020, if other nations outside the bloc make substantial cuts.
Some European leaders suggested that both the U.S. and Chinese pledges were insufficient. Connie Hedegaard, Denmark’s climate and energy minister, said leaders “must analyze more carefully” how significant China’s pledge is. As for the U.S., said Ms. Hedegaard, the bulk of the promised cleanup appears likely to come many years out.
Both the general idea of capping U.S. emissions and the details of how that cap might be structured remain hugely contentious in the U.S., pitting different regions of the country, and different industries, against each other.
The White House said its target reductions are conditional on Congressional approval. But that wasn’t enough for some lawmakers. Sen. James Webb (D., Va.) sent a letter Wednesday to the White House expressing “concern” that U.S. officials “may be intending to commit” the U.S. to an emissions cap at the Copenhagen conference before Congress agrees to anything. Sen. Webb is one of several Democrats from states with significant coal-mining or heavy-industry interests who have expressed opposition to the climate proposals backed by Democrats from coastal states.
Xie Zhenhua, China’s top climate envoy, said his country now expects “real action” by the West before the Copenhagen conference on funding and technical support to slow the growth in Chinese emissions. So far, he said, such support hasn’t materialized.
China said the West also has failed to live up to its own emission-cutting promises so far. Europe imposed rules capping emissions from much of its industry in 2005, but to date its reductions haven’t matched its promises, Chinese officials said.
Emissions through 2008 of the EU nations are down more than 10% since 1990, more than halfway to the target of a 20% cut by 2020.
The pledges by the U.S. and China followed a development in recent days that many analysts said could erode public support for expensive policies to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. Hacked emails from an influential U.K. climate-science lab suggest that researchers there tried to squelch scientific challenges to what has become scientific consensus: that human beings are largely responsible for climate change.
The emails were hacked from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. They suggest that many scientists around the world were concerned about the policy implications of a recent decline in average global temperatures. Although global temperatures remain among the hottest on record, they have declined since 2005, according to various measurements.
Opponents of significant curbs on greenhouse-gas emissions have pointed to the disclosed emails as reason to pause before implementing any broad policies.
—Charles Forelle, Stephen Power and Evan Perez contributed to this article.
Write to Jeffrey Ball at jeffrey.ball@wsj.com and Shai Oster at shai.oster@wsj.com

Giles Whittell in Washington

President Obama has no official engagements for the Thanksgiving weekend but that does not mean that his Blackberry will be switched off. Behind the scenes he has a mountain to climb to sell his new climate change commitments to a sceptical American public.
For all the President’s aspirations to global leadership on climate change there remains a gulf between what the world expects and what he can deliver. That gulf has been exposed by starkly contrasting reactions at home and abroad to his pledge to cut US carbon emissions by 17 per cent relative to their 2005 levels in the next 11 years.
Mr Obama’s target is the first by a US administration in more than a decade, and the most realistic in the history of American involvement in UN-sponsored climate change talks. Yet it was “lower than we would like” and would prove “disappointing to some”, an EU spokesman said. On the conservative wing of the Republican Party, Senator James Inhofe, of Oklahoma, said that it was likely to prove unacceptable to Congress because “it will harm our economy and have virtually no effect on climate change”.
Between such views the White House finds itself in uncharted territory, balancing the risk of being seen to undermine the Copenhagen conference with that of losing congressional support for Mr Obama’s entire domestic agenda.

His announcement that he will travel to Copenhagen with a concrete carbon reduction proposal has already yielded an historic dividend: yesterday’s response from Beijing — an undertaking to cut Chinese carbon emissions per unit of GDP by at least 40 per cent by 2020 — marks the first time the world’s two biggest polluters have committed themselves to measurable carbon targets as part of UN climate change negotiations. It will also allow Mr Obama to argue that the US is not committing itself to a costly process that demands no sacrifices from developing economies.
China’s exemption, along with India and Brazil, from core requirements of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol led the US Senate to reject it by 95-0.
In Denmark on December 9 Mr Obama will hail an almost complete reversal of US policy on climate change since then. He will point to new US car mileage standards and the passage of a climate change Bill through the House of Representatives as evidence that his Administration has done more to curb greenhouse gas emissions in ten months than its predecessor did in eight years. He will also say that the target of a 17 per cent cut by 2020 should become legally binding in a Bill he hopes to sign next year.
That may be enough to mollify those heading for Copenhagen who have accused him this week of snubbing the conference by appearing at its start — when he happens to be in the neighbourhood collecting the Nobel Prize for Peace in Oslo — rather than at the leaders’ forum near the end of the conference. Whether Mr Obama can indeed turn his 17 per cent pledge into law is another matter.
Senator John Kerry, Mr Obama’s closest congressional ally on climate change and the author of a stalled Senate climate change Bill, has called the pledge “one hell of a game changer”. Crucially, the US coal and coal-fired power industries have also broadly endorsed the principle of carbon cap-and-trade, by which major polluters receive an allocation of permits to pollute that is lowered year-on-year to meet carbon targets but which rewards firms that move fastest to cleaner technologies by allowing them to sell surplus permits.
“A well-designed cap will provide a smooth transition to clean energy,” James Rogers of Duke Power, one of America’s largest coal-fired power producers, said when lending his support to the Waxman-Markey climate change Bill passed by the House of Representatives this summer.
American Electric Power, Duke’s biggest rival, also endorsed the Waxman-Markey Bill. The company has since started pumping liquefied carbon dioxide thousands of feet beneath its largest plant in West Virginia in a project that it hopes will prove the viability of carbon capture and storage (CCS), attracting sufficient federal subsidies to remove carbon from the smokestacks of the plants that still provide 40 per cent of America’s electricity.
The Waxman-Markey Bill set out roughly the same targets adopted by Mr Obama this week. His problem is that it cannot become law until it is merged with a comparable Senate Bill, and the 60 votes needed to pass one are still little more than a White House dream.
Senator John McCain, in the past a staunch campaigner for climate change legislation, is now withholding his support for a new Bill being drafted by Senators Kerry and Lindsey Graham, demanding sweeping guarantees for a new generation of US nuclear power plants before joining them.
Experts believe that Mr McCain will be won over eventually but senators from the major oil-producing states will have to swap sides as well to give a Senate Bill a hope of passing. Robert Dillon, spokesman for the powerful Senator Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, has welcomed Mr Obama’s decision to travel to Copenhagen but he warned on Wednesday that whatever the Administration says there “the real negotiations on reductions happen here in Congress. We pass the laws.”
Environmentalists worry that the White House will concede almost anything to win the votes of the senators whom it regards as proxies for Big Oil because the US legislative timetable is already being squeezed by next year’s mid-term elections. “There is a desperation for getting something done before June next year because of the mid-terms,” a Greenpeace spokesman said.
Meanwhile, America’s climate change sceptics have seized on the hacked British academics’ e-mails that appear to point to the suppression of data that may undermine parts of the UN consensus of climate change science. Carole Browner, Mr Obama’s chief adviser on the subject, has made light of what conservatives are calling “Climategate”, saying: “I’m sticking with the 2,500 scientists” who continue to support the view that climate change is real and that humans are largely to blame.