Migiro urges UN system to hasten recovery efforts in Haiti while world remains focused

Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro today implored United Nations agencies and offices to move swiftly and in concert to support reconstruction efforts in earthquake-devastated Haiti.

Solved: the puzzle of how cells age

The finding suggests new ways to tackle age-related diseases and downplays an alternative process long implicated in ageing, says Celeste Biever

Darfur: UN-African Union mission condemns attack on seven peacekeepers

The joint United Nations-African Union mission in Sudan’s strife-torn Darfur region has deplored an attack carried out yesterday outside of the South Darfur capital of Nyala that wounded seven Pakistani peacekeepers.

Muslim Suspect Faces Trial in the Murder of US Soldier at Little RockRecruiting Office

February 17, 2010

A Muslim Son, a Murder Trial and Many Questions

By JAMES DAO
New York Times

MEMPHIS — When Monica Bledsoe spoke to her younger brother late last May, he seemed his old upbeat self. He had just led his first sightseeing tour of Little Rock, Ark., for their father’s new tour bus company and all went well. The tips had flowed.

A week later, her brother, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle on a military recruiting center in Little Rock, killing one soldier and wounding another.

Ms. Bledsoe was stunned. “I would never have thought this could happen,” she said.

Eight months after the shooting, Mr. Muhammad’s family is still sorting through the confusing pieces of his shattered life. A gentle, happy-go-lucky teenager, he had become a deeply observant Muslim in college, shunning gatherings where alcohol was served. He traveled to Yemen to study Arabic, married a Yemeni woman, was imprisoned and then deported for overstaying his visa. After returning to Memphis last year, he stewed with anger about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Recently, Mr. Muhammad, 24, thrust himself back into the news by claiming in a note to an Arkansas judge that he was a member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a terrorist group based in Yemen. He asked that he be allowed to plead guilty to capital murder, a request that will probably be denied.

The note has renewed questions about his case, which had been nearly forgotten in the wake of subsequent attacks, most notably the shooting rampage in November at Fort Hood, Tex., and the attempted bombing of an airplane on Christmas Day. Like both of those cases, Mr. Muhammad’s involved a Yemeni connection and the failure by the authorities to anticipate an attack, despite having clues.

In Mr. Muhammad’s case, the same F.B.I. agent interviewed him twice before the shootings: once while he was in prison in Yemen and then again in Nashville soon after he returned. But the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not place Mr. Muhammad under surveillance, law enforcement officials have said, apparently believing that he did not pose a threat.

In January, Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, sent a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. requesting information about the F.B.I.’s interviews with Mr. Muhammad before the shootings, raising questions about why someone possibly suspected of extremist ties was allowed to buy a firearm.

But no one is more vocal about shining light on Mr. Muhammad’s radicalization than his father, Melvin Bledsoe. Though he has hired a lawyer for his son, visits him in his cell in Little Rock on weekends and contributes to his defense, Mr. Bledsoe, 54, says he has no illusions about his son’s guilt.

“My heart bleeds for the families of the victims,” he said.

What he wants, Mr. Bledsoe says, is to understand how “evildoers” brainwashed his son, as he puts it. And he wants the F.B.I. held accountable for what he considers its negligence in preventing the attack.

“They didn’t pull the trigger, but they allowed this to happen,” Mr. Bledsoe said. “It is owed to the American people to know what happened. If it can happen to my son, it can happen to anyone’s son.”

The F.B.I. said it could not discuss Mr. Muhammad on orders from the judge.

It also appears that Mr. Muhammad’s trial, set for June, will answer few questions about his radicalization. Prosecutors say that they consider it a straightforward murder case and that they intend to try it without delving into Mr. Muhammad’s religious conversion, political beliefs or possible ties to terrorists.

“If you strip away what he says, self-serving or not, it’s just an awful killing,” said Larry Jegley, the lead prosecutor for Pulaski County, which includes Little Rock. “It’s like a lot of other killings we have.”

Pvt. William A. Long of Conway, Ark., was killed in the shooting, and Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula of Jacksonville, Ark., was wounded.

Despite Mr. Muhammad’s claim to be a Qaeda soldier, Mr. Jegley said “it looks to me like he was acting alone,” a view supported by some law enforcement experts. Those experts, and Mr. Bledsoe, also say there is no evidence that Mr. Muhammad was ever in contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Yemeni-American cleric who exchanged e-mail messages with the accused Fort Hood gunman, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan.

Why Mr. Muhammad might fabricate links to Al Qaeda is a subject of debate. Mr. Bledsoe suggests that his son may be trying to fulfill a sense of martyrdom; some experts say it may be a form of self-aggrandizement.

But whether Mr. Muhammad is a lone-wolf jihadist or a Qaeda soldier, his case underscores the immense challenges of identifying homegrown extremists, experts say.

Mr. Muhammad was born Carlos Bledsoe in 1985. Raised a Baptist, he was by all accounts a sunny child who loved playing basketball and telling jokes. After graduating from high school in 2003, he went to Tennessee State University in Nashville to study business, saying he wanted to take over his father’s company someday.

In his freshman year, he was arrested for possessing an illegal weapon. Though the charge was later expunged, the incident caused him to explore religion more deeply, his father said. He considered Judaism, attended a speech by Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, and then, to his parents’ dismay, decided to become a Sunni Muslim.

He dropped out of college at the end of his sophomore year and began working odd jobs in Nashville hotels and restaurants. He was also becoming more religiously devout, spending time in Nashville’s Somali community, praying regularly at the Islamic Center of Nashville, wearing Arab-style clothing, forswearing alcohol and changing his name.

In 2007, wanting to learn Arabic and visit Mecca, he decided to move to Yemen and signed a contract to teach English for $300 a month in the southern port city of Aden, records show.

Before he left, he told his sister that he hoped to marry in Yemen and move to Saudi Arabia. When she expressed concerns about Islamic terrorists, she recalled, “He looked me in the eye, held my hand, and said, ‘I’m not one of those Muslims.’ ”

Details of his life in Yemen remain sketchy. In addition to teaching, he took Arabic at The City Institute in the capital city, Sana, the Yemeni government has said. And a year after arriving, he married one of his students, Reena Abdullah Ahmed Farag, in Aden, according to a copy of the marriage license.

On about Nov. 14, 2008, just two months after his wedding, he was arrested in Sana for overstaying his visa. What might have been a simple immigration case turned complicated when the police found fake Somali identification papers on him.

Somalia is considered a training ground for Islamic extremists by American counterterrorism officials. The Yemeni government threatened to put Mr. Muhammad on trial.

Mr. Bledsoe says that although the F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Muhammad soon after his arrest, he did not learn of his son’s detention until two weeks later, when Mr. Muhammad’s wife contacted him. Under prodding from the American Embassy in Sana, the Yemeni government deported Mr. Muhammad on Jan. 29, 2009.

Mr. Muhammad told his father that while in prison he met Islamic radicals who told him that the American government had forsaken him. “We are your real brothers,” they said, according to Mr. Bledsoe.

Back home, Mr. Muhammad often seemed uneasy, his sister said, fuming sullenly when he saw news reports about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr. Bledsoe decided to open an office in Little Rock to give his son a job so that he could bring his wife to the United States. By April, Mr. Muhammad was living in a spare apartment less than three miles from the recruiting center.

These days, Ms. Bledsoe said, her brother can seemed relaxed one moment, but strident the next.

“He gives a history of what the meaning of paradise is,” she said. “That’s where he wants to go. He wants to go to paradise.”

World record attempt for rearing deep-sea squid

A marine ecologist is attempting to break his own world record for rearing deep sea squid in captivity, says Wendy Zukerman

UN must investigate warming ‘bias’, says former climate chief

‘Every error exaggerated the impact of change’
Ben Webster, Environment Editor, and Robin Pagnamenta, Energy Editor
The UN body that advises world leaders on climate change must investigate an apparent bias in its report that resulted in several exaggerations of the impact of global warming, according to its former chairman.
In an interview with The Times Robert Watson said that all the errors exposed so far in the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) resulted in overstatements of the severity of the problem.
Professor Watson, currently chief scientific adviser to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said that if the errors had just been innocent mistakes, as has been claimed by the current chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, some would probably have understated the impact of climate change.
The errors have emerged in the past month after simple checking of the sources cited by the 2,500 scientists who produced the report.

The report falsely claimed that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 when evidence suggests that they will survive for another 300 years. It also claimed that global warming could cut rain-fed North African crop production by up to 50 per cent by 2020. A senior IPCC contributor has since admitted that there is no evidence to support this claim.
The Dutch Government has asked the IPCC to correct its claim that more than half the Netherlands is below sea level. The environment ministry said that only 26 per cent of the country was below sea level.
Professor Watson, who served as chairman of the IPCC from 1997-2002, said: “The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact. That is worrying. The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened.”
He said that the IPCC should employ graduate science students to check the sources of each claim made in its next report, due in 2013. “Graduate students would love to be involved and they could really dig into the references and see if they really do support what is being said.”
He said that the next report should acknowledge that some scientists believed the planet was warming at a much slower rate than has been claimed by the majority of scientists.
“We should always be challenged by sceptics,” he said. “The IPCC’s job is to weigh up the evidence. If it can’t be dismissed, it should be included in the report. Point out it’s in the minority and, if you can’t say why it’s wrong, just say it’s a different view.”
Dr Pachauri has not responded to questions put to him by The Times, despite sending a text message saying that he would do so.
Professor Watson has held discussions with Al Gore, the former US Vice-President, about creating a new climate research group to supplement the work of the IPCC and to help restore the credibility of climate science.
He said that the scheme to create what he called a “Wikipedia for climate change” was at an early stage but the intention was to establish an online network of climate science research available to anyone with access to the internet and subject to permanent peer review by other scientists.
He said that the project would allow scientists to “synthesise all of the observational record in real-time, not every 5-7 years like the IPCC”.
He rejected concerns that the project would undermine the IPCC’s authority. “It would have to be done so it was complimentary and not a challenge to the IPCC,” he said.
A spokesman for Mr Gore’s office in Nashville, Tennessee, declined to comment on the project.
Meanwhile, a member of the inquiry team investigating allegations of misconduct by climate scientists has admitted that he holds strong views on climate change and that this contradicts a founding principle of the inquiry. Geoffrey Boulton, who was appointed last week by the inquiry chairman, Sir Muir Russell, said he believed that human activities were causing global warming.
Sir Muir issued a statement last week claiming that the inquiry members, who are investigating leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia, did not have a “predetermined view on climate change and climate science”.
Professor Boulton told The Times: “I may be rapped over the knuckles by Sir Muir for saying this, but I think that statement needs to be clarified. I think the committee needs someone like me who is close to the field of climate change and it would be quite amazing if that person didn’t have a view on one side or the other.”

Loft insulation: Australia’s burning issue

An Australian government scheme to promote loft insulation is backfiring on the country’s environment minister, former Midnight Oil singer Peter Garrett

Julian Glover
guardian.co.uk, Monday 15 February 2010 20.00 GMT
‘How can we sleep when our beds are burning?” sang Peter Garrett in 1987, when he was vying with Michael Hutchence for the title of Australia’s most famous rock star. Now, having joined the government as environment minister, the former singer with Midnight Oil has a very real fire to put out.
Garrett is a good man with an impossible task, trying to retain his street cred while doing all the boring but important things that junior environment ministers have to do, such as worrying about what people put in their loft space. He’s behind a sensible scheme to encourage Aussies to insulate their homes. It’s the sort of thing that British politicans back, too. Unfortunately, Garrett is now finding out the hard way what happens when the government pays cowboy builders to come round to your home.
Australians are used to ­finding scary things in their ­attics – ­funnel web spiders and tiger snakes, for instance – but not foil insulation that has been wired to the mains. Thanks to a federal government scheme, intended to cut energy use, thousands of homes may have been fitted with foil insulation that has been ­inadvertently nailed to nearby electrical wiring. Last week, one man died in a fire apparently caused by such an error.
Suddenly, insulation has lept from nowhere to the top of the political agenda, with the opposition calling on Garrett to resign. He is “inhabiting a different moral universe”, says Tony Abbott, the leader of the Liberal party.
Since Abbott also not long ago described climate change as “total crap”, some might ask whether it is Abbott, rather than Garrett, whose morals have gone askew. But at least he hasn’t yet gone as far as his finance spokesman, who last week said insulation was nothing more than “the fluffy stuff that sits in the ceiling for rats and mice to urinate on”. Those mice had better watch out when they pee.

Tajikistan facing water shortages and climate extremes, report warns

Falling supplies due to rising temperatures and retreating glaciers could spark conflict between water-stressed countries in the region, says Oxfam

John Vidal, environment editor
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 17 February 2010 06.00 GMT
It has been occupied by the Russians, the Mongols, the Turks, the Arabs and the Uzbeks, the Chinese, as well as Genghis Khan. But the ancient, mountainous state of Tajikistan, which has been at the crossroads of Asian civilisations for over a thousand years, is in danger of being overwhelmed by water shortages, rising temperatures and climate extremes.
A report released today by Oxfam details fast-rising temperatures, melting glaciers in the Pamir mountains, increased disease, drought, landslides and food shortages. Temperatures plummeted to -20C for more than a month in 2008-09 – unheard of in what is, in places, a subtropical region – and temperatures in the south of the country near Afghanistan have risen several degrees above normal, said the report.
About 20% of the country’s 8,492 glaciers are in retreat and 30% more are likely to retreat or disappear by 2050, said Ilhomjon Rajabov, head of the state’s climate change department. The largest glacier, Fedchenko, has lost 44 sq km, or 6% of its volume, in the last 34 years.
“It is indisputable that glaciers in Tajikistan are retreating. It is also indisputable that if glaciers continue to retreat, and the country experiences more extreme weather, countless people will be dealt an even harder blow. Nearly 1.5 million people are already food-insecure and that figure will likely rise if climate change is not addressed. There could even be a dangerous ripple effect across Central Asia, with countries throughout the region potentially wrestling over dwindling water resources in coming decades,” said Andy Baker, Oxfam Tajikistan’s country director.
Scientists and farmers have also observed significant changes in air temperatures, said Oxfam. There has been an increase in the number of days where temperatures have exceeded 40C in the past 50 years, a decline in thunderstorms and hailstorms and mean temperatures have increased in places 1.2C in 65 years – well above the global average which is around 0.8C in the past century.
The implications of climate change stretch well beyond Tajikistan’s borders, said Oxfam. Because its glaciers and mountains supply much of the water for the Aral Sea and and the vast, water-hungry, cotton-growing areas of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, there is a danger climate change will increase tensions between already water-stressed countries.
The report cites a World Bank study which said: “The consequences of climate change … would contribute to political destabilisation and trigger migration [in Central Asia]. As warming progresses, it is likely to intensify national and international conflicts over scarce resources.”

Get This: Warming Planet Can Mean More Snow

With snow blanketing much of the country, the topic of global warming has become the butt of jokes.

Climate skeptics built an igloo in Washington, D.C., during the recent storm and dedicated it to former Vice President Al Gore, who’s become the public face of climate change. There was also a YouTube video called “12 inches of global warming” that showed snow plows driving through a blizzard.

For scientists who study the climate, it’s all a bit much. They’re trying to dig out.

Most don’t see a contradiction between a warming world and lots of snow. That includes Kevin Trenberth, a prominent climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado.

“The fact that the oceans are warmer now than they were, say, 30 years ago means there’s about on average 4 percent more water vapor lurking around over the oceans than there was, say, in the 1970s,” he says.

Warmer water means more water vapor rises up into the air, and what goes up must come down.

“So one of the consequences of a warming ocean near a coastline like the East Coast and Washington, D.C., for instance, is that you can get dumped on with more snow partly as a consequence of global warming,” he says.

And Trenberth notes that you don’t need very cold temperatures to get big snow. In fact, when the mercury drops too low, it may be too cold to snow.

There’s something else fiddling with the weather this year — a strong El Nino. That’s the weather pattern that, every few years, raises itself up out of the western Pacific Ocean and blows east to the Americas. It brings heavy rains and storms to California and the south and southeast. It also pushes high-altitude jet streams farther south, which bring colder air with them.

Trenberth also says El Nino can “lock in” weather patterns like a meteorological highway, so that storms keep coming down the same track.

True, those storms have been record breakers. But meteorologist Jeff Masters, with the Web site Weather Underground, says it’s average temperatures — not snowfall — that really measure climate change.

“Because if it’s cold enough to snow, you will get snow,” Masters says. “We still have winter even if temperatures have warmed on average, oh, about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past 100 years.”

Masters say that 1 degree average warming is not enough to eliminate winter. Or storms.

A storm is part of what scientists classify as weather. Weather is largely influenced by local conditions and changes week to week. It’s fickle — fraught with wild ups and downs.

Climate is the long-term trend of atmospheric conditions across large regions, even the whole planet. Changes in climate are slow and measured in decades, not weeks.

Masters and most climate scientists say a warming climate would be expected to affect the weather, sometimes drastically, but exactly where and when is hard to predict.

“In that kind of a climate, you will have more frequent extreme events, heat waves and so on, but again, none of those individual events is proof itself that climate is changing,” Masters says.

Climate scientists say they can’t prove any single weather event is due to climate change. Thus, they say, Hurricane Katrina or the heat wave in Vancouver that’s dogging the Winter Olympics isn’t proof that climate change is happening. Nor can southern and eastern snowstorms prove that it’s not.

Source:
NPR, “Get This: Warming Planet Can Mean More Snow“, accessed February 15, 2010

Church leaders call for ‘technology fast’

Church leaders are urging people to give up iPods rather than chocolate this Lent as part of a ‘technology fast’ to save the planet as well as our souls.

By Louise Gray, Environment CorrespondentPublished: 7:30AM GMT 16 Feb 2010

Senior bishops are calling for a cut in personal carbon use for each of the 40 days of Lent. Their list of ways to achieve this includes eating less meat, flushing the toilet less often and cutting vegetables thinner so they cook faster.
But one of their tougher challenges is to give up technology such as television, mobiles and iPods for one day. The “Carbon Fast” , organised every year by development agency Tearfund, even suggests giving up technology for a day every month of the year and giving the money to charity.

The Bishop of Liverpool, the Rt Rev James Jones, who first had the idea of the Carbon Fast, urged people to give the money saved from not using technology to people in the developing world. It is also backed by the Bishop of London, the Rt Rev Richard Chartres
The Bishop of Oxford, the Rt Rev John Pritchard, said giving up technology would help people to think of others less fortunate than themselves.
“Lent is a period when we should look at how we live our lives,” he said. “Giving up chocolate is a symbol of that but giving up technology is a more serious way of looking at the issues that face us as a global community. It is a statement [of solidarity] with a world that does not have that ability to communicate the way we can and a reminder to us that perhaps we may have got beyond ourselves in terms of our own consumption of technology. We have galloped forward so fast maybe we have out-run our global responsibility in doing that.”
The Carbon Fast is also backed by leading scientists such as Sir John Houghton, former Chief Executive of the Meteorological Office and figures in the religious arena such as Joel Edwards, a former faith adviser to Tony Blair and the International Director of Micah Challenge and Steve Clifford, General Director of the Evangelical Alliance.
The Church of England backs the Carbon Fast and last year the Roman Catholic Church called on followers to cut down on texting and other forms of communication in the run up to Easter.
The Bishop of Oxford, who uses a blackberry, mobile phone and emails everyday, said he will struggle this Lent.
But he insisted we all need to concentrate on more “face to face” communication.
“It is a real reminder that life in the slow lane at least some of the time would have real benefits for our mental, emotional and spiritual health,” he added.
Other carbon fast actions include:
:: Have a technology fast. Try a day with no TV, no iPod, no computer, and even no mobile. Why not set aside a technology fast day each month?
:: Check your flush. Do you need to always flush the loo? Get a device from your water company to save water when you flush the toilet.
:: Be a part-time veggie. Aim to eat at least two vegetarian meals every week.
:: Avoid excess idling and hard acceleration to cut back on emissions when you are driving.
:: Make do and mend rather than buying new clothes.
:: Start composing food waste and growing your own fruit and vegetables.
:: Arrange a swapping party with friends. Exchange clothes, DVDs, CDs, jewellery and bags so everyone gets something new without a trip to the shops.
:: Try skinny food. Choosing thin pasta and cutting meat and vegetables smaller will mean they’ll cook faster and use less energy.
:: Eat by candlelight. How many rooms do you light in the evenings? Turn out the lights and have a meal by candlelight.
:: Take the train where possible rather than flying.