Palestinian institution-building efforts continue despite challenges, UN seminar told

Despite challenging political and economic circumstances, Palestinian efforts towards reform, institution-building and development have continued with the aim of eventually establishing a Palestinian State, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today.

Kofi Adu-Brempong Shot by University of Florida Police

Kofi Adu-Brempong shot by University of Florida police: Update

Community members spoke out on the University of Florida campus before marching over to the Board of Trustees meeting

Gainesville, FL – Over 400 angry protesters – a coalition of students,
local residents and university professors – rallied and marched to
protest the racist police shooting of Kofi Adu-Brempong.

Adu-Brempong is an international graduate student from Ghana who was shot in the face by a University of Florida policeman. After receiving a call from a neighbor concerned that Adu-Brempong was screaming, due to stress over his studies and his immigration status, campus police stormed his apartment, tased him three times and then shot him in the face with an assault rifle.

Adu-Brempong is hospitalized in critical condition, having lost his
tongue and jaw. Incredibly, the police action took less than 30
seconds. Having suffered a case of childhood polio, Adu-Brempong was unable to walk without a cane. To add to the outrage, the University of Florida police charged him with a felony for ‘resisting arrest with violence.’

Gainesville Area Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) led the
campus action. Beginning with a rally and speakers at Turlington
Plaza, the mass of protesters marched through campus to the Board of Trustees in the Emerson Hall Alumni Building. The Board of Trustees governs the entire university. Since the building was closed to the public, the protesters pulled the doors open, pushed past security and took over the building.

They presented the board with a list of demands, including dropping
all charges against Kofi Adu-Brempong. The other important demand is the firing of Keith Smith, the officer who shot Kofi in the face. In 2008, Keith Smith was given a verbal warning by the Gainesville city police department where he previously worked.

Smith and three other police officers were throwing eggs and harassing African Americans in the local community. The university police ignored this warning and hired Keith Smith.

Today on New Scientist: 24 March 2010

All today’s stories on newscientist.com at a glance, including: the solar system’s 10 weirdest moons, how your body does the thinking, and what could be a new species of human

UN agency joins forces with Sony to halt spread of HIV and AIDS

Thousands of people in Cameroon and Ghana will have the chance to watch this year’s football World Cup matches live - and have the opportunity to receive HIV and AIDS counselling - thanks to a new partnership announced today by electronics giant Sony and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Average County in the United States Facing Financial Crises

AP analysis: Average county was stressed in Jan.

By MIKE SCHNEIDER and MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP
Tue Mar 23, 3:57 PM EDT

Worsening economic conditions caused the nation to reach a bleak
milestone in January: For the first time since The Associated Press
began analyzing conditions in more than 3,100 U.S. counties nearly a
year ago, the average county was found to be economically stressed.

Driving the pain was a deterioration in states that earlier had
weathered the Great Recession better than the nation as a whole. These states endured the sharpest gains in unemployment for the past three months due to job losses in such industries as energy and construction. The states include West Virginia, Idaho, Mississippi, Montana and Wisconsin.

“What we’re seeing is the state of West Virginia getting sucked into
the same vortex that swallowed the national economy,” said George
Hammond, an economist at West Virginia University.

The AP’s Economic Stress Index found the average county’s score in
January was 11.9. That was sharply higher than the 10.8 reading in
December, the previous high.

The index calculates a score from 1 to 100 based on a county’s
unemployment, foreclosure and bankruptcy rates. A higher score
indicates more stress. Under a rough rule of thumb, a county is
considered stressed when its score exceeds 11.

More than 55 percent of counties were deemed stressed in January. That compares with less than 45 percent in December.

Though the nation’s jobless rate fell to 9.7 percent in January from
10 percent in December, foreclosure rates didn’t budge at 1.5 percent. That means 1.5 percent of households were in some stage of the foreclosure process. And the bankruptcy rate rose to 1.13 percent.

Nevada again endured the worst conditions of any state. Its Stress
score in January was 21.57. Nevada was followed by Michigan (18.04), California (17.29), Florida (16.29) and Illinois (15.5). Stress scores for all five states rose from December.

North Dakota again was the least economically stressed state. Its
score was 5.69. Next best were South Dakota (6.14), Nebraska (6.64), Vermont (8.03) and Hawaii (8.60).

The sharpest year-to-year increases in Stress scores in January were in Nevada, West Virginia, Illinois (15.5), New Mexico (10.23) and
Alabama (14.05).

Early in the recession, which began in December 2007, strong demand and high prices for coal helped buoy West Virginia’s economy. But conditions worsened as worldwide coal demand slackened. And construction jobs disappeared due to the housing bust in the once-booming eastern Panhandle, Hammond said.

West Virginia’s Stress score hit 11.32 in January, up from 9.45 in
December. Pushing up the score was a surge in lost jobs.

“Those job losses have been widely distributed across almost all
sectors,” Hammond said.

Early on, Mississippi, too, avoided the worst effects of the downturn
because of rebuilding jobs from Hurricane Katrina and construction
projects that were under way before the recession began. It also never experienced the housing bubble that triggered the downturn elsewhere. But in the past year, Mississippi lost more than 13 percent of its construction jobs.

Mississippi’s Stress score jumped to 13.36 in January from 11.69 in
the prior month, driven by higher unemployment.

“We were relatively late going into the recession,” said Marianne
Hill, an economist at the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning,
the state university system. “We now seem to be catching up with the
rest of the country in some ways.”

Since peaking at 10.1 percent in October, the nation’s unemployment
rate dipped to 10 percent in November and December before falling to 9.7 percent in January and February. The widespread layoffs of a year ago have slowed. But many businesses still lack enough confidence to hire.

“The lack of hiring remains the No. 1 threat to the recovery,” said
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com.

Zandi and other economists predict the jobless rate will resume
climbing in coming months. That will happen, in part, because people who had stopped looking for work out of frustration will re-enter the job market to resume their search.

Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Global Insight, a private
forecasting firm, said: “What we are seeing is the unevenness of the
recovery. Many sectors of the economy are still struggling.”

High-tech manufacturing is managing to make a comeback, Behravesh said. But the housing slump has only leveled off, auto production is still weak and commercial real estate remains in a deep recession.

Counties in Kansas and South Dakota topped the list of least-stressed counties with populations of at least 25,000. Ford County, Kan. was the healthiest county with a Stress score of 4.17, followed by Ellis County, Kan. (4.31), Brookings County, S.D. (4.59), Brown County, S.D. (4.84) and Finney County, Kan. (4.86).

California counties dominated the list of most-stressed counties.
Imperial County, Calif., was again the most stressed county with a
score of 31.34. It was followed by Merced County, Calif. (28.09), Lyon
County, Nev. (27.91), San Benito County, Calif. (26.58) and Yuba
County, Calif. (25.47).

El Salvador: UN rights expert hits out against rise in killings of women and girls

Violence against women and girls in El Salvador remains prevalent and pervasive, with the number of murders on the rise and kidnappings, sexual assaults and sexual harassment all too frequent, an independent United Nations human rights expert has warned.

Haitians plan how to rebuild their society at UNESCO forum

Intellectuals, artists, international experts, social scientists and members of the Haitian diaspora are meeting today at the Paris headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to develop ideas for how to rebuild Haitian society in the wake of January’s catastrophic earthquake.

Carbon capture industry a UK jobs and cash boost

The carbon capture and storage (CCS) industry could be worth up to £6.5 billion a year and create 100,000 jobs by 2030, the government says. It made the claim as it revealed Yorkshire and the Humber are to be the UK’s first Low Carbon Economic Area (LCEA) for CCS. Ed Miliband, energy and climate change secretary, said: “CCS presents a massive industrial growth opportunity for the UK. “We have a strong, established and skilled workforce in precisely the sectors needed to get CCS deployed at scale. “And we have some of the best potential sites in all of Europe for CO2 storage under the North Sea. “Coal is the most abundant worldwide energy resource but it is also the most polluting, so there is no solution to climate change without CCS.” CCS involves the capture of harmful fossil fuel emissions, which are then moved offshore to be stored under the seabed. Yorkshire and the Humber have been chosen because of the region’s high concentration of industries emitting carbon dioxide, nearness to North Sea storage sites and local expertise, it was revealed. LCEAs were introduced last July (2009) as part of the government’s Low Carbon Industrial Strategy aimed at reducing carbon emissions. They are intended to focus national, local and regional agencies on promoting low carbon industry growth. The designation would be a boon for the area Mr Miliband claimed in last Wednesday’s (March 17) announcement. “Yorkshire and Humber is well placed to see the benefits from the jobs that investment in CCS can bring, other regions will too,” he said. “For the UK economy as a whole these benefits could be worth up to £6.5 billion a year, sustaining jobs for up to 100,000 people, by 2030.” The government also announced Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) has been awarded £6.3 million to fund a trial carbon capture project at its coal-fired power plant in Ferrybridge, Yorkshire. It hopes to make the UK a global leader in CCS. For more details on the UK’s CCS scheme clicking here. David Gibbs

Qteros, UMass get biofuels patent

March 23, 2010 11:20 AM
By Erin Ailworth, Globe Staff
Qteros Inc. in Marlborough and the University of Massachusetts Amherst have patented the fermentation method they use to make biofuel, a plant-based alternative to gasoline, using the so-called Q Microbe.
According to the company, the Q Microbe allows Qteros to streamline the process they use to breakdown plant material into sugars that can then be turned into ethanol, making that fuel easier and cheaper to produce.
“The Q Microbe technology offers numerous important advantages over other ethanol-producing microorganisms, which we believe provides the operational foundation for profitable, commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol production,” Qteros chief executive John A. McCarthy Jr. said in a statement today announcing the patent, which he said “underscores the significance and the unique nature of our technology.”
Being able to produce ethanol cheaply and on a large scale is a challenge faced by those in the biofuel industry. Many hope that their products will one day compete with oil-derived gasoline, cutting the nation’s dependence on foreign oil and offering an environmentally-friendly way of powering vehicles and other gasoline-driven machinery.

Animals do not commit suicide

Time magazine says there is a “scientific debate” going on about whether animals commit suicide. What a load of poppycock, says Rowan Hooper