JHANSI, India — An ancient tractor dumps a trailer load of plant material next to a battered looking shed. Surprising as it may seem, this unremarkable event may hold the key to ending chronic power shortages in rural India. Inside the shed is a noisy, little, green generator that runs on gas produced from rotting biomass. That is where the pile of plant matter dumped by the tractor comes in. The generator produces 100 kilowatts of electricity, enough to service the modest needs of four or five typical Indian villages. However in this particular case it drives a mini-industrial complex that currently provides 130 jobs in an area where employment is hard to find. The location is a rural site about 15km from the city of Jhansi in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. The initiative is called Desi Power (local power). It aims to provide a model for generating low-cost electricity from renewable resources that can easily be copied elsewhere in the vast swathes of rural India that have no connection to the mains grid. ‘This really is a viable solution for remote India’, says Dr Arun Kumar, director of the […]
CORDOBA, Mexico — On the floor of Our Lady of Guadalupe parish, an exhausted Central American man with a farmer’s tan sleeps deeply on the cement floor. He’s endured days in the blazing tropical sun atop a cargo train, and at the parish he can rest for three days, shower, get a free change of clothes and depart well fed. Nearly 1,000 weary Central American immigrants like the sleeping man will seek shelter here during the year, according to the parish priest, Father Margarito Flores Munoz. Most are on their way to the United States. And so Our Lady of Guadalupe and Father Flores have become another point of contention in the long and acrimonious search for a solution to illegal immigration to the United States. The Bush administration wants Mexico to crack down on transiting Central Americans before it supports legislation in Congress that would make it easier for Mexican migrants to work legally in the United States. The issue is expected to be among those discussed when President Bush meets with his Mexican counterpart, Vicente Fox, in Cancun next week. U.S. officials note that U.S. immigration officers now apprehend more Central Americans than Mexicans. […]
March Madness starts this week in America, and for the rest of the month millions of basketball fans will watch the country’s college teams dunk on each other, until the final of the men’s national championship on April 3rd. CBS, a broadcast-television network, has shown the event since 1982 — but this year it is conducting an experiment. As well as broadcasting the games on TV, it is streaming them live over the internet free of charge, accompanied by advertisements. CBS’s move is one of many recent efforts by traditional media companies to try to develop ‘new media’ revenue streams. Music firms have sold their material online for a while. Newspaper and magazine publishers are busy trying to attract readers on the internet. But now the world’s largest entertainment companies are rushing to distribute their video content online and, to a lesser extent, to the users of mobile phones. Old media companies are also snapping up internet firms as fast as they can. Most of these are profitable, in contrast to the dotcoms of a few years ago — but only just. On March 6th NBC Universal, a media firm owned by General Electric, spent $600m on iVillage, […]
WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives is on track this year to be in session for fewer days than the Congress Harry Truman labeled as “do-nothing” during his 1948 re-election campaign. Members of Congress are taking an entire week off for St. Patrick’s Day. It’s the latest scheduling innovation to give members more time to meet with constituents. Through Friday, the House was in session for 19 days, compared with 33 for the Senate. If they stick to their current schedule — including two weeks off in April, a week in May and July, plus all of August — House members will spend 97 days in Washington this year. The House was in session 108 days in 1948, according to the chamber’s archives, compared with 141 days last year. “This is an election year and people want to see more of their constituents,” says House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio. During the first two months of the year, House members logged a total of 47 hours in the Capitol. They took off almost the entire month of January , while the Senate confirmed Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. For both chambers, workweeks have […]
Across the frozen North Slope of Alaska, the region’s largest oil accident on record has been sending hundreds of thousands of litres of crude pouring into the Arctic Ocean during the past week after a badly corroded BPO pipeline ruptured. The publicity caused by the leak in the the 30-year-old pipeline could seriously damage BP’s image, which has been carefully crafted to show it as a company concerned about the environment. Unlike other major oil companies, BP boasts that it is fully signed up to the dangers of global warming and it makes a conspicuous effort to flaunt its green credentials, tackling local environmental problems and erecting wind turbines above its petrol stations. The first indication of the spill came in early March, when an oily patch was discovered near the elevated oil transmission pipeline, but the full scale of the accident is only becoming clear with time. Environmentalists who vociferously objected to the construction of the BP pipeline may now see their worst fears realised. Clean-up crews have removed more than 190,000 litres of crude oil and melted snow off the frozen tundra but reports indicate that the leak is the second largest crude oil spill […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
