Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas held a first official meeting in Jerusalem evening aimed at reviving the stalled peace process. Abbas and Olmert shook hands before the Palestinian leader’s motorcade left the premier’s official residence in Jerusalem following a two-hour meeting over dinner between the two teams, followed by one-on-one talks. Palestinian presidency spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina told AFP that ‘the meeting was useful. It is the first and there will be many more meetings in the coming future. The sides agreed on many issues and we will keep discussing them.’ Olmert spokeswoman Miri Eisin confirmed the meeting had ended and that an official statement would be issued promptly. Abbas’s team included former prime minister Ahmed Qorei and chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, while on Olmert’s side were his chief of staff Yoram Turbovitch and political advisor Shalom Turjeman. The long-awaited summit followed a series of preparatory meetings between officials on both sides, and came after six years of standstill in the Middle East peace process. Although this marked the first official encounter since Olmert was elected last March, the two leaders held an impromptu meeting during a gathering […]
BERKELEY — For 11 years, Jill Banfield at the University of California, Berkeley, has collected and studied the microbes that slime the floors of mines and convert iron to acid, a common source of stream pollution around the world. Imagine her surprise, then, when research scientist Brett Baker discovered three new microbes living amidst the bacteria she thought she knew well. All three were so small – the size of large viruses – as to be virtually invisible under a microscope, and belonged to a totally new phylum of Archaea, microorganisms that have been around for billions of years. What made Baker’s find possible was shotgun sequencing, a technique developed and made famous by Celera Corp., which used it to sequence the human genome in record time. ‘It was amazing,’ said Banfield, a professor of earth and planetary science and of environmental science, policy and management at UC Berkeley since 2001. ‘These were totally new and very small organisms we didn’t know how to culture with standard techniques. This shows the great promise of shotgun sequencing to profile a community of organisms without making any assumptions about what is there.’ Nearly three years ago, Banfield […]
WASHINGTON, Dec. 21 - The United States offers some of the most lucrative incentives in the world to companies that drill for oil in publicly owned coastal waters, but a newly released study suggests that the government is getting very little for its money. The study, which the Interior Department refused to release for more than a year, estimates that current inducements could allow drilling companies in the Gulf of Mexico to escape tens of billions of dollars in royalties that they would otherwise pay the government for oil and gas produced in areas that belong to American taxpayers. But the study predicts that the inducements would cause only a tiny increase in production even if they were offered without some of the limitations now in place. It also suggests that the cost of that additional oil could be as much as $80 a barrel, far more than the government would have to pay if it simply bought the oil on its own. ‘They are giving up a lot of money and not getting much in return,’ said Robert A. Speir, a former analyst at the Energy Department who worked on the report. ‘If they took […]
Time magazine has graced its cover with any number of presidents, presidential candidates and their poll-happy strategists. But no cover has featured a more powerful political force than Time’s choice as the 2006 Person of the Year. It’s you. By acknowledging the immense power of the individual in 21st century America, the magazine’s editors marked the dawn of the information-technology era and the ability of any one person to connect, communicate and create causes with many others at speeds and efficiencies unknown before the Internet. ‘It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before,’ wrote Lev Grossman for the magazine. ‘It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.’ The empowerment of an individual via technology is a trend that impacts all of American society, but especially politics, which in its rawest form is the art of turning the support of one voter into the votes of many. Abraham Lincoln […]
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Army has launched an effort to recruit thousands of translators to facilitate training of Iraqi security forces. The army has awarded a contract for management of translation and interpretation services in Iraq to Global Linguistic Solutions. GLS, a joint venture of DynCorp International and McNeil Technologies, has received a five-year contract, with a maximum value of $4.645 billion. ‘The ability to communicate effectively with the Iraqi people is critical to a successful outcome in Iraq, and we are very aware of the trust that has been placed in us,’ DynCorp chief executive officer Herbert Lanese said. Dyncorp bested L-3 Communications for the army contract. In 2005, L-3 acquired Titan Corp. a leading supplier of linguists to the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, or ISC, Middle East Newsline reported. The GLS contract, awarded by ISC, would begin in March 2007. Under the award, GLS would provide foreign-language interpretation and translation services to the army and other U.S. government agencies in Iraq. Executives said this would include supplying translators for embedding with U.S. forces. They said GLS would employ up to 6,000 Iraqi translators and up to 1,000 U.S. citizens. The Americans, […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
