MOSCOW — Dmitry Medvedev takes over the Russian presidency Wednesday in the shadow of his mentor Vladimir Putin, whose central role at a glittering Kremlin ceremony will underline his intention to retain major power as prime minister. The inauguration of Russia’s third president in the turbulent 17 years since the Soviet collapse was set to take place before about 2,400 guests in the Kremlin palace, starting at midday (0800 GMT), a presidential spokesman told AFP. The brief but pomp-filled ceremony for Medvedev, 42, was to reflect the confidence of a Russian government riding an economic boom on the back of massive oil and gas exports. Putin has overseen that boom in his eight-year rule while rolling back many of the democratic experiments of the 1990s, according to critics. A rare anti-Kremlin rally late Tuesday was snuffed out in Moscow even before it began, with police detaining would-be protestors well ahead of the event and swamping the street where they had hoped to gather. The rally was organised by The Other Russia, an opposition group headed up by chess legend turned leading anti-Kremlin campaigner Garry Kasparov, who had been expected to attend the protest. The […]
Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe. The warning comes from the head of the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) at New Scotland Yard as the force launches a series of initiatives to try to boost conviction rates using CCTV evidence. They include: · A new database of images which is expected to use technology developed by the sports advertising industry to track and identify offenders. · Putting images of suspects in muggings, rape and robbery cases out on the internet from next month. · Building a national CCTV database, incorporating pictures of convicted offenders as well as unidentified suspects. The plans for this have been drawn up, but are on hold while the technology required to carry out automated searches is refined. Use of CCTV images for court evidence has so far been very poor, […]
The oil age began in 1860. By 2006 the world’s oil rigs pumped oil at a rate of 85 million barrels a day. They haven’t come close since, even as prices have risen to more than $100 per barrel. Breaking our fossil fuel dependency will require plugging into the grid instead of pulling up to the pump. And there are some interesting energy options - and others are doing a lot more about developing them than Americans. Germany leads the world in its installed capacity of renewable energy sources (25 percent), and is the third largest producer of solar panels after China and Japan. The share of electricity generated from renewable sources exceeded 14 percent in 2007, an increase from 11 percent in 2006. This means that Germany has already met the European Union’s target that 12.5 percent of electricity should come from renewable sources by 2010. Enercon, a major wind equipment maker, claims that the renewable-energy business will become a major part of the country’s manufacturing business, alongside cars and machine tools. Employment in the renewables industry is now 250,000 ands expected to double by 2020. Throughout Germany, around 160 technical institutions are doing research […]
WASHINGTON — The Arctic and Antarctica are poles apart when it comes to the effects of human-fueled climate change, scientists said on Friday: in the north, it is melting sea ice, but in the south, it powers winds that chill things down. The North and South poles are both subject to solar radiation and rising levels of climate-warming greenhouse gases, the researchers said in a telephone briefing. But Antarctica is also affected by an ozone hole hovering high above it during the austral summer. ‘All the evidence points toward human-made effects playing a major role in the changes that we see at both poles and evidence that contradicts this is very hard to find,’ said Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. An examination of many previous studies about polar climate, to be published May 6 in the journal Eos, ‘further depletes the arsenal of those who insist that human-caused climate change is nothing to worry about,’ Francis said in a telephone briefing. In the Arctic, Francis and co-authors of the research said, warming spurred by human-generated carbon dioxide emissions has combined with natural climate variations to create a ‘perfect Arctic storm’ […]
WASHINGTON — Suicides and ‘psychological mortality’ among US soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan could exceed battlefield deaths if their mental scars are left untreated, the head of the US Institute of Mental Health warned Monday. Of the 1.6 million US soldiers who have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, 18-20 percent — or around 300,000 — show symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression or both, said Thomas Insel, head of the National Institute of Mental Health. An estimated 70 percent of those at-risk soldiers do not seek help from the Department of Defense or the Veterans Administration, he told a news conference launching the American Psychiatric Association’s 161st annual meeting here. If ‘one just does the math’, then allowing PTSD or depression to go untreated in such numbers could result in ‘suicides and psychological mortality trumping combat deaths’ in Iraq and Afghanistan, Insel warned. More than 4,000 US soldiers have died in Iraq since the US invasion of 2003, and more than 400 in Afghanistan since the US led attacks there in 2001, of which some 290 were killed in action and the rest in on-combat deaths. ‘It’s predicted that most soldiers […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
