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Just west of El Paso, near where Spanish conquistador Juan de Onate crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico in 1598, construction crews have completed a steel fence authorities say is a new model for border security. The five-meter (18-foot) tall fence has a mesh woven so tightly that feet and fingers cannot grab hold, but it still allows people to see through. Steel pylons are set close enough to stop a truck from bursting through, and two meters of reinforced concrete underground deters any tunneling. The structure is designed to push would-be illegal immigrants and drug smugglers out into the desert where they are more easily caught, said Border Patrol Agent Martin Hernandez. ‘Will it completely stop them from coming across? Of course not,’ Hernandez said. ‘Rest assured, there will eventually be holes in parts of the wall made by people trying to get in. But it buys us valuable time.’ The US Department of Homeland Security is racing to meet a December 31 deadline to raise 670 miles of steel fences and vehicle barriers along the 3,200 kilometer (2,000 mile) long southern border. About half has been completed, including a six kilometer (four mile) segment […]

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Wind power faces difficult obstacles, but its supporters can at least point to wind farms already in operation. By contrast, tidal power, often touted as an environmentally friendly alternative, has struggled. A firm quoted on London’s Alternative Investment Market believes it is on to the next big thing in carbon-neutral energy - wave power. Ocean Power Technologies (OPT) is one of four companies whose hardware is to be tried out in a wave-power project off the coast of Cornwall. Electricity should start coming ashore in 2010. Over several decades, a range of technologies have been used to capture wave power. The Cornwall project, called Wavehub, will experiment with four approaches. One involves a floating platform in which waves push air through turbines. A second exploits tidal flow rather than waves. The third system - from Scotland’s Pelamis - uses a series of floating tubes joined by hinges: as they move relative to one another, power is generated. Then there is OPT’s system. It consists of a steel column that sits vertically in the water. A collar like a huge doughnut moves up and down the column as waves pass. That movement drives a generator and […]

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MEXICO CITY — Homophobia and disappointments in the search for a vaccine were expected to dominate the 17th International AIDS Conference as an estimated 25,000 scientists, politicians, physicians and activists gathered in Mexico City. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the conference on its opening day Sunday that discrimination against gays must end and called for countries to expand AIDS-prevention programmes for the high-risk group. It is the first such AIDS conference in Latin America since the epidemic began in the 1980s. The gathering, expected to be the largest to date for the biennial conference, is to end Friday. Mexican President Felipe Calderon, former Botswana president Festus Mogae and St Kitts and Nevis President Denzil Douglas each called for the end of discrimination against gay men. Mogae was one of the first African leaders to publicly undergo an HIV test to set an example for his countrymen and -women. Thousands of people demonstrated in the streets of the Mexican capital against homophobia. Gay men represent one-fourth of the new infections in Latin America. Jorge Saavedra Lopez, the director general of Mexico’s National Centre for Prevention and Control of HIV/AIDS and the country’s first openly […]

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LONDON — In the end, the 2008 Lambeth Conference will probably be remembered most for the bishop who was not in attendance but who nonetheless threatened to break apart the world’s third-largest church. The once-a-decade gathering of Anglican bishops and archbishops, which ended Sunday, was dominated by disputes concerning V. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the worldwide Anglican church, who was consecrated five years ago in New Hampshire. In a news conference Sunday, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual head of the world’s 77 million Anglicans, urged bishops to halt further consecrations of gay bishops, pointing a finger specifically at the United States. He said that certain dioceses in the American church continue ‘to put our relations as a communion under strain, and some problems won’t be resolved while those practices continue.’ Williams also pushed for the creation of a covenant, a doctrinal document of shared beliefs to be signed by each of the 38 self-governing Anglican provinces, including the Episcopal Church in the United States, which has about 2.3 million members. For all the attention he generated, Robinson did not attend the 20-day conference. Williams withheld his invitation in […]

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