Germany opened its first offshore wind farm Tuesday which Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel called a key step toward more reliance on renewable energy in Europe’s biggest economy. Gabriel pressed the start button at the Hooksiel complex some 500m off Germany’s North Sea coast. The five megawatts produced at the pilot site will flow into the gas and electrical station in the coastal city of Wilhelmshaven, enough to serve 5,000 households. ‘Offshore wind power is of key importance for our future energy supply and a decisive factor in achieving our expansion goals for renewable energy,’ Gabriel said. ‘The start of operations at this pilot plant is an important step that shows we are making progress.’ The Hooksiel plant is intended as a prototype for a park with 80 turbines 100km off the coast of the North Sea island of Borkum, construction on which is to begin early next year. Britain, the Netherlands and Denmark all have offshore wind farms.
Taiwan’s leader said he will meet with a top Chinese envoy next week in his role as the island’s president, as he attempts to allay fears that such high-level contacts will compromise Taiwan’s sovereignty. Ma Ying-jeou’s comments, made in a television interview Wednesday, were part of the government’s media campaign ahead of a visit by Chen Yunlin, chairman of the mainland’s semiofficial Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait. Chen’s visit, which begins Monday, was clouded when a deputy was attacked by protesters in the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan during an informal visit last week. The deputy was lightly injured and left Taiwan two days early. Chen’s visit _ the first by a top Chinese envoy _ is supposed to provide tangible evidence of reduced tensions between Taipei and Beijing and give a big boost to Ma’s program of greater engagement with the mainland. ‘I will receive them in the capacity of the president of the Republic of China,’ Ma said the ETTV Cable News station interview, referring to the island by its official name. Ma said he hoped Chen would refer to him as president. Ma said the two sides would observe a […]
WASHINGTON — Medical science has learned a great deal about the causes of pain and ways to relieve it, pain experts say, but for a host of reasons, the treatment of pain and suffering has improved hardly at all in recent years. John Seffrin, the president of the American Cancer Society, calls this ‘a national health-care crisis of under-treated pain.” ‘Nearly all cancer pain can be relieved, but fewer than half of our patients report adequate pain relief,” Rebecca Kirch, the society’s associate director of policy, told a pain seminar in Washington last week. Hospitals do a little better than that in managing pain for patients with all kinds of illnesses, according to a survey to be published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine. The survey of hospitals in 40 metropolitan areas by the Harvard School of Public Health found that one-third of patients felt that their pain wasn’t well controlled. The percentage of those who were satisfied by their pain care ranged from 72 percent in Birmingham, Ala., to 57 percent in New York City hospitals. At least 76 million Americans suffer chronic pain, including as much as three-quarters of people who […]
Think of the solitude felt by Marie Smith before she died earlier this year in her native Alaska, at 89. She was the last person who knew the language of the Eyak people as a mother-tongue. Or imagine Ned Mandrell, who died in 1974-he was the last native speaker of Manx, similar to Irish and Scots Gaelic. Both these people had the comfort of being surrounded, some of the time, by enthusiasts who knew something precious was vanishing and tried to record and learn whatever they could of a vanishing tongue. In remote parts of the world, dozens more people are on the point of taking to their graves a system of communication that will never be recorded or reconstructed. Does it matter? Plenty of languages-among them Akkadian, Etruscan, Tangut and Chibcha-have gone the way of the dodo, without causing much trouble to posterity. Should anyone lose sleep over the fact that many tongues-from Manchu (spoken in China) to Hua (Botswana) and Gwich’in (Alaska)-are in danger of suffering a similar fate? Compared with groups who lobby to save animals or trees, campaigners who lobby to preserve languages are themselves a rare breed. But they are trying both to […]
It is a winter habitation option that few would hesitate over: the Siberian tundra or the glorious Gloucestershire wetlands. But flocks of Bewick’s swans appear to have plumped for the former, prompting fears that their great migration might never be seen again. Concerns have been raised by the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust centre at Slimbridge where hundreds of the swans would normally have arrived and be settling for the winter months after a summer in Siberia. None has been sighted, leading conservationists to suggest that climate change has made the Arctic so warm that they are happy to stay put. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) said that if temperatures continued to rise the birds might lose their ‘collective memory’ of their winter home, denying Britain’s birdwatchers one of the year’s most impressive sights. About 8,100 swans usually winter in Britain. The majority, about 6,000, go to East Anglia, about 300 head for Slimbridge and others are seen on the Severn estuary, the Nene Washes, Cambridgeshire, and Martin Mere in Lancashire. The swans were due at Slimbridge on October 21, although they have been late before. In 1969 they did not return until […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
