RFID and recycling fines 08/27/2010
Cleveland residents get RFID-equipped recycling By Bill Ray Posted in Environment, 23rd August 2010 15:33 GMT Residents in Cleveland, Ohio, will have to ensure their recycling is out on time or face a $100 fine for failing to do their bit. RFID tags will be fitted to the recycling bins provide by the city council, and counted by passing rubbish-collection vans. Any residents whose recycling bin isn't on the curb over a couple of weeks will get a visit from the rubbish inspector, and face a $100 fine if it turns out they've been discarding recyclable goods. It's not just for the good of the planet - the city council told Cleveland.comthat a ton of recyclables can be sold off for $26, while a ton of landfill costs $30 to get shot of. 25,000 RFID-enabled bins and reading equipment for the vans will set the Council back $2.5m this year. The idea is to roll out similar numbers of tags every year until in five or six years the whole city is covered. The council reckons that makes the project profitable, assuming that it encourages more recycling, so it's hard finance that prompts the measure rather than any limp-wristed liberal agenda. Not that this has stopped the usual outrage from those who demand the right to produce rubbish. Over at Gizmodo the readers are doing just that: "Wow, what happened to freedom?" Others are less obtuse: "whats with the limiting of garbage? Wouldn't a high amount of refuse be a sign of a strengthening economy?" The problem is that people are very lazy, and asking them politely obviously isn't working - give them a bin labelled "bottles" and some will manage to put glass into it, but the majority continue to put everything in one sack and expect someone else to deal with it. In the UK the idea of fining people for producing too much rubbish has been replaced with a scheme for rewarding people who produce less, though that still faces privacy concerns from people who consider the weight of their rubbish to be private. READ MORE Russia in flames 08/17/2010
EVACUATE NOW!: This is Not a Drill August 15, 2010 posted by Bob Nichols · 52 Comments REUTERS / Denis Sinyakov - Forest fires hit areas remaining radioactive since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. (San Francisco) – Russia is burning down this summer. The smoke is engulfing Moscow and the European Union. Embassies are emptying. What’s the deal? Thousands of forest fires are burning all over Russia. More importantly, the nuclear weapons factories and reactors around Mayak and the former Soviet Union’s Uranium Project are going up in smoke. The smoke is toxic and radioactive in every possible sense of the words. Russian forest fires are burning down old H-Bomb factory areas and the Chernobyl poisoned woodlands. This holds the virtual certainty of at least 241,000,000 Lethal Doses of radioactivity becoming air borne during a fire. Due to peculiar nuclear forces the tiny ceramicized radioactive particles stay in the air for months or even years till they are “rained out” by some form of precipitation. Snowflake edges are particularly good scavengers of radioactive particles. Two US Air Force C130s just flew into Moscow. Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab, or one of the seven other nuclear weapons labs in the US, are more than likely involved. Ask yourself this. What on earth could have scared the Russian nuke forces enough to call in their old hated Cold War foe – the US Air Force – for help? There is a simple way to let the people of the world know what is going on with airborne Chernobyl and Mayak data. We paid for all the data, anyway, whether Russian, American or European Union Data. Free the Data. Release it to the InterNet all over the world and let people decide for themselves which country is safe enough for their families to live in. If you are planning a trip to Europe or Russia – don’t go. If you are already there – leave immediately. If you have family or friends there – get them out if you can. This is not a drill. It is the real deal. Another way to look at the Mayak national sacrifice zone in Russia is that the old Soviet Union manufactured 30,000 global thermonuclear weapons. There were numerous “accidents” at Mayak that weren’t supposed to happen and “officially” never did happen. The government lied, of course. READ MORE Fish Kills along the American East coast 08/17/2010
World Bank to indebt Pakistan with "aid" 08/17/2010
From NBC shills ISLAMABAD — The World Bank will release $900 million to help fund relief efforts for Pakistan's flood disaster as international agencies warned millions of people were at risk from disease. The United Nations has warned that up to 3.5 million children could be in danger of contracting deadly diseases carried through contaminated water and insects in a crisis that has disrupted the lives of at least a tenth of Pakistan's 170 million people. Up to 1,600 people have been killed and two million made homeless in Pakistan's worst floods in decades. Hundreds of villages across Pakistan, one of the poorest countries in Asia, have been marooned, highways have been cut in half and thousands of homeless people have been forced to set up tarpaulin tents along the side of roads. The World Bank funds will come through the reprogramming of planned projects and reallocation of undisbursed funds, but it did not say how it would be utilized to aid flood victims. "We are reprioritizing to make the funds immediately available," said Mariam Altaf, a spokesman for the World Bank. Public anger has grown in two weeks of floods, highlighting potential political troubles for an unpopular government as aid failed to keep pace with the rising river waters. READ MORE Segment of the article from COUNTERCURRENTS Only one country has set a record for its coldest-ever temperature in 2010. Guinea, in west Africa, recorded 1.4C (34.5F) in a nine-day cold snap at Mali-ville in the Labe region in January. Farmers lost most of their crops and animals. Record temperatures in 2010 Belarus, 7 August, 38.9C (102F) at Gomel Ukraine, 1 August, 41.3C (106.3F), Lukhansk, Voznesensk Cyprus, 1 August, 46.6C (115.9F), Lefconica Finland, 29 July, 37.2C (99F), Joensuu Qatar, 14 July, 50.4C (122.7F), Doha airport Russia, 11 July, 44.0C (111.2F), Yashkul Sudan, 25 June, 49.6C (121.3F), Dongola Niger, 22 June, 47.1C (116.8F), Bilma Saudi Arabia, 22 June, 52.0C (125.6F), Jeddah Chad, 22 June, 47.6C (117.7F), Faya Kuwait, 15 June, 52.6C (126.7F), Abdaly Iraq, 14 June, 52.0C (125.6F), Basra Pakistan, 26 May, 53.5C (128.3F), Mohenjo-daro Burma, 12 May, 47C (116.6F), Myinmu Ascension Island, 25 March, 34.9C (94.8F), Georgetown Solomon Islands, 1 February, 36.1C (97F), Lata Nendo Colombia, 24 January, 42.3C (108F), Puerto Salga READ FULL ARTICLE FROM BBC: Some of the cattle cloned to boost food production in the US have been created from the cells of dead animals, according to a US cloning company. Farmers say it is being done because it is only possible to tell that the animal's meat is of exceptionally high quality by inspecting its carcass. US scientists are using a variety of techniques to assess which animals have exceptional qualities. These attributes include meat quality, productivity or longevity. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote The notion behind what we are doing is to find that animal that created that great steak - and once we have it, we want to reproduce it” End Quote Scott Simplot JR Simplot Company These exceptional animals are cloned to be used as breeding stock, with the aim of raising the quality of herds on beef, dairy and pig farms in the US. There is a long tradition of resurrecting dead animals for cloning - Dolly the sheep being a case in point. The head of the leading US animal cloning company has said that European farmers will fall behind the rest of the world unless they are allowed to use such techniques to improve the productivity of their livestock. The aim of livestock cloning is to clone the best animals to produce the best beef. But some cattle farmers believe it is impossible to pick the best quality animals until their meat has been properly analysed. That is why there are cloned bulls here that have been produced from the cells taken from the carcasses of dead animals. Brady Hicks of the JR Simplot company in Idaho said his organisation was among many that had tried out the technique successfully. "The animals are hanging on a rail ready to go to the meat counter," he told BBC News. "We identify carcasses that have certain carcass characteristics that we want, but it's too late to reproduce the genetics of the animal. But through cloning we can resurrect that animal." Supporters of cloning want to improve the great American steak These "resurrected" animals are then bred with naturally born cows. The next step is to see if their offspring - whose meat can be sold to consumers in the US - have the same qualities as the grandparent from which the cells were originally taken. Ranchers at the Simplot company also clone from live animals that are particularly productive or fertile. The driving force behind the project is the head of the company, Scott Simplot, who firmly believes that cloning can be used to improve beef production. His stated aim is to raise the standard of the great American steak. "The notion behind what we are doing is to find that animal that created that great steak - and once we have it, we want to reproduce it," he said. READ MORE |



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