Already, China uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. Every week to 10 days, another coal- fired power plant opens somewhere in China.
"No individual could do this," said John Large, an independent nuclear consultant. "What you are talking about is the creation of a very clever little device, a designer poison pill, possibly created by nanotechnology. Without nanotechnology you would be talking about a fairly big pill, a pea-sized pill. Either way you are looking at intricate technology which is beyond the means and designs of a hired assassin without a state sponsor." He said the likely poison pill that killed Mr Litvinenko would have to have been manufactured in a special laboratory over two or three weeks and then used very quickly - possibly within 28 days - because the half-life of the isotope polonium is only 138 days.
The Russian weapons used by Hezbollah in the July fighting with Israel were new and routed through Syria. Intelligence sources say Bout was spotted in Beirut during the fighting, shortly before the sophisticated armor-piercing Fagot and Kornet anti-tank missiles were discovered. Interesting coincidence. When the Israelis presented the Russians with overwhelming evidence of the armament, it was publicly dismissed, but a senior official in the Russian arms export enterprise was reportedly dismissed to placate the outside world. Finally, there are Bout’s actions in the Horn of Africa where, again with official Russian support, his aircraft have been spotted delivering weapons to the Islamic Court militias in Somalia and arming the Islamist allies in Eritrea.
Polonium 210 does its damage by emitting alpha particles, which have enough energy to tear apart the genetic machinery of cells, killing them outright or causing them to mutate into tumor-producing forms. It gives off 5,000 times more alpha particles than does the same amount of radium.
...groups responsible for many of the insurgent and terrorist attacks are raising $70 million to $200 million a year from illegal activities. It says that $25 million to $100 million of the total comes from oil smuggling and other criminal activity involving the state-owned oil industry aided by “corrupt and complicit” Iraqi officials. As much as $36 million a year comes from ransoms paid to save hundreds of kidnap victims in Iraq, the report said.
Russia has begun delivery of Tor-M1 air defense missile systems to Iran, a Defense Ministry official said Friday, confirming that Moscow would proceed with arms deals with Tehran in spite of U.S. criticism.
Polonium is a highly radioactive and toxic element and is dangerous to handle. Even in milligram or microgram amounts, handling polonium-210 is very dangerous and requires special equipment used with strict procedures. Direct damage occurs from energy absorption into tissues from alpha particles. The maximum allowable body burden for ingested polonium is only 1100 becquerels (0.03 microcurie), which is equivalent to a particle weighing only 6.8 × 10-12 gram. Weight for weight polonium is approximately 2.5 × 1011 times as toxic as hydrogen cyanide. The maximum permissible concentration for airborne soluble polonium compounds is about 7,500 Bq/m3 (2 × 10-11 µCi/cm3). Polonium has been found in tobacco smoke from tobacco leaves grown at some specific places, as a contaminant [2] [3] and in uranium ores. Use as a poison At a committed effective dose equivalent (CEDE) of 5.14×10−7 Sieverts per Becquerel (1.9×103 mrem/microcurie) for ingested 210Po and a specific activity of 1.66×1014 Bq/gram (4.49×103 Curies/gram)[4] the amount of material required to produce a lethal dose of 10 Sieverts would be only .12 micrograms (1.17×10−7g).
he acquittal rate in Japan is less than 1 percent. [Source] (For a good study of the Japanese criminal prosecution system, see David Johnson, The Japanese Way of Justice: Prosecuting Crime in Japan (2002), reviewed here.) Interestingly, Taiwan's acquittal rate is 12% [source] - lower than the US but still in the same ballpark, while conspicuously higher than that of Japan or South Korea, to whose criminal justice systems its own bears a much higher formal resemblance.
The conclusions are dramatic: "I believe this paper will change forever the field of human genetics," commented Professor James R. Lupski, Vice Chair, Department of Molecular and Human Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas. "One can no longer consider human traits as resulting primarily from single base-pair changes or influenced only by SNPs. With all due respect to Watson and Crick, many Mendelian and complex traits, as well as sporadic diseases, may indeed result from structural variation of the genome."
Australia is the first non-European country in the democracy index coming in at number eight, followed by Canada and Switzerland.
The First Law of Petropolitics, in short, argues that the price of oil and the pace of freedom operate in an inverse correlation. As the price of oil goes up in what I call petroauthoritarian states—like Iran, Sudan, Venezuela—the pace of freedom goes down. These regimes can afford to be less responsive to their people and outside pressure. And as the price of oil goes down, the pace of freedom goes up because these regimes have to open up to the world if they want to deliver for their people, and they have to empower their people more. When oil was $30 a barrel, Iran was calling for a dialogue of civilizations. At $70 a barrel, Iran is calling for the destruction of Israel.
But the price of seriously engaging Syria and Iran will be enormously high. It may be viewed as necessary, but ultimately it will be extremely high. Hezbollah, according to recent intelligence estimates, receives some $200 million a year in combined revenue from Iran, Syria, and diasporas in West Africa and Latin America, particularly the Tri-Border Area. That is a significant amount of money that enables it to be a political force far beyond its natural constituency. It has shown its willingness to carry out terrorist attacks against the United States and against other countries at the behest of Iran (the Buenos Aires bombing in the mid 1990s). Giving Iran and Syria-and their allies in Lebanon-a favored seat at the negotiating table, and before negotiations have even begun, to give them the upper hand, is a dangerous proposition.
Addressing the opening session of the sixth review conference of the Convention on Biological Weapons (BWC), U.S. delegation head John C. Rood said those countries were of particular concern given their "support for terrorism". "We believe that Iran probably has an offensive biological weapons programme in violation of the BWC," Rood said. "We also believe North Korea has a biological weapons capability and may have developed, produced and weaponised for use. "Finally, we remain seriously concerned that Syria ... has conducted research and development for an offensive BW programme," he said.
The index provides a snapshot of the current state of democracy for 165 independent states and two territories.
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Sweden, a near-perfect democracy, comes top, followed by a bevy of similarly virtuous northern European countries.
"In this simple experiment, we removed part of the chick embryo's wing, activated Wnt signaling, and got the whole limb back - a beautiful and perfect wing," said the lead author, Juan Carlos Izpis�a Belmonte, Ph.D., a professor in the Gene Expression Laboratory. "By changing the expression of a few genes, you can change the ability of a vertebrate to regenerate their limbs, rebuilding blood vessels, bone, muscles, and skin - everything that is needed."
The bottom line is that the bones are modern (i.e., not Neandertal), but they include features that are common in Neandertals. Almost all the other European bones of early Upper Paleolithic date also have Neandertal features. The number and frequency of such features in this earliest Upper Paleolithic sample are greater than in any later sample. In other words, they look like they have genes from Neandertals. And those genes declined in frequency or effect over time.
Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein. But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.
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Others worry that the study sets a dangerous precedent. Although it was approved by the French research ministry's Genetic Engineering Committee, Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, says any study that creates new viruses or activates old ones should be subject to a special review at the national or international level. What's more, he says, because the researchers couldn't be absolutely sure about Phoenix's infectivity, the study should have been carried out under Biosafety level 4 conditions--the best-protected labs available--instead of the level 3 conditions utilized.
From a clinical perspective, our results suggest the use of sleep deprivation in the immediate aftermath of traumatic events as a possible therapeutic measure to prevent a long-term engravement of these events in memory, thereby at least partly counteracting the development of PTSD as a disease thought to reflect overconsolidated emotional memories.