World-News

28.03.2006

http://www.zdf.de/ZDFde/inhalt/19/0,1872,3918131,00.html

Frontal21

Immer mehr Schwangere und junge Mütter müssen nach Ansicht von Experten um ihren Arbeitsplatz fürchten. Und das, obwohl sie nach dem Gesetz eigentlich unkündbar sein sollen.

Von Anke Becker-Wenzel, Astrid Randerath und Anke Lang

"Wir können beobachten, dass in den vergangenen sechs Jahren die Zahl der gekündigten oder zur Kündigung vorgesehenen Schwangeren sich etwa verdoppelt", sagt Robert Rath vom Berliner Landesamt für Arbeitsschutz, Gesundheitsschutz und technische Sicherheit zu Frontal21. Andere Frauen werden mit unrealistischen Arbeitszeit-Angeboten oder Abfindungen aus dem Job gedrängt.

Mehr dazu
Frontal21, Dienstag, 28.03.2006, 21.00 Uhr

Bundesweit stieg die Zahl der Anträge auf Kündigung während des Mutterschutzes oder der Elternzeit nach Angaben der zuständigen Arbeitsschutzbehörden von 1999 bis zum Jahr 2004 um rund 20 Prozent.

Verdoppelung der Kündigungen Allein in Berlin hat sich die Zahl der Kündigungsversuche seit 1998 etwa verdoppelt, so Rath. Im Landesamt wird über Anträge zur Kündigung entschieden: "Im Jahr 1998 waren das noch etwa 200 Entscheidungen, die wir zu treffen hatten", sagt er. "Im Jahr 2004 waren es knapp 400 Entscheidungen." Er gehe davon aus, dass es außerdem eine große Dunkelziffer gebe.

Bei vielen Frauen waren die Kündigungen Rath zufolge nicht berechtigt. In mehr als der Hälfte der Fälle seien die Entscheidungen zu Kündigungsanträgen während des Mutterschutzes zwar so ausgefallen, dass ihnen stattgegeben werden musste. Aber in der anderen knappen "Hälfte der Fälle waren die Anträge nicht gerechtfertigt - unter fadenscheinigen Gründen sollten die Frauen aus dem Arbeitsmarkt entfernt werden."

Zweifelhaftes Angebot Jana Wehr, medizinisch-technische Assistentin aus Hamburg, hat sich gewehrt - und einen Auflösungsvertrag ihres Arbeitgebers abgelehnt. Nach der Geburt ihres zweiten Kindes sollte sie gegen eine Abfindung ihren Arbeitsplatz aufgeben.

Wehr weigerte sich und wollte vor Gericht ziehen. Daraufhin wurde ihr eine Arbeitszeit von 14 bis 19 Uhr angeboten - Zeiten, die mit Kindertagesstätte und Schule nicht zu vereinbaren sind. "Das ist für mich ganz klar, das macht man, um mich aus der Firma rauszubekommen, ganz einfach, weil sie auch wissen, dass man sich auf so was nicht einlassen kann", glaubt Wehr. "Das habe ich auch schon mehrfach gehört, dass Müttern wirklich solche Angebote gemacht werden."

"Total aussichtslos, total frustrierend" Schließlich gibt Wehr doch auf und akzeptiert die Abfindung. "Das ist einfach total aussichtslos, total frustrierend, weil es fast ausgeschlossen ist, jemals wieder in diesen Beruf reinzukommen", sagt die 37-Jährige. Heute arbeitet sie auf 400-Euro-Basis als Arzthelferin.

Auch für eine junge Wirtschaftsprüferin, die anonym bleiben möchte, bedeutete die Geburt ihrer Kinder das vorläufige Ende der Karriere. Ihr Arbeitgeber habe eine Teilzeitstelle abgelehnt, weil man sie damit nicht an die Kunden "verkaufen könne", berichtet die Anwältin Jutta Glock, die die Frau vertritt.

Keine Alternative Ihre Mandantin klagte zunächst auf Teilzeitbeschäftigung und suchte innerhalb des Unternehmens nach einer anderen Stelle, bei der sie nicht so viel reisen müsste und familienfreundlichere Arbeitszeiten hätte. "Es wurde auch nie überhaupt über eine Alternative auch nachgedacht", sagt sie. Sie selbst habe viele Möglichkeiten in dem Unternehmen gesehen. Schließlich lässt auch sie sich auf eine Abfindung ein und gibt ihren Arbeitsplatz auf.

Anwältin Glock sieht die jungen Frauen - und die Unternehmen - in einem wachsenden Konflikt. "Ich würde sagen, dass Klima hat sich sehr verschärft in den vergangenen Jahren, was sich zwangsläufig durch den wirtschaftlichen Druck ergibt", erklärt sie. Zum einen die wirtschaftlichen Anforderungen auf der Arbeitgeberseite, zum anderen die Knappheit an Arbeitsplätzen aus Arbeitnehmersicht. "Diese beiden Konstellationen führen dazu, dass eine Arbeitnehmerin versuchen muss, wirklich ihren Arbeitsplatz zu behalten, koste es, was es wolle."

Quadratur des Kreises Gleichzeitig gibt es weitere Erwartungen, die schwer zu vereinbaren sind: "Einerseits wird auf die Mutter projiziert, sie soll Kinder kriegen, andererseits wird aber auf sie projiziert, sie soll sich um die Kinder kümmern, soll es nicht nur dem Staat überlassen, die Erziehungsseite, aber letztlich soll sie natürlich aber auch im Arbeitsprozess drin bleiben dürfen, und sie soll auch Karriere machen dürfen", sagt Glock. "Und das alles immer zu vereinbaren ist fast schon manchmal eine Quadratur des Kreises."

Die fehlende Kooperationsbereitschaft der Unternehmen führt bei immer mehr Frauen dazu, dass sie den Spagat zwischen Kindern und Beruf gar nicht erst ausprobieren - und den Kampf gegen ihren Arbeitgeber und um ihren Job aufgeben. Jana Wehr kennt viele solche Fälle. "Diese Entwicklung finde ich wahnsinnig erschreckend, weil es eben auch vielen Müttern in meinem Freundeskreis ähnlich gegangen ist", sagt sie.

"Es wird nichts getan" "Die Rückkehr an ihren Arbeitsplatz sei ihnen erschwert oder gar unmöglich gemacht worden. Das macht Jana Wehr wütend: "Alle jammern rum - unsere Gesellschaft veraltet, und das ist ja ein ganz großes Thema im Moment - aber es wird nichts dafür getan, dass die jungen Menschen auch wieder bereit sind zu sagen: So, ich möchte jetzt Kinder haben."

© ZDF 2006

http://www.zdf.de/ZDFde/inhalt/19/0,1872,3918131,00.html

Illegaler Holzhandel: Greenpeace sieht China in Schlüsselrolle bei Urwaldvernichtung in Südostasien (28.03.06)

Ein am Dienstag in Peking veröffentlichter Greenpeace-Report kommt zum Ergebnis, dass China eine zentrale Rolle im Handel mit illegal gefälltem Holz aus Südostasien spielt. Der Handel werde angetrieben durch den wachsenden chinesischen Eigenbedarf wie auch durch den Weiterverkauf in die USA, nach Europa und Japan. Greenpeace fordert, im Rahmen des UN-Übereinkommens über Biologische Vielfalt (CBD) den Handel mit illegal und zerstörerisch gefälltem Holz zu verbieten sowie ein globales Netz von Urwald-Schutzgebieten einzurichten.

Die ganze Nachricht im Internet: http://www.ngo-online.de/ganze_nachricht.php?Nr=13264

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER

Tuesday, March 28, 2006 · Last updated 7:24 a.m. PT

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

MUNICH, Germany -- The German state of Bavaria on Tuesday announced a ban on the use of cell phones in schools to prevent students from viewing images of pornography and extreme violence.

Students can still carry their phones, but will have to leave them switched off during school hours, including during breaks, state education minister Siegfried Schneider said.

The ban comes after police recently found pornography and violent images on cell phones seized from students at schools in the Bavarian towns of Augsburg and Immenstadt.

"School is no place for phoning and certainly not for distributing concoctions that endanger youth," Schneider said.

©1996-2006 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1103AP_Germany_Phone_Porn.html


Informant: James River Martin

Published: Mar 28, 2006 - 08:57:34 am EST

By Jason Rhodes,
Special to the Crisfield Times

WESTOVER — Cellular telephones are a way of life for many Americans in the 21st century. However, that way of life soon may end for students in Somerset County Public Schools.

Last week, Dr. Karen-Lee Brofee, superintendent of schools, announced the Somerset County Board of Education may reconsider its student cell phone policy, which currently permits students to carry phones in schools for emergencies and parental convenience.

“This is being very badly abused to the point that students are text messaging each other all day and getting calls from parents in the middle of class,” she said.

Besides disrupting classes with cell phone use, some students may be using the devices - particularly camera phones — to help others cheat on tests, Dr. Brofee said. Camera phones may give students the opportunity to photograph tests and quizzes and pass on the questions to students in other classes.

“This is not just a problem in Somerset County. It’s a problem throughout the United States,” the superintendent said.

She also said lack of support from parents in minimizing classroom cell phone disruption compounded the problem. When cell phones are taken away from students, they are turned in to school offices, where parents may retrieve them, she said. Often when parents pick up the phones, they give them back to the students, and the cycle repeats itself.

Dr. Brofee said she planned to submit recommendations for a revised cell phone policy to board members at a future meeting.

http://www.newszap.com/articles/2006/03/28/dm/eastern_shore_of_maryland/crs03.txt

All Rights Reserved - Independent Newspapers, Inc.

Informant: James River Martin

Der Landtag wird am 30.3. über den Antrag der Linke.pds und SPD zum Vergabe- und Mindestlohngesetz entscheiden. Heute durften wir erfahren, dass davon auszugehen ist, dass die CDU-Mehrheit es ablehnen wird.

Deshalb muss genügend Druck von BASIS geschaffen werden. Die MAHNWACHE direkt vor dem Landtag gegen Armut und Billiglohn (29.3., ab 18 Uhr bis 30.3. bis zum start der DEMO), ist ein wichtiges Mittel um Druck auszuüben.

Wenn der Druck auf die SozialKahlSchläger nicht stärker wird, darf man sich nicht wundern, dass die Armut, soziale Ungerechtigkeit und die Rechtsentwicklung wächst.

Deshalb mitmachen!

Weitere Infos: http://www.gegenbilliglohn.de

"Netzwerk Grundeinkommen"

7. Newsletter des Netzwerks Grundeinkommen vom März 2006 (pdf) http://www.grundeinkommen.info/fileadmin/Text-Depot/Newsletter7/NL_07.pdf


ELO Initiative und Erwerbslosenausschuss ver.di Südbaden zum „Einkommen zum Auskommen“ 10 Thesen des Bezirkserwerbslosenausschusses ver.di Südbaden zu den Forderungen des LEA „Eckpunkte Beschäftigungspolitik“

Thesen zu gewerkschaftlicher Erwerbslosenarbeit verabschiedet vom Bezirksvorstand ver.di Südbaden und eingebracht in LEA ver.di Ba Wü im Oktober 2005 (pdf) http://www.labournet.de/diskussion/arbeit/existenz/elo1.pdf


„Für Existenzsicherung mit und ohne Erwerbsarbeit“

Beitrag von Ingrid Wagner vom 16.09.2005 http://www.labournet.de/diskussion/arbeit/existenz/elo.html


Paradiesische Zustände – Wertediskussion und Wachstumszwang

Referat von Ingrid Wagner, gehalten auf der MVV Netzwerk Grundeinkommen am 26.11.06 (pdf) http://www.labournet.de/diskussion/arbeit/existenz/elo2.pdf


Bürgergeld statt Bürgerkrieg. Manager als Sozialreformer

Artikel von Ines Eck in "Der Linke Berliner" vom 15.3.2006 http://www.linker-berliner.de/volltexte/w0603161.html


Aus: LabourNet, 28. März 2006

study says

Old-growth cutting in southwestern B.C. blamed for decline in animal population

http://tinyurl.com/ralqx

TPStory/Environment

MARK HUME

VANCOUVER -- The continued logging of old-growth forests in southwestern British Columbia may lead to the regional extinction of 17 species of mammals, birds, amphibians and fish, according to a new study published in the conservation journal Biodiversity.

While it has been widely accepted that spotted owls are at serious risk of disappearing in B.C. largely because of old-growth logging, it has not been clear previously that so many other species are also in trouble.

But the researchers, Dr. Stephen Yezerinac, of Bishop's University, and Dr. Faisal Moola, of the David Suzuki Foundation, said their study found habitat destruction is threatening a whole spectrum of species, including tailed frogs, coastal marbled murrelets, northern goshawks, fishers and others.

"We found the threat of pervasive endangerment . . . is all across the food web," Dr. Moola said in an interview.

He said the reasons for the population decline of the different species are varied, but there is little doubt that logging of old-growth forests is the main cause for all species.

"The commonality is the shared old-growth habitat," Dr. Moola said. "This study shows that one-quarter of all animals dependent on remaining old-growth forests in southwestern B.C. are threatened [with extirpation]."

He said that while the B.C. government is preparing a spotted-owl recovery program, it's unlikely those efforts will do anything to help the other species that are also threatened.

"There is talk of a captive breeding program, of feeding owls in the winter and shooting predators [of the owls]," he said. "But these efforts will do nothing for the other species."

Dr. Moola said environmental managers should develop a "flagship fleet" of indicator species and then tailor prescriptive measures to ensure they all survive.

He said this means protecting habitat -- and that could lead to considerable restrictions on logging in some areas.

There appears to be no alternative because the animals can't survive unless their habitat is protected, he added.

"Logging was the main factor threatening all of these species at risk," he said.

He said the spread of logging roads and clear-cut zones is fragmenting the forest at an alarming rate.

"The old-growth habitat in southwest B.C. has declined by half [from historic levels], and logging is continuing," Dr. Moola said. "We're looking at an entire ecosystem that's being literally ripped apart."

The researchers studied scientific literature dealing with 138 species in B.C. and identified 119 specific threats to them.

"Timber harvesting was the most commonly stated threat, followed in frequency by a set of threats that indirectly arise from timber harvesting (road building, forest fragmentation, and herbicide application to tree plantations). Timber harvesting plus indirect effects of timber harvesting comprised 41 per cent and 44 per cent of all identified threats to species classified as at risk and secure, respectively," the paper states.

"The pattern of threats to species at risk did not differ noticeably from the threats to species classified as secure. Moreover, the pattern of threats varied little among taxonomic groups.

"Timber harvesting was the most common single threat for amphibians (50 per cent of 6 threats), birds (38 per cent of 40 threats), vascular plants (40 per cent of 20 threats), and fish (14 per cent of 35 threats), whereas human disturbance was the most common threat for mammals (28 per cent of 18 threats)."

During the past decade, the number of spotted owls has declined by nearly half, leaving only 22 known birds in the province, which holds Canada's entire population of the rare birds.

Dr. Moola said the plight of spotted owls has drawn a lot of attention to the management of old-growth forests, but neither the federal nor the provincial governments have moved to adequately protect them or the other species at risk in the forests.

He said half the species at risk in British Columbia have been assessed by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada; therefore, only those are eligible for protection under Canada's new Species at Risk Act.

The research paper is in the current issue of Biodiversity, Journal Of Life On Earth, a quarterly, international publication.

- END -


-- Tim Hermach
Native Forest Council
PO Box 2190 Eugene, OR 97402
541.688.2600 541.461.2156 fax
web page: http://www.forestcouncil.org
DEFENDING LIFE, LAND & LIBERTY
* Honest & Fully Costed Accounting,
* Voices of Integrity, Hope & Reason
* Honest & Uncompromised Education, Advocacy & Litigation
* Real Protection for 650 Million Acres of Federal Land, Rivers & Streams

See for yourself at: http://forestcouncil.org/learn/aerial/index.html


Informant: Scott Munson

Monday, March 27 2006 @ 06:02 AM

PST Biotech Crops Will Hurt U.S. Family Farmers and Deepen the Energy Crisis

By: John E. Peck

As concerns about peak oil mount, the latest group to jump on the renewable energy bandwagon has been the biotech industry. In a March 13th 2006 press release building towards their national convention in early April in Chicago, Jim Greenwood, president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), proclaimed that a new wave of genetically engineered technologies “will end our national addiction to oil.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

Family farmers and others who have already suffered from the first wave of biotech crops can only shudder at what lurks within this latest Pandora’s Box. Thanks to Monsanto, farmers are now stuck producing vast quantities of low quality Bt corn that has hardly any market. This unwanted biotech corn must then be dumped - at taxpayer expense - into domestic ethanol production, factory livestock farms, or abroad in places like Mexico where it contaminates indigenous varieties, undercuts peasant farmers, and creates desperate people who have no choice but to cross the border. And in the wake of the Starlink disaster, one can only imagine the consumer safety threat posed by fields of high starch low fiber biotech corn, genetically engineered with an ethanol enzyme, growing adjacent to other corn across the Midwest.

The conventional ethanol industry is already under the thumb of Archers Daniel Midland (ADM), and many family farmers have lost their shirts investing in co-op ethanol projects that end up being gobbled up by ADM when times get tough, such as happened to MN Corn Processors. And, in tune with its slogan about being the supermarket to the world, ADM could care less about energy independence at a national level. They have already pledged to import sugarcane ethanol from Brazil under new “free trade” deals and leave U.S. corn producers high and dry if the price is right. Adding biotech ethanol crops into this corporate-driven quasi-monopoly will only tip the scales further against family farmers.

Another lucrative “solution” to the energy crisis being promoted by the biotech industry is to engineer microbes to produce enzymes that can then be added to switchgrass or crop wastes such as corn stover or wheat straw in largescale biorefineries – a process known as cellulosic ethanol production. Of course, the environmental impact of such unprecedented industrial facilities is unknown. And beyond all the hype, one is still left with the same Enron style scheme dependent upon potentially dangerous patented technologies, abusive one-sided supply contracts, and commodity markets manipulated by corporate cartels.

Patented seed varieties and large bioenergy facilities serving corporate profit margins are hardly a recipe for sustainable rural development or national energy independence. In fact, given all the problems created by existing biotech crops, this misguided approach will only make matters worse. For this reason and many others, family farmers, consumer advocates, and other concerned citizens will also be gathering in Chicago over the weekend of April 7th - 10th for Bioethics 2006, an open public event to educate each other and further strategize about how best to defend our food/farm system from contamination and cooptation by private agribusiness interests.

Rather than going to war overseas or trusting in corporate biotech to secure our fuel supply, the United States would do much better by investing in comprehensive energy conservation, decentralized energy production, and genuine renewable alternatives such as wind, solar, and biodiesel that rely on open source science under local democratic control.

John E. Peck is executive director of Family Farm Defenders
tel. 608-260-0900 http://www.familyfarmdefenders.org


Informant: Reclaim the Commons

http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=2177

Die amerikanische und die englische Regierung bemühen sich aktuell darum, den Weg in den Krieg mit einer UN-Resolution gegen den Iran zu ebnen. Bei den bevorstehenden Gesprächen in Berlin wird sich möglicherweise herausstellen, ob Deutschland ebenfalls in den Krieg marschiert.

In der Veröffentlichung eines vertraulichen Memos eines Diplomaten in der Times-Online wird die Strategie aufgedeckt, mit der England und die USA den Weg für einen Krieg frei machen wollen. Es häufen sich mittlerweile die Indizien, dass dieser Krieg nicht auf den Iran beschränkt sein wird, sondern China und möglicherweise Russland miteinbezieht, und deshalb mit Atomwaffen geführt werden könnte.

In führenden Wirtschaftszeitungen, wie der Financial Times und der Welt wurden Anlegern bereits Hinweise übermittelt, wie sie sich im Fall eines Kriegs verhalten sollten, um Verluste zu vermeiden. Dass mit dem Iran auch China in den Fokus eines Angriffs rückt, bestätigte unter anderem der Investmentexperte Marc Faber in der Financial Times.

Es besteht eine zunehmend verschärfte Konkurrenz auf dem globalen Rohstoffmarkt zwischen den Industriestaaten Europas, den USA und China sowie Japan. China und Japan betreiben umfangreiche Projekte der Ölexploration im Iran im Wert von mehreren hundert Milliarden Dollar um ihre Energieversorgung zu sichern, die insbesondere von seiten der USA als unerwünscht angesehen werden.

Mit Russland wurde die Lieferung eines Abwehrraketensystems vereinbart, das in den nächsten Monaten im Iran installiert werden soll.

Eine Schlüsselrolle für die Entscheidung über den von seiten der englischen und amerikanischen Regierung beabsichtigten Kriegs liegt bei der Berliner Regierung. Falls diese sich gegen einen Krieg entscheidet, wird die Wahrscheinlichkeit gering, dass er - wie der Irakkrieg - allein von England und den USA geführt wird, da beide mit dem Irak bereits stark belastet sind. Die französische Regierung, die ebenfalls die Bereitschaft zeigt, sich an einem Krieg zu beteiligen, wird sich vermutlich zurückhalten, falls Deutschland nicht mit von der Partie ist, da ansonsten der Gegenwind der öffentlichen Meinung ihr nicht den erforderlichen politischen Spielraum dafür geben dürfte.

Innerhalb der deutschen Politik wird es besonders auf das Verhalten der SPD ankommen: auf seiten der CDU ist eine deutliche Mehrheit für einen Krieg abzusehen, ebenso, wie vermutlich bei der FDP und bei den Grünen. Bei der SPD ist von außenpolitischen Exponenten, wie etwa Hans Ulrich Klose ebenso, wie von Außenminister Steimeier eine Befürwortung des Kriegs zu erwarten, während sich Parteichef Platzeck bisher abwehrend verhält. Für die SPD wird es vermutlich erforderlich sein, die bisherigen Kriegsgegner mit einer fingierten Medieninszenierung (s.a. in der Vergangenheit der kuwaitische Babymord oder der sogenannte "Hufeisenplan " zu überzeugen, oder einen iranischen Terroranschlag glaubhaft zu machen, nach dem Muster, wie sie etwa in den Plänen des amerikanischen Generalstabs für die "Operation Northwoods " enthalten waren.

Von Wolfgang Schäuble war bereits die Möglichkeit eines Anschlags mit einer schmutzigen Bombe angedeutet worden, und auch in einem vertraulichen Memo, das Ende 2005 unter der Führung der republikanischen Partei in Washington kursierte, war die Möglichkeit eines Terroranschlags zur Aufbesserung der Stimmung zugunsten der Partei bereits thematisiert worden.

Für die deutsche Politik ist aktuell die Behinderung einer Kriegspolitik durch die Rücksichtnahme auf bevorstehende Landtagswahlen ausgeräumt.

Ob es in dieser "günstigen " Situation zu der Entscheidung für einen Krieg mit der Tendenz, ganz Eurasien in einen nahezu unbegrenzten militärischen Konflikt einzubeziehen, kommen wird, erscheint derzeit unentschieden.

Dafür sprechen die umfangreichen politischen Pfründe der Westmächte in Deutschland, wie unter anderem die Pressemacht des Springerkonzerns sowie eine Mehrzahl der großen Medien darüber hinaus, sowie die weitreichenden "transatlantischen " Seilschaften in der Politik und in der Schwer- und Rüstungsindustrie.

Dagegen stehen die regionalen wirtschaftlichen Interessen, die durch einen Krieg stark in Mitleidenschaft gezogen würden, ebenso, wie die Belange der Bevölkerung insgesamt, die jedoch bei einer Entscheidung über Krieg und Frieden höchstens marginale Berücksichtigung beanspruchen können.

Link zum Beitrag / Hintergrundinfo oder Pressehinweis: http://www.hh-online.com?lid=23816 und http://links.net-hh.de?lid=23816


Infopool / metainfo hamburg http://www.hh-online.com

Over 70 million Africans and an even greater number of farmers in the Indian sub-continent will suffer catastrophic floods, disease and famine if the rich countries of the world fail to change their habits and radically cut their carbon emissions.

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/032706EB.shtml

by Malcolm Prior BBC News, Eastleigh

When nurse Karen Royce found out a mobile phone mast was to go up close to her home, she was outraged.

Concerns over the health risks and the impact on property values were at the front of the mother-of-two's mind.

Yet she knew the mast's erection was far from a certainty - and her local council would have to listen to her and her neighbours' objections.

But the Hampshire villagers' efforts ended in failure, because the council made one simple administrative error.

Eastleigh Borough Council is among the dozens across the country that have fallen foul of a legal loophole that allows mobile phone operators to put up masts if they do not hear from a local authority within 56 days.

A Freedom of Information Act investigation by the BBC News website has revealed that councils in the BBC South region have made the simple mistake 68 times.

Missed deadlines: worst councils # Horsham - 14 times # Southampton - six times # Oxford - six times # Bracknell Forest - six times # Brighton - five times

Eastleigh Borough Council has made the mistake twice, once in 2001 and again last year, when Vodafone applied to put up a mast in the village of Allbrook.

Local residents immediately banded together to raise concerns over the siting of the mast with the council, raising a 100-signature petition.

"Because there had been so many objections the council said it would hold a meeting," said Mrs Royce, 42, of Allbrook Knoll.

"We were all ready to attend this meeting when we then got a letter saying the 56-day limit ran out before this meeting so it didn't even get held.

"We were really angry and felt very let down by them when we heard."

It's the stubbornness in me that keeps me going Karen Royce

The mistake allowed the company to assume it had consent and - despite negotiations to find a different site - the mast went up towards the end of the year.

The council says extra training has been given to councillors and staff since the mistake.

And two officers have been tasked specifically to deal with phone mast applications and a new numbering and coding system has been introduced.

A spokesman said: "The council apologised to residents for missing the statutory deadline.

"The proposal for this mast complied with the council's development plan policies, met national guidelines, including health guidelines for telecommunications masts, and the local area committee would have been recommended to give consent."

A spokeswoman for Vodafone said: "We have operated within the planning regulations."

But for Mrs Royce, the battle is not over - she now intends to take her fight to the European Court of Human Rights.

She said: "It's the stubbornness in me that keeps me going. I do not see why I should have to suffer health hazards and see my property devalued when I do not even use a mobile phone."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/england/4840670.stm

Published: 2006/03/28 05:00:43 GMT

© BBC MMVI

Time Cover Story

No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/032706EA.shtml

http://www.commondreams.org/news2006/0327-03.htm



http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=impeach
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=impeach

By Malcolm Prior
BBC News

Council blunders have allowed dozens of mobile phone masts to win planning permission across southern England, a BBC News investigation has revealed.

On 66 occasions, councils have fallen foul of a legal loophole allowing masts to be approved if an operator is not sent an answer within a set time limit.

In 37 of those cases, the council had intended to object to the application.

A catalogue of errors has been uncovered across the BBC South region using the Freedom of Information Act.

They include decisions being sent by second-class mail instead of first, letters being given the wrong date-stamp, officers calculating the time period incorrectly, the wrong decision notices being sent out and officers forgetting to state clearly enough that the application had actually been refused.

Missed deadlines: worst councils
# Horsham - 14 times
# Southampton - six times
# Oxford - six times
# Bracknell Forest - six times
# Chichester - three times

The mistakes were revealed after the BBC News website made Freedom of Information requests to 41 councils covering Berkshire, Hampshire, Dorset, the Isle of Wight, Oxfordshire and West Sussex.

The news of the extent of the mistakes has been met with anger by anti-mast campaigners.

Karen Barratt, spokesperson for action group Mast Sanity, said: "I think it's absolutely shocking. You expect your local officers to be efficient on what are very serious matters."

Charmaine Despres has collected almost 900 petition signatures in protest at a mast which won permission after a council blunder made in Bournemouth, Dorset.

She said: "I'm not surprised to hear this because [the council officers] are a law unto themselves. They work for us, they are getting paid to do a job yet they are not doing that job properly."

Current legislation allows mobile phone companies to assume masts below 15m in height have been given planning approval if they do not hear in writing from a council within 56 days.

The council is legally obliged to write to the companies within the given time, outlining whether the mast actually needs prior approval and whether or not the council objects to its siting and appearance.

We should have been getting it right. One time is one too many
Michael Crofton-Briggs, Oxford's head of planning

Among the various reasons given for the errors, Eastleigh Borough Council said "an oversight" meant that "documents were not date-stamped properly".

Arun District Council gave the reason that "although the letter was sent out in time, it was sent by second-class post" and East Dorset District Council admitted "the incorrect decision notice was sent out".

Horsham District Council admits to failing to contact the applicant 14 times, although it emphasises that in each case it only intended to inform the company that prior approval was not required.

A spokesperson said: "All subsequent applications in the last six years to date have been dealt with in time.

"We appreciate the current deadlines and consider that we have satisfactory measures in place to deal with all applications."

Oxford City Council has made the slip-up six times over the years but Michael Crofton-Briggs, the council's head of planning, said that only one of the masts objected to has so far been put up.

He admitted: "The 56-day mechanism has been running for four or five years so we should have been getting it right.

"One time is one too many. I am not complacent about this at all."

John Silvester, spokesman for the Planning Officers Society, which represents those working in council planning departments, said: "Sometimes it can be genuine human error and people can make mistakes but there should be procedures in place.

"It's not rocket science to work out when the period finishes. Things should not be taken to the wire - they should be determined in good time."

Some believe the whole system of allowing operators to assume permission - an assumption rarely found elsewhere in the planning system - needs overhauling.

The decision should be made for the right planning reasons rather than because of some artificial time constraint
Alan Sayle, Southampton City Council

"We feel that operators have far too much freedom - they should have to go through a full planning process," said Ms Barratt.

Alan Sayle, development control manager for Southampton City Council, which has fallen foul of the time limit six times, said: "Is the legislation unfair? Yes, I think so.

"The decision should be made for the right planning reasons rather than because of some artificial time constraint."

But both the government and the UK's mobile phone network operators insist that the system is fair.

A spokeswoman for the Mobile Operators Association said: "The operators undertake the same amount of pre-application consultation on a proposed prior approval development as on a larger proposed full planning development.

"Local communities can, and do, comment on both types of applications in exactly the same way."

A spokesman for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister said: "Local planning authorities have the opportunity to deal with prior approval applications in the same way as a normal planning application, so long as they act within eight weeks."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/england/4838152.stm

Published: 2006/03/28 04:59:54 GMT

© BBC MMVI

Lieber Miha!

Ganz besonders wichtiger Obmann unseres Ludmannsdorfer Umweltausschusses!

Von meiner einmonatigen Reise nach Nordindien und Nepal zurückgekehrt, fühle ich mich leider wieder sofort in den Daseinskreislauf unserer relativen Wirklichkeit zurückgeworfen.

Der Grund ist der Mobilfunkpakt, den das Land Kärnten mit der Mobilfunklobby abgeschlossen hat. Aus der bezüglichen Presseaussendung vom 15.03.06 war zwar schon zu ersehen, was da für heiße Luft zum Nachteil der Bevölkerung und im Interesse der Mobilfunklobby verbreitet wird. Ganz arg und eiskalt läuft es Dir aber den Rücken herunter, wenn Du diesen Pakt im Detail, Absatz für Absatz, genau liest. Vorweg:

1) Die Mobilfunklobby kann danach weiterhin machen, was sie will.

2) Wenn die sogenannten Paktpartner nicht nach ihrer Pfeife tanzen, dann wird eben durchgesetzt, was die Mobilfunkbetreiber wollen.

3) Sie richten sich bei Ihren Vorhaben weiterhin nach den „Schein“-Ö-normen und den Empfehlungen der WHO – beide Institutionen arbeiten bekanntlich eng mit der Mobilfunkindustrie zusammen und haben keinerlei Rechtsverbindlichkeitskompetenz – nur um ganz offensichtlich weiterhin auf die behauptete Unschädlichkeit der gepulsten Hochfrequenzstrahlung verweisen zu können.

4) Praktisch alle Vorhaben, wie etwa die der Mastenreduzierung, stellen sich als fromme Wünsche dar, die, wenn nicht eingehalten, sanktionslos bleiben.

Als Beilage sende ich Dir vorweg diesen Pakt, mit dem Ersuchen, zu verhindern, dass die Gemeinde Ludmannsdorf sich diesem Pakt anschließt. Sie würde nämlich nur scheinbar Rechte einer Mitsprache erhalten und in eine enorme Zwickmühle mit der betroffenen Bevölkerung und insbesonders mit mir geraten. (Du weißt inzwischen, ich habe vor nichts und niemanden Angst!!!)

http://www.buergerwelle.de/pdf/mobilfunkpakt_kaernten_unterfertigung.pdf

In Wahrheit bleibt alles beim Alten (hier ist nicht der Haider gemeint), außer daß sich die Mobilfunklobby bei ihren weiteren Ausbauplänen der Unterstützung des Landeshauptmanns bedienen kann. Ich hatte letzteren bisher als hervorragenden Juristen eingeschätzt. Nach Durchsicht dieses Paktes habe ich aber enorme Zweifel bekommen.

Ich werde diesen “Pakt“ Punkt für Punkt kommentieren, und aus kautelarjuristischer Sicht erläutern, wie dabei zum alleinigen Vorteil und zum ausschließlichen Nachteil der betroffen Bevölkerung herumgemogelt wird und danach alle namhaften Stellen informieren.


Bis bald und mit lieben Grüßen

Erwin
[Dr. Erwin Tripes]

P.S: Wegen der eminenten Gefahrenlage, mit der u.a. die Bevölkerung durch solche Pakte eingelullt werden soll, werde ich diese Vorinfo auch an mir bekannte kritische Denker weiterleiten. Deshalb auch Deine ausdrückliche Anrede als Umweltobmann der Gemeinde Ludmannsdorf/Kärnten.

--------

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren!

Als Obmann des Vereins "Risiko-Elektrosmog- Kärnten" http://www.risiko-elektrosmog.at bin ich natürlich regelmäßiger Leser der Nachrichtenredaktion Bürgerwelle/BI Omega.

Ich darf Ihnen so auch zur Information über unsere Aktivitäten als Attachment unsere Stellungnahme zum "Mobilfunkpakt Kärnten" zumailen.

http://www.buergerwelle.de/pdf/mobilfunkpakt_3.pdf

Besuchen Sie uns auch auf unserer obangeführten Homepage.

Glück auf

Dr. Erwin Tripes

By Jeffrey Kluger With reporting by Greg Fulton / Atlanta Dan Cray / Los Angeles Rita Healy / Denver Eric Roston / Washington David Bjerklie, Andrea Dorfman / New York Andrea Gerlin / London Time Magazine

March 26, 2006

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,1176980,00.html

The climate is crashing, and global warming is to blame. Why the crisis hit so soon--and what we can do about it


No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.

It certainly looked that way last week as the atmospheric bomb that was Cyclone Larry -- a Category 5 storm with wind bursts that reached 180 m.p.h. -- exploded through northeastern Australia. It certainly looked that way last year as curtains of fire and dust turned the skies of Indonesia orange, thanks to drought-fueled blazes sweeping the island nation. It certainly looks that way as sections of ice the size of small states calve from the disintegrating Arctic and Antarctic. And it certainly looks that way as the sodden wreckage of New Orleans continues to molder, while the waters of the Atlantic gather themselves for a new hurricane season just two months away. Disasters have always been with us and surely always will be. But when they hit this hard and come this fast -- when the emergency becomes commonplace -- something has gone grievously wrong. That something is global warming.

The image of Earth as organism -- famously dubbed Gaia by environmentalist James Lovelock -- has probably been overworked, but that's not to say the planet can't behave like a living thing, and these days, it's a living thing fighting a fever. From heat waves to storms to floods to fires to massive glacial melts, the global climate seems to be crashing around us. Scientists have been calling this shot for decades. This is precisely what they have been warning would happen if we continued pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping the heat that flows in from the sun and raising global temperatures.

Environmentalists and lawmakers spent years shouting at one another about whether the grim forecasts were true, but in the past five years or so, the serious debate has quietly ended. Global warming, even most skeptics have concluded, is the real deal, and human activity has been causing it. If there was any consolation, it was that the glacial pace of nature would give us decades or even centuries to sort out the problem.

But glaciers, it turns out, can move with surprising speed, and so can nature. What few people reckoned on was that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse. Pump enough CO2 into the sky, and that last part per million of greenhouse gas behaves like the 212th degree Fahrenheit that turns a pot of hot water into a plume of billowing steam. Melt enough Greenland ice, and you reach the point at which you're not simply dripping meltwater into the sea but dumping whole glaciers. By one recent measure, several Greenland ice sheets have doubled their rate of slide, and just last week the journal Science published a study suggesting that by the end of the century, the world could be locked in to an eventual rise in sea levels of as much as 20 ft. Nature, it seems, has finally got a bellyful of us.

"Things are happening a lot faster than anyone predicted," says Bill Chameides, chief scientist for the advocacy group Environmental Defense and a former professor of atmospheric chemistry. "The last 12 months have been alarming." Adds Ruth Curry of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts: "The ripple through the scientific community is palpable."

And it's not just scientists who are taking notice. Even as nature crosses its tipping points, the public seems to have reached its own. For years, popular skepticism about climatological science stood in the way of addressing the problem, but the naysayers -- many of whom were on the payroll of energy companies -- have become an increasingly marginalized breed. In a new TIME/ ABC News/ Stanford University poll, 85% of respondents agree that global warming probably is happening. Moreover, most respondents say they want some action taken. Of those polled, 87% believe the government should either encourage or require lowering of power-plant emissions, and 85% think something should be done to get cars to use less gasoline. Even Evangelical Christians, once one of the most reliable columns in the conservative base, are demanding action, most notably in February, when 86 Christian leaders formed the Evangelical Climate Initiative, demanding that Congress regulate greenhouse gases.

A collection of new global-warming books is hitting the shelves in response to that awakening interest, followed closely by TV and theatrical documentaries. The most notable of them is An Inconvenient Truth, due out in May, a profile of former Vice President Al Gore and his climate-change work, which is generating a lot of prerelease buzz over an unlikely topic and an equally unlikely star. For all its lack of Hollywood flash, the film compensates by conveying both the hard science of global warming and Gore's particular passion.

Such public stirrings are at last getting the attention of politicians and business leaders, who may not always respond to science but have a keen nose for where votes and profits lie. State and local lawmakers have started taking action to curb emissions, and major corporations are doing the same. Wal-Mart has begun installing wind turbines on its stores to generate electricity and is talking about putting solar reflectors over its parking lots. HSBC, the world's second largest bank, has pledged to neutralize its carbon output by investing in wind farms and other green projects. Even President Bush, hardly a favorite of greens, now acknowledges climate change and boasts of the steps he is taking to fight it. Most of those steps, however, involve research and voluntary emissions controls, not exactly the laws with teeth scientists are calling for.

Is it too late to reverse the changes global warming has wrought? That's still not clear. Reducing our emissions output year to year is hard enough. Getting it low enough so that the atmosphere can heal is a multigenerational commitment. "Ecosystems are usually able to maintain themselves," says Terry Chapin, a biologist and professor of ecology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. "But eventually they get pushed to the limit of tolerance."

CO2 AND THE POLES

As a tiny component of our atmosphere, carbon dioxide helped warm Earth to comfort levels we are all used to. But too much of it does an awful lot of damage. The gas represents just a few hundred parts per million (p.p.m.) in the overall air blanket, but they're powerful parts because they allow sunlight to stream in but prevent much of the heat from radiating back out. During the last ice age, the atmosphere's CO2 concentration was just 180 p.p.m., putting Earth into a deep freeze. After the glaciers retreated but before the dawn of the modern era, the total had risen to a comfortable 280 p.p.m. In just the past century and a half, we have pushed the level to 381 p.p.m., and we're feeling the effects. Of the 20 hottest years on record, 19 occurred in the 1980s or later. According to NASA scientists, 2005 was one of the hottest years in more than a century.

It's at the North and South poles that those steambath conditions are felt particularly acutely, with glaciers and ice caps crumbling to slush. Once the thaw begins, a number of mechanisms kick in to keep it going. Greenland is a vivid example. Late last year, glaciologist Eric Rignot of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and Pannir Kanagaratnam, a research assistant professor at the University of Kansas, analyzed data from Canadian and European satellites and found that Greenland ice is not just melting but doing so more than twice as fast, with 53 cu. mi. draining away into the sea last year alone, compared with 22 cu. mi. in 1996. A cubic mile of water is about five times the amount Los Angeles uses in a year.

Dumping that much water into the ocean is a very dangerous thing. Icebergs don't raise sea levels when they melt because they're floating, which means they have displaced all the water they're ever going to. But ice on land, like Greenland's, is a different matter. Pour that into oceans that are already rising (because warm water expands), and you deluge shorelines. By some estimates, the entire Greenland ice sheet would be enough to raise global sea levels 23 ft., swallowing up large parts of coastal Florida and most of Bangladesh. The Antarctic holds enough ice to raise sea levels more than 215 ft.

FEEDBACK LOOPS

One of the reasons the loss of the planet's ice cover is accelerating is that as the poles' bright white surface shrinks, it changes the relationship of Earth and the sun. Polar ice is so reflective that 90% of the sunlight that strikes it simply bounces back into space, taking much of its energy with it. Ocean water does just the opposite, absorbing 90% of the energy it receives. The more energy it retains, the warmer it gets, with the result that each mile of ice that melts vanishes faster than the mile that preceded it.

That is what scientists call a feedback loop, and it's a nasty one, since once you uncap the Arctic Ocean, you unleash another beast: the comparatively warm layer of water about 600 ft. deep that circulates in and out of the Atlantic. "Remove the ice," says Woods Hole's Curry, "and the water starts talking to the atmosphere, releasing its heat. This is not a good thing."

A similar feedback loop is melting permafrost, usually defined as land that has been continuously frozen for two years or more. There's a lot of earthly real estate that qualifies, and much of it has been frozen much longer than two years -- since the end of the last ice age, or at least 8,000 years ago. Sealed inside that cryonic time capsule are layers of partially decayed organic matter, rich in carbon. In high-altitude regions of Alaska, Canada and Siberia, the soil is warming and decomposing, releasing gases that will turn into methane and CO2. That, in turn, could lead to more warming and permafrost thaw, says research scientist David Lawrence of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. And how much carbon is socked away in Arctic soils? Lawrence puts the figure at 200 gigatons to 800 gigatons. The total human carbon output is only 7 gigatons a year.

One result of all that is warmer oceans, and a result of warmer oceans can be, paradoxically, colder continents within a hotter globe. Ocean currents running between warm and cold regions serve as natural thermoregulators, distributing heat from the equator toward the poles. The Gulf Stream, carrying warmth up from the tropics, is what keeps Europe's climate relatively mild. Whenever Europe is cut off from the Gulf Stream, temperatures plummet. At the end of the last ice age, the warm current was temporarily blocked, and temperatures in Europe fell as much as 10 °F, locking the continent in glaciers.

What usually keeps the Gulf Stream running is that warm water is lighter than cold water, so it floats on the surface. As it reaches Europe and releases its heat, the current grows denser and sinks, flowing back to the south and crossing under the northbound Gulf Stream until it reaches the tropics and starts to warm again. The cycle works splendidly, provided the water remains salty enough. But if it becomes diluted by freshwater, the salt concentration drops, and the water gets lighter, idling on top and stalling the current. Last December, researchers associated with Britain's National Oceanography Center reported that one component of the system that drives the Gulf Stream has slowed about 30% since 1957. It's the increased release of Arctic and Greenland meltwater that appears to be causing the problem, introducing a gush of freshwater that's overwhelming the natural cycle. In a global-warming world, it's unlikely that any amount of cooling that resulted from this would be sufficient to support glaciers, but it could make things awfully uncomfortable.

"The big worry is that the whole climate of Europe will change," says Adrian Luckman, senior lecturer in geography at the University of Wales, Swansea. "We in the U.K. are on the same latitude as Alaska. The reason we can live here is the Gulf Stream."

DROUGHT

As fast as global warming is transforming the oceans and the ice caps, it's having an even more immediate effect on land. People, animals and plants living in dry, mountainous regions like the western U.S. make it through summer thanks to snowpack that collects on peaks all winter and slowly melts off in warm months. Lately the early arrival of spring and the unusually blistering summers have caused the snowpack to melt too early, so that by the time it's needed, it's largely gone. Climatologist Philip Mote of the University of Washington has compared decades of snowpack levels in Washington, Oregon and California and found that they are a fraction of what they were in the 1940s, and some snowpacks have vanished entirely.

Global warming is tipping other regions of the world into drought in different ways. Higher temperatures bake moisture out of soil faster, causing dry regions that live at the margins to cross the line into full-blown crisis. Meanwhile, El Nino events -- the warm pooling of Pacific waters that periodically drives worldwide climate patterns and has been occurring more frequently in global-warming years -- further inhibit precipitation in dry areas of Africa and East Asia. According to a recent study by NCAR, the percentage of Earth's surface suffering drought has more than doubled since the 1970s.

FLORA AND FAUNA

Hot, dry land can be murder on flora and fauna, and both are taking a bad hit. Wildfires in such regions as Indonesia, the western U.S. and even inland Alaska have been increasing as timberlands and forest floors grow more parched. The blazes create a feedback loop of their own, pouring more carbon into the atmosphere and reducing the number of trees, which inhale CO2 and release oxygen.

Those forests that don't succumb to fire die in other, slower ways. Connie Millar, a paleoecologist for the U.S. Forest Service, studies the history of vegetation in the Sierra Nevada. Over the past 100 years, she has found, the forests have shifted their tree lines as much as 100 ft. upslope, trying to escape the heat and drought of the lowlands. Such slow-motion evacuation may seem like a sensible strategy, but when you're on a mountain, you can go only so far before you run out of room. "Sometimes we say the trees are going to heaven because they're walking off the mountaintops," Millar says.

Across North America, warming-related changes are mowing down other flora too. Manzanita bushes in the West are dying back; some prickly pear cacti have lost their signature green and are instead a sickly pink; pine beetles in western Canada and the U.S. are chewing their way through tens of millions of acres of forest, thanks to warmer winters. The beetles may even breach the once insurmountable Rocky Mountain divide, opening up a path into the rich timbering lands of the American Southeast.

With habitats crashing, animals that live there are succumbing too. Environmental groups can tick off scores of species that have been determined to be at risk as a result of global warming. Last year, researchers in Costa Rica announced that two-thirds of 110 species of colorful harlequin frogs have vanished in the past 30 years, with the severity of each season's die-off following in lockstep with the severity of that year's warming.

In Alaska, salmon populations are at risk as melting permafrost pours mud into rivers, burying the gravel the fish need for spawning. Small animals such as bushy-tailed wood rats, alpine chipmunks and pinon mice are being chased upslope by rising temperatures, following the path of the fleeing trees. And with sea ice vanishing, polar bears -- prodigious swimmers but not inexhaustible ones -- are starting to turn up drowned. "There will be no polar ice by 2060," says Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation. "Somewhere along that path, the polar bear drops out."

WHAT ABOUT US?

It is fitting, perhaps, that as the species causing all the problems, we're suffering the destruction of our habitat too, and we have experienced that loss in terrible ways. Ocean waters have warmed by a full degree Fahrenheit since 1970, and warmer water is like rocket fuel for typhoons and hurricanes. Two studies last year found that in the past 35 years the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes worldwide has doubled while the wind speed and duration of all hurricanes has jumped 50%. Since atmospheric heat is not choosy about the water it warms, tropical storms could start turning up in some decidedly nontropical places. "There's a school of thought that sea surface temperatures are warming up toward Canada," says Greg Holland, senior scientist for NCAR in Boulder. "If so, you're likely to get tropical cyclones there, but we honestly don't know."

WHAT WE CAN DO

So much for environmental collapse happening in so many places at once has at last awakened much of the world, particularly the 141 nations that have ratified the Kyoto treaty to reduce emissions -- an imperfect accord, to be sure, but an accord all the same. The U.S., however, which is home to less than 5% of Earth's population but produces 25% of CO2 emissions, remains intransigent. Many environmentalists declared the Bush Administration hopeless from the start, and while that may have been premature, it's undeniable that the White House's environmental record -- from the abandonment of Kyoto to the President's broken campaign pledge to control carbon output to the relaxation of emission standards -- has been dismal. George W. Bush's recent rhetorical nods to America's oil addiction and his praise of such alternative fuel sources as switchgrass have yet to be followed by real initiatives.

The anger surrounding all that exploded recently when NASA researcher Jim Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a longtime leader in climate-change research, complained that he had been harassed by White House appointees as he tried to sound the global-warming alarm. "The way democracy is supposed to work, the presumption is that the public is well informed," he told TIME. "They're trying to deny the science." Up against such resistance, many environmental groups have resolved simply to wait out this Administration and hope for something better in 2009.

The Republican-dominated Congress has not been much more encouraging. Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman have twice been unable to get through the Senate even mild measures to limit carbon. Senators Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman, both of New Mexico and both ranking members of the chamber's Energy Committee, have made global warming a high-profile matter. A white paper issued in February will be the subject of an investigatory Senate conference next week. A House delegation recently traveled to Antarctica, Australia and New Zealand to visit researchers studying climate change. "Of the 10 of us, only three were believers," says Representative Sherwood Boehlert of New York. "Every one of the others said this opened their eyes."

Boehlert himself has long fought the environmental fight, but if the best that can be said for most lawmakers is that they are finally recognizing the global-warming problem, there's reason to wonder whether they will have the courage to reverse it. Increasingly, state and local governments are filling the void. The mayors of more than 200 cities have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, pledging, among other things, that they will meet the Kyoto goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in their cities to 1990 levels by 2012. Nine eastern states have established the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative for the purpose of developing a cap-and-trade program that would set ceilings on industrial emissions and allow companies that overperform to sell pollution credits to those that underperform -- the same smart, incentive-based strategy that got sulfur dioxide under control and reduced acid rain. And California passed the nation's toughest automobile-emissions law last summer.

"There are a whole series of things that demonstrate that people want to act and want their government to act," says Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense. Krupp and others believe that we should probably accept that it's too late to prevent CO2 concentrations from climbing to 450 p.p.m. (or 70 p.p.m. higher than where they are now). From there, however, we should be able to stabilize them and start to dial them back down.

That goal should be attainable. Curbing global warming may be an order of magnitude harder than, say, eradicating smallpox or putting a man on the moon. But is it moral not to try? We did not so much march toward the environmental precipice as drunkenly reel there, snapping at the scientific scolds who told us we had a problem.

The scolds, however, knew what they were talking about. In a solar system crowded with sister worlds that either emerged stillborn like Mercury and Venus or died in infancy like Mars, we're finally coming to appreciate the knife-blade margins within which life can thrive. For more than a century we've been monkeying with those margins. It's long past time we set them right.


Informant: NHNE

A message from Eleanor:

PLEASE SIGN URGENTLY AND FORWARD!

March 28, the signed petition will be sent to Myanmar's representatives at the U.N.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/400800882?ltl=1122012959

6,300 Baby forest elephants have been kidnapped and tortured into slave-loggers in Myanmar. Only 1,500 forest elephants remain - their babies at high risk. Could you forward it to as many people as possible, I only have 1390 signatres but time is running out for the elephants,

Thanks.Laura

By Susanna Schrobsdorff
Newsweek March 26, 2006

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12001020/site/newsweek/

A new book predicts that climate change is likely to be abrupt and cataclysmic -- and that these sudden shifts could cripple national economies.


Last week, Britain¹s Prince Charles called climate change "the No. 1 risk in the world, ahead of terrorism and demographic change.² But the prince, a long-time environmentalist, has some unlikely competition for the year¹s most strident statement on global warming. In a Feb. 6 address to the United Nations Security Council, conservative Republican Sen. Richard Lugar called for action on global warming, citing recent advances in scientific knowledge on the subject: ³The problem [of climate change] is real and caused by man-made emissions of greenhouse gasses, including carbon dioxide from fossil fuels.² He went on to add that climate change could ³bring drought, famine, disease, mass migration and rising sea levels threatening coasts and economies worldwide, all of which could lead to political conflict and instability.²

Lugar is not the only one reassessing global warming. Last week, insurers, bruised by a devastating 2005 Atlantic storm season that saw an all-time high of 14 hurricanes, announced plans to establish a climate-change task force under the auspices of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. Record insurance-industry losses of $30 billion from 2004¹s hurricanes in the United States were dwarfed by the more than $60 billion in insurance losses in 2005 from Hurricane Katrina alone. The industry says must recalibrate its risk models to account for the hurricanes and other severe weather from inland tornados, brushfires, ice storms and drought.

None of this is news to award-winning environmental journalist Eugene Linden. In his new book, ³The Winds of Change² (Simon & Schuster), Linden traces cycles of climate change and how civilizations have responded throughout history. He reports that these shifts tend to be abrupt and catastrophic ³flickerings,² not the gradual warming we¹ve generally expected. And while Linden acknowledges the controversy and contradictions in the science of predicting global warming, he says: ³We know enough to realize that this is a very big deal, and we know it¹s happening much faster than we expected.² NEWSWEEK¹s Susanna Schrobsdorff spoke with Linden about the science and politics of environmental change. Excerpts:


NEWSWEEK: Did the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina affect public attitudes about environmental issues?

EUGENE LINDEN: Yes, I think Katrina was a tectonic shift. People have begun to appreciate that weather can be a weapon of mass destruction. Katrina did more economic damage than the [9/11] World Trade Center attacks. The signals have become incontrovertible and the naysayers just sound silly.

NEWSWEEK: There was a lot of speculation that the intensity of Hurricane Katrina was related to global warming. Is there any consensus on that?

LINDEN: There¹s never going to be perfect knowledge here, but we know that hot water is the energy source for hurricanes. We also know that you¹ve seen the world warm over the last few years, and hurricanes have intensified over the last 30 years. With global warming you¹d expect more intense storms, and that¹s exactly what we are seeing.

NEWSWEEK: The Bush administration been criticized for downplaying the risks of global warming. Has that changed in the wake of the costly 2005 hurricane season?

LINDEN: The Bush administration is in an extreme denial position. They have just had contempt for the problem as far as I can see. But we cannot wait until January of 2009 [when Bush leaves office] to start taking action. I think the business community will bring more pressure on them to do something. And the fact that Christian evangelicals are speaking out on environmental issues will help, as well. I think George Bush can change his mind on this. The world needs him to change his mind.

NEWSWEEK: We usually think of global warming as a very slow process. But you say it¹s happening more quickly than predicted.

LINDEN: As recently as the 1980s, most scientists thought that climate change was a gradual and incremental affair. Then with the studies on the Greenland ice core, and seabed studies and all sorts of other studies, they have confirmed that climate has tended to flip back and forth and that historically it has gone through flickering stages, between warm and cold, as it seeks a new equilibrium. These flickering stages can last decades, creating whipsaw changes in climate that could be ruinous.

NEWSWEEK: Are we prepared for sudden environmental changes?

LINDEN: If climate change was gradual and incremental, societies could deal with it and adjust their behavior to the risk. But if it¹s rapid and extreme, there¹s no society on earth that can deal with it. In fact, economists can¹t even model the impact. Most of the economic modeling you see about climate change is built on a gradual and incremental model, which doesn¹t exist in the environmental record. Even an economy that could absorb the cost of Katrina would have difficulty with a cluster of intense weather shocks -- droughts, floods and ice storms and hurricanes.

NEWSWEEK: You write about ancient civilizations wiped out by cycles of climate change. What do you say to those who question whether current warming is caused by human activities like the burning of fossil fuels?

LINDEN: If it¹s natural, we¹re really screwed; if it¹s human, which is likely, then at least we can do something about it. So I¹d be hoping it¹s man-made. The one variable that¹s really out of whack with history is the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide has marched in lockstep with global warming. The signs are all around us -- and so are the solutions.

NEWSWEEK: What are the solutions?

LINDEN: In a perfect world, it¹s a carbon tax. But you can also look at the California situation when they had their energy crisis in 2001. It was amazing how good people were in reducing their energy use. Consumers can change their buying habits on a dime. There is enormous power to address this problem. But the main thing is that internationally, we have to get China and India in the game. And because we¹re the world¹s largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, the U.S. government has to take a strong stand on this.

NEWSWEEK: What potential economic repercussions are there from climate change at this pace?

LINDEN: To put it in perspective, an El Nino [a major temperature fluctuation in surface waters of the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean] might represent a 1 degree change in global temperatures. The 1998 El Nino did about $100 billion dollars' damage to the global economy, but you have to scale up for each level of change dramatically because you pass what are called tipping points or thresholds. Katrina was only marginally more powerful than previous hurricanes, but it did over a hundred times the damage. A flood that¹s 10 percent higher than a previous flood can cause 10 times as much damage if it overtops levees. Even a 2 degree warming in the next 20 or 30 years could be incredibly ruinous just because it could impose a tax on everybody in every in terms of ice storms and disruption in weather and business.

NEWSWEEK: What kind of tax?

LINDEN: For example, if insurance starts to rise in certain areas, and it already has in coastal areas, you get repercussions for the housing market. People have huge amounts tied up in housing and an enormous number of jobs and spending are in housing. And of course the financial system, which prices these risks, has to absorb it. The system is going to shift the risk back to individuals or government -- that¹s what business does, and that¹s how risk gets aggregated. As these risks begin to become monetized, and if global warming intensifies, it could eventually cause an economy to come to a halt.

NEWSWEEK: How have insurance companies reacted to the intensity of the storms we¹ve already seen?

LINDEN: Traditionally, they¹ve only looked back at what past weather has done, but now they are starting to base rates on anticipated changes in weather. Rates in some parts of south Florida have almost doubled. Flood insurance may end up being 10 times more expensive in parts of New Orleans as it was before. And some have even pulled out of Cape Cod [in Massachusetts], which is [more than] 1,000 miles away from where Katrina hit. That¹s how risk diffuses. And if an insurance company backs out, what bank is going to assume that risk? It causes real problems up the economic chain.

NEWSWEEK: Are other industries making plans to cope with the risk of global warming?

LINDEN: One of the things we¹re seeing right now is a change in attitudes in corporate America about climate change and emissions. Jack Welch [former CEO of General Electric] was famously dismissive of climate change and global warning. But Jeffrey Immelt [Welch¹s successor at GE] has acknowledged the seriousness of it and other environmental concerns -- and that¹s one of the largest corporations on the planet. I think that big business is actually going to put pressure on the White House to actually do something on climate change and emissions because they¹d rather deal with one uniform policy than 17 different policies. And a lot of these big companies are multinationals. Even if the United States doesn¹t take the issue seriously, a lot of other places do, and they have to operate in those markets.

NEWSWEEK: You write that humans are notoriously bad at assessing risk. Is that also why we haven¹t been more concerned about climate change before this?

LINDEN: With a long-wavelength phenomenon like climate change, by the time the signals come it¹s often too late. To paraphrase [Secretary of State] Condi Rice [in her pre-war statements on Iraq¹s nuclear capabilities], you don¹t want to have knowledge of global warming come when we have a ruined economy as a result of global warming. This is science in real time. We know enough to realize that this is a very big deal, and we know it¹s happening much faster than we expected.


Informant: NHNE

Vortrag am 29.03.2006 um 19:00 Uhr im TechnologiePark VS, Am Krebsgraben 15 zu möglichen geophysikalischen Auswirkungen einer Sonnenfinsternis.

Es spricht Prof. Dr. Konstantin Meyl.

Anlässlich der Sonnenfinsternis am 29.März lädt der Technologiepark um 19:00 Uhr zu einem Vortrag in sein Forum ein. Es geht allgemein um die Frage, welche geophysikalischen Auswirkungen ihre Ursache in einer Sonnenfinsternis haben können und im speziellen: welchen Einfluss die nicht sichtbare Strahlung der Sonne bei dem aktuellen Schauspiel hat.

Seit über 50 Jahren ist bekannt, dass Pendel, die schon Foucault zum Nachweis der Erdrotation verwendet hatte, bei einer Sonnenfinsternis in ihrem normalen Gang gestört werden können. Dieser Effekt konnte bei der SoFi von 1999 bestätigt werden, aber offiziell gilt er physikalisch bis heute als unerklärbar. Lediglich Prof. Dr. Konstantin Meyl von der Hochschule in Furtwangen hatte bereits im Vorfeld des Ereignisses von 1999 auf mögliche Gefahren hingewiesen. Tatsächlich hatte es damals, 6 Tage danach, ein schweres Erdbeben in der Türkei gegeben mit über 16.000 Toten.

Auch dieses Mal läuft der Kernschatten über Antalya in der Türkei, lediglich unter einem anderen Winkel. Muss auch diesmal mit einer Katastrophe gerechnet werden? Was werden die Pendel dazu sagen? Im TechnologiePark werden zu diesem Zweck Pendel aufgehängt. In dem mit Spannung erwarteten Vortrag werden die aktuellen Messungen mit den Berechnungen von Prof. Meyl verglichen. Der Vortragende hat ein Modell entwickelt, das den Effekt zu erklären vermag und erstmals Voraussagen ermöglicht. Wie brauchbar diese sind, kann nur bei einer entsprechenden SoFi überprüft werden: Kommt es auch diesmal zu einer Änderung der Erdrotation, zu einem Versatz des magnetischen Nordpols oder zu Erdstößen? Wird am Erdkern, der im flüssigen Erdmantel schwimmt, einseitig gezogen, so dass dieser einen Druck aufbaut, der wenige Tage danach sich in einem schweren Erdbeben entlädt? Der schlimmste anzunehmende Fall wäre ein Tsunami auf der Südostseite der griechischen Insel Rhodos. Von entscheidender Bedeutung wird die Sonnenaktivität an dem Tag sein, die ebenfalls beobachtet wird. Es bleibt also spannend bis zuletzt.

Anmeldung: 07721-503337, http://www.tpvs.de, 29.03.06, 19:00 Uhr, Eintritt 8€, ermäßigt: 4€, VS-Villingen, Am Krebsgraben 15 (neben dem TÜV) Tor A, Haus 8 im Forum.

http://www.emfacts.com/weblog/index.php?p=420

--------

From: Corporate Action at Friends of the Earth
enews@foe.co.uk
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 19:46:01 +0100

Subject: Tell Brown about UK corporate abuse

The Operating and Financial Review required big business to report on its social and environmental impacts.

Last November Gordon Brown scrapped it - he wanted to be seen as a friend to big business.

Friends of the Earth threatened to challenge his decision in the High Court and the Government agreed to a public consultation on company reporting.

This consultation represents a unique opportunity for you to tell the UK Government that UK companies should be legally required to report on their social and environmental impacts.

Email Gordon Brown and the Department of Trade and Industry now.

http://www.foe.co.uk/campaigns/corporates/press_for_change/email_brown/index.html


Shoppers back rules to protect British farmers

Four out of five adults want new rules put in place to protect farmers in their dealings with the big supermarkets.

http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/press_releases/supermarket_code_shoppers_15032006.html

"Aktiv-RFID"
http://www.telepolis.de/tp/r4/artikel/22/22306/1.html

Wahl ohne Signale
http://www.telepolis.de/tp/r4/artikel/22/22331/1.html

By OLIVER CARTWRIGHT

Hodnet parish councillors say they are furious about a mobile phone transformer they have branded “an eyesore” at the gateway to their village.

Members of the parish council say the white O2 telecommunications transformer just off the Espley roundabout, on the Hodnet bypass, looks hideous and they want to see it camouflaged so it blends in with the surrounding countryside, or have it moved completely.

The transformer was put up by Central Networks but residents are upset because they believe it is out of place — especially after hundreds of thousands of pounds was spent landscaping the nearby bypass.

Parish council clerk Stephen Howell-Jones has sent a series of objection letters on behalf of the parish but conceded Central Networks had done everything correctly.

Emily Highmore, of Central Networks, said they had considered what residents had said but the transformer needed to be next to the mast.

“Unfortunately there’s nothing we can do about aesthetics as it is the standard specification and we could not paint it as there could be potential safety implications.”

The full version of this article appears in the North edition of tonight’s Shropshire Star.

© 2003-06 Shropshire Newspapers Ltd

http://www.shropshirestar.com/show_article.php?aID=43826

„Die Bundesagentur für Arbeit wird seit Hartz III auf Effizienz getrimmt. Arbeitsabläufe haben sich verbessert, bei der Vermittlungsstrategie aber verschärft sich der Widerspruch zwischen Wirtschaftlichkeit und sozialem Auftrag. Das geht zu Lasten von schwer vermittelbaren Arbeitslosen, so eine Studie…“ Böckler Impuls 06/2006 http://www.boeckler.de/cps/rde/xchg/SID-3D0AB75D-05720652/hbs/hs.xsl/32014_73789.html

Aus dem Text: „… Die Bundesagentur orientiert sich seit der Reform stärker an einer „betriebswirtschaftlich geprägten Versicherungslogik“. Dadurch, beobachten die Forscher, verschärft sich der Zielkonflikt zwischen Wirtschaftlichkeit und sozialpolitischem Auftrag, der weiterhin im Gesetz verankert ist. Mit begrenztem Aufwand soll die BA die Zahl der leistungsberechtigten Arbeitslosen möglichst rasch senken. Der so genannte Aussteuerungsbetrag erhöht den Druck: Für jeden Arbeitslosen, der keinen Anspruch mehr auf Arbeitslosengeld I hat und von dieser Versicherungsleistung zum steuerfinanzierten Arbeitslosengeld II übergeht, muss die BA fast 10.000 Euro an den Bund zahlen. Für die Bundesagentur birgt das ein erhebliches Haushaltsrisiko - und es ist ein Ansporn, diese Klippe möglichst zu umschiffen. Die BA konzentriert daher ihre Qualifizierungs- und Vermittlungsangebote auf Arbeitsuchende, die zwar nicht aus eigener Kraft eine Stelle finden, aber noch vergleichsweise leicht zu vermitteln sind. Weit weniger Aufmerksamkeit bekommen die so genannten „Betreuungskunden“ – jene Arbeitslose, die bei der Jobsuche erhebliche Hilfe benötigen. Deren Eingliederung ist kostspielig und damit „nicht rentabel“. Volker Hielscher vom iso-Institut: „Faktisch werden Betreuungskunden, für die noch im Bericht der Hartz-Kommission die intensivste Unterstützung vorgesehen war, in Nicht-Betreuungskunden verwandelt.“…“

Aus: LabourNet, 27. März 2006

HLV INFO 40/AT

27-03-2006

Volker Hartenstein, MdL a.D. 25-03-06


Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

diese zweite Sendung geht natürlich in die Runde der Mitstreiter/innen und Sympathisanten. Wer von der Presse informiert wurde, können Sie den untenstehenden Adressen entnehmen. Wer jetzt angeschrieben wird, sehen Sie oben.

Damit sind diese Texte endgültig für die Weiterverbreitung freigegeben.

Vorsicht: Ich bin soeben erst darauf hingewiesen worden, daß die Veranstaltung am 30. nicht im Rathaus von Rehlingen, sondern demjenigen von S i e r s b u r g stattfindet - wie hier bereits korrigiert!!

Bitte elektronisch, mündlich, per Abzug und/oder Handzettel vor Ort auf die beiden Veranstaltungen hinweisen und die teilweise bereits angebahnten Kontakte zu den Medien unterstützen, soweit man auf Sie zukommt oder es sich anbietet.

Die nächsten Informationsrunden gelten Politikern, Ärzten und Wissenschaftlern.

Beste Grüße

Karl Richter



An Mitbürger/innen, Politiker/innen, Ärzte/innen und Wissenschaftler/innen sowie Vertreter/innen der Medien

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

auf Einladung unseres Bündnisses saarländischer Bürgerinitiativen Mobilfunk wird Frau Dr. med. Waldman-Selsam von der Bamberger Ärzteinitiative in der kommenden Woche bei uns im Saarland zu Gast sein und nach Völklingen auch weitere Städte des Landes in die Begutachtung von gesundheitlichen Schädigungen durch die Mobilfunkentwicklung einbeziehen.

In zwei Abendveranstaltungen am 28. 3. in Homburg und am 30. 3. in Rehlingen bietet sie aber auch Gelegenheit zum Gespräch. Soweit Sie daran interessiert sind, sind Sie herzlich dazu eingeladen. Genauere Angaben zu den Veranstaltungen im Anhang!

Diese erste Sendung richten wir an Vertreter/innen von Presse und Rundfunk, zu denen wir bereits gelegentlich Kontakt hatten - als Einladung an möglicherweise Interessierte, aber vor allem auch mit der Bitte, auf die Veranstaltung hinzuweisen (in der SZ bitte möglichst im Landesteil, da wir Interessenten in manchen Regionen sonst schwer erreichen).

Unser Bündnis saarländischer Bürgerinitiativen Mobilfunk vertritt in ehrenamtlicher Arbeit und ohne die Erhebung von Beiträgen inzwischen die Interessen von Tausenden von Bürgern aus den verschiedensten Regionen des Landes. Wir wenden uns nicht gegen den Mobilfunk an sich, sondern gegen unreife und riskante Formen seiner Umsetzung. Es ist keine Zierde unserer Demokratie, daß die Verantwortlichen nur den wirtschaftspolitisch brauchbaren Teil der wissenschaftlichen Wahrheit zur Kenntnis nehmen und die Bürger in der Frage der Antennenaufstellung zweckdienlich entmachtet und entrechtet wurden.

Gegen solche Tendenzen versuchen wir mit unserer Arbeit Bürgerrechte geltend zu machen, wo es noch Inseln dafür gibt:

1. In medizinischen Begutachtungen und Vorträgen von Fachkräften, die von Politik und Industrie unabhängig sind, informieren wir über die ausgeblendeten Teile der Wahrheit.

2. Kritische Bewertungen der Situation aus juristischer Perspektive werden demnächst folgen.

3. Als dritten Schritt bereiten wir gegenwärtig auf breiter Grundlage und im Kontakt zu Institutionen für Bürger- und Menschenrechte eine Sammelklage vor dem Gerichtshof in Straßburg vor.

Die Schweden sind gerade dabei, eine eigene Partei "Stimme des Volkes" mit dem einzigen Ziel zu gründen, die oben geschilderten Tendenzen der Mobilfunkentwicklung rechtzeitig abzuwehren. Uns würde schon genügen, wenn sich alle Parteien wieder an das erinnern, was sie Wählern mit ihrer Namengebung versprochen haben. Wir wünschen uns eine lebendige Demokratie, keine Diktatur kommerzieller Interessen!

Interessenten am Thema und unserer Arbeit bieten sich gegenwärtig drei Möglichkeiten der Information:

- Das Umweltmagazin Saar 1/2006 des BUND ( http://www.bund-saar.de ) zeigt unter dem Schwerpunktthema Mobilfunk und Elektrosmog. Die Wellen schlagen hoch, wie weit gegenwärtig regierungskonforme und kritische Beurteilungen auseinandergehen.

- In unserem Buch Kommerz, Gesundheit und demokratische Kultur. Gewinner und Verlierer in einer Modellregion des Mobilfunks, hg. von K. Richter und H. Wittebrock, beschreiben wir den Stand der industrieunabhängigen Forschung und gesellschaftliche Folgen seiner Verdrängung.

- Auf unserer Homepage http://www.buerger-machen-mobil.de können Sie sich über unsere Arbeit informieren.

Anlagen: - Einladung zu den Abendveranstaltungen mit Frau Dr. med. Waldmann-Selsam - von ihr auch die Information über das Krankheitsbild des Mikrowellensyndroms - von Dr. med. Bergmann ein Beitrag zum Umgang mit Elektrosensibilität.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen

im Namen des Bündnisses saarländischer Bürgerinitiativen Mobilfunk Karl Richter, Hermann Wittebrock, Sabine Goebel und Judith Hemm

Telecommunications companies like AT&T and Verizon are lobbying Congress for the right to control where you go on the Internet, how fast you get there, and how much you pay for the service.

Our first step is to send a strong message now to the big industry execs.

Tell them that the principle of net neutrality needs to be honored.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/983411510?z00m=78102

22,823,00 people have now signed this petition. I urge you to forward this to friends & family that cherish their Freedom! Even if they do not sign the petition they will still know what is going on & maybe even boycott the companies!

This is not a test, this is not a drill! We are not prisoners plz break their will!

Mari

Goddess Bless And Protect The Nature Conservancy http://rainforest.care2.com

Cherish Our Ecology
http://groups.msn.com/helpmesavetheworld

"Earth Day is the first Holy Day...and is devoted to the harmony of Nature... The celebration offends no historical calendar, yet it transcends them all." Margaret Mead, anthropologist. http://www.earthday.net

More than 300,000 seals could be killed in Canada this year - most of them babies. Tell Canada's Prime Minister to stop the hunt now! http://go.care2.com/stophunt

A message from Abid:

For your coooperation.


Original Message:

PLEASE SIGN THIS PETITION THAT LOOKS TO SAVE ALLIANOI (IN TURKEY). ALSO PLS ASK YOUR FRIENDS TO JOIN US AND SIGN IT. HERITAGE PLACES IS WHAT IS LEFT TO OUR CHILDREN, THEIR CHILDREN, THEIR THEIR CHILDREN… PLEASE!!!! THANK YOU. HUGS, AGNES C.

We, the Undersigned, endorse the following petition: International - Save Allianoi Target: Mr Ali Babacan, Minister of State, Secretariat General for EU Relations Sponsor: George Chaplin · Signatures: 205 · Goal: 10,000 · Deadline: Ongoing... · See Full Petition · Email this Petition One of Turkeys most important heritage sites is the Roman Spa of Allianoi. Unfortunately a new dam is going to flood the entire site which will wreck it. A change to the dam design would stop this.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/174631703

Back in 2003 I was approached by someone else –also a long term anti-EMF campaigner, making me aware of the Right Livelihood Awards (RLHA), having then in mind Olle Johansson to be nominated. When finding out that at that time the deadline for nomination just passed (April 10 every year) this topic died for a while until just recently last December, when RLHA was brought up again. So far we very few came to the agreement to also have Magda nominated besides Olle, and my info request with the RLHA Association was responded that Awards might be shared, as happened last year (Maude Barlow & Tony Clarke).

We have known Olle Johansson since the start of our EMF involvement (about 1996). Olle has been working tiredless and always expressing the full truth without siding an quarter of an inch with the industry but supporting his concern about the health and well being of us humans, if not animals and plants as welI. His research is not quite easy, because of the problem that lately his work is kind of “censored” and he has a hard time to get sufficient research funding, which…as we know… most of the time are directly/indirectly coming from the industry.

Magda as well deserved this livelihood, since we/I have known her first over the EMF-L list thanks to guru’s subscription side. I never expected, hence I was very surprised, when Magda agreed to come to West Canada to testify on our behalf in the SumasEnergy2/Abbotssford 230kV line upon my request via e-mail….and this with very short notice and all at her cost, since the National Energy Board did/usually does not provide participation cost compensation. In our recent Osoyoos TL application –again despite the very short notice- she made herself available again,…and as we all know, shortly before our hearing here in Osoyoos, Magda testified in a Vancouver 230 kV TL application case. We all know Magda too well, and there is no need to explain any further why she should be nominated!

A problem will arise, and I am sure some individuals of our EMF campaign community around the globe might feel left out or discriminated by the Magda & Olle nomination, which is true….. we have many who worked on this issue tiredless and on a volunteer basis. But that will mean a list of many to be included as well…however, I am sure all of us will agree that in case Magda and Olle would get the Award, that would mean a recognition for all of us! I myself would just be very very happy in case Magda and Olle jointly would win the award!

I kindly ask you maybe get familiar with the nomination process and share some input, please go to the home site

http://www.rightlivelihood.org/index.htm

and then to the nomination site: http://www.rightlivelihood.org/nominate.htm

and I kindly would like some feedback from you all.

So far I feel a more qualified individual (from one of our EMF citizen group) should submit both nominations.

Magda and Olle have agreed to accept being nominated, once we have progressed with our work, we can then also ASAP inform Magda and Olle what they have to submit from their site, as this is required according to the nomination rules.

I am sorry, I could not approach you a bit earlier with this issue, I was so much occupied in our nearby TL CPCN application/hearing, the written argument stage now approaching.

Please don’t delay your response too long, April 10th is deadline.

Also: please share with others I have not yet included in this list in my hurry.


Thanks,

Cheers and Best,

Hans Karow.



I received a letter in the post today from the Right Livelihood Award Foundation today saying unfortunately we cannot nominate Olle Johansson for the award as you are not allowed to re-nominate a candidate until after three years of the first nomination, Olle was put up for the award in 2004 ‘he should have won then’ which means he can’t be put up again until 2007.

However you may nominate Magda Havas for this year or any one else you think worthwhile and I know there are many people who should receive this award. This is an opportunity to get the emf issue firmly recognised and the work of some of our most brilliant forward thinking and open minded scientists recognised.

For further info e-mail: info@rightlivelihood.se


Best wishes

Eileen


Informant: Eileen O'Connor

27.03.2006

INTERVIEW

Lautstark ist der Protest der Schauensteiner Bürger gegen weitere geplante Standorte für Mobilfunkmasten. Auch in Schwarzenbach an der Saale gab es vor Monaten einen Aufschrei, als nahe Stobersreuth ein neuer Funkmast errichtet werden sollte. Unsere Zeitung sprach mit dem Schwarzenbacher Bürgermeister Alexander Eberl über den Stand der Dinge in Sachen Mobilfunk.

Sie haben in Ihrer Eigenschaft als Vorsitzender der SPD im Hofer Kreistag vor Monaten eine Initiative gestartet, an deren Ende ein Versorgungskonzept stehen sollte, das die Mobilfunkbetreiber bei minimaler Belastung der Bürger zufrieden stellt. Was ist denn daraus geworden?

Alexander Eberl: Wir hatten an einem runden Tisch Mobilfunkbetreiber und die Bürgermeister aller Landkreis-Gemeinden zusammen und haben hier versucht, ein alle zufriedenstellendes Standort-Konzept zu entwerfen. Doch unser Ziel ist gescheitert.

Woran lag’s?

Alexander Eberl : Laut der Mobilfunkbetreiber ist ein derartiges Ansinnen nicht durchführbar, weil die Betreiber keine langfristigen, ja noch nicht einmal mittelfristigen Standortkonzepte entwerfen. Sie wissen schlicht nicht, wohin sie den Funkmast stellen werden. Die Planung richte sich allein nach den Gegebenheiten des Marktes, hieß es. Außerdem fürchten sie, schien mir, auch die Konkurrenz untereinander.

Und ein Standortkonzept für den Landkreis Hof unabhängig von den Mobilfunkbetreibern zu erstellen, hat man daran gedacht?

Alexander Eberl: Ein solches Konzept würde zunächst einmal sehr viel Geld kosten. Das wirklich Problematische daran aber wäre, dass die Betreiber wohl kaum dazu zu verpflichten wären, diese Standorte dann auch zu nutzen.

Also bleibt alles wie gehabt ...

Alexander Eberl: Jein. Bei dem Gespräch am runden Tisch wurde immerhin von Seiten der Betreiber die Gesprächsbereitschaft betont. Dabei baten sie darum, dass die Kommunen frühzeitig das Gespräch suchen und auch alternative Standorte anbieten sollten. Wenn sich erst der Protest rege, sei die Planung vielfach schon so weit fortgeschritten, dass man davon nicht mehr lasse.

Gilt das für alle Sendeanlagen, also auch jene, die nicht baugenehmigungspflichtig sind?

Alexander Eberl: Das bleibt weiter problematisch.

Bürgerinitiativen führen ins Feld, dass momentan die Folgen für die Gesundheit aufgrund der Vielzahl der Anlagen überhaupt nicht absehbar seien. Zählt dieser Aspekt bei den Mobilfunkbetreibern?

Alexander Eberl: Für die Mobilfunkbetreiber ist das ohne Belang. Sie verweisen hier auf die Bundesimmissionsschutzverordnung. So lange ihre Anlagen die dort aufgeführten Grenzwerte einhalten, entsprechen sie dem Stand der Technik, heißt es hierbei.

Aktuell gibt es im Raum Schwarzenbach an der Saale vier Standorte mit Mobilfunksendern. Ein fünfter ist nahe Stobersreuth geplant. Wie ist der aktuelle Sachstand?

Alexander Eberl: Zwei Mal schon hat der Stadtrat die Standorte abgelehnt, besser ablehnen können. Beim ersten Antrag erhielt der Betreiber keine Erlaubnis zur Zufahrt des geplanten Standorts. Im zweiten Fall – der Mast sollte auf einem Grundstück der Stadtwerke errichtet werden – fürchteten die Stadtwerke, der Sender könne mit eigenen technischen Anlagen kollidieren.

Wenn in einem neuerlichen Antrag alle Voraussetzungen für den gewünschten Standort der Betreiber erfüllt wären, bliebe der Kommune keine andere Wahl als abzunicken?

Alexander Eberl: Nun, die Kommune könnte dagegen sein, doch der Mast ließe sich vor dem Hintergrund der aktuellen Rechtslage deswegen nicht verhindern. ts-r

ALEXANDER EBERL

http://www.frankenpost.de/nachrichten/regional/frankenwald/resyart.phtm?id=940785