The Generator news service publishes articles on sustainable development, agriculture and energy as well as observations on current affairs. The news service is used on the weekly radio show, The Generator, as well as by a number of monthly and quarterly magazines. A podcast of the Generator news is also available.
As well as Giovanni’s articles it picks up the most pertinent articles from a range of other news services. You can publish the news feed on your website using RSS, free of charge.
Two new studies into the “plumbing systems” that lie under volcanoes could bring scientists closer to predicting large eruptions. International teams of researchers studied the location and behavior of magma chambers on Earth’s mid-ocean ridge system — a vast chain of volcanoes along which Earth forms new crust.
Glaciers play a vital role in Earth’s climate system, and it’s critical to understand what contributes to their fluctuation. Increased global temperatures are frequently viewed as the cause of glacial melt, but a new study of Patagonia’s Gualas Glacier highlights the role of precipitation in the glacier’s fluctuation.
In a study of PCBs in polar bear cubs in Svalbard, researchers have found that blood levels of PCBs and related contaminants in polar bear cubs appear to have dropped by as much as 59 per cent between 1998 and 2008.
The San Jacinto Fault Zone is a seismically active, major component of the overall southern San Andreas Fault system. Researchers have mapped evidence of past ruptures consistent with very large earthquakes along the Clark Fault, an individual strand associated with the SJF.
Extreme weather such as hurricanes, torrential downpours and droughts will become more frequent in pace with global warming. Consequently, this increases the risk for species extinction, especially in bio diverse ecosystems such as coral reefs and tropical rainforests.
THE company charged with rolling out the NBN has insisted the regions not covered by the $36 billion project were overlooked for engineering reasons – not political ones.
While NBN Co boss Mike Quigley yesterday conceded his company had received “some instructions and directives” from the government, he denied they were political.
“(The government’s instructions were) to get a good balance between regional and metro Australia, to get a balance across the states and to make sure we finish Tasmania by 2015,” Mr Quigley said.
The initial rollout of the NBN will cover 3.5 million homes and businesses in 1500 towns and suburbs across Australia by June 2015. That figure includes 71 Labor seats, 61 coalition electorates and all six crossbench seats.
The comments come after the government was yesterday accused of pork barrelling, after a Daily Telegraph analysis of the newly unveiled three-year rollout revealed coalition seats were being ignored.
In the Sydney region, 64.7 per cent of rollout sites were located in federal ALP seats – compared with only 35.3 per cent of LNP seats.
Pressure has mounted on the embattled company to explain why key targets were altered. The company had originally said it would pass 4.2 million homes by June 2015, before downgrading that target on Thursday to 3.5 million.
Fat Prophets senior telco analyst Greg Fraser said the government and NBN Co had to explain the discrepancy.
“When they first rolled out, they said the network would pass 4.2 million premises and connect to 2.6 million by June 2015 – that’s been reduced to 3.5 million under way or completed and there’s no explanation why,” Mr Fraser said.
“There needs to be some targets for the number of homes that will sign up.”
Millions starving as world responds slowly to disaster
Matt Wade
March 31, 2012
Famine victim … Ouobra Kompalemba, 2, is fed milk through a tube in a Burkina Faso hospital. Photo: AFP
THE hunger season has come early to West Africa. It’s normal for villagers in the drought-prone Sahel region, which spans from Senegal to Chad, to cut back on meals as food stocks run low in the weeks before the September harvest. But an aid worker with Save the Children in Niger, Marianne Tounkara, says families have already run out of food.
”They are surviving on leaves and plants they would not use in normal times,” she said from her base in the Niger capital, Niamey. ”They are also decreasing the number of meals that they have in a day. But those coping strategies should be happening much later in the year.”
Advertisement: Story continues below
A lethal mix of sporadic rains, soaring food prices, regional conflict and chronic poverty has left more than 13 million people across the Sahel short of food. Aid agencies fear the crisis could soon turn into a catastrophe and are frustrated by the sluggish international response.
Ms Tounkara said Niger had received only a fraction of the funding agencies estimate will be needed to stave off a disaster.
”The government is doing its best … but it worries me in terms of an adequate response from the international community,” she said. ”Families need support to feed their children now.”
The vast landlocked nation of Niger is the worst affected with about 6 million people facing food shortages and 2 million of those in critical need of assistance. A study by aid agencies in two Niger districts found up to 90 per cent of people believed their food stocks would run out before the next harvest. But even in normal times Niger accounts for about one sixth of global deaths from malnutrition.
In neighbouring Mali, the democratically elected government was toppled in a military coup last week, and thousands of refugees have fled to Niger, adding to the crisis.
A flood of weapons into Mali following the recent downfall of the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi has been blamed for boosting a long-running rebellion by Tuareg tribesmen and destabilising the government. The political instability threatens to hamper efforts to curb affiliates of al-Qaeda active in the region.
Meanwhile, about 3.5 million people in Mali need emergency help.
It’s estimated that another 1.7 million people are facing food shortages in Burkina Faso, 1.6 million in Chad and hundreds of thousands in Mauritania and Senegal.
Tristan Clements, a World Vision Australia emergency aid specialist who has worked in the Sahel, said the food crisis could peak in the next months. ”West Africa is an incredibly fragile region; it’s the poorest geographical region on Earth and is probably the most neglected region as far as international donors are concerned. It has huge challenges ahead,” he said.
”We already have 1.3 million children that are malnourished and 400,000 of them severe. Without significant intervention we do anticipate we’ll be seeing high levels of child deaths.”
Save the Children in Australia has called on the federal government to raise the alarm on the Sahel food crisis and lift its financial contribution to the aid effort. ”The Australian government responded generously to last year’s food crisis in the Horn of Africa, but now we need them to follow up with swift action and tens of millions of dollars to save lives in West Africa,” Save the Children’s director of emergency programs, Scott Gilbert, said.
”We’re not seeing starving babies yet, but we fear we might unless the Australian government and the international community act, and act now.”
The government contributed $128 million to the emergency response in the Horn of Africa last year and has so far pledged $10 million for emergency food aid in the Sahel.
The government’s aid agency, AusAID, also supports CSIRO scientists to work with farmers in Niger and Mali to improve farming practices where there is limited water.
The head of AusAID in Africa, Jamie Isbister, said emergency assistance in West Africa would need to be carefully managed to ensure fragile local food markets in the region were not impaired. ”It’s important for the international community to respond to both the immediate crisis but also to support the longer term food security needs in Sahel,” he said.
Last year’s famine in East Africa highlighted shortcomings in the international emergency relief system.
A report released in January by Save the Children and Oxfam on the response to the Horn of Africa food crisis said there had been a collective failure to take preventive action, as well as the failure to respond with adequate humanitarian aid when it was needed.
It concluded an earlier response could have saved millions of dollars and thousands of lives. Aid agencies don’t want to make the same mistakes as conditions in West Africa deteriorate.
”Food crises rarely take the world by surprise and yet all too often we see the international community fail to act quickly enough,” World Vision Australia’s chief executive, Tim Costello, said.
Flash flooding has cut highways and forced evacuations in Fiji, with residents sheltering from rising waters on rooftops as authorities scrambled to find rescue boats.
Heavy rains caused rivers to burst their banks in the west of the main island Viti Levu, taking water levels higher than those experienced during a six-day deluge in January which claimed 11 lives, meteorologists said.
Police said they were not aware of any deaths in the latest disaster, which cut off the town of Nadi, home to Fiji’s international airport, as well as other centres including Ba, Lautoka, Rakiraki and Sigatoka.
Most flights to and from Nadi were cancelled, national carrier Air Pacific said.
Disaster management office Dismac said a “massive” number of people were stranded on rooftops awaiting rescue and appealed for anyone with a boat to help relief efforts.
“We’ve got a lot of reports of people on rooftops, it’s quite a massive number,” Dismac director Pajiliai Dobui said.
“If people in these areas have boats, we’re asking them to make them available, as the little we have is not enough.”
Dismac said it had opened 11 evacuations centres. No figures detailing how many people were sheltering in the centres were immediately available.
The National Weather Forecasting Centre predicted the rain would continue until at least Sunday, accompanied by strong winds on Saturday.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/public-boots-the-messenger-20120330-1w3jc.html#ixzz1qe4oNQMu
