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About 150 protesters attacked riot police with rocks and metal barriers and ripped down lampposts in Colombia’s capital today, just moments after US President George W Bush landed for a six-hour visit.

About 200 helmeted police in full body armour responded with water cannon and marched forward, banging their batons against riot shields, to reclaim the street, located about 1.6 km from the presidential palace. No injuries were immediately reported.

The rioters had broken away from about 2000 protesters, including students and members of the left-wing political opposition, who gathered about an hour before Bush’s arrival, chanting "Down with Bush" and burning American flags.

As Bush’s convoy passed about 200 metres away on the way to meet President Alvaro Uribe at the presidential palace, the protesters chanted "Bush go home."

The protesters object that $900 million annually received by Colombia in mostly military US aid only fuels the country’s half century-old conflict and encourages human rights abuses by this country’s armed forces.

At a concert on Friday night in Bogota’s main park by the former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters a big balloon of a pig was released that said "Patron Bush, Welcome to your Colombian Ranch."

Security in Bogota was extensive, with snipers taking up rooftop perches to guard Bush’s 70-vehicle convoy as it drove 20 minutes from El Dorado airport. The highest-security stop on Bush’s five-nation tour, the Colombia visit was also the shortest stopover on the trip.

About 7000 police and troops blocked off large parts of the Bogota, while 14,000 reinforcements set up roadblocks, checking IDs and searching vehicles in the capital’s outskirts.

In contrast with visits to Bogota by US Presidents Ronald Reagan in 1982 and John F Kennedy in 1961, there was no popular reception for Bush, with streets adjacent the presidential palace closed to traffic and pedestrians alike.

Bogota residents also had to do without their beloved "ciclovia", in which major avenues are shut down to traffic on Sundays so people can bike, skate and jog.

"The security measures are excessive," said 56-year-old Manuel Cifuentes, who runs a food stand on the Plaza de Bolivar in the heart of Bogota and said he hadn’t had much business in the past few days.

During Uribe’s first inauguration, in 2002, a mortar attack blamed on leftist rebels terrified visiting dignitaries killed 21 people in a slum near the presidential palace.

Every manhole cover within a five-block radius of the palace and along Bush’s motorcade route was spray-painted with orange ahead of Sunday’s visit to alert security agents to any tampering.

Among those grousing about the extraordinary security — including electronic scans of mobile phone and data traffic — was taxi driver Felipe Rodriguez, who expected to only earn about 60,000 pesos (less than $A35), half his normal take for a Sunday.

Bush arrived from Uruguay, where about 150 anti-US demonstrators marched through the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo the previous day.

Police and some protesters had clashed during a 6,000-strong march on Thursday in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and activists smashed windows and burned tyres on Friday in Montevideo, the first two stops of Bush’s five-country tour.

March 12, 2007

A port in Western Australia’s south has suspended its handling of lead carbonate following revelations lead poisoning could have killed thousands of birds in the area, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Up to 4,000 nectar-eating birds died in and around Esperance between December 7 and January 2 and more than 100 other bird deaths were reported in the town last week.

Last Friday, WA’s Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) said it had determined the small number of birds tested died of lead poisoning.

DEC said the test results did not provide direct evidence of the source of the lead, however lead carbonate is transported into Esperance for shipping through the Esperance port.

The Esperance Port Authority Board on Monday suspended the movement of lead into and out of the port until the source of the poisoning has been identified.

Read More  

   The red winged parrot is one of many
        types of nectar-eating birds

‘They must leave this year. The way things are going, I think the islands will be underwater in 15 to 20 years,’ said Tobasi.

Next week, the 2,000 member-scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will release their latest report, the result of six years of research.

The 7 million citizens of 22 South Pacific island nations and territories are not expecting rosy news.

The panel already warned in 2001 that global sea levels will rise by up to 88 centimetres by the end of the century, a development primarily caused by an increase in human-produced greenhouse gases heating the earth’s atmosphere and melting icebergs and glaciers.

Carteret islanders, where the highest elevation is a mere 1.70 metres above current sea level, will be resettled to Bougainville within the year provided the necessary funds can be raised.

The islanders are aware that they must hurry, because living on the islands has become almost unbearable and food is getting scarce.

‘They live on coconuts and fish. They used to cultivate sweet potatoes and taro in the swamps, but the floods invaded everything. There are high deposits of salt water and the soil is inappropriate now,’ said Tobasi.

On Tuvalu, located halfway between Australia and Hawaii, vegetable fields also have long since deteriorated while fish stocks have been depleted due to coral reef bleaching.

The highest hills found on the eight Tuvalu islands reach only 5 metres above sea level.

The island-nation’s government has signed an agreement with New Zealand, which will accept Tuvalu’s 11,500 inhabitants when the situation becomes dangerous.

Tuvalu’s government expects the islands to be entirely underwater within the next 50 years.

Rain is the only source of drinking water for the 100,000 citizens of the island republic of Kiribati as shallow freshwater reservoirs are increasingly contaminated by salt due to the rising ocean level.

Kiribati once also comprised the uninhabited islands of Tarawa and Abanuea, but in 1999 they simply went under during a tropical storm and never resurfaced.

The doomsday clock is also ticking in the Maldives, a country of 1,200 islands off the southwestern tip of India.

Some of the coral islands were washed over by the 2004 tsunami and remained flooded for several days, after which the waters receded once more.

The United Nations warned that in a few years continually rising sea levels might cause up to 50 million people to lose their livelihoods and become environmental refugees.

Ford had intended to split the assembly line at the Michigan Truck Plant between the Expedition and the Ford F-150 pickup.   But, when the first flood of orders started coming in for the Expedition, the factory was entirely given over to S.U.V.s.   The orders kept mounting.   Assembly-line workers were put on sixty- and seventy-hour weeks.   Another night shift was added.   The plant was now running twenty-four hours a day, six days a week.   Ford executives decided to build a luxury version of the Expedition, the Lincoln Navigator.   They bolted a new grille on the Expedition, changed a few body panels, added some sound insulation, took a deep breath, and charged forty-five thousand dollars—and soon Navigators were flying out the door nearly as fast as Expeditions.   Before long, the Michigan Truck Plant was the most profitable of Ford’s fifty-three assembly plants.   By the late nineteen-nineties, it had become the most profitable factory of any industry in the world.   In 1998, the Michigan Truck Plant grossed eleven billion dollars, almost as much as McDonald’s made that year.   Profits were $3.  7 billion.   Some factory workers, with overtime, were making two hundred thousand dollars a year.   The demand for Expeditions and Navigators was so insatiable that even when a blizzard hit the Detroit region in January of 1999—burying the city in snow, paralyzing the airport, and stranding hundreds of cars on the freeway—Ford officials got on their radios and commandeered parts bound for other factories so that the Michigan Truck Plant assembly line wouldn’t slow for a moment.   The factory that had begun as just another assembly plant had become the company’s crown jewel.  

In the history of the automotive industry, few things have been quite as unexpected as the rise of the S.U.V. Detroit is a town of engineers, and engineers like to believe that there is some connection between the success of a vehicle and its technical merits.   But the S.U.V. boom was like Apple’s bringing back the Macintosh, dressing it up in colorful plastic, and suddenly creating a new market.   It made no sense to them.   Consumers said they liked four-wheel drive.   But the overwhelming majority of consumers don’t need four-wheel drive.   S.U.V. buyers said they liked the elevated driving position.   But when, in focus groups, industry marketers probed further, they heard things that left them rolling their eyes.   As Keith Bradsher writes in "High and Mighty"—perhaps the most important book about Detroit since Ralph Nader’s "Unsafe at Any Speed"—what consumers said was "If the vehicle is up high, it’s easier to see if something is hiding underneath or lurking behind it.  " Bradsher brilliantly captures the mixture of bafflement and contempt that many auto executives feel toward the customers who buy their S.U.V.s.   Fred J. Schaafsma, a top engineer for General Motors, says, "Sport-utility owners tend to be more like ‘I wonder how people view me,’ and are more willing to trade off flexibility or functionality to get that.  " According to Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills.   Ford’s S.U.V. designers took their cues from seeing "fashionably dressed women wearing hiking boots or even work boots while walking through expensive malls.  " Toyota’s top marketing executive in the United States, Bradsher writes, loves to tell the story of how at a focus group in Los Angeles "an elegant woman in the group said that she needed her full-sized Lexus LX 470 to drive up over the curb and onto lawns to park at large parties in Beverly Hills.  " One of Ford’s senior marketing executives was even blunter: "The only time those S.U.V.s are going to be off-road is when they miss the driveway at 3 am."

The truth, underneath all the rationalizations, seemed to be that S.U.V. buyers thought of big, heavy vehicles as safe: they found comfort in being surrounded by so much rubber and steel.   To the engineers, of course, that didn’t make any sense, either: if consumers really wanted something that was big and heavy and comforting, they ought to buy minivans, since minivans, with their unit-body construction, do much better in accidents than S.U.V.s.   (In a thirty-five m.p.h. crash test, for instance, the driver of a Cadillac Escalade—the G.M. counterpart to the Lincoln Navigator—has a sixteen-per-cent chance of a life-threatening head injury, a twenty-per-cent chance of a life-threatening chest injury, and a thirty-five-per-cent chance of a leg injury.   The same numbers in a Ford Windstar minivan—a vehicle engineered from the ground up, as opposed to simply being bolted onto a pickup-truck frame—are, respectively, two per cent, four per cent, and one per cent.  ) But this desire for safety wasn’t a rational calculation.   It was a feeling.   Over the past decade, a number of major automakers in America have relied on the services of a French-born cultural anthropologist, G.   Clotaire Rapaille, whose speciality is getting beyond the rational—what he calls "cortex"—impressions of consumers and tapping into their deeper, "reptilian" responses.   And what Rapaille concluded from countless, intensive sessions with car buyers was that when S.U.V. buyers thought about safety they were thinking about something that reached into their deepest unconscious.   "The No.   1 feeling is that everything surrounding you should be round and soft, and should give," Rapaille told me.   "There should be air bags everywhere.   Then there’s this notion that you need to be up high.   That’s a contradiction, because the people who buy these S.U.V.s know at the cortex level that if you are high there is more chance of a rollover.   But at the reptilian level they think that if I am bigger and taller I’m safer.   You feel secure because you are higher and dominate and look down.   That you can look down is psychologically a very powerful notion.   And what was the key element of safety when you were a child? It was that your mother fed you, and there was warm liquid.   That’s why cupholders are absolutely crucial for safety.   If there is a car that has no cupholder, it is not safe.   If I can put my coffee there, if I can have my food, if everything is round, if it’s soft, and if I’m high, then I feel safe.   It’s amazing that intelligent, educated women will look at a car and the first thing they will look at is how many cupholders it has.  " During the design of Chrysler’s PT Cruiser, one of the things Rapaille learned was that car buyers felt unsafe when they thought that an outsider could easily see inside their vehicles.   So Chrysler made the back window of the PT Cruiser smaller.   Of course, making windows smaller—and thereby reducing visibility—makes driving more dangerous, not less so.   But that’s the puzzle of what has happened to the automobile world: feeling safe has become more important than actually being safe. 

Lord Levene said 2005 was the worst year on record for natural disasters for property insurers, with claims of $US83 billion ($A107.86 billion) worldwide.

Hurricanes such as Katrina and Rita in the United States accounted for $US66 billion ($A85.76 billion) of this total.

But 2006 was a far more benign year.

"Last year was lucky, the wind didn’t blow like (in 2005)," Lord Levene said.

"But the forecast suggests that our good fortune was an anomaly within a trend towards more frequent and more destructive storms."

Lord Levene has urged more businesses to review their risk management strategy and insurance companies to invest more in research to better understand the financial effect of climate change.

Underwriters need to price risk correctly and use better modelling that reflected the latest science, he said.

The former London lord mayor said he accepted it wasn’t easy to precisely measure the effect of global warming on the frequency of natural disasters.

"To what extent (Hurricane Katrina) was caused by climate change or to what extent it would have already happened, we don’t know," he told journalists.

"But the evidence is becoming pretty overwhelming and we have to do something about it."

Lord Levene said some insurers had started pricing the risk of rising sea levels into premiums for property insurance bought by customers in coastal regions.

"If you have a house on the coast you’ll know how much that premium’s gone up," he told journalists.

Lloyd’s hasn’t yet released its full-year results for 2006, but Lord Levene said its revenue rose by about 15 per cent over the past two years to $US16.1 billion ($A20.92 billion).

"We would have had a very good year in 2006," he said.

Lord Levene said Lloyd’s was opening its first Chinese business next month, which he described as a "no brainer" in a "huge, huge market".

Lloyd’s is the sixth-biggest insurer in Australia and has predicted growth for its operations here to be relatively flat after the business experienced rapid growth after the collapse of HIH in 2001.

"In the last two or three years our position in a soft market has plateaued," Lloyd’s head of Australian operations Keith Stern said.

"For as long as we stay in a soft market the ambitions of our underwriters will be tempered by that."

© 2007 AAP

For Mozambique, this deadly combination of floods, drought and cyclone represent a significant blow to a nation that was on the path toward economic recovery.

© 2007 Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Copyright information: http://abc.net.au/common/copyrigh.htm