Tuesday, December 10, 2013
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com



News Clips For The Day


Canada risks tensions with Russia by claiming ownership of North Pole – NBC
By David Ljunggren, Reuters



Canada intends to lay claim to the North Pole as part of a bid to assert control over a large part of the resource-rich Arctic, Foreign Minister John Baird said on Monday.
Baird said Canada had filed a preliminary submission to a special United Nations commission collecting competing claims and would be submitting more data later.
The move could raise tensions with Denmark and Russia, both of which also look set to lay claim to the North Pole on the grounds it lies on a continental shelf they control.

"We have asked our officials and scientists to do additional and necessary work to ensure that a submission for the full extent of the continental shelf in the Arctic includes Canada's claim to the North Pole," Baird told reporters.

Canada, Russia, Denmark, Norway and the United States are all keen to control as much as they can of a region the U.S. Geological Survey says contains 30 percent of the world's undiscovered natural gas and 15 percent of oil.

A Russian submarine planted a flag on the North Pole sea bed in 2007.
"Obtaining international recognition for the outer limits of our continental shelf will be vital to the future development of Canada's offshore resources," said Baird.
"Canada is going to fight to assert its sovereignty in the north but I think we will be good neighbors in doing so."

Russia, Canada and Denmark all say an underwater mountain range known as the Lomonosov Ridge, which stretches 1,120 miles across the pole under the Arctic Sea, is part of their own landmass.

Baird said Canada needed more time to file a final submission to the U.N. commission because it had not had time to fully map the area around the ridge.


North Pole
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The North Pole, also known as the Geographic North Pole or Terrestrial North Pole, is, subject to the caveats explained below, defined as the point in the Northern Hemisphere where the Earth's axis of rotation meets its surface. It should not be confused with the North Magnetic Pole.

The North Pole is the northernmost point on the Earth, lying diametrically opposite the South Pole. It defines geodetic latitude 90° North, as well as the direction of true north. At the North Pole all directions point south; all lines of longitude converge there, so its longitude can be defined as any degree value.

While the South Pole lies on a continental land mass, the North Pole is located in the middle of the Arctic Ocean amid waters that are almost permanently covered with constantly shifting sea ice. This makes it impractical to construct a permanent station at the North Pole (unlike the South Pole). However, the Soviet Union, and later Russia, have constructed a number of manned drifting stations on a generally annual basis since 1937, some of which have passed over or very close to the Pole. Since 2002, the Russians have also annually established a base, Barneo, close to the Pole. This operates for a few weeks during early spring.

The sea depth at the North Pole has been measured at 4,261 m (13,980 ft) by the Russian Mir submersible in 2007[3] and at 4,087 m (13,410 ft) by USS Nautilus in 1958.[4][5] The nearest land is usually said to be Kaffeklubben Island, off the northern coast of Greenland about 700 km (430 mi) away, though some perhaps non-permanent gravel banks lie slightly closer. The nearest permanently inhabited place is Alert in the Qikiqtaaluk Region, Nunavut, Canada, which is located 817 km (508 mi) from the Pole.

MIR submersible, one of the two vehicles that were used in the first ever manned descent to the seabed under the North Pole
On August 2, 2007, a Russian scientific expedition Arktika 2007 made the first ever manned descent to the ocean floor at the North Pole, to a depth of 4.3 km (2.7 mi), as part of the research programme in support of Russia's 2001 extended continental shelf claim to a large swathe of the Arctic Ocean floor. The descent took place in two MIR submersibles and was led by Soviet and Russian polar explorer Artur Chilingarov. In a symbolic act of visitation, the Russian flag was placed on the ocean floor exactly under the Pole.[47][48][49][50]

The expedition is the latest move to show that Russia has the dominant influence in the Arctic.[51] The warming Arctic climate and summer shrinkage of the iced area attracted the attention of many countries, such as China and the United States, toward the top of the world, where resources and shipping routes may soon be exploitable.[52]

Under international law, no country currently owns the North Pole or the region of the Arctic Ocean surrounding it. The five surrounding Arctic countries, Russia, Canada, Norway, Denmark (via Greenland), and the United States (via Alaska), are limited to a 200-nautical-mile (370 km; 230 mi) exclusive economic zone around their coasts, and the area beyond that is administered by the International Seabed Authority.

Upon ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a country has a ten-year period to make claims to an extended continental shelf beyond its 200 mile exclusive economic zone. If validated, such a claim gives the claimant state rights to what may be on or beneath the sea bottom within the claimed zone.[67] Norway (ratified the convention in 1996[68]), Russia (ratified in 1997[68]), Canada (ratified in 2003[68]) and Denmark (ratified in 2004[68]) have all launched projects to base claims that certain areas of Arctic continental shelves should be subject to their sole sovereign exploitation.[69][70]

In 1907 Canada invoked a "sector principle" to claim sovereignty over a sector stretching from its coasts to the North Pole. Although this claim has not been relinquished, but was not consistently pressed until 2013.[71][72]


I hope this will be, as Baird said, a peaceful competition for the North Pole lands. According to this news article, it contains 30 percent of the world's undiscovered natural gas and 15 percent of oil. I suppose the sea there will be dotted with oil wells in the near future. This makes me feel tired. We are literally losing all of our natural places, and it's really depressing. According to the Wikipedia article, there aren't very many animals that live there. I hope oil spills don't become a common thing, none the less.





Senate extends ban on undetectable guns but nixes tighter restrictions – NBC
By Kasie Hunt and Carrie Dann , NBC News


Just days before the anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the Senate extended a ban on undetectable firearms but declined to tighten any of the law's restrictions. 

The legislation -- which continues a 10-year prohibition on the manufacture, sale or possession of guns that cannot be detected by X-ray machines or metal detectors -- was passed by "unanimous consent," or without a roll call vote. President Barack Obama signed it into law Monday night.

Gun rights advocates had opposed making any modifications to the law, known as the Undetectable Firearms Act. 
Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York attempted to add language to the ban to close what he called a "glaring loophole" in the law. 

Schumer argued that gun makers can meet the current requirements of the law by including a metal part that is easily detached, and he said the current ban fails to adequately address 3-D printing technology that could allow individuals to easily remove parts and carry undetectable guns through security checkpoints.

The new technology also raises fears that people could make gun parts that don’t register alarm when they pass through an X-ray machine – but could be assembled into a working gun after the screening.

But Schumer's efforts faced opposition from the gun lobby, including the National Rifle Association and Gun Owners of America. His proposed amendment did not receive a vote. 

Before the measure passed, Schumer said the 10-year extension of the ban is "better than nothing, but it doesn't get us across the finish line." 
"There is no sense in having this kind of threat to the safety of our people and the national security of this country," said Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., in a press conference with Schumer after the law's passage.
 
The quiet nixing of additional restrictions was the latest defeat for gun control proponents, who have been unable to pass any new gun restrictions through Congress even after a massive push for new legislation in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting.
While the powerful NRA did not oppose extending the ban as-is, the group lobbied against tightening its restrictions.

“We would like to make our position clear,” the group said in a statement last week. “The NRA strongly opposes ANY expansion of the Undetectable Firearms Act, including applying the UFA to magazines, gun parts, or the development of new technologies. The NRA has been working for months to thwart expansion of the UFA by Senator Chuck Schumer and others.”

The group Gun Owners of America also argued that the law’s language – and any additions proposed by Schumer – is too broad and could be used to justify additional restrictions on gun ownership.
 


Automatic rifles and undetectable guns are a basic threat to peaceful society. These new 3-D printers make the manufacture of plastic guns easy, even if people can't buy them already made. I don't know why people want to carry guns if they aren't planning to use them, but they apparently don't feel safe without a weapon. I feel less safe with a gun, for fear that someone will take it away from me and shoot me with it. Too many friends are shot with hand guns by mistake. I just don't go out unless I absolutely have to after nightfall, and I don't walk in unsafe neighborhoods. That's my solution to the problem.



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The Secret's Out: Obama Acknowledges Existence Of Area 51 – NPR
by Adam Wollner
­
At one time, Area 51 was one of the most famous military installations in the world — a place widely talked about, yet so secret that the U.S. government refused to confirm its existence.

That's why President Obama's reference to the southern Nevada base Sunday raised eyebrows. It marked the first time a U.S. commander in chief has publicly acknowledged the facility that fueled countless conspiracy theories.

Obama used the annual Kennedy Center Honors ceremony to crack a joke at the expense of actor Shirley MacLaine, one of the five award recipients, who has claimed to have seen UFOs on several occasions.

"Now, when you first become president, one of the questions that people ask you is, 'What's really going on in Area 51?' " Obama said. "When I wanted to know, I'd call Shirley MacLaine. I think I just became the first president to ever publicly mention Area 51. How's that, Shirley?"

Conspiracy theorists have been obsessed with Area 51 for decades, claming — among other things — the government is holding aliens and crashed UFOs there.
The 1996 blockbuster movie "Independence Day" cemented that notion in popular culture by depicting it as a highly secure repository for extraterrestrial beings and alien spacecraft.

A year earlier, President Bill Clinton had added to the mystery surrounding the facility by issuing a presidential determination declaring the site exempt from environmental disclosure laws following a lawsuit. Yet the document never actually referred to Area 51 — rather, it specified "the Air Force's operating location near Groom Lake, Nevada."

It wasn't until last August that the CIA confirmed the existence of Area 51, officially known as the Nevada Test and Training Range and Groom Lake.
The newly released documents said the site served as a testing ground for aerial surveillance programs, such as the U-2 spy plane first used during the Cold War.
No mention of aliens or flying saucers, though.


I don't think Obama should have spoken disparagingly of Shirley McClain at her awards ceremony. That was not kind. There are many people who believe in UFOs, though fewer now than in the past. I hope she was not too embarrassed.



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For Working-Class Chinese, 'Picture Day' Is A Rare Treat – NPR
by Frank Langfitt
­
A holiday gift of sorts came early in more than 20 countries over the weekend, as volunteer photographers shot free, studio-quality portraits of more than 16,000 people who otherwise couldn't have afforded them.

A working-class neighborhood of Shanghai was among the more than 130 sites where the photo shoots took place, part of a global project inspired by Help-Portrait, a U.S.-based nonprofit.

Ronny Chan, an electrical engineer originally from Hong Kong, was among the 16 volunteers at the New Citizen Life Center. He spent much of his day trying to coax smiles from subjects who had rarely if ever sat for portraits.

"Xiao," said Chan, using the Mandarin word for smile, as he tried to brighten up the expressions on a migrant couple with a pair of grandchildren on their laps.
Sue Anne Tay, another volunteer, made rabbit ears behind Chan's head, but the grandchildren — dressed in puffy coats and hats — remained stone-faced.
Finally, the grandmother grinned and Chan captured it.

"They don't have a lot of opportunities to take pictures," said Chan, explaining the often-sober expressions of his subjects. "It's mostly like passport photos. They haven't really done studio shots before."

For the grandfather, Zhuo Wancang, this was his first-ever portrait. Until a few months ago, he farmed corn and wheat in Gansu province in China's northwest. The only photo he has of himself is on his government-issued ID card.

"My grandson has never had his photo taken, so we came here together. It's free!" said Zhou, who zipped his black winter coat all the way to the neck in what looked like an attempt to appear more formal. "I'm already 60 years old, and I don't know when I can have another photo with my grandson."

­ Zhou and the others were photographed at a community center, which volunteers had converted into a studio, complete with light stands and photo printers provided by Canon. They even used walkie-talkies to help process the 215 families who showed up.
The volunteers, including Tay, are members of a Shanghai Flickr group. Tay has lived in Shanghai for six years and works as a banker during the week, but spends some of her weekends exploring old neighborhoods and documenting the city's dramatic transformation on a photo blog called Shanghai Street Stories. She sees the portraits as a way to help a few of the millions of migrant workers who keep this megacity running.

Sue Anne Tay, a Singaporean banker who also runs a documentary photography blog called Shanghai Street Stories, was among the volunteers who helped at Saturday's free portrait event.

"They do jobs that most upwardly mobile citizens prefer not to do," said Tay, 34. "They're involved in the wholesale vegetable sector. They cook food in the streets. They clean." Most earn no more than $300 to $500 a month.

­ When Tay and the other volunteers first started shooting portraits in Shanghai five years ago, people were suspicious.
"The first question is: 'This is free? Why?' " said Tay.
She said the people were initially distrustful because it's hard to find something free in China, and it's rare that someone does something for nothing around here.
Among the crowd last weekend was a woman named You, who hadn't had a formal photo taken in years because it was too time-consuming and expensive.

You said her daughter went to Shanghai's Town God Temple last summer and had a single portrait done at a cost of about $20.
"It was expensive," she said.

After printing the photos Saturday, volunteers spread them on folding tables outside. People's eyes lit up, and some grabbed the portraits before the photographers could put them down.

Asked why she thought these strangers — many of them foreigners — wanted to help people like her, You answered without pausing.
"This is charitable work," she said. "It feels pretty good."


This is a happy story. The simplest things can bring the most pleasure when people don't have many of the things they want.



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Microbiome Candy: Could A Probiotic Mint Help Prevent Cavities? – NPR
by Michaeleen Doucleff
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Eat candy and fight tooth decay. What a sweet concept, right?
Well, microbiologists in Berlin are trying to make that dream a reality.
They've created a sugarless mint that's aimed at washing out cavity-causing bacteria from your mouth. And the candy works in a curious way: It's spiked with dead bacteria. It's like probiotics for your teeth.

The experimental mint is still in the early days of development — and far from reaching the shelves at Walgreens.

­ But a study involving a few dozen volunteers published in September suggests that the concept is promising: Sucking on the bacteria-laced mints lowered the levels of cavity-causing bacteria in the saliva of volunteers, microbiologists reported in Probiotics and Antimicrobial Proteins.

So how does the candy work?
Our mouths are microbial jungles. They're filled with more than 600 species of bacteria. Most of them are harmless. But in terms of tooth decay, one critter is the major culprit: Streptococcus mutans. These bacteria take sugars in our food and turn them into tooth-dissolving acids.

So microbiologist Christine Lang at Organobalance — a German research and development firm that focuses on probiotics — thought, why not get the good bacteria to fight off the bad ones?

"We were looking for something new for oral hygiene," Lang tells The Salt. "Something that specifically recognizes and binds to Streptoccocus mutans, but wouldn't kill the other microbes in the mouth."

Lang and her team screened nearly 800 different types of bacteria until they found one critter that keeps Streptoccocus from sticking onto the surface of teeth. The healthy bacteria, called Lactobacillus paracasei, are found in yogurt and kefir, and they seem to stop Streptoccocus even when they're dead. (That's because the good bacteria hook onto Streptoccocus and cause it to clump up, Lang says.)

So the researchers spiked a sugarless mint with the dead Lactobacillus and then had people suck on the candies. Ten minutes later, the researchers measured the levels of the bad bacteria in the volunteers' mouths. They found that the dead bacteria did strip away some of the Streptoccocus in the volunteers' saliva. However, the effect was small and researchers don't know yet how long it lasts.

Even so, the results are encouraging enough, Lang says, that her team is planning a larger and longer experiment. But James Bader at the University of North Carolina School of Dentistry is more skeptical.

­ "The concept is sound," the research dentist tells The Salt. "Anything we can do to reduce the concentrations of strep mutans in the mouth is good."
But it's way too early to draw many conclusions, he says. "The reduction by the candy is really temporary and very small," he says.

To fight cavities, Bader says, the candy would have to go after bacteria stuck in the plaque on the teeth — not bacteria in the saliva. "What the researchers have shown is that it [sucking on the candy] has some activity in deactivating Streptococcus mutans that are free-floating in the mouth," he says. "They still have to prove that it reduces the bacteria in the biofilm on the teeth."

And that can be a trickier task, Bader says. For decades, he notes, dentists thought that a chemical put in sugarless candy and gum, called xylitol, reduced cavities by killing Streptococcus inside the plaque.

But a large, long-term study by Bader and his colleagues this year didn't support the claims. Even sucking on xylitol lozenges five times a day for three years didn't significantly cut a person's risk for developing cavities, the study found.
"Gum manufacturers have taken a long look at the effect of sugarless gum on teeth" Bader says. "People have less plaque [when they regularly chew gum], but the companies haven't shown that they have less caries."


I'm sure there is no substitute for brushing the teeth. It's interesting about the bacteria found in yogurt, though. I eat a cup of yogurt almost every morning for breakfast. I haven't had any cavities in the last year. Maybe the yogurt helps.




­ Israel, Jordan, Palestinians Strike Water-Sharing Deal – NPR
by Scott Neuman
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Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians have agreed to a water-sharing pact that would see the construction of a desalination plant on the Gulf of Aqaba on the Red Sea and bring "a long-awaited Red Sea-Dead Sea pipeline one step closer to completion," according to Reuters.

The plant would be built on the Jordanian side of the Gulf and the resulting potable water would be shared between Jordan and Israel.

Alexander McPhail, the lead water and sanitation specialist in the World Bank's Water Practice division, tells The Jerusalem Post Monday that in return, "Israel will increase the annual releases of water from Lake Kinneret to Jordan and will also increase its sales of water to the Palestinian Authority."

"'It's like a swap,' McPhail told the Post, regarding the Israeli and Jordan portions of the agreement. 'Israel needs water in the south because they want to settle that part of their country. Jordan needs more water in the North.'"

Israel's Regional Development Minister Silvan Shalom said in a statement that the pact includes building a 112-mile pipeline northward from Aqaba to the Dead Sea at an estimated cost of $300 million to $400 million.

Bloomberg reports:
"That study examined various plans to halt the shrinking of the Dead Sea, whose restorative powers have attracted visitors since biblical times. The lowest place on Earth has lost a third of its surface area from drought, agricultural diversion and pumping to extract minerals for fertilizers."

"'This is a breakthrough after years of difficulty and struggle,' Shalom said on Army Radio of a pipeline he estimated will take three years to build to the benefit of each side economically and environmentally."


I'm very glad to see that Israel is sharing water with their neighbors. Hopefully the desalination project will succeed, too. If Global Warming continues, which I assume it will, the water will be much needed. Water is one of the few things in the Middle East that is more precious than oil.