Der Atomausstieg ist eigentlich beschlossene Sache. Doch angesichts steigender Energiepreise finden die Deutschen die lange verteufelte Kernenergie plötzlich gar nicht mehr so schlimm. Nur noch eine knappe Mehrheit der Deutschen wünscht sich laut Deutschlandtrend den Komplett-Ausstieg. Immerhin elf beziehungsweise 33 Prozent der Anhänger von Grünen und SPD finden den Atomausstieg falsch. Noch überraschender ist, dass sich bei der Linkspartei Unterstützer und Gegner des Ausstiegs mit 50 zu 49 Prozent fast die Waage halten. Auch in der EU wächst die Zustimmung zur Atomenergie. Laut einer Umfrage der EU-Kommission befürworten 44 Prozent der 27.000 befragten EU-Bürger die Nutzung der Kernkraft. Dies ist ein Anstieg um sieben Prozentpunkte seit der letzten Eurobarometer-Erhebung zur Atomkraft vor rund drei Jahren. http://www.welt.de/politik/article2178060/Deutsche_erwaermen_sich_wieder_fuer_Atomkraft.html

At least 2.5 million people have been killed in natural disasters over the recent 48 years. The number of casualties over the recent 20 years made up 1.6 million people, the UN said. Rob Vos, the director of the Development Policy and Analysis Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), said that the number of natural disasters taking place in the world nowadays has quadrupled in comparison with the 1970s. The disaster-related economic damage has increased at least seven times. The authors of the report delivered at the UN headquarters in New York at the session of the UN Economic and Social Council did not specify the reason why natural disasters started happening more frequently in the world today. They said, however, that the frequency of catastrophes could be linked with the global climate change. http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/04-07-2008/105690-earth-0

Reality check: The average annual percentage of the …

European environment ministers on Friday wrapped up a two-day meeting that exposed an East-West divide within the EU over how to slash carbon pollution across the 27-nation bloc by 2020. At an informal meeting outside Paris, the ministers agreed to help the European Union’s poorer members, mostly in central and eastern Europe, hit the target of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 percent compared with 1990 levels. The European Commission’s action plan for cutting greenhouse gases already includes a mechanism for compensating the eastern European nations that remain hugely dependent on indigenous coal, Russian gas and Soviet-era nuclear plants. The EU’s richest nations have agreed to redistribute 10 percent of the income generated by the auction of post-2012 pollution permits under Europe’s emissions trading system. A group of seven nations that were former Soviet satellites have accepted the principle, but say the funds will not be enough.
http://www.eubusiness.com/news-eu/1215172922.32 …

"I came to IIM Calcutta because I see India as a country which has a chance of becoming the USA of the 21st century” – these are the words of Orr Ben Nathan- a student from Israel who has come to study at IIM Calcutta.  He is enrolled for IIM C’s flagship 2 year PGDM course for the 2008-10 session. These are early signs that elite Indian B-schools are emerging as global B-schools. Orr has had an interesting journey so far. He studied Economics and Accounting from The Tel Aviv University in Israel. After his graduation he served as a paratrooper in the Army for 3 years. “Stint at the army instilled the basic tenets of discipline in me,” he remarked. Later Orr operated his own mutual fund for 30 months which further strengthened his fundamentals of Finance. Orr next travelled all over India and South-east Asia for 3 years …

The Russian embassy in Ottawa is suggesting next week’s G8 summit in Japan won’t likely produce hard targets for cutting the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions. Embassy official Sergey Khudyakov says Russia isn’t ruling out firm reduction goals for the years 2020 and 2050 - but he adds the summit on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido isn’t the place to set global targets. Khudyakov says the role of the Group of Eight wealthy, industrialized nations is to hatch ideas to help the world solve the problem of climate change, not dictate global policy. He says the Russian position is closely aligned with the Canadian government’s in opposing any pact that doesn’t include the world’s biggest polluters, like China and India. http://canadianpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5iacK5U4PNapvwZYwKpcgBZXeCkXw

The world’s recession fears and thirst for energy will move Europeans and others closer to Canada’s position on climate change, Prime Minister Stephen Harper predicts. Climate change …

Einige Leser werden sich vielleicht noch an die Schreckensmeldung erinnern: Schmelzwasser und ins Meer stürzende Eisbrocken lassen die Gletscher Grönlands schrumpfen - und zwar schneller als gedacht. Jetzt stellt sich offenbar heraus, die ganze Aufregung war mal wieder ein falscher Alarm: One of the most vivid symbols of global warming used by scientists and campaigners to spur society to curb climate-warming emissions is photography of gushing rivers of meltwater plunging from the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet into the depths. Recent studies have shown these natural drainpipes, called moulins, can speed up the slow seaward march of the grinding ice by lubricating the interface with bedrock below. The faster that ice flows, the faster seas rise. Now, though, a new Dutch study of 17 years of satellite measurements of ice movement in …

The headlines last week brought us terrifying news: The North Pole will be ice-free this summer “for the first time in human history,” wrote Steve Connor in The Independent. Or so the experts at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado predict. This sounds very frightening, so let’s look at the facts about polar sea ice. As usual, there are a couple of huge problems with the reports. Firstly, the story is neither alarming nor unique. In the August 29, 2000 edition of the New York Times, the same NSIDC expert, Mark Serreze, said: “There’s nothing to be necessarily alarmed about. There’s been open water at the pole before. We have no clear evidence at this point that this is related to global climate change.” During the summer of 2000 there was “a large body of ice-free water about 10 miles long and 3 miles wide …

It is a source of great concern that far too many otherwise decent British people now refuse to believe that the British National Party is what it is—a bunch of viciously racist and anti-Jewish bigots. The recent debacle in the Henley by-election, where the BNP did better than either the Labour party or UKIP , shows that it is now tapping into a disturbing level of support.

This is for two reasons. First, like all far right parties it opportunistically seizes upon genuine grievances that mainstream politicians will not address. At present these centre around the deliberate erosion of British national identity through unlimited immigration and a refusal to tackle the growing Islamisation of Britain. Mainstream liberal opinion holds that even to identify this as a problem is racist or ‘Islamophobic’. The result is that the truly racist BNP (which uses concern about Muslims to camouflage its real …