Brazil - Spanish group receives soft funding to expand wind farms in south of Brazil

UNITED NATIONS -- Ships using highly polluting fuel oils can no longer travel through the Southern Ocean near Antarctica, according to a U.N. agency in London.

Vessels plying the waters of North America will also be held to more stringent fuel grade standards in an effort to control emissions, thanks to new environmentally friendly amendments to an international maritime treaty that is taking effect this month and over the next couple of years.

Yesterday officials at the International Maritime Organization announced that rules protecting Antarctic air, attached to the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships, officially entered into force on Aug. 1. The amendments to the treaty, known as MARPOL, regulate what fuel oils cannot be used in ships plying waters below 60 degrees latitude south.

The new rules are meant to curb air pollution from shipping activity in the world's southernmost ocean. Exemptions are only made for vessels conducting search and rescue operations or those sent to aid ships in distress.

The MARPOL agreement was signed and ratified by 136 countries representing about 98 percent of the globe's shipping traffic in tonnage.

According to the new rules amended to the treaty, ships traveling below the 60th parallel will not be allowed to carry any of the heavy grade crude oils or fuels, even if it is only cargo.

The new regulations ban use and carriage of crude oils and other shipping fuel oils with a density higher than 900 kilograms per cubic meter, measured at a temperature of 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit). Carriage and burning of waste bitumen and tar near Antarctica is also forbidden.

Any ships approaching the Antarctic zone and carrying the heavier-grade fuels would have to switch fuel types at a port before passing below 60 degrees south latitude.

The new MARPOL agreements will also establish the first North American special emissions control area (ECA) but at a much later date.

The North American ECA will create a zone that would hold ships to higher emissions control standards than otherwise exist in most of the world.

Nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides are being targeted for reductions. Particulates would also be more heavily regulated.

The North American ECA agreement won't enter into force until mid-2013. A separate ECA for Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands would not be created until 2014.

Currently the only other two shipping ECAs in existence are found in the North and Baltic seas.

The apartheid-inspired Israeli regime continues to go on rampage in illegally occupied Palestine, killing the defenceless Palestinians at will. This context has been imposed in Mideast by USA-UK terror twins following their mischievous victory in the World War II, and now further reinforced by the notorious UNSC-NATO terror organizations, The lawless Israeli regime has even provided it with illegal nukes.

Ever since they were driven out of their homes by the criminal elements Israel’s Jewish population, Palestinians have been struggling to obtain an independent Palestine once again to live free from Zionist attacks and massacres and all the “talks” between them and the illegal Israeli occupiers have failed so far owing to the lack of sincerity on the part of the Zionist leadership as well as the western sponsors led by the unilateral USA.

The USA and Israel have objected to the Palestinian’s diplomatic offensive, calling instead for a resumption of direct peace negotiations. Leaders of both USA and Israel behave like dictators pushing through their own terms to Palestinians, rather than true statesmen trying to find credible solutions.

It seems like the Israeli Establishment’s Zionist ideology. and fascism are also synonymous with “democracy“. USA and Israel, as apparent joint terror twins, employ similar threatening tone regarding UN recognition of Palestine as a full member.

By withstanding all pressure and terror tactics of US-Israeli terrocraices, the Palestinians will seek full membership in the world body through the General Assembly. But the USA, Israel’s ally in humanity crimes, has threatened to veto any such measure, raising procedural questions about the Palestinian campaign.

Pro-West Palestinian leader Abbas acknowledged the internal obstacle of Palestinian bifurcation between Hamas in Gaza and the P.A. in the West Bank. He said, “God willing, Palestinian reconciliation will be achieved before we go to the UN.” Last month, the rotating president of the General Assembly said the body does not deal with membership issues absent an enabling resolution passed by the UNSC.

A close ally of USA and NATO, Israel also kills defenceless Palestinians and uses the corpses as a bargain chip with the Palestinian leadership over their freedom struggle for an independent Palestine state to be a full member of UN. A recent announcement by Israeli military minister Ehud Barak, former terror PM of Israel, that he had placed a hold on plans to transfer the bodies of 84 Palestinian terrorists killed in attacks on Jews has sparked outrage among Israelis who knew nothing about the plan until Barak’s announcement. Washington which claims to be crusader for the cause of freedom and democracy does not open its dirty mouth on the issue.

USA and its CIA-Pentagon-Mossad jointly oppose Palestine as well the sovereignty move legally though UN and, like the Jews, call Palestinians the terrorists. Palestinian diplomats gathered in Istanbul, Turkey, on 23th July to receive marching orders for a diplomatic offensive in support of plans to seek legal recognition of statehood at the UN in September overcoming all pressure tactics of fascist Israel and its allies. Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud ‘Abbas told his assembled diplomats that the UN gambit was forced upon the Palestinians by virtue of Israel’s refusal to “end settlement building and end the occupation. In an apparent response to critics who argue that the UN gambit is a unilateral act proscribed by the Oslo Accords,” and is therefore “not unilateral”, but Abbas reiterated that their decision to approach the UN after such long wait is not “unilateral”.

Meanwhile, Israeli and Palestinian leaders are trading threats over the future of the 1993 Oslo Accords to press their respective positions. It was reported in Israeli media that the Netanyahu government is weighing the voiding of the Oslo Accords as a possible response to a unilateral Palestinian declaration of statehood in September. The offsetting Oslo references are symptomatic of the rapidly intensifying diplomatic campaigns launched by both the Israelis and Palestinians in advance of the September UN session. Still unclear is the mechanism available to the Palestinians in the event the US vetoes a Security Council resolution on statehood and UN membership as the Obama regime has shamelessly threatened with doing.

Under existing Zionist criminal circumstances and failed "talks", recognition by UN is the only option before the besieged Palestinians. The charismatic Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti who is in jail serving a life term in Israel urged his people support the bid to seek UN recognition for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

In a statement released from his prison cell, Barghouti called on Palestinians around the world to stage a “million-man march” during the UN debate scheduled for September. Barghouti is widely respected among Palestinians and considered a possible presidential candidate should he be freed by Zionist criminal state. Abbas would stick to UN route for freedom.

Officially, Israel and USA, having together operated for years now, jointly engineering terror and subversive operations world over, have always projected the Gaza Strip, besieged by Israeli military blockades and terror attacks killing innocent Palestinians, as an unwanted undesirable zone of “terrorists. But Gaza is the world's fourth-most-ancient city, but Israel that indirectly occupies it by putting terror blockades and effectively controls it from outside does not permit any foreign tourists to visit the city. Blockaded by Israel and Egypt, impoverished and subject to Islamic strictures, the Gaza Strip isn’t on the itinerary of most of the world’s tourists, but that hasn’t deterred Gaza City from producing a map highlighting local "must sees" –a the brainchild of students and lecturers at the Geography Department of the city’s University College of Applied Sciences (UCAS). This was the project of their dream and aspiration.

For the first time Obama said in his address on May 19 that any future Israel/Palestine peace agreement should be generally based on the 1967 borders. But he has refused to further purse the issue, thereby letting his opponents to make fun of him. If Israeli fascism cannot be contained effectively, Israel should be shifted to USA or Europe that have got the capacity to withstand Israeli terror operations. Of late, Obama does not talk about Palestine issue seems to be engaged in quiet diplomacy to make Israel behave sane. However, his anti-Palestine stand in opposing their UN move presents the US president's motives in a dark frame.

Global dictator USA is known for its double speaks. Obama's predecessor Bush Jr after pursuing a peace road map toward the end of his tenure at White compound went all the way to Israel to promote Israeli occupation and call Palestinians the "terrorists", thus closing US peace moves. Obama's plan is confusing too. If the USA wants the Palestinian Authority to continue to exist, then it should help with the establishment of a Palestinian state in keeping with the 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital. Arid if the USA misbehaves and vetoes accepting Palestine to the UNSC, uses its financial aid to the PA as political blackmail and leaves Israel as the source of authority, then the PA must cease to exist.

Tel-Aviv is Zionist capital. Washington has not pressed Israel to agree for a Palestine state with Jerusalem as its capital. it is quite likely that Obama would change the CIA plan to veto the UN resolution and support the genuine cause of Palestinians. Veto power is arbitrary and illegal as well.

1 August 2011

Congress' debt deal leaves climate advocates grappling with a decade of potentially declining environmental budgets and narrowing hopes of attaching a tax on greenhouse gas emissions to pay down the deficit.

The deadline measure, passed with bipartisan support in the House last night, promises $917 billion in discretionary cuts over the next 10 years, with decreases of up to $1.5 trillion more ushered in later this year. Huge chunks of funding would be eliminated from the Pentagon and government agencies, prompting concerns that programs related to renewable energy, climate science and technology research could come under the knife for years to come.

It's unclear where the deepest craters will occur, but clean energy supporters urged lawmakers to avoid painful reductions at the Energy Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, which searches for breakthrough technologies to radically alter the nation's energy use. Other vulnerable programs include energy grants, loan guarantees, and tax credits for wind, solar and other clean energies.

Specific cuts aren't known, but Joshua Freed, vice president of clean energy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, described a vivid choice that the Republican-led House will soon be faced with: Cut agency budgets with modern medical precision or hack away with practices used on Civil War battlefields.

"If Congress takes the bone saw to every program and agency, economic growth is going to be sacrificed," Freed said, claiming that the nation would miss out on a $2.3 trillion clean energy market globally.

The deal struck on Sunday between President Obama and congressional leaders contains two key concessions. Republicans sacrificed a future second vote to raise the debt ceiling next winter, closer to the presidential election. And Democrats surrendered tax increases, sending a signal to some climate advocates that reducing the deficit with revenue from a carbon tax is now more difficult.