Atheist Afghan granted religious asylum in UK

Source: BBC

An Afghan citizen has been granted asylum in the UK for religious reasons - because he is an atheist.

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They believe it is the first time a person has been granted asylum in the UK on the basis of their atheism.

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They said the man's return to Afghanistan could result in a death sentence under Sharia law as an apostate - someone who has abandoned their religious faith - unless he remained discreet about his atheist beliefs.

But because every aspect of daily life and culture in Afghanistan is permeated by Islam living discreetly would be virtually impossible, they said.

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Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25715736

Group Takes 'Strong Exception' to New Nuke Recommendation

Source: Hampton-North Hampton Patch

Hundreds of U.S. and international environmental and clean energy groups including Seacoast Anti-Pollution League say that, while they respect the climate change work of former NASA climate scientist Dr. James Hansen and three colleagues, take strong exception to their widely-reported notion that nuclear power is the solution to global warming. Dr. Hanson, who has spoken to state legislators about climate impacts at the NH State House, has become an outspoken advocate of nuclear power, despite widespread criticism of that approach and the almost total collapse of the much-touted “nuclear renaissance” in this country in recent years.

A joint letter from more than 311 groups – including 237 from 46 U.S. states and the District of Columbia and 74 from 44 other nations around the globe – is being issued in response to a widely circulated November 3, 2013 statement from Dr. Hansen and three of his academic world colleagues, Ken Caldeira, Kerry Emanuel, and Tom Wigley. In that statement Hansen and the others voiced their advocacy for increased reliance on nuclear power, an industry plagued by financial, technical and safety issues for more than 50 years.

“We think the public needs to know that while these scientists are leaders in their field of climatology, they have no corresponding expertise in nuclear engineering or energy policy, and their opinions have much less bearing on current reality or future power production prospects,” said Doug Bogen, executive director of Seacoast Anti-Pollution League. “In fact, with recent reversals in nuclear power production in this country and other complications, it remains to be seen whether nuclear power will play much of any role in supplying power in this country past the first few decades of this century, let alone serve as a serious solution to the climate crisis.”

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CSI Senior Energy Analyst Grant Smith said: “We can admire the important work of Dr. Hansen on climate change, which is his area of expertise, while disagreeing with his advocacy of nuclear power. In the face of a clear need for swift action on climate change, there is nothing about nuclear power that resembles a solution that can be put into place quickly, much less in a safe and affordable fashion. Indeed, Dr. Hansen and his colleagues tout so-called ‘advanced’ nuclear technology, which is nothing more than regurgitated attempts by the industry to bring tried-and-failed alternative designs such as expensive and dangerous breeder reactors to commercialization. We have clean, affordable, safe, reliable and proven solutions available to us. These safe and clean sources can be brought to scale creating an electric grid that relies much more heavily on increased energy efficiency, variable wind and solar photovoltaic, distributed power, demand response and storage technologies. This energy path can reduce greenhouse gas emissions much more quickly, cost-effectively and safely than any nuclear option. The markets are responding and there is clear evidence that they are catalyzing an unprecedented technological revolution in the power sector.”

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Read more: http://hampton-northhampton.patch.com/groups/politics-and-elections/p/seacoast-antipollution-league-local-group-takes-strong-exception-to-new-nuke-recommendation

Obama says he’s under 'no illusions' as White House confirms Iran nuclear deal to take effect Jan 20

Source: Agence France-Presse

The White House confirmed Sunday that a nuclear agreement with Iran will take effect from January 20, but US President Barack Obama said he was under “no illusions” how hard it would be reach a comprehensive resolution.

“Beginning January 20th, Iran will for the first time start eliminating its stockpile of higher levels of enriched uranium and dismantling some of the infrastructure that makes such enrichment possible,” a statement from the White House said.

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Obama added in the White House statement: “With today’s agreement, we have made concrete progress. I welcome this important step forward, and we will now focus on the critical work of pursuing a comprehensive resolution that addresses our concerns over Iran’s nuclear program.

“I have no illusions about how hard it will be to achieve this objective, but for the sake of our national security and the peace and security of the world, now is the time to give diplomacy a chance to succeed.”

Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/12/obama-says-hes-under-no-illusions-as-white-house-confirms-iran-nuclear-deal-to-take-effect-jan-20/

In policy shift, decommissioning unit to join Fukushima compensation fund

TEPCO to sell electricity across Japan under new brand name to boost profits

Gov. Chris Christie's History of BULLYING & Political Retribution

Wheat Golden Farmer? A lesson in a new Chinese name

http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-china-names-20140111,5623601,4946258,full.story

Wheat Golden Farmer? A lesson in a new Chinese name
Our new correspondent in Beijing was excited about picking a Chinese name. Then she heard the choices.

By Julie Makinen
January 11, 2014, 7:00 a.m.

BEIJING — Ms. Wheat Golden Farmer. Was that really the new me?

When I was offered the chance to move to Beijing, I was excited about picking a Chinese name. After all, how often does one get to select a new identity?

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When I began my application for a press card, part of the process for receiving a working journalist visa, I found I had already been assigned a name. It was Mai Jinnong, a very loose adaptation of my Finnish surname, Makinen. The characters' meaning? "Wheat Golden Farmer."

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We filed the form with Ma ("Horse&quot as my family name. For my given name, we settled on Zhu Li, meaning something like "Pearl Striving."

I felt like a dazed mother who goes into unexpected early labor and scribbles "Banana" on the birth certificate in the delivery room. As I recounted the episode to a Chinese friend, she frowned. "You should go see a fortuneteller," she said. "In China, parents often do this for new babies. Don't leave it to chance."

So in the shadow of Beijing's Lama Temple, I found the cramped office of Zhang Buyuan, a 75-year-old with a Confucius-style beard. Like Chuang, his services start at $50.

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Unlucky or not, I said, I'm sticking with Ms. Horse Pearl Striving. It's already on the form, and it's better than Banana or Wheat Golden Farmer.

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Space-faring nations lay groundwork for human, robotic exploration

Source: Reuters

Officials from 32 of the world's space-faring nations concluded a trio of summits on Friday to tackle expanding participation in the International Space Station and planning for eventual human expeditions to Mars.

Fifteen nations collaborated to build the space station, a permanently staffed research complex that flies about 250 miles (about 400 km) above Earth. On Wednesday, the Obama Administration announced its intent to extend station operations to at least 2024, four years beyond when it was slated to be removed from orbit.

"We're very happy to hear about extension," Xu Dazhe, administrator of the China National Space Administration, said on Friday at the International Academy of Astronautics conference, one of three global space summits hosted in Washington this week.

"It means that by the time our space station is being built, we would have a companion up there," Xu said, speaking through a translator.

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Read more: http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/space-faring-nations-lay-groundwork-for-human-robotic-exploration-469663

Did you Know How Stretchy Hair Can Be...Plus tips to strengthen...

The Entropy of Nations: Global energy inequality lessens, but for how long?

http://jqi.umd.edu/news/entropy-nations

The Entropy of Nations
Global energy inequality lessens, but for how long?
January 2, 2014

The 18th century writer Adam Smith provided a workable metaphor for the way society utilizes resources. In his book “The Wealth of Nations,” he argued that even as individuals strive, through personal industry, to maximize their advantage in life, they inadvertently contribute---as if under the influence of a “hidden hand”---to an aggregate disposition of wealth. Well, if Smith were a physicist and alive in the 21st century he might be tempted to compare people or nations to molecules and to replace the phrase “hidden hand” with “thermodynamic process.”

EXPONENTIAL BEHAVIOR

Victor Yakovenko, a scientist at the Joint Quantum Institute (1), studies the parallels between nations and molecules. The distribution of energies among molecules in a gas and the distribution of per-capita energy consumption among nations both obey an exponential law. That is, the likelihood of having a certain energy value is proportional to e^(-E/kT), where T is the temperature and k is a proportionality factor called Boltzmann’s constant. (“Temperature” here is taken to be the average national per-capita energy consumption in the world.)

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Actually, the consumption data can be graphed in another way, one that illustrates the distributive nature of energy use. In a “Lorenz plot,” both the vertical and horizontal axes are dimensionless. Figure 3 shows data curves for four years---1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010. The progression of curves is toward a fifth curve which stands for the idealized exponential behavior.

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MAXIMUM ENTROPY

This fifth curve corresponds to a state of maximum entropy in the distribution of energy. Entropy is not merely a synonym for disorder. Rather, entropy is a measure of the number of different ways a system can exist. If, for example, $100 was to be divided among ten people, total equality would dictate that each person received $10. In Figure 3, this is represented by the solid diagonal line. Maximum inequality would be equivalent to giving all $100 to one person. This would be represented by a curve that hugged the horizontal axis and then proceeded straight up the rightmost vertical axis.

Statistically, both of these scenarios are rather unlikely since they correspond to unique situations. The bulk of possible divisions of $100 would look more like this example: person 1 gets $27, person 2 gets $15, and so forth down to person 10, who receives only $3. The black curve in Figure 3 represents this middle case, where, in the competition for scarce energy resources, neither total equality nor total inequality reigns.

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INEQUALITY

The inequality between the haves and have-nots is often characterized by a factor called the Gini coefficient, or G (named for Italian sociologist Corrado Gini), defined as area between the Lorenz curve and the solid diagonal line divided by half the area beneath the diagonal line. G is then somewhere between 0 and 1, where 0 corresponds to perfect equality and 1 to perfect inequality. The curve corresponding to the maximum-entropy condition, has a G value of 0.5.

The JQI scientists calculated and graphed G over time. Figure 4 shows how G has dropped over the years. In other words, inequality in energy consumption among the nations has been falling. Many economists attribute this development as a result of increased globalization in trade. And as if to underscore the underlying thermodynamic nature of the flow of commodities, a recent study by Branko Milanovic of the World Bank features a Gini curve very similar to Figure 4. However, he was charting the decline of global income inequality by tracking the a parameter called purchasing power parity (PPP) among nations (4).

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