Eideard

Canadian military and police are investigating after a package containing a brand new hand grenade, belonging to the army, was found in a suburban backyard.

A woman in the Edmonton, Alberta, discovered the suspicious package on Sunday and took it to her local police station, where officers told her to carefully place it on the lawn.

Police called in the bomb squad, which determined the item was a grenade, still in its packaging and belonging to the Canadian military…

Edmonton police spokeswoman Patrycia Chalupczynska said, “We want to advise people that if they ever do find something suspicious-looking, they shouldn’t touch it — just leave it alone and call police.”

NSS!

Pongamia plantation photo from Tree Oils India Limited

Biofuels can be a sustainable part of the world’s energy future, especially if bioenergy agriculture is developed on currently abandoned or degraded agricultural lands. Using these lands for energy crops, instead of converting existing croplands or clearing new land, avoids competition with food production and preserves carbon-storing forests needed to mitigate climate change. Sustainable bioenergy is likely to satisfy no more than 10% of the demand in the energy-intensive economies of North America, Europe, and Asia. But for some developing countries, notably in Sub-Saharan Africa, the potential exists to supply many times their current energy needs without compromising food supply or destroying forests.

Researchers…estimated the global extent of abandoned crop and pastureland and calculated their potential for sustainable bioenergy production from historical land-use data, satellite imaging, and ecosystem models. Agricultural areas that have been converted to urban areas or have reverted to forests were not included in the assessment…

“At the national scale, the bioenergy potential is largest in the United States, Brazil, and Australia,” says lead author Campbell. “These countries have the most extensive areas of abandoned crop and pasture lands. Eastern North America has the largest area of abandoned croplands, and the Midwest has the biggest expanse of abandoned pastureland. Even so, if 100% of these lands were used for bioenergy, they would still only yield enough for about 6% of our national energy needs.”

The study revealed larger opportunities in other parts of the world. In some African countries, where grassland ecosystems are very productive and current fossil fuel demand is low, biomass could provide up to 37 times the energy currently used.

No reasonable researcher is looking for a single answer to our energy questions. But, here’s another piece of the puzzle identified and offered to a world seeking economic sense.

Worldwide investments in the production of Photovoltaic (PV) cells will rise to the same level as those for semiconductor manufacturing by 2010, due to booming demand for solar energy, according to iSuppli Corp.

Global production of PV cells is expected to rise to as much as 12 Gigawatts (GW) by 2010, up from 3.5GW in 2007. By 2010, as many as 400 production lines in the world that can produce at least 1 Megawatt (MW) of PV cells per year will be in place, representing a four-fold increase from about 90 to 100 production lines in 2007. Factories capable of 1GW of annual PV production also will be established in the future to ensure continued strong delivery of PV cells to the market.

The market for PV cells is estimated to grow by 40 percent annually until 2010, and 20 percent beyond, said Dr. Henning Wicht. Nearly all market participants plan to increase their sales by a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 40 to 50 percent during the next few years. Wicht noted that heavy investments will be required to finance the expansion of PV cell production. Each PV factory will require an investment of $500 million and more, will employ as many as 1,000 workers per site, and will generate annual revenue of $1 billion per year or more, putting them into the size, cost and employment range of semiconductor fabs…

With these cost reductions, many regions throughout the world will soon reach grid parity…a point at which PV electricity costs the same or less than power derived from the electrical grid. PV grid parity is expected beginning 2012 in nations where sunshine is plentiful and constant, and 2018 in areas of the world with adequate or medium sun exposure.

The people who build and profit from power generation know where the future lies. How long will it take the public and politicians to catch up?

Judges and jurors who must decide whether sexually explicit material is obscene are asked to use a local yardstick: does the material violate community standards?

That is often a tricky question because there is no simple, concrete way to gauge a community’s tastes and values.

The Internet may be changing that. In a novel approach, the defense in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbors have broader interests than they might have thought.

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data are vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm…

“Time and time again you’ll have jurors sitting on a jury panel who will condemn material that they routinely consume in private,” said Walters, the defense lawyer. Using the Internet data, “we can show how people really think and feel and act in their own homes, which, parenthetically, is where this material was intended to be viewed.”

Or the judge may eventually rule that the hypocrisy which defines so much social law should prevail.

Charlie Black, chief strategist for John McCain, made some surprisingly frank comments in an interview with Fortune Magazine, surprising only in the fact that someone in the McCain campaign would openly say what they are thinking.

Mr. Black referred to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto as an “unfortunate event” but acknowledged that “it helped us” referring to the timing of the assassination coinciding with the New Hampshire primary. He also said of a future terrorist attack; “Certainly it would be a big advantage to him (McCain).”

McCain denounced Black’s comments saying, “its not true.” Black also apologized for his remarks, saying he “deeply regrets the comments” and calling them “inappropriate.”

Sounds like a big dose of CYA to me. The only thing “inappropriate” to Mr. Black and Sen. McCain is that Black actually said these things out loud. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that McCain’s campaign is built on one theme and one theme only–national security. It is to scare the American people into thinking that Barack Obama is too inexperienced to deal with what might happen, and that McCain would be the steady hand at the wheel.

This wasn’t an impulsive sound bite. It was part of a reasoned, reviewed and edited magazine article.

Let’s face it, he didn’t say anything outside our already existing concerns about the politics of fear that have become the hallmark of neocon politics.

Thanks, K B

A Chinese Muslim at Guantanamo Bay got a small measure of vindication Monday when a federal appeals court announced it had thrown out his designation as an enemy combatant, marking a setback for the Bush administration…

The ruling in favor of Huzaifa Parhat comes in the first of what eventually could be 160 or so such court reviews filed by Guantanamo Bay detainees in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The Justice Department concedes that Parhat never fought against the U.S. and says it has no evidence he was planning to do so.

Still, our Bush-League politicos find it expedient to imprison people because they feel like it. That sort of policy is why we had our revolution in 1776 – you may recall.

No indictment, no trial, no justice.

Thanks, K B

University of South Florida Students, Rodrigo Guiterrez and Jeff Craig, created a native iPhone app to control iRobot’s Packbot over Wi-Fi.

The app streams video directly to the iPhone so they can sneak on to other college campuses and steal their precious mascots. Right now, the app uses arrows on the screen to control the robot, but soon, they hope to control it with the accelerometer.

Get ready for your Roomba to take over your home when the App Store hits in early July.

And there should be some way to sell this to the Pentagon.  They love robots.