With the federal government spending nearly $3 billion trying to reduce the impact of fire in national forests, a new academic study suggests the bulk of the work is being done in precisely the wrong places.
Researchers at the University of Colorado found that only 11% of so-called fuel-reduction projects in the last five years are undertaken where increasing numbers of Westerners are living: in that alluring landscape on the edge of suburbia that fire officials call the urban-wild land interface.
Despite the fact that the National Fire Plan calls for special emphasis on thinning forests in or near the interface areas, the paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes that Americans living in fire-prone areas are not beneficiaries of the same fire protection projects as back country forests.
"We were very surprised by our results," said Tania Schoennagel, lead researcher. "It's a problem. I think we need more targeting of the wild land urban interface in terms of mitigating fire. It's more effective if you are near communities. The public has the impression that a lot of acres are being treated, so there's a sense that a lot is getting done."
The Forest Service's analysis last year, however, cataloged 15 million acres of public land in the urban-wild land fringe that had been treated for "hazardous fuels reduction and landscape restoration" since 2001, compared with about 29 million acres outside the interface: roughly a 1:2 ratio. The study also included Department of Interior lands.
The University of Colorado team of geographers, fire ecologists and landscape ecologists examined more than 44,000 federally funded fuel-reduction projects in 11 western states between 2004 and 2008. It is the first analysis to systematically juxtapose the Forest Service's cutting and clearing with communities and subdivisions. The researchers concluded that only 3% of the projects took place in the interface as strictly defined. An additional 8% of the work occurred within 1.5 miles of the interface, an area the team defined as a "buffer."
Complicating the best intentions of federal fire managers to clear forest land, the study revealed that about 70% of the property in the interface is privately owned and beyond the jurisdictional reach of the U.S. Forest Service.
"It's an odd situation when you step back from it," Schoennagel said. "The Forest Service is in charge of fire suppression and protecting homes, yet that agency has no jurisdiction over requiring fire-wise homes and landscaping."
Schoennagel noted that projects undertaken in interface zones are three to four times more expensive than those in remote areas. With 15% of the West's interface already developed, Schoennagel said, "If we really want to control fire risk, I think we really have to control development in the wild land urban interface."
Monday, June 8, 2009
The rich welcome the humble-looking abode
Coffee tables made from barrels. Lamps crafted from brooms. Chairs swathed in burlap and sackcloth. Look at the some of the newest furniture on the market, and the recession appears to have really hit home. But irony alert: This new brand of shabby chic doesn't come cheap.
At the Dan Marty showroom in the Pacific Design Center, the heart of West Hollywood's design scene and the place where top decorators shop for their wealthy clients, light fixtures made from old French apple baskets carry $1,600 price tags and canopy chairs upholstered in burlap sell for $3,600 a pair. Some of these pillows cost $600 each," Marty said, pointing to shams made from grain bags. Customers tease him about the high prices, but the pillows are selling -- about two dozen a month. Kathy Hilton, Paris' mom, just picked up eight of them.
At Environment Furniture, an eco-chic retailer that counts actor-environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio as one of its customers, giant floor cushions are made of truck tarps and $3,000 sectional sofas are upholstered in material from old pup tents and other military textiles.
Such humble looks would have probably drawn disdain from style-conscious consumers addicted to Hollywood glamour and glitz a few years ago, but times have changed and so have many high-end home fashions. Some of today's expensive decor seems more "Beverly Hillbillies" than "Beverly Hills 90210."
Like a dowager in a Chanel jacket with frayed cuffs, the look suggests modesty -- people of means who wish to express their taste without flaunting their relative immunity to the recession.
Brooke Hodge, former curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, has christened it "dumpster diver deluxe."
Arbiters of style such as Jonathan Adler, a Melrose Avenue boutique owner and judge on the Bravo show "Top Design," see the trend as the convergence of several looks: an organic, modern direction evidenced in tree-stump end tables and other designs that recall the back-to-nature hippie era; the urban loft aesthetic, which embraces castoff industrial furnishings and found objects; and a growing green consciousness, with an emphasis on recycled materials.
"People used to say that 'less is more' meant 'more expensive,' " Adler said. "Now you can say humble is the new grandeur."
Recession chic exudes the "romance and pioneer spirit of homesteaders," said Newell Turner, style director at the 113-year-old House Beautiful, the oldest continuously published shelter magazine in the U.S. "If you work at a computer all day, you have a heightened need for a connection to nature and things that are earthy and homespun."
Regardless of its origins, dumpster diver deluxe is resonating among affluent shoppers who simply want to dial down ostentation and not appear out of step with the times.
"I've seen high-end chairs stripped of gilt to the natural wood and upholstered in very plain canvas," Hodge said. "That's a more refined, less trendy way to show restraint."
The trend has prompted some cynicism in the design community.
Matilda McQuaid, deputy curatorial director of the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York, said the phenomenon was hard to define as restraint when the merchandise was still expensive.
"There is even a theatrical aspect to it as if the wealthy are trying to play the role of an 'impoverished man,' but in a very safe way," she said.
Such designs could be a short-lived fad -- "like patched jeans," McQuaid said.
But part-time Los Angeles resident Bo Banks disagrees. The television producer bought a $3,500 Dan Marty chaise covered in burlap for her Chicago apartment.
"I don't think it's a fad," she said. "When you see something that looks like a traditional antique covered in a plain and natural fabric, it looks fresh and beautiful -- casual but still a little fancy."
At Los Angeles-based Cisco Brothers, whose furniture is sold at 350 retailers nationwide including the company's flagship stores in Pasadena and on La Brea Avenue in L.A., owner Francisco Pinedo is marketing ottomans upholstered with recycled leather patchwork.
What's more, about 20% of Pinedo's line is one-of-a-kind furniture made from reclaimed wood. This year, he said, the company is on track to sell 100 tables made from wine barrels and reclaimed stone tops. Prices start at $1,240.
or $3,600 a pair.
At the Dan Marty showroom in the Pacific Design Center, the heart of West Hollywood's design scene and the place where top decorators shop for their wealthy clients, light fixtures made from old French apple baskets carry $1,600 price tags and canopy chairs upholstered in burlap sell for $3,600 a pair. Some of these pillows cost $600 each," Marty said, pointing to shams made from grain bags. Customers tease him about the high prices, but the pillows are selling -- about two dozen a month. Kathy Hilton, Paris' mom, just picked up eight of them.
At Environment Furniture, an eco-chic retailer that counts actor-environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio as one of its customers, giant floor cushions are made of truck tarps and $3,000 sectional sofas are upholstered in material from old pup tents and other military textiles.
Such humble looks would have probably drawn disdain from style-conscious consumers addicted to Hollywood glamour and glitz a few years ago, but times have changed and so have many high-end home fashions. Some of today's expensive decor seems more "Beverly Hillbillies" than "Beverly Hills 90210."
Like a dowager in a Chanel jacket with frayed cuffs, the look suggests modesty -- people of means who wish to express their taste without flaunting their relative immunity to the recession.
Brooke Hodge, former curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, has christened it "dumpster diver deluxe."
Arbiters of style such as Jonathan Adler, a Melrose Avenue boutique owner and judge on the Bravo show "Top Design," see the trend as the convergence of several looks: an organic, modern direction evidenced in tree-stump end tables and other designs that recall the back-to-nature hippie era; the urban loft aesthetic, which embraces castoff industrial furnishings and found objects; and a growing green consciousness, with an emphasis on recycled materials.
"People used to say that 'less is more' meant 'more expensive,' " Adler said. "Now you can say humble is the new grandeur."
Recession chic exudes the "romance and pioneer spirit of homesteaders," said Newell Turner, style director at the 113-year-old House Beautiful, the oldest continuously published shelter magazine in the U.S. "If you work at a computer all day, you have a heightened need for a connection to nature and things that are earthy and homespun."
Regardless of its origins, dumpster diver deluxe is resonating among affluent shoppers who simply want to dial down ostentation and not appear out of step with the times.
"I've seen high-end chairs stripped of gilt to the natural wood and upholstered in very plain canvas," Hodge said. "That's a more refined, less trendy way to show restraint."
The trend has prompted some cynicism in the design community.
Matilda McQuaid, deputy curatorial director of the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York, said the phenomenon was hard to define as restraint when the merchandise was still expensive.
"There is even a theatrical aspect to it as if the wealthy are trying to play the role of an 'impoverished man,' but in a very safe way," she said.
Such designs could be a short-lived fad -- "like patched jeans," McQuaid said.
But part-time Los Angeles resident Bo Banks disagrees. The television producer bought a $3,500 Dan Marty chaise covered in burlap for her Chicago apartment.
"I don't think it's a fad," she said. "When you see something that looks like a traditional antique covered in a plain and natural fabric, it looks fresh and beautiful -- casual but still a little fancy."
At Los Angeles-based Cisco Brothers, whose furniture is sold at 350 retailers nationwide including the company's flagship stores in Pasadena and on La Brea Avenue in L.A., owner Francisco Pinedo is marketing ottomans upholstered with recycled leather patchwork.
What's more, about 20% of Pinedo's line is one-of-a-kind furniture made from reclaimed wood. This year, he said, the company is on track to sell 100 tables made from wine barrels and reclaimed stone tops. Prices start at $1,240.
or $3,600 a pair.
Nutrition: Parents’ Healthy Diet Has Little Influence
Parents may try to set an example by eating a healthy diet themselves, but a new study has found that their children are not paying attention.
Researchers studied a nationally representative sample of adults ages 20 to 65 and their children 2 to 18, a total of 2,291 parents and 2,692 children, tracking their eating habits with questionnaires. They found little resemblance between the consumption of total energy, carbohydrates, saturated fats or polyunsaturated fats by children and their parents, although children’s diets were slightly more likely to resemble their mothers’ than their fathers’. The study was published online in Social Science and Medicine.
Level of parental education and socioeconomic status made little difference. Unsurprisingly, the older children were, the more likely they were to differ from their parents. As children get older, the authors suggest, peers become a much stronger influence on food consumption.
“This suggests that parents don’t play as large a role as people have thought in their children’s diet,” said a co-author of the study, Dr. Youfa Wang, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Most parents are not doing as good a job as they should.”
Researchers studied a nationally representative sample of adults ages 20 to 65 and their children 2 to 18, a total of 2,291 parents and 2,692 children, tracking their eating habits with questionnaires. They found little resemblance between the consumption of total energy, carbohydrates, saturated fats or polyunsaturated fats by children and their parents, although children’s diets were slightly more likely to resemble their mothers’ than their fathers’. The study was published online in Social Science and Medicine.
Level of parental education and socioeconomic status made little difference. Unsurprisingly, the older children were, the more likely they were to differ from their parents. As children get older, the authors suggest, peers become a much stronger influence on food consumption.
“This suggests that parents don’t play as large a role as people have thought in their children’s diet,” said a co-author of the study, Dr. Youfa Wang, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Most parents are not doing as good a job as they should.”
How a Mild Virus Might Turn Vicious
The swine flu virus is rapidly making its way around the world, but it has been relatively mild so far, causing only 139 confirmed deaths. Could it mutate into something more lethal?
Scientists looking at its genetic structure say there is no obvious pressure for it to do so — no reason for this virus to “want,” in the Darwinian sense, to kill more of its hosts.
It is already doing a near-perfect job of keeping itself alive by invading human noses and inducing humans to cough it from one to another, said Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
“A really aggressive flu that quickly kills its host” — like SARS and H5N1 avian flu — “gives itself a problem,” Dr. Lipkin said.
But flu viruses are highly mutable, and anything could happen in the next two years, the time a new strain normally takes to circle the globe. After all, Spanish influenza began as a mild strain, then turned horrifically virulent, killing 20 million to 100 million people in 1918-19.
But Dr. Peter Palese, head of microbiology at Mount Sinai Medical School and part of the team that rebuilt that virus in 2005 from fragments found in old lung tissue, said that strain was a “once-a-millennium or once-every-10-millennia event — things like it don’t happen very often.”
Nor is it clear, he added, that viruses really “want” a particular outcome.
“For me, that’s too much anthropomorphic thinking,” Dr. Palese said. “Look, I believe in Darwin. Yes, the fittest virus survives. But it’s not clear what the ultimate selection parameter is.”
A mutation that confers lethality, he explained, may confer another advantage scientists have not pinned down.
The new virus has been described as “a real mutt” by Walter R. Dowdle, the former chief of virology for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, because of its unique mix of Eurasian and American swine, human and bird genes.
Flu chromosomes are quite simple — eight short strands of RNA that issue the genetic code for a grand total of 11 proteins. They break apart in a jumble inside cells they infect, and then they reassemble, picking up random bits of other flus, which makes the results unpredictable.
The current swine flu strain lacks several genes believed to increase lethality, including those that code for two proteins known as PB1-F2 and NS-1, and one that codes for a tongue-twister called the polybasic hemagglutinin cleavage site.
PB1-F2 appears to weaken the protective membrane of the energy-producing mitochondria in an infected cell, ultimately killing the cell. Specifically, it attacks dendritic cells, the sentinels of the immune system. Its lethality could be accidental — a protein good at killing sentries might just go on killing other cells once inside the fort.
All pandemic flus, including those of the Spanish, Hong Kong and Asian flus, make PB1-F2. So does the H5N1 bird flu. The current swine strain does not.
The NS-1 protein also maims the immune response by blocking interferon, an antiviral protein made by cells.
Very lethal bird flus also have the unusual cleavage site, which allows the hemagglutinin spike on the virus’s shell to split and inject its genetic instructions into different kinds of cells, like those in the lungs and the gut.
Such an addition to the novel H1N1 would be very dangerous. But because it has been found only in avian flus, it is unlikely to become a component of a human flu, Dr. Palese said. Even the 1918 virus, which was avian in origin, lacked it.
A much more likely change, scientists have said, is that the H1N1 swine flu will become resistant to the antiviral drug Tamiflu. A gene for Tamiflu resistance is now almost universal in seasonal H1N1 flus.
If that happens, the world’s Tamiflu stockpiles will be all but worthless, and doctors may have to switch to Relenza, which is a powder used with an inhaler, which makes it more expensive and harder to take.
Depending on the mutation, older antiviral drugs like rimantidine may be useful, but so much resistance to them developed in seasonal flu that they were largely abandoned a few years ago.
Dr. Palese was asked about another notion concerning likely mutations. There has been outrage at Egypt’s decision to kill all the pigs belonging to its Coptic Christian minority. It has been depicted as misguided and motivated by religious bigotry, because the “swine flu” is really now a human flu.
But Egypt is also in an especially dangerous situation. The new swine flu reached it just last week. The H5N1 avian flu has circulated in its backyard chickens since 2006, defying all eradication efforts. In the last year, dozens of H5N1 cases have been confirmed in toddlers, almost all of whom have survived — which led some experts to speculate that those are cases of a less lethal version of H5N1 that is better adapted to humans.
In that case, might it be wise to get rid of the country’s relatively small pig population, since pigs are “mixing vessels” that can catch both human and bird flus?
“I agree with the premise, if you really could eliminate an animal reservoir,” Dr. Palese said. “But the virus is out of pigs now — and it’s more important that those poor people have something to eat.”
Scientists looking at its genetic structure say there is no obvious pressure for it to do so — no reason for this virus to “want,” in the Darwinian sense, to kill more of its hosts.
It is already doing a near-perfect job of keeping itself alive by invading human noses and inducing humans to cough it from one to another, said Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
“A really aggressive flu that quickly kills its host” — like SARS and H5N1 avian flu — “gives itself a problem,” Dr. Lipkin said.
But flu viruses are highly mutable, and anything could happen in the next two years, the time a new strain normally takes to circle the globe. After all, Spanish influenza began as a mild strain, then turned horrifically virulent, killing 20 million to 100 million people in 1918-19.
But Dr. Peter Palese, head of microbiology at Mount Sinai Medical School and part of the team that rebuilt that virus in 2005 from fragments found in old lung tissue, said that strain was a “once-a-millennium or once-every-10-millennia event — things like it don’t happen very often.”
Nor is it clear, he added, that viruses really “want” a particular outcome.
“For me, that’s too much anthropomorphic thinking,” Dr. Palese said. “Look, I believe in Darwin. Yes, the fittest virus survives. But it’s not clear what the ultimate selection parameter is.”
A mutation that confers lethality, he explained, may confer another advantage scientists have not pinned down.
The new virus has been described as “a real mutt” by Walter R. Dowdle, the former chief of virology for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, because of its unique mix of Eurasian and American swine, human and bird genes.
Flu chromosomes are quite simple — eight short strands of RNA that issue the genetic code for a grand total of 11 proteins. They break apart in a jumble inside cells they infect, and then they reassemble, picking up random bits of other flus, which makes the results unpredictable.
The current swine flu strain lacks several genes believed to increase lethality, including those that code for two proteins known as PB1-F2 and NS-1, and one that codes for a tongue-twister called the polybasic hemagglutinin cleavage site.
PB1-F2 appears to weaken the protective membrane of the energy-producing mitochondria in an infected cell, ultimately killing the cell. Specifically, it attacks dendritic cells, the sentinels of the immune system. Its lethality could be accidental — a protein good at killing sentries might just go on killing other cells once inside the fort.
All pandemic flus, including those of the Spanish, Hong Kong and Asian flus, make PB1-F2. So does the H5N1 bird flu. The current swine strain does not.
The NS-1 protein also maims the immune response by blocking interferon, an antiviral protein made by cells.
Very lethal bird flus also have the unusual cleavage site, which allows the hemagglutinin spike on the virus’s shell to split and inject its genetic instructions into different kinds of cells, like those in the lungs and the gut.
Such an addition to the novel H1N1 would be very dangerous. But because it has been found only in avian flus, it is unlikely to become a component of a human flu, Dr. Palese said. Even the 1918 virus, which was avian in origin, lacked it.
A much more likely change, scientists have said, is that the H1N1 swine flu will become resistant to the antiviral drug Tamiflu. A gene for Tamiflu resistance is now almost universal in seasonal H1N1 flus.
If that happens, the world’s Tamiflu stockpiles will be all but worthless, and doctors may have to switch to Relenza, which is a powder used with an inhaler, which makes it more expensive and harder to take.
Depending on the mutation, older antiviral drugs like rimantidine may be useful, but so much resistance to them developed in seasonal flu that they were largely abandoned a few years ago.
Dr. Palese was asked about another notion concerning likely mutations. There has been outrage at Egypt’s decision to kill all the pigs belonging to its Coptic Christian minority. It has been depicted as misguided and motivated by religious bigotry, because the “swine flu” is really now a human flu.
But Egypt is also in an especially dangerous situation. The new swine flu reached it just last week. The H5N1 avian flu has circulated in its backyard chickens since 2006, defying all eradication efforts. In the last year, dozens of H5N1 cases have been confirmed in toddlers, almost all of whom have survived — which led some experts to speculate that those are cases of a less lethal version of H5N1 that is better adapted to humans.
In that case, might it be wise to get rid of the country’s relatively small pig population, since pigs are “mixing vessels” that can catch both human and bird flus?
“I agree with the premise, if you really could eliminate an animal reservoir,” Dr. Palese said. “But the virus is out of pigs now — and it’s more important that those poor people have something to eat.”
Huge Campaign Rallies Snarl Tehran
A pair of sprawling demonstrations brought the capital virtually to a standstill on Monday, with followers of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his main electoral challenger struggling to demonstrate their street following ahead of Friday’s presidential elections.
The demonstrations were the largest street gatherings here in more than a decade, veteran political observers said.
Iranian elections always bring a loosening of the rules on public speech and behavior, but many say this year’s election is different, in part because of the social crackdown of the past four years under Mr. Ahmadinejad.
“What’s happening now is more than what should happen before an election,” said Mashalah Shamsolvaezin, a political commentator and former director of several reformist newspapers. “This is an expression of protest and dissatisfaction by people. They are venting their frustration and feeling very powerful.”
Mr. Ahmadinejad’s campaign organized a huge rally in a prayer hall in central Tehran Monday afternoon, where tens of thousands of chanting supporters gathered in an apparent effort to match the raucous street rallies that are being held nightly by followers of Mir Hussein Moussavi, his leading challenger for the presidency.
But the president’s rally was overmatched in turn by a larger, simultaneous demonstration by Mr. Moussavi’s followers, with a human sea of people that blocked traffic for miles along one of Tehran’s main boulevards.
The rallies underscored the unusual passions being aroused by the campaign, in which the leading candidates have been exchanging accusations that are extraordinarily fierce for Iranian politics. There have been scattered street clashes in recent days, but the police have generally not intervened, in part — analysts say — because they do not want to unleash protests by the unruly and mostly young crowds.
The street rallies appear to have surprised and unsettled the authorities, and Iran’s supreme leader, in a message broadcast on state television, warned against any further escalation.
“I don’t want to comment about people coming onto the streets, but they should not turn into confrontation or clashes between supporters of the candidates,” said the leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Monday’s rally by Mr. Moussavi’s supporters was motivated partly by anger at Mr. Ahmadinejad, whose campaign rescheduled its own rally in a way that displaced an event by Mr. Moussavi. He had planned to give a speech in the same prayer hall where Mr. Ahmadinejad appeared Monday. Instead, his followers gathered in a long chain running from the south of the capital to the north, most of them wearing sashes of green, his campaign’s signature color.
The campaign has included fierce rhetorical exchanges among the candidates, especially during the presidential debates of the past week, in which Mr. Ahmadinejad has impugned leading figures of the 1979 revolution of corruption.
On Monday, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former two-time president and one of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s chief targets, defended himself for the first time.
“Unfortunately, the course of the election has become tainted with all sorts of lies and slanderous statements,” Mr. Rafsanjani said. “Smear tactics against individuals may be eventually pardoned and excused, but when they step out of line and target the basic principles of the Islamic revolution they become unforgivable.”
Although the harsh criticisms have shocked many Iranians, they seem to have played well with Mr. Ahmadinejad’s followers, who view them as a natural part of his populist campaign against the rich and the corrupt.
“The best thing Mr. Ahmadinejad did was to take away the sanctity of some of the regime’s leaders,” said Meysam Safavi, who had come from the holy city of Qom in southern Tehran to join a huge crowd of Ahmadinejad supporters Monday afternoon.
Another supporter, Javed Kia, 38, said “those people who he criticized were not honest, they were not good for the Iranian people. But Ahmadinejad is honest. He is not afraid of other countries, and he gave us self-confidence.”
As it happened, the crowds at Mr. Ahmadinejad’s rally were so thick that he was not able to get through to the podium in time to speak, and many of his supporters left early. At the same time, not far away, thousands of Mr. Moussavi’s supporters crowded the streets, creating traffic jams so heavy that the blocked roads were full of people walking home through the stopped cars.
For weeks, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s opponents have been saying they are concerned that the government will rig the vote in his favor. On Monday, a group of Interior Ministry employees released a letter saying a senior cleric close to Mr. Ahmadinejad had authorized fixing the vote in his favor, several reformist Web sites reported
The demonstrations were the largest street gatherings here in more than a decade, veteran political observers said.
Iranian elections always bring a loosening of the rules on public speech and behavior, but many say this year’s election is different, in part because of the social crackdown of the past four years under Mr. Ahmadinejad.
“What’s happening now is more than what should happen before an election,” said Mashalah Shamsolvaezin, a political commentator and former director of several reformist newspapers. “This is an expression of protest and dissatisfaction by people. They are venting their frustration and feeling very powerful.”
Mr. Ahmadinejad’s campaign organized a huge rally in a prayer hall in central Tehran Monday afternoon, where tens of thousands of chanting supporters gathered in an apparent effort to match the raucous street rallies that are being held nightly by followers of Mir Hussein Moussavi, his leading challenger for the presidency.
But the president’s rally was overmatched in turn by a larger, simultaneous demonstration by Mr. Moussavi’s followers, with a human sea of people that blocked traffic for miles along one of Tehran’s main boulevards.
The rallies underscored the unusual passions being aroused by the campaign, in which the leading candidates have been exchanging accusations that are extraordinarily fierce for Iranian politics. There have been scattered street clashes in recent days, but the police have generally not intervened, in part — analysts say — because they do not want to unleash protests by the unruly and mostly young crowds.
The street rallies appear to have surprised and unsettled the authorities, and Iran’s supreme leader, in a message broadcast on state television, warned against any further escalation.
“I don’t want to comment about people coming onto the streets, but they should not turn into confrontation or clashes between supporters of the candidates,” said the leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Monday’s rally by Mr. Moussavi’s supporters was motivated partly by anger at Mr. Ahmadinejad, whose campaign rescheduled its own rally in a way that displaced an event by Mr. Moussavi. He had planned to give a speech in the same prayer hall where Mr. Ahmadinejad appeared Monday. Instead, his followers gathered in a long chain running from the south of the capital to the north, most of them wearing sashes of green, his campaign’s signature color.
The campaign has included fierce rhetorical exchanges among the candidates, especially during the presidential debates of the past week, in which Mr. Ahmadinejad has impugned leading figures of the 1979 revolution of corruption.
On Monday, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former two-time president and one of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s chief targets, defended himself for the first time.
“Unfortunately, the course of the election has become tainted with all sorts of lies and slanderous statements,” Mr. Rafsanjani said. “Smear tactics against individuals may be eventually pardoned and excused, but when they step out of line and target the basic principles of the Islamic revolution they become unforgivable.”
Although the harsh criticisms have shocked many Iranians, they seem to have played well with Mr. Ahmadinejad’s followers, who view them as a natural part of his populist campaign against the rich and the corrupt.
“The best thing Mr. Ahmadinejad did was to take away the sanctity of some of the regime’s leaders,” said Meysam Safavi, who had come from the holy city of Qom in southern Tehran to join a huge crowd of Ahmadinejad supporters Monday afternoon.
Another supporter, Javed Kia, 38, said “those people who he criticized were not honest, they were not good for the Iranian people. But Ahmadinejad is honest. He is not afraid of other countries, and he gave us self-confidence.”
As it happened, the crowds at Mr. Ahmadinejad’s rally were so thick that he was not able to get through to the podium in time to speak, and many of his supporters left early. At the same time, not far away, thousands of Mr. Moussavi’s supporters crowded the streets, creating traffic jams so heavy that the blocked roads were full of people walking home through the stopped cars.
For weeks, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s opponents have been saying they are concerned that the government will rig the vote in his favor. On Monday, a group of Interior Ministry employees released a letter saying a senior cleric close to Mr. Ahmadinejad had authorized fixing the vote in his favor, several reformist Web sites reported
Indian farmers to insure themselves against climate change crop failure
For more than half a million farmers in rural India the age old fear of crops failing due to bad weather could soon be banished, thanks to an innovative insurance scheme that UN negotiators gathering in Bonn this week are considering as a central component of climate change adaptation measures in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Following a successful trial last month, MicroEnsure, a company specialising in providing insurance to poor communities, plans to launch a scheme next year for up to 600,000 farmers in India's Kolhapur province allowing them to insure against their rice crops failing due to drought or heavy rains during the plants' flowering period.
Chief executive Richard Leftley said micro-insurance policies — so
-called because of their relatively low premiums — will be offered to farmers with loans from the local Kolhapur District Cooperative Bank.
The firm will then pay out to farmers when weather stations show crops are likely to have been damaged by rain or drought, making it possible for smallholders to support their families and continue loan repayments even when crops fail.
The scheme, which is receiving funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will be promoted using comic books designed to explain visually how insurance works to farmers who have previously had no access to insurance cover. It will also be supported by finance from the Indian government that will effectively halve the price of premiums to around 2.5% of the value of the loan.
Leftley is anticipating huge demand from farmers in the region. "We ran a pilot scheme last month for 5,000 farmers and it sold out in two days," he said, adding that after similarly successful trials in Malawi, Ethiopia and the Philippines the company was now looking to prove micro-insurance schemes could work on a large scale.
As well as insuring against crop failure, the scheme also helps farmers access larger loans to pay for seeds and equipment, Leftley said, citing previous trials that saw banks lend 15% to 40% more to farmers who have insurance.
MicroEnsure's plans come as delegates at this week's UN climate change talks in Bonn debate whether rich countries should provide financial support to the fledgling sector. The official negotiating text [pdf], which forms the basis of an international climate change deal that is expected to be finalised in Copenhagen later this year, includes proposals to support micro-insurance projects.
Dr Koko Warner, an insurance expert at the UN University, said a broad consensus of support was building around the idea ahead of the Bonn meeting with US negotiators showing support for the first time. "There has been a real shift in the US position," she said. "It has got behind micro-insurance as it perceives it as a good way of reducing and spreading climate risk."
Micro-insurance also presents a cost-effective means of promoting climate change adaptation measures, according to Thomas Loster, chairman of the Munich Re Foundation, a not-for-profit arm of the insurance giant. He predicted that as weather-based insurance schemes mature and larger insurance firms enter the market they will provide poor communities with education to help better protect themselves against the impact of droughts and weather-related disasters, such as hurricanes and flooding.
"The basic principle of insurance is that you offer lower premiums when risks are lower," he explained, predicting that micro-insurance providers would want to limit the number of claims they face by helping communities become more resilient to climate change.
Alan Doran, a microfinance expert and consultant to Oxfam, said he expected micro-insurance schemes to become an increasingly important component of development projects.
"These types of schemes allow people in poor communities to cushion themselves against shocks in a way that we take for granted," he said. "If the weather stations are put in place and the risks are spread effectively then it has the potential to deliver real benefits."
Following a successful trial last month, MicroEnsure, a company specialising in providing insurance to poor communities, plans to launch a scheme next year for up to 600,000 farmers in India's Kolhapur province allowing them to insure against their rice crops failing due to drought or heavy rains during the plants' flowering period.
Chief executive Richard Leftley said micro-insurance policies — so
-called because of their relatively low premiums — will be offered to farmers with loans from the local Kolhapur District Cooperative Bank.
The firm will then pay out to farmers when weather stations show crops are likely to have been damaged by rain or drought, making it possible for smallholders to support their families and continue loan repayments even when crops fail.
The scheme, which is receiving funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will be promoted using comic books designed to explain visually how insurance works to farmers who have previously had no access to insurance cover. It will also be supported by finance from the Indian government that will effectively halve the price of premiums to around 2.5% of the value of the loan.
Leftley is anticipating huge demand from farmers in the region. "We ran a pilot scheme last month for 5,000 farmers and it sold out in two days," he said, adding that after similarly successful trials in Malawi, Ethiopia and the Philippines the company was now looking to prove micro-insurance schemes could work on a large scale.
As well as insuring against crop failure, the scheme also helps farmers access larger loans to pay for seeds and equipment, Leftley said, citing previous trials that saw banks lend 15% to 40% more to farmers who have insurance.
MicroEnsure's plans come as delegates at this week's UN climate change talks in Bonn debate whether rich countries should provide financial support to the fledgling sector. The official negotiating text [pdf], which forms the basis of an international climate change deal that is expected to be finalised in Copenhagen later this year, includes proposals to support micro-insurance projects.
Dr Koko Warner, an insurance expert at the UN University, said a broad consensus of support was building around the idea ahead of the Bonn meeting with US negotiators showing support for the first time. "There has been a real shift in the US position," she said. "It has got behind micro-insurance as it perceives it as a good way of reducing and spreading climate risk."
Micro-insurance also presents a cost-effective means of promoting climate change adaptation measures, according to Thomas Loster, chairman of the Munich Re Foundation, a not-for-profit arm of the insurance giant. He predicted that as weather-based insurance schemes mature and larger insurance firms enter the market they will provide poor communities with education to help better protect themselves against the impact of droughts and weather-related disasters, such as hurricanes and flooding.
"The basic principle of insurance is that you offer lower premiums when risks are lower," he explained, predicting that micro-insurance providers would want to limit the number of claims they face by helping communities become more resilient to climate change.
Alan Doran, a microfinance expert and consultant to Oxfam, said he expected micro-insurance schemes to become an increasingly important component of development projects.
"These types of schemes allow people in poor communities to cushion themselves against shocks in a way that we take for granted," he said. "If the weather stations are put in place and the risks are spread effectively then it has the potential to deliver real benefits."
China orders PC makers to install blocking software
Computer makers in China have been instructed to pre-install blocking software on every PC hard drive from next month, under a government push to control access to the internet.
The new software, which has been developed by companies working with the Chinese military, is specifically aimed at restricting online pornography, but it could also be used to strengthen barriers to politically sensitive websites.
China's authorities currently block overseas-based sites they disapprove of, such as those relating to Tibetan independence, or the Falun Gong spiritual movement, with a mesh of filters and keyword restrictions, widely known as the Great Firewall.
Control over domestic servers is applied through instructions to content providers and search engines, which must self-censor to stay in business.
The new software – called Green Dam Youth Escort – potentially adds a powerful new tool at the level of the individual computer. It updates a list of forbidden sites from an online database, much as network security programs automatically download the latest defences against new worms, trojans and viruses.
The software, designed to work with the Microsoft Windows operating system, also collects private user data.
Optional programs that allow parents to restrict internet access by their children have existed for some time, but this is the first time the government has instructed that every computer be installed with a single centralised system.
China's ministry of industry and information technology issued a notice to personal computer-makers on 19 May that every machine sold from 1 July must be preloaded with the software. Last year 40m PCs were sold in China, the world's second biggest market after the US.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the notice says the move aims to "construct a green, healthy and harmonious internet environment, and prevent harmful information on the internet from influencing and poisoning young people".
PC makers and the providers of Green Dam are required to report periodically to the ministry about sales figures and the number of copies installed. For at least the first year the software will be free.
A separate instruction on the ministry's website obliged schools to install Green Dam on every computer in their institutions by the end of last month.
The software was developed by Jinhui Computer System Engineering in Henan under a 21m yuan (£2.2m) deal with the government.
Bryan Zhang, the founder of Jinhui, told reporters his company was compiling a database of forbidden sites, all related to pornography. He claimed users would have the option of uninstalling the software, or choosing to unblock sites, though they will not be permitted to see the list.
According to the company website, Jinhui has long-term working relationships with the ministry of public security and the People's Liberation Army's Information Engineering University.
The other collaborator on the project, Beijing Dazheng Human Language Technology Academy, works with the Armoured Engineering Institute of the People's Liberation Army.
China periodically launches campaigns against online porn. In the latest drive more than 1,900 websites have been shut down and search engines, such as Google and Baidu, have been castigated for failing to self-regulate. Rights groups say the same techniques, along with cruder methods, are used to stifle websites that embarrass, irritate or threaten the government.
Last week the authorities blocked Twitter and Hotmail in the run-up to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
The new software, which has been developed by companies working with the Chinese military, is specifically aimed at restricting online pornography, but it could also be used to strengthen barriers to politically sensitive websites.
China's authorities currently block overseas-based sites they disapprove of, such as those relating to Tibetan independence, or the Falun Gong spiritual movement, with a mesh of filters and keyword restrictions, widely known as the Great Firewall.
Control over domestic servers is applied through instructions to content providers and search engines, which must self-censor to stay in business.
The new software – called Green Dam Youth Escort – potentially adds a powerful new tool at the level of the individual computer. It updates a list of forbidden sites from an online database, much as network security programs automatically download the latest defences against new worms, trojans and viruses.
The software, designed to work with the Microsoft Windows operating system, also collects private user data.
Optional programs that allow parents to restrict internet access by their children have existed for some time, but this is the first time the government has instructed that every computer be installed with a single centralised system.
China's ministry of industry and information technology issued a notice to personal computer-makers on 19 May that every machine sold from 1 July must be preloaded with the software. Last year 40m PCs were sold in China, the world's second biggest market after the US.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the notice says the move aims to "construct a green, healthy and harmonious internet environment, and prevent harmful information on the internet from influencing and poisoning young people".
PC makers and the providers of Green Dam are required to report periodically to the ministry about sales figures and the number of copies installed. For at least the first year the software will be free.
A separate instruction on the ministry's website obliged schools to install Green Dam on every computer in their institutions by the end of last month.
The software was developed by Jinhui Computer System Engineering in Henan under a 21m yuan (£2.2m) deal with the government.
Bryan Zhang, the founder of Jinhui, told reporters his company was compiling a database of forbidden sites, all related to pornography. He claimed users would have the option of uninstalling the software, or choosing to unblock sites, though they will not be permitted to see the list.
According to the company website, Jinhui has long-term working relationships with the ministry of public security and the People's Liberation Army's Information Engineering University.
The other collaborator on the project, Beijing Dazheng Human Language Technology Academy, works with the Armoured Engineering Institute of the People's Liberation Army.
China periodically launches campaigns against online porn. In the latest drive more than 1,900 websites have been shut down and search engines, such as Google and Baidu, have been castigated for failing to self-regulate. Rights groups say the same techniques, along with cruder methods, are used to stifle websites that embarrass, irritate or threaten the government.
Last week the authorities blocked Twitter and Hotmail in the run-up to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
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