Planetsave

BOSTON (Reuters) – The spread of ozone, a greenhouse gas, could inflict serious damage on vegetation in many places, cutting up to 12 percent off the value of global crops by 2100 and hurting the world economy, a study said on Monday.

While hotter temperatures and increases in carbon dioxide from fossil fuels could help vegetation in northern temperate regions, those changes would be undermined by damage to world crops from higher ozone levels, the researchers said.

Levels of ozone, a form of oxygen that pollutes the atmosphere, has been growing near Earth’s surface since 1850.

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BERLIN (Reuters) – A 19-year-old German woman has escaped from prison by hiding in a friend’s suitcase.

The fugitive hid inside the large case when her 17-year-old fellow inmate was released from the youth prison in northwest Germany on Friday, Lower Saxony ministry spokesman Dennis Weilmann said on Monday.

The girl simply walked out of the building with her friend concealed in her luggage, Weilmann said.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. State Department investigators looking into the shooting deaths of 17 Iraqis in Baghdad last month offered immunity deals to Blackwater security guards, The New York Times reported on Monday.

The investigators from the agency’s investigative arm, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, did not, however, have the authority to offer such immunity grants, the newspaper said, citing U.S. government officials.

The offers represent a potentially serious investigative misstep that could complicate efforts to prosecute Blackwater employees involved in the incident, the newspaper said.

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By: Anthony J. Gerst:

What do we know today, if anything? As my father is fond of saying, ‘I know nothing, I can prove it, ask me anything.’ Recently it has been reported that at CO2 atmospheric concentration levels of 500 ppm, the oceans will stop calcification. It has been well documented that the planet’s southern ocean is no longer acting as a carbon sink. And of course, one million acres of ice disappeared from the Arctic and we discovered that Greenland melted at a rate of 25 percent over estimations during this past season.

For the Cro-Magnon in our mist, be they from the trailer parks or the intelligent design pews of humanistic debauchery, to the ten-thousand dollar suited board and CEO members who still can grunt out the response: “huh, I don’t care.” People fail to comprehend the baseline conceptions of what this foretells. People lament my forecast of an impending ecological disaster. They scream, I kid you not, ‘you can’t tell the future.’ I don’t have to tell the future, all I have to do is deduce the information presented yearly. ‘But, but the scientists say we have at least 100 years.’

In the first place, taking that attitude without committing to changing anything is dooming future generations. The deduction here is simply enough, you are not humane, you are narcissist, more animal than man, striving only to serve self. Do you know what humanity calls a completely self-indulged individual? One who justifies every action they do, a psychopath. Have you as an individual questioned your humane meter lately? If you still possess the ability to glance within the looking glass, you may be very surprised at what you find.

Enough of the free psychoanalysis, what does the above information tell a mind that is capable of independent thought? By now most people in the civilized world should know that the Arctic ice cap reflects the sunlight from the earth, helping to stabilize our optimum temperature. Further we know that the ice melting from Greenland affects the oceans circulatory system. This in effect, when slowed or stopped adds to the problem of the oceans acting as a carbon sink, under the currently defined harmonic balance for our species.

Ever year scientists make predications, at first things dropped by ten fold, than by fifty, than by 25 percent. One thing that is obvious is that the time to severe ramifications is knocking at the planet’s door. You know that little thing called Rapid Climate Change, that so many fail to acknowledge. Let us say that the annual growth rate of CO2 is 2 parts per million instead of the current 1.93. We are now at 381 ppm in the atmosphere. This means we have 119 parts per million to go before the now forecasted point of doom. At current growth rates we are looking at 60 years tops, to get everything under control.

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Aside from walking or bicycling or perhaps traveling by electric car, taking the train is often considered the most energy efficient and low emission way to get around. But, determining exactly how efficient or how emission free is a difficult calculation – many questions need to be answered first.

What type of train? Intercity, commuter, subway, light-rail or tram? How many stops? Express or nonstop? A long distance train but a milk-run with a stop at every town? How many passengers on board? Full capacity? Average? Lightly loaded? What type of propulsion? Pure electric with a power grid connection? Diesel electric?

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LONG BEACH, N.Y. – Call it the Misadventure of Captain Underpants and the Peeved Principal. A high school in suburban Long Island has banned all Halloween costumes after three senior girls showed up last year dressed as the underwear-baring subject of a series of best-selling children’s books.

Long Beach High School Principal Nicholas Restivo, who sent the three seniors home to change, said the episode solidified his sense that the school’s costume tradition was disruptive.

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A lock of Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s hair snipped after his death in 1967 has sold for 100,000 US dollars (?50,000) at an auction in Dallas, Texas.

A Houston bookshop owner, Bill Butler, 61, won the auction after placing the only bid that matched the reserve price.

The hair was collected by Gustavo Villoldo, a former CIA operative and Cuban exile who wanted proof of the revolutionary’s death after he was captured and executed in Bolivia.

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BRUSSELS (Reuters) – A Belgian inmate made a dramatic escape from jail for the fourth time Sunday evening after his armed accomplices landed in the prison grounds in a hijacked helicopter, prosecutors said Monday.

Nordin Benallal, self-styled “escape king” with several convictions for armed robbery and carjacking, has previously run from a prison van, walked out of jail wearing a wig and sunglasses and scaled a prison wall with a rope ladder.

Sunday, Benallal’s accomplices hijacked a helicopter near the prison in Ittre, some 30 km (19 miles) south of Brussels.

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HAMBURG, Germany (Reuters) – Imposing a standard speed limit of 130 kph (80 mph) on German motorways would have scant impact on the environment and only hurt domestic carmakers, the country’s VDA auto industry group said on Monday.

“Such fixed speed limits would be an ecological zero-sum game and would damage the German auto sector,” VDA President Matthias Wissmann said in a statement to Reuters.

Germany is unusual in that stretches of its motorways still have no speed limit, and the country’s influential car industry has lobbied hard against any national rules.

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CANBERRA (Reuters) – Quirky crocodile hunter Steve Irwin had a sixth sense that he would die young, his American-born wife Terri said on Monday.

More than a year after the Khaki-clad naturalist died from a stingray’s barb that pierced his heart, Terri Irwin told Australian television she had always tried to deflect her 44-year old husband’s darker moments.

“He wasn’t morbid about it, or awful about it, he was open and earnest about it. We’ve got to accomplish everything we can,” she told Australian Broadcasting Corp. television’s Enough Rope series. “Steve had a real sixth sense about so many things. He had an odd connection with wildlife. He was extraordinarily intuitive with people. I found it all very, I don’t know if ‘eerie’ is the word, but remarkable, certainly.”

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