Wednesday, December 22, 2010

#French hunters urged to declare #war on the boar. #france

French hunters urged to declare war on the boar

 

French farmers and forestry experts are at a loss to explain a dramatic rise in the numbers of wild boar, apparently linked to increased fertility among the female animals.
Last winter, hunters across the country killed a record 560,000 boar - 10 times more than they were shooting 30 years ago.
But the population is easily replacing itself, and now stands at well over a million.
The problem is not just that the animals cause severe damage to crops and meadowland.
They are also beginning to encroach on areas inhabited by humans. Omnivorous, adaptable and highly mobile, wild boar have been increasingly spotted in town streets and gardens in recent years.

#South Korea in live-fire 'show of force' #war #korea #UN

South Korea in live-fire 'show of force'

 

 

 

 

 BBC's Kevin Kim: "Today's event is meant to show the range of weaponry the military is using."



South Korea has staged one of its largest-ever military drills amid highly tense relations with the North.
Hundreds of troops, tanks, helicopters and jet fighters took part, some 20km (12 miles) from the heavily militarised land border.
Tension has been high since North Korea shelled the South's Yeonpyeong island last month, killing four South Koreans.
The North has branded the exercises "warmongering" but has not threatened the South with any retaliation.
Meanwhile South Korean President Lee Myung-bak visited a military unit near the border to inspect defences, Reuters news agency said.
'Drills for invasion' The South Korean army acknowledged that the drill was aimed to display its full firepower.
"Yes, it will be a show of force," one army officer told Associated Press news agency ahead of the exercise.
Thursday's drill was held at Pocheon, about 50km from central Seoul.
Exercises have been held at Pocheon before, but this was on an unprecedented scale, an army spokesman said.

Start Quote

The Korean peninsula has turned sharply unstable on the brink of war due to scheming by the US to militarily stifle the North”
End Quote Rodong Sinmun newspaper
Although the South has conducted 47 military drills this year, this is the largest winter live-fire exercise ever conducted on land.
It began about 45 minutes later than the scheduled start time of 1400 local time (0500 GMT) and lasted about 40 minutes, with 800 troops and more than 100 types of weapons deployed, including tanks, anti-tank missiles, helicopters and fighter jets.
Artillery rounds and rockets were fired, bombs dropped and hillsides erupted in smoke.
The BBC's Kevin Kim in Seoul says the exercise sounded dramatic but was more of a media event, showing the range of weaponry open to the South, with invited members of the public watching from a distance.
He says people in Seoul are carrying on as normal with tension reduced from earlier in the week.
When the North fired on Yeonpyeong last month it said it was in response to a live-fire drill by the South.
A statement by the North's official KCNA news agency said of the latest drills: "[South Korea] is trying to hide the provocative nature toward the North of the war exercises."
The South is simultaneously conducting four days of naval exercises. The North called those "fanatical drills for invasion".
But the comments have been far less strident than threats issued last week of retaliation over the South's impending military drills.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said: "Exercises that have been announced well in advance, that are transparent, that are defensive in nature, should in no way engender a response from the North Koreans."
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in newly released pictures of an undated visit to the Huichon youth electrical complex in Chagang Province  
Kim Jong-il's North Korea has been less strident in its tone over the new exercises
The BBC's Charles Scanlon, in Seoul, says North Korea's leaders may now conclude that their artillery attack last month has served its purpose - South Korean generals are now matching their Northern rivals with hostile rhetoric, a dramatic change of mood in the South.
The South's new, more aggressive stance, our correspondent adds, has given North Korea an opportunity to present itself as the injured party and a force for restraint.
Already, both China and Russia have called on the South to defuse tensions and US officials too are privately expressing their concern.
South Korea and the US had already been conducting large-scale military exercises, following the apparent torpedoing of a South Korean warship by the North on 26 March, which killed 46 south Korean sailors.
Efforts to redirect the Korean issue back to the negotiating table have been unsuccessful.
China and the North say it is time to return to the six-nation talks about North Korea's nuclear programmes.
But the US, South Korea and Japan have said they will not return to such talks, which have previously involved rewards for the North if it cuts back on nuclear development.
North Korea walked out of the six-party talks in April 2009 and expelled UN nuclear inspectors from the country.

 

Skype apologises for losing half of daily call traffic #skype #twitter #video #chat

Skype apologises for losing half of daily call traffic.

People using SkypeMillions of people around the globe have been hit by an outage at the popular internet phone service Skype.
Users as far afield as Japan, Europe and the US have all reported problems.
The company which prides itself on providing relatively reliable service last suffered a major outage in 2007.
"We take outages like this really seriously and apologise for the inconvenience users are having," Tony Bates, Skype chief executive officer told BBC News.
"Right now it looks like clients are coming on and offline and sometimes they are crashing in the middle of calls. We are deep in the middle of investigating the cause of the problem and have teams working hard to remedy the situation," Mr Bates said.
On Skype's Twitter account, the company said their "engineers and site operations team are working non-stop to get things back to normal".
The news blog ReadWriteWeb said they have monitored complaints from users who reported that they are unable to log into the service and that the programme is crashing across all platforms, whether on their mobile device or PC.
Mr Bates did not rule in or rule out the possibility of a malicious attack and said "all avenues" were being explored.
He estimated that as a result of the outage, Skype has lost around 10 million calls.
Mr Bates told the BBC that normal call volume for the time of day would be 20m.
Om Malik, an industry commentator and editor of the Gigaom.com website, is not impressed.
"Skype is one of the key applications of the modern web," he said.
"It is already a hit with consumers, and over the past few years it has become part of the economic fabric for startups and small businesses around the world. I am not sure we can comprehend the productivity cost of this outage.
"The outage comes at a time when Skype is starting to ask larger corporations for their business. If I am a big business, I would be extremely cautious about adopting Skype for business, especially in light of this current outage," added Mr Malik.

 

Plan your #goals well to secure #happiness & #money

Plan your goals well to secure happiness & money

 

The Dalai Lama once said: “Happiness is not something ready-made . It comes from your own actions.” When you look at the context of the same, we realise we are the sole creators of our happiness. And no one incident or person can change the course of this.

Happiness is the ultimate goal that everyone wants to achieve, it be in terms of health, wealth or social status. Bur rarely do we ask the question , what really makes us happy? For most of us, our happiness revolves around our goals and desires that we want to fulfill; it may be buying a house at 30 or planning a world tour with your spouse by 45. For us, our happiness is determined by the goals and dreams we plan to achieve.

#EPF can make you a #crorepati #employee #provident #fund

EPF can make you a crorepati :)

 

 Investment

 

Don't you hate it when you look at your salary slip and find that sundry deductions have pared it down. But believe us, you should actually feel happy about one of these deductions-the monthly contribution to the Employees' Provident Fund (EPF). The 12% of your basic salary that flows into the EPF every month has the potential to make you a crorepati when you retire.

The #History Of #Money: #Currency Wars

The History Of Money: Currency Wars 

 

 

Money has played a very important role in every war since its creation. Ancient kings played with the percentages of precious metals in their coins to create more money to raise armies, feudal lords tried to undermine each other's treasuries and counterfeiters have run rampant throughout history. The most famous currency war, however, took place between the British Empire and its colony in America.

Currency WarsIn the 17th century, England was determined to keep control of both the American colonies and the natural resources they controlled. To do this, the English limited the money supply and made it illegal for the colonies to mint coins of their own. Instead, the colonies were forced to trade using English bills of exchange that could only be redeemed for English goods. Colonists were paid for their goods with these same bills, effectively cutting them off from trading with other countries.
In response, the colonies regressed back into a barter system using ammunition, tobacco, nails, pelts and anything else that could be traded. Colonists also gathered whatever foreign currencies they could, the most popular being the large, silver Spanish dollars. These were called pieces of eight because, when you had to make change, you pulled out your knife and hacked it into eight bits. From this, we have the expression of, "two bits", meaning a quarter of a dollar. (To read about money's beginnings, see The History Of Money: From Barter To Banknotes.)
Massachusetts MoneyMassachusetts was the first colony to defy the British. In 1652, the state minted its own silver coins, including the pine-tree and oak-tree shillings. It circumvented the British law stating that only the monarch of the British empire could issue coins by dating all their coins 1652 - a period when there was no monarch. In 1690, Massachusetts issued the first paper money as well, calling it bills of credit.
Tensions between America and Britain continued to mount until the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775. The colonial leaders declared independence and created a new currency called "continentals" to finance their side of the war. Unfortunately, each government printed as much as it needed without backing it to any standard or asset, so the continentals experienced rapid inflation and became utter worthlessness. This discouraged the government from using paper money for almost a century.
Aftermath of the RevolutionThe chaos from the war left the monetary system in America a complete wreck. Most of the currencies in the newly formed United States of America were useless. The problem wasn't resolved until 13 years later in 1788, when Congress was granted constitutional powers to coin money and regulate its value. Congress established a national monetary system and created the dollar as the main unit of money. There was also a bimetallic standard, meaning that both silver and gold could be valued in dollars and used as money. (For related reading, see The Gold Standard Revisited.)
It took 50 years to get all the foreign coins and competing state currencies out of circulation, but by the early 1800s, the U.S. was ready to try the paper money experiment again. Bank notes had been in circulation all the while, but because banks issued more notes than they had coin to cover, these notes often traded at less than face value.
In the 1860s, the U.S. created more than $400 million in legal tender to finance the Civil War. These were called greenbacks simply because the backs were printed in green. The government backed this currency and stated that it could be used to pay back public and private debts. The value did, however, fluctuate according to the North's success or failure at certain stages in the war. Confederate dollars, also issued during the 1800s, followed the fate of the confederacy and were worthless by the end of the war.
Aftermath of the Civil WarFollowing its victory, the U.S. government got the National Bank Act through congress (February 1863). This act established a monetary system whereby national banks issued notes backed by U.S. government bonds. The government then choked out notes from state banks by taxation. The U.S. Treasury then worked to get greenbacks out of circulation so that the national bank notes would become the only currency.
During this period of rebuilding, there was a lot of debate over the bimetallic standard. Some were for using silver to back the dollar, others were for gold. The situation was resolved in 1900 when the Gold Standard Act was passed. This meant that, in theory, you could take your money to Fort Knox and exchange it for the corresponding value in gold. Another innovation brought the Federal Reserve into being in 1913. The Federal Reserve was given the power to steer the economy by controlling money supply and interest rates on loans. (For more insight, see The Gold Standard Revisited.)
Gold No MoreIn 1971, the U.S. dollar moved off the gold standard. The significance of moving away from the standard is that it became possible to create more money than there was gold to back it. Money's value was now decided purely by its purchasing power as dictated by inflation. There is no shortage of people who believe this is going to cause the end - with the dollar going the way of its forefather, the continental. There is a danger of losing the value of the dollar, but now it is backed by the health of the American economy. If the economy takes a nosedive, the value of the U.S. dollar will drop both domestically through inflation, and internationally through currency rates. Fortunately, the implosion of the U.S. economy would plunge the world into a financial dark age, so many other countries and entities are working tirelessly to ensure that never happens. (To learn more, read What's the relationship between a country's currency and the strength of its economy?)
Money in the FutureAlthough the paper bills we carry around now have high-tech watermarks and security threads, the future of money is moving toward cards and chips. One day, a chip in your wallet may register purchases just by waving it over a product you want to walk out with - no clerk, no smile, no "hi my name is" badge. Internet currencies, such as the Paypal system, are also contenders for the next generation of money as the world becomes more interconnected. Many nations are still worried about cash they can't track or tax, but an internet economy is as inevitable as a free-trading America was. Money has changed a lot since the days of shells and skins, but its main function hasn't changed at all. Regardless of what form it takes, money offers us a medium of exchange for goods and services and allows the economy to grow as transactions can be completed at greater speeds.

#UN chief warns of 'real risk' of I#vory Coast civil #war

UN chief warns of 'real risk' of Ivory Coast civil war

 

 UN troops in Abidjan (21/12/10)

 

 The UN's secretary-general has warned there is a "real risk" of a return to civil war in Ivory Coast after the disputed presidential election.

Ban Ki-moon said the incumbent, Laurent Gbagbo, was illegally trying to expel the UN's peacekeeping force after it recognised Alassane Ouattara as victor.
Earlier, an ally of Mr Gbagbo warned the peacekeepers that they could be treated as rebels if they did not go.
And in his first TV address since the poll Mr Gbagbo stressed his legitimacy.
He also offered to let a panel representing international powers examine the results of the election.
Mr Gbagbo said Mr Ouattara could leave the Golf Hotel in Abidjan, where he has set up his headquarters, protected by the UN.
The army meanwhile announced the lifting of a nightly curfew, so families could "enjoy the end of year holidays and the New Year".
'Mercenaries'
In a speech to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, Mr Ban said he was worried about the 10,000-strong mission in Ivory Coast (Unoci).

Analysis

Laurent Gbagbo's offer of an international panel to solve the crisis came as a surprise at the end of a speech which he started by saying that he was the president of Ivory Coast.
His speech has not changed and his mind is set. For him, the opposition has to be blamed for the violence and Alassane Ouattara simply does not want to respect the law. But Mr Gbagbo is someone who likes to surprise people. He made the offer of the election panel sound like a sign of goodwill, or even like a concession to "avoid another war".
Many consider this latest offer as a chance for Mr Gbagbo to extend a five-year political stalemate during which the election was always postponed and he stayed in power.
Forces loyal to Mr Gbagbo were obstructing Unoci operations, and had blockaded the 800 peacekeepers protecting Mr Ouattara, he warned.
"I am concerned that this disruption of life-support supplies for the mission and the Golf Hotel will put our peacekeepers in a critical situation in the coming days," he said.
"I therefore strongly appeal to member states who are in a position to do so to prepare to support the mission.
"Facing this direct and unacceptable challenge to the legitimacy of the United Nations, the world community cannot stand by," he added.
The BBC's John James in Abidjan says roads leading to the lagoon-side hotel have been blocked and no supplies have been received for days.
Mr Ban said that any attempt to "starve the United Nations mission into submission" would not be tolerated, and warned those who perpetrated such acts would be held accountable under international law.
He also revealed Unoci had confirmed "mercenaries, including freelance former combatants from Liberia, have been recruited to target certain groups in the population", and that an arms embargo was being broken.

map of Abidjan

The secretary-general added that he had sent a request from Mr Ouattara to the General Assembly's credentials committee to recognise his choice for permanent representative and rescind the credentials of Mr Gbagbo's envoy, Alcide Djedje, who he has appointed foreign minister.
'Evaluation committee'
Earlier, Mr Gbagbo appeared on state television for the first time since the election to restate his claim to be the country's legitimate leader.
Ban Ki-moon said supplies to the UN mission in Ivory Coast were being disrupted
"I won the election with 51.45% of vote," he said. "I am the president of the Republic of Ivory Coast. I thank Ivorians for renewing their trust in me."
He attributed responsibility for the recent unrest to his "adversary's refusal to submit to the law".
Mr Ouattara and his supporters were nevertheless free to leave the Golf Hotel and "go where they like", he added.
Mr Gbagbo said he wanted the international community to set up an "evaluation committee", which would "have the mission to analyse the facts and the electoral process objectively in order to resolve the crisis peacefully".
He also paid tribute to the police officers killed in the unrest, who he said had died defending the constitution. But he insisted the way forward was through negotiation.

Ivory Coast

  • World's largest cocoa producer
  • 1990s: Slipped into internal strife after death of President Felix Houphouet-Boigny
  • 2002: New Forces rebels seize north
  • 2007: Power-sharing government installed with ex-rebel leader as prime minister
  • 2010: First presidential elections in 10 years
  • Laurent Gbagbo: President since 2000, southerner, backed by security forces
  • Alassane Ouattara: Former prime minister, northerner, backed by ex-rebels, UN, West and African Union
"I don't want any more blood spilled. I don't want any more war," he said.
Mr Ouattara responded to the address by saying that they had had five years of meetings and that no-one was in any doubt who had really won.
At least 50 people have been killed in violence linked to the dispute, the UN says.
Mr Gbagbo has said the election was rigged in rebel-held areas of the north and was declared the winner by the Constitutional Council.
But the UN mission in Ivory Coast, which was involved in organising the election, backed the electoral commission in saying Mr Ouattara had won.
The election, delayed for five years, was supposed to reunify the world's largest cocoa producer, which has been divided since 2002.