While you were out...

China decides to escalate confrontations with the US, Japan, and Korea.

Don't throw your plate scrapings into the garbage!

You could drive your car on that!: [my bold]

Scandinavian Biogas is investing about 10 million euros to upgrade a wastewater treatment plant in Ulsan and will soon start accepting food and other waste for processing into biogas, said Scandinavian Biogas President and CEO Thomas Davidsson.

"Producing biogas is a very effective way of taking care of the waste" as it can be used for heat, electricity and vehicle fuel, Davidsson said in an interview Wednesday. He was in Seoul to participate in the Seoul Climate Change Expo held in conjunction with the third C40 Large Cities Climate Summit.

Turning food waste into biogas can also contribute to efforts to stop global warming.

"If you dump it into the sea, methane will be produced," he said. "And methane released into the air is 21 times more aggressive than carbon dioxide. So it has a great impact on the greenhouse effect."

Ulsan is not alone in looking to Sweden for help. Seoul, South Korea's largest city with a population of over 10 million people, also sees potential in biogas and has teamed up with Swedish Biogas International AB on a pilot project.

"There is a lot of potential," Kjell Enstrom, who heads the company's operations in South Korea, said Thursday in an interview.

South Korea has the ability to produce biogas, Enstrom said, though not of a clean enough level to be used as fuel. That gives companies from Sweden, which has championed the technology, an advantage.

"Within 10 years I think it will be the main fuel in Sweden," he said.

Davidsson, of Scandinavian Biogas, said his company plans to initially sell the biogas to an industrial user in Ulsan for internal heating. The company has an agreement to run the facility for at least 15 years, he said.

Ulsan's Park said that as a long-term goal, the city wants to adopt the biogas system to all its public buses.

Davidsson said that among the advantages of biogas is that is a technology that, unlike ethanol, does not draw resources away from food production.

Take that, ethanol!

South Korea doesn't want our beef...

I wonder why that is?:

SEOUL, South Korea - Tens of thousands of South Koreans rallied Saturday night against a government decision to import U.S. beef in the largest demonstration in a month of almost daily protests.

A crowd estimated by police at 38,000 people filled a plaza in front of city hall. Protesters lit candles, waved placards and chanted slogans criticizing President Lee Myung-bak.

South Korea agreed in April to reopen what was formerly the third-largest overseas market for U.S. beef. It had been shut for most of the past 4 1/2 years following the first U.S. case of mad cow disease in a Canadian-born cow in Washington state in 2003.

That deal, coupled with some sensational media reports, sparked fears of mad cow disease and triggered protests calling for scrapping or renegotiating the agreement.

Oh, c'mon! Our beef is totally safe! Totally! Tot.. ah ...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration on Friday urged a federal appeals court to stop meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease, but a skeptical judge questioned whether the government has that authority.

Ah... hmm: (my bold)

TUESDAY May 13, 2008 (foodconsumer.org) -- The Bush administration on Friday asked a federal appeals court to stop meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease, USA Today reports.

A low court ruled early that Kansas-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef can conduct mad cow disease testing in all animals. The company pursues the testing to meet the demand from foreign markets like Japan, which requires the testing for every domestic cow.

But the United States Department of Agriculture strongly opposed such a testing saying meatpackers have no right to such a testing. And it also said such a testing would undermine consumers’ confidence in domestic beef safety.

Creekstone Farms sued the government and won the first round in a low court.

In May 2007, Consumer Unions wrote to the USDA asking the agency not to appeal the March 29, 2007 low court ruling. Regardless, the government appealed to a federal appeals court to block the low court’s ruling that allows the meatpacker to conduct the test.

In the United States, less than 1 % of slaughtered cows are tested for mad cow disease under the USDA guidelines, according to USA Today. USDA argued that widespread testing does not guarantee food safety and could cause false positive results that scare consumers.

HhhhooooOOokaaayyy... my confidence is a bit shaken but maybe there's not that many mad cows out there. There shouldn't be any other concerns, right?: (my bold)

Milk and meat from cloned cows could hit grocery shelves in a few years if the FDA approves the process soon, as is expected.

But would the products be safe? Scientists and consumer advocates disagree on the answer.

The Food and Drug Administration has been wrestling for more than five years with the question of whether or not to allow the use of milk or meat from cloned cows, swine and sheep, with a voluntary ban on such products in place for now. Cloning companies and many scientists say the products are safe to eat, while consumer advocacy groups argue there are unaddressed concerns.

Several researchers told LiveScience that the FDA approval is inevitable. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that it could come as soon as this week.

But milk and meat from cloned animals is unlikely to hit grocery store shelves for a few years. Clones must grow up before products from them can be used. And since creating them is expensive, they will likely be used for breeding, not for direct consumption, experts say.

Cloning concerns

Reports of abnormalities, higher disease susceptibility and early deaths of clones have prompted many of the concerns about using their milk and meat. (Dolly, the sheep that was the first animal cloned by this process, was euthanized at the early age of six, though scientists at the institute that created her stated the disease she was suffering from was unrelated to her being a clone.)

Riot, South Koreans!! Go! Go!



crossposted at American Street

Cheap solar cells

Developed by Korean scientists. Via Phila of Bouphonia:

A team of Korean researchers has developed a cutting-edge solar cell that might help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

The discovery could make Korea a leader in the alternative energy industry as the research team plans to double the cell's efficiency and commercialize the technology by 2012.

The team's leader, Lee Kwang-hee of the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, said on Thursday, "Together with Prof. Alan Heeger at the University of California Santa Barbara, we have developed a plastic solar cell with 6.5 percent efficiency. That level of efficiency is sufficiently high for commercial products."

Meanwhile, back on the ranch, North Korea

Gets tired of being ignored:

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- North Korea fired several short-range guided missiles Friday into the sea that separates it from Japan in an apparent test launch, South Korean officials and media reports said.

Analysts and media reports said the North's test was in response to South Korea's launch of its first destroyer equipped with high-tech Aegis radar technology on Friday. South Korea is now one of only five countries armed with the technology, which will make it easier to track and shoot down North Korean aircraft and missiles.

Freedom brings a clash of cultures

As Central Asia has discovered:

MOSCOW. (Igor Rotar, a freelance journalist, for RIA Novosti) "Russians colonized us. Now, we are free at last-but European and American missionaries flooded my country as soon as we won independence.

They are out to make my nation a Western puppet," a Turkmen secret service officer hotly said to a friend of mine, a local Protestant.

Though his reasoning surely did not hold water, he was correct on one point. Protestant missionaries are really among the most effective disseminators of globalization. They openly say they want to turn this world into one big community resting on Christian values, democracy and the free market. They see South Korea as one of their greatest victories-a former Buddhist country where Christian converts presently make up a majority. South Korean missionaries working in Central Asia emphasize that the Protestant faith alone has made their land an affluent and inalienable part of the civilized Western world.

Obstacles to globalization are nowhere so formidable as in former Soviet countries, especially in Central Asia-a region that serves as practical proof of Samuel Huntington's warning. As the American political expert once said, attempts to turn the world into a single community would meet harsh resistance in Muslim countries.

"Democracy clashes with the Islamic canon. It's a godless system that gives an alcoholic atheist the same rights as a pious Muslim! True Believers have no use for Western individualism. We Muslims have lived in a community since time immemorial. We do everything together. Our concept of freedom of speech is also quite different from the European one," a Central Asian of radical convictions told me.

Real bird terrorism

for people and the poor birds:

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - South Korean quarantine officials are set to slaughter 273,000 poultry after an outbreak of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu, the Agriculture Ministry and health officials said Saturday.

The outbreak occurred at a chicken farm in Cheonan, about 60 miles south of Seoul, earlier this week, the fifth such outbreak since November, said Lee Joo-won, a ministry official.

"We plan to start slaughtering 273,000 poultry within a 500-meter radius of the outbreak site and destroying eggs as early as Saturday evening," Lee said.

The ministry also said it will make a decision whether to kill another 386,000 poultry on Sunday while limiting the movement of about 2.16 million chickens and ducks from 90 farms within a six-mile radius of the outbreak.

And then this:

LONDON (AP) - Mutations in the bird flu virus have been found in two infected people in Egypt, in a form that might be resistant to the medication most commonly used to treat the deadly disease, the World Health Organization said Thursday.

The mutations in the H5N1 virus strain were not drastic enough to make the virus infectious enough to spark a pandemic, WHO officials said. But more such mutations could prompt scientists to rethink current treatment strategies.

Samples taken from two bird flu patients in Egypt - a 16-year-old girl and her 26-year-old uncle - were not as responsive as regular H5N1 viruses to Tamiflu, a drug also know as oseltamivir that is used to treat the disease, the officials said

.

Well.. if it won't be global warming that kills off the wild birds, avian flu and pesticides will....

I didn't know dioxin was a seasonal flavoring for beef....

(Via Americablog), Dioxin found in beef sent to South Korea. So what are they making us eat?

"South Korea has asked the United States to explain why a shipment of American beef rejected for having banned bone fragments also contained unacceptable levels of the toxic chemical dioxin, an official said Friday.

The discovery was the latest bad news for the U.S. cattle industry in South Korea, already dealing with the rejection of three recent shipments of beef for including banned bone fragments, which South Korea fears could potentially harbor mad cow disease."

You notice what the Department of Agriculture does? They criticize South Korea for rejecting the beef and ask to see their testing methodology. How dare they say no to mad cow flavored with dioxin!

Sounds like Bush is running the department, doesn't it?