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31 Aralık 2010 Cuma
Tea off: India's farmers say climate changing brew
GAUHATI, India (AP) -- In this humid, lush region where an important part of the world's breakfast is born, the evidence of climate change is - literally - a weak tea.
Growers in tropical Assam state, India's main tea growing region, say rising temperatures have led not only to a drop in production but to subtle, unwelcome changes in the flavor of their brews.
The area in northeastern India is the source of some of the finest black and British-style teas. Assam teas are notable for their heartiness, strength and body, and are often sold as "breakfast" teas.
"Earlier, we used to get a bright, strong cup. Now it's not so," said L.P. Chaliha, a professional tea taster.
Rajib Barooah, a tea planter in Jorhat, Assam's main tea growing district, agreed that the potent taste of Assam tea has weakened.
"We are indeed concerned," he said. "Assam tea's strong flavor is its hallmark."
Tea growers want the Indian government to fund studies to examine the flavor fallout from climate change.
Assam produces nearly 55 percent of the tea crop in India, a nation that accounts for 31 percent of global tea production. But the region's tea production has dipped significantly, and plantation owners fear it will drop further as temperatures rise and rainfall patterns change.
Assam produced 564,000 tons of tea in 2007, but slipped to 487,000 tons in 2009. The 2010 crop is estimated to be about 460,000 tons, said Dhiraj Kakaty, who heads the Assam Branch Indian Tea Association, an umbrella group of some 400 tea plantations.
The drop in production has squeezed consumers. Prices have gone up about 10 percent over the past year.
Mridul Hazarika, director of the Tea Research Association, one of the world's largest tea research centers, blames climate change for Assam's shortfall. He said the region's temperatures have risen 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over the last eight decades.
Scientists at the Tea Research Association are analyzing temperature statistics to determine links between temperature rise, consequent fluctuations in rainfall and their effect on tea yields.
"Days with sunshine were far fewer during the (monsoon) rains this year," Kakaty said, "leading to a shortfall in production and damp weather unfavorable for tea."
Dampness also aggravates bug attacks on the tea crop. Kakaty said a pest called the tea mosquito bug thrives in such weather and attacks fresh shoots of the tea bush. Restrictions on pesticide use because of environmental concerns have added to planters' woes.
The tea industry employs about 3 million people across India. Most live just a few steps above the poverty line.
They are not the only farmers in India suffering because of the weather. Warmer temperatures have cut sharply into wheat farmers' yield in northern India - their crops are maturing too quickly.
Nor are tea growers alone in their concern about how the climate is changing the taste of their product. French vintners, for instance, have seen the taste and alcohol content change for some wines, and are worried they could see more competition as climate change makes areas of northern Europe friendlier to wine-growing.
The U.N. science network foresees temperatures rising up to 6.4 degrees Celsius (11.5 degrees F) by 2100. NASA reported earlier this month that the January-November 2010 period was the warmest globally in the 131-year record. U.N. experts say countries' current voluntary pledges on emissions cuts will not suffice to keep the temperature rise in check.
India has proposed a system for sharing technologies between rich and poor countries designed to free up funding and technologies for poor nations that need help coping with a warmer world. These projects include building barriers against rising seas, shifting crops threatened by drought, building water supply and irrigation systems, and improving health care to deal with diseases.
Industrial countries have pledged $30 billion in emergency funds through 2012 to help poor countries prepare for climate change, and promised to raise $100 billion a year starting in 2020. Developing countries say at least half of those funds should go to adaptation measures, and the other half toward helping their economies shift to low-carbon growth.
The United States has long refused to join the rest of the industrialized world in the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 adjunct to the climate treaty that mandated modest emissions reductions by richer nations. The U.S. has said it would hurt their economy and exempt emerging economies such as China and India.
assam teas, assam tea, assam state, breakfast teas, gauhati india, tea plantations, tea taster, tea planter, rainfall patterns, tea growers, tea research, temperature statistics, tea association, tea production, northeastern india, indian tea, unwelcome changes, temperatures rise, umbrella group, rajib
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30 Aralık 2010 Perşembe
Britons of the Year 2010
Telegraph writers and editors have chosen the most notable Britons of 2010 - not necessarily the highest achiving, nor the most admired, but the people who left an indelible stamp on the year. Today, we profile 12; tomorrow our top 10, including our Briton of the Year.
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Ann Widdecombe
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Phoebe Philo
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Christopher Bailey
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Chris Evans
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Zaha Hadid
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David de Rothschild
8:42AM GMT 28 Dec 2010
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Chris Evans
When Chris Evans was announced as the successor to the adored Terry Wogan on the Radio 2 breakfast show, many critics assumed he would fail. A few weeks after Evans began the job, then vanished for a curiously early “holiday”, they assumed they’d been right. His listening figures, they loudly predicted, would be nothing like Wogan’s. In the event, this proved to be true: Evans’s figures were much higher (9.5 million versus 8.1 million). After a start that Evans himself admitted was unconvincing (“I was so nervous I couldn’t remember my own name, let alone anything amusing to say”), he had settled into a groove that was genial and gently mischievous, a world away from his belligerent laddishness of the 1990s.
Pete Cashmore
Described as “the Brad Pitt of the Blogosphere”, this 25-year-old Scot with matinee idol looks runs one of the world’s fastest growing companies: Mashable. Never heard of it? You obviously haven’t spent much time on the internet. Mashable is a blog, originally started from his bedroom, which rounds up the most interesting developments and news on the internet, and is popular with both geeks and with those taking their first steps into the world of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. It is Twitter, in particular, that has made Cashmore a superstar. He has 2.15 million followers on the micro-blogging site, making him Britain’s most popular Tweeter, eclipsing Stephen Fry, Lily Allen and other celebrities. While their 140-character messages are often inanities, Cashmore’s simple and reliable updates have become a daily necessity for millions.
David de Rothschild
Explorer-with-a-difference, David de Rothschild crossed the Pacific in a catamaran made of plastic bottles to draw attention to pollution by the material, which, it is estimated, kills at least a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals and turtles each year. The 31-year-old scion of the banking family and nine companions made the 8,000-mile journey in 128 days after he was inspired by a report on the state of the oceans by the United Nations Environment Programme. Some 12,500 plastic bottles went to make up the sailing boat, with a mast made of a reclaimed aluminium irrigation pipe, and electronic navigation equipment powered by solar panels, windmills, turbines towed behind it in the sea and even a “bicycle generator”. He plans to start “Plasitiki Pod” programmes on the ecological issues affecting the islands – such as in Kiribati, Western Samoa and the New Hebrides – visited on the voyage.
David Nicholls
David Nicholls’s novel One Day has been the word-of-mouth hit of 2010. Since its release in the summer of last year, the book – which follows the tangled romance of Emma and Dexter, who meet every year on July 15 to compare their lives’ divergent paths – has been passed round offices, taken up by book clubs and recommended online (nearly 300 five-star Amazon ratings). It sold 50,000 in hardback and when it came out in paperback early this year sold 30,000 copies a week. Forty-four year old Nicholls, who works in the unpretentious yet smart mould of Nick Hornby and Jonathan Coe, has managed to pull at the heartstrings of British readers – both male and female. One Day is set for further success next year, when the film version starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess is released. So if 2010 was the year David Nicholls broke through, expect him to be even more famous this time next year.
Phoebe Philo
This has most definitely been Phoebe Philo’s year. First, the young British designer and mother of two changed the shape of global fashion with her second and third “clean and lean” collections for the French house of Céline, which consolidated the rise of the New Minimalism. Then, she was awarded the title Designer of the Year at the British Fashion Awards, and, wearing a super-chic black, strapless all-in-one, accepted her trophy from Bianca Jagger. “I wanted something that felt honest, that was a mixture of what I want to wear and how I want to live,” Philo has said of her vision for Céline. “I felt it needed to be quite simple and very real.” The fashion world has needed little persuading.
Graeme Swann
Success has not come easy for Graeme Swann, whose cricketing triumphs in 2010 are a tribute to his personal character and fortitude. First chosen for England 11 years ago, he blew his chance and gained a reputation for tomfoolery and a bad attitude. Returning to the county game, it took a decade of hard graft to win the favour of the England selectors once again. But when he did so, he grabbed his chance and over the last 18 months he has been the finest off spinner in Test cricket. Shane Warne describes Swann as “the most improved cricketer in the world”. Whatever the outcome of the Fourth Test in Melbourne, and indeed the Ashes series, Graeme Swann has enjoyed a fantastic year.
Zaha Hadid
The Baghdad-born, British-based architect has for years been better feted abroad than at home, but that changed when she was given this year’s RIBA Stirling Prize, the most prestigious architecture award in the UK. Hadid, who had been shortlisted three times before, won for her MAXXI Museum of 21st Century Art in Rome – “a mature piece of architecture, the distillation of years of experimentation, only a fraction of which ever got built”, the judges remarked. Noting her previous near-misses, Hadid said in her Stirling acceptance speech: “People ask me why I stay here in Britain and I tell them it is because of the Architectural Association, the great engineers, the amazing people and London – it is a fantastic city.” The capital will see evidence of that affection in Hadid’s swimming and diving centre for the 2012 Olympics
Lord Judge
Lord Judge, the Lord Chief Justice and head of the judiciary in England and Wales, continues to pepper his rulings and utterances with the sort of common sense observations that the public had begun to despair of ever hearing again from the senior judiciary. He assumed office in 2008 with a reputation for being more of a traditionalist than his recent predecessors and less keen on modernisation and reform. He he has tended to concentrate on matters that most affect the people who are the victims of crime: the general public. Recently, Lord Judge, 68, was critical of the amount of new criminal justice legislation introduced in recent years, though there are hopes that the pace will slow markedly under the Coalition. In April, he complained that courts were basing too many of their decisions on European human rights legislation, rather than centuries-old English common law. He is doing much to help restore public trust in the judiciary.
Christopher Bailey
Not only has Burberry’s share price almost doubled over 2010, but the label’s chief creative director, Christopher Bailey, has blazed a trail online. Luxury goods do not necessarily fit in with the “online space”, mainly because shoppers want the experience of a physical store. However, Mr Bailey has used the web to create a global buzz about Burberry. This year Burberry beamed its London Fashion Week show live to VIP parties in 25 of its overseas stores, from Mumbai to Beverley Hills. Attendees could browse the collection on iPads, or download the songs from a Bailey-curated compilation on iTunes. Burberry’s Art of the Trench social network website continues to grow, and next year it will launch an online “design-your-own” trenchcoat service. The West Yorkshireman – the son of a carpenter and a window dresser for M&S – has the golden touch.
Christopher Hitchens
A diagnosis of oesophagal cancer has done nothing to blunt the dazzling verbal talents and formidable insight of one of Britain’s finest writers, albeit one lost long ago to America’s shores. In a series of articles and interviews, he approached his illness with the same verve, elan and humour that has marked his career, and found the time for a vigorous, sell-out debate about religion with Tony Blair. He has shown an illuminating courage and dignity in the face of adversity – and the debilitations of chemotherapy – that may give succour to fellow sufferers everywhere. The dedicated atheist accepted with good grace the prayers of the devout for his well being, while noting that many were praying for his salvation as well as his recovery. “Please do not trouble deaf heaven with your bootless cries,” he wrote in Vanity Fair. “Unless, of course, it makes you feel better.”
Ann Widdecombe
A prediction made in January that Ann Widdecombe would appear on our television screens in a sequinned frock, being swung around a dancefloor by Anton Du Beke, would probably have been met with incredulity. But the former MP for Maidstone and the Weald was a surprise star of 2010, making it all the way to the quarter finals of Strictly Come Dancing, despite referring to herself as a “dancing elephant”. The woman who once said Michael Howard had something of the night about him proved herself to be a dark horse, with her refusal to take herself too seriously enamouring her to a public who previously knew her as a strict Catholic and Conservative.
Luz de luna de nochebuena
Es Nochebuena. Son las 8:24 a.m. Hubo luna llena el da 21. Todava se refleja en el mar. El cielo est despejado. 0C. El mar est tranquilo aunque sopla algo de viento del sur. Las islas Ces perfilan el horizonte.
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luz de luna, luna llena, islas ces, nochebuena, el cielo, ces
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29 Aralık 2010 Çarşamba
Lake Powell-Aireal-2009-2982 Web
Lake Powell-Aireal-2009-2982 Web
Areal pictures of Lake Powell taken from small Plane.
Lake Powell is a reservoir on the Colorado River, straddling the border between Utah and Arizona (most of it, along with Rainbow Bridge, is in Utah). It is the second largest man-made reservoir in the United States behind Lake Mead, storing 24,322,000 acre feet (30 km) of water when full. Lake Powell was created by the flooding of Glen Canyon by the controversial Glen Canyon Dam, which also led to the creation of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, a popular summer destination. The reservoir is named for explorer John Wesley Powell, a one-armed American Civil War veteran who explored the river via three wooden boats in 1869. In 1972, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area was established. It is public land managed by the National Park Service, and available to the public for recreational purposes. It lies in parts of Garfield, Kane, and san juan counties in southern Utah, and Coconino County in northern Arizona.
Lake Powell is a storage facility for the Upper Basin states of the Colorado River Compact (Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico). The Compact specifies that the Upper Basin states are to provide a minimum annual flow of 8.23 million acre feet (10 km) to the Lower Basin states (Arizona, Nevada, and California).
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civil war veteran, national recreation area, john wesley powell, glen canyon dam, glen canyon national recreation, glen canyon national recreation area, canyon national recreation area, coconino county, san juan counties, acre feet, rainbow bridge, lake mead, basin states, aireal, wooden boats, american civil war, lower basin, arizona lake, upper basin, summer destination
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Bridge
Bridge
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View from Daiba Kaihin Park
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28 Aralık 2010 Salı
Your New Sun Tan
Your New Sun Tan
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27 Aralık 2010 Pazartesi
26 Aralık 2010 Pazar
25 Aralık 2010 Cumartesi
Jason Segel spends holiday season with 'The Muppets'
By Brian Truitt, USA TODAY
Jason Segel is spending much of this holiday season with his second family — namely, Kermit the Frog, Fozzy Bear and Miss Piggy.
Segel is currently filming next year's new Muppets movie — simply titled The Muppets and tentatively scheduled for a Nov. 23 release — and working with many of the same characters he grew up loving as a kid. It's a true passion project for the How I Met Your Mother sitcom mainstay: He is the movie's star, executive producer and co-writer alongside Nicholas Stoller, who directed Segel in Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
"I'm doing The Muppets and the TV show, and I have another script that we're just finishing up to shoot this summer," Segel says. (His next project is the R-rated comedy The Five-Year Engagement, teaming him again with producer Judd Apatow.) "I'm doing proper seven-day weeks, which I've never really done before. It's pretty intense."
In The Muppets, Segel plays Gary, a guy who lives in Smalltown, USA, with his best friend, a puppet named Walter.
"We have an Ernie-and-Bert relationship," Segel says. "But he's never met anyone like him, basically a puppet. His dream is to go to L.A. and meet the Muppets, because they're the only people who he's ever seen who are like him."
The twosome finds out the famous Muppet Theater is in danger of being destroyed, so they work to get the Muppets all back together so they can raise $10 million in a telethon and save the place from certain doom.
The movie is not short on star power: Amy Adams and Chris Cooper are part of the human cast, and there is a slew of celebrity cameos, with everyone from Lady Gaga, Emily Blunt and Ricky Gervais to Jack Black, Zach Galifianakis and Jean-Claude Van Damme reportedly popping up.
But it's performing with the likes of Gonzo, Sam the Eagle, Beaker, Bunsen Honeydew and Rowlf the Dog that excites Segel.
"It's really, I must say, a childhood dream come true," he says. "When Kermit comes out of his little box and all of a sudden he comes alive, it's everything I've ever dreamed of."
"I've worked with puppets for a long time," adds Segel, who recalls making short films with puppets when he was 16. "It's a lot of imagining that inanimate objects are alive, and I don't know if this speaks to that I'm slowly going crazy, but I have gotten pretty good at that."
He's not shy to say that he actually cried during the first table read with Kermit, arguably the most famous creation of the late Jim Henson. "We had to stop and take a two-minute break because Segel lost his (composure) for a minute. And then I got a little worked up at a photo shoot," Segel admits.
"It really brings you back to your childhood when they put these puppets out. And it's amazing — the puppeteer disappears within a minute of them operating one of these puppets. They're standing right there, and you know it's a human with a puppet on his hand, but for some reason you're looking straight into the puppet's eyes."
Segel has been known to write songs for his acting projects — from Sarah Marshall all the way back to the short-lived series Freaks and Geeks. For The Muppets, though, soundtrack duty goes to Bret McKenzie, one half of the New Zealand comedy/music duo Flight of the Conchords. (The director of The Muppets, James Bobin, was also a co-creator of the Conchords' HBO series.)
Segel had considered doing the Muppets music himself, but thought he might be too swamped to do it right.
"Also, I'm good at writing songs that are allowed to just be funny," he says. "They don't need to have a tremendous amount of musical merit, but these Muppet songs have to be great. The lineage of the Muppet songs, things like Rainbow Connection and all that, it's not a job for an amateur. (McKenzie) really knows what he's doing, and his songs have just been beautiful."
forgetting sarah marshall, zach galifianakis, ricky gervais, celebrity cameos, lady gaga, ernie and bert, passion project, miss piggy, emily blunt, doom the movie, jean claude van damme, star executive, true passion, judd apatow, amy adams, childhood dream, chris cooper, smalltown usa, muppets, stoller
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Usatoday.com
New post - Christmas markets, part 5 : Prague Old Town Square #christmas #market #prague #praha #vanocnitrh
New post - christmas markets, part 5 : Prague Old Town Square #christmas #market #prague #praha #vanocnitrh
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England - Cheshire - Acton Bridge - Trent and Mersey Canal - 20th December 2010 -108.jpg
England - Cheshire - Acton Bridge - Trent and Mersey Canal - 20th December 2010 -84.jpg
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