The Eiffel Tower's 20,000 flashing light bulbs will go dark for five minutes tomorrow evening, hours before scientists and officials publish a long-awaited report about global warming.
The blackout comes at the urging of environmental activists seeking to call attention to energy waste -- and just hours before world scientists unveil a major report on Friday warning that the planet will keep getting warmer and presenting new evidence of humanity's role in climate change.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will release a report laying out policy proposals for governments based on the latest research on global warming.
The top UN official for the environment asked Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday to convene an emergency summit of world leaders aimed at breaking a deadlock over cutting greenhouse gases.
The impetus for such a world summit is US President George W. Bush's acknowledgment in his Jan. 24 State of the Union speech that climate change needs to be dealt with and the EU's Jan. 10 proposals for a new European energy policy that stresses the need to slash carbon emissions blamed for global warming, UN environment program spokesman Nick Nuttall said.
"There's a lot of momentum that has being building," Nuttall said. "We have a window of opportunity."
The second day of the Paris talks wound down on Tuesday more or less on schedule, said officials at UNESCO, the conference's host.
There was little sign of the late-night wrangling among countries that marked previous reports. The report must be unanimously approved by bureaucrats from more than 100 governments who can challenge the scientists' wording.
"The government people determine how things are said, but we [the scientists] determine what is said," said Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the report and director of climate analysis at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research.
The end result is a cautious document, many scientists said.
"So far we're running on timetable. But who knows, we've got two more days. If there's any panic, it will be Wednesday night when they realize they've only got a few hours left," said Stephanie Tunmore of Greenpeace.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
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The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
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