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Debating nuclear

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But it also yields hazardous waste, a fact that terrifies a public haunted by memories of accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear reactors. In America, about 60,000 tonnes of heavy nuclear energy byproducts sit in radioactive dumps, with no potential use and no expiration date in sight, while federal experts rack their brains for a better way to manage nuclear waste.

Several energy companies say they have a solution to the waste issue: Recycling, basically squeezing more energy from already-used nuclear fuel while leaving less waste behind. But their efforts face a decades-old policy hurdle that offers them little incentive to pursue the process.

“When it comes to energy, America is strong on technology but weak on policy,” said GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy Chairman John Fuller. “And it’s a critical handicap.” A Carter-era law keeps all used fuel from American commercial reactors in federal hands, and the government has determined it must be stored.

Ironically, the US Department of Energy, or DOE, developed spent fuel reprocessing technology in the late 1980s to mid-1990s, in collaboration with energy companies. But the programme closed when the National Academy of Sciences proclaimed it economically unsustainable. US Congress has approved the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada as the official storage dump for US nuclear waste. But President Barack Obama, fulfilling a campaign pledge, has cut off funding for the facility and wants to find alternatives.

Despite billions of dollars spent on the repository and a long court wrangle over its closing, the DOE has appointed a special commission to determine the best way of handling nuclear waste. And the panel does plan to consider recycling or reprocessing nuclear fuel, said spokesman John Kotek. Yucca’s potential closing has reinvigorated hopes that the United States will jump on the French, British and Japanese bandwagon of reprocessing nuclear fuel as a national policy.

“It’s a perfect time to reconsider recycling for the US,” said Jarret Adams, spokesman for the French firm Areva SA, which has reprocessed its spent fuel for decades. Spent fuel comes as discarded reactor fuel assemblies, 14-foot tubes comprised of thousands of solid enriched-uranium pellets. Every 18 to 24 months, a third of those assemblies is replaced by new ones and stored as waste.

Nuclear energy produces 20 percent of US power, and the conundrum of what to do with that radioactive waste is one impediment to expanding its role.

Costs and policy obstacles
Since the US agency declared spent fuel reprocessing too costly, US research into new technologies has slowed.

President George W. Bush offered federal backing for nuclear waste management alternatives, but over the years the policy has meandered and had few incentives to lure companies, said Steven Kraft, senior director of used∞fuel management at the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s trade organisation.

Being able to burn through rather inexpensive uranium to produce energy, companies are wary of investing millions into recycling technology that may go against the national policy. Still, industry support for the ideas is strong, if not for the procedure itself then for allowing the market – not the government – to determine its cost-effectiveness and fate.

Duke Energy, which operates seven nuclear plants, would support nuclear recycling if there was a cost-effective national policy, spokeswoman Rita Sipe said.

GE Hitachi has proposed a new generation of fast reactors that, they say, could return to the grid up to 99 percent of energy contained in the uranium, compared to recovering two or three percent from a common light water reactor.

But they want federal support for more research and, ultimately, commercialisation of the technology, said chief consulting engineer Erik Loewen.

That support, in essence, would have to come in a form of subsidies such as cost sharing or loan guarantees, said Jack Spencer, nuclear energy policy research fellow at the Heritage Foundation think tank. “What the industry needs… is something to mitigate government-imposed risks,” he said of the regulatory regime. “This will all ultimately be financed by the industry broadly through the fees they pay to the Treasury in order to manage nuclear waste,” he added.

The ultimate price tag for recycling facilities, however, is murky and heavily dependent on which technology is used. Areva estimated the cost of France’s reprocessing plant at $300m. Additional costs are incurred in the United States for federal licensing, approval and fees. Several US senators have chimed in with their support of the nuclear fuel reuse, introducing bills to bring it back to the table on waste management talks.

Is nuclear waste a problem?
But even with recycling or reprocessing, the hazardous waste would still be there – albeit less radioactive, less long∞lasting and in smaller quantities. This has created opposition from environmental groups, who say it simply wouldn’t solve the nuclear waste problem.

The problem with nuclear waste is “there is no safe dose” for radiation, said Mary Olson, director of the southeast office of the Nuclear Information and Resource Center, an environmental group.

Public fears of nuclear technology are centered on the meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania in 1979 and the explosion at the Chernobyl plant in the Ukraine in 1986.

Those didn’t involve nuclear waste but one major disaster did, and one considered the second greatest after Chernobyl. In 1957 at a fuel reprocessing plant near Kyshtym, Russia, a huge radioactive cloud was released into the air after an explosion at a nuclear waste storage facility caused by a cooling failure. With development of new-generation technology and safety research, the industry is looking out for alternative nuclear waste ideas that can be adopted – and soon.

“If you look down 30 or 40 years,” said GE’s Fuller, “what you want to do is leave a legacy for the children that doesn’t have the same issues we have today with the debate on how to deal with spent fuel and spent fuel storage.”

The roar of battle

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What might just be a nuisance in some situations can become a matter of life and death in others.

A soldier pinned down in a fire-fight, for example, needs to hear what his commander is saying.

In the 1990s the Norwegian and Swedish military part-funded the development of a hearing device that can screen out background noise, rendering speech clearer; the US Marines have used the resulting technology since 2006. Now it is becoming commercially available.

The QuietPro is an earplug with a built-in computer that allows speech to pass but shuts out unwanted noise. It comprises a miniature loudspeaker and both internal and external microphones.

The inner microphone measures the noise in the ear; the earplug shuts out the noise but allows speech to pass, thanks to an onboard microchip.

In quiet surroundings the sounds that you want to hear are allowed through, but when things get noisy the system puts up a barrier, allowing only speech to pass.

Because the earpiece lets every noise through in a quite environment, users never feel acoustically “shut off” from their surroundings.

That means they can hold a normal conversation and are in tune with whatever is going on around them.

With a radio built in, the system is a complete communications terminal for use in noisy environments.

The earpiece can be used to send out messages too. It can pick up the wearer’s voice from inside their ear canal, where there is virtually no background noise, and transmit it to colleagues – neither a hand-held microphone or microphone clip in front of the mouth are required.

The company that now owns the QuietPro technology, Nacre, has developed the first civilian version of the earpiece, for use on offshore oil platforms. But it sees other beneficial uses on factory production lines, in machine rooms or with police officers and fire-fighters.

Hearing a little voice whispering in your ear used to be an indication of madness; but it could become just an everyday sound.

Tomorrow’s cars

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At the start of the 20th century, before the era of ubiquitous gas stations, drivers did just that as they tested the limits of cars like the Ford Model T, which ran on gasoline, kerosene or ethanol and could, if driven carefully, travel more than 150 miles on a full tank.

Now a new generation of drivers is set to embark on a similar kind of experiment. Until recently, most electric vehicles, or EVs as they are often known, have had a range of just a few dozen miles, limiting their usefulness and appeal. That’s a big reason the long-talked-about era of electric vehicles has been, well, talked and talked about for so long with little real-world progress.

Over the next couple of years, though, tens of thousands of electric cars will hit the laneways of Europe, the streets of the US and the gleaming highways of Asia. These new battery-powered vehicles have much longer ranges than their predecessors – up to 250 miles in the case of the Tesla Roadster, but mostly about 100 miles – and are likely to be the first to sell in large numbers.

By 2020, says J.D.Power Automotive Forecasting, annual sales of EVs will reach two million. Banking giant HSBC is even more optimistic and puts the figure at nine million. That’s still some way short of the 61 million petrol- and diesel-driven vehicles sold around the world in 2009 but a huge leap from the 5,000 or so EVs sold last year.

But even as these shiny new vehicles take to the road, serious questions remain about the infrastructure – or rather, the lack of infrastructure – to charge them. In an echo of last century’s battle over the best fuel source, the way in which the coming fleet of electric vehicles will be recharged has yet to be settled – and all the proposed models have flaws.

Some experts believe EVs should plug in at a driver’s home or workplace. Others back a global network of roadside recharging stations. One prominent company is pushing the idea of petrol station-like outlets where you can zip in and quickly switch your almost-dead battery for a fully charged one. Another group advocates avoiding “pure” EVs and the problem of charging infrastructure altogether, focusing on cars which use both electricity and gasoline.

The stakes are huge: the pace of the shift to electric vehicles, progress in the fight against climate change, and a market which HSBC bullishly forecast this week would grow 20-fold by 2020 to $473bn – a fifth of the entire low-carbon economy.

Despite the hype, it’s almost impossible to predict the format or formats most likely to win the great electric vehicle infrastructure battle. Model T owners adopted petrol as their fuel of choice for reasons both obvious – the falling price of petrol – and unpredictable: prohibition in 1919 forced ethanol off the market.

The variables today – technology, political interference, the psychology of car-lovers – are similarly hard to pin down. “The introduction of electric vehicles is more than a financial matter,” says US analyst Sam Jaffe, research manager at IDC Energy Insights. “It’s a big anthropological experiment. There’s no question that there are drawbacks, but there are also advantages. It requires a re-setting of mindsets and how that unfolds will decide who wins the race.”

On your marks, plug in
The starting grid for the coming EV race is filling up quickly. Mitsubishi Motors Corp’s jelly bean-shaped i-MiEV has been on sale in Japan since April and will launch in the US and Europe over the coming few months. The Japanese automaker is also making two versions of the car for French automaker PSA Peugeot Citroen.

Nissan is set to roll out its edgy-looking Leaf in December, while corporate partner Renault will start selling its mid-sized Fluence ZE (for zero emissions) in the first half of next year.

Europe’s biggest automaker Volkswagen, a late entrant in the competition, plans to launch all-electric vehicles in 2013, though it says zero-emission vehicles will account for three percent of sales by 2018.

These “pure” electric vehicles face competition from dual gasoline-electric cars. Sometimes called extended range cars, these vehicles can charge at a plug-in socket or switch over to gasoline, and include General Motors’ Chevrolet Volt, which goes on sale in the US from this year for $41,000, and in Britain a year later.

Will the charging infrastructure be able to keep up with all those new cars? The question is critical. “If it’s too difficult to charge an electric vehicle, too inconvenient, the customers will not buy them,” says Christian Feisst, managing director of business development for smart grid at US networking giant Cisco Systems. “Today a lot of the work is around battery technology and the behaviour of customers. There is not a lot of work done around the charging technology, or the charging process itself, nor how to manage charging.”

A battery prophet
One company that is sinking millions into technology is Better Place, a three-year-old California-based firm that has raised about $700m from investors and imagines a vast global network of “switch stations”: gas station-like outlets where drivers can swap a spent battery with a fully charged one in a few minutes.

Led by soft-spoken Israeli-born founder Shai Agassi, a former executive at SAP, the company boasts of having built “the largest cleantech investment in history”. Last January, HSBC bought a 10 percent stake which valued Better Place at $1.25bn.

Since earlier this year, the eco firm has been running a trial in Tokyo using three taxi cabs and will soon start testing a small network of stations in Israel, where it says it has deals with 92 corporate fleet owners. It expects a commercial launch in Israel and in Denmark in late 2011, and has plans in five other countries, including Australia, China and the US.

Diamond industry must end illicit trading

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The sale of diamonds funded wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Angola for years. Under mounting public pressure to clean up its act at the end of the 1990s, the industry set up a global certification scheme in 2003 to eradicate conflict diamonds.

Although it reduced the number of conflict diamonds to less than one percent of global volumes from about 15 percent, lobby groups say there are still holes in the system in Zimbabwe and Ivory Coast, and Venezuela is not part of the scheme.

“Weaknesses in implementation, lack of political will among member governments and imperfect oversight and enforcement mean that problems still persist,” said Elly Harrowell at Global Witness, which campaigns against the trade in illegal diamonds.

“No one can be 100 percent sure that they are buying a ‘conflict free’ diamond.”

Conflict or “blood diamonds” are gems mined in war zones.

Human rights worries in Zimbabwe have sharpened tension in the industry, with state security forces accused of killing hundreds of the more than 30,000 illegal diggers who descended on its Marange diamond fields in 2006.

A compromise deal in July averted a crisis in the Kimberley Process – the global certification scheme that monitors diamond trades – and allowed for a resumption in diamond sales from the Marange fields, one of the largest finds in history.

Nadim Kara, at Partnership Africa Canada (PAC), which monitors the Kimberley Process, said the real test was still to come in Zimbabwe.

“In a way there is political will from some countries to keep Zimbabwe’s heels to the fire, but that political will is being sapped by the incredible economic potential,” he said.

Kara said much hinged on a review in September and PAC wants to see evidence of clear instructions being given to the military and police not to engage in illegal mining or smuggling and the granting of mining concessions to ordinary Zimbabweans.

Some jewellers, however, are still worried.

“We are very conscious and aware of the situation and it is something we take very seriously and are in discussions about the best way forward,” said Simon Rainer, chief executive of the British Jewellers’ Association.

Urgent reforms
Appearing as a witness at the war crimes trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor in The Hague, British supermodel Campbell said she received “dirty looking pebbles” from two men during a charity trip to South Africa in 1997.

Campaigners welcomed her testimony, arguing the industry is still plagued by the trade in illicit diamonds, but some experts have cast doubt on the blood diamond trade and argue the Kimberley Process cannot possibly trace every gem.

In an opinion article to the Wall Street Journal, independent rough diamond consultant Jack Jolis said diamonds and war in Africa were not related, and certainly not more so than any other commercial commodity found on the continent.

“Most African diamonds are produced in places that are reasonably-to-perfectly peaceful (such as Botswana, Namibia and South Africa) whereas there are murderous African conflicts that rage elsewhere without the slightest ‘assistance’ from diamonds (such as Rwanda, Uganda and Sudan),” Jolis wrote.

And diamonds are not the only commodity misused.

A UN report estimates that in the past 60 years, at least 40 percent of civil wars were connected to natural resources such as timber, diamonds, gold, minerals and oil or control of scarce resources such as fertile land and water.

World Diamond Council president Eli Izhakoff said the flow of illicit diamonds was now less than 0.2 percent of global volumes. “I think that’s a wonderful thing. Virtually today there are no conflict diamonds traded,” Izhakoff said.

But New York-based diamond trading company Rapaport has urged its members against trading in Zimbabwe diamonds, warning any breach would result in expulsion from its network.

“There is no guarantee that diamonds with KP certifications are free of associations with human rights violations,” it said.

Campaigners also say illicit diamonds – diamonds traded without certification – are making a comeback in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast and Venezuela and, together with the World Diamond Council, are calling for urgent reform of the Kimberley Process.

The proposals are to be discussed at a meeting in November and include introducing majority voting to avoid vetoes to the current consensus-decision making, full-time staffing, improved monitoring and publication of its reports and actions.

And unless reform is made, PAC’s Kara said the lack of accountability and follow-up risked a return to the problematic past. “Conflict diamonds are just around the corner,” he warned.

Chevron under fire

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On the first floor, people play for pennies in The Mirage bingo and slot machine parlor. Three stories up, in Sucumbios provincial court, the stakes are $27bn.

That’s what local farmers and indigenous tribes want from US oil giant Chevron Corp to fund cleanup of areas they say were polluted with faulty drilling practices in the 1970s and 80s.

The paint is cracked and peeling in the judge’s fourth-storey offices overlooking Lago Agrio, a poor and violent northern Ecuador town near the Colombian border.

Power failures often stop the building’s air conditioners, leaving gamblers and court officials to swelter as judge Leonardo Ordonez pours through thousands of pages of evidence. He says a verdict could be reached in 2011 after 18 years of litigation in US and Ecuadorean courts.

As the ruling looms, each side accuses the other of presenting fraudulent evidence while a slew of related legal actions are played out in the US and Europe.

Investors and the petroleum industry are watching to see if Chevron will have to pay massive damages, setting a precedent that could fuel other big lawsuits against oil companies accused of polluting countries around the world.

Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa has sided publicly with the plaintiffs. Both sides expect Ordonez to rule against Chevron. The company – charging government interference in the case – vows to appeal any adverse decision.

Plaintiffs say Texaco wrecked wide areas of Ecuador’s jungle by dumping drilling waste into unlined pits and leaving them to fester, an accusation that the company denies.

Chevron inherited the case when it bought Texaco in 2001. It says the company cleaned up all pits it was responsible for before turning them over to Ecuador’s state-owned oil firm, Petroecuador, which still operates around Lago Agrio.

“If there is pollution in this area, it is the sole responsibility of the state, which in 1998 released Texaco of further liability,” said Chevron spokesman James Craig, pointing toward one of the waste pools cleaned up by Texaco.

Texaco built and operated more than 330 wells in Ecuador, all of which had at least one reserve pool nearby. The dirt just under the surface of some former waste pits still has a black sheen and carries the eye-watering stench of oil.

The suit names 46 people who claim to represent all area residents who may have suffered from contamination. They are not seeking individual awards but money to fund environment cleanup, as well as health and clean water projects.

“We want the money to go toward a permanent solution,” said Carmen Perez, whose small corn farm is near a series of drilling waste pits that still smell of petroleum and, she says, cause her to have chronic headaches.

Amazon Chernobyl?

Analysts say the case could have wide implications.

“If Chevron loses this case, it could set a precedent for similar cases in other countries against not only Chevron but other international oil companies” said Fadel Gheit, managing directer of oil and gas research at Oppenheimer & Co.

“It could open the floodgates for similar claims, starting in Nigeria where Royal Dutch Shell is being blamed for environmental damage,” he said from his office in New York.

The Ecuador legal saga began in 1993 when a suit was filed against Texaco in a US federal court. The case was tossed out on appeal in 2002 on condition that Texaco agree to Ecuadorean jurisdiction if sued there. A suit was filed in Lago Agrio the next year, this time against Texaco’s new owner Chevron.

About 200,000 pages of documents and 64,000 chemical samples are in evidence while the intrigues of the case have come to resemble something from a Hollywood suspense drama.

A previous judge stepped down from hearing the suit last year after he was recorded discussing the case with a couple of shadowy figures who secretly video-taped him with cameras stuck inside a wristwatch and a pen.

One of the two men who taped the meeting, a former Chevron contractor, was whisked out of Ecuador by the company. The plaintiffs say the secret taping was an attempt by Chevron to delay judgment, a charge the company denies.

A cottage industry has meanwhile sprung up around the case, with plaintiffs providing reporters with thick folders full of information pointing the finger at Texaco/Chevron for what they call the “Chernobyl of the Amazon”. They offer excursions to Ecuador’s northern jungles known as “the toxic tour”.

Chevron also arranges trips for journalists, dubbed “the non-toxic tour”, showing pits that were cleaned up by Texaco. The company offers slickly-produced desk guides describing the suit as based on false claims driven by lawyers motivated more by greed than concern for the environment.

But the environment is certainly the top worry for farmer Jose Briceno, who lives near Lago Agrio and says he can’t keep livestock because it gets sick and dies.

“The problem now is water quality,” he said, looking over his empty farmyard. “They never really cleaned up this area.”

Inflation remains deseeded

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A drought and heat wave in the Black Sea region is estimated to have destroyed a quarter of Russia’s grain crop and led to a ban on exports. Ukraine is also ready to impose export quotas, which traders have criticised as overly restrictive.

FAO economist and cereals analyst Abdolreza Abbassian told reporters that he expected wheat prices to remain high and volatile in the coming months but that they did not pose a threat of global inflation.

“To talk about food inflation when the bulk of the increase is in wheat is a bit too early,” he said.

Earlier in the summer, wheat futures in Chicago rose to the highest levels in about two years, peaking at $8.41 a bushel after a two-month rally fuelled by the Russian drought.

They have subsequently fallen back below $7.00 a bushel on the front month as high global stocks also helped cap the rally and keep prices far below the peak of $13.34-1/2 set in February 2008.

Buyers such as Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer, also are turning to the US, which has ample capacity.

Prices were bolstered by analysts’ and traders’ comments that Russia might become a significant importer of wheat this season.

But a spokesman for the Agricultural Ministry told RIA news agency that the country had no plans to import grain this year. “This rumour is being spread by dishonest grain traders in order to heat up the market,” he said.

Changes in output forecasts

Abbassian has estimated that wheat output in Russia was likely to fall by about 20 million tonnes to 42-43 million tonnes this year.

He had said that the FAO was set to cut its 2010 world wheat output outlook by five to seven million tonnes and trim its global wheat stocks estimate by a couple of million tonnes to take into account Russia’s shortfalls.

The index rise is to be driven by cereals, sugar and vegetable oils and fats, he said.

It rose to a 165.5 reading in July, its highest since February, but it was still far away from its peak reading of 213.5 in June 2008, in the middle of the global food crisis which triggered food riots in developing countries.

Countries such as India where food accounts for a large part of the inflation index could indeed see a risk of food inflation, Abbassian added.

Moreover, if bad weather continues in Russia and hits other major producers in the northern hemisphere as they prepare for their winter plantings campaign, then next season’s global wheat supplies could be at risk, he said.

But that possibility is “very small” at present, because weather conditions appear to be improving in Russia, he said.

Surging wheat prices are likely to prompt farmers around the globe to sow more wheat for the next season, creating the theoretical possibility of a glut, he added.

Bushehr start-up a big moment for Moscow

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What’s clear is that Moscow has little to lose from the start-up of the Bushehr plant, set in motion 15 years after Russia agreed to build the reactor at a site left idle following Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

For the Kremlin, launching the long-delayed power plant bolsters Russia’s aggressive campaign to capture nuclear energy markets abroad and underscores its position at the heart of global diplomacy over Iran’s nuclear programme.

But it will not end tension over Tehran’s ambitions or silence the talk of an attack on Iran – factors that help fuel Russia’s economy by bolstering the price of oil, a major source of revenue.

Russia continues to strike a delicate balance, playing to oil-rich Iran’s insistence on a need for nuclear power and at the same time to Western worries that Tehran could develop an atomic bomb.

Starting the plant is a way for Moscow to appease Tehran after pleasing the US administration by approving fresh UN sanctions against Iran in June and vowing not to send it air-defence missile systems while the measures are in place.

The US criticised Moscow earlier this year for pushing ahead with start-up plans amid persistent Iranian defiance over its nuclear activities, which Washington fears are aimed at acquiring weapons.

But the mandatory return of Bushehr’s spent fuel to Russia allows Moscow to cast the plant as a model for proliferation risk-free nuclear cooperation.

Because weapons-grade plutonium can be derived from spent fuel, Bushehr – which the US for years appealed to Russia to scrap – now also hands the West an argument that Tehran has no need to enrich uranium itself.

Iran, though, insists it has the right to enrich uranium and refuses to suspend its enrichment efforts.

A day before the start-up ceremony, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying in a Japanese newspaper that Iran would stop higher-grade enrichment if it were assured of fuel supplies for a research reactor separate from Bushehr.

Russia suggested it was ready to entertain the offer, calling for a meeting as soon as possible on potential deliveries of the fuel.

But with no clear resolution in sight, the US and Europe will continue to need the support of Russia – which is cementing its Iranian ties by delivering on Bushehr – in its efforts to rein in Tehran’s nuclear programme.

Is immigration a desert mirage for the GOP?

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“Nobody could have guessed the impact it would have,” Pearce said of the divisive law he crafted to crack down on illegal immigrants in his state – of which there are nearly half a million. “Who could have guessed that I would have pissed off the president of the United States?”

A 63-year-old father of five and former lawman who worked for the local Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office for 23 years, Pearce is clearly reveling in the political shockwaves he has created. He says he is also pleased to have called attention to what he and many other Americans consider misguidedly lenient policies toward illegal immigrants.

As a result, Arizona – the desert state that provided presidential candidates in Barry Goldwater and John McCain – has become a crucible for policy on immigration, an issue that crystallises popular anger ahead of the midterm congressional vote in November.

The state’s controversial law makes it a crime to be in the country without proper documents. Local backers say the legislation’s intent is to curb the smuggling of both humans and drugs over the state’s porous border with Mexico.

It also requires state and local police officers to check the immigration status of anyone they suspect is unlawfully in the country, even during routine traffic stops. Critics say that this will inevitably result in widespread harassment of Hispanic or Hispanic-looking Americans.

Even so, polls show the Arizona approach is supported by a solid majority of Americans – a Rasmussen Reports poll in late May found 55 percent of respondents nationally would like a similar law in their own state. Consequently, some political experts say President Obama’s steadfast opposition to it will likely help galvanise grass-roots Republican groups.

More significantly, the new law appears to be inspiring copycat efforts in at least 20 other states. That is in addition to the five states that have already introduced similar legislation this year.

As wedge issues go, however, this one may well end up languishing in the desert. Many political analysts say illegal immigration is unlikely to be a deciding factor in all but a handful of contests – mostly in Arizona itself.

And the eventual backlash against the measure, experts say, could prove severe for its champions, alienating an increasingly affluent Hispanic electorate once considered a potential conservative goldmine for the Republican Party.

High noon
A fifth generation Arizonan – almost a settler in a state that has seen furious recent growth – Pearce fretted as illegal immigration grew from a few farm workers picking oranges in his hometown of Mesa in the 1960s to a multi-billion dollar trade that involves drugs as well as migrant workers.

The violence associated with smuggling was highlighted in March for many Arizonans when a prominent cattleman, Robert Krentz, was shot dead on his border ranch. No arrests have been made, although smugglers remain suspects.

Pearce says his epiphany came on December 16, 2004. That day he was handed a note during a speaking engagement in Washington, telling him that his son Sean, a deputy with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in Phoenix, had been shot serving a homicide warrant.

“I called my wife and she said ‘Russell, this is really going to make you mad, but Sean was shot by an illegal alien,'” he recalled. Hit in the chest and stomach, the younger Pearce was rushed to hospital in critical condition and has survived.

The elder Pearce blames the feds for the incident. “Government has blood on their hands when they ignore the damage to this country and the killings and the maimings, while they defend lawbreakers and refuse to enforce the law.”

Pearce has been working for years on state measures to curb illegal immigrants. An earlier law he championed that ultimately passed required employers to verify their workers using a federal computer system dubbed “E-Verify.” That one was passed in 2007.

With conservative allies in the state legislature – where Republicans control both the House and Senate – he crafted the law with input from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an organisation that pushes for restrictions on immigration and has supported a raft of state and city ordinances across the country.

As the legislation took shape this year, Pearce got together with then-Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas and consulted University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law professor Kris Kobach. In the words of Kobach, the two sought to make the bill, known as SB 1070, a “bullet-proof law that would withstand any and all changes.” They knew the legal challenges were coming.

The bill also needed the political stars to align to become law, and in a strange twist, Obama himself made it possible. Before she went to Washington in January of last year as Obama’s Homeland Security secretary, Arizona’s former Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano was quick to veto many of the Republican-dominated Arizona legislature’s proposals, setting a state record for vetoes with 180 proposals tossed out over seven years in office.

Her Republican Secretary of State, Jan Brewer, stepped up to fill her shoes, and now the conditions were altered. At an April 23 ceremony in the state capitol, she signed the toughest immigration bill in the US into law – a law that seeks to drive an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants out of the state.

The day the law was enacted by Brewer, Pearce stood at the back of the room at the state capitol, reluctant to steal her thunder but quietly elated. “I felt like a player that just scored in the final five seconds of a good basketball game,” he said. “I was excited, I’d worked on this for years.”

Since then, his phone has not stopped ringing. He gets perhaps a dozen media requests a day, including calls from reporters from Spain, Britain and Germany anxious to speak to the man who has forced a national debate on immigration and fanned conservative embers smoldering in the Republican Party.

He has also been dubbed a racist by critics, who point out that both the number of illegals flocking across the border as well as crimes has been declining over the past several years. Opponents of the law also note that illegal immigrants mostly work in low-paid jobs on farms, in construction and in the hospitality industry – oftentimes in jobs that legal residents have long shunned.

A groundswell of support
The law has sparked interest in Republican-controlled state legislatures around the US.

Among them is Utah, where Republican Representative Stephen Sandstrom recently took a daylong trip to the Mexico border with Pearce and other lawmakers and staff. They toured a stretch of the dusty desert strip, marked by an incomplete and much criticised steel border fence, speaking to Border Patrol agents.

Back home in Utah, Sandstrom says he will be introducing similar legislation in the months to come, setting the process in motion by introducing it in committee in late August or early September at the latest.

“There’s a groundswell of support for this,” said Sandstrom, who has pushed anti-immigrant legislation for the past four years. “I think it took until this year for the people of Utah to say enough is enough. … it’s going to pass; there’s no doubt in my mind about that.”

Republicans in Utah are not the only ones keen on copying Arizona. The National Conference of State Legislatures said that five other states – South Carolina, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Rhode Island – have introduced Arizona-style immigrant legislation so far this year. And there are reports that lawmakers and other officials in as many as 20 states – Pearce puts the number at 34 – are poised to push for similar measures after the summer recess.

But it will be a legal slog.

Arizona is currently fighting lawsuits from the Justice Department and six other plaintiffs, including civil rights and advocacy groups. If US District court Judge Susan Bolton does not dismiss them all, the legal battle could drag on for years.

“It’s going to depend a lot on what happens in Arizona,” said Ann Morse, programme director for the NCSL’s Immigration Policy Project. States “don’t want to spend what little money they have tied up in the courts.” she said.

‘Bigger than immigration’
Amid the street protests against the measure in Phoenix, President Obama’s Justice Department lawyers launched their challenge to the state law, and the political topology was established.

“This issue is way bigger than immigration. It is Obama overreaching,” said business student Bryan Berkland, 25, struggling to make himself heard over chants and beating drums outside US District Court in Phoenix.

“It’s the federal government overstepping its bounds,” added Berkland, an independent who said Obama’s challenge would clinch his vote for the Republicans.

But while the law and the administration’s measures to counter it may energise some voters, analysts say illegal immigration is unlikely to become the decisive issue in any of the congressional districts that are coming into play next fall, except possibly in a handful of Arizona House races.

“This is an issue that in every election the Republicans believe is going to be the keys to the kingdom, and it never performs for them politically,” said Simon Rosenberg, founder of NDN, a Democratic advocacy group and think-tank.

“For most Americans this is a secondary or tertiary issue. What they want their politicians to address at the federal level is the economy, healthcare … issues that are actually more important to them,” drawing on polling to back up that argument.

Those facing potential fallout from the legal challenge are Arizona US Representatives Ann Kirkpatrick, Harry Mitchell and Gabrielle Giffords, who are all seeking re-election in congressional districts that already lean Republican, analysts say.

“Those three races are Ground Zero for me,” said Mark Jones, a political scientist at Rice University, citing their vulnerability. “You have three incumbent Democratic members of Congress who are identified with President Obama and Nancy Pelosi … they are eventually part of the power structure that is challenging the Arizona legislation.”

‘Remember in November’
While the controversy is unlikely to severely damage Democrats, neither will it be all positive for Republicans.

But embracing the law carries greater risks for the GOP with Hispanics, the country’s fastest-growing minority and an increasingly hefty voting bloc which turned out two to one for Obama against Republican candidate and Arizona Senator John McCain in 2008.

“I just don’t like that law,” said Mexican-American Susan Islas, a Hispanic and independent who toted a placard at a rally to protest the law in Phoenix recently. “We will remember in November who to vote for and who not to vote for.”

Signs of that discomfort are already being felt.

In California, billionaire gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman had a divisive primary battle with Steve Poizner over which candidate would do the best job of stopping illegal immigration. She has since had to backtrack as she fights for the Hispanic votes she will need if she is to clinch victory over her Democrat rival Jerry Brown.

Using her deep pockets, she is running Spanish-language ads and billboards to distance herself from the Arizona law, and has said she would have voted against Proposition 187 in 1994, an earlier Republican measure that sought to deny services to illegal immigrants in the state.

“Latinos have not been voting for Republicans because they perceive it’s a white man’s party that doesn’t have any respect for them. Meg Whitman has to create an atmosphere of, ‘Hey, I appreciate your needs,'” said Allan Hoffenblum, Republican political analyst and publisher of the California Target Book. “She has the money to do it and do it early.”

In Texas, Governor Rick Perry, meanwhile, is walking a fine line over the law. He has said it “would not be the right direction for Texas,” while appeasing his base by supporting a brief by the state’s attorney general, Greg Abbott, opposing the Obama administration’s challenge to the law.

While the law has put a match to the immigration debate, sending a blaze through some of the Republican conservative base, analysts and advocates say the party will likely try to douse it before heading into the 2012 presidential cycle.

“Smart Republicans know that, if they are going to retake the White House, they are going to have to win approximately 40 percent of the Hispanic vote,” said Frank Sharry, the founder of America’s Voice, a group that supports comprehensive immigration reform.

“Going into the presidential cycle, you’re going to have a lot more Republicans speaking up and going ‘whoaa!'”

Trafigura pay price

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The judge said during the ruling, the first ever to convict Trafigura Beheer BV over the toxic waste handling, the company was fined because it broke European regulations on “the export of waste to the Third World and harming the environment”. It was also convicted for concealing the harmful nature of the waste.

Trafigura, one of the world’s biggest oil and metals traders with 2009 sales of $47bn, said in a statement it would study the ruling, and it may file an appeal. The court also convicted a Trafigura employee and a ship’s captain.

“While Trafigura is pleased to have been acquitted of the charge of forgery it is disappointed by the judge’s ruling on the other two, which it believes to be incorrect,” it said.

Trafigura, which has made settlements to prevent or end court proceedings in Ivory Coast and Britain, had chartered the ship Probo Koala, which wanted to dispose of hundreds of tonnes of chemical slops in Amsterdam in July 2006.

The ship decided against disposing the cargo in Amsterdam after being told it would have to pay the clean-up costs.

About a month later, the material was dumped in the Ivorian economic capital Abidjan after Trafigura hired a local company to dispose of the waste. Thousands of residents of the city complained of illnesses.

The government of Ivory Coast said 16 people died.

The Dutch judge said that the waste was harmful, caustic and could hurt the skin, though a British judge said last September there was no evidence the waste had caused anything more than “flu-like symptoms”.

Trafigura agreed in 2007 to pay a $198m settlement to the Ivory Coast government which exempted it from legal proceedings in the West African country, but it denied responsibility for the dumping or any wrongdoing.

The company also reached a pre-trial settlement in September with a British law firm which represented 31,000 residents of Ivory Coast.

Pending trial
The court also sentenced Trafigura trader Naeem Ahmed to a suspended 6 months’ jail sentence and a 25,000 euro fine for concealing the harmful nature of the waste, and the Probo Koala’s captain Sergiy Chertov to a suspended five month jail sentence for the same charge and forgery when reporting the waste to Dutch authorities.

The court acquitted the city of Amsterdam for its role in handling the waste transport in the city’s port because it was acting as a public body, giving it immunity, the judge said.

The Dutch Supreme Court ruled in early July that a lower Dutch court should re-examine a case against Claude Dauphin, in 2006 chief executive of Trafigura Beheer BV, who Dutch prosecutors suspect of having lead the toxic waste export.

Dauphin has objected to the charge, saying he only knew in mid-August 2006 that Probo Koala transported toxic waste, when the export to Ivory Coast had already taken place.

UN lists Kyoto plan B options if no climate deal

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The document reflects the stuttering pace of UN talks to extend or replace the Kyoto pact and disappointment at the outcome of a summit in Copenhagen last December.

Countries which are party to the Kyoto Protocol in June asked the UN climate secretariat to report on legal options to avoid a political vacuum or gap.

Kyoto placed carbon emissions caps on nearly 40 developed countries from 2008-2012. Under existing rules, a new round of targets needs the agreement of at least 143 countries – or three quarters of all parties to the Protocol.

But a new deal appears months or years off, and even after an agreement its implementation would require ratification by the national parliaments or relevant bodies of more than 100 countries. The process of national ratification of the original Protocol took eight years.

“Domestic ratification processes are likely to involve … national legislative bodies, a process that may involve a considerable amount of time,” said the UN paper, published online and dated July 20.

Ratifying a successor agreement should be quicker, focused mostly on amending the targets in the existing text.

“A delay in the entry into force beyond 1 January 2013 would result in a gap between the end of the first commitment period and the beginning of the subsequent commitment period (of emissions targets),” the paper added.

Carbon market
Legal remedies to avoiding a gap focused on tweaks to the treaty, such as cutting the number of countries required to approve any new targets or extending the existing caps to 2013 or 2014, the UN document said.

UN talks are now in their third year to agree a new deal, having missed a deadline in Copenhagen, with the next major conference due to start in November in Cancun, Mexico.

With so little time to agree a complex climate deal, which will shift the way the world supplies and consumes energy away from fossil fuels, attention is shifting to how countries could soften that legal requirement.

However, such changes to the treaty would have to be made “provisional”, to avoid relying on lengthy, national approval, which would defeat their purpose.

Such an approach would leave uncertainty over the final form of any deal, the paper acknowledged, doubt which investors say is mounting in particular for the carbon market.

Without a deal by the end of 2012, the future of a $20.6bn trade in carbon emissions rights under Kyoto was unsure, said the paper, entitled “Legal considerations relating to a possible gap between the first and subsequent commitment periods.”