Cargill's controversial soya port closed in the Amazon

Santarém, Brazil — In the heart of the Amazon rainforest a huge soya port owned by the giant US company Cargill has just been closed down by the Brazilian Environmental Agency (IBAMA). The orders to close the port came after a seven-year legal battle by the Brazilian Federal Prosecutors over Cargill's failure to provide an environmental impact assessment for the facility.

The port facilities, built by Cargill in Santarém, has been at the centre of a controversy as huge tracts of the Amazon were being destroyed to grow soya which was shipped from the facility to Europe, to provide cheap feed for chicken which is then sold in fast food outlets and supermarkets.

It's been a long struggle. Since 2000 the Federal Ministry of Public Prosecution (MPF) has been engaged in legal battle in order to have a thorough Environmental Impacts Assessment carried out. However, instead of complying with Brazilian environmental law, Cargill has exploited the shortcomings of a complex Brazilian legal system to buy time to construct and operate the terminal without assessing its potentially enormous environmental impacts.

"This is an important day for the Amazon rainforest and for its people. A big step forward has been taken in enforcing the responsible use of natural resources and bringing greater governance in the Amazon," said Paulo Adario, Greenpeace Amazon Campaign Coordinator in Brazil.

"We trust that Cargill will respect the judiciary and conduct a broad environmental impact assessment, which will result in concrete measures to minimize the impacts by its port and soya expansion in the region. In that way, the company will also confirm its commitment to the moratorium on further deforestation for soya planting, announced by the soya sector in Brazil

Eating up the Amazon' revealed that the world-wide demand for soya has been fuelling deforestation of the world's biggest tropical rainforest. In May last year, we launched a high-profile protest in the region, blocking Cargill's Santarem port with our ship, the Arctic Sunrise.

Last year also saw McDonald's being flipped from 'bad guy' to 'good guy' by consumers after it was revealed they purchased soya grown on the ashes of the Amazon rainforest. The unique alliance between Greenpeace and McDonald's that followed was instrumental in creating a moratorium on further destruction of the Amazon for soya.

The suspension of Cargill port activities in Santarém is the culmination of years of demands by the local communities and the people who are fighting the expansion of soya cultivation in the Amazon. Soya and other agricultural products are key drivers for deforestation, threatening huge loss of biodiversity and contributing to climate change. last year."

The Unnatural Museum - The Bermuda Triangle

No doubt you have wondered about the Bermuda Triangle. It is the greatest modern mystery of our supposedly well understood world: a region of the Atlantic Ocean between Bermuda, Miami, Florida, and San Juan, Puerto Rico, where disappearance of ships

The Bermuda Triangle is a stretch of the Atlantic Ocean bordered by a line from Florida to the islands of Bermuda, to Puerto Rico and then back to Florida. It is one of the biggest mysteries of our time - that isn't really a mystery.

The term "Bermuda Triangle" was first used in an article written by Vincent H. Gaddis for Argosy magazine in 1964. In the article Gaddis claimed that in this strange sea a number of ships and planes had disappeared without explanation. Gaddis wasn't the first one to come to this conclusion, either. As early as 1952 George X. Sands, in a report in Fate magazine, noted what seemed like an unusually large number of strange accidents in that region.

In 1969 John Wallace Spencer wrote a book called Limbo of the Lost specifically about the triangle and, two years later, a feature documentary on the subject, The Devil's Triangle, was released. These, along with the bestseller The Bermuda Triangle, published in 1974, permanently registered the legend of the "Hoodoo Sea" within popular culture.

Several books suggested that the disappearances were due to an intelligent, technologically advanced race living in space or under the sea.

The only problem was that the mystery was more hype than reality. In 1975 a librarian at Arizona State University, named Larry Kusche, decided to investigate the claims made by these articles and books. What he found he published in his own book entitled The Bermuda Triangle Mystery-Solved. Kusche had carefully dug into records other writers had neglected. He found that many of the strange accidents were not so strange after all. Often a triangle writer had noted a ship or plane had disappeared in "calms seas" when the record showed a raging storm had been in progress. Others said ships had "mysteriously vanished" when their remains had actually been found and the cause of their sinking explained.

More significantly a check of Lloyd's of London's accident records by the editor of Fate in 1975 showed that the triangle was a no more dangerous part of the ocean than any other. U.S. Coast Guard records confirmed this and since that time no good arguments have ever been made to refute those statistics. So the Bermuda Triangle mystery disappeared, in the same way many of its supposed victims had vanished.

Even though the Bermuda Triangle isn't a true mystery, this region of the sea certainly has had its share of marine tragedy. Perhaps the best known one was the story of Flight 19.

www.bermuda-triangle.org/

The Basics Of Customizing Wordpress Templates

Do you want to change the look of your WordPress site or maybe to put something like a banner or adsense code on your blog? In order to do this you need to know about three important things: template...
Author: Heris Yunora

Do you want to change the look of your WordPress site or maybe to put something like a banner or adsense code on your blog? In order to do this you need to know about three important things: template files, functions and CSS.

- Template Files

These files are stored in a directory (wp-content/themes/template-name/). So if you are using "default theme", you need to access the files that are stored in "wp-content/themes/default/" directory.

There are several common WordPress template files you should know:

1.header.php

This file is responsible for the appearance of the top section of your blog. If you want to change the header image, you have to access this file. Not only that, this file is also the place to add Meta Tags.

2.footer.php

Similar to the header.php, this file is loaded everytime any page or post of your blog is accessed. It is used to store the HTML tags and the code for the bottom section of your blog.

3.sidebar.php

A sidebar is a section which is usually used to display site navigation. Depending on the theme you are using, a sidebar usually provides links to archives, pages and latest posts.

4.index.php

In fact this file is the main template file. When someone visits the homepage of your blog site, this file will be loaded. Then he/she will see the contents (not the source code) of this file. If you want to make the appearance of your blog become similar to a common website, where there is a static description on the homepage, you may try to put the static content in this file.

Besides those files, a theme usually has some other template files with different purposes. For example, the archives.php is a file used to display posts you made in the past. Then the search.php is used to generate search results.

- Functions

A function is a blog of code to accomplish a specific task. In order to modify template files, you don't need to master any programming language. Although having a little knowledge in PHP, you can work faster. In WordPress, the name of a function is usually related to its purpose. For instance, "the_title()" is a function to display the title of a post and "the_content()" is used to display its content. Another example is "blog_info()" which is responsible for displaying the name or description of your blog, depending on the given argument (additional data).

- CSS

Style Sheet is a facility to manage the format and layout of a website efficiently. Without using it, changing small things such as the font type or the background color of all of your webpages is a daunting task where you have to do it page by page. But with the existence of style sheet, one change you make can affect the whole site. You should know that in WordPress a different theme may have a different css file. You also need to know that some styles may be defined in the header.php file. If you are using the "default theme", you have to access the header.php file in order to change the background color or the header image of your blog, not the css file.

Finally, before you customize the templates, it is highly recommended to backup any files you intend to change. If something doesn't work properly, you can always go back to the original settings.

Data Recovery - Let Your Hard Drive Cool

There are many reasons for the hard drive failures. Of course, when you lose your data, you think less about the causes of its loss, but more about the data, itself. However, if you were to learn about the cost of the hard drive data recovery, you would rather prevent it, especially, from the most common reason of hard drive damage overheating.

Learn, How to choose The Best File Recovery Solution

http://www.newsonfocus.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=578&Itemid=14

No matter what we do with our computer, storage is an important part of our system. Nowadays, we have been holding more and more information on our PC. Most computer users no longer keep their documents, letters, music, photos, pictures, etc. in hard copies, but store them on different data storage devices, preferentially the most popular one – the hard drive, counting on it's reliability.

In old drives, the rotating speed was low, so the overheating problem did not exist. However, most recent hard disks, with a speed of 7200-10000 RPM, heat up during their work, and the temperature inside rises up to 70 C and above. Of course, hard drives are now manufactured with internal temperature sensors, computers have fans, coolers, and other gadgets to prevent overheating, and software utilities indicate the temperature of your hard drive. Contemporary hard drive models are able to operate at 50-55 C, but we should point out that the hard drives are more sensitive to high temperatures than any other computer parts. The fact that the hard drives carry your precious data is indeed important, as well as its ultimate loss would be a disaster to you. There are data loss situations when even the most advanced data recovery companies can't guarantee that you will receive you data back.

Vital Data Recovery - Montreal, Quebec, Canada (http://www.vitaldata.ca) . Vital Data is data recovery company, which specializes in recovering data from hard disk drives and other media. Vital Data Recovery offers the most technologically advanced hard drive data recovery available.

Article Source:http://www.Articlestreet,com

LALU KE KHEL MAIN PISSTI RAIL

Railway minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, these days, is fully occupied in preparing his people-friendly budget on Feb 26. Like last year, this year too there are not going to be any major hikes in the railway fares or in freight rates.

After his party, the RJD, fared badly in the Bihar assembly elections, he is in no mood to invite the wrath of the electorate by raising train fares. Thus it is clear that under `Lalunomics’ the Railways would continue to bear further losses. Call it the charisma of Lalu, that from the time, he took over as the Railway minister, nobody has dared to look into the losses being faced by the Railways. Even the media, by informing only the profits being earned by the Railways, have sung peons in Lalu’s name. However, the truth speaks otherwise as the ministry has not been able to bring down the passenger trains losses being faced every year. According to an estimate, the Railways are facing an annual loss of Rs 6300 crores from passenger trains and parcel business. Last year it was proposed to bring down this loss by 50pc but it has not happened. The railway minister had proposed about three dozen plans to take the organisation out from the red, but it seems all related plans have met their end under the weight of the files. Some schemes did start but did not make much progress. The ministry had decided to overcome the losses being suffered by passenger trains, numbering 900, by introducing pantry car services. By this the railways had estimated to earm Rs 130 crores but this service could be started only in 16 trains. Besides, the railways had aimed to earn Rs 900 cr by setting up food stalls of branded cos on platforms. But this plan also did not succeed. The announcement of `Garib Rath’ for making the ordinary passenger sit in cool environs of AC coaches too has failed to materialise. Even the officials admit of its impracticality. Moreso Lalu’s ambitious train is even unable to earn the transport expenses for these `raths’.They are on the top of loss.