Eeyore's News and View

Science is trying to catch-up. What would be the reason to try and create life? Of course you know the answer. The second article is an article that shows "global warming" is alive and well in the UK. (tongue and cheek)
Animal-human clones don't work, U.S. company finds
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers who tried to use mouse, cow and rabbit eggs to make human clones said on Monday the effort failed to produce workable embryos but added that they showed human cloning should work in principle.
Mixing human and animal cells does not appear to program the egg properly, said Dr. Robert Lanza of Massachusetts-based Advanced Cell Technology.
But using human cells did reprogram the egg cell or oocyte and activate the genes needed to make a viable embryo, Lanza and colleagues reported in the journal Cloning and Stem Cells.
Several teams have tried to make animal-human hybrids as a source of embryonic stem cells, the master cells of the body. Because human eggs are scarce -- it requires a surgical procedure to get them from a woman -- some scientists came up with the idea of using animal egg cells.
The cloning technique is called somatic cell nuclear transfer. The nucleus is removed from an egg cell and replaced with the nucleus from another type of cell from the donor animal or person who is to be cloned.
Done right, the process starts the egg growing and dividing as if it had been fertilized by a sperm, but the resulting embryo carries mostly the DNA of the donor.
"The idea was to simply to plunk a patient's DNA into an empty cow or rabbit egg -- and presto -- you reprogram the DNA back into a stem cell," Lanza said in a telephone interview.
But teams that have tried to do this have always ended up with what looks like a cell dividing over and over to become an embryo, but which eventually fizzles out.
"For the last decade, we've carried out literally hundreds of experiments trying to create patient-specific stem cells using animal eggs," Lanza said.
BEAUTIFUL HYBRIDS
"We got beautiful little hybrid embryos, but it didn't work no matter how hard we tried."
A mouse-human hybrid petered out after just one division. The cow and rabbit human hybrids went further, but stopped at the point when maternal DNA is supposed to kick in and turn the ball of cells into a proper embryo, Lanza said.
Lanza's team used a new method called global gene expression analysis to see which genes were turned on and off as the eggs grew.
"We never had the tools before to actually look inside the cell and see what's going on," Lanza said. It appears that using the egg of another species turns off the genes needed to make an embryo instead of turning them on, he said.
But the human-human clone did turn on the right genes, although it, too stopped dividing before it could produce stem cells, Lanza said.
"We see exactly the same genes turned on in a normal embryo are actually turned on in a human clone," he said.
Ian Wilmut of the University of Edinburgh, one of the scientists who cloned the first mammal, Dolly the sheep, and editor of the journal, called the results disappointing.
"This very important paper suggests that livestock oocytes are extremely unlikely to be suitable as recipients for use in human nuclear transfer," Wilmut said in a statement.
But Lanza said it might be possible to use other methods to create "banks" of stem cells that match the several hundred tissue types found among humans.
This could include cloning humans, using a single cell from growing embryos used for fertility treatment, or a new method called induced pluripotent stem cells, made by taking a sample of skin and reprogramming the cells to act like embryonic stem cells, Lanza said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE5114RS20090202?feedType=RSS&feedName=healthNews&rpc=22&sp=true

Snow Escape From The Big Freeze
The worst winter weather for 18 years has caused massive disruption to rail and air services and caused major problems on the roads.
Thousands of schools were closed and over six million workers are said to have stayed at home.
Analysts have put the cost to business at £1.2bn - but say the figure could be a lot higher.
Earlier, major airports closed runways, dozens of trains were suspended and there were no buses in London during the morning rush hour.
On the London Underground, 10 of the 11 lines were either completely or partly suspended.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the authorities were doing "everything in our power" to get the country moving again.
An army of snow ploughs and gritters worked non-stop to clear the roads but motorists were still caught in huge tailbacks.
At 20cm (8ins) the snowfall was the heaviest in Britain since February 1991, when about 10cm fell.
Over 2,000 primary and secondary schools were forced to close, with those in southern England among the worst affected.
Many are expected to remain shut for another day at least - much to the delight of pupils.
Around 80% of the London Underground is now operational while around 100 out of 700 London bus routes are running a limited service.
But air, rail and bus operators are warning of more travel problems on Tuesday and are urging travellers to check the latest information before setting out.
Network Rail said it would do everything possible to get trains running.
Maintenance teams would be out "in force" overnight clearing and de-icing tracks and points.
However, a rail spokesman admitted: "It all depends on the weather."
The Highways Agency said snow and ice would make road conditions hazardous. It is urging drivers not to travel unless it is "essential".
BAA which operates Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted airports says further disruption is inevitable.
More than 800 flights were cancelled at Heathrow alone on Monday.
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/UK-News/Snow-In-The-UK-Britain-Suffers-Travel-Chaos-Schools-Close-Six-Million-Workers-Stay-At-Home/Article/200902115214889?lpos=UK_News_Carousel_Region_0&lid=ARTICLE_15214889_Snow_In_The_UK%3A_Britain_Suffers_Travel_Chaos%2C_Schools_Close%2C_Six_Million_Workers_Stay_At_Home

AP IMPACT: SWAT teams deployed in 911 fraud
February 2, 2009 - 8:00am
This undated booking mug provided by the Orange County District Attorney's office shows Randal Ellis. Ellis is currently serving a three year sentence for placing 185 bogus calls to 911 operators around the country. (AP Photo/Orange County District Attorney)
By JORDAN ROBERTSON
AP Technology Writer
(AP) - Doug Bates and his wife, Stacey, were in bed around 10 p.m., their 2-year-old daughters asleep in a nearby room. Suddenly they were shaken awake by the wail of police sirens and the rumble of a helicopter above their suburban Southern California home. A criminal must be on the loose, they thought.
Doug Bates got up to lock the doors and grabbed a knife. A beam from a flashlight hit him. He peeked into the backyard. A swarm of police, assault rifles drawn, ordered him out of the house. Bates emerged, frightened and with the knife in his hand, as his wife frantically dialed 911. They were handcuffed and ordered to the ground while officers stormed the house.
The scene of mayhem and carnage the officers expected was nowhere to be found. Neither the Bateses nor the officers knew that they were pawns in a dangerous game being played 1,200 miles away by a teenager bent on terrifying a random family of strangers.
They were victims of a new kind of telephone fraud that exploits a weakness in the way the 911 system handles calls from Internet-based phone services. The attacks _ called "swatting" because armed police SWAT teams usually respond _ are virtually unstoppable, and an Associated Press investigation found that budget-strapped 911 centers are essentially defenseless without an overhaul of their computer systems.
The AP examined hundreds of pages of court documents and law-enforcement transcripts, listened to audio of "swatting" calls, and interviewed two dozen security experts, investigators, defense lawyers, victims and perpetrators.
While Doug and Stacey Bates were cuffed on the ground that night in March 2007, 18-year-old Randal Ellis, living with his parents in Mukilteo, Wash., was nearly finished with the 27-minute yarn about a drug-fueled murder that brought the Orange County Sheriff's Department SWAT team to the Bateses' home.
In a grisly sounding call to 911, Ellis was putting an Internet-based phone service for the hearing-impaired to nefarious use. By entering bogus information about his location, Ellis was able to make it seem to the 911 operator as if he was calling from inside the Bateses' home. He said he was high on drugs and had just shot his sister.
According to prosecutors, Ellis picked the Bates family at random, as he did with all of the 185 calls investigators say he made to 911 operators around the country.
"If I would have had a gun in my hand, I probably would have been shot," said Doug Bates, 38. Last March, Ellis was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to five felony counts, including computer access and fraud, false imprisonment by violence and falsely reporting a crime.
In a separate, multistate case prosecuted by federal authorities in Dallas, eight people were charged with orchestrating up to 300 "swatting" calls to victims they met on telephone party chat lines. The three ringleaders were each sentenced to five years in prison. Two others were sentenced to 2 1/2 years. One defendant pleaded guilty last week and could get a 13-year sentence. The remaining two are set to go on trial in February.
A similar case was reported in Salinas, Calif., where officers surrounded an apartment where a call had come in claiming men with assault rifles were trying to break in. In Hiawatha, Iowa, fake calls about a workplace shooting included realistic gunshot sounds and moaning in the background. In November, a teenage hacker from Worcester, Mass., pleaded guilty to a five-month swatting spree including a bomb threat and report of an armed gunman that caused two schools to be evacuated.
Many times, however, swats don't get fully investigated or reported.
Orange County Sheriff's detective Brian Sims spent weeks serving search warrants on Internet providers before he identified Ellis through his numeric computer identifier, known as an IP address.
Law enforcement hopes lengthy prison terms will deter would-be swatters. Technology alone isn't enough to stop the crimes.
Unlike calls that come from landline phones, which are registered to a fixed physical address and display that on 911 dispatchers' screens, calls coming from people's computers, or even calls from landline or cell phones that are routed through spoofing services, could appear to be originating from anywhere.
Scores of Caller ID spoofing services have sprung up, offering to disguise callers' origins for a fee. All anybody needs to do is pony up for a certain number of minutes, punch in a PIN code and specify whom they're calling and what they'd like the Caller ID to display.
Spoofing Caller ID is perfectly legal. Legitimate businesses use the technology to project a single callback number for an entire office, or to let executives working from home cloak their home numbers when making outgoing calls.
At the same time, criminals have latched onto the technique to get revenge on rivals or get their kicks by harassing strangers.
"We're not able to cope with this very well," said Roger Hixson, technical issues director for the National Emergency Number Association, the 911 system's industry group. "We're just hoping this doesn't become a widespread hobby."
The 911 system was built on the idea it could trust the information it was receiving from callers. Upgrading the system to accommodate new technologies can be a huge task.
Gary Allen, editor of Dispatch Monthly, a Berkeley, Calif.-based magazine focused on public-safety communications centers, said dispatchers are "totally at the mercy of the people who call" and the fact they don't have technology to identify which incoming calls are from Internet-based sources.
Allen said upgrading the communications centers' computers to flash an Internet caller's IP address could be helpful in thwarting fraudulent calls. He said an even simpler fix, tweaking the computers to identify calls from Internet telephone services and flash the name of the service provider to dispatchers, can cost under $5,000, but is usually still too costly for many communications centers.
But because this style of fraudulent calls is so new, and many emergency-dispatch centers receive few Internet calls in the first place, those upgrades are not frequently done.
Swatting calls place an immense strain on responding departments. The Orange County Sheriff's Department deployed about 30 people to the Bateses' home, including a SWAT team, a helicopter and K-9 units. It cost the department $14,700.
They take their toll on victims, too.
Tony Messina, a construction worker from Salina, N.Y., was swatted three times by the gang broken up by the federal authorities in Dallas. He was even arrested as the result of one call, because authorities found weapons he wasn't supposed to have while they were searching the house.
Messina had made some enemies on a party line he frequented to flirt with women. Some guys disliked him and out of jealousy, he says, they started swatting him.
The first time, he was home alone with his two poodles when officers swarmed his backyard at 6 a.m. According to Messina, the callers said he had "killed a hooker and sliced her ear to ear, blood all over the place, I'm doing drugs and if you police come over here I'm going to kill you, too." After a few hours at the police station, he was let go.
Two weeks later, he was detained outside his house. A month later, he was in bed watching TV when he saw someone with a flashlight at his window. He went outside and was handcuffed while deputies searched his house and car.
Messina had been told to call 911 himself if the swatting calls happened again, and when the deputies realized it was another fraudulent call, Messina was let go. He said he suffered bruised ribs that kept him out of work for a month and a half.
Investigators say swatters are usually motivated by a mixture of ego and malice, a desire for revenge and domination over rivals.
Jason Trowbridge, one of the defendants currently serving a five-year sentence, told the AP in a series of letters from prison that the attacks started with the standard fare of prank callers _ sending pizzas and locksmiths to victims' homes _ escalated to shutting the power and water off and eventually led to swatting.
"Nobody ever thought anyone would get hurt or die from a SWAT call," he said.
http://www.wtop.com/?nid=108&sid=1590258

Plight of the humble bee
Native British bees are dying out — and with them will go flora, fauna and one-third of our diet. We may have less than a decade to save them and avert catastrophe. So why is nothing being done?
Midwinter. In a garden not far from the sea in Plymouth, there is a splash of pale sunlight and a sound both familiar and strange. Familiar, because if we close our eyes and think of English gardens it’s the sound that fills our heads. Strange, because now it should be silent.
The drone of a bee.
It is a buff-tailed bumble, Bombus terrestris, a worker pottering among late-flowering fuchsias, heathers and mahonias like the ghost of summers past. All the textbooks say it should be dead. Only queens overwinter in holes in the ground. Yet here it is, at 200 wing-beats a second, energetically hawking the beds for nectar. And it is not alone. The man in whose garden it flits, Dr Mick Hanley, a lecturer in terrestrial ecology at Plymouth University, has recorded them in December and January all the way along the south coast as far east as Ramsgate. Others have found them as far north as Shropshire, Leicestershire and even North Wales.
Weird, you might think, but not something we should worry about. But aberrant behaviour in nature, especially when it happens suddenly, is rarely a sign of systemic good health. A bee in winter is no more proof of a thriving ecosystem than a flake of snow is disproof of global warming. The world is going haywire. If the very worst scenarios are to be believed, then the Plymouth bee is an early pathfinder en route not just to its own Armageddon but to our own.
Think of summer. Meadows and gardens daubed with so much colour it looks as if some giant hand has gone berserk with a paintbrush. Now expunge that picture and think of another. This time the giant hand has mislaid every pigment save brown and olive. There are no blooms, no insects, no birds. No visible wildlife of any kind. No fruit. No sound other than the mechanistic din of humankind harvesting fungi and the approaching cries of battle.
The first picture is a poetic fiction, a received vision of England as it never was, an idyllic land of apple-cheeked rustics singing in harmony with a bountiful Nature. The second is a piece of bleak futurology that assumes the process of environmental degradation will be irreversible, leaving hollow-cheeked starvelings to follow the rest of the world’s fauna across the Styx. The creature that links the two visions — by its abundance in the first and absence from the second — is the same that now buzzes unseasonably among the dripping foliage of our winter gardens. The bee.
“The” bee, of course, is a gross oversimplification. There are many species of bumble as well as of honeybee. Or there were. In the bounteous days of teeming hedgerows and fields of clover, Britain had 25 kinds of bumble, all merrily gathering nectar and pollinating plants and trees. Three of these already have vanished, and seven more are in the government’s official Biodiversity Action Plan (Uk Bap) as priorities for salvation.
It’s the same right across Europe, and the reasons everywhere are the same — changes in agricultural practice that have replaced historic mixed farmscapes with heavily industrialised monocultures in which wild animals and plants are about as welcome as jackals in a pie factory. Insects in particular have been targets of intense chemical warfare. We are, at the eleventh hour, learning from our mistakes, but patching nature back together again is exponentially more difficult than blowing it apart.
Most people do now get the point about honeybees. Following the multiple crises that continue to empty the hives — foulbrood, varroa mites, viral diseases, dysfunctional immune systems, and now the mysterious but globally devastating colony-collapse disorder (CCD) — it is understood that the true value of Apis mellifera lies not so much in the sticky stuff that gives our favourite insect its name as in the service it provides as a pollinator of farms and gardens. If you add retailers’ profit to farm gate prices, their value to the UK economy is in the region of £1 billion a year, and 35% of our diet is directly dependent on them. It is an equation of stark simplicity. No pollination: no crops. There is nothing theoretical about it. The reality is in (or, more accurately, not in) the hives. The US has lost 70% of its honeybee colonies over the past two winters. Losses in the UK currently are running at 30% a year — up from just 6% in 2003.
But fewer people realise that bumbles, too, are important not just to some remote, bug-ridden process called “ecology”, of interest only to bearded men in anoraks. Growers of beans, oilseed rape and fruit especially have reason to feel alarm at their disappearance. So vital are they to the productivity of the fields, and so lethal the pressures on them, that farmers are having to import captive-bred reinforcements, many of them southern-European species raised in Slovakia. The total annual influx is reckoned at some 100,000 nests, each containing a queen and 200 workers, priced around £50 a time.
As the example of honeybees shows, this is a strategy of literally incalculable risk. International trade in honeybees has spread pests and diseases that imminently threaten their survival. In November 2007 the then food-and-farming minister, Lord Rooker, declared in the House of Lords that if things went on as they were, the honeybee in the UK would be extinct within 10 years. The situation since then has worsened, so at the best estimate the 10 years have shrunk to eight.
For bumbles, too, time is running out, and nobody knows whether the introduction of alien bees will delay the end or bring it closer. The signs are not encouraging. In the US, wild-bumblebee numbers have collapsed dramatically since the 1990s — they have been killed by parasites carried by European species brought in to pollinate greenhouse crops such as tomatoes and peppers.
“There is a high likelihood of interaction between wild and commercially reared bees at flowers,” says Dave Goulson, professor of biological sciences at the University of Stirling and a world expert on bumblebees. This creates the ideal conditions for what ecologists call “pathogen spillover”. Nor is disease the only risk. There is also the “grey-squirrel effect”, in which native species are driven out by more aggressive foreigners. This is happening in Japan, where, ironically, imports of Bombus terrestris — the same bumblebee now humming in southern England — have escaped and are outbreeding the locals. And it may already be happening in the UK.
As in Japan, the aliens are better foragers and breed more rapidly than the natives, whose health and territory they threaten, while there is no guarantee that the immigrants themselves will not be poleaxed by local infections. This is bad news for more than just the bees themselves. In the complex world of inter-species relationships developed over millennia, small changes can have massive effects. In addition to his general theory of relativity, Albert Einstein had a specific theory about the relativity of man and bee. “If the bee disappears off the surface of the globe,” he is supposed to have said, “then man would only have four years of life left.”
If other scientists are more cautious, it is only in terms of the timescale.
On the face of it, the midwinter appearance of Bombus terrestris looks encouraging — a harbinger of the all-year summers that optimists look forward to. But this is precisely the problem. Contrary to what one might expect, says Goulson, a warming climate will not set the hedgerows buzzing. “Bumblebees evolved in the Himalayas. They are unusual among insects in that they don’t like warm weather.” Their thick fur coat is an aid to survival in a cool climate but an energy-sapping body-broiler in the heat. “This is why the southern hemisphere has no bumblebees.”
Once upon a time, for example, the great yellow bumblebee, Bombus distinguendus, which thrives in the cold and wet, was common throughout Britain. Now it has been driven so far northwards that it occurs on the mainland only within half a mile of the extreme north coast of Caithness and Sutherland. “So,” says Goulson, “it can go no further. It is probably doomed as a result of climate change.” Other species, too, are shrinking into local redoubts. The shrill carder bee, Bombus sylvarum, is now limited to the Somerset Levels, Salisbury Plain and the Thames Estuary, where much of its habitat is on brownfield sites and impossible to protect. Since 1980, the formerly common large garden bumblebee, Bombus ruderatus, has been recorded at fewer than 10 sites in the UK.
And so it goes on. As the entire insect world is being forced inexorably northwards, it may be hoped that other pollinators from southern Europe may be sucked into the vacuum behind them. Hoped, but not expected. Bumblebees are not like migrating birds — they do not fly for hundreds of miles between remote habitats. They are more like mammals, needing a continuous corridor of suitable habitats to move through. Without a linked route up through France, they are more likely to die out where they are.
Even if new species did arrive, they would be unable to take on all the work of the old. Many bumblebees, including all those under threat, are specialist feeders that depend upon — and pollinate — particular groups of plants. By the miracle of evolution, some species have developed long tongues, with which they can reach the nectar of deep-throated flowers. Without them, the plants could not reproduce. The incomers can offer no solution: their tongues are too short. The first casualties of the bumblebee exodus, therefore, will be some of the best-loved British wild flowers such as foxgloves, irises, red clover, comfrey, toadflax, tufted vetch… Soft fruit, oilseed and bean crops would also take a hit.
And that is the thin end of the long-term catastrophe that now stares us in the face. You take one brick out of the ecological wall, others crumble around it. Then more crumble, on and on until the edifice collapses. Ecologists call it an extinction vortex. You lose bees, you lose plants. You lose plants, you lose more bees. Then more plants, then other insects, then the birds and animals that depend on them and on each other, all the way up the food chain. But never mind animals — if you stretch the process far enough, you’re talking about humans.
The more extravagant, ocean-boiling scenarios of climate science have drama on their side, but the entomologists in their quiet way are just as scary. In his book The Creation, the world’s most celebrated biologist, E O Wilson, has spelt out what would happen if the vortex swallowed insects. “People need insects,” he says, “but insects do not need us. If all humankind were to disappear tomorrow, it is unlikely that a single insect species would go extinct, except three forms of human body and head lice… In two or three centuries, with humans gone, the ecosystems of the world would regenerate back to the rich state of near-equilibrium that existed ten thousand or so years ago… But if insects were to vanish, the terrestrial environment would soon collapse into chaos.”
Flowering plants would go first, then herbaceous plants, then insect-pollinated shrubs and trees, then birds and animals and, finally, the soil. Wilson corrects the generally held misapprehension that the principal “turners and renewers” of the soil are worms. That distinction more properly belongs to insects and their larvae. Without them, bacteria and fungi would feast on the decaying plant and animal remains, while — for as long as it was able to support them — the land would be recolonised by a small number of fern and conifer species. The human diet would be wind-pollinated grasses and whatever remained to be harvested from a fished-out sea. It would not be enough. Widespread starvation would shrink the population to a fraction of its former size.
“The wars for control of the dwindling resources, the suffering, and the tumultuous decline to dark-age barbarism would be unprecedented in human history.” Wilson concedes that we might survive quite happily without body lice and malarial mosquitoes. Otherwise, he says: “Do not give thought to diminishing the insect world. It would be a serious mistake to let even one species of the millions on Earth go extinct.”
But here again is a parallel with global warming. Changes have taken place that cannot be reversed, and further change is unstoppable. Unlike global warming, however, loss of insects has not inspired national governments or the UN to take expensive action to forestall it. The plight of the honeybee has been well documented if not well understood. The causes of colony-collapse disorder, in which bees disappear without trace from their hives, are debated as fiercely as the causes of climate change, with opinion dividing along very similar fault-lines determined often by vested interests.
Bee farmers and the European parliament blame arable farmers for killing or poisoning their bees with GM crops and careless use of insecticides. The arable farmers say their critics don’t know what they are talking about. Others suspect viruses, parasites or fungi. Some even blame radiation from mobile telephones for disrupting the insects’ navigational systems. Many think it likely that a combination of factors is at work — pesticides perhaps weakening the bees’ immune systems and rendering them defenceless against common pests and diseases (though again the arable boys won’t have it). Tim Lovett, president of the British Beekeepers’ Association (BBKA), suspects a combination of varroa mites, viruses and a vicious parasite called Nosema ceranae, a microsporidium that occupies some strange biological niche between animal and plant.
What all outside the government are agreed upon is that more money is needed for research. Until recently the UK government committed only £1.2m a year to the bee industry, most of which was spent by Defra’s own National Bee Unit on site inspections, though in January it announced another £400,000 a year for research.
“The government blames poor beekeeping,” says Lovett. “But there is absolutely no reason to suppose that standards in the last few years have got worse. On the contrary, they have got better because beekeepers are aware of the problems.” The BBKA argues that effective research into prophylactics and treatments for bee disease would cost £8m over five years — which, given the economic returns from improved crop yields and the knock-on benefits of jobs and taxation on profit, has all the hallmarks of a bargain. But nothing is certain. The economic cavalry may or may not arrive before the last honeybee flops onto its back, and it may or may not do the trick if it does.
With bumblebees the situation is even worse. Beyond their inclusion in the Biodiversity Action Plan, where they are just seven among 1,149 listed species ranging from mosses to whales, the government offers no direct funding for their protection. Artificial nitrogen fertilisers mean there is no need for the old-fashioned rotation crops, most importantly clover, that they used to forage on, and herbicides have eliminated most of the wild alternatives. Their nesting sites have gone too. Some species live in dense grass above ground; others prefer underground cavities — typically abandoned rodents’ nests. The removal of hedgerows and unploughed field margins has put paid directly to the upstairs bees and indirectly to the downstairs ones by starving out the voles and mice that create their homes. Any that do find nesting places are likely to have them smashed by farm machinery or zonked by pesticides.
Even that is not the end of it. Many surviving populations of bumblebees are small and isolated. This results in inbreeding, which weakens the gene pool and increases the threat of extinction. Goulson reports that the highly virulent small hive beetle, Aethina tumida, whose larvae have devastated tens of thousands of honeybee colonies in the US and Canada, has spread into bumblebee nests, along with deformed-wing virus (which has the effect implicit in its name and is carried by mites). The small hive beetle has not yet appeared in the UK but it has reached other parts of Europe, and its transmission here via imported bees is a matter of “when”, not “if”.
Good news? There is a little. Government subsidies are available to farmers who replant hedgerows, restore grassland or sow wildflower strips. This is for “biodiversity”, but bees will get some benefit. But it is nowhere near enough. “Most bumblebees,” says Goulson, “cannot be conserved by managing small protected islands of habitat within a sea of intensively farmed land. Large areas of suitable habitat are needed to support viable populations in the long term.”
If the worst happens and Lord Rooker’s requiem for the honeybee reaches its solemn conclusion some time around 2017, the burden of responsibility heaped upon the bumblebee will be unsupportable. Bookmakers would give very long odds against the survival of long-tongued bumblebees and the plants that depend on them, and even longer odds against their short-tongued cousins filling the void left by honeybees. Given that a bumblebee nest contains only a few hundred insects, while a honeybee hive contains thousands, it would require a population explosion on the scale of a biblical plague.
Already, says Goulson, crop yields are beginning to suffer. Bald spots are appearing at the centres of bean fields where bumblebees are failing to penetrate. As in so many other aspects of global life, it is China that lights the way ahead. In Sichuan province, the most important crop is pears, which depend on pollination by bees. But there are no bees. A blunderbuss approach to pesticides has all but wiped them out. Result: thousands of villagers have to turn out with paintbrushes to pollinate the trees by hand. “It’s just about possible in a country where labour is cheap,” says Goulson, “but it wouldn’t work in Europe.”
Bombus terrestris meanwhile chugs happily along the Channel coast, following its scrambled instincts and ignoring the calendar. Not since the sirens tempted Odysseus has a mellifluous sound raised such a lethal echo.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article5604401.ece

As much as I hate to rain on the deflation parade, I must point out that food inflation is increasing worldwide. It seems that food prices are unaware that they should be falling, because they are instead rising fast all around the world.
For example in India, after more than two months of steady decline, inflation has risen for the second week in a row due to a spike in food prices. The Economic Times reports that Indian inflation touches 5.64 pc with no respite as prices rise .
NEW DELHI: Costlier food items and a marginal increase in prices of decontrolled fuels pushed up inflation for the second week running even as economists stuck to their estimate of near zero inflation by the middle of 2009.
Government data showed inflation for the week ended January 17 at 5.64% against 5.6% in the previous week. The annual rate of year-on-year inflation was 4.45% in the corresponding week last year.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Eco ... 049566.cms

Russia's inflation amounted to 0.8 percent between January 20 and 26, 2009, and 2 percent for the year to date (compared to 2.2 percent for the same period of January 2008), the Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) reported today. In January 2008 as a whole, the inflation rate stood at 2.3 percent.
The rise in granulated sugar and tea prices contributed the most to the past week's inflation, reaching 6.5 percent and 1.2 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, prices for frozen fish, canned meat, rice, salt, and powdered baby milk increased 0.5-0.7 percent, whereas egg prices fell 1.3 percent and sunflower oil prices 0.8 percent. Fruit and vegetable prices rose 1.3 percent on average, while car gasoline and diesel fuel prices edged down 0.7 percent.
http://www.rbcnews.com/free/20090128143347.shtml

Australian retail fruit and vegetable prices rose by 8pc in the December quarter , standing out against the overall falling price trend, which has resulted in the biggest slide in consumer prices (CPI) for 11 years.
Fruit and vegetables received special mention among the Australian Bureau of Statistics CPI figures for leading the few price rises, followed by takeaway food, which increased by 1.5pc.
Fruit's prominent role, especially, in leading the CPI statistics is likely to be to stir vigorous comment from many Australian fruit growers.
Stone-fruit growers recently have been claiming prices received for their fruit have fallen below cost of production.
They've been vocal in criticising the supermarkets for not paying enough for their fruit.
http://sl.farmonline.com.au/news/nation ... e-big-cpi-

In South Africa, the Business Day reports that....
Measured by the target measure CPIX, consumer price inflation came in below market expectations at 10,3% in December, down from 12,1% in November and the recent peak of 13,6% in August. Transport inflation was sharply down, at only 2% year on year, from 13,3%, because of further cuts in the petrol price, which is now almost 50% down on its July peak. Food remains a worry, though. It remained stubbornly high at nearly 17.1% in December , despite declining international grain and other commodity prices.

In Northern Ireland, the Belfast Telegraph reports that the food bills soar at more than double the inflation rate .
Consumers in Northern Ireland could find rising food bills an added challenge as the recession starts to bite over the coming months.
New figures provided by comparison website mySupermarket.co.uk reveal that the cost of food is going up at more than twice the official rate of inflation. The statistics show that the price of all food and drink products has risen by 6.6% during the year to January 14.
They also show even steeper price rises for staple food items — such as bread, milk and cheese — with the cost of a basket of goods rising by 16% during the past year.
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/food-bills-soar-at-more-than-double-the-inflation-rate-14159588.html


In Canada, the Ottawa Citizen reports that consumers face higher costs despite low inflation .
OTTAWA — Canadian consumers — tens of thousands of whom have already lost their jobs to the recession — may find this hard to swallow, but despite headlines of falling interest rates and waning inflation, their grocery bills and borrowing costs are in fact rising.
While prices fell 0.7 per cent month-to-month and the annual inflation rate to 1.2 per cent in December — projected to fall below zero this year — grocery prices were nine per cent higher than a year earlier , Statistics Canada reported Friday.
"Inflation is at a two-year low, but that's not the way it feels for those of us shopping for groceries," said CIBC World Markets economist Krishen Rangasamy. "As talk of generalized deflation is surfacing, prematurely in our view, food prices continue to trend higher , with the depreciating loonie boosting prices for fresh fruits, vegetables and other imports."
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Business/Consumers+face+higher+costs+despite+inflation/1210939/story.html
The article continues
3) Rising worldwide food prices will quickly bring an end to today's deflation fears
Rising worldwide food inflation is surprising and puzzling economists. They don't understand why it is happening (they didn't see the credit crisis or the bursting commodity bubble coming either). Next month, as food inflation continues to grow worse and consumers around the world start stockpiling food, these economists will really start to worry, and, in about two months time, with food inflation truly spiraling out of control, they start panicking, their deflation predictions completely forgotten.
Conclusion:
The US is not immune from rising food inflation: prices for food in US grocery stores jumped 6.6% last year, the biggest spike since 1980. Even this December, which saw gasoline prices fall by 17.2% (the biggest monthly decline in 71 years), food costs refused to fall. If US food prices couldn't muster a fall in December, five months after the commodity bubble burst and deflation fears gripped the world, then they should not be expected to fall at all.
Rising worldwide food prices also have very negative implications for the dollar . Many countries that are seeing rising food inflation do possess the means to bring it under control: sell off their US reserves. Russia and India alone have over 800 billion dollars they can sell to strengthen their currencies and lower their food costs. So if food inflation keeps increasing, expect a growing quantity of treasuries to be sold by central bankers desperate to prevent starvation at home.
Finally, the rise in world food prices increases the likelihood of out of control inflation in China . Should China drop its dollar peg and start to sell its immense US reserves to fight domestic hyperinflation, the dollar will likely lose its reserve status and most of its value.

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article8573.html