New Conditions for Greek Bailout...[ 2690 ]

Eurozone Sets New Conditions for Greek Bailout

  Financial crisis in Greece

BRUSSELS, February 10 (RIA Novosti)

Eurozone finance ministers on Thursday night agreed to attach additional conditions to Greece’s 130-billion-euro bailout deal and postponed the final decision until next Wednesday, the meeting’s chairman said on Friday.

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Finance ministers from the 17 euro countries met on Thursday night in Brussels for discussions on the bailout package for Greece, which is teetering on the brink of financial collapse.

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“We did not have all the elements necessary for making decisions on the table today,” Jean-Claude Juncker, who chaired the meeting, said.

He named three requirements for Greece to secure the bailout: firstly, Greece needs additional 325 million euro ($432 million) in savings for 2012, secondly, the Greek parliament will have to pass the package of cuts and reforms and thirdly, Greek political forces should guarantee that the austerity measures will continue to be implemented regardless of the outcome of April’s elections.

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“The final decision will be taken next week. The Eurogroup is to convene on Wednesday, it will be made if Greece complies with the terms,” Juncker said.

The announcement comes hours after Greek political leaders finally struck a deal on new austerity measures demanded by creditors to secure a 130-billion euro bailout to avoid default and keep the country afloat. The deal included pension and wages cuts.

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The troika of international lenders comprising the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund demanded from Greece to introduce pension budget cuts as well as to cut additional income in private sectors, to reduce minimal wages and insurance payments.

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Greece has been receiving financial support from the EU and the IMF since May 2010 to reduce the country's large budget deficit. However, the austerity measures approved by the government have sparked numerous riots and strikes, and the Greek government has missed its targets.

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Related News

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NASA's Space Communications Testbed...[ 2689 ]

Image of the NASA's Space Communications Testbed

In this image from late 2010, software engineers worked in the background as Glenn Research Center technician, Joe Kerka, rotated the SCaN Testbed flight enclosure assembly. The Space Communications and Navigation, or SCaN Testbed will be launched on a Japanese H–IIB Transfer Vehicle and installed on the International Space Station and will provide an on-orbit, adaptable software-defined radio facility with corresponding ground and operational systems. 

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This will permit mission operators to remotely change the functionality of radio communications and offer the flexibility to adapt to new science opportunities and recover from anomalies within the science payload or communication system. 

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This effort is sponsored by the SCaN Program as part of the , CoNNeCT, or Communications, Navigation, and Networking reConfigurable Testbed Project led by Glenn Research Center.

The Glenn Research Center will host a media event at 10:30 am on Friday, Feb. 10, to showcase the SCaN Testbed before it is shipped to Japan.

Image Credit: NASA/Quentin L. Schwinn

Shark attacks across the globe,...[ 2688 ]

Shark Attacks Set Record High in 2011

Tiger shark//© flickr.com/ volk//20:18 08/02/2012

MOSCOW, February 8 (RIA Novosti)

With 12 fatalities in unprovoked attacks across the globe, 2011 was the worst year for shark-inflicted deaths since 1993, according to a new report from the International Shark Attack File database.

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The fatalities figure was also more than double the average for the previous decade, according to a new report from the database, run by the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Australia led the count with three people killed in attacks, with Costa Rica, Kenya, New Caledonia, Reunion, the Seychelles and South Africa also contributing, according to the report released on Tuesday.

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However, the total number of unprovoked shark attacks on people worldwide stood at 75 in 2011, down 10 incidents from the previous year. Sixty percent of the victims were surfers, followed by swimmers at 35 percent and divers at five percent.

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The leader was the United States with 29 attacks, but Russia, unusually, also contributed, with three attacks documented last year, all of them in the far eastern Primorye region, where shark attacks previously never took place. In one attack in August, a shark bit off both arms of a swimmer who sacrificed himself to prevent it from targeting his wife.

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The unusual number of fatalities was a “statistical anomaly” because the total number of attacks is decreasing due to shark depopulation, more people learning to avoid shark-infested waters and economic downturn resulting in less swimmers overall, the report said.

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© RIA Novosti./What should you do if you see a shark?

Russian success in the Antarctic ice....[ 2687 ]

Lake Vostok drilling team claims breakthrough

 

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News 

BBC., 8 February 2012 Last updated at 14:29 GMT  

Vostok station is one of the most difficult places to work on Earth

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Russian scientists are reporting success in their quest to drill into Lake Vostok, a huge body of liquid water buried under the Antarctic ice.

It is the first time such a breakthrough has been made into one of the more than 300 sub-glacial lakes known to exist on the White Continent.

Researchers believe Vostok can give them some fresh insights into the frozen history of Antarctica.

They also hope to find microbial lifeforms that are new to science.

"This fills my soul with joy," said Valery Lukin, from Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St Petersburg, which has been overseeing the project,

"This will give us the possibility to biologically evaluate the evolution of living organisms... because those organisms spent a long time without contact with the atmosphere, without sunlight," he was quoted as saying in a translation of national media reports by BBC Monitoring.

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The drilling project has taken years to plan and implement. The lake's location in the heart of East Antarctic Ice Sheet is one of the most inhospitable places on Earth.

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It is the place where thermometers recorded the lowest ever temperature on the planet - minus 89C on 21 July 1983.

Vostok Station was first set up in 1956. However, it was only in the 1970s when, with the help of radar, British scientists first started to suspect there might be something underneath all the ice.

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Further geophysical survey data then established the true scale of the sub-glacial feature.

With an area of 10,000 square km and with depths reaching 800m, Lake Vostok is similar in size to Lake Baikal in Siberia or Lake Ontario in North America.

More than 300 such bodies of water have now been identified across Antarctica. They are kept liquid by geothermal heat and pressure, and are part of a vast and dynamic hydrological network at play under the ice sheet.

Some of the lakes are connected, and will exchange water. But some may be completely cut off, in which case their water may have been resident in one place for thousands if not millions of years. 

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Russian researchers will try to establish just how isolated Lake Vostok has been. If it has been sealed then micro-organisms new to science are very likely to have evolved in the lake.

The Vostok project is one of a number of similar ventures being undertaken on the White Continent.

The British Antarctic Survey (Bas) is hoping to begin its effort to drill into Lake Ellsworth in West Antarctica later this year. An American crew is targeting Lake Whillans, also in the West.

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"It is an important milestone that has been completed and a major achievement for the Russians because they've been working on this for years," Professor Martin Siegert, the principal investigator on the Bas-Ellsworth project said.

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"The Russian team share our mission to understand subglacial lake environments and we look forward to developing collaborations with their scientists and also those from the US and other nations, as we all embark on a quest to comprehend these pristine, extreme environments," he told AP.

The projects are of particular fascination to astrobiologists, who study the origins and likely distribution of life across the Universe.

Conditions in these Antarctic lakes may not be that different from those in the liquid water bodies thought to exist under the surfaces of icy moons in the outer Solar System.

Places like Europa, which orbits Jupiter, and Enceladus, which circles Saturn, may be among the best places beyond Earth to go look for alien organisms.

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter

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Whales and ' ocean noise'...[ 2686 ]

Whales 'stressed by ocean noise'

 
By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

BBC., 8 February 2012 Last updated at 03:28 GMT

 

 

Right whales come to the Bay of Fundy late each summer to feed

Noise from ships stresses whales nearby, researchers have shown.

Ships' propellers emit sound in the same frequency range that some whales use for communicating, and previous studies have shown the whales change their calling patterns in noisy places.

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Now, researchers have measured stress hormones in whale faeces, and found they rose with the density of shipping.

The species studied in the Bay of Fundy in Canada, the North Atlantic right whale, is listed as endangered.

It had been thought that hunting by the Basque people a few hundred years ago brought a robust population down to barely sustainable levels.

But recent research suggests the big population decline happened much earlier, for reasons that are unclear.

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Dr Rosalind Rolland of the New England Aquarium in Boston, US, who led the new study, said the population was now up to an estimated 490 individuals from about 350 a decade ago.

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North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) roam up and down the east coast of North America, coming to the Bay of Fundy typically in late summer to feed.

Aquarium scientists have been studying them in the bay since 1980.

But the new study, reported in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B, came about through chance.

Quiet period

Following the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington DC on 11 September 2001, ship traffic in the bay dropped off.

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Mothers and calves communicate with each other and other whales using low-frequency sound

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Whale researchers registered a 6 decibel (dB) fall in the intensity of underwater noise, with the change particularly pronounced at frequencies below 150Hz.

Fortuitously, another team had just begun a five-year project to gather and examine faeces from the right whales.

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Trained dogs are taken on boats, their noses guiding researchers to the bobbing faecal matter, which is then pulled inboard in nets.

"We were working on different boats, we knew the different studies were going on without any real interaction," Dr Rolland told BBC News.

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"And it was only when I was preparing for a workshop on ocean noise and stress in 2009 that I realised we had this data and analysed it this way - it was just one of those opportunistic things."

Faeces gathered during the 2001 period of light shipping showed a significantly lower level of metabolites of glucocorticoid hormones, which are associated with stress, than in subsequent summers when marine traffic returned to normal levels.

"This is the first time that anyone's documented any physiological effect - these are after all 50 tonne animals so they don't make terribly easy things to study," said Dr Rolland.

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• Guide to the oceans' great whales

"Past studies have shown they alter their vocalisation pattern in a noisy environment just like we would in a cocktail party, but this is the first time the stress has been documented physiologically."

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Precisely how much it matters to the animals is unclear.

But ocean noise has risen substantially in recent decades along with the growth in global shipping; one analysis showed that the north-eastern Pacific is 10-12dB louder now than in the 1960s.

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Past years have seen significant numbers of right whales hit by ships and entangled in fishing nets.

In the Bay of Fundy, relocating shipping lanes away from the feeding grounds in 2003 has reduced ship strikes by 80-90%, while similar measures have been taken elsewhere along the coast.

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The research team would now like to establish a study that could relate stress hormones to ocean noise in a range of locations.

This could include studying the differences between the North Atlantic right whales and their close relatives in the southern hemisphere, the Southern right whales, whose numbers are increasing much more vigorously since the era of industrial hunting.