Murdering and maiming children — war crimes?

Bullets in the brain, shrapnel in the spine: the terrible injuries suffered by children of Gaza

Doctors at a hospital near Gaza are almost overwhelmed by the number of Palestinian children needing treatment for bullet wounds to their heads.

Israeli television broadcast desperate cries for help from a Palestinian doctor on Friday after his children were killed in an Israeli attack in the Gaza Strip and troops later helped surviving members of the family.

Gaza’s Children Suffer During Israeli Conflict
Newsweek – Jan 17 2:41 PMEven if Israel’s ceasefire holds, the impact in Gaza will be felt for a long time to come.

Fresh Israeli strike kills three children in Gaza
People’s Daily – Jan 16 10:25 PMOngoing Israeli military attack killed three children in the Gaza Strip on Friday morning, local witnesses and medical sources said. Paramedics said that two children were killed and ten people were injured during an Israeli airstrike in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah and another girl was killed by Israeli tank shelling in the northern area of Jabaliya. Local witness said Israeli …

UNICEF: Children bearing brunt of Gaza war
CNN – Jan 15 9:01 AMChildren are bearing the brunt of the conflict in Gaza as the Israeli offensive to flush out Hamas fighters leaves youngsters battling indelible trauma while threatening

We begin the long retreat. From the Final Report on Coastal Sensitivity to Sea-Level Rise

Our world may have just flattened. The GEO experiment in Germany may have detected a fundamental length scale at 1e-16 m, far larger than the Planck length. Serendipitously, since they are looking for something else. This would be amazing if verified.

Employers announce nearly 40,000 jobs cuts

In what’s being called “a rare move,” Microsoft is considering job cuts and may announce as early as next week, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Saks and Neiman Marcus Announce Layoffs

General Electric Co. said Friday its finance business has informed employees of layoffs, following up on previous statements that it would restructure the battered financial unit.

“Circuit City Stores Inc. said it is liquidating, closing all its U.S. stores and cutting 30,000 jobs after being hobbled, in part, by declining consumer spending. Rental car company Hertz Global Holdings Inc. is eliminating 4,000 jobs worldwide as families and business travelers forgo trips. Insurer WellPoint Inc. is cutting about 1,500 jobs, with rising unemployment leading to fewer people with health insurance. ”

Petroleum company ConocoPhillips said Friday it will cut about 1,300 jobs, or 4 percent of its work force.

Motorola Inc. said Wednesday it will eliminate 4,000 jobs

“Even Internet search leader Google Inc., which seemed impervious to the economy’s troubles, earlier this week said it will close three engineering offices and cut 100 recruiters. “

Department Of Labor — Nonfarm payroll employment declined sharply in December, and the unemployment rate rose from 6.8 to 7.2 percent. Payroll employment fell by 524,000 over the month and by 1.9 million over the last 4 months of 2008. In December, job losses were large and widespread across most major industry sectors.

In December, the number of unemployed persons increased by 632,000 to 11.1 mil-
lion and the unemployment rate rose to 7.2 percent. Since the start of the reces-
sion in December 2007, the number of unemployed persons has grown by 3.6 million,
and the unemployment rate has risen by 2.3 percentage points. (See table A-1.)

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) decreased
1.0 percent in December, before seasonal adjustment, the Bureau of Labor
Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. The December
level of 210.228 (1982-84=100) was 0.1 percent higher than in December 2007.

With the absence of La Niña and El Niño in the equatorial Pacific Ocean this season (climate patterns that give forecasters clues about potential weather events months in advance), predicting weather patterns on seasonal timescales becomes increasingly challenging. Instead, other climate patterns over the Arctic and North Atlantic regions may play a significant role in influencing U.S. winter weather.

“These patterns are only predictable a week or two in advance and could persist for weeks at a time,” said Michael Halpert, deputy director, Climate Prediction Center. “Therefore, we expect variability, or substantial changes in temperature and precipitation across much of the country.”

NOAA — Aquaculture – often referred to as fish farming or shellfish farming – is the art, science, and business of cultivating aquatic animals in fresh or marine waters for consumption and to supplement commercial and recreational fisheries. About 70 percent of the aquaculture in the U.S. is fresh water farming of catfish and trout. Marine aquaculture is just 20 percent of the entire U.S. industry. Most marine aquaculture is shellfish farming, such as oysters, clams, and mussels. Only a few U.S. farms grow marine finfish, including salmon, cod, cobia, Hawaiian yellowtail, and Pacific threadfin (moi).

Similar to farms on land, fish and shellfish farms come in various sizes and types – from small, family-owned commercial farms to large companies. Local, state and federal agencies, research institutions, and tribes run aquaculture facilities that produce the eggs used to farm many freshwater and marine species.

Currently, more than 80 percent of the seafood Americans eat is imported, and half of that comes from aquaculture. It is vital that the United States further develop its own sustainable aquaculture industry, both to reduce its annual $9 billion seafood import deficit and to keep pace with the growing demand for seafood.

NOAA’s Aquaculture Program is dedicated to fostering safe, sustainable aquaculture in collaboration with other NOAA offices including NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research and NOAA’s National Ocean Service.

The year 2008 tied with 2001 as the eighth warmest year on record for the Earth, based on the combined average of worldwide land and ocean surface temperatures through December, according to a preliminary analysis by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. For December alone, the month also ranked as the eighth warmest globally, for the combined land and ocean surface temperature. The assessment is based on records dating back to 1880.

The analyses in NCDC’s global reports are based on preliminary data, which are subject to revision. Additional quality control is applied to the data when late reports are received several weeks after the end of the month and as increased scientific methods improve NCDC’s processing algorithms.

NCDC’s ranking of 2008 as the eighth warmest year compares to a ranking of ninth warmest based on an analysis by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The NOAA and NASA analyses differ slightly in methodology, but both use data from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center – the federal government’s official source for climate data.

Global Temperature Highlights – 2008

The combined global land and ocean surface temperature from January-December was 0.88 degree F (0.49 degree C) above the 20th Century average of 57.0 degrees F (13.9 degrees C). Since 1880, the annual combined global land and ocean surface temperature has increased at a rate of 0.09 degree F (0.05 degree C) per decade. This rate has increased to 0.29 degree F (0.16 degree C) per decade over the past 30 years.
Separately, the global land surface temperature for 2008, through December, was sixth warmest, with an average temperature 1.46 degrees F (0.81 degree C) above the 20th Century average of 47.3 degrees F (8.5 degrees C).
Also separately, the global ocean surface temperature for 2008, through December, was 0.67 degree F (0.37 degree C) above the 20th Century average of 60.9 degrees F (16.1 degrees C) and ranked tenth warmest.
Global Temperature Highlights – December 2008

The December combined global land and ocean surface temperature was 0.86 degree F (0.48 degree C) above the 20th Century average of 54.0 degrees F (12.2 degrees C).
Separately, the December 2008 global land surface temperature was 1.22 degrees F (0.68 degree C) above the 20th Century average of 38.7 degrees F (3.7 degrees C) and ranked 14th warmest.
For December, the global ocean surface temperature was 0.74 degree F (0.41 degree C) above the 20th Century average of 60.4 degrees F (15.7 degrees C) and tied with December 2001 and December 2005 as sixth warmest.
Other Global Highlights for 2008

The United States recorded a preliminary total of 1,690 tornadoes during 2008, which is well above the 10-year average of 1,270 and ranks as the second highest annual total since reliable records began in 1953. The high number of tornado-related fatalities during the first half of the year made 2008 the 10th deadliest with a 2008 total of 125 deaths.
Northern Hemisphere snow cover extent in December was 16.95 million square miles (43.91 million square kilometers). This was 0.17 million square miles (0.43 million square kilometers) above the 1966-2008 December average. Northern Hemisphere snow cover extent was below average for most of 2008.
Arctic sea ice extent in 2008 reached its second lowest melt season extent on record in September. The minimum of 1.80 million square miles (4.67 million square kilometers) was 0.80 million square miles (2.09 million square kilometers) below the 1979-2000 average minimum extent.
NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources.

Scientists believe fish excrete lumps of calcium carbonate, known as “gut rocks,” that help maintain the ocean’s pH level.

By drinking salt water, fish ingest a lot of calcium, and they excrete more or less calcium carbonate depending on their size and the temperature of the water. “For a given total mass of fish, smaller fish produce more than bigger fish, and fish at higher temperatures produce more than fish at lower temperatures,” explains Rod Wilson of the University of Exeter in the UK.

The interaction between humans, animals and climage change is becoming more evident.