statism watch

BBC News
September 7, 2008

People should consider eating less meat as a way of combating global warming, says the UN’s top climate scientist.

Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will make the call at a speech in London on Monday evening.

UN figures suggest that meat production puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than transport.

But a spokeswoman for the UK’s National Farmers’ Union (NFU) said methane emissions from farms were declining.

Dr Pachauri has just been re-appointed for a second six-year term as chairman of the Nobel Prize-winning IPCC, the body that collates and evaluates climate data for the world’s governments.

“The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has estimated that direct emissions from meat production account for about 18% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions,” he told BBC News.

(more…)

Nicholas C. Stern, Frederick News-Post
September 7, 2008

Ayaad Assaad was in Australia visiting relatives the day before his former colleague and friend, Bruce Ivins, died from an apparent suicide in Frederick in July.

Ivins, a Fort Detrick anthrax specialist, had become the sole focus of a seven-year FBI investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five and injured 17. The FBI has since released evidence it claims proves Ivins’ guilt, but has admitted much of it is circumstantial.

Assaad, who worked in a U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease lab at Fort Detrick from 1989 to 1997 developing a vaccine for ricin, said in an interview Saturday he does not believe Ivins was guilty.

“He’s a great man. He’s honorable, sincere, honest and most important, he didn’t kill five people and he didn’t kill himself,” Assaad said.

Assaad, an Egyptian-born toxicologist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, was called in for questioning by the FBI regarding accusations of biological terrorism shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“I know what Bruce went through, because I went through it too,” he said.

(more…)