Plastic-hardening chemical makes men soft

Regular contact with high levels of bisphenol A (BPA), a compound commonly found in plastic food and drink containers, appears to cause erectile dysfunction and other sexual performance problems in men.

The finding, reported in the Washington Post, is likely to add fuel to the controversy over whether exposure to normal lower levels is harmful to humans and encourage campaigners calling for an outright ban.

According to the new study, male workers in four Chinese factories making BPA or using it reported an average fourfold increase in erectile dysfunction, a sevenfold increase in ejaculation difficulty and a fourfold decrease in sexual drive when compared to controls.

BPA is found in thousands of everyday products, such as the plastic lining of drinks cans. It is used in hard plastic bottles including some baby bottles, although some manufacturers voluntarily removed it from baby bottles sold in the US earlier this year.

More than 93 per cent of Americans have traces of the chemical in their urine and various studies have shown BPA can cause harm to animal reproductive systems, from early sexual maturity to low sperm count. The compound behaves like the hormone oestrogen, and is thought to disrupt hormonal processes.

However animals metabolise the compound more slowly than humans and the evidence base has been interpreted differently by different public health bodies.

Last August the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a draft report stating it was safe at the typical exposure levels from food and drink packaging.

This was contradicted by the National Toxicology Program, which advises the FDA, and by the FDA's own Science Board. The administration is currently undertaking a new review.

The research is the first to show regular exposure to high levels of BPA in the workplace over long periods can have adverse effects on sexual function in men.

But how worried should we be? The levels of the chemical found in the urine of the Chinese workers in the study were around 50 times higher than normal.

Study leader De-Kun Li, a reproductive epidemiologist at US healthcare provider and insurer Kaiser Permanente's research institute in Oakland, California, acknowledged that his findings in BPA exposed workers could not be extrapolated to the general population.

Talk climate and money, not climate vs money, WWF tells APEC

Singapore – Leaders gathering in Singapore for the APEC summit this weekend must commit to strong and ambitious climate actions if they want to achieve sustainable growth for their region and help their countries to avoid disastrous consequences of global warming.

The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation – bringing together world leaders like US President Barack Obama, Chinese President Hu Jintao and Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama – must look beyond the group's usual areas of interest and focus on the common challenges posed by climate change.

"Solving problems of protectionism, trade zones, banks and exchange rates is very important, but what is all of this worth if the world slips into chaos because of devastating climate change?" said Kim Carstensen, Leader of the WWF Global Climate Initiative.

"APEC leaders must open their eyes and look into the real threats and challenges of this world and their region. We cannot talk about sustainable growth without solving the most intractable problem the planet is facing."

UN climate talks are floundering due to attempts by some governments to lower expectations for a new treaty and efforts to delay the deal.

The production of a legally binding framework at Copenhagen together with an amended Kyoto Protocol will help secure the survival of countries, cultures and ecosystems and clear the way towards a low carbon economy.

"If APEC countries would tackle the climate crisis with the same rigor they showed in protecting their economies from the financial meltdown, the world wouldn't have to worry about a lack of political will or insufficient levels of ambition in the UN climate talks", said Carstensen.

"We urge APEC leaders to bring economic recovery and climate recovery in sync, so that money spent on keeping growth levels high also helps bringing emission levels down."

In WWF's view, the Pacific region should become a model of technology cooperation, where developed APEC countries assist their developing country partners with adaptation and mitigation, through clean technologies, financial support and capacity building.

"Many want the APEC region to become a free trade zone, but they should also exploit its potential as a clean tech zone", said Carstensen.

"There is probably no better regional network of countries in the world for piloting smart concepts for technology cooperation like those discussed in the UN climate talks. To boost the international negotiations, we urgently need pioneers who show what's possible and how to make it happen."

Push to Build Mosques Is Met With Resistance

COPENHAGEN — Paris has its grand mosque, on the Left Bank. So does Rome, the city of the pope. Yet despite a sizable Muslim population, this Danish city has nothing but the occasional tiny storefront Muslim place of worship.

The city, Denmark's capital, is now inching toward construction of not one, but two grand mosques. In August, the city council approved the construction of a Shiite Muslim mosque, replete with two 104-foot-tall minarets, in an industrial quarter on the site of a former factory. Plans are also afoot for a Sunni mosque. But it has been a long and complicated process, tangled up in local politics and the publication four years ago of cartoons mocking Islam.

The difficulties reflect the tortuous path Denmark has taken in dealing with its immigrants, most of whom are Muslim. Copenhagen in particular has been racked by gang wars, with shootouts and killings in recent months between groups of Hells Angels and immigrant bands.

The turmoil has fed the popularity of an anti-immigrant conservative party, the Danish People's Party. In city elections scheduled for Nov. 17, the People's Party, by some estimates, could double the roughly 6 percent of the vote it took in the last municipal election.

Denmark is not alone in grappling with the question. In Italy, the rightist Northern League opposes mosques in Italian cities; in Switzerland, voters will go to the polls on Nov. 29 in a referendum to decide whether to ban the construction of minarets.

In Denmark, it was the cartoons, one of which depicted Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, that gave the initial impetus to a movement for a mosque.

"I wrote a front-page story saying we somehow had to reconnect to the Muslims, to collect money to build a mosque as a sign of solidarity," said Herbert Pundik, 82, the former editor of the Danish daily Politiken. Mr. Pundik, speaking by phone from Tel Aviv, where he now lives, said that within 24 hours there had been more than 1,000 positive responses. But then the Muslim reaction to the cartoons turned violent, with attacks on Danish embassies in several cities, including Beirut and Damascus.

"The steam went out of the project," Mr. Pundik said.

Yet it did not die. Bijan Eskandani, the architect of the Shiite mosque, said he found inspiration for his design in the "Persian element in Islamic art," which he said consisted of a "special lyric, poetic attitude." The Shiite community, he said in written answers to questions, lacked the financial means to acquire a suitable site for a mosque. "The building lot they have is situated in an ugly, unattractive, inharmonious gray factory area," he said, adding that, "a sparkling mosque there may make a difference."

The very word Persian sends chills down Martin Henriksen's spine. "We are against the mosque," said Mr. Henriksen, 29, one of the People's Party's five-member directorate, in an interview in Copenhagen's Parliament building. "It's obvious to everyone that the Iranian regime has something to do with it," he said. "The Iranian regime is based on a fascist identity that we don't want to set foot in Denmark."

Since becoming party to the national government coalition in 2001, the People's Party has helped enact legislation to stem the flow of immigrants and raise the bar for obtaining citizenship. Immigrants, Mr. Henriksen insists, "need to show an ability and a will to become Danes." He cites past Jewish immigration as an example. "Many Jews have come to Denmark since the 16th century," he said. "We don't have discussions about whether to build synagogues." There are at least four synagogues in the city.

Abdul Wahid Pedersen, whose parents are Scandinavian, converted to Islam years ago. "I was 28, a child of the 60s," he said. Now 55, he is chairman of a 15-member committee promoting construction of a grand mosque for Copenhagen's Sunni Muslims.

He concedes that of the estimated 250,000 Muslims in a Danish population of 5.5 million, only about 35,000 are Sunnis. Yet he defends the need for a grand mosque and says that while the Sunni community is not soliciting financing from Saudi Arabia, as the People's Party contends, he has no problem accepting a donation. "If someone wants to chip in, that is O.K.," he said, in the shop in a working-class neighborhood where he sells Islamic literature, prayer rugs and other religious objects. "But they will have no influence on running the place." Mr. Pedersen said his committee was even considering installing wind turbines atop the minarets and covering the mosque's dome with one large solar panel.

The city's deputy mayor, Klaus Bondam, 45, defends the right of Muslims to their mosques. The minarets, he said, would be "quite slim towers, we're not going to be Damascus or Cairo." The city had also made clear there would be no calling to prayers from the mosques' minarets. As to the charge of foreign underwriting, Mr. Bondam said it did not concern him as long as the sources were listed openly.

But he said he feared that the debate over the mosques could help the People's Party double its share of the vote in this month's local elections to as much as 12 percent. "It's the little discomfit of people of other religion or background," he said. "Why can't they be like me?"

For Toger Seidenfaden, 52, the present editor of Politiken, the People's Party is "democratic and parliamentary — they are not brownshirts." But he said they were a "very Danish, nationalist party — they'd like Denmark before globalization."

On the broad avenue called Njalsgade, where the Sunni mosque is to be built on a vacant lot, Preben Anderson, 61, a bricklayer, said he had nothing against a mosque, though he pointedly said that he could not speak for his neighbors. "We have churches," he said. "We have to have mosques." He stood across the street from where weeds and junk now cover the lot where the Sunni mosque could one day stand. One neighborhood resident, asked if he could point out the site where the mosque would be built, professed not to know.

Yet, Per Nielsen, 56, a retired history teacher, said the economic slowdown and the gang wars in nearby neighborhoods were feeding the popularity of the People's Party. As for the mosque, he said, "There's very strong pressure — people living here don't want it."

Energy agency warns of 'irreparable' damage

Take all the power stations in the United States. Together, they produce almost 5000 gigawatts of electricity - enough to boil several billion kettles simultaneously.

Now imagine building another five power stations for every one that already exists in the United States. That is about the amount of electricity generation that the world is on track to add over the next 20 years. And three-quarters of the new stations will use fossil fuels.

These startling figures were released today by the International Energy Agency. The agency predicts that between a quarter and a third of the new capacity will be built in China, which generates over 40 per cent of its electricity from coal.
This will lead to huge increases in carbon dioxide emissions. The agency has previously said that the current recession has helped rein in emissions, but that effect will not last.

The report predicts that 40 billion tonnes of CO2 will be emitted worldwide in 2030, around twice the figure for 1990. That would put us on a path towards a future in which atmospheric carbon dioxide levels top 1000 parts per million and average global temperature rise by up to 6 °C.

Many scientists think that that our goal should be a maximum rise of 2 °C and that 4 °C would cause severe flooding and drought. The agency describes our current trajectory as almost certain to cause "irreparable" damage to the planet.

We are not, of course, locked into this future. The agency's calculation come from a modelling exercise in which we continue on the path we are on now, rather than switch to low-carbon technologies like solar power.

Many governments have already committed to changes, albeit limited ones, so the most dire aspects of the agency's predictions will not come to pass. But they are a useful reminder of just how wrong things will go if we do not take action.

Winner in Contest Involving Space Elevator

A start-up company from the Seattle area won $900,000 on Friday in a NASA contest to build a miniature prototype of a machine that could one day climb from Earth to outer space.

The idea of a space elevator — passengers and cargo traveling up and down a 60,000-mile cable — has long been a fixture of science fiction, notably in Arthur C. Clarke's novel "The Fountains of Paradise."

A real space elevator is still decades in the future, but the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, along with the nonprofit organization Spaceward Foundation, sponsored the contest to encourage development of some of the needed technologies.

"It's a way to get work done in an interesting area that probably wouldn't be done otherwise," said Andrew Petro, manager of NASA's Centennial Challenges program.

The challenges program is sponsoring other contests, too. This month, Masten Space Systems of Mojave, Calif., won $1 million for demonstrating precision flying of a rocket simulating a lunar landing. Another challenge will test designs for improved astronaut gloves.

For the space elevator challenge, three competing teams built prototypes designed to climb a one-kilometer cable held aloft by a helicopter. Each took turns, shining lasers on the ground at photovoltaic cells on the climbing machines to power the electric motors.

On Wednesday, an 11-pound pyramid-shaped contraption built by LaserMotive of Kent, Wash., successfully made the climb in 4 minutes 2 seconds, fast enough to qualify for a $900,000 second-place prize. A second attempt was one second faster.

The LaserMotive team then started hacking off pieces of their machine in hopes of making it lighter and faster. To qualify for the $1.1 million top prize, the climber needed to reach the top of the cable in less than three minutes. On Thursday, the LaserMotive team was able to shave 13 seconds off the climb time, to 3 minutes 48 seconds, with the machine averaging an upward speed of not quite 9 miles per hour.

The final attempts on Friday, however, were stymied after too much laser power was focused on their climber's photovoltaic cells, burning out some of the electronics.

Meanwhile, a team of University of Saskatchewan students was never able to get far off the ground, while a climber built by a team called the Kansas City Space Pirates got most of the way up but never quite reached the destination.

In four years of the power-beaming competition, LaserMotive is the only competitor to qualify for a cash prize.

Thomas Nugent and Jordin Kare, the company's principals, do not believe that a space elevator will be built any time soon, but they say the technology will find other commercial applications like powering small robotic aircraft. "This is a business for us," Mr. Nugent said. "We're trying to turn this into a commercial endeavor."

Mr. Nugent declined to say how much LaserMotive had spent in competing the past three years, but said, "We will win more than we have spent."

After months of preparations and three days of competition, he said, "a lot of us might celebrate by going to sleep."

Iran voices support for Turkey's EU membership

ANKARA, Nov. 6 (Xinhua) -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the European Union (EU) should ask Turkey to become one of its members, Turkish media reported Friday.

In an interview with Turkey's state-run TRT TV channel and private news channel NTV, Ahmadinejad said Turkey, with its history, culture and civilization, would increase the EU's credibility if the predominantly Muslim country joins the 27-nation bloc.

Turkey should improve its relations with the East, but it wouldn't mean Turkey's cutting its ties with the West, Ahmadinejad was quoted of saying.

Turkey started accession talks with the EU in 2005 but has only opened negotiations in 11 policy areas out of 35 that are needed before its entry.

The EU has urged Ankara to normalize relations with the EU member Cyprus and speed up reforms, while EU members France and Germany favor a more informal partnership with Turkey instead of full membership.

Ahmadinejad is expected to visit Turkey for a summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to be held in the Turkish city Istanbul on Monday.

Muslim countries should support each other and could create a big market with their large population and economic weight, the president said in the interview.