WereldWijdWij(s) • Puzzles of Life (WorldWideW(is)e)

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The Erebus glacier in Antarctica comes down from Mt. Erebus and protrudes off the coast of Ross Island, forming an 11-12 km long ice tongue—a long and narrow sheet of ice projecting out from the coastline. The Erebus Ice Tongue is the serrated, blue-rimmed "knife" extending toward image center from the upper right out into snow- and ice-covered McMurdo Sound. Beneath the smooth white expanse is the Southern Ocean.

An ice tongue forms when a valley glacier moves very rapidly out into the sea or a lake. When the sea ice in McMurdo sound thaws in the summer, the ice tongue floats on the water without thawing. It also calves off in places forming icebergs. The Erebus Ice Tongue is only about 10 meters high, so its icebergs are small. When the ice around the tongue melts in the summer, waves of sea water constantly batter the edges of the tongue, carving very elaborate structures in the ice, sometimes producing deep caves at the margins. In the winter, the sea freezes once more around these new shapes.

This false-color composite image was acquired by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on the Terra satellite. The image was created by combining near-infrared, red, and green wavelengths (ASTER bands 3, 2, & 1 respectively). The image was acquired on November 30, 2001, in the thin light of permanent "dawn" that the continent experiences during the Southern Hemisphere spring.

NASA image created by Jesse Allen, Earth Observatory, using data provided courstesy of NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and the U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team.

Handelsvoordelen voor ontwikkelingslanden absolute prioriteit voor Nederland.

De Nederlandse regering zet tijdens de top hard in op handelsvoordelen voor ontwikkelingslanden. Dat bleek duidelijk uit de toespraak welke Minister Brinkhorst vandaag uitsprak in de plenaire vergadering van de WTO top in Hongkong. Brinkhorst richtte zich tot de 149 lidstaten en sprak zijn geloof uit in de voordelen van een vrije wereldhandel. Brinkhorst is echter wel van mening dat ontwikkelingslanden een speciale behandeling verdienen. Omdat zij nog niet sterk genoeg zijn om te concurreren met de Westerse landen. Volgens hem is dit cruciaal voor het slagen van de ronde. Nederland onderhandelt in het kader van de Europese Unie. Belangrijke inzet van de EU in Hongkong is dat er afspraken worden gemaakt ten aanzien van ontwikkelingshulp voor handel, markttoegang voor de armste landen, en dat voor ontwikkelingslanden schadelijke subsidies, met name voor katoen, worden afgeschaft.

Bron: Globalisering.com.

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One of the world’s largest artificial lakes, Lake Nasser is named after the Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser, who is largely responsible for the lake’s creation. President Nasser decided to build the Aswan High Dam across the Nile, forming a lake approximately 550 kilometers (340 miles) long.

In this astronaut photograph taken from the International Space Station, the water of Lake Nasser stands out from its surroundings due to sunglint. The Sun’s light reflects off the water’s surface and into the camera lens, giving Lake Nasser an iridescent sheen. Sunglint is a common phenomenon in satellite images as well as astronaut photographs.

The Aswan High Dam, which created this massive lake, is the newer of two dams in the vicinity. The older of these dams is known as the Aswan Low Dam, or simply the Aswan Dam. Completed in 1902, the older dam had nearly overflowed by the middle of the 20th century, despite having been raised twice. Instead of raising it a third time, officials chose to build the Aswan High Dam upriver in the 1960s. The dam proved to be a mixed blessing, providing some residents with irrigation and drinking water, but forcing thousands of others to relocate to higher ground.

The Aswan High Dam ultimately proved much more effective than its predecessor, so effective that the dam’s construction spawned another massive effort. The ancient Egyptian temple of Abu Simbel lay in the path of the rising waters produced by the new dam. In the 1960s, the historical site was literally taken apart piece by piece and reassembled in a new place to avoid submersion. The Aswan High Dam has not, however, proven immune to overflowing. High levels of rainfall led to new lakes in the region in the late 1990s.

The name of Lake Nasser technically refers only to the portion of this lake in Egypt. The Sudanese prefer to call their portion of the lake Lake Nubia.

Astronaut photograph ISS010-E-14618 was acquired January 23, 2005, with a Kodak 760C digital camera with a 400 mm lens, and is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations experiment and the Image Science & Analysis Group, Johnson Space Center. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth.

Meningsverschillen tussen de Verenigde Staten en de Europese Unie houden de WTO onderhandelingen in Hong Kong in een houtgreep. De verwijten vliegen over en weer en beide kemphanen lijken elkaar geen duimbreedte te willen toegeven. Inzet van de strijd zijn de voordelen die deze handelsronde voor ontwikkelingslanden moet opleveren. De Nederlandse minister voor Ontwikkelingssamenwerking Van Ardenne voelt de spanningen, maar stelt dat de EU niks aangerekend kan worden. Toch houdt zij vertrouwen in een positieve uitkomst over drie dagen.

Bron: Globalisering.com.