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Íåâåëèê³ ì³ñòà Êâåáåêó ïðèéìàþòü 400 êàíàäñüêèõ ñîëäàò³â, ÿê³ òðåíóþòüñÿ äëÿ ó÷àñò³ â îïåðàö³¿ ÍÀÒÎ â Ëàò⳿.
Ñîëäàòè Çáðîéíèõ ñèë Êàíàäè òðåíóþòüñÿ â ñåìè íàñåëåíèõ ïóíêòàõ íà ï³âäåííèé çàõ³ä â³ä ì³ñòà Êâåáåê, ùîá ï³äãîòóâàòèñÿ äî ¿õíüîãî ðîçãîðòàííÿ â Ëàò⳿ â ðàìêàõ îïåðàö³¿ ÍÀÒÎ.

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Êîëè î÷³ íå çóñòð³÷àþòü ïåðåøêîä, ñåðöå á'ºòüñÿ øâèäøå...

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Îé, òðåáà æèòè ³íàêøå,
áóòè ³íøèì,
á³ëüøå ï³ä íåáîì
³ ñåðåä äåðåâ,
á³ëüø ñàìîòí³ì
³ áëèæ÷èì äî òàºìíèöü
êðàñè ³ âåëè÷³.

Ãåðìàí Ãåññå
ç: Ïåêëî ìîæíà ïîäîëàòè

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Ïðåçèäåíò Áàéäåí íàçèâຠïðåçèäåíòà ªãèïòó Åëü-ѳñ³ «ïðåçèäåíòîì Ìåêñèêè» ï³ñëÿ òîãî, ÿê â³í çðîáèâ çàóâàæåííÿ íà çàõèñò éîãî ïàì’ÿò³.

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Êîëèøí³é ïðåçèäåíò Áðàçè볿 Áîëñîíàðó ïåðåáóâຠï³ä ñë³äñòâîì ó ñïðàâ³ ïðî ñïðîáó äåðæàâíîãî ïåðåâîðîòó
Êîëèøí³é ïðåçèäåíò Áðàçè볿 Æà¿ð Áîëñîíàðó ïåðåáóâຠï³ä ñë³äñòâîì ó ðàìêàõ ðîçñë³äóâàííÿ éìîâ³ðíî¿ ñïðîáè äåðæàâíîãî ïåðåâîðîòó ç ìåòîþ óòðèìàòè éîãî ïðè âëàä³, ïîâ³äîìèâ îäèí ç éîãî êîëèøí³õ ïîì³÷íèê³â.

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Öåé ãàìáóðãåð íà ñí³äàíîê òàêèé ñìà÷íèé, Áîæå ì³é, ÿ çàáóâ ñôîòîãðàôóâàòè òà äî¿â éîãî! Ñîëîäêèé, ñîëîíèé, çàãàëîì íàäçâè÷àéíî íåïåðåìîæíèé ³ ïðèãîëîìøëèâèé

ÏÐÎ ÓÊÐÀ¯ÍÓ: ÑËÀÍÖÅÂÈÉ ÃÀÇ ÒÀ ÈÍØÅ

19:22 08.05.2011

ÏÐÎ ÓÊÐÀ¯ÍÓ: ÑËÀÍÖÅÂÈÉ ÃÀÇ ÒÀ ÈÍØÅ

KIEV, Ukraine — This former Soviet state in Eastern Europe is betting that the path toward energy independence runs through Fort Worth.

 

Multimedia
A worker picks up geophones and seismic cables.

By drilling in the scrubland and vacant lots in and around the city of Fort Worth, American energy companies have demonstrated that they can produce natural gas economically from shale — a form of sedimentary rock previously considered all but worthless.

Now, despite environmentalists’ opposition to the water-polluting potential of the shale-gas extraction method known as fracking, the technology’s proponents are heading abroad. And Ukraine, which sits atop tantalizingly large shale deposits, is eager to do business.

Already this year, Ukraine has opened talks with three Western energy giants — Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Shell — to search for shale gas. Ukraine’s Parliament has also passed investor-friendly legislation aimed at opening its domestic natural gas market to shale gas producers.

Meanwhile, the nation’s president, Viktor F. Yanukovich, has signed a shale-gas exploration agreement with the United States and reached an accord with the European Union on energy transport that opens Ukraine’s pipeline system to Western companies.

Along with the energy companies courting it, Ukraine sees shale as potentially altering the geopolitics of natural gas, lessening global reliance on Russia and the Middle East. Today, just three countries — Russia, Iran and Qatar — hold 54 percent of the world’s conventional gas reserves. But shale is found in many other places, including Eastern and Western Europe, India, China and Australia.

A 2009 study by the International Energy Agency estimated the world holds nearly as much gas recoverable through new techniques like shale gas, or another known as coal-bed methane, as through the traditional sort obtained by conventional drilling. The agency estimated there might be 380 trillion cubic meters of natural gas that could be recovered through these new techniques, compared with 404 trillion cubic meters obtainable through traditional means.

The energy agency has also predicted that unconventionally produced gas will rise from 12 percent of the global total in 2008 to 19 percent in 2035.

Although Ukraine already produces some natural gas by conventional means, it remains highly dependent on imports from Russia’s state-owned gas monopoly, Gazprom, the world’s biggest producer. Twice in the last five years, Gazprom has halted supplies to Ukraine in politically tinged pricing disputes.

And yet, as a legacy of the Soviet era, Ukraine controls the pipelines through which Gazprom transports its natural gas to its Europe. It is a mutual dependence that at times seems more like a standoff: Russia has the gas; Ukraine has the pipes.

Ukraine, by finding a greater source of its own natural gas, would be hoping to reduce Russia’s leverage in that relationship.

The shale gas industry, for its part, could erode Russia’s once seemingly untouchable monopoly pricing power on natural gas, if the industry can duplicate Fort Worth-scale results from a belt of shale deposits in Poland and Ukraine that in some cases lie right under the pipelines carrying Gazprom’s gas.

Right now, Russia produces about 40 percent of the natural gas imported into the European Union, selling it mostly under long-term contracts that are linked to the price of oil — which has been soaring lately.

Gazprom says its average wholesale price in Europe in the first quarter of 2011, the latest figures available, was $346 for 1,000 cubic meters. By comparison, the benchmark price for natural gas in the United States at the Henry Hub in Louisiana last month averaged $153.30 for the same volume.

Ukraine’s national energy company pays 30 percent less than the European rates, through an agreement Mr. Yanukovich signed last year to let Russia use a naval base on the Crimean Peninsula for 25 years. But that is still higher than the price in the United States.

“Unconventional gas will be a game-changer throughout Europe,” said James Hill, vice president at BNK Petroleum, one of the companies that pioneered the technology in the United States and is now expanding in Europe. “We’re the mouse that roared.”

Poland is three or so years ahead of Ukraine in its shale gas industry, with exploration wells already drilled. But it is less sensitive to Gazprom’s monopoly, because Poland consumes far less gas than Ukraine. And Poland is geographically less critical for the transmission of natural gas to Western Europe than Ukraine, which transports about 80 percent of Gazprom’s exports to Europe.

Ukraine has four major, largely unexplored shale deposits, according to Valerii Berezhnoi, chief geologist for Vikoil, a Ukrainian seismic exploration company studying unconventional natural gas deposits. Nobody pretends to know how much gas they might hold. But as energy companies speculate on Ukraine’s potential, they point to the deposits that lie under Fort Worth, called the Barnett Shale.
Production from Barnett has grown in a decade from almost nothing to 133 million cubic meters a day. That is more than the approximately 109 million cubic meters that Ukraine imports a day from Russia.

Signaling a shift toward support for shale gas development, Ukraine’s minister of energy and coal, Yuri A. Boiko, met with American shale gas executives in Houston this year and announced a once far-fetched sounding goal for Ukraine to become self-sufficient in natural gas.

“We understand that American science is rich in this field,” Mr. Boiko told an audience of mostly Western energy company executives at a conference on shale gas in Kiev last month — the first such gathering for the industry in Ukraine. “We would like to attract this technology, and we would like to attract partners,” he added.

Exxon Mobil, which bolstered its unconventional gas expertise with the purchase of the American shale developer XTO last June, signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ukrainian government earlier this year, formalizing negotiations to begin exploring or drilling. XTO was a pioneer of the Barnett shale play under Fort Worth. Ukrainian officials are now in similar talks with Chevron and Shell.

Shale, the ossified mud from the bed of ancient seas, is prized if it is stained dark gray or black from imbedded organic material. A shale gas strike has none of the drama of an oil gusher. Drilling teams pull core samples to the surface. If rich in gas, the rock will fizz gas in water, like an Alka-Seltzer.

Companies produce industrial volumes of shale gas through hydraulic fracturing — or fracking. The process releases natural gas from shale by blasting the rock with water, sand and chemicals to create cracks through which the gas flows.

Because fracking often produces wastewater laced with toxic substances, it has become a target of environmental protests worldwide. In France, the National Assembly next week will debate a proposal to ban the practice, as opposition heats up ahead of a presidential election next year.

So far in Poland, protests have been small. Because the industry is in its infancy in Ukraine, the public’s attitude there is still mostly unknown.

Jack P. Williams, the president of Exxon’s XTO Energy unit, told a conference last fall that realizing shale gas’s potential abroad will depend on addressing environmental concerns in the United States. “Getting this right is vital not just to U.S. jobs and energy supply,” he said, “but also to our ability to pursue these same opportunities globally.”

 Gazprom, meanwhile, has so far been silent on Ukraine’s negotiations with Exxon, Shell and Chevron. In fact the company’s officials rarely mention shale gas in public. A Gazprom spokesman identified remarks made in a speech by the chief executive, Aleksei B. Miller, to a business convention in Cannes last year, as the most comprehensive so far.

In that talk, Mr. Miller dismissed the technology as environmentally unsound and expensive, and said that shale gas would affect only the margins of Gazprom’s business — characterizing shale as merely an appetizer to Gazprom’s main course.

“If you fell for foie gras,” he told the audience in France, “it does not mean that buttery soft tenderloin steaks grilled to your taste are made redundant.”

More recently, shale gas wildcatters at the Kiev conference said they could not be more pleased with Gazprom’s behavior. By keeping natural gas prices in Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe higher than gas prices in the United States, they said, Gazprom is making shale exploration in Eastern Europe look all the more profitable.
Andrew E. Kramer
The New York Times

Tiere, die ihr Gefieder orangerot mit einem Antioxidans schmücken, leiden unter der Strahlung. Tschernobyl ist erstaunlich wenig untersucht und zudem höchst umstritten.

Wie reagiert die Natur auf langfristig überhöhte radioaktive Strahlung wie in Fukushima? Im Labor kann man das nicht erkunden, man braucht einen Präzedenzfall. Aber der, Tschernobyl, ist erstaunlich wenig untersucht und zudem höchst umstritten: „Ein einzigartiger Zufluchtsort für die Biodiversität“ sei die gesperrte Zone, urteilte 2006 das „Tschernobyl-Forum“, ein Expertengremium von UNO und Weltgesundheitsorganisation: Viele Wildtiere haben sich stark vermehrt, seit die Zone von jeder Nutzung – auch von der Jagd – frei ist.

„Völlig irrational“ sei dieses Bild, entgegnet Biologe Timothy Mousseau (University of South Carolina). Gemeinsam mit Anders Møller (Paris) ist er seit Jahren fast allein an der Forschungsfront, die beiden haben schon viele Effekte der Strahlung dokumentiert, vor allem an Vögeln. An denen ist nun ihnen und Ismael Galván (Biologische Station Doñana, Sevilla) wieder etwas aufgefallen: In der verstrahlten Zone hat sich die Verteilung der Vögel geändert. Die Arten mit orangeroten Federn sind zurückgegangen, die mit braunen und schwarzen haben zugelegt.

Was hat das mit der Strahlung zu tun? Die Farbe von Federn (und Haaren) wird unter anderem von zwei Typen des Pigments Melanin bestimmt, Eumelanin und Phäomelanin. Ersteres bringt Vögeln wie Amseln die dunkleren Töne, Letzteres färbt Vögel wie Wiedehopfe (und Rothaarige). Das mag schmücken und möglicherweise vor UV-Strahlung schützen, aber es hat einen Preis: Die Synthese von Phäomelanin braucht Glutathion, das ist ein Tripeptid, das aus den Aminosäuren Glutaminsäure, Cystein und Glycin gebildet wird.

Und Gluthation wird vom Körper primär nicht als Schmuck, sondern zum Schutz produziert: Das Molekül ist eines der wichtigsten Antioxidantien, es entschärft zellschädigende freie Radikale. Die entstehen etwa durch radioaktive Strahlung. Also sollte unter ihr stärker leiden, wer Gluthation zum Färben einsetzt, er hat dann weniger als Antioxidans zur Verfügung.

 

Viel Schmuck – wenig Schutz

Das war die Hypothese der Forscher, sie bestätigte sich an 97 Arten, die um Tschernobyl herum über vier Jahre gefangen wurden: In stärker verstrahlten Regionen wurden 64 Arten seltener, 33 haben ihre Populationen vergrößert. Dabei litten die orangeroten Arten, die dunkel gefärbten profitierten, sie nahmen die Plätze ein (Oecologia, 165, S.827). Allerdings spielte auch anderes mit: Größere Vögel litten stärker. Das steht in Widerspruch zu einem früheren Befund von Møller/Mousseau, dort sahen sie die Kleineren rascher gehen. So geht es den beiden öfter, sie müssen revidieren, ihre Befunde sind nicht unumstritten. Vor allem ukrainische Biologen, die früher mit ihnen zusammenarbeiteten, kritisieren sie heute heftig (Wired, 14.4.). Aber Mousseau ist schon mit neuen Partnern im Gespräch, er plant Studien um Fukushima.
JÜRGEN LANGENBACH (Die Presse)