WASHINGTON (AP) ? A new national survey says 82 percent of Americans want to prepare now for rising seas and stronger storms from climate change. But most are unwilling to spend the money to keep the beach where it is.
The poll by Stanford University found that only 1 in 3 people favored the government spending millions to construct big sea walls, replenish beaches or pay people to leave the coast.
The options the majority preferred were making sure new buildings were stronger and reducing future coastal development.
Three in 5 people want those who are directly affected by rising seas to pay for protection, not the entire American public.
Survey director Jon Krosnick said Americans seem fatalistic about global warming.
A sense of adventure does not diminish with age. As older women, we have a greater sense of self, are more confident and appreciate those things that are most important in life. We are inspired by natural and authentic beauty, have a dedication to lifelong learning and a curiosity to explore new experiences. Above all, we appreciate and stand in awe of the wonders our world holds. The following 6 must-see tours are suggestions for women just like us. If you have an adventure travel experience you?d like to share, please comment below.
Failte, Ireland ? the Most Beautiful Place on Earth!
National Geographic Photographers dubbed Southern Ireland?s Dingle Peninsula The Most Beautiful Place on Earth thanks to breathtaking views and pristine archeological sites. This unique area of Ireland has supported life for over 6,000 years, and the landscape is dotted with over 2,000 castles, strongholds and archaeological monuments.
Begin your morning with a horseback ride along pristine beaches, four wheeling through the hills or hiking ancient walking trails that lead you through greenest hills you?ve ever seen. Take a mid-morning tour of haunted sites with a special interest tour leader who will fill you in on local legends and lore while giving you a truly unique tour. Try your hand at archery or skeet shooting on castle grounds before ending your tour mid-afternoon.
Take a surfing or try kayaking lesson in the afternoon, charter a vessel for deep sea fishing fun or try dropping a line into one of the many rivers along the coast. Complete your day with Ireland?s finest cuisine accompanied by Irish brewed stouts or ales at a local pub, where you?re sure to have an unbelievable evening full of laughter, storytelling and music.
Anchorage (Alaska),?U.S.A.?- Flightseeing Tours
Alaska is the final frontier, and there is no better place to experience such a ruggedly beautiful terrain while still being within reach of the conveniences of the city. Anchorage is snuggled into the Chugach Mountain Range and receives 600 inches of snow every winter. One of the best ways to view majestic Chugach State Park without undertaking a mountain climbing adventure is to hop aboard a flightseeing tour.
During your tour of the Alaskan skies, you will travel over the Knik Glacier rim where you will view amazing hanging glaciers. Zip over the Colony Glacier at Lake George to view where it spills into the winding Knik Glacier Gorge. See moose, Dall sheep, and more while you fly over pristine lakes and surrounded by breath-taking snowcapped mountains before heading back to your hotel or private cabin.
South Africa ? Elephant Back Safaris
Follow the footsteps of the Ancients to a land of magnificent beauty and exotic wildlife.
Jeep safaris rarely stray from the road, but an elephant back safari takes you off the beaten track. Your tour begins in the saddle of Africa?s most beloved transportation: the elephant. Because their scent masks yours, other creatures feel safe. You?ll remain safe and protected while viewing Africa through the elephant?s eyes ? complete with lions, tigers, hippos, rhinos and more.
Be inspired when you meet preserve guardsmen with passion, sacrifice and dedication to animal welfare. Guards are community heroes: military tough, attuned to the environment, and uniquely qualified by skills learned only by native tribesmen as a rite of passage.
Return to civilization, where you are welcome to tour local markets brimming with handmade textiles, jewelry, art, instruments and traditional dress while you watch the natives sporadically break out in song and dance. This trip is hard to top!
Seattle (WA), U.S.A.?- Blake Island Boat Tour
The appreciation of stunning outdoor beauty combined with a peek into the world of ancient civilizations equates to an adventure tour you don?t want to miss. Seattle?s Puget Sound is home to Blake Island, a private island accessible only by private charter or boat. Hop on your cruise boat from downtown Seattle?s Pier 55, where you will cruise to Tillicum Village.
Tourists learn about the ways of ancient inhabitants while being greeted with a traditional meal of steamed clams in nectar and salmon prepared in Native style. Take in a show of the Coast Salish tribe?s storytelling and symbolism before wrapping up with a quick tour of the islands. Explore the island?s walking and hiking trails and 5 miles of pristine beaches before wrapping up your tour at the gift shop.
Cambodia ? Jungle Safari and Boat Tour
Many of Cambodia?s most precious sites were abandoned for unknown reasons. In time, they were forgotten, eventually lost to the jungle, where they lay untouched, slowly disintegrating. Political unrest discouraged archaeological work. Today, the political climate is comfortable, rediscovery efforts are supported, and there is much to see. While you?re sure to visit Cambodia?s temples and sites, there are adventures to be had in the jungle and sea!
Your adventure begins with breakfast aboard a converted Khmer tour boat. While traveling to Koh Ta Kiev, you?ll enjoy views of lush jungles and white sand beaches complemented by brilliantly blue water. Snorkel stunningly colorful coral reef and try your hand at fishing for squid and reef fish. You will dock on a secluded island before lunching on traditionally cooked fresh seafood at a Khmer floating fishing village. Be sure to explore the local markets for one-of-a-kind souvenirs.
Cruise north to a private cove, drop anchor and take a 30 minute guided jungle trek, where you will likely see jungle cats, exotic birds, monkeys, snakes and other native wildlife. Take a quick dip before leaving campers around 4pm, or speak with your tour guide about renting tent space for an overnight stay in the jungle. Your tour comes to a close with your boat ride back to the mainland whistle you enjoy a sunset drink.
Austin (TX), U.S.A. ? Lake Travis Zip Line Adventures
Austin is a great place to vacation when cold weather keeps beating you back indoors. Temperatures are warm year round, and the city offers constant musical entertainment, numerous fishing lakes, natural hot springs and more to enjoy at your leisure.
While leisure is great, if you?re looking for something a little more heart-poundingly adventurous, you?ve got to try the safe but thrilling 2 ? hour zip line tour of the famous canyons and inlets gracing Lake Travis. Fly down 5 different zip lines ranging in length from 250 feet to over 2800 feet. You?ll never experience views like these any other way! Professional tour guides teach you about the local area while assisting you through challenging hikes and nature walks.
Have you ever participated in an adventurous tour? Did it change your life? What was your experience and what tips would you give to your fellow travelers? Please add your comments below?
WEDNESDAY, March 27 (HealthDay News) ? An experimental therapy for hepatitis C ? a ?silent killer? linked to liver cancer and cirrhosis ? has shown promise in tamping down virus levels in early trials.
Experts caution, however, that it?s too soon to know if the injectable drug will someday gain a standing among emerging oral medications against the disease.
New research suggests that the drug, miravirsen, could potentially be part of a drug ?cocktail? that manages the hepatitis C virus in much the same way as similar combinations have transformed HIV/AIDS from a death sentence into a chronic, manageable condition.
Miravirsen suppresses molecules the hepatitis C virus needs to reproduce. The drug decreased viral loads by about 500-fold at the highest doses used in a small, phase 2 study by an international group of researchers. Drug resistance, a common problem with other hepatitis C medications, did not develop among patients taking miravirsen.
A phase 2 trial evaluates a drug?s effectiveness while continuing to assess its safety.
?This is the first real clinical study of this approach and the results are encouraging,? said Dr. Judy Lieberman, chairwoman of cellular and molecular medicine at Boston Children?s Hospital. ?What?s exciting to me is that there doesn?t seem to be any drug resistance developing. If there?s a way to develop a drug cocktail that doesn?t require a half a year of treatment ? that would be really exciting, but it?s too early to tell.?
Lieberman was not involved in the research but co-wrote an editorial accompanying the new study in the March 27 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Hepatitis C is one form of liver disease and affects about 170 million people worldwide, according to study background information. It?s transmitted by shared needles or, less frequently, through sex. Often symptomless, the infection is a major cause of liver cancer and cirrhosis, or scarring of the liver.
Led by Dr. Harry Janssen, a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto and Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, researchers split 36 patients with hepatitis C into four groups. Nine patients in each of the first three groups received a dose of either 3 milligrams (mg), 5 mg or 7 mg of miravirsen per kilogram of body weight for 29 days, while the last nine patients received a placebo. All were followed for 18 weeks.
The so-called viral load of patients receiving the highest dose decreased by about 500-fold, Lieberman said, and the hepatitis C virus was below detectable levels in four of nine patients. Meanwhile, the treatment caused no significant toxic effects in any patients, aside from mild injection-site reactions and a brief increase in liver enzyme levels.
Calling the study ?interesting,? Dr. David Bernstein, chief of the division of hepatology at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., said that as an injectable drug, miravirsen would be less desirable among patients than other new drugs for hepatitis C that can be taken orally.
?It?s a novel concept, but it?s only 36 patients and a phase 2 study,? Bernstein said. ?It?s impressive that their viral loads came down, but most suffered a recurrence of the virus.?
More information
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about hepatitis C.
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Even graphene has weak spotsPublic release date: 28-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Ruth david@rice.edu 713-348-6327 Rice University
Rice, Tsinghua theorists find junctions in polycrystalline graphene sap strength of super material
HOUSTON (March 28, 2013) Graphene, the single-atom-thick form of carbon, has become famous for its extraordinary strength. But less-than-perfect sheets of the material show unexpected weakness, according to researchers at Rice University in Houston and Tsinghua University in Beijing.
The kryptonite to this Superman of materials is in the form of a seven-atom ring that inevitably occurs at the junctions of grain boundaries in graphene, where the regular array of hexagonal units is interrupted. At these points, under tension, polycrystalline graphene has about half the strength of pristine samples of the material.
Calculations by the Rice team of theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and his colleagues in China were reported this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters. They could be important to materials scientists using graphene in applications where its intrinsic strength is a key feature, like composite materials and stretchable or flexible electronics.
Graphene sheets grown in a lab, often via chemical vapor deposition, are almost never perfect arrays of hexagons, Yakobson said. Domains of graphene that start to grow on a substrate are not necessarily lined up with each other, and when these islands merge, they look like quilts, with patterns going in every direction.
The lines in polycrystalline sheets are called grain boundaries, and the atoms at these boundaries are occasionally forced to change the way they bond by the unbreakable rules of topology. Most common of the "defects" in graphene formation studied by Yakobson's group are adjacent five- and seven-atom rings that are a little weaker than the hexagons around them.
The team calculated that the particular seven-atom rings found at junctions of three islands are the weakest points, where cracks are most likely to form. These are the end points of grain boundaries between the islands and are ongoing trouble spots, the researchers found.
"In the past, people studying what happens at the grain boundary looked at it as an infinite line," Yakobson said. "It's simpler that way, computationally and conceptually, because they could just look at a single segment and have it represent the whole."
But in the real world, he said, "these lines form a network. Graphene is usually a quilt made from many pieces. I thought we should test the junctions."
They determined through molecular dynamics simulation and "good old mathematical analysis" that in a graphene quilt, the grain boundaries act like levers that amplify the tension (through a dislocation pileup) and concentrate it at the defect either where the three domains meet or where a grain boundary between two domains ends. "The details are complicated but, basically, the longer the lever, the greater the amplification on the weakest point," Yakobson said. "The force is concentrated there, and that's where it starts breaking."
"Force on these junctions starts the cracks, and they propagate like cracks in a windshield," said Vasilii Artyukhov, a postdoctoral researcher at Rice and co-author of the paper. "In metals, cracks stop eventually because they become blunt as they propagate. But in brittle materials, that doesn't happen. And graphene is a brittle material, so a crack might go a really long way."
Yakobson said that conceptually, the calculations show what metallurgists recognize as the Hall-Petch Effect, a measure of the strength of crystalline materials with similar grain boundaries. "It's one of the pillars of large-scale material mechanics," he said. "For graphene, we call this a pseudo Hall-Petch, because the effect is very similar even though the mechanism is very different.
"Any defect, of course, does something to the material," Yakobson said. "But this finding is important because you cannot avoid the effect in polycrystalline graphene. It's also ironic, because polycrystals are often considered when larger domains are needed. We show that as it gets larger, it gets weaker.
"If you need a patch of graphene for mechanical performance, you'd better go for perfect monocrystals or graphene with rather small domains that reduce the stress concentration."
###
Co-authors of the paper are graduate student Zhigong Song and his adviser, Zhiping Xu, an associate professor of engineering mechanics at Tsinghua. Xu is a former researcher in Yakobson's group at Rice. Yakobson is Rice's Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and professor of chemistry.
The Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation supported the work at Rice. The National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program and Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology of China supported the work at Tsinghua.
David Ruth
Mike Williams
713-348-6728 mikewilliams@rice.edu
Read the abstract at: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl400542n.
This news release can be found online at: http://news.rice.edu/2013/03/28/even-graphene-has-weak-spots/.
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.
Graphic for download: http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/0328_GRAPHENE-web.jpg
New work by theorists at Rice and Tsinghua universities shows defects in polycrystalline forms of graphene will sap its strength. The illustration from a simulation at left shows a junction of grain boundaries where three domains of graphene meet with a strained bond in the center. At right, the calculated stress buildup at the tip of a finite-length grain boundary. (Credit: Vasilii Artyukhov/Rice University)
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Even graphene has weak spotsPublic release date: 28-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Ruth david@rice.edu 713-348-6327 Rice University
Rice, Tsinghua theorists find junctions in polycrystalline graphene sap strength of super material
HOUSTON (March 28, 2013) Graphene, the single-atom-thick form of carbon, has become famous for its extraordinary strength. But less-than-perfect sheets of the material show unexpected weakness, according to researchers at Rice University in Houston and Tsinghua University in Beijing.
The kryptonite to this Superman of materials is in the form of a seven-atom ring that inevitably occurs at the junctions of grain boundaries in graphene, where the regular array of hexagonal units is interrupted. At these points, under tension, polycrystalline graphene has about half the strength of pristine samples of the material.
Calculations by the Rice team of theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and his colleagues in China were reported this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters. They could be important to materials scientists using graphene in applications where its intrinsic strength is a key feature, like composite materials and stretchable or flexible electronics.
Graphene sheets grown in a lab, often via chemical vapor deposition, are almost never perfect arrays of hexagons, Yakobson said. Domains of graphene that start to grow on a substrate are not necessarily lined up with each other, and when these islands merge, they look like quilts, with patterns going in every direction.
The lines in polycrystalline sheets are called grain boundaries, and the atoms at these boundaries are occasionally forced to change the way they bond by the unbreakable rules of topology. Most common of the "defects" in graphene formation studied by Yakobson's group are adjacent five- and seven-atom rings that are a little weaker than the hexagons around them.
The team calculated that the particular seven-atom rings found at junctions of three islands are the weakest points, where cracks are most likely to form. These are the end points of grain boundaries between the islands and are ongoing trouble spots, the researchers found.
"In the past, people studying what happens at the grain boundary looked at it as an infinite line," Yakobson said. "It's simpler that way, computationally and conceptually, because they could just look at a single segment and have it represent the whole."
But in the real world, he said, "these lines form a network. Graphene is usually a quilt made from many pieces. I thought we should test the junctions."
They determined through molecular dynamics simulation and "good old mathematical analysis" that in a graphene quilt, the grain boundaries act like levers that amplify the tension (through a dislocation pileup) and concentrate it at the defect either where the three domains meet or where a grain boundary between two domains ends. "The details are complicated but, basically, the longer the lever, the greater the amplification on the weakest point," Yakobson said. "The force is concentrated there, and that's where it starts breaking."
"Force on these junctions starts the cracks, and they propagate like cracks in a windshield," said Vasilii Artyukhov, a postdoctoral researcher at Rice and co-author of the paper. "In metals, cracks stop eventually because they become blunt as they propagate. But in brittle materials, that doesn't happen. And graphene is a brittle material, so a crack might go a really long way."
Yakobson said that conceptually, the calculations show what metallurgists recognize as the Hall-Petch Effect, a measure of the strength of crystalline materials with similar grain boundaries. "It's one of the pillars of large-scale material mechanics," he said. "For graphene, we call this a pseudo Hall-Petch, because the effect is very similar even though the mechanism is very different.
"Any defect, of course, does something to the material," Yakobson said. "But this finding is important because you cannot avoid the effect in polycrystalline graphene. It's also ironic, because polycrystals are often considered when larger domains are needed. We show that as it gets larger, it gets weaker.
"If you need a patch of graphene for mechanical performance, you'd better go for perfect monocrystals or graphene with rather small domains that reduce the stress concentration."
###
Co-authors of the paper are graduate student Zhigong Song and his adviser, Zhiping Xu, an associate professor of engineering mechanics at Tsinghua. Xu is a former researcher in Yakobson's group at Rice. Yakobson is Rice's Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and professor of chemistry.
The Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation supported the work at Rice. The National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program and Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology of China supported the work at Tsinghua.
David Ruth
Mike Williams
713-348-6728 mikewilliams@rice.edu
Read the abstract at: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl400542n.
This news release can be found online at: http://news.rice.edu/2013/03/28/even-graphene-has-weak-spots/.
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.
Graphic for download: http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/0328_GRAPHENE-web.jpg
New work by theorists at Rice and Tsinghua universities shows defects in polycrystalline forms of graphene will sap its strength. The illustration from a simulation at left shows a junction of grain boundaries where three domains of graphene meet with a strained bond in the center. At right, the calculated stress buildup at the tip of a finite-length grain boundary. (Credit: Vasilii Artyukhov/Rice University)
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Multiple moves found harmful to poor young childrenPublic release date: 28-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Sarah Mancoll smancoll@srcd.org 202-289-7905 Society for Research in Child Development
Poor children who move three or more times before they turn 5 have more behavior problems than their peers, according to a new study by researchers at Cornell University and the National Employment Law Project. The study is published in the journal Child Development.
Moving is a fairly common experience for American families; in 2002, 6.5 percent of all children had been living in their current home for less than six months. Among low-income children, that number rose to 10 percent. In addition, in 2002, 13 percent of families above poverty moved once, but 24 percent of families below poverty moved. Research has shown that frequent moves are related to a range of behavioral, emotional, and school problems for adolescents.
Using national data on 2,810 children from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal, representative study of children born in 20 large U.S. cities between 1998 and 2000, researchers sought to determine how frequent moves relate to children's readiness for school. Parents were interviewed shortly after the birth of their children, then again by phone when the children were 1, 3, and 5; in-home assessments were done when the children were 3 and 5. The study also looked at the children's language and literacy outcomes, as well as behavior problems reported by mothers.
The study found that 23 percent of the children had never moved, 48 percent had moved once or twice, and 29 percent had moved three or more times. Among children who moved three or more times before age 5, nearly half (44 percent) were poor; poverty was defined based on the official federal threshold. Moving three or more times was not related to the children's language and literacy outcomes.
But children who moved three or more times had more attention problems, anxiousness or depression, and aggressiveness or hyperactivity at age 5 than those who had never moved or those who had moved once or twice. These increases in behavior problems occurred only among poor children, the study found, suggesting that frequent moves early in life are most disruptive for the most disadvantaged children.
"The United States is still recovering from the great recession, which has taken a major toll on the housing market," notes Kathleen Ziol-Guest, postdoctoral associate at Cornell University, who led the study. "As housing markets have collapsed across communities, highly mobile low-income families have moved in search of work and less expensive housing.
"The findings in this study suggest that the housing crisis and its accompanying increase in mobility likely will have negative effects on young children, especially poor children."
###
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Multiple moves found harmful to poor young childrenPublic release date: 28-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Sarah Mancoll smancoll@srcd.org 202-289-7905 Society for Research in Child Development
Poor children who move three or more times before they turn 5 have more behavior problems than their peers, according to a new study by researchers at Cornell University and the National Employment Law Project. The study is published in the journal Child Development.
Moving is a fairly common experience for American families; in 2002, 6.5 percent of all children had been living in their current home for less than six months. Among low-income children, that number rose to 10 percent. In addition, in 2002, 13 percent of families above poverty moved once, but 24 percent of families below poverty moved. Research has shown that frequent moves are related to a range of behavioral, emotional, and school problems for adolescents.
Using national data on 2,810 children from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal, representative study of children born in 20 large U.S. cities between 1998 and 2000, researchers sought to determine how frequent moves relate to children's readiness for school. Parents were interviewed shortly after the birth of their children, then again by phone when the children were 1, 3, and 5; in-home assessments were done when the children were 3 and 5. The study also looked at the children's language and literacy outcomes, as well as behavior problems reported by mothers.
The study found that 23 percent of the children had never moved, 48 percent had moved once or twice, and 29 percent had moved three or more times. Among children who moved three or more times before age 5, nearly half (44 percent) were poor; poverty was defined based on the official federal threshold. Moving three or more times was not related to the children's language and literacy outcomes.
But children who moved three or more times had more attention problems, anxiousness or depression, and aggressiveness or hyperactivity at age 5 than those who had never moved or those who had moved once or twice. These increases in behavior problems occurred only among poor children, the study found, suggesting that frequent moves early in life are most disruptive for the most disadvantaged children.
"The United States is still recovering from the great recession, which has taken a major toll on the housing market," notes Kathleen Ziol-Guest, postdoctoral associate at Cornell University, who led the study. "As housing markets have collapsed across communities, highly mobile low-income families have moved in search of work and less expensive housing.
"The findings in this study suggest that the housing crisis and its accompanying increase in mobility likely will have negative effects on young children, especially poor children."
###
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?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Russia is laying to rest any thoughts that its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad might be wavering: It is championing the Assad regime?s position in a United Nations probe of alleged chemical weapons use in the Syria conflict, and blasting as ?illegal? the official recognition of the Syrian opposition by some countries.
At the same time, Britain and France are advocating providing Western military assistance to the rebels, and urging the United States to drop its opposition to joining such a plan.
Secretary of State John Kerry, in Paris Wednesday, got a bit of direct pressure from the French, who want the US to at least provide nonlethal logistical assistance if the Britain and France provide the heavy weapons the rebels want.
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The result of this standoff between camps of world powers is that the Syrian conflict, which the UN says has already claimed more than 70,000 lives and driven hundreds of thousands of Syrians into neighboring countries, seems likely to drag on for some time.
?It?s hard to see the conditions or sequence of events that lead to a quick end to this war, which is one reason there is so much emphasis on maintaining the delivery of humanitarian assistance,? says one UN official.
At the UN, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is assembling the team and finalizing other details of the investigation he ordered last week into allegations from both camps in the Syria war that chemical weapons were used in Aleppo in northern Syria.
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But Russia is complicating Secretary General Ban?s already politically sensitive task, demanding that the team of investigators include representatives from the five permanent members of the Security Council ? in other words that Russia and China, which have repeatedly blocked UN action against Mr. Assad, be guaranteed a hand in the investigation.
At one point, Russia even briefly insisted that the investigation be called off. That came after Britain and France urged Ban to extend the investigation to all claims of chemical weapons use in Syria and not limit it to the Aleppo incident earlier this month.
Ban?s spokesman, Martin Nesirky, told reporters earlier this week that the investigation team would be made up of experts from two international organizations ? the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the World Health Organization. On Tuesday, Mr. Nesirky announced that Ban had named Ake Sellstrom, a Swedish scientist who was part of the team that investigated allegations that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, as head of the Syria investigation.
Nesirky also said that the investigation will focus on technical issues and on determining whether or not chemical weapons were used ? and not on determining who used them.
President Obama has said the use of chemical weapons in the Syria conflict would be a ?red line? for the US. Some regional analysts speculate that a determination that the Assad regime had used chemical weapons would trigger deeper US involvement in the conflict, perhaps a US decision to arm the rebels.
The US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, hinted as much in a statement last week supporting Ban?s decision to launch an investigation. ?If Bashar al-Assad and those under his command make the mistake of using chemical weapons, or fail to meet their obligation to secure them, then there will be consequences,? Ambassador Rice said
It was the Syrian regime that originally requested that Ban launch an investigation of the Aleppo incident. But according to some analysts, Russia now wants to make sure that the investigation doesn?t end up a pretext for Western intervention in the conflict ? in the way the US used allegations of Iraq?s (as it turned out, nonexistent) WMDs to launch the Iraq invasion.
But Russia is not limiting its unflagging support for Assad to the chemical weapons investigation.
Moscow reacted swiftly this week when the Arab League turned Syria's seat in the organization over to the opposition, and as Qatar ? which was hosting an Arab League summit ? gave the Syrian opposition the keys to Syria?s embassy in Doha, the Qatari capital. Russia said it was "illegal" and "anti-Syrian" for Qatar to hand over the embassy.
The Assad regime said Qatar had illegally given the embassy to a band of ?bandits and thugs,? and the official Syrian news agency SANA reacted by calling Qatar ?the biggest bank for supporting terrorism in the region.? Assad regularly dismisses the opposition battling him as ?terrorists.?
Some UN diplomats say Russia ? which at one point last year seemed to be softening its support for Assad ? has recently ?tacked harder? toward the regime?s defense, as one diplomat says.
That hardening has convinced the UN?s special representative for Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, that his goal of getting even some minimal form of Security Council action on Syria remains unrealistic.
And that sidelining of the special representative?s role in trying to reach some political settlement of the Syrian war has only added to a resignation that the diplomatic stalemate ? and the violence ? are not about to end.
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Public release date: 28-Mar-2013
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