EU Debates Olympic Boycott Over Tibet

Sarkozy does not exclude boycotting Olympics opening
26.03.2008 - 09:24 CET By Elitsa Vucheva

French president Nicolas Sarkozy on Tuesday (25 March) did not rule out boycotting the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games on 8 August in Beijing following China's crackdown on Tibet.
[...] Asked by journalists whether he was considering a boycott of the Olympic Games' opening ceremony in retaliation for the Chinese crackdown, Mr Sarkozy said he was not "closing the door to any possibility."

"Our Chinese friends must understand the worldwide concern that there is about the question of Tibet, and I will adapt my response to the evolutions in the situation that will come, I hope, as rapidly as possible," he said in Tarbes, southwest France.

[...] Ruprecht Polenz, chairman of the German Parliament's foreign affairs committee, on Tuesday echoed Mr Sarkozy's position.

He told Germany's South West radio that if China remained as "militant" as at present, he could not imagine German politicians "attending the opening or closing ceremonies." Meanwhile, during the official Olympic torch-lighting ceremony in Olympia, Greece on Monday (24 March) protests were held in several cities worldwide, while the ceremony itself was disrupted by pro-Tibet demonstrators showing the Olympic rings transformed into handcuffs.

[...] On Tuesday, European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso also rejected the idea of a boycott and said that he did not see the Games as a political event, reported AP.

By contrast, the president of the European Parliament Hans-Gert Poettering said that a boycott should be considered as an option."We should not exclude the possibility of a boycott of the Beijing Olympics. We want a successful Games, but not at the price of the cultural genocide of the Tibetans," he told German newspaper Bild am Sonntag on 23 March.

During a plenary session of the European Parliament in Brussels today (26 March), MEPs together with EU foreign affairs commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner and Slovenia's State Secretary for European Affairs Janez Lenarcic, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency, will hold a debate on the situation in Tibet.

http://euobserver.com/9/25868/?rk=1

Seed Banks for Doomsday

Biodiversity 'doomsday vault' comes to life in Arctic
By Pierre-Henry Deshayes | Posted Sun Feb 24, 2008
LONGYEARBYEN, Norway (AFP) - Aimed at providing mankind with a Noah's Ark of food in the event of a global catastrophe, an Arctic "doomsday vault" filled with samples of the world's most important seeds will be inaugurated here Tuesday.
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and Nobel Peace Prize winning environmentalist Wangari Matai will be among the personalities present at the inauguration of the vault, which has been carved into the permafrost of a remote Arctic mountain, just some 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) from the North Pole.
The vault, made up of three spacious cold chambers each measuring 27 x 10 metres (89 x 33 feet), create a long trident-shaped tunnel bored into the sandstone and limestone.
It has the capacity to hold up to 4.5 million batches of seeds from all known varieties of the planet's main food crops, making it possible to re-establish plants if they disappear from their natural environment or are obliterated by major disasters.
[...] Norway has assumed the six million euro (8.9 million dollar) charge for building the vault in its Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, where ironically no crops grow.
[...] Many of the more vulnerable seed banks have begun contributing to the "doomsday vault" collection, but some of the world's biodiversity has already disappeared, with gene vaults in both Iraq and Afghanistan destroyed by war and a seed bank in the Philippines annihilated by a typhoon. [my bold]
[...] Protected by high walls of fortified concrete, an armoured door, a sensor alarm and the native polar bears that roam the region, the "doomsday vault" has been built 130 metres (425 feet) above current sea level -- high enough that it would not flood if the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melt entirely due to global warming.
The concrete cocoon has also been built to withstand nuclear missile attacks or a plunging plane, something that could come in handy in light of the 6.4-scale tremor -- the biggest earthquake in Norway's history -- registered near the archipelago on Thursday.
http://green.yahoo.com/news/afp/20080224/sc_afp/norwayarcticenvironmentwarmingcrops.html