₦airaland Forum

vislabraye:
Yes, there's something about Genny. She's pretty, smart, a good actress, very sociable and a very good friend to [size=8pt][size=8pt]Alhaji Atiku[/size][/size]

You are right. She is pretty. Very pretty.
But she is also intelligent enough not to associate with the likes of Alhaji Atiku in spite of his wealth and fame.
Genny deserves better. Don't you think?

Good Girl:
Naliakar is back from Ingo. How was the village "obhushuma"?

They served me Ingokho without the Imondo. I do not know where they threw it or someone ate it first.

kosovo:
Moved from Politics Section

Thanks. I realized I had posted it in the politics section inadvertently.
On the topic, what surprising is not that she beat her opponent hands down, but that she did so in one of the most south of the Southern states, ideologically speaking. It debunks the myth that gays in USA only live north of the Mason Dixie line.

Where was Tayo-D and jeSoul. Texsas of all the places.I thought the Republicans were on a roll after winning NJ and VI.

December 13, 2009
Houston Is Largest City to Elect Openly Gay Mayor
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

HOUSTON — Houston became the largest city in the United States to elect an openly gay mayor on Saturday night, as voters gave a solid victory to the city controller, Annise Parker.

Cheers and dancing erupted at Ms. Parker’s campaign party as her opponent, Gene Locke, a former city attorney, conceded defeat just after 10 p.m. when it became clear he could not overcome her lead.

Twenty minutes later, Ms. Parker appeared before ecstatic supporters at the city’s convention center and then joked that she was the first graduate of Rice University to be elected mayor. (She is, by the way.) Then she grew serious.

“Tonight the voters of Houston have opened the door to history,” she said, standing by her partner of 19 years, Kathy Hubbard, and their three adopted children. “I acknowledge that. I embrace that. I know what this win means to many of us who never thought we could achieve high office.”

With all precincts reporting, Ms. Parker, the city controller, had defeated Mr. Locke 53 percent to 47 percent.

Throughout the campaign, Ms. Parker tried to avoid making an issue of her sexual orientation and emphasized her experience in overseeing the city’s finances. But she began her career as an advocate for gay rights in the 1980s, and it was lost on no one in Houston, a city of 2.2 million people, that her election marked a milestone for gay men and lesbians around the country.

Several smaller cities in other regions have chosen openly gay mayors, among them Providence, R.I., Portland, Ore., and Cambridge, Mass. But Ms. Parker’s success came in a conservative state where voters have outlawed gay marriage and a city where a referendum on granting benefits to same-sex partners of city employees was soundly defeated.

Turnout was light across the city on a rainy, foggy day, with only about 16 percent of registered voters going to the polls.

Ms. Parker’s sexual orientation did not become an issue in the race until after the general election produced no winner and led to a run-off between her and Mr. Locke, who is black and enjoys strong support among African-American voters.

The two candidates differed very little on the issues. Mr. Locke, who is 61, promised to crack down on crime and expand the police department. Ms. Parker, 53, said her experience as controller made her a better candidate to steer the city through the tough financial times it now faces.

The candidates also started slinging stones at one another in final weeks as it became clear neither had a huge advantage in the few polls conducted here. Mr. Locke bashed Ms. Parker as “soft on crime” and suggested she favors tax increases. She portrayed him as nothing more than a lobbyist for developers.

But the ugliest attacks came from a group of black pastors who spoke out against Ms. Parker for what they called her gay agenda and two separate anti-gay advocates who sent out fliers in the mail calling attention to her support from gay groups and to her relationship with her partner. Mr. Locke denied having anything to do with the attacks, but two members of his finance committee gave $40,000 to help finance one of the mailings.

Some national gay-rights groups, meanwhile, came to the aid of Ms. Parker’s campaign with money and volunteers to man telephone banks in a get-out-the-vote effort and to urge her likely supporters to vote.

Political strategists said that to win, Mr. Locke needed to carry a large majority of the black vote, which is usually around a third of the turnout, and to attract significant support from conservative whites, many of them Republicans, who are also about a third of the voting mix here.

The crowd at Ms. Parker’s speech included dozens of young gay men and lesbians who had volunteered on her campaign. Many were elated with the sense of history being made.

“It’s a huge step forward for Houston,” said one of the volunteers, Lindsey Dionne, who is lesbian. “It shows hate will not prevail in this city.”

Robert Shipman, who is gay and worked long hours for Ms. Parker, said: “The diversity in this room, it’s not just gay people, it’s gay, straight, black, white, Jew, Christian, Muslim, every kind of person. It took all of us to get to this point.”

For his part, Mr. Locke was gracious in defeat, calling for unity after what had sometimes been a heated campaign. “We have to all work together to bring our city closer and closer together,” he said.

Ms. Parker appeared to have cobbled together a winning coalition of white liberals and gay people, who were expected to turn out in large numbers.

Rachel Marcus contributed reporting from Houston.

Where was Tayo-D and jeSoul. Texsas of all the places.I thought the Republicans were on a roll after winning NJ and VI.

December 13, 2009
Houston Is Largest City to Elect Openly Gay Mayor
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

HOUSTON — Houston became the largest city in the United States to elect an openly gay mayor on Saturday night, as voters gave a solid victory to the city controller, Annise Parker.

Cheers and dancing erupted at Ms. Parker’s campaign party as her opponent, Gene Locke, a former city attorney, conceded defeat just after 10 p.m. when it became clear he could not overcome her lead.

Twenty minutes later, Ms. Parker appeared before ecstatic supporters at the city’s convention center and then joked that she was the first graduate of Rice University to be elected mayor. (She is, by the way.) Then she grew serious.

“Tonight the voters of Houston have opened the door to history,” she said, standing by her partner of 19 years, Kathy Hubbard, and their three adopted children. “I acknowledge that. I embrace that. I know what this win means to many of us who never thought we could achieve high office.”

With all precincts reporting, Ms. Parker, the city controller, had defeated Mr. Locke 53 percent to 47 percent.

Throughout the campaign, Ms. Parker tried to avoid making an issue of her sexual orientation and emphasized her experience in overseeing the city’s finances. But she began her career as an advocate for gay rights in the 1980s, and it was lost on no one in Houston, a city of 2.2 million people, that her election marked a milestone for gay men and lesbians around the country.

Several smaller cities in other regions have chosen openly gay mayors, among them Providence, R.I., Portland, Ore., and Cambridge, Mass. But Ms. Parker’s success came in a conservative state where voters have outlawed gay marriage and a city where a referendum on granting benefits to same-sex partners of city employees was soundly defeated.

Turnout was light across the city on a rainy, foggy day, with only about 16 percent of registered voters going to the polls.

Ms. Parker’s sexual orientation did not become an issue in the race until after the general election produced no winner and led to a run-off between her and Mr. Locke, who is black and enjoys strong support among African-American voters.

The two candidates differed very little on the issues. Mr. Locke, who is 61, promised to crack down on crime and expand the police department. Ms. Parker, 53, said her experience as controller made her a better candidate to steer the city through the tough financial times it now faces.

The candidates also started slinging stones at one another in final weeks as it became clear neither had a huge advantage in the few polls conducted here. Mr. Locke bashed Ms. Parker as “soft on crime” and suggested she favors tax increases. She portrayed him as nothing more than a lobbyist for developers.

But the ugliest attacks came from a group of black pastors who spoke out against Ms. Parker for what they called her gay agenda and two separate anti-gay advocates who sent out fliers in the mail calling attention to her support from gay groups and to her relationship with her partner. Mr. Locke denied having anything to do with the attacks, but two members of his finance committee gave $40,000 to help finance one of the mailings.

Some national gay-rights groups, meanwhile, came to the aid of Ms. Parker’s campaign with money and volunteers to man telephone banks in a get-out-the-vote effort and to urge her likely supporters to vote.

Political strategists said that to win, Mr. Locke needed to carry a large majority of the black vote, which is usually around a third of the turnout, and to attract significant support from conservative whites, many of them Republicans, who are also about a third of the voting mix here.

The crowd at Ms. Parker’s speech included dozens of young gay men and lesbians who had volunteered on her campaign. Many were elated with the sense of history being made.

“It’s a huge step forward for Houston,” said one of the volunteers, Lindsey Dionne, who is lesbian. “It shows hate will not prevail in this city.”

Robert Shipman, who is gay and worked long hours for Ms. Parker, said: “The diversity in this room, it’s not just gay people, it’s gay, straight, black, white, Jew, Christian, Muslim, every kind of person. It took all of us to get to this point.”

For his part, Mr. Locke was gracious in defeat, calling for unity after what had sometimes been a heated campaign. “We have to all work together to bring our city closer and closer together,” he said.

Ms. Parker appeared to have cobbled together a winning coalition of white liberals and gay people, who were expected to turn out in large numbers.

Rachel Marcus contributed reporting from Houston.

Mugabe endorsed to lead party for another 5 years


[img][/img]


Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe was on Sunday endorsed to lead his ZANU-PF party for another five years and vowed to resist demands by his opponents to reform the country's security forces.

At 85, Mugabe is in the twilight of a political career spanning more than half a century and has led ZANU-PF since the mid 1970s when the party fought a guerrilla war against white minority rule.

But the veteran leader was forced to share power with Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party after losing its parliamentary majority for the first time in March last year.

The coalition has been rocked by differences over how to share power and the MDC is pressing for reform of the security forces it accuses of being used by ZANU-PF to stifle dissent.

"May I state this clearly and categorically, as ZANU-PF the defence of our sovereignty rests with us and with no other. Any manoeuvres to tamper with the forces will never be entertained by us," Mugabe said while closing a ZANU-PF congress.

Many senior officers in the security forces fought in Zimbabwe's war of independence and remain loyal to Mugabe. They have vowed never to recognise Tsvangirai as leader.

ZANU-PF and the MDC are involved in a round of talks to clear outstanding issues of a political deal signed last year.

The MDC wants the central bank governor and attorney general replaced, and party treasurer Roy Bennett and some senior officials sworn-in as deputy agriculture minister and provincial governors, respectively.

ZANU-PF passed a resolution on Saturday rejecting the demands and said, instead, the MDC should call for the removal of Western sanctions and persuade radio stations broadcasting from abroad to stop.

Succession battle

While Mugabe has managed to remain at the helm of ZANU-PF, a raging battle is underway over who will eventually succeed him, threatening the future of a party that had enjoyed uninterrupted rule from independence in 1980 till last year.

ZANU-PF retained Joyce Mujuru, 54, as Mugabe's deputy while party chairman John Nkomo, 75, filled in the vacant second vice president position. He will be sworn in as Zimbabwe's deputy president on Monday.

Mugabe on Friday condemned internal fighting over leadership posts in the party, saying this was "eating up" ZANU-PF but on Saturday the veteran leader said the party had emerged from the congress much stronger.

"We go back much stronger, a better focused party raring to go, to take on the enemy who has sought our ruin through sanctions," Mugabe said.

He accused Western countries of plotting to reverse seizures of white commercial farms to resettle blacks but said they would not succeed.

Good Girl:
Lol. I have always suspected that 'naliakar' is a fraud in that, he/she is not what he/she claims to be. He/she claims to be an Igbo from Enugu, but let me guess SHE is from Western Kenya and HER real name is Ruth Naliaka. No, it's Rose Naliaka. Ooops! Lol!

@Goodgirl

I am back from Kakamega. tell me all about Ingo.

Naliakar is back. I wonder what anyone has been sating about OMO which is not palatable in my absence.

Naliakar is back.

@NoAtheism.

people engaged in a debate don't shout like ill-mannered untethered children. Posting links does not constitute proof because in the current discourse on climate warming either side has a point to put across. For every link "of proof you put out there about the emails, I could more than equalize with contrary info so do not play righteous. On the Russian connection, you can be skeptical as you should when neutral issues such as climate are taken captive by ideological interest. That is the true mark of intelligence.

I asked you a simple question how the incremental emissions of carbon into the atmosphere in the wake of expanding global industrialization factors in the anti-global warming theory. You chose to be mute on that one.

So listen, stop being gratuitous as playing petulance and read some more: here is a much more recent link on the story and there are many more.

Were Russian security services behind the leak of 'Climategate' emails?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1233562/Emails-rocked-climate-change-campaign-leaked-Siberian-closed-city-university-built-KGB.html#
By Will Stewart and Martin Delgado
Last updated at 1:29 PM on 06th December 2009



Suspicions were growing last night that Russian security services were behind the leaking of the notorious British ‘Climategate’ emails which threaten to undermine tomorrow’s Copenhagen global warming summit.

An investigation by The Mail on Sunday has discovered that the explosive hacked emails from the University of East Anglia were leaked via a small web server in the formerly closed city of Tomsk in Siberia.

The leaks scandal has left the scientific community in disarray after claims that key climate change data was manipulated in the run-up to the climate change summit of world leaders.
Sergei Kirpotin

Sergei Kirpotin of Tomsk University warned that the melting of the peat bogs in Siberia is 'an ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climactic warming'

The row erupted when hundreds of messages between scientists at the university’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and their colleagues around the world were placed on the internet along with other documents.

The CRU is internationally recognised as one of the most important sources of information on the rise in global temperatures.

Its data is relied on by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body which co-ordinates the world response to climate change.



But now the CRU’s findings are under suspicion.

The leaked emails appear to show that CRU director Professor Phil Jones and colleagues attempted to manipulate the figures and hide their raw data from researchers with opposing views.

Prof Jones has stepped aside from his post while claims are investigated that he wanted certain papers excluded from the United Nations’ next major assessment of climate science.

Russia – one of the world’s largest producers and users of oil and gas – has a vested interest in opposing sweeping new agreements to cut emissions, which will be discussed by world leaders in Copenhagen tomorrow.

Russia believes current rules are stacked against it, and has threatened to pull the plug on Copenhagen without concessions to Kremlin concerns.

The Mail on Sunday understands that the hundreds of hacked emails were released to the world via a tiny internet server in a red brick building in a snow-clad street in Tomsk.
v

The Tomsk office from which emails may have been leaked

The original internet link was quickly removed after the information spread from it like wildfire on to international websites.

A message written in English accompanied the leaked package of emails. It read: ‘We feel that climate science is too important to be kept under wraps.

'We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.’

Climate-change sceptics in the West seized on the emails as evidence that the books were being cooked by the global-warming lobby.

Stories highlighting the ‘scandal’ began to appear from November 21, three or four days after the information was first released on to the server. Some of the leaked emails date back to March, 1996.

Tomcity – the server – and Tomline, its parent company, were unavailable for comment yesterday.

The firm offers an internet security business to prevent hacking and bugs and the ‘compromising of confidential information’.

Other divisions of the firm are involved in laying the cable which provides high-speed internet access to companies in the Siberian city.

The server is believed to be used mainly by Tomsk State University, one of the leading academic institutions in Russia, and other scientific institutes.

Computer hackers in Tomsk have been used in the past by the Russian secret service (FSB) to shut websites which promote views disliked by Moscow.

Such arrangements provide the Russian government with plausible deniability while using so-called ‘hacker patriots’ to shut down websites.

In 2002, Tomsk students were said to have launched a ‘denial of service’ attack at the Kavkaz-Tsentr portal, a site whose reports about Chechnya angered Russian officials.

The FSB office in Tomsk put out a special Press release saying that what the students had done was a legitimate ‘expression of their position as citizens, one worthy of respect’.

A Russian hacking specialist said last night: ‘There is no hard evidence that the hacking was done from Tomsk, though it might have been.

'There has been speculation the hackers were Russian. It appears to have been a sophisticated and well-run operation, that had a political motive given the timing in relation to Copenhagen.’

And gazeta.ru news website, having received information about the Tomsk server connection, said: ‘Presumably it was Russian hackers who broke into the servers of the university.’

The university said that there was strict security on its server, heightening the theory that an extremely sophisticated hacking operation was carried out to obtain it.

East Anglia University has gone out of its way to promote itself to students from the former Soviet Union. Its website says that 33 Russian students currently study there.

It is not known if they have fallen under suspicion as part of the police investigation.
Tomsk – 2,190 miles east of Moscow – was closed to foreigners during the Soviet era.

Its population of 630,000 includes the secret satellite city of Seversk, formerly known as Tomsk-7 and seven miles to the north, which houses strategic uranium and plutonium plants and remains shut to Westerners.

It was built in the Fifties by 20,000 prisoners from nearby Siberian labour camps.

Today, the city, and especially Seversk, remains closely monitored by the FSB, the successor security service to the Soviet-era KGB.

The city’s academic quarter – some of which uses the server that revealed the climate-change scandal – includes a leading world expert on the subject, Professor Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist of Tomsk University.

He was unavailable yesterday and has not commented on the email controversy.

Previously, in research with academic Judith Marquand from Oxford University, he warned of the risk of the release of billions of tons of methane gas because of the melting of the Siberian peat bogs, seen as being due to global warming.

Kirpotin described the situation as ‘an ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming’.

Russia is the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and lags behind many Western countries in greening its industry.

However, its emissions plunged in the Nineties as its economy collapsed and it now sits on a treasure trove of unused carbon emission permits that could be sold to other countries.

These are due to expire in 2012 with the Kyoto Treaty. The Kremlin wants these to be rolled forward and last week signalled they would not sign a new deal without this, threatening the whole Copenhagen summit.

The crisis caused by the Climategate email row has resulted in the UK’s Met Office being forced to re-examine 160 years’ of climate data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made warming had been undermined by the leaks.

A new three-year analysis of the data will mean the Met Office – which works closely with Prof Jones’s unit – will not be able to declare with complete confidence the extent of global warming trends until the end of 2012.

The Norwich-based university has called in Sir Muir Russell, a former senior civil servant, to investigate the row, which is also the subject of a separate probe by the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Last night, news of the Kremlin connection coincided with Norfolk Police confirming to The Mail on Sunday that it was now ‘investigating criminal offences’ in relation to the data breach.

Norfolk police sources said they were working with ‘other agencies’ on the inquiry. But they were unable to say if these included the British security services MI5 and MI6.

This newspaper has established, however, that Scotland Yard computer experts from its Central e-Crime unit are helping Norfolk officers track down the hacker responsible for the leaks.

A Norfolk Police spokeswoman said last night: ‘Norfolk Constabulary can confirm that it is investigating criminal offences in relation to a data breach at the University of East Anglia (UEA).’

The Mail on Sunday tracked down Professor Ross McKitrick, a world-renowned expert on the economic effects of climate change, who said Prof Jones had tried to stop his findings being published in an influential UN report.

Prof McKitrick concluded that Jones and his colleagues at the CRU had overstated the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on global temperatures by failing to take account of external factors linked to population growth and urbanisation.

The attempt to silence McKitrick was revealed in an email from Jones to a US colleague in 2004, when the UN was preparing for a major report by the IPCC.

After describing McKitrick’s findings as ‘garbage’ and dismissing another researcher’s work as inaccurate, Prof Jones wrote: ‘I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is! Cheers, Phil.’

‘Kevin’ is understood to refer to Dr Kevin Trenberth, a Jones ally and climate analyst at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

A spokesman for the University of East Anglia said last night: ‘A police inquiry is under way.’

Explore more:

@NoAtheism.

people engaged in a debate don't shout like ill-mannered untethered children. Posting links does not constitute proof because in the current discourse on climate warming either side has a point to put across. For every link "of proof you put out there about the emails, I could more than equalize with contrary info so do not play righteous. On the Russian connection, you can be skeptical as you should when neutral issues such as climate are taken captive by ideological interest. That is the true mark of intelligence.

I asked you a simple question how the incremental emissions of carbon into the atmosphere in the wake of expanding global industrialization factors in the anti-global warming theory. You chose to be mute on that one.

So listen, stop being gratuitous as playing petulance and read some more: here is a much more recent link on the story and there are many more.

Were Russian security services behind the leak of 'Climategate' emails?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1233562/Emails-rocked-climate-change-campaign-leaked-Siberian-closed-city-university-built-KGB.html#
By Will Stewart and Martin Delgado
Last updated at 1:29 PM on 06th December 2009



Suspicions were growing last night that Russian security services were behind the leaking of the notorious British ‘Climategate’ emails which threaten to undermine tomorrow’s Copenhagen global warming summit.

An investigation by The Mail on Sunday has discovered that the explosive hacked emails from the University of East Anglia were leaked via a small web server in the formerly closed city of Tomsk in Siberia.

The leaks scandal has left the scientific community in disarray after claims that key climate change data was manipulated in the run-up to the climate change summit of world leaders.
Sergei Kirpotin

Sergei Kirpotin of Tomsk University warned that the melting of the peat bogs in Siberia is 'an ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climactic warming'

The row erupted when hundreds of messages between scientists at the university’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and their colleagues around the world were placed on the internet along with other documents.

The CRU is internationally recognised as one of the most important sources of information on the rise in global temperatures.

Its data is relied on by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body which co-ordinates the world response to climate change.



But now the CRU’s findings are under suspicion.

The leaked emails appear to show that CRU director Professor Phil Jones and colleagues attempted to manipulate the figures and hide their raw data from researchers with opposing views.

Prof Jones has stepped aside from his post while claims are investigated that he wanted certain papers excluded from the United Nations’ next major assessment of climate science.

Russia – one of the world’s largest producers and users of oil and gas – has a vested interest in opposing sweeping new agreements to cut emissions, which will be discussed by world leaders in Copenhagen tomorrow.

Russia believes current rules are stacked against it, and has threatened to pull the plug on Copenhagen without concessions to Kremlin concerns.

The Mail on Sunday understands that the hundreds of hacked emails were released to the world via a tiny internet server in a red brick building in a snow-clad street in Tomsk.
v

The Tomsk office from which emails may have been leaked

The original internet link was quickly removed after the information spread from it like wildfire on to international websites.

A message written in English accompanied the leaked package of emails. It read: ‘We feel that climate science is too important to be kept under wraps.

'We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.’

Climate-change sceptics in the West seized on the emails as evidence that the books were being cooked by the global-warming lobby.

Stories highlighting the ‘scandal’ began to appear from November 21, three or four days after the information was first released on to the server. Some of the leaked emails date back to March, 1996.

Tomcity – the server – and Tomline, its parent company, were unavailable for comment yesterday.

The firm offers an internet security business to prevent hacking and bugs and the ‘compromising of confidential information’.

Other divisions of the firm are involved in laying the cable which provides high-speed internet access to companies in the Siberian city.

The server is believed to be used mainly by Tomsk State University, one of the leading academic institutions in Russia, and other scientific institutes.

Computer hackers in Tomsk have been used in the past by the Russian secret service (FSB) to shut websites which promote views disliked by Moscow.

Such arrangements provide the Russian government with plausible deniability while using so-called ‘hacker patriots’ to shut down websites.

In 2002, Tomsk students were said to have launched a ‘denial of service’ attack at the Kavkaz-Tsentr portal, a site whose reports about Chechnya angered Russian officials.

The FSB office in Tomsk put out a special Press release saying that what the students had done was a legitimate ‘expression of their position as citizens, one worthy of respect’.

A Russian hacking specialist said last night: ‘There is no hard evidence that the hacking was done from Tomsk, though it might have been.

'There has been speculation the hackers were Russian. It appears to have been a sophisticated and well-run operation, that had a political motive given the timing in relation to Copenhagen.’

And gazeta.ru news website, having received information about the Tomsk server connection, said: ‘Presumably it was Russian hackers who broke into the servers of the university.’

The university said that there was strict security on its server, heightening the theory that an extremely sophisticated hacking operation was carried out to obtain it.

East Anglia University has gone out of its way to promote itself to students from the former Soviet Union. Its website says that 33 Russian students currently study there.

It is not known if they have fallen under suspicion as part of the police investigation.
Tomsk – 2,190 miles east of Moscow – was closed to foreigners during the Soviet era.

Its population of 630,000 includes the secret satellite city of Seversk, formerly known as Tomsk-7 and seven miles to the north, which houses strategic uranium and plutonium plants and remains shut to Westerners.

It was built in the Fifties by 20,000 prisoners from nearby Siberian labour camps.

Today, the city, and especially Seversk, remains closely monitored by the FSB, the successor security service to the Soviet-era KGB.

The city’s academic quarter – some of which uses the server that revealed the climate-change scandal – includes a leading world expert on the subject, Professor Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist of Tomsk University.

He was unavailable yesterday and has not commented on the email controversy.

Previously, in research with academic Judith Marquand from Oxford University, he warned of the risk of the release of billions of tons of methane gas because of the melting of the Siberian peat bogs, seen as being due to global warming.

Kirpotin described the situation as ‘an ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming’.

Russia is the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and lags behind many Western countries in greening its industry.

However, its emissions plunged in the Nineties as its economy collapsed and it now sits on a treasure trove of unused carbon emission permits that could be sold to other countries.

These are due to expire in 2012 with the Kyoto Treaty. The Kremlin wants these to be rolled forward and last week signalled they would not sign a new deal without this, threatening the whole Copenhagen summit.

The crisis caused by the Climategate email row has resulted in the UK’s Met Office being forced to re-examine 160 years’ of climate data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made warming had been undermined by the leaks.

A new three-year analysis of the data will mean the Met Office – which works closely with Prof Jones’s unit – will not be able to declare with complete confidence the extent of global warming trends until the end of 2012.

The Norwich-based university has called in Sir Muir Russell, a former senior civil servant, to investigate the row, which is also the subject of a separate probe by the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Last night, news of the Kremlin connection coincided with Norfolk Police confirming to The Mail on Sunday that it was now ‘investigating criminal offences’ in relation to the data breach.

Norfolk police sources said they were working with ‘other agencies’ on the inquiry. But they were unable to say if these included the British security services MI5 and MI6.

This newspaper has established, however, that Scotland Yard computer experts from its Central e-Crime unit are helping Norfolk officers track down the hacker responsible for the leaks.

A Norfolk Police spokeswoman said last night: ‘Norfolk Constabulary can confirm that it is investigating criminal offences in relation to a data breach at the University of East Anglia (UEA).’

The Mail on Sunday tracked down Professor Ross McKitrick, a world-renowned expert on the economic effects of climate change, who said Prof Jones had tried to stop his findings being published in an influential UN report.

Prof McKitrick concluded that Jones and his colleagues at the CRU had overstated the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on global temperatures by failing to take account of external factors linked to population growth and urbanisation.

The attempt to silence McKitrick was revealed in an email from Jones to a US colleague in 2004, when the UN was preparing for a major report by the IPCC.

After describing McKitrick’s findings as ‘garbage’ and dismissing another researcher’s work as inaccurate, Prof Jones wrote: ‘I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is! Cheers, Phil.’

‘Kevin’ is understood to refer to Dr Kevin Trenberth, a Jones ally and climate analyst at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

A spokesman for the University of East Anglia said last night: ‘A police inquiry is under way.’

Explore more:

@NoAtheism.

people engaged in a debate don't shout like ill-mannered untethered children. Posting links does not constitute proof because in the current discourse on climate warming either side has a point to put across. For every link "of proof you put out there about the emails, I could more than equalize with contrary info so do not play righteous. On the Russian connection, you can be skeptical as you should when neutral issues such as climate are taken captive by ideological interest. That is the true mark of intelligence.

I asked you a simple question how the incremental emissions of carbon into the atmosphere in the wake of expanding global industrialization factors in the anti-global warming theory. You chose to be mute on that one.

So listen, stop being gratuitous as playing petulance and read some more: here is a much more recent link on the story and there are many more.

Were Russian security services behind the leak of 'Climategate' emails?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1233562/Emails-rocked-climate-change-campaign-leaked-Siberian-closed-city-university-built-KGB.html#
By Will Stewart and Martin Delgado
Last updated at 1:29 PM on 06th December 2009



Suspicions were growing last night that Russian security services were behind the leaking of the notorious British ‘Climategate’ emails which threaten to undermine tomorrow’s Copenhagen global warming summit.

An investigation by The Mail on Sunday has discovered that the explosive hacked emails from the University of East Anglia were leaked via a small web server in the formerly closed city of Tomsk in Siberia.

The leaks scandal has left the scientific community in disarray after claims that key climate change data was manipulated in the run-up to the climate change summit of world leaders.
Sergei Kirpotin

Sergei Kirpotin of Tomsk University warned that the melting of the peat bogs in Siberia is 'an ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climactic warming'

The row erupted when hundreds of messages between scientists at the university’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and their colleagues around the world were placed on the internet along with other documents.

The CRU is internationally recognised as one of the most important sources of information on the rise in global temperatures.

Its data is relied on by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body which co-ordinates the world response to climate change.



But now the CRU’s findings are under suspicion.

The leaked emails appear to show that CRU director Professor Phil Jones and colleagues attempted to manipulate the figures and hide their raw data from researchers with opposing views.

Prof Jones has stepped aside from his post while claims are investigated that he wanted certain papers excluded from the United Nations’ next major assessment of climate science.

Russia – one of the world’s largest producers and users of oil and gas – has a vested interest in opposing sweeping new agreements to cut emissions, which will be discussed by world leaders in Copenhagen tomorrow.

Russia believes current rules are stacked against it, and has threatened to pull the plug on Copenhagen without concessions to Kremlin concerns.

The Mail on Sunday understands that the hundreds of hacked emails were released to the world via a tiny internet server in a red brick building in a snow-clad street in Tomsk.
v

The Tomsk office from which emails may have been leaked

The original internet link was quickly removed after the information spread from it like wildfire on to international websites.

A message written in English accompanied the leaked package of emails. It read: ‘We feel that climate science is too important to be kept under wraps.

'We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.’

Climate-change sceptics in the West seized on the emails as evidence that the books were being cooked by the global-warming lobby.

Stories highlighting the ‘scandal’ began to appear from November 21, three or four days after the information was first released on to the server. Some of the leaked emails date back to March, 1996.

Tomcity – the server – and Tomline, its parent company, were unavailable for comment yesterday.

The firm offers an internet security business to prevent hacking and bugs and the ‘compromising of confidential information’.

Other divisions of the firm are involved in laying the cable which provides high-speed internet access to companies in the Siberian city.

The server is believed to be used mainly by Tomsk State University, one of the leading academic institutions in Russia, and other scientific institutes.

Computer hackers in Tomsk have been used in the past by the Russian secret service (FSB) to shut websites which promote views disliked by Moscow.

Such arrangements provide the Russian government with plausible deniability while using so-called ‘hacker patriots’ to shut down websites.

In 2002, Tomsk students were said to have launched a ‘denial of service’ attack at the Kavkaz-Tsentr portal, a site whose reports about Chechnya angered Russian officials.

The FSB office in Tomsk put out a special Press release saying that what the students had done was a legitimate ‘expression of their position as citizens, one worthy of respect’.

A Russian hacking specialist said last night: ‘There is no hard evidence that the hacking was done from Tomsk, though it might have been.

'There has been speculation the hackers were Russian. It appears to have been a sophisticated and well-run operation, that had a political motive given the timing in relation to Copenhagen.’

And gazeta.ru news website, having received information about the Tomsk server connection, said: ‘Presumably it was Russian hackers who broke into the servers of the university.’

The university said that there was strict security on its server, heightening the theory that an extremely sophisticated hacking operation was carried out to obtain it.

East Anglia University has gone out of its way to promote itself to students from the former Soviet Union. Its website says that 33 Russian students currently study there.

It is not known if they have fallen under suspicion as part of the police investigation.
Tomsk – 2,190 miles east of Moscow – was closed to foreigners during the Soviet era.

Its population of 630,000 includes the secret satellite city of Seversk, formerly known as Tomsk-7 and seven miles to the north, which houses strategic uranium and plutonium plants and remains shut to Westerners.

It was built in the Fifties by 20,000 prisoners from nearby Siberian labour camps.

Today, the city, and especially Seversk, remains closely monitored by the FSB, the successor security service to the Soviet-era KGB.

The city’s academic quarter – some of which uses the server that revealed the climate-change scandal – includes a leading world expert on the subject, Professor Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist of Tomsk University.

He was unavailable yesterday and has not commented on the email controversy.

Previously, in research with academic Judith Marquand from Oxford University, he warned of the risk of the release of billions of tons of methane gas because of the melting of the Siberian peat bogs, seen as being due to global warming.

Kirpotin described the situation as ‘an ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming’.

Russia is the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and lags behind many Western countries in greening its industry.

However, its emissions plunged in the Nineties as its economy collapsed and it now sits on a treasure trove of unused carbon emission permits that could be sold to other countries.

These are due to expire in 2012 with the Kyoto Treaty. The Kremlin wants these to be rolled forward and last week signalled they would not sign a new deal without this, threatening the whole Copenhagen summit.

The crisis caused by the Climategate email row has resulted in the UK’s Met Office being forced to re-examine 160 years’ of climate data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made warming had been undermined by the leaks.

A new three-year analysis of the data will mean the Met Office – which works closely with Prof Jones’s unit – will not be able to declare with complete confidence the extent of global warming trends until the end of 2012.

The Norwich-based university has called in Sir Muir Russell, a former senior civil servant, to investigate the row, which is also the subject of a separate probe by the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Last night, news of the Kremlin connection coincided with Norfolk Police confirming to The Mail on Sunday that it was now ‘investigating criminal offences’ in relation to the data breach.

Norfolk police sources said they were working with ‘other agencies’ on the inquiry. But they were unable to say if these included the British security services MI5 and MI6.

This newspaper has established, however, that Scotland Yard computer experts from its Central e-Crime unit are helping Norfolk officers track down the hacker responsible for the leaks.

A Norfolk Police spokeswoman said last night: ‘Norfolk Constabulary can confirm that it is investigating criminal offences in relation to a data breach at the University of East Anglia (UEA).’

The Mail on Sunday tracked down Professor Ross McKitrick, a world-renowned expert on the economic effects of climate change, who said Prof Jones had tried to stop his findings being published in an influential UN report.

Prof McKitrick concluded that Jones and his colleagues at the CRU had overstated the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on global temperatures by failing to take account of external factors linked to population growth and urbanisation.

The attempt to silence McKitrick was revealed in an email from Jones to a US colleague in 2004, when the UN was preparing for a major report by the IPCC.

After describing McKitrick’s findings as ‘garbage’ and dismissing another researcher’s work as inaccurate, Prof Jones wrote: ‘I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is! Cheers, Phil.’

‘Kevin’ is understood to refer to Dr Kevin Trenberth, a Jones ally and climate analyst at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

A spokesman for the University of East Anglia said last night: ‘A police inquiry is under way.’

Explore more:

@NoAtheism.

People engaged in a debate don't shout like ill-mannered untethered children. Posting links does not constitute proof because in the current discourse on climate warming either side has a point to put across. For every link "of proof you put out there about the emails, I could more than equalize with contrary info so do not play righteous. On the Russian connection, you can be skeptical as you should when neutral issues such as climate are taken captive by ideological interest. That is the true mark of intelligence.

I asked you a simple question how the incremental emissions of carbon into the atmosphere in the wake of expanding global industrialization factors in the anti-global warming theory. You chose to be mute on that one.

So listen, stop being gratuitous as playing petulance and read some more: here is a much more recent link on the story and there are many more.

Were Russian security services behind the leak of 'Climategate' emails?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1233562/Emails-rocked-climate-change-campaign-leaked-Siberian-closed-city-university-built-KGB.html#
By Will Stewart and Martin Delgado
Last updated at 1:29 PM on 06th December 2009



Suspicions were growing last night that Russian security services were behind the leaking of the notorious British ‘Climategate’ emails which threaten to undermine tomorrow’s Copenhagen global warming summit.

An investigation by The Mail on Sunday has discovered that the explosive hacked emails from the University of East Anglia were leaked via a small web server in the formerly closed city of Tomsk in Siberia.

The leaks scandal has left the scientific community in disarray after claims that key climate change data was manipulated in the run-up to the climate change summit of world leaders.
Sergei Kirpotin

Sergei Kirpotin of Tomsk University warned that the melting of the peat bogs in Siberia is 'an ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climactic warming'

The row erupted when hundreds of messages between scientists at the university’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and their colleagues around the world were placed on the internet along with other documents.

The CRU is internationally recognised as one of the most important sources of information on the rise in global temperatures.

Its data is relied on by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body which co-ordinates the world response to climate change.



But now the CRU’s findings are under suspicion.

The leaked emails appear to show that CRU director Professor Phil Jones and colleagues attempted to manipulate the figures and hide their raw data from researchers with opposing views.

Prof Jones has stepped aside from his post while claims are investigated that he wanted certain papers excluded from the United Nations’ next major assessment of climate science.

Russia – one of the world’s largest producers and users of oil and gas – has a vested interest in opposing sweeping new agreements to cut emissions, which will be discussed by world leaders in Copenhagen tomorrow.

Russia believes current rules are stacked against it, and has threatened to pull the plug on Copenhagen without concessions to Kremlin concerns.

The Mail on Sunday understands that the hundreds of hacked emails were released to the world via a tiny internet server in a red brick building in a snow-clad street in Tomsk.
v

The Tomsk office from which emails may have been leaked

The original internet link was quickly removed after the information spread from it like wildfire on to international websites.

A message written in English accompanied the leaked package of emails. It read: ‘We feel that climate science is too important to be kept under wraps.

'We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.’

Climate-change sceptics in the West seized on the emails as evidence that the books were being cooked by the global-warming lobby.

Stories highlighting the ‘scandal’ began to appear from November 21, three or four days after the information was first released on to the server. Some of the leaked emails date back to March, 1996.

Tomcity – the server – and Tomline, its parent company, were unavailable for comment yesterday.

The firm offers an internet security business to prevent hacking and bugs and the ‘compromising of confidential information’.

Other divisions of the firm are involved in laying the cable which provides high-speed internet access to companies in the Siberian city.

The server is believed to be used mainly by Tomsk State University, one of the leading academic institutions in Russia, and other scientific institutes.

Computer hackers in Tomsk have been used in the past by the Russian secret service (FSB) to shut websites which promote views disliked by Moscow.

Such arrangements provide the Russian government with plausible deniability while using so-called ‘hacker patriots’ to shut down websites.

In 2002, Tomsk students were said to have launched a ‘denial of service’ attack at the Kavkaz-Tsentr portal, a site whose reports about Chechnya angered Russian officials.

The FSB office in Tomsk put out a special Press release saying that what the students had done was a legitimate ‘expression of their position as citizens, one worthy of respect’.

A Russian hacking specialist said last night: ‘There is no hard evidence that the hacking was done from Tomsk, though it might have been.

'There has been speculation the hackers were Russian. It appears to have been a sophisticated and well-run operation, that had a political motive given the timing in relation to Copenhagen.’

And gazeta.ru news website, having received information about the Tomsk server connection, said: ‘Presumably it was Russian hackers who broke into the servers of the university.’

The university said that there was strict security on its server, heightening the theory that an extremely sophisticated hacking operation was carried out to obtain it.

East Anglia University has gone out of its way to promote itself to students from the former Soviet Union. Its website says that 33 Russian students currently study there.

It is not known if they have fallen under suspicion as part of the police investigation.
Tomsk – 2,190 miles east of Moscow – was closed to foreigners during the Soviet era.

Its population of 630,000 includes the secret satellite city of Seversk, formerly known as Tomsk-7 and seven miles to the north, which houses strategic uranium and plutonium plants and remains shut to Westerners.

It was built in the Fifties by 20,000 prisoners from nearby Siberian labour camps.

Today, the city, and especially Seversk, remains closely monitored by the FSB, the successor security service to the Soviet-era KGB.

The city’s academic quarter – some of which uses the server that revealed the climate-change scandal – includes a leading world expert on the subject, Professor Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist of Tomsk University.

He was unavailable yesterday and has not commented on the email controversy.

Previously, in research with academic Judith Marquand from Oxford University, he warned of the risk of the release of billions of tons of methane gas because of the melting of the Siberian peat bogs, seen as being due to global warming.

Kirpotin described the situation as ‘an ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming’.

Russia is the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and lags behind many Western countries in greening its industry.

However, its emissions plunged in the Nineties as its economy collapsed and it now sits on a treasure trove of unused carbon emission permits that could be sold to other countries.

These are due to expire in 2012 with the Kyoto Treaty. The Kremlin wants these to be rolled forward and last week signalled they would not sign a new deal without this, threatening the whole Copenhagen summit.

The crisis caused by the Climategate email row has resulted in the UK’s Met Office being forced to re-examine 160 years’ of climate data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made warming had been undermined by the leaks.

A new three-year analysis of the data will mean the Met Office – which works closely with Prof Jones’s unit – will not be able to declare with complete confidence the extent of global warming trends until the end of 2012.

The Norwich-based university has called in Sir Muir Russell, a former senior civil servant, to investigate the row, which is also the subject of a separate probe by the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Last night, news of the Kremlin connection coincided with Norfolk Police confirming to The Mail on Sunday that it was now ‘investigating criminal offences’ in relation to the data breach.

Norfolk police sources said they were working with ‘other agencies’ on the inquiry. But they were unable to say if these included the British security services MI5 and MI6.

This newspaper has established, however, that Scotland Yard computer experts from its Central e-Crime unit are helping Norfolk officers track down the hacker responsible for the leaks.

A Norfolk Police spokeswoman said last night: ‘Norfolk Constabulary can confirm that it is investigating criminal offences in relation to a data breach at the University of East Anglia (UEA).’

The Mail on Sunday tracked down Professor Ross McKitrick, a world-renowned expert on the economic effects of climate change, who said Prof Jones had tried to stop his findings being published in an influential UN report.

Prof McKitrick concluded that Jones and his colleagues at the CRU had overstated the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on global temperatures by failing to take account of external factors linked to population growth and urbanisation.

The attempt to silence McKitrick was revealed in an email from Jones to a US colleague in 2004, when the UN was preparing for a major report by the IPCC.

After describing McKitrick’s findings as ‘garbage’ and dismissing another researcher’s work as inaccurate, Prof Jones wrote: ‘I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is! Cheers, Phil.’

‘Kevin’ is understood to refer to Dr Kevin Trenberth, a Jones ally and climate analyst at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

A spokesman for the University of East Anglia said last night: ‘A police inquiry is under way.’

Explore more:

No2Atheism:
image 2

I have carefully written and posted a rejoinder twice to your misplaced righteousness two postings above. For some reason each time I press to post I get a statement that the thread is locked. When I raise a simple statement such as this, it goes through. Until such a time that I am able to get my rejoinder through, I will assume non existence of you two last postings okay? A dialogue has to be a dialogue-twain and twain.

Why is the moderator locking out my rejoinder in this topic

No2Atheism:
http://www.australianclimatemadness.com/?p=1557

No Atheism.

[people engaged in a debate don't shout like ill-mannered untethered children. Posting links does not constitute proof because in the current discourse on climate warming either side has a point to put across. For every link "of proof you put out there about the emails, I could more than equalize with contrary info so do not play righteous. On the Russian connection, you can be skeptical as you should when neutral issues such as climate are taken captive by ideological interest. That is the true mark of intelligence.

I asked you a simple question how the incremental emissions of carbon into the atmosphere in the wake of expanding global industrialization factors in the anti-global warming theory. You chose to be mute on that one.

So listen, stop being gratuitous as playing petulance and read some more: here is a much more recent link on the story and there are many more.

Were Russian security services behind the leak of 'Climategate' emails?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1233562/Emails-rocked-climate-change-campaign-leaked-Siberian-closed-city-university-built-KGB.html#
By Will Stewart and Martin Delgado
Last updated at 1:29 PM on 06th December 2009



Suspicions were growing last night that Russian security services were behind the leaking of the notorious British ‘Climategate’ emails which threaten to undermine tomorrow’s Copenhagen global warming summit.

An investigation by The Mail on Sunday has discovered that the explosive hacked emails from the University of East Anglia were leaked via a small web server in the formerly closed city of Tomsk in Siberia.

The leaks scandal has left the scientific community in disarray after claims that key climate change data was manipulated in the run-up to the climate change summit of world leaders.
Sergei Kirpotin

Sergei Kirpotin of Tomsk University warned that the melting of the peat bogs in Siberia is 'an ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climactic warming'

The row erupted when hundreds of messages between scientists at the university’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and their colleagues around the world were placed on the internet along with other documents.

The CRU is internationally recognised as one of the most important sources of information on the rise in global temperatures.

Its data is relied on by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body which co-ordinates the world response to climate change.



But now the CRU’s findings are under suspicion.

The leaked emails appear to show that CRU director Professor Phil Jones and colleagues attempted to manipulate the figures and hide their raw data from researchers with opposing views.

Prof Jones has stepped aside from his post while claims are investigated that he wanted certain papers excluded from the United Nations’ next major assessment of climate science.

Russia – one of the world’s largest producers and users of oil and gas – has a vested interest in opposing sweeping new agreements to cut emissions, which will be discussed by world leaders in Copenhagen tomorrow.

Russia believes current rules are stacked against it, and has threatened to pull the plug on Copenhagen without concessions to Kremlin concerns.

The Mail on Sunday understands that the hundreds of hacked emails were released to the world via a tiny internet server in a red brick building in a snow-clad street in Tomsk.
v

The Tomsk office from which emails may have been leaked

The original internet link was quickly removed after the information spread from it like wildfire on to international websites.

A message written in English accompanied the leaked package of emails. It read: ‘We feel that climate science is too important to be kept under wraps.

'We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.’

Climate-change sceptics in the West seized on the emails as evidence that the books were being cooked by the global-warming lobby.

Stories highlighting the ‘scandal’ began to appear from November 21, three or four days after the information was first released on to the server. Some of the leaked emails date back to March, 1996.

Tomcity – the server – and Tomline, its parent company, were unavailable for comment yesterday.

The firm offers an internet security business to prevent hacking and bugs and the ‘compromising of confidential information’.

Other divisions of the firm are involved in laying the cable which provides high-speed internet access to companies in the Siberian city.

The server is believed to be used mainly by Tomsk State University, one of the leading academic institutions in Russia, and other scientific institutes.

Computer hackers in Tomsk have been used in the past by the Russian secret service (FSB) to shut websites which promote views disliked by Moscow.

Such arrangements provide the Russian government with plausible deniability while using so-called ‘hacker patriots’ to shut down websites.

In 2002, Tomsk students were said to have launched a ‘denial of service’ attack at the Kavkaz-Tsentr portal, a site whose reports about Chechnya angered Russian officials.

The FSB office in Tomsk put out a special Press release saying that what the students had done was a legitimate ‘expression of their position as citizens, one worthy of respect’.

A Russian hacking specialist said last night: ‘There is no hard evidence that the hacking was done from Tomsk, though it might have been.

'There has been speculation the hackers were Russian. It appears to have been a sophisticated and well-run operation, that had a political motive given the timing in relation to Copenhagen.’

And gazeta.ru news website, having received information about the Tomsk server connection, said: ‘Presumably it was Russian hackers who broke into the servers of the university.’

The university said that there was strict security on its server, heightening the theory that an extremely sophisticated hacking operation was carried out to obtain it.

East Anglia University has gone out of its way to promote itself to students from the former Soviet Union. Its website says that 33 Russian students currently study there.

It is not known if they have fallen under suspicion as part of the police investigation.
Tomsk – 2,190 miles east of Moscow – was closed to foreigners during the Soviet era.

Its population of 630,000 includes the secret satellite city of Seversk, formerly known as Tomsk-7 and seven miles to the north, which houses strategic uranium and plutonium plants and remains shut to Westerners.

It was built in the Fifties by 20,000 prisoners from nearby Siberian labour camps.

Today, the city, and especially Seversk, remains closely monitored by the FSB, the successor security service to the Soviet-era KGB.

The city’s academic quarter – some of which uses the server that revealed the climate-change scandal – includes a leading world expert on the subject, Professor Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist of Tomsk University.

He was unavailable yesterday and has not commented on the email controversy.

Previously, in research with academic Judith Marquand from Oxford University, he warned of the risk of the release of billions of tons of methane gas because of the melting of the Siberian peat bogs, seen as being due to global warming.

Kirpotin described the situation as ‘an ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming’.

Russia is the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and lags behind many Western countries in greening its industry.

However, its emissions plunged in the Nineties as its economy collapsed and it now sits on a treasure trove of unused carbon emission permits that could be sold to other countries.

These are due to expire in 2012 with the Kyoto Treaty. The Kremlin wants these to be rolled forward and last week signalled they would not sign a new deal without this, threatening the whole Copenhagen summit.

The crisis caused by the Climategate email row has resulted in the UK’s Met Office being forced to re-examine 160 years’ of climate data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made warming had been undermined by the leaks.

A new three-year analysis of the data will mean the Met Office – which works closely with Prof Jones’s unit – will not be able to declare with complete confidence the extent of global warming trends until the end of 2012.

The Norwich-based university has called in Sir Muir Russell, a former senior civil servant, to investigate the row, which is also the subject of a separate probe by the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Last night, news of the Kremlin connection coincided with Norfolk Police confirming to The Mail on Sunday that it was now ‘investigating criminal offences’ in relation to the data breach.

Norfolk police sources said they were working with ‘other agencies’ on the inquiry. But they were unable to say if these included the British security services MI5 and MI6.

This newspaper has established, however, that Scotland Yard computer experts from its Central e-Crime unit are helping Norfolk officers track down the hacker responsible for the leaks.

A Norfolk Police spokeswoman said last night: ‘Norfolk Constabulary can confirm that it is investigating criminal offences in relation to a data breach at the University of East Anglia (UEA).’

The Mail on Sunday tracked down Professor Ross McKitrick, a world-renowned expert on the economic effects of climate change, who said Prof Jones had tried to stop his findings being published in an influential UN report.

Prof McKitrick concluded that Jones and his colleagues at the CRU had overstated the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on global temperatures by failing to take account of external factors linked to population growth and urbanisation.

The attempt to silence McKitrick was revealed in an email from Jones to a US colleague in 2004, when the UN was preparing for a major report by the IPCC.

After describing McKitrick’s findings as ‘garbage’ and dismissing another researcher’s work as inaccurate, Prof Jones wrote: ‘I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is! Cheers, Phil.’

‘Kevin’ is understood to refer to Dr Kevin Trenberth, a Jones ally and climate analyst at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

A spokesman for the University of East Anglia said last night: ‘A police inquiry is under way.’

Explore more:

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1233562/Emails-rocked-climate-change-campaign-leaked-Siberian-closed-city-university-built-KGB.html##ixzz0ZEtMQMMq

yeswecan:
Why are they scared of the debate? the whole global warming project has been religionised to the extend opposer s are treated as extremist, I remember when 30 thousand scientists (9,000 PHD inclusive) sued for an open debate and they were turned down. Hm this is indeed another conspiracy theory,

No Atheism
The leaked emails are a Russian design to counter any changes that might cap emission rates. They only tell part of the story.

Now that Ini Edo has successfully produced a movie, it behooves us to ask whether or not Genny has done a similar thing? She is a trail blazer you know.

Billygoat:
Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after 'Danish text' leak

Developing countries react furiously to leaked draft agreement that would hand more power to rich nations, sideline the UN's negotiating role and abandon the Kyoto protocol



The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN's role in all future climate change negotiations.


The document is also being interpreted by developing countries as setting unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries in 2050; meaning that people in rich countries would be permitted to emit nearly twice as much under the proposals.


The so-called Danish text, a secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as "the circle of commitment" – but understood to include the UK, US and Denmark [where's Russia?] – has only been shown to a handful of countries since it was finalised this week.


The agreement, leaked to the Guardian, is a departure from the Kyoto protocol's principle that rich nations, which have emitted the bulk of the CO2, should take on firm and binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, while poorer nations were not compelled to act. The draft hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank; would abandon the Kyoto protocol – the only legally binding treaty that the world has on emissions reductions; and would make any money to help poor countries adapt to climate change dependent on them taking a range of actions.


The document was described last night by one senior diplomat as "a very dangerous document for developing countries. It is a fundamental reworking of the UN balance of obligations. It is to be superimposed without discussion on the talks".


A confidential analysis of the text by developing countries also seen by the Guardian shows deep unease over details of the text. In particular, it is understood to:

• Force developing countries to agree to specific emission cuts and measures that were not part of the original UN agreement;
• Divide poor countries further by creating a new category of developing countries called "the most vulnerable";
• Weaken the UN's role in handling climate finance;
• Not allow poor countries to emit more than 1.44 tonnes of carbon per person by 2050, while allowing rich countries to emit 2.67 tonnes.


Developing countries that have seen the text are understood to be furious that it is being promoted by rich countries without their knowledge and without discussion in the negotiations.


"It is being done in secret. Clearly the intention is to get [Barack] Obama and the leaders of other rich countries to muscle it through when they arrive next week. It effectively is the end of the UN process," said one diplomat, who asked to remain nameless.


Antonio Hill, climate policy adviser for Oxfam International, said: "This is only a draft but it highlights the risk that when the big countries come together, the small ones get hurting. On every count the emission cuts need to be scaled up. It allows too many loopholes and does not suggest anything like the 40% cuts that science is saying is needed."

Hill continued: "It proposes a green fund to be run by a board but the big risk is that it will run by the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility [a partnership of 10 agencies including the World Bank and the UN Environment Programme] and not the UN. That would be a step backwards, and it tries to put constraints on developing countries when none were negotiated in earlier UN climate talks."


The text was intended by Denmark and rich countries to be a working framework, which would be adapted by countries over the next week. It is particularly inflammatory because it sidelines the UN negotiating process and suggests that rich countries are desperate for world leaders to have a text to work from when they arrive next week.


Few numbers or figures are included in the text because these would be filled in later by world leaders. However, it seeks to hold temperature rises to 2C and mentions the sum of $10bn a year to help poor countries adapt to climate change from 2012-15.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/08/copenhagen-climate-summit-disarray-danish-text

Billy Goat
What a name

At some point, one has to seriously consider the array of covert ways through which the West, doubling up as the North tries to maintain power asymmetries into perpetuity. Recalling Friedman's The World is Flat, it is expected that the equalizing processes of the global community as carried out through the UN and other unilateral agencies, is not what the industrialized North wishes for and so such a conspiracy is to be expected.

No2Atheism:
Is Global Warming a Fraud - YES

Is Earth's Climate changing - YES

Why is it changing - NATURAL CYCLE THAT HAS SIGNIFICANTLY LITTLE OR NOTHING TO DO WITH HUMANS

Do you mean it also changed even when we did not have the kind of technologies we have today - YES

Is Sea level possibly rising - YES

Who is causing it - NO

Is it Humans - NO

What is causing it - THE SUN

What is the evidence for this - CLIMATE CHANGE IS ALSO OCCURING ON A FEW OTHER PLANETS IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM AND THERE ARE SCIENTIFIC DATA COLLECTED AS REGARDS THE EFFECT OF THE SUN

Is there evironmental pollution - YES

Is pollution the same thing as Global Warming - NO 

So why is there Global Warming Conference - CAUSE ITS ALL ABOUT MONEY I.E. CARBON TAX AND ITS ALSO A MEANS TO STIFFLE THE DEVELOPMENT OF MOST NON-EUROPEAN DOMINATED COUNTRIES.

Is Global Temperatures increasing - NO IT IS NOT INCREASING

Is the email scandal about Global Warming true - YES IT IS

So what is the big deal about the email scandal - ITS A BIG DEAL CUS THE LOCATION OF THE EMAIL SCANDAL IS ALSO THE SAME LOCATION PROVIDING A SIGNIFICANT SOURCE OF THE DATA USED TO SUPPORT GLOBAL WARMING.

Are there simple ideas about Global Temperature variation - YES


http://www.longrangeweather.com/

http://www.longrangeweather.com/global_temperatures.htm

The chart and supportive arguments are a strong testament to the so called natural climatic cycles in recorded human history. On that score, I lack the confidence for an equally informed rebuttal-at least for now. What I wish to know from you is whether or not the cycles you graphically present above were, at any one time, interrupted by the injection into the atmosphere of such vast quantities of carbon emissions as obtains in the current dispensation. Is it possible that the sense of immediacy of global warming is contingent upon a new element injected into Earth's atmosphere in unprecedented proportion. If so , does it render the substance of the data you present null?

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The buzz in Hollywood after the shooting of IJE is that everyone (producers and directors) is asking in whispers, "who is that actor? referring to OMO. Give it a little more time you will hear great things with this lady in Hollywood.

http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/afp-south-africa-jennifer-hudson.html
South African Actors 'Want Hudson Out of Mandela Film'
JOHANNESBURG (AFP) · December 7, 2009

South African actors want to stop Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson from playing Winnie Madikizela-Mandela in a new film on the ex-wife of the nation's first black president, reports said Monday.

The Creative Workers Union of South Africa said using foreign actors to tell the country's stories undermined efforts to develop the national film industry.

"It can't happen that we want to develop our own Hollywood and yet bring in imports," the union's president Mabutho Sithole said in The Citizen newspaper.

"This decision must be reversed, it must be stopped now," union secretary general Oupa Lebogo said in The Times. "If the matter doesn't come up for discussion, we will push for a moratorium to be placed on the film."

Hudson, who scooped a best supporting actress Oscar in 2007 for the musical "Dreamgirls", landed the role of Madikizela-Mandela last month.

The film will be directed by South African film-maker Darrell J. Roodt, whose films include "Cry, The Beloved Country" and "Sarafina."

The criticism comes just days before the opening of the Clint Eastwood film "Invictus", a drama about Nelson Mandela and South Africa's 1995 rugby World Cup victory which united the nation.
Morgan Freeman in 'Invictus'

Morgan Freeman plays the president and Matt Damon is the rugby team captain.

Madikizela-Mandela campaigned tirelessly for her husband's release during his 27-year imprisonment in the apartheid era.

However, her image was tarnished by a series of scandals including her links to the kidnap and murder of a young activist and a 2003 conviction for fraud.

She separated from Nelson Mandela in 1992, two years after his release.

Considering Nigeria's population. We should be ashamed at that position. Who is good with maths to tel us what percentage of Nigeria's population that represents compared to the rest. And you say you are a sleeping giant.

yeswecan:
Hey ! forget about that Copenhagen summit global warming is all fraud.

Really. Didn't you just learn today that the Maldives may soon be fully under water. Is that fraud too. Don't go the ultra Evangelical conservative way. it is wrong and UN-Godly abi.

NKENNA SHOULD HAVE WON INSTEAD
WAS SHE NOT THE TRUE FACE OF NIGERIA IN BBA?

What is the degree of Genny's involvement in non English Nollywood movies especially Igbo ones? She must be great in those one going by how good she is in the English variants.