Could this mark the END of Israeli expansion into Palestine? McDonald's refuses to operate in West Bank settlement

The West Bank Jewish settlement of Ariel is seen in this Sept. 20, 2010 aerial photo. (AP / Ariel Schalit)


 Tia Goldenberg, The Associated Press
Published Thursday, June 27, 2013 2:46PM EDT

JERUSALEM -- The McDonald's restaurant chain refused to open a branch in a West Bank Jewish settlement, the company said Thursday, adding a prominent name to an international movement to boycott Israel's settlements.

Irina Shalmor, spokeswoman for McDonald's Israel, said the owners of a planned mall in the Ariel settlement asked McDonald's to open a branch there about six months ago. Shalmor said the chain refused because the owner of McDonald's Israel has a policy of staying out of the occupied territories. The decision was not co-ordinated with McDonald's headquarters in the U.S., she said. The headquarters were not immediately available for comment.

The Israeli branch's owner and franchisee, Omri Padan, is a founder of the dovish group Peace Now, which opposes all settlements and views them as obstacles to peace. The group said Padan is no longer a member.

The decision by such a well-known multinational company to boycott the West Bank deals settlers an unwelcome blow.

It also adds the name of an important international brand to a movement that has urged businesses to stay out of the West Bank. International companies like Caterpillar, France's Veolia and others have faced pressure from a global network of pro-Palestinian activists to sever links with the settlements.

The activists have also pushed consumers to shun products made in settlements. Israeli academics and unions have also been boycotted because of Israel's settlement policies and European countries are considering stepping up efforts to label settlement-made products sold in Europe.

The Palestinians want the West Bank, along with the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, as part of their future state. Israel captured those areas, along with the Golan Heights, in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians and most of the international community consider Israel's West Bank settlements illegal or illegitimate.

The mall's owners, settlers and politicians who back them chided McDonald's for its decision.

"McDonald's has gone from being a for-profit company to an organization with an anti-Israeli political agenda," said Yigal Dilmoni, a leader of the Yesha Council, a settler umbrella group. He urged Israelis to think twice before they buy a meal at McDonald's following its decision. Pro-settler lawmaker Ayelet Shaked said she would boycott the fast food chain.

Tzahi Nehimias, a co-owner of the Ariel mall, said an Israeli burger chain, Burger Ranch, had offered to take McDonald's spot. He also said Burger King had shown interest, but Miguel Piedra, a spokesman for Burger King Worldwide Inc. said the company had no plans to re-enter Israel. The company closed its restaurants in Israel in 2010 and turned them over to Burger Ranch.

Nehimias said other international companies who were asked to open a branch at the mall also declined, but none cited the mall's location in a settlement as a reason. He declined to identify the other companies. Some 19,000 Jewish settlers live in Ariel and it has a large student population.

Peace Now welcomed McDonald's decision.

"We totally understand and support people who think settlements are bad for Israel's interests," said Yariv Oppenheimer, who heads Peace Now. "They don't want to take an active role by opening a business there and helping to expand and to contribute to the settlement idea."

Rafeef Ziadah of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement said McDonald's move "will encourage other corporations to end their complicity in Israel's occupation."

This is not the first time McDonald's has stirred controversy in Israel. The company didn't open a branch in Israel until 1993 due to the Arab League boycott of the country.

A year later, McDonalds built a branch near a memorial to Israel's Golani military brigade, and Israelis objected to the large double arches sign there, saying it desecrated the site. The sign was later made smaller. In 2004, McDonalds was criticized for telling its Arabic and Russian speaking staff not to speak those languages at work.

Ecuador waives U.S. trade rights over Snowden case

(Reuters) - Ecuador said on Thursday it was waiving preferential rights under a U.S. trade agreement to demonstrate its principled approach to the asylum request of former American spy agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Officials in Quito added that the U.S. fugitive's case had still not been processed because he had not reached any of its diplomatic premises.

In a deliberately cheeky touch from the leftist government of President Rafael Correa, Ecuador also offered a multimillion donation for human rights training in the United States.

Snowden, 30, is believed to be at Moscow's international airport.

"The petitioner is not in Ecuadorean territory as the law requires," government official Betty Tola said at an early morning news conference in Ecuador.

Bristling at suggestions Quito was weighing the pros and cons of Snowden's case in terms of its own interests, officials also said Ecuador would not base its decision on its desire to renew the Andean Trade Preferences Act with Washington.

"Ecuador gives up, unilaterally and irrevocably, the said customs benefits," said another official, Fernando Alvarado.

"What's more, Ecuador offers the United States economic aid of $23 million annually, similar to what we received with the trade benefits, with the intention of providing education about human rights," Alvarado added.

"Ecuador does not accept pressure or threats from anyone, nor does it trade with principles or submit them to mercantile interests, however important those may be."

(Reporting by Brian Ellsworth and Alexandra Valencia; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Doina Chiacu)

New Eco-Friendly Battery Made of Wood And Sodium

New Eco-Friendly Battery Made of Wood And Sodium Can Be Charged More Than 400 Times

By Kukil Bora | June 20 2013 1:56 AM

Using only wood, tin and sodium as raw material, scientists at the University of Maryland have come up with a tiny, long-lasting, eco-friendly battery, which can be charged hundreds of times.

The scientists build the battery by using a very thin piece of wood, which they say is “a thousand times thinner than a piece of paper,” coated with tin. And, instead of lithium, which is found in many rechargeable batteries, they chose to use sodium to make it environmentally friendly.

Photo: ACS Publications Scientists have developed a very small long-lasting eco-friendly battery, using wood, tin and sodium, which can be charged hundreds of times. 
 

According to the scientists, lithium can be more efficient than sodium in storing energy. But sodium, wood and tin are more readily available, making them the ideal materials to build a cheap battery that will stock huge amounts of energy at once, not unlike solar energy at a power plant.

“Sodium (Na)-ion batteries offer an attractive option for low cost grid scale storage due to the abundance of Na. Tin (Sn) is touted as a high capacity anode for Na-ion batteries with a high theoretical capacity of 847 mAh/g,” scientists said in a research paper that appeared in ACS Publications.

The ubiquitous lithium-ion batteries are generally inflexible making them too fragile and susceptible to swelling and shrinking. But, the new sodium-ion battery is capable of withstanding extreme conditions, the scientists say, thanks to the wood fibers that are supple enough to let it survive more than 400 charging cycles, putting the new battery in the company of the longest-lasting nanobatteries.

“The soft nature of wood fibers effectively releases the mechanical stresses associated with the sodiation process, and the mesoporous structure functions as an electrolyte reservoir that allows for ion transport through the outer and inner surface of the fiber,” scientists said.

Liangbing Hu, an assistant professor of materials science at the University of Maryland, said that the idea of a wood-sodium battery was inspired by trees. According to him, wood fibers from trees are capable of storing mineral-rich water, and so are ideal for storing liquid electrolytes, making them not only the base but an active part of the battery.

Scientists observed that after charging and discharging the battery for hundreds of times, the wood used in it got wrinkled but remained intact, and that the wrinkles helped relax stress on the battery during the process.
"Pushing sodium ions through tin anodes often weaken the tin’s connection to its base material,” said Teng Li, an associate professor of mechanical engineering. "But the wood fibers are soft enough to serve as a mechanical buffer, and thus can accommodate tin’s changes.  This is the key to our long-lasting sodium-ion batteries."

According to the new research, which was funded by the University of Maryland and the National Science Foundation, the soft and mesoporous wood fiber substrate can be utilized as a new platform for low-cost, sodium-ion batteries.

This is not the first time scientists have developed small batteries that can store huge amounts of power.
In April, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign developed new microbatteries, which they claimed could “pack such a punch that a driver could use a cellphone powered by these batteries to jump-start a dead car battery – and then recharge the phone in the blink of an eye.”

NSA is collecting phone records of Verizon

 

 

By Joseph Menn and Sinead Carew

SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK | Wed Jun 5, 2013 11:01pm EDT
 

(Reuters) - The U.S. National Security Agency is collecting telephone records of millions of Verizon Communications customers, according to a secret court order obtained and published by the Guardian newspaper's website.

The order marked "Top Secret" and issued by the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court directs Verizon's Business Network Services Inc and Verizon Business Services units to hand over electronic data including all calling records on an "ongoing, daily basis" until the order expires on July 19, 2013.
The order can be seen at: r.reuters.com/kap68t

Signed by Judge Roger Vinson at the request of the FBI, the order covers each phone number dialed by all customers and location and routing data, along with the duration and frequency of the calls, but not the contents of the communications.

The disclosure comes as the Obama administration is already under fire on other privacy and First Amendment issues. In particular, it is being criticized for a search of Associated Press journalists' calling records and the emails of a Fox television reporter in leak inquiries.

Officials at the White House and the NSA declined immediate comment. Verizon spokesman Ed McFadden declined to comment.

Verizon's biggest rival, AT&T Inc, did not provide any immediate comment when asked if the government had made a similar request for its data.

"That's not the society we've built in the United States," said Kurt Opsahl, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is suing the NSA over surveillance inside the country. "It's not the society we set forth in the Constitution, and it's not the society we should have."
 
MOBILE AND LANDLINE NUMBERS

The order expressly compels Verizon to turn over both international calling records and strictly domestic records, and it forbids disclosure of the order's existence. It refers to mobile and landline numbers, though not explicitly to Verizon's consumer business.

The order is the first concrete evidence that U.S. intelligence officials are continuing a broad campaign of domestic surveillance that began under President George W. Bush and caused great controversy when it was first exposed.

In 2005, the New York Times reported that the NSA was wiretapping Americans without warrants on international calls. Los Angeles Times and USA Today later reported that the agency also had unchecked access to records on domestic calls.

In addition, a former AT&T technician, Mark Klein, said that a room accessible only with NSA clearance in the carrier's main San Francisco hub received perfect copies of all transmissions.

Privacy lawsuits against the government are continuing, though cases filed against the phone carriers were dismissed after Congress passed a 2008 law immunizing the companies that complied with government requests. That law also allowed for broader information-seeking, though methods must be approved by the special court handling foreign intelligence matters.

The new order cites legal language from the 2001 U.S. Patriot Act, passed soon after the September 11 attacks, that allows the FBI to seek an order to obtain "any tangible thing," including business records, in pursuit of "foreign intelligence information."

Verizon is the second biggest U.S. telephone company behind AT&T in terms of revenue. The vast majority of Verizon's overseas operations come from its acquisition of MCI Communications, which is also covered by the order although foreign-to-foreign calls are exempted from it.

Opsahl said it was unlikely that Verizon would be the only subject of such an order and that the other major carriers probably had similar orders against them.

It is unclear what the NSA and FBI do with the phone records they collect. If past practices have continued, though, Opsahl said, they are probably mined with sophisticated software in an attempt to figure out close connections between people the agencies consider to be terrorism suspects and their associates.

(Editing by Mohammad Zargham)