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U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell will visit Myanmar next week, U.S. State Department announced on Friday.

“Assistant Secretary Kurt Campbell and Deputy Assistant Secretary Scott Marciel are scheduled to travel to Burma Nov. 3 and 4,” said State Department spokesman Robert Wood.

“They expect to meet with senior government officials and with members of the opposition, including Aung San Suu Kyi as well as representatives of ethnic groups,” said the spokesman.

Campbell’s visit came one month after the Obama administration held a senior-level dialogue with representatives of the Myanmar’s leadership in New York on Sept. 29.

According to Wood, the visit’s aim is to “continue this dialogue.”

Citing Myanmar’s military junta of crackdown on democracy, the United States has downgraded its level of representation in Myanmar from ambassador to charge d’Affaires and has imposed broad sanctions since the 1988 military coup.

Following months of policy-reviewing, the Obama administration wants to begin a direct dialogue with Myanmar in order to “lay out the path to better relations,” said Campbell in a recent speech relating to U.S. policy toward Myanmar.

According to the senior diplomat, the administration will continue to support a “unified, peaceful, prosperous and democratic” Myanmar that respects the human rights of its citizens, and press Myanmar to comply with its international obligations, including full compliance with the UN Security Council Resolutions of 1874 and 1718.

“If Burma makes meaningful progress toward these goals, it will be possible to improve the relationship with the United States in a step-by-step process. We recognize that this will likely be a long and difficult process and we are prepared to sustain our efforts on this front,” said Campbell.

Four people died when their self-built house caught fire at 2:50 a.m. Tuesday in Urumqi, capital of northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, local police said.

The four people included three males and one female, with the oldest being 41 years old and the youngest eight years old, according to the Urumqi City Public Security Bureau.

The 70-square-meter brick-and-wood-structured house was almost totally destroyed in the blaze, local police said.

Police said they were investigating the cause of the fire.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Sunday that Russia will not raise export duties on raw timber in 2010 amid a trade dispute with neighboring Finland, Russian news agencies reported.

“The moratorium on raising export duties on round timber will remain in force for the next year. I believe it possible to make a similar decision for 2011,” Putin told a press conference after talks with his Finnish counterpart Matti Vanhanen in Russia’s northern city of St. Petersburg.

Putin said the decision to delay the next round of duty hike was because of a slump in demand for timber amid the global financial crisis.

Vanhanen, for his part, said he was satisfied with the Russian decision and the Finnish government would decide on the construction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline across its territories in early November.

“After that, the environmental authorities will give their permission to the passage of the gas pipeline. We expect this to be done by the end of the year,” Vanhanen told reporters.

Russia started tax increases on round wood back in 2007 over its unwillingness to play the role of a raw material supplier to global markets. The country has been trying to diversify its economy, which depends heavily on exports of energy and raw materials, and create competitive value-added and high-technology industries.

The Nord Stream pipeline project, currently being built by Russia and Germany, aims to eventually pump 55 billion cubic meters of Siberian gas per year to Western Europe through the Baltic Sea, bypassing Ukraine and former Soviet republics. Denmark recently gave its approval to the project.

A senior UN official is on a two-day visit to Sierra Leone for wide-ranging talks on the situation in a country that was the first to be put on the agenda of the new UN Peacebuilding Commission, set up three years ago to prevent conflict-plagued States from relapsing into bloodshed, UN officials said here Thursday.

Assistant UN Secretary-General for Peacebuilding Support Judy Cheng-Hopkins’ visit comes a little over a month after the top UN official in the West African nation warned that the journey toward a stable, peaceful and democratic country would will be bumpy, long, and even dangerous despite remarkable progress made since the end of a civil war earlier this decade.

She will meet with government and UN officials as well as other stakeholders including civil society groups in a country that provides a good case study for examining the work of the UN in peacebuilding.

In September, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Executive Representative for Sierra Leone Michael Schulenberg told the UN Security Council the country needs time, patience, determined national leadership and continued international support.

“We must anticipate accidents, derailments and mistakes along this road … there are no easy benchmarks that will tell us that Sierra Leone is out of the woods,” he said, adding that the country is one of the poorest in the world, does not have a large educated middle class, and over 70 percent of the population remains illiterate.

State institutions, moreover, remain weak and the nation’s journey towards prosperity is taking place in a “difficult” regional environment, with the political and security situation inWest Africa remaining “highly precarious” amid worrying signs of military coups, ethnic and inter-religious conflicts, and threats from illicit drug trafficking and international crime, he added.

In October 2006, at its first ever country-specific meeting, the Peacebuilding Commission recommended Sierra Leone for support from the newly established Peacebuilding Fund, set up a week earlier to assist countries emerging from conflict to rebuild and prevent them falling back into bloodshed.

Last month the Security Council extended for another year the mandate of the UN Integrated Peacebuilding Office in Sierra Leone (UNIPSIL) after Ban stressed in his latest report that greater efforts are needed by all Sierra Leoneans to build on momentum from a key peace pact signed in April between the governing All People’s Congress (APC) and the opposition Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) to end political violence.

The newly-opened ancient wood-fired ceramic kiln in east China’s porcelain capital of Jingdezhen City produced about 20,000 ceramics on Thursday after being abandoned for 15 years.

The kiln with an 18-meter-long furnace and a volume of 300 cubic meters set a world record for largest wood fired ceramic kiln, said Wu Xiaohong, representative of the British-based Guinness World Records Ltd.

The last remaining ancient kiln in the city covers an area of 800 square meters. It is located on a quiet hillside in Jingdezhen, a city with a 1,700-year-old history of pottery production. Its history dates back to the reign of Emperor Qianlong in the Qing Dynasty more than 300 years ago.

The once fired pots for the royal families became home of termites after the firing stopped in 1995.

Normally, the kiln fired pots once every week and needed repairing once every five years.

“With the reopening of the kiln, we could study how the ancient people loaded the kiln, how they controlled the temperature and duration of the firing, how they created atmosphere within a kiln to affect the appearances of the finished wares. Some techniques were unique in the world,” Zhou Ronglin, director of the Jingdezhen Municipal Ceramic Cultural Heritage Research and Protection Center.

Craftsmen began to repair the kiln since Aug. 1. It took them 24 days to make the kiln appear as it used to be.

“If the kiln had not been refired, the cultural heritage would be lost, ” said Yu Yunshan, who was in charge of the repair work.

The rekindling of the kiln was done exactly in the ancient way on Monday without any modern instrument. The workers relied on their experience to decide how much wood should be fired for 23 hours non-stop.

“While heating up, different parts of the wood-fired ceramic kiln varies in temperature, thus producing various types of ceramics, an advantage unmatched by modern kilns,” said Liu Yuanchang, a master of arts and crafts in China.

“The kiln with the temperature of up to 1,320 degrees has to cool down for two days before the ceramics are ready,” said Hu Jiawang, responsible for overseeing the temperature of the kiln.

More than 40 tons of woods were used in the firing.

“Most of the blue and white porcelain from Jingdezhen kept in the well-known museums in the world were all made in the wood-fired ceramic kilns, ” said Liu Yuanchang.

“The kiln is a perfect platform to inherit, display and restore the traditional firing techniques of the city,” he said.

A red four-seater aircraft on show in Xi’an, northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, draws crowds of people who huddle to pose for a photo with it.

The Cirrus SR22 GTS, owned by a businessman in Shaanxi Province, is the first private plane in northwest China, an area inhabited by 100 million people.

Chen Yilong, a real estate tycoon from Weinan City, bought the U.S.-made aircraft for more than 5 million yuan (732,440 U.S. dollars) early this year.

Chen and his aircraft were a highlight at the 2009 China International General Aviation Convention that gathered in Xi’an from Oct. 17 to 19.

Many wage earners who could never dream of owning their own aircraft basked in Chen’s reflected glory.

“Even though I myself cannot afford a private aircraft, it’s good to know other northwesterners can,” said Xi’an resident ZhangXiaoqiang. “Maybe in a decade or two, I’ll own one, too. Who knows? I couldn’t afford a car 10 years ago — now I’ve got one.”

Northwest China, covering Shaanxi, Gansu and Qinghai provinces and Ningxia Hui and Xinjiang Uygur autonomous regions, lags far behind the central and eastern regions in terms of economic growth.

For the new rich like Chen, however, owning a plane is one thing, but flying it is quite another. “I might not be able to fly for five years. I’m prepared for that,” said Chen, 50.

China’s low-altitude airspace is controlled by the Air Force and the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC). Private flights need approval, each time, and the procedure takes at least half a day, making a private flight a less than enticing event.

“To avoid such restrictions, you need to buy high-performance aircraft that can easily reach high-altitudes. But they sell for at least 10 million U.S. dollars each, plus running costs of 5 million yuan a year,” said Li He, regional sales manager of Avion Pacific Limited.

Last year, Li’s company sold four such luxury planes to private buyers on the Chinese mainland, at more than 100 million yuan each, he said.

Inadequate ground facilities were another factor that keeps China’s private plane sales and general aviation market sluggish, Li said.

“China has only 160 airports nationwide, all in big cities, compared with 19,100 general aviation airports across the United States. This is too inconvenient for private jet owners,” he said.

It is not just the rich who are dreaming of private planes.

In a remote village in Gansu Province, farmer Zhang Yuxiang keeps trying to make his own, out of a Santana car engine, three motorcycle tires and propellers blades he shaped out of wood.

While most of Zhang’s flight trials have failed, Xu Bin, a farmer from the eastern Zhejiang Province, flew 20 minutes on a home-made plane three years ago. Xu’s plane, made out of old car seats, home-made wings and an engine he bought over the Internet, cost 30,000 yuan.

But some daredevil, self-made pilots have ended up killing themselves, forcing the government to tighten controls over such attempts. In 2007, a student was denied approval to test fly his self-built plane.

Yet in general, China has loosened control of low-altitude airspace use for private airplanes. This year, the authorities made Guangdong Province and the northeast region trial sites for opening the use of airspace below 1,000 meters.

If successful, this will lead to the gradual opening of low-level airspace to private planes across the country.

“It’s big step,” said Professor Wu Tongshui, of China Civil Aviation University. “A complicated project, too, because you’ve got to build a complete ground radar network and a huge team of air traffic controllers to ensure flight safety.”

Experts estimate China’s private planes will increase, from 11 in 2006 to 2,000 in 2020.

The CAAC was encouraging overseas investment in general aviation companies and supporting individual ownership of private jets, said Liu Wanming, deputy director of CAAC’s transport department, at the Xi’an convention Monday.

Middlebury College used to heat its buildings with oil, then switched to wood chips. Now it has planted a sustainable and relatively cheap fuel source — willow shrubs _that could help cut demand on the state’s forests.

With a nine-acre patch of the fast-growing willows, the college is conducting a biomass energy experiment that seeks to answer the question: What if wood chip-burning heat systems lead to the deforestation of Vermont?

Willows, which grow faster than other trees and branch out when pruned, may be the answer — and may be a resource for other cold-weather states, too. So Jack Byrne, director of sustainability for the college, and business services director Tom Corbin have turned into farmers of sorts, planting tightly packed rows of willows in a field west of Middlebury’s campus.

The question of biomass fuel supply has taken on new urgency for the college since last winter, when the exclusive liberal arts school opened a new boiler system that heats about 100 campus buildings, running turbines that meet about a fifth of the college’s electrical demand.

The system, in a glass-fronted building in the middle of campus, runs on a “gasifier,” heating wood chips and extracting carbon monoxide and other gases that are then burned in the boiler.

“We use our buildings to teach as much as we can,” Byrne said. “We wanted students to be aware that when they turn up a thermostat, there’s a connection to a tree getting cut down.”

The college now buys 20,000 tons of wood chips a year, mainly from loggers operating within 75 miles. That will provide about half the heat used by the campus — the rest comes from heating oil — and reduce Middlebury’s $1.5 million annual oil bill by about $700,000, Byrne said.

Byrne said the willow-growing experiment is aimed at a potential problem.

The concern is that if other colleges, institutions, businesses and homeowners follow Middlebury’s lead and begin relying on forests for fuel, Vermont’s wooded hillsides — already a source of lumber and firewood — could end up being depleted.

“We wanted to anticipate the possibility that our success might encourage increased use of the forests for other biomass systems, and we also wanted to take advantage of another natural resource that we have in abundance in Vermont, and that’s open land for use in agriculture,” Byrne said.

Joining in the experiment are scientists from the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. Tim Volk, a SUNY research scientist whose school had been working with willow for about 20 years, sees a trend developing in willow fuel being used along with traditional wood harvest.

“It’s something that’s going to start happening fairly quickly in the next few years,” he said. “People can start up a small-scale heating system with biomass, using a mixture of willows and low-value wood harvested from natural forests.”

These aren’t shaggy weeping willows with narrow green leaves like those that grow in wet soil, nor pussy willows with cottony white flower clusters, or catkins. Rather, these tall, skinny saplings can reach 16 feet at harvest.

“We have trials and they’re working well from southern Virginia to Minnesota and Wisconsin and as far west as Alberta, Canada,” Volk said. The chosen varieties must have a certain amount of cold for proper growth, he added

One challenge for willow is that while it grows faster than other trees, it’s slower to mature than traditional farm crops — and getting farmers to plant a crop with a three-year harvest cycle is a hard sell.

But it has some advantages: It can be harvested in winter, when the ground is frozen, so it can be grown on more ecologically sensitive land — near rivers, for example.

The willow saplings, which can grow to about 8 feet in the first year, are cut back to a few inches and then allowed to regrow in a more bush-like way, with as many as a dozen stems, for the next three years. The stems, typically 1-3 inches in diameter, are harvested with a modified corn harvester fitted with a special cutting head.

Willow production can take advantage of Vermont’s many farm fields left fallow, no longer needed for corn acres harvested a year.

Still to be answered are questions about the economics of willow as a fuel — that’s one of the goals of the Middlebury experiment.

Christopher Recchia, executive director at the Montpelier-based Biomass Energy Research Project, a nonprofit that promotes biofuels, said the best estimates now are that willow would cost more than twice as much as wood chips, currently about $8 per million Btu. Willow would be competitive with wood pellets, which are about $23 per million Btu and oil, about $32 per million Btu.

Adam Sherman, program director for fuels at BERC, praised the work going on at Middlebury, saying the college is “doing the right thing in leaving no stone unturned” in looking for fuel sources for its biomass system.

But Sherman says Vermont isn’t in danger of getting to “peak wood,” the way some energy experts talk about “peak oil” meaning that supplies of petroleum soon will be declining steeply.

Vermont is 78 percent forested, and its forests add about 13 million tons of wood every year through natural growth, Sherman said. Loggers take about 1.5 million to 2 million tons of that, and could double the harvest without harming the forests, according to Sherman’s group.

At Middlebury’s willow patch, the experiment is about a year from completion. The first crop will be harvested in the winter of 2010-2011. So far, aside from a bit of blight on leaves on some plants closest to the road, Corbin said the experiment is going well.

“They’re doing just what the book said they’d do,” he said.

Accustomed as I am to traditional Chinese cuisine with its regional variations, I was thrilled to find I could feast on delicious and wholesome foods while traveling across Yunnan.

I was pleasantly surprised to find on an almost daily basis wonderful and fresh homegrown or wild produce, prepared the way any ordinary farming family has been doing for centuries.

Imagine my initial surprise when walking along the picturesque alleyways of the UNESCO heritage site Lijiang city when a street vendor offered me sunflower seeds freshly dug out from a large sunflower pod cut from its stalk that very morning. What better sustenance than to crack a soft shell and bite into the fresh raw taste of a natural sunflower seed?

Or take the humble potato, grown by every farming household in these parts and stored through the winter months to augment daily meals. Imaginative stall-holders at the local market turn the spud into delicious snacks, shoestring bundles frying gently in a wok over coal fire nestling alongside roughly cut French fries, next to a basketful of crispy thin slices of deep-fried potato chips liberally sprinkled with salt and chili powder.

I didn’t realize rural Yunnan is mushroom country until I discovered how delicious and ubiquitous a wild mushroom hotpot is in touristy Lijiang. When asked by a waiter which wild mushrooms I would like in my hotpot stock, I confessed that I had never seen such a dazzling array. Suffice to say, the boiling hot mlange of fungi soup was a feast for the senses.

I chanced upon a young farmer displaying a basketful of Matsutake mushrooms (song rong, pine mushrooms), telling me he had hand-picked them on a dawn trek through the pine forests rimming Lugu Lake northeast of Lijiang.

Matsutakes are revered as the “king of mushrooms” in Japan. But the young man only wanted a tiny fraction of its Tokyo price for his morning labor.

My love of this rare delicacy was requited when I took a bunch to a home-stay caf and had it steamed in its own juices and barbequed with a separate order of garlic chips.

Having an egg for breakfast must be the most banal first meal of the day anywhere in the world, but this reached new heights for me in Yunnan. There were freshly laid chicken eggs for sure, but it was a peddler sitting by a rustic wooden bridge cutely named The Bridge for Lovers on the shore of Lugu Lake whose array of eggs blew me away.

Here he was offering boiled pale-green duck eggs that contained more goodness than their chicken counterparts, as well as gigantic goose eggs each big enough to feed four.

I found one of the best cooks at a lakeside restaurant where the proprietor netted a live carp from her pond and effortlessly whipped up a lip-smacking fish stew.

She first fried garlic, ginger, dried red chili and pepper in oil coaxed from some fatty air-dried belly pork.

She then plunked in chunks of the freshwater fish to simmer gently in a stock. She served the finished product with a dipping sauce of chopped fresh garlic, cilantro, green onions, dried red pepper flakes and salt moistened with a little of the soup.

Every Frenchman or Chinese knows the sweet taste of frog legs, but when I spotted an item on the menu called “beautiful ladies” at a bed-and-breakfast lodge run by a Mosuo family, I had to ask what it was. The little girl helping out at the eatery replied: “Deep-fried frog skins - because they look like ladies’ legs!” The crispy-crunchy snack made from leftover frog leg dishes turned out to be utterly delicious.

There are more surprises when your taste buds move up the animal chain. When you enter a friendly farmer’s home, you will be asked if you’d like a chicken or duck for lunch. Your answer will mean life-and-death for the farm animal in question.

After I chose “chicken”, a young boy chased one down in the courtyard, which his father slaughtered with a knife and his mother cooked in a big cauldron of soup over a wood fire by the hearth. It was a most tummy-warming meal I have had in a long time.

Another time, I saw an item on a local restaurant menu called “wild chicken”. Upon learning that it meant wild pheasant, I had the chef make a soup prepared the traditional Chinese way - that is, by slow boiling the whole wild fowl in a medicinal herbal broth.

The resulting fragrant golden stock floating with delicious meat is a culinary experience worth writing home about.

In Yunnan’s countryside, you can very easily find natural foods that are wild or small-farm grown without encountering any processed or manufactured items pushed from a factory conveyor belt.

And with very little effort, you can feast on wholesome foods anywhere, anytime, simply by eating what the locals eat.

Simple Yunnanese peasant fare easily qualifies as wholesome by any modern, trendy yardstick for healthy living.

Canada will start immunizing citizens against the A/H1N1 flu in early November and expects to complete that by Christmas before the virus peaks, health officials said Wednesday.

At a press conference in the western city of Winnipeg, both the country’s Chief Public Health Officer Samuel Butler-Jone and Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq urged people to immunize, while Prime Minister Stephen Harper said earlier in the day he will get the vaccine.

Canada has been criticized for not getting out the vaccine quickly enough when it is already available in the United States and other countries. But Butler-Jones said Canada is in an advantage in that it has enough vaccine for everyone and the immunization can work out really fast.

The officials also announced 2.4 million Canadian dollars (2.3 million U. S. dollars) in funding for five research projects related to A/H1N1.

Projects include studies on why some pregnant women develop complications with the new flu, why some patients develop serious respiratory illnesses, how institutions can handle the most ill patients and new drug therapies for severe infections.

Elinor Ostrom, a professor at Indiana University, said Monday Morning that she was “flabbergasted” to get the news that she received the Nobel Prize. “It was a fantastic surprise and a thrilling one,” she said. “I’m very appreciative.”

“This is fantastic news,” said IU President Michael A. McRobbie.” Professor Ostrom has won widespread recognition from around the world for her very original research and scholarship. For her to win the Nobel Prize is fully appropriate.”

Ostrom is the first women to win Nobel Prize in the economic sciences category, which has been awarded since 1968. Her award recognizes her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons.

Ostrom said she knows Oliver Williamson, her co-recipient, and is pleased to share the 1.4-million-dollar award with him.

“Elinor Ostrom has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized,” the Academy said in announcing the prize.

“Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories.

“She observes that resource users frequently develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts of interest, and she characterizes the rules that promote successful outcomes.” The Academy said.