Saturday, February 26, 2011
Don’t expect too much.
A southern African mediator says a proposed deal to end Madagascar’s political crisis will be concluded in a few days despite the main political parties rejecting it. Andry Rajoelina, who seized presidential power in a 2009 coup, has threatened to move ahead if the deal is not signed soon, while deposed President Marc Ravalomanana says no consensus can be reached without the major parties and wants new talks held in Madagascar to include him.
A proposal aimed at lifting Madagascar from a two-year crisis will be concluded “in the coming days” even without the signatures of the three main political parties, according to Mozambican politician and head of the southern African mediation team Leonardo Simao.
Audio at the link. I finally learned how to pronounce Rajoelina’s name. I think. Notice how the last vowel pf any name is silent. Not exactly, The Malagasy can somehow hear it. Supposedly the language is very easy to learn. )
Friday, February 25, 2011
Sentencing in Britain.
A jury in London’s Old Bailey criminal court convicted Mohammed Gul of five terrorist offenses with publications that police said “could have encouraged the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.”
In passing sentence on the 23-year-old student on Friday (Feb. 25), Judge David Paget said Gul’s actions amounted to “pouring petrol on the fire.”
He told the defendant, “I am in no doubt that you have been thoroughly radicalized” in extremist Islamism.
Organ Traffic in
Some of you may remember that at one time I thought that this was silly. No more.
Last December, Mr Marty delivered a report to the Council of Europe that alleged that Hashim Thaçi, who has just begun a second term as Kosovo’s prime minister, was close to people who, after the 1999 Kosovo war, had kidnapped some 500 Serbs, Albanians and others, all of whom were eventually killed. Some of them, the report claimed, were murdered so that their organs could be harvested and sold. Mr Thaçi has vigorously denied the claims.
Mr Marty’s allegations were not new. Their first public outing was in a 2008 book by Carla Del Ponte, the former prosecutor of the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague (ICTY), and Chuck Sudetic, a former ICTY analyst.
Now, however, documents have been leaked to the Serbian press that appear to strengthen Mr Marty’s claims. They contain transcripts of original interviews with witnesses gathered by a key source known to me and handed over confidentially in 2003 to the then UN administration in Kosovo (UNMIK). The witnesses in the documents are quoted as saying they believed kidnapped Serbs and others had been killed for their organs.
Another way to fight back.
First, she and her group of lawyers at the Israel Law Centre in Tel Aviv track down the terrorists’ financial pipelines, then they set about suing the banks, institutions and charitable fronts used to facilitate the flow of funds. In doing so, the 37-year-old Israeli attorney and mother of six has taken on some of the world’s biggest banks – the Arab Bank, the Bank of China, and American Express – and to date has recovered a whopping $120 million for the victims of terrorist attacks.
It’s not going away.
Fannie Mae, which reported a fourth-quarter loss of $2.1 billion, said it needs more federal assistance.
The government-sponsored enterprise, which was taken into conservatorship in September 2008 during the financial crisis, said its 4Q loss included $2.2 billion in dividend payments to the U.S. Treasury.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency requested $2.6 billion on the company’s behalf from the Treasury Department, more than 80% of which is the dividend payment. Upon receiving those funds, the company’s total obligation to Treasury for its senior preferred stock will be $91.2 billion. Fannie has paid $10.2 billion in dividends to Treasury since its senior preferred stock was issued, including $7.7 billion paid in 2010.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
I hope there’s plenty of parking.
The unmanned robotic truck attached itself to the Zvezda module on the rear of the platform at 1559 GMT.
The ship is delivering new supplies of fuel, food, air, and equipment to the ISS’s astronauts.
Kepler is totally automatic and used its own computerised systems and sensors to find the station in orbit and make the connection.
Having travelled half a million kilometres since its launch eight days ago, the freighter made the docking with an accuracy that could be measured in centimetres.
And this:
The cargo ship hooked up with the space station less than six hours before the space shuttle Discovery’s planned launch toward the orbiting laboratory, clearing the way for the orbiter’s flight, NASA officials said.
Requiring perfect symmetry.
Buried in the flood of data from the Kepler telescope is a planetary system unlike any seen before. Two of its apparent planets share the same orbit around their star. If the discovery is confirmed, it would bolster a theory that Earth once shared its orbit with a Mars-sized body that later crashed into it, resulting in the moon’s formation.
The two planets are part of a four-planet system dubbed KOI-730. They circle their sun-like parent star every 9.8 days at exactly the same orbital distance, one permanently about 60 degrees ahead of the other. In the night sky of one planet, the other world must appear as a constant, blazing light, never fading or brightening.
Gravitational “sweet spots” make this possible. When one body (such as a planet) orbits a much more massive body (a star), there are two Lagrange points along the planet’s orbit where a third body can orbit stably. These lie 60 degrees ahead of and 60 degrees behind the smaller object. For example, groups of asteroids called Trojans lie at these points along Jupiter’s orbit.
In theory, matter in a disc of material around a newborn star could coalesce into so-called “co-orbiting” planets, but no one had spotted evidence of this before. “Systems like this are not common, as this is the only one we have seen,” says Jack Lissauer of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Lissauer and colleagues describe the KOI-730 system in a paper submitted to the Astrophysical Journal (arxiv.org/abs/1102.0543).
So close and yet so far.
Researchers have designed tiny nanoparticles that resemble viruses in size and immunological composition and that induce lifelong immunity in mice. Blue = resting B cells. Red = activated B cells that are being “trained” to produce high-quality antibodies. Green = specialized antibody-producing cells.
Back posting on Bahrain.
A blogger freed by the king of Bahrain along with dozens of other prisoners has told the BBC World Service he was insulted and tortured in prison.
Ali Abdulemam was arrested in September and charged with being a member of a terrorist cell and spreading false information about the authorities.
He denied wrongdoing, saying he had no sectarian or party political loyalties.
If the government had heeded calls for reform earlier, he said, it might have avoided today’s popular upheaval.
“Our demand was to reform the constitution but it just ignored us,” he told the BBC on Wednesday.
What to do? Especially when we’ve admitted that multiculturalism doesn’t work.
Although initially wrong-footed by the uprisings across the Arab world, European nations eventually collected themselves, welcomed the new eras in Tunisia and Egypt, and blessed the yearning for democracy that is spreading across the region. But the European Union’s delicate diplomatic dance has been tainted by a conflicting message of hostility: while throwing their support behind the Arab protests, officials are simultaneously shrieking at the prospect of Arab migrants seeking refuge in Europe.
Protests in Jordan.
ordan’s Cabinet has approved laws making it easier to organize protests and will revive a government body that works to ensure basic commodities remain affordable to the poor.
A government official said the reforms had been passed late Tuesday.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the government official said organizers would need only to inform authorities 48 hours in advance of protests so public protection is assured.
Reforms came hours after the country’s largest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, vowed to resume demonstrations pushing for change.
Jordan’s powerful Islamist opposition said it plans to stage a “day of anger” demonstration with other parties Friday to demand reforms, in what they hope will be the largest protest since January.
“Around 10,000 members of the Islamist movement as well as supporters of 19 political parties will take part in the march to call for reforms,” Zaki Bani Rsheid of the Islamic Action Front executive committee said Wednesday.
President Marc asking for help.
Madagascar’s ousted leader Marc Ravalomanana has met with a regional mediator to discuss his predicament after being prevented from leaving South Africa, he said on Wednesday in a statement.
Ravalomanana, who has been in exile in South Africa since 2009, met former Mozambican president Joaquim Chissano in Maputo, the Mozambican capital, to ask for his support after authorities in Madagascar barred the deposed leader’s return to the Indian Ocean island.
“It is important for me to be there to negotiate with the genuine political parties so we can get together for genuine Malagasy-Malagasy talks.”
Boulder Time
