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News
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
International
Life Style
International
Moroccan court slaps life term on terror suspect Agence France-Presse
RABAT - An anti-terrorism court in Morocco on Tuesday handed a life sentence to Moroccan-born Belgian national Abdelkader Belliraj, accused of leading a 35-member extremist group. Belliraj was accused at the court in Sale of leading a terrorist group, committing six murders in Belgium in the late 1980s and early 1990s, of committing theft, smuggling arms into Morocco and threatening state security.
The 50-year-old denied the charges, saying several times during the trial: “I never brought weapons into Morocco and deny making any attempts to overthrow the regime.” He also denied involvement in supplying arms to an Algerian group, the Islamic Salvation Front. The state prosecutor had initially sought the death sentence for Belliraj. He and several others were arrested in Morocco in January and February 2008 and the trial began the following October.
SUVA - Fiji’s controversial President Ratu Josefa Iloilo is to retire, the country’s military leader Voreqe Bainimarama said Tuesday. The 88-year-old Iloilo, who has been in poor health for several years, will retire after taking leave from Thursday, Bainimarama said in a statement. Vice-President Ratu Epeli Nailatikau will take over the functions of president until a replacement is chosen by the regime’s cabinet, he said. Iloilo has been seen as under the influence of Bainimarama since before the December 2006 coup, in which the military chief toppled the elected government. Bainimarama said Iloilo, who had been president since late 2000, “demonstrated strong leadership
of the country throughout difficult and challenging times.” “This is a truly significant event, the symbolic passing of the torch from a statesman who has made a tremendous contribution to the nation and to the lives of all Fijians,” he said. Nailatikau, a former army commander who is credited with guiding Bainimarama through his military career, was selected as vicepresident in April. His elevation to vice-president came a week after Bainimarama abrogated the constitution, sacked the judiciary and introduced emergency regulations including press censorship. The president and vice president were traditionally appointed by Fiji’s traditional Great Council of Chiefs, which has been sidelined since soon after the coup by Bainimarama.
AFP PHOTO/FILES/Naashon Zalk
Ratu Josefa Iloilo.
AFP PHOTO / PIUS UTOMI EKPEI
NIGERIA - A policeman inspects on July 28, 2009 the burnt police station in the northern Nigerian city of Potiskum, Yobe State, after self-styled Taliban militants went on a rampage, burning a policeman to death and slitting the throat of a firefighter from an adjacent fire station.
SINGAPORE - Three Singaporean inmates who were due for release have received new jail terms and will be caned after sexually abusing another prisoner and forcing him to eat faeces, court officials said
Tuesday. The three were sentenced to between 16 and 19 years in jail as well as up to 22 strokes of the cane in the High Court on Monday, a court official told AFP. Serious crimes in Singapore are punishable by caning, a practice which dates back to British colonial
AP Photo/Mike Roemer
WhiteKnightTwo follows two photos planes as it circles Monday, July 27, 2009 above the Experimental Aircraft Association’s annual AirVenture convention in Oshkosh, Wis. British billionaire Sir Richard Branson hopes to use WhiteKnightTwo to carry a spaceship into the upper atmosphere. The spaceship would then detach and rocket into space. Branson hopes to use the system to create a commercial space travel business.
65 killed as police frontier: Crowd sees Final battle Nigerian Islamists spaceship launcher fly Agence France-Presse
BAUCHI - Nigeria’s security forces on Monday fought gun battles with radical Islamists who went on a rampage torching churches, police posts and government buildings in four northern states.
Police put the number of dead from the weekend religious clashes at 65 in two states of Bauchi and Yobe, as of early Monday morning. In Borno state, heavily armed Islamist rebels torched a police headquarters, a church and a customs office in the border town of Gamboru-Ngala overnight before moving to the state capital Maiduguri where battles ran into the afternoon. A Nigerian Islamist sect styled on Afghanistan’s Taliban burnt down a central prison in Maiduguri, two police stations, several churches, a government primary school and offices of a state unemployment bureau. “The situation has degenerated into big battles between the Taliban ... and the soldiers and police. Since
morning, you can hear nothing but gunfire all over the city,” resident Sanisu Ahamad told AFP by telephone as sound of gunfire could be heard in the background. “Many government buildings have been burnt including the central prison and several churches. Streets are deserted. People are in their homes,” he said. Several telecommunications masts have been burnt cutting off many parts of the city. Maiduguri is the Nigerian Taliban birthplace and stronghold and some neighbourhoods there are seen as Taliban enclaves. Muhammad Auwal Mujahid told AFP by phone: “Its quite scary, all you hear is frightening sounds from guns.” In Wudil town situated on the
outskirts of Kano, the largest city in northern Nigeria, the militants attacked a police station but were repelled in clashes that left three rebels dead, Kano police spokesman Baba Mohammed told AFP. In Yobe, the militants doused a police station with petrol and set it alight. “The police station is still burning with billows of dark smoke... coming from the inferno,” said resident Ibrahim Bashir. Nigeria’s police chief InspectorGeneral Ogbonna Onovo earlier told reporters that weekend attacks claimed the lives of 60 militants and five police. He said the death toll related to clashes in the neighbouring states of Bauchi and Yobe, adding that new fighting was raging in nearby Borno state. “They (militants) are out there in Maiduguri (Borno) now, battling with the police,” Nigeria’s police chief told a news conference in the capital Abuja.
Singapore inmates punished for ‘sadistic’ jail abuse Agence France-Presse
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Unhooking the ObesityDiabetes Connection
Fiji’s president to retire Agence France-Presse
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
rule and leaves lasting scars. The Straits Times reported Tuesday that the victim, whose identity cannot be disclosed, suffered multiple rib fractures and was hospitalised for two months after the attacks, which took place in April and May last year. In addition to severe beatings
and being forced to swallow human excrement, the 22-year-old victim was also made to perform oral sex on the trio, aged 20 to 22, and sodomised by one of them, the court was told. “Their actions were inhumane and repulsive,” Judge Tay Yong Kwang was quoted as saying by the
newspaper. “It is shocking that they allowed themselves to be carried away by their numerical and physical superiority, to the extent of bullying a fellow inmate using such sadistic and degrading acts,” he said at the end of a 12day trial.
Associated Press Writer
OSHKOSH, Wis. – Hundreds of earthlings turned their faces to the sky Monday to see an airplane built to launch a ship into space, watching the gleaming white craft soar overhead. The twin-fuselage craft named WhiteKnightTwo, looking like two planes connected at the wing tips, circled the runway several times before touching down at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s Air Venture annual gathering. It was the first glimpse the public had of the plane, which was made by Virgin Galactic as part of its effort to jump-start commercial space travel. Its designers, engineer Burt Rutan and British billionaire Sir Richard Branson, watched and smiled from the edge of the tarmac. It was “majestic,” said 13-year-old Alura Law of Reddick, Fla. Her mother, 45-year-old Kim Law, is blind but aimed her camera at the sound of the WhiteKnightTwo. She said it offers hope that scientific experiments in weightlessness might someday restore her sight. “I’m telling you, (I’m) real hopeful. Inspired,” she said. Virgin Galactic’s plan calls for WhiteKnightTwo to lift SpaceShipTwo, a pressurized spacecraft, into the atmosphere from a base in New Mexico. When they reach 50,000 feet, the spaceship would detach and blast into space at four times the speed of sound. The six passengers would experience about five minutes of weightlessness and get a glimpse of Earth. The spaceship would glide back to Earth much like the space shuttle. Takeoff to landing is expected to take about 2 1/2 hours.
Virgin Galactic doesn’t have a launch date yet, but has taken 300 reservations at $200,000 each and is holding $40 million in deposits. Customers include scientist Stephen Hawking and “Superman Returns” director Bryan Singer, according to Virgin Galactic President Will Whitehorn. “Superman Returns” even features a sequence involving two aircraft much like WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo. In the movie, Lois Lane boards a launcher jet with a space shuttle-like vehicle attached. The jet lifts the shuttle into the atmosphere, but the plane ends up plunging to Earth and Superman must race to save it. Virgin Galactic officials say safety will be their “guiding star.” “We not only have to do it safely, we have to give (passengers) a good time,” said Virgin Galactic’s commercial director, Stephen Attenborough. The plan came about after Rutan partnered with Virgin Group chairman Branson. Rutan had made history in 2004 when his SpaceShipOne became the first private manned craft to reach space with help from launcher plane WhiteKnightOne. The feat earned him the $10 million Ansari X Prize. WhiteKnightTwo has now made
16 test flights, Attenborough said. The company will keep testing it until fall, when tests will begin on SpaceShipTwo. Branson himself plans to take the first trip and bring his 92-year-old father and 89-yearold mother with him. The WhiteKnightTwo, nicknamed “Eve” in honor of Branson’s mother, sports a painting of a woman in a space helmet on both fuselages and looks like nothing so much as a gleaming white half of the letter “E.” “Most people never really believed it would be a reality,” said Branson. “By just trying these things, new things come out of it.” Matthew Pritzker, a science fiction fan since his youth, has his trip booked. The 27-year-old from Chicago, who runs his own investment firm, is looking forward to being weightless and said he’s no more nervous that he would be getting on a roller coaster. Pritzker said he wants to walk on the moon someday, and SpaceShipTwo marks a step toward that. “This venture will prove to be a huge, huge turning point in the world of travel,” he said. “It means so much to people who grew up looking at the stars.”
Scientists may be closer to solving a medical mystery with huge implications for personal and public health: Why obese people are prone to developing type 2 diabetes. A series of studies appearing online July 26 in Nature Medicine suggest that inflammation within the fat tissues of heavy individuals could trigger the blood sugar disease. What’s more, each of the four completely independent studies, from two continents and three countries, showed that interfering with these immune-cell processes actually reversed diabetes in mice. The long-term implications of the findings are enticing: perhaps one day a cure for type 2 diabetes, a condition that now plagues more than 23 million people in the United States alone. “This group of papers suggests that cellular immunity may regulate inflammation in fat,” said Dr. Vivian Fonseca, professor of medicine at Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine and director of the Diabetes Institute at Scott & White. “The authors do suggest that if you change the inflammatory response by changing the way the body cells respond to a trigger for inflammation, you might be able to get at the real heart of diabetes and that suggests you could cure it.” But Fonseca warned, all these studies were conducted in mice and have yet to be proven in humans. In type 2 diabetes, the body
often becomes resistant to insulin and doesn’t use it effectively. In the last decade or so, researchers have presented evidence that suppressing inflammation in animals could improve insulin resistance and other processes involved with diabetes. Inflammation is now widely believed to be involved in many metabolic diseases afflicting obese individuals. Inflammation in fat tissue, in particular, seems to be a culprit, by changing fat tissue function, thereby contributing to insulin resistance. But the exact mechanisms of the phenomenon have been unclear. Three papers, one from Japan, one from Canada and one from the United States, showed that immune system cells known as T cells were deficient in obese mice, pushing the immune system to somehow initiate insulin resistance. Restoring T cells to more normal levels actually reversed weight gain and improved insulin resistance, even when the mice continued on a high-fat diet. The fourth study looked at another class of immune cells called mast cells, which are more commonly linked to allergies. An over-abundance of mast cells contributed to obesity and diabetes in mice, but when mast cells were removed from the system the problem was corrected, explained study senior author GuoPing Shi, a biochemist with Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Sleeping in Space is Easy, But There’s No Shower Astronauts may have some tough jobs in orbit - like building a $100 billion International Space Station - but apparently getting a goodnight’s sleep isn’t one of them. In fact, sleeping is pretty comfy in space because you can slumber without gravity’s incessant pull, according to Canadian astronaut Julie Payette, who has been living aboard the linked space station and shuttle Endeavour for more than a week. “We sleep very well in space. Can you imagine?” Payette told reporters in a recent interview broadcast by NASA. “We have a sleeping bag each, and when you get into it you float in the sleeping bag. The sleeping bag floats in the module. So all you have to do is just attach it somewhere, which is a good idea by the way because during the night while your sleeping you might start drifting and end up somewhere you didn’t intend to be in the first place.” Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, who is returning home aboard Endeavour after living on the station for 4 1/2 months, has said that anchoring yourself at
night is key because otherwise you might bump into sensitive computers and equipment and switch them on accidentally. Some astronauts have complained in the past that the first night’s sleep in space can be fitful because their minds are racing ahead to the coming mission’s complexity. But Endeavour’s six-man, one-woman crew is in the homestretch of a 16-day spaceflight that included five challenging spacewalks to deliver spare parts and a Japanese experiment porch to the space station. About the only thing missing, Payette said, is a shower. The thing that makes sleeping in space so comfortable - that weightless feeling - also makes it impossible to start the next morning with a refreshing shower. “Of course, we’re in weightlessness, so a showerhead with water dripping on top of your head would not work,” Payette said. “We don’t have a shower. We don’t even have a faucet or a tap.” NASA’s first space station, Skylab, and Russia’s Mir space station did include a shower facility for crewmembers.