The Morung Express
INTERNATIONAL
Thursday 27 November 2008
Dimapur
9
Thai army chief ask govt to step down
(Left): An anti-government protester, right, shows a banner to tourists during a protest at Suvarnabhumi international airport during a protest Wednesday, November 26, in Bangkok, Thailand. The protest have forced the cancellation of outgoing and incoming of both domestic and international flights and stranding thousands of tourists when protesters demand the immediately resignation of the government of Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat. (Right): Anti government protesters in front of the departure terminal at Suvarnabhumi airport, Bangkok in the early hours of Wednesday November 26. Outbound flights at Suvarnabhumi International Airport were temporarily suspended at 9 p.m. Tuesday, authorities said, shortly before hundreds of demonstrators _ some masked and armed with metal rods _ broke through police lines and spilled into the passenger terminal. Airport manager Serirat Prasutanon said airport authorities had tried to negotiate with the protesters “but to no avail.” “For the safety for passengers, we have to stop flights out of the airport temporarily until the situation returns to normal,” he said in a statement, adding that incoming flights were still operating. The anti government protesters are demanding the resignation of Thailand’s Prime Minister, Somchai Wongsawat. (AP Photo)
BANGKOK, NOVEMBER 26 (REUTERS): Thailand's army chief told the government on Wednesday to step down and call a snap election as a way out of a deepening political crisis, but the government and protesters rejected the call. Army chief Anupong Paochinda also pledged he would not launch a coup only two years after the military removed Thaksin Shinawatra as prime minister. At a news conference in Bangkok, he told the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) protest movement to
end its crippling siege of Bangkok's international airport and cease its anti-government campaign. "The prime minister should dissolve parliament and call a snap election," Anupong said in outlining a fourpoint plan to end political crisis now in its fourth year. Anupong and other top military brass made a similar intervention on national television last month, fuelling frenzied speculation of another military takeover in the coup-prone country. Now, as then, the government dismissed the idea. "The prime minister has said
many times that he will not quit or dissolve parliament because he has been democratically elected. That still stands," government spokesman Nattawut Saikuar told Channel 3 television. PAD spokesman Suriyasai Katasila also rejected the plan. "We won't pull out, we won't leave if Somchai does not quit," he told reporters. Somchai, whom the PAD accuse of being a puppet of Thaksin, his brother-in-law, landed in the northern city of Chiang Mai on his return from an Asia-Pacific summit in Peru, TPBS TV said.
Thai media reports speculated he may declare a state of emergency in Bangkok, where the PAD stormed Suvarnabhumi airport on Tuesday night, stranding thousands of travellers after airport officials cancelled all flights. After masked PAD members stepped up their action by breaking into the control tower at Suvarnabhumi airport, a rival pro-government group said it would launch its own street action, raising the prospect of clashes. "What they have done are terrorist acts," Jatuporn Prompan, a ruling party politician
and leader of the anti-PAD Democratic Alliance Against Dictatorship (DAAD), told a news conference. One senior DAAD source said the movement would consider any retreat by the government to be a military coup, and immediately launch a counter street offensive against the army. "There will be war for sure," the source told Reuters. The unrest forced the stock market and Thai baht lower in early trade as investors feared it would exacerbate the problems facing the economy, but stocks turned higher by the close amid spec-
ulation Somchai would quit. Thailand's finance minister has said the protests could cause a recession in an economy that depends on tourism and exports, both vulnerable to the global economic slowdown. The government forecast this week that the economy would grow just 4.5 percent this year, its slowest rate in seven years. Thousands of passengers slept overnight on benches and luggage carousels at Suvarnabhumi, many angry that airport staff fled when the PAD demonstrators, dressed in the movement's
yellow shirts, invaded the terminal. "We came here and we saw all these people in yellow. We thought they were football fans. Now we're just waiting," said a Dutchman who gave his name as Mark. Thai Airways, the national carrier, said 16 inbound flights had been diverted to Bangkok's old airport Don Muang, 45 km from Suvarnabhumi, and another three flights to a Vietnam War-era airbase 150 km southeast of Bangkok. Most airlines halted services to the Thai capital, a regional hub with 125,000 passengers passing through
Suvarnabhumi daily. Police have gone out of their way not to escalate the tension by confronting the PAD, although gunfire broke out on the streets on Tuesday as armed PAD members took on government supporters. At least 11 people were hurt, officials said, in scenes shown on Thai television that are likely to undermine public support for the PAD, which claims the backing of Bangkok's urban middle classes and elite. Broadly speaking, Thaksin and the government have the support of rural voters and the urban poor.
Deep sleep ups creativity, memory
In this photo released by NASA, astronaut Steve Bowen, STS-126 mission specialist, participates in the mission's fourth and final scheduled session of extravehicular activity (EVA) as construction and maintenance continue on the International Space Station on Monday November 24. During the six-hour, seven-minute spacewalk, Bowen and astronaut Shane Kimbrough, unseen, mission specialist, completed the lubrication of the port Solar Alpha Rotary Joints (SARJ) as well as other station assembly tasks. Bowen returned to the starboard SARJ to install the final trundle bearing assembly, retracted a berthing mechanism latch on the Japanese Kibo Laboratory and reinstalled its thermal cover. Bowen also installed a video camera on the Port 1 truss and attached a Global Positioning System antenna on the Japanese Experiment Module Pressurized Section. (AP Photo)
‘Fall of Tamil Tiger Greenland rebel HQ imminent’
COLOMBO, NOVEMBER 26 (REUTERS): Sri Lankan soldiers would soon capture the headquarters of the separatist Tamil Tiger rebels, the military said on Wednesday, and had reached the outskirts of the key town as an assault in the north ground ahead. The battle for Kilinochchi, the self-declared capital of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), has intensified in the two weeks since the army seized the entire western coast from the rebels for the first time since 1993. "The fall of Kilinochchi is very imminent," defence spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella told a media conference. "Troops are in the outskirts of Kilinochchi and consolidating the power." The LTTE could not be reached for comment. Independent confirmation is all but impossible since both sides limit media access to the war zone. Rambukwella declined to say how far away soldiers are from the town, located 330 km north of the capital Colombo. Military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara confirmed that clashes were continuing on Wednesday. Since early September, soldiers have been battling through earthen defences and bunkers on the southwestern edge of Kilinochchi. The military now says other units are
approaching it from the west and north. Speculation intensified this week that President Mahinda Rajapaksa would announce the town's seizure on Thursday to upstage LTTE leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran's annual speech. Prabhakaran, who turned 54 on Wednesday, traditionally uses his Heroes' Day speech to rally backers, including those in the global Tamil diaspora who have helped fund the LTTE for years. Rajapaksa's government has captured more ground than any other in the 25-year-old war, one of Asia's longest-running rebellions. That has led to calls by allies to hold early elections to capitalise on his military success, which analysts say would help him sidestep criticism over an ailing economy. Since 1983, the Tigers have fought to create a separate homeland for Sri Lanka's minority Tamils, many of whom have complained of discrimination by governments led by the Sinhalese ethnic majority for all 60 years since independence from Britain. The LTTE is on U.S., E.U. and Indian terrorism lists after decades of assassinations and widespread use of suicide bombings. Rajapaksa has rejected the LTTE's latest offer of a ceasefire, saying they must surrender or be wiped out.
WASHINGTON, NOVEMBER 26 (AP): Just in time for the holidays, some medical advice most people will like: Take a nap. Interrupting sleep seriously disrupts memory-making, compelling new research suggests. But on the flip side, taking a nap may boost a sophisticated kind of memory that helps us see the big picture and get creative. "Not only do we need to remember to sleep, but most certainly we sleep to remember," is how William Fishbein, a cognitive neuroscientist at the City University of New York, put it at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience last week. Scientists increasingly are focusing less on sleep duration and more on the quality of sleep, what's called sleep intensity, in studying how sleep helps the brain process memories so they stick. Particularly important is "slow-wave sleep", a period of very deep
that a new word containing that character meant "princess" and not "ape". Conversely, Wisconsin researchers briefly interrupted nighttime slow-wave sleep by playing a beep — just loudly enough to disturb sleep but not awaken — and found those people couldn't remember a task they'd learned the day before as well as people whose slowwave sleep wasn't disrupted. That brings us back to fragmented sleep, whether from aging or apnea. It can suppress cell birth in the hippocampus, where memorymaking starts — enough to hinder learning weeks after sleep returns to normal, warns Dennis McGinty of the University of California, Los Angeles. McGinty found that rats with disturbed sleep could only randomly stumble upon an escape hole in a maze that their counterparts detected easily by using room cues.
votes in favour of Self-Rule
This is a July 2007 file image of a Inuit seal hunter Dines Mikaelsen as he touches a dead seal atop a melting iceberg near Ammassalik Island, Greenland. Greenland voters overwhelmingly approved a plan to seek more autonomy from Denmark and take advantage of oil reserves that may lie off the glacial island, official results showed Wednesday November 26. The Arctic island's election commission said 76 percent of voters supported the referendum, which sets new rules on splitting future oil revenue with Denmark. The vote was seen as a key step toward independence for the semiautonomous territory, which relies on Danish subsidies. (AP Photo)
NUUK, NOVEMBER 26 (AFP): Greenland voted massively in favour of self-rule in a referendum that paves the way for independence from Denmark and gives it rights to lucrative Arctic resources, final results showed. A total of 75.54 percent voted "yes" to greater autonomy, while 23.57 percent said "no."
sleep that comes earlier than better-known REM sleep, or dreaming time. Fishbein suspected a more active role for the slowwave sleep that can emerge even in a power nap. Maybe our brains keep working during that time to solve problems and come up with new ideas. He taught 20 Englishspeaking college students lists of Chinese words spelled with two characters — such as sister, mother, maid. Then half the students took a nap, being monitored to be sure they didn't move from slow-wave sleep into the REM stage. Upon awakening, they took a multiple-choice test of Chinese words they'd never seen before. The nappers did much better at automatically learning that the first of the two-pair characters in the words they'd memorized earlier always meant the same thing — female, for example. So they also were more likely than non-nappers to choose
A self-rule proposal hammered out with Denmark earlier this year gives Greenland, which was granted semi-autonomy from Copenhagen in 1979, rights to potentially lucrative Arctic resources, as well as control over justice and police affairs and, to a certain extent, foreign affairs. The new status will
take effect on June 21, 2009. The head of the local government Hans Enoksen hailed the outcome in an emotional televised address. "I say thank you to the people of Greenland for this overwhelming result. Greenland has been given a mandate to take another step" toward independence, he said. In Nuuk, the capital that
is home to a quarter of the island's 57,000-strong population, fireworks lit up the night sky even before the final results were announced. Opinion polls prior to the referendum had suggested the result would be a clear "yes." Anne Sofie Fisker, a voter in her 60s, was prophetic as she left a Nuuk polling station earlier in the day. "It's a day to celebrate, a historic day, one that I have waited for for years and years," she told AFP. "It was time for us for to regain our rights and freedoms that were stolen from our ancestors, a people of free and proud hunters whose lands were colonised" by Denmark 300 years ago, said David Brandt, a former fisherman. Others however, including Johannes Mathiassen, feared the self-rule "is too early, and the country is not ready to assume these new responsibilities." There are potentially lucrative revenues from natural resources under Greenland's seabed, which according to international experts is home to large oil and gas deposits. Melting ice in the Arctic owing to climate change could make the region more accessible to exploration in the future. The countries ringing the Arctic Ocean -- Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States -- are currently competing over territorial claims in the region and Greenland is keen to garner its share. A Danish-Greenlandic commission that studied which policy fields would be transferred to the local government in Nuuk in the event of self-rule proposed among other things that "the revenues from activities related to raw materials be distributed to Greenland"
in return for reducing annual subsidies from Copenhagen. "Self-rule will bring with it only good things for Greenland," said Lars-Emil Johansen, who was prime minister of the island from 1991 to 1997 and who helped bring about its semi-autonomous status in 1979. Home to the US Thule radar base, Greenland will also with its new status be consulted on foreign and defence policy, which are now decided by Copenhagen, but Nuuk would not have the final say and little is expected to change in that area. Greenlanders, who voted to withdraw from the European Union in a 1982 referendum, will be also be recognised as a distinct people in line with international law, and Greenlandic will be recognised as the official language. Most of the parties in the local parliament were in favour of self-rule, but a fringe movement, backed by a single political party, the Democrats, had opposed it. "With such a tiny population it is impossible to provide the human contributions needed to turn Greenland into a modern and independent state," politician Finn Lyng said. With its 2.1-million square kilometre surface, 80 percent of which is covered by ice, Greenland is the world's largest island and contains 10 percent of the world's fresh water reserves. It counts 57,000 inhabitants, 50,000 of whom are native Inuits. In 2007, the territory received subsidies of 3.2 billion kroner (540 million dollars) from Denmark, or about 30 percent of its gross domestic product. The local government said 71.96 percent of the island's 39,000 eligible voters had cast ballots.