Tunis festival honors Arab revolution

2011-07-20

Tunis will host the first "Arab Revolutions Festival" on Thursday, AKI reported on Tuesday (July 19th). Artists from Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Palestine will perform at the ten-day event. "The purpose is to send a message giving thanks to the Tunisian people," festival organizer Khadar al-Asaad said.

Source: Magharebia.
Link: http://www.magharebia.com/cocoon/awi/xhtml1/en_GB/features/awi/newsbriefs/general/2011/07/20/newsbrief-09.

New Mauritania motorway to link rural towns

2011-07-20

Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz on Tuesday (July 19th) launched the construction of a new motorway that will ease access for rural residents, Pana reported. The 83km road will connect the southern towns of Kiffa and Kankossa. Funded in part by the Islamic Development Bank, the three-year project is part of Mauritania's infrastructure development program.

Source: Magharebia.
Link: http://www.magharebia.com/cocoon/awi/xhtml1/en_GB/features/awi/newsbriefs/general/2011/07/20/newsbrief-08.

AQIM creates new Sub-Saharan brigade

2011-07-20

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb leaders met last week in Mali to launch a new brigade for sub-Saharan Africans, Le Temps d'Algerie reported on Tuesday (July 19th), citing jihadist websites. "Beit El Ansar" will be comprised of fighters from Mali, Nigeria, Guinea, Chad, Burkina Faso and Senegal.

Osama Bin Laden reportedly chose the same name 25 years ago for a brigade of Arab jihadists in Afghanistan.

Source: Magharebia.
Link: http://www.magharebia.com/cocoon/awi/xhtml1/en_GB/features/awi/newsbriefs/general/2011/07/20/newsbrief-01.

Last Shuttle Astronauts Bid Historic Farewell to Space Station

by Clara Moskowitz
19 July 2011

HOUSTON — NASA's last space shuttle ever to visit the International Space Station cast off from the orbiting lab early Tuesday (July 19) to begin one final trip back to Earth.

Atlantis launched July 8 on the 135th and last voyage of NASA's 30-year space shuttle program. The orbiter delivered four astronauts and a horde of spare parts for the space laboratory, and is now packed full of trash to take back to Earth.

The astronauts closed the hatches between the shuttle and the station Monday (July 18) and undocked and departed from the outpost Tuesday at 2:28 a.m. EDT (0628 GMT).

"Atlantis departing for the last time," station astronaut said while ringing a bell as the orbiter backed away. "Thank you for your 12 docked missions to the International Space Station. We'll miss you guys. Godspeed, soft landing."

Collectively, NASA's space shuttles spent about 40 weeks over 37 missions docked to the International Space Station helping to assemble the football-field sized laboratory.

"The International Space Station now enters the era of utilization," Atlantis commander Chris Ferguson said. "Like a proud parent, we anticipate great things to follow from the men and women who build, operate, and live there. From this unique vantage point, we can see a great thing has been accomplished. Farewell ISS, make us proud."

On this mission, Atlantis spent 8 days, 15 hours and 21 minutes docked to the outpost.

Ferguson plans to land the spacecraft Thursday (July 21) for one last time at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Working the night shift

Ferguson and his crew began their 12th day in space Monday just after 10 p.m. EDT (0200 GMT Tuesday), waking to the song "Don't Panic" by Coldplay, played especially for pilot Doug Hurley.

"Good morning Houston, I'd like to thank my wife Karen and my son Jack for the great song — they know I really like it," Hurley said. "We are getting ready for undock today. We get to do one last lap of Atlantis around ISS and start our trip home." [Astronaut Rock: NASA's Final Space Shuttle Wakeup Songs]

Following undocking, astronauts aboard the space station rotated their vehicle about 90 degrees to allow the shuttle astronauts to take detailed photos of the outpost from many angles to document the status of its exterior. The maneuver offered some unique views of the space station, NASA officials said.

"Station, Atlantis, you'll be happy to know you look just as good from the side as you do from the front," Fergusion radioed the station crew.

Following the rotation, Hurley steered Atlantis on a half lap around the space station.

"We see you from Sergei's bedroom window," station astronaut Ron Garan said, referring to station crewmember Sergei Volkov of Russia. "You guys look good from here."

Final separation

After the flyaround, Atlantis made a final separation burn to depart from the station at 4:18 a.m. EDT (0818 GMT).

"It's been an incredible ride," Ferguson radioed NASA astronaut Dan Tani and the room of flight controllers working at NASA's Mission Control room in Houston. "On behalf of the four of us, we're really appreciative that we had the opportunity to work with you. We're glad to be headed home and we're happy to have served with you."

The shuttle's crewmembers will spend the rest of their day performing one final inspection of the orbiter's heat shield to ensure the sensitive tiles are intact and ready to protect the vehicle during re-entry through Earth's atmosphere.

"The undocking day will be a very busy day; we have a great deal of activities to do," shuttle flight director Kwatsi Alibaruho told reporters during a Monday briefing.

Intense emotions

The voyage is the end not just for the space shuttles, but for the thousands of NASA shuttle workers who will soon be taking on non-shuttle related jobs within the agency or moving on entirely.

"After my shift tomorrow, we'll commend the crew and the mission to the care of the entry team," Alibaruho said. "The emotions feel a bit more intense today than they felt back on flight day two or flight day three." [9 Weird Things NASA Flew on Space Shuttles]

Alibaruho and his on-orbit flight control team will hand over mission control duties to Tony Ceccacci, lead shuttle re-entry flight director, and his team.

"Personally, I feel a great sense of honor and pride at being able to serve as a shuttle flight director," Alibaruho said. "It's been an extraordinary program. I feel intense gratitude and I'm very humbled by it. My team have been absolutely fantastic, I couldn't be more proud of them."

Museum bound

So far, the weather looks good for a Thursday landing in Florida, NASA officials said.

"Preliminary indications are that it should be favorable," Alibaruho said. "As we know from launch day, you never know what's going to happen until you show up on game day."

After Atlantis lands, the vehicle and its siblings Discovery and Endeavor will be readied to go on display in museums. Atlantis is promised to the Kennedy Space Center's Visitors Center, while Discovery will go to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum near Washington, D.C., and Endeavor will be placed at the California Science Center in Los Angeles.

In the absence of the shuttles, NASA will rely on Russian spacecraft to carry U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station, until private American spacecraft are ready to take over the job. Meanwhile, NASA will begin building a heavy-lift rocket and crew capsule to carry astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit, ultimately to Mars.

Source: SPACE.com.
Link: http://www.space.com/12338-final-shuttle-astronauts-final-farewell-space-station.html.

NASA fends off tears with shuttle end in sight

Washington (AFP)
July 20, 2011

NASA astronauts and engineers fought off tears Wednesday as Atlantis made its final approach toward Earth, bringing an end to the 30-year shuttle program and closing a chapter in human spaceflight.

The shuttle was set to roll to a stop early Thursday, exactly 42 years after US astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first human to step foot on the Moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission.

Atlantis's landing will end an era of US dominance in human space exploration, leaving Russia as the sole taxi to the International Space Station until a replacement US capsule can be built by private industry.

But NASA administrator Charles Bolden insisted that once the shuttle eases onto the runway at Kennedy Space Center at 5:56 am (0956 GMT) Thursday, any tears on the faces of NASA employees will reflect both sadness and joy.

"My number one job right now is to ensure that we safely get Atlantis and her crew on the runway tomorrow," Bolden, a former astronaut, said on CNN.

"I will have tears of joy and tears of sadness at that time, but the tears of joy will be because we are already working with commercial companies to put cargo on the International Space Station as early as next year," he said.

"We are working with other commercial companies to put American astronauts and our partner astronauts on the International Space Station in four or five years."

Bolden has repeatedly brushed off critics who say the US space agency is in disarray, facing thousands of layoffs, an astronauts corps half the size it had 10 years ago and no human spaceflight program to replace the shuttle.

"We have just not done a good job of telling our story. NASA is very busy," Bolden said. "The president said to us, 2025 for an asteroid and 2030 to Mars. We have a lot of work to do ahead."

Meanwhile, the crew of four US astronauts aboard Atlantis savored their final day in orbit and NASA TV ran live images of the shuttle's view of Earth after a successful mission to restock the ISS for a year with several tons of supplies and food.

Final inspections of the shuttle's heat shield, which protects the spacecraft during its fiery transition into Earth's atmosphere, were completed and NASA said the spacecraft looked to be in good shape for landing.

"The space shuttle has been with us at the heart and soul of the human spaceflight program for about 30 years, and it's a little sad to see it go away," commander Chris Ferguson said as the crew sat for a series of TV interviews.

"It's going to be an emotional moment for a lot of people that dedicated their lives to the shuttle program for 30 years. But we're going to try to keep it upbeat... We're going to try to make it a celebration of the tremendous crowning achievements that have occurred."

Over the course of the program, five NASA space shuttles -- Atlantis, Challenger, Columbia, Discovery and Endeavor -- have comprised a fleet designed as the world's first reusable space vehicles.

Besides the prototype Enterprise that never flew in space, only three have survived after Columbia and Challenger were destroyed in accidents that killed their crews.

At a time of US budget austerity, President Barack Obama has opted to end the program that has averaged about $450-500 million for each of its 135 missions.

He also canceled Constellation, a project that aimed to put US astronauts back on the Moon by 2020 at a cost of $97 billion.

Mission specialist Rex Walheim said he was optimistic about the future of the US space program, but acknowledged "we're in a kind of a transition period, which is a little bit uncomfortable."

NASA aims to turn over low-orbit space travel and space station servicing to commercial ventures, with a commercial launcher and capsule built by a private corporation in partnership with NASA ready to fly sometime after 2015.

Until the private sector fills the void, the world's astronauts will rely on Russian Soyuz rockets for rides to the ISS.

NASA flight director Tony Ceccacci said his team was trying to stay focused on getting the shuttle home safely.

"Every time you feel something you have to remember that this thing is not over yet," he told reporters.

"We have a motto in the mission control center that flight controllers don't cry, so we are going to make sure that we keep to that."

Source: Space-Travel.
Link: http://www.space-travel.com/reports/NASA_fends_off_tears_with_shuttle_end_in_sight_999.html.

NASA's Hubble Discovers Another Moon Around Pluto

Boston MA (SPX)
Jul 21, 2011

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope discovered a fourth moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto. The tiny, new satellite - temporarily designated P4 - was uncovered in a Hubble survey searching for rings around the dwarf planet.

The new moon is the smallest discovered around Pluto. It has an estimated diameter of 8 to 21 miles (13 to 34 km). By comparison, Charon, Pluto's largest moon, is 648 miles (1,043 km) across, and the other moons, Nix and Hydra, are in the range of 20 to 70 miles in diameter (32 to 113 km).

"I find it remarkable that Hubble's cameras enabled us to see such a tiny object so clearly from a distance of more than 3 billion miles (5 billion km)," said Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who led this observing program with Hubble.

The finding is a result of ongoing work to support NASA's New Horizons mission, scheduled to fly through the Pluto system in 2015. The mission is designed to provide new insights about worlds at the edge of our solar system. Hubble's mapping of Pluto's surface and discovery of its satellites have been invaluable to planning for New Horizons' close encounter.

"This is a fantastic discovery," said New Horizons' principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "Now that we know there's another moon in the Pluto system, we can plan close-up observations of it during our flyby."

The new moon is located between the orbits of Nix and Hydra, which Hubble discovered in 2005. Charon was discovered in 1978 at the U.S. Naval Observatory and first resolved using Hubble in 1990 as a separate body from Pluto.

The dwarf planet's entire moon system is believed to have formed by a collision between Pluto and another planet-sized body early in the history of the solar system. The smashup flung material that coalesced into the family of satellites observed around Pluto.

Lunar rocks returned to Earth from the Apollo missions led to the theory that our moon was the result of a similar collision between Earth and a Mars-sized body 4.4 billion years ago. Scientists believe material blasted off Pluto's moons by micrometeoroid impacts may form rings around the dwarf planet, but the Hubble photographs have not detected any so far.

"This surprising observation is a powerful reminder of Hubble's ability as a general purpose astronomical observatory to make astounding, unintended discoveries," said Jon Morse, astrophysics division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

P4 was first seen in a photo taken with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 on June 28. It was confirmed in subsequent Hubble pictures taken on July 3 and July 18. The moon was not seen in earlier Hubble images because the exposure times were shorter. There is a chance it appeared as a very faint smudge in 2006 images, but was overlooked because it was obscured.

Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy Inc. in Washington.

Source: Space Daily.
Link: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/NASA_Hubble_Discovers_Another_Moon_Around_Pluto_999.html.

Kenya Holds Large-scale Burning of Illegal Ivory

By June Kellum
July 20, 2011

In a high-profile ceremony Wednesday, Kenya burned several tons of contraband ivory confiscated more than a decade ago in Singapore.

This is the first time in over 20 years Kenya has burned ivory in large quantities. In 1989, 12 tons were destroyed as a statement against the poaching of elephants.

On Wednesday, Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki set fire to 335 tusks and 41,553 hankos (carved signature stamps), which went up in a blaze of orange flames and black smoke at the Kenya Wildlife Service Field Training School in southwestern Kenya.

DNA testing of the ivory determined that most of it came from Zambian elephants, although some were from elephants in Malawi and Tanzania. The ivory was exported from Lilongwe, Malawi and more than seven tons were discovered by authorities in Singapore in 2002, according to a press release from the Environmental Investigation Agency in London.

Some of the ivory—as many as 196 tusks—will be taken back to Zambia and Malawi for prosecution evidence and educational research, according to the African Conservation Foundation (AFC).
Controversy

The burning, which took place on Elephant Law Enforcement Day, comes after years of lobbying and with continued controversy over the right way to manage Africa’s resources, according to the AFC.

Some conservationists say that burning ivory wastes a resource that could otherwise be put to into development and educational programs in Africa, while others, such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare, hail incineration of illegal ivory.

The World Conservation Trust Foundation (WCTF), which advocates managing elephant populations, holds that human needs must be balanced with elephant welfare, and that burning ivory deprives impoverished African communities of much-needed income.

“Some elephant populations in Africa have grown to the point where they endanger the welfare of local people by trampling crops and homes … In the west, the false impression has grown that all elephant populations are in great danger from man. The reality is that many elephant stocks are abundant. What is required is the proper management of their populations,” WCTF states on it’s website.

In a recent study, IFAW found that that ivory trade of “questionable legality” is active in Europe. It found 650,000 euro ($922,000) worth of merchandise for sale on websites in the U.K., France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and Germany.

“Any legal trade in ivory encourages elephant poaching by providing a cover for illegal trade in ivory,” states the Director of IFAW’s Wildlife Trade Program, Kelvin Alie, on the organization’s website.

“The war on illegal ivory trade and elephant poaching can only be won by removing elephant ivory not just from international trade, but entirely from the global marketplace. If ivory had no commercial value, there would be little incentive for anyone to kill elephants for their tusks and one of the major threats to their survival would disappear,” Alie states.

The burning was carried out under the Lusaka Agreement Task Force (LATF), a wildlife law enforcement initiative.

The six LATF countries are Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, Lesotho, Tanzania, and The Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), with Ethiopia, South Africa and Swaziland as signatories.

Source: The Epoch Times.
Link: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/world/kenya-holds-large-scale-burning-of-illegal-ivory-59334.html.

Thousands Riot in Malawi

By Jasper Fakkert
July 20, 2011

Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets across the southeast African nation of Malawi on Wednesday.

The Malawians are protesting the high cost of living and bad economic governance.

The protests were declared illegal by the country’s High court on Tuesday, resulting in running street battles with police on Wednesday. At least one person has died.

On Tuesday, supporters of the ruling DPP party were already roaming the streets carrying machetes threatening anyone taking part in the protests, according to the BBC.

About 40 percent of Malawi’s economy is dependent on foreign aid. A large portion of that aid was cut off earlier this year by the U.K., Malawi’s biggest donor, after a dispute between London and Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika. Mutharika expelled the U.K. ambassador over a leaked diplomatic cable in which the president was referred to as “autocratic and intolerant of criticism."

Source: The Epoch Times.
Link: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/world/thousands-riot-in-malawi-59343.html.

Indian baby boy with 34 fingers and toes sets new Guinness record

Jul 21, 2011

Bareilly (Uttar Pradesh), July 20 (ANI): Akshat, a baby boy over the age of one, registered his name in the Guinness world records for having a total of 34 fingers and toes.

He has set the record for having the highest number of fingers and toes and hails from the Bareilly district in Uttar Pradesh.

Amrita Saxena, the mother of the child, said it was difficult for her to believe that her son broke the world record, until a family friend convinced her.

"He (family friend) read on the internet about the baby born in China with 31 fingers. Then he said that my boy has broken the record of having 34 fingers. At first, I was not convinced at all. It was hard to believe that my son has broken the record. But later, he along with my husband and my younger sister registered the data in the Internet. Then I was asked to submit certain documents after which his name was in the Guinness World Records," added Saxena.

Doctors attending to the child informed the mediapersons that it was a rare phenomenon and diagnosed it as polydactyly.

"The person who is diagnosed with it is polydactylic. It is due to certain defects in the bone development of the uterus. The reason behind this defect can be either developmental congenital formation or chromosomal anomalies, which is due to maternal infection or drugs," said Dr. Parul Gupta, a gynaecologist.

Gupta further explained that this congenital physical anomaly could be easily cured by performing a surgery.

"Yes, it is absolutely curable. Mostly people go for plastic surgery. And sometimes when polydactyly is minimal, it can be cured normally, without an operation. And if there is a major problem, then people prefer to go for a plastic surgery," added Gupta.

Meanwhile Saxena was a little worried for her son's future. She aspires for her son to lead a 'normal' life and wants him to undergo proper treatment for it.

It is quite interesting to know that Polydactyly or polydactylism is also known as hyperdactyly. It is a congenital physical anomaly in humans, dogs, and cats having supernumerary fingers or toes.

UN may switch blue helmets to green, then launch climate change peacekeeping wars

Thursday, July 21, 2011
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

(NaturalNews) The United Nations may soon announce that merely by changing the color of its soldiers' helmets from blue to green, it can intervene in the business of sovereign nations under the guise of so-called "climate change peacekeeping."

As you consider this, keep in mind that the current bombing of infrastructure in Libya is also brazenly called "peacekeeping." In fact, there's hardly a military campaign that's been conducted in the last hundreds years that wasn't sold to the public as a way to create "peace." Now, the UN is on the verge of "waging peace" wearing green helmets instead of blue helmets. The invocation of all things "green," it seems, provides justification for just about anything these days... including war.

This new "green" UN initiative is due for discussion in a special meeting of the United Nations security council, where the organization will decide whether to expand its "peacekeeping" role to cover everything that happens in a world suffering under climate change. An article in The Guardian explains that this plan involves "...a new environmental peacekeeping force -- green helmets -- which could step into conflicts caused by shrinking resources."

Justification for UN troops on U.S. soil?
This would give the UN justification to place a "peacekeeping" force on U.S. soil, of course. Virtually the entire U.S. Southeast -- from Texas all the way to D.C. -- is currently sweltering under a severe heat wave combined with a hundred-year drought in many areas. Under the UN's new "climate change peacekeeping" initiatives, if crop failures result in riots, they could drop in a few hundred thousand UN troops -- all wearing GREEN helmets -- and then explain they're here to save us from "conflicts caused by shrinking resources."

Because, you know, GREEN means it's good for us, you see. Perhaps they'll even paint the tips of their bullets green so that when they start firing into the crowds of innocent protestors, they can claim it's not an act of war but rather "green kinetic action." The streets may be red with blood, but the evening news will present it all to you as a new "green initiative" that's good for the environment!

The Guardian goes on to report:

In an official "Concept Note" ahead of the meeting, Germany said the security council needed to draw up scenarios for dealing with the affects of extreme temperatures and rising seas. How would the UN deal with climate refugees?

As you can see from this quote, the UN feels that it must function as the police force of the world, intervening in the affairs of sovereign nations, and even painting their helmets green to make it all acceptable to the masses. If a foreign military force invades the United States of America and puts non-U.S. boots on the ground, that's called a military invasion. But I guess if they paint their helmets green, it's all okay, right?

Hopefully they'll paint their helmets NEON green so they stand out much like the British Empire's redcoat soldiers in 1776 who made easy targets.

Coming soon: Food supply disruptions leading to global riots
One thing the UN is getting right in all this, by the way, is the implied prediction that massive global crop failures are headed our way. Given the current depletion of food production resources (topsoil, fossil water supplies, etc.) a global food crisis is now inevitable. Food prices are already skyrocketing around the world, and the widespread use of GMOs is setting up our civilization for devastating food failures due to DNA contamination of food crops.

Food disruptions will, of course, lead to food riots. And food riots could get pretty ugly in high population areas (cities, namely) where the people import nearly 100 percent of their food. Even in places like New York City, we could see extreme food riots that have never been witnessed before in the history of America. But does this give the UN the right to intervene under the guise of green helmets?

Globalists think it does. The global elite are not merely setting us up for UN occupation under the excuse of "climate change peacekeeping," they're also the ones causing many of the problems in the first place! Who's behind the global GMO invasion? It's the global elite, of course. That's why the U.S. state department was caught on record saying that Spain should be punished for resisting GMOs.

How about global vaccination campaigns that are actually sterilization efforts designed to limit population growth? Then there's the issue of chemtrails, fluoride and all the other chemicals being dumped into the environment, which actually cause environmental problems that then provide justification for the UN to show up and police the world. Wouldn't it make more sense to just stop poisoning the planet with all these synthetic chemicals in the first place?

But no, the more problems there are in our world, the more power security forces are able to exercise over the populations. Conflict enables control. War is power, not peace. Every crisis in an opportunity. "Never waste a good crisis," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously said in a talk about climate change. And that's the whole point, you see: The global elite wish to exploit the very same environmental crises they've caused in order to gain more power over entire nations.

And now with this UN initiative, we're seeing yet another example of how "green" is used as a cover story for military imperialism. The term "climate change peacekeeping" is downright Orwellian in its tone and intention. Hitler fought wars to create "law and order." Stalin's atrocities were done in the name of "peace." The Crusades were mass killing campaigns conducted in the name of "God." Tyrants always have a justification for their wars, it seems. The killing that used to be done in the name of God will soon be conducted in the name of GREEN.

So get ready, America. Your neighborhoods are about to be "peacekept" by UN forces wearing green helmets and claiming to be operating under environmental initiatives that somehow give them the right to occupy your land and order you to obey. Remember, it's all about "Never waste a good crisis," and a global food crisis is headed your way very, very soon.

NaturalNews readers may be interested in protecting themselves from the coming food crisis by taking advantage of our Food Security course that teaches food preparedness, how to build your own water filter, how to create a food "go bag" and much more.

Source: NaturalNews.
Link: http://www.naturalnews.com/033076_United_Nations_peacekeeping.html.