Venezuelan student protesters seek to woo poor

March 19, 2014

PETARE, Venezuela (AP) — The two students venture into one of Latin America's biggest slums for the first time, feeling scared and somewhat awkward. Their mission: to broaden support for their anti-government protest movement in the low-income barrios whose working poor the late President Hugo Chavez championed.

"Our families didn't want us to come up here," says Fernando Viscuna, a 21-year-old international commerce major at the Instituto Universitario de Nuevas Profesiones. "But if you want a better country, it's got to be done."

He and Jhony Pulido, a curly-haired 22-year-old economics student at Andres Bello University, are earnest foot soldiers in an incipient bridge-building effort by students whose five-week-old protest movement has badly convulsed the country and triggered a firm government crackdown.

The students have no illusions. If anything is to change, they need allies in the very districts that Chavez converted into bulwarks of support by investing tens of billions of dollars in oil income in generous social welfare programs.

In two hours of knocking on doors and canvassing shop owners in the hilltop barrio of El Morro, accompanied by a local auto mechanics teacher allied with the opposition, the students get a polite but mostly cool reception.

Most people barely engage them. Some, like 79-year-old retired plumber Valentin Castillo, openly dismiss them. "You're killing a lot of people, torching cars. You're against us, against everyone," Castillo says, raising his voice.

"Exactly. We agree with you. We're against the blockades, too," says Viscuna, trying to get in a word. But Castillo doesn't buy it. He mentions the slaying of National Guardsmen, the government's shock troops against protesters, by unknown gunmen — four have now been killed — and a motorcyclist who authorities say was killed by a steel cable stretched across a street by protesters.

"What are they looking for with this fight?" Castillo demands, doubting Viscuna's claim not to endorse violence or seek the overthrow of President Nicolas Maduro. Some people the students meet say they, too, are fed up enough with worsening food shortages, crippling inflation and unchecked violent crime — the very maladies that precipitated the unrest — and would take to the streets, too, but for their fear of pistol-packing pro-government posses known as "colectivos" that have violently suppressed dissent. The colectivos have been implicated in at least six protest-related killings, only one in metropolitan Caracas.

Katherin Castillo, a 35-year-old single mother of five, and her neighbors are exhausted by the roulette that food shopping has become, of spending hours in queues outside state-run supermarkets in hopes that flour, milk, cooking oil will show up at subsidized prices.

On this morning, chicken is all Castillo has on offer at the storefront canteen where she serves cheap breakfasts. "I would go out and protest. But I'm afraid," Castillo says after the students leave. "The colectivos are abusing their power, and a mother can't take risks."

The auto mechanics teacher who accompanies the students, Jorge Idrogo, says colectivos threw him to the street when he tried to protest at a busy Petare intersection on Feb. 17, his banner torn away while national police stood by idly. Such stories about colectivos abound.

Earlier this month, colectivos twice prevented students from entering Petare to explain themselves in assemblies with residents in two districts, says Idrogo, 35. "It's the only way around the government media blackout," he says. State-run media portray student protesters as violent troublemakers bent on destroying the gains of 15 years of socialist-inspired advances.

Student leader Alfredo Graffe of Simon Bolivar University said the movement has held more than a dozen informational meetings in working-class districts since late February, but says it is only safe for students to visit by daylight.

In the lower middle-class district of Caricuao in Caracas' mostly pro-government west, colectivos have broken up all five student-organized protests since mid-February. In other parts of the proletarian west, students have dared not even try.

Which is why the handbill that Idrogo presses into people's hands as he works his neighborhood with the students, his wife and two young children, stresses the shared problems of all Venezuelans in simple language spoken by stick figures in comic book-like balloons.

"I've been robbed." "I don't know when the water will come back on." "They didn't get the guy who killed him." "Two months without obtaining milk." The handbills that the students distribute use fancier words and list demands: The government must acknowledge that its economic policies are bankrupting the country. It must halt censorship, reverse violent crime that has made Venezuela a world leader in murder.

But Venezuela's poor are, on the whole, more worried about losing the pensions, subsidies, education and basic health services gained under Chavez if the opposition were to come to power. That's what University of Georgia sociology graduate student Rebecca Hanson says people tell her in the sprawling working-class district of Catia in Caracas' west, where she has been living on-and-off since 2009. "I think people are widely interpreting the protests as seeking to get Maduro out of office and nothing else."

On top of that, the students have not clearly articulated an agenda, says Luis Vicente Leon, director of the Venezuelan Datanalisis polling firm. And they're divided among moderates and radicals just like the main opposition parties.

"I'd say the majority are moderates, but they've been tainted by the radical battle at the barricades, and get blamed for it," says Leon. In all, at least 27 people have been killed in the unrest, by government count.

Ironically, many of the protesters who have battled riot police regularly in Caracas' upper class Chacao district in recent weeks hail from poorer barrios, where they say they don't dare protest publicly.

Those who have tried to organize peaceful marches in their home districts say the repressive response from armed, government-allied groups has been swift. When colectivos broke up a Feb. 17 protest in the southwestern district of Caricuao, firing tear gas and blocking marchers with motorcycles as National Guardsmen stood by idly, a local colectivo leader approached the father of Jefres Henriquez, a 23-year-old student activist who lives there.

The leader knew both father and son because Henriquez had once worked at a children's summer camp that the colectivo runs. "He showed my father a photo of me and said, 'We need to take action against your son,' said Henriquez.

So he fled, and didn't return for a week. "When I got back, I got calls from colectivo members who said they wanted to meet with me," said Henriquez. Fearful, he declined.

Associated Press writer Fabiola Sanchez contributed to this report.

US Air Force fires nine in nuclear missile cheating scandal

Washington (AFP)
March 27, 2014

The US Air Force said Thursday it sacked nine nuclear missile officers and will discipline dozens of others over an exam cheating scandal that has sparked concerns about lax ethics.

The officers, including chiefs of four squadrons, were all working at Malmstrom Air Force base in Montana, which has been rocked by cheating allegations that implicated up to 100 airmen.

"Nine officers in leadership positions at Malmstrom were recommended for removal," Air Force Secretary Deborah James told a news conference.

An internal investigation had found that the commanders had not engaged in any test cheating but had "failed to provide adequate oversight of their crew force," James said.

A tenth officer had submitted his resignation over the case, she said.

A top general overseeing nuclear forces said the cheating stemmed in part from a stifling atmosphere created by commanders who over-emphasized perfect test scores for the missile launch officers.

"Although the required test score is 90 percent, crew members felt pressure to score 100 percent on each and every test," Lieutenant General Stephen Wilson said at the same news conference.

"They felt compelled to cheat to get a perfect score," he said.

The "zero-defect" approach was unrealistic and unnecessary, as the rules for managing the ballistic missiles had redundancies and other automatic safeguards, Wilson said.

"Leaders lost sight of the fact that execution in the field is more important than what happens in the class room," he said.

The cheating was first uncovered in January during an unrelated investigation into illegal drugs. The outcome of that drug probe is still pending.

Out of 100 officers potentially linked to the cheating, nine have since been cleared in an investigation, James said.

Another nine cases were being examined separately by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. Of those, eight could involve criminal charges related to mishandling classified information -- possibly the exam materials.

About 30 to 40 officers will be retrained and allowed to return to duty to the missile force, while the remainder will face disciplinary action that could include being discharged from the military, officials said.

Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel has expressed deep disappointment over the cheating and voiced a wider concern over unethical conduct across the armed forces, after a spate of embarrassing scandals.

Hagel this week appointed a senior naval officer, Rear Admiral Margaret Klein, to serve as a special adviser looking at ethics and "character" issues.

Source: Space War.
Link: http://www.spacewar.com/reports/US_Air_Force_fires_nine_in_nuclear_missile_cheating_scandal_999.html.

A Honduran Paradise that Doesn't Want to Anger the Sea Again

By Thelma Mejía

SANTA ROSA DE AGUÁN, Honduras , Mar 26 2014 (IPS) - At the mouth of the Aguán river on the Caribbean coast of Honduras, a Garífuna community living in a natural paradise that was devastated 15 years ago by Hurricane Mitch has set an example of adaptation to climate change.

“We don’t want to make the sea angry again, we don’t want a repeat of what happened with Mitch, which destroyed so many houses in the town – nearly all of the ones along the seashore,” community leader Claudina Gamboa, 35, told IPS.

Around the coastal town of Santa Rosa de Aguán, the stunning landscape is almost as pristine as when the first Garífunas came to Honduras in the 18th century.

To reach Santa Rosa de Aguán, founded in 1886 and home to just over 3,000 people, IPS drove by car for 12 hours from Tegucigalpa through five of this Central American country’s 18 departments or provinces, until reaching the village of Dos Bocas, 567 km northeast of the capital.

From this village on the mainland, a small boat runs to Santa Rosa de Aguán, located on the sand in the delta of the Aguán river, whose name in the Garífuna language means “abundant waters.”

Half of the trip is on roads in terrible conditions, which become unnerving when it gets dark. But after crossing the river late at night, under a starry sky with a sea breeze caressing the skin, the journey finally comes to a peaceful end.

A three-year project to help the sand dunes recover, which was completed in 2013, was carried out by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) through the Global Environment Facility’s (GEF) Small Grants Program, with additional support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).

The project sought to generate conditions that would enable the local community to adapt to the risks of climate change and protect the natural ecosystem of the dunes.

The initiative enlisted 40 local volunteers, almost all of them women, who went door to door to raise awareness on the importance of protecting the environment and to educate people about the risks posed by climate change.

“They called them crazy, and thought the people working on that were stupid, but I asked them ‘don’t stop, just keep doing it.’ Now there is greater awareness and people have seen the winds aren’t hitting so hard,” Atanasia Ruíz, a former deputy mayor of the town (2008-2014) and a survivor of Hurricane Mitch, told IPS.

She and Gamboa said the women played an essential role in raising awareness on climate change, and added that thanks to their efforts, the project left an imprint on the white sand and the local inhabitants.

People in the community now understand the importance of protecting the coastal system and preserving the dunes, and have learned to organize behind that goal, Gamboa said. “It’s really touching to see the old women from our town picking up garbage for recycling,” she said.

The sand dunes act as natural protective barriers that keep the wind or waves from smashing into the town during storms.

“When the sea got mad, it made us pay. When Mitch hit, everything here was flattened, it was just horrible,” Gamboa said.

Some people left town, she said, “because we were told that we couldn’t live here, that it was too vulnerable and that the sea would always flood us because there was no way to keep it out.

“But many of us stayed, and with the knowledge they gave us, we know how to protect ourselves and our town,” she said, proudly pointing out how the vegetation has begun to grow in the dunes.

In late October 1998, Hurricane Mitch left 11,000 dead and 8,000 missing in Honduras, while causing enormous economic losses and damage to infrastructure.

Santa Rosa de Aguán was hit especially hard, with storm surges up to five meters high. The bodies of more than 40 people from the town were found, while others went missing.

The effort to recover the sand dunes along the coast included the construction of wide wooden walkways to protect the sand.

In addition, the remains of cinder block houses destroyed by Mitch were finally removed, to prevent them from inhibiting the natural formation of dunes.

The project also introduced recycling, to clear garbage from the beach and the sandy unpaved streets of this town, where visitors are greeted with “buiti achuluruni”, which means “welcome” in the Garífuna language.

Lícida Nicolasa Gómez is an 18-year-old member of the Garífuna community who prefers to be called “Alondra”, her nickname since childhood.

“I loved it when they invited me to the dunes and recycling project, because we were deforesting the dunes, hurting them, destroying the vegetation, but we’re not doing that anymore,” she said.

“We even made a mural on one of the walls of the community centre, to remember what kind of town we wanted,” she added, with a broad smile.

The mural includes scraps of plastic, metal, tiles and bottle tops. It reflects the beauty of the Garífunas, showing people fishing, crops of mandioc and plantain, and the sea and bright sun, while reflecting the desire to live in harmony with the environment.

The sand dunes are up to five meters high in this small town at the mouth of a river that runs through the country’s tropical rainforest.

Hugo Galeano, from GEF’s Small Grants Program, told IPS that Santa Rosa de Aguán became even more vulnerable after Hurricane Mitch, which affected the local livelihoods based on fishing, farming and livestock.

For this community built between the river and the sea, flooding is one of the main threats to survival, said the representative of the GEF program.

Ricardo Norales, 80, told IPS that, although the sand dunes and vegetation are growing, “the location of our community means we are still exposed to inclement weather.

“With the project, we saw how the wind and the sea don’t penetrate our homes as much anymore. But we need this kind of aid to be more sustainable,” he said.

The history of Santa Rosa de Aguán is marked by the impact of tropical storms and hurricanes, which have hit the town directly or indirectly many times since it was founded.

But the sand dunes are once again taking shape along the shoreline, where the community has built walkways to the sea.

Local inhabitants want their town to be seen as an example of adaptation to climate change and the construction of alternatives making survival possible. Several of them said they did not want an “ayó” – good-bye in Garífuna – for their community.

Source: Inter-Press Service (IPS).
Link: http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/03/honduran-paradise-doesnt-want-anger-sea/.

Côte d’Ivoire’s Middle Class – Growing or Disappearing?

By Marc-Andre Boisvert

ABIDJAN, Mar 27 2014 (IPS) - “I’m middle class. Definitively,” Sonia Anoh, a young and independent 30-year-old Ivorian tells IPS. Anoh has a master’s degree, earns 1,470 dollars a month working in marketing, lives alone, owns a car and is now shopping for a home.

But while Anoh freely talks about her economic status, not many others brag so easily about being middle class in this West African nation.

Defining the African “middle class” is a challenge. For the World Bank, it comprises everyone who earns between two and 20 dollars per day. It’s a range that is far too broad and while the African Development Bank uses the same income range, it emphasizes the need to subdivide the middle class into two.

The upper middle class, by this definition, earns between 10 and 20 dollars a day, and a vulnerable lower class is one that earns between two and four dollars a day. The latter are just marginally above the poverty line of 1.5 dollars a day and can easily slip back into it.

Côte d’Ivoire used to have the strongest middle class in West Africa until it was seriously hit by the post-1980 economic meltdown and the recent post-electoral political crisis from 2010 to 2011. More than 3,000 people died in the violence that followed former Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo’s refusal to concede victory to current President Allassane Ouattara. Now the Ivorian middle class represents over two million of this country’s 23 million inhabitants, according to government figures.

While Côte d’Ivoire’s middle class may have shrunk, there are signs that this economic group appears to be slowly starting to increase. But its expansion remains limited by two decades of economic problems and conflict.

According to the Moscow-based Institute for Emerging Market Studies, the African middle class will rise three times from 32 million in 2009 to 107 million by 2030 — the largest increase in the world. And with the World Bank predicting that Côte d’Ivoire’s economy will grow at a rate of 8.2 percent for 2014, there is hope that this boom will lift many more of the country’s people out of poverty.

Growing or disappearing?

“Building a strong middle class was an important preoccupation for former president Félix Houphouet-Boigny (1905-1993),” Professor Marcel Benie Kouadio, economist and dean at the Abidjan Private University Faculty tells IPS.

“At the time, [middle class] meant mostly civil servants, doctors, magistrates and other liberal workers.

“Houphouet-Boigny [implemented] several policies to transform a middle class dependent on the state into an entrepreneur class. The state fostered the middle class to invest in cocoa or palm oil plantations as a way to build a middle class that would also be able to produce goods.”

Jean Coffie is a retired civil servant and an example of what Houphouet-Boigny dreamt of for the middle class. He is an entrepreneur who lives off his investments.

“My pension is not enough to live on. But I invested in hevea [rubber trees]. Income is random but I still earn more with that than from my government pension,” he tells IPS.

With this extra money, he is helping pay for his grandson’s studies in France. But Coffie is quick to point out that life for a middle class Ivorian is not what it used to be.

“At the time [during Houphouet-Boigny’s presidency], we had a lot of support to develop ourselves. University [education] and health care were more accessible. We might still be middle class but we lost all our privileges.”

Benie Kouadio agrees.

“The middle class has shrunk. Twenty years ago, teachers and doctors were middle class. Now, they can’t afford a new car. The Ivorian middle class lost its purchase power.”

A consumer class

Purchase power is a key word. Accountants differ with economists in their understanding of the middle class; rather than analyzing income, they look at disposable revenue.

Being middle class is about hitting a “sweet spot”, where people are able to spend money for things other than survival, says a report from accounting firm Ernst & Young.

Marcel Anné is the managing director of the supermarket chain Jour de Marché, which is situated in downtown Abidjan, the country’s economic capital. He has a good view of the emerging consumer class.

“Actually, this supermarket is less crowded than it used to be but this is more about changing consumer habits. This used to be [a] central [spot] for the middle class. Civil servants would buy things here and then go home,” he tells IPS.

The middle class here has become a more diverse, complex grouping that is not necessarily just comprised of civil servants anymore. The privatization of companies, the need for qualified labor work in IT and on the new oil and gas fields have diversified this economic grouping.

So now Jour de Marché has opened “more, smaller supermarkets where the middle class live.”

And around Abidjan, the housing boom too suggests that there is a rising middle class.

Riviera Palmeraie, a former plantation where palm oil trees were cut down to make space for several small bungalows, has been one of the first major housing developments in Abidjan based on affordable units.

And now similar developments are slowly spreading across the city and beyond.

Ousmane Bah is the director of Alliance Cote d’Ivoire, one of the companies building middle class housing. His company will build the Akwaba Residence, one of many housing developments being constructed along Abidjan’s outskirts. Prices for homes start at 21,000 dollars for a two-room home and 36,100 dollars for four rooms.

“It targets mostly the young professionals starting up in life, as well as civil servants,” he tells IPS.

His project, like several others, is supported by the government and is part of an initiative to boost social housing for the middle class.

The government targets households with revenue of less than 840 dollars per month. Buyers only need to provide a 10 percent cash deposit, and then benefit from a government-backed loan with low interest rates of 5.5 percent.

It addresses a difficult problem that seriously limits the growth of the Ivorian middle class: lack of credit.

“People are not used to buying flats here. They rent. Credit institutions are not used to provide housing loans. This is a big issue. We cannot simply build and expect people to buy,” says Bah.

Mohamed Diabaté is the first to agree.

“This is ridiculous. I wanted to get a credit for my house. It was easier to get credit to buy a goat for a Muslim holiday than having a real sustainable project. They did not even look at my file,” the 40-year-old IT specialist tells IPS.

He says even though he has a “comfortable revenue” and a steady job for 12 years, he could not obtain a home loan.

Benie Kouadio points out that “this is a clear limitation to the growth of the middle class. The middle class has no access to credit. Banks do not give loans for housing or cars any more.”

Source: Inter-Press Service (IPS).
Link: http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/03/cote-divoires-middle-class-growing-disappearing/.

AU troops declare war on CAR militia

Wed Mar 26, 2014

The African Union peacekeeping force in the Central African Republic (CAR) has declared war against the majority Christian vigilante groups.

The head of the African-led peacekeeping mission to the CAR blamed the anti-Balaka groups for attacks against the troops belonging to the African Union force.

“From now on, we consider the anti-Balaka as enemies of MISCA,” media outlets quoted Congolese General Jean Marie Michel as saying, adding, “And we will treat them as such.”

The peacekeepers have been fighting the anti-Balaka in the capital Bangui since Saturday, with at least 16 people being killed in the latest clashes there.

“They even fire on people who are here to try to end this crisis on behalf of the Central African people to which they belong. We hold them responsible for attacks that have targeted our troops in recent days,” the general added.

The AU mission is in the CAR to help end an ongoing violence which broke out between Muslims and Christians a year ago.

The United Nations Human Rights chief, Navi Pillay, has recently expressed horror at the level of the ongoing violence in the CAR.

The developments come as UN has described the displacement of the Muslims of the CAR as ethnic-religious cleansing.

The conflict in the CAR erupted after Christian militia launched coordinated attacks on the mostly Muslim Seleka group, which toppled the government last March.

Christian militiamen, however, have been targeting the Muslim population as a whole.

French and African peacekeepers are on the ground, but they have been unable to stop the violence and even in some occasions have been accused of killing Muslims.

France currently has around 2,000 troops in the CAR, while the African Union has three times that number.

So far, thousands of people are believed to have been killed and more than one million displaced.

Source: PressTV.
Link: http://edition.presstv.ir/detail/356108.html.

Philippines, Muslim rebels seal historic peace deal

Manila (AFP)
March 27, 2014

The biggest Muslim rebel group in the Philippines signed an historic pact Thursday to end one of Asia's longest and deadliest conflicts, promising to give up their arms for an autonomous homeland.

Following four decades of fighting that has claimed tens of thousands of lives; the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) signed the peace deal with President Benigno Aquino's government at a high-profile ceremony in Manila.

"The comprehensive agreement on Bangsamoro is the crowning glory of our struggle," MILF chairman Murad Ebrahim said at the signing ceremony, using a local term that refers to a Muslim homeland.

"With this agreement the legitimate aspirations of the Bangsamoro and the commitment of the government of the Philippines to recognize those aspirations are now sealed."

The pact makes the MILF and the government partners in a plan to create a southern autonomous region for the Philippines' Muslim minority with locally elected leaders by mid-2016.

"What is being presented before us now is a path that can lead to a permanent change in Muslim Mindanao," Aquino said at the ceremony, attended by more than 1,000 people.

The Bangsamoro region would cover about 10 percent of territory in the mainly Catholic Philippines. The planned region has a majority of Muslims, but there are clusters of Catholic-dominated communities.

Muslim rebels have been battling since the 1970s for independence or autonomy in the southern islands of the Philippines, which they regard as their ancestral homeland dating back to when Arabic traders arrived there in the 13th Century.

The conflict has condemned millions of people across large parts of the resource-rich Mindanao region to brutal poverty, plagued by Muslim and Christian warlords as well as outbreaks of fighting that has led to mass displacements.

The conflict also created fertile conditions for Islamic extremism, with the Abu Sayyaf group and other hardline militants making remote regions of Mindanao their strongholds.

The MILF, which the military estimates has 10,000 fighters, is easily the biggest Muslim rebel group in Mindanao, and the political settlement was greeted with relief and optimism in the south.

"I am really happy. In the face of all the hardship of our parents, we the next generation hope and pray that Christians and Muslims will have peace," Mona Rakman, 42, a mother of four who lives close to the MILF headquarters, told AFP.

The autonomous region would have its own police force, a regional parliament and power to levy taxes, while revenues from the region's vast deposits of natural resources would be split with the national government.

It would have a secular government, rather than being an Islamic state. The national government would retain control over defense, foreign policy, currency and citizenship.

There are about 10 million Muslims in the Philippines, roughly 10 percent of the population, according to government statistics. Most live in the south of the country.

- Fragile peace -

However there are no guarantees the peace deal will be implemented by the middle of 2016, a crucial deadline as that is when Aquino is required by the constitution to end his six-year term.

Aquino needs to convince Congress to pass a "basic law" to create the Bangsamoro autonomous region, ideally by the end of this year to allow time for other steps such as a local plebiscite.

But even though Aquino enjoys record-high popularity ratings, there are concerns politicians could reject or water down the proposed law.

Powerful Christian politicians in Mindanao are regarded as potential deal breakers, while others elsewhere may see political advantage in opposing the deal to appeal to some Catholics ahead of the 2016 national elections.

The deal is also likely to be challenged in the Supreme Court, which in 2008 struck down a planned peace deal the MILF had negotiated with Aquino's predecessor, Gloria Arroyo.

Islamic militants opposed to the peace deal are another threat, and could continue to create enduring violence in Mindanao.

Among the potential spoilers is the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF), an MILF splinter group of a few hundred militants that has carried out deadly attacks in the south in recent years.

"We will continue to fight against the government of the Republic of the Philippines because we are for independence and nothing else," BIFF spokesman Abu Missry Mama told AFP by phone from his southern hideout.

The MILF leadership has committed to working with the government to neutralize the threat of the BIFF.

However the MILF will not give up its arms or the identities of its fighters until the basic law has been passed, highlighting the fragility of Thursday's peace deal.

In his speech, Aquino warned militant and political foes alike that he was prepared to crush any challenge to the peace deal.

"I will not let peace be snatched from my people again," Aquino said to applause.

"Those who want to test the resolve of the state will be met with a firm response based on righteousness and justice."

Source: Space War.
Link: http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Philippines_Muslim_rebels_seal_historic_peace_deal_999.html.

Philippines refuses to free 2 top communist rebels

March 23, 2014

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Philippine officials said Sunday that they would not release two leaders of a violent rebel group fighting to overthrow the government, whose arrests were a serious blow to one of Asia's longest-running communist insurgencies.

Communist rebels have demanded the release of Benito Tiamzon, chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines, and his wife, Wilma Austria, who were captured in central Cebu province with five other suspected Maoist insurgents on Saturday.

The arrests were a big blow to the 45-year Marxist insurgency, one of Asia's longest and most violent. The military has described Tiamzon, 63, as the "center of gravity" of the Maoist insurgency who has overseen major rebel actions for years. The United States has blacklisted the group, which has about 4,000 armed fighters, as a terrorist organization.

The Tiamzons have been charged for their alleged involvement in the 1985 massacre of 15 people whose remains were discovered in a mass grave in 2006 in the central province of Leyte, according to the military.

Military chief of staff Gen. Emmanuel Bautista said the two were arrested "for their crimes against humanity, including multiple murders." The two and their companions were traveling in two vans, apparently to move to another hideout, when about 40 military intelligence agents, soldiers and policemen blocked their path in a downtown area of Cebu. Authorities seized four pistols, ammunition, two grenades, four laptop computers, 16 cellphones and rebel documents from the captured guerrillas, the military said.

The rebels condemned the arrests, saying the two were consultants in stalled peace talks who were granted temporary immunity from arrests under a 1995 accord with the government. Government peace negotiators, however, said they could no longer verify whether Tiamzon, who uses a rebel alias, was on a secured list of rebels given immunity from arrests. His wife was ineligible because she escaped from jail in 1989 and jumped bail, officials said.

A list of 75 rebel consultants supposedly with pictures was jointly deposited by the Philippine government, the rebels and church witnesses in a Dutch vault in 1996 so it could serve as a future basis for identifying guerrilla consultants who could be immune from arrests.

Philippine officials and the rebels, however, discovered in 2011 that two diskettes containing the list have been damaged with the passage of time and its details could no longer be retrieved. It made it impossible for the government to verify rebel claims that some of their captured comrades were in the roster of guerrillas with immunity, officials said.

The government's refusal to release those rebels led to the collapse of yearslong peace talks brokered by Norway. A recent wave of rebel attacks against government forces and foreign-owned mining companies and vast plantations in the south has also damaged efforts to revive the talks.

"We are happy to resume talks based on a clear, doable and time-bound agenda," said presidential peace talks adviser Teresita Deles. "But when their public statements say that they're working to bring down this government, how do we restart talks?"

The rebels have been fighting since 1969, accusing successive Philippine administrations of subservience to U.S. interests and failing to improve the lives of the poor. Their numbers have dwindled amid battle setbacks, surrenders and factionalism, but the resilient guerrillas remain the country's most serious security threat.

Constitutional Court rules Thai election invalid

March 21, 2014

BANGKOK (AP) — Thailand's Constitutional Court ruled Friday that a general election held in February was invalid, but the country's political crisis appeared again to be complicating arrangements for a new vote.

The judges voted 6-3 to declare the Feb. 2 election unconstitutional because voting was not held that day in 28 constituencies where protesters had prevented candidates from registering. The constitution says the election must be held on the same day nationwide, although it also allows advance voting.

"The process (now) is to have a new general election," Pimol Thampitakpong, the court's secretary-general, said at a news conference announcing the decision. Election Commission President Supachai Somcharoen said it will take no less than three months until the general election can take place again. In 2006, there was an 8-month gap before rescheduled polls were to be held after an election was nullified, but before it could take place, the army carried out a coup.

Thailand has suffered from severe political conflict since 2006, when then-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra — brother of current Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra — was ousted by a military coup after being accused of corruption and abuse of power. Thaksin's supporters and opponents have since taken to the streets for extended periods in a power struggle.

Prompong Nopparit, a spokesman for Yingluck's Pheu Thai Party, said it would take an official position after studying the ruling. The party feels it has been treated unfairly by the courts, which its sees as hostile.

"We insist that the Pheu Thai Party will play by the rules under democracy and by nonviolent means, no matter how much we are bullied," he said. "The reason this election is nullified is because the polls were blocked by the protesters, weren't they? We've played by the rules all along, but what about the other side?"

He said the party would sue those it believed undermined the election, including protest leader Suthep Thaugsuban, the opposition Democrat Party and the Election Commission, which made little effort to rein in the protesters.

"I think today's decision is the beginning toward the solution to the nation's crisis," said Democrat Party spokesman Chavanond Intarakomalyasut. "The government now will have to revise their strategy on how to make an election fair, peaceful and without disruptions. The Democrat Party will participate in the election when it's accepted by all sides and held fairly."

The Democrat Party boycotted the February election and is closely linked to the People's Democratic Reform Committee protest movement, which sparked the crisis late last year when it demanded that Yingluck's administration be replaced by an unelected "people's council" to implement reforms it says are needed to end corruption and money politics.

Protest movement spokesman Akanat Promphan said the court put the blame for the failed election on Yingluck's government. "The crux of the matter is not the date of the next elections, but ensuring that elections are free, fair, and clean," He said. "The court ruling presents the opportunity for Thailand to implement the necessary reforms to achieve this so we can all move forward together as a nation."

The Democrat Party is closely linked to the protest group, which is led by some of its former lawmakers. While its new words appeared conciliatory, they represented virtually the same position it took in boycotting the nullified election. Yingluck's Pheu Thai Party and its predecessors, operating under different names, have easily won every national election since 2001.

Yingluck refused to resign and called early elections in a bid to ensure a fresh mandate. But the protesters tried to prevent the election from taking place, physically blocking and intimidating both potential candidates and voters. It was their efforts that prevented voting from being completed on the same day.

Yingluck's opponents hope that that the failure to form a new government will spark a constitutional crisis allowing them to invoke some vaguely defined clauses of the charter to have a non-elected prime minister installed.

The Constitutional Court issued its ruling after being petitioned by the state ombudsman, who accepted a complaint lodged by a university law lecturer. "It no longer makes sense to attempt to explain the current political situation in Thailand by relying on legal principles and constitutional framework," commented independent political analyst Verapat Pariyawong. "The current situation is more or less a phenomenon of raw politics whereby the rule of law is conveniently stretched and stripped to fit a political goal."

But even if new polls did proceed smoothly, Yingluck faces several legal challenges that could force her from office, faced with a judiciary which has a record of hostility toward her and her political allies.

The protesters, whose main strength is in the Democrats' southern strongholds and Bangkok, have maintained constant street demonstrations in the capital. They have clashed with police and rivals, and been the target of gun and grenade attacks by unknown parties. The violence has left at least 23 people dead and hundreds hurt.

Police Col. Kamthorn Auicharoen said Friday that two grenades fired overnight from an M79 launcher landed on houses near a Constitutional Court judge's residence in Bangkok, injuring one man. Most such incidents but not all have targeted opponents of the government.

Putin's Games end under a Crimean cloud

March 16, 2014

SOCHI, Russia (AP) — Triumphant in the midst of global condemnation, Vladimir Putin clinked his champagne flute with leading sports officials, toasting the success of his pet project in Sochi.

Under chandeliers in ornate surroundings, the wine was flowing over lunch during the Paralympics this week as the Russian president saluted the transformational effect of his nation's six-week sporting extravaganza. For Putin, the 2014 Winter Olympics and Paralympics were a validation of modern Russia's place on the world stage and "our invariably kind attitude toward friends."

But between the Olympians leaving the Black Sea resort of Sochi last month and the Paralympians arriving, Putin became rapidly isolated in the international community as Russian forces took over Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, only 300 miles (480 kilometers) away.

The Paralympics closed Sunday night with a patriotic, high-tempo ceremony attended by Putin just as voting ended in a referendum in Crimea, denounced in the West as illegitimate, on whether it should secede from Ukraine and seek annexation by Russia.

Although Ukraine backed off from boycotting the Paralympics, the crisis afflicting their homeland remained on the minds of athletes competing in Russia. In protest, Ukrainian parathletes covered their medals during podium ceremonies.

"That is how we show our protest and disagreement that our country could be divided and part of it could be excluded from Ukraine," said Iuliia Batenkova, who won six medals in Sochi including one gold. "Crimea is my motherland, where I was born, and of course I worry about it. I want peace."

Ukraine Paralympic Committee President Valeriy Sushkevych on Sunday decried what he called Russian "aggression" in his country and said hoped that Putin "recognizes the danger of what we call war." Russia's intervention in a neighboring country seemed to be at odds with the message it intended in this $50 billion-plus rebranding exercise — that of a nation which had moved on since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. But Putin's government remains convinced that the successful transformation of Sochi — once a decaying Soviet-era resort — into a world-class tourist hotspot will override the current diplomatic tensions.

"The new Russia is a Russia that is capable of carrying out large-scale projects, capable of creating modern infrastructure in a record short timescale, both in terms of sports and the rest of society," Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak told The Associated Press in Sochi. "The new Russia is a Russia that open to the whole world."

That's the impression some visitors had after the high-profile Winter Olympics — but it could be a rapidly shifting vision. "I think (the Olympics) did improve the image (of Russia)," Martin Sorrell, CEO of global advertising giant WPP, said in an interview in Sochi. "But now you have this controversy over Ukraine, Crimea, and that's driving a lot of the perception."

But the world cannot afford to ostracize Putin, Sorrell said, especially with domestic polls that indicate Putin's popularity has risen as a result of the games that are the centerpiece of his third term as president.

"Putin is extremely strong, has a clear approach and a clear strategy — you might agree with it, you might disagree with it — but he has considerable resources of all types," said Sorrell. "We in the West don't quite get how influential Russia is or how influential we are prepared to accept them being, politically and economically. But they are a force to be reckoned with."

The scale of the Sochi venture — it was the most expensive Olympic Games ever, winter or summer — was matched by the record-breaking achievement of the Russian athletes who topped the Paralympic medals table.

"Russia always wants to try to be the best," biathlete Alena Kaufman, who won three golds for Russia, said through a translator. "We have definitely done that." Dmitry Chernyshenko, president of Sochi's organizing committee, is convinced that attitudes have already shifted in this vast nation during the 10-day Paralympics, breaking down a "mental barrier" in Russian society.

"We have broken the stereotypes about people with impairments," Chernyshenko said. "We are really different as a country." Visiting Sochi from Moscow, 30-year-old Yulia Simonova found moving around the resort to be far easier in a wheelchair than in the Russian capital. She said attitudes in Russia toward the disabled have steadily improved in the years since she was not allowed to attend a regular school.

"I felt very comfortable in Sochi and I could go around very easily," Simonova said. "Maybe it's not perfect, but it's much better." Throughout the games, International Paralympic Committee President Philip Craven has steered clear of the political tensions hanging over the games. At closing ceremony Sunday, Craven instead focused on Russia's progress on inclusivity for the disabled.

The challenge for Sochi is now ensuring the new resorts carved into the mountains and on the coast have a legacy and don't become empty, crumbling memories of Russia's 2014 winter of sports. The stadium for the opening and closing ceremonies in Sochi could remain largely empty until 2018, when soccer's World Cup comes to Russia. But the first Formula One race will be staged this year around Sochi's Olympic Park and officials are anticipating an influx of tourists to the mountain village of Krasnaya Polyana, which has been transformed into a Swiss-style ski resort.

But the next major event planned here — the Group of Eight summit in June — is already in turmoil. The U.S. and six other nations have suspended planning for the summit after Russian-backed forces seized control of Ukraine's Crimea two weeks ago.

By then, the memories of Olympic and Paralympic glory — witnessed by record TV audiences globally — could have faded. Chernyshenko, who led Sochi's Olympic bid and staging, hopes not. "We have created a fantastic cumulative effect that united the nation and turned dramatically the attitude from abroad to Russia," he said. "Everyone recognizes that we are modern, efficient, transparent and very hospitable. We delivered what we have promised."

Covering medals, Ukrainians stage silent protest

March 15, 2014

SOCHI, Russia (AP) — On a podium in Russia, Ukrainian athletes cover their medals in a silent protest against the turmoil being inflicted on their country by the host country of the Paralympics.

Ukraine's team decided against boycotting the Sochi Games, which end on Sunday, despite Russian forces taking over part of their country — the Crimea peninsula — in the week before the Paralympics. So Ukraine's athletes, who are prohibited from expressing political messages on the podium under Paralympic rules, found another way to protest.

"It is a silent protest, fighting for peace for everyone ... because the situation in Ukraine didn't change," Ukraine team official Nataliya Harach told The Associated Press. Ukraine's cross-country skiing relay team covered their silver medals as Russian rivals collected their gold medals at a ceremony on Saturday.

"It is not a political protest, it's us fighting for peace," Harach said. "It's a different kind of protest. We put our hands on our medals because you cannot do anything more. "If we demonstrate some way else, if we say something, it will not be in the rules of the International Paralympic Committee. So we try to do a silent protest and because we don't want any disqualifications."

Russian President Vladimir Putin watched part of the cross-country event where he met Ukraine's Paralympic Committee president Valery Sushkevich. "During the meeting, they discussed how the celebration of sport, especially one like the Paralympics, cannot and shouldn't come under the influence of some or other processes on the international political agenda of the day," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency.

Sushkevich complained before the games that the Paralympic hosts "started an intervention on the territory of a country taking part" but said Ukraine would pull out only if the Crimea crisis escalates. Sochi's closing ceremony on Sunday will coincide with Crimea's referendum — denounced by Ukraine's government and Western nations as illegal — on whether to join Russia.

Ukraine is third in the medal standings heading into the final day of the Parlaympics on Sunday, behind Russia and Germany. "The most difficult thing was to concentrate and work as a united and confident unit," said Vitaliy Lukyanenk after collecting silver with Ukraine's 4x2.5-kilometer cross-country relay team.

Huge 'Super Earth' planet ten times bigger than our own could be orbiting Sun

Dion Dassanayake
Thu, March 27, 2014

A HUGE planet dubbed the "Super Earth", which is ten times bigger than our own, could be orbiting the Sun at the far edge of the solar system.

Scientists today revealed the massive planet may be located past the Kuiper Belt, a comet-rich area which is also home to dwarf planet Pluto.

The revelation comes after the most distant dwarf planet orbiting the sun, called the 2012 VP113, was discovered by astronomers.

A study published in journal Nature said the similarity in orbits of this new 280 mile wide dwarf planet and the Sedna dwarf planet points to an undiscovered "Super Earth".

Dr Linda Elkins-Tanton, of the Carnegie Institution in America, said: "This is an extraordinary result that redefines our understanding of our solar system."

The 2012 VP113 dwarf planet is located at the very edge of the solar system in a region called the Oort cloud.

It was discovered by researchers high up the Chilean Andes mountains using the new Dark Energy Camera (DECam).

Dr Sheppard said: "Some of these inner Oort cloud objects could rival the size of Mars or even Earth.

"This is because many of the inner Oort cloud objects are so distant even very large ones would be too faint to detect with current technology."

The 2012 VP113 dwarf planet lies 80 times further from the Sun than the Earth is.

Researchers in the Andes calculated that around 900 objects which have orbits like Sedna and 2012 VP113 could exist at the edge of the solar system.

The object would be larger in diameter than 1,000km (621 miles). Pluto is also classified as a dwarf planet and has a diameter of 2,302km (1.430 miles)

Source: Express.
Link: http://www.express.co.uk/news/science-technology/467077/Huge-planet-ten-times-bigger-than-Earth-could-be-orbiting-Sun-at-edge-of-solar-system.

Technical hitch delays US-Russia crew's ISS docking

Moscow (AFP)
March 26, 2014

A US-Russian three man crew Wednesday faced an unprecedented two-day delay in their docking with the International Space Station (ISS) after their Russian Soyuz spacecraft suffered a technical glitch on its approach in orbit.

The two Russian cosmonauts and American astronaut were to have docked with the ISS early Wednesday just six hours after launch from Kazakhstan but the problem means that the docking is now only planned on Friday.

This means that the trio will now orbit the Earth 34 times before their rendezvous with the international space laboratory, instead of the fast track route of four orbits originally envisaged.

Russians Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev along with Steve Swanson of NASA had earlier taken off from Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in the spectacular night-time launch that initially went without problem.

The issue appeared to arise once their Soyuz capsule was in orbit and a thruster failed to fire to assist its approach for docking with the ISS.

The US space agency NASA said in a statement on its website that the Soyuz spacecraft "was unable to complete its third thruster burn to fine-tune its approach" to the orbiting space station.

The trio was using a fast-track approach to the ISS that Russia has been employing since 2013. After the problem, they are now using the traditional two-day longer approach that was employed up to 2012.

"Rendezvous experts are reviewing the plan, and may update it later as necessary," the US space agency said, adding that the trio on board was "in good spirits".

- 'Mathematical problem?' -

NASA said Russian flight controllers were reviewing data to work out why the third thruster burn did not occur as planned.

"Initial information indicates the problem may have been the spacecraft was not in the proper attitude, or orientation, for the burn," NASA said.

The head of Russia's space agency Roscosmos Oleg Ostapenko said the problem appeared to have been triggered by a hitch with the orientation system.

"The crew have taken off their space suits and are continuing their flight normally," he said.

The head of the Russian rocket state firm Energia that supplies the Soyuz rocket that propels the craft into space however said that the origin of the problem was not yet clear.

"It could be mathematics, it could be a transmitter problem or that the engine choked. But most likely it was a mathematical problem," said Vitaly Lopota, quoted by the Interfax news agency.

This would imply that ground scientists failed to work out the correct altitude in orbit for the thruster to fire to take the Soyuz to the ISS.

Roscosmos said that the docking was now provisionally expected at 3:58 am Moscow time Friday (2358 Thursday).

-Space cooperation despite Ukraine-

After the retirement of the US shuttle, NASA is for now wholly reliant on Russia for delivering astronauts to the space station on its tried-and-trusted Soyuz launch and capsule system.

US-Russia space cooperation has continued undimmed despite the diplomatic standoff over Ukraine and the joint work is seen as one of the few true success stories in post Cold War bilateral ties.

At the pre-flight news conference at Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, senior astronauts Skvortsov and Swanson said that they had decided to have dinners together on board the ISS "as an opportunity to come together as friends in the kitchen and look each other in the eye".

Swanson also paid homage to Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut who became the first man in space in 1961 with his flight from Baikonur.

"Yuri is a symbol for the whole world. I am proud to be part of history here," he said.

Skvortsov is making his second space flight and Swanson, a veteran of two past shuttle missions, his third.

Artemyev meanwhile is making his first voyage to space. He took part in a 2009 experiment where volunteers were shut up in a capsule at a Moscow laboratory for 105 days to simulate the effects of a possible voyage to Mars.

After docking, the trio will bring the ISS crew up to six by joining on board incumbent crew Koichi Wakata of Japan, American Rick Mastracchio and Russian Mikhail Tyurin.

Source: Space-Travel.
Link: http://www.space-travel.com/reports/Technical_hitch_delays_US-Russia_crews_ISS_docking_999.html.

First Ring System Around Asteroid

La Silla, Chile (ESO)
Mar 27, 2014

Observations at many sites in South America, including ESO's La Silla Observatory, have made the surprise discovery that the remote asteroid Chariklo is surrounded by two dense and narrow rings.

This is the smallest object by far found to have rings and only the fifth body in the Solar System - after the much larger planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune - to have this feature. The origin of these rings remains a mystery, but they may be the result of a collision that created a disc of debris. The new results are published online in the journal Nature on 26 March 2014.

The rings of Saturn are one of the most spectacular sights in the sky, and less prominent rings have also been found around the other giant planets. Despite many careful searches, no rings had been found around smaller objects orbiting the Sun in the Solar System. Now observations of the distant minor planet (10199) Chariklo as it passed in front of a star have shown that this object too is surrounded by two fine rings.

"We weren't looking for a ring and didn't think small bodies like Chariklo had them at all, so the discovery - and the amazing amount of detail we saw in the system - came as a complete surprise!" says Felipe Braga-Ribas (Observatorio Nacional/MCTI, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) who planned the observation campaign and is lead author on the new paper.

Chariklo is the largest member of a class known as the Centaurs and it orbits between Saturn and Uranus in the outer Solar System. Predictions had shown that it would pass in front of the star UCAC4 248-108672 on 3 June 2013, as seen from South America. Astronomers using telescopes at seven different locations, including the 1.54-meter Danish and TRAPPIST telescopes at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile, were able to watch the star apparently vanish for a few seconds as its light was blocked by Chariklo - an occultation.

But they found much more than they were expecting. A few seconds before, and again a few seconds after the main occultation there were two further very short dips in the star's apparent brightness. Something around Chariklo was blocking the light! By comparing what was seen from different sites the team could reconstruct not only the shape and size of the object itself but also the shape, width, orientation and other properties of the newly discovered rings.

The team found that the ring system consists of two sharply confined rings only seven and three kilometers wide, separated by a clear gap of nine kilometers - around a small 250-kilometer diameter object orbiting beyond Saturn.

"For me, it was quite amazing to realize that we were able not only to detect a ring system, but also pinpoint that it consists of two clearly distinct rings," adds Uffe Grae Jorgensen (Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark), one of the team. "I try to imagine how it would be to stand on the surface of this icy object - small enough that a fast sports car could reach escape velocity and drive off into space - and stare up at a 20-kilometer wide ring system 1000 times closer than the Moon."

Although many questions remain unanswered, astronomers think that this sort of ring is likely to be formed from debris left over after a collision. It must be confined into the two narrow rings by the presence of small putative satellites.

"So, as well as the rings, it's likely that Chariklo has at least one small moon still waiting to be discovered," adds Felipe Braga Ribas.

The rings may prove to be a phenomenon that might in turn later lead to the formation of a small moon. Such a sequence of events, on a much larger scale, may explain the birth of our own Moon in the early days of the Solar System, as well as the origin of many other satellites around planets and asteroids.

The leaders of this project are provisionally calling the rings by the nicknames Oiapoque and Chui, two rivers near the northern and southern extremes of Brazil.'

Source: Space Daily.
Link: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/First_Ring_System_Around_Asteroid_999.html.

New Dwarf Planet Found at Solar System's Edge, Hints at Possible Faraway 'Planet X'

By Mike Wall
March 26, 2014

Astronomers have found a new dwarf planet far beyond Pluto's orbit, suggesting that this distant realm contains millions of undiscovered objects — including, perhaps, a world larger than Earth.

The new found celestial body, called 2012 VP113, joins the dwarf planet Sedna as a confirmed resident of a far-flung and largely unexplored region scientists call the "inner Oort Cloud." Further, 2012 VP113 and Sedna may have been pulled into their long, looping orbits by a big planet lurking unseen in these frigid depths.

"These two objects are just the tip of the iceberg," study co-author Chadwick Trujillo, of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, told Space.com. "They exist in a part of the solar system that we used to think was pretty devoid of matter. It just goes to show how little we actually know about the solar system."

Probing the depths

For several decades, astronomers have divided our solar system into three main parts: an inner zone containing the rocky planets, such as Earth and Mars; a middle realm housing the gas giants Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune; and an outer region called the Kuiper Belt, populated by distant and icy worlds like Pluto.

Discovery of New Inner Oort Cloud 2012 VP113Pin It These images show the discovery of the new inner Oort cloud object 2012 VP113 taken about 2 hours apart on UT November 5, 2012. The motion of 2012 VP113 clearly stands out compared to the steady state background stars and galaxies.

The discovery of Sedna in 2003 hinted that this map is incomplete. Sedna, which is about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) wide, has an incredibly elliptical orbit, coming no closer to the sun than 76 astronomical units (AU) and going all the way out to 940 AU or so at its most distant point. (One AU, the distance from Earth to the sun, is about 93 million miles, or 150 million km.)

That puts Sedna in the far outer reaches of the solar system. For comparison, Pluto's orbit takes it between 29 and 49 AU from the sun.

And now astronomers know Sedna is not alone out there. Trujillo and Scott Sheppard, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., discovered 2012 VP113 using the Dark Energy Camera, which is installed on a 4-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

Follow-up observations by the 6.5-meter Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory, also in Chile, helped Trujillo and Sheppard determine details of 2012 VP113's orbit and learn a bit more about the object.

The body comes no closer to the sun than 80 AU, and it gets as far away as 452 AU. About 280 miles (450 km) wide, 2012 VP113 is large enough to qualify as a dwarf planet if it's composed primarily of ice, researchers said. (By definition, dwarf planets must be big enough for their gravity to mold them into spheres; the mass required for this to happen depends upon the objects' composition.)

The inner Oort Cloud

Objects as distant as Sedna and 2012 VP113 are incredibly difficult to detect; astronomers really only get a chance when the bodies near their closest approach to the sun. [Our Solar System: A Photo Tour of the Planets]

Based on the amount of sky the scientists searched, Trujillo and Sheppard estimate that about 900 bodies larger than Sedna may exist in this faraway realm, which the astronomers dub the inner Oort Cloud. (The true Oort Cloud is an icy shell around the solar system that begins perhaps 5,000 AU from the sun and contains trillions of comets.)

The total population of objects in the inner Oort Cloud, in fact, may exceed that of the Kuiper Belt and the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, researchers said.

?"Some of these inner Oort Cloud objects could rival the size of Mars or even Earth," Sheppard said in a statement. "This is because many of the inner Oort Cloud objects are so distant that even very large ones would be too faint to detect with current technology."

The study was published online today (March 26) in the journal Nature.

Planet X?

Astronomers don't know much about the origin or evolutionary history of Sedna and 2012 VP113 at this point. The objects may have formed closer to the sun, for example, before getting pushed out by gravitational interactions with other stars — perhaps "sister stars" from the sun's birth cluster, researchers said. Or inner Oort Cloud objects may be alien bodies that the sun plucked from another solar system during a stellar close encounter.

It's also possible that 2012 VP113 and its neighbors were knocked from the Kuiper Belt to the inner Oort Cloud when a big planet was booted outward long ago. This planet may have been ejected from the solar system entirely, or it may still be there in the extreme outer reaches, waiting to be discovered.

Indeed, certain characteristics of the orbits of Sedna, 2012 VP113 and several of the most distant Kuiper Belt objects are consistent with the continued presence of a big and extremely faraway "perturber," researchers said. It's possible that a planet roughly 10 times more massive than Earth located hundreds of AU from the sun is shepherding these bodies into their current orbits.

Such supposition is far from proof that an undiscovered "Planet X" actually exists, Trujillo stressed. But he did say that the door is open, noting that an Earth-mass body at 250 AU from the sun would likely be undetectable at present.

"It raises the possibility that there could be stuff out there of significant mass, Earth-mass or larger, that we don't know about," he said.

The picture should clear up as more inner Oort Cloud objects are found, allowing astronomers to put more constraints on the origin and orbital evolution of these frigid, distant bodies.

"I think it's a little hard to draw firm conclusions from two objects," Trujillo said. "If we were to have 10 inner Oort Cloud objects, then we could really start saying detailed things about the formation scenarios."

Source: SPACE.com.
Link: http://www.space.com/25218-dwarf-planet-discovery-solar-system-edge.html.

Four Moons About Saturn's Rings

Pasadena CA (JPL)
Mar 27, 2014

Two pairs of moons make a rare joint appearance. The F ring's shepherd moons, Prometheus and Pandora, appear just inside and outside of the F ring (the thin faint ring furthest from Saturn). Meanwhile, farther from Saturn the co-orbital moons Janus (near the bottom) and Epimetheus (about a third of the way down from the top) also are captured.

Prometheus (53 miles, or 86 kilometers across) and Pandora (50 miles, or 81 kilometers across) sculpt the F ring through their gravitational influences. Janus (111 miles, or 179 kilometers across) and Epimetheus (70 miles, or 113 kilometers across) are famous for their orbital dance, swapping places about every four years. They are also responsible for gravitationally shaping the outer edge of the A ring into seven scallops.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 47 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Oct. 11, 2013.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 810,000 miles (1.3 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 47 degrees. Image scale is 47 miles (76 kilometers) per pixel.

Source: Saturn Daily.
Link: http://www.saturndaily.com/reports/Four_Moons_About_Saturns_Rings_999.html.

Mars One building simulated colony to vet potential colonists

Washington DC (UPI)
Mar 26, 2014

Mars One is a a private, Netherlands-based push to realize a human colony on the red planet by 2025.

In an email statement to Popular Science Thursday, Mars One announced plans to build a simulated colony here on Earth to vet astronauts and make sure they can withstand the cramped and isolated conditions colonists will have to endure before awarding them their one-way ticket.

They are currently in the process of courting financial sponsors and construction companies, and while the simulated Martian digs won't actually boast extraterrestrial life-support right off the bat, the company intends to retrofit the technology to the structure down the line.

More than 200,00 people applied for the chance to be among the first colonists. Mars One has already narrowed the pool to just over a thousand candidates, and intends ultimately to send a cadre of 24-40 colonists to the planet.

According to Popular Science, "spaceflight contractors Lockheed Martin and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. are already working with Mars One to develop a robotic lander and a data-link satellite for an unmanned, exploratory mission to Mars in 2018."

Mars One has said in the past that they intend to televise the colonization as a means of funding.

So who's ready for Big Brother: Martian Edition? That will be reality television worth watching.

Source: Mars Daily.
Link: http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/Mars_One_building_simulated_colony_to_vet_potential_colonists_999.html.

Russian spacecraft brings three-man crew to ISS after two-day delay

Moscow (AFP)
March 28, 2014

A Russian spacecraft carrying a three-man Russian and US crew on Friday docked successfully at the International Space Station after an unprecedented two-day delay caused by a technical hitch.

The Soyuz TMA-12M carrying Russia's Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev and NASA's Steve Swanson docked at 03:53 am Moscow time (1153 GMT Thursday), Russia's mission control said.

"The docking of the piloted spaceship has taken place to the ISS. All the systems are working normally," mission control announced as Russian television showed a live broadcast of the docking.

The trio was originally to have docked with the ISS early Wednesday, just six hours after launch from Kazakhstan, but their Soyuz spacecraft suffered a technical glitch on its approach in orbit.

The trio had to orbit the Earth 34 times before their rendezvous with the international space laboratory, instead of the fast-track route of four orbits originally envisaged.

The issue arose once their Soyuz capsule was in orbit and a thruster failed to fire to assist its approach for docking with the ISS.

US space agency NASA said in a statement on its website that the Soyuz spacecraft "was unable to complete its third thruster burn to fine-tune its approach" to the orbiting space station.

The Soyuz capsule later carried out three maneuvers in orbit bringing it on the correct trajectory for the adapted two-day route to the ISS.

The head of the Russian rocket state firm Energia that supplies the Soyuz rocket that propels the craft into space however said that the origin of the problem was not yet clear.

"It could be mathematics, it could be a transmitter problem or that the engine choked. But most likely it was a mathematical problem," said Vitaly Lopota on Wednesday, quoted by the Interfax news agency.

This would imply that ground scientists failed to work out the correct altitude in orbit for the thruster to fire to take the Soyuz to the ISS.

A commission has been formed to pinpoint the cause of the error.

Russia first used a fast-track route for sending manned spacecraft to the ISS last year.

After the retirement of the US shuttle, NASA is for now wholly reliant on Russia for delivering astronauts to the space station on its tried-and-trusted Soyuz launch and capsule system.

The trio bring the ISS crew up to six by joining incumbent crew Koichi Wakata of Japan, American Rick Mastracchio and Russian Mikhail Tyurin, who are due to leave in May.

The new crewmembers are set to spend around five and a half months in space.

Source: Space-Travel.
Link: http://www.space-travel.com/reports/Russian_spacecraft_brings_three-man_crew_to_ISS_after_two-day_delay_999.html.

Two Suns Could Make More Habitable Moons

by Nola Taylor Redd for Astrobiology Magazine
Moffett Field CA (SPX)
Mar 25, 2014

Moons in close binary solar systems have a better chance of hosting life than those in single-star systems, new research has shown.

Binary stars dampen each other's solar radiation and stellar winds, thereby creating a more hospitable environment for life and increasing the habitable zone around such solar systems, according to research presented at the 223rd American Astronomical Society meeting in January.

"The two stars calm each other down in terms of activity," said Paul Mason, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas at El Paso in an interview with Astrobiology Magazine.

Mason presented the results of a study, which used data collected by NASA's Kepler spacecraft mission to discover potentially habitable exoplanets in our region of the Milky Way galaxy.

Although more than a thousand planets have been found outside of the solar system, as well as a host of candidates waiting for follow-up observations, no moons have yet been confirmed. Scientists like Mason are performing theoretical calculations to determine which solar systems might be better for hosting potentially habitable moons.

Violent and active young stars spin rapidly, emitting radiation and stellar winds that could interfere with the habitability of planets and moons nearby. A close binary system of stars can help to dampen these effects, as the two stars synchronize their spins.

Binary stars exist in a range of configurations. Some are widely separated, so that a planet in orbit around one functions much like a planet around a single sun, while the companion is so distant that it appears as point-like as any other star. Others may be extremely close together, synching together to keep each other rapidly spinning for billions of years.

Mason's research focuses on pairs of stars that orbit each other between 10 and 60 Earth-days, with a planet in orbit around both suns. These are known as circumbinary systems. The paired stars exert tidal forces on one another that cause a slowdown in spin, weakening the radiation and stellar wind of the pair faster than they would suffer as single stars. Fast-moving stellar winds can strip a moon or planet of its atmosphere, leaving it open to heavy radiation bombardment that can interfere with the development of life.

At the same time, the combined light from the duo pushes the edge of the region where water can exist, commonly termed the "habitable zone"," farther back than it would lie around a single star. Moving the entire zone a greater distance from its sun further reduces the negative effects from the stars.

"The habitable zone in a binary system is a little bit farther away, simply because you have the light from two stars rather than the light from one," Mason said.

This distance is important because, if a planet orbits too close to its parent star, its moon can be stripped away completely.

"The closer a planet is to the star, the smaller its gravitational sphere of influence," said David Kipping and astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in an interview with Astrobiology Magazine.

"Essentially, the star will rip off the moon if it gets too close," he said.

Kipping, who was not involved in the research, searches for exomoons and is the principle investigator of The Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler project.

Pushing exomoons farther away also has ramifications for red dwarfs, the most populous stellar type in the galaxy. The habitable zone around these smaller, long-lived stars is so close to its parent star that stellar activity made many astronomers consider habitable planets around them unlikely to even exist, though recent research has increased the potential. In a binary system, the pushed-back habitable zone would decrease many of the negative effects that limit habitability around the plentiful stars.

According to Mason, if the sun had a companion star, the makeup of the solar system would change significantly. The water stripped from the atmosphere of Venus would likely still be present, making it potentially habitable. Earth itself could have been a very different environment.

"Earth would be a wetter planet if we were orbiting a binary star," Mason said.

Twin suns

When it comes to potentially habitable exomoons, sun-like stars are always better.

"The ideal circumstance is solar twins," Mason said.

Simply adding a sun-like star to the mix improves the chances for life.

"Solar-type stars with companions work really well," Mason said. "They work better than our own solar-type star without a companion."

Still, in a circumbinary system, it is not the type of star that matters nearly as much as how often they orbit one another. As long as the pair of stars dance around between once every 10 and 60 Earth-days, they increase the chances of the habitability of their moons and planets. (The exception is massive, giant stars, which burn through their fuel and die quickly, giving life little to no chance to evolve.)

Still, if at least one of the two stars in a binary system is sun-like, it provides a very wide habitable zone with plenty of room for water, a situation that Mason says he's most excited about.

A wider habitable zone means a better chance of hosting planets capable of sustaining life, as well as exomoons that could support it.

"There's plenty of room for several habitable planets," Mason said. "These may be places where many worlds in system could be habitable."

Unfortunately, systems with multiple planets make finding exomoons more challenging at the moment.

The hunt for exomoons

Astronomers hunt for distant moons essentially the same ways that they hunt for distant planets. They might watch for the planet and its moon to cross between their sun and the Earth. As a single planet crosses, it causes a dip in brightness; if a moon precedes or follows it, that dip is preceded or followed by a smaller dip as just the moon blocks the stellar light.

They can also watch a planet for a small wobble as the moon gravitationally tugs its host ever-so-slightly. A moon might also slightly change how quickly a planet orbits its sun.

In a multi-planet system, however, other planets can also cause the wobbles and velocity changes, making them "kind of a pain for looking for exomoons," according to Kipping.

Kipping and his team have pared down the list of almost 5,000 planetary candidates detected by NASA's Kepler spacecraft to approximately 250 bodies considered the best targets for hosting an exomoon.

Originally, he hoped to target Jupiter-size and larger planets. In the solar system, the only moons considered potentially habitable orbit gas giants. Earth-sized moons could lay outside of the habitable zone of a star but still hold liquid water due to tidal heating from their planet. Such moons would be minimally affected by their orbit around a binary star system instead of a single star.

But it was not to be.

"One of the most staggering discoveries from Kepler is that Jupiter-like planets are rare," Kipping said. "This is kind of a shame for the exomoon hunt, because those are the planets easiest to find a moon around."

Instead, Kipping and his team have turned to the slightly less massive sub-Neptunes, which abound in Kepler's field of view.

Although moons around Earth-sized planets may not be habitable by themselves, they could have an enormous impact on their parent body. Born of a collision early in the life of the solar system, Earth's moon is far larger by comparison to its planet than other moons in the solar system. The collision might have kicked off volcanism and plate tectonics on the early Earth, while the moon stabilizes the planet's tilt and controls the tides. Biologists consider all four actions important to the evolution of life.

"There are many beneficial qualities to having a big moon nearby," Kipping said. "If we find Earth 2.0, one of the first things we'll be asking is if it has a Moon 2.0."

Because our moon is unique in the solar system, scientists don't yet understand whether its formation was what Kipping called "a freak event" or something that's very common. Detecting different kinds of moons in a variety of orbits will help scientists narrow down how unique the solar system and the Earth-moon system are.

As scientists have used Kepler to hunt for exoplanets, they have learned a great deal about the variety of planetary systems in the galaxy. According to Kipping, circumbinary systems were once thought to be "the more exotic type" of binary systems. But Kepler revealed several cases, showing them to be fairly common.

Though the mission goal is to detect planets, Kepler is an important tool when it comes to looking for moons outside of the solar system.

"Kepler is really the ideal instrument for detecting exomoons," Kipping said.

He pointed out that while NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, to be launched in October 2018, will be ideal for follow-up observations, it will be in too high of a demand by the astronomical community to stare at a patch of sky for years on end the way Kepler did. If Kepler's second run, K2, is funded, it will stare at a different region of the sky than the original Kepler mission, and will provide greater insight into planet populations.

Though he expressed excitement about the exoplanet discoveriesthat will come from both upcoming missions, he said, "My feeling is that Kepler is still probably the best resource for discovering exomoons."

As to how long it might be before the first exomoon is confirmed around a distant planet, Kipping said that it depends on how common larger moons are.

"If Nature builds big moons-Earth-sized moons-very frequently throughout the cosmos, then they're in the Kepler data," he said. "They're lurking there, and we will find them in the next year or two."

If, however, most of the moons are small, like the ones in orbit around Neptune and Uranus, they may never be seen.

If moons large enough to be detected exist, Mason is confident that the most habitable of them can be found in circumbinary systems.

"Exomoons in binary systems may be more habitable than around single stars," he said in his presentation at the AAS meeting. "Maybe less common, but potentially more habitable"

Source: Space Daily.
Link: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Two_Suns_Could_Make_More_Habitable_Moons_999.html.

Russian-US crew blast off for ISS from Kazakhstan

Baikonur, Kazakhstan (AFP)
March 25, 2014

A crew of two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut blasted off Tuesday from Kazakhstan on a Russian Soyuz rocket for the International Space Station, with US-Russia space cooperation pressing on despite the diplomatic standoff over Ukraine.

Russians Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev along with Steve Swanson of NASA took off in a spectacular night-time launch at the start of a fast-track six-hour journey to the orbiting laboratory, where they will spend half a year.

All the stages of the launch went without a hitch and the Soyuz capsule successfully went into the right orbit. Docking with the ISS was expected at 0304 GMT Wednesday.

After the retirement of the US shuttle, NASA is for now wholly reliant on Russia for delivering astronauts to the space station on its tried-and-trusted Soyuz launch and capsule system.

Space officials have made clear that space cooperation -- one of the few areas of genuine mutual work between Russia and the United States -- will continue unaffected by the mounting diplomatic strains that have seen the US impose sanctions on Russian officials over Moscow's seizure of Crimea.

A yellow toy duck nicknamed "quack" given to Swanson by his daughter hung in the cockpit and started floating a few minutes into launch as the crew started to experience weightlessness.

-'We'll live together peacefully'-

At the pre-flight news conference at Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, senior astronauts Skvortsov and Swanson were all smiles behind the glass than protects them from infections from the media and other bystanders.

Skvortsov said that they had decided to have dinners together on board the ISS "as an opportunity to come together as friends in the kitchen and look each other in the eye".

Swanson said that the crew would also been looking forward to watching the football World Cup in Brazil, which will take place during their mission.

Skvortsov, whose name originates from the word "starling" in Russian, said he would be able to live in harmony with the "swan" Swanson.

"In nature these birds exist together very peacefully. I do not think we will have any problems. I think we will all be able to live peacefully together," he said.

Swanson also paid homage to Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut who became the first man in space in 1961 with his flight from Baikonur.

"Yuri is a symbol for the whole world. I am proud to be part of history here," he said.

Skvortsov is making his second space flight and Swanson, a veteran of two past shuttle missions, his third.

Artemyev meanwhile is making his first voyage to space but took part in a 2009 experiment where volunteers were shut up in a capsule at a Moscow laboratory for 105 days to simulate the effects of a possible voyage to Mars.

"I hope that my small contribution will help those going to Mars and who make the first step on Mars and maybe even see extra-terrestrial life!" he said ahead of the launch.

"There are lots of good jobs on Earth but that would be the ultimate."

After docking, the trio will bring the ISS crew up to six by joining on board incumbent crew Koichi Wakata of Japan, American Rick Mastracchio and Russian Mikhail Tyurin.

Source: Space-Travel.
Link: http://www.space-travel.com/reports/Russian-US_crew_blast_off_for_ISS_from_Kazakhstan_999.html.

Planet Labs Set To Launch Largest Satellite Fleet In History

San Francisco CA (SPX)
Mar 25, 2014

Planet Labs has announced that it has confirmed launches for more than 100 satellites over the next 12 months. The satellites will launch on rockets from the USA and Russia.

This constitutes the largest constellation of satellites manifested in history. These new launches will build on Planet Labs first 28 satellites, Flock 1, which were launched in January.

This constellation will allow Planet Labs to image the whole earth every 24 hours. "We are imaging the planet to save the planet," said Will Marshall, cofounder of Planet Labs.

Imaging the Earth at this frequency will help us to measure things from deforestation, to improving agricultural yield, to detecting overfishing. Our mission is to create information people need to help life on the planet."

"Getting 100 satellites on the launch manifest is a major milestone in the new space industry," said Steve Jurvetson, Managing Director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson and board member of Planet Labs and SpaceX.

"The small form factor requires less space on the rocket, allowing for more flexibility for launch configurations. And a constellation of 100 satellites is unprecedented." This announcement comes on the heels of a $52 million Series B round of financing for Planet Labs in December led by Yuri Milner.

Previous investors in the company include Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), O'Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures (OATV), Capricorn Investment Group, Founders Fund Angel, Data Collective, First Round Capital, and Innovation Endeavors.

Source: Space Daily.
Link: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Planet_Labs_Set_To_Launch_Largest_Satellite_Fleet_In_History_999.html.

Soldiers, police patrol streets in western Myanmar

March 28, 2014

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — Soldiers and police patrolled streets in western Myanmar and surveyed the damage Friday after Buddhist mobs attacked offices and homes of international aid workers, forcing the relocation of almost all staff from the troubled state of Rakhine.

An 11-year-old girl was killed when police fired into the air to disperse crowds on the second day of rioting Thursday, state TV reported, and at least one other person was slightly wounded. Twenty-nine houses, seven warehouses and two motor vehicles — all in the state capital, Sittwe — were damaged, it said.

Paula Schriefer, head of the U.S. delegation to the Human Rights Council, called on the government to hold accountable those responsible. "It is long overdue for the government of U Thein Sein to take the decisive action necessary to prevent these acts, address the core problems in Rakhine state, including the continued lack of adequate security forces and rule of law on the ground, and create conditions for sustainable peace and development," she said in a statement.

Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist nation of 60 million, emerged from a half-century of military rule in 2011. But newfound freedoms of expression that accompanied its transition to democracy have given voice to religious hatred, causing violence that has left up to 280 people dead and sent another 240,000 fleeing their homes.

Most of the victims have been members of the long-persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority. Aid groups that have been providing care for those now living in crowded camps — where they have little access to food, education or health care — have for months faced threats and intimidation by ethnic Buddhists in Rakhine, hampering their ability to work.

The violence Wednesday and Thursday made it impossible. "As for now, no aid services are functioning in the region. If humanitarian aid cannot be restarted quickly, this will have a severe impact on the ground," said Ingo Radtke, secretary-general of Malteser International, which estimated that 90 percent of all aid groups in Sittwe had been targeted.

"We are very concerned that the riots might also spread to neighboring district." Police escorted aid workers from their homes for safety reasons, placing dozens under protection, Sittwe resident Aung Than said by phone. Other aid groups said they were evacuating all local and foreign non-essential staff, some on regularly scheduled flights, others on charters.

Tun Tha, another resident contacted by phone, said the situation was calm Friday, thanks in part to a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew. Soldiers and police were patrolling the streets, he said. Win Myaing, the state spokesman, said several people were being questioned in connection with the rioting.

Local Rakhine residents have in recent months staged several protests against international non-governmental groups, accusing them of showing favoritism to tens of thousands of Rohingya in camps for the displaced. Many Western aid workers started leaving days ago for security reasons.

Last month, the government stopped the Nobel Peace Prize-winning aid group Doctors Without Borders from working in the state altogether, in part because it had hired Rohingya. It had been providing care to more than 700,000 people statewide.

As part of the anti-Rohingya campaign, Buddhist flags have been placed in front of almost every house and office in Sittwe in recent days. On Wednesday the tensions exploded, sparked by reports that an American woman had removed one of those flags from in front of the Malteser International office and then held it near her hip as she carried it away, an act that was interpreted as a deep insult.

The 300 people who surrounded the building dispersed only after police fired dozens of rounds of warning shots into the air, state spokesman Win Myaing said. The violence continued Thursday, with more than 1,000 people running through a street that houses international aid workers, throwing rocks at homes and damaging several of the residences. OXFAM, the World Lutheran Foundation and the World Food Program were among those targeted.