Whither India and Pakistan?

25.07.2013
By Kamal Wadhwa

With the modernization of their armed forces, both India and Pakistan are again locked into a military lockjaw that may ultimately lead to that fatal embrace - given the new developments on the sub-continent such as the setting up of an Indian Air Force base in Tajikistan. Except that now there is no turning away from good neighborliness and the unpleasant realities of forever having to stare at each other - be it from field binoculars or the look-down facility  offered by reconnaissance airplanes and spy satellites.

Not too long ago, the deposed former Prime Minister of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, sought to unlock his nation from the permanent hostility of the Indo-Pakistani embrace  after his dream of a secular and democratic Pakistan had been resoundingly rejected by everyone of note in that ill-starred country. He now turned the eyes of the Pakistani nation towards the Muslim world where Pakistan was respected and looked up to as a natural leader of great energy and vision.

Pakistan thereafter became an Islamic republic with Islam enshrined as the State religion in its very Constitution. Bhutto now focused his eyes on creating the only platform that could yet enable Pakistan to secure a place on the world map - on the fragile Pakistani economy- that could not yet free itself from American largesse and the resultant interference in Pakistani foreign policy.

Pakistan may well have become a great Islamic nation because the entire Muslim world was a ready receptacle for Bhutto's grand vision - even willing to pay for it without recompense- unlike those hated Americans whose influence in Pakistani affairs was finally to lead Bhutto to his grave.

Had Pakistan finally managed to separate itself from its permanent engagement with India, it may well have become a stable and prosperous country. Bhutto was even ready to put the Kashmir issue on the backburner to attain that end. Indeed, India too could have benefited immensely from Bhutto's vision and secured its own development budget against the periodic imbalances caused by unpredictable military expenditures. Alas, that dispensation was not to be and the deadlock between the two neighbors continues to this day.

Perhaps, India too could have resiled and retreated from its cousin across the border. Surely, India has more in common with the Buddhist countries of Thailand, the Koreas, Vietnam and Cambodia than an Islamic Pakistan that openly emphasizes its religious and cultural differences with India! Even in lowly neighboring Bangladesh, there are periodic outbursts of anti-Indian sentiment voiced vociferously and zealously by large sections of the populace who threaten to march to New Delhi to do justice to their Islamic forebears and heritage.

Then, too, most Muslims outside India believe Hindus to be idolatrous and regard Hinduism to be an unworthy religion. This is the mindset in much of the Islamic world and it is reflected in the refusal of Saudi Arabia to allot jobs to Hindus even when they are well-qualified. Yet no Indian government has taken up serious issue with this valid concern because it has a large, established and vociferous Muslim minority within its own borders. This is the permanent and surreal tragedy of the Indian republic from which there seems to be no real escape!

However, it is the bonhomie and conviviality of Indo-Pakistani diplomacy that tell a different tale, no less sordid in other aspects. After the periodic bloodletting on their borders, both India and Pakistan send their seasoned and topmost diplomats for parleys, negotiations and Confidence Building Measures (CBMs). Hospitality is shared, pleasantries exchanged and a flurry of diplomatic memos is passed between peers who have illustrious lineages, expensive foreign education and sartorial elegance that would put British royalty to shame. And, what's more, they like each other's company!

Yet, curiously enough, nothing concrete or substantial has emerged from this decades-long diplomatic endeavor between India and Pakistan though both sides express full satisfaction at the pace and seriousness of the dialogue undertaken by their diplomats. Diplomatic parleys are buttressed by Indo-Pakistani cricket tours where the very decency and civility of the game create feelings of camaraderie and brotherhood so that all loose talk of Kashmir is drowned out in the resounding din of adulating crowds who by now can judge each bowler or batsman on his own merits - be he Indian or Pakistani!  In brief, Indo-Pakistani diplomacy and cricket have survived the British Raj on the sub-continent!

However, it is the occasional and unexpected act of resentment by some lowly official in India or Pakistan that shows the hardening of attitudes on both sides of the border. When a former Prime Minister of Pakistan is snubbed by his generals who refuse to meet a visiting Indian premier, or indeed when an Indian ex-Prime Minister is not given deferential treatment worthy of his status by officials at the Wagah border checkpoint, the state of Indo-Pakistani relations begins to be seen in its true perspective.

For most Indians and Pakistanis, there can be no half-war, half-peace daily bombarded as they are by images of violence perpetrated by the other side - on TV, radio and the print media. Yet most maintain a complacent, even indifferent, attitude to the reality of Indo-Pakistani confrontation as they are caught in the daily toil of earning a livelihood. Until the demagogue and politician again take center stage at public meetings and exhort the crowds to commit greater acts of desperation and frenzy - and violence! That is the saga of Indo-Pakistani affairs as they stand now!

Source: Pravda.
Link: http://english.pravda.ru/hotspots/conflicts/25-07-2013/125262-india_pakistan-0/.

Iftar meals ancient Islamic custom

Thursday 25 July 2013

JEDDAH: KHADIJA HABIB

Iftar meals for the needy or travelers to break their fast, or “Banquets of God” as the custom is known among Muslims, is an ancient Islamic custom.

Taha Al-Bashir, a researcher in Muslim customs, said: “Historians differ on how the custom originated. Some people believe it goes back to the era of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) when he was in Madinah. When a delegation from Taif came to see him to convert to Islam, he ordered that they be given food every morning and night.

“The other story is that this custom first started during the era of Ahmad ibn Toulon, who invited Egyptian dignitaries to a banquet to break their fast and asked them to feed the poor from what they ate. He told them that this should go on during the whole month of Ramadan. This became an Egyptian custom, and was later copied in other countries.”

Regardless of the controversy over its origin, some observers believe that it's better to provide the food directly to the poor at their houses and gathering places.

Ahmad Hamzah, imam of Al-Rahmah mosque, told Arab News that “to do so is better because this preserves their dignity and does not embarrass them. It's much better than having them line up at the mosque to wait to be served,” he said.

“I believe this is where charities should step in. They have lists of the poor and needy families, or the families with low incomes. And they can take the food to them.” He said iftar meals at mosques often see people who are not poor come for food.

Some wealthy families offer these meals to the poor at “Ramadan tents” that are erected for this purpose.

Ikram Husseini, a Pakistani cook, said that he has been working for a wealthy family for five years, who “offer these meals to the poor in Ramadan.”

Al-Azhar University recently conducted a study about the Banquets of God in Egypt. It found that in Ramadan people offer 21,000 meals at a cost of more than 1 billion Egyptian pounds (SR535 million) in Cairo, while people in other provinces spend another billion pounds. It also found that these banquets feed about 3 million people, and are organized by 10,000 parties or institutions.

Source: Arab News.
Link: http://www.arabnews.com/news/459111.

Watery asteroid discovered in dying star points to habitable exoplanets

Cambridge UK (SPX)
Oct 14, 2013

Astronomers have found the shattered remains of an asteroid that contained huge amounts of water orbiting an exhausted star, or white dwarf. This suggests that the star GD 61 and its planetary system - located about 150 light years away and at the end of its life - had the potential to contain Earth-like exoplanets, they say.

This is the first time that both water and a rocky surface - two "key ingredients" for habitable planets - have been found together beyond our solar system.

Earth is essentially a 'dry' planet, with only 0.02% of its mass as surface water, so oceans came long after it had formed; most likely when water-rich asteroids in the solar system crashed into our planet.

The new discovery shows that the same water 'delivery system' could have occurred in this distant, dying star's solar system - as latest evidence points to it containing a similar type of water-rich asteroid that would have first brought water to Earth.

The asteroid analyzed is composed of 26% water mass, very similar to Ceres, the largest asteroid in the main belt of our solar system. Both are vastly more water-rich compared with Earth.

Astronomers at the Universities of Cambridge and Warwick say this is the first "reliable evidence" for water-rich, rocky planetary material in any extrasolar planetary system.

They describe it as a "look into our future" as, six billion years from now, alien astronomers studying the rocky remains around our burned out sun might reach the same conclusion - that terrestrial planets once circled our parent star.

The new research findings used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and are reported in the journal Science.

All rocky planets form from the accumulation of asteroids, growing until full size, so asteroids are essentially the 'building blocks' of planets.

"The finding of water in a large asteroid means the building blocks of habitable planets existed - and maybe still exist - in the GD 61 system, and likely also around substantial number of similar parent stars," said lead author Jay Farihi, from Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy.

"These water-rich building blocks, and the terrestrial planets they build, may in fact be common - a system cannot create things as big as asteroids and avoid building planets, and GD 61 had the ingredients to deliver lots of water to their surfaces," Farihi said.

"Our results demonstrate that there was definitely potential for habitable planets in this exoplanetary system."

The researchers say that the water detected most likely came from a minor planet, at least 90 km in diameter but probably much larger, that once orbited the GD 61 star before it became a white dwarf around 200 million years ago.

Previous and current astronomical observations have measured the size and density of exoplanets, but not their composition.

This is because conventional work was done on planets orbiting living stars. But the only way to see what a distant planet is made of is to take it apart, say the researchers, and nature does this for us in a dying white dwarf system through its extreme gravitational pull - sucking in and shredding the surrounding material.

This debris, which "pollutes" the atmosphere of the white dwarf, can then be chemically analyzed using powerful spectrograph techniques that "distill the entire asteroid, core and all", they say.

The team detected a range of "elemental abundance" in the white dwarf's contaminated atmosphere - such as magnesium, silicon and iron, which, together with oxygen are the main components of rocks.

By calculating the number of these elements relative to oxygen, the researchers were able to predict how much oxygen should be in the atmosphere of the white dwarf - but they found "significantly" more oxygen than if there were only rocks.

"This oxygen excess can be carried by either water or carbon, and in this star there is virtually no carbon - indicating there must have been substantial water," said co-author Boris Gansicke, from the University of Warwick.

"This also rules out comets, which are rich in both water and carbon compounds, so we knew we were looking at a rocky asteroid with substantial water content - perhaps in the form of subsurface ice - like the asteroids we know in our solar system such as Ceres," Gansicke said.

Ultraviolet observations are the only way to obtain such precise measurement of oxygen levels in the white dwarf's debris - and that can only be carried out above the Earth's atmosphere.

The team used the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph onboard Hubble to get the data required, with chemical analysis computed by team member Detlev Koester from the University of Kiel.

The "planetary bodies" such as these asteroids that fall into and pollute this dying star - which, in its heyday, was three times 'heavier' than our sun - also reveal that giant exoplanets probably still exist in this remote and withering system.

"In order for the asteroids to pass sufficiently close to the white dwarf to be shredded, then eaten, they must perturbed from the asteroid belt - essentially pushed - by a massive object like a giant planet," added Farihi.

"These asteroids tell us that the GD 61 system had - or still has - rocky, terrestrial planets, and the way they pollute the white dwarf tells us that giant planets probably still exist there.

"This supports the idea that the star originally had a full complement of terrestrial planets, and probably gas giant planets, orbiting it - a complex system similar to our own."

Source: Space Daily.
Link: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Watery_asteroid_discovered_in_dying_star_points_to_habitable_exoplanets_999.html.

Kepler Finds First Signs of Other Earths

Los Angeles CA (SPX)
Oct 14, 2013

A new analysis of observations from the Kepler spacecraft reveals what may be the first earth-sized planets with earthlike temperatures found orbiting sunlike stars.

Until now, Kepler's nearly continuous observations of over 150,000 stars have confirmed the existence of Earth-sized planets in the hot regions close to their star. Larger planets, some as small as one and a half times the Earth's diameter, have been found in the Habitable Zone, where the amount of heat they receive from their star may sustain earthlike temperatures.

In addition, earthlike planets have been found in the Habitable Zone of tiny, cool red dwarf stars, which may offer a more hazardous environment for life than with sunlike stars. But finding planets with the combination of earthlike size and earthlike temperature around sunlike stars, a major goal of the Kepler mission, has been elusive.

Part of the challenge is how difficult it is to spot a single transit by an Earth-sized planet, which blocks only 0.01% of its star's light, far less than larger planets block. This figure (figure 1 top image) shows the graph of three different stars' brightness as measured by Kepler during actual transits by extrasolar planets the size of Jupiter, Neptune, and Earth. Transits of larger planets stand out prominently, but transits by Earth-sized planets are so subtle, Kepler can only identify them when there is a series of many such dimming events occurring at the same regular interval.

Last December, the Kepler team released a list of 18,406 possible planets found by an algorithm that searched the first three years of Kepler data looking for series of transits.

If we define a size limit of no more than 1.25 times the Earth's diameter and a Habitable Zone where the amount of heating that a planet would receive is between that of Venus and Mars in our solar system, then this list contains 87 possible earthlike planets - a bonanza! There is, however, a catch: It is certain that the vast majority of these 87 are not real planets at all.

The algorithm is overly lenient in interpreting normal variations in starlight as being transits of small planets, and this was further complicated by abnormalities in the Kepler instrument itself. To explain this, it's necessary to say something of how Kepler operated.

During its operational lifetime, which ended earlier this year, Kepler would spend a quarter year (about three months) at a time staring very steadily at the same region of the sky. The light from Kepler's telescope falls onto an array of charge-coupled devices, or CCDs, like those in a digital camera.

At the end of each quarter, Kepler rotated its entire body 90 degrees, still staring at the same area of the sky, but with each star now observed by a different location on the surface of Kepler's grid of photosensitive CCDs for the new quarter. After that quarter, Kepler would rotate again, and so on for the four years, or 16 quarters, of Kepler's lifetime. This means that each particular star was observed by four different locations on Kepler's CCD grid, alternating in a cycle of four quarters, or one year.

The problem in this scheme is that certain locations of Kepler's CCD grid have proven to be slightly erratic. The data they collected are still useful, but with a little random noise, or jitter, added to the observations in ways that could make it seem like a small planet had transited in front of the star when in fact no transit at all had taken place. As a result, the same balky electronics could report bogus transits each quarter it observed the star, which therefore means at intervals of about a year.

If the bogus transits happened by chance to come at even intervals in time, this fooled the search algorithm into thinking it may have seen a small planet. What makes this particularly insidious is that these false reports of planets often seem to be earthlike in both size and temperature, including many of the 87 seemingly earthlike planets mentioned above.

That list of possible planets came from Kepler's first three years of observations, but fortunately, there is a saving grace - the fourth year. For three bogus transits to be spaced out evenly in time is not highly unlikely: The second bogus transit simply has to occur at the time halfway between the first and the third. But if the planet is real, then a fourth transit should occur about a year later, timed just as precisely as the first three. This is unlikely to occur if the first three were bogus. So by finding a fourth transit is a powerful reality check on that list of possible earthlike planets.

In my analysis of this data, I first studied the "noise" that Kepler recorded in observing each star to come up with an estimate of how likely it was that Kepler was registering some false transits associated with that star. Then, by focusing on a small list of stars which had a possible earthlike planet and seemed to escape the problem of Kepler's noisy electronics, I checked to see if their that planet showed an additional transit in the final year of observations. At least two, and perhaps five, showed signs of an additional and confirmatory transit.

Does this constitute the discovery of five truly earthlike planets around other stars? Not yet, because in any particular case there are other explanations for how real astrophysical events can mimic the transits of an earthlike planet. This figure (figure 2 lower image) shows three different cases that can look the same to Kepler. In case (a), we see an earthlike planet in the process of transiting its star, the case we are hoping to find.

In case (b), we see a large planet transiting a distant star, which just happens to be lined up right behind the closer (and therefore seemingly bigger) star that Kepler was looking at. In this figure, we can see what's happening, but Kepler doesn't obtain pictures with this level of detail; it only measures how the total amount of light varies over time.

When the large planet transits across the distant star, the loss of light is the same as if a small planet were transiting across the nearer star, so Kepler is effectively blind to the difference between these two cases. Case (c) shows another possibility, that a pair of binary stars perform a grazing eclipse of one another, hiding just enough of each other to block the same amount of light that an earth-sized planet would.

Source: Space Daily.
Link: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Kepler_Finds_First_Signs_of_Other_Earths_999.html.

Fossil bird from 125 million years ago shows some dinosaur traits

Beijing (UPI)
Oct 8, 2013

A bird 125 million years ago had two distinct kinds of feathers, resembling those of non-flying feathered reptiles and modern birds, Chinese researchers say.

A new analysis of the fossil Jeholornis, first described more than a decade ago, revealed a previously unrecognized second group of flight feathers at the base of its tail, Zhonghe Zhou of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing said.

"We did not expect to find this new structure," he told New Scientist.

Like the tails of modern birds, these formed an airfoil that could have provided control during flight, the researchers said.

Previously it had been thought Jeholornis only had feathers at the tip of its tail, largely useless for flight, similar to the tail feathers of some dinosaurs like the flightless Caudipteryx.

"We believe that the fan at the base of the tail mainly helps to streamline the body and reduce drag," Zhou said. They could have also generated more lift than the feathers along the tail of the most primitive bird, Archaeopteryx, making it more useful for flight, he said.

The find raises new questions about feather evolution, leaving the place of Jeholornis in the avian family tree somewhat unclear, Michael Habib of the University of Southern California, who was not involved in the study, said.

"This could be an intermediate form or an 'evolutionary experiment', which left no descendants," Habib told New Scientist.

Source: Terra Daily.
Link: http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Fossil_bird_from_125_million_years_ago_shows_some_dinosaur_traits_999.html.

French far-right candidate scores election win

October 13, 2013

PARIS (AP) — A candidate of France's far-right National Front won a run-off vote in a local election Sunday that drew widespread attention amid signs that the once-shunned anti-immigrant party is gaining strength.

Laurent Lopez defeated center-right UMP candidate Catherine Delzers in the by-election to win one of 43 seats on the Var department council. France is made up of more than 100 departments; five or so departments make up a region.

A smiling Marine Le Pen, the National Front's leader, appeared on French television and declared the results showed "a real desire for change by the French." Le Pen, who scored 17.9 percent in the first round of last year's presidential vote, said her party could win "hundreds, maybe a thousand" seats in local elections next March.

The National Front currently holds dozens of local seats across France and two seats in the national parliament. A call by the ruling Socialist party of President Francois Hollande and other left-wing parties to vote for the UMP candidate in Sunday's election fell flat, with the Lopez taking 53.9 percent of the more than 9,000 votes cast. More than half of the eligible voters stayed home.

Thousands in Romania protest plans for gold mine

October 13, 2013

BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — Thousands of people blocked a major road in downtown Bucharest on Sunday to protest plans to create what would be Europe's biggest gold mine.

Protesters marched past government headquarters yelling, "Your treason is measured in gold!" Demonstrations also took place in other cities, including the city of Cluj, where thousands called for the 2,000 year-old site where the open-cast mine will be located to be listed as a UNESCO heritage site.

Canada's Gabriel Resources has been trying to gain permits to go ahead with the planned mine in northwest Romania's town of Rosia Montana for 14 years. The site has been mined for precious metals since at least Roman times, though work there stopped a few years ago. The Canadian company's approach would be far more efficient and involve razing four mountains. It is expected to fully extricate all the gold and silver in a couple of decades.

The mine is believed to contain 314 tons of gold and 1,500 tons of silver. Protests against the plans began after the government sent a law to parliament on Aug. 27 calling on lawmakers to give their support to the controversial project. A vote is expected in the coming weeks.

Opponents of the mine criticize plans to use cyanide in the extraction process, while others say Romania would earn too little from the project. But supporters argue that the project would create jobs for unemployed miners and provide vital foreign investment to a deprived area. The Canadian company has pledged to protect the environment and historical monuments in Rosia Montana.