OSCE: Apparent Russian troops at Crimea roadblocks

March 12, 2014

VIENNA (AP) — A multinational observer mission says Russian armed forces were apparently present at roadblocks where its team was stopped repeatedly at gunpoint from entering Ukraine's tense Crimea region.

The finding appears to be the first time Russian troops — and not Russian-backed local militias — are specifically implicated by international observers as playing a role in controlling Crimea. The observers were sent by the 57-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to monitor the military situation in Crimea, which is preparing for a referendum on whether to join with Russia.

An OSCE statement Wednesday said the team observed "significant evidence ... consistent with the presence" of Russian troops, including license plates and markings associated with Russian forces. The observers were prevented from entering Crimea five times over the past week.

3 shot dead during unrest in central Venezuela

March 13, 2014

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — A university student, a National Guard captain and a third man were shot to death in separate incidents Wednesday as anti-government protests roiled the central Venezuelan city of Valencia. Three National Guardsmen and several protesters were wounded.

Two of the deaths came in the opposition-dominated Isabelica neighborhood, where residents unhappy with the scarcity of basic items and rising unemployment from the closure of some businesses in the area have protested for weeks by blocking streets and throwing rocks at police.

Valencia Mayor Miguel Cocchiola said a man was killed and six people wounded in Isabelica. The newspaper Notitarde de Valencia said the dead man's cousin, Luis Acosta, identified him as 22-year-old student Jesus Enrique Acosta and said he was killed near his home by men on motorcycles, but it was unclear if the victim was participating in a protest.

The opposition has accused the government of supporting armed civilian thugs who attack protests. The mayor later said through his Twitter account that another man, 42-year-old Guillermo Sanchez, also died from a gunshot wound in Isabelica. He said Sanchez was painting the front of his house when he was shot.

Carabobo state Gov. Francisco Ameliach, who supports the socialist government of President Nicolas Maduro, announced via Twitter that National Guard Capt. Ramzor Ernesto Bracho also was killed in Valencia. The federal prosecutor's office said another guardsman was wounded in that shooting. The office reported earlier that a lieutenant colonel and two guardsmen were wounded by bullets while clearing a barricade blocking a highway in the city.

A month of student-led demonstrations in a number of Venezuelan cities has left at least 25 people dead, according to the government. Venezuelans fed up with inflation that reached 56 percent last year, long lines for buying some items at grocery stores and one of the highest homicide rates in the world have joined students in protesting against the government.

Wednesday's death toll matched the highest single day total exactly one month after that mark was set Feb. 12. Maduro's governing bloc, which easily won municipal elections in December, shows no sign of collapse. The president accuses the opposition of trying to instigate his overthrow, but his party controls the legislature and judiciary, retains the support of the military and counts as members the governors of all but three states.

After mentioning the Valencia violence to a group of students at a government rally, Maduro said he would convene a special meeting of his security cabinet Wednesday evening. "I'm going to take drastic measures with all of these sectors that are attacking and killing the Venezuelan people," he said.

In the national capital of Caracas, pro- and anti-government student groups approaching 10,000 people staged competing marches. When the larger opposition group tried to move toward the chief public defender's office to demand his resignation, security forces blocked the way. After negotiations failed to break the impasse, some protesters hurled rocks and National Guard troops responded with water cannons and tear gas.

Jorge Olivares, a 21-year-old chemical engineering student at Simon Bolivar University who joined the anti-government march, said the protests would not push Maduro from office, but expressed hope that the general discontent would guarantee a win for the opposition in the next election.

He also said security forces seemed to be getting tougher in dealing with the daily protests. "Something has changed," Olivares said. "Each time there's more repression." In Washington, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry left open the possibility of sanctions, but said there was concern that in Venezuela's fragile economic state that sanctions might not be appropriate.

He said Maduro's frequent accusations that the U.S. is participating in a conspiracy against his government have made it difficult for the U.S. to influence the situation. "We have become an excuse, we are a card they play," Kerry said. "I regret that because we pretty much opened up and reached out in an effort to say, 'It doesn't have to be this way.'"

The UNASUR group of South American nations said Wednesday that it will send a commission of foreign ministers to Venezuela in April to encourage dialogue on resolving the political conflict. The Venezuelan political opposition and student leaders have refused to speak with the government until it releases jailed protesters.

Associated Press writers Luis Alonso Lugo in Washington, Andrew Rosati in Caracas, Vivian Sequera in Bogota and Luis Andres Henao in Santiago contributed to this report.

Leftist declared winner in Salvador's election

March 14, 2014

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — El Salvador's electoral court on Thursday declared leftist candidate Salvador Sanchez Ceren the winner of the tight presidential election, making him the first former rebel commander to win the presidency of a nation where 76,000 died in a civil war.

With all the votes counted, the electoral court announced on its website that Sanchez Ceren, candidate of the ruling Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, the FMLN, got 50.1 percent of the votes. Norman Quijano of the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance party, known as ARENA, had 49.9 percent.

With about 3 million ballots cast in Sunday's runoff election, Sanchez Ceren won by less than 7,000 votes, and Quijano's party vowed to appeal the election until a new ballot is held. ARENA informed its members it had filed a complaint with El Salvador's attorney general, where it is presenting evidence of fraud. So far it has not made any such evidence public.

Outgoing President Mauricio Funes was a journalist who was sympathetic to the FMLN rebels during the 1980-92 civil war but was never a guerrilla, unlike Sanchez Ceren, who most recently served as Funes' vice president.

A campaign comparing El Salvador's left to Venezuela's ruling socialist bloc brought Quijano from far behind in the polls to the near tie. Sanchez Ceren has sought to distance himself from Venezuela's crisis, saying during his campaign: "El Salvador is not and cannot be Venezuela."

He said his role model is Uruguayan President Jose "Pepe" Mujica, who spent 14 years in prison during Uruguay's dictatorship. A flower-farming former guerrilla, Mujica gives away 90 percent of his presidential salary, doesn't have a bank account, drives a 41-year-old Volkswagen and never wears a tie.

"Mujica is the example to follow, because he works on two main fronts: development and social investment," Sanchez Ceren said. He has promised to maintain good relations with the United States, where hundreds of thousands of Salvadoran migrants live.

Much like Mujica, Sanchez Ceren, 69, favors rolled-up shirt sleeves and usually eschews suits and ties. Close associates call him "Profe," or "Teacher," a reference to his beginnings as a grade-school teacher in a poor rural school.

"In truth, at the end of the day, I'm a teacher, and my greatest pride is when people call me 'Teacher,'" Sanchez Ceren said at a ceremony in February where he was given an honorary doctorate by the country's National University.

Sanchez Ceren was one of 12 children born to a carpenter and a food vendor. Once he started working, he quickly became an activist in the teachers union, pressing demands for better salaries and working conditions. Amid bloody repression of union leaders in El Salvador in the 1970s, he gravitated toward the rebel movement, then a series of leftist groups allied under the umbrella of the FMLN.

By 1978, Sanchez Ceren headed into the mountains as an armed guerrilla, and by 1983 he became one of the rebels' five top commanders, using the nom-de-guerre "Comandante Leonel Gonzalez." He was seen within the movement as an advocate of dialogue, and he served as a negotiator in the 1992 peace accord that ended the war.

"He is true to his revolutionary principles. He is a stalwart who is a life-long party member, but he is not stuck in the past," said Miguel Montenegro, an official of El Salvador's Human Rights Commission.

Sanchez Ceren is likely to face continued resistance from emboldened activists of ARENA, which governed El Salvador for two decades before losing the presidency to Funes in 2009. Ernesto Muyshondt, ARENA's vice president for ideology, said Thursday that there is strong evidence that members of the FMLN party engaged in double voting across the country.

"We have testimonies, we have videos where people who work closely with FMLN talk about how they did it," Muyshondt said. ARENA has filed complaints with the electoral tribunal and with federal prosecutors and has said it will appeal the results to the country's Supreme Court.

Sanchez Ceren also has to deal with one of the highest murder rates in the world. A 2012 gang truce seemed to cut the country's daily average of 14 dead by half, but the drop appears to have been short-lived. Police statistics show 501 murders the first two months of this year, an increase of more than 25 percent over the same period of 2013.

Influx of CAR refugees into Chad

Wed Mar 12, 2014

Chad is struggling to manage the influx of refugees from the Central African Republic (CAR) as its resources are limited.

The Chadian government is sheltering more than 80,000 refugees from the CAR in transit centers across the country.

This is while thousands of people have been neglected by the authorities and humanitarian agencies, and many are suffering from severe malnutrition and with no shelter other than the shade of trees.

“It is unacceptable for thousands of men, women and children who were forced to leave CAR fearing for their lives, to die here in Chad for lack of even the most basic assistance. It is important that the Chadian government and the international community including the UN agencies urgently assist these people and ensure that they have security, access to food, medical services, and adequate shelter,” Christian Mukosa, the Central Africa Researcher at Amnesty International, said.

Doctors Without Borders’ emergency coordinator, Foura Sassou Madi, said refugees fleeing the violence in the Central African Republic are arriving in Chad in very precarious conditions in need of medical assistance.

Tens of thousands of civilians have crossed from the Central African Republic into southern Chad in the past three months. Most of them are Muslims and are sleeping in makeshift shelters near the border. The CAR has been facing deadly violence since December 2013, when Christian armed groups launched coordinated attacks against the mostly Muslim Seleka group, which toppled the government in March 2013.

On March 11, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said ongoing violence pushed most Muslims out of the western side of the CAR.

According to the UN, more than 950,000 people have been displaced and thousands more killed by violence in the country.

The atrocities take place despite the intervention of French troops in the former colony. On December 5, 2013, France invaded the CAR after the UN Security Council adopted a resolution giving the African Union and France the go-ahead to send troops to the country.

Source: PressTV.
Link: http://edition.presstv.ir/detail/354321.html.

Philippines drops food to troops after China 'blockade'

Manila (AFP)

March 13, 2014

The Philippine military said Thursday it had evaded a Chinese sea blockade by using an airplane to drop food to soldiers on a tiny and remote South China Sea shoal claimed by both countries.

The incident was the latest to escalate tensions between the Asian nations over their conflicting claims to parts of the South China Sea, a major sealane and rich fishing ground that is believed to hold vast mineral resources.

“We confirmed there was an airdrop of food to our troops,” Defense Department spokesman Peter Paul Galvez said.

He said the airdrop was “via airplane,” but did not say when it occurred nor give further details.

The incident took place at Second Thomas Shoal in the Spratly island group, which is around 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the western Philippine island of Palawan and which Manila insists is part of its continental shelf.

The shoal is more than 1,000 kilometers from Hainan island, the closest Chinese landmass, but China claims nearly all of the South China Sea based on what it says are historical records.

A tiny unit of Filipino marines live on the BRP Sierra Madre, a decrepit, beached former World-War-II US navy transport ship that was transferred to the Philippine navy and run aground on the shoal in the 1990s.

Troops on the 1,000-meter (3,280-foot) long ship have ever since guarded the shoal.

China has long demanded the Philippines pull out the vessel and the marines.

But the Philippines said this week that Chinese coastguard ships blocked two Philippine-flagged civilian vessels on March 9 as they were carrying supplies and personnel to the shoal.

The Philippines said this was the first time there had been such Chinese resistance.

The Philippines issued a diplomatic protest over the incident, but China in response reiterated its position that the shoal was Chinese territory.

The Philippines and China, along with Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam all claim parts or all of the South China Sea.

The Philippine government has accused China of becoming increasingly aggressive in asserting its claims to the sea. Last year it initiated United Nations arbitration to settle the dispute, but China refused to participate.

The Philippines also last month accused Chinese ships of using water cannon to drive away Filipino fishermen who were approaching Scarborough Shoal, another South China Sea outcrop.

Source: Space War.

Link: http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Philippines_drops_food_to_troops_after_China_blockade_999.html.

Baseball, softball merge to seek Games return

Sun Apr 14, 2013

(Reuters) - The governing bodies of baseball and softball have merged in a bid to win back their spot on the Olympic program, the heads of the federations said on Sunday.

The newly named World Baseball Softball Confederation (WBSC) will campaign for a return to the Olympic program at the 2020 Games as a single sport. The International Olympic Committee will pick one sport to be included in the 2020 program at its meeting in September.

Seven other sports - wushu, squash, karate, wakeboarding, sports climbing, roller sports and wrestling - are also vying for Olympic inclusion.

The IOC's executive board voted to drop wrestling from the list of core sports for the 2020 Games, forcing it to join seven other candidate sports seeking one spot in a revamped program.

"This is an historic day," said Riccardo Fraccari, the president of the International Baseball Federation (IBAF) and co-president of the new WBSC.

"We have brought a new level of worldwide unity and determination to our quest to return to the Games.

"The 65 million currently playing baseball and softball around the world now have a single federation to rally behind," he added after a new joint constitution was ratified.

Baseball and softball were dropped from the program in 2005 and their last Olympic appearance came in Beijing three years later.

By joining into one global confederation they are now bidding as one unified sport rather than two, hoping to increase their chances of a return.

Olympic inclusion guarantees a sport millions of euros in funding from the IOC, sponsors and broadcasters, while being cut from the program severely limits a sport's global appeal and reach.

"This is in the best interests of the athletes and putting the welfare of the athletes and the future of sport first, and inspiring young athletes to stand on the highest podium that an athlete can aspire to - the Olympic Games," Fraccari said.

The IOC will pick one sport to be included in the 2020 Olympics at its meeting in September but baseball and softball will first have to make it onto a May shortlist.

The IOC executive board will meet in St Petersburg in May to determine which of the seven sport will be put to the vote at the session in Buenos Aires, where the host city for the 2020 Games will also be chosen.

"Baseball-softball is a game that anyone, anywhere can play," said International Softball Federation chief and WBSC co-president Don Porter.

"There are no barriers to participation. If you've got a bat and ball you can play, regardless of age, gender, social, cultural or economic stature."

(Reporting by Karolos Grohmann; Editing by Peter Rutherford)

Source: Reuters.
Link: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/14/us-olympics-softball-baseball-idUSBRE93D02U20130414.

UK joins the planet hunt with Europe's PLATO mission

London, UK (SPX)
Mar 13, 2014

The UK is set to play a leading role in the search for habitable planets orbiting alien stars, following David Willett's announcement 11 March 2014 that the UK Space Agency will invest 25 million pounds in ESA's PLATO mission.

Planned for launch by 2024, the planet hunting mission will see strong involvement from several UK institutes, with Professor Don Pollacco from the University of Warwick providing UK scientific leadership for the European consortium.

With several UK space companies in a strong position to bid for the industrial opportunities that PLATO will produce, the UK's investment in the mission is also set to secure excellent return, generating economic growth and creating new jobs.

PLATO (Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) was selected by ESA's Science Program Committee for implementation as part of its Cosmic Vision 2015-25 Program.

The mission will address two key themes of Cosmic Vision: what are the conditions for planet formation and the emergence of life, and how does the Solar System work?

Dr Chris Castelli, Acting Director of Technology, Science and Exploration at the UK Space Agency said:

"With strong involvement from our science community and UK industry, PLATO is an important mission for the UK. It's also a very exciting mission, as this is the first time we've been involved in a spacecraft designed to seek out habitable planets like our own."

PLATO will monitor relatively nearby stars, searching for tiny, regular dips in brightness as their planets transit in front of them, temporarily blocking out a small fraction of the starlight.

By using 34 separate small telescopes and cameras, PLATO will search for planets around up to a million stars spread over half of the sky.

It will also investigate seismic activity in the stars, enabling a precise characterization of the host sun of each planet discovered, including its mass, radius and age.

Professor Don Pollacco from the University of Warwick, said:

"PLATO is the logical next step in our search for extrasolar planets. It will revolutionize our knowledge of rocky planets and will enable the first directed search for life around sun-like stars in the next decade."

When coupled with ground-based radial velocity observations, PLATO's measurements will allow a planet's mass and radius to be calculated, and therefore its density, providing an indication of its composition.

The mission will identify and study thousands of exoplanetary systems, with an emphasis on discovering and characterizing Earth-sized planets and super-Earths in the habitable zone of their parent star - the distance from the star where liquid surface water could exist.

The UK and PLATO

The UK, together with other ESA member states, will design PLATO's scientific instruments and finance their development while ESA commissions the spacecraft to be built in European industry. Eleven UK Institutes (Birmingham, Cambridge, Keele, Leicester, Open University, Oxford, Queens Belfast, Queen Mary's London, St Andrews, Warwick, UCL MSSL) have involvement in PLATO and Prof Don Pollacco of Warwick University is the Science Consortium Leader for the mission.

Professor Alan Smith, of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, University College London, will lead the Focal Plane Array development for the detection system, with support from Leicester and the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge.

The Ground System Exoplanet Analysis software development program is being co-ordinated by Dr Nic Walton at the IoA in Cambridge.

UK industry is well placed to bid for the build of the spacecraft and the development of the sophisticated CCD detectors needed for PLATO's camera.

Source: Space Daily.
Link: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/UK_joins_the_planet_hunt_as_Government_pledges_25_million_pounds_to_Europes_PLATO_mission_999.html.