Spacewalk Day: Astronauts install new porch on lab

By MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Astronauts working inside and out installed a porch for experiments on Japan's enormous space station lab Saturday, accomplishing the major objective despite microphone static that often drowned out the spacewalkers' voices.

Veteran spaceman David Wolf and rookie Timothy Kopra could barely make themselves understood at times because of the loud static emanating from Kopra's helmet microphones.

"Dave, you're unreadable," astronaut Christopher Cassidy called from inside the shuttle-station complex.

Two hours later, it was no better. "It's hard to follow along with this comm," Cassidy said, looking for clarification on what the spacewalkers were doing. The trouble lasted the entire 5 1/2-hour spacewalk, the first of five planned during Endeavour's space station visit.

Mission Control officials said it was a challenge to monitor the 220-mile-high action, especially with so many people in orbit — a record crowd of 13. But they said the static never threatened safety.

The problem apparently was with the two microphone booms in the cap worn by Kopra under his helmet. The booms were too far from his mouth — he could not move them once his helmet was on — and the ventilation flow created all the static. The booms may have been bumped as he was putting on his helmet.

This was Kopra's only spacewalk for the mission, so the airwaves should be much quieter when astronauts step back outside Monday.

"Listening to the static throughout the whole (spacewalk) tends to wear you out more than you would expect," said Kieth Johnson, the lead spacewalk officer in Mission Control. "But I think we made it through."

Despite the nerve-racking racket, the spacewalkers managed to prep the Kibo lab — Hope in Japanese — and the new porch for their mechanical hookup. Wolf removed a cover from the lab and tossed it overboard; the white cover drifted away, flipping end over end.

The spacewalkers then moved on to other routine work at the international space station as their colleagues inside used the shuttle and station robot arms, one at a time, to lift the Japanese porch from Endeavour's payload bay and hoist it toward the Kibo lab. The spacewalk was over by the time the porch was finally latched in place.

It marked the completion of Japan's $1 billion lab, so big that it required three shuttle flights to launch everything. The first two sections of the lab flew up last year.

The veranda — about 16 feet square — will get its first outdoor experiments in five more days.

Mission Control's congratulations to Wolf and Kopra, as they headed back inside, could hardly be heard because of the static. In the end, the two fell behind and had to skip some chores. They managed to free a platform for spare parts that jammed months ago, using a specially designed tool. But they did not have time to release a similar platform on the opposite side of the outpost.

With Apollo 11 on the minds of many back on Earth, NASA noted that Saturday's spacewalk was the 201st by Americans since those first steps on the moon by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin 40 years ago this Monday.

Remaining inside the linked shuttle and station were 11 astronauts, a full house. The station population swelled to 13 when Endeavour arrived Friday for a 1 1/2-week stay. Kopra, the station's newest resident, will remain on board for another 1 1/2 months.

Earlier Saturday, Mission Control had both good and bad news for the spacefarers.

The good: Endeavour looks to be in fine shape for re-entry at the end of the month, although a review of shuttle photos and other data continues. A surprisingly large amount of foam insulation came off Endeavour's fuel tank during liftoff, but the shuttle ended up with just 16 minor scuff marks on its belly.

The bad: The astronauts were informed of Walter Cronkite's death. Mission Control relayed statements by Armstrong and NASA's new chief, ex-astronaut Charles Bolden, both of whom noted Cronkite's passion for human space exploration.

Indonesia police reconstructing face of suicide bomber

By Sunanda Creagh and Ed Davies

JAKARTA (Reuters) – Indonesian police said on Sunday they were reconstructing the face of one of the suspected suicide bombers from a severed head in a bid to push forward a probe into deadly attacks on two luxury Jakarta hotels.

Nine people died and 53 were wounded in Friday's attacks on the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton, according to police. The two hotels were popular with business executives and diplomats and considered to be among the most secure buildings in the capital.

The blasts, which are suspected of being carried out by Islamic militants, left some bodies so badly mutilated they were difficult to identify and two decapitated corpses were believed by police to belong to the suicide bombers.

"We are trying to reconstruct the face of one of the heads we found to see if it matches the guest from 1808. We will ask witnesses and receptionists, is it him?," police spokesman Nanan Soekarna told a news conference.

Police said the bombers had checked in to the Marriott as paying guests on Wednesday and had assembled the bombs in their room. A third bomb was found and defused in a laptop computer bag in room 1808.

Soekarna said the attacks bore the hallmarks of Jemaah Islamiah (JI), the radical militant Islamist group responsible for a string of deadly attacks in Jakarta and on the resort island of Bali that seemed to end in 2005.

"The method, the equipment used is the same as both bombs in Bali and the one found in Cilacap," he said referring to the Bali attacks in 2002 and 2005, and bomb equipment police recently found during raids in Cilacap, Central Java.

Ansyaad Mbai, head of the anti-terrorism desk at Indonesia's security ministry, said the attacks may be linked to a fugitive Malaysian-born militant Noordin Top, who is believed to have broken away from JI to form a more radical wing.

Mbai was quoted as saying by state news agency Antara that the government was stepping up efforts to find Noordin Top, who has been linked to a string of attacks, as priority.

Sidney Jones, a Jakarta-based expert on Islamic terrorism at the International Crisis Group, also said that the attacks had the hallmarks of Noordin Top.

"The most important hallmark is the suicide bombing as a method of attack and also the targeting of iconic Western symbols, both of those are associated more with Noordin than with mainstream Jemaah Islamiah," Jones told Reuters in an interview.

Malaysia's New Sunday Times newspaper cited an unnamed senior police source as saying that although the attacks bore Noordin Top's hallmark, intelligence reports indicated that he was not involved.

Security was increased at shopping malls and hotels across Jakarta at the weekend.

The Four Seasons Hotel in Jakarta was briefly evacuated on Sunday morning after a bomb scare, although guests were later allowed to return after a search, a receptionist said.

Elshinta radio reported that the hotel had received a telephone call warning of a device planted on the 18th floor.

The casualties of Friday's attacks included citizens of Indonesia, the United States, Australia, South Korea, the Netherlands, Italy, Britain, Canada, Norway, Japan and India.

The blasts are a severe blow for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who was re-elected earlier this month in a landslide victory on the back of strong growth in Southeast Asia's biggest economy.

Member of Malaysia ruling coalition joins opposition

KUALA LUMPUR (AFP) – A senior member of Malaysia's ruling Barisan Nasional coalition has quit over its alleged abuse of power and the mysterious death of an opposition leader's aide.

Former health minister Chua Jui Meng, 66, of the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA), which is the second largest party in the Barisan Nasional, Saturday joined opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim's Keadilan party.

"Today I announce that I am resigning as a member of MCA. Now I announce I am joining PKR (Parti Keadilan Rakyat)," Chua said in a statement late Saturday. Chua had been a member of the MCA for 33 years.

"We see the abuse of power in the use of the federal institutions to harass, persecute and prosecute the leader of the opposition," he added, in reference to Anwar's sodomy trial.

Anwar has rejected the sodomy allegations leveled by a 23-year-old former aide as a conspiracy to derail his plan to topple the government.

Khoo Kay Peng, an independent political analyst, told AFP Sunday that Chua's defection was a "big blow" to the MCA.

"It is a big blow to MCA. Chua is a charismatic leader. His defection will not only help woo votes to the opposition but also build voter confidence for the Pakatan Rakyat opposition alliance," he said.

Khoo said the Pakatan coalition has a fair chance to advance its gains in the next polls due in 2011 if the three coalition partners enhance cooperation.

After seizing control of a third of seats in parliament, it is now vowing to unseat the Barisan Nasional coalition -- which has ruled Malaysia for half a century -- in the next general elections.

Chua in his speech also said that the sudden death of a young opposition political aide, Teoh Beng Hock, became the tipping point in his decision to join Keadilan.

"The tragic death of 30-year-old Teoh Beng Hock is the consequence of one such institution going overboard in its action," he added.

Teoh, an assistant to a member of the state cabinet in Selangor, which is ruled by the Pakatan Rakyat opposition alliance, apparently plunged from the 14th floor of anti-corruption offices.

His body was found on Thursday sprawled on the roof of an adjacent building, after he had undergone questioning late into the night at the offices of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC).

The opposition has demanded a Royal Commission of Inquiry to investigate the death.

Police said an initial autopsy confirmed the cause of death was multiple injuries caused by a fall from a high place. They have not ruled out foul play.

Meanwhile, an ethnic Indian activist who was held under a tough security law for mounting an anti-discrimination rally in 2007, launched a political party to champion the rights of marginalized people.

"Human Rights Party is an Indian-based multiracial party. UMNO is our enemy due to its gross injustices against minority ethnic Indians," P. Uthayakumar told AFP.

"We would also struggle against all forms of racial discrimination by the UMNO-led government," he added. Uthayakumar, 48, was freed in May.

Ethnic Indians, who make up less than eight percent of the 27 million population of the mainly Muslim-Malay country, say they fare badly in terms of education, wealth and employment opportunities.

There are already half-a-dozen ethnic Indian-based political parties in the country but most are aligned to the ruling United Malays National Organization (UMNO) which leads the Barisan Nasional coalition in government.

US offensive reflects uneasy run-up to Afghan vote

by Ben Sheppard

HELMAND PROVINCE, Afghanistan (AFP) – A month before polls in Afghanistan, campaigning has been scarce in the southern Helmand river valley where US Marines are fighting insurgents for control of the key region.

Landmines have closed main roads while frightened villagers have abandoned their homes despite a major US military offensive designed to ensure safe conditions for presidential and provincial council elections on August 20.

The vote comes after the hardline Taliban movement -- driven from power by the US-led invasion eight years ago -- has re-emerged since as a potent insurgency force that increasingly threatens security.

Multi-national efforts to foster stability have struggled to make progress, with the top US military commander Admiral Michael Mullen admitting last week that security had deteriorated progressively over the last three years.

In southern Helmand province, where most of the opium that funds the insurgency is grown, villagers told AFP that they broadly supported the foreign troops' attempts to defeat the Taliban.

"The Taliban just walk into our homes and demand food and money," said one village elder speaking through an interpreter employed by the US military.

"They close schools and we can't disobey them as they will torture and kill us. We support what the US troops are doing but they point their guns at our children, who cannot go outside to play."

The man said he wanted to vote in the elections but that registration cards had not arrived at his mud-walled village in the Garmsir district of Helmand.

He spoke during a week in which a Marines' unit was hit by a series of deadly IED (improvised explosive devices) planted on the dirt road immediately outside the village.

"They are not local people," he said of those behind the bombings, without giving further details.

All residents living close to where the US Marines stopped for the night fled their houses, fearful that the troops' presence would attract violence -- rather than provide security.

The battle for control of Helmand is in contrast to the widespread optimism about Afghanistan's future in the years after the fall of the Taliban.

In 2005 George W. Bush, the then US president, described democracy in Afghanistan as "flourishing" and expressed hope that it and Iraq would show the way ahead for what he called the "greater Middle East" -- including Iran.

Barack Obama, his successor, has carved out a more specific US mission in Afghanistan that focuses on bringing stability to prevent the country from becoming a haven for terror groups such as Al-Qaeda that threaten the West.

When the latest US operation against the Taliban swung into action in Helmand on July 2, Brigadier General Larry Nicholson said it would "set conditions for the elections in the river valley."

"The aim is to improve things to a level where (voter) registration can take place," he told AFP, though he warned that gaining people's trust and finally transferring security responsibilities to Afghan forces would take time.

Western troops are expected to keep a low profile on polling day itself, leaving visible security in the hands of the Afghan police and army personnel who are being trained up to take over in the long term.

The 4,000 Marines air-lifted into Taliban-held areas of south Helmand have met only sporadic resistance and have often received a positive response from local leaders who wish to see the extremists driven out, the military says.

However the difficulties faced by the NATO-led coalition were emphasised by the experiences of the US Marine convoy with which AFP travelled in the province last week.

Its attempt to clear a 30-kilometre (19-mile) route of IEDs ended in failure with the convoy returning to base after seven days of repeatedly being hit by IED blasts, including one which killed two Marines.

The Taliban threatened to target elections in Afghanistan in 2004 and 2005, though violence was relatively limited during the polls.

They have so far avoided making direct threats against next month's elections.

Hamid Karzai, the current Afghan president, is seen as the favorite to win having secured strong political alliances despite complaints about the slow pace of development and allegations of corruption within his administration.

AP sources: Taliban video shows captive US soldier

By PAMELA HESS and LOLITA BALDOR, Associated Press Writers

WASHINGTON – The American soldier who went missing June 30 from his base in eastern Afghanistan and was later confirmed to have been captured, appeared on a video posted Saturday to a Web site by the Taliban.

Two U.S. defense officials confirmed to The Associated Press that the man in the video is the captured soldier. The video provide the first glimpse the public has had of the missing soldier.

The soldier is shown in the 28-minute video with his head shaved and the start of a beard. He is sitting and dressed in a nondescript, gray outfit. Early in the video one of his captors holds the soldier's dog tag up to the camera. His name and ID number are clearly visible. He is shown eating at one point and sitting cross-legged.

The soldier, whose identity has not yet been released by the Pentagon pending notification of members of Congress and the soldier's family, says his name, age and hometown on the video, which was released Saturday on a Web site pointed out by the Taliban.

The soldier said the date is July 14. He says he was captured when he lagged behind on a patrol.

He is interviewed in English by his captors, and he is asked his views on the war, which he calls extremely hard, his desire to learn more about Islam and the morale of American soldiers, which he said was low.

Asked how he was doing, the soldier said on the video:

"Well I'm scared, scared I won't be able to go home. It is very unnerving to be a prisoner."

He begins to answer questions in a matter-of-fact and sober voice, occasionally facing the camera, looking down and sometimes looking to the questioner on his left.

He later chokes up when discussing his family and his hope to marry his girlfriend.

"I have my girlfriend, who is hoping to marry," he said. "I have a very, very good family that I love back home in America. And I miss them every day when I'm gone. I miss them and I'm afraid that I might not ever see them again and that I'll never be able to tell them that I love them again and I'll never be able to hug them."

He is also prompted his interrogators to give a message to the American people.

"To my fellow Americans who have loved ones over here, who know what it's like to miss them, you have the power to make our government bring them home," he said. "Please, please bring us home so that we can be back where we belong and not over here, wasting our time and our lives and our precious life that we could be using back in our own country. Please bring us home. It is America and American people who have that power."

The video is not a continuous recording — it appears to stop and start during the questioning.

It is unclear from the video whether the July 14 date is authentic. The soldier says that he heard that a Chinook helicopter carrying 37 NATO troops had been shot down over Helmand. A helicopter was shot down in southern Afghanistan on July 14, but it was carrying civilians on a reported humanitarian mission for NATO forces. All six Ukrainian passengers died in the crash, and a child on the ground was killed.

On July 2, the U.S. military said an American soldier had disappeared after walking off his base in eastern Afghanistan with three Afghan counterparts and was believed to have been taken prisoner. A U.S. defense official said the soldier was noticed missing during a routine check of the unit on June 30 and was first listed as "duty status whereabouts unknown."

Details of such incidents are routinely held very tightly by the military as it works to retrieve a missing or captured soldier without giving away any information to captors.

But Afghan Police Gen. Nabi Mullakheil said the soldier went missing in eastern Paktika province near the border with Pakistan from an American base. The region is known to be Taliban-infested.

The most important insurgent group operating in that area is known as Haqqani network and is led by warlord Siraj Haqqani, whom the U.S. has accused of masterminding beheadings and suicide bombings including the July 2008 attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul that killed some 60 people. The Haqqani group also was linked to an assassination attempt on Afghan president Hamid Karzai early last year.

On Saturday, a U.S. military official in Kabul, Col. Greg Julian, said the U.S. was "still doing everything we can to return him safely."

Julian said U.S. troops had distributed two flyers in the area where the soldier disappeared. One of them asked for information on the missing soldier and offered a $25,000 reward for his return. The other said "please return our soldier safely" or "we will hunt you," according to Julian.

China says police killed 12 in Urumqi rioting

By GILLIAN WONG, Associated Press Writer

BEIJING – Chinese police killed 12 people during July 5 rioting in the western city of Urumqi, officials said — a rare acknowledgment by the government that security forces opened fire in the worst ethnic clashes to hit the region in decades.

The unrest began when a peaceful protest by Muslim ethnic minority Uighurs turned violent after it was stopped by police. The Uighurs went on a rampage in the capital of Xinjiang province, smashing windows, burning cars and beating Han Chinese, the nation's dominant ethnic group.

Two days after the first rioting, vigilante groups of ethnic Han took to the streets and attacked Uighurs.

Xinjiang Governor Nur Bekri said police shot the "mobsters" on July 5 after first firing warning shots, according to a report late Saturday by the official Xinhua News Agency. He apparently did not say which ethnic group the "mobsters" belonged to.

"The police showed as much restraint as possible during the unrest," Bekri was quoted as saying, adding that many police officers were injured and one was killed.

An official surnamed Wu from the Xinjiang regional government information office confirmed the report Sunday. Wu could not say if those killed by police were Uighurs or Han Chinese.

The governor said three of them died on the spot and nine died after treatment failed.

The government first acknowledged that its security forces had opened fire more than a week after the rioting started, when police shot dead two Uighurs and wounded a third July 13. An Urumqi official said the Uighurs started fighting with police after officers tried to stop them from attacking a fellow Uighur.

In Saturday's Xinhua report, Bekri also said the death toll from the unrest had risen to 197. The government had previously said the rioting killed 192 and injured 1,721. Most of the dead were Han Chinese.

The initial protest was centered on calls for an investigation into the June 25 deaths of Uighur factory workers killed in a brawl with Han Chinese in the southern city of Shaoguan. State media reports said two people died.

Graphic photos, however, soon spread on the Internet purportedly showing at least a half dozen bodies of Uighurs with Han Chinese standing over them, arms raised in victory.

Authorities accuse Rebiya Kadeer, a prominent exiled Uighur activist, of inciting the unrest. They have not provided evidence, and Kadeer, who lives in the U.S., has denied it.

Bekri said authorities had received information about the July 5 protest beforehand but had not expected such violence to erupt.

"We could never imagine that the mobsters were so extremely vicious and inhumane," he said in the report, adding that the government believed the rioters had prepared weapons such as rods and stones in advance for use in coordinated attacks. "We really didn't expect that."

In a separate report Saturday, Xinhua said the rioters appeared to have been well-organized, saying weapons were gathered in advance and that the agitation occurred all over the city.

Xinhua cited the local public security department as saying it received reports that rioters had attacked people and property in more than 50 places across the city.

It also said the city's telephone system collapsed under the weight of calls for help.

Urumqi residents have complained that the authorities' response was too slow, with police arriving in some places six hours after the violence began.

Like foreign bases

Philippine Daily Inquirer

UNDER our laws, foreigners or non-Philippine nationals may purchase condominiums, buildings, and enter into long-term land leases. Prior to 1935, foreigners could own land. Before World War II, Japanese land leases in Davao became a hot political issue and led to the passage of the Immigration Act, still in force today.

But since the 1935 Constitution came into force, it has been an established economic and social justice principle of all our basic laws that land ownership should be restricted to Filipinos only.

Last March, President Macapagal-Arroyo said China was interested in leasing 1.2 million hectares of land. This land area alone equals the alienable and disposable public land that the Department of Environment and Natural Resources had declared, back in 1993, to have been surveyed and ready for redistribution under land reform. And the President has kept at peddling public lands for foreign leases. Last December, during her visit to Qatar, the President announced the government would explore the idea of leasing at least 100,000 hectares of agricultural land to the emirate.

The blunt global reality is this: rich countries have no space to plant food or crops for industrial uses; and so, they are aggressively leasing lands in poorer countries to secure resources for themselves. To give just two examples, Kuwait in August last year granted a $546-million loan to Cambodia in exchange for crop production; South Korea’s Daewoo Logistics in November last year announced it would invest about $6 billion to develop 1.3 million hectares in Madagascar for palm oil and corn plantations.

Talking to Focus on the Global South, Rep. Walden Bello called this development “an intersection of corrupt governments and land-hungry nations.” Bello said large government-sponsored leases are “particularly explosive in those countries where you have a high degree of landlessness, like the Philippines where seven out of 10 rural people do not have access to land.”

To compound the problem, government seems to be exercising only nominal control over the process. Recently, there were reports that Jeonnam Feedstock Ltd., a company owned by the southwestern province of South Jeolla in South Korea, had leased 94,000 hectares of farmland in Mindoro for 25 years to grow 10,000 tons of corn a year for feed production. The deal ended up bogged down in confusion. The national government confessed it didn’t know there was such a deal.

To be precise, the Philippine Agricultural Development and Commercial Corp. (PADCC) a government corporation attached to the Department of Agriculture, which is tasked with identifying suitable lands for agribusiness development and assisting prospective investors keen on forging joint venture deals with local farm groups and companies, told the Inquirer it had never heard of the deal. The best the PADCC could do was to say an alphabet soup of agencies ranging from the DENR to the National Food Authority of the DA would have to give their OK, too, if ever.

But one thing is sure: however dubious the present circumstances in Mindoro may be, the deal wouldn’t have been explored in the first place by either of the two Mindoro provincial governments if it weren’t in keeping with the declared policies of the national government. And this is a government that had to be shoved, kicking and screaming, to continue the unfinished business of land reform.

An unholy alliance of conservative landowners and radical sectoral representatives tried to derail the passage of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program Extension with Reforms (Carper) altogether; but when the proponents of Carper proved they had the votes, the radical representatives were abandoned by conservative politicians who recognized they couldn’t be seen as opposing farmers in an election year. From that perspective it’s obvious that the government hopes it can sideline land reform by leasing lands to foreign governments and corporations.

This is a policy tantamount to leasing lands for foreign military bases without Senate concurrence; its implications for our food security and in terms of social justice are as deep – but this one is being pushed purely on the initiative of the chief executive.