Panetta: US at war in Pakistan

Wed Oct 12, 2011

Amid rising anti-American sentiments in Pakistan over covert US drone raids in the Asian country, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has admitted that Washington is fighting a war on Pakistani soil.

While the US government has always declined to publicly discuss its aerial attacks in Pakistan, Leon Panetta said on Tuesday that there are a lot of reasons for the US military operations in Pakistan, AFP reported.

The American military chief, who was also the previous CIA director, said Washington and Islamabad have a "complicated relationship" because of America's war in Pakistan.

The US often carries out drone attacks on Pakistan's tribal regions, claiming that the militants are their target. But locals say civilians are the main victims of the non-UN-sanctioned US strikes.

The issue of civilian casualties has strained the relations between Islamabad and Washington with the Pakistani government repeatedly objecting to the attacks.

Attacks by unmanned American aircraft have left dozens of people dead in the volatile region over the past weeks.

The aerial attacks, initiated by former US president George W. Bush, have been escalated under President Barack Obama.

Islamabad has repeatedly condemned the attacks, insisting that they violate Pakistan's sovereignty.

Source: PressTV.
Link: http://edition.presstv.ir/detail/204112.html.

Mali families criticize Saudi response to Mina tragedy

Wed Feb 17, 2016

A group of families in Mali, who lost their loved ones in the last September Hajj tragedy, are planning to file complaints against Riyadh, they lawyer says.

Marcel Ceccaldi on Tuesday criticized Saudi Arabia’s response to the deadly human crush which took place in Mina, near the Saudi city of Mecca, and said that the families of the victims are considering filing complaints against Riyadh in Mali and with the European Union.

Ceccaldi also rapped the response of the Mali government to the crush.

Some 320 pilgrims from Mali lost their lives in the Mina disaster which took place on September 24, 2015 when two large masses of pilgrims were directed by Saudi authorities toward one another and fused at a crossroads in Mina. The pilgrims were on their way to participate in the symbolic stoning of Satan in Jamarat.

Saudi Arabia claims nearly 770 people were killed in the incident, but officials with Iran’s Hajj and Pilgrimage Organization say about 4,700 people, including 465 Iranians, lost their lives in the tragedy.

The AP record says 2,426 pilgrims died in the incident.

Saudi Arabia has come under harsh criticism over its role and handling of the Mina incident.

Iran says Riyadh’s incompetence in handling safety at the rituals caused the deadly incident.

The Mina disaster came days after a massive construction crane collapsed into Mecca’s Grand Mosque, killing more than 100 people and leaving over 200 others wounded.

Separately, a fire at a 15-story hotel in Mecca on September 21, 2015 forced the evacuation of some 1,500 people. A fire also broke out at another hotel in the city days earlier, which left a number of foreigners injured.

Source: PressTV.
Link: http://presstv.ir/Detail/2016/02/17/450765/Mali-Saudi-Arabia-Hajj-Mina-Mecca.

Liberians vote in second post-war presidential election

By BNO News

MONROVIA (BNO NEWS) -- Hundreds of thousands of Liberians on Tuesday took part in the second presidential and parliamentary elections since the end of its 10-year-conflict in 2003. United Nations (UN) peacekeepers were on standby for increased security.

Tuesday's elections are seen as a milestone in the African country's efforts to strengthen peace and democratic governance as sixteen candidates, including incumbent Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, are vying for the presidency. The main opponent is opposition leader Winston Tubman who is running with former football star George Weah as vice presidential candidate.

Most polling stations opened at 8 a.m. local time, although a small number of stations opened later due to heavy rains or delays in receiving voter materials. At the end of the day, at 6 p.m. local time, polls closed without reports of any significant incidents.

Nearly 1.8 million people had registered to vote in Tuesday's elections, which came just days after 72-year-old Johnson Sirleaf, who is Africa's first democratically elected female president, won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for her work to improve women's rights.

The National Elections COMMISSION (NEC) said it would begin releasing preliminary results on Thursday, with final results expected on October 26. Unofficial and incomplete results suggested a possible win for the ruling party and turnout was believed to be quite high, although no numbers were available as of Tuesday evening. If necessary, a run-off election will be held on November 8.

UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) spokesperson Yasmina Bouziane noted that this was the first time that Liberians were running their own elections. The previous elections in 2005 were managed by the UN, but this year's polls have been organized by the country's NEC.

The importance of the elections also led to UNMIL deploying more ground troops and increased air patrols to improve security and reassure Liberians as they went out to cast their vote. This turned out to be only a precaution as no major incidents were reported.

"We will be there to assist the Liberian national police who are the first and frontline for response to any incidents," Bouziane said earlier on Tuesday. "The police have been on the frontline for quite some time. They have also redoubled their efforts with regard to border patrols following the crisis in Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast)."

Bouziane also underlined that political campaigning in Liberia has "by and large" been peaceful since campaigning began earlier this year in July, except for some incidents of "heightened rhetoric."

Tuesday's polls marked Liberia's second democratic elections since the end of the decade-long conflict that killed nearly 150,000 people, mostly civilians, and sent 850,000 others fleeing to neighboring countries.

Wednesday, October 12th, 2011

Source: Wire Update.
Link: http://wireupdate.com/news/liberians-vote-in-second-post-war-presidential-election.html.

Mars Express observes clusters of recent craters in Ares Vallis

Paris, France (ESA)
Oct 13, 2011

Newly released images taken by ESA's Mars Express show an unusual accumulation of young craters in the large outflow channel called Ares Vallis. Older craters have been reduced to ghostly outlines by the scouring effects of ancient water.

In the distant past, probably over 3.8 billion years ago, large volumes of water must have rushed through the Ares Vallis with considerable force. Mars Express imaged the preserved aftermath of this scene on 11 May 2011.

The prominent Oraibi crater lies in the channel and is about 32 km across. It is filled with sediments and its southern rim has been eroded by water. NASA's Pathfinder mission landed in this region in 1997, 100 km to the north of the crater and off the right-hand side of this image.

The great outflow that partially eroded Oraibi also cut stepped riverbanks and excavated parallel channels in the riverbed that indicate the flow path. Streamlined islands have been left standing above the valley floor, again indicating the direction taken by the flow.

On the floor and on the plateau to the left of the image there are a number of 'ghost craters'. These were once fully formed craters, but water or wind eroded their rims and filled them by depositing sediments.

Their presence on the plateau suggests that even that higher ground may have been at least partially overrun by flooding. The solitary mounds that can be seen likely represent the remaining sections of the plateau's original surface.

In addition to these heavily eroded, ancient features, however, there is evidence in the image for an impact on the martian surface in the much more recent past.

On the far left side of the image, parts of an ejecta blanket can be seen, made of material excavated from the ground during the formation of an impact crater. In the upper left corner of the image, there is a landslide roughly 4 km wide, probably caused by the same impact, and surrounding the landslide, single streaks of ejecta can be traced out.

Furthermore, there are numerous small craters in the image, appearing both in clusters and in aligned groups. An abundance of such craters can result when an asteroid or other projectile breaks up into many pieces in the atmosphere before crashing to the ground.

Clusters of craters may also be created when a large impact ejects rock fragments with such force that they travel from a few kilometers to hundreds of kilometers before returning to the surface, creating new impacts called secondary craters.

The clusters of craters in this image are relatively young and likely formed within the past 20 million years: erosion would have erased them if they had occurred a long time ago.

Source: Mars Daily.
Link: http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/Mars_Express_observes_clusters_of_recent_craters_in_Ares_Vallis_999.html.

Wet and Mild: Caltech Researchers Take the Temperature of Mars' Past

Pasadena CA (JPL)
Oct 13, 2011

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have directly determined the surface temperature of early Mars for the first time, providing evidence that's consistent with a warmer and wetter Martian past.

By analyzing carbonate minerals in a four-billion-year-old meteorite that originated near the surface of Mars, the scientists determined that the minerals formed at about 18 degrees Celsius (64 degrees Fahrenheit).

"The thing that's really cool is that 18 degrees is not particularly cold nor particularly hot," says Woody Fischer, assistant professor of geobiology and coauthor of the paper, published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on October 3. "It's kind of a remarkable result."

Knowing the temperature of Mars is crucial to understanding the planet's history-its past climate and whether it once had liquid water. The Mars rovers and orbiting spacecraft have found ancient deltas, rivers, lakebeds, and mineral deposits, suggesting that water did indeed flow. Because Mars now has an average temperature of -63 degrees Celsius, the existence of liquid water in the past means that the climate was much warmer then. But what's been lacking is data that directly points to such a history.

"There are all these ideas that have been developed about a warmer, wetter early Mars," Fischer says. "But there's precious little data that actually bears on it." That is, until now.

The finding is just one data point-but it's the first and only one to date. "It's proof that early in the history of Mars, at least one place on the planet was capable of keeping an Earthlike climate for at least a few hours to a few days," says John Eiler, the Robert P. Sharp Professor of Geology and professor of geochemistry, and a coauthor of the paper. The first author is Itay Halevy, a former postdoctoral scholar who's now at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

To make their measurement, the researchers analyzed one of the oldest known rocks in the world: ALH84001, a Martian meteorite discovered in 1984 in the Allan Hills of Antarctica. The meteorite likely started out tens of meters below the Martian surface and was blown off when another meteorite struck the area, blasting the piece of Mars toward Earth.

The potato-shaped rock made Wet and Mild: Caltech Researchers Take the Temperature of Mars's Pasts in 1996 when scientists discovered tiny globules in it that looked like fossilized bacteria. But the claim that it was extraterrestrial life didn't hold up upon closer scrutiny. The origin of the globules, which contain carbonate minerals, remained a mystery.

"It's been devilishly difficult to work out the process that generated the carbonate minerals in the first place," Eiler says. But there have been countless hypotheses, he adds, and they all depend on the temperature in which the carbonates formed. Some scientists say the minerals formed when carbonate-rich magma cooled and crystallized.

Others have suggested that the carbonates grew from chemical reactions in hydrothermal processes. Another idea is that the carbonates precipitated out of saline solutions. The temperatures required for all these processes range from above 700 degrees Celsius in the first case to below freezing in the last. "All of these ideas have merit," Eiler says.

Finding the temperature through independent means would therefore help narrow down just how the carbonate might have been formed. The researchers turned to clumped-isotope thermometry, a technique developed by Eiler and his colleagues that has been used for a variety of applications, including measuring the body temperatures of dinosaurs and determining Earth's climate history.

In this case, the team measured concentrations of the rare isotopes oxygen-18 and carbon-13 contained in the carbonate samples. Carbonate is made out of carbon and oxygen, and as it forms, the two rare isotopes may bond to each other-clumping together, as Eiler calls it. The lower the temperature, the more the isotopes tend to clump. As a result, determining the amount of clumping allows for a direct measurement of temperature.

The temperature the researchers measured-18 +/- 4 degrees Celsius-rules out many carbonate-formation hypotheses. "A lot of ideas that were out there are gone," Eiler says. For one, the mild temperature means that the carbonate must have formed in liquid water. "You can't grow carbonate minerals at 18 degrees other than from an aqueous solution," he explains.

The new data also suggests a scenario in which the minerals formed from water that filled the tiny cracks and pores inside rock just below the surface. As the water evaporated, the rock outgassed carbon dioxide, and the solutes in the water became more concentrated. The minerals then combined with dissolved carbonate ions to produce carbonate minerals, which were left behind as the water continued to evaporate.

Could this wet and warm environment have been a habitat for life? Most likely not, the researchers say. These conditions wouldn't have existed long enough for life to grow or evolve-it would have taken only hours to days for the water to dry up.

Still, these results are proof that an Earthlike environment once existed in at least one particular spot on Mars for a short time, the researchers say. What that implies for the global geology of Mars-whether this rock is representative of Martian history or is just an isolated artifact-is an open question.

The research described in the PNAS paper, "Carbonates in the Martian meteorite Allan Hills 84001 formed at 18 +/- 4 degrees C in a near-surface aqueous environment," was supported by a Texaco Postdoctoral Fellowship, NASA, and the National Science Foundation.

Source: Mars Daily.
Link: http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/Wet_and_Mild_Caltech_Researchers_Take_the_Temperature_of_Mars_Past_999.html.

Iran snubs Doha proposal, won't freeze on oil output level

February 17, 2016

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — A senior Iranian Oil Ministry official says his country won't freeze its oil output but will keep increasing crude exports until it reaches levels attained before international sanctions were imposed on Tehran.

The remarks by Mahdi Asali, Iran's OPEC envoy, are a direct snub to a proposed cap to crude oil production that was agreed to by four oil-producing countries during a meeting the day before in Qatar. Asali says the fall in oil prices should be blamed on oversupply and that it's up to Saudi Arabia and others to cut down production to boost oil prices.

Iran has already announced plans to increase its oil production by 500,000 barrels per day after sanctions were lifted last month under a landmark nuclear deal with world powers.

West Leads in Wielding Veto Powers at Security Council

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 5 2011 (IPS) - When Russia and China exercised a rare double veto against a Western resolution aimed at punishing Syria, the two big powers were repeating a similar feat derailing two earlier resolutions: one against Myanmar (Burma) in 2007 and the other against Zimbabwe in 2008.

The Myanmar resolution was critical of that country’s deplorable human rights record, while the Zimbabwe resolution threatened to cut off arms sales to the beleaguered regime of President Robert Mugabe (who was being beefed up with both Chinese and Russian weapons).

Both Western-inspired resolutions were double-vetoed by Russia and China in an attempt to protect their allies – just as much as the last five U.S. vetoes (during 2004-2011) in the Security Council were meant to protect Israel.

The vetoed resolutions either condemned Israel for building settlements in occupied territories or were critical of its devastating military operations in Gaza.

But in the annals of the Security Council, Tuesday’s double veto is apparently not a political monopoly held by the Russians and the Chinese.

Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco who has done extensive research on voting patterns in the Security Council, told IPS, “Actually, it is the United States and its allies (UK and France) that hold the record for double (and triple) vetoes”.

There have been 23 double vetoes by the U.S. and UK and 13 triple vetoes by the U.S., UK and France, he said.

Most of them, he pointed out, were in regard to sanctions and related matters involving South Africa, Namibia or Rhodesia in the 1970s and 1980s.

The last triple veto was in 1989, in a resolution deploring the U.S. invasion of Panama. (UK and France also had two double vetoes during the 1956 Suez crisis.)

“I think it is worth pointing out that the United States holds the U.N. record in terms of vetoing resolutions threatening or imposing sanctions against governments engaged in human rights abuses as well as of resolutions simply deploring or condemning such governments,” Zunes said.

Although a majority of the Council members – nine out of 15 – voted in favour of Tuesday’s resolution (qualifying it to be adopted), the two vetoes negated the positive result.

The draft resolution, which strongly condemned the continued grave and systematic human rights violations by Syrian authorities, drew positive votes from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, France, Gabon, Germany, Nigeria, Portugal, the UK and the United States.

The countries abstaining were India, Brazil, South Africa (known collectively as IBSA) and Lebanon.

The resolution, which had been co-sponsored by France, Germany, Portugal and the UK, also called on Syria to immediately cease the use of force against civilians.

If Syria failed to do so within 30 days, the Security Council would consider “other options” (a euphemism for economic and military sanctions).

Asked about the failed resolution, U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky told reporters Wednesday that Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon “regrets” that the Council failed to adopt the resolution.

But he hopes the divisions will be overcome.

“We have a moral obligation to avoid further bloodshed and help the people of Syria out of this crisis,” Ban was quoted as saying.

He also reiterated that the violence in Syria – from any quarter – cannot continue.

Since mid-March, an estimated 2,700 people have been killed in Syria, according to the United Nations.

Syria’s growing protest movement is part of a wider uprising across North Africa and the Middle East this year.

Zunes told IPS that the double-veto was definitely a reaction to the decision by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to go way beyond the U.N. Security Council mandate earlier this year to authorize force to protect Libyan civilians and to instead become an active participant in the civil war.

He said he found it interesting that four non-permanent members – Brazil, India, Lebanon and South Africa – abstained.

Asked whether Libya was the reason for failure of the Security Council resolution, U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice told reporters, “I think this is an excuse.”

“I think the vast majority of countries, even today, on the Council that were not able to vote in favour of this text know that this was a resolution that, in substance, was unobjectionable,” she said.

And their decisions to vote as they did, she said, may have had a lot less to do with the text than it did with some effort to maintain solidarity among a certain group of countries.

“So I think Libya has been beat to death, overused, and misused as an excuse for countries not to take up their responsibilities with respect to Syria,” Rice said.

Asked whether diplomacy had reached a dead-end on Syria, she refuted the argument by pointing out that the majority of members would have supported a sanctions resolution.

And the countries in the region are, every day, coalescing and raising their voices against what is transpiring in Syria, she added.

“This is not, as some would like to pretend, a Western issue. We had countries all over the world supporting this resolution today, and we have countries throughout the region who’ve been very clear that the brutality of the (Bashar) al-Assad regime has to end and that the behavior of the regime is absolutely intolerable.”

The two dissenting countries – Russia and China – took a strong stand on their vetoes.

Ambassador Vitaly Churkin of Russia said his country did not support the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad but the draft resolution would not promote a peaceful resolution of the crisis.

The majority of Syrians, he said, wanted gradual political change, rather than quick regime change, and the text of the resolution did not adequately take into account the behavior of extremist groups in opposition to Syrian authorities.

Chinese Ambassador Li Baodong said the draft resolution was overly focused on exerting pressure on Syria, and included the threat of sanctions, which would not resolve the situation.

Source: Inter-Press Service (IPS).
Link: http://www.ipsnews.net/2011/10/west-leads-in-wielding-veto-powers-at-security-council/.