The arrest in Yemen this week of a group of "Islamist militants" has provided more evidence that the Israeli government and its associated agencies are still hard at work fabricating "Islamic terrorism" for the enthrallment of the 'educated' masses back home and in the 'enlightened' West:
Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has said the security forces have arrested a group of alleged Islamist militants linked to Israeli intelligence.
Mr Saleh did not say what evidence had been found to show the group's links with Israel, a regional enemy of Yemen.
The arrests were connected with an attack on the US embassy in Sanaa last month which killed at least 18 people, official sources were quoted saying.
Israel's foreign ministry has rejected the accusation as "totally ridiculous".
"A terrorist cell was arrested and will be referred to the judicial authorities for its links with the Israeli intelligence services," Mr Saleh told a gathering at al-Mukalla University in Hadramawt province.
"Details of the trial will be announced later. You will hear about what goes on in the proceedings," he added.
The 17 September attack was the second to target the US embassy since April. Militants detonated car bombs before firing rockets at the heavily fortified building.
Mr Saleh did not identify the suspects, but official sources were quoted saying it was same cell - led by a militant called Abu al-Ghaith al-Yamani - whose arrest was announced a week after the attack.
An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman said the Yemeni president's statement was without foundation.
"To believe that Israel would create Islamist cells in Yemen is really far-fetched. This is yet another victory for the proponents of conspiracy theories," Igal Palmor said in remarks reported by AFP.
Is it really "far fetched" to believe that Israel would fabricate Islamic terrorist attacks? After all, is it not true that Islamic terrorism is Israel's 'bread and butter', without which Israel would stand naked, for all the world to see, as the brutal occupier that it is? And is the same not true of the US and British governments?
Lest we forget the past, and the very recent past at that, below are a collection of mainstream news reports that leave us in little doubt that Israel (closely followed by the US and UK) has its fingers all over "Islamic terrorism" in the Middle East.
Frank Schaeffer The Huffington Post 2008-10-06 11:35:00
Speaking as a former right wing Evangelical who helped organize the Religious Right in the 1970s and early eighties, nothing instills conviction like believing you're on a mission from God. If you're going to fool others, you have to fool yourself.
It takes sincerity to tell a series of barefaced lies with enough conviction to carry the day. As we close in on the 2008 election, the increasingly desperate Republicans will do what they have learned to do best: court the sincere but misinformed Evangelical voters by lying to them.
A U.S. military officer warned Pentagon officials that an American detainee was being driven nearly insane by months of punishing isolation and sensory deprivation in a U.S. military brig, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.
Hockey moms in glass houses shouldn't throw stones
Last Wednesday, Sheriff's deputies arrived at the home of a woman in Akron, Ohio named Addie Polk, in order to evict her. After 38 years in that house, Ms. Polk had fallen behind on paying the mortgage. It was so bad that the company that held that mortgage, Fannie Mae, had foreclosed.
In fact, it was far worse than anybody knew. Addie Polk couldn't bear it any more. So, rather than be evicted, she shot herself in the chest.
The dirty tricks are starting even earlier than usual this year. According to the Philadelphia Daily News, "An anonymous flier circulating in African-American neighborhoods in North and West Philadelphia states that voters who are facing outstanding arrest warrants or who have unpaid traffic tickets may be arrested at the polls on Election Day."
TV Channel KTVK got an exclusive tour of the desert gigantic house, more like a compound.
The McCain family's 13-bedroom Mac-mansion estate located in Arizona will be auctioned in October. The base price is US$12,000,000.00.
And it is not just the 13 bedrooms that make that mansion unique. It also has 10 fireplaces (in the desert), 3 ramadas, garage for six cars and just the air conditioning room, actually another stand alone house, is bigger than many condos around the country.
Interesting to note is that the interview video was placed in a number of news outlets but immediately deleted after starting to draw attention, maybe unwanted attention for John McCain's presidential nominee, a very rich man who some say is out of touch with the regular, middle class American people.
A man told today how he was shot three times in a London street for wearing a Barack Obama T-shirt.
Dube Egwuatu was buying a mobile telephone top-up card in an off-licence when the gunman confronted him and glared at the top, which carries an image of the Democrat US presidential candidate underneath the legend 'Believe'.
The man then launched into a tirade of racist slurs, shouting 'I f***ing hate n*****s' and urging 36-year-old Mr Egwuatu to leave the shop with him.
Spain's Supreme Court has acquitted 15 men who were convicted earlier this year of membership in an Islamic terrorist group, but upheld the convictions of five others from the same trial, according to a summary of the rulings issued Tuesday and viewed by CNN.
On appeal, the Supreme Court ruled there was insufficient evidence to prove that the 15 were members of a terrorist group, as the lower court held.
The 20 men, mainly Algerians and Moroccans, were convicted by the National Court last February of Islamic terrorist activity. None was found guilty of the more serious charge of plotting to destroy Madrid's anti-terrorism courthouse with a truck bomb.
The booms were (allegedly) caused by two Eurofighters flying at 37,000 feet.
The Minister for Development, Magdalena Álvarez, has said that the Ministry of Defence is to investigate and will try to avoid a repetition of the shocks suffered by Málaga and part of the Costa del Sol which was rocked by two explosions as two military planes broke the sound barrier.
The government has plans to launch a new strategy in the fight against terrorism. Under the new plan, only professional teams will fight terrorists and a temporary security zone in northern Iraq may be set up along the Iraqi border.
Zafar Bangash Media Monitors Network 2008-10-06 19:28:00
Pakistani analysts believe this is part of a larger US strategy to destabilize Pakistan, preparing for its denuclearisation and ultimate destruction.
Unable to contain (much less defeat) the resistance that has spread to most parts of Afghanistan in the last two years, the US has decided to bomb its way to "victory" by attacking Pakistan on the spurious pretext that it is going after insurgent sanctuaries across the border. This is the "Cambodianisation" of Pakistan with a sinister twist: the US's attacks on Pakistan are also aimed at destabilizing the country, with the eventual objective of destroying it. In April 1970 the US started bombing Cambodia, ostensibly to stem the flow of weapons to the Viet Cong guerrillas fighting American forces in Vietnam. The US bombings resulted in the deaths of more than two million Cambodians. Ultimately, the US lost the Vietnam war, leading to its ignominious retreat. Many analysts expect the US to face a similar fate in Afghanistan, but in the process it appears determined to destroy Pakistan, whose rulers are willing tools in Washington's so-called war on terror, even to attacking and killing their own people.
U.S. military officials don't talk about our secret war in Pakistan.
Don't even ask, I was told, on U.S. military bases in Afghanistan at Bagram and Jalalabad.
Don't ask about the remotely-controlled American drones armed with missiles that are now hunting across the Pakistani border, searching through the mountain peaks, valleys and dusty villages inside Pakistan for the leaders of a few dozen networks of al-Qaida fighters, Taliban militants, warlords, weapons smugglers and opium traffickers.
Network Ten has been found guilty of using subliminal advertising during the 2007 ARIA Awards, but the media authority will not penalise the broadcaster.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority today found Network Ten guilty of breaching the Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice during the broadcast of the 2007 ARIA Music Awards on October 28.
The discovery of steamy love letters to a high-school sweetheart ended with a jealous husband daring his wife to steal a car to prove her love.
But when the couple took the vehicle home they panicked and wrapped it in plastic to stop their big dogs from scratching it. Details of the bizarre crime emerged during the trial of Ullricht Walter, 42, a German citizen who rents out classic cars in Cape Town, and his 41-year-old wife, Linda.
Voters in Ecuador appear to have approved a new constitution, guaranteeing rights to clean water, universal healthcare, pensions, and free state-run education through the university level. It also may allow President Rafael Correa to remain in power until 2017. Particularly of note is a world first bill of rights for nature which grants inalienable rights to nature.
Sitting idle, the Taser Shockwave looks like a waist-high rack of square green teeth. But press a button, and those teeth--six electrified cartridges tethered by 25-foot wires--shoot out in a 20-degree arc. Inch-long probes emitting 50,000 volts of electricity pierce through clothing and skin. If a human being is in their path, his or her muscles immediately flex and lock involuntarily.
Use Shockwave defensively to create a perimeter around rioters, as police demonstrated in a training exercise on California's Treasure Island earlier this month, and a mob of unruly individuals can be corralled into a corner. Or fire the device into a crowd, and several targets go down in a temporarily paralyzed heap.
Massachusetts Law Enforcement Networrk 2008-10-02 23:08:00
Police in Langley, B.C., say an autopsy is needed to determine exactly how a suspected bank robber died after being Tasered on Tuesday.
The 49-year-old man was naked and bleeding when he was jolted at least once by RCMP officers. Police were trying to subdue him after he had fallen from the second floor of his home.
The suspect had apparently already suffered severe chest injuries before he crashed naked through the window and fell to the ground.
The incident began Tuesday morning, when the man was followed to his Langley home after being allegedly seen robbing a nearby Royal Bank.
Orange County, Florida - Another suspect subdued by a deputy's taser died Wednesday as the Justice Department investigates Orange County's use of tasers.
A man holding a squeegee was charging at cars on Orange Blossom Trail late Tuesday night. Deputies said they used the taser to calm him down, but he later died. All indications are the suspect was out of control.
The sheriff's office said 45-year-old Jose Amaro was running in and out of traffic on South Orange Blossom Trail at West Landstreet Road, lunged at deputies and ran from them. They said he was high on a mix of cocaine and alcohol. When you add a taser, the results can be deadly.
Karlin Lillington The Irish Times 2008-09-19 21:09:00
Phones which know who is holding them; remote controls that sense when you are speaking too fast during a presentation; hand-helds that tell your house when you walk into a room and get it to adjust the music to your favourite playlist.
Those are just a few glimpses of possible intelligent devices in the near future thanks to embedded sensors, according to Andrew Chien, Intel's director of research, who was in Ireland last week to address an Intel-hosted conference on innovation in Leixlip.
French film legend-turned-activist Brigitte Bardot took a swipe at Sarah Palin on Tuesday, saying the US vice-presidential candidate was a disgrace to women.
"I hope you lose these elections because that would be a victory for the world," Bardot wrote in an open letter to Republican John McCain's running mate in the November vote.
"By denying the responsibility of man in global warming, by advocating gun rights and making statements that are disconcertingly stupid, you are a disgrace to women and you alone represent a terrible threat, a true environmental catastrophe," wrote Bardot.
The screen icon from the 1960s, who now heads an animal rights foundation, went on to assail Palin for supporting Arctic oil exploration that could jeopardise delicate animal habitats and for dismissing measures to protect polar bears.
"This shows your total lack of responsibility, your inability to protect or simply respect animal life," Bardot wrote.
In August 2002, the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an armed Iranian opposition group listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization but supported by the neoconservatives within and without the Pentagon, provided the first concrete evidence of the existence of Iran's uranium enrichment facility in Natanz. In February 2003, Iran formally declared the existence of the facility to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Since then, Iran's nuclear facilities and program have undergone the most intrusive and time-consuming inspections in the history of the IAEA, including from October 2003-February 2006, when Iran voluntarily implemented the provisions of the Additional Protocol of its Safeguards (SG) Agreement with the IAEA, which it had signed but not ratified.
On the day when the McCain campaign released a new attack ad not-so-subtly titled "Dangerous," Sarah Palin made a concerted effort to use words like "fearful" and "afraid" to describe Barack Obama, signaling her campaign's decision to make the election a referendum on Obama's character, rather than the issues facing the country.
"I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way that you and I see America - as the greatest source of good in this world," Palin said at a rally this morning in Clearwater, Fla.
"I'm afraid this is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country. This, ladies and gentlemen, has nothing to do with the kind of change anyone can believe in - not my kids, not for your kids."
Paris - The nuclear physicist Leo Szilard once remarked that the fall of the Soviet system would eventually lead to the fall of the American system. He said that in a two-element structure the interrelationship and interdependence are such that the one cannot survive without the other.
Jonathan S. Landay McClatchy Newspapers 2008-10-07 16:49:00
A nearly completed high-level U.S. intelligence analysis warns that unresolved ethnic and sectarian tensions in Iraq could unleash a new wave of violence, potentially reversing the major security and political gains achieved over the last year.
U.S. officials familiar with the new National Intelligence Estimate said they were unsure when the top-secret report would be completed and whether it would be published before the Nov. 4 presidential election.
More than a half-dozen officials spoke to McClatchy on condition of anonymity because NIE's, the most authoritative analyses produced by the U.S. intelligence community, are restricted to the president, his senior aides and members of Congress except in rare instances when just the key findings are made public.
Baghdad - The 38-year-old teacher wanted to participate in Iraq's first provincial elections in four years - until she realized that a new law would require the ballot to list her name, not just her party.
Even as violence has declined, lingering fear bred by rampant crime and a small but die-hard insurgency has left many Iraqi women afraid to run in the elections, to be held by Jan. 31.
"I feel that I am unprotected," said the teacher, speaking by telephone on condition of anonymity because of her fears. "I am not going to run in the elections because I fear for the safety of members of my family who might be targeted."
A senior Iranian official denied on Tuesday a local news agency report that a U.S. military plane had violated the country's airspace and was forced to land, saying both the aircraft and the people on board were Hungarian.
The Pentagon also denied the report by Iran's semi-official Fars News agency, which came at a time of tension over Tehran's disputed nuclear programme, and said all American planes were accounted for.
The oil market spiked briefly after the Fars report.
"The Fars report was not accurate. It was an Hungarian aid plane. No American was on board. The incident happened on September 30," the Iranian official, who declined to be named, said.
Iran's Arabic-language al-Alam channel, citing a military source, said the Hungarian plane was carrying aid to Afghanistan and that it had been allowed to leave Iran after the incident.
There has been persistent speculation about a possible U.S. or Israeli military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, which U.S. and Israeli officials say form part of a covert weapons programme. Iran denies the charge.
Hostile rhetoric and close encounters in the Gulf have fuelled tension. In April, the U.S. navy said a cargo ship hired by the U.S. military fired warning shots at approaching boats in the Gulf. Iran denied that any confrontation had occurred.
Fars gave no source for its report, which said the plane left Iran after it was established it entered Iran unintentionally.
Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh said on Monday authorities had arrested a group of Islamic militants which he said had links to Israeli intelligence.
Minister of Information Mohsen Bilal underlined that the Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Syrian Golan into the line of June 4th, 1967 is a basis to realize the just and comprehensive peace in the region.
The United States is preparing to hand control of Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace in Baghdad to the Iraqi Government in one of the most symbolic examples of the country's increasing sovereignty.
Plans are also under way to turn over swaths of the green zone, which surrounds the palace, to the Iraqi authorities, with Iraqi forces expected to replace US troops at some checkpoints over the next year, according to sources inside the compound.
Allen Sykora Dow Jones Newswires 2008-10-08 21:55:00
New York gold futures traded sharply higher early Thursday following a coordinated rate cut by the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank and other major banks.
This has triggered safe-haven buying on ongoing worries about the world financial system, as well as buying as a hedge against potential inflation down the road as a result of easier monetary policy, traders and analysts said.
Around 8:40 a.m. EDT (1240 GMT), December gold was up $32.80 to $914.80 an ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange. December silver was 54.5 cents higher at $11.925.
Britain's largest banks are to be part-nationalised after the government took the momentous decision to pump tens of billions of pounds of public money into the sector to avert a banking collapse.
The move came as central banks around the world announced a co-ordinated cut in interest rates in response to mounting fears about the impact of the financial crisis on the world economy. The US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, and the central banks of Canada, Switzerland and Sweden and the United Arab Emirates all cut their main lending rates by 0.5 percentage points.
Angela Balakrishnan Guardian UK 2008-10-08 20:38:00
Gordon Brown today said the British government planned to sue Iceland to recover the deposits of thousands of savers in the nation's stricken banks.
The chancellor, Alistair Darling, had earlier guaranteed that the government would cover deposits of British savers with Icesave, which yesterday stopped customers from withdrawing money from their accounts
The British government also seized control of Kaupthing Singer & Friedlander and put the business into administration, transferring the £2.5bn of retail deposits in its Kaupthing Edge accounts to ING Direct. Kaupthing is the largest bank in Iceland and the only one left of the big three still operating in private hands.
Christopher Booker The Daily Mail 2008-10-08 18:03:00
At the very moment when Europe's banking system is teetering on the edge of collapse and national economies are in freefall, we might, perhaps, have expected the EU finally to live up to its more grandiose pretensions as the ' government of Europe'.
Yet what have we seen by way of the EU's response to what is undoubtedly the most testing crisis in its history?
A few perfunctory fine words and empty gestures - and then the national leaders flapping off like so many headless chickens to pursue their own national interests, regardless of all those laws and principles which in easier times they were apparently so happy to sign up to.
David Isenberg Partnership for a Secure America 2008-10-06 13:56:00
One might think that the current crisis roiling the American economy might be an opportunity for Senators Obama and McCain to spell out their differences on one important issue; U.S. military spending.
Consider the fact that on September 24th, during the fight over the Wall Street bail out, the House of Representatives passed, by a vote of 392-39, a $612 billion defense authorization bill for 2009 without any public protest or meaningful press comment. This show there is unlikely to be any significant pressure to cut military or related national security spending.
David Leonhardt The New York Times 2008-10-03 02:29:00
The government is out with more bad economic news this morning: The job market began to deteriorate even before the financial crisis reached a more serious stage two weeks ago.
One of the smallest seals - the Caspian - has joined a growing list of mammal species in danger of extinction.
Scientists from the University of Leeds together with international partners have documented the disastrous decline of the seal - a species found only in the land-locked waters of the Caspian Sea - in a series of surveys which reveal a 90 per cent drop in numbers in the last 100 years.
The research findings have prompted the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to move the Caspian seal from the Vulnerable category to Endangered on its official IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, announced today in Barcelona [06 October 2008].
Dr Simon Goodman of Leeds' Faculty of Biological Sciences says: "Each female has just one pup a year, so with numbers at such a low levels, every fertile female that dies is a nail in the coffin of the species. We're hoping that the seal's change in Red List status will help raise awareness about their plight, and the many important conservation issues facing the whole Caspian ecosystem."
Commercial hunting, habitat degradation, disease, pollution and drowning in fishing nets have caused the population of the seal collapse from more than 1 million at the start of the 20th century to around 100,000 today.
Frozen arctic soil contains nearly twice the greenhouse-gas-producing organic material as was previously estimated, according to recently published research by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists.
School of Natural Resources & Agricultural Sciences professor Chien-Lu Ping published his latest findings in Nature Geoscience. Wielding jackhammers, Ping and a team of scientists dug down more than one meter into the permafrost to take soil samples from more than 100 sites throughout Alaska. Previous research had sampled to about 40 centimeters deep.
After analyzing the samples, the research team discovered a previously undocumented layer of organic matter on top of and in the upper part of permafrost, ranging from 60 to 120 centimeters deep. This deep layer of organic matter first accumulates on the tundra surface and is buried during the churning freeze and thaw cycles that characterize the turbulent arctic landscape.
Scientists filming in one of the world's deepest ocean trenches have found groups of highly sociable snailfish swarming over their bait, nearly five miles (7700 metres) beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean. This is the first time cameras have been sent to this depth.
'We got some absolutely amazing footage from 7700 metres. More fish than we or anyone in the world would ever have thought possible at these depths,' says project leader Dr Alan Jamieson of the University of Aberdeen's Oceanlab, on board the Japanese research ship the Hakuho-Maru.
'It's incredible. These videos vastly exceed all our expectations from this research. We thought the deepest fishes would be motionless, solitary, fragile individuals eking out an existence in a food-sparse environment,' says Professor Monty Priede, director of Oceanlab.
North Fork - Scientists say what appeared to be an earthquake in northeastern Nevada was actually a seismograph picking up waves from an earlier quake in the Arctic Ocean.
A preliminary report from the U.S. Geological Survey said a magnitude-4.2 temblor centered about 18 miles west of North Fork shook Elko County at 3:07 a.m. Tuesday.
USGS geophysicist Jessica Sigala says a seismologist reviewed the record and determined that phases from a magnitude-5.8 quake in the Arctic Ocean seven minutes earlier had been wrongly interpreted by a seismograph as a local quake.
Jakarta - People living in the shadow of Mount Soputan volcano on Indonesia's Sulawesi island were warned to stay away Tuesday after it started erupting with smoke and flame, officials said.
"There's no order to evacuate but people are asked to stay outside a radius of four kilometres (2.5 miles) from the volcano's summit because it could spew lava and heat clouds down its slopes," volcanologist Sandi said.
Volcano Nevado del Huila in southeast Colombia displayed prolonged "seismicity" last weekend, causing alarm to the inhabitants of the surrounded urban and rural zones.
Small eruptive chains that normally produce 400 movements were even more active this weekend, said Jair Cardoso, member of the local Attention, Prevention and Disasters Committee, according to El País. He did not say how many were registered.
The volcano has ejected only mud and ashes so far, but a large eruption at any moment, or at least more solid materials, that would leave disastrous results.
Authorities maintain a yellow alert in the zone, but will raise it to orange if the situation continues.
Camp LeJeune, NC. - The explosion of practice mortars sent Army Spc. Kade Williams into panic attacks, and nightmares plagued his sleep. The ravages of post-traumatic stress had left the veteran of the war in Afghanistan vulnerable, and he was desperate for help.
But sitting silently on the floor with his eyes closed while listening to a soft-spoken instructor tell him to find a focal point by pressing on his lower stomach as guitar music hums in the background? That seemed a bit far-out.
Until he tried it.
"I will be the first one to admit that I was wrong," Williams said.
Warriors have long used such practices to improve concentration and relaxation - dating back more than 1,000 years to the techniques of the samurai. Here at coastal Camp Lejeune, 100 miles inland at the Army's Fort Bragg and at several bases in California, such meditation now comes with a name: Warrior Mind Training.
The course is catching on in military circles as a way not only to treat both post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injuries, but to improve focus and better prepare soldiers and Marines for the rigors of combat. It can also improve shooting range performance and raise training test scores, said Sarah Ernst, a senior Warrior Mind instructor.
Misty Harris Canwest News Service 2008-10-05 20:58:00
Smile and the world smiles with you. Fake it and the recently divorced, socially unpopular and romantically rejected will be onto you.
This is the conclusion of a new study that shows people who have been cast off or excluded have an enhanced ability to determine whether the "happy" face before them is genuine or feigned.
Researchers from Miami University found subjects who were manipulated to feel rejection were able to tell a fake smile from a real one roughly 80 per cent of the time, while the odds of doing so among people with a sense of inclusion were only slightly better than chance.
Telescopes on the ground and in space have teamed up to compose a colourful image that offers a fresh look at the history of the star-studded region NGC 346. This new, ethereal portrait, in which different wavelengths of light swirl together like watercolours, reveals new information about how stars form.
The picture combines infrared, visible and X-ray light from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, ESO's New Technology Telescope (NTT) and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton orbiting X-ray telescope, respectively. The NTT visible-light images allowed astronomers to uncover glowing gas in the region and the multi-wavelength image reveals new insights that appear only thanks to this unusual combination of information.
NGC 346 is the brightest star-forming region in the Small Magellanic Cloud, an irregular dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way at a distance of 210 000 light-years.
"NGC 346 is a real astronomical zoo," says Dimitrios Gouliermis of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, and lead author of the paper describing the observations. "When we combined data at various wavelengths, we were able to tease apart what's going on in different parts of this intriguing region."
Scientists at the Department of Genetics at the University of Leicester - where the revolutionary technique of genetic fingerprinting was invented by Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys -- are developing techniques which may one day allow police to work out someone's surname from the DNA alone.
Doctoral research by Turi King has shown that men with the same British surname are highly likely to be genetically linked. The results of her research have implications in the fields of forensics, genealogy, epidemiology and the history of surnames.
On Wednesday 8th October Dr King will present the key findings of her Ph.D. research in which she recruited over two and a half thousand men bearing over 500 different surnames to take part in the study. Carried out in Professor Mark Jobling's lab, Dr Turi King's research involved exploring this potential link between surname and Y chromosome type.
A Cosmic Eye has given scientists a unique insight into galaxy formation in the very early Universe. Using gravity from a foreground galaxy as a zoom lens the team was able to see a young star-forming galaxy in the distant Universe as it appeared only two billion years after the Big Bang.
Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), USA, and Durham University and Cardiff University, UK, are behind the research published October 9 in the scientific journal Nature.
The researchers, led by Dr Dan Stark, of Caltech, say their findings show for the first time how the distant galaxy might evolve to become a present-day system like our Milky Way.
And they say their study also provides a taste of what astronomers will be able to see in the distant Universe once projects such as the planned European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) and the American Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT) come into use.
A NASA probe has begun beaming back stunning new images from its successful second flyby of Mercury, the planet closest to the sun.
NASA's MESSENGER probe captured never-before-seen views of the Mercury during its encounter on Monday. The spacecraft zipped past Mercury for the second time this year and used the planet's gravity to adjust its path as it continues en route to become the first probe to orbit the planet in March 2011.
One new image shows large patterns of ray-like lines extending southward across much of the planet surface from a young, newly-imaged crater. The previously-imaged Kuiper crater and others craters also have similar webs of lines radiating outward.
Another raw picture represents the highest-resolution color image ever taken of Mercury's surface, and came just 9 minutes after the spacecraft's closest approach to Mercury at 4:43 a.m. EDT (0845 GMT). Details include a large impact basin with an 83-mile (133-km) diameter, named Polygnotus for a Greek painter from the 5th century B.C.
Astronomers studying new images of a nearby galaxy cluster have found evidence that high-speed collisions between large elliptical galaxies may prevent new stars from forming, according to a paper to be published in a November 2008 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Led by Jeffrey Kenney, professor and chair of astronomy at Yale, the team saw a spectacular complex of warm gas filaments 400,000 light-years-long connecting the elliptical galaxy M86 and the spiral galaxy NGC 4438 in the Virgo galaxy cluster, providing striking evidence for a previously unsuspected high-speed collision between the galaxies. The view was constructed using the wide-field Mosaic imager on the National Science Foundation telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft is scheduled to fly within 16 miles of Saturn's moon Enceladus on Oct. 9 and measure molecules in its space environment that could give insight into the history of the solar system.
"This encounter will potentially have far-reaching implications for understanding how the solar system was formed and how it evolved," said professor Tamas Gombosi, chair of the University of Michigan Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences.
Gombosi is the interdisciplinary scientist for magnetosphere and plasma science on the Cassini mission. His role is to coordinate studies that involve multiple plasma instruments on the spacecraft.
Enceladus is Saturn's sixth-largest moon, orbiting within the planet's outermost ring. It is approximately 313 miles in diameter.
Prof. Ana Luisa Cid Inexplicata 2008-10-06 00:54:00
Luis Enrique Villegas was taking photos of the new Police Department Building in the town of Tlaltenango (Casa de Seguridad Publica) to the east of this city and in the vicinity of the Zacatecas Sur Technological Institute.
The witness claims to have taken over 20 shots to be used for a photo essay, adding that in only one of these images is it possible to see what could be an unidentified flying object. There is even a close-up that suggests some sort of antenna or appendix on the upper section.
In Chile, according to residents of the communities of Chusmiza, Poroma and several places within the nation's 1st region, the existence of a race of diminutive bipeds has been known and discussed in hushed tones for generations. These entities measure some15 to 17 centimeters tall and are the inhabitants of an underground realm that exists beneath the sands of the Atacama Desert. They are known to local elders as "the gentiles"
"This photo was taken in Cuzco during a tour of Perú. The location is known as Tipón Cusco."
"Upon downloading photos from the trip to his computer, the eyewitness was surprised to see the presence of an elongated, flattened object behind him and over the mountain slopes."
Chancellor Alistair Darling last night warned UK banks could collapse after a series of daring raids by hordes of 'little people'.
Darling said the leprechauns were sneaking into savers' bedrooms in the early hours, climbing onto their pillow and promising to hide their gold under an old rowan tree.
