THE POSTS MOSTLY BY GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION

THE POSTS MOSTLY BY GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION

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Boston artist Steve Mills - realistic painting

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Mammoth Galaxy


June 14, 2010

Mammoth Galaxy Seen Through 'Electro-Magnetic' Eyes




This image of the mammoth spiral galaxy M81, located about 12 million light years away, contains data from four different NASA satellites. Explanation: This impressive color composite shows spiral galaxy M81 across the electromagnetic spectrum. It combines X-ray data (blue) from the Chandra Observatory, infrared data (pink) from the Spitzer Space Telescope, and an ultraviolet image (purple) from the GALEX satellite, with a visible light (green) Hubble image. The inset highlights X-rays from some of M81’s black holes, including black holes in binary star systems with about 10 times the mass of the sun, as well as the central, supermassive black hole of over 70 million solar masses. Comparing computer models of the giant black hole’s energy output to the multiwavelength data suggests that feeding that monster is relatively simple — energy and radiation is generated as material in the central region swirls inwards forming an accretion disk. In fact, the process otherwise appears to be just like the accretion process feeding M81’s stellar mass black holes, even though the central black hole is millions of times more massive. M81 itself is about 70000 light-years across and only 12 million light-years away in the northern constellation Ursa Major. M81 in 60 Seconds Narrator (Megan Watzke, CXC): This image of the mammoth spiral galaxy M81, located about 12 million light years away, contains data from four different NASA satellites. First we see infrared data from the Spitzer …

Image of the Day -The Mysterious Beauty of a Supernova Embryo


June 14, 2010

Image of the Day -The Mysterious Beauty of a Supernova Embryo

4014473972_03592b9041Eta Carinae is a mysterious, extremely bright and unstable star located a mere stone's throw - astronomically speaking - from Earth at a distance of only about 7,500 light years. The star is thought to be consuming its nuclear fuel at an incredible rate, while quickly drawing closer to its ultimate explosive demise. When Eta Carinae does explode, it will be a spectacular fireworks display seen from Earth, perhaps rivaling the moon in brilliance. Its fate has been foreshadowed by the recent discovery of SN2006gy, a supernova in a nearby galaxy that was the brightest stellar explosion ever seen. The erratic behavior of the star that later exploded as SN2006gy suggests that Eta Carinae may explode at any time.
Eta Carinae, a star between 100 and 150 times more massive than the Sun, is near a point of unstable equilibrium where the star's gravity is almost balanced by the outward pressure of the intense radiation generated in the nuclear furnace. This means that slight perturbations of the star might cause enormous ejections of matter from its surface. In the 1840s, Eta Carinae had a massive eruption by ejecting more than 10 times the mass of the sun, to briefly become the second brightest star in the sky. This explosion would have torn most other stars to pieces but somehow Eta Carinae survived.
The latest composite image shows the remnants of that titanic event with new data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope. The blue regions show the cool optical emission, detected by Hubble, from the dust and gas thrown off the star. This debris forms a bipolar shell around the star, which lies near the brightest point of the optical emission. This bipolar shell is itself surrounded by a ragged cloud of fainter material. An unusual jet points from the star to the upper left.
Chandra's data, depicted in orange and yellow, shows the X-ray emission produced as material thrown off Eta Carinae rams into nearby gas and dust, heating gas to temperatures in excess of a million degrees.
This hot shroud extends far beyond the cooler, optical nebula and represents the outer edge of the interaction region. The X-ray observations show that the ejected outer material is enriched by complex atoms, especially nitrogen, cooked inside the star's nuclear furnace and dredged up onto the stellar surface. The Chandra observations also show that the inner optical nebula glows faintly due to X-ray reflection. The X-rays reflected by the optical nebula come from very close to the star itself; these X-rays are generated by the high-speed collision of wind flowing from Eta Carinae's surface (moving at about 1 million miles per hour) with the wind of the companion star (which is about five times faster).
The companion is not directly visible in these images, but variability in X-rays in the regions close to the star signals the star's presence. Astronomers don't know exactly what role the companion has played in the evolution of Eta Carinae, or what role it will play in its future.
Via chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2007/etacar/
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/GSFC/M.Corcoran et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI 

MORE NEW EXOPLANETS!

The New York Times


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  • June 14, 2010

    In the Hunt for Planets, Who Owns the Data?




    We are about to find out just how generous nature really is.
    On Tuesday, astronomers operating NASA’s Kepler spacecraft will release a list of about 350 stars newly suspected of harboring planets, including five systems with multiple candidate planets. That data could dramatically swell the inventory of alien worlds, which now stands at 461, none of them habitable by the likes of us.
    Astronomers everywhere, who have been waiting since Kepler’s launch in March 2009 to get their hands on this data, will be rushing to telescopes to examine these stars in the hopes of advancing the grand quest of finding Earthlike planets capable of harboring life out there.
    But a lot of attention has been paid in astronomical circles over the past few months to what the Kepler team will not be saying. By agreement with NASA, the team is holding back data on its 400 brightest and best planet candidates, which the astronomers intend to observe themselves over a busy summer.
    NASA’s policy requires astronomers to release their data from instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope in a year, but the Kepler astronomers say launch delays and other problems robbed them of the observing time they needed to check out their planet candidates, which are only visible from the ground from April until September. An extension of the deadline is needed, they say, to guard against a flood of bogus claims — “false positives” — by other astronomers misinterpreting their data.
    “If I sent you 0’s and 1’s, it would be useless,” said William Borucki, Kepler’s leader, from the Ames Research Laboratory at Moffett Field in California. The public wants answers to the age-old question of whether the Earth is unique, he said.
    “If we say, ‘Yes, they are small planets,’ ” he went on, “you can be sure they are.”
    The decision to hold back some data, reported on Nature.com, has divided astronomers. Some say say they do not begrudge the Kepler scientists — who have in some cases devoted their careers to the project — a few more months with their data.
    Paul Kalas of the University of California, Berkeley, who used Hubble to take one of the first images of an exoplanet in 2008, said, “The stakes aren’t that high compared to human subject experiments, where a six-month delay has real consequences when therapies might become available for diseases.”
    But the sequestering of the data, even temporarily, has irritated other astronomers, who believe that it is antithetical to the ideal of scientific openness.
    “Kepler was constructed and launched with a comparatively large sum of money for a project that is run by a single team,” said Ben Oppenheimer, an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, in an e-mail message. “At this point, I have to say I do think they are being far too restrictive.”
    B. Scott Gaudi, an astronomer and planet hunter at Ohio State University, said there were more planet candidates than the Kepler team members could check by themselves. “They need help,” he said. “If they were more open they would be able to get more science out.”
    But then he added: “Who am I to say this? I didn’t put 10 years of my life into this.”
    Nobody denies that the stakes, both personal and institutional, are huge.
    “The first astronomer who can prove they found an Earthlike planet around an Earthlike star will win many kudos and prizes,” said John Huchra of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led a NASA advisory committee that approved the deal. “It’s glory for NASA,” he added.“NASA would like to have one of its missions find an Earthlike planet.”
    The fate of data — who owns it and who gets to see it, and when — has become one of the more contentious issues in science, scientists say.
    In the past, scientific data consisted of carefully inked notations in research notebooks, bound, with numbered pages, accumulating on a bookshelf in the office or lab, or photographic plates in yellowing envelopes sitting in a filing cabinet. And it was proprietary, meaning it was yours forever to publish or mull endlessly as you desired.
    Today, it often consists of billions or trillions of 1’s and 0’s reposing in vast digital archives, whose capacity is measured in terabytes or petabytes, buttressed by the giant computer programs that process it and the reams of ancillary information, dubbed metadata, that give it context.
    In the era of the Web, all this information can be sent around the globe at the click of a mouse, retrieved and manipulated by anyone who wants to use it to better understand the nature of dark matter, argue about the safety or desirability of nuclear power, or decide how much salt to put in her food.
    “Science is more and more living in a glass house,” said Robbert Dijkgraaf, a physicist at the University of Amsterdam and co-chairman of the InterAcademy Council, a multinational organization of science academies that is reviewing the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at the request of the United Nations.
    Phillip Sharp, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led a National Academy of Sciences study last year that said rules for sharing data should be built into projects. In an interview, he said: “The time has past when a bunch of elite true-meaning experts could go into the next room and make conclusions. They have to be transparent. That’s a change in the culture.”
    The result has been a shift in the balance between the duty of a scientist to wring every last drop of truth and credibility out of the data he or she might have spent years gathering and the rights of the rest of us to know what our tax dollars have discovered.
    “Proprietary” has become a four-letter word, said Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago who was part of the panel on research data. He said he worried that the pendulum had swung too far toward the Internet ideal of free information.
    Secrets have been part of modern science since its beginning. Galileo reported his discovery of the rings of Saturn in an anagram that he wouldn’t decode until he was sure that he wasn’t seeing things. In the early 1960s, when radio astronomers discovered the powerful radio sources known now as quasars, they jealously guarded their coordinates, giving them to only a few trusted astronomers to investigate.
    The members of a scientific collaboration typically agree not to talk about their results before they have been officially released in a paper or a news conference, for example, upon pain of being kicked out. The Kepler team took this a step farther by signing formal nondisclosure agreements.
    But then, few areas of physical science have excited the public imagination in recent years as the search for planets around other stars, dubbed exoplanets. Most of them are giants like Jupiter in orbits broilingly close to their stars, but that is not surprising, since most of them were found by looking at stars that wobble under the influence of their planets; the wobble from big planets up close is much easier to detect than that of an Earth at a more temperate distance.
    Kepler employs a different approach, which Mr. Borucki has championed ever since 1984. It stares at a patch of sky in the constellation Cygnus, constantly measuring the brightness of 156,000 different stars looking for the small blips that would signal a planet’s passing in front of its star.
    “In a sense, it’s the most boring mission ever flown: doing the same thing every six seconds,” Mr. Borucki said. The grand scientific goal of the project, a kind of cosmic census planned to go on until 2013, is to discover Earthlike planets in Earthlike places — that is to say, in the not-too-cold, not-too-hot Goldilocks zones near a star where liquid water can exist.
    Mr. Borucki said the Kepler team started out with 12,000 suspicious dips. They laboriously whittled down those to 956 planet candidates, then quickly dismissed 204 as false positives. That leaves about 750 real candidates, some with supposed orbits of less than a day. Only about half of them, he suspects, will turn out to be real planets. The rest will be double stars, triple stars, starspots and other impostors.
    “We have dozens of ways of recognizing when it isn’t a planet,” said Mr. Borucki.
    Realizing earlier this year that sorting them out would take more time than they had before the June 15 deadline, the Kepler team asked NASA for an extension. Jon Morse, director of astrophysics at NASA headquarters, referred the Kepler question to the astrophysics subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Council, a group of 13 astronomers who serve as a go-between between the space agency and professional astronomers.
    On April 12, the Kepler team presented the committee with four options. The most radical, and Mr. Borucki’s favorite, was to hold back the data on 500 candidates until the end of the mission or until the planets had been verified. At the other end of the spectrum was an option to release everything on June 15, as originally planned.
    Dr. Huchra of Harvard, who led the discussion, said, “We all felt the sooner the data hit the streets the better,” and in the end there were no votes for holding back candidate data until the end of the mission. “If we had done that everybody would have been hung out to dry,” he said.
    The group settled on a compromise in which Kepler will be able to protect 400 planet candidates until Feb. 1 — an extra eight months — and an additional 100 from a second set of candidates in another data release in 2011. The extra time will in effect give the Kepler astronomers back the summer observing season they lost last year. The compromise, Dr. Morse said, was “in the spirit of the regular release policy.”
    Meanwhile, the treasure hunt for the end to cosmic loneliness continues.“The public wants to know whether there is life on other planets,” Mr. Borucki said, noting that it could take decades. The effort to get an answer, he said, reminds him of the building of the great cathedrals in Europe, in which each generation of workers had to tell themselves that “someday it will be built.”
    “In a sense, we, too, are doing these things,” he said.

    Image of the Day: Galaxy X


    June 15, 2010

    Image of the Day: Galaxy X


     
    The odd galaxy NGC 4725 is thought to have only one spiral arm as opposed to the standard two or more arms. Astronomers refer to NGC 4725 as a ringed barred spiral galaxy because a prominent ring of stars encircles a bar of stars at its center (the bar is seen here as a horizontal ridge with faint red features). In contrast, our Milky Way galaxy sports multiple arms and a proportionally smaller bar and ring. In this false-color Spitzer picture, the galaxy's arm is highlighted in red, while its center and outlying halo are blue. Red represents warm dust clouds illuminated by newborn stars, while blue indicates older, cooler stellar populations. The red spokes seen projecting outward from the arm are clumps of stellar matter that may have been pushed together by instable magnetic fields. NGC 4725 is located 41 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. 
    Ngc4725L_siniscalchi_c800
     
    Image Credit:
    NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Kennicutt (University of Arizona) and the SINGS Team

    NEW EXOPLANETS DISCOVERED


    June 15, 2010

    ExoPlanet Bonanza -No twin Earths, but six new planets from 'shrunken-Saturn's to 'bloated hot Jupiters', to massive brown dwarfs

    Browndwarf
     
    An international team, including Oxford University scientists, has discovered six diverse new planets. "Each of these planets is interesting in its own right, but what is really fascinating is how diverse they are." said co-investigator Dr Suzanne Aigrain from Oxford University’s Department of Physics who leads a team of UK researchers at the Universities of Oxford, Exeter and St Andrews who participate in the CoRoT exoplanet program. 
    ‘"Every discovery of an extrasolar planetary system is a new piece in the puzzle of how these systems do form and evolve. The more systems we uncover, the better we can hope to understand the processes at play," said Magali Deleuil, researcher at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM) and head of the CoRoT exoplanet program.
    The six new planets are:
    CoRoT-8b: the smallest in this batch: At about 70% of the size and mass of Saturn, CoRoT-8b is moderately small among the previously known transiting exoplanets. Its internal structure should be similar to that of ice giants, like Uranus and Neptune, in the Solar System. It is the smallest planet discovered by the CoRoT team so far after CoRoT-7b, the first transiting Super-Earth.
    CoRoT-10b: the eccentric giant: The orbit of CoRoT-10b is so elongated that the planet passes both very close to and very far away from its star. The amount of radiation it receives from the star varies tenfold in intensity, and scientists estimate that its surface temperature may increase from 250 to 600°C, all in the space of 13 Earth-days (the length of the year on CoRoT-10b). 

    CoRoT-11b: the planet whose star does the twist: CoRoT-11, the host star of CoRoT-11b, rotates around its axis in 40 hours. For comparison, the Sun’s rotation period is 26 days. It is particularly difficult to confirm planets around rapidly rotating stars, so this detection is a significant achievement for the CoRoT team.
    CoRoT-12b, 13b and 14b: a trio of giants: These three planets all orbit close to their host star but have very different properties. Although CoRoT-13b is smaller than Jupiter, it is twice as dense. This suggests the presence of a massive rocky core inside the planet. With a radius 50% large than Jupiter’s (or 16 times larger than the Earth’s), CoRoT-12b belongs to the family of `bloated hot Jupiters’, whose anomalously large sizes are due to the intense stellar radiation they receive. On the other hand, CoRoT-14b, which is even closer to its parent star, has a size similar to Jupiter’s. It is also massive, 7.5 times the mass of Jupiter, which may explain why it is less puffed up. Such very massive and very hot planets are rare, CoRoT-14b is only the second one discovered so far.
    CoRoT-15b: the brown dwarf: CoRoT-15b’s mass is about 60 times that of Jupiter. This makes it incredibly dense, about 40 times more so than Jupiter. For that reason, it is classified as a brown dwarf, intermediate in nature between planets and stars. Brown dwarfs are much rarer than planets, which makes this discovery all the more exciting. 
    A brown dwarf [BD] is a celestial object intermediate in mass between a planet and a star. It's helpful to recall the definition of a star: a star is a ball of gas held together by its own gravity and which radiates light produced by thermonuclear reactions in its core, mainly burning Hydrogen to produce Helium. A brown dwarf is an object very much like a star, but which is not massive enough to burn Hydrogen in its core.
    As such, brown dwarfs are faint and radiate mainly in the infrared, slowly releasing the heat they accrued during their formation. On the other hand, according to the International Astronomical Union's definition, a planet is also held by its own gravity but it is a) in orbit around a star or brown dwarf and b) not massive enough to burn Deuterium (Deuterium is an element which burns even more easily than Hydrogen). Any object which has a mass below the Hydrogen limit but above the Deuterium limit is thus a brown dwarf. This is the case for CoRoT-15b.
    Brown dwarfs are not rare in themselves, on the contrary. It is difficult to detect and study them, because they are faint compared to stars, so we don't know as many of them as we know stars, but over the past 20 years, with the advent of better and better infrared detectors, we have been discovering many of them.
    What is extremely rare, however, is to find one in a tight orbit around a star, as in the CoRoT-15 system. Until a few years ago, we knew of none at all, and this absence was called the 'brown dwarf desert'. Now we know of a handful, but CoRoT-15b has the shortest orbital period of any known brown dwarf. The very existence of CoRoT-15b in its tight orbit is interesting (see below), but the fact that it transits across the disk of its parent star makes it even more useful, because it enables us to measure its radius.
    Systems like CoRoT-15 are very important to understand star and planet formation as well as evolution. The majority of brown dwarfs are thought to be the result of the same process which forms stars. Stars form from giant clouds of gas and dust. Regions in these clouds which are marginally more dense than their surroundings attract more material onto themselves, and these over-densities grow and grow until thermonuclear fusion ignites in the core, and a star is born.
    If a clump never grows large enough for that to happen - because the material within its gravitational influence runs out - you get a BD. So, from the formation point of view, there is nothing fundamentally different between a star and a brown dwarf, but whilst tight binary stars are quite common, tight binary systems involving a star and a brown dwarf are rare.
    There are very few BDs in close binaries, and even fewer which transit their parent star. These are the only BDs whose radii we can measure, so they are very valuable. If you make a plot of radius versus mass for stars and planets, stars all more or less fall on a single line, which basically is the line you expect for a self-gravitating ball of Hydrogen. This line flattens out at low masses - from 0.1 solar masses to a Jupiter mass, the expected radius is about 1 Jupiter radius.
    However, the measurements for exoplanets are scattered, with a range of radii observed for a given mass. This is because the radius of a planet is affected not just by its mass, but also by its composition (how much solid versus gaseous material it contains) and by the amount of light it receives from its parent star. 
    CoRoT-15b fills an important gap in this diagram, between low-mass stars and planets. It's also extremely close to its star, so extremely hot, and hence a particularly strong test of just how much intense irradiation can affect the radius of an object of that mass.

    We know that having a binary companion does not prevent planet formation, since we know of stars which have both one or more planets and a binary companion. If the Sun had a wide BD companion, the solar system would not necessarily be very different. We would definitely know about it, however: BDs are faint compared to stars, but a BD that close to us would not be missed.
    On the other hand, if the BD was very close-in like CoRoT-15b, things would be very different.
    If the BD formed in-situ, there would be no disk, or very little of it, around the Sun, for the planets of the solar system to form out of. There might have been a disk around the binary (we have seen such disks around other binaries) and it's conceivable that this disk might form planets. We currently know of no such circum-binary planets, but this is at least in part because it is harder to detect them.
    But if the BD was captured (or kicked into a close orbit from a wider one) after the Sun had formed its planets, then that would most probably have a very dramatic impact, as the gravitational influence of the inbound BD would wreak havoc on the planets and most likely eject them from the solar system!
    CoRoT already found another transiting BD, CoRoT-3b. It is less massive and less close in than CoRoT-15b, but the fact that CoRoT found two of these very rare systems shows that it is well-suited to detecting them. Along with the NASA mission Kepler, which is also searching for transiting planets, CoRoT can hope to discover several more systems like these in the next few years. They will tell us more about how these rare systems form, about what forms the difference between a massive planet and a BD, and about how BDs evolve when very close to their host star.
    The CoRoT (Convection, Rotation and Transits) space telescope is operated by the French space agency CNES. It discovers planets outside our solar system - exoplanets - when they ‘transit’, that is pass in front of their stars.
    Once CoRoT detects a transit, additional observations are made from the ground, using a number of telescopes all over the world. Although astronomers cannot see the planets directly, they use the space- and ground-based data to measure the sizes, masses, and orbits of these new planets precisely. This is why, among all known exoplanets, those with transits yield the most complete information about planet formation and evolution.
    Casey Kazan via materials provided by Oxford University

    HOLLAND:The rise of Geert Wilders


    The rise of Geert Wilders

    Gavin Hewitt | 18:06 UK time, Thursday, 10 June 2010

    wilders_ap_226.jpgFirstly, a significant number of voters in the Netherlands must have misled the pollsters. The polls suggested Geert Wilders' influence was on the wane. It is not uncommon for people not to admit to voting for a controversial party. Mr Wilders wants to ban face veils, shut down Islamic schools and to ban the building of mosques
    Secondly, the question now is whether an anti-Islam party will join a coalition government. The Netherlands may be in for months of haggling and instability. The pro-business Liberal party, which gained the most seats, will be very reluctant to ask Mr Wilders party to join them. Internationally, there would be hostility to Mr Wilders being in government.
    However, Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party can no longer be ignored. "We are very much here to govern," he said today. He now has a mandate from 1.5 million voters. His party came third with 24 seats. He saw his vote doubled.
    What the vote underlines again is that parts of Europe are anxious about their identity. They believe that immigration has been too swift and, in particular, they resent new arrivals who do not integrate into society but live in separate, parallel communities. It is the same fear that has led to a ban on minarets in Switzerland and the moves to ban full-face veils.
    The expectation is that the Netherlands will be back at the polls sooner rather than later. Coalition-building may prove all but impossible, but the country will have to find out why so many people voted for a party whose leader goes on trial in October on charges of inciting racial hatred against Muslims.

    Merkel-Sarkozy unity show


    BBC BLOGS - Gavin Hewitt's Europe

    Gavin Hewitt | 09:52 UK time, Tuesday, 15 June 2010

    German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Berlin, 14 Jun 10The German chancellor and the French president did what was demanded of them. They displayed unity. They said the words. "More than ever, Germany and France are determined to talk with one voice," said President Sarkozy, "to adopt common policies, to give Europe the means to meet its legitimate ambitions".
    They often meet together just before a summit. What France and Germany agree on before the summits is what usually happens. But not necessarily this time. Courtship rituals do not disguise the fact that there are deep differences between France and Germany over how to address the crisis in the eurozone.
    The key for Germany remains discipline - those who use the single currency must live by the rules when it comes to tax and spending. The German chancellor wants a "strengthening of the Stability and Growth Pact" that governs the eurozone. In future those countries that live beyond their means risk losing their voting rights. It seems an odd sanction and one that a country in difficulty might gladly embrace, rather than take tougher decisions at home.
    The French view is for a giant leap forward towards integration for the 16 countries that use the eurozone. They favour "economic government" with a powerful secretariat, a treasury that would co-ordinate national budgets and tax and spending. In the French dream, monetary union would morph into financial union.
    For the moment the German view seems to have the upper hand. Angela Merkel wants "economic governance" for all 27 EU member states. She is wary of a two-tier Europe in which the eurozone has its own secretariat. So, for the time being, there will be no new institutions.
    The German chancellor does, however, back pre-approval for national budgets. To bring this about she envisages treaty changes. After the bruising experience of getting approval for the Lisbon Treaty there is little appetite to enter the ring again. The President of the Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, opposes treaty changes because he fears that countries like the UK would see it as an opportunity to reopen negotiations on clauses they don't like.
    But the idea of a treaty change could pose a real challenge to David Cameron. If the result of the change was that power moved to Brussels he would have to put it to the British people in a referendum. That is a commitment which may soon be backed by legislation.
    In all of this there is much that remains unclear. There is a fog around the words "economic governance". As regards the relationship between Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, they will have to do far more to convince an anxious Europe that they see eye-to-eye. Only this week the German magazine Der Spiegel said that "they can hardly stand each other" and that she calls him the "little Napoleon". The French paper Le Point concludes "nothing is working anymore in the German-French relationship".
    Meanwhile, as Europe's leaders circle each other, there are clouds on the horizon. Many people expect a Greek default. Despite the optimistic words coming out of the Greek finance ministry it is hard to find an official in Brussels who does not think that sooner or later Greek debt will have to be restructured. "Restructure" is the word that dare not mention its name, but it may still happen. And then the question is whether Greek debt should be restructured inside or outside the eurozone.
    Then there is Spain. A Spanish official said yesterday (Monday) that some foreign banks were refusing to lend to a group of Spanish banks. There was a liquidity freeze on some Spanish banks in the interbank market. Yesterday - although I'm not sure it eased investors' fears - the German chancellor said Spain could make use of the 750bn-euro (£623bn; $917bn) rescue mechanism. In the twitchy world of eurozone rumours a lot of attention is being given to Spain.
    The question is this: if the rescue mechanism is drawn upon will the sums be enough? It is inconceivable that Germany would be willing again to underwrite a further deal.
    And then there are the austerity packages that are gradually dropping on European doormats like unwelcome bills. Will the people accept la rigueur? In Germany 87% of those polled thought their measures were unfair. The Italians and the Spanish are all preparing to protest further. Eventually the question could become political: "Is all this (austerity, bail-outs) the price of keeping the eurozone together?"

    INCREDIBLE:The U.S. wins the right to abduct innocent people with impunity


    The U.S. wins the right to abduct innocent people with impunity

    By Glenn Greenwald

    June 14, 2010

    The Supreme Court today denied a petition of review from Maher Arar, the Canadian and Syrian citizen who was abducted by the U.S. Government at a stopover at JFK Airport when returning to Canada in 2002, held incommunicado for two weeks, and then rendered to Syria, where he spent the next 10 months being tortured, even though -- as everyone acknowledges -- he was guilty of absolutely nothing.  Arar sued the U.S. Government for what was done to him, and last November, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of his lawsuit on the ground that courts have no right to interfere in these decisions of the Executive Branch.  That was the decision which the U.S. Supreme Court let stand today, ending Arar's attempt to be compensated for what was done to him.


    I've written in detail several times about Arar's case, including in November when the appellate court upheld dismissal of his lawsuit; see here for how extreme his treatment has been at the hands of the U.S. Government, which was most responsible for his harrowing nightmare and then spent years fighting to deny him any remedy for what was done.  I won't reiterate those points here, as everything I have to say about the Supreme Court's actions today was said in that November post (read the last part of that post, where I excerpted the court's description of what was done to Arar).  But I do want to highlight one aspect of this episode:


    Just compare how the American and Canadian Governments responded to what everyone agrees was this horrific injustice.  The Canadians, who cooperated with the U.S. in Arar's abduction, conducted a sweeping investigation of what happened, and then publicly "issued a scathing report that faulted Canada and the United States for his deportation four years ago to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured," and made clear he had done absolutely nothing wrong.  Then, Canada's Prime Minister personally and publicly apologized to Arar, and announced that Canada would compensate him with a payment of $ 8.5 million.


    By stark contrast, the U.S. Government, which played a far more active role in his abduction and rendition to Syria, has never apologized to Arar (thoughindividual members of Congress have).  It has never clearly acknowledged wrongdoing (the only time it even hinted at this was when Condoleezza Ricecalled U.S. conduct in this case "imperfect" -- you think? -- and generously added:  "We do not think this case was handled as it should have been").  In fact, it continuously did the opposite of providing accountability:  in response to Arar's efforts to seek damages from the U.S. Government, the U.S. raised -- under two successive administrations -- a slew of technical arguments to persuade American courts not to hear his case at all, including the argument that what was done to Arar involved "state secrets" that prevented a judicial adjudication of his claims.  The U.S. even continued to ban Arar from entering the U.S. long after it was acknowledged that he had done nothing wrong, thus preventing him for years from appearing before Congress or in the U.S. to talk about what was done to him.  Indeed, after the Bush administration spent years arguing that courts were barred from hearing Arar's case on the ground of "state secrets," the Obama administration embraced those same arguments and then urged the Supreme Court not to hear his appeal.
    As the Center for Constitutional Rights pointed out today:

    The Obama administration could have settled the case, recognizing the wrongs done to Mr. Arar as Canada has done. . . . Yet the Obama administration chose to come to the defense of Bush administration officials, arguing that even if they conspired to send Maher Arar to torture, they should not be held accountable by the judiciary.
    So congratulations to the U.S. for winning the right to wrongfully abduct people and send them to their torture with total impunity.  What a ringing statement about our country's willingness to right the wrongs it commits and to provide access to our courts to those whose lives we devastate with our behavior.  Andrew Sullivan today referred to "the cult of the inerrant leader":  the inability and refusal of our political class to acknowledge wrongdoing, apologize for it, and be held accountable.  The Maher Arar case is a pathological illustration of that syndrome.

    Covert Wars in Latin America


    Private Contractors and Covert Wars in Latin America

    Cyril Mychalejko

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    (Image: Jared Rodriguez / truthout; Adapted: Señor Lebowski - 1, 2, Tim Dorr)


    truthout, June 14, 2010

    U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) threatened to issue subpoenas against the U.S. Defense and State Departments last month if they continue to refuse to accurately account for billions of dollars spent on private contractors assisting Washington in the 'war on drugs' in Latin America. But McCaskill's concerns raise broader questions about oversight and transparency of a controversial industry and its ever expanding role in Washington's foreign policy.

    "We asked for this information from the State Department and the Defense Department (DoD) more than three months ago. Despite our repeated requests, neither Department has been able to answer our questions yet," said U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill at a Senate hearing on May 20.

    The Defense Department, which could only provide an estimate of how much of $5.3 billion it spent on counternarcotics operations in the last decade, actually outsourced what turned out to be an incomplete audit to a private contractor.

    Contractors such as DynCorp and Northrop Grumman working in South and Central America are paid to spray drug crops, work with foreign militaries and police, offer intelligence and operational support, and conduct public relations assignments.

    McCaskill, who said "there is almost no transparency," added that she "will not hesitate to use subpoenas."

    Meanwhile, the United Nations is pushing for a new international convention to regulate Private Military and Security Companies (PMSC's).

    "This industry, which deals with heavy weaponry in conflict zones is less regulated than the toy industry," said José Luis Gómez del Prado, chair of the UN's Working Group on the use of mercenaries, in April.

    The Working Group, worried about the "increased privatization of war and security," urged Washington last August to allow more public oversight with its use of PSMC's, especially those contracted by U.S. intelligence agencies.

    One requirement included in the proposed legal framework for PMSC's would be the termination of immunity agreements covering private security personnel. This would affect Washington's controversial new base agreement with Colombia which grants diplomatic immunity to US military personnel and private defense contractors.

    William F. Wechsler, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Counternarcotics and Global Threats, used his testimony at the Senate to connect the 'war on drugs' with the 'war on terrorism.'

    "Terrorists associated with Islamic Radical Groups (IRGs), as well as narcoterrorist groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), operate sophisticated networks designed to move not only weapons, drugs, and other materials, but people as well. A wealth of intelligence reporting has linked many IRG members to both drug trafficking and alien smuggling. The DoD, through extensively coordinated projects with Federal law enforcement agencies, has developed collaborative and effective methods for detecting, and monitoring, the movement of illegal drugs," said Wechsler. "Such trafficking, in which terrorists with transnational reach commonly engage, is a present and growing danger to the security of the United States, our forces abroad, and our allies."

    This should cause particular concern in the region given President Obama's expansion of covert special forces operations in the fight against al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Furthermore, contractors that are working in intelligence gathering could be shielded from public or Congressional oversight due to potentially classified designations to their operations.

    Unfortunately, McCaskill's tough stance with the Defense and State Departments is more a matter of fiscal concern rather than operational mission. She believes that private contractors' "efforts are crucial to the success of the United States' mission in Latin America."

    There needs to be both national and global efforts to legally reign in an industry which was recently exposed for teaching torture to Mexican Police just a day after the 'war on drugs' was officially expanded in Mexico through the Merida Initiative, a joint security agreement between the U.S. and Mexico.

    To think that the toy industry is more heavily regulated is no laughing matter.


    Cyril Mychalejko is an editor at www.UpsideDownWorld.org, where this article was originally published.

    OIL disaster: BP Is Destroying Evidence


    BP Is Destroying Evidence and Censoring Journalists

    By Riki Ott


    AlterNet, June 14, 2010
    Orange Beach, Alabama -- While President Obama insists that the federal government is firmly in control of the response to BP's spill in the Gulf, people in coastal communities where I visited last week in Louisiana and Alabama know an inconvenient truth: BP -- not our president -- controls the response. In fact, people on the ground say things are out of control in the gulf.
    Even worse, as my latest week of adventures illustrate, BP is using federal agencies to shield itself from public accountability.
    For example, while flying on a small plane from New Orleans to Orange Beach, the pilot suddenly exclaimed, "Look at that!" The thin red line marking the federal flight restrictions of 3,000 feet over the oiled Gulf region had just jumped to include the coastal barrier islands off Alabama.

    "There's only one reason for that," the pilot said. "BP doesn't want the media taking pictures of oil on the beaches. You should see the oil that's about six miles off the coast," he said grimly. We looked down at the wavy orange boom surrounding the islands below us. The pilot shook his head. "There's no way those booms are going to stop what's offshore from hitting those beaches."
    BP knows this as well -- boom can only deflect oil under the calmest of sea conditions, not barricade it -- so they have stepped up their already aggressive effort to control what the public sees.
    At the same time I was en route to Orange Beach, Clint Guidry with the Louisiana Shrimp Association and Dean Blanchard, who owns the largest shrimp processor in Louisiana, were in Grand Isle taking Anderson Cooper out in a small boat to see the oiled beaches. The U.S. Coast Guard held up the boat for 20 minutes - an intimidation tactic intended to stop the cameras from recording BP's damage. Luckily for Cooper and the viewing public, Dean Blanchard is not easily intimidated.

    A few days later, the jig was up with the booms. Oil was making landfall in four states and even BP can't be everywhere at once. CBS 60 Minutes Australia found entire sections of boom hung up in marsh grasses two feet above the water off Venice. On the same day on the other side of Barataria Bay, Louisiana Bayoukeeper documented pools of oil and oiled pelicans inside the boom - on the supposedly protected landward side - of Queen Bess Island off Grand Isle.
    With oil undisputedly hitting the beaches and the number of dead wildlife mounting, BP is switching tactics. In Orange Beach, people told me BP wouldn't let them collect carcasses. Instead, the company was raking up carcasses of oiled seabirds. "The heads separate from the bodies," one upset resident told me. "There's no way those birds are going to be autopsied. BP is destroying evidence!"
    The body count of affected wildlife is crucial to prove the harm caused by the spill, and also serves as an invaluable tool to evaluate damages to public property - the dolphins, sea turtles, whales, sea birds, fish, and more, that are owned by the American public. Disappeared body counts means disappeared damages - and disappeared liability for BP. BP should not be collecting carcasses. The job should be given to NOAA, a federal agency, and volunteers, as was done during the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.
    NOAA should also be conducting carcass drift studies. Only one percent of the dead sea birds made landfall in the Gulf of Alaska, for example. That means for every one bird that was found, another 99 were carried out to sea by currents. Further, NOAA should be conducting aerial surveys to look for carcasses in the offshore rips where the currents converge. That's where the carcasses will pile up--a fact we learned during the Exxon Valdez spill. Maybe that's another reason for BP's "no camera" policy and the flight restrictions.
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    On Saturday June 12, people across America will stand up and speak out with one voice to protest BP's treatment of the Gulf, neglect for the response workers, and their response to government authority. President Obama needs to hear and see the people waving cameras and respirators. Until the media is allowed unrestricted access to the Gulf and impacted beaches, BP - not the President of United States - will remain in charge of the Gulf response.
    For more information on community rallies, please visit HERE.

    Riki Ott, PhD, is a community activist, a former fisherm'am, and has a degree in marine toxicology with a specialty in oil pollution. She is also the author of Sound Truth and Corporate Myth$: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. 


    McChrystal Faces Massive Failure in Afghanistan


    McChrystal Faces Massive Failure in Afghanistan in Next Few Months

    Gareth Porter

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    The Afghan population in the Taliban heartland is not cooperating with U.S. and NATO forces. 

    June 14, 2010

    Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal confronts the specter of a collapse of U.S. political support for the war in Afghanistan in coming months comparable to the one that occurred in the Iraq War in late 2006.

    On Thursday, McChrystal's message that his strategy will weaken the Taliban in its heartland took its worst beating thus far, when he admitted that the planned offensive in Kandahar City and surrounding districts is being delayed until September at the earliest, because it does not have the support of the Kandahar population and leadership.

    Equally damaging to the credibility of McChrystal's strategy was the Washington Post report published Thursday documenting in depth the failure of February's offensive in Marja.

    The basic theme underlined in both stories - that the Afghan population in the Taliban heartland is not cooperating with U.S. and NATO forces - is likely to be repeated over and over again in media coverage in the coming months.

    The Kandahar operation, which McChrystal's staff has touted as the pivotal campaign of the war, had previously been announced as beginning in June. But it is now clear that McChrystal has understood for weeks that the most basic premise of the operation turned out to be false.

    "When you go to protect people, the people have to want you to protect them," said McChrystal, who was in London for a NATO conference.

    He didn't have to spell out the obvious implication: the people of Kandahar don't want the protection of foreign troops.

    The Washington Post story on McChrystal's announcement reported "U.S. officials" had complained that "the support from Kandaharis that the United States was counting on [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai to deliver has not materialised."

    That explanation hardly makes McChrystal's war plan more credible, because Karzai has made no secret of his preference for a negotiated settlement rather than continued efforts to weaken the Taliban by occupying key Taliban strongholds.

    The report in the Post, written by National Editor Rajiv Chandrasekaran, provided the first detailed evidence of the systematic non-cooperation of the population of the district-sized area called Marja with U.S. troops.

    Chandrasekaran reported that female U.S. Marines tried to get Afghan women to come to a meeting last week, but that not a single woman showed up. And despite a NATO offer to hire as many as 10,000 residents for labor projects on irrigation projects, only about 1,200 have signed up.

    The U.S. officials in Marja are trying to convince local residents, in effect, that they should trust the foreign troops to protect them from the Taliban, but the Taliban are still able to threaten to credibly to punish those who collaborate with occupation forces.

    About a dozen people have been killed for such collaboration already, and many more have been warned to stop, according to Chandrasekaran's report.

    "You can't get beyond security when you talk to people," a civilian official working on development told the Post editor. "They don't want to entertain discussions about projects."

    Chandrasekaran also reported that representatives of rural development and education projects came to Marja initially and then retreated to the province centre. They appear to be as convinced as the population that the Taliban will continue to be a powerful presence in the region.

    That was not supposed to happen when the U.S.-NATO declared victory in Marja three months ago. To ensure that no Taliban would be able to operate in the area, McChrystal had deployed nearly 15,000 U.S., British and Afghan troops to control Marja's population.

    Despite news media references before and during the offensive to Marja as a "city of 80,000", it was an agricultural area whose population of about 35,000 was spread over some 120 square kilometres, based on the fewer than 50 dwellings shown on the Google Earth map of a 1.2 kilometre segment of the area.

    That means the 15,000 NATO and Afghan troops provide a ratio of one occupying soldier for every two members of the population. Counterinsurgency doctrine normally calls for one soldier for every 50 people in the target area.

    The fact that the U.S.-NATO forces could not clear the Taliban from Marja despite such an unusually heavy concentration of troops is devastating evidence that the McChrystal strategy has failed.

    Throughout 2009, media coverage of the war was focused on plans for a new offensive strategy that promised to turn the war around. But Thursday's double dose of bad news suggests a cascade of news stories to come that will reinforce the conclusion that the war is futile.

    That in turn could lead to what might be an "Iraq 2006 moment" – the swift unraveling of political support for the war on the part of the elected and unelected political elite, as occurred in the Iraq War in the second half of 2006. The collapse of elite political support for the Iraq War followed months of coverage of sectarian violence showing the U.S. military had lost control of the war.

    McChrystal is still hoping, however, to be given much more time to change the attitudes of the population in Helmand and Kandahar.

    Chandrasekaran quoted "a senior U.S. military official in Afghanistan" - the term often used for McChrystal himself - as saying, "We're on an Afghan timetable, and the Afghan timetable is not the American timetable." The official added, "And that is the crux of the problem."

    McChrystal and his boss, CENTCOM chief Gen. David Petraeus, may now be counting on pressure from the Republican Party to force President Barack Obama to reverse his present position that withdrawal of U.S. troops will begin next year.

    That was the view expressed Thursday by retired Army lieutenant colonel and former Petraeus aide John Nagl, a leading specialist on counterinsurgency who is now president of the Centre for a New American Security.

    After the organization's annual conference, Nagle told IPS that Obama will have to shift policy next year to give more time to McChrystal, because he would otherwise be too vulnerable to Republican attacks on his Afghanistan policy going into the 2012 election campaign.

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