Saturday, September 21, 2013

[batavia-news] Al-Qaeda-linked gunmen seize Syrian town

 

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Al-Qaeda-linked gunmen seize Syrian town

Date  September 20, 2013

Albert Aji and Bassem Mroue

Syrian town falls into hands of al Qaeda

Fighting among different rebel groups, including an al Qaeda affiliate, forces more Syrians to flee the country into Turkey.

Damascus, Syria: Al-Qaeda militants in northern Syria captured a town near the Turkish border on Thursday after heavy clashes with Western-backed rebels, prompting the closure of a nearby frontier crossing, activists and Turkish officials said.

Jihadis represent a comparatively small minority of the total insurgent force but exert far more of an impact on the conflict than some larger and more moderate insurgent forces  

It was the latest development in what has effectively become a war within a war in northern and eastern parts of Syria — pitting moderate fighters and Kurdish militiamen against extremists with ties to al-Qaeda in battles that have left hundreds dead from both sides.

War within a war ... In this file photo, a Free Syrian Army fighter takes cover during fighting with the Syrian Army in Azaz, Syria. Al-Qaeda-linked gunmen in northern Syria captured a town near the Turkish border after clashing with Western-backed rebels on Thursday.

War within a war ... In this file photo, a Free Syrian Army fighter takes cover during fighting with the Syrian Army in Azaz, Syria. Al-Qaeda-linked gunmen in northern Syria captured a town near the Turkish border after clashing with Western-backed rebels on Thursday. Photo: AP / Virginie Nguyen Hoang

The US and its European and Gulf allies are increasingly concerned about the rising prominence of Islamists among the rebels, who have played a major role in the civil war against President Bashar al-Assad's forces.

Elsewhere, a bus struck a roadside bomb in the central province of Homs, killing 19 people, a local official said. The blast in the village of Jbourin also wounded four people, according to the official from the Governor's office, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk to the media.

The village is predominantly Alawite — an offshoot of Shiite Islam and a minority sect of which Mr Assad is a member — but it also has Christians and Sunni Muslims.

It was not immediately clear why the bus was targeted. The civil war, which has left more than 100,000 dead, has taken increasingly sectarian overtones. Most of the rebels trying to overthrow Mr Assad belong to the majority Sunni sect.

The fighting in the north prompted Turkey to close the border crossing of Bab al-Salameh, a Turkish Foreign Ministry official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk to the media.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an activist group that monitors the conflict, said members of the al-Qaeda offshoot, known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, stormed the town of Azaz on Wednesday evening, forcing opposition fighters from the Western-backed bloc to pull out.

Clashes between both sides broke out when ISIL fighters tried to detain a German doctor they accused of taking photos of their positions on behalf of the rival rebels, Rami Abdul-Rahman, who heads the Observatory, said. The doctor, a volunteer in the region, escaped, but the two rebel factions started fighting.

Amateur video showed dozens of gunmen with heavy machine guns on pick-up trucks gathering at the border with Turkey. The Associated Press was able to verify the footage based on interviews and other reporting on the events depicted.

Abdul-Rahman said three opposition fighters and two jihadis were killed. On Thursday, mediation was underway to get the al-Qaeda-linked militants to leave Azaz, he said.

Loay al-Mikdad, a spokesman for the Western-backed rebels of the Free Syrian Army, said the al-Qaeda-linked fighters "want to occupy the area".

"What they are doing is unjustified, it serves the [Assad] regime," Mr al-Mikdad said by telephone from Turkey.

In July, ISIL fighters killed two FSA commanders. The deaths enraged the FSA leadership, which has demanded the killers be handed over for trial.

There has also been infighting among rebel groups in the eastern province of Deir el-Zour, which borders Iraq, and in the north, where al-Qaeda fighters from ISIL and their allies in the Nusra Front have been battling Kurdish rebels for months.

The rise of jihadi fighters has been a worrying development and FSA members have increasingly been on the offensive against the al-Qaeda militants, who they feel have discredited the rebellion.

The US and its allies have been reluctant to get involved militarily in Syria or give lethal weapons to the rebels because of concerns the munitions would end up in the hands of jihadis.

The two sides have engaged in retaliatory killings in recent months. Kurdish militiamen have also been fighting against members of the ISIL and the Nusra Front in predominantly oil-rich Kurdish areas of north-eastern Syria.

Residents of rebel-held areas are also turning against extremists for their brutal tactics and for trying to impose Islamic law.

According to Charles Lister, an analyst with HIS Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Centre in Britain, al-Qaeda-linked fighters make up between 10,000 and 12,000 of the insurgency's estimated 100,000-member force but wield far more influence because of their better discipline and battle experience.

Jihadis "represent a comparatively small minority of the total insurgent force, but as a result of superior finances, organisational capacity and individual fighter subservience to tight command and control structures, they have been able to exert far more of an impact on the conflict than some larger and more moderate insurgent forces," Mr Lister said in a statement.

Also on Thursday, Oxfam said many donor countries were failing to provide their share of the funding for the humanitarian response to the Syria crisis. Donors, including France, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Russia, should make funding the United Nation's $5 billion appeals a priority, the international aid agency said.

Oxfam's report came ahead of next week's donors' meeting in New York. The donors have been influential in shaping the international response to the conflict, but should also pay their fair share of the humanitarian aid, the agency said.

The fighting has forced 7 million people from their homes since the uprising began in March 2011. Five million Syrians have been displaced inside the country and more than 2 million have fled to neighbouring Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq, the UN said.

AP



 

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[batavia-news] Bo Xilai sentenced to life in prison

 

 
 

Bo Xilai sentenced to life in prison

Chinese court finds former top politician guilty of corruption, accepting bribes and abuse of power.

Last Modified: 22 Sep 2013 03:22
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Bo was one of China's top 25 politicians before criminal charges ended his career [Reuters]

A Chinese court has sentenced former leading politician Bo Xilai to life in prison after finding him guilty on charges of graft, accepting bribes and abuse of power.

The Jinan Intermediate People's Court announced the verdict against Bo on Sunday. It also ordered that all his personal assets be seized, according to a transcript carried on the court's official microblog.

The former Politburo member and party chief of the megacity Chongqing vigorously denied any criminal wrongdoings during the trial, but Chinese courts are not independent and a guilty verdict was widely expected.

Bo was escorted into the court by marshals on Sunday morning and stood to listen as the judge began reading the lengthy verdict, which reviewed the facts established in the trial.

Dozens of police, some uniformed and others in plain clothes surrounded the court on Sunday. Barricades and barriers were erected more than 50 metres away from the court to prevent people from approaching.

Though edited transcripts from the trial were posted online, China's government has tightly controlled information about Bo's case, and police erected barriers to stop pedestrians from entering areas around the court.

'Lied in his testimony'

Bo poured billions into public works and social housing programmes while party chief of the southwestern megacity of Chongqing, where he launched a high-profile anti-crime campaign that won him admirers across China.

Despite his popularity, reports of forced confessions and torture during the crime crackdown horrified Chinese liberals, while some top party leaders saw his ambition as challenging the party's cherished unity.

The verdict came as China's new leadership under President Xi Jinping attempts to show it is cracking down on corruption, which he has said threatens the existence of the Communist Party.

The catalyst for Bo's fall came when Wang Lijun, his top aide in Chongqing, fled to a US consulate with evidence the politician's wife had murdered a British associate, Neil Heywood, in February 2012.

Bo told the court that Lijun, the Chongqing police chief, "constantly lied in his testimony".

At the close of Bo's dramatic trial last month, a prosecutor urged the court to punish the disgraced politician with a severe sentence because of his lack of remorse.

Bo mounted a fierce defence against claims that he corruptly obtained 26.8 million yuan ($4.4m) and abused his political position to cover up the killing committed by his wife.

He accused his wife, Gu Kailai, for many of the corruption charges and even some aspects of the abuse of power allegation.

Gu received a suspended death sentence for the murder of Heywood.

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[batavia-news] DNA Double Take

 

 

DNA Double Take

Noah Berger for The New York Times

DNA sequencing elements displayed on a monitor.

By CARL ZIMMER
Published: September 16, 2013 118 Comments

From biology class to "C.S.I.," we are told again and again that our genome is at the heart of our identity. Read the sequences in the chromosomes of a single cell, and learn everything about a person's genetic information — or, as 23andme, a prominent genetic testing company, says on its Web site, "The more you know about your DNA, the more you know about yourself."

Multimedia
Graphic
Mosaicism

 

A DNA sample. Sequencing has become faster and relatively cheaper in the last 20 years.

Readers' Comments

Readers shared their thoughts on this article.

But scientists are discovering that — to a surprising degree — we contain genetic multitudes. Not long ago, researchers had thought it was rare for the cells in a single healthy person to differ genetically in a significant way. But scientists are finding that it's quite common for an individual to have multiple genomes. Some people, for example, have groups of cells with mutations that are not found in the rest of the body. Some have genomes that came from other people.

"There have been whispers in the matrix about this for years, even decades, but only in a very hypothetical sense," said Alexander Urban, a geneticist at Stanford University. Even three years ago, suggesting that there was widespread genetic variation in a single body would have been met with skepticism, he said. "You would have just run against the wall."

But a series of recent papers by Dr. Urban and others has demonstrated that those whispers were not just hypothetical. The variation in the genomes found in a single person is too large to be ignored. "We now know it's there," Dr. Urban said. "Now we're mapping this new continent."

Dr. James R. Lupski, a leading expert on the human genome at Baylor College of Medicine, wrote in a recent review in the journal Science that the existence of multiple genomes in an individual could have a tremendous impact on the practice of medicine. "It's changed the way I think," he said in an interview.

Scientists are finding links from multiple genomes to certain rare diseases, and now they're beginning to investigate genetic variations to shed light on more common disorders.

Science's changing view is also raising questions about how forensic scientists should use DNA evidence to identify people. It's also posing challenges for genetic counselors, who can't assume that the genetic information from one cell can tell them about the DNA throughout a person's body.

Human Blueprint

When an egg and sperm combine their DNA, the genome they produce contains all the necessary information for building a new human. As the egg divides to form an embryo, it produces new copies of that original genome.

For decades, geneticists have explored how an embryo can use the instructions in a single genome to develop muscles, nerves and the many other parts of the human body. They also use sequencing to understand genetic variations that can raise the risk of certain diseases. Genetic counselors can look at the results of genetic screenings to help patients and their families cope with these diseases — altering their diet, for example, if they lack a gene for a crucial enzyme.

The cost of sequencing an entire genome has fallen so drastically in the past 20 years — now a few thousand dollars, down from an estimated $3 billion for the public-private partnership that sequenced the first human genome — that doctors are beginning to sequence the entire genomes of some patients. (Sequencing can be done in as little as 50 hours.) And they're identifying links between mutations and diseases that have never been seen before.

Yet all these powerful tests are based on the assumption that, inside our body, a genome is a genome is a genome. Scientists believed that they could look at the genome from cells taken in a cheek swab and be able to learn about the genomes of cells in the brain or the liver or anywhere else in the body.

In the mid-1900s, scientists began to get clues that this was not always true. In 1953, for example, a British woman donated a pint of blood. It turned out that some of her blood was Type O and some was Type A. The scientists who studied her concluded that she had acquired some of her blood from her twin brother in the womb, including his genomes in his blood cells.

Chimerism, as such conditions came to be known, seemed for many years to be a rarity. But "it can be commoner than we realized," said Dr. Linda Randolph, a pediatrician at Children's Hospital in Los Angeles who is an author of a review of chimerism published in The American Journal of Medical Genetics in July.

Twins can end up with a mixed supply of blood when they get nutrients in the womb through the same set of blood vessels. In other cases, two fertilized eggs may fuse together. These so-called embryonic chimeras may go through life blissfully unaware of their origins.

One woman discovered she was a chimera as late as age 52. In need of a kidney transplant, she was tested so that she might find a match. The results indicated that she was not the mother of two of her three biological children. It turned out that she had originated from two genomes. One genome gave rise to her blood and some of her eggs; other eggs carried a separate genome.

Women can also gain genomes from their children. After a baby is born, it may leave some fetal cells behind in its mother's body, where they can travel to different organs and be absorbed into those tissues. "It's pretty likely that any woman who has been pregnant is a chimera," Dr. Randolph said.

Everywhere You Look

As scientists begin to search for chimeras systematically — rather than waiting for them to turn up in puzzling medical tests — they're finding them in a remarkably high fraction of people. In 2012, Canadian scientists performed autopsies on the brains of 59 women. They found neurons with Y chromosomes in 63 percent of them. The neurons likely developed from cells originating in their sons.

In The International Journal of Cancer in August, Eugen Dhimolea of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and colleagues reported that male cells can also infiltrate breast tissue. When they looked for Y chromosomes in samples of breast tissue, they found it in 56 percent of the women they investigated.

A century ago, geneticists discovered one way in which people might acquire new genomes. They were studying "mosaic animals," rare creatures with oddly-colored patches of fur. The animals didn't inherit the genes for these patches from their parents. Instead, while embryos, they acquired a mutation in a skin cell that divided to produce a colored patch.

Mosaicism, as this condition came to be known, was difficult to study in humans before the age of DNA sequencing. Scientists could only discover instances in which the mutations and the effects were big.

In 1960, researchers found that a form of leukemia is a result of mosaicism. A blood cell spontaneously mutates as it divides, moving a big chunk of one chromosome to another.

Later studies added support to the idea that cancer is a result of mutations in specific cells. But scientists had little idea of how common cases of mosaicism were beyond cancer.

"We didn't have the technology to systematically think about them," said Dr. Christopher Walsh, a geneticist at Children's Hospital in Boston who recently published a review on mosaicism and disease in Science. "Now we're in the midst of a revolution."

Benign Differences

The latest findings make it clear that mosaicism is quite common — even in healthy cells.

Dr. Urban and his colleagues, for example, investigated mutations in cells called fibroblasts, which are found in connective tissue. They searched in particular for cases in which a segment of DNA was accidentally duplicated or deleted. As they reported last year, 30 percent of the fibroblasts carried at least one such mutation.

Michael Snyder of Stanford University and his colleagues searched for mosaicism by performing autopsies on six people who had died of causes other than cancer. In five of the six people they autopsied, the scientists reported last October, they found cells in different organs with stretches of DNA that had accidentally been duplicated or deleted.

Now that scientists are beginning to appreciate how common chimerism and mosaicism are, they're investigating the effects of these conditions on our health. "That's still open really, because these are still early days," Dr. Urban said.

Nevertheless, said Dr. Walsh, "it's safe to say that a large proportion of those mutations will be benign." Recent studies on chimeras suggest that these extra genomes can even be beneficial. Chimeric cells from fetuses appear to seek out damaged tissue and help heal it, for example.

But scientists are also starting to find cases in which mutations in specific cells help give rise to diseases other than cancer. Dr. Walsh, for example, studies a childhood disorder of the brain called hemimegalencephaly, in which one side of the brain grows larger than the other, leading to devastating seizures.

"The kids have no chance for a normal life without desperate surgery to take out half of their brain," he said.

Dr. Walsh has studied the genomes of neurons removed during those surgeries. He and his colleagues discovered that some neurons in the overgrown hemisphere have mutations to one gene. Two other teams of scientists have identified mutations on other genes, all of which help to control the growth of neurons. "We can get our hands on the mechanism of the disease," said Dr. Walsh.

Other researchers are now investigating whether mosaicism is a factor in more common diseases, like schizophrenia. "This will play itself out over the next 5 or 10 years," said Dr. Urban, who with his colleagues is studying it.

Moving Cautiously

Medical researchers aren't the only scientists interested in our multitudes of personal genomes. So are forensic scientists. When they attempt to identify criminals or murder victims by matching DNA, they want to avoid being misled by the variety of genomes inside a single person.

Last year, for example, forensic scientists at the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory Division described how a saliva sample and a sperm sample from the same suspect in a sexual assault case didn't match.

Bone marrow transplants can also confound forensic scientists. Researchers at Innsbruck Medical University in Austria took cheek swabs from 77 people who had received transplants up to nine years earlier. In 74 percent of the samples, they found a mix of genomes — both their own and those from the marrow donors, the scientists reported this year. The transplanted stem cells hadn't just replaced blood cells, but had also become cells lining the cheek.

While the risk of confusion is real, it is manageable, experts said. "This should not be much of a concern for forensics," said Manfred Kayser, a professor of Forensic Molecular Biology at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. In the cases where mosaicism or chimerism causes confusion, forensic scientists can clear it up by other means. In the Austrian study, for example, the scientists found no marrow donor genomes in the hair of the recipients.

For genetic counselors helping clients make sense of DNA tests, our many genomes pose more serious challenges. A DNA test that uses blood cells may miss disease-causing mutations in the cells of other organs. "We can't tell you what else is going on," said Nancy B. Spinner, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania, who published a review about the implications of mosaicism for genetic counseling in the May issue of Nature Reviews Genetics.

That may change as scientists develop more powerful ways to investigate our different genomes and learn more about their links to diseases. "It's not tomorrow that you're going to walk into your doctor's office and they're going to think this way," said Dr. Lupski. "It's going to take time."

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[batavia-news] Hacking U.S. Secrets, China Pushes for Drones

 

 
 

Hacking U.S. Secrets, China Pushes for Drones

By
Published: September 20, 2013
 

BEIJING — For almost two years, hackers based in Shanghai went after one foreign defense contractor after another, at least 20 in all. Their target, according to an American cybersecurity company that monitored the attacks, was the technology behind the United States' clear lead in military drones.

Enlarge This Image
Associated Press

A hacking operation run by a unit of the People's Liberation Army was tracked to this building outside of Shanghai.

"I believe this is the largest campaign we've seen that has been focused on drone technology," said Darien Kindlund, manager of threat intelligence at the company, FireEye, based in California. "It seems to align pretty well with the focus of the Chinese government to build up their own drone technology capabilities."

The hacking operation, conducted by a group called "Comment Crew," was one of the most recent signs of the ambitions of China's drone development program. The government and military are striving to put China at the forefront of drone manufacturing, for their own use and for export, and have made an all-out push to gather domestic and international technology to support the program.

Foreign Ministry officials have said China does not sanction hacking, and is itself a victim, but another American cybersecurity company has tracked members of Comment Crew to a building of the People's Liberation Army outside Shanghai.

China is now dispatching its own drones into potential combat arenas. Every major arms manufacturer in China has a research center devoted to drones, according to Chinese and foreign military analysts. Those companies have shown off dozens of models to potential foreign buyers at international air shows.

Chinese officials this month sent a drone near disputed islands administered by Japan; debated using a weaponized drone last year to kill a criminal suspect in Myanmar; and sold homemade drones resembling the Predator, an American model, to other countries for less than a million dollars each. Meanwhile, online photographs reveal a stealth combat drone, the Lijian, or Stealth Sword, in a runway test in May.

Military analysts say China has long tried to replicate foreign drone designs. Some Chinese drones appearing at recent air shows have closely resembled foreign ones. Ian M. Easton, a military analyst at the Project 2049 Institute in Virginia, said cyberespionage was one tool in an extensive effort over years to purchase or develop drones domestically using all available technology, foreign and domestic.

Chinese engineers and officials have done reverse engineering, studied open source material and debriefed American drone experts who attend conferences and other meetings in China. "This can save them years of design work and mistakes," Mr. Easton said.

The Chinese military has not released statistics on the size of its drone fleet, but a Taiwan Defense Ministry report said that as of mid-2011, the Chinese Air Force alone had more than 280 drone units, and analysts say the other branches have thousands, which means China's fleet count is second only to the 7,000 or so of the United States. "The military significance of China's move into unmanned systems is alarming," said a 2012 report by the Defense Science Board, a Pentagon advisory committee.

China's domestic security apparatus, whose $124 billion official budget this year is larger than that of the military, is also keenly interested in drones, which raises questions about the potential use of drones for surveillance and possibly even attacks inside China, including in restive areas of Xinjiang and Tibet. Drone technology conferences here are attended by both military and domestic security officials. An international conference on nonmilitary drones is scheduled to take place in Beijing from Sept. 25 to 28.

A signal moment in China's drone use came on Sept. 9, when the navy sent a surveillance drone near the disputed Diaoyu Islands, which Japan administers and calls the Senkakus. Japanese interceptor jets scrambled to confront it. This was the first time China had ever deployed a drone over the East China Sea. The Chinese Defense Ministry said "regular drills" had taken place "at relevant areas in the East China Sea, which conform to relevant international laws and practices."

The drone appeared to be a BZK-005, a long-range aircraft used by the Chinese Navy that made its public debut in 2006 at China's air show in Zhuhai, said an American official.

Mr. Easton said deploying the drone near disputed waters and islands "was very much a first" for China and had caught Japanese officials off guard.

"I think this is really just the beginning of a much broader trend we're going to see — for China to increase its ability to monitor the East China Sea and the Western Pacific, beyond the Philippines, and to increase the operational envelope of their strike capabilities," he said.

The Chinese military, with its constant focus on potential war over Taiwan and an eye on China's growing territorial disputes, is at the vanguard of preparing drones for use in maritime situations. That is unlike the United States, which has used drones to hunt and kill suspected terrorists and guerrilla fighters, mostly in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

American drones "are not designed to enter into contested or denied air space," Mr. Easton said. "So they would be unable to fight in any conflict with China."

China, on the other hand, is building drones, also called unmanned aerial vehicles, precisely to operate in contested spaces. "It's a very useful instrument for safeguarding maritime sovereignty," said Xu Guangyu, a retired major general and director of the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association. "China will gradually step up its use of U.A.V.'s in this area."

Chinese strategists have discussed using drones in attack situations if war with the United States were to break out in the Pacific, according to the Project 2049 report. Citing Chinese military technical material, the report said the People's Liberation Army's "operational thinkers and scientists envision attacking U.S. aircraft-carrier battle groups with swarms of multimission U.A.V.'s in the event of conflict."

University research centers are at the core of China's drone program. The oldest research and production center for drones is the Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi'an, where design work began in 1958. The ASN Technology Group, linked to the school, said on its Web site that it produces 90 percent of Chinese drones.

At the program's start, China reverse-engineered drones it had acquired from the Soviet Union in the 1950s. It also got its hands on American drones that crashed in Vietnam in the 1960s and in China while monitoring China's nuclear weapons program. China bought 100 Harpy armed drones from Israel in the 1990s — its only significant purchase of foreign-made drones — and the Pentagon later pressured Israel not to upgrade those drones for China.

In recent years, China has continued to acquire foreign drone technology and is especially focused on studying American models. "American U.A.V. technology is very sophisticated," Mr. Xu said. "We can only envy their technology. Right now, we're learning from them."

For the Obama administration and American business executives, no method of Chinese technology acquisition is more worrisome than cyberespionage. An American official confirmed that drone technology had been stolen by hackers.

FireEye, the cybersecurity company in California, called the drone theft campaign Operation Beebus, traced back to a command-and-control node at bee.businessconsults.net. Cybersecurity experts say that general address and tools linked to it are associated with the Comment Crew, the Chinese hacker unit that Mandiant, another cybersecurity company, discussed in a report in February. Mandiant said the group was part of Unit 61398 of the People's Liberation Army, based in Shanghai.

Though the initial victims in Operation Beebus were large defense contractors, the hackers began to pick out companies that specialized in drone technology, said Mr. Kindlund, FireEye's threat intelligence manager. They then alternated between large companies that made a wide range of military technology and boutique firms that focused on drones.

In China, it is not just the military that is looking at uses for drones. In February, Liu Yuejin, the director of the antidrugs bureau in the Ministry of Public Security, which is responsible for domestic security, told Global Times, a state-run newspaper, that the ministry had considered using a drone armed with 44 pounds of explosives to kill a Burmese man in northern Myanmar suspected of ordering the murders of 13 Chinese sailors on the Mekong River. In the end, the idea was shelved because senior Chinese officials wanted the suspect, Naw Kham, captured alive.

Chinese drones are increasingly appearing in the arsenals of other nations. The Chinese version of the Predator, the Wing Loong, or Pterodactyl, was first exported in 2011, according to People's Daily. At the Paris Air Show in June, the president of a Chinese aeronautics company told Global Times that the drone could carry two laser-guided missiles and was the equal of the Predator in endurance and flight range, but was much cheaper.

Patrick Zuo and Bree Feng contributed research.

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[batavia-news] Destination Mars when Earth moves out of 'habitable zone'

 

 
 

Destination Mars when Earth moves out of 'habitable zone'

Date  September 19, 2013
 

Life on Earth will continue for at least another 1.75 billion years ... but human life could die out long before.

Astrobiologists predict our planet will move out of the solar system's "habitable zone" and become too hot for even primitive bacteria. To survive, humans might have to migrate to Mars.

The calculations were based on our distance from the sun and temperatures at which it is possible for the planet to retain water.

The study, published in the magazine Astrobiology, also looks at the possibility of extraterrestrials living on planets outside our solar system.

Andrew Rushby, of East Anglia University, said: "We used the 'habitable zone' concept to make these estimates.

"This is the distance from a planet's star at which temperatures are conducive to water on the surface. We estimate Earth will cease to be habitable somewhere between 1.75 billion and 3.25 billion years from now.

"After this point ... the seas would evaporate. We would see a terminal extinction event for all life."

Mr Rushby said conditions for humans would be intolerable much sooner. This was being accelerated by climate change. "Humans would be in trouble with even a small increase in temperature," he said.

"Near the end, only microbes in niche environments would be able to endure the heat.

"If we ever needed to move to another planet, Mars is probably our best bet.

"It's very close and will remain in the habitable zone until the end of the sun's lifetime – 6 billion years from now."

Mr Rushby said the length of time a planet could be inhabited indicated the potential for the evolution of complex life.

"We had insects 400 million years ago, dinosaurs 300 million years ago and flowering plants 130 million years ago," he said.

"Modern humans have only been around for the last 200,000 years – so it takes a really long time for intelligent life to develop."

Telegraph, London

 

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[batavia-news] War crime politics: Dutch apology and its implications

 

 
September 21, 2013 at 5:46pm

War crime politics: Dutch apology and its implications

The Jakarta Post 20 Sept. 2013 (Versi online tak ada, di bawah ini versi asli)
 
Aboeprijadi Santoso, Amsterdam
 
History's victims are commonly victims of lack of political will among contemporary elite. Indeed it took more than six decades before judges of a new generation in the Netherlands decided in 2011 to deal with cases of executions of civilians in Indonesia during the 1940s – e.g. the Rawagede case in 1947 - as 'unlawful killings'.
 
The Jakarta Post 20 Sept. 2013
The Jakarta Post 20 Sept. 2013
 
Thus Dutch excessive war violence in Indonesia can no longer be put aside as 'expired' - which the plaintiff advocate, prof. Liesbeth Zegveld, saw as a break-through in "a continuity of illegitimate acts of the (Dutch) State" (Radio Netherlands 2011).
 
As a consequence, the Dutch government has quickly sought and reached a legal settlement to offer an official apology for Captain Raymond P.W. Westerling 1946-1947-mass executions in South Sulawesi – which the Dutch Ambassador Tjeerd de Zwaan last week made to the ten victims' relatives in Jakarta. 
 
Up to the late-1950s, Captain Westerling was an icon, worshipped as he was as a 'great patriot' for whom schoolchildren every morning sung a song and prayed for his well being. Only a decade later, however, the Dutch public was deeply shocked as Joop Hueting, a former soldier assigned in Java in the 1940s, told before the television in 1969: " .. in one village house, a corporal used all bullets he had. And I saw some 20 men, women and children, some were hysteric, others bleeding and dead".
 
Hueting's 'bomb' touched the nerves of Dutch conscience and politics. PM Piet de Jong was forced to response and issued Excessennota (1969) that "deplored" such "excesses", but emphasized that "our military, as a whole, did behave correctly" – a statement that soon appeared dishonest as public debate began to question it, and books, novels, and witness stories on similar events were published throughout the later years.
 
Thus was born problem of 'Indie veterans' (former soldiers in the Netherlands-Indies) as they began to gather strength to resist war crime allegations. In 1987 prof. Loe de Jong, who was assigned to write the official history of the Netherlands during the WW-II, was forced to delete the term 'war crime' in his chapter on the Indonesian revolution.
 
Such controversies eventually led to hot political issue of whether the Dutch state should offerapology. Time and again the Dutch administration was pressed to do so, but politicians' and judicial authorities' mindset changed slowly. Public debate has never been conclusive. Accordingly, even if admitted, none of the veterans accused of wrongdoings were ever prosecuted.
 
Next, thanks to the pressures of Prince Bernhard and the liberal-conservative political party VVD, respectively the patron and ally of the Indie veterans, Queen Beatrice had to cancel her presence and plan to offer an official apology at the 50-year commemoration of Indonesia's independence on August 17, 1995 in Jakarta.
 
It was not until a decade later, though, as the Indie veterans' influence declined, when Dutch Foreign Minister Ben Bot - himself, like many Dutch and Indies veterans, a former Japan's war prisoner in Java - attended the commemoration of August 17, 2005 in Jakarta and declared that "the Dutch were on the wrong side of the history" as he acknowledged Indonesia's historic date of independence.
 
This de facto, i.e. political-moral acceptance, rather than de jure recognition, of Indonesia's independence date means that any official apology expressed by the Dutch government toward local war crime victims related to the 1940s events, needs to be framed within Dutch legal framework. In other words, the apology is theoretically intended for them in their formal status as former Dutch East Indies onderdaan (subject), rather than as Indonesian citizen.    
 
Above all, any official form of de jure recognition would imply that the Indie veterans had actually fought in Indonesia as 'aggressor' rather than 'restoring order', which would basically deny their patriotism and loyalty to the Royal family.
 
What is more, the fact that they were now also burdened with war crimes allegations might put them equal to the Nazi, who occupied the Netherlands during the WW-II. In postwar Netherlands, there is no greater taboo – a worse stigma - than this. Hence, Dutch veterans' resistance.
 
On the Indonesian side, Jakarta has always seemed reluctant to deal with the issue. 'Moeten wij oude koeien uit de sloot halen?' (Do we have to raise old wounds?)', Foreign Minister Ali Alatas told me in 1995 on the eve of Dutch Queen state visit. Obviously Dutch and Indonesia's paramount interests were to nurture a good economic and trade relation.
 
Now, however, Minister Marty Natalegawa has for the first time "warmly welcomed" Dutch apology, although Indonesian officials were significantly absent in last week ceremony.
 
It's true, the fact that precisely the Dutch, the former colonial ruler, refused to fully recognize Indonesia's historic date of independence, is still painful to many Indonesians. Nonetheless, the Indonesian state's stance is clear: once we proclaimed it on August 17, 1945, it will remain our independence date no matter what outsiders claim.  
 
While this gap between the state's stance and the society's desire for full recognition of independence date remains unresolved, the uneasiness about Dutch apology may have been compounded by similar, more recent, and even more urgent issues.
 
For, had not the state that is now offered apology and "warmly welcomes" it, itself been involved in similar violence and war crimes against civilians in recent past?
 
Gen. Soeharto, 1965
Gen. Soeharto, 1965
A new awareness has undeniably been growing among Indonesians at home and abroad around Indonesia's past atrocities ever since its Human Rights National Commission issued its 2011 report on the 1965-66 massacres and public interest grew on the issues and events surrounding the killings as demonstrated by responses to Joshua Oppenheimer's exceptional documentary film 'The Act of Killing' (2012) and the weekly TEMPO's coverage, Jagal , on the testimonies of 1965-killers.
 
Hence, once we accept (Dutch) apology on similar cases, it would only be fair, consistent and ethical, at least for domestic aim, for the Indonesian state to seriously make a critical reappraisal of our own gross violations of human rights i.e. the 1965-66 genocide and the war crimes its Army committed in former East Timor (1975-1999) - not to mention Aceh and Papua – for the sake of reconciliation and to honor and compensate the victims.
 
When justice is delayed, even honest apology may not be satisfying whereas unresolved human wrongs would only shape a burden of painful legacy.
 
 
@ The author is a journalist

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