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Monday, April 8, 2013

Swiss offer to mediate in North Korea crisis

ZURICH (Reuters) - Switzerland has offered to mediate with North Korea as tension rises on the Korean peninsula following U.N. sanctions imposed in response to a North Korean nuclear weapon test in February.

The Swiss foreign ministry recently made contact with the North Korean authorities but there are no current plans for any talks, a spokeswoman said.

"Switzerland is willing to contribute to a de-escalation on the Korean peninsula and is always willing to help find a solution, if this is the wish of the parties, such as hosting meetings between them," she said in an emailed statement.

North Korea has issued increasingly strident warnings of imminent war with South Korea and the United States, urging diplomats on Friday to consider leaving Pyongyang.

Swiss media say that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who took over in December 2011 after the death of his father Kim Jong-il, apparently spent several years in Switzerland being educated under a pseudonym.

Neutral Switzerland often hosts peace talks and mediates in international conflicts, more recently between Russia and Ukraine and between the United States and Iran and Cuba.

The Swiss Foreign Ministry said it had been involved in more than 15 sets of peace negotiations in the past seven years, including in Sudan, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Uganda and Nepal.

Former Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey, who in 2003 became the first foreign government official to cross the demarcation line separating North and South Korea, said Pyongyang's wishes had not changed much since then.

"For North Korea, symbols are very important," she told the SonntagsZeitung newspaper in an interview. "What the North Koreans still want is recognition and security guarantees from the United States."

Five Swiss and five Swedish officers monitor the demilitarised zone between the North and South. Urs Gerber, the Swiss head of the operation, said not much has changed in recent months. "We are just monitoring the situation more intensively," he also told the SonntagsZeitung.

(Reporting by Emma Thomasson; editing by Mark Heinrich)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/swiss-offer-mediate-north-korea-100337459.html

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Sudan officers get jail terms for alleged coup attempt

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - A Sudanese court sentenced nine army officers to prison terms of up to five years on Sunday for their role in an alleged coup attempt against President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, a lawyer said.

In November, Sudan arrested its former spy chief Salah Gosh and other senior military and security officials after foiling what the government says was a coup plot.

In the first verdict since the arrests, a military court in the capital Khartoum handed down jail terms of between two and five years to nine army officers, said Hisham al-Ja'ali, a lawyer for the defendants.

"They were also dismissed from the armed forces," he told Reuters, adding that another officer had been acquitted of all charges due to a lack of evidence and set free.

Among the convicted is Wad Ibrahim, a senior officer and prominent Islamist in the army, who got a five-year jail term. The trial of Gosh and the accused security officers has yet to start, the lawyer said.

There was no immediate comment from the government, which has refused to provide details of the coup attempt or the investigation.

Bashir has ruled Sudan for 23 years, weathering multiple armed rebellions, years of U.S. trade sanctions, an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court and the loss of most of the country's oil with South Sudan's 2011 secession.

The alleged coup attempt amplified a debate about Bashir's future and about who might one day replace him.

High food prices in Sudan caused by the loss of the oil - and with it the source of foreign currency used to import wheat and other staples - has stoked some protests against Bashir since the South seceded in July 2011.

Some Islamists inside the army and the ruling National Congress Party have also complained that Bashir and other senior leaders have abandoned the Muslim values of the 1989 coup and concentrated decision-making in the hands of a few people.

But Sudan has avoided the sort of mass unrest and political turmoil that unseated rulers in neighboring Egypt and Libya.

(Reporting by Khalid Abdelaziz; Writing by Ulf Laessing in Cairo; Editing by Stephen Powell)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/sudan-officers-jail-terms-alleged-coup-attempt-164918101.html

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Berlin's airport project delays shame Germans

BERLIN (AP) ? Rabbits scamper over quiet runways. Only the call of a crow disturbs the silence around a gleaming, empty terminal that should be humming with the din of thousands of passengers.

Willy Brandt International Airport, named for Germany's famed Cold War leader, was supposed to have been up and running in late 2011, a sign of Berlin's transformation from Cold War confrontation line to world class capital of Europe's economic powerhouse. Instead it has become a symbol of how, even for this technological titan, things can go horribly wrong.

After four publicly announced delays, officials acknowledged the airport won't be ready by the latest target: October 2013. To spare themselves further embarrassment, officials have refused to set a new opening date.

The saga of Berlin's new airport has turned into a national joke and a source of humiliation for a people renowned for being on time. Yet it is just the highest profile in a string of big-ticket projects ? including a concert hall in Hamburg, railway tunnels in Munich and Leipzig, a subway line in Cologne and a Stuttgart underground train station ? that have been plagued by huge cost overruns and delays.

The airport fiasco presents a staggering picture of incompetence.

German media have tracked down a list of tens of thousands of technical problems. Among them: Officials can't even figure out how to turn the lights off. Thousands of light bulbs illuminate the gigantic main terminal and unused parking lots around the clock, a massive energy and cost drain that appears to be the result of a computer system that's so sophisticated it's almost impossible to operate.

Every day, an empty commuter train rolls to the unfinished airport over an eight-kilometer-long (five-mile) stretch to keep the newly-laid tracks from getting rusty, another example of gross inefficiency. Meanwhile, hundreds of freshly planted trees had to be chopped down because a company delivered the wrong type of linden trees; several escalators need to be rebuilt because they were too short; and dozen of tiles were already broken before a single airport passenger ever stepped on them.

The airport itself points to problems with the fire safety system as the immediate cause of the delays: The fire safety system incorporates some 75,000 sprinklers, but computer programming glitches mean it's not clear whether all of these sprinklers would spray enough water during a fire. And the system's underground vent system, designed to suck away smoke, isn't working. Here, again, technology's getting in the way: It's so advanced that technicians can't figure out what's wrong with it.

Critics say that the difficulties with handling today's complex technology have been compounded by hasty, negligent work due to the intense time pressures.

Underlying these problems appears to be a culture of political dishonesty.

"Many politicians want prestigious large-scale projects to be inseparably connected with their names," said Sebastian Panknin, a financial expert with the Taxpayer's Association Germany. "To get these expensive projects started, they artificially calculate down the real costs to get permission from parliament or other committees in charge."

In addition to that, politicians at the city, state and federal levels then often come with extra demands once construction is underway, which leads to expensive modifications. In the case of the Berlin airport, said Pankin, there were about 300 ad hoc change requests by politicians which created an explosion of costs and several delays ? among them a last-minute wish to expand the terminal to include a shopping mall.

"The airport is a classic example of the incompetence of our politicians," said Sven Fandrich, a 28-year-old Berliner who works for an insurance company. "We've seen this happen with many big infrastructure projects in Germany. Nobody feels responsible. The politicians are more concerned about winning the next elections than devoting their service to the people."

Hamburg's concert hall was to have opened by 2010. Instead it's nowhere near complete and costs have more than doubled to 575 million euros. It's now due to open in 2016.

Construction on Cologne's North-South subway line began in 2004. After cost overruns and a collapse that killed two people in 2009, officials say the entire line may not be open until 2019. Costs have soared from 780 million to 1.08 billion euros.

In Leipzig, the city tunnel for commuter trains was expected to open in 2009. Construction is still not finished, and costs have jumped from 572 million to 960 million euros.

Of all the bungled projects, the Berlin airport is the biggest embarrassment.

The initial plan foresaw building a stately airport that would be financed by private investors and replace the city's two Cold War airports ? Tegel in former West Berlin and Schoenefeld in what was the communist east.

After a series of disputes with private investors, the city, state and federal governments eventually took over the airport project. In 2006, costs were estimated at 2 billion euros, but after four delays, the figure spiked to 4.4 billion euros.

Companies like Air Berlin, Germany's second biggest carrier, have been severely affected by the delays and are suing for lost revenues. Small businesses like coffee shops, restaurants, retail stores or bus operators ? who had already hired staff and invested in new stores at the airport ? are facing bankruptcy.

Twitter users asked the mayor to "please open this gate," playing off President Ronald Reagan's famous 1987 appeal to Moscow to "tear down" the Berlin Wall.

And by the time the airport finally opens, it may face a new headache.

Some aviation experts are warning that by its inauguration date, the airport will already be too small to handle the rising number of passengers. The nearly 3.9 million square foot (360,000 square meter) airport complex was designed to handle 27 million passengers. But the existing two city airports handled 25 million passengers last year ? and the city keeps attracting more visitors every year.

"The airport is too expensive, too small and too much behind time," said aviation expert Dieter Faulenbach da Costa, who recently caused a stir when he proposed that the airport ought to be torn down.

In an effort to salvage the mess, Hartmut Mehdorn, the hardnosed former boss of the German railway system with a reputation for turning around failing corporations, was named chief executive of the airport in early March.

"The whole world says: it's not possible at all," Mehdorn said when he took over. "I say: It should be possible.

"I just don't know how yet."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/berlins-airport-project-delays-shame-germans-093036692--finance.html

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Sunday, April 7, 2013

ALMA detects signs of star formation surprisingly close to galaxy's supermassive black hole

Friday, April 5, 2013

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope have discovered signs of star formation perilously close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. If confirmed, this would be the first time that star formation was observed so close to the galactic center.

The center of our galaxy, 27,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, is home to a monstrous black hole with a mass of four million suns. Extending outward from this gravitational behemoth for many light-years is a turbulent region of space that is thought to be wracked by such extreme tidal forces that any star-forming clouds of dust and gas would be stretched thin and shredded long before infant stars could emerge.

Yet against these extreme odds, ALMA spotted telltale jets of material bursting out of what appear to be dense cocoons of gas and dust. These jets, if they were observed in more placid surroundings, would indicate the formation of a young star. The results were accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"People think it is very hard to form stars near a supermassive black hole," said Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University. "This is because the gravity of the black hole produces extreme tidal forces that would stretch and elongate molecular clouds, preventing them from ever accumulating enough mass to trigger star formation. But what we seem to have found are patches of dust and gas that have become so dense that they are able to overcome their inhospitable surroundings."

Yusef-Zadeh and his colleagues speculate that these molecular clouds have become so massive and dense, possibly by colliding together, that they cross the all-important threshold that allows internal gravity to take over, starting a chain of events that inexorably leads to the birth of a new star. As this process evolves, material in these clouds clumps together and collapses into an ever denser mass that begins to rotate faster and faster. This rapid rotation, possibly coupled with the star's magnetic field, accelerates some of the material and shoots it out into space along the nascent star's axis of rotation. The astronomers were able to detect these characteristic jets of material by tracing the presence of the molecule silicon monoxide (SiO), which is relatively abundant in molecular clouds. When excited during star formation, SiO emits a very specific set of wavelengths of light in the microwave, or millimeter range. This is precisely the window of light that ALMA was designed to study.

"SiO is an excellent tracer of molecular outflows," said Yusef-Zadeh. "What we see in these images from ALMA are outflows that appear very much like what we see in star-forming regions elsewhere in galaxy. So the environments may be very different, but once you get the right conditions, collapse takes place and you're able to create what we would observe to be run-of-the-mill massive or intermediate mass stars."

For more than a decade, astronomers have puzzled over the origin of stars seen whipping around the black hole that lurks at the center of our galaxy. These massive, young stars (less than 10 million years old) are rocketing through an area of space where it was thought they had no business being. Astronomers believe that they either formed elsewhere under more placid conditions and migrated inward or they somehow overcame their turbulent childhoods to emerge as relatively normal and well-adjusted stellar objects. "Though this question of stars near the galactic center is still open ended, ALMA will definitely have the power and sensitivity to shed more light on the mystery," said Al Wootten, the North America ALMA Project Scientist with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Charlottesville, Virginia. "These latest studies do suggest that the conditions necessary for star formation could extend much closer to the galactic center than we previously believed."

These results were part of the ALMA Science Verification program. The data were taken with only 12 of ALMA's eventual full complement of 66 antennas. Earlier data from CARMA, the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy, contributed to this research.

###

National Radio Astronomy Observatory: http://www.nrao.edu

Thanks to National Radio Astronomy Observatory for this article.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127615/ALMA_detects_signs_of_star_formation_surprisingly_close_to_galaxy_s_supermassive_black_hole

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90% Caesar Must Die

All Critics (42) | Top Critics (16) | Fresh (38) | Rotten (4)

There's barely a wasted moment in the film, which runs a brisk 76 minutes and contains no female roles.

There's an intensity and emotional accuracy to the performances that's just stunning, particularly Striano's Brutus, as he longs for death and release.

It's an arresting, playful and moving film ...

Prison theatricals are nothing new in the movies, but Caesar Must Die, a quasi-documentary featuring hardened convicts acting out Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, is in a class by itself.

Ranks among the most involving adaptations of Shakespeare ever put on screen ...

What works best is what's readily accessible, the startling power of performers who understand the drama all too well.

Destined to lose to years in prison, the actors seem to take pride in their association with something as seemingly immortal as Shakespeare's words.

As they find issues and themes they can relate to, the action is never remotely static despite the frequent nature of the close-ups and the plastic sword.

The problem with the film, which somewhat inexplicably won the Golden Bear at Berlin last year, is that it scarcely transcends the basic novelty of its premise.

The juxtaposition of Shakespearean text and prison cell life is a particularly poignant one.

It is difficult to understand exactly where documentary ends and fiction begins, but the finale, again in colour, of the triumphant first night of the production can't fail to move.

It's never anything less than interesting, though I felt it didn't quite fulfil its potential, and the repetition of material at the beginning and end is disconcerting.

It is uncanny how Italy's film-makers keep failing to nail, or effectively to satirise, their country's strident political shortcomings.

Deeply felt melancholy lingers long after the credits roll.

Delivers a compelling and considered take on immemorial themes.

[It] has plenty of wit and punch, although compared to the best of the medium - Man On Wire, for instance - it sometimes comes off as guileless and clunky.

[An] inventive, urgent and humane prison drama, in which real-life Mafia and Camorra prisoners act in a version of Julius Caesar.

If you're looking for an adventurous thought-provoking film, "Caesar Must Die" more than fits the bill.

In just 76 minutes, the Taviani brothers treat us to a deeply affecting adaptation of this ancient play, embedded with even deeper meaning on account of its unconventional stars.

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/caesar_must_die_2012/

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