Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/169731335?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Monday, December 5, 2011
Many Russians dismayed with ruling party (AP)
KALININGRAD, Russia ? In the glitzy central square of what once was regarded as one of Europe's ugliest cities, Marina Timofeyeva was underwhelmed by the changes brought by a decade under Vladimir Putin. "It's all nice if you have money to buy something, but what if you don't?," asked the 29-year-old manager of a boutique.
She hadn't decided who to vote for in Sunday's national elections ? except that it won't be for Putin's United Russia party.
Widespread dismay with United Russia threatens to undermine the party's control of Russia and authorities are clearly nervous, including applying strong pressure on the country's only independent election-monitoring group.
The group, Golos, has complied some 5,300 complaints of election-law violations ahead of the vote. Most are linked to United Russia, the party headed by Putin, who has dominated Russian politics for a dozen years as president and prime minister.
Roughly a third of the complainants ? mostly government employees and students ? say employers and professors are pressuring them to vote for the party.
Golos' leader, Lilya Shibanova, was held at a Moscow airport for 12 hours upon her Friday return from Poland after refusing to give her laptop computer to security officers, said Golos' deputy director Grigory Melkonyants. On Friday, the group was fined the equivalent of $1,000 by a Moscow court for violating a law that prohibits publication of election opinion research for five days before a vote.
The group has come under growing pressure since last Sunday, when Putin accused Western governments of trying to influence the election. Golos is funded by grants from the United States and Europe.
United Russia has received overwhelmingly favorable coverage during the campaign, mostly from Kremlin-controlled national television. But the party is increasingly disliked, seen as representing a corrupt bureaucracy and often called "the party of crooks and thieves."
Independent pollster Levada Center said last week that United Russia will receive 53 percent of the vote, down from the 64 percent it got in the 2007 vote. This would deprive it of the two-thirds majority that has allowed it to amend the constitution.
Putin, who is expected to win a third term as president next year, and the party, had won much of their popularity on the back of Russia's economic revival, driven largely by high prices for oil and natural gas. Kaliningrad was one of the most striking beneficiaries.
The city and the region of the same name, disconnected from the rest of Russia and bordered by Lithuania, Poland and the Baltic Sea, had been a particularly dismal post-Soviet landscape of clumsy concrete buildings and shabby infrastructure. But the city's main square now features two sleek malls and dozens of boutiques whose lights cast a glow on streams of shoppers.
In a country infamous for lousy roads, a new highway connecting the city with the seacoast is a standout marvel. A nuclear plant, a casino center and a stadium for the 2018 World Cup are all under way. Putin promises even more: a new heart disease clinic, support for the local soccer team, kindergarten repairs, a major bridge through the city, and a new convalescent center for children.
Both Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev, apparently aware of discontent in Kaliningrad, have made pre-election trips to the region. But many local residents are unimpressed.
"I'm going to vote for the Communist Party," says Tatyana Zhuravlyova, 29, a boutique manager. United Russia "have done some things, but they did the minimum they could have. As much as they've done, they've stolen in equal numbers."
Anatoly Polyakov, a retired naval officer, said he too would vote for the Communists because of the yawning gap between society's haves and have-nots.
"United Russia is for the super-rich, but Russia has lots of poor people and its middle class is just developing. We need more social justice for the poor," he said.
Only seven parties have been allowed to field candidates for parliament this year ? down from 11 in 2007 ? while the most vocal opposition groups have been denied registration and barred from campaigning.
The Kremlin is determined to see United Russia maintain its majority in parliament. Medvedev and Putin both made final appeals for the party on Friday, warning that a parliament made up of diverse political camps would be incapable of making decisions.
Putin needs the party to do well in the parliamentary election to pave the way for his return to the presidency in a vote now three months away.
It remains unclear whether the pressure on Golos may impede its monitors from working on Sunday. The Organization for Security and Cooperation Europe has sent a monitoring mission. A preliminary report from the mission noted pointedly that "Most parties have expressed a lack of trust in the fairness of the electoral process."
The Helsinki Commission, a federal board that advises on U.S. policy about security, human rights and other issues involving Europe, criticized the court ruling to fine Golos in a statement released late Friday.
"The campaign against Golos provides additional reason for doubt about the legitimacy of the parliamentary election that will take place in Russia on Sunday and the broader state of democracy there," it said.
_____
Associated Press writers Mansur Mirovalev and Jim Heintz in Moscow contributed to this story.
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Sunday, December 4, 2011
Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish (ContributorNetwork)
COMMENTARY | Herman Cain addressed the public today about the future of his candidacy. I watched the live broadcast online from ABC. He withdrew from the campaign, saying he was "suspending" it. His speech was laden with buzzwords and cliches about believing in America, God, country and "we the people" in particular.
He called running for president a "dirty, dirty game." As someone alleged to prefer harassing and having affairs with dirty, dirty girls Cain might be in position to know. Throughout his speech he kept to his usual strategy regarding the dirty, dirty allegations against him of sexual misconduct: deny, deny, deny. What else can we expect from a man of the same party as Richard "I am not a crook" Nixon?
Cain broke down America into three groups: The media, politicians and "we the people." During his closing he repeatedly asked people to "look inside to see what they can do." If he came any closer to saying, "Ask not what your country can do for you" he'd have to become a Democrat and change his name to Kennedy.
He says he is now embarking on Plan B, centered around policies on a website called thecainsolutions.com, which has a placeholder page at the time of this writing. He said foreign policy should revolve around strength and clarity. He says the U.S. needs energy independence. Cain claimed to be "disappointed that things have come to this point."
Cain asserted Washington needs to change and that while he wanted to be the man to change it from the inside that he will work to change it from the outside. His idea of change still appears to be centered around the 999 plan. If that strategy were any more slanted toward the rich Cain could ski down it with helpless working-class people strapped to his feet.
Cain failed to take the honorable path. He should have apologized for his moral shortcomings and for shaming his party, and then stepped down gracefully. Instead he remains a curse on his party because he announced on camera that he plans to endorse another candidate soon.
If I were running as a Republican I would beg him not to endorse me. Who needs a recommendation from a perceived harassing, lying, and adulterous plutocrat?
I wish we could say a final goodbye to Herman Cain but, like a bad rash, he'll be back.
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Saturday, December 3, 2011
Astronomers find 18 new planets: Discovery is the largest collection of confirmed planets around stars more massive than the sun
ScienceDaily (Dec. 2, 2011) ? Discoveries of new planets just keep coming and coming. Take, for instance, the 18 recently found by a team of astronomers led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
"It's the largest single announcement of planets in orbit around stars more massive than the sun, aside from the discoveries made by the Kepler mission," says John Johnson, assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech and the first author on the team's paper, which was published in the December issue of The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. The Kepler mission is a space telescope that has so far identified more than 1,200 possible planets, though the majority of those have not yet been confirmed.
Using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii -- with follow-up observations using the McDonald and Fairborn Observatories in Texas and Arizona, respectively -- the researchers surveyed about 300 stars. They focused on those dubbed "retired" A-type stars that are more than one and a half times more massive than the sun. These stars are just past the main stage of their life -- hence, "retired" -- and are now puffing up into what's called a subgiant star.
To look for planets, the astronomers searched for stars of this type that wobble, which could be caused by the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet. By searching the wobbly stars' spectra for Doppler shifts -- the lengthening and contracting of wavelengths due to motion away from and toward the observer -- the team found 18 planets with masses similar to Jupiter's.
This new bounty marks a 50 percent increase in the number of known planets orbiting massive stars and, according to Johnson, provides an invaluable population of planetary systems for understanding how planets -- and our own solar system -- might form. The researchers say that the findings also lend further support to the theory that planets grow from seed particles that accumulate gas and dust in a disk surrounding a newborn star.
According to this theory, tiny particles start to clump together, eventually snowballing into a planet. If this is the true sequence of events, the characteristics of the resulting planetary system -- such as the number and size of the planets, or their orbital shapes -- will depend on the mass of the star. For instance, a more massive star would mean a bigger disk, which in turn would mean more material to produce a greater number of giant planets.
In another theory, planets form when large amounts of gas and dust in the disk spontaneously collapse into big, dense clumps that then become planets. But in this picture, it turns out that the mass of the star doesn't affect the kinds of planets that are produced.
So far, as the number of discovered planets has grown, astronomers are finding that stellar mass does seem to be important in determining the prevalence of giant planets. The newly discovered planets further support this pattern -- and are therefore consistent with the first theory, the one stating that planets are born from seed particles.
"It's nice to see all these converging lines of evidence pointing toward one class of formation mechanisms," Johnson says.
There's another interesting twist, he adds: "Not only do we find Jupiter-like planets more frequently around massive stars, but we find them in wider orbits." If you took a sample of 18 planets around sunlike stars, he explains, half of them would orbit close to their stars. But in the cases of the new planets, all are farther away, at least 0.7 astronomical units from their stars. (One astronomical unit, or AU, is the distance from Earth to the sun.)
In systems with sunlike stars, gas giants like Jupiter acquire close orbits when they migrate toward their stars. According to theories of planet formation, gas giants could only have formed far from their stars, where it's cold enough for their constituent gases and ices to exist. So for gas giants to orbit nearer to their stars, certain gravitational interactions have to take place to pull these planets in. Then, some other mechanism -- perhaps the star's magnetic field -- has to kick in to stop them from spiraling into a fiery death.
The question, Johnson says, is why this doesn't seem to happen with so-called hot Jupiters orbiting massive stars, and whether that dearth is due to nature or nurture. In the nature explanation, Jupiter-like planets that orbit massive stars just wouldn't ever migrate inward. In the nurture interpretation, the planets would move in, but there would be nothing to prevent them from plunging into their stars. Or perhaps the stars evolve and swell up, consuming their planets. Which is the case? According to Johnson, subgiants like the A stars they were looking at in this paper simply don't expand enough to gobble up hot Jupiters. So unless A stars have some unique characteristic that would prevent them from stopping migrating planets -- such as a lack of a magnetic field early in their lives -- it looks like the nature explanation is the more plausible one.
The new batch of planets have yet another interesting pattern: their orbits are mainly circular, while planets around sunlike stars span a wide range of circular to elliptical paths. Johnson says he's now trying to find an explanation.
For Johnson, these discoveries have been a long time coming. This latest find, for instance, comes from an astronomical survey that he started while a graduate student; because these planets have wide orbits, they can take a couple of years to make a single revolution, meaning that it can also take quite a few years before their stars' periodic wobbles become apparent to an observer. Now, the discoveries are finally coming in. "I liken it to a garden -- you plant the seeds and put a lot of work into it," he says. "Then, a decade in, your garden is big and flourishing. That's where I am right now. My garden is full of these big, bright, juicy tomatoes -- these Jupiter-sized planets."
The other authors on the The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series paper, "Retired A stars and their companions VII. Eighteen new Jovian planets," include former Caltech undergraduate Christian Clanton, who graduated in 2010; Caltech postdoctoral scholar Justin Crepp; and nine others from the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii; the University of California, Berkeley; the Center of Excellence in Information Systems at Tennessee State University; the McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas, Austin; and the Pennsylvania State University. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by California Institute of Technology. The original article was written by Marcus Woo.
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Journal Reference:
- John Asher Johnson, Christian Clanton, Andrew W. Howard, Brendan P. Bowler, Gregory W. Henry, Geoffrey W. Marcy, Justin R. Crepp, Michael Endl, William D. Cochran, Phillip J. MacQueen, Jason T. Wright, Howard Isaacson. Retired A Stars and Their Companions. VII. 18 New Jovian Planets. The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, 2011; 197 (2): 26 DOI: 10.1088/0067-0049/197/2/26
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111202155801.htm
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Friday, December 2, 2011
Senate clears way for passage of big defense bill (AP)
WASHINGTON ? Senate Democrats and Republicans are pushing for harsher sanctions against Iran's Central Bank as fears of Tehran developing a nuclear weapon outweigh concerns that any step would drive up oil prices and hit Americans at the gas pump.
The Senate on Wednesday weighed whether to add the sanctions measure to a massive, $662 billion defense bill that moved closer to passage. A vote on the sanctions was likely Thursday.
On Wednesday, lawmakers voted 88-12 to limit debate on the legislation, and looked to wrap up the bill by week's end.
The legislation would authorize funds for military personnel, weapons systems, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and national security programs in the Energy Department. The bill is $27 billion less than what President Barack Obama requested for the budget year beginning Oct. 1 and $43 billion less than what Congress provided to the Pentagon this year.
Tougher sanctions against Iran have widespread support in Congress, reflecting concerns not only for U.S. national security but ally Israel's as well. Last week, the Obama administration announced a new set of penalties against Iran, including identifying for the first time Iran's entire banking sector as a "primary money laundering concern." This requires increased monitoring by U.S. banks to ensure that they and their foreign affiliates avoid dealing with Iranian financial institutions.
But lawmakers pressed ahead with even tougher penalties despite reservations by the administration.
Sens. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and Mark Kirk, R-Ill., offered an amendment to the defense bill that would target foreign financial institutions that do business with the Central Bank of Iran, barring them from opening or maintaining correspondent operations in the United States. It would apply to foreign central banks only for transactions that involve the sale or purchase of petroleum or petroleum products.
The sanctions on petroleum would only apply if the president determines there is a sufficient alternative supply and if the country with jurisdiction over the financial institution has not significantly reduced its purchases of Iranian oil.
Lawmakers cited the recent International Atomic Energy Agency report that Iran is suspected of clandestine work that is "specific to nuclear weapons," its alleged role in the plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in the United States and the attack on the British Embassy in Tehran.
"One of the greatest threats to our nation and our ally Israel is Iran," Menendez said, insisting that the United States must take steps to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
"We cannot, we must not and we will not let that happen," Menendez said, "but the clock is ticking."
Kirk said the amendment was clear: "If you do business with the Central Bank of Iran, you cannot do business with the United States."
The administration harbors concerns about the enforcement of the measure, which has more than 80 backers in the Senate. Denis McDonough, White House deputy national security adviser, held a closed-door Capitol Hill meeting with several senators on Tuesday, including Kirk and Menendez.
After the session, Kirk sought to allay concerns about rising gasoline prices.
"I've had detailed conversations with Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, who described a great willingness by Saudi Arabia to increase (oil) production," Kirk told reporters.
A vote on the amendment was expected on Thursday.
The Senate approved dozens of amendments by voice vote on Wednesday. Among them:
_Linking funds for the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Fund to a requirement that the Obama administration certify to Congress that Pakistan is trying to counter improvised explosive devices.
_Calling on the president to devise a plan, with input from the military and NATO, for accelerating the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.
_Seeking an urgent intelligence assessment of Libya's stockpile of about 20,000 portable anti-aircraft missiles and the threat they pose to the United States and its allies.
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U.S. House passes Cravaack bill on military travel (Star Tribune)
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