Pakistan fires Advisor who says there was link to Mumbai attack

A former Pakistani ambassador to the US was fired for saying Pakistan had a state link to the Mumbai attacks.

Pakistan on Tuesday forcefully denied a suggestion by India’s prime minister that official Pakistani agencies were involved in November’s attacks in the city of Mumbai and said that leveling such accusations posed “grave risks” to the region.

With this latest exchange of sharp words, tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbors appeared to be increasing anew. In the weeks since the three-day rampage by gunmen in India’s commercial capital, the two sides have made alternately conciliatory and bellicose comments. – lat

The office of Pakistani Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani confirmed Wednesday that National Security Adviser Mahmud Ali Durrani had been fired, but gave no reason for his dismissal.

Earlier in the day, Durrani said the sole surviving suspect in the Mumbai attacks — in which more than 160 people were killed — had ties to Pakistan.

“I think it probably would be true now that for example [Mohammed Ajmal Kasab] had Pakistani connections,” said Durrani. “So one cannot deny there was zero link with Pakistan. How much, who all was involved, that we have to investigate.” … Durrani is a former ambassador to the United States and a former Pakistani soldier. – cnn

… India’s swift finger-pointing in the wake of the onslaught angered and offended many Pakistanis. Many people here do not accept the Indian contention, backed up by U.S. intelligence, that the banned Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Taiba carried out the shootings. – lat

Pakistan, India and Saudi Arabia were the leading buyers of weapons in 2006 while the United States was the topmost supplier of arms to the developing world, a Congressional study has revealed. October 01, 2007 – rediff

Public in India and Pakistan wants peace. Yes, it does after having lived through a turbulent past. But the peace process is always thwarted because the leaders in the two countries, alongwith the leaders in the Western world, seem to have developed a vested interest in fanning insecurities among the large populace, and thus encouraging arms’ race in the Indian subcontinent. Never mind that in the past few years there has been a sea change in threat perspective.

Today Indian government entered into the biggest defence deal with the USA, while the French President has reached India promoting better ‘defence ties’. More here…

Every leader from the powerful countries that comes visiting India and Pakistan (or for that matter any developing country, including the Middle East) has a bagful of arms, nuclear deals, aircraft and naval vessels to sell…Did someone say ‘merchants of death and destruction’…Arms manufacturing and sales, it is said, is big business and the deals provide the biggest kickbacks to the high and mighty…so who would among them object if the going is good!!!

Billions of dollars/rupees that go down the drain building up the huge arsenals could well be utilised for feeding, educating and keeping the teeming masses healthy in these extremely poor countries (where two square meals is a luxury). - pakspectator

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had telephone talks with Pakistani President AsifAli Zardari and Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee, expressing her concerns over tense relations between India and Pakistan, State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid said on Monday. “She has made it part of her conversations to note that tensions are already high, that neither side should be taking actions that increase those tensions,” Duguid said. – xin

Obama Names Chief Performance Officer

via YouTube – Obama Names Chief Performance Officer.

‘Spookfish’ has mirrors for eyes

A Pacific fish uses mirrors as well as lenses to help it see in the murky ocean depths, scientists have revealed.

The brownsnout spookfish has been known for 120 years, but no live specimen had ever been captured. Last year, one was caught off Tonga, by scientists from Tuebingen University, Germany.

Tests confirmed the fish is the first vertebrate known to have developed mirrors to focus light into its eyes, the team reports in Current Biology.

“In nearly 500 million years of vertebrate evolution, and many thousands of vertebrate species living and dead, this is the only one known to have solved the fundamental optical problem faced by all eyes – how to make an image – using a mirror,” said Professor Julian Partridge, of Bristol University, who conducted the tests.

Spookfish is a name often given to Barreleyes – a group of small, odd-looking deep-sea fish species, found in tropical-to-temperate waters of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.

A rare live brownsnout spookfish, Dolichopteryx longipes, was caught last year between New Zealand and Samoa, by Professor Hans-Joachim Wagner, of Tuebingen University.  …

These “diverticular” eyes are unique among all vertebrates in that they use a mirror to make the image.

Prof Partridge said: “Very little light penetrates beneath about 1,000m of water and like many other deep-sea fish, the spookfish is adapted to make the most of what little light there is.

“At these depths it is flashes of bioluminescent light from other animals that the spookfish are largely looking for.

“The diverticular eyes image these flashes, warning the spookfish of other animals that are active, and otherwise unseen, below its vulnerable belly.”

The mirror uses tiny plates, probably of guanine crystals, arranged into a multi-layer stack.

Prof Partridge made up a computer simulation showing that the precise orientation of the plates within the mirror’s curved surface is perfect for focusing reflected light on to the fish’s retina.

He added: “The use of a single mirror has a distinct advantage over a lens in its potential to produce bright, high-contrast images.

“That must give the fish a great advantage in the deep sea, where the ability to spot even the dimmest and briefest of lights can mean the difference between eating and being eaten.” – bbc

I wonder how good these biological mirrors are.

Did Earth’s Twin Cores Spark Plate Tectonics?

It’s a classic image from every youngster’s science textbook: a cutaway image of Earth’s interior. The brown crust is paper-thin; the warm mantle orange, the seething liquid of the outer core yellow, and at the center the core, a ball of solid, red-hot iron.

Now a new theory aims to rewrite it all by proposing the seemingly impossible: Earth has not one but two inner cores.

The idea stems from an ancient, cataclysmic collision that scientists believe occurred when a Mars-sized object hit Earth about 4.45 billion years ago. The young Earth was still so hot that it was mostly molten, and debris flung from the impact is thought to have formed the moon.

Haluk Cetin and Fugen Ozkirim of Murray State University think the core of the Mars-sized object may have been left behind inside Earth, and that it sank down near the original inner core. There the two may still remain, either separate or as conjoined twins, locked in a tight orbit. …

the inner core is a mysterious place. Recently, scientists discovered that it rotates faster than the rest of the planet. And a study last year of how seismic waves propagate through the iron showed that the core is split into two distinct regions….

Cetin and Ozkirim think a dual inner core can explain the rise of plate tectonics, and help explain why the planet remains hotter today than it should be, given its size.

“If this is true, it would change all Earth models as we know them,” Cetin said. “If not, and these two cores coalesced early on, we would have less to say, but it could still be how plate tectonics got started.”

Based on models of Earth’s interior, Cetin thinks the two cores rotate in opposite directions, like the wheels of a pasta maker. Their motion would suck in magma from behind and spit it out in front. If this motion persisted for long enough, it could set up a giant current of circulation that would push plates of crust apart in front, and suck them down into the mantle in back.

Friction generated by the motion would keep the planet hot.

Scientists asked to comment on this hypothesis were extremely skeptical. Some asked not to be quoted, citing insufficient evidence to make a well-reasoned critique of the study, which the authors presented last month at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

“In terms of its volume, and even its mass, the Earth’s inner core is quite small relative to the whole planet, about 1 percent,” Paul Richards of Columbia University said. “I seriously doubt that inner core dynamics could play a significant role in moving the tectonic plates.”

via Did Earth’s Twin Cores Spark Plate Tectonics? : Discovery News.

If opposite rotating twin cores and the early mixing of planets lead to the conditions which generated life on Earth, our planet may be incredibly unique … and then we may indeed be alone in the Universe. Following a thought I had last night regarding the Milky Way eating another galaxy, could the Earth itself be composed of planets from different galaxies?

Imagine some God-Alien smashing galaxies just so to bring far flung elements and conditions together in exactly one place: Earth. Ta dah. Future theories may pull this apart, but I like the special effects movie the idea  creates in my imagination.

Possible Abnormality In Fundamental Building Block Of Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity

An image taken from an animation using Kostelecky’s Standard Model Extenstion to predict how apples might fall differently. (Credit: Indiana University)

Physicists at Indiana University have developed a promising new way to identify a possible abnormality in a fundamental building block of Einstein’s theory of relativity known as “Lorentz invariance.” If confirmed, the abnormality would disprove the basic tenet that the laws of physics remain the same for any two objects traveling at a constant speed or rotated relative to one another.

… “It is surprising and delightful that comparatively large relativity violations could still be awaiting discovery despite a century of precision testing,” said Kostelecky. “Discovering them would be like finding a camel in a haystack instead of a needle.”

If the findings help reveal the first evidence of Lorentz violations, it would prove relativity is not exact. Space-time would not look the same in all directions and there would be measurable relativity violations, however minuscule.

The violations can be understood as preferred directions in empty space-time caused by a mesh-like vacuum of background fields. These would be separate from the entirety of known particles and forces, which are explained by a theory called the Standard Model that includes Einstein’s theory of relativity. …

“No dedicated experiment has yet sought a seasonal variation of the rate of an object’s fall in the Earth’s gravity,” said Kostelecky. “Since Newton’s time over 300 years ago, apples have been assumed to fall at the same rate in the summer and the winter.”

Spotting these minute variances is another matter as the differences in rate of fall would be tiny because gravity is a weak force. The new paper catalogues possible experiments that could detect the effects. Among them are ones studying gravitational properties of matter on the Earth and in space.

The Standard Model Extension predicts that a particle and an antiparticle would interact differently with the background fields, which means matter and antimatter would feel gravity differently. So, an apple and an anti-apple could fall at different rates, too.

“The gravitational properties of antimatter remain largely unexplored,” said Kostelecky. “If an apple and an anti-apple were dropped simultaneously from the leaning Tower of Pisa, nobody knows whether they would hit the ground at the same or different times.” …

via Possible Abnormality In Fundamental Building Block Of Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity.

Thousands of shoes left on Florida highway

State troopers are looking for a charity to take thousands of shoes that were dumped on a Miami expressway, tying up rush hour traffic.

Lt. Pat Santangelo says the Florida Highway Patrol received a call about the shoes this morning.

Santangelo says he’s not sure where the shoes came from. There were no signs of a crash and no one stopped to claim them. He says he hopes someone will take them because he doesn’t want to send them to the dump.

Workers using a front-end loader and a dump truck were able to quickly clear at least one lane by sweeping all the shoes to shoulder, but delays were expected until they could all be removed. – chron

Someone dumped thousands of shoes all over the southbound lanes of Palmetto Expressway. There were a wide variety of shoe types: slippers, sandals, and work boots. The piles of shoes on the highway disrupted traffic for hours. … The shoes will be picked up from the field where they were moved to by Soles4Souls, a nonprofit group in Nashville, TN, which distributes shoes to the needy. The founder of the group, Wayne Elsey, said “We throw nothing away. Right now they’ll probably go to Haiti.” Florida Highway Patrol Lt. Pat Santangelo said “No witnesses have come forward, but whoever is responsible would be charged for the cleanup.” – ac

Police said thousands of work boots, bath slippers, tennis sneakers, beach sandals, even pairs of in-line skates, all inexplicably materialized shortly before 8 a.m. on the busy roadway, disrupting traffic for hours. A private contractor had to be hired to pick up the sea of soles and deposit them at an empty field near the U.S. 441 exit off I-95. – mh

Top 5 theories of origin so far. Have a another?

5) Remains after Goodwill donation truck abducted by aliens
4) Soylent Green is people!
3) Floridian’s reaction to “Jeb as President” news item recently
2) Spillover from White house mail room
1) Russians shoesmacking US from Cuba with big slingshots

Obama Faces Heavy Fire Over Panetta Selection

President-elect Barack Obama said yesterday that he has selected a “top-notch intelligence team” that would provide the “unvarnished” information his administration needs, rather than “what they think the president wants to hear.”

But current and former intelligence officials expressed sharp resentment over Obama’s choice of Leon E. Panetta as CIA director and suggestions that the agency suffers from incompetent leadership and low morale. “People who suggest morale is low don’t have a clue about what’s going on now,” said CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield, citing recent personnel reforms under current Director Michael V. Hayden. …

Several of Panetta’s former White House colleagues also said yesterday that he was appreciative of and engaged in national security issues during the Clinton years.

In a clear reference to harsh interrogation policies, including waterboarding, that were used against CIA terrorism detainees, Obama said his team would be “committed to breaking with some of the past practices and concerns that have, I think, tarnished the image of . . . the intelligence agencies as well as U.S. foreign policy.”

Almost as an afterthought at the end of his remarks, Obama noted that “there are outstanding intelligence professionals in the CIA” and other intelligence agencies, “and I have the utmost regard for the work that they’ve done.”

A widely held view among intelligence officials was that Obama’s team had decided to automatically disqualify any candidate who might have been seen as tainted by association with the controversial interrogation and detention policies of the Bush presidency — essentially anyone who held a management job in the past eight years. Former senior CIA official John O. Brennan, who headed the transition intelligence team, withdrew his name from consideration over concerns that his association with interrogation and rendition policies under President Bush and then-CIA director George J. Tenet would taint Obama.

A number of Tenet-era officials have argued that they were simply carrying out orders that the president and the attorney general, as well as Congress, had approved. Hayden, the outgoing director, defended interrogation policies, including waterboarding, that many have labeled torture, saying they were necessary to break some terrorism suspects. Although he has told Congress that waterboarding has not been used recently, Hayden publicly supported Bush’s decision to retain the option to use “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

But one former senior intelligence official noted that many of the people Panetta will be expected to lead will have participated in the interrogation policy’s enforcement. Obama and Panetta “should think twice about pledges they make now” about the handling of terrorism detainees, another former senior official said, “because they may come back to haunt them in the future if some dire circumstances occur.”

The desire to retain Kappes and Morrell, both of whom held senior positions under Tenet as well as with Hayden, however, indicated that Obama does not intend to clean house beyond the top leadership level.

Obama has said he plans to close the detention facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and that he would “make sure we do not torture.” Feinstein introduced legislation yesterday to do both.

The bill provides for “a legal, effective, and humane system of gathering intelligence and holding suspected terrorists.” It would close Guantanamo and require detainees either to be charged and tried in this country, transferred to an international tribunal or another country or held “in accordance with the law of armed conflict.”

It would also restrict the CIA and other intelligence agencies to 19 interrogation techniques authorized by the Army Field Manual, “creating a clear, single standard across the U.S. government.”

via Obama Faces Heavy Fire Over Panetta Selection – washingtonpost.com.

Picking the CIA’s leadership is one of the most difficult and risky things he will have to do as president if we wants to combat terrorism and lead us in a new direction. Lets hope this strategy of the keeping upper but not uppermost management works.

Co-Chair, Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget
Mr. Panetta is a former U.S. representative from California and during his last two terms was chairman of the House Budget Committee. During the Clinton Administration he served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget in 1993 and White House Chief of Staff from 1994-1996. Currently, he is a professor of politics at Santa Clara University, Distinguished Professor for the California State University, and director of the Panetta Institute for Public Policy. He also co-directs the Leon & Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy and serves on many public policy and organizational boards. – usbudgetwatch

There is something about the nose that I trust. Like that nose would never pour water up another nose, you know? It’s a very sypmathetic nose, a fair nose. Let’s hope. Time will tell.

Troops won’t get Purple Heart for stress disorder

The Purple Heart medal, awarded to service members who have been physically wounded in combat, will not be given for a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, a Pentagon statement said.

The decision, which was made in early November but just made public this week, came after months of deliberations sparked by a question on the topic posed to Defense Secretary Robert Gates during a Pentagon briefing in May.

“[It's] clearly something that needs to be looked at,” Gates said in response to the query. His answer prompted a review by the Defense Department’s Awards Advisory Group, made up of “award experts” in the Pentagon.

After the review, Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness David Chu examined the advisory group’s findings and determined that service members with PTSD alone would not be eligible for the award, according to Pentagon spokeswoman Eileen Lainez. Gates agreed with the decision, Lainez added.

Thousands of service members are at risk for or have been diagnosed with PTSD after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Pentagon statistics. The Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that up to 11 percent of Iraq veterans and 20 percent of Afghanistan veterans have PTSD.

“The Purple Heart recognizes those individuals wounded to a degree that requires treatment by a medical officer, in action with the enemy or as the result of enemy action where the intended effect of a specific enemy action is to kill or injure the service member,” according to a statement released by the Pentagon. …

via Troops won’t get Purple Heart for stress disorder – CNN.com.

Everyone should care a lot more that our soldiers get the proper mental health treatment once they get back so they don’t snap and turn back into the killing machines they were trained to be.

I suspect that witnessing the horrors of war will cause damage in any healthy mind. I still get flashbacks from the car wreck fatality I witnessed as a boy. Really horrible stuff can stick with you a lifetime. Luckily,  memories can be selectively erased, at least in mice. There was a story a while back about a drug (hormone?) and some conditioning they can do with cartoon versions of the soldier’s individual traumatic events. Let’s get that working in humans soon.

Police Puzzled By Strange Lights Over Morris County – wcbstv.com

Strange, red, blinking lights could be seen across Morris County on Monday night, and officials thought they had figured out what caused them. Now, they’re not so sure.

Between 8:30 and 9 p.m., the Hurley family in Whippany captured images of a bizarre object in the sky and contacted WCBSTV.com.

“It was unsettling for sure,” said Cindy Hurley. “It was something you’ve never seen before, and a very strange pattern.”

Eleven-year-old Kristin was the first to spot them, a group of three lights together, and two lights together, seen in the horizon through the trees. “I looked up outside. I was really scared and saw five red lights,” she said.

The family all went out onto their deck to look at the strange sight. Paul Hurley, a pilot who works at Morristown Airport, said they weren’t planes.

“I’ve been in aviation for 20 years and never seen anything like it,” he told CBS 2.

Paul was one of several people who e-mailed WCBSTV.com after witnessing the lights.

“Red lights in the sky over the Morristown-Morris Township area, 5 red lights in a weird pattern over the area,” one viewer wrote.

“The formation of 5 lights were first noticed over Cedar Knolls and then as they approached the Madison/Morris Township border the rear half of the formation slowly faded and appeared to drop from the sky and then the front part of the formation went out one by one,” wrote another.

At 8:28, the Hanover Township police received the first of seven 911 calls.

“It looks like flares attached to balloons,” said a caller.

Paul Hurley, who called the Morristown Airport control tower, says the lights had also been spotted from there, and they caused no interference with flight operations. Between those officials and the Morristown Police, the best guess as to what the lights were: nothing more than a prank, roadside flares attached to helium balloons. Yet, they left rather quickly.

“It like, it took off, very strange,” said Paul.

There’s been no report of any recovered, and police don’t know who released them.

The Federal Aviation Administration tells CBS 2 news, with the exception of laser lights and weather balloons, there is no regulation on releasing balloons or lights into the sky.

via Police Puzzled By Strange Lights Over Morris County – wcbstv.com.

Seriously, it’s almost funny. Someone releases some sky lamps and a town goes nuts. “We never saw nothin’ like it. Grandpa was so scared he ate the dog. “