Mystery of Giant Ice Circles Resolved

Strange circles have once again appeared in the frozen surface of Lake Baikal in Siberia, as spotted by astronauts aboard the International Space Station this April. News reports described the ice rings as a puzzling phenomenon.
But experts say they can explain the mystery, and it's not aliens - methane gas rising from the lake floor represents the likely culprit.
Methane emissions can create a rising mass of warm water that begins swirling in a circular pattern because of the Coriolis force, or the phenomenon caused by the Earth's rotation that also helps create cyclones.
"Once the water mass reaches the underside of the ice on the surface of the lake, the warm water melts the ice in a ring shape," said Marianne Moore, a marine ecologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts who has spent much time studying Lake Baikal with Russian researchers. The lake is the largest (by volume) and deepest fresh water lake on Earth.
The latest ring patterns included a circle of thin ice with a diameter of 2.7 miles (4.4 km), although the circular patch was becoming a hole of open water. Astronauts spotted similar ice circles in both 1985 and 1994, and satellites have also made sightings over the past years.
This phenomenon is nothing new to the Russian government, which has documented circle sightings on an official Ministry of Natural Resources Web site.
"Interestingly, the government is also warning people that abnormally high emissions of methane may occur in these areas in the summer and fall, posing risks for ships," Moore told LiveScience.
The Russian Ministry of Natural Resources points out that random emissions of natural gas have probably always occurred in Lake Baikal. And such emissions would have created ice rings every few years.
"But, because of the huge size, it is practically impossible to see a ring standing on the ice or even from a mountain," the Ministry Web site notes. The Russian government has ordered daily space monitoring of the Lake Baikal area in recent years, which prompted many of the satellite sightings.
Tectonic activity deep in the Earth may be the trigger for such methane gas release, according to the Russian government.
That could have major consequences for Lake Baikal's rich array of plants and animals, Moore cautioned - especially in combination with a warming climate. Both could lead to spring ice disappearing more rapidly from Lake Baikal, which can typically hold onto an ice cover through June.
"Unlike other lakes in the world, spring ice is essential for the reproduction of the lake's top predator (the Baikal seal) and the dominant plants (under-ice phytoplankton) at the bottom of the food web," Moore said. "Without spring ice, the food web of this lake will be disrupted substantially."

Mahatma Gandhi

"The devotion of such titans of spirit as Lenin to an Ideal must bear fruit. The nobility of his selflessness will be an example through centuries to come, and his Ideal will reach perfection."

Mao Zedong

"We must have faith in the masses and we must have faith in the Party. These are two cardinal principles. If we doubt these principles, we shall accomplish nothing."

Che Guevara

“Struggles of masses and ideas. An epic that will be carried forward by our peoples, mistreated and scorned by imperialism; our people, unreckoned with until today, who are now beginning to shake off their slumber. Imperialism considered us a weak and submissive flock; and now it begins to be terrified of that flock...”

Karl Marx

"Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!"

Hélder Câmara

"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist."

Confidential Nuclear Sites

WASHINGTON – The government accidentally posted on the Internet a list of government and civilian nuclear facilities and their activities in the United States, but U.S. officials said Wednesday the posting included no information that compromised national security.
However, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, questioned about the disclosure at a House hearing, expressed concern with respect to a uranium storage facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Y-12 facility in Tennessee. The facility holds large quantities of highly enriched uranium, which if obtained can be used to fashion a nuclear weapon.
"That's of great concern," said Chu, referring to the Y-12 site. "We will be looking hard and making sure physical security of those sites (at Y12) is sufficient to prevent eco-terrorists and others getting hold of that material."
The 266-page document was published on May 6 as a transmission from President Barack Obama to Congress. According to the document, the list was required by law and will be provided to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Some of the pages are marked "highly confidential safeguards sensitive."
Chu said he had no details as to how the document was released, beyond that it involved the government printing office. "Someone made a mistake," said Chu, appearing before a House Appropriations subcommittee .
Damien LaVera, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, said the document had been reviewed by a number of U.S. agencies and that disclosure of the information did not jeopardize national security. He said the document is part of an agreement on nuclear material inspection under the IAEA's nuclear nonproliferation effort.
"While we would have preferred it not be released, the Departments of Energy, Defense, and Commerce and the NRC all thoroughly reviewed it to ensure that no information of direct national security significance would be compromised," LaVera said in a statement.
An Energy Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the situation publicly, said none of the sites on the list are directly part of the government's nuclear weapons infrastructure.
Included in the report, however, are details on a storage facility for highly enriched uranium at the Y-12 complex at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and some sites at the Energy Department's Hanford nuclear site in Washington state, this official acknowledged.
Beth Hayden, a spokeswoman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said the agency reviewed the document as it relates to civilian facilities with NRC licenses and "we are confident that information of direct national security significance was not compromised."
The NRC has jurisdiction over commercial nuclear power plants and civilian uranium processing and storage facilities.
The publication of the list was first reported in an online secrecy newsletter Monday. The document had been posted on the Government Printing Office Web site, but has since been removed from that site.
In a statement, the Government Printing Office said Wednesday: "Upon being informed about potential sensitive nature of the attachment in this document, the Public Printer of the United States removed it from GPO's Web site pending further review. After consulting with the White House and Congress, it was determined that the document, including sensitive attachment, should be permanently removed from the Web site."
The GPO said it processes and produces approximately 160 House documents during the two-year congressional cycle, and the list was received by the agency in the normal process and produced under routine operating procedures.
The document includes both government and civilian nuclear facilities, all of which have various levels of security, including details and location of nation's 103 commercial nuclear power reactors, information readily available from various sources.
The document details the location of the nuclear sites and what is being done there.
For instance, there are nuclear reactors at the Westinghouse Electric Company in Pittsburgh, Pa. This facility is currently working on research into what happens when there are accidents with the nuclear reactors. The project started in 2006 and is expected to end in 2012, according to the document.
There are "zero" national security implications to the publication of this document, said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy. Aftergood found the document on the GPO Web site and highlighted it in his online bulletin.
"I regret that some people are painting it as a roadmap for terrorists because that's not what it is," Aftergood said.
"This is not a disclosure of sensitive nuclear technologies or of facility security procedures. It is simply a listing of the numerous nuclear research sites and the programs that are under way," Aftergood said. "And so it poses no security threat whatsoever."

Obama, Can he Win Muslim Hearts and Minds?

The scene: a packed auditorium at a major Cairo university. The speaker: a leader in the U.S. government, with a compelling personal story. The message: American foreign policy is "idealistic." The world should embrace the "challenge of listening," while seeking "a new standard of justice for our time." The impact: not much.
On June 20, 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice delivered an ode to liberty, democracy and a bright future in U.S.-Arab cooperation to a group of students in Cairo. As an effort to sell Arabs on American foreign policy, it was a measurable failure: three years later, a piddling 6% of Egyptians told Gallup pollsters that they approved of the job performance of U.S. leaders.
Now, President Barack Obama is set to attempt a makeover. He will appear at a different Cairo university on Thursday to deliver a speech to the entire Muslim world. Not unlike Condi Rice, Obama is expected to offer an idealistic vision of the future, proclaiming a common purpose as allies who can celebrate their differences and embrace their similarities. But Obama's team hopes to succeed where Rice failed, in changing the deteriorating dynamic between the U.S. and the Muslim world. (See pictures of Islam's soft revolution.)
In appealing to the Muslim world, Obama starts with an advantage over Rice: his biography, which ranges from his international family, which included Muslim members, to his opposition to the Iraq War. As early as April 2007, candidate Obama had ventured that his unique story "allows me to say things to them that other Presidents might not be able to say."
Even before he speaks, Obama has registered considerably higher approval ratings in Muslim countries than his predecessors. A recent Gallup poll found 1 in 4 Egyptians now approves of the U.S. leadership. Governments in the Arab world have welcomed the new tone adopted by Obama in his early outreach efforts. "They are discussing issues, showing their concerns, but they also listen," Egypt's Foreign Minister Ahmed Ali Aboul Gheit said of Obama's team during a recent visit to Washington. "I think they are very much different from the Bush Administration." Last month, Jordan's King Abdullah II enthused on Meet the Press, "In the Middle East, this President provides hope ... There's a collective hope that there is a new America."
When it comes to policy, however, Obama's message becomes a tougher sell. He may have sought to distinguish his Administration from its predecessor on issues ranging from treatment of detainees to an exit date in Iraq and a renewed push for Israeli-Palestinian peace, including a tougher line against Israel's expansion of West Bank settlements. But many of the policies that most aggrieve the Muslim world remain intact, and any changes will be slow in coming. Obama arrives in Cairo as the commander of a military whose deployment in Iraq continues, while its engagement in Afghanistan is steadily growing. Civilian death from U.S. air strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan continue to be a problem, while the situation in the Palestinian territories has deteriorated over the past year.
No matter how well liked Obama is personally, substantial differences over a raft of U.S. policies will not be easily papered over. "Our policies are a reflection of our interests and our alliances and while they may change moderately from administration to administration, the underlying interests are simply not allied with the policies that many Muslims around the world would like to see the United States pursue," explained Jon Alterman, a former State Department adviser, at a recent forum in Washington. "We're going to have to agree to disagree, and that's the first task for the President - to frame U.S. policy in a way that takes some of the passion out of the widespread hostility for the United States."
Alterman's advice dovetails with Obama's diplomatic approach on previous trips to Latin America and Europe, where rather than try to paper over differences, he focused on changing the tone of the discussion. "Where there is resistance to a certain set of policies that we are pursuing, that resistance may turn out just to be based on old preconceptions or ideological dogmas that, when they're cleared away, it turns out that we can actually solve a problem," Obama said in Trinidad.
Obama appears to believe that many of the world's most intractable problems can be alleviated by better communication and understanding. Similar themes are likely to be echoed in his Cairo speech: a call for dialogue and understanding that flows both ways, and which the Bush Administration, with its tin-eared visions of global transformation, sorely lacked. When Rice spoke in Egypt in 2005, she cast the democratic project as an American success story that would soon spread through the Arab world. "The day is coming when the promise of a fully free and democratic world, once thought impossible, will also seem inevitable," Rice promised the students.
Rice's historical prescription fell mostly on deaf ears. When Obama stands before his own crowd of Egyptian students, he is likely to avoid her mistakes, and instead emphasize the need for a respectful conversation.

Putin, the new star columnist

MOSCOW (AFP) – It looks like a standard weekly magazine column, written in down-to-earth language, dispensing folksy advice and with the intriguing title "Why is it hard to fire a person?"
But there is something different about the new star columnist for the Russian magazine Russky Pioner (Russian Pioneer) -- it's none other than strongman Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
After showing off his skills as a fighter pilot, half-naked fly fisherman, painter and even singer, Putin can now add magazine pundit to a growing and surprisingly diverse CV.
The piece for the trendy magazine, his first ever column for a Russian media outlet, will be published Friday. It is not clear whether it will be part of a regular series.
Choosing a hot topic as Russia enters its first recession in a decade and nearly eight million people in the country are without jobs, Putin cautioned management across the country against ill-considered decisions to fire people.
Managers of all levels, he added, should never avoid responsibility.
"One can never run away from the solution of a problem, bask in ignorance and think that God has fallen asleep on you," he wrote.
The column -- an advance copy of which was released to AFP -- also provided clues as to Putin's often controversial decisions to keep notorious officials in their jobs despite public discontent.
"I am deeply convinced that constant shuffles will not improve things," he said. "I distinctly understand that others who come in place of those fired will be like their predecessors.
"I can honestly say, for example, that had I not interfered in certain situations when I worked as president there would not have been a government in Russia a long time ago," Putin wrote.
Resorting to his trademark earthy style, Putin said he was prepared to forgive officials for mistakes, even if they "snivelled" or "burst in tears."
The only thing he was not ready to take was 'no' for an answer, he said. "There should be no 'impossible'. If 'impossible' than goodbye for sure," he said.
He also gave a slightly chilling account of what to do if the worst comes to the worst and a manager is forced to lay-off staff.
"You need to do this, above all, correctly. As for myself, in contrast to the former, Soviet leaders, I always do this personally.
"Before, people would find out they had problems from the television. I usually call the person into the office and look him right in the eye."
Putin said he then confronts the unfortunate official with the complaint about their work and tells them "that if it does not correspond to reality you can dispute it."
Despite his tough-guy image, Putin said he always took time to return people's calls and remembered to congratulate people on their birthdays.
"That's just my style of work with people," he said. "I know that calling on a birthday when a person is within his family circle and congratulating him means leaving a trace on his soul."
He said that people had expressed surprise that he could remember that a certain regional governor was celebrating a birthday on a given day.
"But I can't not know about it. This information has been sitting on my table since the morning," Putin said.
Andrei Kolesnikov, editor of Russky Pioner and one of Russia's most prominent journalists, said he wasn't sure himself how he tempted Putin to pen the column.
"I myself don't know how I pulled this off, it was my idea as the editor-in-chief of this magazine, I believe that any editor-in-chief dreams of publishing such a columnist on his pages at least once in a lifetime," Kolesnikov said.
Speaking on Ekho of Moscow radio this week, Kolesnikov added that he "of course" didn't edit the column and Putin would be paid for it in accordance with law.

Sonia Sotomayor

Soromayor as a child (on the left)

Facts on Sonia Sotomayor

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is sure to face some tough questions when she undergoes confirmation hearings later this summer. To prepare, she may want to look at what Yahoo! searchers are interested in. Folks are seeking the scoop on her background, biography, and stance on key issues. Here's a quick rundown on a woman who is sure to be one of the top news stories for months to come.
Ambition: From Nancy to PerryAs a child, Ms. Sotomayor loved Nancy Drew mysteries and had aspirations to become a police officer. When she was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, a childhood doctor told her that career wouldn't be possible. So, instead, she focused her considerable energy on law. Watching an episode of "Perry Mason" in which the camera settles on the judge at the end of the show, she realized that the person with the gavel "was the most important player in the room." It's a judgment call that searchers have noticed: For the first time in a long time, lookups on the fictional lawyer are soaring.
Background: Born in the BronxAs soon as the nomination was announced, searches soared on "sotomayor biography" and "sotomayor background." Here's the scoop: She's 54 years old and comes from the Bronx, New York. Her parents came from Puerto Rico, and she grew up in a public housing project. After her father died when she was nine, her mother worked two jobs, and Sonia helped out by looking after her brother. She went on to graduate from Princeton summa cum laude and Yale law school.
Key casesAn article from Politico offers up a nice summary of some of Sotomayor's most important legal decisions. Over her career, she has ruled on topics ranging from abortion to affirmative action to gun control. Still, she isn't a prototypical liberal. Again according to Politico, she "resolved the cases in ways that complicate critics' efforts to peg her as a liberal." Time magazine calls her "moderately liberal." In particular, her decision on an affirmative action-related lawsuit brought on by firefighters has garnered a flurry of attention.
Healthy enough to serve?Though it was never a secret that Sotomayor has type 1 diabetes, her nomination has focused renewed attention on the condition. By all accounts, she has diabetes under control. According to the AP, officials from the White House consulted with Sotomayor's doctors about her health before offering her the position. Though she must continue to carefully monitor her diabetes, she was given the go-ahead.
Family matters: Do they matter?Among the avalanche of searches that came in following the nomination were a significant number of lookups for "sonia sotomayor family" and "is sonia sotomayor married." She was married to Kevin Edward Noonan while still a student at Princeton. The couple divorced in 1983 without children, and she has not remarried.
Will she be confirmed?Anyone who remembers Robert Bork's failed nomination for the Supreme Court knows that just because you're nominated doesn't mean you'll be confirmed. In Sotomayor's case, experts seem to think she won't face much opposition. Why? According to Washington insiders, Republicans will fight the nomination, but they'll have to do so carefully. And, this article concludes, GOP senators "won't likely be able to stop her."

U.S Womens Open

Kerr overcame a bout of lightheadedness at the start and had one of only six rounds under par on the tough Saucon Valley Country Club layout, offsetting four bogeys with five birdies. She stands at 3-under 139.
The focus Friday was back on golf, a marked change at an event that has been overshadowed all week by a dispute between LPGA Tour commissioner Carolyn Bivens and more than a dozen top tour players who signed a letter calling for her resignation.
The LPGA reiterated its statement from earlier in the week. "Out of respect to the USGA and the amazing work that they've done and continue to do in producing and hosting this great event, we will not respond to media reports on internal matters related to the LPGA business," LPGA Tour spokesman David Higdon said in the statement.

Richie Sambora

(born on July 11, 1959), is an American rock guitarist, producer, musician, singer/ songwriter who is the longtime lead guitarist of the popular rock band Bon Jovi. Along with frontman Jon Bon Jovi, he forms the primary songwriting unit of the band. He is also a solo artist, having released two solo albums; Stranger in This Town in 1991, and Undiscovered Soul in 1998.

Born to an Italian father, Adam C. Sambora, and a Polish mother, Joan Sienila, Sambora grew up in Woodbridge, New Jersey. He attended Woodbridge High School there, graduating in 1977. He began playing the guitar at the age of 12 following the death of guitar legend Jimi Hendrix in 1970. From his early days Sambora was strongly influenced by blues and 60s rock 'n' roll. His most important influences were Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Johnny Winter and Jimmy Page and Joe Perry. He was also influenced by Spanish classical music and began a life long love of the Spanish guitar[citation needed].
Sambora played guitar for Joe Cocker and auditioned for Kiss. Bon Jovi added Sambora to replace original lead guitarist Dave Sabo.
Sambora has occasionally taken over as lead vocalist on some Bon Jovi songs, most notably "I'll Be There for You" and "These Days" when played live on the Bounce, Have a Nice Day and Lost Highway tours. He has also performed "Stranger In This Town". One of the live performances of "Stranger In This Town", recorded during the Keep the Faith tour, was released on Bon Jovi's CD single "Dry County" in 1994.

World Population Day

VARANASI: To mark the World Population Day a workshop was organised at the meeting hall of Indian Medical Association (IMA) on Saturday.

IMA observes World Population Day

Addressing the workshop, additional director, health and family welfare, Dr DN Sharma said that India is the largest populated country after China with a population of 126 crore. A population of about 2.26 crore is added every year, he said adding that a country like Australia is added every year to Indian population, and every sixth person in the world is an Indian. Speaking on the occasion, the chief medical officer Dr. RS Verma said that the health department is providing many facilities and service for population control. Though the acceptability of these services is not satisfactory, it is an encouraging trend that the number of families with more than three children is reducing. Presiding over the function, the IMA president Dr PC Sharma said that since the youths are in majority in the country there is a need to educate them about birth control. The function was also addressed by IMA secretary Dr Sanjay Rai, additional CMO Dr RP Tiwari, regional coordinator of UNICEF Dr Sanjeev, and others. On the occasion of World Population Day, similar workshops were also organised at the primary health centre in development blocks.

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