Glen Norah ‘A’ house attacked
By Roselyne Sachiti
A HOUSE at Glen Norah Police Camp was petrol bombed early yesterday morning by suspected MDC supporters in yet another round of unprovoked attacks on the law enforcement agents.
Although no one was injured in the incident, in which three petrol bombs and a teargas canister were thrown at house number 2962, occupants said they were terrified.
Police have since picked up one person for questioning in connection with the bombing.
The house is situated on one of the two blocks of houses belonging to the Zimbabwe Republic Police built opposite the main camp at Glen Norah Police Station.
An armed policeman was guarding the house when The Sunday Mail visited the area yesterday.
One window was shattered while a curtain and other items were burnt. Soot could be seen on the walls.
Broken pieces of alcohol bottles that included Breakers, Vodka and Mainstay, were strewn near the window while a piece of the teargas canister was picked up in a flower garden on the adjacent house.
Police spokesperson Superintendent Andrew Phiri yesterday confirmed the incident and said the house, which is shared by two policemen and their families, was bombed at around 12.45 in the morning.
He said three family members were sleeping in the room that was attacked, but they were all evacuated to safety.
The police spokesperson said: "We have picked up one person for questioning and he is assisting us with investigations.
"Such bombings show that thugs and people bent on causing mayhem in the country are at work. As police, we will not let people engage in acts of terrorism."
Superintendent Phiri said police would do all they could to make sure that people involved in the bombing were brought to book.
He said the continued bail refusal for the ringleaders arrested in connection with earlier petrol bombings has resulted in the cases of petrol bombing becoming few and far between. He said the incident becomes the 11th terror bomb in a month.
Over the past month, the nation witnessed organised and sporadic petrol bombings targeting State institutions, public transport, supermarkets, houses, police officers and security forces.
In the weeks between March 12 and 25, three police stations in Marimba, Sakubva and Gweru have been petrol bombed resulting in serious injury to two female constables and damage to property.
Unit "N" Police Camp in Chitungwiza was petrol bombed on March 12 while a house belonging to the Zanu-PF councillor for Ward 18, Seke, was also petrol bombed.
Nehanda Police Station in Gweru was petrol bombed on March 13 while Marimba Police Station was attacked on March 14.
On March 23 Sakubva Police Station in Mutare was petrol bombed while Muchada Supermarket, trading as Lucky 7, at Pfukwa Shopping Centre in Warren Park D, was also petrol bombed on March 24, leaving a trail of destruction.
Several windows were shattered while shelving material was reduced to ashes.
A Bulawayo-bound National Railways of Zimbabwe train was petrol bombed in Mufakose injuring five people while 750 others escaped unhurt on March 24. Zanu-PF Mbare district offices were petrol bombed on March 27.
Gumba’s Wholesalers in downtown Harare, belonging to Chitungwiza businessman and Zanu-PF MP for Zengeza, Cde Christopher Chigumba, was attacked early this month and goods worth millions of dollars were destroyed.
Defence Minister Cde Sydney Sekeramayi recently said security forces would not fold their arms while elements of negation eroded the gains of independence and threatened the country’s sovereignty through complicity with Western countries. He warned those indulging in terrorist acts that the police and other security arms had the constitutional mandate and capability to maintain peace and order in the country.
Braindead Russian hunters kill one of the last Amur Leopards in the wild
Yet another unintelligent hunter...
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Hunters in Russia's Far East have shot and killed one of the last seven surviving female Amur leopards living in the wild, WWF said on Monday, driving the species even closer to extinction.
Last week environmentalists said there were only between 25 and 34 Amur leopards -- described as one of the most graceful cats in the world -- still living in the wild.
At least 100 are needed to guarantee the species' survival which depends upon female leopards breeding. There are more male leopards in the wild than female because cats tend to breed males when under stress, WWF said.
"Leopard murder can only be provoked by cowardice or stupidity, in this case most likely by both," Pavel Fomenko, WWF's biodiversity coordinator in Russia's Far East said in a statement.
A hunter shot the leopard through the tail bone. It tumbled over and was then beaten over the head with a heavy object, WWF said. Amur leopards have not been know to attack humans.
Environmentalists have urged the Russian government to introduce tighter controls on its national parks in the Far East to crack down on leopard hunting.
They also want more done to protect the animal's natural environment and food supply, which they say is being destroyed by human development.
A local wildlife watchdog received an anonymous tip-off that a leopard had been killed. State wildlife officers found the dead animal after a day of searching. The leopard died on either April 15 or April 16, WWF said.
http://news.yahoo.com
potentially habitable planet found
source- http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070425/...bitable_planet
WASHINGTON - For the first time astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is potentially habitable, with Earth-like temperatures, a find researchers described Tuesday as a big step in the search for "life in the universe."
The planet is just the right size, might have water in liquid form, and in galactic terms is relatively nearby at 120 trillion miles away. But the star it closely orbits, known as a "red dwarf," is much smaller, dimmer and cooler than our sun.
There's still a lot that is unknown about the new planet, which could be deemed inhospitable to life once more is known about it. And it's worth noting that scientists' requirements for habitability count Mars in that category: a size relatively similar to Earth's with temperatures that would permit liquid water. However, this is the first outside our solar system that meets those standards.
"It's a significant step on the way to finding possible life in the universe," said University of Geneva astronomer Michel Mayor, one of 11 European scientists on the team that found the planet. "It's a nice discovery. We still have a lot of questions."
The results of the discovery have not been published but have been submitted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Alan Boss, who works at the Carnegie Institution of Washington where a U.S. team of astronomers competed in the hunt for an Earth-like planet, called it "a major milestone in this business."
The planet was discovered by the European Southern Observatory's telescope in La Silla, Chile, which has a special instrument that splits light to find wobbles in different wave lengths. Those wobbles can reveal the existence of other worlds.
What they revealed is a planet circling the red dwarf star, Gliese 581. Red dwarfs are low-energy, tiny stars that give off dim red light and last longer than stars like our sun. Until a few years ago, astronomers didn't consider these stars as possible hosts of planets that might sustain life.
The discovery of the new planet, named 581 c, is sure to fuel studies of planets circling similar dim stars. About 80 percent of the stars near Earth are red dwarfs.
The new planet is about five times heavier than Earth. Its discoverers aren't certain if it is rocky like Earth or if its a frozen ice ball with liquid water on the surface. If it is rocky like Earth, which is what the prevailing theory proposes, it has a diameter about 1 1/2 times bigger than our planet. If it is an iceball, as Mayor suggests, it would be even bigger.
Based on theory, 581 c should have an atmosphere, but what's in that atmosphere is still a mystery and if it's too thick that could make the planet's surface temperature too hot, Mayor said.
However, the research team believes the average temperature to be somewhere between 32 and 104 degrees and that set off celebrations among astronomers.
Until now, all 220 planets astronomers have found outside our solar system have had the "Goldilocks problem." They've been too hot, too cold or just plain too big and gaseous, like uninhabitable Jupiter.
The new planet seems just right — or at least that's what scientists think.
"This could be very important," said NASA astrobiology expert Chris McKay, who was not part of the discovery team. "It doesn't mean there is life, but it means it's an Earth-like planet in terms of potential habitability."
Eventually astronomers will rack up discoveries of dozens, maybe even hundreds of planets considered habitable, the astronomers said. But this one — simply called "c" by its discoverers when they talk among themselves — will go down in cosmic history as No. 1.
Besides having the right temperature, the new planet is probably full of liquid water, hypothesizes Stephane Udry, the discovery team's lead author and another Geneva astronomer. But that is based on theory about how planets form, not on any evidence, he said.
"Liquid water is critical to life as we know it," co-author Xavier Delfosse of Grenoble University in France, said in a statement. "Because of its temperature and relative proximity, this planet will most probably be a very important target of the future space missions dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life. On the treasure map of the Universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X."
Other astronomers cautioned it's too early to tell whether there is water.
"You need more work to say it's got water or it doesn't have water," said retired NASA astronomer Steve Maran, press officer for the American Astronomical Society. "You wouldn't send a crew there assuming that when you get there, they'll have enough water to get back."
The new planet's star system is a mere 20.5 light years away, making Gliese 581 one of the 100 closest stars to Earth. It's so dim, you can't see it without a telescope, but it's somewhere in the constellation Libra, which is low in the southeastern sky during the midevening in the Northern Hemisphere.
"I expect there will be planets like Earth, but whether they have life is another question," said renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in an interview with The Associated Press in Orlando. "We haven't been visited by little green men yet."
Before you book your extrastellar flight to 581 c, a few caveats about how alien that world probably is: Anyone sitting on the planet would get heavier quickly, and birthdays would add up fast since it orbits its star every 13 days.
Gravity is 1.6 times as strong as Earth's so a 150-pound person would feel like 240 pounds.
But oh, the view. The planet is 14 times closer to the star it orbits. Udry figures the red dwarf star would hang in the sky at a size 20 times larger than our moon. And it's likely, but still not known, that the planet doesn't rotate, so one side would always be sunlit and the other dark.
Distance is another problem. "We don't know how to get to those places in a human lifetime," Maran said.
Two teams of astronomers, one in Europe and one in the United States, have been racing to be the first to find a planet like 581 c outside the solar system.
The European team looked at 100 different stars using a tool called HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity for Planetary Searcher) to find this one planet, said Xavier Bonfils of the Lisbon Observatory, one of the co-discoverers.
Much of the effort to find Earth-like planets has focused on stars like our sun with the challenge being to find a planet the right distance from the star it orbits. About 90 percent of the time, the European telescope focused its search more on sun-like stars, Udry said.
A few weeks before the European discovery earlier this month, a scientific paper in the journal Astrobiology theorized a few days that red dwarf stars were good candidates.
"Now we have the possibility to find many more," Bonfils said.
