Sound of Pan Africa

There are so many techniques for Afro Braids and plaits today, it’s sometimes difficult to keep up with the sheer number of looks.
Just call from 15:00-24:00 Ukrainian time
sarah : +380939435798 or
send mail seachibo@gmail.com.

Cornrow braids can be patterned to make almost any hair style. The ends of the hair can be braided down the center, in a single braid, to create a French braid. Let the end of the French braid hang loose, or pin it up. A fancy, inverted braid down the center of the head can liven up the look. Inverted braids are also called fishtail braids. Cornrow wearers also opt to wear large cornrows that extend down to the back of the head. Fancy zigzag parts are popular. This cornrow style is achieved with natural hair or with synthetic hair added for length.

Just call from 15:00-24:00 Ukrainian time
sarah +380939435798 or send
mail:seachibo@gmail.com.

Popular braiding styles for African American hair include cornrows and box braids. It is common to use synthetic hair to add length and volume to cornrows. Either synthetic or human hair is used for box braids. Buy braiding hair online or from beauty supply stores. Although they are both classified as braids, box braids and cornrows are not the same. Cornrows are braids that are attached to the scalp, creating a pattern. Box braids are single braids. They look like tiny plaits. Small, thin, cornrows that are braided close together toward the nape of the neck is a nice corporate African American hair braiding style. The loose ends of the hair are then tied into a bun. A donut bun or a sock bun looks great in this popular braid style.
To create a braided sock bun, tie a sock or a scrunchy around the ponytail of braids. Make sure that the scrunchy or sock bun is secure. Tuck the loose ends of the braid into and around the sock or scrunchy. Alternatively, the ends of the ponytail can be plaited into several thick plaits and tucked into the ponytail holder for a regal look.

Send a mail for more information if your interested!!!

A reclusive Russian mathematician has been awarded a million dollars for proving a theory which has baffled some of the world’s finest brains for a century.
Grigory Perelman solved one of the seven so-called “Millennium Problems” set out by the Massachusetts-based Clay Mathematics Institute.

Perelman, who lives in St. Petersburg, has little contact with the outside world and is known for turning down plaudits for his work.

He’s a brilliant mathematician, but also an enigmatic recluse. But despite the media obscurity, he’s become one of the most famous mathematicians of our age.

Read more

Masha Gessen, author of “Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century,” claims that Perelman’s contribution to mathematics is unparalleled in the history of mathematics.

“He thinks he knows exactly how the world should work, and the longer he lives the more people disappoint him, and the fewer people he’s willing to allow in his life, and he actually has very sound reasons every time, the rules are solid,” Gessen told RT.

Perelman has just been awarded the prestigious Millenium Prize and $1 million by the Clay Mathematics Institute, although it is not yet known if he will accept it.

In 2006 he was offered the Fields Medal, the highest honor in the world of mathematics. However, he became the only person ever to turn it down, though not without attempts to convince him otherwise. A British mathematician, Sir John Ball, flew out to St. Petersburg to meet him.

Ball, from the University of Oxford, claims he was trying to make Perelman change his mind.

“I spent two days talking to him and I think he’d made up his mind before I arrived so there was not much chance of dissuading him, but I think that he felt alienated from the mathematical community and so he didn’t want to be seen as a figurehead for the mathematical community,” Ball told RT.

He achieved these accolades by solving a mathematical problem – and not just any problem.

Sergey Rukshin, a friend of Perelman, states that Perelman is a unique scientist.

“Only one problem of this importance has been solved over the last 1,000 years. I’m not sure when we might see another mathematician that can achieve something this big,” Rukshin told RT.

In 2002 Perelman solved the Poincare conjecture, a geometrical problem that had dogged some of world’s best mathematicians for nearly a century.

In an official statement on Thursday, James Carlson, President of CMI, said that the “resolution of the Poincaré conjecture by Grigory Perelman brings to a close the century-long quest for the solution. It is a major advance in the history of mathematics that will long be remembered.”

The Poincaré conjecture was formulated in 1904 by the French mathematician Henri Poincaré. It deals with a topological problem of telling a multidimensional counterpart of a sphere via a set of measurements and other operations. Poincaré suggested such a test, but it took almost a century to prove that it always worked. Perelman published the correct solution in three papers in 2002 and 2003.

Featuring mathematics of formidable complexity, the solution of the Poincare conjecture is essential to an understanding of three-dimensional shapes.

Though there are only a handful of people in the world who can relate to Perelman’s breakthrough, one day we could all feel the benefits. But he wants none of the attention for it.

In 2003 Perelman left the St. Petersburg institute where he worked. He’s reportedly given up mathematics altogether, is unemployed and living with his mother. But whether he likes it or not, his huge contribution to the field of mathematics will be remembered for a long time.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in Moscow for talks on the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START. The signing has reportedly stalled over US plans to install anti-missile defense units in Eastern Europe.
Moscow says the reduction of offensive and defensive weapons should be linked in the new pact.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is on a two-day official visit to Moscow. The UN chief is meeting with the Russian leadership, and will also take part in the Middle East Quartet talks taking place on Friday.

Although African-Americans were overjoyed with the election of US President Barack Obama, black unemployment remains high. Is Obama neglecting the black community for fear of being seen as an angry black man?
A recent study found that the median wealth of single black women is $5 in their prime earning years. In comparison, the median wealth of single white women between 36 and 49 is $42,600. As the financial crisis drags on, unemployment rates are continuing to rise among minorities in the United States while rates of home ownership fall. Is this an indication that US President Barack Obama not doing enough to help African-Americans?

The Pope’s letter to the Irish faithful will be released today and read at Sunday Mass in an attempt to defuse the spiralling scandal over clerical sex abuse.
However, the pastoral letter has already been judged a failure by many after a week in which the Primate of All Ireland, Cardinal Sean Brady, apologised for his role in covering up the activities of a notorious paedophile priest.

Another bishop was found to have bought a victim’s silence by signing off on an out-of-court settlement with a confidentiality clause. Cardinal Brady said that he would spend the rest of Lent considering his own future after demands for his resignation.

Vatican sources said that the Pope’s letter would not only call for “repentance and healing”, but would outline measures to ensure that such grave crimes were not repeated. The pontiff has said that he hopes the letter “will help in the process of repentance, healing and renewal”.
However, it is unlikely to have been redrafted to take account of this week’s events in Ireland and it will fail in its purpose if it does not include an apology.

Meanwhile, One in Four, Ireland’s leading campaign group for victims of sexual abuse, issued its own papal letter, setting out what it said survivors deserved to hear. Its version of the Pope’s letter reads: “I want to say clearly and unequivocally that the Catholic Church at the highest levels has always known about the clerical sexual abuse of children.

“We have pursued a deliberate policy of cover-up, protecting sex offenders in order to avoid scandal, with no regard for the safety of children … For this I am deeply sorry.”

Amid growing calls for a nationwide police investigation, another bishop said that he believed more cases of clerical sexual abuse would emerge.

Bishop Donal McKeown said that there was still no civil obligation to report abuse allegations to the Irish authorities.

The Northern Ireland Executive meanwhile said that it was urgently considering options for dealing with historic institutional and clerical child abuse, including a full state inquiry.

Further allegations of child abuse by Catholic clergy have come to light in the Pope’s native Germany, as well as in Austria and the Netherlands.

The head of the German Catholic Church was accused yesterday by a victim of sexual abuse of failing to notify prosecutors about a predator priest. In a report to be broadcast on television on Monday the victim accuses Archbishop Robert Zollitsch of having “covered up” for the priest, who preyed upon at least 17 children.

A spokesman for the Archbishop’s diocese said that church officials had “acted in a consistent manner and very rapidly”, forcing the priest into retirement before the accusations against him were proven.

The Pope himself was dragged into a separate row after the German press disclosed that during the future pontiff’s time as Archbishop of Munich, another known paedophile priest was allowed to move into his diocese to “undergo therapy”. Werner Huth, a Munich psychiatrist, told The New York Times that he repeatedly warned officials in the Munich archdiocese about Father Peter Hullermann, who was fined and given an 18-month suspended sentence for sex offences in 1986.

Catholic authorities say that the Pope was not involved in the decision to allow Father Hullermann to resume his duties after his Munich “therapy”. Father Hullermann was suspended this week at his current parish, Bad Tölz, in Bavaria, for violating an undertaking not to have contact with children or young people.

The split between Europe’s leaders over aid to Greece widened yesterday as Germany softened its opposition to a bailout by the International Monetary Fund and France insisted on a European solution to the crisis.

As Berlin and Paris bickered over the politics of IMF intervention in the eurozone, an outspoken board member of Germany’s central bank said that Greece had not done enough to mend its finances. Asked what Greece should do if it could not refinance its debt, Thilo Sarrazin said: “Then it should do what every defaulter has to do and file for insolvency.”

The European Commission urged member states yesterday to make a political commitment to a standby rescue plan. A summit meeting in Brussels next week will address Greek warnings that soaring borrowing costs may jeopardise its efforts to cuts its budget deficit. Greece threatened this week to call on the IMF for aid if Europe failed to come up with concrete proposals for a rescue package.

Olli Rehn, the Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner, said that the European Union must “come to a more specific political conclusion about the European framework for co-ordinated and conditional action, if needed and required”.
The French Government waded in to support Greece, however, stating that the priority was to find a European solution to the crisis, suggesting it was premature to talk about an IMF loan.

Fairfax, Virginia — President Obama made a final, urgent public plea for health care reform Friday, slamming private insurers and accusing his plan’s opponents of spreading lies and distortions.

The president’s populist push on his signature issue came two days before a planned climactic vote in Congress. The House of Representatives is set to vote Sunday on a sweeping $875 billion reform plan that cleared the Senate in December, as well as another $65 billion of compromise changes to the measure.

“In just a few days, a century-long struggle with culminate in a historic vote,” Obama declared at a campaign-style event at Virginia’s George Mason University. “If you believe that it’s right, you’ve got to help us finish this fight. … The time for reform is right now.”

If the Senate bill passes the House, Obama will sign it into law. If the package of changes is passed, it will be taken up by the Senate.

Obama warned that if Congress rejects his plan, “the insurance industry will continue to run amok.”

“The only question left is this: Are we going to let the special interests win again, or are we going to make this vote a victory for the American people?” he asked.

The president, who delayed an overseas trip to help make a final reform push, was expected to meet with and call wavering House members after his speech. He is also expected to address the entire House Democratic caucus on Saturday, according to four Democratic officials familiar with Obama’s plans. The pitch to lawmakers will be made on Capitol Hill, White House aides said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, is struggling to round up 216 votes from her 253-member caucus to pass the plan. No Republicans are expected to back it.

Multiple Democratic leadership sources told CNN that Democrats have more than 200 “yes” votes, although it was not clear Friday night how close Democrats were to securing the 216 votes they need.

Twenty-nine House Democrats have indicated to CNN they will join Republicans in opposing the Senate plan. That leaves opponents of reform nine votes shy of defeating the measure.

The president has had 64 meetings and calls pushing for a final health care vote, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Friday.

Florida Rep. Suzanne Kosmas, a Democrat who’d been opposed to the bill, announced Friday that she will support it.

Indiana Rep. Brad Ellsworth, a Democrat who’s running for the U.S. Senate seat held by the retiring Evan Bayh and who had been undecided on health care, also announced his support Friday.

“Like most Americans I was frustrated by this process throughout,” Ellsworth said in a statement, “[but] in my core I know it’s the right decision for Hoosiers.”

The National Republican Senatorial Committee quickly attacked Ellsworth’s decision, saying he “chose Nancy Pelosi and President Barack Obama’s interests over the best interests of Indiana voters.”
Other Democrats appeared to be resisting pressure from their party’s leadership. One undecided member, Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, said he had refused to answer a telephone call from the White House. Cuellar said he was refusing to do so before deciding how to vote.

“At the end of the day, when we take a vote, [Obama's]not going to be out there supporting me and running my elections,” Cuellar said. “It’s going to be up to me to run my election. And it’s up to me to decide on my own that this is in the best interests of my district.”

Administration officials claim, however, that the reform plan has been picking up momentum in recent days. They said they had a “really good day” Thursday, when the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the compromise plan would cost $940 billion over 10 years while reducing the deficit by $138 billion — $20 billion more than the bill passed by the Senate.

The budget office numbers reassured some fiscally conservative Democrats, according to congressional leaders.

One previously undecided Democrat, Ohio Rep. John Boccieri, said he decided to vote for the plan after being “very encouraged” by the budget office report.

“A lot of people are telling me this decision could cost me my job. … [but] I’m standing for what I believe in,” he said.

The plan also received key endorsements Thursday from the AFL-CIO and the Federation of American Hospitals. The American Medical Association officially backed the plan Friday.

iReport: Share your views on health care reform

If enacted, the measure would constitute the biggest expansion of federal health care guarantees since the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid over four decades ago. It would extend insurance coverage to an additional 32 million Americans, according to a preliminary analysis from the budget office.

Republicans contend that the plan amounts to a government takeover of the private insurance system that will do little to slow spiraling medical costs. They argue that it would lead to higher premiums and taxes for middle-class families while resulting in deep Medicare cuts.

Among other things, the plan would expand Medicare prescription drug coverage, increase federal subsidies to help people buy insurance and ban denials of coverage for pre-existing conditions.

It seeks to bridge the gap between previous House and Senate bills partly by watering down and delaying the implementation of a tax on high-end insurance plans.

As with earlier House and Senate plans, it includes significant reductions in Medicare spending, in part through changes in payments made under the Medicare Advantage program.

It also eliminates a deeply unpopular provision in the Senate bill that provides a special exemption for the state of Nebraska from paying increased Medicaid expenses.

The decisions to reduce the tax on high-end insurance plans and eliminate the Nebraska exemption — the “Cornhusker Kickback” — are two of many concessions being made made to House liberals unhappy with the prospect of voting for the less expansive Senate bill.

Pelosi has tried to further sweeten the deal for some more progressive members of the Democratic caucus by adding a large student loan reform measure to the compromise plan.

The measure, which is a priority for Obama, would end the practice of having private banks offer student loans and would expand direct lending from the government.

The speaker may also try to help unhappy House Democrats by allowing them to avoid a direct vote on the Senate bill. She is strongly considering pushing for a vote on a rule that would simply “deem” the Senate bill to be passed. The House then would proceed to a separate vote on the changes incorporated in the $940 billion version of the plan.

GOP leaders failed Thursday to force a vote on a resolution requiring the Senate health care bill to be brought to an up-or-down vote.

Republicans also are fuming over Democrats’ decision to use a legislative maneuver called reconciliation, which will allow the compromise measures — if passed by the House — to clear the Senate with a simple majority of 51 votes.

Senate Democrats lost their filibuster-proof 60-seat supermajority in January with the election of GOP Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts.

Republicans contend that reconciliation, which is limited to provisions pertaining to the budget, was never meant to facilitate passage of a sweeping reform measure such as the health care bill. Democrats point out that reconciliation was used to pass several major bills in recent years, including George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.

House Democrats have expressed concern that the compromise measures will not be approved by the more conservative Senate. Pelosi said Friday, however, that “when our members go to vote, they will have all the assurances they need” that the Senate will approve the compromise plan.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, will be at the White House on Saturday when Obama meets with the House Democrats, two Democratic officials said. He will help reassure nervous House members that the Senate intends to finish the job next week, they said.

Nelson Mandela’s ex-wife Winnie is threatening legal action against the makers of a biographical film about her starring Jennifer Hudson.

The film is likely to detail the fraud, kidnapping and murder controversies that have surrounded the anti-apartheid leader’s former wife.
Mrs Madikizela-Mandela, as she has been known since her divorce from Mr Mandela in 1996, is one of South Africa’s most controversial and divisive figures

She is revered in some quarters as the “Mother of the Nation” for her role in the struggle, the harassment she suffered from the white authorities, and her populist rhetoric that still appeals to South Africa’s poor.
But for others she is reviled. She once notoriously declared that “with our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country”, referring to the preferred way of killing suspected informers in the townships, setting fire to a petrol-filled tyre around their necks, so ensuring an agonising death.
Under apartheid she was convicted of kidnapping Stompie Moeketsi, 14, who was later found beaten to death in Soweto, and long after the advent of democracy, she was convicted of more than 40 charges of fraud in 2003 – her prison sentence was replaced with a suspended term on appeal.
Even so she topped the poll for the ruling African National Congress’ national executive committee at its last congress in 2007, prompting speculation – which proved to be unfounded – that she would be given a cabinet post in Jacob Zuma’s government.
The South African-made film, titled Winnie, is due to start shooting in May and will star Jennifer Hudson, the Oscar-winning American actress, whose casting in the role provoked protests from South African actors.
It is based on an independent biography of her, Winnie Mandela: A Life, by Anne Marie du Preez Bezdrob, a former journalist, described by one reviewer as “hard-hitting but not heartless”.
Nonetheless lawyers for Mrs Madikizela-Mandela, 73, have stepped in to warn the producers that she is reserving her legal rights.
A letter from Bowman Gilfillan, one of the country’s leading law firms, said she had not been approached for consent to the film, according to Johannesburg’s Star newspaper.
“It is difficult to understand how a production bearing the name of an individual who has not been consulted at all could ever be appropriate or tell the full story of that individual life,” it quoted the letter as saying.
“This is certainly the case here where our client has not responded to allegations and comment which have been made about her, precisely because she has sought to protect her sphere of personal privacy as best she can in extremely difficult and turbulent times.”
A spokesman for Bowman Gilfillan declined to comment on the matter, citing lawyer-client privilege.
With Mrs Madikizela-Mandela’s status making the film a sensitive issue the production company, Ironwood Films, referred enquiries to its spokesman, who was not able to comment.
The ANC’s spokesman Brian Sokutu said that “out of courtesy and respect” the filmmakers should have discussed the project with her “to see how she feels”, particularly as it was likely to be “highly controversial and personal”.
Mrs Madikizela-Mandela, he said, was “entitled to take legal action to protect her reputation from any form of character assassination”.
But he declined to say whether the party would back her in any attempt to stop it being made. “We are a constitutional democracy,” he said.

US president says Bin Laden ‘trying to take credit’ for Detroit bombing attempt is indication of terror group’s waning powers

Barack Obama today dismissed Osama Bin Laden’s attempt to claim responsibility for the failed Christmas Day attack on a US airliner, a plot thought to have been hatched in Yemen, as evidence that al-Qaida was greatly weakened.

Bin Laden associated himself with the attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up a transatlantic Northwest flight over Detroit in a recording claimed to be from “Osama to Obama” – but the US president questioned the assertion.

“Al-Qaida itself is greatly weakened from where it was back in 2000,” he told ABC news.

“Bin Laden sending out a tape trying to take credit for a Nigerian student who engaged in a failed bombing attempt is an indication of how weakened he is, because this is not something necessarily directed by him.”

US attention is instead increasingly focused on Yemen, where Abdulmutallab is believed to have been trained and supplied with explosives.

The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, is expected to attend a London conference on the threat from Yemen tomorrow.

Prior to the talks, Saudi Arabia agreed to play a leading role in helping the Yemeni government confront the growing threat from al-Qaida on its soil.

Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi Arabian foreign minister, is attending the conference along with ministers from the five other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which will join a new Friends of Yemen group to monitor the country’s security, economic and development issues.

No new financial pledges will be made, but diplomats said the Saudis had agreed to host a follow-up conference in Riyadh next month to discuss aid.

The US and Britain have been pressing the Saudis to play a bigger role in Yemeni affairs amid concerns about the spillover of the Houthi rebellion in the north, growing unrest in the south and the dangers posed by a resurgent al-Qaida.

Obama’s national security adviser, General Jim Jones, visited Saudi Arabia this month for talks with King Abdullah and Crown Prince Sultan, who oversees Saudi Yemen policy.

Saudi Arabia is Yemen’s biggest single donor, but hands out millions of dollars annually directly to influential figures, tribal leaders and religious foundations, often to promote its austere brand of Sunni Islam.

“Saudi influence and leverage in Yemen is equal to, or more than, the rest of the world’s,” Abdel-Ghani al-Iryani, a Sana’a consultant, said.

“So if the Saudis agree to collaborate with the other stakeholders, it will be a massive departure.”

Washington and London hope the Saudis will promote development, good governance and economic reform and fight corruption.

But there is no sign that they and their GCC partners are ready to open their labour markets to Yemeni workers, banned since the 1990 Gulf war.

Tomorrow’s two-hour meeting at the Foreign Office, convened by Gordon Brown, is designed to launch a process of closer engagement with Yemen – something that will need President Ali Abdullah Salih to address widespread international concerns.

Yemen was the subject of an international conference in 2006, when around $5bn (£3bn) in aid was pledged – but less than 10% of that has been spent because of a lack of capacity and the problems posed by corruption.

Yemen will now be asked to engage with the IMF on financial reforms as a condition for aid.

The poorest of the Arab countries, it is often described as a fragile state that is in danger of failing and faces crises ranging from the depletion of water and oil to illiteracy and rapid population growth.

But the recent focus has been on the danger that al-Qaida would find a safe haven in its “ungoverned spaces” – tribal areas beyond the reach of the now cash-strapped central government.

“December 25 had an electrifying impact and made the international community … this was a time to get past the excuses and get back to work,” Daniel Benjamin, the counterterrorism coordinator at the US state department, said.

Streets in Colombo peaceful and less crowded than usual as election monitors say turnout at between 70% and 80%

Voting in Sri Lanka’s first presidential election since the defeat of the Tamil Tigers has largely passed off peacefully, with the country awaiting the result tomorrow after an acrimonious and at times violent campaign.

Following weeks of frantic campaigning by the two main presidential candidates, calm enveloped the capital, Colombo, today.

Streets were quieter than usual, with less traffic and bustle, as voters visited polling stations from 7am.

Election monitors said overall turnout was high, at between 70% and 80%, and voting took place amid heavy security, with more than 68,000 police officers deployed.

The feared widespread violence did not materialise, although more than a dozen incidents were reported, including one case in which a group chased away election workers and took their documents.

The economy was the primary concern for many of the 14 million eligible voters in the country’s first peacetime presidential election in 26 years.

“Life is difficult – the cost of living is high. We need a change of government to stop corruption,” Pathirannnehelage Priyalal, a 40-year-old businessman in the Colombo suburb of Gampaha, said .

He said he had voted for General Sarath Fonseka, a former army chief, and added: “There has been no relief even after the war and, if this government remains, even finding food will be difficult.”

Dharmasena, a 55-year-old trishaw driver, said he was supporting President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who is seeking a second six-year term.

“The former president will win,” he said. “If people don’t vote for him, you have to blame them because he has done a good job.

“Today we can go around Colombo without fear of bombs and violence. His leadership made the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) possible. He will be the winner.”

Formerly allies, and the architects of the military victory against the Tamil Tigers in last year’s campaign, Rajapaksa and Fonseka have since fallen out.

Fonseka, who believes he was sidelined after crushing the rebels, has accused the president of corruption. Rajapaksa’s supporters claim Fonseka is a dictator in the making.

Both are considered heroes to the Sinhalese majority, and have promised to bring development to the country and lead its rebuilding effort after the war.

But neither has presented a detailed plan to resolve the underlying ethnic tensions – and the Tamil complaints of marginalisation – that sparked the rebels’ separatist insurgency.

Fonseka’s promise of change has resonated with many voters in Colombo, despite the fact that the former general is a political novice without administrative experience.

Many members of the electorate say they are tired of the government propaganda machine, which has fought hard to control information and media coverage, and the fact that so many members of Rajapaksa’s family hold positions of political power.

Two Tamil lawyers at the Wellawatta polling station at St Peter’s College, in Colombo, said they had backed Fonseka.

“We voted for Fonseka because we need good governance, to eliminate corruption and to implement law and order,” one said.

“We like his ideas about abolishing the executive presidency. He has a good team backing him and we want peace.”

PP Sekara, 41, a Tamil businessman, was also backing Fonseka, who has the support of a coalition of opposition parties including the main Tamil party, the Tamil National Alliance. The result of the election is expected to be tight.

“The chances are 50-50, who can say? We need to encourage foreign investment and we need to be a confident democracy,” Sekara said.

“We need better relationships with the west because they can help us with development.”

Asked whether he found it hard to vote for Fonseka knowing that he led the army against the LTTE in a campaign that caused many civilian deaths, Sekara said: “What’s happened has happened, but we are hopeful for a brighter future.”

Voting in the predominantly Tamil Jaffna peninsula in the north passed off equally peacefully.

“Everything has been calm … I have been to several villages and talked to people casting their votes at schools,” Soori Asgaram, a civil engineer who returned to Sri Lanka three months ago after living in Britain for 44 years, said.

“It is as orderly as an election in England, but I am anxious about the possibility of post-election violence, as it usually happens.”

With the Sinhalese majority expected to be evenly split by the two main rivals, the Tamil vote could be decisive.

During the last presidential election in 2005, won by Rajapaksa, the Tamil Tigers enforced a boycott among ethnic Tamils at gunpoint. This year, however, Tamils were expected to vote.

The first results are not expected until tomorrow morning.

The leader of the Cuban revolution Fidel Castro is questioning why the U.S. and other countries sent soldiers to quake-ravaged Haiti.
According to RIA Novosti News Agency, Castro wrote in an article on Sunday that “without anyone knowing how or why, Washington dispatched troops to occupy Haitian territory and other nations followed suit.”

Castro said that “neither the United Nations nor the government of the United States has offered an explanation to the people of the world” for sending soldiers.

Castro noted that “several governments” complained that the troop presence kept them from landing aid flights in Haiti, saying it “complicated international cooperation.” He called on the U.N. to investigate.

He also wrote that Cuban specialists were not experiencing any problems with getting to Haiti until now.

“We send our doctors, not our soldiers,” Castro added.

Sony’s PlayStation 3 has reportedly been hacked – by the technical wizard who cracked the iPhone.

George Hotz, 20, claims he has worked out how to access the console’s memory and central processor.
This could allow PlayStation 3 owners to run unauthorised software, play older PS 2 games, or install a different operating system.
The PlayStation officially only runs software licensed by Sony.
Hotz claims it took him just five weeks to hack it using “very simple hardware” and “some not so simple software”.
Posting a running commentary on his website a few weeks ago, he revealed he was getting close to cracking the console.
“I already know more about the cell processor then I ever wanted to,” he wrote.
Then last week he announced a breakthrough: “Glitching the memory bus like a savage with a screwdriver is going to work.”

When he finally cracked the console, he tweeted the result.
But other hackers keen to exploit his work will have to wait a while because Hotz is refusing to release the code just yet.
He said on his website: “As far as the exploit goes, I’m not revealing it yet. Also, for obvious reasons I can’t post dumps.
“I’m hoping to find the decryption keys and post them, but they may be embedded in hardware.”
The PlayStation 3 was regarded as being almost unhackable.
Hotz received notoriety in 2007 when he revealed he had unlocked the hardware of Apple’s iPhone with “some complicated soldering”.
This hack allowed the phone to be used on any other phone network.
A spokesman from Sony said: “We are investigating the report and will clarify the situation once we have more information.”

Two children’s TV presenters have revealed they were held by police under anti-terrorism powers after being stopped while running around with hairdryers in London.

Anna Williamson and Jamie Rickers, who front ITV1’s hit show Toonattik, were filming a sketch for the programme on London’s South Bank wearing combat gear and armed with children’s walkie-talkies and glitter-covered hairdryers.
Their fake fatigues aroused the suspicions of patrolling police, who stopped and questioned them.
Williamson, 28, said: “We were filming a strand called Dork Hunters, which is to do with one of the animations we have on the show.
“We were out and about doing ‘dork hunting’ ourselves on the streets of London.
“Jamie and I were kitted out in fake utility belts. We’ve got hairdryers in our belt, a kids’ walkie-talkie, hairbrushes and all that kind of stuff, and we were being followed by a camera crew and a boom mike and we get literally pulled over by four policemen and we were issued with a warning ‘under the act of terrorism’.”

Rickers, 32, added: “We were stopped, not arrested, but they had to say ‘we are holding you under the Anti-Terrorism Act because you’re running around in flak jackets and a utility belt’, and I said ‘and please put spangly blue hairdryer’ and he was, like, ‘all right’.”
The presenting duo also hit the headlines in 2008 when Rickers, re-enacting a scene from The Emperor’s New Clothes, appeared to strut around the studio naked, although it was later revealed he was wearing a flesh suit from the waist down.
The morning programme, which provides light-hearted links in between cartoons such as Ben 10: Alien Force and Dork Hunters From Outer Space, attracts around 616,000 viewers each weekend morning, making it the most popular terrestrial programme of its kind.

Sarah’s Law – the pilot scheme allowing parents to check if someone has a history of child sex offences – is expected to be rolled out nationally.

The scheme enables a parent the right to check with police if anyone with regular unsupervised access to their children has a criminal conviction for child sex offences.
The programme, known as Sarah’s Law, follows the abduction and murder of eight-year-old Sarah Payne by convicted sex offender Roy Whiting 10 years ago.
The youngster’s mother, Sara, was crowned the Government’s Victims Champion after her ceaseless attempts to bring in the law.

SO WHAT IS SARAH’S LAW?

Sarah’s Law calls for a range of measures to curb and control paedophiles. But at its heart, we want Sarah’s Law to enshrine one simple reform.

That is: Controlled Access To Information…

The LEGAL RIGHT of every parent to know the identity of serious child sex offenders living in their community.

However, with severe penalties in place for anybody who misuses this information.

Since launching our FOR SARAH campaign in July 2000, the News of the World has achieved 14 pieces of new legislation to protect our children.

Importantly, Home Secretary David Blunkett has pledged legislation to ensure no sex offender can ever be freed until it is certain they pose no risk to our children.

Here is what our For Sarah campaign has achieved so far.

Evidence showing the Government was “clearly advised” the Iraq war was illegal will be disclosed at the Chilcot inquiry, it has been reported.

Sir Michael Wood, who was the Foreign Office’s chief legal adviser, is expected to reveal he believed the war was unlawful without a second United Nations resolution.
His evidence will come just days before Tony Blair appears at the inquiry.
Elizabeth Wilmshurst, a senior FCO lawyer who quit in protest at the invasion, will also give evidence to the inquiry.
She is expected to say she was not “a voice in the wilderness” in harbouring doubts over the legitimacy of military action, the Independent on Sunday reported.

Barack Obama is “troubled” by cyber attacks on internet giant Google and wants answers from China, the White House has said.

News of the president’s concerns comes after US and Chinese diplomats held a series of meetings to discuss the attacks.
Google has said the attacks targeted the email accounts of Chinese human rights activists, and more talks were expected.
Obama is looking to Beijing to shed some light on the accusations which have prompted Google to say it will stop censoring Web search results in China.
The move may force Google to leave the country entirely.”As the president has said, he continues to be troubled by the cyber security breach that Google attributes to China,” White House deputy spokesman Bill Burton said.
“As Secretary (Hillary) Clinton said yesterday, all we are looking for from China are some answers.”
Ms Clinton on Thursday urged Beijing to conduct a thorough investigation into the cyber attacks on Google and other US firms.He criticised China and other nations for censoring the Web and restricting the “free flow of information.

The first Kirk’s dik-dik antelope has been born at Chester Zoo, but because it was rejected by its mother, the keepers are stepping in to raise the baby.

Standing only a few centimetres tall, the female newborn was abandoned by her mother who gave her the cold shoulder during the recent big freeze.
While the zoo’s keepers are looking after the youngster, they told Sky News that a reunion between mother and baby is not on the cards.
“It’s probably unlikely, unfortunately. Mum stopped looking after her and keeping her warm, so we’ve had to do that instead,” senior keeper Helen Massey told Sky News.
Ms Massey and her team are hand-rearing the unnamed baby. They are bottle feeding it milk five times a day until she is old enough to eat the species’ regular diet of buds, shoots, and fruits.
The spindly-legged creature is also being fed hay and a nutritious concentrate.
“Kirk’s dik-dik is one of the smaller of the antelope species but what they lack in stature, they make up for in appeal,” she said.
“Our addition is growing stronger by the day and we hope she will be holding her own in the next few weeks.”
Although the little one does not have a name yet, Ms Massey says her staff are working on one.
“We’re hoping to decide on a name all together, we need to whole team to be here for that, though,” she told Sky News.
Click here to see more pictures of the baby antelope.
A tiny species that looks like a pygmy deer, the Kirk’s dik-dik is Native to Kenya, Tanzania, and Namibia and is named for the sound it makes when fleeing danger.
The Chester newborn, whose parents arrived to Britain in 2008, will grow to be about 40cm tall.
The female’s parents came from Colchester and Hanover zoos.

A mother has been reunited with her young daughter eight months after the little girl went missing in Egypt.Leila Sabra, 32, from Whitefield, Lancashire, received a phone call from the British Embassy this week to say two-year-old A’ishah had been found.
The child was abducted by her father, Saber Mesbah Sabra, last year.
“It’s a dream come true. From a constant nightmare that I thought would never end, I woke up to a phone call saying that the state police have found my baby,” Ms Sabra said.
“Finally, after so long, I had my baby back in my arms.
“It was surreal, I had waited minute by minute, hour after hour, and month after month whilst I mourned the loss of my baby – yet here she was, cradled against my chest.”
Ms Sabra met her former husband when she went to the country on holiday five years ago.
They married months later and the family lived in Egypt, where Mr Sabra ran a quad biking company.
But the relationship broke down and she returned to England, agreeing that their daughter would visit once a year.
On May 16 last year, during one of these supervised visits in the east coast city of Hurghada, the little girl was bundled into the back of a car and driven away.
Ms Sabra has spent the last eight months scouring the country for her daughter.

A “sadistic” mother has been jailed for subjecting her healthy son to “24 hour-a-day torture” by pretending he was severely ill to gain publicity and cash

Lisa Hayden-Johnson, from Brixham, Devon, was said to have “revelled” in the national attention her young son received.
The mother-of-two conned charities out of dream holidays and donations and secured meetings with royalty, celebrities and former prime minister Tony Blair.
She even successfully lobbied for her son – who she falsely claimed suffered from cerebral palsy, cystic fibrosis and dysphagia among a litany of illnesses – to receive a Child of Courage Award in 2005.
The 35-year-old, who previously admitted child cruelty and perverting the course of justice, was jailed for three years and three months at Exeter Crown Court.Prosecutor Andrew Macfarlane said Hayden-Johnson “organised, orchestrated and ensured a regime of medical, physiological and psychological mistreatment amounting to 24 hour-a-day torture that touched on every aspect of his young vulnerable life”.
She frequently described her son “as the most ill child in Britain”, the lawyer said.
He continued: “As a result of her sadistic fabrication of non-existent symptoms, the defendant achieved much publicity and national attention, including an encounter with royalty and the then prime minister.”
Hayden-Johnson subjected the child to a total of 325 medical encounters, during which he was subjected to a series of “physical intrusions and interventions”, Mr Macfarlane said.
These included blood tests, intravenous treatments and a gastrostomy, and he was fed through a tube and confined to a wheelchair.
In the boy’s room, police discovered a hospital bed, a feed pump, oxygen mask and medical supplies.
Mr Macfarlane said the boy, who was taken into care in October 2007, remained “convinced that he was chronically and seriously ill”, adding that “the effect of all this on his long-term psyche is unclear”.

The latest British soldier killed in Afghanistan told doctors to “tell his mother that he loved her” as lay dying on the battlefield.

Rifleman Peter Aldridge, 19, of A Company 4 Rifles, was serving as part of 3 Rifles Battle Group when he died in an explosion near Sangin, in central Helmand province.
In a statement released through the Ministry of Defence, his family said: “Our son died a hero, he lost his life doing what he believed in.
“Peter said, ‘If I’m going to die I want to die a soldier’.”
His death on Friday took the number killed to 250 – just five below the amount who died during the Falklands War in 1982.
The teenager, from Folkestone, Kent, was on his first tour of duty.

A shop clerk buried in the Haiti quake has been pulled alive from the rubble after 11 days – and told how he survived on beer and cookies.

Dozens of onlookers cheered as Wismond Exantus emerged smiling from a deep tunnel drilled by rescuers.
His brother had alerted a Greek rescue team after hearing a voice 20 feet beneath the surface rubble of a hotel grocery store in capital Port-au-Prince.
Wismond had initially survived by diving under a desk when the rubble started to fall around him as the quake struck.

The 24-year-old found himself trapped in a tiny space but discovered a few select groceries within arms reach – beer, cookies and cola.
Speaking from his hospital bed he said: “I was hungry. But every night I thought about the revelation that I would survive.
“I would eat anything I found. After the quake I didn’t know when it was day and when it was day and when it was night.Buried Haiti Man Lived On Beer For 11 Days
2:47am UK, Sunday January 24, 2010
Damien Pearse, Sky News Online
A shop clerk buried in the Haiti quake has been pulled alive from the rubble after 11 days – and told how he survived on beer and cookies.

Alive and well: Wismond Exantus is carried from the rubble after 11 days
Dozens of onlookers cheered as Wismond Exantus emerged smiling from a deep tunnel drilled by rescuers.
His brother had alerted a Greek rescue team after hearing a voice 20 feet beneath the surface rubble of a hotel grocery store in capital Port-au-Prince.
Wismond had initially survived by diving under a desk when the rubble started to fall around him as the quake struck.

Relieved in hospital
The 24-year-old found himself trapped in a tiny space but discovered a few select groceries within arms reach – beer, cookies and cola.
Speaking from his hospital bed he said: “I was hungry. But every night I thought about the revelation that I would survive.
“I would eat anything I found. After the quake I didn’t know when it was day and when it was night.

“It was God who was tucking me away in his arms. It gave me strength.”
The survivor then turned to his family and said: “When you are in a hole I will try to reach out to you, too.”
Brother Jean Elit Jean Pierre said Wismond worked as a cashier in the store on the ground floor of the Hotel Napoli.

With tiny brown eyes, a sparrow-like frame, a Brummie accent and, when we meet, wearing a sharp black trouser suit, Julie Walters could scarcely look less like the late Mo Mowlam. Yet at a screening this week of Channel 4’s forthcoming Mo, with Walters playing the former Northern Ireland Secretary, several of Mowlam’s family and former colleagues were so swayed by her portrayal that they wound up in tears.
The audience included Harriet Harman, Charles Clarke and Adam Ingram, who worked alongside Mowlam as Minister of State for Northern Ireland. They all stood up to applaud Walters.
“I was overwhelmed: fantastically acted,” said Mr Ingram.
“It was an absolutely fantastic portrayal of her,” said Mr Clarke. “Mo’s personality and her effervescence came through.”
Walters, who turns 60 next month, may not look much like Mowlam, but in terms of personality there is more than a passing resemblance.
“I do feel an affinity with her,” she says. “I love that down-to-earth honesty and I like people. That out-front thing that she’s got – I identify with that. And being the clown and wanting to have a good laugh, I identify with that as well.”
Having a good laugh has always been a priority for Walters. Although she has had two Oscar nominations (for Educating Rita and Billy Elliot) and enjoyed critical acclaim for heart-rending performances such as her portrayal of Anne Turner in the euthanasia drama A Short Stay in Switzerland, the role she remains most proud of is Mrs Overall, the dotty tea lady in Victoria Wood’s spoof soap Acorn Antiques.
Yet although she made her name in comedy alongside Wood, in recent years, on top of the Hollywood work, she has become an actress of choice for trenchant single dramas.
She says it is important to her that films such as A Short Stay in Switzerland and Mo are made. “They’re good stuff. They open debate or they enlighten and they usually bring out what’s important in life.”
Her only concern is how many more of them there will be. “There’s hardly any film being done here [in Britain] at the moment and there’s less and less drama – single dramas, I mean. Every time I do one I feel this might be the last one that’s ever made. There’s no money for them or anything. Mo will probably be the last.”
In some ways Mo Mowlam’s story is the perfect Walters vehicle – it goes from raucous to sombre to profound, sometimes within a line or two. It’s hard to think of another actress “of a certain age” pulling off the scene where Mowlam flashes her knickers in order to disarm a stodgy David Trimble, or the one where she takes off her wig in front of Martin McGuinness and asks him if he, too, “likes a good itch”.
Yet Walters nearly turned it down. Having signed up to play Mowlam on the strength of Neil McKay’s script, doubts began to creep in as she studied footage of the politician.
“I don’t look anything like her at all – facially it was like asking Daniel Craig to play Gerry Adams. We are poles apart. She’s got big grey eyes, a huge round open face and she’s a really big woman. My whole shape was wrong, in fact. I thought, ‘No one will see past me.’ ”
Surprisingly for an actress who seems able to wear disparate roles like so many coats, Walters decided that Mowlam was a wig too far. She called her agent to pull out.
“I said, ‘She’s too well known, too loved – I just can’t get over that gap.’ My agent said, ‘With respect, that’s bollocks. Get the wig and the glasses on and you’ll be fine.’ ”
All credit to Walters’s agent. In truth, by the time the hair, make-up and costume departments have worked their magic, she does look eerily like Mowlam. She wore padding to change her shape, gorged on cake to podge up her face and then studied hard to get Mowlam’s squeaky voice and her striding, hockey-mistress gait down pat. The hardest transformation was imitating Mowlam’s thinning hair after her radiotherapy treatment. They experimented with a bald cap, but under the scrutiny of high definition cameras the seam was visible. So Walters shaved her head.
“I looked like Harry Hill,” she says, accompanied by a screeching laugh. Then, as on screen, she switches moods in a beat. “I felt terribly sad when I shaved my head. Inexplicably sad. I think because you link it with things like the Holocaust, with cancer, with women being humiliated and dehumanised in some way. It’s like feeling more naked than you could possibly ever feel if you took your clothes off.”
She says she never went out in public with a shaven head: the costume department made her a wig so that she could look like herself again. But the baldness helped the transformation. “I didn’t like to look at photographs of myself as her, simply because in my head I was her.”
The affinity between the two women extends to their biographies. Walters, like Mowlam, married late, to a man who is happy to play second fiddle – she met Grant Roffey, a former AA patrol man, in a pub and they married in 1997; Mowlam married banker Jon Norton in 1995. They were born within six months of each other and Walters appeared in a Labour campaign video in the 1970s, although she says “that’s the only thing I’ve ever done that’s been mildly political”.
But playing Mowlam has given Walters renewed admiration for what she achieved in the run-up to the Good Friday Agreement. In early 1998, Mowlam visited the Maze prison to try to persuade jailed Loyalists to sign up to the peace process. It was an audacious and, some said, dangerous move – she was unaccompanied in a room with convicted murderers. Recreating the scene on location in Northern Ireland was an unnerving experience for Walters. “I found it very frightening going and interviewing those lads. They weren’t former terrorists but they were around at the time and they ‘knew’ people. They knew all the history and they were scary in that little room. I didn’t know just how brave she was. It took huge courage to go in to the Maze.”
The film discloses for the first time that Mowlam chose to withhold from Tony Blair, the prime minister at the time, the severity of her illness. Walters is adamant that it was the right thing to do.
“First of all it would be political suicide [to tell Mr Blair], but secondly it was what fuelled her life. She knew her amazing talent was connecting with the people and serving the people and she had a massive drive and ambition… so she knew what she could do. And she was right. History tells us that. She was right not to be honest with him at that moment.”
Mo Mowlam, she implies, knew that everyone loved her, and she could use that to do something useful. You sense that Julie Walters feels the same.

Lawyers for Michael Jackson’s estate said they should not have to pay the late pop star’s father, Joe, a reported £9,000 monthly allowance.
In papers filed on Thursday, lawyers for the estate argued Joe Jackson was never dependent on his son when alive, and that the estate should not have to pay his expenses now because he was excluded from the Thriller singer’s will.

The papers state that Joe Jackson sought the allowance for air travel, hotel, assistants and legal fees, and to support his children and grandchildren.
Joe Jackson, 81, said in November that his expenses exceed £12,400 a month but that his income from U.S. Social Security is a mere £1,000.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mitchell Beckloff set a Jan 28 hearing on the request. Joe Jackson’s lawyer could not be reached for comment.
Michael Jackson provided for his mother and three children in a trust created to disburse funds from his estate, which is believed to have been boosted by at least £124 million due to sales of his music and other products.
But he had a contentious relationship with his father, who he accused of abusing him when he was younger, and did not include Joe in his will.
Jackson died on June 25 aged 50 from an overdose of powerful medications. Police are still investigating his death.

The Island Safari Centre on Koh Samui is teaching six-year old Malie, and nine-year old Toktak to use their trunks to perform basketball skills, in an effort to improve their health and vitality.Organisers at the centre, which cares for the animals, say that they undergo rigorous training in order to learn the basics of the game.
“It takes two or three months of intensive training to teach them basics, but fortunately their standards are improving with each passing day”, said organiser Ning.
The keepers begin by teaching the elephants basic ball control skills, and how to hold the ball in their trunk. The animals are then taught to stand on their hind legs, walk with the ball and finally shoot it through the hoop.
Visitors to the centre described the game as “unbelievable”, with one onlooker saying, “I had never seen an elephant playing basketball.”

The 44 year-old, who worked on the 2002 Mel Gibson film Signs, was discovered floating in the sea off the coast of Portsmouth, Hants, in February last year.
Mr Vigay, a leading figure internationally on the research of UFOs and crop circles, had split up with girlfriend Andrea Smith on the night of his death, Portsmouth Coroners Court heard.

Miss Smith, who shared a final meal with her former boyfriend before his death, told the hearing: “It was not aggressive. It was just emotional.
“He was crying, I was crying. I said, ‘this is it’.
“I think it has come to the end of the line now.”
She added: “He went out and I said ‘you promise me you come home’ (and) he said, ‘it is not important now’.”
The hearing heard there was no suspicious circumstances, no sign of struggle on Paul’s body and only a small quantity of alcohol.
Mr Vigay, who was £10,000 pounds in debt, had left a note in his house to Andrea saying “I Love You” and a list of computer passwords and his phone code.
When police and family attempted to use them, however, they did not work.
His father, John, told the inquest: “He had very firm beliefs and he would stick to them.
“He did not believe in suicide.”
Coroner David Horsley, who recorded an open verdict, said: “I cannot say beyond reasonable doubt that yes Paul has taken his own life.
“The only person who could tell us what was going on in his mind and what happened that night is sadly not here to tell us.”

A quarter of a century after Live Aid, 140 of the biggest names in music and entertainment united once more at a fund-raising telethon in aid of Haiti.
In a restrained and distinctly non-glitzy event broadcast from closed studios in Los Angeles, New York and London, stars dressed in sombre tones performed solemn songs and delivered tributes to the victims of the western hemisphere’s worst natural disaster.

Actress Halle Berry narrated the tale of Monley, a five-year-old boy who survived more than a week trapped under concrete, curled up in a ball.
“For eight days he had no one to comfort him, no one to tell him that they loved him, and no one to tell him that things were going to be all right,” she said, her voice trembling.

The Hope for Haiti Now telethon, organised in just one week by the actor George Clooney in association with Haitian-American musician Wyclef Jean, featured singers including Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Bono, Coldplay, Rihanna, Sting, Stevie Wonder and Sheryl Crow, and addresses from former US president Bill Clinton, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Nicole Kidman and Samuel L. Jackson.
In the background, Hollywood’s finest manned the telephones – such as director Stephen Spielberg, and actors Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, Julia Roberts, Mel Gibson, Reese Witherspoon and Penelope Cruz.

“This is a tragedy that reaches across all borders, all boundaries. It demands our attention, our help and our compassion,” Mr Clooney stated in a brief introduction.
“The Haitian people need help. They need to know that they are not alone. They need to see that we still care,” he added, as millions of donors immediately snarled up the telephone lines.
Funds were also collected via text messaging and over the internet, which streamed the two-hour live global broadcast.

In the US, programming was wiped out across 25 networks, and MTV made it available in 640 million homes worldwide.
None of the star faces were introduced, with the format focusing instead on the heartbreak in Haiti.
Clint Eastwood and Matt Damon led a tribute to United Nations staff killed in the earthquake; an orphanage worker recounted how he had turned away 80 children a month even before the disaster and now feared that there would be so many more; a little girl rescued from beneath the ruins sat wide-eyed before the cameras in Port au Prince as CNN reporter Anderson Cooper told how she lost ten members of her family and now lived on the streets.

“He had no one because the earthquake had claimed the lives of his mother and father.”
Proceeds from the telethon were still being tallied yesterday. They will be shared between Oxfam America, Partners in Health, the Red Cross, UNICEF, the UN World Food Programme, Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti Foundation, and the Clinton Bush Haiti Foundation.
The event “was a case study in giving it all, while holding it all back”, the New York Times concluded, adding: “Overall it was an effective trade-off: an excess of restraint in the pursuit of extravagant generosity.”

The UN has appealed for more than $US 500 million to help victims of the devastating earthquake in Haiti. The organization says the funds are intended to help three million people over the next few months.
Much of the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince still lies in ruins – with no means of communication, as well as a critical lack of food, water and medical supplies. The island’s small international airport remains the only entry point for foreign aid, and planes are struggling for space.

According to estimates, 50,000 to 200,000 people died in the quake and some 3 million lost their homes.

Ukraine has reduced the presidential playing field to Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko and her formidable rival Viktor Yanukovich, as observers attempt to predict which way Kiev’s political winds are blowing.
It would be difficult to name another modern politician whose political fortunes have crashed harder and faster than that of Ukraine’s incumbent President Viktor Yushchenko.

A year ago the world watched Barack Obama’s historic inauguration as US president. At the time the buzzword was “hope”. Today it has changed to “broken promises” and “lost expectations”.

On January 20, 2009, Capitol Hill was filled with crowds cheering for the newly elected president. But shortly after his inauguration people started taking to the streets for different reasons – demanding the promised closure of the Guantanamo Bay and protesting against healthcare reform and treatment of immigrants.

“America is going broke. We’ve given trillions of dollars for Wall Street, trillions of dollars for war. Meanwhile, you’ve got all these people out of work, people losing their homes, their jobs, their retirement security. I mean, that’s not what America is supposed to be about,” says US Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich

One returned to her Haitian roots, to give voice to women, honor their stories and shape their futures.
Another urged women to pack a courtroom in Haiti, where she succeeded in getting a guilty verdict against a man who battered his wife.
A third joined the others and helped change the law to make rape, long a political weapon in Haiti, a punishable crime.
Myriam Merlet, Magalie Marcelin and Anne Marie Coriolan, founders of three of the country’s most important advocacy organizations working on behalf of women and girls, are confirmed dead — victims of last week’s 7.0 earthquake.
Remembering the victims of the Haiti earthquake
And their deaths have left members of the women’s movement, Haitian and otherwise, reeling.
“Words are missing for me. I lost a large chunk of my personal, political and social life,” Carolle Charles wrote in an e-mail to colleagues. The Haitian-born sociology professor at Baruch College in New York is chair of Dwa Fanm (meaning “Women’s Rights” in Creole), a Brooklyn-based advocacy group. These women “were my friends, my colleagues and my associates. I cannot envision going to Haiti without seeing them.”
Myriam Merlet was until recently the chief of staff of Haiti’s Ministry for Gender and the Rights of Women, established in 1995, and still served as a top adviser. She died after being trapped beneath her collapsed Port-au-Prince home, Charles said. She was 53.
iReport: A tribute to Merlet
Merlet, an author as well as an activist, fled Haiti in the 1970s. She studied in Canada, steeping herself in economics, women’s issues, feminist theory and political sociology.
In the mid-1980s, she returned to her homeland. In “Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and Resistance,” published in 2001, she contributed an essay, “The More People Dream,” in which she described what brought her back.
“While I was abroad I felt the need to find out who I was and where my soul was. I chose to be a Haitian woman,” she wrote. “We’re a country in which three-fourths of the people can’t read and don’t eat properly. I’m an integral part of the situation. I am not in Canada in a black ghetto, or an extraterrestrial from outer space. I am a Haitian woman. I don’t mean to say that I am responsible for the problems. But still, as a Haitian woman, I must make an effort so that all together we can extricate ourselves from them.”
One returned to her Haitian roots, to give voice to women, honor their stories and shape their futures.
Another urged women to pack a courtroom in Haiti, where she succeeded in getting a guilty verdict against a man who battered his wife.
A third joined the others and helped change the law to make rape, long a political weapon in Haiti, a punishable crime.
Myriam Merlet, Magalie Marcelin and Anne Marie Coriolan, founders of three of the country’s most important advocacy organizations working on behalf of women and girls, are confirmed dead — victims of last week’s 7.0 earthquake.
Remembering the victims of the Haiti earthquake
And their deaths have left members of the women’s movement, Haitian and otherwise, reeling.
“Words are missing for me. I lost a large chunk of my personal, political and social life,” Carolle Charles wrote in an e-mail to colleagues. The Haitian-born sociology professor at Baruch College in New York is chair of Dwa Fanm (meaning “Women’s Rights” in Creole), a Brooklyn-based advocacy group. These women “were my friends, my colleagues and my associates. I cannot envision going to Haiti without seeing them.”
Myriam Merlet was until recently the chief of staff of Haiti’s Ministry for Gender and the Rights of Women, established in 1995, and still served as a top adviser. She died after being trapped beneath her collapsed Port-au-Prince home, Charles said. She was 53.
iReport: A tribute to Merlet
Merlet, an author as well as an activist, fled Haiti in the 1970s. She studied in Canada, steeping herself in economics, women’s issues, feminist theory and political sociology.
In the mid-1980s, she returned to her homeland. In “Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and Resistance,” published in 2001, she contributed an essay, “The More People Dream,” in which she described what brought her back.
“While I was abroad I felt the need to find out who I was and where my soul was. I chose to be a Haitian woman,” she wrote. “We’re a country in which three-fourths of the people can’t read and don’t eat properly. I’m an integral part of the situation. I am not in Canada in a black ghetto, or an extraterrestrial from outer space. I am a Haitian woman. I don’t mean to say that I am responsible for the problems. But still, as a Haitian woman, I must make an effort so that all together we can extricate ourselves from them.”

With the three leaders gone, there is concern about the future of Haiti’s women and girls. Even with all that’s been achieved, the struggle for equality and against violence remains enormous.
The chaos that’s taken over the devastated nation heightens those worries, said Taina Bien-Aimé, the executive director of Equality Now, a human rights organization dedicated to women.
Before the disaster struck last week, a survey of Haitian women and girls showed an estimated 72 percent had been raped, according to study done by Kay Fanm. And at least 40 percent of the women surveyed were victims of domestic violence, Bien-Aimé said.
And humanitarian emergencies have been linked to increased violence and exploitation in the past, she said.
“From where we stand,” Bien-Aimé wrote in an e-mail, “the most critical and urgent issue is what, if any, contingencies the relief/humanitarian agencies are putting in place not only to ensure that women have easy access to food, water and medical care, but to guarantee their protection.”
Concerned women in the New York area plan to gather Wednesday to strategize their next steps, Ensler said.
And while they will certainly keep mourning, she and the others are hopeful that Haitian women, inspired by these fallen heros and leaders, will forge ahead — keeping their fight and legacies alive.

In what may be the first fallout of the Republicans’ upset win in a Senate race, the former FBI agent says he’s withdrawing, complaining that he had become a political lightning rod.
Erroll Southers, the Los Angeles airport official whose nomination to lead the Transportation Security Administration was blocked by Republican opposition in Washington, has withdrawn his name from consideration.

Southers, in a statement issued today, complained that his nomination had become a political lightning rod.

President Obama nominated Southers, who is a former FBI agent with experience in counter-terrorism, to head the TSA in September. But Sen. Jim DeMint, a South Carolina Republican who complained that Southers hoped to make good on an Obama pledge to allow TSA workers to join unions, had placed a hold on Southers’ confirmation by the Senate.

Southers also had faced questions over an event years ago, when he had ordered criminal background checks on the boyfriend of his estranged wife. He acknowledged in a letter to senators that it was wrong and he regretted the incident. He had been censured by his FBI superiors for the action 20 years ago.

“Americans deserve a leader at TSA with integrity and with an unwavering commitment to putting security ahead of politics,” DeMint said in a statement today.

He said the White House had never responded to requests for more information about Southers’ testimony during his committee confirmation hearing about the background checks.

“And Mr. Southers was never forthcoming about his intentions to give union bosses veto power over security decisions at our airports,” DeMint said.

Southers maintained that he had no intention of sacrificing security in the interest of collective bargaining for TSA screeners.

The White House accepted Southers’ withdrawal of his nomination today, while maintaining that he would have made an excellent TSA administrator.

Following the attempted bombing of a U.S.-bound airliner on Christmas Day, congressional leaders had called for a speedy confirmation of Southers for the vacant TSA post.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had said he would seek to force the confirmation over Republican objections in the Senate by invoking cloture.

However, the Democrats’ 60-vote super-majority in the Senate, which enables the party to override GOP filibusters, is evaporating with the loss this week of a Senate seat in Massachusetts to Republican Sen.-elect Scott Brown.

The forfeiture of the administration’s nominee in the face of Republican objections may also be taken as the first sign of the effect of the GOP’s stunning victory in Massachusetts, where Republican Brown claimed the seat held by the late and long-serving Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in a special election on Tuesday.

Marshall McClain, president of the Los Angeles Airport Peace Officers Assn., said his group was saddened by Southers’ decision to withdraw.

“We understand his decision but are saddened he has chosen to withdraw his name from consideration because of the manner in which the political process was playing out in Washington,” McClain said in a prepared statement.

“The TSA desperately needs permanent leadership at this crucial time in our nation’s war on terrorism. We are grateful that his decision will allow him to remain in Los Angeles as assistant chief for homeland security and intelligence to help keep LAX secure.”

Beagy Zielinski is a German-born 28-year-old stylist who moved to New York to study fashion in 1995 and stayed. Just before Christmas, she broke up with her blue-collar boyfriend, who repaired Navy ships.
“He was extremely insecure about my career and how successful I am,” Ms. Zielinski said.

An analysis of census data to be released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center found that she and countless women like her are victims of a role reversal that is profoundly affecting the pool of potential marriage partners.

“Men now are increasingly likely to marry wives with more education and income than they have, and the reverse is true for women,” said Paul Fucito, spokesman for the Pew Center. “In recent decades, with the rise of well-paid working wives, the economic gains of marriage have been a greater benefit for men.”

The analysis examines Americans 30 to 44 years old, the first generation in which more women than men have college degrees. Women’s earnings have been increasing faster than men’s since the 1970s.

“We’ve known for some time that men need marriage more than women from the standpoint of physical and mental well-being,” said Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and research director for the Council on Contemporary Families, a research and advocacy group. “Now it is becoming increasingly important to their economic well-being as well.”

The education and income gap has grown even more in the latest recession, when men held about three in four of the jobs that were lost. The Census Bureau said Friday that among married couples with children, only the wife worked in 7 percent of the households last year, compared with 5 percent in 2007. The percentage rose to 12 percent from 9 percent for blacks, among whom the education and income gap by gender has typically been even greater.

“I’m not married, I would like to be married, and my friends are all in a similar situation,” said Dr. Rajalla Prewitt, a 38-year-old psychiatrist in New Jersey. “We’re having difficulty finding someone where there’s a meeting of the minds, where we can have the same goals and values.”

“Particularly, African-American men who are educated want a traditional home where they are the breadwinner,” said Dr. Prewitt, who is a black woman.

In 2007, the Pew report found, median household incomes of married men, married women and unmarried women were all about 60 percent higher than in 1970. But among unmarried men, median household income rose by only 16 percent. These days, men who marry typically gain another breadwinner.

In 1970, 28 percent of wives had husbands who were better educated, and 20 percent were married to men with less education. By 2007, the comparable figures were 19 percent and 28 percent. In 1970, 4 percent of husbands had wives who made more money; in 2007, 22 percent did.

College-educated wives are less likely to have a husband who is college-educated and in the highest income bracket than they were in 1970, and married women are less likely to have a husband who works.

“Among all married couples,” the report said, “wives contribute a growing share of the household income, and a rising share of those couples include a wife who earns more than her husband.”

While marriage rates have declined over all, women with college degrees are still more likely to marry today than less educated women.

But some women find that the dating pressures are intense. Syreeta McFadden, a 35-year-old Columbia and Sarah Lawrence graduate who is between jobs after working in real estate development, said: “With men of any ethnic group, it’s a little intimidating for them to encounter smart women. Money is tricky.

“But, I think for me, it comes down to compatibility,” Ms. McFadden said. “Can you grow with me? Or as my genius friend the textile designer says, she asks on first dates or meeting men in bars, ‘Do you have a passport and a library card?’ ”

Elaine Richardson, who is in her 50s, is divorced and owns a health care consulting firm in Westchester, said that men “call you high maintenance if you look like you don’t need anyone to take care of you.”

Professor Coontz at Evergreen State recalled that from the late 19th century through the 1940s, it was not uncommon for a woman to finish high school or go to college and marry a man who made more but was less educated.

“This changed in the 1950s to 1970, as financial returns to education really mounted for men, but not for women,” Professor Coontz said.

The latest shift, Professor Coontz said, “is truly a sea change in gender relations within marriage.”

“Many people have worried that men’s increasing dependence on their wives, especially if they are laid off, might lead to the kind of backlash against women workers that happened in the Great Depression,” Professor Coontz said. “But I think that wives’ work has become so normative that this is unlikely.”

Ms. Zielinski, the fashion stylist, said her best friend, a man, told her once: “ ‘You are confident, have good credit, own your own business, travel around the world and are self-sufficient. What man is going to want you?’ He laughed, but I found that pretty depressing.”

LOS ANGELES — Can Sundance’s new director redefine not just the festival but also the entire independent film industry?
The Sundance Film Festival kicks off its 26th installment on Thursday, and people are chattering about all the usual things, from which films are hot acquisition targets (“Blue Valentine” is a good bet) to whether this would finally be the year that the celebrity sideshow dies down (unlikely).

But veteran festivalgoers are also chewing over something more meta: this might very well be the most important Sundance in years.

For the first time in two decades, America’s premiere film festival has a new director, John Cooper, and his primary goal has been to shift Sundance sharply back toward its arty roots. “Less commercial, more independent” is how he sums up this year’s selections. While the roster is still stuffed with stars, Mr. Cooper may have accomplished his goal. Movies on the whole are tougher and smaller. There are fewer studio premieres. In a move many call long overdue, Sundance will introduce a section called Next, focused on “low- or no-budget” films.

With the struts kicked out from under independent film — a parade of studios have shuttered their indie divisions — Sundance’s decisions have more potential than ever to have an impact on the genre, industry veterans say. This enormous, unexpected responsibility comes partly from a power vacuum. Harvey Weinstein no longer leads the independent film pack; the big buyers that remain, like Fox Searchlight, have been hammered in recent months.

“We try not to think about the industry much, but I do think people are coming here to get recharged,” Mr. Cooper said.

Will Mr. Cooper’s Sundance help get this corner of moviedom back on track by focusing attention more squarely on innovation? Many people think the only way to resuscitate the indie sector is to make it more of a laboratory again — to un-nest it from the overtly commercial motion picture business.

Or will such a move hurt? These filmmakers need money, and if the buyers do not see marketability, they are not going to pry open their wallets very far.

“It’s hard for me to tell yet, but this year’s festival will definitely help us figure out what the future is,” said Christine Vachon, the producer of 60 films, including “Far From Heaven” and “Boys Don’t Cry.”

Sundance, of course, has tried to reel in its freewheeling ways before, with varying success. When you get this big — 113 feature films over 10 days, and more than 40,000 attendees — shifting course is very difficult.

And Sundance has always made risky selections. Last year’s grand jury prize and audience award in the United States dramatic competition went to “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire,” about a Harlem teenager who suffers extreme abuse.

“To some degree, the festival blows the back-to-our-roots trumpet every year,” said Bob Berney, a co-founder of Apparition, a film distributor.

Even so, Mr. Berney said that he saw a clear swing back toward more daring filmmaking in the selections made by Mr. Cooper and his top lieutenant, Trevor Groth. A shift toward art over commerce is perhaps inevitable, given the market, he said. Over the last two years studios have folded specialty divisions (Warner Independent, Picturehouse, Paramount Vantage) or scaled them back drastically (Miramax). Outside the studio system, financing has become extremely difficult to obtain because of the credit crisis and recession.

“I see fewer star vehicles in this bunch, and the ones with stars seem to be darker stories,” Mr. Berney said.

Prominent examples include “Blue Valentine,” a bleak portrait of a failing marriage starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, and “Sympathy for Delicious,” about a paralyzed disc jockey who seeks faith healing, starring Orlando Bloom and Mark Ruffalo. “The Company Men,” the first feature from John Wells (“ER”), stars Ben Affleck and Kevin Costner and tackles the dreary topic of corporate downsizing. Ryan Reynolds spends the entirety of “Buried” in a coffin.

Other films receiving early buzz include a batch made on microbudgets, with nary a star in sight. “Catfish” is a nonfiction feature made in real time about a photographer who goes through an unusual experience involving Facebook, and “Winter’s Bone” takes a sparse look at a girl from the Ozarks in search of her drug-dealing father.

“It looks like the quality of films will be very consistent with past festivals — the kinds of smart, subversive comedies and subtle, elegant dramas we look for every year,” said Richard Klubeck, a partner at United Talent Agency. Mr. Klubeck is hoping to sell a flurry of pictures, including Nicole Holofcener’s “Please Give,” about a couple’s entanglements with an elderly woman.

Indeed, agents are cautiously optimistic about sales, partly because “Precious” has been a box office success.

“This potentially could be the beginning of the beginning — the renaissance we’ve all been hoping for,” said Kevin Iwashina, a co-founder of Parlay Media, a film sales and production company. Among other films, Mr. Iwashina is a co-representative for “8: The Mormon Proposition,” a controversial documentary about Mormon efforts to ban gay marriage.

Some of Mr. Cooper’s changes might appear subtle to outsiders but are the equivalent of sonic booms to regular attendees. The inaugural Next section is one. Another involves opening night. This year Sundance will forgo a splashy single premiere in favor of a shorts program and two features: the partly animated “Howl,” with James Franco as a young Allen Ginsberg, and “Restrepo,” a searing documentary about the war in Afghanistan.

“I could taste the dirt in that one,” Mr. Cooper said of “Restrepo,” directed by Sebastian Junger (“The Perfect Storm”) and Tim Hetherington.

This being Sundance, there are other hot-button documentaries, including “The Tillman Story,” about how Pat Tillman’s family took on the United States government following his death from his own troops’ fire in Afghanistan. But there is also some fun, including “High School,” a stoner comedy, and the 3-D nature feature “Cane Toads: The Conquest.” The British comedy “Four Lions” centers on a bumbling group of self-styled jihadis. As for sure-fire celebrity free-for-alls, count on “Welcome to the Rileys” and “The Runaways,” both starring Kristen Stewart of “Twilight” fame.

Mr. Cooper has held various programming jobs at Sundance since 1989, but took over as director in March. What is his state of mind, especially given the festival’s renewed weight?

“Panic attack, mostly,” he said.

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Thursday will publicly propose giving bank regulators the power to limit the size of the nation’s largest banks and the scope of their risk-taking activities, an administration official said late Wednesday.
The president, for the first time, will throw his weight behind an approach long championed by Paul A. Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve and an adviser to the Obama administration. The proposal will put limits on bank size and prohibit commercial banks from trading for their own accounts — known as proprietary trading.

The White House intends to work closely with the House and Senate to include these proposals in whatever bill dealing with financial regulation finally emerges from Congress.

Mr. Volcker flew to Washington for the announcement on Thursday. His chief goal has been to prohibit proprietary trading of financial securities, including mortgage-backed securities, by commercial banks using deposits in their commercial banking sectors. Big losses in the trading of those securities precipitated the credit crisis in 2008 and the federal bailout.

The president will speak at an appearance on Thursday at the White House with Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, an administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the talks were private. It will come after a meeting with Mr. Volcker.

A similar discussion is percolating in Europe, led by Mervyn King, head of the Bank of England.

The president’s announcement comes as his popularity in public opinion polls is falling because of stubborn unemployment and the stagnant economy, and just days after he suffered a stinging loss when the Republicans won the Senate seat from Massachusetts.

It will be the third time in just a week that he has waded into the battle heating up in Congress over tightening regulation of financial institutions to avoid the sort of abuses that contributed to the near collapse on Wall Street. Last week he proposed a new tax on some 50 of the largest banks to raise enough money to recover the losses from the financial bailout, which ultimately could cost up to $117 billion, the Treasury estimates.

And this week, he served notice to senior lawmakers that he wants an independent agency to protect consumers as part of any financial overhaul legislation.

Only a handful of large banks would be the targets of the proposal, among them Citigroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street trading house, became a commercial bank during this latest crisis, and it would presumably have to give up that status.

“The heart of my argument,” Mr. Volcker said, “is who we are going to save and who we are not going to save. And I don’t want to save what is not at the heart of commercial banking.”

Mr. Volcker has been trying for weeks to drum up support — on Wall Street and in Washington — for restrictions similar to those passed in the Glass-Steagall Act in 1933. That law separated commercial banking and investment banking, so that the investment arm could no longer use a depositor’s money to purchase stocks, sometimes drawing money from a savings account, for example, without the depositor’s knowledge.

The 1929 stock market crash and subsequent Depression made a shambles of that practice. But Glass-Steagall was watered down over the years and revoked in 1999.

Now the concern is a new type of activity in which financial giants like Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase engage. They now operate on two fronts. On the one hand, they are commercial banks, taking deposits, making standard loans and managing the nation’s payment system. On the other hand, they trade securities for their own accounts, a hugely profitable endeavor. This proprietary trading, mainly in risky mortgage-backed securities, precipitated the credit crisis in 2008 and the federal bailout.

Mr. Volcker, chairman of the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, a panel of outside advisers set up at the start of the Obama administration, has gradually lined up big-name support for restrictions on such trading.

But the Obama administration until now focused on regulating the activities of the existing financial institutions, not breaking them up or limiting their activities. Under the new approach, commercial banks would no longer be allowed to engage in proprietary trading, using customers’ deposits and borrowed money to carry out these trades.

“Major institutions with a deposit facility should not be allowed to invest in subprime obligations under any conditions,” said Henry Kaufman, an economist and money manager, and one of a dozen prominent Wall Street figures who have told Mr. Volcker that they support his proposal, in principle if not in detail.

Others include William H. Donaldson, former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission; Roger C. Altman, chairman of Evercore and a Treasury official in the Clinton administration, and John S. Reed, a former chairman of Citigroup.

“When I was running Citi,” Mr. Reed said of his tenure in the 1980s and 1990s, “we simply did not trade for our own account.”

Beijing, China- China’s economy grew by 8.7 percent in 2009, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
China’s fourth quarter growth alone surged to 10.7 percent on an annualized basis.
China’s economy has been picking up pace the first three quarters of the year, growing at 6.2 percent the first quarter and 7.9 percent the second quarter and 9.1 percent in the third quarter.
The gross domestic product total was $4.9 trillion in 2009. The annual growth was spurred by a $586 billion stimulus package to bolster its economy.
The government had set a growth target rate of 8 percent last year, which the government sees as a benchmark to maintain employment rates in the nation of 1.3 billion.
“In the face of severe impact brought about by the global financial crisis in a century and the most complicated domestic and international situations, the (government) sized up the situation, made scientific decisions, and headed the whole nation united as one to surmount the difficulties of our time,” said Ma Jiantang, director of the National Bureau of Statistics. “It stopped the remarkable decline … and China became the first to emerge (from the recession).”
Retail sales rose 16.9 percent in 2009, as China encourage domestic spending to make up for lost export business during the recession.
But concerns are rising of a growing property bubble in China, fueled by lending which has seen property prices grow 50 percent or more in some cities.
On Wednesday China signaled to several banks to curb lending, causing stock markets to slump globally as questions about China’s lending practices slammed the price of commodities.
The sector was also hit by reports that China intends to slow the pace of lending this year in an attempt to get ahead of inflation. A stronger dollar also pressured dollar-traded commodity prices and stocks.
“China’s efforts to get their banks to lend less really hit commodities hard, because China is the marginal buyer of commodities,” said David Chalupnik, head of equities at First American Funds.
The numbers released Thursday showed, foreign trade dropped 13.9 percent. China still holds a significant trade surplus — $196 billion — though the surplus slipped more than 34 percent.
Monthly import-export numbers for December 2009, however, were up.

The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest machine. It is a massive subterranean experiment situated under the Franco-Swiss border. It consists of an accelerator designed to propel protons around a 27-km-long tunnel and smash them together. Its purpose is to simulate conditions that existed in the briefest of periods following the Big Bang. Scientists hope to be able to gather evidence that will shed greater insight into the nature of the universe.