NASA's last space shuttle mission will be delayed until November so scientists can adapt a $2 billion particle detector for an extended life aboard the International Space Station

NASA’s last space shuttle mission will be delayed until November so scientists can adapt a $2 billion particle detector for an extended life aboard the International Space Station, officials said Monday.Three more shuttle flights remain and the space agency had planned to close out the program by September 30 with a final mission by shuttle Discovery to resupply the orbital outpost.That mission now moves ahead of shuttle Endeavour’s launch with the Alpha Magnetic Spectometer, a 16-nation project overseen by Nobel laureate Samuel Ting, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”It became clear that (Endeavour) could not fly in July like was on the manifest,” said NASA spokesman Kyle Herring.

AMS, which is designed to look for antimatter particles and other exotic forms of matter in space, had been set to fly in July. But with the Obama administration’s proposal to extend the space station program until at least 2020, scientists decided to switch the detector’s cryogenically cooled superconducting magnet, estimated to last three years, to a permanent magnet that would last 10 to 18 years.

“We began thinking about this at the end of last year and the beginning of January when people were talking about the space station going to 2020 and beyond,” Ting said in an interview.”I began to realize that we’d have a museum piece.”

Dumping AMS’ liquid helium-cooled magnet cuts the device’s power to bend the path of charged cosmic particles as they pass through five different types of detectors. But Ting says adding more precision detectors and the extra years in orbit more than compensates for that.The replacement magnet, which flew in a prototype AMS during a 1998 shuttle mission, was taken out of clean room storage in Germany and tested. No degradation was found and it is scheduled to arrive at CERN — the European Organization for Nuclear Research — in Geneva where the AMS is being assembled this week.

Delaying the last shuttle flight will give the 6,000 to 8,000 workers at the Kennedy Space Center preparing for layoffs a short reprieve.

Obama’s budget request for NASA for the year beginning October 1, which still must be approved by Congress, includes $600 million to keep the program going until the end of the year if necessary to accommodate technical or weather-related delays.The schedule change is not expected to affect the final planned flight of shuttle Atlantis, targeted for liftoff on May 14 to deliver a Russian docking port to the station.(Reuters)

senior official said on Monday Iran has started work on a new uranium enrichment nuclear plant

Iran has started work on a new uranium enrichment nuclear plant, a senior official said on Monday, part of a big expansion of its nuclear program which has contributed to fears in the West it aims to build a bomb.Defying Western pressure to curb its sensitive nuclear work, Iran announced in November it planned to expand its enrichment activities by building 10 new sites. The announcement was condemned by the United states and its European allies.”The president has confirmed the designated location of a new nuclear site and on his order the building process has begun,” Mojtaba Samareh-Hashemi, a senior adviser to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, told the semi-official ILNA news agency.

“New locations on which the plants should be constructed this year have been determined and initial construction is underway,” Samareh-Hashemi was quoted as saying.Iran’s top nuclear official Akbar Salehi told Reuters in February that Iran would start construction of two enrichment sites by March 2011.Washington is pushing for a fourth round of United Nations sanctions on Iran in the coming weeks to pressure it to halt its enrichment-related work, which Tehran says is entirely peaceful.Iran started higher-level enrichment in February, saying it needed the 20 percent enriched fuel for a research reactor in Tehran making medical isotopes. Such potent material is not necessary to generate electricity.

Tehran has said it is still willing to swap low-level enriched uranium for higher-grade fuel enriched abroad — a move which would help address fears about Iran’s enrichment activities — but the exchange must happen on Iranian soil.The West believed it had persuaded Iran, at talks in Geneva last October, to hand over some of its uranium stocks to be enriched abroad, but that deal fell apart soon afterwards.Samareh-Hashemi said any import of enriched uranium would not mean Iran planned to stop its own enrichment.”The domestic production of (nuclear) fuel does not contradict importing it,” he said.

“We have started to produce uranium domestically based on our need to provide fuel for the Tehran research reactor and this will continue until our needs are met.”In a separate development, state-owned Jam-e-Jam daily said Iran’s ambassador to the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, would soon be stepping down as his term was coming to an end. Soltanieh was not immediately available to comment.(Reuters)

new U.S.-Russian treaty to reduce long-range nuclear weapons

PRAGUE has agreed to host the signing of a new U.S.-Russian treaty to reduce long-range nuclear weapons, the Czech Foreign Ministry said Wednesday.The announcement is the clearest sign yet that Washington and Moscow are close to completing the deal on an accord to replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, which expired in December.

Ministry spokesman Filip Kanda said that Prague agreed to host the signing of the accord by U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev when the negotiators reach a deal. He said negotiations have not been completed yet.

“As an ally, we have consulted with the U.S. side on an option for us to complete the signing when a deal is done,” Kanda said. “We’ve agreed,” he said.It was not clear if the plan for the signing ceremony had also been discussed with the Russian government.

The negotiations are still under way in Geneva. The treaty is likely to limit the number of deployed strategic warheads by the United States and Russia. Any agreement would need to be ratified by the legislatures of both countries and would still leave each with a large number of nuclear weapons, both deployed and stockpiled.

Both U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said following talks in Moscow last week that a deal was near – but not done.

The expired START treaty, signed by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and President George H.W. Bush, required each country to cut its nuclear warheads by at least one-fourth, to about 6,000, and to implement procedures for verifying that each side was sticking to the agreement.

The two sides pledged to continue to respect the expired treaty’s limits on nuclear arms and allow inspectors to continue verifying that both sides were living up to the deal.

Obama and Medvedev agreed at a Moscow summit in July to cut the number of nuclear warheads each possesses to between 1,500 and 1,675 within seven years as part of a broad new treaty.

For Obama, signing the treaty in Prague would be a symbolic return to the city where he outlined his nuclear agenda in April and declared his commitment to “a world without nuclear weapons” in a sweeping speech before a crowd of many thousands.(AP)

Global airlines are undergoing a surprisingly strong recovery with Asian and Latin American carriers leading the way

GENEVA Global airlines are undergoing a surprisingly strong recovery with Asian and Latin American carriers leading the way, the leading industry group said Thursday as it halved its loss forecast for 2010 to $2.8 billion.The International Air Transport Association said carriers began bouncing back late last year, and have continued to see stronger demand after posting record losses during the global economic crisis. The group also lowered its 2009 loss estimate to $9.4 billion from $11 billion because of the year-end rally.”We are starting to see some blue skies ahead of us,” said IATA chief executive Giovanni Bisignani.The group, which represents 240 airline companies worldwide, had predicted in December that 2010 losses would total $5.6 billion because of the “extraordinarily low” yields airlines are generating – the average price someone pays to fly one mile.

Yields are now expected to improve 2 percent for passenger planes, and 3.1 percent for cargo traffic this year, despite a glut of planes on the market and lower corporate travel budgets. Both key statistics dived 14 percent in 2009.Passenger demand should grow 5.6 percent for the year, while cargo demand could jump 12 percent, IATA added. It said strong growth in Asia and Latin America was offsetting lagging demand in Europe and the United States.”We are seeing a definite two-speed industry,” Bisignani told reporters. He noted that American and European travelers may take a longer time to return to higher-priced business class seats for short-haul flights, and said markets in their regions continued to contract.

European carriers are expected to post a $2.2 billion loss, the largest in the world, while North American airlines could lose $1.8 billion because of a jobless recovery and poor consumer confidence, the group said. By contrast, Asian-Pacific companies could make $2.7 billion and Latin American carriers another $800 million.Bisignani said 2010 represents the halfway point in a recovery effort that could take three years – even if that still doesn’t mean profits. Airlines should generate $44 billion in revenues more than last year, but that is still be $43 billion below the industry’s 2008 peak, he said.IATA warned, however, that higher fuel costs would hamper any industrywide rebound. It is now gauging an average oil price of $79 a barrel for the year, meaning $132 billion in costs for carriers. That’s over a quarter of all operating costs.

“Oil is a wild card,” Bisignani conceded.Speaking on industry developments, he noted over 30 airlines were knocked out of business since the crisis began and that carriers have lost nearly $50 billion in the last decade. They now hold over $200 billion in debts.”This is not the time for increases in salaries or prices for services,” Bisignani said, without mentioning specifically Lufthansa’s strike last month or similar action threatened at British Airways.”It’s certainly not the time for strikes,” he said. “All the partners need to work together to get out of these red numbers.”(AP)

WHO staff prepare boxes of antiviral drugs to treat the H1N1 virus

WHO staff prepare boxes of antiviral drugs to treat the H1N1

The moderate impact of the H1N1 pandemic is the “best possible health news of the decade,” but the head of the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) today warned that more people – particularly in the southern hemisphere – could become sick this season and that it would be premature to say the health risk is over.“It is too early for us to say that we have come to an end of the pandemic influenza worldwide,” WHO Director-General Margaret Chan told reporters at a year-end press conference in Geneva.“There is no basis for any allegations that this is not a pandemic. We are seeing million and millions of people infected with this new virus and we are fortunate that many of these people make recovery.”

Ms. Chan added that it would be prudent for WHO and member states to continue to monitor the pandemic evolution for up to 12 more months.According to the agency, more than 6,000 people have died from the H1N1 since the outbreak began in April, compared with up to 500,000 who die annually from the regular flu. Pregnant women, children under two and people with underlying conditions such as respiratory problems are particularly vulnerable.

The WHO head said that in a background of a fragile economy where many people suffer from chronic diseases, a severe instead of a moderate pandemic could have brought momentum for health development “to a grinding halt and reversed the hard-earned against that the world collectively has achieved in the last ten years.”

She added that Member States and WHO partners have made steady but fragile progress in internationally-agreed goals in the past decade, and must work hard to maintain the momentum of progress and to catch up in areas that are lacking.

Among the priorities for the next year, Ms. Chan called on countries to continue to push for progress on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), eight ambitious anti-poverty targets with a 2015 deadline, especially in improving maternal mortality.

She noted possible roadblocks caused by weak and insufficiently-funded health care systems. She also cautioned against threats from policies outside the direct control of the health sector, such as from the financial or the agricultural sectors.

On a positive note, she highlighted the new breed of South-South and North-South collaborations on research and development that have yielded “badly needed vaccines and drugs, particularly for diseases of the poor.”

The United Nations expert repeats call for threat of sanctions against Israel over Gaza blockade

lift the blockade

The United Nations independent expert on Palestinian rights has again called for a threat of economic sanctions against Israel to force it to lift its blockade of Gaza, which is preventing the return to a normal life for 1.5 million residents after the devastating Israeli offensive a year ago.“Obviously Israel does not respond to language of diplomacy, which has encouraged the lifting of the blockade and so what I am suggesting is that it has to be reinforced by a threat of adverse economic consequences for Israel,” Richard Falk, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, told UN Radio.

“That probably is something that is politically unlikely to happen, but unless it happens, it really does suggest that the United States and the Quartet and the EU [European Union] don’t take these calls for lifting the blockade very seriously and are unaffected by Israel’s continuing defiance of those calls,” he said, referring to the diplomatic Quartet of the UN, EU, Russia and US, which have been calling for a two-state solution to the Middle East conflict.

The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), the main UN body tending to the needs of some 4 million Palestinian refugees, said today Gaza had been “bombed back, not to the Stone Age, but to the mud age,” because UNRWA was reduced to building houses out of mud after the 22-day offensive Israel said it launched to end rocket attacks against it.

“The Israeli blockade has meant that almost no reconstruction materials have been allowed to move into Gaza even though 60,000 homes were either damaged or completely destroyed. So we in UNRWA have been saying ‘let’s lift this senseless blockage,’” UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness told UN Radio.

“We are the United Nations and we always hope that diplomacy will prevail, and it will prevail above the rationale of warfare. But if you look at what is going on in Gaza, and if you look at the continued blockade and the fact that that blockade is radicalizing a population there, then one has to have one’s doubts.”

In a statement last week, Mr. Falk stressed that the “unlawful blockade” was in its third year, with insufficient food and medicine reaching Gazans, producing further deterioration of the mental and physical health of the entire civilian population.

Building materials necessary to repair the damage could not enter Gaza, and he blamed the blockade for continued breakdowns of the electricity and sanitation systems due to the Israeli refusal to let spare parts needed for repair get through the crossings.Mr. Falk also deplored the wall being built on the borders between Gaza and Egypt.

“I’m very distressed by that, because it is both an expression of complicity on the part of the government of Egypt and the United States, which apparently is assisting through its corps of engineers with the construction of this underground steel impenetrable wall that’s designed to interfere with the tunnels that have been bringing some food and material relief to the Gaza population,” he told UN Radio.

“And of course, the underground tunnel complex itself is an expression of the desperation created in Gaza as a result of this blockade that’s going on now for two and a half years, something that no people since the end of World War II have experienced in such a severe and continuing form.”As a Special Rapporteur, Mr. Falk serves in an independent and unpaid capacity and reports to the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council.

In a new policy brief, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), entrusted with promoting the integration of developing countries into the world economy, reported that more than 80 per cent of Gaza’s population are now impoverished; 43 per cent unemployed; and 75 per cent lack food security. “In view of the eroded productive base, poverty is likely to widen and deepen unless reconstruction begins in earnest and without further delay,” it warned.

Violence erupted in the Swiss city of Geneva

Violence erupted in the Swiss city of Geneva Saturday as a scheduled peaceful protest of a World Trade Organization conference turned violent and police had to use tear gas and rubber bullets.Thirty-three arrests have been made and police were on the streets working to maintain order, authorities said. There was one minor injury reported: An 80-year-old woman in a walker suffered a head bruise when she fell during the tumult of the demonstrations.The demonstration started around 2:30 p.m. (8:30 a.m. ET) and about 3,000 people turned up in the central part of town, Geneva police spokesman Patrick Puhl told CNN. World Trade Organization ministers will hold a conference next week.”There were three groups who came seeking violence,” Puhl said.”The troublemakers quickly began attacking banks, hotels and shops, smashing windows and burning four cars, so we had to stop them using tear gas and rubber bullets,”The general theme for discussion at the conference is “The WTO, the Multilateral Trading System and the Current Global Economic Environment.”