Palestinian leaders agreed to create a national unity government in a move that could end months of political and fiscal crisis and pave the way for a resumption of urgently needed Western aid. President Mahmud Abbas will dissolve the current government within the next 48 hours and charge prime minister Ismail Haniya of the Islamist movement Hamas with forming a new cabinet, officials said after the deal was announced. ‘President Abbas will be issuing a presidential decree within the next 48 hours to dismiss the current government and charge a new prime minister’ to form a new cabinet, Abbas spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina said. ‘Current prime minister Ismail Haniya will be charged … with forming a national unity government,’ a senior official said on condition of anonymity. The 43-year-old Haniya will have five weeks to form a new government once he is officially charged with doing so. Abbas told reporters in Gaza City that he and rival Haniya had clinched a deal on forming a national unity government after weeks of tortuous talks. ‘We have finished defining the political program of a national unity government, based on the national reconciliation document,’ Abbas said. […]
WASHINGTON — Humans are largely to blame for the recent trend toward more powerful hurricanes, a group of 19 American and European scientists declared Monday. In a paper appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists claim to have established a solid chain linking human burning of fossil fuels, global warming, higher ocean temperatures, and the intensity and duration of recent hurricanes such as Katrina and Wilma. The scientists’ key finding was that as sea surface temperatures rise and fall, the maximum wind speed of hurricanes goes up and down in step with them. ‘Human-caused changes in greenhouse gases are the main driver’ of warmer waters in the tropical Atlantic and northwestern Pacific oceans, where hurricanes and cyclones are born, the paper says. Its principal author was Benjamin Santer, a senior climate researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. Other contributors come from 11 different laboratories in the United States, Germany and England. Their report is unlikely to end the controversy over the connection between human burning of fossil fuels in cars, buildings and factories, the warming of the world’s air and seas, and the surge in category 4 […]
WASHINGTON — Earthlike planets covered with deep oceans that could harbor life may be found in as many as a third of solar systems discovered outside of our own, US researchers said on Thursday. These solar systems feature gas giants known as ‘Hot Jupiters,’ which orbit extremely close to their parent stars — even closer than Mercury to our sun, University of Colorado researcher Sean Raymond said. The close-orbiting gassy planets may help encourage the formations of smaller, rocky, Earthlike planets, they reported in the journal Science. ‘We now think there is a new class of ocean-covered, and possibly habitable, planets in solar systems unlike our own,’ Raymond said in a statement. The team from Colorado, Penn State University and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Maryland ran computer simulations of various types of solar systems forming. The gas giants may help rocky planets form close to the suns, and may help pull in icy bodies that deliver water to the young planets, they found. ‘These gas giants cause quite a ruckus,’ Raymond said. Water is key to life as humans define it. ‘I think there are definitely habitable planets out there,’ Raymond […]
SYDNEY, Australia — Former Vice President Al Gore said Sunday he hadn’t rule out making a second bid for the White House, though he said it was unlikely. Gore spoke to reporters in Sydney, where he was promoting the local premiere of his documentary on global warming. ‘I haven’t completely ruled out running for president again in the future but I don’t expect to,’ Gore said before the Sunday night premiere of ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ ‘I offer the explanation not as an effort to be coy or clever. It’s just the internal shifting of gears after being in politics almost 30 years. I hate to grind the gears,’ he added. Gore, who lost the presidency to President Bush in 2000 in disputed circumstances, said there was no doubt the impact of global warming would be best addressed through the power of the presidency, but making a documentary was second best. Gore’s renewed popularity and movie tours across the United States have spurred speculation of a White House run in 2008. He has previously repeatedly denied such intentions. The documentary, which Gore narrates, is critical of the United States and Australia for refusing to adopt […]
America’s newest Muslims arrive in the afternoon crunch at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Their planes land from Dubai, Casablanca and Karachi. They stand in line, clasping documents. They emerge, sometimes hours later, steering their carts toward a flock of relatives, a stream of cabs, a new life. This was the path for Nur Fatima, a Pakistani woman who moved to Brooklyn six months ago and promptly shed her hijab. Through the same doors walked Nora Elhainy, a Moroccan who sells electronics in Queens, and Ahmed Youssef, an Egyptian who settled in Jersey City, where he gives the call to prayer at a palatial mosque. ‘I got freedom in this country,’ said Ms. Fatima, 25. ‘Freedom of everything. Freedom of thought.’ The events of Sept. 11 transformed life for Muslims in the United States, and the flow of immigrants from countries like Egypt, Pakistan and Morocco thinned sharply. But five years later, as the United States wrestles with questions of terrorism, civil liberties and immigration control, Muslims appear to be moving here again in surprising numbers, according to statistics collected by the Department of Homeland Security and the Census Bureau. Immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
