Ice caves discovered in China

Five out-of-season ice cave groups have been discovered in succession in the Yunqiu Mountain of Xiangning County in North China s Shanxi Province. They have been identified as the largest group of ice caves ever discovered in China, according to the Institute of Geology and Geophysics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences after textual research.

People could shudder at the entrance to one of the natural out-of-season ice caves even when the outdoor temperature is over 22 degrees centigrade. Thick ice froze inside the cave, with many icicles on the ceiling of the cave, making a striking contrast with the green vegetation outside. Five groups of ice caves like this have been discovered in an area of 35 square kilometers at the Yunqiu Mountain, the largest of its kind ever discovered in China.

According to Chen Shicai, researcher of the CAS Institute of Geology and Geophysics, only about one in every 10,000 caves in China is ice cave. So the ice cave groups are rather a miracle.

NASA Scientists: Alien life Likely exists

Alien life likely exists, we just may not have been looking in the right forms. That announcement was made Thursday by NASA.

Scientists say they have always thought phosphorous was found in every living thing, but for the last two years they have been studying near Yosemite National Park. They found a type of bacteria that thrives by replacing phosphorous with the toxic chemical arsenic. We still don’t know what might make a habitable environment on another planet or a satellite of another planet . We have to increasingly broaden our perspective, Pam Conrad of NASA said.

Scientists say this is a huge development and will change the way we look for life. It could even mean new missions to Titan, the largest moon of Saturn which is known for having traces of arsenic.

Apple to make iTunes announcement Tuesday

NEWYORK: Apple Inc is set to make an announcement Tuesday about its iTunes Store, the leading music retailer in the United States.

Apple posted a message on Monday on the iTunes website, teasing an announcement to be made at 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, but gave few clues.

“Tomorrow is just another day. That you’ll never forget,” the message read.

The iTunes store raked in more than $1 billion (623 million pounds) in revenue last quarter. The company launched iTunes 10 in September, and also unveiled Ping, a new social networking service.

Apple’s iTunes is the largest digital music store in the United States, and it also sells and rents movies and television shows. More than 10 billion songs have been downloaded from the iTunes Store since it launched in 2003.

Shares of Cupertino, California-based Apple were off 0.2 percent to $307.50 in

Myanmar army-backed party to sweep poll: party official

YANGON: Myanmar’s biggest military-backed party expects to sweep the country’s first election in 20 years, picking up as many as 80 percent of seats in parliament, a senior party official said on Tuesday.

The Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), closely aligned with junta supremo Than Shwe, is winning broadly nationwide, the official said, two days after the election, which has been condemned by the United States, Europe and Japan as a sham to entrench military rule under a civilian facade.

The USDP lost only six out of 91 seats in Irrawaddy and just two out of 105 in Mandalay, the USDP official said. Mandalay and Irrawaddy are among the largest of Myanmar’s 14 divisions. AGENCIES

68 dead in Cuban plane crash

All 68 passengers on board an Aerocaribbean plane died in a crash in a rural area in Cuba, government news agencies said.
Flight 883 from Santiago de Cuba to Havana lost contact with air traffic control at 5:42pm. Investigators said the plane was believed to have gone down near the Zaza Reservoir, the largest in the country, which is about halfway between Santiago and Havana.
The official news media said there were seven members of the crew on board and 61 passengers, 28 of them non-Cubans. The cause of the crash was still unknown Thursday night.

NATO kill about 50 Afghan insurgents, repel base raid

KABUL: U.S. and other NATO troops killed about 50 insurgents during attacks in Afghanistan on Saturday, calling in air strikes to repel an assault on an outpost in the volatile southeast.

In the largest assault, U.S. troops at a combat outpost in southeastern Paktika province came under fire from rocket-propelled grenades, gunfire and mortars, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said.

“They are still investigating the area. Right now it is 38 insurgents killed,” said U.S. Army Master Sergeant Brian Sipp, a spokesman at ISAF’s eastern regional command. Another ISAF spokesman identified the troops involved as American.

There were at least two other attacks in the south and just north of the capital, Kabul, on Friday and Saturday, Afghan and ISAF officials said.

Rising violence and record casualties among foreign troops and

WikiLeaks renews question of secrecy

WASHINGTON: When WikiLeaks readied the largest-ever release of secret war files, US officials warned the whistleblower site it was irresponsible. After the 400,000 documents came out, the Pentagon said they revealed little new.

And so, some experts ask, why were the documents classified as secret in the first place?

“The Pentagon used the word ‘mundane’ to refer to some of these materials. Mundane materials should not be classified as national security information,” said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy.

“There are several things the US could do to reduce more of these unauthorized disclosures and one of them is to drastically cut back on the scale of classification.”

WikiLeaks, run by shadowy Australian hacker Julian Assange, released the documents on Friday in defiance of warnings

U.S. accused of failing to probe Iraqi abuse cases

WASHINGTON: WikiLeaks released nearly 400,000 classified U.S. files on the Iraq war on Friday, some detailing gruesome cases of prisoner abuse by Iraqi forces that the U.S. military knew about but did not seem to investigate.

The Pentagon decried the website’s publication of the secret reports, the largest security breach of its kind in U.S. military history, far surpassing the group’s dump of more than 70,000 Afghan war files in July.

U.S. officials said the leak endangered U.S. troops and threatened to put some 300 Iraqi collaborators at risk by exposing their identities.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said the documents showed evidence of war crimes, but the Pentagon dismissed the files as “ground-level” field reports from a well-chronicled war with no real surprises.

“We deplore WikiLeaks for inducing individuals to break the law, leak

Indian media sing praises of finished Games

NEW DELHI: India’s newspapers lavished praise on the Delhi Commonwealth Games on Friday as they focused on a dazzling closing ceremony and India’s record medals haul.

The Games ended on Thursday after 11 days of fiery competition that helped mend some of the damage done to Indian pride and prestige by the chaotic buildup to the event.

“Mission Accomplished 101%” headlined The Times of India, the largest selling English-language newspaper as it hailed the “Dream end with dancing lights.”

“After the spellbinding opening ceremony and a stirring surge in the medals tally, the mood in the capital was expectedly upbeat,” it said.

The Indian Express headlined with a pun on the Indian capital’s name, “Delhightful”, written in bold over a giant picture of the spectacular light show in the main stadium during the closing ceremony.

“What began a dozen

Protest against Sohail Zia’s arrest

Staff Report

LAHORE: Hundreds of people held a protest outside Lahore Accountability Court against the arrest of PML-N leader, Sohail Zia Butt.

The accountability court has sent Sohail Zia to jail for eleven days of judicial remand.

Before the case hearing, many supporters of Sohail Zia Butt held a protest outside accountability court and demanded his release and withdrawal of all cases against him.

The protesters chanted slogans against the federal government and in support of Chief Minister Punjab Shahbaz Sharif.

While talking to the media, Sohail Zia Butt said that many false cases were filed against him and his family during Musharraf’s era.

Earlier, the accountability court sentenced Butt to three years in prison.

Another reference presented him before court today (Saturday). SAMAA

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