world news update

11-2-18  Hawaii telescopes get legal okay.   One called

TMT with a 30 meter diameter mirror, the observatory is expected to produce images 12 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope, and is the only one of its kind in the northern hemisphere., on Mauna Kea. The non-profit international effort is backed by the California Institute of Technology, alongside partners in India, Canada, Japan and China, and has received significant funding from the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation.  Near several existing observatories, including the Keck and Subaru telescopes – the site offers a stable upper atmosphere with very little turbulence, critical for using adaptive optics to correct for atmospheric distortions.

  The other is Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST). Housed inside a 25 meter enclosure and with a 4 m-diameter primary mirror, it is currently being completed at the summit of Maui’s Mount Haleakalā and should become operational next year.  http://optics.org/news/9/11/2

………………………………………………………………… 

    In June 2009 a Pakistani mother of

five (3 shown), Asia Bibi, was out picking fruit in the fields.  At midday she went to the nearest well, picked up a cup, and took a drink of cool water, and then offered it to another woman.  Suddenly one of her fellow workers cried out that the water belonged to Muslim women and that Bibi--who is Christian--had contaminated it.  “Blasphemy!” someone shouted, a crime punishable by death in Pakistan.  In that instant with one word Bibi’s fate was sealed.  First attacked by a mob, Bibi was then thrown into prison and sentenced to be hanged.

https://www.amazon.com/Blasphemy-Memoir-Sentenced-Death-Water/dp/1613748892

…………………………………..............................

Asia Bibi's acquittal last week prompted violent protests by the Islamist movement CNN he was concerned for his life….

Tehreek-e-Labbaik (TLP), and on Friday her lawyer Saiful Malook told

The government also pledged not to oppose a TLP application to add Bibi to a list preventing her from leaving the country.  And the government agreed to release everyone detained in connection with the protests….

  Bibi, a mother of five from Punjab province, was convicted of blasphemy in 2010 and sentenced to hang after she was accused of defiling the name of the Prophet Mohammed during an argument a year earlier with Muslim colleagues.

  The workers had refused to drink from a bucket of water Bibi had touched because she was not Muslim.  At the time Bibi said the case was a matter of women who didn't like her "taking revenge.”  https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/04/asia/asia-bibi-lawyer-flees-pakistan-intl/index.html

…………………………………..................................................................….…..

  Bibi had been on death row for eight years following her arrest in the central Pakistani village of Ithan Wali over an argument with two Muslim women, who refused to drink water from the same vessel as her due to her religion.  The women accused her of having insulted Islam's Prophet Muhammad during the altercation, a charge Bibi has consistently denied.

  Salman Taseer, the then-Punjab provincial governor, spoke in Bibi's defence before being assassinated by his bodyguard in 2011.  The TLP was founded out of a movement to support Taseer's assassin, who was hanged in 2016.  Shahbaz Bhatti, a federal minister for minorities, was also killed after calling for Bibi's release.  https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/11/aasia-bibi-husband-pakistan-appeals-asylum-181104145054488.html

…………………………………....................…

  World chess championship scheduled to run 9 Nov. to near end of month in London, featuring Carlsen of Norway versus Caruana of USA.

...............................................

11-3-18    The United Nations Children’s Fund has warned that both sides in Yemen’s brutal conflict are making it “impossible” to deliver and distribute much-needed humanitarian aid to the country, where some 14 million people are threatened by famine....The secretary-general stressed that the immediate priority is to stop the bombing in populated areas and preserve critical infrastructure including in the key port of Hodeida, the main entry point for international aid and 70 percent of food imports that Yemen relies on.  https://www.france24.com/en/20181103-famine-yemen-war-unicef-guterres-humanitarian-disaster

........................................

11-2-18  Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros’s powerful photographs played an important role in moving the world to action and ultimately bringing the Second Liberian Civil War (1999-2003) to an end.

  Trapped with Liberian dictator Charles Taylor’s forces in besieged Monrovia in the summer of 2003, Chris braved artillery and rocket fire to send frontline pictures of women and children being killed by the hundreds. His photos ran on front pages around the world and provoked outrage over a brutal war whose victims were almost entirely noncombatants.  Tim Hetherington, embedded with the LURD rebels in the same period, provided documentation of the rebels shelling civilians.  Even the ruthless Charles Taylor considered him a threat and sent assassination squads to kill the British photojournalist.  Tim barely escaped, only to return and live in Liberia following the conflict.  His haunting book, Long Story Bit by Bit: Liberia Retold, has become a standard text of the Liberian wars.  https://www.yahoo.com/news/war-peace-liberia-tim-hetherington-slideshow-wp-183521337.html