SpaceX has made history. Its privately developed rocket has made it into space.

“I don’t know what to say… because my mind is just blown,” said Musk, during a brief address to his staff after the successful launch. “This is just the first step of many.”

so this is what it looks like to leave earth…

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Family of Spanish poet Lorca slain in Civil War won’t oppose opening of mass grave
By CIARAN GILES | Associated Press Writer
8:45 AM EDT, September 19, 2008

MADRID, Spain (AP) _ Federico Garcia Lorca’s family won’t oppose a petition to open a mass grave where his body is believed to have been dumped after Franco supporters allegedly executed the poet and playwright at the outbreak of Spain’s Civil War, a relative said Thursday.

A judge will decide whether to exhume the remains, but the announcement by the family of Spain’s most prominent and popular 20th century poet is a significant about-face after years of refusing to touch the grave.

It also takes Spain a bit closer to unraveling one of the 1936-39 war’s most intriguing mysteries — how the writer died and where exactly his remains are.

Garcia Lorca was 38 when he was killed. His work deals with universal themes such as love, death, passion, cruelty and injustice.

“We will accept whatever decision is taken without objection,” said Laura Garcia Lorca, the poet’s niece. But she insisted the family would prefer if the grave was left untouched.

A gorge in southern Spain believed to hold the poet’s and many other bodies “should be protected for the cemetery that it is, a testimony to the terrible crimes committed under Franco and the repression,” she told The Associated Press.

“To open just one of the graves there and distinguish some of the dead above the others demeans the virtue of the place as a historic legacy.”

Relatives of two other men believed to be buried in the same grave as the poet asked National Court judge Baltasar Garzon last week to order the grave opened — a move responding to the Lorca family’s steadfast refusal to let the grave be dug up.

It also formed part of a surging nationwide movement to give proper burial to the thousands of people known to have been killed by supporters of late dictator Gen. Francisco Franco and buried in mass graves.

“We understand the desire of a family to recover the remains of their relatives and give them proper burials,” said the niece. “For our family it is preferable that he (Lorca) stay there. He is in good company.”

Investigations indicate the poet, who was open about his homosexuality, was shot along with a school teacher named Dioscoro Galindo Gonzalez and two labor union activists — Francisco Galadi and Juan Arcolla — on Aug. 18, 1936, near the Viznar mountain gorge in Garcia Lorca’s native province of Granada.

The four bodies are believed to lie in a site close to an olive tree that has since been designated a memorial park. Others claim the burial spot is 400 yards away.

Several thousand others are believed to have been shot and dumped at the gorge.

The Franco rebellion triggered a civil war against the left-wing, democratically elected Republican government, and was followed by a 36-year dictatorship.

There is no official record of how many people died at the hands of Franco’s forces. British historian Paul Preston, an expert on the conflict, says 55,000 were killed by the Republican forces and were fully accounted for afterward.

Garzon recently asked church leaders, city mayors and other authorities for help in building a reliable list.

In many ways, the Lorca case symbolizes Spain’s attempts to deal with its painful past, with many, especially conservative groups, opposed to what they call opening up old wounds.

Last year, Spain’s Socialist government passed a watershed bill formally denouncing the Franco regime for the first time and made symbolic amends to victims of the war and the ensuing dictatorship.

The final decision regarding the grave rests with Garzon and this may take several months.

Iraq: Confirmed cholera cases exceed 100

BAGHDAD, 17 September 2008 (IRIN) - The number of confirmed cases of cholera has risen to 107 in central and southern parts of the country, a Health Ministry spokesman said on 16 September.

“The number of confirmed cases has reached 107: Babil 64 cases, Karbala 14, Baghdad 24, Najaf two, Diyala one, Basra one case and the last case in Maysan,” said Ihssan Jaafar, director-general of the public health directorate and spokesman for the ministry’s cholera control unit.

Jaafar said Iraqi health authorities were still fighting the outbreak on two fronts: offering medical treatment and raising awareness among the population either by issuing posters or through television programmes.

He said two kinds of medical treatments were used: oral dehydration therapy - Dextrolyte - for the simple cases, especially for children; while the intravenous one - Ringer Lacpate - involved antibiotics.

“We don’t have any shortages [of drugs] for these treatments and we can cope with any outbreak,” he said.

Since the outbreak in late August, Iraqi health authorities have been accusing each other of not doing enough to curb the spread of the disease.

On 16 September, Zuhair al-Khafaji, head of the Environment Department at Babil Health Directorate, said negligence by the service authorities was to blame.

“It has been confirmed to us that the chloride, which was used before in the water purification plants and which was of Iranian and Indian origin, had expired. But now we are waiting for a new supply of chloride from Amman, Jordan, which is better than the previous one,” al-Khafaji said.

“The reason behind the daily increase in cases [of cholera] is that many people still do not pay attention to health authorities’ directions and keep drinking from rivers without using water [purification] tablets.”

Cholera is a gastro-intestinal disease typically spread by contaminated water. It can cause severe diarrhoea, which, in extreme cases, can lead to fatal dehydration. It can be prevented by treating drinking water with chlorine and by improving personal hygiene conditions.

(more…)

BERLIN (Reuters) - German biologists have discovered a new species of ant they believe is the oldest on the planet, dating back around 120 million years.

Researchers from Karlsruhe’s Natural History Museum found the 3-millimeter-long (0.118 inch) insect in the Amazon rainforest in 2007, and hope it will shed light on the early evolution of ants.

“It’s by far the most spectacular find of my 26-year career,” said museum biologist Manfred Verhaagh on Tuesday.

Scientists from Karlsruhe originally found an unidentified species of ant of a similar type in the Brazilian rainforest in 2003. However, due to an accident in the laboratory, the insect dried up, making further research impossible, Verhaagh said.

Last year a separate team from the museum’s research body was in the forest investigating fungus when they stumbled upon the tiny insect, and named it “Martialis heureka”.

Resembling a miniature wasp, the insect is like no other ant, and probably dates back 120 million years, making it the oldest still inhabiting the earth, Verhaagh said. The scientists used DNA samples from its front leg to establish its likely age.

The last discovery of a new ant species was in 1923, he added.

(Reporting by Josie Cox, Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

sweeeeeet.

Sweeeeet.

‘Ride The Beast’, the ballet choreographed to the music of Radiohead, is set to make its London debut later this year.

The show, put on by the [url=http://www.scottishballet.co.uk/whats-on/current-productions/autumn-season-2008/autumn-season-2008.htm ]Scottish Ballet[/url], uses a number of the band’s songs, drawn mainly from their experimental album ‘Kid A’.

Tracks used include ‘Hunting Bears’, ‘Idioteque’, ‘The National Anthem’, ‘Fitter Happier’ and an acoustic version of ‘Creep’.

As previously reported, ‘Ride The Beast’ was debuted in Edinburgh last year, but the ballet will now visit Glasgow, London, Inverness and Aberdeen as the last part of a three-part show.

Choreographer Stephen Petronio explained his choice of music for the piece, saying: “Radiohead’s music is a brilliant investigation of achingly modern taste.

“They sail through genre and form effortlessly and passionately and their music demands a physical response from me that bypasses reason. I have to live with music so intimately while creating with it, I simply have to work with music I love.”

‘Ride The Beast’ will be performed at:

Glasgow Theatre Royal (September 18-20)
Edinburgh Festival Theatre (25-27)
London Queen Elizabeth Hall (October 4-5)
Inverness Eden Court (7-8)
Aberdeen His Majesty’s Theatre (10-11)

interesting read…i noted some key parts in bold, but i recommend checking out the entire article.

When success is failure in Iraq
By Michael Schwartz

As the George W Bush administration was entering office in 2000, Donald Rumsfeld exuberantly expressed grandiose ambitions for Middle East domination, telling a National Security Council meeting: “Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime that’s aligned with US interests. It would change everything in the region and beyond.” A few weeks later, Bush speechwriter David Frum offered an even more exuberant version of the same vision to the New York Times Magazine: “An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the replacement of the radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned with the United States, would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans.”

From the moment on May 1, 2003, when the president declared “major combat operations … ended” on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, such exuberant administration statements have repeatedly been deflated by events on the ground. Left unsaid through all the twists and turns in Iraq has been this: Whatever their disappointments, administration officials never actually gave up on their grandiose ambitions. Through thick and thin, Washington has sought to install a regime “aligned with US interests” - a government ready to cooperate in establishing the United States as the predominant power in the Middle East.

Recently, with significantly lower levels of violence in Iraq extending into a second year, Washington insiders have begun crediting themselves with - finally - a winning strategy (a claim neatly punctured by Juan Cole, among other Middle East experts). In this context, actual Bush policy aims have, once again, emerged more clearly, but so has the administration’s striking and continual failure to implement them - thanks to the Iraqis.

In the past few weeks, the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has made it all too clear that, in the long run, it has little inclination to remain “aligned with US interests” in the region. In fact, we may be witnessing a classic “tipping point”, a moment when Washington’s efforts to dominate the Middle East are definitively deep-sixed.

The client state that the Bush administration has spent so many years and hundreds of billions of dollars creating, nurturing, and defending has shown increasing disloyalty and lack of gratitude, as well as an ever stronger urge to go its own way. Under the pressure of Iraqi politics, Maliki has moved strongly in the direction of a nationalist position on two key issues: the continuing American occupation and the future of Iraqi oil. In the process, he has sought to distance his government from the Bush administration and to establish congenial relationships, if not an outright alliance, with Washington’s international adversaries, including the Bush administration’s mortal enemy, Iran.
(more…)

Bush to maintain Iraq troop levels until 2009

Up to 8,000 U.S. military personnel are scheduled to leave by February

WASHINGTON - President Bush plans to pull 8,000 more combat and support troops out of Iraq by February, a measured drawdown that will leave nearly the same level of U.S. forces in the war zone for the rest of the year.

Bush’s decision, to be delivered in a speech Tuesday, is perhaps his final stamp on the war that has defined his presidency. The scope and pace of the U.S. troop withdrawals are smaller than long anticipated, reflecting a desire by the military and the president not to jeopardize security gains in Iraq.

By the time the troops return home on the timeline Bush is proposing, someone else will be making the wartime decisions from the Oval Office. (more…)

say no to Palin.
Alaskans Speak (In A Frightened Whisper): Palin Is “Racist, Sexist, Vindictive, And Mean”

By MATT APUZZO

WASHINGTON (AP) - Jack Abramoff, the once powerful lobbyist at the heart of a far-reaching political corruption scandal, was sentenced to four years in prison Thursday by a judge who said the case had shattered the public’s confidence in government.

Abramoff, who fought back tears as he declared himself a broken man, appeared crestfallen as the judge handed down a sentence lengthier than prosecutors had sought.

Over the past three years, Abramoff has come to symbolize corruption and the secret deals cut between lobbyists and politicians in back rooms or on golf courses or private jets. The scandal shook Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to Capitol Hill and contributed to the Republicans’ loss of Congress in 2006.

“I come before you as a broken man,” Abramoff said at his sentencing before U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle. “I’m not the same man who happily and arrogantly engaged in a lifestyle of political and business corruption.”

He added later that, “My name is the butt of a joke, the source of a laugh and the title of a scandal.” (more…)

Biden says criminal violations will be pursued
· Democrats have issued subpoenas to Bush aides
· 3 staffers have been held in contempt of Congress

Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden said yesterday that he and running mate Barack Obama could pursue criminal charges against the Bush administration if they are elected in November.

Biden’s comments, first reported by ABC news, attracted little notice on a day dominated by the drama surrounding his Republican counterpart, Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

But his statements represent the Democrats’ strongest vow so far this year to investigate alleged misdeeds committed during the Bush years.

“If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation, they will be pursued,” Biden said during a campaign event in Deerfield Beach, Florida, according to ABC.

“[N]ot out of vengeance, not out of retribution,” he added, “out of the need to preserve the notion that no one, no attorney general, no president — no one is above the law.”

Obama sounded a similar note in April, vowing that if elected, he would ask his attorney general to initiate a prompt review of Bush-era actions to distinguish between possible “genuine crimes” and “really bad policies”.

“[I]f crimes have been committed, they should be investigated,” Obama told the Philadelphia Daily News. “You’re also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.”

Congressional Democrats have issued a flurry of subpoenas this year to senior Bush administration aides as part of a broad inquiry into the authorisation of torturous interrogation tactics used at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

Three veterans of the Bush White House have been held in criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to respond to subpoenas: former counsel Harriet Miers, former political adviser Karl Rove, and current chief of staff Josh Bolten. The contempt battle is currently before a federal court.

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