Tag: Open Thread

The Kavoshgar 3 (Explorer) rocket was carrying an “experimental capsule”, state-owned Al-Alam television reported.

State television’s website said it was carrying “live animals” — a rat, turtles and worms, the first such experiment by Iran in space technology.

The shift will be unveiled Monday when Obama presents his 2011 budget blueprint to Congress, according to an external White House advisor.

“Constellation is dead,” the advisor told AFP on Friday, referring to a program that envisioned using Earth’s nearest neighbor as a base for manned expeditions to Mars.

Justice officials said the 10 Americans behind the alleged abductions might have to be tried in the United States because of post-quake chaos which also led the government on Tuesday to delay legislative elections indefinitely.

“The parents now are coming to the village to reclaim their children,” said Heather Paul, the CEO of SOS Children’s Villages USA, the aid group now caring for the children.

Amid growing concern over the safety of hundreds of thousands of vulnerable women and children left destitute after the January 12 quake, the case could also go to trial in the US courts.

Mazar Fortil, interim prosecutor for the main Port-au-Prince court, told AFP the group may also face a lesser charge of criminal conspiracy.

Flights that have carried more than 500 people with spinal injuries, burns and other wounds ended Wednesday after the governor of Florida asked the government to share the financial burden on his state’s hospitals.

“Apparently, some states were unwilling to accept the entry of Haitian patients for follow-on critical care,” US Transportation Command spokesman Captain Kevin Aandahl told AFP.

Since the January 12 catastrophe killed up to 200,000 people and left around 1 million homeless in the nation of 9 million, authorities and aid workers have cleared tens of thousands of bodies from the rubble, provided water supplies for makeshift refugee camps and developed a system of food distribution.

Some police are back in the streets, schools in unaffected areas will open on Monday, communications are working and some businesses have reopened their doors.

A vast foreign aid effort is struggling to meet survivors’ needs 17 days after the disaster, which killed around 170,000 people and left one million homeless and short of medicine, food and water.

Several medical teams reported increased cases of diarrhea in the last few days in Haiti, Paul Garwood, a spokesman for the UN World Health Organization, said in Geneva.

The seeds of the wild plant, which grows abundantly across India, produce non-edible oil that can be blended with diesel, to make the biofuel that is part of government efforts to cut carbon emissions and combat climate change.

That, combined with the shrub’s much vaunted ability to flourish on poorly irrigated land, should make it the perfect crop for wasteland in the drought-prone nation.

“We just can’t get used to these quakes. Each aftershock is terrifying and everyone is afraid,” trader Edison Constant said after the aftershocks struck in quick succession around dawn, two weeks after the quake.

“I hid under my bed,” added iron merchant Julien Louis, exhausted by a stream of some 50 aftershocks since the devastating 7.0-magnitude quake on January 12.

Nearly two weeks after the worst recorded disaster in the Americas killed at least 150,000 people, a conference of foreign creditors in Montreal heard that it would take at least 10 years to rebuild the stricken Caribbean nation.

As bulldozers cleared more corpse-filled buildings in the center of the flattened capital Port-au-Prince, Haitians expressed both hope and skepticism about the emergency meeting of donor countries in Montreal.

Twelve days after a catastrophic earthquake razed much of the city, hundreds of thousands of Haitians remained in desperate need of food, water and shelter, despite a large-scale US military intervention and UN-run aid program.

In Port-au-Prince, morning prayers and song gave way to apocalyptic scenes as earthmovers cleared downtown rubble, spewing rotting corpses into the streets and opening new routes for looters to swarm through the ruins.