View toward Saturn,...[ 2940 ]

Angling Saturn

Angling Saturn

The Cassini spacecraft takes an angled view toward Saturn, showing the southern reaches of the planet with the rings on a dramatic diagonal.

North on Saturn is up and rotated 16 degrees to the left. This view looks toward the southern, unilluminated side of the rings from about 14 degrees below the ringplane. The rings cast wide shadows on the planet's southern hemisphere.

The moon Enceladus (313 miles, or 504 kilometers across) appears as a small, bright speck in the lower left of the image.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on June 15, 2012 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.8 million miles (2.9 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 72 degrees. Image scale is 11 miles (17 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Disputed islands in the East China Sea.[ 2939 ]

Water cannon forces Taiwanese flotilla to leave disputed islands

North Asia correspondent Mark Willacy, wires

www.abc.net.au/. Updated 1 hour 6 minutes ago

Photo: Several dozen fishing boats set off to the disputed islands in the East China Sea. (Reuters: Pichi Chuang)

Video: Top diplomat dispatched over Japan, China tensions (Australia Network News)

Related Story: Beijing crowds protest at Japan embassy

Related Story: Japan in talks to buy disputed islands

Related Story: Japan lodges official protest over disputed islands

Map: Taiwan

Dozens of Taiwanese boats have retreated after crossing into Japanese territorial waters near a group of disputed islands in the East China Sea.

About 40 to 50 Taiwanese ships crossed into Japanese waters this morning, ignoring orders by the Japanese coastguard to leave the area.
The vessels departed after the Japanese coastguard fired water cannons at them.
The flotilla of fishing boats and Taiwanese coastguard ships made the voyage to stake their claim for the islands, which are administered by Japan.
The uninhabited outcrops in the East China Sea are also claimed by Beijing, which has been angered by the Japanese government's move to buy and nationalise the islands.
The seabed near the island group, which is claimed by the Japanese as Senkaku and the Chinese as Diaoyu, is believed to be rich in rare earths and gas.
Taiwan, whose coast lies around 200 kilometres from the islands, also claims the islands belong to it.
Before retreating, the boats had planned to circle the islands but not to land.
Japan has lodged a complaint with Taipei.
The clash came a day after Chinese ships also sailed close to the uninhabited isles.

Photo: A flotilla of Taiwanese fishing boats head to the disputed East China Sea islands. (AFP: Mandy Cheng)

Souring relations

Relations between Japan and China have sunk in recent weeks following Tokyo's purchase of the islands from a private Japanese landowner.
Japan's coastguard said on Monday that two of China's maritime surveillance ships had spent seven hours in territorial waters around Uotsurijima, the largest island in the chain.
Two fisheries patrol boats briefly also entered the 12-nautical-mile zone around the chain, the coastguard said.

Video: Top diplomat dispatched over Japan, China tensions (Australia Network News)

Separate dispute

Meanwhile, South Korea is refusing to allow a Japanese warship to dock at its port during a joint naval exercise because of disputed islands, according to reports.
Tokyo has lodged a protest with Seoul over the refusal during an exercise that also involves the US and Australia, reports said, with one diplomat calling it "extremely rude".
The four-nation drill, scheduled to take place on Wednesday and Thursday, is aimed at coordinating a response to possible trafficking of weapons of mass destruction, Japanese defence officials said.
In the original scenario a Japanese vessel was to dock in the city of Busan, but South Korean authorities refused to grant it permission, Japan's broadcaster NHK said.
The Sankei newspaper reported a similar story, citing a Japanese diplomat in Seoul as saying: "It is extremely rude as a host country of a multi-nation military drill."
The US-led drill, known as the Proliferation Security Initiative, has been held most years since 2003.
Japanese ships were permitted to make a port call in the 2010 drill in South Korea, a spokesman for Japan's Maritime Self-Defence Force said.
This year's drill will focus on boarding inspections in waters between Japan and South Korea, "so we don't necessarily have to make a port call in Busan", the naval spokesman said.
The Sankei newspaper said Tokyo had considered withdrawing from the joint drill in the face of Seoul's refusal, but Washington mediated and rewrote the scenario so that the Japanese ship's port call was unnecessary.
A Japanese foreign ministry official in charge of the drill declined to comment on the reports, citing "consideration into relations with other countries".
Ties between Tokyo and Seoul went into virtual freefall in August when South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak made a surprise visit to Dokdo, a pair of islands that lie between the two countries, which Japan claims as Takeshima.
His call for an apology from Japan's revered emperor, for crimes committed by forces who occupied the Korean peninsula for much of the first half of the 20th Century, was rounded on by Japanese leaders.
Diplomatic exchanges were stymied and a war of words erupted.
Tokyo's relationship with its former colony is often tense, despite their close economic ties, with historical grievances informing exchanges.

Video: Taiwanese boats cross Japanese waters (ABC News)

Hammer and sickle...[ 2938 ]

American High School Band Marches with Hammer & Sickle

Sep 24, 2012/Fox News

By Todd Starnes
A Pennsylvania high school marching band is raising eyebrows with a halftime performance that commemorates the Russian revolution, complete with red flags, olive military-style uniforms, and giant hammers and sickles.
“St. Petersburg: 1917” is the theme for the New Oxford High School Marching Band. Ironically, the school’s athletic teams are called the Colonials and their colors are red, white and blue. The band’s website features a picture of the group with students holding a hammer and sickle.
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“There is no reason for Americans to celebrate the Russian revolution,” said one irate parent who alerted Fox News. “I am sure the millions who died under Communism would not see the joy of celebrating the Russian revolution by a school 10 miles from Gettysburg.”
The parent, who asked not to be identified, attended a football last Friday night with his children. He said he was shocked by what he saw.
“It was Glee meets the Russian Revolution,” he told Fox News. “I’m not kidding you. They had giant hammers and sickles and they were waving them around.”
“Who thought this was a good idea?”
Rebecca Harbaugh, the superintendent for the Conewago Valley School District, told Fox News that the band’s performance was “not an endorsement of communism at all.”
“It’s a representation of the time period in history called St. Petersburg 1917,” she said. “I am truly sorry that somebody took the performance in that manner. I am.”
“If anything is being celebrated it’s the music,” she said. “It is what it is. I understand people look at something and choose how to interpret that and I’m just very sorry that it wasn’t looked at as just a history lesson.”
Besides, she explained, “in 2008 we did an entire show on freedom.”
But some critics said it’s outrageous for any American school to be celebrating such a violent era.
“It would be tantamount to celebrating the music of 1935 Berlin,” the parent said. “If I was Lithuanian, Estonian, or Ukrainian, I’d be a little hot. I’d be really hot. It’s insulting to glorify something that doesn’t need to be glorified in America.”
Paul Kengor is the executive director for the Center for Vision & Values at Pennsylvania’s Grove City College.
He initially thought the halftime performance was a joke.
“This is surreal,” he told Fox News. “This is like something out of the Twilight Zone – but it’s even stranger than that.”
Kengor said even if the school was not celebrating the revolution “they seem to be commemorating this to some degree.”
“The Bolshevik Revolution launched a global Communist revolution that from 1917 through the 1990s was responsible for the deaths of over a hundred million people,” he said. “What the Russian revolution unleashed was a nightmare – a historical human catastrophe. This is something that should be condemned and not in any way commemorated or laughed at.”
Gerson Moreno-Riano, dean of Regent University’s College of Arts & Sciences, told Fox News the performance is shocking.
“The Russian revolution was one of the most violent episodes of the 20^th Century,” he said. “Lenin put into place a doctrine of mass terror to crush the opposition and thousands and thousands of people were murdered.
The history professor said there’s very little to celebrate in that movement.
“It’s full of violence, terror, destruction and in some weeks thousands of people were executed – some thrown with rocks around their necks into the river to drown,” he said.
“It’s quite frankly horrific that a high school would be celebrating that at a football game,” he said.
He was even more disturbed by the group photograph of the band in front of the hammer and sickle.
“To raise the emblems of the hammer and sickle – the emblems of so much violence, destruction and terror – is a lack of knowledge of history,” he said.
In the best case scenario, he said the editors were simply ignorant of the era.
“The worst case scenario is someone who is trying to celebrate something they know about – and they’re trying to insert this into their educational agenda,” he said.
Todd is the author of Dispatches From Bitter America – endorsed by Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Mark Levin and Sean Hannity. Click here to get your copy.

$100,000 bounty for 'anti-Islam' film-maker...[ 2937 ]

Pak minister places $100,000 bounty for 'anti-Islam' film-maker

AFP
Islamabad,
Last Updated: 08:55 IST(23/9/2012)

A Pakistani protester carries a burning piece of canvas towards containers police had placed to block the road leads to the diplomatic enclave in Islamabad. AP Photo/BK Bangash//more photos »

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A Pakistani official on Saturday placed a $100,000 bounty on the head of the maker of an anti-Islam film that has sparked a wave of violence and anger, as Muslims mounted fresh protests worlwide. Railways minister Ghulam Ahmed Bilour also called on the Taliban and al-Qaeda to join the hunt and help accomplish the "noble deed."
Bilour spoke to reporters in the northwestern city of Peshawar a day after violent nationwide demonstrations against the "Innocence of Muslims" film left 21 people dead and more than 200 injured.
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"I announce today that this blasphemer who has abused the holy prophet, if somebody will kill him, I will give that person a prize of $100,000," Bilour said, urging others to shower the killer with cash and gold.
"I also invite Taliban and al-Qaeda brothers to be partners in this noble deed," he added. "I also announce that if the government hands this person over to me, my heart says I will finish him with my own hands and then they can hang me."
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Protests against the low-budget film have erupted across the Muslim world, leading to more than 50 deaths since the first demonstrations on September 11.
A French satirical magazine's publication this week of cartoons mocking the Prophet has further stoked anger.
The producer of the film, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, is reportedly a Los Angeles-based 55-year-old Egyptian Copt and convicted fraudster, currently out on parole.
US media reports say Nakoula wrote and produced the film, using the pseudonym Sam Bacile before being identified. Police questioned him before he went into hiding with his family.
Thousands of Islamist activists in Pakistan staged demonstrations again Saturday but there was no repeat of the previous day's widespread violence.
More than 5,000 protesters, including hundreds of women, marched towards the parliament in Islamabad chanting "We love our Holy Prophet" and "Punishment for those who humiliated our Prophet".
Some 1,500 people from the hardline Islamist Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Sunni religious groups rallied in front of the US consulate in the eastern city of Lahore, chanting "The US deserves only one remedy -- jihad, jihad".
Smaller protests took place in the southwestern city of Quetta, as well as in Peshawar, where six people died in Friday's protests, and in the southern port city of Karachi, where 15 people were killed Friday.
Witnesses estimated that more than 45,000 people joined Friday's nationwide rallies, mainly members of right-wing religious parties and supporters of banned terror groups.

Demonstrators attack a cinema during a protest against an anti-Islam film in Karachi. AFP photo 

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Those numbers, however, were still considered small in a country of 180 million.
Four more people died overnight from wounds they received during the protests, taking toll of those killed across Pakistan on Friday to 21, health officials said.
The combined total of wounded in Karachi, Peshawar and the capital Islamabad was 229.
In Nigeria, meanwhile, tens of thousands of people protested in the second city of Kano, burning images of US President Barack Obama and stomping on the American flag.
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The procession of men, veiled women and children stretched for several kilometres (miles) through the city, the largest in Nigeria's mainly Muslim north.
They shouted "death to America, death to Israel and death to the enemies of Islam". There were no reports of violence.
The demonstration was organised by the Islamic Movement of Nigeria, a pro-Iranian group that adheres to the Shiite branch of Islam.
In Lebanon, thousands of supporters of the Shiite Hezbollah movement took to the streets in the southern town of Bint Jbeil.
Women in black chadors carried colourful Islamist flags alongside young children holding the Koran, the Muslim holy book.
Hezbollah parliamentary representative Nawaf al-Moussawi told the crowd the film was "... not merely a trivial creation carried out by a group, but American politics intended to be disseminated to the Western world."
He also warned against reprisal attacks on the Christian community.
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In east Jerusalem about 500 Palestinians, accompanied by a marching band, protested against both the film and the cartoons in the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.
In Germany, 1,500 people staged a peaceful protest in the western city of Dortmund, a day after similar demonstrations in other German cities.
A German far-right group's threat to screen the video has prompted heated debate over whether or not the authorities should ban the film on security grounds.
In neighboring Austria, about 500 people protested outside the US embassy in the capital Vienna.
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In France, riot police were out in force in several parts of Paris to enforce a ban on protests, a week after an unauthorised demonstration against the film led to 150 arrests.
Social networks had been awash with appeals for French Muslims to defy the ban and hold fresh protests.
French police have arrested a man in the western city of La Rochelle for having allegedly called on a jihadi website for Stephane Charbonnier, chief of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, to be decapitated.

Turkish Coup Trial...[ 2936 ]

Hundreds Convicted in Turkish Coup Trial

By EMRE PEKER

• EUROPE NEWS
• Updated September 21, 2012, 6:40 p.m. ET

ISTANBUL—A Turkish court found more than 300 active and retired military officers guilty of plotting to overthrow the government, in a sign that the judiciary is joining a government-led effort to strip the armed forces of political influence.
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The decision Friday comes after more than two years of raids, detentions and hearings, with 365 people—including some civilians—put on trial for participating in an alleged plot called Sledgehammer. Retired and active officers received as much as 20 years in prison for seeking to destabilize Turkey through clandestine agitation and prepare the grounds for a coup. Of the total, 36 were acquitted.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Relatives of Turkish officers in Silivri, left, react to a court decision in the coup trial.

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The defendants deny the charges leveled by the state and upheld by the court.
Celal Urgen, an attorney for retired Gen. Çetin Dogan, said the defendants planned to appeal the decision, but that there was little hope for success.
"There is no free judiciary here, on the contrary, there is a judicial system that is the backyard of the government," he said in a televised speech after the verdict was announced.
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Some commentators said that while the outcome was expected, the sentences seemed heavy-handed. Most people in Turkey see the verdict as a blow to the military, once the country's leading political player and self-appointed defender of the secular republic since it was established in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a general who became the first president.

Source: WSJ research

Supporters of the government called the decision a victory for democracy, while others dismissed it as another tool the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, is using to suppress critics. The main opposition Republican People's Party, or CHP, called the case a witch hunt. 
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Some analysts said the verdict calls into question relations between the civilian government and the military. They cautioned it could hurt soldiers' morale at a time when Turkey's national security is threatened by Kurdish militants seeking autonomy in the country's southeast and by the armed conflict in neighboring Syria. 
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"This decision seriously hurts the Turkish armed forces' morale to fight. From now on, no one will sacrifice their lives for Turkey, why should they bother?" said Atilla Yesilada, an Istanbul-based analyst with Global Source Partners, a political and economic research firm. "Political games are being played over the military, the biggest asset that Turkey has at hand just as it seeks to be a regional power in the Middle East."

 

European Pressphoto Agency

A photo from February shows former Air Force Gen. Ibrahim Firtina, right, headed to court.

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Over the past year, escalating clashes between Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, have claimed more than 700 lives, according to the International Crisis Group, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's has put his support behind rebels trying to oust Syria's President Bashar al-Assad from power.
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"It's uncertain whether there can be sustainable cooperation between the government and the military to tackle national-security issues," said Robert O'Daly, a senior analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit, London. "There is a need to move forward for the government and the armed forces."
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Among the high-profile defendants found guilty are Gen. Bilgin Balanli, commander of the War College and the top-ranking active officer in the trial, and Gen. Dogan, the former commander of Turkey's First Army who was identified as the ringleader of the Sledgehammer plot.
Three generals, including Mr. Dogan, had life sentences reduced to 20 years in prison because they "only attempted" to oust Mr. Erdogan's party. 
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"The people who give license to these kinds of courts, who protect them, are those that applaud injustice and lawlessness," Mr. Dogan said at the conclusion of hearings Thursday.
Since the AKP came to power in 2002, it has been locked in a power struggle with the armed forces, the second largest in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization after the U.S. Friday's decision is the latest sign that Mr. Erdogan is winning against the military, which has deposed four governments since 1960.
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"The impression remains that this has been at least as much a political trial as a legal one," said Bill Park, a senior lecturer who specializes in Turkish foreign and security policy at King's College, London. He said an increasing number in the military are sympathetic to the AKP, and that any effect on morale "need not be terminal." 
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"Of course, a worst-case scenario is that Kemalist/secularist officers are now more generally purged as part of an Islamist long march through Turkey's institutions," Mr. Park added.
The prime minister has been criticized for jailing more journalists than China and Iran, silencing the media and using the courts to go after the opposition, even while he also has been hailed for expanding civil rights as part of Turkey's effort to join the European Union.
Talking to reporters in Ankara Friday, Mr. Erdogan said the government hoped "the just decision emerges," declining further comment on the case because the process won't be completed until after appeals.
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The coup-plot trials—which also include a case against an alleged clandestine organization called Ergenekon, composed of journalists, military officers and academics—have come under scrutiny for what some analysts have called flimsy evidence.
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Reports from the U.S., Germany and Turkey state the evidence at the heart of the prosecutors' Sledgehammer case—a CD of key documents—is fraudulent. The findings state that Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents dated 2002 to 2003 were prepared with fonts and in formats that the Seattle-based company didn't unveil until 2007. Some of the documents dated 2003 refer to companies established in 2008 and 2009. The findings were introduced at court by the defense.
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The Sledgehammer indictment outlined an alleged plot that was to use attacks such as the bombings of Istanbul mosques to create an atmosphere of chaos and instability that would give cause for a military intervention in civilian politics.
Court documents state the coup was rehearsed during an annual army seminar in 2003, in which one of the war-game scenarios was against an "internal Islamist threat" in Turkey. Officers at the trial said the presentations at the seminar weren't coup plans, but rather hypothetical scenarios. 
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The traditionally secular military has always viewed the AKP government with suspicion. The AKP was formed in 2001, drawing from members of the Welfare Party, which was closed in 1998 by a court decision for violating the secularism principle of the constitution. The new party charted a more moderate course than Turkey's traditional leading Islamist party. In 1997, Welfare's coalition government had collapsed following a military decree.
In a 2010 interview with The Wall Street Journal before the trial, Mr. Doğan criticized 
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Western countries for believing that "mild Muslims" can lead Turkey to democracy. He said, "Once [the AKP] have power all to themselves, they will turn Turkey into Iran, step by step. I see it going there."
—Ayla Albayrak and Yeliz Candemir contributed to this article.