Northern League steals another march

September 30th,2010    by Eric

The opening of a new school at Adro, in Lombardy, a small town with a conservative Northern League council, shows just how effectively the main ally in the coalition led by Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi can promote its agenda at almost no cost.

The League's green Sole delle Alpi (sun of the Alps) logo is plastered all over the school, on the doormat, on classroom desks and cupboards, even on the roof – 600 times in all. The school is named after the late Gianfranco Miglio, a political theorist and one of the first advocates of autonomy for northern Italy.

Faced with a public outcry, council leader Oscar Lancini played dumb. In April, he attracted an enviable amount of media attention by stopping school meals for children whose parents failed to pay. The measure affected 80 pupils, mostly immigrants. In response to accusations of racism he said: "Those who don't pay don't eat."

This time his approach was slightly more subtle. He agreed that the Sole delle Alpi did feature largely in the school's decor. "But it is an emblem of local identity. I can't help it if the League uses it as its logo," he said. "After all it's not a swastika."

The education minister, Mariastella Gelmini, initially chose to ignore the furore, but on 18 September two weeks ago she finally realised that it had upset a great many Italians and demanded that the logo be removed from the school.

In the meantime, the League had the publicity it wanted. Last December, the leader of the local council in Coccaglio, another small town in Lombardy, was just as ham-fisted in his attempts to defend Operation White Christmas, which had municipal police officers making house-to-house searches for illegal immigrants.

"It is perhaps an unfortunate turn of phrase," the mayor said, "but the operation ends on Christmas Day and it is quite common for there to be snow at this time of year." In the end, the searches were stopped, much as many other similarly provocative Northern League schemes.

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Butt defends not suspending spot-fixing trio

September 29th,2010    by Eric

Pakistan Cricket Board chairman Ijaz Butt has defended his decision to not suspend the three players accused of spot-fixing during the recent tour of England, claiming it would have sent out the wrong message.

Butt insisted the players - skipper Salman Butt and pacemen Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Aamer - had simply been withdrawn, not suspended, from the side due to News of the World allegations of spot-fixing in the fourth npower Test against England.

"We didn't take action against them and let the ICC follow its course of action," Butt told Pakistani newspaper The News.

"We didn't want to send out a message to the world that we believed our players were tainted. The world would have believed that the trio was indeed guilty of spot-fixing."

The ICC responded to claims over the players' alleged links to illegal betting scams by suspending the accused trio pending appeal.

However, Butt - who is reportedly on his way to London to meet with solicitors over the allegations - maintained the ICC action was taken without gathering substantial evidence.

"We have our reservations over the decision to suspend the players without proof," he said.

"But we have co-operated with the ICC anti-corruption and security unit. And as a board we have a responsibility to ensure that no one keeps on making unsubstantiated allegations against our players."

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China launches major push to invest in North Korea

September 28th,2010    by Eric

China has launched a major push to boost economic engagement with North Korea and persuade Pyongyang to adopt reforms, experts say.

Analysts suggest Beijing believes development will improve regional stability by encouraging its impoverished neighbour to act more cautiously.

China also hopes to benefit from port access, mineral rights and increased trade.

But some believe the economic drive undercuts the impact of sanctions imposed in the hope of forcing North Korea to denuclearise.

China has more sway over the North than anyone else, but it cannot control Pyongyang's actions and has often been frustrated by them.

"The second nuclear test [last year] was an absolute red line for China," said Professor Hazel Smith, a leading researcher on North Korea at Cranfield University.

"It looks like they decided to do something totally counterintuitive to us: invest and take control."

Scott Snyder, author of China's Rise and the Two Koreas, pointed to the North Korean leader's recent visit to China as evidence that Beijing is more actively promoting reform through a cross-border growth strategy.

"Instead of simply showing Kim Jong-il the fruits of China's reform and opening with the hopes that he will follow, China now appears ready to take a variety of measures to induce North Korea's opening as a condition of its economic 'bailout' of the north," he writes in an essay for Yale Global this month.

Beijing used Kim Jong-il's two visits this year to hammer home the benefits of reform, taking him to the fast-developing cities of Dalian and Tianjin in May and to north-eastern factories in August. President Hu Jintao highlighted China's reform and opening process.

"The Chinese are a very practical people and they will not invest where they don't see a mid to longterm return," said Dr Kongdan Oh of the Brookings Institution in Washington DC.

"But that alone would not make the Chinese government promote this. It is strategic and political ... They want North Korea to have at least minimum economic stability."

Beijing fears that the collapse of the regime could lead to a flood of refugees and upset the regional power balance.

Bilateral trade reached $1.3bn (£822m) in the first half of 2010, according to Chinese data.

That is particularly valuable since South Korea's trade agency recently estimated the North's total trade had fallen by 10% year-on-year thanks to United Nations sanctions introduced in the wake of the nuclear test.

It reported that China accounted for almost 80% of the North's trade, excluding trade with the South.

Now China wants to boost cross-border trade across the three north-eastern provinces that border North Korea, with Jilin taking the lead.

Beijing media have reported that a Chinese firm spent 20m yuan (£1.9m) building a pier at North Korea's Rajin port, with work on a second to begin soon.

China has also spent a reported 3.6m yuan repairing a bridge across the Tumen river, which divides the two countries, and is expected to spend multiple millions more upgrading a road to improve access to Rajin.

Separately, South Korean media have reported that China is spending 1.8bn yuan to build a new bridge across the Yalu river and Chinese reports have highlighted a potential £500m plan to create a special investment zone on two islands there.

This year Pyongyang created the Korea Taepung international investment group – and a state development bank – and has talked of creating special enterprise zones.

Yet Rodong Shinmun – the official Workers' Party newspaper – this week called for a self-reliant economy, attacking what it called "begging from others".

Nor is it clear that accepting foreign investment will lead to wider economic changes.

Pyongyang launched reforms in 2002 only to roll them back swiftly, apparently fearful that they would erode its authority.

"China has been telling the Kim family and party elites for over 20 years: 'You should follow our model'," said Oh.

"Why are we expecting that suddenly, for the sake of a couple of railroads, the regime will change position?"

Korea-watchers say the country's black markets have become an essential part of its economy, with many people relying on them for food.

The question is whether the leadership allows the markets to develop and puts them on a stable footing.

November's botched currency reform targeted the growing wealth and confidence of "kiosk capitalists" – although Oh suggests the backlash may have convinced parts of the regime that some change is needed to appease the urban population.

Smith argued the Chinese were taking a generational view, preparing the ground for change in case the next leader was more sympathetic to reform.

The push does not breach UN sanctions, but Snyder said that Beijing's strategy was in "direct contradiction" to US-led efforts to increase sanctions on the North.

Critics argue the much-needed inflow of foreign currency reduces pressure on the regime to denuclearise.

"Chinese engagement provides a safety valve and a guarantee to the North that it need not fear the recent announcement of the stepped-up US bilateral sanctions," wrote Snyder.

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Localism vs globalism: two world views collide

September 27th,2010    by Eric

Stop economic growth in its tracks, start living locally, at a slower pace, and share more – that was the remarkable demand yesterday at the beginning of the Sustainable Planet Forum, a three-day international conference on environmental issues in the French city of Lyon, which The Independent is co-sponsoring.

In the radical corner was Paul Ariès, one of France's more colourful political figures, an anti-globalisation campaigner who edits a magazine entitled Le Sarkophage, which is a French pun on the word for coffin and the name of the President of the Republic, Nicolas Sarkozy. (You can guess the content.)

In the Conservative corner was Peter Ainsworth, the former shadow Environment Secretary who left Parliament at the last election after 18 years as the MP for East Surrey. He is active on numerous environmental issues and has long been seen by environmentalists in Britain as the epitome of a Green Tory.

Immediately after the forum's opening ceremony, they clashed in the main auditorium of the Lyon Opera House before an audience of nearly 1,000 intent listeners, many of them young. It's an indication of how popular in France such think-fests are – this one being organised by the French daily Libération, in co-operation with The Independent and Italian newspaper La Repubblica.

The Sustainable Planet Forum is focusing on the issue of sustainable development – how we can provide for our needs without stopping future generations from satisfying needs of their own (and without wrecking the planet) – which until less than a decade ago was the animating cause of the environment movement, until concern for climate change swept everything before it. The forum also has an underlying subsidiary theme, which is Europe and its future.

But it was the idea of economic growth, or rather degrowth, to use the term of Mr Ariès – décroissance – which set the debates going with a bang. The French thinker is not just opposed to economic growth, but actively wants to stop it, seeing it as the root of all our evils. In fact, he is opposed to sustainable development, as – to paraphrase his thought – for him, the development bit cancels out the worth of the sustainable bit.

Economic growth, he told the audience, inevitably leads to social inequality. Mr Ariès wants a new sort of society, organised locally, at a slower pace, based on sharing rather than exploitation, and if you take his thought to its logical conclusion, virtually shrinking.

He expressed it yesterday from the stage of the Opera House with a finger-jabbing and strident passion which at times verged on the excitable, and was in sharp contrast to the dry but powerful response of Mr Ainsworth, who told him to his face: "You are a dreamer."

"Vous êtes un rêveur," said the interpreter, just in case Mr Ariès had missed it in English. He certainly didn't look like he got told that an awful lot, and Mr Ainsworth hastened to add that society needed dreamers. But he launched a full-frontal assault on his opponent's degrowth idea, based in what you might call a Conservative view of human nature.

He said: "Humans are acquisitive; we always have been. It's a fair bet that when we originally crawled out of a cave in prehistory we went looking for stuff to accumulate. Another pelt; a better home; a sharper weapon; a longer stick. Stuff: it's what people like."

That word stuff caused the interpreter a momentary hesitation, but Mr Ainsworth was already saying: "The people who live in the poorest parts of the world don't talk about poverty. They live with it. The notion of poverty is for the affluent to worry about, and rightly so. But people who live in real poverty, whether in the deprived cities or rural areas of the developed West or in the developing world, talk about prosperity. They want economic growth because it is a natural thing to want. They want more stuff."

A recent visit to Albania, one of Europe's poorest countries, had impressed this upon him, he said.

"Try telling people in Albania you want to offer them degrowth. You won't get a friendly answer."

Mr Ainsworth said he shared many of Mr Ariès' concerns about overexploitation and overconsumption, pointing out: "If everyone on our planet lived like an average European, we would need three planets to live on. If everyone had the lifestyle of an average citizen of the United States, we would need five planets to live on."

But he said degrowth was not the answer. The only solution was to grow in a different way – that was what sustainable development meant – and the only institutions who could enable us to do that were major companies, with innovations.

Mr Ariès responded that he wasn't looking to Coca-Cola to save the planet – his best line, which drew laughter and applause – but Mr Ainsworth insisted that it was only new technological advances ("game-changers" he called them) which would set growth on a different path. "You want to save the planet with gadgets!" cried a woman in the audience. "The electric car is not a gadget," Mr Ainsworth said.

His finished by telling Mr Ariès that the ultimate problem with his degrowth idea was political. "No democratic politician anywhere in the world will embrace it," he said. "Call that cowardice, or call it realism." And turning to the audience: "You choose."

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New discoveries hint at 5,500 year old fratricide at Hamoukar, Syria

September 25th,2010    by Eric

Five years ago, archaeologists found the “earliest evidence for large scale organized warfare in the Mesopotamian world.” Using slings and clay bullets a – likely Uruk – army took over the city of Hamoukar, burning it down in the process. Now, new discoveries at a nearby settlement shed more light on the 3500 BC battle – and raise more questions. If the invading army was from Uruk, did they kill their own people? If so, why?

Hamoukar is a city that flourished in northern Syria since at least 4000 BC. They traded in obsidian and in later times copper working became increasingly important to the city’s economy. Thousands of clay sealings – once used to lock doors or containers and impressed with stamp seals – were found at the ancient site. They tell of a bureaucratic system that was almost as complex as our own.

Uruk was a massive city, located to the south in modern day Iraq. Unlike Hamoukar it was lacking in natural resources such as timber and metal. Yet, despite this lack of resources, its people were on the move. “This Uruk culture from the south started expanding all over the Middle East,” said Professor Clemens Reichel, of the University of Toronto and Royal Ontario Museum, who is leading the excavation at Hamoukar. His team’s work is being supported by the Department of Antiquities in Syria and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

One of these colonies was located just outside Hamoukar. It’s a small site, probably occupied by no more than a few hundred people. Its pottery remains were scattered over a hectare. When researchers analysed the pottery they found that much of it consisted of Uruk pottery. “It’s the same stuff that you would find in Southern Mesopotamia, almost 700 km to the south,” said Reichel.

Researchers believe that this colony was there to facilitate trade, but was probably not controlled by Uruk’s rulers. “I’m tending more to them being sub-state entities,” said Reichel, private entrepreneurs, perhaps like the British East India Company of more recent colonial times.

In 3500 BC Hamoukar was destroyed by a violent attack. Slings and clay bullets were the force’s primary weapons. While incredibly crude, by today’s standards, these weapons could do a lot of damage. The archaeologists tested the slings' effectiveness by creating their own bullets and attacking their own dig house.

“The impact is quite remarkable,” said Reichel. At one point he was accidentally hit in the head by a colleague who was practising. “He wasn’t very good at that point, but by god I felt it,” he said. “Once he got really good, the speed, the velocity, that those guys get, is amazing... I’m virtually certain it can be fatal.”

While Professor Reichel survived his encounter, many people at Hamoukar did not. The attackers broke inside the city’s three meter thick city wall, the fighting continued and buildings were set on fire.

Artefacts from Hamoukar which postdate the battle, are similar in style as items created at Uruk. This makes an Uruk army the likeliest attackers. "If the Uruk people weren't the ones firing the sling bullets, they certainly benefited from it. They took over this place right after its destruction," Reichel told the New York Times back in 2005.

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Steve Lewis's 1960s East End photographs show an area as diverse as it was divided

September 24th,2010    by Eric

As Peter Ackroyd writes in his London: The Biography: "It has been observed that the West End has the money, and the East End has the dirt." London's history is a tale of the haves and the have-nots. In the sixth century, victorious invading Saxons settled in the west of the capital, with poor Romano-British natives populating the east. This gap in Londoners' fortunes has persisted until the present day.

While bad news for society, this was good news for newspaper readers. Between 1963 and 1969, Steve Lewis, a former photographer for The Sun and the Newham Recorder, captured the East End in all its dilapidated glory. He tilted his lens towards everything from the era's bomb-site reconstruction to its political graffiti daubed across walls east of the City and north of the Thames, the area traditionally considered to be the East End. To mark his recent retirement from the business, the photographer has assembled an array of images from the time – miniskirted waifs, pearly kings and queens, even portraits of David Bailey – for his forthcoming book London's East End: A 1960s Album, which will be released on Monday.

"The thing that first struck you was the poverty," Lewis says. "One of my first experiences was reporting on a black family who had just moved to east London. Someone had put a fire-bomb through their door. The whole area was changing so quickly. And some people had a problem with that. It was a turbulent time, what with Vietnam, and Enoch Powell stirring things up. That's reflected in the images."

The post-war East End was a palimpsest of the past. It was a mixture of terraced housing from the 1880s and 1890s, Georgian domiciles, 1920s estates, and new developments. It was a realm of dark canals and gasworks, of old pathways and rusting bridges, of waste ground strewn with weeds and litter. The people, as evinced through Lewis's photographs, were just as colourful: the elderly and disabled twisting out of their slippers; cloth-clapped gents dealing for a game of rummy while sipping pints in Forest Gate's Old Spotted Dog; cockles and whelks sold by costermongers, or street-sellers; cries of "Peanuts, lovely peanuts" from vendors plying a roaring trade around those queuing for football matches.

Lewis was born in Cheam, Surrey, in 1944, though his family moved to Barking when he was a teenager. His first job was for the Ilford Recorder, latterly the Newham Recorder. Lewis lived in Upton Park while working there. "I ended up doing a regular photography slot called 'The Lewis View' showing the changing face of the East End, or anything else which I felt was of interest. The book comprises mainly these pictures, along with any features I happened to be working on," he explains.

These articles tackled subjects such as "The Legacy of War", illustrated with photography showing vistas from new tower blocks – many of which have remained in place until today – and rubble-strewn gaps in terraces, marking the pattern of the Luftwaffe's aerial onslaughts. Entire rows of houses were razed to the ground.

Then there were the "Nissen huts", named after Major Peter Norman Nissen, the Royal Engineer who designed them in 1916. These arch-shaped, barrack-like properties were built across east London in the 1940s as makeshift accommodation for families left homeless by German bombing. Lewis's photographs show that many of these buildings were still occupied 30 years after the war ended. Elsie Osborne, an elderly lady, is pictured crouching in front of her makeshift corrugated-iron home (originally constructed by Italian prisoners of war) in 1969, insisting she will never move. "I've been here since 1945 and I've become attached to the place," she said at the time. Her neighbour Charles Mears added: "I'm quite happy living here, just as long as I'm left in peace to get on with my paintings."

Lewis can look back with fondness at such scenes now. "But it was very hard work then," he continues. "There wasn't a lot of money about. I wasn't really aware at that very young age really how deep the repercussions of the war had become. The people we encountered were still living in the Nissen huts and were the last of an entire generation who occupied them. They were promised they were going to be rehoused. What happened after we encountered them is anyone's guess."

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The Frozen Zoo aiming to bring endangered species back from the brink

September 23rd,2010    by Eric

The inside of a metal box filled with liquid nitrogen and frozen to -173C (-280F) is hardly the ideal habitat for a large African mammal. But, as a test tube is fished out of the frigid container amid a billowing cloud of white gas, a note written on its side is unequivocal about its contents. "This is a northern white rhino," says Scripps research scientist Inbar Ben-Nun as she reads out the label and holds the freezing vial with thick gloves that look like industrial-grade oven mitts.

Ben-Nun is holding no ordinary scientific sample. For the frozen cells in that test tube could one day give rise to baby northern white rhinos and help save the species from extinction. They would be living specimens of one of the most endangered species on Earth, who after a few months would be trotting into wildlife parks, and maybe, just maybe, helping repopulate their kind on the African grasslands. No wonder that the place where the sample came from is called the Frozen Zoo.

The Frozen Zoo was founded in 1972 at San Diego Zoo's Institute for Conservation Research as a repository for skin-cell samples from rare and endangered species. At the time that the first samples were collected and put into deep freeze it was not really known how they would be used and genetic technology was in its infancy. But there was a sense that one day some unknown scientific advance might make use of them and it was better to be safe than sorry. Now, thanks to a team at the nearby Scripps Research Institute, that day has come a lot closer.

Genetic scientists at Scripps, working from an anonymous-looking building in a business park in San Diego's northern suburbs, have succeeded in taking samples of skin cells from the Frozen Zoo and turning them into a culture of special cells known as induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells. Stem cells are a sort of all-purpose building block of life that can then become any other sort of cell. By creating IPS cells from a species it is now theoretically possible to use them to create egg cells and sperm cells. Those two could then be combined via in vitro fertilisation to form a viable embryo. And long-dead animals whose species are almost extinct could create new life. The breakthrough, so far, has come with creating IPS cells for the silver-maned drill monkey, a primate native to just a few parts of West Africa and which is the continent's most endangered monkey. On 1 June this year, the stem cells morphed into brain cells, proving their viability.

"The Frozen Zoo was a wonderful idea. They just thought: 'Well, something might happen, so we should preserve some samples for the future'," says Dr Jeanne Loring, who is leading the Scripps team of which Ben-Nun is a part. "This is the first time that there has been something that we can do."

The implications of Loring's breakthrough are clear for those trying to save endangered animals. If the technology is perfected and IPS cell cultures can be established for many of the species held in the Frozen Zoo, then conservationists will not just have to rely on preventing extinction by coaxing a few remaining individuals to breed. Instead, cell lines preserved in the Frozen Zoo can be added to the possible gene pool, increasing the chances of healthy reproduction.

"If we could use animals that were already dead – even from 20 years ago – to generate sperm and eggs then we can use those individuals to create greater genetic diversity. I see it as being possible. I see no scientific barrier," Loring says.

It has also raised another prospect among some observers: that of a Jurassic Park scenario. If viable cell samples could be harvested from the remains of extinct animal species, such as stuffed Tasmanian tigers in museums or the woolly mammoth corpses dug up from the Siberian tundra, then perhaps scientists would one day be able to reverse extinction. It is not a prospect that many scientists involved want to encourage. But ever since news of Loring's work with the drill monkey cells was revealed, the Jurassic Park headlines have been coming thick and fast.

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Eau la la! Parisians get free fizzy water from a park fountain

   by Eric

France's addiction to bottled sparkling water is up there with its penchant for bike racing, foie gras and Johnny Hallyday. Now, authorities in Paris are attempting to fight back against the national dependence by unveiling a public water fountain that gushes with chilled bubbles.

La Pétillante – literally, she who sparkles – is the first fountain in France to inject carbon dioxide into tap water before cooling it and serving it up to passers-by. Inaugurated today in the Jardin de Reuilly in south-east Paris, it is expected to prove a user-friendly means of weaning the French off the bottle.

"Our aim is to boost the image of Paris tap water," said Philippe Burguiere of Eau de Paris, the capital's public water supplier. "We want to show that we're proud of it, that it's totally safe."

Today, locals from the 12th arrondissement queuing up to try the water greeted the fountain with enthusiasm. Speaking on television, one woman even paid La Pétillante the ultimate compliment. "I think it's pretty tasty," she said. "A bit like Perrier."

With the average person drinking 28 gallons of still or sparkling last year, France is the eighth biggest consumer of bottled water in the world, according to figures from the Earth Policy Institute. Observers warn that this habit, which has persevered in many households despite public campaigns to improve the image of l'eau de robinet, is having pernicious effects on the environment: the country is estimated to have produced more than 262,000 tonnes of plastic waste during 2009.

According to Anne Le Strat, chairman of Eau de Paris, the main thing stopping people from changing is that tap water – without the use of a soda fountain – is still. "Lots of Parisians have told me that they would consume more [tap] water if it were fizzy," she said. There are signs the French are already taking matters into their own hands: sales of household carbonation machines rocketed last year.

Free of charge and available whenever the Jardin is open – which, in high summer, is 8am until 9.30pm – La Petillante will allow thirsty passers-by to experiment with publicly supplied water.

Housed in a former garden cabin, the fountain pumps water straight from the city's supply and emerges either as still, chilled, with bubbles, or simply still water at room temperature. Authorities said it had cost €75,000 (£63,500) to install.

Already a common feature in Italy, the fountain will be watched closely to see whether the Jardin de Reuilly will be the first of many locations. "This is a first, so we're going to watch how Parisians react and whether there's an uptake. Then we might gradually install others in the busiest parks," said Burguiere.

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Boeing buys a ticket for the new space race

September 18th,2010    by Eric

"Please ensure your spine is in the stiffened position and your fears of hurtling towards the stars are stowed for take-off. Any passengers not planning to visit the Space Station today should disembark now."

These are niceties you probably will not hear should you become one of the lucky terrestrials to land a spot in the new Boeing "space taxi" that could be blasting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida as soon as in 2015. It will be cosy in there – you, perhaps another couple of casual tourists and, hopefully, three or four professional astronauts.

Catching a cab to the constellations may sound like science fiction, but not according to Boeing. The aviation giant has entered a joint venture with Space Adventures to catapult Joe Public to the stars. Based in Virginia, Space Adventure is the outfit that has arranged already for a very few – and very rich – individuals to visit the International Space Station (ISS) by way of Russia's Soyuz spacecraft. Seven souls have taken that trip.

The Boeing announcement offers a new glimpse into a future where space routes will be commercially exploited and travellers running out of places to see on Earth will suddenly have new, rather inky horizons stretching beyond the planet. Vanishing are the days when space travel is exclusively government-run and funded and blast-off is something you only watch on television. Globe-trotting will no longer do. Prepare to space-trot.

The plan – though it hinges almost entirely on the outcome of squabbles in Washington about the future of Nasa – is for Boeing to build capsules much like the familiar Apollo ones; blunt cones, just 15 feet across, and then send them up to the space station carrying astronauts from Nasa and tourists. Space Adventures will do the marketing, persuading you and me that a week in space might make for a different sort of holiday.

The space-excursion industry already has other players, most notably the British aviation tycoon Richard Branson, the founder of \Virgin Galactic, which expects to begin test flights beyond the Earth's atmosphere, all being well, next year. The company said it welcomes Boeing joining the fray because the two will not be in direct competition.

Customers of the Virgin Galactic, which has its base in the Mojave Desert close to Los Angeles, will be paying far less for a much less involved expedition. They will essentially go up into space for three hours or so and then come back down again, all for around $200,000. If it is anything like the rides already offered on the Soyuz, those riding on the Boeing capsule will pay as much as $40m for a round-trip ticket. They will circumnavigate Earth as they rendezvous with the ISS and they will remain in space, presumably, for days at a time.

"This is not a competing product in any shape, sense or form," said Will Whitehorn, the president of Virgin Galactic, arguing that what Boeing has in mind will "be more like putting lots of Darwins on the Beagle than space tourism".

That US government policy on space exploration is in flux means opportunity and peril for the new Boeing project. The Obama White House is pushing for a new direction for Nasa, under which it would give up trying to develop new spacecraft of its own to ferry astronauts to the ISS – the current shuttle fleet has only about two more missions left before it is retired – and turn instead to commercial companies to develop them. It is into this breach that Boeing hopes to tread. Taking tourists as well as astronauts is a way towards greater viability.

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'Asian unicorn' dies after capture in Laos

September 17th,2010    by Eric

It is one of the rarest animals in the world, a horned beast sighted so rarely it is nicknamed "the Asian unicorn".

So when villagers in a remote region of Laos became the first people in a decade to spot a saola they were keen to keep the antelope-like creature, which has large white streaks of fur that look like eyebrows.

But in their enthusiasm to protect it they may have killed the animal. It died last month after a few days in captivity, conservationists said.

The critically endangered mammal is found in the mountains of Vietnam and Laos. It was discovered in 1992.

The saola looks similar to the antelope of North Africa but is more closely related to wild cattle and is likened to the mythical unicorn because of its rarity.

It has never been seen by conservation experts in the wild and the last confirmed sighting was from automated cameras in 1999.

The species is listed as critically endangered, with just a few hundred thought to exist in the wild. There are none in zoos and almost nothing is known about how to keep them in captivity, meaning if they vanish in the wild they will be extinct.

The Lao government said villagers in the country's central province of Bolikhamxay captured the saola in late August and brought it to their village.

When news of the capture reached the authorities a team was sent, advised by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) to examine and release the animal.

But the adult male saola died shortly after the team reached the remote village. It was photographed while still alive.

The IUCN's saola expert William Robichaud said:

"We hope the information gained from the incident can be used to ensure that this is not the last saola anyone has a chance to see."

The provincial conservation unit of Bolikhamxay province said the animal's death was "unfortunate" but the incident confirmed an area where it was still found and the government would immediately strengthen conservation efforts there.

Dr Pierre Comizzoli, a member of the IUCN saola working group, said study of the animal's carcass could yield some good.

"Our lack of knowledge of saola biology is a major constraint to efforts to conserve it. This can be a major step forward in understanding this remarkable and mysterious species."

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