Water bonanza at Mercury's pole

30 November 2012 Last updated at 07:55 ET

First hints of water came from radio data two decades ago, which Messenger has now shown to be accurate

Scientists have finally shown what has been postulated for decades: the planet Mercury holds billions of tonnes of water ice at its north pole.

A report in Science shows evidence from the Messenger spacecraft that craters in constant shadow host water.

A futher pair of Science papers show that much of the ice is beneath an insulating layer of dark material rich in organic and “volatile” molecules.

The findings may help explain how these ingredients first arrived on Earth.

Messenger was the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, and since its arrival in March 2011 has been feeding back the best images of the planet that scientists have ever seen.

The principal evidence for water ice comes from the craft’s “neutron spectrometer”, which can detect the subatomic particle neutrons as they stream from Mercury.

“Neutrons are generated when cosmic rays hit a planet,” Sean Solomon, Messenger principal investigator, explained to the Science podcast.

“Hydrogen is the best absorber of neutrons, so a neutron spectrometer looks for the signature of hydrogen near the surface by looking for decrease in the flux of neutrons coming from the planet.”

Prof Solomon spoke to BBC News in early 2011, just before Messenger arrived at Mercury

This dip in the neutron count showed vast amounts of hydrogen in specific places at the planet’s pole, consistent with deposits of water.

But further measurements using a laser and looking for reflections showed that much of the ice is covered with a layer of dark material tens of centimetres thick.

“The guess is that both the water and the dark material, which we think is organic-rich material, were delivered by the same objects impacting Mercury: some mixture of comets and the kinds of asteroids that are rich in organic and volatile material like water ice,” Prof Solomon said.

“These are very common objects in the Solar System, we know many of them have orbits that bring them very close to the Sun.”

Prof Solomon said that what Messenger finds not only unlocks secrets about the innermost planet in our Solar System, but could also shed light on those of other planets.

“The surprise that we received on making the first chemical measurements of Mercury was that none of the theories for how Mercury was assembled are correct,” he said.

“So we’re having to rewrite the books on how Mercury was assembled, and by implication how all the inner planets were assembled.

“The ice at the poles is only a recent chapter in that history but it’s one that might be very informative.”

Images captured by Messenger have already revealed surprising details about the planet

Water bonanza at Mercury's pole http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/64485000/jpg/_64485081_64485080.jpg

Cote d'Ivoire: Govt Returns to North

Korhogo/Bouake — After almost a decade of rebel rule, northern Côte d’Ivoire is coming to terms with a new authority as the government of President Alassane Ouattara, who assumed power some 18 months ago, establishes its presence in a region which effectively split from the rest of the country.

A 2002 armed insurrection partitioned Côte d’Ivoire into two, with the north under insurgent occupation and the south ruled by Laurent Gbagbo, who was ousted as president in April 2011 after a bloody poll dispute with Ouattara. A 2007 deal between the rebels and Gbagbo provided for the eventual unification of the country.

The return of the government to the Central-North-West (CNO) region that makes up 60 percent of Côte d’Ivoire’s territory is slowly reviving the education and health sectors, but residents complain of rising commodity and rent prices due to government levies, and say insecurity remains high, especially in the central city of Bouaké, the former rebel stronghold where some ex-fighters are still armed and are accused of committing crimes.

“There’s now an effective return to normalcy,” said Daouda Ouattara, administrator of the northern Korhogo District, noting that around 1,000 government workers are back on duty in the various district offices in Korhogo, home to some one million people.

In Bouaké, Côte d’Ivoire’s second largest city, most government offices have reopened. Lassina Diomandé, the local member of parliament, told IRIN that there was a 95 percent government presence in the city. However, armed forces are still occupying a building meant to house the social security offices.

Private firms are also re-establishing in the north. Major local banks have reopened alongside smaller branches of international banks. Foreign oil companies are also making a come-back to set up filling stations in Bouaké and Korhogo, where many fuel sellers still operate small roadside stations.

Government and tax

For many residents of the north, the return of government is mainly associated with taxation. Under rebel rule, tax collection was rather random. Commodities were smuggled in from neighbouring Burkina Faso and Mali and residents therefore paid no customs levies.

“We are setting up a public sensitization campaign. For almost 10 years people were used to living free from paying taxes,” said Ouattara, adding that a customs office is now operational.

Out of an 800-million CFA (US$ 1.6-million) tax revenue target for Korhogo District, the authorities have so far collected more than two billion francs ($ 4 million). “There’s good progress. We are able to work. Our aim now is to have people pay the taxes they were never used to paying,” a customs officer appointed to the region five months ago told IRIN.

On the streets of Korhogo and Bouaké, many motorbikes do not have registration plates. The authorities there have set low registration fees (compared to the rates in the commercial capital Abidjan), and an end of December 2012 vehicle registration deadline.

“Some people have kept their motorbikes at home because they don’t have the money to pay the duty,” said Korhogo resident Yaya Soro. “We are all trying to adapt to the new order, but it’s difficult to resume a trend we lost 10 years ago.”

Bouaké legislator Diomandé argued that the government’s presence was beneficial to the people. “People used to pay little, but for low quality products, especially sugar, cooking oil and fuel.”

House rents are reported to have tripled as those who fled the area to Abidjan return, and demand has also pushed up by the return of government workers.

Health and education improving

Some 476 volunteer teachers who took over after government teachers fled from the north during the conflict have been trained and absorbed by the Education Ministry, said Louis Vigneault-Dubois, a communications officer with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

In Korhogo, 300 primary and secondary school teachers have been employed, including volunteer teachers to fill a shortage, and a university is also to be built in the region, said Ouattara, the local administrator. The university in Bouaké has been renovated to accommodate 21,000 students who resumed studies in November.

However, in some northern Côte d’Ivoire areas, school attendance is around 40 percent and the region has registered some of the poorest examination results in the past two years, according to officials.

Korhogo region has had one paediatrician, one cardiologist and one gynaecologist for years, said Ouattara. But since the government’s return, doctors have been employed and the University of Korhogo is to have a training hospital.

With the return of the administration’s regional offices, “people no longer have to make long trips to Yamoussoukro or Abidjan for official documents such as birth certificates,” said Diomandé. “It’s comforting.”

Nonetheless, many still decry the underdevelopment in the northern region compared to Abidjan where infrastructural development is advancing. A few roads have been renovated in Korhogo, according to residents.

A Bouaké resident who spoke to IRIN on condition of anonymity described the return of government as a “semblance of administration.”

“The judiciary is not functional yet. If I have problem and I want to lodge a complaint, there is no one to help me.”

“I don’t object to paying more taxes to the government, but I would like to see the outcome in infrastructure development. Here, nothing has been done,” said local restaurant owner Albertine Kouassi.

[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations.]

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After Moves on New Constitution, Protesters Gather in Cairo

CAIRO — Large groups of protesters streamed toward the central Tahrir Square on Friday as opponents of President Mohamed Morsi, galvanized and angered by his unexpected and hurried effort to pass Egypt’s new constitution, sought to marshal large numbers of demonstrators for the second time in a week.

The protesters, including leftists, liberals and staunch opponents of Mr. Morsi and his party, the Muslim Brotherhood, have grown into an increasingly assertive opposition bloc in recent days, since Mr. Morsi issued an edict granting himself powers above any court.

On Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of the president’s opponents gathered in Tahrir Square, denouncing Mr. Morsi as a new dictator and the Muslim Brotherhood as a secretive group, narrowly focused on its own survival.  

“Egypt for all Egyptians!” protesters chanted on Friday.  

Mr. Morsi has said the edict is temporary and intended to protect a number of his efforts, including passing the constitution and replacing the general prosecutor, from interference by judges on the Constitutional Court appointed by deposed president Hosni Mubarak.  

While some of those judges are seen as independent, others have made no secret of their disdain for Mr. Morsi and the Brotherhood.

The president and his supporters have yet to provide any proof that meddling by the court was imminent.  Even so, on Thursday, the largely Islamist constituent assembly raced through the process of approving a draft constitution — filled, human rights groups and analysts said, with ambiguities and holes.

The result would fulfill some central demands of the revolution: the end of Egypt’s all-powerful presidency, a stronger Parliament and provisions against torture or detention without trial. But it would also give Egypt’s generals much of the power and privilege they had during the Mubarak era and would reject the demands of ultraconservative Salafis to impose puritanical moral codes.

Yet the contents of the document were perhaps less contentious than the context in which it was being adopted. Adding to the divisive atmosphere in Egypt, its passage was expected after almost all the delegates from secular parties and Coptic Christians walked out and protesters took to the streets.

Dismissing the discord, President Morsi, a former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, said in a televised interview on Thursday that he expected to call for an almost immediate referendum on the draft constitution to help bring Egypt’s chaotic political transition to a close — “a difficult birth from the womb of an ancient nation.”

“We are going to get out of this short bottleneck hugging each other,” he added.

But Mohamed ElBaradei, an opposition leader and former United Nations diplomat, compared the proposed constitution to the charters that Egypt’s former authoritarian rulers passed in rigged plebiscites. “It will not survive,” he said.

The Coptic Church, whose members are believed to make up about 10 percent of Egyptians, directed its representatives on the assembly to boycott the vote. One representative said the constitution represented only the Islamists who had drafted it. “Not the constitution of Egypt,” the church negotiator, Kamel Saleh, told the state newspaper Al Ahram.

But several independent analysts said the hasty way in which it was prepared led to more problems than any ideological agenda. Instead of starting from scratch and drawing on the lessons of other countries, the deadline-conscious drafters tinkered with Egypt’s existing Constitution, without attempting to radically remake Egyptian law in any particular direction, said Ziad Al-Ali, who has tracked the assembly for the International Institute for Democratic and Electoral Assistance, an intergovernmental organization in Sweden.

On the question of Islamic law’s place in Egyptian jurisprudence, the assembly left unchanged a longstanding article at the beginning of the text grounding Egyptian law in the “principles of Islamic law.”

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.

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Austrian police raid privacy net

30 November 2012 Last updated at 07:27 ET

Tor makes data hop across lots of different nodes to hide where traffic is going

Austrian police have seized servers that were part of a global anonymous browsing system, after images showing child sex abuse were found passing through them.

Many people use the Tor network to conceal their browsing activity.

Police raided the home of William Weber, who ran the servers, and charged him with distributing illegal images.

Mr Weber denied the charges and said he had no knowledge of what people did via the servers, which supported Tor.

‘Anything goes’

The Onion Router (Tor) was invented by the US military as a way to conceal official use of the net. It pipes data through many different nodes, like the layers of an onion, to hide who is browsing what site.

Mr Weber operated part of the Tor network known as an “exit node”. These powerful servers act as a link between the wider net and the cloud of computers forming the core of the Tor network.

In total, Mr Weber had operated seven Tor exit nodes that had piped terabytes of data every day between the two networks, he revealed in an interview conducted after the raid.

“I mainly run the exit nodes to make it possible for the not-so-privileged folks to have uncensored access to the internet, without fear of government prosecution,” he said.

The police raided Mr Weber’s flat and took away the 20 computers he had there. However, he said, the server police had said had been used to distributed the illegal images was in Poland and was currently offline following complaints from Polish police about it being used in hack attacks.

After the raid Mr Weber was interviewed by police who, he said, had become “more friendly” after he had explained how Tor worked and that he was been responsible for what people did via the anonymising system and had kept no “logfiles” of activity.

Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at security firm F-Secure, said although Tor had many laudable uses, others were content to abuse it.

“It reminds me of the web in 1995,” he said. “In those early days, once people got the hang of it, anything goes as there seemed to be no law, no police and no regulation.”

“People trust they will never be found when they are on Tor,” he said.

Mr Weber is appealing for donations to help fund his legal defence and establish a legal precedent to help protect other operators of Tor exit nodes from similar police attention.

He potentially faces a lengthy prison sentence if found guilty of distributing images of child sex abuse.

Austrian police raid privacy net http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/64481000/jpg/_64481759_tv012282211.jpg

Two Lebanese killed, several wounded near Syria-Lebanon border: sources

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South Korea’s Top Prosecutor Resigns Amid Scandals and Infighting

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s top prosecutor resigned Friday following a wave of scandals and public infighting in his office. The resignation of Prosecutor General Han Sang-dae was quickly accepted by President Lee Myung-bak, who urged the nation’s prosecutors to undertake “self-reflection” and “reform to restore the trust of the people.”

For weeks, the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office has been embarrassed by a series of scandals. Early in November, a senior prosecutor named Kim Kwang-joon was arrested on charges of accepting $ 826,000 in bribes from a conglomerate and from the alleged mastermind behind a Ponzi scheme. Days later, it was revealed that a junior prosecutor had had sex in his office with a female suspect he had been questioning on theft charges.

Amid the uproar over those incidents, another prosecutor issued a public call for thorough reform in the agency — but, in a text message meant for a friend that became public after he mistakenly sent it to a reporter, wrote that he was merely paying lip service to the idea in hopes of appeasing the public and the news media.

A survey released this week by a government anticorruption panel found that South Korea’s law enforcement authorities — prosecutors, the police and the Justice Ministry — were viewed as the most corrupt arms of the government.

“I bow before the people in apology because the prosecution caused a great shock and disappointment,” Mr. Han said on Friday.

Prosecutors in South Korea have long been accused of wielding outsized influence. They supervise police investigations and have exclusive power to decide who is indicted (South Korea has no grand jury system). The office’s elite Central Investigation Unit, which investigates high-profile corruption cases among tycoons, politicians and relatives of high-ranking officials, is both feared by politicians and derided by civic groups that say it essentially serves the interests of the political establishment, by pursuing some targets and ignoring others. Critics cite this unusual dynamic between prosecutors and politicians to explain why repeated attempts — most recently by President Lee’s predecessor, the late Roh Moo-hyun — to curtail prosecutors’ influence have all failed.

But pressure on the office has been escalating. The National Police Agency has demanded more freedom to conduct investigations independent of prosecutors’ supervision. All of the major candidates in the Dec. 19 presidential election have promised to rein in their power. The main opposition candidate, Moon Jae-in, has pledged to establish a new, separate agency to investigate corruption within the government, and some lawmakers in the governing party support the idea.

Mr. Han had been working on a reform package said to include many of the opposition’s demands, including the elimination of the Central Investigation Unit and the introduction of a grand jury system — until he faced a public revolt from his subordinates. Choi Jae-kyong, head of the Central Investigation Unit, publicly clashed with Mr. Han over whether the unit should be scrapped.

Mr. Han then ordered an internal investigation of Mr. Choi. It emerged that Mr. Choi had sent text messages to Mr. Kim, the prosecutor accused of taking bribes, advising him on how to stonewall news media inquiries. “Say ‘I did nothing against the law. That’s not true,’” one text message read. “Then stop there and give them no details.”

By this week, the spat between Mr. Han and Mr. Choi appeared to have expanded into a full-blown staff rebellion. Senior prosecutors confronted Mr. Han as a group, asking him to resign to take responsibility for the recent scandals. Mr. Han reportedly insisted that he would resign only after seeing his reforms through.

But on Friday, Mr. Han said he was leaving the question of reforms to his successor, who was not named immediately. Mr. Choi indicted that he, too, would resign from his post.

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