BENGHAZI, Libya – Libya‘s transitional leader declared his country’s liberation on Sunday, three days after the hated dictator Moammar Gadhafi was captured and killed.

He called on Libyans to show “patience, honesty and tolerance” and eschew hatred as they embark on rebuilding the country at the end of an 8-month civil war.

The transitional government leader Mustafa Abdul-Jalil set out a vision for the post-Gadhafi future with an Islamist tint, saying that Islamic Sharia law would be the “basic source” of legislation in the country and that existing laws that contradict the teachings of Islam would be nullified. In a gesture that showed his own piety, he urged Libyans not to express their joy by firing in the air, but rather to chant “Allahu Akbar,” or God is Great. He then stepped aside and knelt to offer a brief prayer of thanks.

“This revolution was looked after by God to achieve victory,” he told the crowd at the declaration ceremony in the eastern city of Benghazi, the birthplace of the uprising against Gadhafi began. He thanked those who fell in the fight against Gadhafi’s forces. “This revolution began peacefully to demand the minimum of legitimate rights, but it was met by excessive violence.”

Abdul-Jalil said new banks would be set up to follow the Islamic banking system, which bans charging interest. For the time being, he said interest would be cancelled from any personal loans already taken out less than 10,000 Libyan dinars (about $7,500).

He also announced that all military personnel and civilians who have taken part in the fight against Gadhafi would be promoted to the rank above their existing one. He said a package of perks would later be announced for all fighters.

“Thank You, thank you to the fighters who achieved victory, both civilians and military,” he said. He also paid tribute to the Gulf Cooperation Council, a six-nation alliance led by Saudi Arabia, The Arab League and the European Union. NATO, which aided the anti-Gadhafi fighters with airstrikes, performed its task with “efficiency and professionalism.”

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/libyas-transitional-leader-declares-liberation-sets-islamist-tone-163539334.html

In terms of evolution, the species Homo sapiens is extremely successful. The populations of other species that are positioned similar to us on the food chain tend to max out at about 20 million. We, by contrast, took just 120,000 years to achieve our first billion members, and then needed only another 206 years to add 6 billion more. According to the United Nations Population Division, our population will hit 7 billion on Oct. 31, and though fertility rates have begun to decline across much of the globe, we’re still projected to reach 9 billion by mid-century and level off at around 10 billion by 2100.

A panel of academics met at Columbia University’s Earth Institute on Monday (Oct. 17) to discuss the impacts of the human population explosion, including the ways in which it will change the face of the Earth this century. Here are five striking changes you — or your kids or grandkids — can expect to see.

Shifting people

Currently, it’s a well-known fact that China is the most populous country in the world, and that Africa, though riddled with problems, is not necessarily overpopulated considering its size. These facts will drastically change. China’s one-child policy has significantly curbed its growth, while in some African countries, the average woman gives birth to more than 7 children. [How Many People Can Earth Support?]

According to Joel Cohen, a population biologist at Columbia University and the keynote speaker at Monday’s conference, India’s population will overtake China’s around 2020, and sub-Saharan Africa’s will overtake India’s by 2040. Furthermore, “In 1950, there were three times as many Europeans as sub-Saharan Africans. By 2100, there will be five sub-Saharan Africans for every European. That’s a 15-fold change in the ratio,” Cohen said. “Could you imagine that that might have an impact, geopolitically and on international migration?”

Jean-Marie Guehenno, former UN Under-Secretary General for Peacekeeping Operations and director of the Center for International Conflict Resolution at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, said the migration of people from Africa to Europe will present a major challenge in the near future. “You can look at it as an enormous potential from a European standpoint … or you can say, ‘[Africa] is a continent that still has 15 percent that are not going to school,’ and that can be seen as a threat,” Guehenno said. “How are you going to manage that immigration so that this aging continent of Europe benefits from it while managing it? That is going to be a huge question.”

Urbanization

Globally, the number of people living in urban areas matched and then overtook the number of rural people sometime in the past two years. The trend will continue. According to Cohen, the number ofpeople living in cities will climb from 3.5 billion today to 6.3 billion by 2050. This rate of urbanization is equivalent to “the construction of a city of a million people every five days from now for the next 40 years,” he said.

Of course, new cities don’t tend to get constructed; instead, cities that already exist tend to balloon. Guehenno argues that megacities become chaotic. “Urbanization is going to change the face of conflict in a big way. When you live in small towns and rural areas, there are all sorts of traditional conflict- resolution mechanisms. They are not all nice, but they create a sort of stable equilibrium,” he said. “With the megacities that you see now in Africa, such as Monrovia (Liberia) and Kinshasa (Republic of Congo), we see cities where the dynamics are no more under control or have been lost. We are, I think, heading toward new types of conflicts — urban conflicts — and we haven’t really thought through the implications of that.”

Water wars

Not only has the human population exploded in the past two centuries, but the per-person consumption of resources — especially in industrialized nations — has grown exponentially. Scientists think that resource shortages will cause an escalation of conflicts during this century, and will widen the gulf between the rich and the poor — the haves and the have-nots.

No resource is more precious and vital than water, and, according to economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia, there are already parts of the world that, because of the rapidly changing climate, are at a severe crisis point. “Take the Horn of Africa for example: Somalia’s population has risen roughly fivefold since the middle of the 20th century,” Sachs said. “Precipitation is down roughly 25 percent over the last quarter century. There’s a devastating famine under way right now after two years of complete failure of rains, and [there is] the potential that this is entering a period of long-term climate change.”

Conflicts over water shortages will probably play out as class warfare, said Upmanu Lall, director of the Columbia Water Center. “Wealth inequality tends to grow as a country’s population grows, and this is a very important point to note because per capita consumption of resources has been increasing dramatically. Couple that with inequity in income and couple that with [the issue of] the availability of water,” Lall said. [How Much Water Is On Earth?]

When you add it all up, you get this dire picture: As the population grows, there is less water per person. Meanwhile, the gap between the rich and the poor widens, and the rich demand more resources to accommodate their lifestyles. Inevitably, they will commandeer the water and other resources of the poor. In all likelihood, Lall said, this will lead to challenges, and perhaps class conflict.

Future energy

Currently, there isn’t enough energy being extracted from known sources of fossil fuels to sustain 10 billion people. This means that humans will be forced to turn to a new energy source before the end of the century. However, it’s a mystery what that new source will be.

“Energy is the basic resource which underlies every other,” said Klaus Lackner, director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy. “And actually, technology is not quite ready to solve the [energy] problem. We know there’s plenty of energy in solar, in nuclear, in carbon itself — in fossil carbon — for probably 100 or 200 years (if we are willing to clean up after ourselves and pay the extra to make that happen). But none of these technologies are quite ready. Solar has its problems and is still too expensive.”

Carbon storage — a technology that prevents carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from escaping into the atmosphere when fossil fuels are burned — is still on the drawing board, though it looks possible, he added. “And lastly, nuclear energy: if we were betting on that, we may have just lost that one,” Lackner said, referring to the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan, earlier this year.

“Let me just give you a feeling how big today our energy consumption is: In New Jersey, the energy consumption exceeds the photosynthetic productivity of the same area if it were left pristine,” Lackner said. “We have to have technology help us out. I am optimistic … that the technologies can be developed to solve these problems … but I am a pessimist because we lack the societal structures which would enable us to employ these technologies, and we could very well fall on our own faces.”

In short, the future will match one of these two pictures: Either some new, superior form of energy extraction (such as highly efficient solar panels) will be widespread, or the technology, or its implementation, will fail, and humanity will face a major energy crisis.

Mass extinctions

As humans spread, we leave scant room or resources for other species. “There is good evidence that we are in the sixth massive species extinction of the history of the planet, because of the incredible amount of primary production that we take as a species to maintain 7 billion of us,” Sachs said.

Aside from the lack of land and resources left for other species, we’ve also caused rapid changes to the global climate, with which many of them cannot cope. Some biologists believe that with the current rate of extinction, 75 percent of the planet’s species will disappear within the next 300 to 2,000 years. These disappearances have already begun, and extinction events will become more and more common over the course of the century. [10 Species Our Population Explosion Will Likely Kill Off]

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/5-ways-world-change-radically-century-145807574.html

Lake Vostok is located beneath Russia’s Vostok Station under the surface of the central East Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is at 3488 metres (11,443.6 ft) above mean sea level. The surface of this fresh water lake is 4000 metres (13,123.4 ft) under the surface of the ice, which places it at 512 metres (1,679.8 ft) below sea level. Measuring 250 kilometres (155.3 mi) long by 50 kilometres (31.1 mi) wide at its widest point, Lake Vostok is similar in size to Lake Ontario. Lake Vostok covers an area of 15690 square kilometre. The average depth is 344 metres (1,128.6 ft). It has an estimated volume of 5400 cubic kilometres (1,295.5 cu mi). The lake is divided into two deep basins by a ridge. The liquid water over the ridge is about 200 metres (656.2 ft), compared to roughly 400 metres (1,312.3 ft) deep in the northern basin and 800 metres (2,624.7 ft) deep in the southern.

No water sample has been obtained yet.

Discovery

Russian scientist P.A. Kropotkin first proposed the idea of fresh water under Antarctic ice sheets at the end of the 19th century. He theorized that the tremendous pressure exerted by the cumulative mass of thousands of vertical meters of ice could increase the temperature at the lowest portions of the ice sheet to the point where the ice would melt. Kropotkin’s theory was further developed by Russian glaciologist I.A Zotikov, who wrote his Ph.D. thesis on this subject in 1967. Russian scientist A.P. Kapitsa used seismic soundings in the region of Vostok Station in 1959 and 1964 to measure the thickness of the ice sheet.

When British scientists in Antarctica performed airborne ice-penetrating radar surveys in the early 1970s, they detected unusual radar readings at the site which suggested the presence of a liquid, freshwater lake below the ice. In 1991, Jeff Ridley, a remote sensing specialist with the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London, directed theERS-1 satellite to turn its high-frequency array toward the center of the Antarctic ice cap. The data from ERS-1 confirmed the findings from the 1973 British surveys, but this new data was not published in the Journal of Glaciology until 1993. Space-based radar revealed that this subglacial body of fresh water was one of the largest lakes in the world—and one of some 140 subglacial lakes in Antarctica. Russian and British scientists delineated the lake in 1996 by integrating a variety of data, including airborne ice-penetrating radar imaging observations and space-based radar altimetry. It has been confirmed that the lake contains large amounts of liquid water under the more than 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) thick ice cap, promising to be the most unspoiled lake on Earth. The lake has at least 22 cavities of liquid water, averaging 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) each.

In 2005 an island was found in the central part of the lake. Then, in January 2006, the discovery of two nearby smaller lakes under the ice cap was published; they are named 90 Degrees East and Sovetskaya. It is suspected that these Antarctic subglacial lakes may be connected by a network of subterranean rivers. Centre for Polar Observation & Modelling glaciologists Duncan Wingham and Martin Siegert published in Nature in 2006 that many of the subglacial lakes of Antarctica are at least temporarily interconnected. Because of varying water pressure in individual lakes, large subsurface rivers may suddenly form and then force large amounts of water through the solid ice.

Geological History and Research 

Africa separated from Antarctica around 160 million years ago, followed by the Indian subcontinent, in the earlyCretaceous (about 125 million years ago). About 65 million years ago, Antarctica (then connected to Australia) still had atropical to subtropical climate, complete with marsupial fauna and an extensive temperate rainforest.

The Lake Vostok basin is a small (50 km wide) tectonic feature within the overall setting of a several hundred kilometer widecontinental collision zone between the Gamburtsev Mountain Range, a subglacial mountain range and the Dome C region. The lake water is cradled on a bed of sediments 70 metres (229.7 ft) thick, offering the possibility that they contain a unique record of the climate and life in Antarctica before the ice cap formed.

The lake water is believed to have been sealed off under the thick ice sheet about 15 million years ago. Initially, it was thought that the same water had made up the lake since the time of its formation, giving a residence time in the order of one million years. Later research by Robin Bell and Michael Studinger from the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University suggested that the water of the lake is continually freezing and being carried away by the motion of the Antarctic ice sheet, while being replaced by water melting from other parts of the ice sheet in these high pressure conditions. This resulted in an estimate that the entire volume of the lake is frozen and removed every 13,300 years—its effective mean residence time.

Drilling for sample cores was halted in 1998 at roughly 100 metres (328.1 ft). In November 2010, when the team came up with new, ecologically-safe methods of probing the lake without contamination; the scientists submitted a final environmental evaluation of the project to the Antarctic Treaty System‘s environmental protection committee and were given the go-ahead to sample the ancient waters. In January 2011 the head of the Russian Antarctic Expedition, Valery Lukin, announced that his team had only 50 meters of ice left to drill in order to reach the water. The researchers then switched to a new thermal drill head with a “clean” silicone oil fluid to drill the rest of the way. Instead of drilling all the way into the water, they would stop just above it, when a sensor on the thermal drill detects free water. At that point, the drill will be stopped and extracted from the bore hole, thereby lowering the pressure beneath it and drawing water into the hole and left for quite some time to freeze, creating a plug of frozen ice in the bottom of the hole. Finally, next summer, the team would drill down again to take a sample of that ice and analyze it.

Drilling stopped on 5 February 2011 at a depth of 3720 metres (12,204.7 ft) so that the research team could make it off the ice and onto the last flight before the beginning of the Antarctic winter season. The drilling team left by aircraft on February 6 and will have to wait until the next austral summer begins in December 2011 to try again.

In the Antarctic summer of 2012–13, the Russian team also plans to send an underwater robot into the lake to collect water samples and sediments from the bottom. An environmental assessment of the plan will be submitted at the Antarctic Treaty’s consultative meeting in May 2012.

Temperature

It was at Vostok Station that the coldest temperature ever observed on Earth was recorded on 21 July 1983. The average water temperature is calculated to be around -3 °C; it remains liquid below the normal freezing point because of high pressure from the weight of the ice above it. Geothermal heat from the Earth’s interior warms the bottom of the lake. The ice sheet itself insulates the lake from cold temperatures on the surface.

Ice Core

Researchers working at Vostok Station produced one of the world’s longest ice cores in 1998. A joint Russian, French, and United States team drilled and analyzed the core, which is 3623 metres (11,886.5 ft) long. Ice samples from cores drilled close to the top of the lake have been assessed to be as old as 420,000 years, suggesting that the lake was sealed under the ice cap 15 million years ago. Drilling of the core was deliberately halted roughly 100 metres (328.1 ft) above the suspected boundary where the ice sheet and the liquid waters of the lake are thought to meet. This was to prevent contamination of the lake from the 60 ton column of freon and kerosene Russian scientists filled it with to prevent the borehole from collapsing and freezing over.

From this core, specifically from ice that is thought to have formed from lake water freezing onto the base of the ice sheet,extremophile microbes were found, suggesting that the lake water supports life. Scientists suggested that the lake could possess a unique habitat for ancient bacteria with an isolated microbial gene pool containing characteristics developed perhaps 500,000 years ago.

Oxygen Levels 

Lake Vostok is an oligotrophic extreme environment, one that is expected to be supersaturated with nitrogen and oxygen, measuring 2.5 liters of nitrogen and oxygen per 1 kilograms (2.2 lb) of water, that is 50 times higher than those typically found in ordinary freshwater lakes on Earth. The sheer weight and pressure (350 atmospheres) of the continental ice cap on top of Lake Vostok is believed to contribute to the high gas concentration.

Besides dissolving in the water, oxygen and other gases are trapped in a type of structure called a clathrate. In clathrate structures, gases are enclosed in an icy cage and look like packed snow. These structures form at the high-pressure depths of Lake Vostok and would become unstable if brought to the surface.

Tidal Forces

In April 2005, German, Russian, and Japanese researchers found that the lake has tides. Depending on the position of the Sun and the Moon, the surface of the lake rises about 12 millimeters.

Life

The lake is under complete darkness and expected to be rich in oxygen, so there is speculation that any organisms inhabiting the lake could have evolved in a manner unique to this environment. These adaptations to an oxygen-rich environment might include high concentrations of protective oxidative enzymes.

Living Hydrogenophilus thermoluteolus microorganisms have been found in Lake Vostok’s deep ice core drillings; they are an extant surface dwelling species. This suggests the presence of a deep biosphere utilizing a geothermal system of the bedrock encircling the subglacial lake. There is optimism that microbial life in the lake may be possible despite high pressure, constant cold, low nutrient input, potentially high oxygen concentration and an absence of sunlight.

Due to the lake’s similarity to Jupiter‘s moon Europa and Saturn‘s moon Enceladus, any confirmation of life living in Lake Vostok would strengthen the prospect for the possible presence of life on Europa or Enceladus.

Controversy

The drilling project was opposed by some environmental groups and scientists who argued that hot-water drilling would do less environmental damage. The Russians however complained that hot-water drilling required more power than they could generate at their remote camp. Scientists of the United States National Research Council have taken the position that it should be assumed that microbial life exists in Lake Vostok and that after such a long isolation, any life forms in the lake require strict protection from contamination. Sediments on its floor should give clues to its long-term climate, and isotopes in its water are expected to help geologists determine how and when subglacial lakes such as Lake Vostok form. However, meticulously documented decontamination procedures will be required to establish the credibility of the scientific data obtained.

The drilling technique employed thus far by the Russians has involved the use of freon and kerosene to lubricate the borehole and prevent it from collapsing and freezing over; 60 tons of these chemicals have been used thus far on the ice above Lake Vostok. Other countries, particularly the United States and Britain, have failed to persuade the Russians not to pierce to the lake until cleaner technologies such as hot-water drilling are available. Though the Russians claims to have improved their operations, they continue to use the same borehole, which has already been filled with kerosene. According to the head of Russian Antarctic Expeditions, Valery Lukin, the new equipment had been developed by researchers at the St. Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute that would ensure the lake remains uncontaminated upon intrusion. Lukin has repeatedly reassured other signatory nations to the Antarctic Treaty System that the drilling will not affect the lake. He argues that on breakthrough, water will rush up the borehole, freeze, and seal the chemical fluids out.

The international scientific community however remains unconvinced by these arguments. The Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition argues that this is a profoundly misguided step, which endangers not only Lake Vostok itself, but could harm other subglacial lakes in Antarctica, which some scientists are convinced are inter-linked with Lake Vostok. This coalition asserts that “it would be far preferable to join with other countries to penetrate a smaller and more isolated lake, before re-examining whether penetration of Lake Vostok is environmentally defensible. If we are wise, the Lake
will be allowed to reveal its secrets in due course.”

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Lake_Vostok

Documentary

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-lost-world-of-lake-vostok/

ANKARA, Turkey – European countries criticized Russia and China on Wednesday for vetoing a U.N. Security Council resolution that threatened sanctions against Syria if it didn’t halt its crackdown on civilians.

Turkey’s prime minister said his nation and others would respond by imposing more sanctions of their own against Syria.

Russia and China on Tuesday vetoed what would have been the first legally binding Security Council resolution against Syria since President Bashar Assad‘s military began using tanks and soldiers to attack pro-democracy protesters in mid-March. The U.N. estimates the crackdown has led to more than 2,700 deaths.

Russia and China both said they oppose the crackdown but that sanctions wouldn’t help resolve the crisis. The U.N. vote was 9-2 with four abstentions — India, South Africa, Brazil and Lebanon.

On Wednesday, Germany, France, Britain, Denmark and the EU joined Turkey in denouncing the veto, with French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe sounding outraged.

Juppe denounced Assad as a “dictator who is massacring his people” and vowed support for Syrians trying to overthrow the head of the former French colony. Juppe’s strongly worded English-language statement was highly unusual.

The EU and the U.S. have imposed several rounds of sanctions against Assad and his regime, including a ban on the import of Syrian oil. Most of Syria’s oil exports had gone to Europe. Now Damascus is forced to look for buyers in the east.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan used a speech in South Africa on Wednesday to say that Turkey and other nations would press ahead with sanctions.

“Turkey and either some or all of the European Union nations, and who knows which others, will take steps,” the state-run Anatolia news agency quoted Erdogan as saying. “It won’t stop our sanctions.”

Germany sharply criticized the veto by Russia and China, with Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle saying it was a “really sad day for international law and for human rights, too.”

Westerwelle said Western nations would maintain pressure on Assad and that European countries are preparing an eighth package of sanctions against Syria.

At the U.N. on Tuesday, the European sponsors of the resolution tried to avoid a veto by watering down the language on sanctions three times, to the point where the word “sanctions” was taken out entirely. But that failed.

“We have absolutely no understanding for the fact the U.N. Security Council was unable to agree in New York, even on a very much weakened statement,” Westerwelle said in Berlin.

“We will — not just in Europe, but also with our partners — not only keep up the pressure on the Assad regime, but increase it further if the killing and violence against peaceful demonstrators continues,” he said.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague told a rally of his governing Conservative Party in that Beijing and Moscow were wrong to oppose the proposed resolution.

“The decision of Russia and China to veto this resolution and to side with a brutal regime rather than the people of Syria is deeply mistaken,” Hague said in England.

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said through her spokesman that the bloc would now work to increase international pressure on Assad’s regime.

Denmark’s new foreign minister, Villy Soevndahl, said: “The Assad regime’s assault on civilians and brutal violation of basic human rights is utterly unacceptable.” He said the international community must find a way to speak in a single voice to maintain pressure on Assad and his government.

Turkey already has imposed an arms embargo on Syria, and Erdogan is expected to announce new sanctions on the neighbour country later this week when he visits camps near the border where some 7,500 Syrians have sought refuge from Assad’s brutal crackdown.

“Out of necessity our package of sanctions will come into effect,” Erdogan said. He did not provide details, but Turkish leaders have said that the measures would punish Syria’s leadership, not its people.

Turkey is an important trade partner for Syria, and Erdogan had cultivated a close friendship with Assad. But Turkish leaders have grown increasingly frustrated with Damascus over its refusal to halt the crackdown on the opposition protests.

The military has announced eight days of exercises in Hatay province, which borders Syria, starting Wednesday, to test the armed forces’ mobilization capability and communication among various state organizations. The military has described the drills as routine, but analysts said they were intended to increase pressure on Syria.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/russia-china-veto-security-council-resolution-threatening-un-223526752.html

TORONTO (Reuters) – Ontario Liberals scored a third straight victory in a provincial election in Canada’s economic center on Thursday, but fell one seat short of a majority and will need support from opposition legislators to stay in power.

The Liberals won 53 seats in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario after a late surge in a campaign in which polls showed they started in a weak second place. The election numbers were not yet official and many individual races were very close.

This will be the first minority government in the province since the mid-1980s.

The Progressive Conservatives scooped up 37 seats while the left-leaning New Democrats were ahead in 17.

The Liberals’ took most of the seats in urban centers including the financial capital of Toronto, while the Conservatives dominated the province’s rural areas.

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, now heading for his third straight term in office, campaigned on a message of a “steady hand at the tiller” in difficult times.

McGuinty highlighted his track record of steering the province, Canada’s manufacturing powerhouse, through recession with no major spending cuts.

Ontario, with a population of more than 13 million, is Canada’s most populous province. Its export-oriented economy accounts for about 40 percent of the national gross domestic product.

The Liberals lost a total of 17 seats in the election, with the Conservatives picking up 12 and the New Democrats gaining seven. There were two vacancies going into the vote.

Fifty-four seats is the slimmest possible majority for the Liberals. Being one seat short of a majority means the Liberals will need to cooperate with opposition legislators to push through their agenda.

The two opposition parties can join forces to vote them out, either by rejecting major legislation or by passing a vote of no confidence.

‘PREMIER DAD’

The race began with a call for change over public frustration with the rising debt, taxes, electricity bills and spending scandals. In the end, voters decided that boring is sometimes best with a stable McGuinty dubbed “Premier Dad.”

“It’s important that we be sober minded about the message Ontarians have sent us tonight,” McGuinty said in a bittersweet speech before a cheering crowd in Ottawa.

“Ontarians said to us, ‘We are placing our trust in you but we expect you to work even harder, listen more than ever and give us nothing but your best every day. But most of all we demand that you lead.’”

During the campaign, the Liberals promised more money for their priorities of healthcare and education.

They say they can rein in a C$16 billion deficit and ween the province off its dependency on the auto sector by investing heavily in renewable energy.

Tim Hudak, leader of the Progressive Conservatives, saw his lead disappear in the final weeks of the campaign as he scrambled to connect with voters on a platform that looked very similar to that of the Liberals, albeit with some promises to lower taxes and curb spending.

“It is very clear that the people of Ontario have put Dalton McGuinty on a much shorter leash,” Hudak told supporters at his campaign headquarters in Niagara Falls.

A vow to scrap Ontario’s C$7 billion green energy deal with South Korea’s Samsung and end above-market prices for renewable power were the party’s only big policy difference with the Liberals.

Negative media play about right-wing crime and punishment ideas and moves deemed anti-immigrant and homophobic also did the Conservatives few favors.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/liberals-head-ontario-win-maybe-not-majority-report-020157505.html

CAIRO - Egypt‘s ruling military and protesters seeking greater and faster change are moving into an outright collision, as the generals try to strip away public support for the movement while cozying up to the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.

Youth activists are not backing down, betting that Egyptians‘ dissatisfaction with the military’s running of the country will grow.

The generals, in power since the February ouster of longtime leaderHosni Mubarak, have launched an intensified media campaign against the protest activists, depicting them as a troublemaking minority and agents paid by foreign governments to grab power in an apparent attempt to turn the public against them. The message could have some appeal among Egyptians growing tired of continued unrest and fragile security.

At the same time, the military is cultivating ties with the powerful Muslim Brotherhood, which joined liberal and leftist youth in the 18-day uprising that toppled Mubarak but has since split with them on multiple issues. By cultivating the Brotherhood, the generals can take advantage of their large popular support base to counter the young protesters’ influence.

Maj. Gen. Mohammed al-Assar, a member of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the body of generals that have taken over from Mubarak, praised the Brotherhood on Monday, saying they were playing a constructive role in post-Mubarak Egypt.

“Day by day, the Brotherhood are changing and are getting on a more moderate track,” he said in a speech in Washington at the United States Institute of Peace. “They have the willingness to share in the political life … they are sharing in good ways.”

The generals have also encouraged street protests by pro-military groups. Dozens of army supporters have held daily rallies the past two weeks in a square in northeastern Cairo, getting heavy TV coverage, aimed at counterbalancing a tent camp by the youth activists at Tahrir Square, the center of the anti-Mubarak uprising.

If the tension between the two camps boils over, it could plunge Egypt deeper into chaos, even sparking clashes. That could derail the country’s transition to democratic rule, a failure that could have wider implications on a region that is looking to Egypt to provide a role model for pro-democracy uprisings elsewhere in the Arab world.

A sign of the dangers came Saturday, when thousands of protesters made a peaceful march on the Defense Ministry in Cairo to push demands that police officers responsible for the killing of some 850 protesters during anti-Mubarak uprising be brought to justice and that military trials of civilian protesters be stopped. They were attacked by bands of men armed with sticks, knives and firebombs.

Hundreds of military police backed by anti-riot policemen stood by without intervening as the two sides fought for several hours. At least 300 people were wounded in the clashes.

The protest movement began to hike up pressure on the military earlier this month, launching their sit-in protest in Tahrir. One of their top demands is that the killers of protesters be brought to justice, but they also complain that the generals have mismanaged the transition to democratic rule, operating without transparency and dragging their feet in weeding out Mubarak loyalists from the judiciary, the civil service and the police force. Their ultimate fear is that the military will allow much of Mubarak’s authoritarian regime to stay in place.

The generals have countered by doing some revision of history, aiming to restore their longtime status as the ultimate authority in Egypt. For example, they have sought to depict themselves as equal partners with the Tahrir protesters in the popular uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak’s 29-year regime.

Over the weekend, the military took its rhetoric against the protesters into a dramatically higher gear. A military statement over the weekend accused a key youth group, April 6, of driving a wedge between the armed forces and Egyptians and of receiving foreign funding and training.

It also criticized “Kifaya,” or “Enough!”, a movement that emerged in 2004 and was the first in Egypt to publicly call for Mubarak’s removal and to oppose plans for his son Gamal to succeed him. One general said Kifaya was an “imported” movement, suggesting that it was created, financed and controlled by foreign powers.

Columnist Wael Kandil criticized the military’s comments Monday in the independent daily Al-Shorouq, warning that “we are now in the phase of burning the revolution.”

“The only thing left is to bring a tailor to take Mubarak’s measurements to make him a new set of suits for his triumphant return,” he wrote.

Activists from April 6 and Kifaya denied the military charges, accusing the generals of using Mubarak-era tactics.

The military has also been making a major media push. Numerous retired army generals have appeared on TV political talk shows as commentators in recent days, promoting the military council’s line.

This week, the host of one popular show, Dina Abdel-Rahman, was fired after repeated criticism of the military, including a sharp debate with one of the retired generals who called in to her show defending the military council.

Gamal Eid, a human rights lawyer, said her firing was a warning to others.

“Fear of the military is still great,” he said.

“I expect a clash between the two sides,” said analyst Hala Mustafa. “There exists a huge gap in their vision and tempo. Unlike the revolutionaries, the generals want to reform the system from within while they want to bring it down and build a new one in its place.”

A senior Brotherhood figure, Essam el-Erian, said the youth activists protesting against the military were trying to dominate Egypt’s politics but have failed to convince the majority of Egyptians.

He denied any growing ties between the Brotherhood and the military, saying they agree only on one issue — that elections should be held to transfer power to the people. The military has called for parliamentary and presidential elections to be held later this year, and the Brotherhood is expected to do well in the voting.

El-Erian warned that the alternative is a military coup.

“The military would tell us, ‘You go back home’, and they will manage the country. That would be a coup,” he told The Associated Press.

In the other camp, Mustafa Shawki, a key youth activist, acknowledged that smaller numbers have been showing up for Tahrir Square rallies. But he said the military’s continued mismanaging of the transition will fuel public discontent.

“We are at the end of the second wave of the revolution,” he said. “What will bring about the third wave of the revolution is the failure of the military council to bring about social justice. That will win back support for the revolutionaries that has currently been lost.”

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/07/25/world/middleeast/AP-ML-Egypt.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=world

TRIPOLI (Reuters) – NATO‘s chief on Thursday slapped down a call from Italy for a suspension of hostilities in Libya and tried to reassure wavering members of the Western coalition that Muammar Gaddafi can be beaten.

Italy’s ceasefire call exposed the strain on the NATO alliance, nearly 14 weeks into a bombing campaign that has so far failed to dislodge Gaddafi but is causing mounting concerns about its financial cost and about civilian casualties.

Highlighting the wider consequences of the war in the North African oil-producer, oil-consuming nations announced a rare move to release reserves from oil stockpiles to fill the gap left by disruption to Libyan output.

Asked about Italy’s ceasefire call, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in a newspaper interview: “No, on the contrary. We shall continue and see it through to the end.”

“The allies are committed to making the necessary effort for a sustained operation,” he told France’s Le Figaro newspaper.

“We will take the time needed until the military objective is reached: end all attacks against Libyan civilians, return armed forces to barracks and freedom of movement for humanitarian aid.”

NATO says it is operating under a United Nations mandate to protect civilians from Gaddafi’s forces as he tries to crush an uprising against his 41-year rule. Gaddafi says NATO’s real aim is to steal the country’s plentiful oil.

British Prime Minister David Cameron said the Libyan leader’s ability to hold out was being steadily worn down, so now was not the moment to relax the pressure on him.

“Time is on our side, time is not on the side of Colonel Gaddafi,” Cameron said on a visit to the Czech capital. “So we need to be patient and persistent.”

NATO said it had delivered a blow to Gaddafi forces near Zlitan, a town about 170 km (105 miles) east of Tripoli, with an air and naval strike on Wednesday that took out 13 armed vehicles, an armored personnel carrier and a rocket launcher.

NATO CRACKS

At the weekend, NATO acknowledged for the first time in the campaign that it may have caused multiple civilian casualties, when an air strike hit a house in Tripoli, prompting a vitriolic attack from Gaddafi in an audio speech broadcast late Wednesday.

“You said, ‘We hit our targets with precision’, you murderers!” he said. “One day we will respond to you likewise and your homes will be legitimate targets.”

Libyan officials in Tripoli took reporters to the central Green Square where a crowd of around 200 people, most of them women waving green flags or pictures of Gaddafi, had gathered to demonstrate their support.

“We love our leader. We want him to stay in this country,” said one woman, who gave her name as Budur.

There was though a note of discord. As the reporters were guided back to their bus by government minders, a man shouted out of his car window: “Gaddafi go down!”

FORCES STRETCHED

Time is now a crucial factor for both sides in the conflict, with unity in the NATO-led coalition likely to come under more strain and Gaddafi’s ability to resist being steadily worn down by sanctions, air strikes and fighting with rebels.

In Paris, the 28-member International Energy Agency said it would release 60 million barrels a day over an initial 30 days to fill the gap left by the disruption to Libya’s output.

Libya was exporting about 1.2 million bpd before the rebellion that brought its oil industry to a standstill.

“This supply disruption has been underway for some time and its effect has become more pronounced as it has continued,” said the IEA. “Greater tightness in the oil market threatens to undermine the fragile global economic recovery.”

In a sign that Gaddafi’s military is being stretched, a Reuters photographer in rebel-held Al Qalaa saw about 50 navy servicemen being held prisoner in a police station.

They said their commanders had told them they were being deployed to protect the region from attack by al Qaeda, and they were later captured by the rebels.

The conflict has effectively partitioned Libya. The eastern third around the city of Benghazi is in rebels hands while the West — apart from some rebel enclaves — is controlled by Gaddafi. There is almost no movement between the two.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said it had begun an operation to transfer people back home who had been trapped on the wrong side of the civil war divide.

It said a ship would take several hundred from Tripoli to Benghazi, and about 110 were due to travel the other way.

“Most of the people we are transferring are Libyans who were working away from their home towns or visiting relatives or friends when the conflict broke out,” said Paul Castella, head of the ICRC delegation in Tripoli.

“They are very eager to rejoin their families.”

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/nato-chief-tries-repair-cracks-over-libya-095345120.html

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

By Hamza Hendawi,Lee Keath, The Associated Press | The Canadian Press

CAIRO – For years, Osama bin Laden’s charisma kept al-Qaida’s ranks filled with zealous recruits.

But it was the strategic thinking and the organizational skills of his Egyptian right hand man that kept the terror network together after the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and pushed al-Qaida out.

With Bin Laden killed, Ayman al-Zawahri becomes the top candidate for the world’s top terror job.

It’s too early to tell how exactly al-Qaida would change with its founder and supreme mentor gone, but the group under al-Zawahri would likely be further radicalized, unleashing a new wave of attacks to avenge bib Laden’s killing by U.S. troops in Pakistan on Monday to send a message that it’s business as usual.

Al-Zawahri’s extremist views and his readiness to use deadly violence are beyond doubt.

In a 2001 treatise, “Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner,” he set down the longterm strategy for the jihadi movement — to inflict “as many casualties as possible” on the Americans, while trying to establish control in a nation as a base “to launch the battle to restore the holy caliphate” of Islamic rule across the Muslim world.

Unlike bin Laden who found his Jihadist calling as an adult, al-Zawahri’s activism began when he was in his mid-teens, establishing his first secret cell of high school students to oppose the Egyptian government of then President Anwar Sadat he viewed as infidel for not following the rule of God.

The doors of jihad opened for him when, as a young doctor, a visitor came to him with an offer to travel to Afghanistan to treat Islamic fighters battling Soviet forces. His 1980 trip to the Afghan war zone — only a few months long but the first of many — opened his eyes to a whole new world of possibilities.

What he saw there, he was to write 20 years later, was “the training course preparing Muslim mujahideen youth to launch their upcoming battle with the great power that would rule the world: America.”

The bond between al-Zawahri and bin Laden began in the late 1980s, when al-Zawahri reportedly treated the Saudi millionaire-turned-jihadist in the caves of Afghanistan as Soviet bombardment shook the mountains around them. The friendship laid the foundation for the al-Qaida terror network, which carried out the Sept. 11, 2001 suicide airplane hijackings that sparked the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan later that year.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon made bin Laden Enemy No. 1 to the United States. But he likely could never have carried it out without al-Zawahri. Bin Laden provided al-Qaida with the charisma and money, but al-Zawahri brought the ideological fire, tactics and organizational skills needed to forge disparate militants into a network of cells in countries around the world.

“Al-Zawahri was always bin Laden’s mentor, bin Laden always looked up to him,” says terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University.

While bin Laden came from a privileged background in a prominent Saudi family of Yemeni descent, al-Zawahri had the experience of a revolutionary in the trenches. “He spent time in an Egyptian prison, he was tortured. He was a jihadi from the time he was a teenager, he has been fighting his whole life and that has shaped his world view,” Hoffman says.

Perhaps even more significant than al-Zawahri’s role before the 9/11 attacks was his task afterward, when the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan demolished al-Qaida’s safe haven and scattered, killed and captured its fighters and leaders. The blow was personal as well — al-Zawahri’s wife and at least two of their six children were killed in a U.S. airstrike in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.

Al-Zawahri ensured al-Qaida’s survival, rebuilding al-Qaida’s leadership in the Afghan-Pakistan border region and installing his allies as new lieutenants in key positions. Since then, the network inspired or had a direct hand in attacks in North Africa, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, the 2004 train bombings in Madrid and the 2005 transit bombings in London.

Meanwhile, al-Zawahri — with his thick beard, heavy-rimmed glasses and the prominent mark on his forehead from prostration in prayer — became the new face of al-Qaida, churning out Web videos and audiotapes while bin Laden faded from public view for long stretches.

In his videos, he lay down strategy, mocked the failures of former President George W. Bush and urged unity among jihadi ranks — wagging his finger to make his points, often with an automatic rifle visible by his side, the ideologue and the fighter at the same time.

“Bush, do you know where I am?” he sneered in a January 2006 video weeks after a U.S. airstrike in Pakistan that targeted him but missed. “I am among the Muslim masses … and I’m participating in their jihad until we defeat you.” A similar strike in October that year would also miss him.

It was the 2008 election of Obama to the U.S. presidency, however, that would present al-Zawahri with his greatest propaganda challenge as he sought to maintain Muslim anger against a U.S. leader of African origins with “Hussein” as middle name.

In one of his most infamous video messages issued two weeks after the election, al-Zawahri described Obama as “house negro,” a slur for blacks subservient to whites — even bin Laden was more sparing of Obama in his criticism of the new U.S. president.

But before al-Qaida — and before al-Zawahri focused his wrath on the “far enemy,” United States — his goal was to bring down the “near enemy,” the U.S.-allied government of then President Hosni Mubarak in his native Egypt.

He was born June 19, 1951, the son of an upper middle class family of doctors and scholars in the Cairo suburb of Maadi. His father was a pharmacology professor at Cairo University’s medical school and his grandfather, Rabia al-Zawahri, was the grand imam of Al-Azhar University, a premier centre of religious study.

From an early age, al-Zawahri was enflamed by the radical writings of Egyptian Islamist Sayed Qutb, who taught that Arab regimes were “infidel” and should be replaced by Islamic rule.

In the 1970s, even as he earned his medical degree as a surgeon, he was active in militant circles. He merged his own militant cell with others to form Islamic Jihad and began trying to infiltrate the military — at one point even storing weapons in his private medical clinic.

Then came the 1981 assassination of Sadat by militants from Islamic Jihad. The slaying was carried out by a different cell in the group — and al-Zawahri has written that he learned of the plot only hours before the assassination took place.

But he was arrested along with hundreds of other militants and served three years in prison. During his imprisonment, he was reportedly tortured heavily — one factor some have cited as pushing him into a more violent radicalism.

After his release in 1984, al-Zawahri returned to Afghanistan and joined the Arab militants from around the Middle East who were fighting alongside the Afghans against the Soviets. He began courting bin Laden, who was becoming a heroic figure among radicals for his financial support of the mujahideen, as well as fighting alongside them.

At the same time, al-Zawahri began reassembling Islamic Jihad and surrounded bin Laden with Egyptian members of Jihad such as Mohammed Atef and Saif al-Adel, who would one day play key roles in putting together the Sept. 11 attacks.

The alliance established al-Zawahri as bin Laden’s deputy and soon after came the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa, followed by the 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen, an attack al-Zawahri is believed to have helped organize.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/egypts-al-zawahri-bin-ladens-deputy-likely-next-090006836.html