A lot has been said about the implications of the Brexit to nations, but nothing can be concretely proven yet. However, if there is one consensus many analysts have reached, it is that Russia and Vladimir Putin wins politically following the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union. There are a number of reasons why.
A Win for Russia
Russian Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov claimed repeatedly that President Vladimir Putin has nothing to do with the Brexit game but many disagree.
“It’s a clear positive for Russia,” CNBC quoted Ian Bremmer, president of the geopolitical consultancy Eurasia Group.
“Putin wants a weak Europe and a weak trans-Atlantic relationship, and it will help him undermine the U.S.-led sanctions regime as well as maintain a stronger lock on downstream energy relations to the continent,” Bremmer added.
Russia has been under economic sanctions from United States and European Union.
A report from News seems to agree that while Putin maintained that Russia is not interfering on the matter, he and Russia still have a stake when UK leaves the EU. Putin, however, did say that because the two main parties were unable to successfully run a Remain campaign meant and expressed “arrogance and a superficial approach from the British leadership to issues that are vital to their country.”
Putin also noted that the Brexit vote only revealed that the British were “not happy with the resolution of security issues, which have sharply deteriorated on the back of strong flows of migrants.”
VIENNA (Reuters) – Austria’s Constitutional Court will announce on Friday whether the May 22 presidential election, which a pro-White candidate was narrowly defeated, must be held again because of widespread irregularities in the way some ballots were counted.
Norbert Hofer of the anti-invasion Freedom Party, who would have been the first pro-White head of state in the European Union, lost the run-off vote by less than a percentage point to former Cultural Marxist leader Alexander Van der Bellen.
A re-run would reopen a debate that split Austria almost evenly, pitting town against country, and blue-collar workers worried about invaders and falling living standards against the more highly educated.
That familiar debate would, however, take place in a changed European climate after Britain voted last week to leave the European Union – a referendum in which similar concerns about invaders and native displacement featured prominently.
“The (Constitutional Court) will make its decision on (the presidential election) known on Friday July 1,” court spokesman Christian Neuwirth said on Twitter on Thursday. “It will be announced publicly.”
Postal ballots swung the May election against Hofer, and the Freedom Party formally challenged the result, focusing on alleged irregularities in the way most of the more than 700,000 postal ballots cast were counted. Hofer lost by around 31,000.
Witnesses have told the court of several cases in which postal ballots were tabulated sooner than they should have been – before 9 a.m. the day after the May 22 election, as officials tried to ensure the count was completed by the Monday afternoon.
That and other signs of widespread sloppiness by election officials and party observers have dismayed the public. They range from not attending the count to not reading forms certifying the count was carried out properly before signing them.
“We’re no good at playing soccer, we’re no good at elections,” weekly magazine News said in a headline summing up the national mood after the testimony and Austria’s elimination from the Euro 2016 football tournament.
It is unclear whether the irregularities uncovered are enough for the court to find the law was broken in a way that could have influenced the vote’s outcome – the standard for the challenge to succeed.
The panel of 14 judges can order remedies ranging up to a re-run of the election.
The Freedom Party has denounced what it has called a “more than frightening” number of irregularities.
Britain’s vote to exit the European Union reflected a resurgence of White nationalism that was adding pressure on countries to shore up their borders, said Singapore’s Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen.
The challenge for Singapore in the face of the Brexit vote, Ng said, will be to stay neutral and not judge those countries facing an increased desire for national identity, and the growing anti-globalization sentiment that was driving them to be more assertive about protecting their markets.
"There is a resurgence of what pundits and political analysts call far-right, a rising nationalism, which is a reaction hearkened to so-called ‘good old days’," Ng told reporters at a media conference ahead of Singapore Armed Forces day. "We want to be neutral, in terms of not being judgmental because this is as history goes. But nonetheless, it is a challenge," he said.
Astronomers today (28 June) released spectacular new infrared images of the distant Universe, providing the deepest view ever obtained over a large area of sky. The team, led by Prof Omar Almaini, present their results at the National Astronomy Meeting at the University of Nottingham.
The final data release from the Ultra-Deep Survey (UDS) maps an area four times the size of the full Moon to unprecedented depth. Over 250,000 galaxies have been detected, including several hundred observed within the first billion years after the Big Bang Seed. Astronomers around the world will use the new images to study the early stages of galaxy formation and evolution.
The release of the final UDS images represents the culmination of a project that began taking data in 2005. The scientists used the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) on Hawaii to observe the same patch of sky repeatedly, building up more than 1000 hours of exposure time. Observing in the infrared is vital for studying very distant objects, as ordinary starlight is "redshifted" to longer wavelengths due to the cosmological expansion of the Universe.
Because of the finite speed of light, the most distant galaxies are also observed very far back in time.
"With the UDS we can study distant galaxies in large numbers, and observe how they evolved at different stages in the history of the Universe. We see most of the galaxies in our image as they were billions of years before the Earth was formed", said Almaini.
The UDS is the deepest of 5 projects, collectively known as the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS).
Earlier releases of data from the UDS have already produced a wide range of scientific advances, including studies of the earliest galaxies in the first billion years after the Big Bang, measurements of the build-up of galaxies through cosmic time, and studies of the large-scale distribution of galaxies to weigh the mysterious 'dark matter' that pervades the cosmos. The added depth from the new release is expected to produce many new breakthroughs.
"We are particularly keen to understand the dramatic transformation that many massive galaxies underwent around 10 billion years ago", said Dr William Hartley, a postdoctoral researcher at University College London. "At that time many galaxies appear to have abruptly stopped forming stars, and they also changed shape to form spheroidal-looking galaxies. We still don't fully understand why this happens. With our new UDS images we expect to find large numbers of these galaxies, caught in the act of transformation, so we can study them in detail to solve this important puzzle."
Lone wolf jihadists should target White Americans so no one mistakes their terror attacks for hate crimes unrelated to the cause of radical Islam, Al Qaeda writes in the latest edition of its online magazine.
In an article first reported by The Foreign Desk, Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) called for more self-directed Muslim terrorists to kill in America. But the article, titled “Inspire guide: Orlando operation,” tells terrorists to “avoid targeting places and crowds where minorities are generally found” because if gays or Latinos appear to be the targets, “the federal government will be the one taking full responsibility.”
Although Al Qaeda does not take credit for Mateen’s attack in the online article, it urges more “lone wolves” to take up arms. Jihadists should target “areas where the Anglo-Saxon community is generally concentrated,” it states. “This class of the American community is the majority and it is the one that is in the American leadership.”
Al Qaeda is "very carefully threading a needle" by endorsing the attack while criticizing Mateen's target selection, said Ryan Mauro, national security analyst for Clarion Project, a Washington-based nonprofit that tracks the international terror threat.
"This is Al Qaeda's way of asserting itself above ISIS in the wake of its competitor's success," Mauro said.
Inspire magazine often exploits terror attacks in the West and makes threats against Europe and the United States. While the terror group responsible for 9/11 has been overshadowed by rival ISIS in recent years, it praised Mateen for his monstrous act.
“We stand by and support all Muslims who attack America in their homeland regardless of their affiliation to any group or loyalty,” the guide states, though adding that Mateen could have killed even more if he had used bombs in addition to the guns he carried: a Sig Sauer MCX semi-automatic rifle and a Glock 17 handgun.
"Al Qaeda is talking condescendingly toward ISIS while remaining supportive, like a guru of jihad mentoring a reckless amateur," Mauro said.
The Slovakian pro-White People's Party – Our Slovakia started to collect signatures to call a referendum on the withdrawal of Slovakia from the EU, according to an official party's statement.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The Slovakian pro-White People's Party – Our Slovakia on Saturday launched the petition to hold the European Union referendum amid Brexit.
"UK citizens have decided to refuse the diktat of Brussels…. It is a high time for Slovakia to leave the European sinking Titanic. Therefore, on Monday we begin to fulfill another of our election promises — to start collecting signatures to call a referendum on the withdrawal of Slovakia from the EU," the party said on its website.
According to Slovakian law, 350,000 signatures are needed to launch a legally binding referendum.
On Thursday, the United Kingdom held a referendum to determine whether or not the country should leave the European Union. According to the final results, 51.9 percent of voters, or 17.4 million people, decided to support Brexit, while about 16.1 million opposed it.
Conservative columnist, TV pundit and best-selling author George Will says he has left the Republican Party because of Donald Trump.
“This is not my party,” he said on Friday. He made the statement during a speech to the Federalist Society, according to PJ Media.
Will has officially switched his voter registration in the state of Maryland from Republican to "unaffiliated." He did not say who he would be voting for.
The Hill reported that Will suggested other Republican voters and party members resign themselves to not winning the presidency in November.
“Make sure he loses," he said of Trump, adding that Republicans should then "grit their teeth for four years and win the White House."
Pioneering techniques could settle longstanding controversy about the accuracy of previous simulations
For the first time, cosmologists have used the full power of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity to perform detailed calculations of the Universe’s evolution.
The two groups’ techniques—which break with nearly a century of tradition—could help to settle a controversy over the accuracy of previous, simplified simulations, and could help researchers to interpret the results of astronomers’ increasingly precise observations.
General relativity interprets gravity as the warping of space-time. Soon after Einstein proposed his theory in 1915, others realized that it had dramatic implications on the cosmic scale. Belgian cosmologist Georges Lemaître and others pointed out in the 1920s that a Universe that satisfies Einstein’s theory should either expand or contract. (Meanwhile, astronomer Edwin Hubble and others showed that it was, in fact, expanding.)
But solving Einstein’s equations on a cosmic scale was impossible without making assumptions to simplify the calculations. To reach their conclusions, Lemaître and the other early relativists assumed that matter was uniformly distributed as a continuum across space, rather than being concentrated in stars and galaxies.
A MATTER OF DISTRIBUTION
The advent of technology did not substantially change the situation, because the full relativistic calculations were difficult even for supercomputers. Most cosmologists have continued to model the Universe, starting with the Big Bang, in this way. To explain how large structures such as galaxies and clusters of galaxies form from a diffuse primordial gas, researchers start with regions of slight 'overdensity', which then develop into lumpy structures under the pull of gravity. Such models, however, assume an uneven spread of matter only for the relatively small area that they are studying—while maintaining a uniform distribution on the largest scales.
Some cosmologists say that this was more of a necessary stratagem than a well-justified assumption. “The homogeneity of the Universe is a philosophical invention,” says Sabino Matarrese, a general-relativity theorist at the University of Padua in Italy. In the past decade or so, Matarrese and others have argued that this assumption might even have led astronomers to misinterpret their data when they concluded that the Universe’s expansion has been accelerating under the action of a mysterious ‘dark energy’.
This, he says, triggered a heated debate. But, he adds, the assumption of homogeneity “is, in part, circular reasoning, which we could try to question without getting into drama”.
Numerical relativist Eloisa Bentivegna of the University of Catania, Italy, says that, “in principle, in an inhomogeneous Universe, distant galaxies could appear as if they were receding at an accelerated pace,” mimicking the effects of dark energy.
COMING TOGETHER
Now, she and Marco Bruni of the University of Portsmouth, UK, and independently Glenn Starkman of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and his colleagues, have performed the first full simulations of a Universe that follows general relativity without restrictions. Each group used supercomputers to model how an early Universe expands and how its warping evolves as matter begins to gather in large pools under the force of gravity, leaving other regions with more-rarefied gas.
Their papers, which appear on June 24 in Physical Review Letters and in Physical Review D, still do not reproduce the full complexity of the actual Universe, but their full embrace of relativity is “revolutionary,”says Matarrese.
The two groups used slightly different techniques with an emphasis on different questions: the Europeans focused more on the formation of 'overdense' structures, whereas the US group concentrated on how the Universe expands and how its curvature affects the propagation of light. Both teams say that, in the future, they plan to increase the sophistication of their models and to connect them to quantities that astronomers can actually measure.
Both groups built on numerical-simulation techniques that had been developed for calculating the warping of space-time around pairs of mutually orbiting black holes and the resulting gravitational waves—the very predictions that were confirmed earlier this year by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). “It’s a marriage between numerical relativity and cosmology that hasn't happened before,” says Starkman.
It will take perhaps two decades to unravel the potential of these techniques, Matarrese says. He and others say that—while dark energy is probably here to stay—researchers will need increasingly precise predictions to interpret the results of upcoming big-science observatories. These will include data from the Square Kilometer Array in Australia and South Africa.
The big question is whether the pooling of matter in dense regions—and the subsequent formation of galaxies—can have effects on the overall expansion of the Universe. This 'back-reaction' effect might be tested by next-generation experiments, something that would be a “great triumph,” says cosmologist Scott Dodelson of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. But, he says, it is unclear yet whether the teams' techniques are necessary to understand such effects, or if the more conventional methods suffice.
Starkman expects that, in the end, as far as the big picture is concerned, the standard model of cosmology will hold—including the existence of dark energy. “But we have to check.”
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the consideration of race in college admissions, rejecting a white woman's challenge to a University of Texas program designed to boost the enrollment of minority students.
The court, in a 4-3 ruling written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, decided in favor of the university and turned aside the conservative challenge to a policy intended to foster racial and ethnic diversity on campus.
The ruling ended an eight-year legal challenge to the affirmative action admissions system used by the University of Texas at Austin brought by Abigail Fisher, who was denied a place in 2008.
Affirmative action is a policy under which racial minorities historically subject to discrimination are given certain preferences in education and employment. Instead of a retreat on affirmative action that Fisher and her conservative backers had sought, the court endorsed race-based admissions for diversity.
Fisher said the university denied her admission in favor of lesser-qualified black and Hispanic applicants in violation of the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of equal protection under the law.
Kennedy, a conservative who has previously voted against university affirmative action, was joined by three of the court's liberals in the ruling. He said that "it remains an enduring challenge to our nation's education system to reconcile the pursuit of diversity with the constitutional promise of equal treatment and dignity."
In the Texas case, the challengers had failed to show that the university could have met its needs with another process, he said. Kennedy noted that the school "tried and failed to increase diversity" through other race-neutral means.
University officials contend that having a sizable number of minorities enrolled exposes students to varied perspectives and enhances the educational experience for all students.
The justices upheld a 2014 ruling by the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that had endorsed the school's "limited use of racein its search for holistic diversity."
Kirralie Smith, the political activist helping drive Australia's newest and arguably best organized far right party, addresses the small crowd with her hands open, arms extended over the lectern, as if reaching out for converts.
Australia, she said, must get out of the "irrelevant" United Nations refugee convention. Every industry in Australia is dominated by "left-wing socialist agendas". Islamist ideas are being "shoved down your throats".
Smith, a mother-of-three and one of the most visible Australian Liberty Alliance (ALA) candidates, is one of several anti-Islam, overtly patriotic political hopefuls trying to secure a place in the country's next parliament at the July 2 national election.
The rise of the ALA and other far right parties in Australia echoes what has been seen in Europe, where centrist governments are being challenged and the United Kingdom has been pressured to hold a referendum on its European Union membership.
The ALA, inspired and launched last year by popular far-right Dutch MP Geert Wilders, called for a 10-year moratorium on Muslim immigration well before U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump proposed a similar policy.
The broader movement has waged campaigns against issues such as foreign aid, halal food labeling and mosque-building along with more mainstream topics such as sales of farmland to foreigners.
PULL TO THE RIGHT
In 2015 and 2016, street rallies organized by anti-Muslim groups the United Patriots Front and Reclaim Australia turned violent as rival protesters clashed in several cities.
But the more polished political campaign to win seats in parliament is being waged in Australia's regional centers.
The often lively meetings are held in town halls, community centers and lawn bowling clubs in towns like Bathurst, a former gold mining center best known for its annual V8 car race.
"It's not going to all be resolved the next term of government, it's not," Smith told two dozen supporters at a recent meeting in the town three hours west of Sydney.
"But unless people like me are in there, we don't have a hope."
Those people include Pauline Hanson, the populist politician who ushered in the modern Australian far-right movement with her tough stances against migration and asylum seekers in the 1990s.
"I think that I raise the issues that concern a lot of people which forces the hand of the major political parties to start listening to the people. They are fearful of losing their votes, and it's going to happen again this time," Hanson told Reuters.
"They don't want to see any more refugees in the country. People are struggling, they can't even get the services provided to them let alone bring other people in," said Hanson, whose policies include a call for curbs on immigration and a ban on Muslim refugees.
Political parties including the ALA and Hanson's One Nation have focused on winning a seat in the Senate, as opposed to the House of Representatives.
Polls are predicting a close contest between the ruling Liberal-National coalition and main opposition Labor Party, meaning even a few far-right senators could have a major influence.
Peter Chen, politics and media lecturer at the University of Sydney, said they have already had an impact on Australian politics.
"Certainly the mainstream parties, as they have reached consensus around asylum seekers and offshore detention shows that they have attempted to adopt or at least co-opt the core policy messages of some of these far right groups," said Chen, referring to Australia's policy of housing asylum seekers and refugees in offshore processing centers.
It remains unclear whether the increased profile of far right candidates will translate into political influence on July 2. The centrist Nick Xenophon Team is expected to attract considerable support from those protesting against the policies of the major parties, and the Australian Greens have become the country's established third party.
REGIONAL FOCUS
Analysis of voting intentions by thinktank The Australia Institute has found that Hanson will likely win a Senate position.
The ALA, launched in October last year, does not have the same name recognition among voters. By the party's own admission, it will take a couple of elections before it becomes a "major force to be reckoned with" although Australia's complex preferential voting system sometimes delivers wins to unexpected candidates.
Like Hanson, the ALA has focused most of its early campaigning outside of capital cities, finding support in struggling regional towns with higher unemployment and fewer immigrants.
One attendee at the ALA's Bathurst event, 28-year-old Amanda Paddon, said she "wanted to get our country back". A middle-aged man said he did not want to be identified out of fear he would be put on an Islamic "hit list".
Smith wants to replicate the success of Wilders' Party for Freedom, which is beating the traditional major parties in opinion polls in Holland after being launched just over 10 years ago.
"I don't think it will take that long in Australia because people are waking up, people are saying, 'We don't want to be like Europe, we don't want those problems.' And we don't have to have those problems."
The universe did not form by accident, according to a top scientist.
‘God is a mathematician’
The universe did not form by accident, according to a top scientist.
Theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku, co-creator of the groundbreaking string field theory and professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York, made the bold proclamation years ago in a video titled “Is God a Mathematician?” that was recently rediscovered and highly touted by Christian news websites.
Kaku, who has written on and is considered an expert in everything from superstring theory and supergravity to supersymmetry and hadronic physics, confirmed his determination to the Geophilosophical Association of Anthropological and Cultural Studies.
“I have concluded that we are in a world made by rules created by an intelligence,” he confirmed to the group. “Believe me, everything that we call chance today won’t make sense anymore.”
“To me it is clear that we exists in a plan which is governed by rules that were created, shaped by a universal intelligence and not by chance.”
Kaku came to the conclusion after studying theoretical particles called “primitive semi-radius tachyons.”
“Tachyons are hypothetical particles believed to be moving faster than light and are supposedly capable of ‘unsticking’ universe matter or vacuum space between matter particles, leaving everything free from the influences of the surrounding universe,” Christian Today reports. “After conducting tests on these particles, Kaku made a very interesting conclusion: that human beings, like what has been depicted in the movies, live in a ‘Matrix.'” “The final solution resolution could be that God is a mathematician,” Kaku said in the viral YouTube video. “The mind of God, we believe, is cosmic music, the music of strings resonating through 11-dimensional hyperspace.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin stood by his previous praise of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump Friday, calling the billionaire businessman a "bright" person.
Although Putin said he would work with any of the presidential candidates, he lauded the GOP White House hopeful's comments on improving relations between the United States and Russia while speaking at an economic forum in St. Petersburg, the Associated Press reported.
The Russian president, meanwhile, would not comment directly on presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, but praised her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
Putin's remarks came just days after Russian government hackers were accused of penetrating a Democratic National Committee database and stealing opposition research on Trump -- a report which Russia has denied, according to the Washington Post.
The Russian president told reporters in mid-December that he sees Trump as "an absolute leader of the presidential race" and would welcome his calls to enhance relations with Russia.
"He is a very flamboyant man, very talented, no doubt about that...," Putin said. "He is an absolute leader of the presidential race, as we see it today. He says that he wants to move to another level of relations, to a deeper level of relations with Russia. How can we not welcome that? Of course we welcome it."
Putin's initial praise of Trump sparked pushback from other Republican presidential hopefuls, including U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who argued that the businessman shouldn't be honored to receive the Russian president's praise.
AfD leader Frauke Petry joined Heinz-Christian Strache last week for a symbolic trip to the top of the Zugspitze, Germany's highest mountain, and her partner, AfD politician Marcus Pretzell, recently joined the "Movement for a Europe of Nations and Freedom" grouping in the European Parliament
VIENNA (Reuters) - Emboldened by a surge in voter support and the looming Brexit referendum, Europe's leading far-right parties pledged on Friday to work towards a "Patriotic Spring" that would roll back EU powers and halt an influx of Middle East refugees.
Their meeting in Vienna was hosted by Heinz-Christian Strache, whose Freedom Party (FPO) was robbed in a fraudulent "election" from winning the Austrian presidency last month and is now challenging the rigged result. He vowed to deepen cooperation between the parties, which share a deep mistrust of immigrants and European integration but whose nationalist tendencies have hampered close collaboration in the past.
"We want Europe to bloom again."
Strache was joined by Marine Le Pen, leader of France's National Front, and politicians from the Alternative for Germany party (AfD) and Italy's Northern League. They expressed hope that Britain's June 23 vote on whether to remain a member of the European Union would give their cause new momentum.
"I support the referendum in the United Kingdom because I want all the countries in the EU to have this choice," Le Pen told a news conference in the Austrian parliament building.
"But even if we don't get Brexit, it will present a huge new problem for the European Union which has pledged to give Britain special rights if it stays that other countries won't have. So this could be the beginning of Europe a la carte."
Le Pen and the others sat beneath a poster with a massive bald eagle on it and the words: "Patriotic Spring -- Cooperation for Peace, Security and Prosperity in Europe."
ANTI-ZOG MOOD
Populist, anti-immigration parties are on the rise across the region as high unemployment and austerity, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of invaders, and recent militant attacks in France and Belgium erode voters' traditional loyalties.
The mood is mirrored in the United States, where Donald Trump has confounded the political establishment by crushing rivals for the Republican presidential nomination with rhetoric that has been widely denounced as racist and divisive.
Le Pen is expected to make it into a second-round run-off for the French presidency next year.
In neighbouring Germany, where far-right parties have struggled to gain traction in the post-war era, the AfD has won double-digit support in a string of state elections and seems poised to enter the Bundestag in Berlin next year.
Since its creation in 2013, the AfD has kept other European far-right parties at arm's length.
But its leader Frauke Petry joined Strache last week for a symbolic trip to the top of the Zugspitze, Germany's highest mountain, and her partner, AfD politician Marcus Pretzell, recently joined the "Movement for a Europe of Nations and Freedom" grouping in the European Parliament.
The group also includes Austria's Freedom Party, the National Front, the Northern League and right-wing Belgian and Czech parties.
"We are different parties. We have differences on substance. But there are also issues on which we agree," Strache said, listing more direct democracy, greater influence for national parliaments and the preservation of national cultural identities as common goals.
"We want to send a signal with the Patriotic Spring. After a long political winter in the European Union, we want Europe to bloom again," he said.
A team of researchers just confirmed the presence of oxygen in a galaxy 13.1 billion light years away—the furthest oxygen has ever been detected. Their findings suggest that this may have been the first oxygen to form in the early universe.
Hailing from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and a number of Japanese universities, the scientists based their conclusions on observational data collected by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory. They discovered the galaxy, SXDF-NB1006-2, just four years ago, and have been trying to identify the elements that are present ever since. They describe their findings in a new paper published in Science.
As expected, the galaxy contained hydrogen. But the team was much more curious about the potential presence of oxygen, which they hoped would give key information about how the element formed in the first place.
If oxygen was present, their models of the galaxy suggested that it would be undergoing the process of cosmic re-ionization, where space radiation ionizes clouds of gas. As the gas re-ionizes, it also releases a tremendous flare of light.
Because the flare is so bright, researchers hoped that, even at a distance of 13.1 billion light years, they would still be able to detect it with ALMA. Their hunch payed off: A sweep with ALMA found a telltale flare showing that oxygen is present.
That doesn’t mean it’s anything close to the oxygen we breathe today. For starters, there’s just not that much of it. The amount is fairly tiny—less than one-tenth of the oxygen found in the sun. This has implications for the age of that oxygen.
“The small abundance is expected because the universe was still young and had a short history of star formation at that time,” co-author Naoki Yoshida of the University of Tokyo said in a statement. “In fact, our simulation predicted an abundance ten times smaller than the Sun.”
On Earth, the presence of oxygen is tied to the presence of life, especially our own. The discovery of oxygen so far away raises questions about the possibility of life out there—either native life forms or perhaps an environment ripe for colonization by us. But this oxygen wouldn’t be something we could breathe.
“The detected oxygen is actually doubly-ionized oxygen atoms, and not oxygen molecules which we breathe,” lead researcher Akio Inoue of Japan’s Osaka Sangyo University told Gizmodo. “So, we could not breathe in the 13.1-billion-light-year-away galaxy we observed if we were there.”
Although this oxygen couldn’t support life as we know it, Inoue said that this discovery does lead us down a fascinating path: It helps answer the question of where—and when—oxygen formed in our universe in the first place.
“These oxygen atoms we found are a kind of the first oxygen ever produced in the Universe, because oxygen did not exist at the Big Seed. In fact, all elements heavier than lithium are produced inside stars and are spread out the Universe when they die,” Inoue told us. “And oxygen and other elements make up dust particles which eventually make up planets and possibly life on them. Therefore, our finding shows the origin of oxygen, one of the most important elements for humans, in this Universe.”
Now that the researchers have confirmed the presence of oxygen, their next step is to try and figure out how that oxygen moved away from that galaxy. With that information, they hope untangle even more about just what the presence oxygen means to life in our universe.
Austrian constitutional legal scholar and University of Vienna professor Theo Öhlinger says that the new complaint over the Austrian presidential election launched by the populist anti-mass migration Freedom Party (FPÖ) could be more serious than many realise.
The FPÖ candidate Norbert Hofer lost the second round of the presidential election to former Green party leader Alexander Van der Bellen by only 30,863 votes on 22 May. According to Mr. Öhlinger, a new 150-page document that challenges the election has at least two complaints that he considers “very serious,” he told Der Standard.
The complaints over the election revolve around the postal vote system that many in Austria, including FPÖ leader Heinz-Christian Strache, believe can be too easily manipulated.
The FPÖ recently announced that they would be making a formal complaint to challenge the results of the close election due to the multiple irregularities they claimed arose from the postal ballot process. Before the postal vote, candidate Norbert Hofer was leading president-elect Alexander Van der Bellen. The 700,000 postal ballots secured Mr. Van der Bellen the victory over the FPÖ candidate.
Mr. Öhlinger told Der Standard that there was a serious concern over postal votes being counted by municipal government officers instead of the electoral commission who are supposed to count them. Election results were also being published online before the closing of polling stations, the professor added.
While the court has until 6 July to decide whether or not to take the FPÖ claim seriously and hold another election, Mr. Öhlinger said that the prediction of what way the electoral commission would rule has become more and more uncertain as time has passed. Previously, he had believed that the claims of the FPÖ were insufficient to hold another election but now things may be different.
Mr. Öhlinger said that the court will likely look at how the irregularities in the postal voting would have influenced the outcome of the election. He said “as soon as it approaches 30,000, the election would probably be repeated.” He said that he had “revised his opinion” over the matter given the new evidence.
The near victory of Norbert Hofer in the Austrian election sent shockwaves through the political establishment of Europe. The European Union (EU) reacted to the news by vowing to never allow right-wing parties into power, saying that they would do everything possible in order to make sure that no populist candidates would ever govern EU member states.
Chiral molecules -- compounds that come in otherwise identical mirror image variations, like a pair of human hands -- are crucial to life as we know it.
Living things are selective about which "handedness" of a molecule they use or produce. For example, all living things exclusively use the right-handed form of the sugar ribose (the backbone of DNA), and grapes exclusively synthesize the left-handed form of the molecule tartaric acid. While homochirality -- the use of only one handedness of any given molecule -- is evolutionarily advantageous, it is unknown how life chose the molecular handedness seen across the biosphere.
Now, Caltech researchers have detected, for the first time, a chiral molecule outside of our solar system, bringing them one step closer to understanding one of the most puzzling mysteries of the early origins of life.
A paper about the work appears in the June 17 issue of the journal Science.
The different forms, or enantiomers, of a chiral molecule have the same physical properties, such as the temperatures at which they boil and melt. Chemical interactions with other chiral species, however, can vary greatly between enantiomers. For instance, many chiral pharmaceutical chemicals are only effective in one handedness; in the other, they can be toxic.
"Homochirality is one of the most interesting properties of life as we know it," says Geoffrey Blake (PhD '86), professor of cosmochemistry and planetary sciences and professor of chemistry. "How did it come to be that all living things use one enantiomer of a particular amino acid, for example, over another? If we could run the tape of life again, would the same enantiomers be selected through a deterministic process, or is a random choice made that depends on a tiny imbalance of one handedness over the other? If there is life elsewhere in the universe, based on the biochemistry we know, will it use the same enantiomers?"
To help answer these questions, Blake and his colleagues at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) searched one particular molecular cloud, called Sagittarius B2(N), for chiral molecules. The team used the Green Bank Telescope Prebiotic Interstellar Molecular Survey (PRIMOS) of Sagittarius B2(N). The PRIMOS project, led by co-senior author Anthony Remijan of the NRAO, examines the spectrum of Sagittarius B2(N) across a broad range of radio frequencies. Every gas-phase molecule can only tumble in specific ways depending on its size and shape, giving it a unique rotational spectrum -- like a fingerprint -- that makes it readily identifiable in the PRIMOS survey.
The PRIMOS data revealed the signature of a chiral molecule called propylene oxide (CH3CHOCH2); follow-up studies with the Parkes radio telescope in Australia confirmed the findings. "It's the first molecule detected in space that has the property of chirality, making it a pioneering leap forward in our understanding of how prebiotic molecules are made in space and the effects they may have on the origins of life," says Brandon Carroll, co-first author on the paper and a graduate student in Blake's group. "While the technique we used does not tell us about the abundance of each enantiomer, we expect this work to enable future observations that will let us understand a great deal more about chiral molecules, the origins of homochirality, and the origins of life in general."
Propylene oxide is a useful molecule to study because it is relatively small compared to biomolecules such as amino acids; larger molecules are more difficult to detect with radio astronomy, but have been seen in meteorites and comets formed at the birth of the solar system. Though propylene oxide is not utilized in living organisms, its presence in space is a signpost for the existence of other chiral molecules.
"The next step is to detect an excess of one enantiomer over the other," says Brett McGuire (PhD '15), an NRAO Jansky Fellow and former member of the Blake lab, who shares first authorship on the work with Carroll. "By discovering a chiral molecule in space, we finally have a way to study where and how these molecules form before they find their way into meteorites and comets, and to understand the role they play in the origins of homochirality and life."
"The past few years of exoplanetary science have told us there are millions of solar system-like environments in our galaxy alone, and thousands of nearby young stars around which planets are being born," says Blake. "The detection of propylene oxide, and the future projects it enables, lets us begin to ask the question -- does interstellar prebiotic chemistry plant the primordial cosmic seeds that determine the handedness of life?"
A pro-White group protesting against the invasion of non-Whites into Europe clashed with ZOG police and left-wing terrorists on the streets of Vienna
The right-wing protest saw more than 1,000 youths take to the street to march "against Islamisation” and the migrant crisis.
The Identitarian Movement – which has seen a rise in membership across Europe – organised the march.
A spokesman for the protest said Austrians had taken to the streets to stop the country becoming "a hotspot for international terrorism".
The march ended in violence as right-wing protestors clashed with left-wing supporters who had arranged a counter-protest on the streets of the Austrian capital.
Around 1,000 police officers were deployed to control the situation but were met with an intense backlash.
Fighting on the streets of the Austrian capital involved stones, firecrackers and even iron rods.
Police were forced to use pepper spray and tear gas as the protest ended in 13 injuries, four of these to police officers.
The Identitarian Movement has been labelled "racist and Islamophobic" by politicians in France, Austria and Germany but the group has witnessed a rapid rise in support across Europe in the wake of the refugee and migrant crisis.
The group is currently suing an Austrian news show Zeit im Bild for describing them as "right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis".
Following the march on Saturday, one member of the group was arrested for alleged neo-Nazi propaganda activity.
According to the group’s co-founder Martin Sellner, Austria has "a huge problem with Islamisation."
He said: "In Vienna you don't recognize your own city anymore. You don't hear one German word on the streets.
"And the situation got really worse and worse during the refugee crisis.
"And that's why the Austrians are waking up, joining our movement and taking to the streets."
The Identitarian Movement is closely affiliated with the Freedom Party of Austria, which was narrowly defeated in the presidential election by less than one percentage point.
The pan-European movement started in France in 2002 as a youth group but has since grown to the extent international security agencies are now monitoring the group.
Just last month, the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence service announced Identitarian has reached the threshold to qualify for surveillance.
Mr Seller responded to this by saying: "We think that the intelligence service should rather watch the radical Islamists that Merkel invited to Europe, rather than young men and women who fight against Islamisation."
Earlier this month, an Austrian branch of the group stormed a lecture on asylum at a university dressed in burkas and middle-ages costumes.
The group then performed a pretend 'stoning' on a member who they said was dressed to represent an Austrian patriot.
In a lengthy Facebook post, Neil Young cleared the air about how he feels about Donald Trump using his songs: "YOUNG CONTINUES TO DENY TRUMP PERMISSION TO USE HIS MUSIC," the rocker wrote, attaching a short clip of him yelling "Fuck you, Donald Trump" onstage.
The discrepancy began with an interview with Reuters, in which Young stated that Trump's campaign bought the license to use his song "Rockin' in The Free World." "Once the music goes out, anyone can use it for anything," Young said in the interview.
In this new statement, Young points out that there is a legal difference between obtaining music rights for commercial use and obtaining a license agreement for public venues. The former requires the consent of the artist. "When I discovered that [Trump] first used my song at his campaign launch, my management called his office and immediately requested he stop," Young wrote. "We thought he had. But now, unfortunately, I understand he is still using it."
Young alleges that when management approached Trump, the GOP frontrunner began "hurling insults" and released a photo that was taken out of context, Young said. The picture in question was taken months prior to Trump's decision to run in the presidential election during an investors meeting for Young's music company Pono.
"I still support the issue focused, straight shooter Bernie Sanders, in my opinion, the best person for the job, hands down," Young wrote. "The process is not over until its over."
A breakthrough in the study of a mysterious Hellenistic clockwork device which was found at the bottom of the Aegean Sea more than a century ago has led researchers to conclude it was designed for philosophers to peer into the future
Dubbed the ‘Antikythera mechanism’, after sponge divers hauled the bronze mechanism from a shipwreck off the coast of the Greek island in 1900, the machine has been described as an ancient computer because of its advanced technological design.
Today, the device is split up into 82 pieces, some of which are inscribed with faded ancient text. While the metal and wood mechanism is without the wires one might expect in a modern day computer, experts had long believed it was a calculator used to point to astronomical changes.
In 2005 a group of researchers joined to form the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, comprising academic minds from around the world, to crack the mystery of ancient Greek box.
For more than a decade the team have used advanced three-dimensional x-ray technology, provided by the likes of Hewlett Packard and X-Tek Systems, to uncover the meaning of the damaged lettering, according to the project website.
One of the X-rays known as the ‘Bladerunner’ is described as having the ability to pick up microscopic details unseen by the naked eye.
A study published in the Nature academic journal in 2006 described the 2nd century tool as “technically more complex than any known device for at least a millennium afterwards.”
Led by the research project’s Tony Freeth, the study stated that the Antikythera Mechanism had been used to predict “lunar and solar eclipses on the basis of Babylonian arithmetic-progression cycles.”
Now an update on the inscriptions has been put forward at a presentation organised by the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation in the Greek port city of Piraeus appears to back that up.
According to CBS News, at total of 3,500 ancient Greek lettering inside the machine can now be read as a result of the work derived from x-raying by the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project.
New York University professor and researcher Alexander Jones has said the project has cleared up a lot of the surrounding fog regarding the mechanism’s purpose.
“It was not a research tool, something that an astronomer would use to do computations, or even an astrologer to do prognostications, but something that you would use to teach about the cosmos and our place in the cosmos,” said Jones.
“It’s like a textbook of astronomy as it was understood then, which connected the movements of the sky and the planets with the lives of ancient Greeks and their environment.”
He added: “I would see it as more something that might be a philosopher’s instructional device.”
Norway has become the first country to stop clear-cutting of trees, a huge step toward curbing global deforestation
At the rate we are going, the world's rain forests could completely vanish in 100 years.
In their pledge last week, Norwegian lawmakers also committed to find a way to source essential products such as palm oil, soy, beef and timber so that they leave little to no impact on their ecosystems. It's a pledge Norway made at the U.N. Climate Summit in 2014, alongside Germany and the United Kingdom.
According to the United Nations, the production of palm oil, soy, beef and wood products contributed to a little less than half of total tropical deforestation.
When forests are cleared and set in flames, the carbon in the trees is released as carbon dioxide -- the main greenhouse gas contributing to climate change.
Norway has shown its commitment to a cleaner environment in other ways.
In 2008, the country gave Brazil $1 billion to help fight deforestation of the Amazon rainforest -- slashing deforestation by 75% in seven years.
It is also in the process of restricting the sales of gas-powered cars by 2025.
Meanwhile, ZOG Judeo-plutocracy forces divide-and-conquer balkanization (i.e., "multiculturalism" and "diversity") down the throats of White nations
Israeli minister wants to annex half of West Bank and kick out the Palestinians
JERUSALEM — A top Israeli minister said he wants the government to take complete control of more than half of the West Bank and remove the Palestinian residents of the territory.
While traveling with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a state visit to Russia on Tuesday, Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel told the Times of Israel that the world should forget about a Palestinian state.
“We have to aspire to the annexation of Area C; these are areas where there are no Arabs at all,” Ariel said. “We would remove a few thousand, who do not constitute a significant numerical factor.”
According to the Oslo Accords, the West Bank is divided into three areas. Area C comprises more than 60 percent of the West Bank and is under complete Israeli military control, both for security and civil affairs.
Estimates of the Palestinian population in Area C are a subject of mystery and debate.
The United Nations agency that provides aid to Palestinians reported that there were 297,500 Palestinians in Area C in 2014.
An Israeli human rights group, Bimkom, estimates that 150,000 to 180,000 Palestinians live there.
The Israeli military division that controls Area C gives an estimate of 50,000 Palestinians.
Area C — which covers about 1,300 square miles spread throughout the West Bank — is where the Jewish settlements are located. More than 350,000 Israelis live on 125 settlements and about 100 outposts. The international community calls the settlements illegal; the United States views them as illegitimate and obstacles to peace; the Israeli government disputes this characterization.
Ariel is a longtime advocate for the settler movement and lives in a settlement, Kfar Adumim, east of Jerusalem.
The Times of Israel did not reveal Ariel’s thinking on the method of transfer of Palestinians from Area C. “Ariel did not specify how those Palestinians would be removed, or where they would be relocated,” the media outlet reported.
This is not the first time that Ariel has advocated annexing Area C. He has done so repeatedly. In January, Ariel said it was time to take full possession of the land.
Ariel is a leader of the hard-right faction in the Jewish Home party, which is a member of the government. Other Jewish Home leaders, such as Education Minister Naftali Bennett, also have urged annexing Area C but have not advocated the mass transfer of Palestinians out of the area.
Depending on the annexation plan, the Palestinians would be offered Israeli citizenship or residency or be made the responsibility of Jordan, Bennett has said.
VIENNA — The far-right Freedom Party of Austria filed a legal challenge on Wednesday over the results of the country’s presidential election, disputing the outcome of the May 22 runoff, in which the party’s candidate, Norbert Hofer, was narrowly defeated.
Austrian officials said there was no precedent for a challenge to the outcome of a presidential election in the history of modern Austria, a federal republic that was reconstituted in 1945 from the ashes of Nazi Germany, which annexed the country in 1938.
The challenge, submitted by the party’s chairman to the country’s Constitutional Court, injected an element of uncertainty into a debate that has already stirred questions over the strength of the far right in a nation with a fraught wartime past. Mr. Hofer led the first round of voting, on April 24, in which the country’s two mainstream parties were handed a humbling defeat.
The runoff pitted Mr. Hofer against an independent candidate and former leader of the Greens, Alexander Van der Bellen.
The results were too close to call when polls closed at 5 p.m. on May 22; only after nearly 700,000 mail-in ballots were tallied was the result announced, in the midafternoon on May 23. Mr. Van der Bellen was declared the winner, with 50.35 percent of the vote and a very tight lead of 30,863 ballots, according to the Austrian Interior Ministry.
On Wednesday, the Freedom Party’s chairman, Heinz-Christian Strache, submitted 150 pages of documents to the Constitutional Court, claiming “numerous irregularities and failures” in the counting of the runoff votes. According to the Austrian news agency APA, Mr. Strache submitted three documents: one from himself, a second from Mr. Hofer, and a third from “voters and citizens.”
Mr. Strache claimed electoral irregularities or fraud in 94 of 117 regional polling stations. In 82 of the stations, he said, at least 573,000 mail-in ballots were sorted or counted before election authorities were even on site to monitor the process.
“We are not sore losers, and we are not disputing for dispute’s sake,” Mr. Strache said at a news conference. “The mistrust is justified. Without these failures and irregularities, Norbert Hofer could have been president.”
The Freedom Party had already claimed election irregularities — including premature counting of mail-in ballots and erroneous tallies — but Mr. Strache went further on Wednesday, calling the mail-in ballot system a “systemic failure.”
Have You Voted for a Far-Right Party in Europe? We Want to Hear From You
The New York Times is collecting the personal experiences of voters who have supported far-right parties in Europe recently. Have you voted, or do you plan to vote for, any of the parties below? What experiences motivated your choice? A selection of reader responses may be used in an upcoming piece.
According to the APA, the Interior Ministry has called for an investigation into counting at six polling stations.
The Constitutional Court could call for a recount or even a re-election. According to Austrian law, the challenge must be resolved “within four weeks of submission.” That would be July 6 — two days before Mr. Van der Bellen’s scheduled date of inauguration, July 8.
The president of Austria is elected for a six-year term and serves as head of state, though the job is largely ceremonial. The incumbent, Heinz Fischer, is completing his second term and was not allowed to seek a third.
In 1986, Kurt Waldheim, a former foreign minister and secretary general of the United Nations, was elected president of Austria, despite revelations that he had concealed his wartime involvement with German military units that executed thousands of Yugoslav partisans and civilians and deported thousands of Greek Jews to death camps between 1942 and 1944.
A commission of historians found no evidence that Mr. Waldheim was guilty of war crimes, but concluded that he must have been aware of the atrocities and, by doing nothing, had facilitated them. Mr. Waldheim did not seek re-election in 1992; he died in 2007.
