Naftali Bennett: "I say to the Americans: we will manage the matters of the state of Israel ourselves"

A war of words has erupted between Israel and its closet ally, the United States, after a leading right-wing politician told Washington to mind its own business over a highly contentious bill to declare the country a Jewish state while stripping Arabs of national rights.

The rebuff was delivered by Naftali Bennett, the economy minister and leader of the nationalist Jewish Home party, after the US State Department suggested the bill - approved by the cabinet on Sunday - undermined Israel's democratic credentials.

"Israel is a Jewish and democratic state and all its citizens should enjoy equal rights. We expect Israel to stick to its democratic principles," said Jeff Rathke, a state department spokesman.

That drew a quick riposte from Mr Bennett, who told Israel Radio: "I say to the Americans: we will manage the matters of the state of Israel ourselves."

The exchange occurred as bitter divisions over the proposed nation-state law threatened to tear apart the rickety coalition led by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, amid rising speculation about a possible early general election.

A scheduled vote on the bill in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, was postponed from Tuesday until next week in an effort to find a compromise after two prominent centrists, Tzipi Livni, the justice minister, and Yair Lapid, the finance minister, said they would quit the government - effectively collapsing the coalition - if the legislation passed in its current form.

The bill approved in Sunday's bitterly divisive cabinet meeting would define Israel as "the nation-state of the Jewish people", enshrine Jewish law as the basis of the legal system and relegate Arabic from its current status as an official language.

Opponents say it elevates Israel's Jewish character at the expense of its status as a democracy, set out in the country's 1948 declaration of independence.

Ms Livni, leader of the centrist Hatnua party - who had a heated exchange with Mr Netanayahu during the cabinet meeting - called the bill "jingoistic, divisive and [driven by] a group of extremists" at a conference in Sderot on Tuesday.

The liberal Haaretz newspaper was equally scathing, warning that it would "remove the State of Israel from the community of democratic nations, and give it a place of honor instead beside those dark regimes in which minorities are persecuted".

Mr Netanyahu, who supported a more hardline form of the legislation approved by Ze'ev Elkin, a Right-wing MP from his Likud party, said the change was necessary because of challenges - from Palestinians and others - to Israel's status a Jewish state.

Critics, however, warn that the bill encourages racism at a time when tensions are already running high between Israel's Jews and its Arab minority, who make up 20 per cent of the population.

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A real American government would respond by telling Naftali Bennett and his fellow Zionist-fascists that they can "manage the matters of the state of Israel" without American taxpayer money.

Russia Gets Greater Control Over Black Sea Region

Russia tightened its control Monday over Georgia's breakaway province of Abkhazia with a new treaty envisaging closer military and economic ties with the lush sliver of land along the Black Sea.

The move drew outrage and cries of "annexation" in Georgia and sent a chill through those in Abkhazia who fear that wealthy Russians will snap up their precious coastline. It also raised further suspicions in the West about Russian President Vladimir Putin's territorial aspirations after his annexation of Ukraine's Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in March.

Under the treaty signed by Putin and Abkhazia's leader in the nearby Black Sea resort of Sochi, Russian and Abkhazian forces in the territory will turn into a joint force led by a Russian commander.

Putin said Moscow will also double its subsidies to Abkhazia to about 9.3 billion rubles (over $200 million) next year.

"I'm sure that cooperation, unity and strategic partnership between Russia and Abkhazia will continue to strengthen," he said.

"Ties with Russia offer us full security guarantees and broad opportunities for socio-economic development," Abkhazian President Raul Khadzhimba said.

Russian troops have been deployed in Abkhazia for more than two decades since the region of 240,000 people broke away from Georgia in a separatist war in the early 1990s. Still, Monday's agreement reflected a clear attempt by Moscow to further expand its presence and came only after a change of leadership in the territory.

Coming amid a chill in Russia-West ties over the Ukrainian crisis, the deal raised concern about Moscow's plans. The Black Sea region has always been important for Putin, who justified the annexation of Crimea by saying it would guarantee that NATO warships would never be welcome on the peninsula, the home base of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

NATO's secretary-general condemned the treaty, stressing that the alliance supports Georgia's sovereignty. He also called on Russia to reverse its recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, another breakaway province, as independent states.

"This so-called treaty does not contribute to a peaceful and lasting settlement of the situation in Georgia," Jens Stoltenberg said. "On the contrary, it violates Georgia's sovereignty and territorial integrity and blatantly contradicts the principles of international law, OSCE principles and Russia's international commitments."

The U.S. also said it wouldn't recognize Russia's move and expressed continued support for Georgia's sovereignty.

"The United States will not recognize the legitimacy of any so-called 'treaty' between Georgia's Abkhazia region and the Russian Federation," the U.S. State Department said in a statement.

Abkhazia's former leader, Alexander Ankvab, was forced to step down earlier this year under pressure from protesters who reportedly were encouraged by the Kremlin. Khadzhimba, a former Soviet KGB officer, was elected president in an early vote in August that Georgia rejected as illegal.

Unlike Ankvab, who had resisted Moscow's push to let Russians buy assets in Abkhazia, Khadzhimba has appeared more eager to listen to Russia's demands.

The Georgian Foreign Ministry denounced the new agreement as a "step toward the de-facto annexation" of Abkhazia and called on the international community to condemn the move.

Russian-Georgian relations were ruptured by war in August 2008 after former Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili attempted to restore control over South Ossetia. The Russian military routed the Georgian forces in five days and Moscow recognized both rebel provinces as independent states.

The Georgian Dream bloc led by Russia-friendly billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, which unseated Saakashvili's party in the 2012 vote, has sought to repair ties with Moscow. But while economic relations have improved, political ties have remained frozen because of Moscow's refusal to compromise on the status of Georgia's separatist regions.

Saakashvili's United National Movement party has accused the Georgian government of kowtowing to Moscow.

"The Georgian government has done practically nothing," said party leader David Bakradze, who urged the government to join Western sanctions against Russia and opt out of political talks with Moscow.

The deal with Abkhazia appears to reflect Moscow's concerns that Saakashvili's party could mount a political comeback and push for stronger ties with the West.

New Counter-Terrorism Bill Will Prohibit 'Extremist' Speakers from British Universities

Extremest Speakers = Truth Tellers

British schools and universities will soon be legally obligated to prevent terrorist radicalization on their campuses, Home Secretary Theresa May announced on Monday.

Under Britain's new Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill, which will be introduced on Wednesday, universities will be barred from hosting extremist speakers — although May did not elaborate on what will constitute "extremist" speech. In addition to prisons, probation providers, and local councils, schools and colleges will also have a statutory duty "to help prevent people from being drawn into terrorism." This new duty, said May, "will be enforceable by court orders."

"It is far from clear how universities and other public bodies will be required to 'cooperate' or how they will be able to identify 'extremist' speakers," Thomas Hughes, executive director of the human rights organization Article 19, told VICE News. "A flourishing education system depends on lively and diverse debate. The vague measures that Theresa May alluded to in her speech raise serious concerns regarding academic freedom."

HERE

Thanks for the precedent: 'Dropping Pretense of Democracy,' Israel Advances Bill for Jewish Nation-State

The Israeli Cabinet on Sunday passed a controversial bill which declares Israel a Jewish nation-state, institutionalizes Jewish religious law, and eradicates Arabic as a second official language.

Critics warn that the measure, which still requires approval by parliament, would further codify religious and ethnic discrimination against Palestinians and other non-Jews while institutionalizing a theocratic shift to the right.

"The cabinet's vote is another clear indication that Israel is dropping any pretense of it being a democracy," Josh Ruebner of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, told Common Dreams. "Israel more than ever self-identifies as an apartheid state which exists for the privilege and benefit of one set of people and discriminates against another."

The bill, which is backed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would amend Israel's Basic Law to designate Israel "the national homeland of the Jewish People."

"The right to self-determination in the state, according to the bill, is limited to Jews," writes Aeyal Gross for Haaretz. "Others only have 'personal rights according to any law.' Most of the principles in the bill, relating to heritage, symbols, holidays, and the role Hebrew law plays in legislation, equate the state with only one group."

According to Ruebner, the bill would further subject the approximately 20 percent of Israeli citizens who are Palestinian to deeper levels of oppression and mistreatment by adding to the more than 50 discriminatory laws on Israel's books.

"This bill is, in many respects, a logical outcome of Israel's turning inward, becoming more of a fascist culture and society, and developing a politics that's growing increasingly intolerant of any Palestinian presence in all of historic Palestine, not just Israel's armistice borders," said Ruebner.

Michael Marder argues in Al Jazeera that much of the bill, if passed, "will only confirm the ongoing discrimination that [Palestinian Israelis] have been subjected to well before the drafting of the new law."

Europa: Ocean World

Forget moonmen and those old “canals” on Mars , if you want to find life in our solar system, your best bet might be to set your sights beyond the asteroid belt to Jupiter’s moon Europa, which appears to be frozen stiff at first glance.

But appearances can be deceiving, and scientists now believe that beneath Europa’s icy shell lies a tidally-heated liquid water ocean that could contain all the building blocks for life. In February, suspicions that the jovian moon is not frozen solid were bolstered by the observation of vapor plumes emanating from its surface in a new analysis of Hubble telescope data.

NASA has requested public funds to begin planning a mission to Europa, and in July it put out a call for proposals for science instruments that could ride along on the long trip, potentially to help search for signs of life there.

“The possibility of life on Europa is a motivating force for scientists and engineers around the world,” said NASA’s John Grunsfeld at the time.

Last week, NASA seemed to turn up the Europa charm offensive a notch, putting out some “re-mastered” images of the icy world and a new video touting its potential as a dark water world hidden beneath a frozen shell.  

While there are those who are skeptical about NASA’s enthusiasm for Europa’s biological potential, Kevin Hand, an astrobiologist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, lays out the preponderance of evidence in the video below. He says there is a “high degree of confidence” that a liquid ocean on Europa exists today and has existed for billions of years.

“For the first time in the history of humanity we have the tools and technology and capability to potentially answer this question (of the existence of life beyond Earth), and we know where to go to find it.” Hand says. “Jupiter’s ocean world, Europa.”

A new "remastered" image of Jupiter's moon Europa has made it look like the beginning of life itself - an embryo

France’s pro-White National Front funded by Russian lender

The French pro-White National front’s cosiness with Vladimir Putin’s Russia is back in the spotlight as Marine Le Pen’s party confirms it borrowed nine million euros from a Russian lender, saying “no one else will give us a cent”.

France’s pro-White National Front (FN) said Sunday it had borrowed the money from Moscow-based First Czech Russian Bank (FRCB), confirming a report by the investigative news website Mediapart.

The party treasurer Wallerand de Saint-Just told France Info radio a deal was signed with the Russian lender in September.

Saint-Just said the party had received a first installment of two million euros.

“We have been looking for loans for some time, to fund our election campaigns. But our bank, like most French and European lenders, categorically refuses to give the FN and FN candidates the slightest cent,” he said.

Saint-Just has expressed similar concerns in the past, saying banks were reluctant to lend money to political parties since former president Nicolas Sarkozy was fined 500,000 euros for undisclosed expenses in his failed 2012 presidential bid.

Last November, the FN’s longtime bank Société Générale said it would no longer lend money to its client.

The surging anti-immigration party, which has made a breakthrough in the French parliament and came first in European elections in May, has long struggled to raise the cash needed to match its political ambitions.

French investigators are currently probing suspicious loans paid to FN candidates by affiliated group “Jeanne”, set up by party leader Marine Le Pen and named after French heroine Joan of Arc.

Russian influence

News of the Russian loan comes at a critical time in relations between Russia and the Judeo-plutocratic EU, which have been soured by the Ukrainian crisis.

Brussels has slapped sanctions on five Russian lenders and more than 100 businessmen and politicians, including Russian nationalist lawmaker Alexander Mikhailovich Babakov, who allegedly acted as go-between in the FN’s loan deal.

FN veteran Christian Bouchet told Mediapart there was nothing wrong with reaching out to Russian banks.

“It’s certainly no worse than borrowing from [Muammar] Gaddafi,” he said, in a thinly veiled reference to ongoing investigations into claims Sarkozy received funding from the late Libyan leader for his 2007 presidential campaign.

Pointing to Le Pen’s well-known penchant for Moscow, Mediapart said the FN’s Russian funding raised concerns about “possible foreign interference in French politics”. [Mediapart made no mention of the “possible foreign interference in French politics” by the Zionist Lobby, however.]

The pro-White leader has made multiple trips to Moscow since taking over from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2011.

She has made no secret of her respect for President Vladimir Putin, repeatedly slamming EU leaders for stoking a “new Cold War” with Russia.

She has been particularly critical of French President François Hollande’s decision to suspend delivery of two Mistral-class warships to Moscow, accusing the government of bowing to pressure from the US.

Diversity is a Codeword for White Genocide

UKIP's victory in Rochester by-election: An expression of voters’ rage that is unlikely to dissipate

Vote Ukip, get coalitions: Rochester shows that two-party politics are a thing of the past

Yesterday the Conservatives resorted to the old clichés about by-elections being a mid-term protest as they expressed confidence they would regain Rochester and Strood from Ukip’s Mark Reckless at next May’s general election.

It was an inevitable but inadequate response. If the Tories really believe the “Farage effect” is just another mid-term blip, they really are the stupid party. I suspect they know the politics of anger and grievance, skilfully tapped into by Ukip, will not suddenly melt away next May. Although Ukip offers few solutions, the temptation for voters to say “a plague on all your houses” will be strong.

The Tory election strategy is clear: if you want a long-term economic plan, action on immigration and welfare and an in/out referendum on Europe, vote for us. If you vote Ukip, you risk putting Ed Miliband into Downing Street. “We will ask people to get serious, remind them they are choosing a government and a prime minister,” one senior Tory told me. But he admitted: “We haven’t a clue how many we will get back from Ukip.”

Rochester gave Nigel Farage a neat riposte to the Tories’ “vote Ukip, get Miliband” pitch. He said the by-election showed that “when you vote Ukip, you get Ukip”. you vote Ukip, you get Ukip”.

Mr Cameron is getting conflicting advice on how to combat the Ukip threat. Tory modernisers believe the by-election proves that you cannot “outkip Ukip”. In recent weeks, the Prime Minister has ramped up the rhetoric on the EU and immigration but it didn’t halt the march of Mr Farage’s “people’s army”. Tory modernisers fear Mr Cameron will only drive more natural Conservatives into Ukip’s arms by trying to ape it – while alienating the younger and ethnic minority voters the Tories will need to win future elections.

Mr Cameron’s problem is that he has an election to fight in May. So when he makes a big speech soon on his plans to limit EU migration, he will not want to pull his punches.

The Tories took comfort from being able to share the pain from Thursday’s by-election with Labour, which made another disastrous error when Emily Thornberry, the now former shadow Attorney General, tweeted a picture of a white van man’s house in Rochester with three England flags.

Like Ed Miliband forgetting to mention the deficit and immigration in his Labour conference speech, Ms Thornberry’s mistake was symbolic. It was an early Christmas present for Ukip as it targets Labour’s working-class supporters. At a time when politicians are accused of being out of touch, her remark that she had not seen anything like the three England flags was toxic.

Labour had hoped the by-election would provide a break from Mr Miliband’s woes, as the media spotlight turned to the Tories’ troubles. There was no such respite. Indeed, the Labour leader is one reason why there is no “wobble” on the Tory backbenches this weekend or any attempt to dump Mr Cameron, like the coup Mr Miliband had to see off this month. “Miliband gives us hope that we can still be the largest party after next May,” said a senior Tory MP. “He’s Cameron’s best asset. We are still in the game.”

Labour’s response to Rochester was more grown-up than the complacent Tory talk of mid-term blues. Douglas Alexander, who is charge of Labour’s election strategy, said last night that the “rising level of anger among the public” had built up over decades. “Simply amplifying anger is not enough – we need to offer answers,” he said. He argued that all the mainstream parties had to get to grips with a new 21st-century politics defined by contests over “identity and insecurity” rather than simply economic interests.

Ukip faces challenges too. Its mask slipped briefly on the NHS and immigration during the Rochester campaign, a foretaste of the media microscope it will now be under. The big question is whether our new multi-party politics – which also include the Scottish National Party and the Greens – can prosper under a first-past-the-post voting system designed for the two biggest parties.

Ukip is showing a new professionalism but will need it to translate its votes into seats next May. There have been false dawns before, not least when the breakaway Social Democratic Party almost pushed Labour into third place in the 1980s. Today feels very different. My hunch is that the “anger” will not dissipate just because the Tories and Labour tell voters the election is a two-horse race.

Voters have a way of getting what they want, despite the constraints of the electoral system. They could vote tactically where they think Ukip has a chance of winning to send a message to “the Westminster parties.” With Labour and the Tories running at neck and neck in the low 30s in the opinion polls, it looks increasingly like we will have another hung parliament.

My hunch is that Ukip could now win up to 20 seats. It is no longer barmy for Mr Farage to claim his party could hold the balance of power. However, he might not be alone; the Liberal Democrats and the SNP could be in the same boat. It might take a combination of more than two parties to create a Commons majority. If you thought the two-party coalition formed in 2010 was complicated, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Subaru Telescope detects sudden appearance of 7 galaxies in early universe

A team of astronomers have used the Subaru Telescope to look back more than 13 billion years to find 7 early galaxies

Credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team

It’s an amazing thing, staring into deep space with the help of a high-powered telescope. In addition to being able to through the vast reaches of space, one is also able to effectively see through time.

Using the Subaru Telescope’s Suprime-Cam, a team of astronomers has done just that. In short, they looked back 13 billion years and discovered 7 early galaxies that appeared quite suddenly within 700 million years of the Big Bang. In so doing, they discovered clues to one of astronomy’s most burning questions: when and how early galaxies formed in our universe.

The team, led by graduate student Akira Konno and Dr. Masami Ouchi (Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo’s ICRR) was looking for a specific kind of galaxy called a Lyman-alpha emitter (LAE), to understand the role such galaxies may have played in an event called “cosmic reionization”.

The current cosmological model states that the universe was born in the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago. In its earliest epochs, it was filled with a hot “soup” of charged protons and electrons. As the newborn universe expanded, its temperature decreased uniformly.

It is estimated that the first stars and galaxies formed 12.8 billion years ago, during a period of “cosmic reionization”

Credit: NASA/ESA/A. Felid (STScI)

When the universe was 400,000 years old, conditions were cool enough to allow the protons and electrons to bond and form neutral hydrogen atoms. That event is called “recombination” and resulted in a universe filled with a “fog” of these neutral atoms.

Eventually the first stars and galaxies began to form, and their ultraviolet light ionized the hydrogen atoms, and “divided” the neutral hydrogen into protons and electrons again. As this occurred, the “fog” of neutral hydrogen cleared.

Astronomers call this event “cosmic reionization” and think that it ended about 12.8 billion years ago – a billion years after the Big Bang. The timing of this event – when it started and how long it lasted – is one of the big questions in astronomy.

To investigate this cosmic reionization, the Subaru team searched for early LAE galaxies at a distance of 13.1 billion light years. Although Hubble Space Telescope has found more distant LAE galaxies, the discovery of seven such galaxies at 13.1 billion light-years represents a distance milestone for Subaru Telescope.

Color composite images of seven LAEs found in the study. The red objects between two white lines are the LAEs

Credit: ICRR, University of Tokyo

Mr. Konno, the graduate student heading the analysis of the data from the Subaru Telescope pointed out the obstacles that Subaru had to overcome to make the observations.”It is quite difficult to find the most distant galaxies due to the faintness of the galaxies.” he said. “So, we developed a special filter to be able to find a lot of faint LAEs. We loaded the filter onto Suprime-Cam and conducted the most distant LAE survey with the integration time of 106 hours.”

That extremely long integration time was one of the longest ever performed at Subaru Telescope. It allowed for unprecedented sensitivity and enabled the team to search for as many of the most distant LAEs as possible.

According to Konno, the team expected to find several tens of LAEs. Instead they only found seven.

“At first we were very disappointed at this small number,” Konno said. “But we realized that this indicates LAEs appeared suddenly about 13 billion years ago. This is an exciting discovery. We can see that the luminosities suddenly brightened during the 700-800 million years after the Big Bang. What would cause this?”

This shows evolution of the Lyman-alpha luminosities of the galaxies. 

Credit: ICRR, University of Tokyo; Hubble Space Telescope/NASA/ESA

As the table above illustrates, the luminosities of LAEs changed based on this study. The yellow circle at 1 billion years after the Big Bang is used for normalization. The yellow circles come from previous studies, and the yellow dashed line shows the expected evolutionary trend of the luminosity.

The current finding is shown by a red circle, and we can see that the galaxies appear suddenly when the universe was 700 million years old. This indicates that the neutral hydrogen fog was suddenly cleared, allowing the galaxies to shine out, as indicated by the backdrop shown for scale and illustration.

According to the team’s analysis, one reason that LAEs appeared very quickly is cosmic reionization. LAEs in the epoch of cosmic reionization became darker than the actual luminosity due to the presence of the neutral hydrogen fog.

In the team’s analysis of their observations, they suggest the possibility that the neutral fog filling the universe was cleared about 13.0 billion years ago and LAEs suddenly appeared in sight for the first time.

Bottom line: Japanese astronomers probing deeply back into our universe’s early history have found 7 galaxies at a time when the universe was only 700 million years old

“However, there are other possibilities to explain why LAEs appeared suddenly,” said Dr. Ouchi, who is the principal investigator of this program. “One is that clumps of neutral hydrogen around LAEs disappeared. Another is that LAEs became intrinsically bright. The reason of the intrinsic brightening is that the Lyman-alpha emission is not efficiently produced by the ionized clouds in a LAE due to the significant escape of ionizing photons from the galaxy. In either case, our discovery is an important key to understanding cosmic reionization and the properties of the LAEs in early universe.”

Dr. Masanori Iye, who is a representative of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project of Japan, commented on the observations and analysis. “To investigate which possibility is correct, we will observe with HSC (Hyper Suprime-Cam) on Subaru Telescope, which has a field of view 7 times wider than Suprime-Cam, and TMT currently being built on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii in the future. By these observations, we will clarify the mystery of how galaxies were born and cosmic reionization occurred.”

Further Reading: Subaru Telescope

'Cosmic Web' of the Universe – "Reveals an Enormous Non-Random Network of Galaxies"

This image is a simulation showing galaxy clusters embedded in the cosmic web

Image courtesy of Klaus Dolag, Universitäts-Sternwarte München, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany

The distribution of galaxies and matter in the universe is non-random. Galaxies are organized, even today, in a manner resembling an enormous network - the cosmic web. This web has dense regions made up of galaxy clusters and groups, sparsely populated regions devoid of galaxies, as well as the filaments that link overdense regions.

"We think the cosmic web, dominated by dark matter, formed very early in the history of the universe, starting with small initial fluctuations in the primordial universe," said Behnam Darvish, at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UC Riverside. "Such a 'skeletal' universe must have played, in principle, a role in galaxy formation and evolution, but this was incredibly hard to study and understand until recently." 

A new study has revealed that thread-like "filaments" in the cosmic web played a critical role in the formation of distant universe

The researchers highlight the role of the "cosmic web" - a large-scale web-like structure comprised of galaxies - on the evolution of galaxies that took place in the distant universe, a few billion years after the Big Bang. In their paper, published Nov. 20 in the Astrophysical Journal, they present observations showing that thread-like "filaments" in the cosmic web played an important role in this evolution. "The filaments are like bridges connecting the denser regions in the cosmic web," Darvish explained. "Imagine threads woven into the web."

"But the role of intermediate environments and, in particular, the role of filaments and the cosmic web in the early universe remained, until very recently, a mystery," said coauthor Bahram Mobasher, a professor of physics and astronomy at UCR and Darvish's adviser. What greatly assisted the researchers is a giant section of the cosmic web first revealed in two big cosmological surveys (COSMOS and HiZELS). They proceeded to explore data also from several telescopes (Hubble, VLT, UKIRT and Subaru). They then applied a new computational method to identify the filaments, which, in turn, helped them study the role of the cosmic web.

Galaxies are distributed along a cosmic web in the universe

"Mpc/h" is a unit of galactic distance (1 Mpc/h is more than 3.2 million light-years)

They found that galaxies residing in the cosmic web/filaments have a much higher chance of actively forming stars. In other words, in the distant universe, galaxy evolution seems to have been accelerated in the filaments.

"It is possible that such filaments 'pre-process' galaxies, accelerating their evolution while also funneling them towards clusters, where they are fully processed by the dense environment of clusters and likely end up as dead galaxies," Darvish said. "Our results also show that such enhancement/acceleration is likely due to galaxy-galaxy interactions in the filaments."

Because of the complexities involved in quantifying the cosmic web, astronomers usually limit the study of the cosmic web to numerical simulations and observations in our local universe. However, in this new study, the researchers focused their work on the distant universe - when the universe was approximately half its present age.

"We were surprised by the crucial role the filaments play in galaxy formation and evolution," Mobasher said. "Star formation is enhanced in them. The filaments likely increase the chance of gravitational interaction between galaxies, which, in turn, results in this star-formation enhancement. There is evidence in our local universe that this process in filaments also continues to occur at the present time."

Darvish and Mobasher were joined in this research by L. V. Sales at UCR; David Sobral at the Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal; N. Z. Scoville at the California Institute of Technology; P. Best at the Royal Observatory of Ediburgh, United Kingdom; and I. Smail at Durham University, United Kingdom.

Next, the team plans to extend this study to other epochs in the age of the universe to study the role of the cosmic web/filaments in galaxy formation and evolution across cosmic time. "This will be a fundamental piece of the puzzle in order to understand how galaxies form and evolve as a whole," Sobral said.

More here, here, and here.

Golden Dawn's Barmparousis and comrades found innocent for Missolonghi incident

Another part of the conspiracy against Golden Dawn collapses!

The mockery of a trial for last year’s notorious “countertops” incident has finally concluded, that involved our comrades from Missolonghi, whom among them was MP of the Aetolia-Acarnania region, Konstantinos Barmparousis. We remind you that for the so-called incident, that the first court session that was held a few months ago adjourned by way of a coup, in order to find new witnesses to replace the previous ones.

Ultimately, on November 14th, the second session was held and the “new witnesses” that had been summoned, were completely inadequate to the point where they were useless to the prosecutors. These persons submitted testimony based on video they saw of the case, apparently unaware that their opinions had no legal value.

The result, after several hours of deliberation, the prosecutor’s recommendation and the court’s decision was for the defendants to be acquitted, as the witnesses could not identify the defendants and because no unlawful acts had been witnessed.

This specific case, which is part of the notorious “criminal organization” file, demonstrated the weakness of the argument against the Leader, the MPs, and the staff of Golden Dawn, whom are imprisoned “under orders from Samaras” and because of the actions of those in “Bobby’s Circle”.

The news of Konstantinos Barmparousis and the rest of comrades’ acquittal WERE NOT reported by any of the controlled and heavily indebted porn-channels; as opposed to the lies and the slanderous reporting that was first aired back then!

Quasar Alignment Shocks Scientists In 'Spooky' Observation

Mystery of the 'spooky' pattern in the universe: Scientists find that supermassive black holes are aligned

• Eerie observations were made by the Very Large Telescope in Chile 
• It found alignment between huge interstellar objects called quasars 
• Quasars are galaxies with supermassive black holes at their centres 
• Scientists looked at rotation of the central supermassive black holes 
• They were parallel to one other over distances of billions of light-years 
• Probability alignments are down to chance is less than one per cent 
• 'This may be a hint that there is a missing ingredient in our current models of the cosmos,' researcher Dominique Sluse said

Black holes are one of the strangest objects in the universe, preventing anything from escaping their grip – even light. Now astronomers have discovered something even more peculiar about these enigmatic objects; they are aligned with each other over distances stretching billions of light-years. The remarkable observations were made by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, which found an eerie alignment between enormous interstellar objects called quasars. 

Quasars are galaxies with very active supermassive black holes at their centres. They shine more brightly than all the stars in the rest of their host galaxies put together. A European research team has found that the rotation axes of the central supermassive black holes in a sample of quasars are parallel to each other over vast distances.

These black holes are surrounded by spinning discs of extremely hot material that is often spewed out in long jets along their axes of rotation. A team led by Damien Hutsemékers from the University of Liège in Belgium used the Fors instrument on the VLT to study 93 quasars that were known to form huge groupings spread over billions of light-years, seen at a time when the universe was about one third of its current age. 

'The first odd thing we noticed was that some of the quasars' rotation axes were aligned with each other — despite the fact that these quasars are separated by billions of light-years,' said Professor Hutsemékers. The team then went further and looked to see if the rotation axes were linked, not just to each other, but also to the structure of the universe on large scales at that time.

When astronomers look at the distribution of galaxies on scales of billions of light-years they find that they are not evenly distributed. They form a cosmic web of filaments and clumps around huge voids where galaxies are scarce. This intriguing and beautiful arrangement of material is known as large-scale structure. The new VLT results indicate that the rotation axes of the quasars tend to be parallel to the large-scale structures in which they find themselves. So, if the quasars are in a long filament then the spins of the central black holes will point along the filament. The researchers estimate that the probability that these alignments are simply the result of chance is less than one per cent. 'A correlation between the orientation of quasars and the structure they belong to is an important prediction of numerical models of evolution of our universe,' said Dominique Sluse, a researcher at the University of Liège. 'Our data provide the first observational confirmation of this effect, on scales much larger that what had been observed to date for normal galaxies.' 'The alignments in the new data, on scales even bigger than current predictions from simulations, may be a hint that there is a missing ingredient in our current models of the cosmos,' added Professor Dominique Sluse. 

The Big "Bang" was an autotelic cosmic seed

Philae lander detects organic molecules on surface of comet

(Reuters) - European comet lander Philae 'sniffed' organic molecules containing the carbon element that is the basis of life on Earth before its primary battery ran out and it shut down, German scientists said.

They said it was not yet clear whether they included the complex compounds that make up proteins. One of the key aims of the mission is to discover whether carbon-based compounds, and through them, ultimately, life, were brought to early Earth by comets.

Philae landed on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko after a 10-year journey through space aboard the Rosetta spacecraft on a mission to unlock details about how planets and maybe even how life evolved.

It wrapped up its 57-hour mission on the comet's surface on Saturday after radioing back data from a series of experiments as its battery ran out.

Comets date back to the formation of our solar system and have preserved ancient organic molecules like a time capsule.

The COSAC gas analyzing instrument on Philae was able to 'sniff' the atmosphere and detect the first organic molecules after landing, the DLR German Aerospace Center said.

The lander also drilled into the comet's surface in its hunt for organic molecules, although it is unclear as yet whether Philae managed to deliver a sample to COSAC for analysis.

Also onboard the lander was the MUPUS tool to measure the density and thermal and mechanical properties of the comet's surface. It showed the comet's surface was not as soft as previously believed.

A thermal sensor was supposed to be hammered around 40 cm into the surface but this did not occur, despite the hammer setting being cranked up to its highest level.

The DLR reckons that after passing through a 10-20 cm thick layer of dust, the sensor hit a layer of material estimated to be as hard as ice.

"It's a surprise. We didn't expect such hard ice on the ground," Tilman Spohn, who leads the MUPUS team at the DLR, said in a statement on Tuesday.

Spohn said MUPUS could be used again if enough sunlight gets through to reload Philae's batteries, which the scientists hope may happen as the comet approaches the sun.

The Origins of Life Could Indeed Be “Interstellar”

Star-forming region in interstellar space

Image credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration

Some of science’s most pressing questions involve the origins of life on Earth. How did the first lifeforms emerge from the seemingly hostile conditions that plagued our planet for much of its history? What enabled the leap from simple, unicellular organisms to more complex organisms consisting of many cells working together to metabolize, respire, and reproduce? In such an unfamiliar environment, how does one even separate “life” from non-life in the first place?

Now, scientists at the University of Hawaii at Manoa believe that they may have an answer to at least one of those questions. According to the team, a vital cellular building block called glycerol may have first originated via chemical reactions deep in interstellar space.

Glycerol is an organic molecule that is present in the cell membranes of all living things. In animal cells this membrane takes the form of a phospholipid bilayer, a dual-layer membrane that sandwiches water-repelling fatty acids between outer and inner sheets of water-soluble molecules. This type of membrane allows the cell’s inner aqueous environment to remain separate and protected from its external, similarly watery world. Glycerol is a vital component of each phospholipid because it forms the backbone between the molecule’s two characteristic parts: a polar, water-soluble head, and a non-polar, fatty tail.

Many scientists believe that cell membranes such as these were a necessary prerequisite to the evolution of multicellular life on Earth; however, their complex structure requires a very specific environment – namely, one low in calcium and magnesium salts with a fairly neutral pH and stable temperature. These carefully balanced conditions would have been hard to come by on the prehistoric Earth.

The Murchison Meteorite.

Image credit: James St. John

Icy bodies born in interstellar space offer an alternative scenario. Scientists have already discovered organic molecules such as amino acids and lipid precursors in the Murchison meteorite that landed in Australia in 1969. Although the idea remains controversial, it is possible that glycerol could have been brought to Earth in a similar manner.

Meteors typically form from tiny crumbs of material in cold molecular clouds, regions of gaseous hydrogen and interstellar dust that serve as the birthplace of stars and planetary systems. As they move through the cloud, these grains accumulate layers of frozen water, methanol, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide. Over time, high-energy ultraviolet radiation and cosmic rays bombard the icy fragments and cause chemical reactions that enrich their frozen cores with organic compounds. Later, as stars form and ambient material falls into orbit around them, the ices and the organic molecules they contain are incorporated into larger rocky bodies such as meteors. The meteors can then crash into planets like ours, potentially seeding them with building blocks of life.

In order to test whether or not glycerol could be created by the high-energy radiation that typically bombards interstellar ice grains, the team at the University of Hawaii designed their own meteorites: small bits of icy methanol cooled to 5 degrees Kelvin. After blasting their model ices with energetic electrons meant to mimic the effects of cosmic rays, the scientists found that some molecules of methanol within the ices did, in fact, transform into glycerol.

While this experiment appears to be a success, scientists realize that their laboratory models do not exactly replicate conditions in interstellar space. For instance, methanol traditionally makes up only about 30% of the ice in space rocks. Future work will investigate the effects of high-energy radiation on model ices made primarily of water. High-energy electrons fired in a lab are also not a perfect substitute for true cosmic rays and do not represent effects on ice that may result from ultraviolet radiation in interstellar space.

More research is necessary before scientists can draw any global conclusions; however, this study and its predecessors do provide compelling evidence that life as we know it truly could have come from above.

Big Seed's Echo May Reveal "Skeleton" of the Universe

This computer-generated image reveals the "skeleton" of the universe: the organization of matter at very large scales (the image shows a distance of 300 million light-years on each side). Scientists with POLARBEAR announced recently that light from the early universe can help them see this skeleton, and the large-scale distribution of matter

Scientists may soon get a look at the universe's skeleton by taking a close look at light left over from the Big Seed, which can be used to reveal the presence of matter like stars, galaxies, black holes and even larger structures in the otherwise empty universe. It's a lot like an X-ray revealing bones in a body, but on a cosmic scale.

X-ray machines work by shining light over an entire area and detecting how different materials react. The light passes through tissue, but is stopped by bone.

In a similar way, scientists with the international POLARBEAR collaboration want to use a diffuse light that fills every corner of the cosmos to indicate where there is matter and where there is none. 

POLARBEAR studies the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — the surviving light from the infant universe that is normally seen a kind of baby picture of the cosmos. Scientists estimate the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. 

"We're using the light that we've usually used to measure the seeds of the structure of the universe, to measure the whole tree," said Adrian Lee, a professor of physics at the University of California Berkeley, and a lead scientist with POLARBEAR. "But the mechanism [we use] is pretty different. Instead of looking at a baby picture, we're looking at the distortion of the baby picture."

Bending cosmic light

Just as the bones in a skeleton are not randomly scattered in the body, the mass in the universe is not randomly scattered through space. Forces such as gravity drive the organization of matter, so stars get grouped into galaxies; galaxies herd together into galaxy clusters; and on an even larger scale, scientists think matter in the universe is arranged into a structure resembling a web, with vast regions of emptiness between strings of galaxy groups.

The gravity of massive objects can bend light. The light moves around the object like water going around a rock in a stream. This bending causes a change in the CMB, and POLARBEAR scientists say they have now detected that change.

The bending of light by a massive object is called gravitational lensing, and it changes a property of the light called polarization. When sunlight reflects off the surface of water, it often becomes polarized. Polarizing sunglasses can block this polarized light, but they do not block the sunlight coming from above — ideal for water sport fans.

CMB light that has not been gravitationally lensed — that has never bumped into any type of matter — has a so-called E-mode polarization. New results from the collaboration show that the researchers can detect something called B-mode polarization, which means the CMB has encountered a massive object on the way to Earth.

POLARBEAR has only just demonstrated that it can detect this polarization, but eventually, it could create a sketch of the large-scale skeleton inside the universal body.

Dark energy and exotic dragons

Seeing the universe's skeleton — the location and structure of all matter — could tell scientists if they've got the right idea about how matter in the universe is arranged, and if there are yet-unknown forces acting on it in peculiar ways. 

"There's some possibility [the structure] won't look the way theorists predict," Lee said. "[POLARBEAR] could confirm that the universe is acting the way we think it is; that there are no exotic dragons out there changing the signal."

The most dominant force in our universe is dark energy, but scientists know very little about it -- only that it's causing our universe to expand like a balloon. They don't know when dark energy started this expansion, but Lee said it would have had an effect on how structures formed. 

"Gravity wants to pull structures together but dark energy wants to pull them apart," Lee said. "If dark energy was acting more strongly early on in the universe that would suppress structure formation, because [the dark energy] would be yanking masses away from each other." Lee said future datafrom POLARBEAR could help identify when dark energy started pushing the universe apart.

Flexing BICEP2

Earlier this year, members of the BICEP2 collaboration announced that they had detected B-mode polarization in the CMB. But that polarization signal comes from a different source than the one detected by POLARBEAR. The BICEP2 polarization may come from gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time, in the early universe.

Detection of this type of B-mode polarization would indirectly demonstrate the existence of gravitational waves, and their presence in our early universe. But following BICEP2's announcement, observations by the Planck satellite have raised questions about whether the results were contaminated by space dust.

It's possible, said Lee, that POLARBEAR could eventually measure polarization created by gravitational waves from the inflating universe. Those polarization patterns are larger on the sky than the lensing polarization that POLARBEAR has measured, but as BICEP2 has shown, they are in some ways more challenging to observe.  

POLARBEAR's observations alone can provide only a two-dimensional map of the matter in the universe. But with the help of other telescopes, Lee said it would be possible to create a three-dimensional map, and to even determine when the structure appeared in the universe.

"If we use other data, if we cross correlate, we could look at the structure of matter over the whole history of the universe," Lee said. "That's the strength of all the data sets together."

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Zionist-fascist Lieberman tells ZOG German Foreign Minister no limits on Judaization of East Jerusalem

The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians shall continue, dictates Zio-fascist Lieberman

Zi0-fascist Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman (R) and his ZOG German quisling Frank-Walter Steinmeier (L) deliver joint statements to the media before their meeting in Jerusalem November 16, 2014

(Reuters) - Rebuffing international criticism, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told his German counterpart point-blank on Sunday that Israel will not stop building homes for Jews in East Jerusalem.

His remarks were likely to compound Western frustration over Israeli settlement policy on occupied land that Palestinians seek for a state.

"We won't accept any limitations on building in Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem," Lieberman told a joint news conference with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Since the start of October, Israel has advanced building plans for some 4,300 homes on West Bank land annexed to Jerusalem, heightening tensions in a city which is already on edge following confrontations over access to a renown holy site.

The slew of construction announcements have angered the European Union and the United States, which deem Israeli enclaves on occupied land as illegal and an obstacle to peace.

Palestinians want East Jerusalem to be the capital of the state they aspire to establish in the West Bank and Gaza Strip -- areas captured by Israel in a 1967 war. Israel quit the Gaza Strip in 2005, but blockades the Hamas Islamist-ruled enclave.

Israel considers all of Jerusalem as its united capital, a claim that is not recognized internationally, and an estimated 150,000 Jews live in East Jerusalem.

"Whoever dreams the Israeli government will surrender and limit construction in Jerusalem is mistaken," said Lieberman, who himself lives in a West Bank settlement.

"We are ready to defend our independence, our sovereignty, and there won't be any compromise. I think any pressure here will be very, very negative and very counterproductive."

Steinmeier said the establishment of an independent Palestinian state was the only solution to the decades-old conflict. Palestinians fear settlements will deny them a viable and contiguous country.

European officials have said they are looking at new ways to halt settlement building. Discussions are at an early stage, but officials say the European Union, Israel's biggest trading partner, may look at stopping settlers from visiting the EU and could examine the fine print of a free-trade agreement.

Asked about Lieberman's remarks, Nabil Abu Rdeineh, a senior aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said settlement building in East Jerusalem was illegal.

"We ask the international community, especially the United States and the EU to stop this Israeli escalation," he said.