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900,000 Somalians in dire need of humanitarian assistance Nine hundred thousand Somalians are in dire need of foreign humanitarian aid. Good seasonal rains in Somalia which have ended a four-year drought, has had little effect on the estimated 900,000 Somalians in need of humanitarian aid. The December Indian Ocean Tsunami devastated the northeastern Somali coastline, further worsening the humanitarian situation now seen in Somalia. NASA's Deep Impact probe strikes comet successfully NASA's Deep Impact probe collided with the comet Tempel 1 on Monday, as intended by scientists. The collision took place at 5:45 UTC and NASA held a press briefing shortly after impact at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, NASA's non-manned space flight control center. A full-fledged press conference by NASA is scheduled to be at JPL on Monday afternoon at 2 p.m. PDT (9:00 UTC). 17 civilians dead following U.S. air strike on 'terrorist compound' 17 Afghan civilians, including women and children, are thought to be have been killed as the result of U.S. aircraft bombing a “known terrorist compound” in the east of the country late last week, says the governor of Kunar province.

Wikipedia Current Events
The Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the country's current opposition party that ruled for over 70 years, has claimed victory in elections for the governor of the country's most populated State, Mexico. Elections in Burundi for the National Assembly begin under tight security. The voters will elect the first democratic government after the civil war. Vote is expected favor Hutu group Forces for the Defence of Democracy when Hutu Forces for National Liberation is yet to lay down its arms. The impactor of NASA probe Deep Impact successfully strikes comet Tempel 1.

900,000 Somalians in dire need of humanitarian assistance
Nine hundred thousand Somalians are in dire need of foreign humanitarian aid. The December Indian Ocean Tsunami devastated the northeastern Somali coastline, further worsening the humanitarian situation now seen in Somalia. Good seasonal rains in Somalia which have ended a four-year drought have dome done little to help the estimated 900,000 Somalians in need of humanitarian aid.
"Overall, the extended effects of four years of drought, which adversely impacted livelihoods and coping mechanisms, combined with chronic food insecurity, and more recently flooding has exacerbated the suffering of Somalis," said the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

According to an OCHA report, of the 500,000 Somalians directly affected by the drought, around 400,000 are internally displaced, and an additional 12,000 Somalians had been affected by seasonal flooding in the central regions of Hiraan and Middle Shabelle as well as in in the self-declared northwestern republic of Somaliland.

OCHA estimates that around 44,000 people were directly affected by the tsunami, and many still need urgent humanitarian assistance, the agency said. An estimated figure released by OCHA stated that $162,266,738 would be needed to be raised to target an estimated 900,000 vulnerable people. As of June 10, donors had funded approximately 39 percent of this appeal.

On April 4, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) suspended all aid shipments to Somalia due to the recent hijacking of one of their ships containing tsunami relief off the coast on Somalia.

"We have suspended all shipments of food aid to Somalia due to the insecurity of Somali waters," the agency said in a statement released in Kenya. "The decision will be reviewed depending on the release of the vessel," they said. If the ship is released quickly there should be "no major interruption of WFP operations."

Earlier on April 4, WFP officials said they were "hopeful" for the release of the ship, its 10-member crew and the 850 tons of rice donated by Japan and Germany, but had no new information about the status of the negotiations.

The UN WFP supplies about 3,000 tons of food for about 275,000 Somalis per month, and as of April 4, country had about two weeks of stocks left.

Underwater volcano causes 3,300 ft column of steam

An underwater volcano near the island of Iwo Jima (translation: "Sulfur Island") in the Pacific Ocean has caused a 3,280 ft (1,000m) column of vapour to rise from the water, coastguard officials said yesterday morning. The column of steam was reported on Saturday by Japanese troups who were stationed on the island.

An observational expedition to assess the activity was prematurely ended due to safety concerns, though the possibility of a tsunami was denied. Officials who flew over the area said the surface of the water "appeared red", which would suggest underwater volcanic activity. The expedition returned with video footage confirming earlier reports, said Shigeyuki Sato, a spokesperson for the coast guard. The survey crew found "grayish mud" rusing from the ocean, though it is not known whether volcanic gases are being released.

The area known as Fukutokuoka-no-ba has a history of seismic activity, with at leat ten historic eruptions in the last century. The most recent underwater volcano erupting in 1986 and lasted three days. Japan's Meteorological Agency said there was no current danger of a tsunami, often caused by underwater seismic activity.

'Bad language' at Live 8 concerts trigger complaints to the BBC
The BBC, who broadcast the Live 8 event throughout Saturday and Sunday, has received hundreds of complaints regarding "swearing outbursts". Madonna and Snoop Dogg are among those who used "bad language" before the 9:00PM watershed.

Following last year's Superbowl, where U.S. broadcasting networks were criticised for not forecasting Janet Jackson's bodily exposure, the BBC pledged to incorporate a time delay of several seconds in certain live broadcasts in order to provide a level of censorship to potentially violent/unsuitable scenes.

The Live 8 event, however, was broadcast live.

The BBC, said a spokesperson, had received "just under" 400 complaints regarding the use of language in its coverage.

"Millions of people enjoyed our 12 hours of live broadcasting. We are sorry if any offence was caused.", she added.

The stars guilty of swearing before the watershed include Snoop Dogg, Madonna, Johnny Borrell (Razorlight) and Billie-Joe Armstrong (Green Day).

Previous complaints recieved by the BBC range from 240 complaints made as a result of the new 3D weather map, to 47,000 in the build up to the broadcast of "Jerry Springer - The Opera".

Stockholm district court in favor of the mobile operator disputing with TV channel on number copyright
Swedish media company Modern Times Group, owner of Stockholm-based TV channel TV3, claims monetary damages from Swedish mobile telephone operator 3 totaling 300 million Swedish kronor for trademark infringement by using the number "3" as their name. Modern Times' TV3 has used a logotype saying "3" for many years.

However, on July 1 the Stockholm district court (Stockholms tingsrätt) decided that TV3 does not have exclusive rights to the number 3, disagreeing that the mobile telephone company's use of the numeral was a violation of Swedish trademark protection laws.

TV3 has three weeks to appeal the verdict to keep it from becoming legally enforceable. In making the decision, the Stockholm court allowed other disputes between the companies not concerning the use of the numeral "3" to continue to be argued before it.

San Jose replaces Detroit as 10th-largest U.S. city
According to a recent report by the United States Census Bureau, the pecking order of the most populous U.S. cities has changed. The report, issued June 30, shows in 2004 San Jose, with an estimated population of 904,522 is the nation's 10th-largest city, overtaking Detroit with is smaller population of 900,198.

The U.S. Census traditionally releases population figures for the year previous to the date the figures are made public.

According to a report in the San Jose Mercury News, Mayor Ron Gonzales is saying the new ranking may help people across the U.S. be more interested in San Jose and think of it as a world-class city. "It puts us in a very distinguished class," he told the paper.

But for many, northern California's largest city, the self-proclaimed "Capital of Silicon Valley" remains an enigma. In a country not noted for its geographical knowledge prowess, many Americans have no idea where San Jose actually is. Culturally, the city may be best known as the title location of a Dionne Warwick hit song with the ironic title, Do You Know the Way to San Jose?

Many locals claim the city suffers from a self esteem problem stretching back to 1852 when San Jose lost the honor of being the California state capital to Sacramento. Additionally, for most of its existence, San Jose has been overshadowed by its smaller and more glamorous neighbor to the north, San Francisco.

"San Francisco has been in the limelight since 1849, and it was the capital of everything west of the Mississippi - it was a huge presence in the psyche of the world, and we can never replace that," David Vossbrink, San Jose city spokesman told the San Francisco Chronicle.

It doesn't stop with San Francisco, San Jose is routinely outshined by other Bay Area cities such as Oakland, California, which is one-third the size of San Jose. Additionally, the city's own Silicon Valley suburbs, including Palo Alto and Cupertino, steal the national spotlight from San Jose.

San Jose continues to reel from the dot-com meltdown of the early 2000's. With an unemployment rate of 5.5 percent, it has a higher unemployment rate than the national average of 5.1 percent. For a couple of years after the 2000 tech crash, San Jose lost population as displaced workers fled to look for work elsewhere.

But the city is on the mend and does have some legitimate bragging rights aside from sheer size. Despite the unemployment, San Jose is America's wealthiest big city with an average household annual income of $70,000. It consistently ranks as "The Safest Big City in America," according to FBI crime statistics as having the lowest violent crime rate for any U.S. city with a population over 500,000. The local public university, San Jose State is the largest within the California State University system.

Economically, an increasing number of large companies also are opting to call San Jose home, including Cisco Systems, Knight Ridder, eBay and Adobe Systems.

For many media outlets covering San Jose's ascendance into the ranks of the United States' Top 10 cities. The real story has been the decline of Detroit and its symbol at a Midwest industrial giant.

For decades Detroit, the self-styled "Motor City," rested its fortunes with the American automobile industry. Each of the Big Three automobile manufacturers, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler maintained headquarters there.

But with the shift of the U.S. economy to away from heavy industry to services and technology, cities like Detroit suffered while cities like San Jose prospered.

Detroit's decline in population is not a new phenomenon. In the 1950s, the city had a population of about 1.8 million, ranking as the fourth-largest U.S. city. But its fortunes started changing in the 1970s with the OPEC oil embargo and the rise of Japan as an automobile-producing powerhouse. As the city's fortunes waned, many residents fled Detroit for the suburbs or opted to leave Michigan altogether.

"It's part of a pattern for the heavily industrialized cities, but I think Detroit is a specific case. There's been an ongoing dynamic here of people, middle-class people in Detroit, fleeing the city looking for better schools, better lifestyles, better services. So it has been a particularly hard fall," Dana Johnson, chief economist at Comerica Bank in Detroit said in an interview with the New York Times.

Detroit also has been taking its knocks in recent statistics. Unlike San Jose's reputation for being a safe place to live, Detroit tops the list of most violent U.S. big cities. In the past year, Time magazine named Detroit Mayor Kwame M. Kilpatrick among the worst mayors in the U.S.

Along with the exodus of people and 7.8 percent unemployment rate, Detroit harbors a sight unseen in San Jose, blocks of vacant housing. For years these vacant buildings have been the targets of arsonists on the so-called Devil's Night, where blocks of homes have been set ablaze in Detroit.

Additionally, unlike San Jose, which is in the process of moving 1,800 employees into a new $388 million city hall and faces shortage of police officers, shrinking Detroit faces a $300 million budget deficit and the prospect of laying off 700 police and fire-fighting personnel in the next few months.

Egyptian envoy's captors remain anonymous
The kidnappers of Egypt's ambassador to Iraq, Ihab Al-Sherif, remain anonymous amid pleas for his well treatment. Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said that Cairo was working with Iraqi authorities to advance the release of Mr. Al-Sherif, who was kidnapped on Saturday.

A search of insurgent hideouts conducted by Iraqi and U.S. forces began on Monday in western parts of Baghdad.

Abul Gheit pledged that everyone involved "handle the situation wisely".

"Our colleague... went to Iraq to serve the interests of the Iraqi people. We hope that they try their best in locating him and that he returns safely to his family," he said while in Lybya for an African Union summit.

"We understand the fury of the Iraqi people but this man is working for the benefit of the Iraqi and the Egyptian people and therefore we wish that he is treated accordingly."

An unidentified source said Mr Al-Sherif was "buying a newspaper" when he was kidnapped last Saturday. Witnesses said that a gunman "hit him on the head with a pistol as others shouted that he was 'an American spy'". He was then pushed into one of two BMWs used in the kidnapping. More than 36 hours afterwards no group have claimed responsibility or made any demands

Egyptians in Iraq are no strangers to kidnappings. Last July, rebels kidnapped Egyptian diplomat Mohamed Mamdouh Qutb, who was freed unharmed. The gunmen from this case released a statement saying that their actions were in response to Egypt offering to train Iraq's security forces, an offer that was later withdrawn.

Mr. Al-Sherif arrived in Iraq on June 1, shortly before his promotion to the position of ambassador — a move that was praised by Iraq's foreign minister. The Egyptian government upgraded its relations with Iraq in mid-June to "full embassy status".

Some believe the U.S. is "urging" Arab states to appoint ambassadors in order to "support the new government and curb the resistance." Egypt had withdrawn its ambassador to Iraq 14 years ago, and was in support of the first gulf war in 1991.

17 civilians dead following U.S. air strike on 'terrorist compound'
17 Afghan civilians, including women and children, are thought to be have been killed as the result of U.S. aircraft bombing a “known terrorist compound” in the east of the country late last week, said a governor.

The air strike occurred last Friday in the same area as an elite U.S. military team went missing three days ago.

Provincial governor Assadullah Wafa told the Associated Press “seventeen civilians died in the U.S. bombing of the village.” He went on to comment that casualties consisted of women and children, though he did not know the exact figure.

A U.S. military statement said that the compound bombed was a “known operating base for terrorist attacks in Kunar province as well as a base for a medium-level terrorist leader,"

The statement, written after criticism in the press of the U.S. military’s lack of precaution in these matters, then went on to say the U.S. armed forces “regret the loss of innocent lives and follow stringent rules of engagement specifically to ensure that non-combatants are safeguarded. However, when enemy forces move their families into the locations where they conduct terrorist operations, they put these innocent civilians at risk."

One member of the missing military team has been recovered and is currently being “evaluated” on Monday, a U.S. Defence Department spokesperson said, though he refused to comment on details regarding his whereabouts and health.

Afghan and U.S. forces are currently in the Kunar province searching for members of the missing military team. U.S. officials at the time of the bombing said in a statement that the attack utilised “precision-guided munitions that resulted in the deaths of an unknown number of enemy terrorists and non-combatants,"

The statement continued, concluding that "battle damage assessment is currently ongoing."

In May, Afghan president Hamid Karzai voiced his concerns over the excessive number of civilian casualties as a result of US-led operations.

Ahmadinejad pictures: Iran Gov't denies hostage-taker allegations
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President-elect of Iran
Speaking to a group of lawmakers from provinces of Azerbaijan on Monday, Iranian president-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called "baseless" and "questionable" the controversial spread of photo comparisons of himself to the image of a hostage-taker.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi, said during a interview with Alison Caldwell on The World Today on Sunday that, "Mr. Ahmadinejad's involvement in the US Embassy takeover was a lie, which was even confirmed by the Americans. That was evidently propaganda. We should be aware and not let such propaganda lead us to misunderstanding and pessimism."

Former secret agent Saeed Hajjarian, a one-time top adviser to outgoing President Mohammad Khatami, identified the man in a 1979 photo as Taqi Mohammadi, who was jailed in 1981 for his involvement in bombing that killed the president and prime minister in Tehran. According to a story in the Jordan Times, "Mohammadi committed suicide in Evin prison. I myself was a witness to take his body out of jail for burial," Hajjarian said.

Many top news sources reported that Ahmadinejad was believed by 5 former hostages of the 1981 hostage crisis in Teheran to be one of the hostage-takers or interrogators of that incident. Two images have been used commonly across the media on this topic. The first, a known picture of Ahmadinejad during his student days and the second an image of one of the hostagetakers, both in black and white. One or both of these images have been placed side-by-side on a number of current images of the president in most news media.

Fox News chose to enlarge features of the known student photo of Ahmadinejad alongside current photos of himself, i.e. comparing his nose and eyes with the same features on himself. To no great surprise, the similarity is striking.

Currently, U.S. officials find "serious discrepancies" between images of the Ahmadinejad and the mentioned images of the terrorist.

Russian astrologist sues NASA for Deep Impact test
Russian astrologist Marina Bai has filed suit in Moscow asking for 8.7 billion rubles (311 million U.S. dollars) because, she claims, the NASA Deep Impact mission damaged her business by altering her ability to provide accurate horoscopes, harmed her "system of spiritual values," and will "interfere with the natural life of the universe."

"It is obvious that elements of the comet's orbit, and correspondingly the ephemeris, will change after the explosion, which interferes with my astrology work and distorts my horoscope," Bai was quoted in the daily newspaper, Izvestia.

NASA has refuted similar accusations by pointing out that this impact is only a new addition to many previous collisions already on the comet.

On July 4, NASA successfully crashed a probe into the Temple 1 comet in hopes the debris kicked up in the resulting explosion could shed light in the building blocks of the early solar system.

The lawsuit, originally filed in June, has not yet been scheduled for an initial hearing, according to Russian authorities.

NASA's Deep Impact probe strikes comet successfully
Deep Impact's collision with comet
NASA's Deep Impact probe collided with the comet Tempel 1 on Monday, as intended by scientists. The collision took place at 5:45 UTC and NASA held a press briefing shortly after at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, NASA's non-manned space flight control center. A full-fledged press conference by NASA is scheduled to be at JPL on Monday afternoon at 2 p.m. PDT (9:00 UTC).

The experiment, intending to provide more information about the make up of comets, consisted of a 370 kg projectile being fired at the comet in order to observe and analyse the resultant impact. With information gleaned from the impact, the comet's general make-up can be established and more accurate hypotheses regarding how the Solar system and the universe came to be.

Deep Impact is a NASA space probe designed to study the composition of the interior of a comet. Previous space missions to comets, such as Giotto and Stardust, were merely fly-by missions, only able to photograph and examine the surfaces of cometary nuclei. The Deep Impact mission will be the first to examine a cometary interior, and thus, scientists hope, reveal new secrets about these small frozen bodies.

Following its launch on January 12, 2005, the Deep Impact spacecraft took 174 days to reach Comet Tempel 1 at a cruising speed of 103,000 kilometers per hour (64,000 miles per hour). Once the spacecraft reached the vicinity of the comet on July 3, 2005, it separated into two portions, an impactor and a flyby probe. The impactor used its thrusters to move into the path of the comet, impacting 24 hours later at a relative speed of 37,000 kilometers per hour. The impactor has a mass of 370 kilograms and approached Tempel 1 with a relative speed of 10.30 kilometers per second (6.3 miles per second), thus delivering 1.96 × 1010 joules of kinetic energy, the equivalent of 4.5 tons of TNT. Scientists believe that the energy of this high-velocity collision will be sufficient to excavate a crater up to 100 meters wide (larger than the bowl of the Roman Colosseum), although the crater has not yet been spotted in post-impact images because the cloud of debris is obscuring the view.

Just minutes after the impact, the flyby probe passed by the nucleus at a close distance of 500 km, taking pictures of the crater position, the ejecta plume, and the entire cometary nucleus. The entire event was photographed by Earth-based telescopes and orbital observatories, such as the Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer and XMM-Newton. In addition, the impact was observed by cameras and spectroscopes on board Europe's Rosetta spacecraft, which was about 80 million km from the comet at the time of impact. Rosetta should determine the composition of the gas and dust cloud kicked up by the impact.

The Deep Impact mission will help answer fundamental questions about comets, such as:

Is the composition of a cometary nucleus the same throughout, or has some physical process caused the interior to become differentiated from the surface? In other words, is the nucleus layered?

Are cometary nuclei highly cohesive and tightly-packed, or porous conglomerates?

Do any parts of a cometary nucleus contain pristine material that have been untouched since the creation of the comet during the Solar System's early history?

Scientists hope that these questions will be answered, at least in part, by data from the Deep Impact mission. For example, the size and shape of the crater produced by the impact will tell scientists how well-packed the cometary material is.
Deep Impact mission team members celebrating a successful encounter with comet Tempel 1.

Iraq's UN Envoy accuses U.S. Marines of 'cold blooded murder'
Mohamed al-Sumaidaie, Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, accused U.S. marines of murdering his cousin's 21-year-old son, Mohammed Sumaidaie, who was studying engineering at the University of Technology in Baghdad. “All indications point to a killing of an unarmed innocent civilian - a cold-blooded murder,” said Sumaidaie. “The Marines were smiling at each other as they were leaving.”

Sumaidaie called for an investigation of the alleged June 25 killing of the student while the US military said the charges “roughly correspond to an incident involving coalition forces on that day in that general location.” U.S.-led forces were conducting a sweep in the western portion of Anbar, in the province of Sumaidaie's ancestral villiage.

Sumaidaie said the “Americans come and rough up the youths in the village demanding information which they simply do not have,”

The alleged victim was at his father’s house with his mother when marines knocked at the door the ambassador said, quoting the young man's mother. According to Sumaidaie's letter, the Marines asked if there were any weapons, and Mohammed said there was a rifle, which only had blanks. He then led some of the Marines into his father's bedroom where it was kept. The younger brother of the dead student was dragged by his hair into a corridor and beaten while the rest of the family was told to wait outside, he said.

After waiting for more than an hour on the porch, the marines left, and the victim's mother found her son dead with a bullet to the neck, according to Sumaidaie.

"The mother let off a deafening cry of anguish but the marines were smiling at each other as they were leaving," Sumaidaie said. "In the bedroom, Mohamed was found dead and laying in a clotted pool of his blood."

U.S. Maj. Gen. Stephen T. Johnson said, "We take these allegations seriously and will thoroughly investigate this incident to determine what happened."

2005 Mediterranean Games close in Almeria
The fifteenth Mediterranean Games, held in Almería, Spain were closed yesterday. The most successful country this year was Italy, with a total of 153 medals, 57 of which were gold. France tied in their total number of medals, but had one less gold medal. Spain was third with 152 medals. The next Mediterranean Games will be held in Pescara, Italy in 2009.

Today in History
1687 - Volume One of Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica was published for the first time.

1811 - Venezuela declared its independence from Spain.

1951 - William Shockley invented the junction transistor.

1962 - Algeria became independent from France.

1989 - Oliver North was sentenced for his part in the Iran-Contra Affair.

July 05 is Tynwald Day on the Isle of Man

Quote of the Day

"From time to time the exceptional is necessary. For events as well as for men, the stock company is not enough; geniuses are needed among men, and revolutions among events. Great accidents are the law; the order of things cannot get along without them; and, to see the apparitions of comets, one would be tempted to believe that Heaven itself is in need of star actors." ~ Victor Hugo in Les Misérables

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