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UN Assembly asks Israel to tear down barrier
Hawking throws new light on black holes Counter-terror missionaries
refuse to testify Foreign nurses in
UK underpaid
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UN Assembly asks Israel to tear down barrier
United Nations, July 21 India joined 149 other member states in voting for the resolution that was opposed by six nations, including the US, which had earlier asserted that it was one sided and could adversely affect the peace process. There were 10 abstentions in the 191-member Assembly. A major boost for the Palestinians was that all 25 members of the European Union voted for the resolution after Arabs accepted amendments suggested by it during negotiations lasting several days. As a result, the resolution adopted last night also calls on both Israel and Palestinians to immediately implement their obligations under the road map proposed by the international Quartet. The court, as well as the resolution, demands that the barrier be dismantled and reparations be paid to Palestinians harmed by its construction. The road map, proposed by Quartet comprising the US, European Union, Russia and the United Nations Secretary-General, lists a number of reciprocal steps that the two sides must take to achieve the aim of two states of Palestine and Israel living side by side in peace. But the continuing conflict has derailed the proposals. Voting against the resolution, Israel denounced it as “one-sided and totally counterproductive.” “Thank God, that the fate of Israel and Jewish people is not decided in this hall. The resolution cannot but embolden those who are the enemies of the Israel and the Palestinian people,” Israeli Ambassador Dan Gillerman said. Palestinian representative Nasser al-Kidwa said it “could be the most important resolution of the General Assembly since the adoption of Resolution 181 of 1947,” which split Palestine into Jewish and Arab lands. The court, in its advisory opinion, given on July 9, had ruled that the barrier, which cuts deep into the occupied Palestinian lands, is illegal and must be dismantled and Tel Aviv should pay reparations to the Palestinians who suffered as result of building the wall. Tel Aviv says it is building a wall to prevent suicide bombers being sent by the Palestinian militant group from entering Israel, but Palestinians charge that the Israel is trying to grab their lands. The resolutions of the General Assembly, like the opinion of the court, are not enforceable. Only the Security Council resolutions are enforceable, but any attempt to get such a measure through is bound to be vetoed by the US. The resolution also called on all UN member states to comply with the court’s ruling asking them “not to recognise the illegal situation resulting from the construction of the wall in the occupied Palestinian territory, including in and around east Jerusalem” and “not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by such construction.”
— PTI |
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Hawking throws new light on black holes Dublin, July 21 Hawking’s radical new thinking, presented in a paper to the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, capped his three-decade struggle to explain an elemental paradox in scientific thinking: How can black holes destroy all traces of consumed matter and energy, as Hawking long believed, when subatomic theory says such elements must survive in some form? Hawking’s answer is that the black holes hold their contents for eons but themselves eventually deteriorate and die. As the black hole disintegrates, they send their transformed contents back out into the infinite universal horizons from whence they came. Previously, Hawking, 62, had held out the possibility that disappearing matter travels through the black hole to a new parallel universe, the very stuff of science fiction. “There is no baby universe branching off, as I once thought. The information remains firmly in our universe,” Hawking said in a speech distributed ahead of his arrival. “I’m sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes,” he said. “If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe, but in a mangled form, which contains the information about what you were like, but in an unrecognisable state.”
— AP |
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Counter-terror missionaries refuse to testify Kabul, July 21 Jonathan K. Idema, Brett Bennett and Edward Caraballo were arrested when Afghan security forces raided their makeshift jail in a house in Kabul on July 5. The American and Afghan authorities say they were posing as US special forces and had no official backing. Appearing before a three-judge panel in a heavily guarded national security court, the trio listened quietly to the charges, including hostage-taking and torture, and as three of their ex-detainees described how they were beaten, doused with boiling water and deprived of food. The Americans didn’t testify. But Idema said afterward that the abuse allegations were invented. He also said he was in regular phone and e-mail contact with Pentagon officials “at the highest level.” Idema named a Pentagon official who allegedly asked the group to go “under contract” — an offer they refused. — AP |
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Foreign nurses in UK underpaid London, July 21 A research by “King’s Fund”, the health policy think-tank has found that internationally recruited nurses were being denied full careers. Another study by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has found that black and ethnic minority nurses from Britain and abroad are less likely to be promoted than their white colleagues, but are twice as likely to be given extra responsibilities for which they never get paid. The research findings said one in five black and ethnic minority nurses was doing the job a grade above the one he or she was being paid for, compared with the one in 10 of white nurses. Pippa Gough, the head of the research study said: “These nurses are finding it very difficult to progress up the career ladder. If we do not do something about this, they are going to be lured by other countries, such as America, and that could be disastrous for the NHS’’.
— UNI |
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Dublin, July 21
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