Pakistan Court Jails 10 for Malala Murder Conspiracy

But the man who ordered it and the man who attempted to carry it out are still free

So far, Malala is my hero of the 2nd decade of the 21st century

From BBC Asia

Malala Yousafzai is pictured before officially opening
The Library of Birmingham in Birmingham, central England.
Malala Yousafzai was seriously injured in the 2012 gun attack

A Pakistani court has jailed 10 men for life for involvement in the attack on education activist Malala Yousafzai.

Ms Yousafzai, who was 15 at the time, was shot in the head on board her school bus in the Swat valley in 2012, in an attack that shocked the world.

She was awarded last year's Nobel Peace Prize for campaigning for children's rights, despite the risk to her life.

Officials say the 10 men, who do not include the man named as chief suspect, belonged to the Pakistani Taliban.

Ataullah Khan, a 23-year-old militant, was identified by a police report at the time of the shooting - but he did not appear in the list of 10 men convicted on Thursday.

Pakistani female students walk past the school of child activist,
Malala Yousafzai, in Mingora the capital of Swat Valley
Malala was shot on her way home from this school in Mingora

A Pakistani teacher leading a class of girls at a school in Mingora,
the main town of Swat valley. The 15-year-old had campaigned
for the right of girls, like these in her home town, to access education

They were tried in an anti-terrorist court in Swat, in north-west Pakistan.

The BBC's M Ilyas Khan in Islamabad says that no local journalists were aware that the court case was taking place, so there is uncertainty as to the exact charges the men were facing and who the witnesses were.

A lawyer from the local District Bar Association told the BBC that "there were no open hearings".

Those convicted "had a role in the planning and execution of the assassination attempt on Malala", a police official in Swat told Reuters.

A Pakistani army soldier stands guard at an army post overlooking
the city of Mingora in Swat valley, the Yousafzai family's home town

Death threats

Pakistani officials believe local Taliban leader Mullah Fazlullah ordered the attack. He is thought to be in Afghanistan.

Ms Yousafzai, now 17, was treated for her injuries in the UK and currently lives in Birmingham with her family. They are unable to return to Pakistan because of Taliban death threats.

A file photograph showing Laureate Malala Yousafzai displaying her medal
during the award ceremony of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize at
Oslo City Hall, Norway, 10 December 2014.
Malala was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her campaigning work

Profile: Malala Yousafzai
1997: Born in Swat Valley, Pakistan
2009: Wrote anonymous BBC blog about life under the Taliban
2009-10: Identity revealed in TV interviews and a documentary
2011: International Children's Peace Prize nominee
2012: Shot in assassination attempt by Taliban
2013: Addresses the United Nations
2014: Becomes youngest ever winner of Nobel Peace Prize
2015: An asteroid is named after Malala

Malala speaking at the UN

Pakistan's mountainous Swat valley was overrun by the Taliban from 2007 to 2009.

It was the threat by Mullah Fazlullah to close down schools offering girls' education that led to Malala's diary for BBC Urdu, which was written when she was just 11 years old.

The blog, which described life under the Taliban, was anonymous, but the schoolgirl also began to campaign publicly for children's rights.

'Who is Malala?'

Malala Yousafzai at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham on 7 Nov. 2012
Malala underwent further surgeries at QEH

By the time Malala was shot in October 2012 most militants had been cleared from the valley by Pakistan government forces - but people who spoke out were still at risk.

Malala was travelling home from school in the town of Mingora when her bus was flagged down.

A group of gunmen asked "Who is Malala?" and opened fire.

Two of her classmates were also injured in the attack.

Shazia Ramzan and Kainat Riaz have recovered from their injuries and are now studying at Atlantic College in Wales.

Malala Yousafzai (left) and Shazia Ramzan chat after meeting
for the first time after the attack. They were reunited in Birmingham in 2013

Controversial UN Climate Panel Chief in the Spotlight Again - Steps Down

NEW DELHI: Rajendra Pachauri, industrial engineer-turned head of the UN’s climate science panel and one-off sex novel author, who stepped down as the head of the UN’s climate science panel, is no stranger to accolades — nor to controversy.

At his peak, the now 74-year-old Indian accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the policy-shaping body he heads, and was showered with national honours and honorary doctorates.

On Tuesday he stood down as head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) following allegations that he sexually harassed a 29-year-old woman researcher from the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), the Delhi think tank he heads.

The allegations had forced the bearded father-of-three, who denies any wrongdoing, to pull out of a four-day conference at a highly sensitive time, with the global community preparing to ink a planet rescue pact in December.

Rajendra Pachauri - IPCC head steps down

That deal will be largely informed by the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, a summary of the latest climate science.

It warns that on current greenhouse gas-emission trends the world is on track for double the UN goal of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), resulting in devastating floods, droughts and rises in sea level.

Pachauri, a vocal advocate of tough action against global warming, has had many career ups and downs, and this is not the first time he has faced public scrutiny.

He had to weather calls for his resignation after gross errors were found in a landmark IPCC report, and faced widespread ridicule for an attempt at erotic literature.

In 2007 he held aloft the Nobel jointly awarded to the IPCC under his chairmanship, and to former US vice president-turned climate campaigner Al Gore.

That was instead of giving it to Irena Sendlar (right) the brilliant and courageous, young, Polish woman who rescued 2500 Jewish babies and children from Nazi Warsaw's ghetto at great risk. And, indeed, had both of her legs broken by the Gestapo when she was finally caught.
But what's 2500 lives compared to some shaky science by a man of questionable integrity and a politician.

But three years later Pachauri was mired in controversy when errors were found in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report.

An erroneous claim that Himalayan glaciers could be lost by 2035 was allegedly taken from a press article instead of a scientific study. Or maybe he got it from Al Gore??!!

Pachauri refused to accept personal responsibility for the error and rejected pressure to step down, claiming “ideologically-driven posturing” was behind attacks on the IPCC.

An international review at the time called for fundamental reforms at the IPCC, including an overhaul of the post of chairman which Pachauri first took up in 2002.

Some critics have questioned where his loyalties lay, given his business dealings with carbon trading companies.

According to a CV on the TERI website, Pachauri had during his IPCC tenure also served on the boards of India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corporation and natural gas company GAIL. No conflict there...Pfft!

Educated in Britain and the United States, where he earned doctorates in industrial engineering and economics, Pachauri is a sustainable development veteran.

But his critics, who once included Gore, stress that he has no science qualifications.

An avid cricket fan and vegetarian, Pachauri has said his focus on the health of our planet came from his childhood in India’s Himalayan foothills — not far from some of the glaciers that have since blemished his career.

“It was so beautiful and unpolluted when I was a child,” he told AFP in 2007. “One saw the beauty of nature at its most pristine. It gets into your soul and you don’t lose that.”

Having penned more than 130 academic papers and nearly 27 books, mainly related to energy and the environment, Pachauri generated warming of a different kind when he tried his hand at creative writing with the 2010 novel Return to Almora.

The offering is laced with steamy references to the sexual urges of protagonist Sanjay Nath who, like Pachauri, studied engineering.

He has hinted that the book, which interweaves themes of reincarnation with breathless accounts of Nath’s carnal prowess, may be based on his own life.

His very appointment was controversial. Pachauri was regarded as a compromise candidate to replace the outspoken British-American scientist Bob Watson whom sources claimed was forced out by the climate-sceptic Bush administration.

Pachauri’s second consecutive six-year term as IPCC chairman had been due to end in October, just weeks before the Paris conference.

The IPCC said vice-chair Esmail Al Gizouli would take over as acting chair.

Irena Sendlar - One of the Great Heroes of WWII

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendlar, one of the great heroes of WWII

Died: May 12, 2008 (aged 98)
Warsaw , Poland

During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an ulterior motive. Irena smuggled Jewish infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried. She also carried a burlap sack in the back of her truck, for larger kids.

Irena kept a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers, of course, wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the children and infants' noises.

During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 children and infants.

Ultimately, she was caught, however, and the Nazis broke both of her legs and arms and beat her severely.

Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she had smuggled out in a glass jar that she buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived
and tried to reunite the family. Most had been gassed.

Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.

In 2007 Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize.

She was not selected.

Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming. Later another politician, Barack Obama, won for simply being the first black president of the US. After all, what is saving 2500 children's lives at enormous personal risk compared to a slide show. I've made slide shows, I know how difficult it is. Good grief! Gore should have refused the prize so a real hero could be honoured.

It is now more than 65 years since the Second World War in Europe ended. This blog post is in memory of the 6 million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians, and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, massacred.

Now, more than ever, with Iran, and others, claiming the Holocaust to be 'a myth', it’s imperative to make sure the world never forgets,  because there are others who would like to do it again.

UK Scientists: Aliens May Have Sent Space Seeds To Create Life On Earth

In the "out of this world science" category, 

comes this article, allegedly from Huffington Post.

Scientists in the U.K. have examined a tiny metal circular object, and are suggesting it might be a micro-organism deliberately sent by extraterrestrials to create life on Earth.

Don't be fooled by the size of the object in the microscopic image above. It may appear to look like a planet-sized globe, but in fact, it's no bigger than the width of a human hair.

The University of Buckingham reports that the minuscule metal globe was discovered by astrobiologist Milton Wainwright and a team of researchers who examined dust and minute matter gathered by a high-flying balloon in Earth's stratosphere.

"It is a ball about the width of a human hair, which has filamentous life on the outside and a gooey biological material oozing from its centre," Wainwright said, according to Express.co.uk.

"One theory is it was sent to Earth by some unknown civilization in order to continue seeding the planet with life," Wainwright hypothesizes.

That theory comes from a Nobel Prize winner.

"This seeming piece of science fiction -- called 'directed panspermia' -- would probably not be taken seriously by any scientist were it not for the fact that it was very seriously suggested by the Nobel Prize winner of DNA fame, Francis Crick," said Wainwright.

Panspermia is a theory that suggests life spreads across the known physical universe, hitchhiking on comets or meteorites.

The idea of directed panspermia was suggested by Crick, a molecular biologist, who was the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA in 1953. Twenty years later, Crick co-wrote -- with biochemist Leslie Orgel -- a scientific paper about directed panspermia.

The abstract of their manuscript states:

It now seems unlikely that extraterrestrial living organisms could have reached the Earth either as spores driven by the radiation pressure from another star or as living organisms imbedded in a meteorite. As an alternative to these nineteenth-century mechanisms, we have considered Directed Panspermia, the theory that organisms were deliberately transmitted to the Earth by intelligent beings on another planet.

We conclude that it is possible that life reached the Earth in this way, but that the scientific evidence is inadequate at the present time to say anything about the probability. We draw attention to the kinds of evidence that might throw additional light on the topic.

In contrast to what Crick-Orgel speculated about in 1973, four decades later, a team of scientists, led by astronomer-astrobiologist Chandra Wickramasinghe of the Buckingham Center for Astrobiology, announced they had found fossils with biological properties attached to a meteorite (check out the slideshow at the bottom of this story) that fell in Sri Lanka.

Of course, these controversial claims bring forth the skeptical side of science. I thought that was reserved for religious kooks, like me.

In the case of the meteorite fossils, astronomer Phil Plait wrote that the scientists didn't do a good enough job convincing him there were actual fossils in that meteorite.

Wainwright and his team launched balloons nearly 17 miles into Earth's stratosphere, and when they examined the material collected by one of the balloons (like the one pictured below), they discovered a small crash mark which indicated to them that the microscopic, circular object didn't simply land softly.

stratospheric balloon
University of Sheffield

"On hitting the stratosphere sampler, the sphere made an impact crater, a minute version of the huge impact crater on Earth caused by the asteroid said to have killed off the dinosaurs," Wainwright said.

Even with this more recent discovery of a tiny globe found lodged into a high-flying balloon, the alien space seed proponents know they have a long way to go before that can be proven and accepted by the scientific community.

"Unless, of course, we can find details of the civilization that is supposed to have sent it in this respect, it is probably an unprovable theory," Wainwright conceded.

Time -- and space -- will tell.

My question is, how did they find a microscopic globe on the surface of a balloon that is about 7 stories high? I'm guessing the 'sampler' was of smaller size. Consequently, for a globe to hit the sampler, we must be being bombarded with millions of these little, creature carriers.

Did they do genetic testing on the 'ooze' that came out of it?

Perhaps they are responsible for pimples? Pimples might have little aliens growing in them. Or perhaps an alien infection is responsible for the madness of Islam? I think we should microscopically examine radical Muslims to see if they have evidence of little alien globes in their flesh. While we are at it, we should inspect Republicans and Democrats to see which side has been infected with the evil bug. I think I already know the answer to that question - both!