Priceless Information about Arts And Humanities, Beauty And Style And More

A replica of the ‘mobile toilet’ used by Father of the Nation Mahatma Gandhi will soon be displayed at the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, along with his other belongings.

The Ashram will also be displaying replica of a system designed by Gandhiji for washing utensils using minimum amount of water.

These models will be open for public viewing in a couple of weeks, Ashram authorities said.

“Before coming to India, Gandhiji was based in South Africa and London, where they had proper toilets. But, when he returned to India, he saw people answering to nature’s call out in the open. He felt it was an unhygienic system,” trustee of the Sabarmati Ashram, Amrut Modi said.

“Gandhiji felt that there should be proper toilets for people in the Ashram. He designed a mobile lavatory, four feet in length and breadth with a pit one feet deep. He then made a wooden frame around the hole and used tin sheets to cover the area,” Modi said.

“After being used to its maximum capacity the pit was covered with mud and the entire structure was shifted to a different location. The human excreta was allowed to decompose and was later used as manure in the fields,” he said.

According to Modi, similar toilet blocks were used whenever there was a huge gathering of people in the ashram or during any public meeting in any part of the country.

“The mobile toilets designed by Gandhiji were in use till 1955. Later, permanent toilets were built in the Ashram premises. Once the old structures started disintegrating, the then Ashram authorities decided to get rid of them,” Modi said.

According to him, a model of the ‘mobile toilet’ was made after studying the original design through available literature and interaction with other Gandhians.

About the utensil washing system designed by Gandhiji, Modi said, “vessels from the ashram kitchen were washed in the Sabarmati river using a lot of water. So Bapuji designed a system which used less water and did not put strain on the person cleaning them.”

With the US-led forces in Afghanistan stepping up cross-border attacks on militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas, President Asif Ali Zardari today said violations of the country’s borders would not be tolerated. During a meeting with visiting British Permanent Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs Peter Ricketts and Permanent Under Secretary in the Home Office, David Normington, Zardari said Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected.

Official sources were quoted by Dawn News channel as saying that Zardari had told the British officials that violations of Pakistan’s frontiers would not be tolerated. The officials discussed bilateral ties, trade and economic relations and the war on terror with Zardari, who called on Britain to cooperate with Pakistan in eliminating terrorism.

The regional security situation, especially the situation on the troubled Pakistan-Afghanistan border and the tribal areas, was also discussed, the sources said. The British officials assured Zardari of full cooperation in economic and security issues, they said.

Pakistan has angrily protested against a series of cross-border missile strikes by US drones in its tribal areas, describing them as a violation of the country’s sovereignty. A statement issued by the Foreign Office said Zardari highlighted “Pakistan’s multi-dimensional approach in dealing with the scourge of terrorism, which had been acknowledged all around”.

“In this regard, the international community, particularly Pakistan’s friends, needed to show greater understanding and support for its position,” Zardari said. Zardari also stressed the government’s “determination to overcome the present economic challenges which had come about as a result of the international economic situation”.

The British officials expressed understanding for Pakistan’s situation and said their country would extend support as part of the ‘Friends of Pakistan’ group.

The head of the Belarus election commission says no opposition candidate won a seat in parliament with nearly all districts counted.

Sunday’s parliamentary election was seen as a major test of authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko’s commitment to democratic reforms. Opposition leaders have alleged the vote was rigged despite promises by Lukashenko that international standards would be followed.

Results from 99 of the 110 districts showed all of the prominent opposition candidates lost, Central Election Commission head Lidia Yermoshina said early Monday. Those running in the remaining 11 districts are not well known.

Full results are expected later in the day.

Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden on Wednesday questioned John McCain’s judgment to be commander in chief, arguing that the Republican presidential candidate would keep digging the United States into a hole of isolation and insecurity.”Our country is less secure and more isolated than it has been at any time in recent history,” Biden said in remarks prepared for a speech to supporters. “This administration has dug America into a very deep hole around the world at a time our leadership is needed to meet the challenges of the 21st century.”

Biden said a central question for the election is which candidate can get the U.S. out of that hole, and he said it is Democrat Barack Obama.

“Nothing is more important than judgment,” Biden said in his remarks. “But time and again, on the most critical national security issues of our time, John McCain’s judgment was wrong.”

The speech offered some of the Obama campaign’s strongest criticism to date about McCain’s leadership abilities. It was scheduled two days before the first presidential debate, which will focus on foreign policy, and was billed by the campaign as a major speech on foreign policy by the veteran chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Biden was scheduled to speak at the Cincinnati Museum Center, where President Bush made the case for attacking Iraq.

“Mark my words: If, God forbid, there is another major attack on America, it will not come from Iraq,” Biden said. “It will almost certainly come from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border — where the Bush-McCain approach let down our guard and let our enemies off the hook.

“And unlike John McCain — who opposed Barack Obama’s call to take out the high-level terrorist targets in Pakistan and called it ‘bombing our ally’ — we will not tolerate a terrorist sanctuary in Pakistan.”

The speech gave Biden a chance to display his policy experience after a recent run of verbal miscues, such as comments to CBS News about Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt going on television after the stock market crash — although Republican Herbert Hoover was president during 1929 crash, which predated television.

China performs its crowning feat in a year of national drama in coming days, when an astronaut floats out of an airlock 341 kilometres (212 miles) above the earth.The Shenzhou VII spacecraft due to blast off from Jiuquan in barren northwest China on Thursday, weather permitting, will carry three men, including one picked to become the nation’s first space-walker.

The craft’s journey of probably three to five days will be China’s third manned spaceflight and comes five years after China first joined Russia and the United States in the elite club of states able to send humans into space. The second, two-manned mission was in 2005.

“For China this will be a milestone on the way to developing a space lab,” said Huang Hai of the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “But especially this year, it will also mean a lot beyond the technological breakthrough.”

The space walk and other tests in the flight are steps in China’s long-term plan for an orbiting station and maybe one distant day a trip to the moon.

But following the Beijing Olympics and this year’s upsurge in ardent popular patriotism, the cramped capsule will also carry an especially heavy symbolic payload for the ruling Communist Party.

“There is definitely a political angle to show that China is strong and has all the trappings of a power,” said Kevin Pollpeter, an expert on Chinese space strategy at the Defense Group Inc in Washington D.C.

“Human space flight and then a space station are seen as the indicators of a great power.”

Yet as a vehicle for the Party’s nation-building ambitions, China’s space programme carries the tensions and limits of those ambitions.

Beijing says its space plans are purely peaceful. But some of its military experts, fearing U.S. technological domination, warn military rivalry in space looms.

And while admiring China’s achievements, experts say its space technology remains far from rivalling the United States’.

“China is still far behind the U.S. and Russia,” said Jiao Weixin, a space scientist at Peking University. “It would be unrealistic to speak of catching up. We can only do our best to narrow the gap.”

WINNING THE WORLD’S ATTENTION

Astronaut Zhai Zhigang, the 41-year-old air force pilot due to make the space walk of less than an hour in a 120-kilogramme suit, is already a feted hero.

His and the other candidate astronauts’ preparations have been painstakingly reported. Their journey will be televised to hundreds of millions, with perhaps a brief time-delay in case an accident blights the spectacle.

For China’s history-conscious leaders, this show is serious.

“One successful [manned] launch can win the attention of the nation and even the whole world,” two People’s Liberation Army officers wrote in a 2008 study of China’s strategy in space.

“Above all, it can unify the public mood and is an important political tool for raising morale.”

That sentiment cuts particularly deep here.

From the 19th century, Chinese thinkers blamed domination by Western powers and Japan on technological backwardness.

After 1949, Communist leaders made mastering nature a defining test of strength, brandished in atomic arsenals, mega-dams and engineering marvels beyond the grasp of other developing nations.

The revolutionary founder Mao Zedong signed off on a proposal to develop manned space flight in July 1970, four months after the strife-ridden nation launched its first, primitive satellite, according to a semi-official history of China’s space programme.

With Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatic economic reforms from the late 1970s, reaching into space became more urgent for this country seeking respect as a modernising power.

In 1979, Deng visited the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, buckling up in a space shuttle simulator and meeting the pioneer U.S. astronaut John Glenn, according to the semi-official history of China’s space programme which was published in 2005.

“You in America have many things worth our while studying,” was Deng’s typically laconic comment on NASA’s gadgets.

For Chinese leaders since, nearly all engineers, the manned space effort has offered a means of dramatically avenging a past of vulnerable backwardness, said Joan Johnson-Freese, an expert on the programme at the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island.

“I think the Chinese are trying to be viewed as Asia’s technology leader, where technology is both an indicator of power and a tool of persuasion to influence other countries,” she said.

From a first, unmanned flight in 1999, the Shenzhou programme has embodied that ambition. With a name meaning “sacred vessel”, the programme secretively runs through military and government agencies and its budget is murky. In 2003, officials said it had cost 18 billion yuan ($2.6 billion) up to then.

The Shenzhou VII launch is well timed to create a patriotic crescendo in a year when China’s growing national ambitions brought contention and glory.

In the build-up to the Beijing Olympics, Chinese nationalism was inflamed by international protests over Tibet that upset the international leg of the Games torch relay.

The devastating May 12 earthquake in the southwest then galvanised an intensely patriotic nationwide relief effort.

And then the Olympics in August brought China a winning haul of gold medals and another burst of patriotic pride.

To judge from internet chatter, the next Shenzhou launch will unleash another wave of state-nurtured patriotic fervour.

“China in 2008, the Olympics China, strong China, beautiful Shenzhou VII fly into space,” wrote one Internet user.

“Earthquakes cannot crush the Chinese people,” wrote another. “Our dreams fly skyward with science and technology.”

RIVALRY IN SPACE

Behind the spectacle, China’s space programme carries potential consequences that have generated anxiety in the United States and among other aspirating Asian space powers.

The government says the cost of shooting humans into space — officially, about 1 billion yuan ($150 million) each time so far — is a sliver of the bulging state budget. But the total cost of the programme is heavy even for increasingly wealthy China.

Chinese scientists persuaded leaders to back manned spaceflight by arguing the prestigious task would help state labs attract engineers otherwise heading into private business, said Pollpeter, the Washington-based analyst.

Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics now has 23,000 students, including about one-third directly involved in aerospace, he noted in a recent study, calling the ranks of youthful engineers “a strategic advantage for China.”

“We’ve already been able to use the experience and technology accumulated from the Shenzhou project,” said Huang Hai, the professor at the university.

“People have been moving out with new skills. So the practical benefits of manned flight are longer term, not instant pay-offs.”

Beijing has often said its technology is for peaceful ends. But especially after China showed its reach in space in 2007 by blasting apart one of its own aged satellites, Washington and Asian capitals have been wary of its military potential.

“The more other countries like China develop space technology, the more threatened the U.S. feels because of the dual-use issue,” said Johnson-Freese. “(It’s) a vicious cycle.”

Chinese experts in turn say U.S. domineering risks making space a zone of growing military rivalry and eventually competition over resources.

“There has emerged a dangerous tendency for space competition to mutate into a space arms race,” a senior Beijing analyst wrote in the latest issue of the journal China International Studies.

“An arms race in space is being unveiled, and it was provoked by the United States.”

But for now China is far behind the United States in the space race and that gap will remain for years to come, said several Chinese and U.S. experts.

To propel a space station skywards, Beijing must develop a new generation of Long March rockets. Their appearance has been delayed, probably until mid next decade. And there are countless other gadgets and techniques to be mastered.

“Comparing Chinese technology to that of the U.S. is like comparing a Ford Fiesta and a Mercedes,” said Johnson-Freese. “Both run and do the job, but the quality and advancements are very different.”

Iran has stymied a U.N. inquiry into whether it covertly researched how to make an atom bomb while steadily expanding uranium enrichment in defiance of international demands, a nuclear watchdog report said on Monday.Iran blamed the International Atomic Energy Agency for the impasse. A senior Iranian official, who asked not to be named, called on the Vienna-based IAEA to change its approach and work in a “legal and logical” manner.

The White House called on Iran to stop enriching uranium or face the possibility of more U.N. sanctions adding to relatively modest punitive measures the Islamic Republic has shrugged off.

A confidential report by the IAEA, the U.N.’s nuclear agency, said Iran had raised the number of centrifuges enriching uranium to 3,820, compared with 3,300 in May, with over 2,000 more being installed.

“We have arrived at a gridlock,” said a senior U.N. official familiar with the latest report, which urged Iran to take the intelligence allegations seriously to defuse suspicions its nuclear work is not entirely peaceful.

But Iran seemed some way from refining enough uranium to build a nuclear weapon, if it chose, the report indicated.

Iran had stockpiled 480 kg (1,050 pounds) of low-enriched uranium so far. It would need 1,700 kg (3,740 pounds) to convert into high-enriched uranium (HEU) for fuelling an atom bomb, said U.N. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“That would be a significant quantity, one unit of HEU, and would take of the order of two years,” said one official.

On the day the report emerged, Iran announced air defence exercises in half of the Islamic Republic’s 30 provinces.

Air defence commander Brigadier General Ahmad Mighani “emphasised that the enemies would receive a serious response for any aggression and we would surprise them and make them regretful,” the ISNA agency in Tehran reported.

Washington says it wants a diplomatic solution to the nuclear standoff, but has not ruled out military action if that fails. Iran, the world’s fourth-largest oil exporter, says its nuclear programme is a peaceful drive to generate electricity.

FULL DISCLOSURE

In its last report in May, the IAEA said Iran appeared to be withholding information needed to explain intelligence that it had linked projects to process uranium, test high explosives and modify a missile cone in a way suitable for a nuclear warhead.

IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei called on Iran then for “full disclosure” — namely, going beyond flat denials without providing access to sites, documentation or relevant officials for interviews to substantiate their stance.

Monday’s report said Iran had done nothing to that end.

“Regrettably the agency has not been able to make any substantial progress on the alleged (weaponisation) studies and other associated key remaining issues which remain of serious concern,” the report said.

It said IAEA investigators had stressed to Iran that the intelligence documentation was detailed and consistent enough “that it needs to be taken seriously, particularly in light of the fact that, as acknowledged by Iran, some of the information contained in it was factually accurate,” it said.

Unless Iran provided such transparency and allowed wider-ranging, snap U.N. inspections, the report said, the agency “will not be able to provide credible assurances about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran”.

Gregory Schulte, U.S. ambassador to the IAEA, said Iran was continuing to “rebuff the IAEA across the board” in defiance of four U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding it suspend enrichment and come clean with U.N. investigators.

“Iran’s refusal to address the (issues) is particularly troubling as it continues to develop the abilities to produce fissile material that could be weaponised into a nuclear bomb,” Schulte told reporters.

The report said Iran was also pressing ahead with tests of advanced centrifuges able to refine uranium 2-3 times faster than the machine it now uses, adapted from an antiquated 1970s model.

President George W. Bush Thursday invited Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to the White House Sep 25 in a major indication that the historic India-US civil nuclear deal may be close to be inked, sealed and delivered.The invitation to Manmohan Singh with whom he had signed a joint statement July 18, 2005, to set the nuclear ball rolling came hours after Bush asked the US Congress to approve the implementing 123 accord to end a three decades old ban on nuclear exports to India.

A White House statement announcing the invitation ‘to strengthen the Strategic Partnership and build upon our progress in other areas of cooperation’ said Bush ‘looks forward to working with Congress to ensure passage on the agreement this year’.

But coming as it did after three days of hectic efforts led by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to push the Congress to hasten the approval process indicated that she might well have persuaded key lawmakers to get the deal approved before the legislature takes a break Sep 26 for the Nov 4 election.

‘The conclusion of this agreement, which completes the US-India Civil Nuclear Cooperation Initiative, has been a priority for both President Bush and Prime Minister Singh, and strengthens the US-India Strategic Partnership,’ the White House statement said.

‘This historic achievement will bolster international non-proliferation efforts, provide economic and business opportunities in both countries, and help India address its growing energy needs in an environmentally responsible manner,’ it said.

President Bush also looks forward to welcoming Prime Minister Singh to the White House on September 25, 2008, to strengthen the Strategic Partnership and build upon our progress in other areas of cooperation, such as agriculture, education, trade, and defence,’ the White House statement added.

The success of Bush administration to get the deal to end India’s nuclear isolation approved by the Congress before Manmohan Singh’s visit to the White House hangs on three key players.

The Democrat trio, the speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Senate majority leader Democrat Harry Reid and House foreign affairs panel chairman Howard Berman hold the key to putting the approval process on fast track.

Of them, Reid has indicated he will work to win approval this year of the accord, but it was still unclear what view Pelosi and Berman would take.

Rice has met all the three top Congressional leaders to discuss how to move the deal forward with the lawmakers without insisting on a rule that requires a resting period of 30 days for the legislation.

Alternatively, the Congress could come back for a lame-duck session after the election to approve the ‘Hyde Amendment package’ as the paperwork sent to the Capitol Hill is called.

‘Senator Reid indicated that he would try to find a way to move it forward, and will consult with the (Senate) Foreign Relations Committee and the Republican leadership to try and find a way to do so,’ his spokesman Jim Manley was quoted as saying.

Asked if that meant Reid would try to advance the deal this year, he said, ‘Yes.’ But the position of Pelosi, who is reluctant to hold a lame-duck session after the election is unclear.

So is that of Berman, who supports the deal, but had some reservations about the waiver given by the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) to India for nuclear trade.

A spokesman for Pelosi said after her meeting with Rice Tuesday that she looked forward to reviewing the formal agreement in detail and to consulting on the matter with her colleagues, including Berman.

Apart from meeting Reid, Pelosi and Berman, Rice has been working on the phone to drum up support for quick passage for the deal with calls to key lawmakers including Democratic Vice Presidential nominee, Joe Biden, who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Biden is an avid supporter of the deal

The Bush administration pulled out all stops to push the deal after it helped win India a waiver for nuclear trade from NSG removing the last hurdle in presenting the deal to the US Congress.

India had crossed the first hurdle by reaching an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for an additional safeguards protocol for its civilian nuclear facilities.

Australia will not sell uranium to India despite voting with other members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) to end a 34-year embargo on nuclear trade with Delhi, officials said Monday.Prime Minister Kevin Rudd took office in November pledged to withhold uranium sales so long as India remains outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

John Howard, his conservative predecessor, held that India’s refusal to sign the NPT should not debar it from importing uranium from Australia, custodian of 40 percent of the world’s known reserves.

‘Labor is committed to supplying uranium to only those countries party to the NPT,’ Trade Minister Simon Crean told The Australian newspaper.

‘Australia will therefore not be supplying uranium to India while it is not a member of the NPT.’

In a NSG meeting in Vienna at the weekend Australia supported a waiver allowing India to engage in nuclear trade so long as its nuclear programme came under an inspection regime.

The opposition Liberal Party said the Rudd government, which has no objections to selling uranium to China, is being hypocritical by at once supporting technology transfer but banning the export of the feedstock for the nuclear power stations that India wants to build.

The Liberals argue that nuclear power is green energy and Australia ought to be supporting India’s efforts to reduce its emissions.

Brazil’s president tried to avert a political crisis Monday after the national intelligence service was accused of tapping the phones of the Supreme Court chief and other top officials.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva met with Chief Justice Gilmar Mendes for more than two hours Monday after the Veja newsweekly published transcripts of what it said was a conversation between Mendes and opposition Sen. Demostenes Torres.

According to the magazine, Torres was asking Mendes for help in overturning a lower-court decision to keep a witness from appearing before his senate committee investigating pedophilia.

Neither Mendez nor Silva commented after emerging from their meeting, but presidential spokesman Marcelo Baumbach later said Silva expressed his “concern and indignation” that Mendes’ phone was tapped. He said Silva was still deciding what measures to take.

Opposition leaders called for a congressional investigation, and some even said Silva could be impeached. They said even if the president knew nothing about the wiretapping, the incident indicates that the intelligence agency, known by its Portuguese acronym ABIN, doesn’t obey his command.

“The government has to show that it has control of ABIN,” Torres said.

The head of a congressional committee that was already investigating illegal wiretapping said he would call Silva’s security chief to testify about who ordered the wiretaps.

“The charges are extremely serious,” said Rep. Marcelo Itagiba, the committee head. “Something much bigger is going on, a power struggle between groups within the government.”

But political analysts predicted that Silva would be able to contain the scandal before it affects his Workers Party in October municipal elections, a key test of his party’s strength ahead of the 2010 presidential vote.

Low-ranking Brazilian police and security officials are known to tap the phones of politicians and others in attempts to mount extortion schemes, said David Fleischer, a political scientist at the University of Brasilia. But he said such schemes rarely reach someone as powerful as the head of the Supreme Court.

He predicted the scandal would die down if top administration officials can show they weren’t involved.

“If they determine it was done by freelancers, and not as part of a deliberate policy decision, there will be no real repercussions for Lula,” Fleischer said.

A turtle that toddled alongside the dinosaurs died just days before laying a clutch of eggs. Now, about 75 million years later, paleontologists are announcing their find of the fossilized mother-to-be and the eggs tucked inside her body.

Scientists from the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Canada discovered the turtle in 1999 in a mud-filled channel in the badlands of southeastern Alberta. Then, in 2005, University of Calgary scientists found a nest of 26 eggs laid by another female of the same species in the same region.

Both specimens, described this week in the journal Biology Letters, belong to an extinct turtle in the Adocus genus, a large river turtle that resembles today’s slider and cooter turtles.

The pregnant turtle represents the first fossil turtle to be unearthed with eggs still inside the body cavity, the scientists say.

“Although it is relatively rare to find the eggs and babies of extinct animals, it is even rarer to find them inside the body of the mother,” said researcher Darla Zelenitsky, a geoscientist at the University of Calgary in Alberta, who was also involved in the first discovery of a dinosaur with eggs inside its body.

Fertile find

It was almost by accident that scientists realized that the fossil turtle had been pregnant.

“The reason we knew she was pregnant was because when the fossil was found the body was broken,” Zelenitsky told LiveScience, “so there was egg shell on the ground just below the fossil, it was falling out of the body.”

The team spotted at least five crushed eggs within the body of the fossilized female, and computed tomography (CT) scans revealed more eggs hidden beneath the turtle’s shell. The turtle, estimated to be about 16 inches (40 cm) long, could have produced about 20 eggs.

When still intact, the eggs would have been spherical and about 1.5 inches (4 cm) in diameter. The eggs from the nearby nest were about the same size and shape. Both sets of eggs also had extremely thick and hard shells, especially compared with most modern turtles whose shells are either thinner or soft.

Thick-shelled

The thick eggshell may have evolved to protect the eggs from drying out or from voracious predators that lived during the Age of Dinosaurs.

The pregnant turtle and nest specimens, the researchers say, shed light on the evolution of reproductive traits of modern turtles.

“Based on these fossils, we have determined that the ancestor of living hidden-necked turtles, which are most of today’s turtles and tortoises, laid a large number of eggs and had hard, rigid shells,” said François Therrien, the Museum’s Curator of Dinosaur Palaeoecology, who worked on the turtle report in the journal.

• Rumor or Reality: The Creatures of Cryptozoology
• Image Gallery: Dinosaur Fossils
• Do All Turtles Have Shells?

• Original Story: Fossil of Ancient Pregnant Turtle Discovered

LiveScience.com chronicles the daily advances and innovations made in science and technology. We take on the misconceptions that often pop up around scientific discoveries and deliver short, provocative explanations with a certain wit and style. Check out our science videos, Trivia & Quizzes and Top 10s. Join our community to debate hot-button issues like stem cells, climate change and evolution. You can also sign up for free newsletters, register for RSS feeds and get cool gadgets at the LiveScience Store.