It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, September 15, 2022
Fossilized Barf From 150 Million Years Ago Reveals Ancient Meal
Amanda Kooser - 1h ago
Around 150 million years ago in what's now Utah, an animal chowed down on a small frog and a salamander. It then lost its lunch. Fast forward to modern times, when a team of paleontologists identified and investigated the fossilized vomit, unraveling a mystery along the way.
The researchers published a study on the puke in the journal Palaios late last month. The scientists found frog bones, including some that likely came from a tadpole, and bits from a salamander. "Aspects of this new fossil, relating to the arrangement and concentration of the bones in the deposit, the mix of animals, and the chemistry of the bones and matrix, suggested that the pile of bones was regurgitated out by a predator," Utah State Parks said in a statement on Tuesday.
Whose puke was it? The vomit dates back to the Late Jurassic, a time when dinosaurs like the jumbo-size Brachiosaurus and armored Stegosaurus still roamed. Shoutout to ReBecca Hunt-Foster, a paleontologist at Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, for coining the phrase "Jurassic Barf." However, the vomit didn't come from a dino.
The fossil site, famous for plant remains, was a pond long ago, home to amphibians and fish. The researchers worked out that a bowfin fish most did the vomiting. It's possible the ancient fish upchucked to distract a predator. Utah State Parks noted the paleontologists jokingly referred to the fossil find as the "fish-puked tadpole."
Despite having happened many millions of years ago, the vomit represents a familiar scene.
"There were three animals that we still have around today, interacting in ways also known today among those animals -- prey eaten by predators and predators perhaps chased by other predators," said study co-author John Foster, curator of the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum. "That itself shows how similar some ancient ecosystems were to places on Earth today."
The researchers hope to find other, similar fossils within Utah's Morrison Formation, a layer of history that also preserves many dinosaur remains. Puke might not seem like the most glamorous paleontology subject, but it's a fascinating (and slightly gross) window into life long ago.
A 380-million-year-old fish heart found embedded in a chunk of Australian sediment has scientists' pulses racing. Not only is this organ in remarkable condition, but it could also yield clues about the evolution of jawed vertebrates, which include you and me.
The heart belonged to an extinct class of armored, jawed fish called arthrodires that thrived in the Devonian period between 419.2 million and 358.9 million years ago -- and it's a good 250 million years older than the jawed-fish heart that currently holds the "oldest" title. But despite the fish being so archaic, the positioning of its S-shaped ticker with two chambers led researchers to observe surprising anatomical similarities between the ancient swimmer and modern sharks.
"Evolution is often thought of as a series of small steps, but these ancient fossils suggest there was a larger leap between jawless and jawed vertebrates," said Professor Kate Trinajstic, a vertebrate paleontologist at Australia's Curtin University and co-author of a new study on the findings. "These fish literally have their hearts in their mouths and under their gills -- just like sharks today," Trinajstic said.
The study appeared in the journal Science on Wednesday.
Scientists got an extra good look at the organ's exact location because they were able to observe it in relation to the fish's fossilized stomach, intestine and liver, a rare happening.
"I can't tell you how truly amazed I was to find a 3D and beautifully preserved heart and other organs in this ancient fossil," Trinajstic said.
Paleontologists encountered the fossil during a 2008 expedition at Western Australia's GoGo Formation, and it adds to a trove of information gleaned from the site, including the origins of teeth and insights into the fin-to-limb transition. The GoGo Formation, a sedimentary deposit in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, is known for its rich fossil record preserving reef life from the Devonian period of the Paleozoic era, including relics of tissues as delicate as nerves and embryos with umbilical cords.
"Most cases of soft-tissue preservation are found in flattened fossils, where the soft anatomy is little more than a stain on the rock," said study co-author Professor Per Ahlberg of Sweden's Uppsala University. "We are also very fortunate in that modern scanning techniques allow us to study these fragile soft tissues without destroying them. A couple of decades ago, the project would have been impossible."
Those techniques include neutron beams and X-ray microtomography, which creates cross sections of physical objects that can then be used to re-create virtual 3D models.
And study co-author Ahlberg has a reminder for those who might not consider such finds significant: that life is, at its most fundamental level, an evolving system.
"That we ourselves and all the other living organisms with which we share the planet have developed from a common ancestry through a process of evolution is not an incidental fact," Ahlberg said. "It is the most profound truth of our existence. We are all related, in the most literal sense."
CHINA WAS RIGHT Lancet Report Claiming COVID Could Have Come From U.S. Lab Met With Uproar
Dan Ladden-Hall - 11h ago
A top medical journal at the heart of several pandemic-related controversies published a major COVID-19 Commission report Wednesday that concluded the deadly pathogen might possibly have leaked from a United States laboratory.
The report also called for new safeguards to be put in place to prevent future natural spillovers—in which an animal transmits a virus to a human, who then passes it to other humans—and research-related spillovers.
But concerns have been raised about the commission’s chairman—prominent economist Jeffrey Sachs—and his previous comments about the origins of COVID.
Earlier this year, the Columbia University academic said he was “pretty convinced” the pathogen “came out of a U.S. lab of biotechnology, not out of nature.” When asked about the view, Sachs told Politico in July that he believed the virus “quite likely emerged from a U.S.-backed laboratory research program,” adding: “A natural spillover is also possible, of course. Both hypotheses are viable at this stage.”
“Sachs’ appearance on RFK Jr’s podcast… undermines the seriousness of the Lancet Commission’s mission to the point of completely negating it,” Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization in Canada, told the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper.
“This may be one of the Lancet’s most shameful moments regarding its role as a steward and leader in communicating crucial findings about science and medicine,” Rasmussen said, adding that she’d been “pretty shocked at how flagrantly” the report had ignored important evidence about the origin of COVID.
Sachs told the outlet that he stood by his earlier comments, adding that all of the Lancet’s commissioners had signed off on the final wording of the report.
But Peter Hotez, a member of the Lancet Commission and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas (and a Daily Beast contributor), said there had been “diverse views” and that he had “pushed hard on removing” the references to American labs in the report because it was “a distraction.” He added that he was left “speechless” by Sachs’ appearance on Kennedy’s podcast.
Wednesday’s report is just the latest controversy surrounding The Lancet and the pandemic.
In February 2020, in the earliest days of the outbreak of the virus, The Lancet published a letter signed by 27 public-health scientists slamming “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” The Telegraph later reported that 26 of the 27 signatories had connections to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the journal published a separate letter in 2021 that responded to the first by calling a research-related origin to the virus “plausible,” adding: “Research-related hypotheses are not misinformation and conjecture.”
The journal also notoriously retracted a major May 2020 article that had questioned the efficacy of using the drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID, which then-President Donald Trump had advocated. After pulling the paper over concerns about data used in the study, The Lancet updated its editorial and peer-review policies in order to reduce “risks of research and publication misconduct.”
And even before the coronavirus pandemic, The Lancet unwittingly played a central role in the formation of the modern anti-vaccine movement at the end of the 20th century. In 1998, the journal published an article by British former physician Andrew Wakefield linking the MMR vaccine with autism. The study was ultimately proved to be a complete fraud and was retracted in 2010, with Wakefield being barred from practicing medicine in the U.K. He has nevertheless been revered by anti-vaxxers, including the likes of RFK Jr., with his acolytes continuing to spread dangerous health myths to this day.
In a statement to The Daily Beast, a spokesperson for The Lancet said: “The Lancet COVID-19 Commission includes 11 Task Forces in areas ranging from vaccine development to humanitarian relief strategies, safe workplaces, and global economic recovery.
“Throughout the Commission’s two years of work, The Lancet, in collaboration with Commission Chair Professor Jeffrey Sachs, regularly evaluated the work of each Task Force as scientific evidence about COVID-19 evolved to ensure that the final peer-reviewed report will provide valuable new insights to support a coordinated, global response to COVID-19 as well as to prevent future pandemics and contain future disease outbreaks.”
NASA Traces Supernova Remains Back to the Middle Ages
Monisha Ravisetti -
In the 14th century, while bloodshed from the Hundred Years' war spilled onto Earth, remnants of a dead star might have shone in the sky.
Three very strong telescopes combined to bring you this image of a supernova's graveyard.
NASA announced Monday that three powerful telescopes -- the Hubble, the Spitzer and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory -- joined forces to study debris stemming from a white dwarf's death. Think of these stellar remains as the overall aftermath of the star's final moments, the environment in which it met its demise.
The astronomers who parsed all this cosmic data say they've managed to glean enough clues to decode an exquisite timeline of the destroyed star's violent detonation long, long ago.
"This data provides scientists a chance to 'rewind' the movie of the stellar evolution that has played out since and figure out when it got started," Chandra team members wrote in a statement. A preprint of these results can be seen here.
Eventually, this could elucidate when and where the stellar body might have blown up in the first place, but as the team began piecing together that story, it also realized something immensely fascinating about one particular part of the supernova's remains.
An aspect of the star's mortal evidence, located some 160,000 light-years away from Earth in a small galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud, might have emitted luminescence post-explosion that finally reached our planet during the Middle Ages. Yes, that means it decked the night sky within the same year we attribute to the apotheosis of the Ming Dynasty and most tragic point of the Black Plague.
The remnant is named SNR 0519-69.0, or SNR 0519 for short. (SNR stands for supernova remnant, as you might have guessed.)
On the upper end of their estimate, the scientists believe the remnant's deep-space light might have appeared about 670 years ago. However, based on its space-borne trajectory, they say it's also likely "the material has slowed down since the initial explosion and that the explosion happened more recently than 670 years ago."
OK, but what am I looking at here?
In the striking image released alongside this discovery, SNR 0519 seems to be a translucent, magenta blob against the star-studded canvas of space.
What you're looking at is a conglomerate of the telescopes' observations, overlaid to create a full diagram of the stellar fragment. Let's break it down.
Whoever picked the color combination for this space pic is probably my hero.
The strong, pinkish-red areas and white wispy trails come from Hubble optical data to indicate the SNR's outline. If you look closely, you'll also see some green splotches, blue marks and purple halo-like designs leaking from the two. Those are colorized X-Ray observations that represent, respectively, low, medium and high energies emitted. Some overlaps of Chandra observations also show up as white-ish areas, and the brightest regions of the image dictate the slowest-moving material.
If you're wondering about Spitzer, this machine was more of a behind-the-scenes helper. It provided lots of data integral to the timeline goal of the team's study.
Of note, Hubble images of SNR from 2010, 2011 and 2020, NASA says, also measured speeds of the material provoked by the explosion's blast wave. Put together, this led to the conclusion that the remnant spurted out within a whopping range of 3.8 million to 5.5 million miles per hour -- the higher end of that is the part that supports the team's 670 years estimation for the initial eruption.
But again, NASA urges that "these results imply that some of the blast wave has crashed into dense gas around the remnant, causing it to slow down as it traveled," deeming the other scenario to have a solid likelihood, too.
Long lost moon could have been responsible for Saturn's rings
AFP -
Discovered by Galileo 400 years ago, the rings of Saturn are about the most striking thing astronomers with small telescopes can spot in our solar system.
But even today, experts cannot agree on how or when they formed.
A new study published Thursday in the prestigious journal Science sets out to provide a convincing answer.
Between 100-200 million years ago, an icy moon they named Chrysalis broke up after getting a little too close to the gas giant, they conclude.
While most of it made impact with Saturn, its remaining fragments broke into small icy chunks that form the planet's signature rings.
"It's nice to find a plausible explanation," Jack Wisdom, professor of planetary sciences at MIT and lead author of the new study, told AFP.
Saturn, the sixth planet from the Sun, was formed four and a half billion years ago, at the beginning of the solar system.
But a few decades ago, scientists suggested that Saturn's rings appeared much later: only about 100 million years ago.
The hypothesis was reinforced by observations made by the Cassini probe, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017.
"But because no one could think of a way to make the rings 100 million years ago, some people have been questioning the reasoning that led to that deduction," said Wisdom.
By constructing complex mathematical models, Wisdom and colleagues found an explanation that both justified the timeline, and allowed them to better understand another characteristic of the planet, its tilt.
Saturn has a 26.7 degree tilt. Being a gas giant, it would have been expected that the process of accumulating matter that led to its formation would have prevented tilt.
- Gravitational interactions -
Scientists recently discovered that Titan, the largest of Saturn's 83 moons, is migrating away from the planet, at a rate of 11 centimeters a year.
This changes the rate at which Saturn's axis of tilt loops around the vertical -- the technical term is "precession." Think of a spinning top drawing circles.
Around a billion years ago, this wobble frequency came into sync with Neptune's wobbly orbit, creating a powerful gravitational interaction called "resonance."
In order to maintain this lock, as Titan kept moving out, Saturn had to tilt, scientists argued.
But that explanation hinged on knowing how mass was distributed in the planet's interior, since the tilt would have behaved differently if it were concentrated more at its surface or the core.
In the new study, Wisdom and colleagues modeled the planet's interior using gravitational data gathered by Cassini during its close approach "Grand Finale," its last act before plunging into Saturn's depths.
The model they generated found Saturn is now slightly out of sync with Neptune, which necessitated a new explanation -- an event powerful enough to cause the drastic disruption.
Working through the mathematics, they found a lost moon fit the bill.
"It's pulled apart into a bunch of pieces and those pieces subsequently get pulled apart even more, and gradually rolls into the rings."
The missing Moon was baptized Chrysalis by MIT's Wisdom, likening the emergence of Saturn's rings to a butterfly emerging from a cocoon.
The team thinks Chrysalis was a bit smaller than our own Moon, and about the size of another Saturn satellite, Iapetus, which is made entirely of water ice.
"So it's plausible to hypothesize that Chrysalis is also made of water ice, and that's what it needs to make the rings, because the rings are almost pure water.
Asked whether he felt the mystery of Saturn's rings stood solved, Wisdom replied, soberly, "We've made a good contribution."
The Saturn satellite system still holds "a variety of mysteries," he added.
ia/dw
Mars rover sees hints of past life in latest rock samples
Issued on: 15/09/2022 -
Percy cored two samples from a rock called "Wildcat Ridge," which is about three feet (one meter) wide, and on July 20 abraded some of its surface so it could be analyzed with an instrument called SHERLOC that uses ultraviolet light
Handout NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS/AFP
Washington (AFP) – NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has detected its highest concentrations yet of organic molecules, in a potential signal of ancient microbes that scientists are eager to confirm when the rock samples are eventually brought to Earth.
While organic matter has been found on the Red Planet before, the new discovery is seen as especially promising because it came from an area where sediment and salts were deposited into a lake -- conditions where life could have arisen.
"It is very fair to say that these are going to be, these already are, the most valuable rock samples that have ever been collected," David Shuster, a Perseverance return sample scientist, told reporters during a briefing.
Organic molecules -- compounds made primarily of carbon that usually include hydrogen and oxygen, but also at times other elements -- are not always created by biological processes.
Further analysis and conclusions will have to wait for the Mars Sample Return mission -- a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to bring back the rocks that is set for 2033.
Nicknamed Percy, the rover landed on Mars' Jezero Crater in February 2021, tasked with caching samples that may contain signs of ancient life, as well as characterizing the planet's geology and past climate.
The delta it is exploring formed 3.5 billion years ago. The rover is currently there investigating sedimentary rocks, which came about from particles of various sizes settling in the then watery environment.
Percy cored two samples from a rock called "Wildcat Ridge," which is about three feet (one meter) wide, and on July 20 abraded some of its surface so it could be analyzed with an instrument called SHERLOC that uses ultraviolet light.
The results showed a class of organic molecules called aromatics, which play a key role in biochemistry.
"This is a treasure hunt for potential signs of life on another planet," NASA astrobiologist Sunanda Sharma said.
"Organic matter is a clue and we're getting stronger and stronger clues...I personally find these results so moving because it feels like we're in the right place, with the right tools, at a very pivotal moment."
There have been other tantalizing clues about the possibility of life on Mars before, including repeated detections of methane by Perseverance's predecessor, Curiosity.
While methane is a digestive byproduct of microbes here on Earth, it can also be generated by geothermal reactions where no biology is at play.
New UNICEF ambassador seeks to give louder voice to climate change victims
AFP -
Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate recently traveled to the drought-ravaged Horn of Africa to hear from children suffering from starvation. The next day she learned that one of the boys she met had died.
It is for such children, whose lives have been shattered by the global climate crisis, that Nakate, UNICEF's newest Goodwill Ambassador, has set out to make their voices heard.
"I'm hoping to continue doing the same thing to amplify, and really platform, the stories of the children ... that are suffering, because of the climate crisis," Nakate, who is 25, told AFP in an interview.
Inspired by Sweden's climate crusader Greta Thunberg, several years ago Nakate founded the Rise Up Climate Movement in her native Uganda and has spoken at prestigious international climate events.
On Thursday, she was appointed the newest Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF, the United Nations' children's agency, joining recent high-profile supporters such as actor Priyanka Chopra Jonas, singer Katy Perry and Syrian refugee and education activist Muzoon Almellehan.
"In my journey of activism, I've always told myself, and I've always believed that every activist has a story to tell," Nakate said. "And every story has a solution to give and every solution has a life to change."
The activist says children and women suffer the most from global warming and her mission is make their voices heard -- but not to speak on their behalf.
"I cannot say that I can give a voice to anyone, because I believe everyone has their own distinct voice," she added.
"But the question is, who is listening to what we are saying? Who is paying attention?" - 'Roof for all of us' -
Last week, Nakate visited UNICEF-run hospitals and nutrition centers in Turkana, a Kenyan region in the Horn of Africa hit by devastating drought.
There she witnessed the tragedy firsthand.
"I got to meet many children suffering from severe, acute malnutrition, because of this drought," Nakate said of the trip. "One of the children that I got to meet that day, I got to learn the following morning that he had passed."
UNICEF says about half of the world's children -- roughly 1 billion -- live in one of 33 countries classified as "extremely high risk" due to climate change impacts.
Scientists say that droughts, floods, storms and heat waves will only get stronger and more frequent due to global warming, and Nakate is frustrated that governments around the world, busy with the war in Ukraine and the Covid-19 pandemic, are not doing enough to save the planet.
"It can be discouraging to see that the world is not paying the attention that it should to climate issues, it can be very frustrating," said the activist.
"Leaders especially need to understand that Earth is a home for all of us, is like that roof for all of us. And we have to ensure that the entire roof is well and no part is leaking," Nakate said. "Because any leak in a part of a roof will eventually affect everyone in that house."
abd/ube/md/dw
CLIMATE CRISIS IS A CAPITALI$T CRISIS Traffic, water shortages, now floods: the slow death of India's tech hub?
By Devjyot Ghoshal and Nivedita Bhattacharjee - Yesterday Water recedes in parts of India's Bengaluru, residents venture out
BENGALURU (Reuters) - Harish Pullanoor spent his weekends in the late 1980s tramping around the marshes and ponds of Yemalur, an area then on the eastern edge of the Indian metropolis of Bengaluru, where his cousins would join him catching small freshwater fish.
In the 1990s, Bengaluru, once a genteel city of gardens, lakes and a cool climate, rapidly became India's answer to Silicon Valley, attracting millions of workers and the regional headquarters of some of the world's biggest IT companies.
Concrete replaced green spaces and construction around the edge of lakes blocked off connecting canals, limiting the city's capacity to absorb and siphon off water.
Last week, after the city's heaviest rains in decades, the Yemalur neighbourhood was submerged under waist-deep water along with some other parts of Bengaluru, disrupting the southern metropolis' IT industry and dealing a blow to its reputation.
Traffic moves as water is pumped out of an inundated residential area following torrential rains in Bengaluru
Residents fed up with gridlocked traffic and water shortages during the dry season have long complained about the city's infrastructure.
But flooding during the monsoon has raised fresh questions about the sustainability of rapid urban development, especially if weather patterns become more erratic and intense because of climate change.
"It's very, very sad," said Pullanoor, who was born close to Yemalur but now lives in the western city of Mumbai, parts of which also face sporadic flooding like many of India's urban centres.
"The trees have disappeared. The parks have almost disappeared. There is chock-a-block traffic."
Big businesses are also complaining about worsening disruptions, which they say can cost them tens of millions of dollars in a single day.
Bengaluru hosts more than 3,500 IT companies and some 79 "tech parks" - upmarket premises that house offices and entertainment areas catering to technology workers.
Wading through flooded highways last week, they struggled to reach modern glass-faced complexes in and around Yemalur where multinational firms including JP Morgan and Deloitte operate alongside large Indian start-ups.
Millionaire entrepreneurs were among those forced to escape flooded living rooms and swamped bedrooms on the back of tractors.
Insurance companies said initial estimates for loss of property were ran into millions of rupees, with numbers expected to go up in the next few days.
'GLOBAL IMPACT'
The latest chaos triggered renewed worries from the $194 billion Indian IT services industry that is concentrated around the city.
"India is a tech hub for global enterprises, so any disruption here will have a global impact. Bangalore, being the centre of IT, will be no exception to this," said K.S. Viswanathan, vice president at industry lobby group the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM).
Bangalore was renamed Bengaluru in 2014.
NASSCOM is currently working to identify 15 new cities that could become software export hubs, said Viswanathan, who is driving the project.
"It is not a city-versus-city story," he told Reuters. "We as a country don't want to miss out on revenue and business opportunities because of a lack of infrastructure."
Even before the floods, some business groups including the Outer Ring Road Companies Association (ORRCA) that is led by executives from Intel, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft and Wipro, warned inadequate infrastructure in Bengaluru could encourage companies to leave.
"We have been talking about these for years," Krishna Kumar, general manager of ORRCA, said last week of problems related to Bengaluru's infrastructure. "We have come to a serious point now and all companies are on the same page."
Thomson Reuters also has major operations in Bengaluru.
"The safety of all employees is always our top priority," the company said in a statement. "While Thomson Reuters employees in Bangalore continue to work remotely throughout the recent flooding, there has been no impact to our operations."
In the early 1970s, more than 68% of Bengaluru was covered in vegetation.
By the late 1990s, the city's green cover had dropped to around 45% and by 2021 to less than 3% of its total area of 741 square kilometres, according to an analysis by T.V. Ramachandra of Bengaluru's Indian Institute of Science (IISC).
Green spaces can help absorb and temporarily store storm water, helping to protect built up areas.
"If this trend continues, by 2025, 98.5% (of the city) will be choked with concrete," said Ramachandra, who is part of IISC's Centre for Ecological Sciences. CITY IN DECAY Rapid urban expansion, often featuring illegal structures built without permission, has affected Bengaluru's nearly 200 lakes and a network of canals that once connected them, according to experts.
So when heavy rains lash the city like they did last week, drainage systems are unable to keep up, especially in low-lying areas like Yemalur.
The state government of Karnataka, where Bengaluru is located, said last week it would spent 3 billion Indian rupees ($37.8 million) to help manage the flood situation, including removing unauthorised developments, improving drainage systems and controlling water levels in lakes. "All the encroachments will be removed without any mercy," Karnataka Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai told reporters. "I will personally go and inspect."
Authorities have identified around 50 areas in Bengaluru that have been illegally developed. Those included high-end villas and apartments, according to Tushar Girinath, Chief Commissioner of Bengaluru's civic authority.
Last week, the state government also announced it would set up a body to manage Bengaluru's traffic and start discussions on a new storm water drainage project along a major highway.
Critics called the initiatives a knee-jerk reaction that could peter out.
"Every time it floods, only then we discuss," said IISC's Ramachandra. "Bengaluru is decaying. It will die."
($1 = 79.4130 Indian rupees)
(Reporting by Devjyot Ghoshal in NEW DELHI and Nivedita Bhattacharjee in BENGALURU, Additional reporting by Nandan Mandayam in BENGALURU; Editing by Mike Collett-White and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
France debates the right to die: It's not just a 'legal' issue, but also a 'philosophical' one
French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday announced a national debate meant to broaden end-of-life options that will include exploring the possibility of legalizing assisted suicide, with the aim of implementing changes next year. The current 2016 law in France provides that doctors can keep terminally ill patients sedated until death comes but stops short of legalizing assisted suicide. Joining the debate is Dr. Aurélien Raccah, Lawyer at the ELEA law firm in Paris and Directeur of the International & European Law School (IELS) at the Catholic University of Lille. "There is a right to life, legally, but the question that is asked today to the French people is whether we should create the right to die." Dr. Raccah explains that the answer to that question is not so clear cut. There's the 'legal' aspect and also the 'philosophical' one.
Baby pulled alive from under rubble of collapsed building in Jordan
By Al Mayadeen English Source: Agencies 15 Sep 23:35
A miracle in Jordan: Four-month-old baby Malak was rescued from under the rubble of a collapsed building in Amman.
Jordanian mother Israa Raed expressed indescribable joy Thursday after her four-month-old daughter Malak was rescued from under the rubble of a collapsed building in Amman.
"I knew it was her by her pink pyjamas," Israa Raed, 26, said as quoted by AFP, after waiting for more than 24 hours for any news of her only child.
"Words cannot describe how happy I am," she said. "I thank God she's safe."
Since Tuesday, hundreds of rescuers have combed the site of the four-story residential building in Jabal Al-Weibdeh, one of Amman's oldest neighborhoods.
Local authorities said at least ten people were killed, but the survival of Malak – 'Angel' in English – brought some relief to many Jordanians who watched the disaster unfold.
"The doctor said it was a miracle for my daughter to come out safely from under the ruins of a four-story building," the mother said, standing outside Luzmila Hospital, where Malak was being kept under observation.
On Wednesday, rescue workers extracted the young girl from a narrow gap in the debris, according to video footage shared by the civil defense service. She was only slightly bruised.
"I had a gut feeling that she was alive, and my husband had reassured me that she was waiting for us."
Hussam Abboud, a 50-year-old rescue worker, said that "it was a divine miracle" that Malak came out alive.
Jabal Al-Weibdeh is one of the oldest districts of Amman as it dates back to the early 20th century and is inhabited by a large number of expatriates.
https://digitalcollections.sit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3685&... · PDF file
The neighborhood of Jabal al-Weibdeh is one of Amman’s most historic neighborhoods, founded in the 1930s atop one of Amman
'Miracle' in Jordan as baby pulled alive from collapsed building
AFP -
Jordanian mother Israa Raed said she was indescribably happy Thursday, after emergency workers rescued her four-month-old daughter Malak from the rubble of a collapsed building in the capital Amman.
"I knew it was her by her pink pyjamas," Israa Raed, 26, told AFP, after waiting more than 24 hours for news of her only daughter.
"Words cannot describe how happy I am," she said. "I thank God she's safe."
Hundreds of rescuers have been scouring the site of the four-storey residential building in Jabal al-Weibdeh, one of Amman's oldest neighbourhoods, since it toppled over on Tuesday.
At least 10 people were killed, authorities said, but the survival of Malak -- 'Angel' in English -- heralded some relief for many Jordanians who watched the disaster unfold.
Video footage shared by the civil defence service shows rescue workers extracting the little girl on Wednesday from a narrow gap in the debris. She sustained only minor bruises.
"The doctor said it was a miracle for my daughter to come out safely from under the ruins of a four-storey building," the mother said, standing outside Luzmila Hospital, where Malak was being kept under observation.
"I had a gut feeling that she was alive, and my husband had reassured me that she was waiting for us."
Raed, who sells perfume and makeup, said she left her only daughter with a friend who lived in the basement of the building so that she could deliver an order.
"I don't live there. My friend lives there and I left my baby girl with her." - A cry from the wreckage -
"After about an hour, I got a phone call telling me that my daughter fell," she recalled. "I started running like crazy. I thought she may have fallen from her bed, but when I arrived, I saw that the whole building collapsed over my daughter."
"I started screaming, 'Where is my girl? Where is my girl?'"
Just over 24 hours later, "the rescue workers told me that they heard a little girl's cry," she said.
Hussam Abboud, a 50-year-old rescue worker, said that "it was a divine miracle" that Malak came out alive.
She wasn't seriously injured in the collapse itself, and "a small hole" in the concrete enabled her to carry on breathing, Raed said.
But she said that alongside her joy at baby Malak's survival, she felt sadness, because her friend -- and that friend's own little daughter -- did not make it out alive.
Another mother, who was out grocery shopping when the building collapsed, lost her three children, aged 17, 12 and nine.
A 45-year-old man was rescued from under the rubble on Wednesday, and defence sources initially said others may still be trapped there.
"I was hoping we would bring the rest out safely," said Wissam Ziyadin, a 42-year-old rescue worker, as the prospects of pulling more people out alive dimmed.
Jordan's public prosecutor Hassan al-Abdallat ordered the arrest of three people, state news agency Petra reported.
The trio were said to the building's manager as well as two other people involved in maintenance work that was supposed to have been carried out on the structure, Petra added.
Percy cored two samples from a rock called "Wildcat Ridge," which is about three feet (one meter) wide, and on July 20 abraded some of its surface so it could be analyzed with an instrument called SHERLOC that uses ultraviolet light
