AO Weekly News Round Up 1-11-9
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The A-O Weekly News Round Up
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For
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1-11-09
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Editor's Note: This page is the residual leftover of the week's news as several major news stories are posting on separate article pages.
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US Navy To Lead World Navy
Against Somali Pirates
The US Navy will lead an international naval task force in the battle against Somali Pirates off the Horn of Africa. Operations are expected to begin this week in an attempt to sharpen a coorindated military approach against the pirates rather than unorganized, haphazard attempts by warships of various nations.
The Pentagon hails this new effort as part of a move to create an international structure that combines military forces, intelligence sharing and coordinated patrols in the battle against piracy along the African coast's vital shipping lanes. In some respects it suggests the first infant steps towards a 1-world Government navy.
At the moment, more than a dozen warships are patrolling pirate-infested waters around the Horn of Africa and its vital shipping lanes. The U.S. Russia, Britain, France, China, India and even Iran are committing warships to the region. All told, 20 nations will take part in furnishing warships for the operation. More details, LINK HERE.
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More on Obama's Citizenship
Supreme Court Won't Stop Inauguration
A legal challenge that alleges Barack Obama isn't a "natural born" citizen and therefore constitutionally ineligible to be president of the United States will follow the Democrat into the Oval Office, with a U.S. Supreme Court conference on the dispute set after the Jan. 20 inauguration.
The court's website today announced that a fourth case on the issue will be reviewed by justices Jan. 23.
The court previously heard two cases in conference – private meetings at which justices consider which cases to accept – and denied both Cort Wrotnowski and Leo Donofrio full hearings.
The court now has a conference scheduled Friday on a case raised by attorney Philip Berg, with another conference on a matter related to the same Berg case on Jan. 16. Then today the court website revealed the case Gail Lightfoot et al v. Debra Bowen, California Secretary of State, will be heard in conference Jan. 23.
The case initially appeared at the Supreme Court Dec. 12 but was rejected. It then was submitted to Chief Justice John Roberts, and today's notice confirmed it was distributed for the Jan. 23 conference.
Orly Taitz, the California attorney handling the case, said, "The timing of this decision by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, is absolutely remarkable. On January 7, one day before the January 8 vote by Congress and Senate whether to approve or object to the electoral vote of Barack Hussein Obama, aka Barry Soetoro, as president of the United States, Chief Justice Roberts is sending a message to them: 'Hold on, not so fast, there is value in this case, read it.'"
There is much more coverage on this story at WorldNetDaily - for complete details, LINK HERE.
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China Issues Bird Flu Alert
After One Death
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Sunday Oil Prices Fall
Oil Prices Hover at $40
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Crude Oil Drops Big on Wed
Down 12% or nearly $5 a barrel
Biggest 1-day Drop in 7 Years
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Mystery Roar From Outer Space Detected
Space is typically thought of as a very quiet place. But one team of astronomers has found a strange cosmic noise that booms six times louder than expected.
The roar is from the distant cosmos. Nobody knows what causes it.
Of course, sound waves can't travel in a vacuum (which is what most of space is), or at least they can't very efficiently. But radio waves can.
Radio waves are not sound waves, but they are still electromagnetic waves, situated on the low-frequency end of the light spectrum.
Many objects in the universe, including stars and quasars, emit radio waves. Even our home galaxy, the Milky Way, emits a static hiss (first detected in 1931 by physicist Karl Jansky). Other galaxies also send out a background radio hiss.
But the newly detected signal, described here today at the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, is far louder than astronomers expected.
There is "something new and interesting going on in the universe," said Alan Kogut of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
A team led by Kogut detected the signal with a balloon-borne instrument named ARCADE (Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Diffuse Emission).
In July 2006, the instrument was launched from NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas, and reached an altitude of about 120,000 feet (36,500 meters), where the atmosphere thins into the vacuum of space.
ARCADE's mission was to search the sky for faint signs of heat from the first generation of stars, but instead they heard a roar from the distant reaches of the universe.
"The universe really threw us a curve," Kogut said. "Instead of the faint signal we hoped to find, here was this booming noise six times louder than anyone had predicted."
Detailed analysis of the signal ruled out primordial stars or any known radio sources, including gas in the outermost halo of our own galaxy.
Other radio galaxies also can't account for the noise – there just aren't enough of them.
"You'd have to pack them into the universe like sardines," said study team member Dale Fixsen of the University of Maryland. "There wouldn't be any space left between one galaxy and the next."
The signal is measured to be six times brighter than the combined emission of all known radio sources in the universe.
For now, the origin of the signal remains a mystery.
"We really don't know what it is,"said team member Michael Seiffert of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
And not only has it presented astronomers with a new puzzle, it is obscuring the sought-for signal from the earliest stars. But the cosmic static may itself provide important clues to the development of galaxies when the universe was much younger, less than half its present age. Because the radio waves come from far away, traveling at the speed of light, they therefore represent an earlier time in the universe.
"This is what makes science so exciting," Seiffert said. "You start out on a path to measure something – in this case, the heat from the very first stars – but run into something else entirely, some unexplained."
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