Chuck Hagel nomination creates rare partisan fight over Pentagon post

The nomination of former senator Chuck Hagel to lead the Pentagon has set in motion a highly unusual campaign-style brawl over a Cabinet post long considered above politics.

Supporters and opponents are raising money and building political organizations in anticipation of a grueling and contentious Senate confirmation process.

The opponents, led by a conservative group called the Emergency Committee for Israel, began airing attack ads soon after the Nebraska Republican’s name surfaced weeks ago and on Monday rolled out a Web site, chuckhagel.com, to lay out its case against him. The group has questioned Hagel’s commitment to the security of the Jewish state and accused him of being soft on Iran.

White House officials, meantime, have begun an aggressive campaign to introduce “the real Chuck Hagel,” recruiting high-profile endorsements and contacting potential critics in an effort to neutralize opposition. For the first time since his name was floated, “the White House is putting its full muscle” behind Hagel, said a person familiar with the process.

In the past week, fundraising became a priority for both sides, introducing a new element of electoral-style politics into a realm that has seldom, if ever, seen it before.

A group of Hagel’s backers, led by Richard Burt, a senior diplomat in the Reagan administration, has formed a nonprofit organization and solicited contributions from donors active in foreign policy and defense. Burt said the aim was to prepare a public response to what they said was unfair criticism and make sure “Hagel was not whittled down” before he was nominated. With President Obama officially naming Hagel on Monday and the White House ramping up its defense of the nominee, Burt said his group will refund the donations.

As Burt’s group was getting started, another organization, the Bipartisan Group, hired the Podesta Group, a lobbying firm, to promote Hagel’s credentials.

The escalating campaigns come amid what has already been flurry of published letters, op-eds, and print and broadcast advertisements.

Officials at the Emergency Committee for Israel said Monday that they are ramping up a substantial online ad campaign, buying Google keywords, and placing ads on Facebook and Twitter to drive traffic to its new anti-Hagel Web site. “Anyone concerned about Chuck Hagel is going to see what we have to contribute to this debate in the coming weeks,” said Noah Pollak, the group’s executive director.

The Log Cabin Republicans, which supports gay rights, purchased a full-page ad in Monday’s Washington Post recalling Hagel’s 1996 statement supporting the Defense of Marriage Act, as well as a statement he made in 1998 referring to an ambassadorial nominee as being “openly, aggressively gay.” The ad takes note of Hagel’s recent regret for his past comments and labels the apology “Too little, too late.” Gregory T. Angelo, the group’s interim executive director, declined to say how much money the group raised for the anti-Hagel ads.

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"17 billion" Earth-sized planets in Milky Way: study

WASHINGTON: The Milky Way contains at least 17 billion planets the size of Earth, and likely many more, according to a study out Monday that raises the chances of discovering a sister planet to ours.

Astronomers using NASA's Kepler spacecraft found that about 17 per cent of stars in our galaxy have a planet about the size of Earth in a close orbit.

The Milky Way is known to host about 100 billion stars, meaning that about one of every six has an Earth-sized planet around it.

The finding does not mean that all those planets beyond our solar system, or exoplanets, could be habitable, though it increases the chances of finding planets similar to Earth.

In order to host life, and allow water to flow in liquid form, a planet must be at a distance from its star that allows surface temperatures to be neither too hot nor too cold.

The Kepler craft detected possible exoplanets when they passed in front of their star, creating a mini-eclipse that dims the star slightly.

During the first 16 months of the survey, Kepler identified about 2,400 candidates.

Francois Fressin, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and his colleagues used the results to determine which signals were true and to list the exoplanets by size.

They found that 17 percent of stars have a planet 0.8 to 1.25 times the size of Earth in an orbit of 85 days or less.

About a fourth of stars have a super Earth (1.25 to twice the size of Earth) in an orbit of 150 days or less, with a same fraction having a mini Neptune (two to four times Earth) in orbits up to 250 days long.

Larger planets are a much rarer occurrence. Only about three percent of stars have a large Neptune (four to six times Earth) and only five percent have a gas giant (six to 22 times Earth) in an orbit of 400 days or less.

The researchers presented the analysis at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, California.

Separately, NASA's Kepler mission announced it had discovered 461 new possible planets.

Four of them are less than twice the size of Earth and orbit their sun's "habitable zone," where liquid water might exist on the planet's surface and thus make life possible.

The findings, based on observations conducted from May 2009 to March 2011, showed the number of smaller-size planet candidates and the number of stars with more than one candidate steadily rising.

-AFP/ac

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Yadavinder Singh's anniversary a low key affair

PATIALA: Once celebrated as a big event, the 100th birth anniversary of late Maharaja Yadavindra Singh of Patiala on Monday passed off without any grand celebrations. A majority of the city residents were not even aware of the event as the family members of the late ruler preferred to celebrate it at a personal level.

"There should at least be a small function so that our younger generation knows about the birth anniversary of the king, who fought with enemies to save Patiala," said Khushwinderpal, who has run a shop in Quila Mubarak for last 30 years.

Family members and some relatives of Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee president Amarinder Singh, who is the elder son of the Maharaja, reached Patiala on Saturday evening and attended a bhog ceremony at Qila Mubarak the next morning.

About the lack of care of many properties of the family, including Qila Mubarak, Sheesh Mahal, Old Moti Bagh Palace, National Institute of Sports and Pinjore Gardens, which were donated by Maharaja Yadavinder Singh to the government, Malvinder accused both the Central and state government of playing politics.

"The Union and the state government must remember that now these properties belong to the nation and must be maintained properly. These were donated for better maintenance as my family alone could not do so properly. But almost all the buildings are dying a slow death due to lack of care," alleged Malvinder.

Although Malvinder parted ways with his brother and family to join the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) in February 2012, they continue to play a perfect host to their relatives, who are expected here on every birthday of their father. "It's purely a family function and has nothing to do with politics. Our entire family is united during all our personal functions," he added.

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Primitive and Peculiar Mammal May Be Hiding Out in Australia

It’d be hard to think of a mammal that’s weirder than the long-beaked, egg-laying echidna. Or harder to find.

Scientists long thought the animal, which has a spine-covered body, a four-headed penis, and a single hole for reproducing, laying eggs, and excreting waste, lived only in New Guinea. The population of about 10,000 is critically endangered. Now there is tantalizing evidence that the echidna, thought to have gone extinct in Australia some 10,000 years ago, lived and reproduced there as recently as the early 1900s and may still be alive on Aussie soil.

The new echidna information comes from zoologist Kristofer Helgen, a National Geographic emerging explorer and curator of mammals at the Smithsonian Institution. Helgen has published a key finding in ZooKeys confirming that a skin and skull collected in 1901 by naturalist John T. Tunney in Australia is in fact the western long-beaked echidna, Zaglossus bruijnii. The specimen, found in the West Kimberley region of Western Australia, was misidentified for many years.

(More about echidnas: Get to know this living link between mammals and reptiles.)

Helgen has long been fascinated by echidnas. He has seen only three in the wild. “Long-beaked echidnas are hard to get your hands on, period,” he said. “They are shy and secretive by nature. You’re lucky if you can find one. And if you do, it will be by chance.” Indeed, chance played a role in his identification of the Australian specimen. In 2009, he visited the Natural History Museum of London, where he wanted to see all of the echidnas he could. He took a good look in the bottom drawer of the echidna cabinet, where the specimens with less identifying information are often stored. From among about a dozen specimens squeezed into the drawer, he grabbed the one at the very bottom.

(Related from National Geographic magazine: “Discovery in the Foja Mountains.”)

“As I pulled it out, I saw a tag that I had seen before,” Helgen said. “I was immediately excited about this label. As a zoologist working in museums you get used to certain tags: It’s a collector’s calling card. I instantly recognized John Tunney’s tag and his handwriting.”

John Tunney was a well-known naturalist in the early 20th century who went on collecting expeditions for museums. During an Australian expedition in 1901 for Lord L. Walter Rothschild’s private museum collection, he found the long-beaked echidna specimen. Though he reported the locality on his tag as “Mt Anderson (W Kimberley)” and marked it as “Rare,” Tunney left the species identification field blank. When he returned home, the specimen was sent to the museum in Perth for identification. It came back to Rothschild’s museum identified as a short-beaked echidna.

With the specimen’s long snout, large size, and three-clawed feet, Helgen knew that it must be a long-beaked echidna. The short-beaked echidna, still alive and thriving in Australia today, has five claws, a smaller beak, and is half the size of the long-beaked echidna, which can weigh up to 36 pounds (16 kilograms).

As Helgen began tracing the history and journey of the specimen over the last century, he crossed the path of another fascinating mind who had also encountered the specimen. Oldfield Thomas was arguably the most brilliant mammalogical taxonomist ever. He named approximately one out of every six mammals known today.

Thomas was working at the Natural History Museum in London when the Tunney echidna specimen arrived, still misidentified as a short-beaked echidna. Thomas realized the specimen was actually a long-beaked echidna and removed the skull and some of the leg bones from the skin to prove that it was an Australian record of a long-beaked echidna, something just as unexpected then as it is now.

No one knows why Thomas did not publish that information. And the echidna went back into the drawer until Helgen came along 80 years later.

As Helgen became convinced that Tunney’s long-beaked echidna specimen indeed came from Australia, he confided in fellow scientist Mark Eldridge of the Australian Museum about the possibility. Eldridge replied, “You’re not the first person who’s told me that there might be long-beaked echidnas in the Kimberley.” (That’s the Kimberley region of northern Australia.) Scientist James Kohen, a co-author on Helgen’s ZooKeys paper, had been conducting fieldwork in the area in 2001 and spoke to an Aboriginal woman who told him how “her grandmothers used to hunt” large echidnas.

This is “the first evidence of the survival into modern times of any long-beaked echidna in Australia,” said Tim Flannery, professor at Macquarie University in Sydney. “This is a truly significant finding that should spark a re-evaluation of echidna identifications from across northern Australia.”

Helgen has “a small optimism” about finding a long-beaked echidna in the wild in Australia and hopes to undertake an expedition and to interview Aboriginal communities, with their intimate knowledge of the Australian bush.

Though the chances may be small, Helgen says, finding one in the wild “would be the beautiful end to the story.”

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Colo. Suspect Bought Ticket 12 Days Before Shooting

Accused Aurora movie theater gunman James Holmes bought his movie ticket 12 days before the shooting, it was revealed in court today during the emotional first day of a preliminary hearing.

Aurora Police Department homicide detective Matthew Ingui testified that there is no video surveillance of the actual shooting, but there are several photos of Holmes checking into the theater kiosk with his cellphone. He scanned his phone three times.

Surveillance footage shown in court for the first time also showed Holmes lingering by the concession stand for about three minutes before entering theater nine dressed in dark pants, a light colored shirt and a skull cap. He would later be caught wearing a bullet proof vest and a gas mask.

Another video showed the lobby the moment theater staff heard shots ring out. Some of them ducked behind counters as people started streaming out of the front door.

Ingui also testified about the positions of the bodies in the theater, strewn across seats and aisles.

Click here for full coverage of the Aurora movie theater shooting.

Holmes is accused of killing 12 people and wounding dozens more in the movie theater massacre.

Earlier in the day, two veteran police officers broke down on the stand, with one officer choking up when he described finding the body of a 6-year-old girl inside the theater.

Sgt. Gerald Jonsgaard needed a moment to compose himself as he described finding the little girl, Veronica Moser Sullivan, in the blood splattered theater.

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An officer felt for a pulse and thought Veronica was still alive, Jonsgaard said, but the officer then realized he was feeling his own pulse.

The officers wiped away tears as they described the horror they found inside of theater nine.

Officer Justin Grizzle recounted seeing bodies lying motionless on the floor, surrounded by so much blood he nearly slipped and fell.

Grizzle, a former paramedic, says ambulances had not yet made it to the theater, so he began loading victims into his patrol car and driving to the hospital.

"I knew I needed to get them to the hospital now, " Grizzle said, tearing up. "I didn't want anyone else to die."

Grizzle drove six victims in four trips, saying that by the end there was so much blood in his patrol car he could hear it "sloshing around."

An officer who took the stand earlier today described Holmes as "relaxed" and "detached" when police confronted him just moments after the shooting stopped.

The first two officers to testify today described responding to the theater and spotting Holmes standing by his car at the rear of the theater on July 20, 2012. He allegedly opened fire in the crowded theater during the midnight showing of "The Dark Knight Rises."

Officer Jason Oviatt said he first thought Holmes was a cop because he was wearing a gas mask and helmet, but as he got closer realized he was not an officer and held Holmes at gunpoint.

Throughout the search and arrest, Holmes was extremely compliant, the officer said.

"He was very, very relaxed," Oviatt said. "These were not normal reactions to anything. He seemed very detached from it all."

Oviatt said Holmes had extremely dilated pupils and smelled badly when he was arrested.

Officer Aaron Blue testified that Holmes volunteered that he had four guns and that there were "improvised explosive devices" in his apartment and that they would go off if the police triggered them.

Holmes was dressed for the court hearing in a red jumpsuit and has brown hair and a full beard. He did not show any reaction when the officers pointed him out in the courtroom.

This is the most important court hearing in the case so far, essentially a mini-trial as prosecutors present witness testimony and evidence -- some never before heard -- to outline their case against the former neuroscience student.

The hearing at the Arapahoe County District Court could last all week. At the end, Judge William Sylvester will decide whether the case will go to trial.

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Obama to nominate Chuck Hagel for defense secretary

President Obama plans to nominate former senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican and Vietnam veteran, to be secretary of defense, according to a person close to the process and a senior administration official.

The White House informed the Hagel camp over the weekend that Obama intends to announce the nomination Monday.

Hagel’s successful nomination would add a well-known Republican to the president’s second-term Cabinet at a time when he is looking to better bridge the partisan divide, particularly after a bitter election campaign.

But the expected nomination has drawn sharp criticism in recent weeks, particularly from Republicans, who have questioned Hagel’s commitment to Israel’s security.

The choice sets up a confirmation fight of the sort that Obama appeared unwilling to have over Susan E. Rice, his preferred pick for secretary of state. Rice pulled out of consideration for that job last month after facing sharp Republican criticism about her characterization of the September attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

In an appearance Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) called Hagel’s selection an “in-your-face nomination.”

But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Hagel’s record would be given a fair shake in the Senate if he is nominated. McConnell stopped short of saying whether he would support his former colleague.

“He’s certainly been outspoken in foreign policy and defense over the years,” McConnell said on ABC’s “This Week.” He added: “The question we’ll be answering, if he’s the nominee, is: Do his views make sense for that particular job? I think he ought to be given a fair hearing, like any other nominee. And he will be.”

The Hagel nomination will begin what White House officials have said will probably be a busy week of announcements about who will fill Obama’s second-term Cabinet and senior staff positions.

The president returned Sunday from a curtailed holiday in Hawaii and will begin making final personnel decisions that were delayed by the year-end negotiations with Congress over taxes and spending cuts.

Foreign-policy tussle

Despite the opposition to a Hagel nomination that has arisen on Capitol Hill, a senior administration official said Sunday that the White House expects him to receive the support of Democrats, as well as many Republicans who served with him.

“Having a name floated and having one officially put forward are two different things,” the official said.

Hagel, who was twice awarded the Purple Heart for wounds suffered in Vietnam, served in the U.S. Senate for two terms, ending in 2009.

He was an outspoken and often-independent voice as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, breaking with many in his party to sharply criticize the management of the Iraq war after he initially supported the U.S.-led invasion.

“A lot of Republican opposition is rooted in the fact that he left his party on Iraq,” the senior administration official said. “And we think it will be very hard for Republicans to stand up and be able to say that they oppose someone who was against a war that most Americans think was a horrible idea.”

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British tourist plunges to death off Australia waterfall

SYDNEY: Police on Monday were attempting to retrieve the body of a British tourist who slipped over the edge of a waterfall in Australia's Blue Mountains and plunged to his death.

The 20-year-old man was walking with friends at Wentworth Falls, west of Sydney, on Sunday afternoon when he lost his footing and fell some 80 metres (260 feet).

Police said a friend summoned help and while paramedics were able to establish that he was dead, their helicopter crew was unable to retrieve the body due to high winds.

A guard was placed at the scene overnight and officers walked into the bushland Monday morning to help winch him out.

A witness told state broadcaster ABC she had seen a group of friends gathered on some rocks.

"Then they went down to the next one and I knew something was going to happen," she said.

"We just saw them all panic and a 20-year-old boy fell over, down the waterfall."

The Blue Mountains are a popular tourist attraction some 60 kilometres (40 miles) west of Sydney. Consisting mainly of a sandstone plateau, the area is dissected by gorges up to 760 metres deep.

-AFP/ac

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Faridkot minor dalit girl rape case: Main accused discharged from hospital, arrested

FARIDKOT: The prime accused in the rape case of a minor dalit girl was formally arrested by police on Sunday, after he was discharged from the hospital where he was admitted for consuming poison. Meanwhile, police officials visited the victim's village, where people demanded strict action against the accused.

SSP Gurpreet Singh Toor said, "We are investigating why the prime accused had consumed a poisonous substance. He has been arrested (on Sunday) after being discharged from the hospital. Search is on to nab Chaina Singh, the third accused."

The girl, 16, was abducted, raped and forced to swallow some pesticide by an upper caste accused. Along with his two associates, he had then dumped the victim outside her house in Matta village in Faridkot district on Saturday morning. In her statement, the girl has stated that she was abducted by three men on Friday night from outside her house when she was going to a relative's place nearby. She was taken to a room in the fields, where Jagmeet Singh allegedly raped her and Jagsir Singh and Chaina Singh stood guard outside.

Jagsir was arrested on Saturday and produced in the court of duty magistrate on Sunday, who sent him in one day police remand. Police have arrested prime accused Jagmeet, 21, on Sunday.

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Best Pictures: 2012 Nat Geo Photo Contest Winners

• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Winner: Places

  Photograph by Nenad Saljic

  A full moon illuminates the Matterhorn peak near Zermatt, Switzerland, in the winning image in the contest's Places category.

  Full moons occur every 29.5 days or so as the moon moves to the side of Earth directly opposite the sun, reflecting the sun's rays off its full face and appearing as a brilliant, perfectly circular disk.

  (Read more about full moons.)

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Winner: People

  Photograph by Micah Albert

  A picture of women scavenging refuse from a landfill in Dandora, Kenya, is the winning image in the People category of the National Geographic Photo Contest.

  The Dandora landfill, located in eastern Nairobi, is one of the largest in Africa.

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Photograph by Jason Ching

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  

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Hagel to Be Obama's Defense Secretary Nominee

Jan 6, 2013 4:52pm

(Junko Kimura/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Obama will nominate former senator Chuck Hagel to be his next Secretary of Defense tomorrow.

Senior officials within the administration and Capitol Hill confirmed the pick to ABC News today after the Nebraska Republican had emerged as a frontrunner among potential candidates several weeks ago.

Hagel, 66, is a decorated Vietnam veteran and businessman who served in the senate from 1997 to 2009. After having sat on that chamber’s Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees,  he has in recent years gathered praise from current and former diplomats for his work on Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board as well as the policy board of the current Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

But the former lawmaker faces an upscale battle in the coming confirmation hearings in Congress; critics on both sides of the aisle have taken aim at his record toward Israel and what some have called a lack of experience necessary to lead the sprawling Pentagon bureaucracy or its operations.

Progressives have also expressed concern about comments he made in 1998, questioning whether an “openly, aggressively gay” James Hormel could be nominated to an ambassador position by then-President Clinton. Hagel apologized for the comments last month, adding that he also supported gays in the military – a position he once opposed.

Who Is Chuck Hagel? Meet Obama’s Top Pentagon Pick

The friction with his former colleagues has left a degree of uncertainty in the air going into the hearings. Today on ABC’s “This Week,” Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell demurred when asked whether he would support the man who, in 2008, he had championed for his candidness and stature in foreign policy.

“I’m going to wait and see how the hearings go and see whether Chuck’s views square with the job he would be nominated to do,” he told George Stephanopoulos.

Senator Lindsey Graham was more blunt in his opposition to Hagel on CNN. The Georgia Republican called Hagel an “in your face nomination,” and said he “would be the most antagonistic secretary of defense towards the state of Israel in our nation’s history.”

If confirmed, Hagel will join a crop of new cabinet members expected to join the president in his second term, including Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who was nominated in December to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.

ABC’s Elizabeth Hartfield and Devin Dwyer contributed reporting.

SHOWS: Good Morning America This Week World News

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