Nelson Mandela - The Greatest Man of the World

Think this is the biggest news of the world that After 27 years of enforced silence, Nelson Mandela emerged from prison in 1990 and proceeded to speak and write, becoming one of the most quoted people in the world. He is also, according to Sello Hatang and Sahm Venter, the editors of Nelson Mandela - By Himself, one of the world’s most misquoted people too. This means the Nelson Mandela Foundation Centre of Memory is kept busy processing thousands of requests for quotations to be authenticated. So Hatang and Venter trawled through thousands of public and private papers, speeches, letters, tapes, interviews, manuscripts and diary extracts going back as far as 1948 in a bid to produce.

Biggest News of 2011

This is the world biggest  News that the withdrawal of U.S forces from Afghanistan has begun today.This is great news for all the people.One thing must remember that now it is very difficult to attack and live as invader.Even powerful army of the world has to withdraw.

Facing growing political opposition to the nearly decade-old war, Obama announced in June the withdrawal plan, which was a faster timetable than the military had recommended.
The first 10,000 troops will come home by the end of the year, but Obama left the details up to his commanders.
U.S. Lt. Col. Wayne Perry, a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), said about 650 troops who had completed their rotation in Afghanistan left on Wednesday as scheduled, and would not be replaced.
"As part of the drawdown the first U.S. troops have left Afghanistan," he said.
The units that left were the Army National Guard's 1st Squadron, 134th Cavalry Regiment, based in Kabul, and the Army National Guard's 1st Squadron, 113th Cavalry Regiment, which had been in neighbouring Parwan province.
Afghan security forces are to take over security responsibility from foreign forces in seven areas of the country this summer. Afghan forces will then take the lead in securing the entire country by the end of 2014.
Critics have said Obama's decision to bring troops home from Afghanistan faster than the military recommended could jeopardize the next major push of the war, to unseat insurgents in the east.
The drawdown comes amid intense fighting in Afghanistan, where more than 1,500 U.S. forces have been killed since the war began.
Although extra U.S. troops ordered into southern Afghanistan have made security gains there, the situation in the east of the country bordering Pakistan has deteriorated.
Late last month, insurgents staged a brazen raid on the Kabul Intercontinental hotel, killing 12 people and raising fresh questions about whether Afghan forces are ready to assume responsibilities as U.S. forces pull out.

Well-Deserved Victory - The New State of South Sudan

Yes its right that New State of South Sudan has came into existence.On Saturday, South Sudan becomes a free and independent country. It is a well-deserved victory for its people. Under a 2005 American-backed political accord that ended two decades of civil war, the people of the mainly Christian territory voted overwhelmingly in January to secede from the Arab Muslim north

Still, celebrations in the capital, Juba, cannot obscure a sobering truth: building a functional new country will take decades of hard work. Responsibility falls primarily on South Sudan, but also on the United States and the international community that shepherded it.

Africa’s 54th state is at the bottom of the developing world. Most people live on less than $1 a day. More than 10 percent of children do not reach the age of 5. Some 75 percent of adults cannot read.

Meanwhile, festering disputes between north and south are stoking chaos in a land already bloodied by two million deaths in civil war. Sudan on Friday became the first state to recognize South Sudan. Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, author of the murderous war in Darfur, said he would attend the festivities in Juba. But he also said he would continue the fight that erupted last month against forces loyal to the south in South Kordofan, an oil-rich region still under Khartoum’s control. Mr. Bashir’s decision to order the United Nations to withdraw peacekeepers from South Kordofan is deeply worrisome.

Major elements of the 2005 peace agreement are unresolved — such as which side will control the oil-rich region of Abyei, where fighting has also broken out; citizenship protections for minorities; where final borders will be set; how oil earnings will be shared (the south has 70 percent of the reserves).

The two sides are dependent on each other. South Sudan needs the north’s pipeline to get its oil to market. Sudan needs oil money to help pay its bills. Both need foreign investment and the north needs debt relief. They have a better chance of winning international support if they are at peace.

As an incentive, the United States and its partners have offered to convene an international conference in September for South Sudan. That will allow South Sudan’s leaders to present their plans for encouraging desperately needed private investment. Washington gave Juba $300 million for education and housing and is promising more. International assistance should go forward only if South Sudan works constructively with Khartoum to bring stability to both countries.

The Obama administration, correctly, is not taking Sudan off its terrorism list and normalizing relations until Khartoum fulfills the peace deal and ends the conflict in Darfur. China, Sudan’s main oil investor and arms supplier, should deliver a similar message to Mr. Bashir, who is under war crimes indictment, instead of receiving him with fanfare in Beijing and promising him new oil deals. The international community must persuade the two sides to avoid war and work to build a future for both Sudans.

The Last Journey of Space Shuttle Atlantis

The last journey of Atlantis has started with great attention of the whole world.Now read  the whole story of  Atlantis.There was a time, some of us remember, when a countdown at Canaveral stopped the world in its tracks. On television or at the launching, every breath was held at liftoff and every eye followed the fiery plume of ascent, up and away. Godspeed, said someone who was everyone.

That was a half century ago, when men first squeezed into their machines and, defying gravity, rode into a new dimension of human experience. Unbound to Earth, our species could imagine that an age of spacefaring was truly under way, the Moon and Mars within reach, maybe even an asteroid where the Little Prince awaited our visit. The promised new reality legitimized fantasies.

The atmosphere here on Friday at the launching of the space shuttle Atlantis was, in some respects, reminiscent of the old days. The crowd was the largest in years, attracted by the last chance for no telling how long to see astronauts in this country leave for space.

Everything was class-reunion festive. The gray-hairs recharged memories from youth. Their grandchildren trooped along to see what had turned people on when there were just a few channels of black-and-white TV and the only telephone in the house was at the end of a cord — and the only ones twittering were sparrows. 

As rain clouds hovered ominously and the countdown began to the 135th departure in the 30-year-old shuttle program, the milling crowd grew still and anxious. There was concern for the four lives in the winged space plane, of course, and all eyes searched for the break in the clouds that finally came. But this time, more than ever, spectators and others who care about NASA worried for nothing less than the future of human spaceflight in the United States.

“We’ve come full circle since 1961, back to when we had yet to show we could launch people into space,” said Steven J. Dick, a retired NASA chief historian. “We will be hitching rides from the Russians to go to the space station that is mainly ours.”

The irony of having to send our astronauts up in Russian Soyuz capsules is as plain as cold war history. The Soviet Union’s early dominance of space, manifested by the Sputnik surprise in 1957 and subsequent feats, prompted the United States to match and then surpass the Soviets in a program topped off by the Apollo 11 lunar landing in 1969. Human spaceflight would have come along anyway, but not with quite the urgency of the Soviet-American competition.

Foreseeing the end of shuttle flights, the Obama administration and NASA last year proposed new plans, approved by Congress, to develop heavy-lift rockets for sending people deeper into space, to be ready perhaps after 2020. Meanwhile, NASA has begun financing research for intermediate crew-only spacecraft to be produced and launched by commercial companies, probably no sooner than 2016. Such plans, of course, are at the mercy of the budget cutting and government downsizing spreading in Washington.

Lori B. Garver, the deputy administrator of NASA, insisted this week that the future was bright for human spaceflight. “We are tapping into how we developed almost everything great in this country, through commercial enterprise and competition,” Ms. Garver said.

Other NASA officials noted that Congressional support for the new programs was bipartisan. But they acknowledged that budget cuts were possible, and would ultimately take a toll on launching capabilities.

John M. Logsdon, a space policy expert and the author of “John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon,” said there had been gaps in human flight before, especially after Apollo flights ended in 1975 and the first shuttles flew in 1981. “We can accept that as long as a replacement is in the pipeline,” Dr. Logsdon said. “But we are ending programs with no sure follow-ons.”

Dr. Dick, the historian, questioned whether the barely started new programs would be ready to boost this country’s astronauts into orbit in this decade. “We’re stuck in the short term, can’t rouse ourselves to do much that’s inspiring,” he said.

Whatever happened to the space age as imagined back in the 1950s and early ’60s, when science fiction writers and rocket scientists spun tales of travel out in the solar system and beyond? Propellants, oxygen and other good stuff never seemed limited, or radiation a risk, or Congressional budgets a curse. This alternate universe appealed to some in a society flush with confidence after winning the Second World War but feeling a bit confined in the postwar gray-flannel conformity. Americans seemed to have lost none of their can-do spirit.