4A NEWS
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN MONDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2008
INTERNATIONAL
Rebels turn violent in Chad, confront presidential palace
BY TOM MALITI ASSOCIATED PRESS
NAIROBI, Kenya — Hundreds of rebels charged into Chad's capital aboard pickup trucks Saturday, clashing with government troops around the presidential palace in the most forceful attempt yet to oust President Idriss Deby.
The violence endangered a $300 million global aid operation supporting millions of people in the former French colony and also delayed the deployment of the European Union's peacekeeping mission to both Chad and neighboring Central African Republic.
Libya's official agency, JANA, reported that Chadian rebel leader Mahamat Nouri agreed to a ceasefire Saturday night after speaking to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, who was appointed by the African Union to mediate in the crisis.
Rebel spokesman Mahamat Hassane Boulmaye said he had not heard of any cease-fire and did not believe Nouri would agree to an unconditional end to hostilities. "The fighters would rebel," Boulmaye told The Associated in an early morning telephone call Sunday. Boulmaye said he was speaking from the border with Sudan and had not spoken to Nouri since Saturday afternoon.
The rebels arrived after a three-day push across the desert from the eastern border with Sudan in about 250 pickups with mounted submachine guns.
The rebels gathered outside N'Djamena overnight before 1,000 to 1,500 fighters entered early
Saturday and spread through the city, said Col. Thierry Burkhard, a French military spokesman.
Government forces were pushing rebels away from N' Djamena, he said late Saturday. "It
"The head of state is fine in his palace. It's true that there are some rebels who have entered the city, but to say the city has fallen is false." Zene said his information came from a telephone call with the defense minister in N'Diamena.
"It's true that there are some rebels who have entered the city,but to say the city has fallen is false."
Boulmaye, the rebel spokesman,
CHERIF MAHAMAT ZENE Chad's ambassador to Ethiopia
appears clear that President Deby succeeded in containing them at his palace and is even in the process of pushing them back," Burkhard said.
A bomb hit the residence of the Saudi ambassador to Chad, killing the wife and daughter of an embassy staffer taking shelter from the fighting, according to a Saudi Foreign Ministry statement.
Chad's ambassador in Ethiopia, Cherif Mahamat Zene, told The Associated Press "the situation is under control.
told AP earlier that rebel had surrounded the presidential palace and claimed that government soldiers were defecting.
"Many in the military have rallied with the rebels," said Boulmaye, whose Union of Forces
for Democracy and Development is the biggest rebel group.
Chad, a French colony until 1960, has been convulsed by civil wars and invasions since independence, and the recent discovery of oil has only increased the intensity of the struggle for power in the largely desert country about three times the size of California.
In April 2006, one Chadian rebel group launched a failed assault on N'Dijamaa.
The rebel force is believed to be a
coalition of three groups, including the biggest led by Nouri, a former diplomat who defected 16 months ago, and a nephew of Deby's, Timan Erdimi. They long have been fighting to overthrow Deby, whom they accuse of corruption. Deby, himself a soldier, has suffered many defections in the past and morale is low in the army.
The rebels also have said they were unhappy with the president not providing enough support to rebels in Sudan's Darfur region, some of whom are from Deby's own tribe, the Zaghawa, who are found in both Chad and Sudan.
The African Union, holding a summit in Ethiopia, said it would not recognize the rebels should they seize power. Tanzania's President Jakaya Kikwete, new head of the 52-nation bloc, said leaders had selected Gadhafi and Republic of Congo President Denis Sassou-Nguesso to try to broker peace.
France said it "firmly condemns the attempt to take power by force."
A leader of Chad's main opposition alliance, which is unarmed and not associated with the rebels, said shooting broke out after rebels entered the city around 8 a.m. but appeared to die down.
A young boy collects milk that fell off a World Food Program truck on Jan. 26 during food distribution at the Nairobi showgrounds in Kenya where they took shelter from ethnic fighting.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
SCIENCE
Hubble in need of an eye exam New land-based telescopes could look even further back in time
BY SETH BORENSTEIN ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON — A telescope arms race is taking shape around the world. Astronomers are drawing up plans for the biggest, most powerful instruments ever constructed, capable of peering far deeper into the universe — and further back in time — than ever before.
The building boom, which is expected to play out over the next decade and cost billions of dollars, is being driven by technological
In fact, the super-sized telescopes will yield even finer
advances that afford unprecedented clarity and magnification. Some scientists say it will be much like switching from regular TV to high-definition.
pened 13.7 billion years ago.
HENRI BOFFIN Outreach scientist for the ESO
"We hope to answer these questions: Are we alone in the universe? What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy in the universe?"
"We hope to answer these questions: Are we alone in the universe? What is the nature of the dark matter and dark energy in the universe?" said astronomer Henri Boffin, outreach scientist for the European Southern Observatory.
pictures than the Hubble Space Telescope, which was put in orbit in 1990 and was long considered superior because its view was freed from the distorting effects of Earth's atmosphere. But now, land-based telescopes can correct for such distortion.
With these proposed giant telescopes, astronomers hope to get the first pictures of planets outside our solar system, watch stars and planets being born, and catch a glimpse of what was happening near the birth of the universe.
"We know almost nothing about the universe in its early stages," said Carnegie Observatories director Wendy Freedman, who chairs the board that is building the Giant Magellan Telescope. "The GMT is going to see in action the first stars, the first galaxies, the first supernovae, the first black holes to form."
Two new technologies enable this extraordinary quest — one reliant on modern lasers and computing power and the other inspired by ancient Greek and Roman tilework.
The first is adaptive optics. It allows telescopes on the ground to
When scientists look at a faraway celestial object, they are seeing it as it existed millions and millions of years ago, because it takes so long light from the object to reach Earth.
Just the names of many of the proposed observatories suggest an arms race: the Giant Magellan Telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope, which was downsized from the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope. Add to those three big ground observatories a new super eye in the sky, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2013.
Current telescopes are able to look back only about 1 billion years in time. But the new telescopes will be so powerful that they should be able to gaze back to a couple of hundred million years after the Big Bang, which scientists believe hap-
get rid of the distortion caused when looking through Earth's thick atmosphere into space.
Adaptive optics relies on a laser to create an artificial star, or a constellation of fake stars, in the sky. Astronomers then examine
the fake stars and use computers to calculate how much atmospheric distortion there is at any given time. Then they adjust the mirrors to compensate like a pair of eyeglasses. This adjustment happens automatically hundreds of times per second.
Adaptive optics worked first for smaller telescopes. But getting it to work for big observatories was a problem. The first successful use in large telescopes was in 2003 at the twin-telescope Keck Observatory in Hawaii, an effort that took nine years.
The second breakthrough involves technology that makes bigger mirrors possible. Instead of casting a giant mirror in one piece, which is difficult and limits size, astronomers now make smaller mirror segments and piece them together.
Keck scientist Jerry Nelson, now working on the Thirty Meter Telescope, pioneered this technique and said he got the idea from looking at how the Greeks and Romans
A partnership of six U.S. universities, an Australian college, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Carnegie Institution of Washington will place the telescope in Las Campanas, Chile, around 2016. The plan is for an 80-foot mirror. The cost is around $500 million.
- The Thirty Meter Telescope. The California Institute of Technology, the University of California and the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy are aiming for a telescope with about 98-foot mirror by 2018. No site has been chosen. The cost is about $780 million.
— The European Extremely Large Telescope. A partnership of European countries, called the European Southern Observatory, already has telescopes in Chile and is aiming for a new one with a mirror of 138 feet. The Europeans are aiming for a 2018 completion, but have not chosen a specific location yet. The cost would be $1.17 billion.
The managers of these projects are fairly confident they will get the money they need to complete their grand visions. However, some astronomers worry that there may not be enough private or government money for all of them, so they find themselves competing for funding, even as they cheer each other on.
If completed, ESO's European Extremely Large Telescope would be the biggest of the new observatories and should be able to see 20 to 100 times more sharply than the current best land-based telescopes. The Hubble, which set the standard for stunning astronomical pictures, will seem less amazing.
In astronomy, the bigger the mirror, the greater the amount of light that can be grabbed from the universe. For the past decade and a half, the Keck has had the largest Earth-bound telescopes, with mirrors nearly 33 feet in diameter.
"Oh, you ain't seen nothing yet," said 2006 Nobel Prize-winning physicist John Mather, senior project scientist for NASA's James Webb
However, three giant land observatories, proposed for construction within the decade, are going to dwarf those:
tilled their baths. This technique is going from 36 segments in current telescopes to 492 segments with his new project.
The $4.5 billion Webb Telescope, designed to travel 900,000 miles beyond Earth's orbit, is not faced with the atmospheric distortion of ground
JOHN MATHER Senior project scientist for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope
Space Telescope.
- The Giant Magellan Telescope
"Oh, you ain't seen nothing yet."
telescopes. Still, it will use its own version of adaptive optics. Because of temperature fluctuations in the cold of space, the telescope will have to adjust the shape of its mirrors automatically. Webb's mirror, which is $2\frac{1}{2}$ times bigger than Hubble's, has 18 segments.
While places like Arizona and Hawaii have been successful sites for high-quality space images. Chile is the focal point of the next-generation building boom.
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