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Happy New Year 2012

on December 31, 2011

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Scenes from across the world - London, Viena, Germany, Sidney, Beijing - 2012

Cicero Lounge News

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UN gets Syrian Assurance

Kofi Annan , The UN and Arab League envoy to Syria , has said he has received assurances from Damascus that it will respect the ceasefire plan he has previously proposed. Mr Annan who has been visiting Iran said there could be "improved conditions on the ground" by Thursday morning. However the Syrian government had previously failed to withdraw troops and weaponry from large population centres as it had agreed. So far at least 100 people have been reported dead. Three people were killed on Wednesday after violent shelling in the city of Homs and the Deraa province. Mr Annan told reporters in Tehran that he had received "further clarifications" from the government of President Bashar al-Assad on how it intended to suspend hostilities, and respect his six-point peace plan. Mr Annan said "We have been in touch with them and have had positive answers from them and have also approached governments with influence to ensure that all parties respect the ceasefi

What do a billion stars look like?

Astronomers released this week a picture containing more than one billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy . It combines data from two near-infrared 1 telescopes – the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii and the VISTA telescope in Chile - and is the result of a decade-long collaboration by astronomers at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Cambridge to process, archive and publish the prodigious quantities of sky survey data generated by these two telescopes. Source: Edinburgh University Physics Department Dr Phil Lucas from the University of Hertfordshire leads the UKIRT study of the Milky Way, and co-leads the VISTA study. He said: “The combined data on over a billion stars represent a scientific legacy that will be exploited for decades in many different ways. They provide a three-dimensional view of the structure of our spiral galaxy, the Milky Way, while also mapping several hundred nebulae where stars are being born. The VISTA data, in particular, is bre

SOPA AND PIPA GONE, NOW THE OPEN ACT?

In the wake of widespread online protest, the House and the Senate have stopped both the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in their tracks. Just this Friday morning, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced that he has canceled next week’s Senate vote on PIPA, which is now indeed opposed by many of its co-sponsors. Shortly afterwards, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said that SOPA will not be taken up as planned and that legislators must “wait until there is wider agreement on a solution.” Reid indeed acknowledged that ”recent events” — the blackout on Wikipedia and other sites including Reddit and the other protests involving an estimated 115,000 websites this past Wednesday — had played a role in his decision to postpone the vote. PIPA sponsor Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, agreed to the change of course only “reluctantly,” painting a dire picture of how Chinese an

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