EDITOR'S NOTE; The following news story was posted at midday Tuesday.

Ecuador's foreign minister
raps Britain on Assange


Ecuador's foreign minister Tuesday accused the British government of trampling on the human rights of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange by refusing to allow him to travel to Ecuador, which granted him political asylum almost a year ago.
 
Assange, 41, took refuge in Ecuador's tiny embassy in London last June to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over sex assault and rape allegations. He denies the allegations.
 
Ecuador's socialist president, Rafael Correa, angered the U.K. by granting Assange asylum in August on concerns that the former computer hacker might be further extradited from Sweden to the United States. Ecuador's government late last year said the Australian citizen was suffering from lung problems.
 
“By not granting him safe passage they are violating the human rights of a citizen, and every day that passes the effects of that violation hurt the person more and more,” Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said in an interview. “It's a whole year that this gentleman has spent without feeling the sun and that's really serious ... because this decision has been taken by a state that says it protects human rights.”
 
Ecuador argues that Assange's deportation to Sweden is part of a scheme by the U.S. government to have the former computer hacker extradited to American soil so that he can face charges over WikiLeaks' release of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables.
 
U.S. and European government sources say the United States has issued no criminal charges against him, nor launched any attempts to extradite Assange.
 
Assange, whose platinum hair and high-flying friends made him a household name around the world, is said to be living a cramped life inside the modest diplomatic mission. He eats mostly take-out food and uses a treadmill to burn off energy and a vitamin D lamp to make up for the lack of sunlight.
Patino said the Ecuadorean government is preparing a document in which it will argue that Britain is legally obliged to give Assange permission to leave the embassy and travel to South America.
 
He said that talks with the British government over Assange's fate continue and that he hopes to discuss the issue with British Foreign Minister William Hague in “a matter of weeks or months.”
 
Assange said last year he expected to wait six months to a year for a deal that would allow him to leave the embassy.


Cuba offers broader access
to closely monitored Internet


Cuba will begin offering broader Internet access next month through 118 outlets around the country, according to a decree in the government's Official Gazette on Tuesday. This is a step long awaited by many Cubans.
 
The announcement said Internet would be made available starting June 4 at offices of ETECSA, the state telecommunications monopoly, and elsewhere in what a government blogger said was a first step toward home service.
 
“Maybe it will take a while but the next step is to connect Cubans from their houses. This is the advance party,'' said blogger Yohandry Fontana, who often is first to report official information and viewpoints, commenting on Twitter.
 
The decree made clear that the new Internet access would be closely monitored, warning users it could not be used to “endanger or prejudice public security, or the integrity and sovereignty of the nation.''
 
Currently, unrestricted access to Internet in Cuba is available only to select institutions and professionals and to luxury hotels catering to tourists.
 
The Communist-led island says that 2.6 million Cubans, out of a population of 11.2 million, have access to the Internet, but until now most have only been able to explore a limited, state-controlled “intranet'' basket of approved websites.
 
While Cubans will have greater, unrestricted access to the Internet, it will still be too expensive for most of them, the equivalent of $4.50 an hour in a country where the average monthly salary amounts to $20.
 
Cuba was connected to a fiber-optic communication cable from close ally Venezuela in 2011, which the government has been testing in recent months but still not put into wide use.
 
The island has been getting its Internet through a slow and expensive satellite link.
 
Cuban media said the number of Internet outlets would be expanded as time and money permit.


Plants stuck under glaciers
for centuries live again


Scientists have succeeded in bringing back to life plants that have spent more than 400 years under a glacier.

The plants known as bryophytes, more commonly known as mosses and liverworts, were left behind by retreating glaciers and are thought to be between 400 and 600 years old. The finding overturns the long-held assumption that plants exposed by shrinking glaciers are dead.

In a laboratory setting, researchers took 24 samples and were able to successfully produce 11 cultures regenerated from four species.

“These simple, efficient plants, which have been around for more than 400 million years, have evolved a unique biology for optimal resilience,” says Catherine La Farge, director and curator of the Cryptogamic Herbarium at the University of Alberta in Canada. “Any bryophyte cell can reprogram itself to initiate the development of an entire new plant. This is equivalent to stem cells in faunal systems.”

Ms. La Farge said no one expected the plants to be rejuvenated after nearly 400 years beneath a glacier.

The finding, according to Ms. La Farge, “amplifies the critical role of bryophytes in polar environments and has implications for all permafrost regions of the globe.”

“Bryophytes are extremophiles that can thrive where other plants don’t. Hence they play a vital role in the establishment, colonization and maintenance of polar ecosystems,” she said. “This discovery emphasizes the importance of research that helps us understand the natural world, given how little we still know about polar ecosystems - with applied spinoffs for understanding reclamation that we may never have anticipated.”

The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 
Money laundering damages
economy, Colombians say


Rotting wooden planks heave as dozens of barefoot Wayuu Indians carry washing machines, fans and stereos on their backs from the hull of a cargo ship docked on the tip of northern Colombia.
   
Throughout the night, they unload thousands of boxes piled 30 feet (10 meters) high and haul them down the battered ramp to waiting trucks.
   
By torchlight, customs director Claudia Gaviria rips open a box at the makeshift wharf at Puerto Nuevo on the La Guajira peninsula. She counts the number of fans against documents supplied by the ship.
   
“If there's more than the paperwork says, we will seize the merchandise and investigate because it could be contraband or even money laundering,” said Ms. Gaviria, taping the box up and reaching for another. “We found some doctored papers on this ship.”
   
Contraband smuggled into Colombia is part of multi-billion-dollar money laundering operations that damage legitimate businesses, undermining Colombia's bid to reinvent itself as a thriving economy after decades of political and drugs violence.
   
In complicated schemes, Colombian traffickers receive drug money from overseas dealers in the form of goods, often shipped along with legitimate merchandise. Once the goods are sold and a sales receipt given, the drug money is clean.
   
The amount of money laundered from the trafficking of drugs, arms and human beings in Colombia is estimated by experts to be as much as $17 billion a year, more than 5 percent of the economy's total value and more than total foreign direct investment last year.
   
Much of the merchandise unloaded by the Wayuu, the bulk of it legitimate, will make its way to the desert town of Maicao, a Wild West type of place that sells cheap designer perfumes and whiskey at half the retail price, alongside knock offs of Prada and Giorgio Armani label goods.
   
“That goods are sold at lower prices than they are produced in the factory says it all,” said national tax agency head Juan Ricardo Ortega.
   
Last year, as much as $128 million worth of contraband was seized by authorities, less than 10 percent of the amount estimated to come into Colombia, according to government data.
   
“It's an impossible task,” said Luis Carlos Canas, head of the tax office in northern Maicao, as he inspects ingots of aluminum on an 18-wheeler crossing the border from Venezuela. “We just don't have the human resources to check everything.”
   
Exports also are part of the laundering business. Fake paperwork is created for overseas sales that do not exist. Once the paperwork is filed at the customs office, cash from international drug deals can enter without raising suspicion.
   
Colombia's official annual gold exports are reported to be as much as 70 tons, Ortega said, although the industry only produces 15 tons. While there is a considerable amount of artisanal gold that could account for some of the extra, Ortega suspects the bulk is fictitious sales.
   
So while Colombia continues to transform its image from a violence-plagued nation to an investment magnet with booming oil and mining industries, the economy is skewed by the money laundering of traffickers' cocaine sales abroad.
   
Colombia has for decades struggled to reduce crime linked to the drug trade, waging a U.S.-backed war against Marxist rebels, right-wing paramilitary groups and cocaine cartels. But crime gangs have become wilier in duping authorities.
   
Back in the days of Colombia's best-known drug lord, Pablo Escobar, in the 1980s, so much laundered cash simply came in by plane from the United States that dealers just buried it around their homes. Now things are far more sophisticated.
   
There are three main ways the gangs clean their money: smuggling undeclared physical cash across the border; through the financial system; and via contraband.
   
It is not just the proceeds from drug trafficking – about $8.8 billion a year - that gets laundered. Money earned from corruption, gun running, prostitution, and illegal gold mining also needs to be cleaned.
   
Once it makes it into Colombia's $330 billion economy, it can inflate economic growth numbers by several basis points, said Luis Edmundo Suarez, head of the UIAF, a government body that looks into suspicious money movements and sends them for investigation.
   
“The launderer is only interested in injecting the money into the system,” Suarez said at his Bogota office. “It creates suffering, distorts the economy and alters reference prices as he doesn't care if he loses money, just that it's cleaned.”
   
Ortega reckons a large range of official data from inflation to real estate, retail, exports, imports and agricultural output may be different than reported due to fake or overstated sales from laundering.

The problem for ordinary Colombians, Ortega says, is that laundered goods are mostly sold at below-market prices, which elbows out and often shutters competitors.

Conversely, it can create price bubbles in certain sectors when criminals pay excessive amounts for goods like farms or bill extra through restaurants and stores.
   
“For a poor country, the social impact is brutal,” Ortega said. “It limits growth and destroys opportunity for legitimate business.”
   
Cattle ranching, for example, is a common financing vehicle along with drugs for left-wing rebels of the Fuerza Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, known as FARC, as well as other drug cartels.

They often pay above value for cattle farms and that in turn pushes up prices for neighboring property. Then they liquidate assets, the cattle, to receive quick cash, cutting the price of livestock in the area.
   
Many agriculture businesses in central Meta province, for example, are looking to sell off and get out because they cannot compete with the low livestock prices on offer.
   
“You can tell from the price of beef in some rural areas when a crime gang is selling its stock of cattle,” Suarez said.
   
Farmers are intimidated into selling their land and offered cash sums they can't refuse, according to a cattle rancher with land in Meta who requested anonymity for security reasons.
   
“It's hard to refuse the drug dealers,” the rancher said. “And we also face herds of cattle coming in illegally from Venezuela as contraband that slashes the price of the beef.”
   
The government says the FARC is among the biggest owners of cattle, assets that are easy to turn into cash to buy weapons or food and clothing for their 8,000-strong fighting force.
   
Colombia's financial system, surprisingly, is among the most rigid and successful in protecting against money launderers. Red flags go up with any unusual movement of cash.
   
Banking clients complain about the charges levied each month and the mountain of paperwork needed to open an account, but Maria Mercedes Cuellar, head of the Asobancaria banking union, says that is what keeps the system safe. “Colombia has more controls in its system than most places in the world, even more than in the U.S,” she said.
   
But that also causes its own set of problems, she says, since it facilitates a cash-based economy that enables launderers. They simply work outside the system, she said.
   
While detecting smuggled goods has proved tough, authorities have turned to accountants to catch the smugglers, just as U.S. authorities did with legendary gangster Al Capone in the 1930s.
   
“If we can't pursue them for contraband or laundering, we'll pursue them for tax evasion,” Claudia Rincon, head of the tax office's legal department, said of the uphill task. One of her agents was assassinated just weeks ago in connection with her work as a tax investigator.
  

Club Mediterranee prepares
for a friendly takeover


Club Mediterranee's top shareholders plan to take over the French holiday firm in a bid that values it at around 541 million euros ($700 million), to accelerate its shift to fast-growing emerging markets.

Chinese investor Fosun International and AXA Private Equity said Monday they would team up with management to offer 17 euros a share for the stock they do not already own, a 23 percent premium to Friday's closing price.

Chief Executive Officer Henri Giscard d'Estaing, who has spearheaded Club Med's upmarket shift and expansion away from recession-hit Europe, said the friendly bid would give the group freedom to focus on emerging markets.

"We need to be free from short-term constraints for the next four to five years," he said.

Founded in 1950 and listed since 1966, Club Med was a pioneer of the all-inclusive holiday resort.

But it fell on hard times in the past decade because of stiff competition and an unsuccessful expansion into services, and its more recent drive to recast itself as an upmarket operator has been hampered by a flagging European economy.

One Paris-based trader, who declined to be named, said Fosun's involvement would help Club Med's achieve its aim to make China its second-biggest market after France.
 
Club Med aims to operate five villages in China by 2015, including three by the end of this year, Giscard d'Estaing said.
 
Beyond China, Club Med is speeding up expansion in Russia and Brazil, with the goal to lift the contribution of emerging markets sales to 33 percent by 2015 from around 25 percent.
 

New insecticide to target
just malaria mosquitoes


Scientists are making progress in developing a new species-specific insecticide that would be lethal only to insects that carry malaria.

According to scientists at Virginia Tech and the University of Florida the insecticide would be far less toxic to beneficial insects such as bees. They say the insecticide is formulated to interfere with an enzyme found in the nervous system of mosquitoes and other organisms called acetylcholinesterase. If the effectiveness of the enzyme is disrupted, it causes an organism to convulse and die.

“A simple analogy would be that we’re trying to make a key that fits perfectly into a lock,” said entomologist Jeff Bloomquist, a professor at the University of Florida's Emerging Pathogens Institute and its Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. “We want to shut down the enzyme, but only in target species.”

Scientists are trying to perfect the mosquito-specific compounds and manufacture them on a large scale so that they can be applied to netting where mosquitoes might land. They say it will take at least four to five years before a compound is ready to be submitted for federal approval.

The team recently published a study in the journal Pesticide Biochemistry and Physiology comparing eight experimental compounds with commercially available insecticides that target the enzyme.

Though they were less toxic to mosquitoes than commercial products, the experimental compounds were far more selective, indicating researchers are on the right track, Bloomquist said.

“The compounds we’re using are not very toxic to honeybees, fish and mammals, but we need to refine them further, make them more toxic to mosquitoes and safer for non-target organisms,” he said.

Malaria is caused by microscopic organisms called protists, which are present in the saliva of infected female mosquitoes and transmitted when the mosquitoes bite. Initial symptoms of the disease can include fever, chills, convulsions, headaches and nausea. In severe cases, malaria can cause kidney failure, coma and death.

Worldwide, malaria infected about 219 million people in 2010 and killed about 660,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 90 percent of those infected lived in Africa.


Moon rocks stuck in storage
discovered in California lab


Twenty vials of moon rock and lunar soil collected by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin during the Apollo 11 moon landing mission in 1969 have been found in a warehouse at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

Berkeley Lab archivist Karen Nelson uncovered the moon dust, vials with handwritten labels and dated “24 July 1970,” recently while reviewing and clearing out artifacts from Berkeley Lab’s warehouse.

“They were vacuum sealed in a glass jar,” said Ms. Nelson, who has worked in Berkeley Lab’s Archives and Records Office for 17 years. “We don’t know how or when they ended up in storage.”

After Apollo 11's historic mission, moon samples were distributed to 150 labs around the world, including Berkeley, and while they were supposed to be eventually sent back to NASA after study, these samples ended up in storage for nearly 40 years.

Also found with the samples was a 1971 paper, “Study of carbon compounds in Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 returned lunar samples,” which was published in the Proceedings of the Second Lunar Science Conference. The paper examined the nature and chemical characteristics of the carbon in the lunar samples.

NASA has asked for the samples to be returned.

Various bits of Apollo 11 memorabilia have surfaced in recent months, according to the technology website, CNET. In March, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos funded an effort to raise Apollo 11’s booster rocket engines from the ocean floor. Recently, Buzz Aldrin’s space sleepwear went up for auction, as did Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk EKG reading.


Three astronauts lift off
for time on space station


A veteran Russian cosmonaut, a rookie Italian astronaut and an American mother on her second flight blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan Tuesday for a six-hour ride to the International Space Station.
 
The Russian Soyuz rocket lifted off at 4:31 p.m. EDT (2031 GMT), streaking through clear, pre-dawn skies in Kazakhstan as it headed into orbit, a NASA TV broadcast showed.
 
In command of the Soyuz capsule was cosmonaut Fyodor   Yurchikhin, 54, who already has made two long-duration flights aboard the space station and one aboard NASA's now-retired space shuttle.
 
He was joined by Luca Parmitano, 36, a major in the Italian Air Force. Parmitano, who initially studied political science and international law at the University of Naples, and will be the first Italian to live aboard the station, a $100 billion project of 15 nations.
 
“This is very momentous,” Parmitano said in a preflight NASA interview.
 
NASA allotted the crew slot to the Italian Space Agency as part of a barter agreement for cargo carriers that were taken to the station aboard the shuttles. One module was converted into a storage closet and left aboard the station.
 
Rounding out the crew is NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg, a 43-year-old mechanical engineer who has one previous spaceflight on her resume, a two-week shuttle mission. She leaves behind her astronaut husband, Doug Hurley, and their 3-year-old son, Jack.
 
“Time for me to 'unplug!' Thanks everyone for well wishes and great interest in what our nations do in space,” Ms. Nyberg wrote on Twitter seven hours before liftoff.
 
The crew is expected to reach the space station, which orbits about 250 miles (400 km) above Earth about six hours after launch, an expedited trip that has been made by only one other previous crew.
 
Awaiting their arrival are station commander Pavel Vinogradov and flight engineers Alexander Misurkin and Chris Cassidy. The men are two months into a planned six-month mission.