TEHRAN, Iran – Iran's supreme leader ordered the president, a close ally, to dismiss his controversial choice of a top deputy for making pro-Israeli remarks, the semiofficial media reported Wednesday. The move marked a rare split among the country's top conservatives.
The order is a humiliating setback for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who has strongly defended his decision to appoint Esfandiar Rahim Mashai, his son's father-in-law, as his first vice president.
Mashai angered hard-liners in 2008 when he said Iranians were "friends of all people in the world — even Israelis." Mashai was serving as vice president in charge of tourism and cultural heritage at the time. Iran has 12 vice presidents, but the first vice president is the most important because he leads Cabinet meetings in the absence of the president.
Ahmadinejad is already in a crisis over opposition claims he stole last month's presidential election from the pro-reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei strongly backed Ahmadinejad, who is seen as his protege, in that dispute.
"The view of the exalted leader on the removal of Mashai from the post of vice president has been notified to Ahmadinejad in writing," the semiofficial Fars news agency reported Wednesday.
It was not immediately clear if Ahmadinejad would cave in to Khamenei's order, who has the final say on all state matters in Iran.
Ali Akbar Javanfekr, top media adviser to Ahmadinejad, said on Tuesday that the president won't change his mind over the controversy.
"The president makes his decisions ... within the framework of his legal powers and on the basis of investigations carried out. Experience has proved that creating baseless controversies won't influence the president's decision," Javanfekr said in his blog. It was unclear if this was before or after the supreme leader's order.
The deputy speaker of the parliament, Mohammad Hasan Aboutorabi-Fard, meanwhile, said that Mashai's dismissal was a decision by the ruling system itself, according to the semiofficial ISNA news.
"Removing Mashai from key posts and the position of vice president is a strategic decision of the system ... Dismissal or resignation of Mashai needs to be announced by the president without any delay," ISNA quoted him as saying late Tuesday.
Pressure has been mounting on Ahmadinejad to remove Mashai from the top post immediately after he appointed the controversial figure to the post Friday.
But nearly the same time as Khamenei was issuing his order late Tuesday, Ahmadinejad vowed to keep Mashai as his first vice president.
"Mr. Mashai is a supporter of the position of the supreme leader and a pious, caring, honest and creative caretaker for Iran ... Why should he resign?" the official IRNA news agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying late Tuesday. "Mashai has been appointed as first vice president and continues his activities in the government."
Iran's state television didn't report Ahmadinejad's comments supporting his deputy. A conservative Web site said TV officials had orders from higher officials not to do so.
Mashai also angered many of Iran's top clerics in 2007 when he attended a ceremony in Turkey where women performed a traditional dance. Conservative interpretations of Islam prohibit women from dancing.
He ran into trouble again in 2008 when he hosted a ceremony in Tehran in which several women played tambourines and another one carried the Quran to a podium to recite verses from the Muslim holy book.
The criticism is a change of focus for hard-liners, who have spent the last few weeks lambasting Mousavi and his supporters for challenging the presidential election. On Saturday, hard-liners accused Rafsanjani of defying Khamenei by using his sermon to encourage opposition supporters to continue their protests.

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Does a sandwich on Mars taste
different?

The answer could be no, according to
new research that found long-term spaceflight
exposure doesn't change later generations of wheat seeds.

Molecular biologist Robert Ferl of the University of Florida and colleagues studied wheat
seeds descended from plants that flew on the Russian Mir space station. The
progenitor plants
were in space for 167 days in 1991. When they were brought back to Earth,
the plants gave rise to viable offspring seeds.

After four generations of plants
were grown from the seeds, the researchers analyzed gene expression in the
descendant wheat plants as a sensitive measure of potential lasting effects of
spaceflight. They looked at thousands of genes and found no significant changes
in how those genes were expressed between their test plants and a control group
of plants whose forebears were never in space.

Still wheat

"We can find no difference
between plants with spaceflight in their heritage or not," Ferl said. "This says you can send plants up and bring them back down and they can be the same."

Ferl said the findings offered promising
evidence that growing plants
on other worlds might not be that hard. People should be able to pack up a
bunch of seeds for their favorite foods, and after an extended microgravity
journey, land on another planet and grow the seeds without ill consequence.

Previous research found that the weightless
environment of spaceflight isn't a serious impediment to plant growth,
though plants do often grow differently in microgravity - sometimes even
taller, without gravity to pull them down.

"Plants, while they are in
orbit, do exhibit changes in gene expression because that is a different
environment," Ferl said.

But no one had yet tested whether
any changes occurring in the plants during their spaceflight experience were
passed on to future generations. This new study, published in the May 2009
edition of the journal Astrobiology, found this does not seem to be the case.

"We can still expect wheat
plants to be wheat plants once they get to Mars," Ferl
said.

New challenges

That doesn't mean there aren't other
challenges to transporting and growing plants on other planets.

For one, while plants are in space
and on other planets, they could be exposed to strong radiation from the sun
and cosmic rays. On Earth, we are blocked from the worst of this radiation by
our protective atmosphere and magnetic field. 

The average journey to Mars would
take six months (180 days), and then the plant seeds would be exposed to higher
levels of radiation while on Mars due to the red planet's thinner atmosphere.

"I do think accumulated
radiation damage over time could become an issue," Ferl
said.

Dealing with radiation danger is a
top priority for scientists planning future space exploration missions, because
humans as well as plants are vulnerable to damage from energetic radiation.
Engineers must design strong shielding for both space ships and planet
habitats.

Another difficulty may be what kind
of soil to grow the plants in.

While some necessary minerals may
already exist on other planets that can be used
for agriculture, other vital plant nutrients might have to be carried over
from Earth. Because shipping heavy materials via rocket is expensive, as many
materials as possible must be mined or created in the new environment.

Mars soil is rich in sulfur, and it
is unknown at this time if seeds from Earth would prosper or fail in the alien
red soil. Plants on Earth also rely on a rich microbial diversity within the
soil to carry out many functions. Mars, as far as we know, has no such
organisms in its soil, so the plant-friendly soil microbes would probably need
to be transported to Mars along with the seeds.

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SEOUL (AFP) –
US defence group Lockheed Martin and South Korea's Hyundai Heavy Industries will team up to build and export mid-size warships equipped with advanced Aegis weapons systems, an official said Wednesday.

They signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in May 2006 to jointly produce Aegis-equipped guided missile ships, Hyundai Heavy spokesman Cho Woo-Tae told AFP.

Cho said it is thought to be very rare for Lockheed to partner with a foreign company to produce Aegis-equipped vessels for possible sale to a third country.

Aegis, one of the most advanced naval defence systems, is designed to simultaneously track and destroy a multiple number of incoming missiles.

Asked why the agreement was not made public for three years, the spokesman said Hyundai Heavy rarely discloses MoUs. "I believe Lockheed decided to disclose it to the media probably because there is some progress in looking for buyers."

Hyundai Heavy is the world's biggest shipbuilder.

"The idea is that the partnership would make it possible to build high profit-margin warships at a reasonable price," said Cho.

Concrete terms need to be fixed but the two firms could produce 4,000 to 6,000-ton ships under the joint project, Cho said.

He added the vessels could be sold to third countries such as India but no firm decisions had been made given the sensitivity of the technology.

South Korea's navy in May 2007 launched its first Aegis-equipped warship, the 7,600-ton Sejong the Great, jointly built by Hyundai and Lockheed.

It was used to track North Korea's long-range rocket launch in April, along with US Aegis ships.

South Korea plans to launch a second Aegis destroyer in 2010 and a third in 2012, in an attempt to keep up with the naval powers of Japan and China.