The European Space Agency (ESA) said it hoped to set up its own detection system for space junk instead of relying on US radar to track the chunks of shattered satellites and spent rockets in earth orbit. 

After a US satellite accidentally hit an out-of-commission Russian satellite, scattering a trail of debris in space last week, the European Space Agency said Monday, Feb. 16, it wanted its own system to protect satellites.

 

Gaele Winters, who heads ESA's European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) at Darmstadt, said the debris would be a danger to ESA's own satellites in the same orbit. He said ESA need live data so its spacecraft could steer clear of the junk.

 

Jean-Francois Kaufeler, head of the space junk monitoring department at ESOC, said, "Much more monitoring needs to be done." Experts are to meet March 30 to April 2 in Darmstadt to swap ideas on how.

 

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) tracks about 13,000 objects in orbit, but ESA estimates hundreds of thousands of distinct items are in orbit. A fragment 1 centimeter across could knock out a satellite if it hit it at speed.

Cern is losing ground rapidly in the race to discover the elusive Higgs boson, its American rival claims.

Fermilab say the odds of their Tevatron accelerator finding it first are now 50-50 at worst, and up to 96% at best.

Cern's Lyn Evans admitted the accident which will halt the $7bn Large Hadron Collider until September may cost them one of the biggest prizes in physics.

The two rivals are trying to identify the "God Particle" - one of the fundamental particles of matter.

Ghaffar Hussain was once a radical Islamist with the group Hizb ut-Tahrir. Now he is part of the Quilliam Foundation, a British think tank seeking to combat extremism. He spoke with SPIEGEL ONLINE about the Islamist world view and the pleasant feeling of omniscience.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: As we speak, around three dozen German Islamists are supposedly living in terrorist training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Some of them have radicalized very quickly, within months. You yourself were a radical Islamist at one time and are now an expert in the field. What is it that makes some young Muslims tick?

A young German Islamist in Waziristan.

Hussain: Primarily they buy into a certain narrative, and a specific world view, which seems to be particularly appealing for young Muslims in Europe. Quite a few of them feel marginalized, they don't feel they fit into society and they can't connect with their parents' generation. So they look for something they can belong to and some of them feel very attracted by the Umma concept, the idea that all Muslims form a unity. This is then where your allegiance lies and nothing else matters. From there, they develop an urge to do something good, and then they are sometimes confronted with what I call shock tactics: graphic images of Muslim victims, for example. They reach the conclusion that they have to do something about it. Plus there is the scriptural side: They are being told that they have to fight, that fighting is a duty.

Turks living in the western city of Dortmund have set up Germany's first Turkish carnival association. They want to prove they can party as hard as anyone else -- and to encourage immigrants to join in the peculiar festival which kicks off on Thursday.

If you're an immigrant in western or southern Germany, you will never truly arrive until you have embraced carnival. The national psyche cannot be understood unless one has taken part in this fancy dress festival with its strange rituals which include symbolic castration, mock assaults on town halls, binge drinking and singing along to nonsensical songs.

The founding members of Germany's first Turkish carnival society -- press spokesman Aytac Arman (L), Aykut Akköse (C) and Yalcin Bayram (R) at a news conference in Dortmund. So it may seem surprising that even though more than two million people with Turkish backgrounds live in Germany and they started coming as long as half a century ago, they have only just now set up a carnival association of their own.

The 1st Turkish Fools' Association Dortmund 09 was formed in the western industrial city as an official registered group last week in a small but significant step to deepen their integration into German society.

ROME: Close on the heels of the pope's rehabilitation of a group of schismatic bishops, including one who denied the Holocaust, a second scandal has compounded a searching debate within the church over whether Pope Benedict XVI's focus on doctrine and perceived insensitivity to political tone are alienating mainstream Roman Catholics and undermining the church's moral authority.

On Sunday, a priest known for such provocative statements as blaming the sins of New Orleanians for Hurricane Katrina asked the pope to rescind his appointment as an auxiliary bishop in Austria.

The affairs have engendered a storm of criticism of the church hierarchy and led to frantic efforts to mollify angry and confused parishioners around the globe, while the latest controversy has raised concerns that the actions could be part of a disturbing pattern.

The Vatican expert George Weigel, in a recent essay in First Things, an American religion journal, criticized the Vatican for its "chaos, confusion and incompetence."

A Portuguese carpenter has made a fully working Vespa scooter out of wood.

The machine was made in ten months by Carlos Alberto and has been carved out of ten different types of wood and even has an original 1957 Vespa engine.

Capable of speeds of up to 46 mph, Mr Alberton first hit on the idea in 2001 during a conversation with a fellow Vespa enthusiast, but didn't start work on his labour of love until October 2007.

Covered in a special fire-proof varnish and built using woods from Brazil and Mozambique, Mr Alberto's Vespa cost him £2,491 (2,800 euros), but to him the tiny scooter is priceless.

"The idea came to me in 2001 when I was lying in bed with a terrible case of flu," Mr Alberto said.

The founder of a US Muslim TV network has been charged over the beheading of his wife, media reports say.

Muzzammil Hassan, 44, is accused of second degree murder of Aasiya Hassan, whose body was found last week at the TV station in New York state.

Both Mr Hassan and his wife worked at Bridges TV, a station aimed at countering stereotypes of Muslims.