Soyuz Launches Sharp-Eyed Pleiades Satellite

News of science:

Cannot play media. You do not have the correct version of the flash player. Download the correct version

The launch of Soyuz rocket carrying six satellites took place in French Guiana

Continue reading the main story

Related Stories

• Galileo sat-nav rides into orbit
• A rocket abroad - Soyuz in French Guiana

A Russian Soyuz rocket has launched from French Guiana - only the second such vehicle to fly out of the territory's new Sinnamary spaceport.

The Soyuz put six satellites in orbit, including France's new Pleiades-1 high-resolution imaging spacecraft.
This satellite is designed to take pictures that resolve features on the ground as small as 50cm across.
The capability will put it on a par with the leading US commercial systems operated by GeoEye and DigitalGlobe.
Lift-off occurred on schedule at 23:03 local time, Friday (02:03 GMT, Saturday), with Pleiades-1 being dropped off in its 700km-high polar orbit some 55 minutes later.
The 970kg satellite is the result of a near-decade-long programme in the French space agency (Cnes) to develop one of the most powerful Earth observation systems in the world.
The spacecraft's sensor actually has a resolution of 70cm, but image processing will recover detail that is around the half-metre mark.

Pleiades-1 will be followed by Pleiades-2 in the coming year

Pleiades carries gyroscopes that allow it to swivel its telescope in quick time, enabling it to acquire a strip, or mosaic, of images around its target in a single pass overhead.
The Pleiades spacecraft has been assembled by Astrium, Europe's largest space company, with its instrument supplied by Thales Alenia Space (France).
It will have both a civilian and military role, and a number of European countries (Austria, Belgium, Spain and Sweden) have part-funded the project to get access to its pictures.
Pleiades-1 will be followed by Pleiades-2 on a separate Soyuz launch in 2012.
"The fact that we will have two, twin satellites operating in a phased orbit separated by 180 degrees will give us something very powerful - a daily re-visit capacity. It means we will be able to gather information every day on any part of the globe," explained Charlotte Gabriel Robez, Pleiades project manager with Astrium Geo-information Services.
"This is key because it allows us to tackle applications such as rescue or crisis management, in the aftermath of an earthquake for example," she told BBC News.
The commercial market for very high resolution imagery has become dominated in recent years by the American companies GeoEye and DigitalGlobe, which benefit from multi-billion-dollar contracts with the US intelligence agencies.
Astrium Geo-information Services is hoping these agencies' voracious appetite for pictures will leave a productive hole in the market for Pleiades' products.
The Soyuz rocket flew its inaugural mission from Europe's Sinnamary spaceport in October. A dedicated new launch pad has been constructed in the Guianese jungle for the Russian vehicle.
By operating closer to the equator, the rocket receives a bigger boost from the Earth's rotation, meaning it can lift nearly double the mass of a comparable payload at its traditional home in Baikonur, Kazakhstan.
The Soyuz' five other "passengers" included a high-resolution imaging satellite for the Chilean military called SSOT; and four radar eavesdropping spacecraft developed for the French military. All six satellites were manufactured by Astrium.
A simulated image of London's 02 Arena. The picture shows the detail Pleiades should be able to retrieve.

News source:BBC

Brain Stimulation Reduces Post-Stroke Neglect

News of world :
Post-stroke hemispatial neglect improved significantly after a two-week course of magnetic stimulation of the affected brain area, according to results of a small clinical trial.
The degree of neglect improved by 16% after two weeks and by 23% after one month, as assessed by a standardized behavioral inattention test (BIT).
In contrast, patients treated with sham stimulation had no improvement in hemispatial neglect, Giacomo Koch, MD, PhD, of the Santa Lucia Foundation in Rome, and co-authors reported in the Jan. 3 issue of Neurology.
"These findings suggest that a two-week course of continuous theta-burst stimulation over the left hemisphere posterior parietal cortex may be a potential effective strategy in accelerating recovery from visuospatial neglect in subacute stroke patients, possibly counteracting the hyperexcitability of the left hemisphere parieto-frontal circuits," they wrote in conclusion.
"This study provides class III evidence that left posterior parietal cortex theta-burst stimulation improves hemispatial neglect for up to two weeks after treatment," the authors added.
As many as 40% of stroke patients develop hemispatial neglect, which refers to the inability to recognize or respond to stimuli on the side opposite to the brain infarction. The syndrome is particularly disabling to patients who have unilateral strokes of the right hemisphere.
Current approaches to cognitive rehabilitation for hemispatial neglect have yielded unsatisfactory results, the authors wrote.
One theory about the mechanisms of hemispatial neglect posits that right-hemisphere lesions induce pathologic overexcitability of left-hemisphere circuits. Neuroimaging studies have implicated altered cortico-cortical connectivity in hemispatial neglect, the authors continued.
Koch and colleagues previously demonstrated increased excitability of left-hemisphere parieto-frontal cortical circuits in patients with neglect compared with other stroke patients (Brain 2008; 131: 3147-3155). They also found that a single session of transcranial magnetic stimulation of the left posterior parietal cortex led to transient normalization of the overexcitability and improvement in neglect.
Results of another recent study suggested that continuous theta-burst stimulation applied to the left posterior parietal cortex reduced post-stroke neglect for several hours (Stroke 2009; 40: 2791-2796).
Continuing the line of investigation, Koch and colleagues conducted a randomized, sham-controlled study of 20 patients who developed hemispatial neglect following right-hemisphere strokes. The investigators sought to determine whether repeated application of continuous theta-burst stimulation over two weeks would lead to further amelioration of hemispatial neglect.
Patients randomized to active therapy had two treatment sessions daily, 15 minutes apart, Monday through Friday, for two weeks. Each session consisted of three-pulse bursts at 50 Hz, repeated at 200 msec intervals for a total of 40 seconds. Treatment occurred at the same time each day.
Change in hemispatial neglect was assessed by means of the BIT battery of tests.
The two treatment groups did not differ significantly with respect to patients' age, sex, duration of illness, or baseline BIT scores. One patient in each group did not finish the study, and they were excluded from analysis.
Comparison of BIT total scores showed that patients randomized to active continuous theta-burst stimulation had significant improvement in visuospatial neglect that was evident immediately after the two-week treatment period (P<0.001) and two weeks later (P<0.05).
Analysis of individual BIT subtests revealed significant differences in favor of active brain stimulation for multiple assessments (P<0.05 to P<0.001).
The investigators assessed functional connectivity between the left posterior parietal cortex and the ipsilateral primary motor cortex by means of paired-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation. Baseline excitability was similar in the groups.
After the two-week treatment period, active stimulation was associated with a significant reduction in the excitability of the parieto-frontal functional connections in the left hemisphere (P<0.05), and values for the two groups remained significantly different at four weeks (P<0.05).
Researchers found that the BIT scores improved by 16.3% after two weeks of active stimulation and 22.6% at one month follow-up.
The study was limited by addition of the magnetic stimulation to standard cognitive rehabilitation so that the effect of stimulation alone could not be assessed and also by the use of only BIT rather than other neuropsychologic tests as a measure of function.
The study by Koch and colleagues "represents an important step forward in the effort to rehabilitate neglect, and presents us with some general principles that help to advance an emerging approach to neurorehabilitation," Heidi M. Schambra, MD, and Randolph S. Marshall, MD, of Columbia University in New York City, wrote in an accompanying editorial.
"Here the investigators successfully expanded a single-session approach to two weeks," they continued. "It remains to be determined whether efficacy can be further enhanced by pushing the stimulation dose higher ... or by shortening the interval between stimulation and behavioral intervention.
"There is emerging evidence that intervention beginning in the first week after stroke may improve therapeutic efficacy by taking advantage of an enhanced window of plasticity."

News source :medpagetoday

NASA revises its spaceship plans

News of world :

Budget uncertainties have led NASA to change its policy on funding the development of commercial spaceships, shifting to a process that provides more flexibility but also more risk for the space agency.
More than $365 million has already been devoted to NASA's commercial crew development program, or CCDev. Congress has approved another $406 million to be paid to would-be spaceship builders, with the aim of having U.S.-made, crew-capable successors to the space shuttle fleet flying to the International Space Station by 2017.
During the first two phases of the program, the effort has been managed through a set of Space Act Agreements, which award money to the companies in stages as they reach agreed-upon milestones. For the third phase, known as CCDev3, NASA had planned to switch to a different fixed-price contracting system that would give the space agency more control over the management of the companies' development efforts. NASA was scheduled to issue a request for proposals under that system on Monday.
But because of the uncertainties surrounding the federal budget for the next couple of years, NASA has decided to stick with the Space Act arrangement, said Bill Gerstenmaier, the agency's associate administrator for human exploration and operations. "It's really tough to lock into a fixed-price contract with the number of providers that can keep us moving forward," Gerstenmaier explained during a teleconference with journalists.
The shift means NASA will have to delay its announcement for proposals until the first quarter of next year, but Gerstenmaier said he still hoped agreements could be made in mid-2012 to cover a 21-month period lasting into early 2014. Two potential spaceship providers, and perhaps more, should be able to get close to a critical design review on that timetable with NASA funding, Gerstenmaier said.
In a statement, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said the space agency is "committed to ensuring that U.S. companies are sending American astronauts into space."

advertisement
"This new acquisition strategy will allow us to preserve competition as we maintain our momentum to provide a U.S.-based commercial crew launch capability at the earliest possible time," he said. 

Crucial difference
 The crucial distinction has to do with how much control NASA will have over the designs that are produced."We can't actually approve their designs, we can't say we're needing a service or getting a service," but the companies at least will be able to keep making progress, Gerstenmaier said. He used the rocket-science term for "change" to describe how the process could go: "There's going to be some potential delta that has to occur when we complete this phase."The companies involved in CCDev had initially voiced reservations about the fixed-price contract plan, out of concern that NASA could exert too much control or even cancel the program altogether in midstream. One of the CCDev companies, California-based SpaceX, issued a statement in support of today's shift.

 "Given budget realities, NASA and domestic space companies need to innovate more than ever," SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell was quoted as saying. "Space Act Agreements yield amazing results — we need only look at the Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket, both highly advanced, all-American vehicles designed using 21st-century technology.  We applaud NASA's decision to use Space Act Agreements for the next round of commercial crew and look forward to the competition."
However, U.S. Rep. Ralph Hall, the Texas Republican who heads the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, questioned the move.
"The disadvantage of using Space Act Agreements is that NASA cannot impose its safety requirements as would be possible under a normal acquisition," Hall said in a statement. "Therefore, it is vitally important that NASA and its industry partners work cooperatively to ensure the highest level of crew safety, even in the absence of safety requirements."

advertisementIn a report issued today, the Government Accountability Office, Congress' independent investigative arm, mentioned fixed-price, performance-based contracts as one of the "good acquisition practices" that NASA was planning for future CCDev work. The report was drawn up before NASA's announcement. 
What lies ahead
 CCDev funding is currently going to Blue Origin, the Boeing Co. and Sierra Nevada as well as SpaceX for spaceship development. For the next phase, commercial ventures will have to propose a full-service system, including the launch vehicle, to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Gerstenmaier said that once the 2012-2014 design phase is done, he expected that fixed-price contracts would be drawn up for the follow-up work, such as spacecraft certification.NASA originally planned for commercial spacecraft to start ferrying astronauts in 2016, but because Congress authorized only half as much money for the current fiscal year as the White House was seeking, NASA now says flight operations won't begin until 2017 at the earliest.

In the meantime, NASA has to purchase seats from the Russians for rides on Soyuz capsules, at a price that's due to rise to more than $60 million in 2014. Gerstenmaier said NASA will now have to negotiate with the Russians for additional seats in the 2016-2017 time frame.
Today's GAO report raised further concerns about the development timetable. It said the "critical need to transport crew to the space station beginning in 2016 requires an aggressive program schedule that may not be attainable, given NASA's experiences with past government and commercial development efforts."

advertisementNASA is also supporting the development of commercial cargo spacecraft under a separate program known as Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, or COTS. A key test flight in that program is scheduled to come in February, when SpaceX is due to launch a Dragon cargo capsule to a potential linkup with the space station. Orbital Sciences Corp., the other COTS company, is planning to begin test launches next year as well
. 
Update for 2:05 p.m. ET: Blue Origin issued a statement from its president, Rob Meyerson, about NASA's change of plans:"We applaud NASA’s plans to continue using competitively awarded Space Act Agreements to accelerate the development of truly commercial crew capabilities.  We believe commercial means significant private investment and competition to accelerate technologies and capabilities designed to enable a space economy, one that includes trips to the International Space Station. ...

"We suggest NASA limit its co-funding to 20 percent of any single private effort, and perhaps less. This keeps the effort predominantly a private endeavor, with the private sector having real 'skin in the game.'  This level of co-funding limits the government’s role to accelerating a private marketplace, not distorting it."

News source : cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.

Bangladesh celebrate their 40th Birthday

News of world :
History is forever a matter of remembering what has been.
And forty years ago, in this land, history took shape and form and substance, through reinventing itself on a declining December day.
It was the winter of ecstasy for the people of Bangladesh, for they had just succeeded in beating back an enemy which should have had no business running riot through their hearths and homes. All across the streets and alleys of this city was heard a continuum of Joi Bangla, the nationalistic slogan which had over the years turned into an articulation of the collective Bangalee demand for democratic rights.
The demand had, of course, changed course through the exigencies of the times -- from that of autonomy for a people long suppressed to that of freedom for a nation convinced that Bangladesh needed to be born if decency was to survive and thrive.
In the afternoon of December 16 four decades ago, it was freedom which stepped gingerly into our homes. Liberty, so long the stuff that dreams are made of, was suddenly and yet expectedly ours to savour. The brave soldiers of the marauding Pakistan army, having put an end to the lives of three million Bangalees and dishonoured as many as two hundred thousand Bangalee women, had finally caved in.
Note that there were 93,000 of them, all men who had been taught to believe that the Bangalees did not matter, that indeed it was "East Pakistan" which had to be reclaimed, that nothing else was. The dramatic nature of the Bangalee victory was as compelling as it was inevitable, for just days before his men bit the dust, General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi had served the eerie warning that Dhaka would be taken only over his dead body. But it was a living, breathing Niazi who had capitulated before the rolling bandwagon of the nationalistic Bangalee spirit.
Forty years on, it is time to reflect on what was, perhaps on what should have been. On December 16, 1971, it was a cheerful rendering of "'aaj srishti shukher ullaashe'" wafting along, per courtesy of a newly reopened and rejuvenated Dhaka Radio. The joy of creation was all, as was the painful happiness of a return home. Abdul Jabbar, having with so many others kept the spirit of triumph alive in the months preceding the end of the war, now sang " hajar bochhor pore abar eshechhi phire . . . Bangla'r buuke achhi darhiye".
In a few days, the Mujibnagar government would be coming home from exile. Within weeks, as time would tell us, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman -- father of the nation, liberator, our friend and our window to the world -- would be back in our midst. There would be a constitution within a year, with a general election to follow. The secular, sovereign Bangalee state, fashioned out of the crucible of a twilight struggle, would be on the road to a consolidation of life and liberty.
The rest is, surely, history. Forks in the road would take us down paths we did not need to take. And foul conspiracy would stand triumphant, through a wholesale murder of the men who had steered the nation to freedom. The brave soldiers who would not rest until liberty was at hand would disappear, one after the other, in the land they had caused to be born. These are realities that ought not to have been. This is history which fundamentally owes its reality to the elemental nature of those who have never tolerated the rise of truth.
Anti-history was around, right from the moment of our rebirth as a proud, free nation. Precious years were lost through democratic politics being pushed into exile and unconstitutional rule taking over. Bangabandhu enlightened us, even as the euphoria of freedom kept us in thrall, on how Bangladesh could graduate to being the Switzerland of the east. Those who came after him, in predatory fashion, simply jostled us back into the dark.
It was not, as Humayun Azad was to proclaim loudly, the Bangladesh we had bargained for back in the terrifying as also terrific months of the war. Our collective imagination and objective reality, as we serenaded a liberated land, did not envision an ambience of untruth, a political canvas where coups d'etat and a rapid decline in values would undermine our ethos before a horrified world. Bloodletting had never been our prediction; and yet blood streamed into the lives of people who had not forgotten the blood shed by their compatriots in all the years leading up to the arrival of liberty. A free nation does not relish the spectacle of blood. And yet blood has flowed.
Forty years on, there is that compulsion in the heart, that tug at the soul, for new promises to be made in the interest of generations of Bangalees to be. Those promises come touched with necessary emotion. Now that we are forty, it is time to restore the ideals we have lost along the way.
Our democracy must be made stronger, through a strengthening of the institutions which underpin governance. Our political classes must inform themselves that politics is never combative or adversarial but is always cooperative; that parliament, being the fountainhead of freedom and justice, ought not to be spurned by those elected to be part of it.
Having arrived at adulthood that ought to be of a mature sort (and we speak of the four decades time has now claimed), we cannot afford to go on playing young any longer. Good governance is now the aspiration; and visionary politics is what defines the future.

As dawn breaks, with memories as profound as they are painful, this nation proudly recalls those who paved the way to freedom forty years ago. Their minds were without fear. Their heads were held high. And we celebrate liberty in a Tagorean heaven of freedom.

Putin Hits Back at Opposition Protest in Vote-Fraud Standoff

News of world :

Dec. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Prime Minister Vladimir Putin hit back at protests over alleged electoral fraud even as Russia’s biggest street demonstrations in a decade threaten to complicate his bid to return to the Kremlin next year.

While Putin pledged to bolster transparency during March’s presidential vote, he rejected accusations of fraud at Dec. 4 parliamentary elections and said foreign funding was helping fuel protests organized by his foes to “destabilize” Russia. He spoke in a 4 1/2-hour phone-in show on television yesterday.

Putin, 59, is facing the biggest unrest since he came to power. Opposition groups got permission this week to stage a demonstration in Moscow on Dec. 24 for as many as 50,000 people, twice the size of the crowd estimated by police at a similar rally Dec. 10. The protests may force Putin into a run-off for the Kremlin if he can’t win more than 50 percent support.

“Putin doesn’t believe he has to make any serious compromises,” Mikhail Vinogradov, head of the St. Petersburg Politics Foundation research group, said yesterday by phone. “He made statements the opposition will consider insulting.”

The ruble was little changed at 31.7674 per dollar after yesterday snapping 10 days of losses against the U.S. currency. The 30-stock Micex Index advanced for a second day, adding 0.7 percent to 1,403.33 at 10:59 a.m. in Moscow.

Orange Revolution

Putin warned against being “dragged into some schemes to destabilize society” and compared the rallies against accusations of ballot-rigging to Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. Organizers paid students to join the Dec. 10 rally in the Russian capital, he added.

“We know the Orange Revolution in Ukraine -- some of our opposition leaders were in Ukraine at the time and were working officially as advisers to Yushchenko,” Putin said, referring to the 2004 street protests in the former Soviet republic that overturned the results of a presidential election and brought opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko to power. “They are transferring these tactics to Russia.”

Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and an opposition leader who backed Yushchenko as president, became an economic adviser after the Ukrainian leader was elected. He didn’t answer calls to his mobile phone seeking comment.

Some of his opponents “have Russian passports, but are acting in the interests of foreign states and with foreign money,” Putin said.

Majority Eroded

The ruling United Russia party’s majority in the State Duma dropped to 238 of the legislature’s 450 seats from 315 after the 2007 vote as stalling wage growth and the government’s failure to curb corruption repelled voters. International observers said the parliamentary vote was marked by ballot-stuffing and was neither free nor fair.

Putin’s party won more than 46 percent of the vote in Moscow, Europe’s largest city with 11.5 million people and the epicenter of the protests to date, according to official results. That compared with 27.5 percent support in an exit poll by the Public Opinion Foundation.

“The results of these elections definitely reflect the real balance of forces in the country,” said Putin, who announced plans in September to return to the Kremlin, pushing aside his protege Dmitry Medvedev. “The opposition will always claim election results aren’t fair.”

Courts must review allegations of vote fraud after official results are announced, he added.

Presidential Vote

As he gears up for Russia’s 2012 presidential elections, Putin said he’d quit his leadership role if he understood that he no longer had the support of the people.

The premier’s approval rating is 46 percent, according to a Nov. 26-27 poll of 3,000 people by the Public Opinion Foundation. No margin of error was given. Putin would get 42 percent if a presidential election were held this weekend, the state-run All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion, or VTsIOM, said today, citing a survey conducted among 1,600 people on Dec. 10-11 with a 3.4 percentage-point margin of error.

Putin, who served as president from 2000 to 2008 and may be in power until 2024, told election officials yesterday to install web cameras at every single polling station in March to avoid any accusations of vote fraud.

‘Delegitimize the Authorities’

“For me it’s clear these attacks about the recent elections have an ongoing character -- the main aim is the next elections, presidential elections,” Putin said. “We need to make sure there aren’t any problems here, to minimize the chance for people to point to these elections as unfair, to pull the rug from under those who want to delegitimize the authorities completely.”

Putin also said he would consider pardoning Mikhail Khodorkovsky if he succeeds in returning to the Kremlin, countering billionaire presidential challenger Mikhail Prokhorov’s pledge to free the former Yukos Oil Co. owner.

Ousted Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Putin shouldn’t “provoke” political protesters with claims that many of them were paid to attend rallies.

People are right to condemn the election results because violations occurred and the response from the authorities has been “inadequate,” Kudrin told reporters in Moscow today.

Putin’s attitude to the protests shows that he hasn’t understood the need to take on board the complaints of middle- class Russians who took to the streets, said Julian Rimmer, a trader of Russian shares at CF Global Trading in London.

“He has been trotting out the familiar canards to explain away the most vociferous expressions of discontent since his reign of ‘managed democracy’ began,” Rimmer said by e-mail today. “He has, by turns, blamed foreign interference for the dissent or clever manipulation of callow youth by unscrupulous ‘counter-revolutionary elements.’”

News source : businessweek

Carlos the Jackal convicted for 1980s French terrorist attacks

news of world :

A French court has convicted the Venezuelan-born terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal of organising four deadly attacks in France in the 1980s and sentenced him to life in prison. 

 

He was handed the maximum sentence that had been requested by French prosecutors who had urged the court to find Carlos Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, 62, guilty of the bombings that killed 11 people and left nearly 150 injured.

His lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, described the verdict as a "scandal" and said he would appeal.

Carlos first rose to prominence in 1975 when his commando group burst into the conference room where ministers from the powerful OPEC oil cartel were meeting in Vienna, taking 11 hostage.

His Paris trial dealt with four attacks that were seen as part of a private war Carlos waged against France to free two comrades, including his future wife, who were arrested in Paris while planning to attack the Kuwaiti embassy.

French authorities received a letter, allegedly marked with Carlos's fingerprints, threatening "war" if the pair were not released within 30 days.

French prosecutor Olivier Bray had argued that the bombings in France in 1982 and 1983 were not "targeted" political actions, but "blind" attacks aimed to "kill the maximum number of people with the minimum of risk."
He said 30 years was "too long" for Carlos's victims to have waited for his conviction, but that "the duty of democracies is to never give up ... arresting those behind attacks and bringing them to justice."
Alain Poupaux, who was injured in one of the attacks, said he was "relieved" by the minimum term "which will make sure he stays in prison."
German national Christa Froehlich, tried in absentia for one of the attacks, was found not guilty. The prosecution had asked for a 15-year sentence on the 69-year-old woman who lives in Hanover.
Two other life sentences were handed down on co-accused who were also tried in absentia. German national Johannes Weinrich, Carlos's former right-hand man, is being held in Germany for other crimes while Palestinian Ali Kamal al-Issawi is at large.
The trial of Carlos lasted six weeks. He spoke for five hours before the verdict was announced and the deliberations of the court lasted for four hours.
Carlos sobbed as he wound up his speech by reading a document he said was "the testament of (former Libyan leader) Muammar Gaddafi, a "man who did more than all the revolutionaries like us in the world."
With clenched fist he shouted "Long live the revolution," "Allah Akhbar" (God is greatest), echoed by some 15 supporters in the public gallery.
Carlos was arrested in Sudan in 1994 and transferred to France, where he has since been held in various jails. In 1997 he was convicted of the 1975 murder of a civilian and two policemen, and jailed for life.
Carlos has boasted in newspaper interviews of carrying out more than 100 attacks as the leader of a militant gang that operated in Europe on behalf of Warsaw Pact intelligence agencies and militant Palestinian groups.
The series of attacks began with the bombing of the express train "Le Capitole" on March 29, 1982, which was running from Paris to the southern city of Toulouse.
Five died in the attack and 28 were wounded.
The attack on Le Capitole was claimed by the "International Terrorist Friends of Carlos" and was followed on April 22, 1982, by the Paris car bombing of anti-Syrian newspaper Al-Watan Al-Arabi, which killed a passer-by and wounded 60.
On the same day, Carlos's comrade Bruno Breguet and future wife Magdalena Kopp were convicted of the foiled embassy attack.
Two more bombings took place on New Year's Eve 1983. One hit a high-speed TGV train between Marseille and Paris, killing three people and wounding 13. Moments later, a bomb in a Marseille train station killed two.
Despite his notoriety, he has drawn the support of Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, who praised him last month as a "worthy heir of the greatest struggles ... on behalf of the people and social justice."
news source : telegraph