The World Daily Blog

It will be the world’s largest telescope, once they manage to build it.

That could take a while – about 10 years, according to the current plan.

Once it is completed, however, the E-ELT (abbreviation for the European Extremely Large Telescope) will command a front-row view of an ever unfolding universe from its perch high in the Andes of northern Chile.

The instrument’s somewhat prosaic-sounding name at least has the virtue of accuracy. This telescope will be very large, with an “optical aperture” stretching 39-metres in diameter, which is huge.

Gen. Rubén Alzate has done what he had to do.

He has resigned.

Whatever his intentions may have been, the Colombian army officer made a big mistake last month while traveling by boat on the remote Atrato River in Colombia’s Choco province.

Dressed in civilian clothes and accompanied only by a corporal named Jorge Rodriguez and a lawyer named Gloria Urrego, the general ordered the boat’s operator to dock at Las Mercedes, a small riverside village, where all three passengers were promptly taken prisoner by FARC rebels active in the region. The rebels let the boat's operator go.

Sergei Magnitsky has an iron-clad alibi for not appearing at his trial.

He’s been dead for five years.

But that hasn’t stopped the Russian judicial system from prosecuting him – for the second time since his death. He was found guilty of tax fraud on the first round, an accusation levelled at him while still alive, when he blew the whistle on the biggest known tax theft in Russian history and documented its alleged links to the Russian government.

Now a judge of the Russian Supreme Court has rejected an application by Magnitsky’s mother to quash the case on the grounds that it would violate presumption of innocence and access to a fair trial. Furthermore, it would ignore conflict of interest on the part of the investigator of the original case, who knew members of the group named by Magnitsky as part of a “criminal conspiracy” to steal $230 million in government funds and recycle it to officials.

In Toronto, they pulled down the subway posters.

Meanwhile, in Peru, a major retailer has been obliged to cancel an entire Christmas advertising catalogue.

In both cases, the cause of the disturbance is much the same: it has to do with skin colour.

A Toronto company called Liberty Clinic got into trouble a week or so ago when TTC riders complained about advertising posters that showed an African woman and a South Asian woman whose skin had apparently been rendered “brighter and lighter” thanks to an intravenous-drip treatment available at the clinic. In response, the company asked to have all the offending posters removed.

You may very well dislike Robert Mugabe , but you have got to grant the man this much: he is wily, he is ruthless, and he surely is persistent.

At 90 years of age, he remains the uncontested ruler of Zimbabwe, a position he has held – first as prime minister and then as president – since the southern African country formerly known as Rhodesia gained independence under majority rule in 1980.

That was 34 years ago, and Robert Mugabe is in power still, showing no signs of contemplating retirement.

To judge by a recent outbreak of turmoil at the highest levels of the ruling party – known as Zanu-PF – Mugabe is moving in the opposite direction, seeking to further cement his grip on the future of Zimbabwe and even to extend his dominion beyond the grave, with the previously unsuspected assistance of his much younger wife, Grace Mugabe, who has suddenly emerged as a potent political force herself.

For most of us, spending just one day in an insect-infested cell little bigger than a broom closet would be a 24-hour nightmare.

Fast forward to 500 days, and you’ll have the ordeal suffered by Canadian resident Khaled Al-Qazzaz, about to mark this unhappy anniversary under guard in a Cairo hospital as result of 16 months in solitary confinement that has shattered his physical and emotional health.

But there’s no fast forward for inmates of Cairo’s now infamous Tora prison – where Canadian journalist Mohamed Fahmy and two Al Jazeera colleagues are also banged up on charges widely considered bogus.

In spite of his months behind bars, Al-Qazzaz has been charged with nothing. An educator and human rights advocate, he was arrested as an aide to Egypt’s deposed Islamist president Mohammed Morsi, who was ousted in a military-backed coup that followed massive protests against his leadership.

Here is further proof, if further proof were needed, that Uruguay’s outgoing president – José Mujica, 78 – is the planet’s most appealing politician.

Not only did the former guerrilla fighter introduce a raft of liberal social legislation during his four years in office – legalizing same sex marriage, relaxing Uruguay’s previous restrictions on abortion, and introducing the world’s most permissive marijuana laws.

Not only did he turn over most of his presidential salary to charity.

Not only did he decline to occupy Uruguay’s luxurious presidential palace in order to continue residing, along with his wife, in their rustic farmhouse outside Montevideo.