They have been searching in Iraq for the past nine years, 10 months and 15 days.
Today, the hard work finally paid off as soldiers found one of those elusive ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that Saddam Hussein was supposed to have been hiding.
So is it all round to Tony Blair’s house for celebratory drinks?
Explosive discovery: Iraqi army officials with the rocket they found
Unfortunately the discovery came just a few days late for the former prime minister, who could have used the extraordinary find as proof he was right about Iraq all along during the Chilcot Inquiry.
But from the looks of the rocket, it would appear unlikely it could be deployed anywhere in 45 minutes, let alone be fired at the UK, as a certain dossier led us to believe.
The bomb is thought to have been buried by Saddam Hussein’s regime before the UK and U.S. invasion of Iraq started in 2003.
Iraqi guards were as surprised as the rest of us to discover the ‘missile’ during an operation in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib suburb.
It is not yet known whether the seven-metre rocket is armed with a warhead.
Buried: It is thought the ‘missile’ had been hidden by Saddam Hussein’s regime
By Carol Driver
Two of his first customers on a cold winter morning are young fighters in their late teens from the militant Shiite movement Hizbollah who are enraptured with a selection of gleaming new 9mm handguns from Belgium, the United States and the Czech Republic.
But these young fighters make only about US$400 (Dh1,500) a month for their work in “The Resistance”, putting the sleek automatic pistols, listed at $2,000 each, well outside their price range.
Although Hizbollah obviously issues military-grade weaponry to its fighters, the boys say only the highest-ranking members – leadership, undercover operatives, bodyguards and security teams – are given pistols, making them a critical, if expensive, status symbol among the youngest fighters, who have been known to take second jobs or save for years just to add private weapons to their inventory.
The group does not buy its weaponry on Lebanon’s back market, according to people familiar with its acquisitions process, but from the international black market. Hizbollah’s arms also come direct from Iran and Syria.
“Professional fighters or not, they’re young Lebanese boys and all of them love guns,” according to Abu Ibrahim, a colleague. “I bet the American army has the same situation; boys spend all day carrying their M4s around Iraq and Afghanistan and the minute they get home and have some money saved, they go buy other weapons just because they like them.”
A few minutes after the Hizbollah gunmen arrive, a jeep from the Internal Security Forces, Lebanon’s federal police force, pulls up outside the shack but neither Mr Mahdi nor his militant customers seem worried. The police officers have arrived to pick up two assault rifles that they ordered a few weeks earlier. They seem to know the fighters and all start happily chatting and playing with the dozens of weapons stuffed in the back of Mr Mahdi’s truck.
It is a slightly surreal scene and Mr Mahdi suddenly worries that the two government employees and two Hizbollah fighters shopping for illegal weapons might feel uncomfortable with a foreign journalist quietly watching the tableau of illicit male bonding as he suggests scheduling another interview.
Almost two weeks later, he walks into a nearby home and collapses on a sofa and takes a sip of a Sprite soft drink.
“I am exhausted,” he says, thanks to non-stop business demands. “I am making a lot of money but I have no time to sleep. Anyone who tells you that Lebanon is peaceful and stable is lying. Everyone is buying weapons; I can’t keep up.”
Officially, the only legal weapons in Lebanon are shotguns meant for hunting birds. And although much of the population was heavily armed during the 1975 to 1990 civil war, the various factions agreed to disarm their heavy weapons stockpiles, with the notable exception of Hizbollah.
Some tanks, mortars and rocket launchers were passed on to the reformed Lebanese army, but most, according to an international arms dealer, were immediately sold to various factions in the then nascent conflict in the former Yugoslavia. But little was done about light weapons – assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and sniper rifles – which were often stuffed into storage in homes and villages around Lebanon. And ever since, the arms dealers have used an interesting metric for judging the stability of the country: the price of the ubiquitous AK-47 assault rifle.
“There were so many AKs in the country at the end of the war that it’s almost pointless to import them, everyone just sells the same guns back and forth,” Mr Mahdi says. “So I can tell you, according to the price of one gun, how Lebanon is looking. And things are not good.”
Just before the death of the former prime minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005, whose assassination ushered in Lebanon’s longest period of chaos since the end of the civil war, a new model AK-47 in very good condition could be bought for $300. A month after his death, the price had doubled to $600. By the outbreak of the July 2006 war between Hizbollah and Israel, it had tripled to $900 as people expected either an occupation by Israel or ongoing civil strife in the aftermath.
“The war was terrible for Lebanon but I made $10,000 profit in just a few weeks,” Mr Mahdi admits. “But prices just kept rising.”
He says the high point for the price of the AK-47 was in the period of major Sunni and Shiite sectarian tension that preceded the May 2008 clashes between Hizbollah and its allies against groups of Sunnis loyal to the government.
“In the days before the action, I knew that something was going to happen because prices jumped to $1,300 per AK,” he said. “It’s come down just a little but business is too much for this peace to last. Everyone is walking the streets acting all good, but they’re lying.”
This prediction is based on several factors, according to Mr Mahdi. The first is a widespread concern by Hizbollah that al Qa’eda-style groups, who cannot resist having their biggest enemies – the Shiite and Israel – in such close proximity, will target Lebanon. The second problem is a lack of faith in Lebanon’s government.
“There is no government, those people are useless,” says Mr Mahdi. “No one trusts them to keep the peace, so everyone buys weapons to protect their homes and families. Normally I sell about 30 to 40 machine guns a month but right now, it’s double that. And the price is $1,200 for a gun in good condition, almost as high as May 2008.”
“But I know there is a real problem on the streets right now not just because of the machine guns but because I am selling so many RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) launchers. People only buy grenades when they think war is coming. An RPG isn’t really a weapon you use to protect your house, but everyone is buying them anyway. Not good.”
WARSAW, Poland — A team of Polish scientists said today they have discovered three Neanderthal teeth in a cave, a find they hope may shed light on how similar to modern humans our ancestors were.
Neanderthal artifacts have been unearthed in Poland before. But the teeth are the first bodily Neanderthal remains found in the country, according to Mikolaj Urbanowski, an archaeologist with Szczecin University and the project’s lead researcher.
Urbanowski said the teeth were unearthed in the Stajna Cave, north of the Carpathian Mountains, along with flint tools and the bones of the woolly mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, both extinct Ice Age species.
The researchers also found a hammer made of reindeer antler and bones of cave bears bearing cut marks, indicating they were eaten by the Neanderthals, Urbanowski said.
“The cave bears were big, dangerous animals and this supports the view the Neanderthals were really efficient hunters,” he said.
The findings were reported by the German science journal Naturwissenschaften in an online article dated Jan. 28.
The article focused mainly on one of the teeth, providing evidence for the claim that it is from a Neanderthal about 20 years old at the time of death.
Urbanowski said that tooth has undergone the most analysis but the team is nearly certain the other two also belonged to Neanderthals who lived 100,000 to 80,000 years ago.
The placement of the teeth along with flint tools has led the team to hypothesize that the site could have been some kind of primitive burial site, which would point to a belief in the afterlife.
“How they treated their dead is crucial to understanding how human-like they were,” he said, but he stressed that much more research is required on that question.
Scientists have found that those who run barefoot, or in minimal footwear, tend to avoid “heel-striking,” and instead land on the ball of the foot or the middle of the foot. In so doing, these runners use the architecture of the foot and leg and some clever Newtonian physics to avoid hurtful and potentially damaging impacts, equivalent to two to three times body weight, that shod heel-strikers repeatedly experience.
“People who dont wear shoes when they run have an astonishingly different strike,” says Daniel E. Lieberman, professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University and co-author of a paper appearing this week in the journal Nature. “By landing on the middle or front of the foot, barefoot runners have almost no impact collision, much less than most shod runners generate when they heel-strike. Most people today think barefoot running is dangerous and hurts, but actually you can run barefoot on the worlds hardest surfaces without the slightest discomfort and pain. All you need is a few calluses to avoid roughing up the skin of the foot. Further, it might be less injurious than the way some people run in shoes.”
Working with populations of runners in the United States and Kenya, Lieberman and his colleagues at Harvard, the University of Glasgow, and Moi University looked at the running gaits of three groups: those who had always run barefoot, those who had always worn shoes, and those who had converted to barefoot running from shod running. The researchers found a striking pattern.
Most shod runners — more than 75 percent of Americans — heel-strike, experiencing a very large and sudden collision force about 1,000 times per mile run. People who run barefoot, however, tend to land with a springy step towards the middle or front of the foot.
“Heel-striking is painful when barefoot or in minimal shoes because it causes a large collisional force each time a foot lands on the ground,” says co-author Madhusudhan Venkadesan, a postdoctoral researcher in applied mathematics and human evolutionary biology at Harvard. “Barefoot runners point their toes more at landing, avoiding this collision by decreasing the effective mass of the foot that comes to a sudden stop when you land, and by having a more compliant, or springy, leg.”
The differences between shod and unshod running have evolutionary underpinnings. For example, says Lieberman, our early Australopith ancestors had less developed arches in their feet. Homo sapiens, by contrast, has evolved a strong, large arch that we use as a spring when running.
“Our feet were made in part for running,” Lieberman says. But as he and his co-authors write in Nature: “Humans have engaged in endurance running for millions of years, but the modern running shoe was not invented until the 1970s. For most of human evolutionary history, runners were either barefoot or wore minimal footwear such as sandals or moccasins with smaller heels and little cushioning.”
For modern humans who have grown up wearing shoes, barefoot or minimal shoe running is something to be eased into, warns Lieberman. Modern running shoes are designed to make heel-striking easy and comfortable. The padded heel cushions the force of the impact, making heel-striking less punishing.
“Running barefoot or in minimal shoes is fun but uses different muscles,” says Lieberman. “If you’ve been a heel-striker all your life you have to transition slowly to build strength in your calf and foot muscles.”
In the future, he hopes, the kind of work done in this paper can not only investigate barefoot running, but can provide insight into how to better prevent the repetitive stress injuries that afflict a high percentage of runners today.
“Our hope is that an evolutionary medicine approach to running and sports injury can help people run better for longer and feel better while they do it,” says Lieberman, who has created a web site, www.barefootrunning.fas.harvard.edu, to educate runners about the respective merits of shod and barefoot running.
The Nature paper arose out of the senior honors theses of two Harvard undergraduates, William A. Werbel ‘08 and Adam E. Daoud ‘09, both of whom went to Africa with Lieberman to help collect data for this study.
Liebermans co-authors on the Nature paper are Venkadesan and Daoud at Harvard; Werbel, now at the University of Michigan; Susan D’Andrea of the Providence Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Providence, R.I.; Irene S. Davis of the University of Delaware; and Robert Ojiambo Mang’Eni and Yannis Pitsiladis of Moi University in Kenya and the University of Glasgow in Scotland.
The research was funded by the American School of Prehistoric Research, the Goelet Fund, Harvard University, and Vibram USA.
Aliens visiting Earth will be just like humans, scientist claims
Alien visitors to Earth may be as acquisitive as humans. Photograph: Getty
Governments should prepare for the worst if aliens visit Earth because beings from outer space are likely to be just like humans, a leading scientist is claiming.
Extra-terrestrials might not only resemble us but have our foibles, such as greed, violence and a tendency to exploit others’ resources, says Simon Conway Morris, professor of evolutionary paleobiology at Cambridge University.
And while aliens could come in peace they are quite as likely to be searching for somewhere to live, and to help themselves to water, minerals and fuel, Conway Morris will tell a conference at the Royal Society in London tomorrow.
His lecture is part of a two-day conference at which experts will discuss how we might detect life on distant planets and what that could mean for society. “Extra-terrestrials … won’t be splodges of glue … they could be disturbingly like us, and that might not be a good thing – we don’t have a great record.”
The US space agency’s search for alien life is based upon the mantra “follow the water”, a strategy reflecting the fact that, on Earth, where there’s water there’s life. Recent missions have revealed ice on the moon and Mars.
Astronomers have detected more than 400 planets outside our solar system, some of which sit in the ”Goldilocks zone” where the temperature is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to form.
Conway Morris will argue that alien life is most likely to occur on a planet similar to our own, with organisms made from the same biochemicals. The process of evolution will even shape alien life in a similar way, he added.
“My view is that Darwinian evolution is really quite predictable, and when you have a biosphere and evolution takes over, then common themes emerge and the same is true for intelligence.
“If you have a planet much smaller than ours, the gravity is so weak it loses its atmosphere. If the planet is much bigger, its gravity is so strong that everything crawls around on the ground, because you don’t have to fall far to break everything. It’s fantastically dull.”
The meeting is the first in a series that marks the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary. Future conferences will tackle the science of ageing, vaccines, stem cells and geoengineering: the use of technology to protect the planet from the adverse effects of climate change.
Albert Harrison, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, who is speaking at the meeting tomorrow, will raise concerns about the radio signals humans are sending out to any eavesdropping aliens.
Scientists have used telescopes to listen for alien broadcasts for more than 20 years, but we have also beamed our own signals into space. Harrison wonders if we might be sending the wrong kind of messages.
“Some of them are serious, but there’s a lot of hoopla, like love letters and commercials. What would we make of an alien civilisation if the first thing we translated from them was a commercial for a snack food?” he said.
In the spring, scientists will debate whether Earth should be more proactive in trying to make contact with aliens by broadcasting signals to solar systems that might harbour life.
Some enthusiasts believe any alien civilisation capable of reaching us can only have survived long enough to develop the necessary technology by solving major social problems, such as war, poverty and discrimination. Harrison disagrees.
“I do think there’s a risk in active searches for extra-terrestrials. The attitude seems to be they’re friendly, they’re a long way away, and they can’t get here. But if you wake up one morning and an armada of extra-terrestrial spaceships are circling Earth, that prediction won’t necessarily hold,” Harrison said.
If life has evolved elsewhere in our cosmic neighbourhood, we should find out by detecting their waste gases in the atmosphere of their planet or by discovering remnants of extra-terrestrial microbes in meteorites or alien soil samples, he said.
Harrison dismisses fears of public panic if alien life is discovered, of the kind which reportedly followed Orson Welles’ infamous radio broadcast of War of the Worlds in 1938.
“The public reaction was overstated. Most people who thought the broadcast was real took sensible actions to protect themselves,” Harrison said. “Surveys suggest most people think they will be fine, but they worry about others freaking out.”
Ted Peters, professor of systematic theology at the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in California, has surveyed religious groups to understand whether confirmation of extra-terrestrials could trigger the collapse of religion on Earth.
His research suggests not, but he believes Christians should clarify whether God’s creation covers the whole of space or just Earth.
BAGHDAD – The U.S. Marine Corps is leaving Iraq.
The U.S. military says the Marines will formally handover control on Saturday of Iraqs western desert to the Army during a ceremony at Camp Ramadi, about 70 miles (115 kilometers) west of Baghdad.
The handover marks the end of the Marine mission in an area once considered a main battleground of the insurgency.
The Armys 1st Armored Division is now responsible for both Baghdad and the vast desert province of Anbar.
The departure of the Marines marks the beginning of an accelerated American drawdown in Iraq.
President Barack Obama has ordered all but 50,000 troops out of the country by Aug. 31, 2010, with most to leave after the March 7 parliamentary election.
TRICARE Increasing Social Media Presence. The final item in Federal News Radio’s (1/20) “Daily Debrief” reports, “TRICARE is taking the plunge into social media to uncover what issues matter most to its beneficiaries.” The “deputy director of the TRICARE Management Activity said in a press release that TRICARE is already active on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr, and is getting ready to launch a new media center Web page in March 2010
