Eternal Life gets deadly, Atlantis gets found, tobacco gets illegal

Fallujah reports differ

The U.S. assault on Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah forced most… Fallujah reports differ

The U.S. assault on Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah forced most western reporters and aid workers to leave the city, making it difficult to access substantiated news of the situation on the ground.

But the Asia Times reported Iraqi refugees saying American forces used cluster bombs in built-up areas and sprayed white phosphorus, a banned chemical weapon.

By any account, Fallujah appears to be a humanitarian disaster. The city has been virtually reduced to rubble, and the Red Cross has confirmed that surviving residents are “eating roots” and “burying their dead in their gardens.”

U.S. forces captured the main hospital at the beginning of the campaign, saying that it was spreading propaganda after high civilian-casualty figures emerged from the location. The Red Cross has said there is no medicine left in the remaining medical centers to help any survivors of the invasion.

Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has insisted that no civilians have died in Fallujah, but a top Red Cross official in Baghdad estimated at least 800 civilians have been killed so far. The same official described this estimate as a “low figure,” based on accounts by aid workers still barred from entering the city center by U.S. troops.

Many in the Arab world have seen an interview with Dr. Asma Khamis al-Muhannadi, of Fallujah’s general hospital. After marines captured the building, she said, “we were tied up and beaten, despite being unarmed and having only our medical instruments.”

She said the hospital was targeted with bombs and rockets during the initial siege of the city. She added that, when the marines came into the building, she was with a woman in labor.

“The umbilical cord had not yet been cut. At that time, a U.S. soldier shouted at one of the Iraqi National Guards to arrest me and tie my hands while I was helping the mother to deliver. I will never forget this incident in my life.”

Emerging video footage of a U.S. marine shooting and killing a wounded, unarmed Iraqi in a mosque on Saturday has fueled controversy over the Fallujah offensive. The U.S. military has begun an investigation into possible war crimes over the incident.

“Eternal life” nearly kills five

Reuters news network reported Wednesday that a 75-foot-high monument in Tajikistan called “Eternal Life” collapsed and nearly killed five people.

Five men were working on the monument, which was designed to herald the end of a drawn-out war during the 1990s. The workers suffered broken arms and legs when it came crashing down on them, said police spokesperson Alisher Khakimov.

Atlantis uncovered?

An American researcher has said he discovered the lost, ancient civilization of Atlantis last week, in the Mediterranean Sea, 50 miles off the coast of Cyprus.

Robert Sarmast said Atlantis lies just more a mile beneath sea level, between Cyprus and Syria.

“We have definitely found it,” Sarmast said.

Reuters reported Sarmast’s statement that “deep water sonar scanning [has] indicated man-made structures on a submerged hill, including a 3-kilometer-long wall, a walled hill summit and deep trenches.”

The team of explorers cannot provide tangible proof in the form of bricks and mortar, since any evidence is buried under several layers of sediment, but “the circumstantial and other evidence is irrefutable,” Sarmast said.

At a news conference in the port city of Limassol, Cyprus, Sarmast provided animated simulations of what he said was a “hill.”

The question of where the remains of Atlantis will be found, and whether it existed at all, has captured imaginations for many centuries. Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher, said Atlantis was an island nation on which an advanced civilization developed more than 11,500 years ago.

Theories about the city’s disappearance range from an explanation that it was hit by a cataclysmic natural disaster to the Greek myth that describes destruction at the hands of the gods as punishment for rampant corruption and greed.

Skeptics have argued that Atlantis was simply a figment of Plato’s imagination.

Banned smoke

Authorities in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan have banned the sale of tobacco, South Africa’s Cape Times reported last week. The new law, to come into effect next month, will be the first ban of its kind in the world, the newspaper said.

The Mahayana Buddhist nation, with a population of 734,000, has levied harsh fines of more than $210 against anyone caught selling tobacco. The country’s poverty line is set at an income of around $15 dollars a month.

Blinded in one eye, three times

A New York man has been jailed for 15 years after claiming he was blinded in his right eye on three separate occasions.

The New York Daily News reported last Thursday that Brian Calen, 48, received $75,000 in 1992 after he claimed a cruise ship telescope left him with solar burn. In 1997, he received another million after claiming an exploding wine bottle blinded him during another cruise.

In 2002, Calen filed a third claim, saying he had been blinded by a flying disc — again on a cruise — and he was picked up after an insurance agent spotted his previous claims. Calen has been charged with insurance fraud and grand larceny.

Drugs, giant squid seized in police raid

Peruvian police said Monday that they had seized more than 1,500 pounds of cocaine, with a street value of $17.5 million, hidden in a frozen giant squid bound for the United States.

Reuters reported the drugs were covered in pepper and sealed in plastic to divert police dogs. Seven people were arrested at the scene.

An Evolution of Arms

An Oxford University zoologist working for the Pentagon has attempted to use his theory of evolution to build a computer program that would monitor global developments and possible terrorist threats.

Dr. Andrew Parker’s book, “In the Blink of an Eye,” describes the Cambrian explosion: a period 550 million years ago, in which primitive forms of life flourished into a stunning variety of new species. Parker contends that this upsurge in evolution was triggered by the emergence of the eye.

Parker accepted an e-mail invitation from the Pentagon last year, traveling to a secret location near the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, according to The Guardian. About 20 personnel were flown from Washington to see the scientist’s presentation. The discussions centered on how the Cambrian period was comparable to an evolutionary arms race, with different creatures developing new defenses and means of attack.

The Guardian reported that the Pentagon “believed modeling [Parker’s theory] on a computer might help predict how to defend against new tactics dreamed up by terrorists.”

“One of the big surprises was how seriously I was taken,” Parker said. “It was all a bit surreal.”