WASHINGTON — Footprints found in Kenya that resemble those left in wet sand by beach goers today show that 1.5 million years ago a human ancestor walked like we do with anatomically modern feet, scientists said on Thursday. The remains of the footprints found in sedimentary rock near Ileret in northern Kenya most likely were left by a human ancestor called Homo erectus, also known as Homo ergaster, an international team of scientists wrote in the journal Science. The scientists found a series of footprints, including one apparently left by a child, left by individuals walking on a muddy river bank. Judging from stride length, they estimated the individuals were about 5-foot-9 (1.75 meters) in height. ‘It was kind of creepy excavating these things to see all of a sudden something that looks so dramatically like something that you yourself could have made 20 minutes earlier in some kind of wet sediment just next to the site,’ archaeologist David Braun of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, one of the researchers, said in a telephone interview. ‘These could quite easily have been made on the beach today,’ Braun added. The footprints show that […]
CAIRO — A dozen Palestinian factions agreed to form committees that will establish one government for the West Bank and Gaza Strip during an Egyptian-brokered talks in Cairo on Thursday. Negotiators of the factions led by bitter rivals Fatah and Hamas said in a news conference after the meeting that they had agreed to end their bitter fighting in an effort to form a unity government. Hamas and Fatah agreed to release prisoners in their bases, and to stop smear campaigns in the media, according to a statement released after the meeting. Representatives from other groups in the region also attended the meeting. The group has agreed to form five committees to address security and the formation of an election commission. The committees would begin work March 10 and complete their work at the end of the month, by which time they hope a national unity government will be formed. The breakthrough came three days ahead of an international donor conference in Egypt that hopes to raise money for the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. Several Western nations have expressed a reluctance to work with any government that includes Hamas, which they consider […]
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will seek to reinstate the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 during the Bush administration, Attorney General Eric Holder said today. ‘As President Obama indicated during the campaign, there are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons,’ Holder told reporters. Holder said that putting the ban back in place would not only be a positive move by the United States, it would help cut down on the flow of guns going across the border into Mexico, which is struggling with heavy violence among drug cartels along the border. ‘I think that will have a positive impact in Mexico, at a minimum.’ Holder said at a news conference on the arrest of more than 700 people in a drug enforcement crackdown on Mexican drug cartels operating in the U.S. Mexican government officials have complained that the availability of sophisticated guns from the United States have emboldened drug traffickers to fight over access routes into the U.S. A State Department travel warning issued Feb. 20, 2009, reflected government concerns about the violence. […]
PHOENIX — The Mexican agents who moved in on a safe house full of drug dealers last May were not prepared for the fire power that greeted them. When the shooting was over, eight agents were dead. Among the guns the police recovered was an assault rifle traced back across the border to a dingy gun store here called X-Caliber Guns. Now, the owner, George Iknadosian, will go on trial on charges he sold hundreds of weapons, mostly AK-47 rifles, to smugglers, knowing they would send them to a drug cartel in the western state of Sinaloa. The guns helped fuel the gang warfare in which more than 6,000 Mexicans died last year. Mexican authorities have long complained that American gun dealers are arming the cartels. This case is the most prominent prosecution of an American gun dealer since the United States promised Mexico two years ago it would clamp down on the smuggling of weapons across the border. It also offers a rare glimpse of how weapons delivered to American gun dealers are being moved into Mexico and wielded in horrific crimes. ‘We had a direct pipeline from Iknadosian to the Sinaloa cartel,’ said Thomas […]
Renewable resources such as wind and solar will provide enough baseload electricity to meet the needs of society in the near future, said a longtime energy conservation advocate. Roger Peters, national secretary to the board of the Canadian Renewable Energy Alliance, said new technology to harness the wind and sun will make reliance on renewable resources feasible by possibly 2020-30 and certainly by 2050. ‘In the debate over alternatives, renewable energy tends to get second shrift with the assumption that it can not provide the basic energy requirements we need, particularly on the power side, because the amount is too small, there isn’t enough power … because it’s too variable,’ Peters told the editorial board of the StarPhoenix on Tuesday. Peters said that assumption is unfair. As seen in other countries, renewable energy can compete on reliability, cost and other aspects against carbon capture and nuclear power. ‘In terms of the amount of renewable energy, a lot more renewable energy falls on the Earth than we could ever use — even commercially collect,’ said Peters. Renewable energy equals roughly 100 times the Earth’s annual consumption of electricity, he said. Saskatchewan is blessed with one of […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
