FILE – Sunni protesters chant slogans against the Iraq’s Shiite-led government as they wave national flags during a 2013 demonstration in Fallujah.

The Sunni-Shi’ite divide playing out in violence in parts of the Middle East is an ancient dispute that traces back to the dawn of Islam.

It started some 1,400 years ago with a dispute over leadership for the Muslim community following the death of the Prophet Mohammad.

‘There were those who felt that the leadership should fall upon the most able individual,” said Gregory Gause, a professor at the International Affairs Department at Texas A&M University. ‘These people came to be known as Sunnis because they followed the Sunna, or the way of the prophet.

‘There were those who felt that the leadership should remain within the blood relatives of the prophet,” he said. ‘These people focused on Ali; the prophet’s cousin and they became known as the Shi’ite or ‘partisans of Ali.”’

Through the centuries, there […]

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The Pentagon is funding social science research to model risks of “social contagions” that could damage US strategic interests. Photograph: Jason Reed/REUTERS

A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme is designed to develop immediate and long-term “warfighter-relevant insights” for senior officials and decision makers in “the defense policy community,” and to inform policy implemented by “combatant commands.”

Launched in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis – the DoD ‘Minerva Research Initiative’ partners with universities “to improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US.”

Among the projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a Cornell University-led study managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research which […]

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‘Forests are the lungs of our land,” said Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Twenty years ago, the world’s lungs were diseased. Brazil, the country with more tropical trees than any other, was cutting down an area of forest two-thirds the size of Belgium every year. Roughly half of all the planet’s once-luxuriant tropical forests had been felled and the further degradation of the Earth’s green spaces seemed inevitable.

It would be too much to say that forests have made a full recovery. Worldwide, over 5m hectares of jungle-getting on for two Belgiums-are still being felled or burned down each year. In some countries, notably Indonesia, the chainsaws are growing louder. But the crisis is passing and the prognosis is starting to improve. Fears that the great forests of the Congo would be cleared have proved unfounded so far. Brazil and Mexico have reduced their deforestation rates by well over two-thirds. India and Costa Rica have done more than reduce the rate of loss: they are replanting areas that were once clear-cut.

Over time countries trace a ‘forest transition curve”. They start in poverty with the […]

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Demonstrators supporting protesters in Ferguson, Mo., hold up mirrors to police during a march Wednesday in Oakland. Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle

The violence that turns a small-town protest into a fiery national spectacle like the one that has played out this month in Missouri is often unwittingly provoked by police, according to researchers at UC Berkeley.

The research team, which studied clashes between police and activists during the Occupy movement three years ago, found that protests tend to turn violent when officers use aggressive tactics, such as approaching demonstrators in riot gear or lining up in military-like formations.

Recent events in Ferguson, Mo., are a good example, the study’s lead researcher said. For nearly two weeks, activists angered by a white police officer’s fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager have ratcheted up their protests when confronted by heavily armed police forces.

“Everything starts to turn bad when you see a police officer come out […]

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Extremely advanced for his time

Neanderthals coexisted with early modern humans in Europe for up to 5,400 years, according to researchers from Oxford university who used new techniques to pinpoint when the early cousins of Homo sapiens became extinct.

Scientists used radiocarbon dating evidence for 200 bone, charcoal and shell samples from 40 European archaeological sites to show that the two human groups overlapped for a significant period of time.

They also concluded that Neanderthals disappeared gradually at different times in different locations, rather than undergoing rapid extinction.

It was already known that there was some contact and interbreeding between the two groups because research has shown that about 1.5-2.1 per cent of the DNA of modern non-African humans originates from Neanderthals.

However, the Oxford research published in the journal Nature on Wednesday provides the most detailed timeline so far of how this process unfolded.

Neanderthals – a human subspecies related to, but genetically different from Homo sapiens – had lived in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years when the first modern humans migrated out of Africa.

It is thought they died out because […]

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