LONDON (Reuters) - U.S. plans for handling Iraq after the 2003 invasion were "fatally flawed," a retired British general said, adding that the U.S. administration had refused to listen to British concerns about postwar planning.
Major General Tim Cross said he had talked to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld before the invasion about the need to have international support and enough troops on the ground to reconstruct Iraq.
"He didn't want to hear that message. The U.S. had already convinced themselves that Iraq would emerge reasonably quickly as a stable democracy," Cross told the Sunday Mirror.
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JACKSON HOLE, Wyoming - The weak housing market could topple the country into a full-blown recession and the Federal Reserve should slash interest rates aggressively, one of the country's most prominent economists warned on Saturday.
"Lower interest rates now would help," Martin Feldstein, president of the influential National Bureau of Economic Research, told an annual retreat of central bankers and academics, including a number of senior Fed policy-makers.
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ATHENS - Greece's huge forest fires have been blamed by some on global warming, but satellite images of smoke plumes drifting as far as Africa prompt the question: are forests a major source of greenhouse gas?
Usually it is cars, factories and power stations that are most often mentioned as sources of carbon dioxide (CO2), a gas which traps heat in the atmosphere. Trees, considered the "lungs of the planet", soak the gas up. But what if they burn?
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ACAPULCO, Mexico - Tropical Storm Henriette swept by Mexico's Pacific coast on Saturday, killing six people in the resort of Acapulco before moving out to sea, where it could become a hurricane. A man and his two children were killed in a poor area of Acapulco overnight when heavy rain dislodged a boulder from a hill and sent it crashing down on their house.
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LORETO, Italy - Pope Benedict on Saturday led the Catholic Church's first eco-friendly youth rally -- where nearly everything used was biodegradable or recyclable -- and urged his young listeners to shun "disposable love."
The 80-year-old Pope told the young people, estimated by organizers at some 300,000, to dare to change the world and search for lasting, meaningful relationships.
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COLUMBUS, Ohio, - It's called Itsy Bitsy Yoga. As the name implies, it's yoga for babies, taught to mom and baby via DVD. The DVD introduces babies to yoga routines that can help them learn to stretch, roll and crawl, while helping moms better understand their babies' physical development and abilities. A recent survey of fitness providers found a 40 percent increase in demand for parent-baby fitness classes(1). Additionally, research shows that having a baby triggers greater attention to health and nutrition issues(2).
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SEOUL, South Korea - Hyundai Motor Corporation will unveil the i-Blue Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle at the 2007 Frankfurt International Motor Show on September 13. The all-new i-Blue platform is tailored to incorporate Hyundai's third-generation fuel cell technology, currently being developed at Hyundai's Eco-Technology Research Institute in Mabuk, Korea.
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Top negotiators from the United States and North Korea met on Saturday for two days of talks meant to advance an international drive to end Pyongyang's nuclear program.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Chris Hill and his North Korean counterpart Kim Kye-gwan did not speak to the press on arrival at the U.S. mission in Geneva, where the first day of the weekend talks began.
Their session, aimed at normalizing relations between the countries that fought each other in the 1950-53 Korean War, is expected to focus on how the Stalinist state will disable and account for its nuclear facilities, as promised in a February "six-party" deal.
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Iowa State University researchers will join a study of climate change to produce mid-century projections by late next year of the likely regional effects on North American farms from global warming.
"There is no question now that the climate is changing on a global scale," said Gene Takle, an Iowa State University professor of geological and atmospheric sciences who will lead a study to project North American climate from 2040 to 2070.
Iowa and Illinois are the epicenter of the U.S. Midwest farm belt, which produces the world's largest exportable surpluses of corn, soybeans and wheat and vast amounts of meat, dairy products, poultry and vegetables.
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Today's trawlers are capable of fishing deep-sea canyons and rough seafloor that was once avoided for fear of damaging nets. To capture one or two target commercial species, deep-sea bottom trawl fishing vessels drag huge nets armed with steel plates and heavy rollers across the seabed, plowing up and pulverizing everything in their path. For a few commercial target species, thousands of tons of coral are hauled up only to be thrown back dead or dying, along with huge quantities of unwanted bycatch. In a matter of a few weeks or months, bottom trawl fishing can destroy what took many thousands of years to create.
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