The World
A Doomsday Cult Adds to Iraqi Tumult
As U.S. and Iraqi security forces prepare to intensify a security crackdown in Baghdad, the violence continued to escalate throughout Iraq last week. The bloodiest attack was a double suicide bombing in the central market in the southern Shiite town of Hillah, which killed some 73 people and wounded about 163. Baghdad itself was rocked by a series of smaller bombings, while insurgents appeared to be getting more proficient at shooting down helicopters. The U.S. military has lost four helicopters in the past two weeks.
But perhaps the most confusing incident occurred near the Shiite holy city of Najaf, where U.S. and Iraqi troops fought a pitched battle with a mysterious doomsday cult that might have been planning to attack Shiites during the important religious holiday of Ashura.
Most of the violence plaguing Iraq today is believed to be conducted by Iraqis against other Iraqis. But the Bush administration continued its deliberate strategy of saber rattling directed at Iran, blaming Tehran for supplying weapons and training to Shiite militias. The Iraqi government, meanwhile, is increasingly uneasy about being caught in the middle. Iraqi officials last week announced plans to invite neighbors, including Iran and Syria, to Baghdad in March for a regional meeting to discuss security issues.
Time to Worry About the Weather
Rising sea levels. Widespread droughts. Vanishing polar ice. Last week's report from the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was the most worrying installment yet in the avalanche of warnings from scientists about global warming. But the report, released in Paris on Friday, was less ominous in its apocalyptic scenarios than its certainty. The 2,500 scientists who wrote and edited the dense review of scientific knowledge to date concluded that there was a 90 percent chance that greenhouse gases are cooking the planet and that the trend will accelerate this century, most likely raising global temperatures 3.2 to 7.1 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100.
Since its first report in 1990, the IPCC has released a consensus-driven, some say conservative, review of climate data approximately every six years, each one reaching stronger conclusions than the last. This year's Fourth Assessment is no different. But U.S. action now may be at hand because of record warm years and 2005's violent hurricane season. Sen. Barbara Boxer, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, calls climate-change legislation her top priority, and she met with United Nations officials on the day of the report's release. Even the otherwise skeptical Bush administration concurred with the report's main elements, though it continues to oppose mandatory reductions in greenhouse gases.
The certainty of the results is likely to force policymakers worldwide to layer another difficult debate onto the contentious task of cutting greenhouse gases: adapting to the inevitable environmental change. It could mean storm surge walls for New York, Miami, and more. "You will see serious attention given to the potential damage [of climate change]," says Philip Clapp of the National Environmental Trust. But it's costly, which is why "politicians have been loath to go there."
Look, Hu's Trawling for Influence
Look who's trawling for influence in Africa: President Hu Jintao of China. Last week, Hu embarked on a 12-day, eight-nation African tour, an ambitious itinerary reflecting China's growing interest in the continent for both its natural resources and its growing markets. Trade between China and Africa has more than quadrupled in the past decade to more than $50 billion and is projected to grow by 2010 to $100 billion, the 2006 level of U.S.-Africa trade. And Beijing has also become a major aid supplier-notably absent Western-style human rights and anticorruption conditions-as it courts friends on a continent offering oil and other raw materials needed by China's growing industrial economy. China reportedly now gets one third of its crude oil from Africa. Hu's stops: Sudan, Cameroon, Liberia, Zambia, Namibia, South Africa, Mozambique, and Seychelles.
Just a Stone's Throw Away
An addendum to the mysteries-of-history file: the 4,600-year-old remains of a small village in Britain, about 2 miles from the mysterious Stonehenge that dates back to the same prehistoric period. Archaeologists suspect that the Stone Age settlement housed the monolith's builders and say it may have hosted ceremonial events by sun worshipers. Excavations at a site known as Durrington Walls revealed the clay foundations and other remains of eight wooden buildings-and experts said there may be dozens more in the area. Six are clustered together, but two larger structures that are set off from the others may have housed chiefs or priests or may have been used only for rituals, given that hardly any trace of household waste was found inside them.
With Kevin Whitelaw, Bret Schulte and Associated Press
This story appears in the February 12, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.