Brights News Feed

From the Guardian:

The discovery of a new species of great ape that roamed Africa 10m years ago has forced scientists to rethink the earliest steps of human evolution.

Fossil hunters working along the Afar rift in central Ethiopia unearthed remnants of teeth they claim belonged to the primitive ape, a previously unknown species of gorilla they named Chororapithecus abyssinicus.

The finding, if confirmed, will redraw the evolutionary tree of primates, suggesting that humans and chimpanzees must have split from their gorilla-like ancestors 3m years earlier than thought. Geneticists have previously put the date at which the human and chimpanzee lineage split from gorillas at around 7m years ago, with humans and chimps diverging more recently, at 5m years ago.

“We have been defeated. I have removed my uniform. Most of my comrades have also changed into civilian clothes. Most of our leaders have fled.”

So said one former combatant of the Union of Islamic Courts after the secular, UN-backed Somali transitional government, with the support of Ethiopian troops, re-took Mogadishu, today.

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After days of increased hostility — including exchange of rockets and artillery fire which claimed dozens of lives and injured hundreds — between Islamist militias and forces loyal to the transitional Somali government, tanks from majority-Christian Ethiopia yesterday rolled into Somalia’s Baidoa region, according to witnesses. (Ethiopia has so far denied this, possibly because they have previously promised to publicize any decision to officially go to war with the Islamists.) Their mission would be to defend the fragile seat of the internationally-recognised, UN-backed, secular Somali government, which holds sway only over a relatively small area around the city of Baidoa, against redoubled threat from the Union of Islamic Courts and their militia.

Somali forces defending the UN-backed government

The Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) control Mogadishu, the Somali capital, and most of the south of the country. Yesterday they issued threats that the militias were preparing to take Baidoa (Toronoto Star), desipte earlier claiming that they were at war with Ethiopia and not the transitional government (Al Jazeera). Ethiopian reinforcements pose a formidable block to the ambition of the Islamist militias, but a UN report states that arms in support of the UIC are continuing to roll in from Eritrea and Yemen, who back the Islamic Courts, and may yet send their own forces to officially stand alongside the militia. This would reignite war across the Horn of Africa, especially between old enemies Ethiopia and Eritrea. Meanwhile the UN has called for calm, but while the fighting continues, aid is still failing to reach thousands of people whose lives are threatened by flood and famine (News24.com).

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