World news wrap: Manning, meteors and the CIA
A wrap-up of the latest world news.
US prosecutors demand 60 years for Manning
FORT MEADE, Maryland: US military prosecutors have demanded that Private Bradley Manning spend at least 60 years in jail for handing a vast trove of classified government files to anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks.
Captain Joe Morrow on Monday urged the trial judge to impose a tough six-decade sentence and a $US100,000 ($A110,332) fine to “send a message to any soldier contemplating stealing classified information”.
Manning’s defence counsel, David Coombs, insisted that this would be far too harsh a sentence for a young man with a chance of rehabilitation, who had expressed remorse and who had co-operated with the court.
Coombs pleaded for a sentence that would allow Manning one day to walk free, find love, get married and live his life, arguing that he had acted out of a humane, but naive desire to halt the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“He is a young man, he is a very intelligent man,” Coombs said. “He’s caring, he’s respectful, he’s a young man. He was in fact young, was in fact naive, but certainly was good intentioned.”
The military judge overseeing Manning’s court martial, Colonel Denise Lind, brought the sentencing hearing to a close and said she would briefly reconvene the court on Tuesday before retiring to consider the punishment.
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Last month, the 25-year-old former army intelligence analyst was convicted on a raft of espionage and theft charges that could see him jailed for up to 90 years.
Earliest iron artefacts came from meteor
PARIS: The earliest iron artefacts ever found – funeral beads strung around bodies in a 5000-year-old Egyptian cemetery – were made from a meteorite.
Hi-tech scanning of the beads, discovered by British archaeologists in the Lower Egypt village of el-Gerzeh in 1911, shows the metal came from a rock in outer space.
The nine small beads come from two burial sites dated around 3200 BC, where they were found in necklaces along with exotic terrestrial minerals such as lapis lazuli, agate and gold.
They are stored at the University College London (UCL) Petrie Museum.
Meteorite iron is an alloy that has a different composition from terrestrial iron.
The scientists teased out a signature of the elements in the beads through a non-destructive ID test called prompt-gamma neutron activation analysis (PGAA).
Under this, a sample is bathed in low-energy beams of neutrons. Elements in the sample absorb some of the neutrons and emit gamma rays in response, the level of which provides the telltale evidence.
The team found traces of nickel, phosphorus, cobalt and germanium that meant the source could only have been extraterrestrial.
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X-ray scanners, meanwhile, showed that the meteorite iron had been repeatedly heated and hammered to make the precious jewels for the afterlife.
This shows that in the fourth millennium BC, the Egyptians were already advanced in the art in smithing, say the researchers.
Meteoritic iron is much harder and more brittle than copper, the commonly-worked material of the time.
“They were rolled and hammered into shape,” said Thilo Rehren, a UCL professor of archaeology.
“This is very different technology from the usual stone bead drilling, and shows quite an advanced understanding of how the metal smiths worked this rather difficult material.”
The study appears in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
CIA admits it ordered 1953 Iran coup
WASHINGTON: The CIA has admitted orchestrating the 1953 coup that toppled Iran’s prime minister after he tried to nationalise his country’s oil wealth from Britain, accordingly to declassified documents.
The CIA’s role in the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh has long been known, with the coup haunting relations between the US and Iran.
But George Washington University’s National Security Archive – which obtained the documents under the Freedom of Information Act, says that a secret internal history marked the most explicit CIA admission.
“The military coup that overthrew Mosadeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy,” the document said, using an alternative spelling of Mossadegh.
Mossadegh had angered Britain by moving to take over the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company – the predecessor of modern-day BP. The British believed that control of Iranian oil was vital to reviving their economy from the destruction of World War II.
While recognising that London needed the oil, the CIA history said that British policy makers had “little in their experience to make them respect Iranians, whom company managers and Foreign Office managers saw as inefficient, corrupt and self-serving”.
But the CIA history cast the decision in Cold War terms, fearing that the Soviets would invade and take over Iran if the crisis escalated and Britain sent in warships – as it would do three years later alongside France and Israel when Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal.
“Then not only would Iran’s oil have been irretrievably lost to the West, but the defence chain around the Soviet Union which was part of US foreign policy would have been breached,” it said.
The coup allowed the return of the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who became a close US ally. He was toppled in the 1979 Islamic revolution, with the new leadership making hostility to the United States a cornerstone of Iran’s foreign policy.
