Middle East

A British archaeologist has announced that he and his colleagues have unearthed a large, rare complex near the ancient city of Ur in southern Iraq, the home of the biblical Abraham.

Stuart Campbell of Manchester University's Archaeology Department says that the site dates back about 4,000 years, which is about the time that Abraham would have lived there. He believes that it was an administrative center for Ur.

On Thursday, Campbell said that the complex is about the size of a football field - about 260 feet on each side. He notes that complexes of this age and size are rare.

Italian archaeologists have discovered the ruins of an ancient mythological cave - Pluto's Gate - located in Turkey, which is believed to be the "gate to Hell."

Both Cicero and Greek geographer Stabo made references to the entryway to Hell in their writings, and had placed it in the ancient city of Hierapolis, an ancient Greco-Roman city in Phrygia located on hot springs in southwest Anatolia. Its ruins are adjacent to modern day Pamukkale, Turkey. This is indeed the location that Italian archaeologist Francesco D'Andria, professor of classic archaeology at the University of Salento, and his team discovered the fabled portal to the underworld.

Stabo explained that the cave opening spewed noxious vapors, adding:

"Any animal that passes inside meets instant death. I threw in sparrows and they immediately breathed their last and fell."

D'Andria, who also once claimed to have found one of the 12 apostles' tombs in Hierapolis, says that the found the "Pluto's Gate" " by reconstructing the route of a thermal spring" to the cave. He also says that he was able to identify the ruins of a temple, pool, and steps, from which pagan pilgrims once would watch sacred rites performed at the portal's opening. Small birds were given to pilgrims to test the cave's deadly effects, while hallucinating priests sacrificed bulls to Pluto.

D'Andria described the cave's deadly attributes, saying:

"We could see the cave's lethal properties during the excavation. Several birds died as they tried to get close to the warm opening, instantly killed by the carbon dioxide fumes."

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning American doctors about a mysterious new coronavirus that's been claiming lives overseas in the Middle East, but has yet to be detected in the U.S.

According to the CDCs latest report in its journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on March 7, there have so far been a total of 14 confirmed cases of the novel infection reported to the World Health Organization, with eight deaths. The illnesses were found to have occurred in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, and the United Kingdom from April 2012 to February 2013.

No cases have yet been reported in the U.S.

Coronaviruses are a family of viruses that can range from the common cold to more deadly varieties like SARS, which killed 800 in a 2003 global epidemic.

The WHO has been tracking the disease since September 2012 after the deaths of a patient in Saudi Arabia and the hospitalization of a Qatari national in the U.K.

This particular infection presents as a severe respiratory illness.

The CDC is requesting that doctors immediately notify the agency if a patients comes in with unexplained severe respiratory illness within 10 days of traveling from the Arabia Peninsula or nearby countries including Bahrain, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestinian Territories, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. This also applies to people who present with severe illness who are in close contact with a recent traveler to the region who had a recent fever or respiratory illness.

The President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, has ordered U.S. special forces to leave the Maidan Wardak province following reports from local officials claiming that the elite forces had been involved in the torture and disappearance of nine Afghan civilians.

U.S. military officials are rejecting the allegations of torture and involvement in the disappearances, but President Karzai, who convened a meeting of the Afghan national security council on Sunday, seems to believe that the evidence was strong enough to demand that the forces leave the province within two weeks.

Over the past year, security in the province bordering the capital city of Kabul has deteriorated and has become a focus of American-led efforts to prevent insurgents from reaching the capital.

Afghanistan's decision to disallow U.S. special forces in Maidan Wardak province could have serious implications for the nation's relations with Washington, as well as for U.S. plans to maintain a counter-terrorist force in Afghanistan even after NATO combat troops leave in 2014.

Just days ahead of talks with Western powers over its highly disputed atomic program, Iran has announced that it has found significant new deposits of raw uranium to feed its nuclear program. The Islamic nation also revealed that it has identified sites for 16 additional nuclear power stations.

A report from the Iran Atomic Energy Organization was cited by state news agency IRNA on Saturday, revealing that the deposits were found in the "southern coastal areas", and are much more plentiful than the amounts outlined in previous estimates.

Western experts had previously believed that Iran may be close to exhausting its supply of raw uranium because Iran had few uranium mines of its own. There has been no independent confirmation of the claimed discovery of new uranium deposits.

In May 2011, a massive tornado devastated the town of Joplin, Missouri. 161 people were killed and six public schools were destroyed by the twister, leaving the community in a near hopeless situation. That's when the United Arab Emirates stepped up to the plate and offered to help rebuild the town as pay back for all of the foreign aid that the United States gives to the rest of the world.

This is not the first time that the Arab nation has reached out to the U.S. in the name of charity, as the UAE has also previously launched a campaign to provide assistance to the most dire areas of the U.S.

Insurance covered the re-construction of buildings, and the largest thing that the school system still needed was new textbooks. Unfortunately, this was considered unaffordable, even on the statewide level.

Instead of textbooks, the UAE made it so that each of the towns roughly 2,200 students could have a MacBook laptop. The UAE has also given $5 million to rebuild a neontal intensive-care unit in the town's hospital, which had also been destroyed by the tornado.

Buddha statues have been added to the growing list of items that are banned in Iran. Officials have begun confiscating the statues from shops in the capital city of Tehran in order to stop the promotion of Buddhism.

The Islamic republic has long waged a ware against items such as Barbie dolls i order to limit western influence, but this appears to be the first time that authorities have shown hostility towards symbols from the east.

According to a report in the independent Arman daily, Saeed Jaberi Ansari, an official for the protection of Iran's cultural heritage, has deemed the Buddha statues as symbols of "cultural invasion."

Ansari reportedly said that authorities would not permit a specific belief to be promoted through items like Buddha statues. He did not indicate how many Buddha statues had been seized, but noted that the "cleansing" would continue.

According to images captured by NASA satellites, water reserves the size of the Dead Sea have been depleted in just seven years, mostly due to well-drilling. This means that the Middle East is quickly heading towards a serious water shortage crisis

The images show that 144 cubic kilmeters of freshwater, which is a volume equivalent to that of the Dead Sea or Lake Tahoe, had been removed from the ground in the area encompassing Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria between 2003, and 2009.

Jay Famiglietti, a UC Irving professor who led the team that made the findings, said:

"That's enough water to meet the needs of tens of millions to more than a hundred million people in the region each year, depending on regional water use standards and availability>"

40 percent of the decline isin the soil and surface water, however, the decrease in groundwater, which is caused by human actions, is responsible for 90 cubic kilometers of the shortfall.

Famiglietti added:

"Satellite data shows an alarming rate of decrease in total water storage in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins, which currently have the second fastest rate of groundwater storage loss on Earth, after India."

Just last week, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad [unveiled a stealth fighter jet] that aviation experts were quick to dismiss as a "fake" or "toy" that likely couldn't even fly. Having heard the skepticism abroad, Iran has now released an image of the aircraft flying over mountaintops.

Unfortunately this new image of the domestically produced Qaher-313 supposedly flying over snow-covered mountains has done nothing to squash the rumors as it appears to have been blatantly Photoshopped.

Doubt has already been cast on Iran's recent claims that it successfully sent a monkey into orbit, and now it looks like the Iranian propaganda machine has spit out another gem. Aviation experts say that the so-called stealth fighter jet unveiled by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a Tehran hangar last week is a "laughable toy" and a probably can't even fly.

Aviation and defense experts point out that the small one-seater looks like a toy and might not even be able to fly. The Qaher F313 is too small for a human pilot, says experts, and the controls and wiring look far too simple for a real jet.

When unveiling the aircraft last week, Ahmadinejad called it "one of the most advanced" aircraft in the world, and boasted that it had "almost all the positive features" of the world's most sophisticated jets.

One feature that is missing, say U.S. aviation experts, are bolts and rivets, which are found on even the simplest aircraft.