PITTSBURGH (AP) — The decision to hold the world-renowned Prague Writers' Festival in western Pennsylvania isn't as unlikely as it seems, considering the festival's home base was once the capital of a nation born 95 years ago in a Loyal Order of Moose lodge in Pittsburgh.
The festival has given writers a platform to promote their works but, more importantly, to freely express the thoughts behind them. Friday and Saturday mark the first time the festival will be held in the United States — or anywhere outside Europe, for that matter — at Point Park University downtown.
"It's a festival of ideas," said Michael March, the festival's founder — and often a platform for contentious or unpopular ones. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a San Francisco writer who won a U.S. Supreme Court appeal of his arrest on obscenity charges in the 1950s, and Salman Rushdie, whose novel "The Satanic Verses" led to death threats from some who felt it attacked Islam, are past participants.
"Writers' festivals are celebratory expressions of intellectual and artistic freedom," said E.L. Doctorow, who will read excerpts of his new novel, "Andrew's Brain," at the festival.
Doctorow, known for works including "Ragtime" and "Billy Bathgate," said festivals are important because in many countries, writers are "censored, jailed, exiled, attacked, murdered, because they know what governments know: that reality is amenable to any construction placed upon it."
That the festival coincides with the anniversary of the birth of what was originally known as Czecho-Slovakia (the country later dropped the hyphen) only adds to that importance, said professor Channa Newman, director of global cultural studies at Point Park. She's also the international program director for the festival and helped bring it to Pittsburgh.
The Czech Senate is sending a delegation, as is the Czech Chamber of Commerce, while the honorary consul representing Slovakia will also attend, Newman said.
"So there's the historical ties, the cultural ties and the business ties, which is now apparently of interest," Newman said.
March agreed that holding the festival in Pittsburgh underscores its international significance.
March, a poet, was raised in New York City. He moved to Europe after the Helsinki Accords attempted to thaw relations between then-Communist bloc nations and the West, and formed a smaller writers' festival in late-1970s London.
March eventually established the Prague Writers' Festival in May 1991, less than two years before Czechoslovakia peacefully split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The festival was first held in Wallenstein Palace, now home to the Czech Senate.
Celebrating Czecho-Slovakia's birth brings the festival full circle.
The Pittsburgh Agreement, which announced the intention to form Czecho-Slovakia, grew out of a meeting in May 1918 of the Czecho-Slovak National Committee at the Moose lodge in downtown Pittsburgh, said University of Pittsburgh professor Martin Votruba. He leads what is believed to be the nation's only university program offering a minor in Slovak Studies.
Czechs, Slovaks and some smaller ethnic groups foresaw the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and hoped to determine their own future as a nation, instead of having it thrust upon them by the international community, Votruba said.
The resulting Pittsburgh Agreement was essentially a Czecho-Slovak declaration of independence, said Andrew Masich, director of Pittsburgh's Senator John Heinz History Center. The museum, which is affiliated with the Smithsonian, has had a copy of the document since 2007.
The document's author, T. G. Masaryk, declared the nation's independence on Oct. 18, 1918, and became the new nation's first president a month later, after the war.
"People forget, the first Czecho-Slovak flag either flew in Washington, D.C., or in Pittsburgh," March said.
The Pittsburgh Agreement "wasn't a perfect creation, it was an artificial creation during a terrible time of the first World War, a time of absolute devastation for people," March said. But, he said, reflecting on that might help people "appreciate their own environment even more."
In this photo released by the Syrian official news agency SANA, Syrian President Bashar Assad, third left, prays on the first day of Eid al-Adha at the Sayeda Hassiba mosque, in Damascus, Syria, Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2013. (AP Photo/SANA)
In this photo released by the Syrian official news agency SANA, Syrian President Bashar Assad, third left, prays on the first day of Eid al-Adha at the Sayeda Hassiba mosque, in Damascus, Syria, Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2013. (AP Photo/SANA)
BEIRUT (AP) — International inspectors have visited 11 sites linked to Syria's chemical weapons program and destroyed "critical equipment" at six, the agency overseeing the elimination of the country's stockpile said Wednesday.
The team also supervised the destruction of unloaded chemical weapons munitions, said the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
A joint OPCW-U.N. mission is to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons, precursor chemicals and production facilities by mid-2014. Syria is believed to have some 1,000 metric tons of blistering and nerve gas agents and the inspectors have to visit more than 20 sites, the OPCW has said.
The team began operating in Syria at the beginning of October, and by last week, had visited two sites. Wednesday's update signaled a significant progress in the team's work.
The inspectors are being asked to complete a first round of site visits by the end of October, including verifying inventory and rendering production, mixing and filling facilities unusable. The next phase, of eliminating chemical agents, would begin after Nov. 1.
Experts say it's a tight timetable, especially since the inspectors are operating in the midst of a civil war. The head of the OPCW has said one of the sites is in rebel-held territory and that routes to other facilities linked to the chemical weapons program are near areas of fighting.
Meanwhile, there were growing signs of division among those trying to topple the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
A rebel who claimed to speak for dozens of groups of fighters in southern Syria said they no longer recognize the authority of the country's main Western-backed political opposition alliance.
If confirmed, the announcement would serve as a new blow to the Syrian National Coalition and its claim to speak for those trying to bring down Assad. Southern Syria is considered a stronghold of the moderate, Western-funded opposition which appears to be losing ground to Islamic extremists.
In a video posted Wednesday, a bearded man in military fatigues stood in front of two dozen fighters, some holding up the emblem of the Free Syrian Army, the main Western-backed rebel alliance.
The man read out the names of more than 65 fighting groups, saying they feel abandoned by the political leadership and "withdraw their recognition" of the Coalition.
Louay Mikdad, a FSA spokesman, said groups mentioned in the video are part of the FSA-linked local military councils.
"We respect what they are saying," Mikdad said of the announcement. "We think our brothers in the Coalition, they should listen to the people inside, and they should open a direct dialogue with them."
In northeastern Syria, heavy clashes that erupted Tuesday and continued Wednesday between Kurdish gunmen and al-Qaida-linked rebels have killed at least 41 fighters, activists said.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the fighting in Hassakeh province pitted Kurdish militias against rebels from two al-Qaida-linked factions — Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.
Such battles between the groups have become common in recent months in the northeast, which has a large Kurdish population.
Observatory director Rami Abdul-Rahman said that 29 of the dead are from the two extremist groups, while the remaining 12 are Kurdish fighters.
In the southern province of Daraa, an explosion around midnight Tuesday killed at least 21 people, although activists and state media provided conflicting accounts as to what happened.
The Observatory said an explosion struck a vehicle packed with passengers near Tel al-Juma. It said four children and six women were among the dead.
It was not immediately clear what caused the explosion, nor why a group of women and children were traveling in dangerous and disputed territory in the middle of the night.
Syria's state news agency reported that 21 "terrorists" were killed when the car they were loading with explosives blew up inside a hideout. The government refers to those trying to overthrow President Bashar Assad as "terrorists."
Conflicting accounts are common in the Syrian conflict, in which both sides try to paint events in an advantageous light to score propaganda points.
The violence came as Muslims observe the holiday of Eid al-Adha, or the Feast of Sacrifice, and underscored just how relentless the violence in Syria's civil war is. Since its outbreak in March 2011, the conflict has claimed the lives of more than 100,000 people, and forced some 7 million to flee their homes.
Syria's revolt began with largely peaceful protests against Assad but later descended into civil war. Now in its third year, the conflict has carved the country up into rebel- and regime-controlled areas, with front-lines crisscrossing the country.
___
Associated Press writers Mike Corder at The Hague, Netherlands and Karin Laub in Beirut contributed to this report.
Israel is keeping a close eye on the Geneva talks on Iran's nuclear program. Israel is not party to the negotiations but its leaders say they have a big stake in the outcome. A cabinet statement Tuesday warned of "cosmetic [Iranian] concessions that could be reversed in weeks. In exchange, Iran demands an easing of the sanctions, which have taken years to put in place."
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
In Geneva today, Iran made a proposal to end the standoff over its nuclear program. Western diplomats involved in the talks called the offer useful. While the details have not been made public, two things are clear: Iran hopes a deal will bring relief from crippling economic sanctions, and Israel - which is not a party to the negotiations, but insists it has big stake in the outcome - remains skeptical of Iranian diplomacy.
From Jerusalem, NPR's Emily Harris reports.
EMILY HARRIS, BYLINE: For months, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been pushing the international community to keep economic sanctions in place until Iran proves it's not pursuing a bomb. This week, as world powers gathered in Geneva to negotiate with Iran, Netanyahu pressed his message again.
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: (Through translator) It would be an historic mistake to relax the pressure on Iran now, a moment before the sanctions achieve their goal. There can be no giving in at this time and the pressure must be continued.
HARRIS: That was yesterday in a speech to the Israeli Parliament. Netanyahu went on to reiterate that a nuclear Iran should worry the world, not just Israel alone.
NETANYAHU: (Through translator) Iran is continuing unhindered to develop inter-continental missiles that are capable of carrying nuclear warheads. These missiles can reach all parts of the Middle East, Europe and the U.S., and other parts of the world as well.
HARRIS: Analyst Max Singer, with Israel's BESA Institute, believes a deal may come out of Geneva that would allow Iran to continue to enrich uranium, under the guise of a civilian energy program, but forbid it from designing or building bomb components.
MAX SINGER: The thing about a nuclear bomb is the most important part and the most expensive part, is this uranium or plutonium. But it doesn't work by itself. You have to have a very complicated, advanced mechanism. And those have to be designed and built and maybe tested. And that work of designing and building it, that's done on a very small scale and it's relatively easy to keep secret.
HARRIS: Secret enough, he says, that there would be no way to verify whether Iran has the components to quickly put together a bomb.
SINGER: So from that point of view, Israel would say: They have the bomb. United States and everybody else would look at the question: Do they have any actual physical bombs they could put on an airplane? The answer is no, as far as we know. So therefore they don't have the bomb. That will be the dynamic and I think Israel is stuck.
HARRIS: Israel says it is not opposed to Iran pursuing a civilian nuclear program to produce electricity if that is verifiable by the international community. Israeli Intelligence Minster Yuval Steinitz says if that's really what Iran wants, there's an easy solution.
YUVAL STEINITZ: Iran wants civilian nuclear energy, OK. The world want to be totally confident that Iran is not producing nuclear weapons, or even getting closer to the capacity of producing nuclear weapons. You can combine those two demands very easily. Let Iran produce nuclear electricity but buy the nuclear fuel from other countries.
HARRIS: Iran has said it will not allow any of its enriched uranium to be taken out of the country. Today, Israel's Security Cabinet insisted in a public statement that economic sanctions against Iran must stay in place, until specific steps are taken to dismantle elements of its nuclear program that point to weapons development. The talks in Geneva continue tomorrow.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.
World ocean systems undermined by climate change by 2100
Public release date: 15-Oct-2013 [
| E-mail
| Share
]
Contact: Talia S Ogliore togliore@hawaii.edu 808-956-4531 University of Hawaii at Manoa
Scientists warn against the high risk of degradation of marine ecosystems and associated human hardships
An ambitious new study describes the full chain of events by which ocean biogeochemical changes triggered by manmade greenhouse gas emissions may cascade through marine habitats and organisms, penetrating to the deep ocean and eventually influencing humans.
Previous analyses have focused mainly on ocean warming and acidification, considerably underestimating the biological and social consequences of climate change. Factoring in predictable synergistic changes such as the depletion of dissolved oxygen in seawater and a decline in productivity of ocean ecosystems, the new study shows that no corner of the world ocean will be untouched by climate change by 2100.
"When you look at the world ocean, there are few places that will be free of changes; most will suffer the simultaneous effects of warming, acidification, and reductions in oxygen and productivity," said lead author Camilo Mora, assistant professor at the Department of Geography in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (UH Manoa). "The consequences of these co-occurring changes are massiveeverything from species survival, to abundance, to range size, to body size, to species richness, to ecosystem functioning are affected by changes in ocean biogeochemistry."
The human ramifications of these changes are likely to be massive and disruptive. Food chains, fishing, and tourism could all be impacted. The study shows that some 470 to 870 million of the world's poorest people rely on the ocean for food, jobs, and revenues, and live in countries where ocean goods and services could be compromised by multiple ocean biogeochemical changes.
Mora and Craig Smith with UH Manoa's School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) worked with a 28-person international collaboration of climate modelers, biogeochemists, oceanographers, and social scientists to develop the study, which is due for publication October 15 in the scientific journal PLOS Biology.
The researchers used the most recent and robust models of projected climate change developed for the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to inform their analysis. They quantified the extent of co-occurrence of changes in temperature, pH, oxygen, and primary productivity based on two scenarios: a business-as-usual scenario wherein atmospheric CO2 concentrations could reach 900 ppm by 2100, and an alternative scenario under which concentrations only reach 550 ppm by 2100 (representing a concerted, rapid CO2 mitigation effort, beginning today).
They discovered that most of the world's ocean surface will be simultaneously impacted by varying intensities of ocean warming, acidification, oxygen depletion, or shortfalls in productivity. Only a very small fraction of the oceans, mostly in polar regions, will face the opposing effects of increases in oxygen or productivity, and nowhere will there be cooling or pH increase.
"Even the seemingly positive changes at high latitudes are not necessary beneficial. Invasive species have been immigrating to these areas due to changing ocean conditions and will threaten the local species and the humans who depend on them," said co-author Chih-Lin Wei, a postdoctoral fellow at Ocean Science Centre, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada.
The researchers assembled global distribution maps of 32 marine habitats and biodiversity hotspots to assess their potential vulnerability to the changes. As a final step, they used available data on human dependency on ocean goods and services and social adaptability to estimate the vulnerability of coastal populations to the projected ocean biogeochemical changes.
"Other studies have looked at small-scale impacts, but this is the first time that we've been able to look the entire world ocean and how co-occurring stressors will differentially impact the earth's diverse habitats and people," said co-author Andrew Thurber, a postdoctoral fellow at Oregon State University. "The real power is in the quantitative, predictive approach using IPCC climate models that allow us to see how much it will all change, and also how confident we can be in our estimates."
By 2100, global averages for the upper layer of the ocean could experience a temperature increase of 1.2 to 2.6 C, a dissolved oxygen concentration reduction of ~2% to 4% of current values, a pH decline of 0.15 to 0.31, and diminished phytoplankton production by ~4% to 10% from current values. The seafloor was projected to experience smaller changes in temperature and pH, and similar reductions in dissolved oxygen.
Of the many marine habitats analyzed in the study, researchers found that coral reefs, seagrass beds, and shallow soft-bottom benthic habitats would experience the largest absolute changes in ocean biogeochemistry, while deep-sea habitats would experience the smallest changes.
Co-author Lisa Levin, a professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, notes: "Because many deep-sea ecosystems are so stable, even small changes in temperature, oxygen, and pH may lower the resilience of deep-sea communities. This is a growing concern as humans extract more resources and create more disturbances in the deep ocean."
"The deep-sea floor covers most of the Earth's surface and provides a whole host of important ecosystem services including carbon sequestration in seafloor sediments, buffering of ocean acidity, and providing an enormous reservoir of biodiversity," said Smith. "Nonetheless, very little attention has been paid to modeling the effects of climate change on these truly vast ecosystems. Perhaps not surprisingly, many deep seafloor ecosystems appear susceptible to the effects of climate warming over the next century."
"The impacts of climate change will be felt from the ocean surface to the seafloor. It is truly scary to consider how vast these impacts will be," said co-author Andrew K. Sweetman, who helped to convene the original team of investigators and now leads the deep-sea ecosystem research group at the International Research Institute of Stavanger, Norway. "This is one legacy that we as humans should not be allowed to ignore."
###
Funding for this study was provided by SeaGrant Hawai'i, the Norwegian Research Council, and the International Network for scientific investigation of DEEP-sea ecosystems (INDEEP). The authors extend their thanks to the University of Washington and its Friday Harbor Laboratories for hosting the original May 2012 workshop on synergistic climate change impacts at the deep-sea floor (CLiDEEP) that precipitated this study.
[
| E-mail
| Share
]
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
World ocean systems undermined by climate change by 2100
Public release date: 15-Oct-2013 [
| E-mail
| Share
]
Contact: Talia S Ogliore togliore@hawaii.edu 808-956-4531 University of Hawaii at Manoa
Scientists warn against the high risk of degradation of marine ecosystems and associated human hardships
An ambitious new study describes the full chain of events by which ocean biogeochemical changes triggered by manmade greenhouse gas emissions may cascade through marine habitats and organisms, penetrating to the deep ocean and eventually influencing humans.
Previous analyses have focused mainly on ocean warming and acidification, considerably underestimating the biological and social consequences of climate change. Factoring in predictable synergistic changes such as the depletion of dissolved oxygen in seawater and a decline in productivity of ocean ecosystems, the new study shows that no corner of the world ocean will be untouched by climate change by 2100.
"When you look at the world ocean, there are few places that will be free of changes; most will suffer the simultaneous effects of warming, acidification, and reductions in oxygen and productivity," said lead author Camilo Mora, assistant professor at the Department of Geography in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (UH Manoa). "The consequences of these co-occurring changes are massiveeverything from species survival, to abundance, to range size, to body size, to species richness, to ecosystem functioning are affected by changes in ocean biogeochemistry."
The human ramifications of these changes are likely to be massive and disruptive. Food chains, fishing, and tourism could all be impacted. The study shows that some 470 to 870 million of the world's poorest people rely on the ocean for food, jobs, and revenues, and live in countries where ocean goods and services could be compromised by multiple ocean biogeochemical changes.
Mora and Craig Smith with UH Manoa's School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) worked with a 28-person international collaboration of climate modelers, biogeochemists, oceanographers, and social scientists to develop the study, which is due for publication October 15 in the scientific journal PLOS Biology.
The researchers used the most recent and robust models of projected climate change developed for the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to inform their analysis. They quantified the extent of co-occurrence of changes in temperature, pH, oxygen, and primary productivity based on two scenarios: a business-as-usual scenario wherein atmospheric CO2 concentrations could reach 900 ppm by 2100, and an alternative scenario under which concentrations only reach 550 ppm by 2100 (representing a concerted, rapid CO2 mitigation effort, beginning today).
They discovered that most of the world's ocean surface will be simultaneously impacted by varying intensities of ocean warming, acidification, oxygen depletion, or shortfalls in productivity. Only a very small fraction of the oceans, mostly in polar regions, will face the opposing effects of increases in oxygen or productivity, and nowhere will there be cooling or pH increase.
"Even the seemingly positive changes at high latitudes are not necessary beneficial. Invasive species have been immigrating to these areas due to changing ocean conditions and will threaten the local species and the humans who depend on them," said co-author Chih-Lin Wei, a postdoctoral fellow at Ocean Science Centre, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada.
The researchers assembled global distribution maps of 32 marine habitats and biodiversity hotspots to assess their potential vulnerability to the changes. As a final step, they used available data on human dependency on ocean goods and services and social adaptability to estimate the vulnerability of coastal populations to the projected ocean biogeochemical changes.
"Other studies have looked at small-scale impacts, but this is the first time that we've been able to look the entire world ocean and how co-occurring stressors will differentially impact the earth's diverse habitats and people," said co-author Andrew Thurber, a postdoctoral fellow at Oregon State University. "The real power is in the quantitative, predictive approach using IPCC climate models that allow us to see how much it will all change, and also how confident we can be in our estimates."
By 2100, global averages for the upper layer of the ocean could experience a temperature increase of 1.2 to 2.6 C, a dissolved oxygen concentration reduction of ~2% to 4% of current values, a pH decline of 0.15 to 0.31, and diminished phytoplankton production by ~4% to 10% from current values. The seafloor was projected to experience smaller changes in temperature and pH, and similar reductions in dissolved oxygen.
Of the many marine habitats analyzed in the study, researchers found that coral reefs, seagrass beds, and shallow soft-bottom benthic habitats would experience the largest absolute changes in ocean biogeochemistry, while deep-sea habitats would experience the smallest changes.
Co-author Lisa Levin, a professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, notes: "Because many deep-sea ecosystems are so stable, even small changes in temperature, oxygen, and pH may lower the resilience of deep-sea communities. This is a growing concern as humans extract more resources and create more disturbances in the deep ocean."
"The deep-sea floor covers most of the Earth's surface and provides a whole host of important ecosystem services including carbon sequestration in seafloor sediments, buffering of ocean acidity, and providing an enormous reservoir of biodiversity," said Smith. "Nonetheless, very little attention has been paid to modeling the effects of climate change on these truly vast ecosystems. Perhaps not surprisingly, many deep seafloor ecosystems appear susceptible to the effects of climate warming over the next century."
"The impacts of climate change will be felt from the ocean surface to the seafloor. It is truly scary to consider how vast these impacts will be," said co-author Andrew K. Sweetman, who helped to convene the original team of investigators and now leads the deep-sea ecosystem research group at the International Research Institute of Stavanger, Norway. "This is one legacy that we as humans should not be allowed to ignore."
###
Funding for this study was provided by SeaGrant Hawai'i, the Norwegian Research Council, and the International Network for scientific investigation of DEEP-sea ecosystems (INDEEP). The authors extend their thanks to the University of Washington and its Friday Harbor Laboratories for hosting the original May 2012 workshop on synergistic climate change impacts at the deep-sea floor (CLiDEEP) that precipitated this study.
[
| E-mail
| Share
]
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
An Iraqi man pushes a woman in a wheelchair past piles of trash in Baghdad in May, 2003.
By Bill Briggs, NBC News contributor
About a half million Iraqi people died during the eight-year war in that country, and among those casualties roughly four in 10 perished due to Iraq's decimated infrastructure — from crippled health-care and power systems to interruptions in water and food supplies, according to a study released Tuesday.
U.S. researchers hired Iraqi physicians to go door-to-door at randomly selected homes in 100 Iraqi neighborhoods to ask families what members died between 2003 and 2011 and how they lost their lives, the report states. Among non-violent deaths tied to the war, the most common cause was heart attacks or cardiovascular conditions, followed by infant or childhood deaths other than injuries, chronic illnesses and cancer.
"In a war situation, people can’t leave their homes to get medical care. When they do leave their homes to get medical care, they arrive at institutions overwhelmed with violent injuries. The water is compromised. Stress is elevated. The power is out. The distribution networks for medical supplies are compromised," said Amy Hagopian, associate professor of Global Health at the University of Washington and lead author of the paper.
Conducted by the University of Washington, Johns Hopkins University and two other colleges, the unfunded study is the first population-based analysis of deaths that covers the full span of the Iraq War. It was published in the open access journal PLOS Medicine. The estimated count is in addition to the death rate Iraq would have experienced if not for the war.
Mohammed Hato / AP file
An Iraqi boy studies under an oil lamp, in Baghdad, March 2, 2006 during an electricity outage.
The authors urge that public-health practitioners around the world begin to treat war as a major public-health threat, beyond the obvious concerns over bombs and bullets.
"Everybody’s against polio and car crashes and tobacco smoke. But it’s time we got serious about the direct and indirect threats to public health from war, for both the invaded as well as the invader," Hagopian said.
"We (the U.S. government) should have to file health impact assessments before we decide to invade countries. In the whole discussion of what to do about Iran, have you heard any discussion about what the health effects would be on the whole? Not one," she added. "You look around the United States and you see plenty of health effects from the Iraq War. So this is a public health problem of serious magnitude. But there is not a single National Institutes of Health grant to look into this for researchers. Our entire study was done by academic volunteers."
The researchers believe their calculations carry a 95 percent certainty because they applied a meshed grid system to Google Earth software to ensure a fully random sampling of Iraqi households.
Philippe Desmazes / AFP file
An Iraqi man fills a plastic bottle with drinking water from a leaking pipe as his son drinks in Basra, May 8, 2003.
"We're saying a half million dead, and we think that’s a really conservative number," Hagopian said. "We’re pretty sure that we missed a lot (of other deaths) because of the migration effect out of Iraq, and because some people weren’t really willing to talk with us."
Among U.S. troops that served in Iraq, 4,476 service members died in that conflict, including more than 3,500 killed in action, according to the Department of Defense.
When it comes to tracking civilian casualties, however, some experts warn the past attempts to assess non-combatant fatalities in Iraq produced estimates that critics called wildly inflated — five times higher than more commonly accepted death tolls. A paper by U.S. academics published in 2006 estimated that about 600,000 people had, at that point, been killed in the war's violence.
But the new study and its figures seem rooted in reality, said Michael O'Hanlon, senior fellow with the 21st Century Defense Initiative and director of research for the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution.
"There’s no doubt that infrastructure did decline and that were — like there would be in any war setting — a lot of additional quote-unquote excess deaths from inadequate nutrition or healthcare of stress or what have you," O'Hanlon said. "That point is fair and important and I’m glad they’re making it. The numbers sound more credible" than earlier surveys had claimed.
Muddying the somber tally, however, is the fact that Iraq already was in decline before U.S. forces invaded in 2003. International economic sanctions placed against the country as well as attacks unleashed by Iraq's later-executed leader Saddam Hussein against some of his own people all contributed to a failing state, O'Hanlon said.
Amy Hagopian
Researchers (not named by the study) tally up death-survey counts while in Iraq.
"Some of these declines definitely did get worse during the violence that resulted from the invasion. But other trends in Iraqi excess deaths began sooner, first because of Saddam’s brutality and his mismanagement of the country and then because of the sanctions" O'Hanlon said. "All of these things had a human toll. So disentangling all these pieces is a complicated thing."
Even worse, sectarian violence has continued in Iraq since U.S. forces pulled out. More than 1,000 people there were killed in July, the highest monthly death toll in five years, the United Nations reported in August.
Violence has been on the rise in Iraq throughout 2013. The increased attacks have fueled fears that Iraq is again bound for the widespread chaos that nearly ripped the nation apart in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion that ousted its ruler in 2003.
Apple sent out invites to its next product-filled media event, which will be held on October 22. We're expecting a whole lot of iPad news and OS X Mavericks on the agenda.
This is the second child for Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner, who are already parents to two-year-old Arabella.
Donald Trump, 67, took to Twitter to announce the birth of his grandchild.
Donald, who already has five grandchildren, followed up his initial tweet with a second message thanks their fans for their sweet messages.
Ivanka Trump, 31, recently stated she hoped her second child’s birth would be as easy as her first.
She stated, “With Arabella I was lucky – I had her within two hours of starting contractions. I’m sure I won’t get so lucky again this time, but that would be a great birth plan!”
The entrepreneur said it was a challenge to be fashionable with a baby bump. She said, “You spend the better part of your youth experimenting and trying to find a style that fits your body type, and all that gets thrown out the window.”
Ivanka said, “Maternity wear really makes you look much more pregnant than non-maternity wear”.
She found wearing a blazer helps give you a better silhouette than a boxy dress.
![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uCgGaIYwggF_NEkMpjlc8lZsuIybRzA4Y7xB3ivhUFwKQ7oedZIM9Ao9dLqhuW4__OLnJVsjz5e7JyBVy_Jumbg5klMLnlQkKI9FBMWpg=s0-d){kind=small}
Share
Source: 
