“The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War, according to two nuclear historians who say they have new evidence backing the controversial theory.

Causing a fission reaction in several kilograms of uranium and plutonium and killing over 200,000 people 60 years ago was done more to impress the Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they say. And the US President who took the decision, Harry Truman, was culpable, they add.

‘He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the species,’ says Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington DC, US. ‘It was not just a war crime; it was a crime against humanity.'” (New Scientist)

“In his book—titled Jawbreaker—the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon’s own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora, says Berntsen’s lawyer, Roy Krieger. (Berntsen would not divulge the book’s specifics, saying he’s awaiting CIA clearance.) That backs up other recent accounts, including that of military author Sean Naylor, who calls Tora Bora a ‘strategic disaster’ because the Pentagon refused to deploy a cordon of conventional forces to cut off escaping Qaeda and Taliban members. Maj. Todd Vician, a Defense Department spokesman, says the problem at Tora Bora ‘was not necessarily just the number of troops.'” (Newsweek)

“Dr. Berti, a neuroscientist at University of Turin in Italy, has had many such conversations with stroke patients who suffer from denial syndrome, a strange disorder in which paralyzed patients vehemently insist that they are not paralyzed.

This denial, Dr. Berti said, was long thought to be purely a psychological problem. ‘It was a reaction to a stroke: I am paralyzed, it is so horrible, I will deny it,’ she said.

But in a new study, Dr. Berti and her colleagues have shown that denial is not a problem of the mind. Rather, it is a neurological condition that occurs when specific brain regions are knocked out by a stroke.

Patients deny the paralysis because a closely related region of the brain that is still intact appears to tell them that their bodies are responding normally.” (New York Times )