Science overturns view of humans as naturally 'nasty' - Biological research increasingly debunks the view of humanity as competitive, aggressive and brutish, a leading specialist in primate behavior told a major science conference Monday.
"Humans have a lot of pro-social tendencies," Frans de Waal, a biologist at Emory University in Atlanta, told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Children play in Bangkok in 2011. Biological research increasingly debunks the view of humanity as competitive, aggressive and brutish, a leading specialist in primate behavior told a major science conference Monday. (AFP Photo/Saeed Khan)
New research on higher animals from primates and elephants to mice shows there is a biological basis for behavior such as cooperation, said de Waal, author of "The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society."
Until just 12 years ago, the common view among scientists was that humans were "nasty" at the core but had developed a veneer of morality -- albeit a thin one, de Waal told scientists and journalists from some 50 countries.
But human children -- and most higher animals -- are "moral" in a scientific sense, because they need to cooperate with each other to reproduce and pass on their genes, he said.
Research has disproved the view, dominant since the 19th century, typical of biologist Thomas Henry Huxley's argument that morality is absent in nature and something created by humans, said de Waal.
And common assumptions that the harsh view was promoted by Charles Darwin, the so-called father of evolution, are also wrong, he said.
"Darwin was much smarter than most of his followers," said de Waal, quoting from Darwin's "The Descent of Man" that animals that developed "well-marked social instincts would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience."
De Waal showed the audience videos from laboratories revealing the dramatic emotional distress of a monkey denied a treat that another monkey received; and of a rat giving up chocolate in order to help another rat escape from a trap.
Such research shows that animals naturally have pro-social tendencies for "reciprocity, fairness, empathy and consolation," said de Waal, a Dutch biologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
"Human morality is unthinkable without empathy."
Asked if wide public acceptance of empathy as natural would change the intense competition on which capitalist economic and political systems are based, de Waal quipped, "I'm just a monkey watcher."
But he told reporters that research also shows animals bestow their empathy on animals they are familiar with in their "in-group" -- and that natural tendency is a challenge in a globalized human world.
"Morality" developed in humans in small communities, he said, adding: "It's a challenge... it's experimental for the human species to apply a system intended for (in-groups) to the whole world." ( AFP )
Oldest dinosaur nesting site ever found contains hundreds of 190-million-year-old eggs -A 190-million-year-old dinosaur nursery with 340 eggs has been discovered, providing an insight into the animals' behaviour from the oldest nesting site ever found.
The excavation site in South Africa belonged to the prosauropod dinosaur Massospondylus and predates other nesting sites by 100 million years, according to researchers.
It has provided experts with clues and evidence as to the evolution of complex reproductive behaviour in early dinosaurs.
Nursery: An artist's impression of a nesting site of the dinosaur Massospondylus
Unique: A close-up of the embryonic skeleton of the Massospondylus, from a clutch of eggs at the nesting site. The head was pushed out of the egg after death, probably because of gases produced by decay
Fascinating discoveries such as hand-prints of the ancient animals have led the scientists to believe the hatchlings remained at the nursery long enough to double in size and the adults returned repeatedly to the same nest.
And it is believed there are still more fossils hidden away in the Golden Gate Highlands National Park.
David Evans, associate curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum said: ‘Even though the fossil record of dinosaurs is extensive, we actually have very little fossil information about their reproductive biology, particularly for early dinosaurs.
‘This amazing series of 190-million-year-old nests gives us the first detailed look at dinosaur reproduction early in their evolutionary history, and documents the antiquity of nesting strategies that are only known much later in the dinosaur record.’
The new study, led by palaeontologist Professor Robert Reisz, describes clutches of eggs, many with embryos, as well as tiny dinosaur footprints, providing the oldest known evidence that the hatchlings remained at the nesting site long enough to at least double in size.
At least ten nests have been discovered at several levels at the site, each with up to 34 round eggs in tightly clustered clutches.
The distribution of the nests in the sediments indicate that these early dinosaurs returned repeatedly to this site, a behaviour known as ‘nesting fidelity’, and likely assembled in groups to lay their eggs, known as ‘colonial nesting’.
The newly unearthed site is the oldest known evidence of such behaviour in the fossil record.
The large size of the mother, at six metres in length, the small size of the eggs, about six to seven centimetres in diameter, and the highly organised nature of the nest suggest that the mother may have arranged them carefully after she laid them.
Professor Reisz said: ‘The eggs, embryos and nests come from the rocks of a nearly vertical road cut only 25 metres long.
‘Even so, we found ten nests, suggesting that there are a lot more in the cliff, still covered by tons of rock. We predict that many more nests will be eroded out in time as natural weathering processes continue.’ The fossils were found in sedimentary rocks from the Early Jurassic Period.
The same site has previously yielded the oldest known embryos belonging to Massospondylus, a relative of the giant, long-necked sauropods of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. ( dailymail.co.uk )
Tax Tips To Consider After Losing Your Job - Imagine that the unthinkable has just happened. After putting in 15 years with the same company, your job position is eliminated and you are let go. For many, this nightmare has become a reality as more and more companies look to cut costs in response to a souring national economy.
When you have just lost your job, taxes are probably the last thing that you want to think about. However, there are some important tax issues that are associated with the loss of a job that you need to know about.
Here are five important tax issues associated with losing your job.
Severance Pay And Unemployment Insurance Payments Are Taxable
If you receive a severance package from your employer, the full amount of the package will be taxed. The same goes for any money that you receive for unused vacation and sick time. You employer is supposed to withhold federal and state taxes from these payments and this should appear on your W-2. However, to avoid getting dinged at tax time, make sure that you confirm that these taxes have been taken out.
Unemployment insurance benefits that you receive from the state are also taxable. However, taxes are not automatically removed from these payments. You can avoid having to worry about this at tax time if you file a petition with your state to request that taxes are taken out before you receive your unemployment check. The appropriate form is called a W-4V.
Distributions From Your Retirement Plan Are Taxable, But Rollovers Are Not
If you decide to take a distribution from your 401k or IRA to help cover your living expenses until you find a new job, the money that you take out will be fully taxed unless you have a Roth 401k or a Roth IRA. Keep in mind that the standard rules about early withdrawals still apply. Expect to pay a 10 percent penalty if you take a distribution before you are 59 ½ years old.
Alternatively, you can roll your 401k from your previous employer into an IRA tax free as long as you don’t take any distributions.
You May Be Able To Deduct Some Of The Expenses Incurred While Looking For A New Job
The IRS will allow you to deduct certain expenses associated with finding a new job. For example, if you pay an employment agency a fee to place you in a new job, you can deduct the cost of that fee. You can do the same for costs associated with resume preparation and travel expenses for job searching and interviews.
Additionally, if you find a new job that requires you to move, you may be able to deduct the moving costs you incur. There are certain requirements pertaining to the distance moved and the timing of the move that you will have to meet in order to qualify for the deduction. You can reference IRS publication 521 for more information about deducting moving expenses.
You May Be Able To Sell Some Investments Without Paying Taxes On The Capital Gains
If you own investments that you want to sell to help cover your living expenses while you are unemployed, you might not have to pay taxes on the money you receive from the sold investment. If your taxable income is less than $34,500 or your joint taxable income is less than $69,000, you will not have to pay taxes on the money you earn from your sold investments.
You May Be Eligible For Certain Tax Credits
If your income drops significantly as a result of your job loss, you may be eligible for certain beneficial tax credits. Some of these include:
- The Earned Income Tax Credit: If your earned income falls below a predetermined amount, you can qualify for the earned income tax credit. This tax credit reduces the amount of taxes that you owe. If the credit is larger than your tax liability, you can receive a refund check from the federal government for the difference. Note that unemployment benefits do not count as part of your earned income so you do not have to include them in your calculation.
- Education Tax Credit: If you think that you need to go back to school to get a new job, you might be able to benefit from education tax credits that will help you reduce your education expenses. Credits such as the American Opportunity Credit and the Lifetime Learning Credit can help to ease the financial burden of college education. Keep in mind that there are income requirements that you must meet in order to benefit from these credits.
Losing your job is tough enough. Don’t make your situation worse by missing out on important tax benefits associated with job loss. Given the current state of the national economy, you will need all the help you can get. ( candofinance.com )
Could the Internet Ever Be Destroyed? - The raging battle over SOPA and PIPA, the proposed anti-piracy laws, is looking more and more likely to end in favor of Internet freedom — but it won't be the last battle of its kind. Although, ethereal as it is, the Internet seems destined to survive in some form or another, experts warn that there are many threats to its status quo existence, and there is much about it that could be ruined or lost.
Physical destruction
A vast behemoth that can route around outages and self-heal, the Internet has grown physically invulnerable to destruction by bombs, fires or natural disasters — within countries, at least. It's "very richly interconnected," said David Clark, a computer scientist at MIT who was a leader in the development of the Internet during the 1970s. "You would have to work real hard to find a small number of places where you could seriously disrupt connectivity." On 9/11, for example, the destruction of the major switching center in south Manhattan disrupted service locally. But service was restored about 15 minutes later when the center "healed" as the built-in protocols routed users and information around the outage.
However, while it's essentially impossible to cripple connectivity internally in a country, Clark said it is conceivable that one country could block another's access to its share of the Internet cloud; this could be done by severing the actual cables that carry Internet data between the two countries. Thousands of miles of undersea fiber-optic cables that convey data from continent to continent rise out of the ocean in only a few dozen locations, branching out from those hubs to connect to millions of computers. But if someone were to blow up one of these hubs — the station in Miami, for example, which handles some 90 percent of the Internet traffic between North America and Latin America — the Internet connection between the two would be severely hampered until the infrastructure was repaired.
Such a move would be "an act of cyberwar," Clark told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.
Content cache
Even an extreme disruption of international connectivity would not seriously threaten the survival of Web content itself. A "hard" copy of most data is stored in nonvolatile memory, which sticks around with or without power, and whether you have Internet access to it or not. Furthermore, according to William Lehr, an MIT economist who studies the economics and regulatory policy of the Internet-infrastructure industries, the corporate data centers that harbor Web content — everything from your emails to this article — have sophisticated ways to back up and diversely store the data, including simply storing copies in multiple locations.
Google even stores cached copies of all Wikipedia pages; these were accessible on Jan. 18 when Wikipedia took its own versions of the pages offline in protest of SOPA and PIPA.
This diversified storage plan keeps the content itself safe, but it also offers some protection against loss of access to any one copy of the data in the event of a cyberwar. For example, if power were cut to a server, you may be unable to reach a website on its home server, but you mayfind a cached version of the content stored on another, accessible server. Or, "If you wanted data that was not available from a server in country X, you may be able to get substantively the same data from a server in country Y," Lehr said.
Internet arms race
The redundancy of so much online content and of connectivity routes makes the Internet resilient to physical attacks, but a much more serious threat to its status quo existence is government regulation or censorship. In the early days of Egypt's Arab Spring uprising, the government of Hosni Mubarak attempted to shut down the country's Internet in order to cripple protesters' ability to organize; it did this by ordering the state-controlled Internet Service Provider (ISP), which grants Internet access to customers, to cut service.
"ISPs have direct control of the Internet, so what happens in any country depends on the control that the state has over those ISPs," Clark said at the time. "Some countries regulate the ISPs much more heavily. China has in the past 'turned off' the Internet in various regions."
However, in Egypt last year, many protesters found ways to bootstrap connectivity and bypass the shut-off, such as by using smartphones to communicate with the global Internet over cellular networks and tapping into private companies' Intranet connections. "[A] lot of the connectivity to protesters was provided by workers who made access available to their business networks," Lehr said.
If, in future, the U.S. government sought to shut down or limit Internet access, similar workarounds would crop up, and they would grow more sophisticated as the regulatory methods became more extreme — a "weapons race," Lehr called it. "The tools for fighting the war are mostly defensive (fire walls, shutting down interconnects, monitoring, locking up folks who have violated 'laws') but also can be offensive (viruses to attack hostile websites/destroy content, locking folks up preemptively, etc.)."
Governments could also simply tax Internet access, or providers could jack up the prices, in such a way as to price it out of reach of most people.
Lehr added that, while no single government could destroy the Internet everywhere, it could certainly cripple it sufficiently to render its use unattractive for people within its country of governance.
In the balance
Bad regulation, be it in any particular country or on the international scale, could severely hamper the Internet's value and its ability to grow, Lehr said. While some version of the Internet is likely to exist as long as humanity does, what might be lost or greatly diminished is "the openness of the Internet."
This openness is useful both economically and socially, but it is also a source of problems, Lehr noted; it lends itself to endless security and privacy attacks, junk mail, viruses, malware and so on. He believes new security models must be developed to protect privacy and security while still allowing the Internet to function.
"Whether we can effectively strike that balance is a difficult challenge and work in progress." ( LiveScience.com )
More Water than Ever Found on the Surface of the Moon - There are a whole lot of forbidding places in the solar system, but the permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) of the moon have to be near the top of the list. Found in the northern and southern lunar poles, the PSRs are low-lying spots — often deep in the bowls of craters — that never receive so much as a breath of warmth or a flicker of light from the sun. As a result, they don't go through the same heating and cooling cycle as the rest of the moon, where temperatures soar to 200°F during lunar daylight and plunge to –200°F at night. Instead, the PSRs remain in an unending deep freeze.
That ought to make those areas unlikely places for astronauts ever to visit, much less settle — except for one little wrinkle: if there happened to be water ice nearly anywhere on the surface of the moon, it would boil away the instant it felt the solar fires; at the poles it would last forever. In 2010, scientists discovered that even at lower latitudes, the moon is not entirely dry, with faint traces of ice surviving beneath the surface, making lunar soil about twice as wet as the sands of the Sahara — which by moon standards is practically drenched. Now, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has found that the PSRs indeed have a whole lot more water than that, with up to 2% of the surface in those blacked-out regions consisting of ice crystals.
Water ice was likely imported to the moon by incoming comets, a bombardment similar to the one that many astronomers believe helped fill the earth's oceans. Our planet's dense atmosphere and comparatively powerful gravity would have kept the water in place. The small, airless moon would have frittered most of its into space — except on the poles, that is.
These images produced by the Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal features at the Moon's northern and southern poles in the regions that lie in perpetual darkness. They show many permanently shadowed regions, or PSRs, are darker at far-ultraviolet wavelengths (top inset) and redder than nearby surface areas that receive sunlight (bottom inset). The darker PSR regions are consistent with having large surface porosities — indicating "fluffy" soils — while the reddening is consistent with the presence of water frost on the surface.
To test that theory, the LRO trained its eye down on the dark polar regions, using an instrument appropriately named LAMP (the Lyman-Alpha Mapping Project). The LAMP system analyzes the spectrum of different species of hydrogen ions, a technique that is typically used to study the deep-space interstellar medium, but on the moon can reveal the presence of water molecules — which, after all, are two-thirds hydrogen. In this case, LAMP revealed extensive areas in the PSRs that showed up in one of two wavelengths: the dark ultraviolet and the deep infrared. The ultraviolet readings indicated soil regions that are more porous than other parts of the moon, giving them an unexpected fluffiness. "LAMP's technique supports a fairy castle–like arrangement of grains in the PSR soils," said senior research scientist Kert Retherford.
The fluffy regions, however, could not be wet, but there were plenty of other regions that glowed in the far infrared. This indicated water ice — and lots of it. Not only are the PSRs wetter than the soil on the rest of the lunar surface, they are also losing what water they do have at a much slower rate than thought. Even in a permanently dark region, a volatile substance like water would eventually degrade, but given the age of the moon and the quantity of ice found, the LRO scientists believe this is happening 16 times slower than earlier estimates suggested.
None of this makes the moon a wellspring, and it would have a long way to go before it became a remotely hospitable place. But a sine qua non for any lunar base would be a steady supply of water, and transporting even a little bit of it from earth would be very difficult and prohibitively expensive. Knowing that there would be a steady supply on hand for drinking, raising food in greenhouses and even manufacturing rocket fuel allows space planners to check at least one essential box long before we even consider a lunar journey. Now all we need is the will, the wallet and the technical know-how to check all the rest. ( time.com )
Osama bin Laden didn’t win, but he was ‘enormously successful’ - What he wanted to do was bankrupt U.S - Did Osama bin Laden win? No. Did he succeed? Well, America is still standing, and he isn’t. So why, when I called Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counterterrorism expert who specializes in al-Qaeda, did he tell me that “bin Laden has been enormously successful”? There’s no caliphate. There’s no sweeping sharia law. Didn’t we win this one in a clean knockout?
Apparently not. Bin Laden, according to Gartenstein-Ross, had a strategy that we never bothered to understand, and thus that we never bothered to defend against. What he really wanted to do — and, more to the point, what he thought he could do — was bankrupt the United States of America. After all, he’d done the bankrupt-a-superpower thing before. And though it didn’t quite work out this time, it worked a lot better than most of us, in this exultant moment, are willing to admit.
Bin Laden’s transition from scion of a wealthy family to terrorist mastermind came in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was trying to conquer Afghanistan. Bin Laden was part of the resistance, and the resistance was successful — not only in repelling the Soviet invasion, but in contributing to the Communist super-state’s collapse a few years later. “We, alongside the mujaheddin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt,” he later explained.
The campaign taught bin Laden a lot. For one thing, superpowers fall because their economies crumble, not because they’re beaten on the battlefield. For another, superpowers are so allergic to losing that they’ll bankrupt themselves trying to conquer a mass of rocks and sand. This was bin Laden’s plan for the United States, too.
“He has compared the United States to the Soviet Union on numerous occasions — and these comparisons have been explicitly economic,” Gartenstein-Ross argued in a Foreign Policy article. “For example, in October 2004 bin Laden said that just as the Arab fighters and Afghan mujaheddin had destroyed Russia economically, al Qaeda was now doing the same to the United States, ‘continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.’ ”
For bin Laden, in other words, success was not to be measured in body counts. It was to be measured in deficits, in borrowing costs, in investments we weren’t able to make in our country’s continued economic strength. And by those measures, bin Laden landed a lot of blows.
Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz estimates that the price tag on the Iraq War alone will surpass $3 trillion. Afghanistan likely amounts to another trillion or two. Add in the build-up in homeland security spending since 9/11 and you’re looking at another trillion. And don’t forget the indirect costs of all this turmoil: The Federal Reserve, worried about a fear-induced recession, slashed interest rates after the attack on the World Trade Center, and then kept them low to combat skyrocketing oil prices, a byproduct of the war in Iraq. That decade of loose monetary policy may well have contributed to the credit bubble that crashed the economy in 2007 and 2008.
Then there’s the post-9/11 slowdown in the economy, the time wasted in airports, the foregone returns on investments we didn’t make, the rise in oil prices as a result of the Iraq War, the cost of rebuilding Ground Zero, health care for the first responders and much, much more.
But it isn’t quite right to say bin Laden cost us all that money. We decided to spend more than a trillion dollars on homeland security measures to prevent another attack. We decided to invade Iraq as part of a grand, post-9/11 strategy of Middle Eastern transformation. We decided to pass hundreds of billions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts and add an unpaid-for prescription drug benefit in Medicare while we were involved in two wars. And now, partially though not entirely because of these actions, we are deep in debt. Bin Laden didn’t — couldn’t — bankrupt us. He could only provoke us into bankrupting ourselves. And he came pretty close.
It’s a smart play against a superpower. We didn’t need to respond to 9/11 by trying to reshape the entire Middle East, but we’re a superpower, and we think on that scale. We didn’t need to respond to failed attempts to smuggle bombs onto airplanes through shoes and shampoo bottles by screening all footwear and banning large shampoo bottles, but we’re a superpower, and our tolerance for risk is extremely low.
In the end, bin Laden was just another bag of meat and bones, hiding in a walled compound in Pakistan, so deeply afraid of death that he tried to use his wife as a shield when the special forces came for him. But he understood the psychology of the superpower well enough to use our capabilities against us. He may not have won, but he did succeed, at least partially.
But then, we can learn from our mistakes. He can’t. ( washingtonpost.com )
Osama Bin Laden - The false story of his life meets the false story of his death - First we hunt you down. Then we blow a hole in your face. Then we dump your body in the sea, where no one can find your grave. Then we destroy the last thing left of you: your reputation.
This isn't cruelty. It's strategy. Al-Qaida's greatest strength—diffusion—is also its greatest weakness. It's a scattered network held together by the legend of Osama Bin Laden. We took his life. Now we're out to liquidate his legend.
John Brennan, President Obama's counterterrorism coordinator, understands this. Killing Bin Laden was only the first step. The next step is to use his death to demoralize and divide his followers. "We have a lot better opportunity now that … Bin Laden is out of there to destroy that organization, create fractures within it," Brennan said at a White House briefing Monday. "The number two, Zawahiri, is not charismatic. … You're going to see them start eating themselves from within."
Osama Bin Laden - The false story of his life meets the false story of his death
To accelerate this fratricide, Brennan issued a damning account of Bin Laden's behavior during the raid on his compound. "He was engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the house he was in," said Brennan. During this shootout, "there was a female who was in fact in the line of fire that reportedly was used … to shield bin Laden." Brennan concluded:
Here is Bin Laden, who has been calling for these attacks, living in this million-dollar-plus compound, living in an area that is far removed from the front, hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield. I think it really just speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years.
At a Pentagon briefing, a senior defense official told the same story: Bin Laden was "living in a mansion that was eight times the size of any other structure in the neighborhood, living rather comfortably. He and some other male combatants on the target appeared to use—certainly did use women as shields." A senior intelligence official repeated that Bin Laden "died during a firefight" and that "many of his terrorist associates in other parts of Pakistan and throughout the region are living in much more dire conditions. So you have to be wondering what they're thinking at this moment when they see that their leader was living, relatively speaking, high on the hog."
Across the Atlantic, British Prime Minister David Cameron echoed this talking point:
The myth of Bin Laden was one of a freedom fighter living in austerity, risking his life for the cause as he moved around in the hills and mountainous caverns of the tribal areas. The reality of Bin Laden was very different: a man who encouraged others to make the ultimate sacrifice while he himself hid in the comfort of a large expensive villa in Pakistan, experiencing none of the hardship he expected his supporters to endure.
But the image of Bin Laden shooting at U.S. commandos from behind an innocent woman also turns out to be a myth. Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney issued a revised "narrative" of the raid, courtesy of the Defense Department. It says the commandos started "on the first floor of the Bin Laden house and worked their way to the third floor." The people who fired at the commandos died on the first floor. Bin Laden was upstairs and "was not armed."
A reporter asked Carney "which of those women was being used a human shield, as Mr. Brennan suggested yesterday." Carney answered: "The woman I believe you're talking about might have been the one on the first floor who was caught in the crossfire. Whether or not she was being used as a shield or trying to use herself as a shield or simply caught in crossfire is unclear." What's clear is that Bin Laden, who was upstairs, couldn't have used her as a shield.
Carney blamed the misleading early reports on the "fog of war." But a fog of war creates confusion, not a consistent story like the one about the human shield. The reason U.S. officials bought and sold this story is that it fit their larger indictment of Bin Laden. It reinforced the shameful picture of him hiding in a mansion while sending others to fight and die. It made him look like a coward.
This is the narrative that's really at stake. A narrative isn't just a chronology. It's a tale woven with themes. For 20 years, Bin Laden peddled a tale of oppression and jihad. In elaborate video and audio messages, he depicted al-Qaida's trail of bombings as a Muslim struggle against Western persecution. He wasn't just a terrorist. He was a storyteller.
That's the story Brennan sought to undermine when he cited Bin Laden's use of a human shield to show "how false his narrative has been over the years." Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also targeted Bin Laden's story. In a statement trumpeting his death, she argued that "people across the Middle East and North Africa are rejecting the extremist narratives and charting a path of peaceful progress." Carney, too, warned against false interpretations. "It would be a shame," he warned, if Bin Laden's killing "became a piece in a partisan narrative."
Carney is right. So are Brennan, Clinton, and Cameron. Bin Laden was a delusional mass murderer, and his narrative was false. But you can't debunk one false narrative with another. The firefight at Bin Laden's compound, it now appears, pitted two or three men against a dozen or more commandos. Bin Laden didn't engage in the firefight and used no human shield. He wasn't even armed. We shot him dead anyway. That's the truth. Deal with it. ( salte.com )
