Has the leader of ISIS been killed?

Caliph-Ibrahim

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ISIS leader and recently self-declared Caliph Ibrahim, ruler of the so-called Islamic State, has until now kept a very low profile.

His first officially released video shows him delivering a sermon in Mosul.

Why the appearance now?

Perhaps in order to dispel rumors that he has been severely injured or might even be dead. Of course such reports might be a ruse to draw him out of hiding and thus make him an easier target to be killed. Either way, there’s no disputing al-Baghdadi’s vulnerability.

International Business Times reports: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Sunni militant outfit Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis), is said to have been severely injured in the raging battle forcing him to flee to neighbouring Syria.

According to a report in the Iraqi news network Al Sumaria, the insurgent leader was injured during a raid led by Iraq’s Shiite-led security forces in the west of Anbar.

“The Iraqi security forces carried out an operation in the city of Qaim on the border with Syria based on accurate intelligence and with the help of the Air Force where the leader of ISIL, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi was seriously injured,” said Haidar al-Shara, a representative of the international parliament in Iraq.

However, the report has so far not been independently verified. If confirmed, it will be a severe blow to the militant group which has been marching on several Iraqi cities.

The Iraqi official said: “After being hit, al-Baghdadi, with a range of elements of his organisation fled into Syrian territory because of its proximity to Qaim,” adding: “al-Baghdadi might be killed as a result of the severity of his injuries.”

If al-Baghdadi has indeed fled back to Syria, so much for ISIS’s claim that it has erased the boundary between Syria and Iraq. At this point in time, ISIS appears to recognize that one side of a supposedly non-existent border is safer than the other.

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ISIS destroys mosques and shrines in Iraq

AFP reports: Jihadists who overran Mosul last month have demolished ancient shrines and mosques in and around the historic northern Iraqi city, residents and social media posts said Saturday.

At least four shrines to Sunni Arab or Sufi figures have been demolished, while six Shiite mosques, or husseiniyahs, have also been destroyed, across militant-held parts of northern Nineveh province, of which Mosul is the capital.

Pictures posted on the Internet by the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group showed the Sunni and Sufi shrines were demolished by bulldozers, while the Shiite mosques and shrines were all destroyed by explosives.

The photographs were part of an online statement titled “Demolishing shrines and idols in the state of Nineveh.”

Local residents confirmed that the buildings had been destroyed and that militants had occupied two cathedrals as well.

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Maliki to run for a third term as Iraq’s prime minister

The New York Times reports: Despite sharp criticism from almost every political party in Iraq and pressure from friendly foreign powers to step down, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki announced Friday that he would seek a third term as prime minister.

He never suggested that he would step down. But the chorus of criticism over his sectarian policies, which helped create the conditions that led to a large portion of the country falling to Islamic extremists, had left many believing that lacking supporters, he might relinquish power.

They appear to have underestimated his desire to hold on to it.

“I will not give up my candidacy for a third term,” Mr. Maliki announced in a statement read on Iraqiya, the state television channel.

He noted that the bloc of lawmakers that supported his nomination was the largest in the Parliament and that they should not be asked to meet any conditions imposed by other legislative groups, such as supporting a different candidate. [Continue reading…]

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Iranian pilot killed fighting in Iraq: Can Iran avoid ‘mission creep’?

The Wall Street Journal reports: Iran is pursuing a delicate strategy of supporting fellow Shiite Muslims and preserving its influence in neighboring Iraq—where the government is under siege by radical Sunni militants—without pushing the confrontation into outright sectarian warfare.

For the second straight week, influential clerics, who are appointed by the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, used their Friday sermons to denounce the militant groups and support Iraq’s government. But their speeches steered clear of explicitly encouraging individual Shiites to act against the Sunni insurgents.

“We are ready to help Iraq as they ask for help,” Ayatollah Mohammad Saeedi told thousands of Iranians gathered for Friday prayers in Qom, Iran’s religious capital.

The country has openly sent top military advisers to help the Iraqi government, and blamed a collection of foreign enemies from Saudi Arabia to Israel and the U.S. for the violence. It deployed at least three battalions of elite Revolutionary Guards units to Iraq, according to Iranian security officials—an action Iran’s foreign ministry denied.

Yet it has stopped short of sending in large numbers of its own troops and discouraged ordinary Iranians from crossing the border to fight or defend holy sites in Iraq. [Continue reading…]

Al Jazeera reports: An Iranian pilot has been killed while fighting in Iraq, in what is thought to be the first military casualty that Tehran officially acknowledged during battles against Sunni fighters led by the Islamic State group.

Iran’s official IRNA news agency said on Saturday that Colonel Shoja’at Alamdari Mourjani was killed while “defending” the Shia Muslim holy sites in the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad.

Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan, reporting from Baghdad, said there were no reports of a plane being shot down in Iraq and the pilot probably died while fighting on the ground. [Continue reading…]

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Palestinian Mohammad Abu Khdair ‘was burned alive’

BBC News reports: A Palestinian teenager killed in Jerusalem was burned alive, first post mortem examination findings quoted by the Palestinian attorney-general say.

“The direct cause of death was burns as a result of fire,” Mohammed al-A’wewy was quoted as saying.

Israeli authorities say the circumstances surrounding the death of Mohammad Abu Khdair, 16, are unclear.

His death followed the abduction and murder of three young Israelis, with violent clashes spreading overnight.

The post mortem examination on Mohammad Abu Khdair was carried out by Israeli doctors, with Saber al-Aloul, the director of the Palestinian forensic institute, in attendance.

The Palestinian official news agency Wafa quoted the attorney-general as saying that Mr Aloul had reported fire dust in the respiratory canal, meaning the victim had “inhaled this material while he was burnt alive”.

Mohammad Abu Khdair, who had also suffered a head injury, had burns to 90% of the body, it was reported.

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German man arrested as spy implicates U.S.

The New York Times reports: In the latest turn in the yearlong tensions with Germany over American spying, a German man was arrested this week on suspicion of passing secret documents to a foreign power, believed to be the United States. The American ambassador, John B. Emerson, was summoned to the Foreign Office here and urged to help with what German officials called a swift clarification of the case.

The arrest came as Washington and Berlin were trying to put to rest a year of strains over the National Security Agency’s monitoring of Germans’ electronic data, including Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone, and just months after the collapse of an effort by Germany to strike a “no spy” accord with the White House.

While the White House and American intelligence officials refused to comment on the arrest, one senior American official said that reports in the German news media that the 31-year-old man under arrest had been working for the United States for at least two years “threaten to undo all the repair work” the two sides have been trying to achieve.[Continue reading…]

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Iran and Saudi Arabia in secret talks to replace Maliki

The Times reports: Iran is sending officials to Saudi Arabia for secret talks about replacing Iraq’s embattled prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, with a compromise candidate who might broker a political solution to the deepening crisis there.

The move towards co-operation by the two regional enemies reflects growing alarm at the situation in Iraq, where lightning gains by the al-Qaeda splinter group Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (Isis) threaten both countries. Saudi Arabia deployed 30,000 extra troops along its border with Iraq yesterday after Baghdad pulled its forces out of the area, leaving the world’s largest oil producer to defend its frontier alone.

The move by Iran’s President Rouhani to solicit Saudi backing for a compromise candidate is a remarkable step, given the enmity between the two powers, but reflects the desperation in both capitals. With Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish government taking steps towards declaring full independence, it falls to Tehran and Riyadh to break the political deadlock in Baghdad.

Iran has been Mr al-Maliki’s principal backer since he took power in 2006, but has reluctantly conceded that he must step aside to save Iraq from implosion. After years of discrimination against Iraq’s Sunni and Kurdish minorities by his Shia-led government, Mr al-Maliki is considered too widely hated to lead the country out of crisis.

Tehran is therefore ready to ditch the prime minister and has drawn up a list of potential replacements. Saudi Arabia, the dominant Sunni power in the region, has said it will urge Iraqi groups it can influence to join a unity government, but only if Mr al-Maliki goes. [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s role in Syria

Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel, directors of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver, interviewed by IranWire:

How does the Syrian opposition interpret Iran’s involvement in Syria?

Nader Hashemi: The Syrian opposition understandably views Iran as an enemy state, which is the biggest backer and sustainer of Assad’s criminal enterprise. The fingerprints of the Islamic Republic are all over the atrocities in Syria. The full story of Iran’s involvement in Syria has yet to be told. If we ever get to the point where there’s a full investigation, we’ll likely see that Iran’s involvement has been much larger and more significant than has been publicly admitted and reported. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that Bashar al-Assad is hugely in debt to the Iranian regime for its survival, increasingly so as the conflict has gone on.

Danny Postel: The Hezbollah’s Syrian surge, for example, in 2013, was critical. It came at a time when Assad was very vulnerable, and that’s why Hezbollah was drawn in. And we now have reports of Iraqi fighters in Syria, which Iran has played a direct role in, and Afghan fighters.

Hashemi: There was a piece in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago reporting that the Iranian government is paying a $500 bribe to Afghan Shia refugees in Iran to fight in Syria, which is quite revealing. This suggests that the Syrian regime does not have enough troops to do its fighting, and must rely on external forces to do its dirty work. It also suggests that the Assad regime is not as strong as it, and its backers, claim it to be. It does have a weakness in terms of fighters, otherwise why would you have thousands of Hezbollah troops doing some of the regime’s heavy lifting?

If you read the Iranian press, one month ago, the Iranian deputy foreign minister Amir Abdollahian was giving a talk at the University of Tehran where he admitted publicly that Assad was about to fall, and then Iran stepped up its involvement to save the regime. That most likely happened in late 2012 or early 2013, when it looked like the regime was on very shaky ground.

Iran is invested in supporting the Assad regime right till the end, and they’re doing it not for reasons of religious doctrine or political ideology. It’s pure realpolitik. The Iranian regime realizes that the survival of the Assad regime is central to Iran’s national security and defense doctrine — particularly with respect to Israel. If there’s a toppling of the Assad regime, Iran’s regional clout — specifically its access to Hezbollah — diminishes significantly. [Continue reading…]

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Syria: War’s toll on women

Human Rights Watch: Women in Syria have been arbitrarily arrested and detained, physically abused, harassed, and tortured during Syria’s conflict by government forces, pro-government militias, and armed groups opposed to the government, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW Committee) will conduct a review of the situation for Syrian women on July 4, 2014, in Geneva.

The 47-page report, “We Are Still Here: Women on the Front Line of Syria’s Conflict,” profiles 17 Syrian women who are now refugees in Turkey. Through written and photographic portraits, the report documents ways in which the conflict impacts women in particular. Women profiled in the report experienced violations by government and pro-government forces as well as by armed groups opposed to the government such as Liwa’al-Islam and extremist groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS). Some female activists and humanitarian aid providers said they had been threatened, arbitrarily arrested and detained, and tortured by government or armed opposition forces. All six former detainees profiled in the report experienced physical abuse or torture in detention; one woman was sexually assaulted multiple times. Other women said they had been victims of discriminatory restrictions on their dress and movement. Several women were injured or lost family members in indiscriminate attacks on civilians by government forces.

“Women have not been spared any aspect of the brutality of the Syrian conflict, but they are not merely passive victims,” said Liesl Gerntholtz, women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “Women are taking on increasing responsibilities – whether by choice or due to circumstance – and they should not have to pay with intimidation, arrest, abuse, or even torture.” [Continue reading…]

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Syria refugees set to exceed a third of Lebanon’s population

Reuters reports: Lebanon faces the threat of political and economic collapse as the number of refugees pouring in from Syria is set to exceed a third of the population, Social Affairs Minister Rashid Derbas said on Thursday.

Derbas said the total was expected to hit 1.5 million by the end of the year, an excessive burden for a country of just 4 million people.

He said the influx of refugees fleeing Syria’s civil war will have cost Lebanon’s already fragile economy around $7.5 billion between 2012 and 2014. Border communities hosting Syrian refugees were under particular pressure because of the increase in people willing to work for low wages.

“Unemployment doubled, especially among unspecialized or unskilled labor in those mostly poor areas,” he said, warning that the refugee crisis “threatens to take us to an economic, political and even security collapse.”

The turmoil next door has not only hurt Lebanon’s economy, but has aggravated sectarian tensions and fueled violence. It currently hosts around 1.1 million registered Syrian refugees. [Continue reading…]

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The enemy of your enemy isn’t your friend, but you can have an affair with him

Maziar Bahari and Reza HaghighatNejad write: Every few days a crowd gathers at the Leadership Complex in central Tehran, chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Hypocrites.” The group varies in size: sometimes there are hundreds of people, and other times only a handful. Supporters range from prominent government officials to farmers from remote villages. But everyone who attends these ritual gatherings is rewarded in some way. It might be extra food rations or a higher government position. People at risk of losing their jobs might be told their positions are now secure. What’s important to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is to have his supporters there with him, lending further legitimacy to his words. Whatever they may be.

Last week, during a ceremony attended by Iranian judges and prosecutors, Khamenei expressed his doubts on Iran’s potential cooperation with the U.S. in Iraq. He accused the American government of exploiting the advances made by extremist Sunnis in Iraq to gain control over the country. As his audience sat before him, many of them crossing their hands over their crutches or their chests — a very Iranian sign of submission — Khamenei said that the current crisis had nothing to do with the sectarian divide between Shia and Sunni Muslims. The crowd chanted on cue. The Ayatollah added, “Americans are trying to undermine the stability and the territorial integrity of Iraq, in which the last remnants of Saddam Hussein’s regime are used as proxies and those formerly outside this network of power are treated as pawns.”

Khamenei’s words were echoed by his supporters, who see the rise of the extremist Sunni group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS, as an important threat to Iran’s dominance in Shia-majority Iraq. “After the victory of the Shias in Iraq, Arab countries, America and Israel started causing trouble because they were not happy with a Shia democratic government in Iraq,” said Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, former Chief Justice of Iran. “The people of Iraq should remain united,” he said. “Only the U.S. would benefit from a split.” Shahroudi’s comments are particularly important because he was born and raised in Iraq, and was among the leaders of the opposition against Saddam Hussein. He is also widely regarded as Khamenei’s mentor.

Khamenei’s supporters call him “The Leader of All Muslims around the World.” The gist of their conspiracy theories is that the whole world is united to undermine Khamenei’s leadership. The U.S. presence in Iraq and the region is regarded as the main challenge to dominance in Iraq, but they also include ISIS in an American scheme against Iran. “Command centers for the ISIS fighters were in the White House and Saudi Arabia,” said a revolutionary guards commander, and a Khamenei appointee. “The ISIS conflict is an American and Zionist conspiracy to reverse Islamic awakening in the Middle East,” added another appointed commander. [Continue reading…]

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Maliki’s effort to suppress the Sunnis

A New York Times report reiterates earlier reports, saying: “To help the Iraqis repel ISIS, Mr. Obama has flooded Iraq with intelligence and surveillance equipment and said he would deploy up to 300 military advisers to assess the condition of the Iraqi military.”

Buried in a Washington Post story which details the inadequacies of Iraq’s air force, is a passage which conflicts with the overarching narrative of a fledgling state, unable to meet its own needs.

Under Maliki’s direction, the Iraqi government became less concerned about the risks presented by extremists than it was about holding the Sunnis down.

[E]ven before the U.S. military left the country, the Iraqi government purged many of its best intelligence officers and assets because they were either Sunnis or Kurds, vastly degrading its ability to locate important terrorist targets, according to a senior intelligence official who spoke anonymously so that he could speak freely. Killing terrorists was no longer the Shiite-dominated government’s top priority, the officials said. Instead, the goal became one of undermining Sunni influence and power.

To accomplish this, Maliki created a special military liaison office, the Office of the Commander in Chief (OCINC), as a work-around to the normal chain of command, the officials said. It was also meant to bypass prying American eyes.

Michael Pregent, a former Army intelligence officer working on contract as an embedded adviser to the Iraqi security forces in 2008, obtained evidence that showed how politicized the Iraqi targeting process had become.

Pregent was secretly passed a list of 3,000 targets that OCINC was giving to its ground commanders conducting raids, he said in a recent interview. A confidential analysis of the list by Americans in a targeting cell at the Baghdad Operations Center found that 95 percent of the targets were either Sunni men of military age, tribal leaders or other Sunnis listed simply as “the friend of a terrorist, father of a terrorist, grandfather of a terrorist,” Pregent said. No direct evidence of terrorist involvement was provided, he said.

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Iraq chases Baghdad sleeper cells as ‘Zero Hour’ looms over capital

Reuters reports: Iraqi insurgents are preparing for an assault on Baghdad, with sleeper cells planted inside the capital to rise up at “Zero Hour” and aid fighters pushing in from the outskirts, according to senior Iraqi and U.S. security officials.

Sunni fighters have seized wide swathes of the north and west of the country in a three week lightning advance and say they are bearing down on the capital, a city of 7 million people still scarred by the intense street fighting between its Sunni and Shi’ite neighborhoods during U.S. occupation.

The government says it is rounding up members of sleeper cells to help safeguard the capital, and Shi’ite paramilitary groups say they are helping the authorities. Some Sunni residents say the crackdown is being used to intimidate them.

Iraqis speak of a “Zero Hour” as the moment a previously-prepared attack plan would start to unfold.

A high-level Iraqi security official estimated there were 1,500 sleeper cell members hibernating in western Baghdad and a further 1,000 in areas on the outskirts of the capital. [Continue reading…]

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Iraqi Shiite militias enter battle against ISIS

AFP reports: Iraq’s government once battled entrenched Shiite militiamen but is now making common cause with them against a jihadist-led onslaught that Baghdad’s forces are struggling to contain on their own.

Shiite militiamen are fighting alongside Iraq’s flagging forces, bringing experience, morale and increased numbers to the government side, which has lost large areas of five provinces to the Sunni Arab militant offensive.

But even if it pushes back the offensive, the government may have traded that immediate threat for another it cannot control.

“The last time the militias became strong and Baghdad had to contend with them, it led to operation Charge of the Knights,” said John Drake, a security analyst with AKE Group, referring to a 2008 operation against Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia that only succeeded with American support.

“This involved heavy fighting in the south of the country,” said Drake. “The difference now is that the government won’t have the same US military support.”

The Shiite militia resurgence also risks further alienating the Sunni Arab minority, which populates most areas overrun in the offensive and was targeted by death squads during a Sunni-Shiite sectarian war, which peaked in 2006-2007 and killed thousands.

“The reinvigoration of Shiite militia groups will, at the very least, be of concern for the Sunni community, given that such groups were involved in widespread sectarian killing,” Drake said. [Continue reading…]

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German student under NSA scrutiny, reports say

The New York Times reports: A 27-year-old informatics student in southern Germany was identified in news reports on Thursday as the first German citizen known to be under surveillance by the National Security Agency since it was revealed last year that the agency had once tapped the cellphone of Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The news came on the same day that two former American security officials testified to a parliamentary inquiry about reports of sweeping digital surveillance and monitoring in Germany by American intelligence, which touched off a major controversy and put strains on German-American relations.

The student, Sebastian Hahn of Erlangen in Bavaria, said he had been active for six years in the Tor network, a group that works to encrypt digital communications, and that he had rented space on a computer in Nuremburg that he said was one of several around the world that direct other computers involved in Tor. Two German state broadcasting channels reported that there was evidence that the N.S.A. was tracking the Nuremberg computer as part of an operation called “XKeyscore.” A server at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that is used by Roger Dingledine, a well-known web activist, was also tracked in the operation, the German broadcasters reported. [Continue reading…]

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Why this isn’t a ‘new’ intifada

Samer Badawi writes: In a pre-interview with a television news producer yesterday, I found myself stammering over a familiar question: as a Palestinian, do you have any hope for the future?

Steeped in the day-to-day of our “conflict” with Israel, I find it difficult to respond to such banalities – not least because I’m in no position to represent all Palestinians.

So after attempting something articulate with the producer, I decided to get in touch with my friend, Emad Burnat, the Oscar-nominated director of 5 Broken Cameras and as good a gauge as any of the situation in the West Bank.

If you’ve seen his film, you’ll know why. In it, Emad documents his West Bank village’s nonviolent struggle against Israeli land grabs. Produced from more than 700 hours of footage, the documentary features intimate portraits of Bil’in’s leading nonviolent activists, who maintain a remarkable sense of hope amidst the violence and tragedy that surround them. But here’s the thing: the earliest of the film’s footage dates back to 2005, when common wisdom had it that the Second Intifada was over.

So when I asked Emad today if a third intifada was coming, his response wasn’t surprising. Instead, it reminded me of something he published just before his appearance at the 2012 Oscars:

“I come from Palestine. I have lived my entire life under military occupation, and I have no memory of a time without struggle.” [Continue reading…]

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To understand turbulence we need the intuitive perspective of art

turbulence-leonardo

Philip Ball writes: When the German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld assigned his most brilliant student a subject for his doctoral thesis in 1923, he admitted that “I would not have proposed a topic of this difficulty to any of my other pupils.” Those others included such geniuses as Wolfgang Pauli and Hans Bethe, yet for Sommerfeld the only one who was up to the challenge of this subject was Werner Heisenberg.

Heisenberg went on to be a key founder of quantum theory and was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in physics. He developed one of the first mathematical descriptions of this new and revolutionary discipline, discovered the uncertainty principle, and together with Niels Bohr engineered the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum theory, to which many physicists still adhere today.

The subject of Heisenberg’s doctoral dissertation, however, wasn’t quantum physics. It was harder than that. The 59-page calculation that he submitted to the faculty of the University of Munich in 1923 was titled “On the stability and turbulence of fluid flow.”

Sommerfeld had been contacted by the Isar Company of Munich, which was contracted to prevent the Isar River from flooding by building up its banks. The company wanted to know at what point the river flow changed from being smooth (the technical term is “laminar”) to being turbulent, beset with eddies. That question requires some understanding of what turbulence is. Heisenberg’s work on the problem was impressive—he solved the mathematical equations of flow at the point of the laminar-to-turbulent change—and it stimulated ideas for decades afterward. But he didn’t really crack it—he couldn’t construct a comprehensive theory of turbulence.

Heisenberg was not given to modesty, but it seems he had no illusions about his achievements here. One popular story goes that he once said, “When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions. Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.”

It is probably an apocryphal tale. The same remark has been attributed to at least one other person: The British mathematician and expert on fluid flow, Horace Lamb, is said to have hoped that God might enlighten him on quantum electrodynamics and turbulence, saying that “about the former I am rather optimistic.”

You get the point: turbulence, a ubiquitous and eminently practical problem in the real world, is frighteningly hard to understand. [Continue reading…]

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