U.S. ‘still the Great Satan’ says Iranian Guard chief

 

The head of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard said on Tuesday that the U.S. “is still the Great Satan,” regardless of the nuclear deal struck with Americans and world powers over the Islamic Republic’s contested nuclear program. The comments were made by Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, reported by the official Guard website. He said that “the enmity against Iranian nation by the U.S. has not lessened and it has been increased.” “We should not be deceived by the U.S.,” Gen. Jafari reportedly said. “It wants to infiltrate into Iran, resorting to new instruments and method.”

The Guard and hardliners remain suspicious of the U.S., even as authorities look over the historic accord that curbs Iran’s nuclear program in return to lifting economic sanctions. Earlier Tuesday, Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, the head of powerful Iran’s Experts Assembly, which oversees the nation’s Supreme Leader and institutions under his supervision, also said the nuclear deal would not alter Iran’s foreign policy toward the U.S.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran considers the U.S. its No. 1 enemy,” Ayatollah Yazdi said. “If you try to discover the root of the sedition that is happening around us today, you will identify U.S. as its main supporter.” Meanwhile on Tuesday, the state news agency IRNA quoted Tehran’s police chief, Gen. Hossein Sajedinia, as saying his officers detained several people for distributing apparel bearing the flags of the U.S., Israel and Britain, as well as items bearing ‘Satanic symbols’. Such crackdowns on Western items are common in Iran.

Alien living beings on Pluto

 

Pluto may contain a subsurface ocean warm enough to host life, according to English physicist Brian Cox (who also said that humans could be the only complex life in our galaxy). Cox believes the tell-tale ooze of glaciers on Pluto’s surface hints at the possibility of a subterranean sea warm enough to host organic chemistry. “New Horizons probe showed that there may be a subsurface ocean on Pluto which means - if our understanding of life on Earth is even slightly correct- that you could have living things there,” Cox told ‘The Times’

The New Horizons spacecraft completed a three billion mile journey across the Solar System and performed a flyby of Pluto in July. The spacecraft captured detailed images and other data of Pluto and also of its moons: Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra. It is unlikely that New Horizons would be able to tell for certain whether warm water exists in the dwarf planet. Cox said that the most immediate prospect for finding evidence of life was on the moons of other planets closer to home. “It’s not as accessible, unfortunately, as Europa [a satellite of Jupiter] or some of Saturn’s moons. Titan looks as though it’s got a subsurface ocean now, and Enceladus throws liquid into space, so you can fly through that and see if it’s got organics in it,” he said. Cox also said it was plausible that humans could be the only complex life in our galaxy. The biological “bottlenecks” on the way to multi-cellular organisms are so difficult to squeeze through that only a tiny fraction of the planets where life emerges will be home to anything more than the simplest biology, he said. Cox added that science is telling us now that “complex life is probably rare.” 

Source:The Hindu