The answer to one of Spain's great historical mysteries is believed to lie in an area of olive-clad mountainside, the size of half a football pitch.

The site has been fenced off and placed under 24-hour guard, such is the sensitivity of what is about to take place.

This remote spot, between the Andalucian villages of Viznar and Alfacar, is where the poet and dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca was murdered before daybreak on 18 August 1936 - by gunmen loyal to General Francisco Franco.

The Spanish Civil War was a month old, and seven decades later the remains of arguably its most famous victim are set to be unearthed and identified.

Howard Barton Unruh, who shot and killed 13 people as he walked the streets of New Jersey 60 years ago, has died at the age of 88.

Diagnosed as mentally ill, he never stood trial. He is widely regarded by many as the first single-episode mass murderer in the United States.

Unruh, who was confined in a state psychiatric hospital after the rampage, died on Monday after a long illness.

Unruh had planned whom he was going to shoot for up to a year beforehand.

As medicine has allowed people who would previously have died young to live to childbearing age and beyond, many have assumed that natural selection no longer works on our species.

But Prof Stephen Stearns, the evolutionary biologist at Yale University behind the study, says: "That's just plain false."

While survival to reproductive age is no longer such a hurdle for humans, other evolutionary pressures – including sexual selection and reproductive fitness – are still working away in full force.

If the trends the research detected are representative and continue for another 10 generations, Prof Stearns says that the average woman in 2409AD will be 2cm (0.8in) shorter and 1kg (2lb 3oz) heavier, will bear her first child five months earlier, and enter the menopause 10 months later.

Prof Stearns and his team studied the medical histories of 14,000 residents of the Massachusetts town of Framingham, using medical data from a study going back to 1948 and spanning three generations.

The Prince of Wales joined World War Two veterans on Sunday to mark the restoration of a famous Army memorial.

The service, held on Powrie Brae on the outskirts of Dundee, included a re-dedication for a bronze statue of a Black Watch soldier.

It came 50 years after the Queen Mother unveiled the original memorial.

The Obama administration will not seek to arrest medical marijuana users and suppliers as long as they conform to state laws, under new policy guidelines to be sent to federal prosecutors on Monday.

Two Justice Department officials said prosecutors will be told it is not a good use of their time to arrest people who use or provide medical marijuana in strict compliance with state laws.

The new policy is a significant departure from the Bush administration, which insisted it would continue to enforce federal anti-pot laws regardless of state codes

An Italian art expert says he is on the verge of discovering a long-lost Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece hidden in a secret cavity behind a palace wall.

Maurizio Seracini, a university professor, claims a cryptic message in a huge artwork in Florence's historic Palazzo Vecchio suggests Leonardo's The Battle of Anghiari is hidden behind.

He believes it was painted over with the fresco which can be seen today – The Battle of Marciano in the Chiana Valley – by another Renaissance artist, Giorgio Vasari, in 1563.

In his most outspoken comments since he resigned as the last Soviet leader in 1991, Mr Gorbachev fiercely criticised the ruling United Russia party led by Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, and said that genuine political debate was now confined to Russia's tiny liberal press.

"In the eyes of everybody, elections have been turned into a mockery of people and a symbol of disrespect for their choices," he said.

"The electoral system has been maimed." His comments, made in an interview with Novaya Gazeta, a liberal newspaper he parts owns, follow local elections earlier this month that Kremlin opponents called the dirtiest in living memory.

More than 150 items that had belonged to the former president of the Elvis Presley fan club went on the block at Chicago's Leslie Hindman auctioneers.

The most expensive items included a red ultrasuede shirt worn by Presley, which was sold for $34,000, and a monogrammed cream-colored shirt that sold for $62,000, according to the auction house's listing of post-auction sale prices.

Two concert-worn scarves sold for a combined $2,318. A set of concert-used handkerchiefs went for $732.

Somalia isn’t just a nagging geopolitical headache that won’t go away. It is also a cautionary tale. Few countries in modern history have been governmentless for so long, and as the United States has learned, it would be nice to think you could ignore this wild, thirsty, mostly nomadic nation 7,000 miles away. But you can’t

Al Qaeda is working feverishly to turn Somalia into a global jihad factory, according to recent intelligence assessments, and the way the United States chooses to respond could serve as a template for other fronts in the wider counterterrorism war. Just last month, American helicopters swept over the dusty Somali horizon to take out Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a wanted Qaeda suspect who had been hiding out in Somalia for years and training a new bevy of killers; some of those trainees are believed to be Somali-Americans who could easily slip back into the United States and do some serious damage as suicide bombers

In a way, the daring daylight strike against Mr. Nabhan, which was supposedly part of the Obama administration’s shift from targeting terrorists with cruise missiles that often kill civilians, was a flashback. Few in Somalia — or the American military — have forgotten Black Hawk Down, the battle in October 1993 when Somali militiamen in flip-flops killed 18 American soldiers, including members of the Army’s elite Delta Force. It was a searing humiliation for the Pentagon, which had just emerged from the first gulf war pumped up on smart bombs and laser-guided missiles, but in Somalia found itself back in a Vietnam-style quagmire where high technology was no match for local rage.

Black Hawk Down made the United States gun-shy for years, contributing to its failure to intervene against genocide in Rwanda and, for a time, in Bosnia, too. The battle itself was immortalized in a so-so film and a great book — required reading for some courses at West Point.

“Never again, that was the message,” said John Nagl, a retired Army officer who was on the team that wrote the military’s new counterinsurgency field manual. “People were saying this is what happens when we get involved in small wars in places we don’t understand.”

But American policy has pivoted since 1993 to another question: What happens when we don’t get involved?

The experience in Somalia speaks to that concern as well — to the problems of ignoring any patch of ungoverned territory, especially in the Muslim world, whose anarchy might tempt the arrival of the likes of Al Qaeda.

Concern about the perils of lawlessness is not new to American policy planning, of course; it was an element in the Reagan administration’s abortive effort to help calm Lebanon in 1982. But it has acquired intense urgency since Sept. 11, 2001, and now figures heavily in calculations about Afghanistan and Pakistan, about the pace of extracting American forces from Iraq — and in a reprise of 1993, about what to do in Somalia.

The United States has never really understood this place. “I frequently marveled at how little Washington seemed to care about what was happening in Somalia during 1989-90, but as an old African hand I simply chalked it up to the low level of priority that the department almost always attached to African affairs,” said Frank Crigler, American ambassador to Somalia from 1987 to 1990. “The only question people asked us was, ‘What happens after Siad?’ ” His reference was to Siad Barre, the dictator who was ousted by clan warlords in 1991, ushering in the chaos that reigns today.

“We hazarded a few guesses” about what would follow Siad’s rule, Mr. Crigler said, “but we never came close to imagining the scenario that eventually unfolded or the humanitarian nightmare.”

A drought that swept the country in 1992 killed several hundred thousand Somalis. There was probably enough food in the country at the time. But the clan warlords, for whatever calculations, were blocking aid shipments from reaching the parched interior. In his final months in office, President George H. W. Bush set in motion an enormous peacekeeping mission — nearly 30,000 American soldiers — to feed the Somalis. This was during the heady days of the post-Soviet “new world order.” The aid eventually got through and probably saved half a million lives. But even as it was turning over the mission to the United Nations, the new Clinton administration allowed itself to get sucked into Somalia’s vortex of warring clans.

On Oct. 3, 1993, the 18 Black Hawk Down soldiers were killed during an attempt to arrest the pre-eminent warlord of the day, Muhammad Farah Aideed. In the end, Mr. Aideed’s extortionist sins were forgiven by the Somali people, who were desperate to rally around someone resembling a national leader. The United States pulled out early in 1994, having acquired a cautionary new military term still widely used today: mission creep. The United Nations left the next year, as Somalia tumbled into chaos.

Just as the United States all but forgot about Afghanistan after the Soviets withdrew with their tails between their legs in 1989, the United States all but forgot about Somalia after the American military slunk away five years later. And the same thing happened. Both countries are almost purely Muslim; in both places a grass-roots Islamist movement emerged as the panacea to disorder; and in both places, Al Qaeda was not far behind. Actually, Osama bin Laden’s men may have gotten to Somalia first; Somalia is believed to have been the staging ground for the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

One widely held misperception about Somalia is that it is rabidly anti-American. This may come from the indelible images of gleeful Somalis dragging the corpses of American soldiers through the streets after militiamen shot down the two Black Hawk helicopters and a heavily armed mob finished them off. Later American policies did little to curb antagonisms. In 2006, the C.I.A. shoveled a few million dollars to predacious warlords in an attempt to stymie a competing Islamist movement. When that didn’t work, the American government supported Ethiopia, Somalia’s historic enemy, when it invaded. What followed was a nasty guerilla war that ended only when the Ethiopians agreed to leave earlier this year and the Islamists were allowed back in. Essentially, the 2006 status quo was returned, minus 15,000 Somalis, now dead...

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