Sunday, November 22, 2009 LONDON: An auction house says it is selling a rare first edition of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" found in a family's guest lavatory in southern England.Christie's auction house said Sunday the book — one of around 1,250 copies first printed in 1859 — had been on a toilet bookshelf at a family's home in Oxford.The book will be auctioned on Tuesday, the 150th anniversary of the publication of the famous work. Christie's said the book is likely to sell for 60,000 pounds ($99,000).Darwin's "The Origin of Species" outlined his theory of natural selection, the foundation for the modern understanding of evolution.Celebrations around the world this year have marked the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth.
BAGHDAD: Nearly 500 U.S. Army combat engineers who specialize in clearing roads of explosives started shifting to southern Afghanistan."We are probably going to be the beginning of the influx you are going to see to Afghanistan," Lt. Col. Kevin Landers, commander of the Fort Carson, Colo.-based 4th Engineer Battalion, said as crews packed crates and cleaned vehicles for the flight to Kandahar.Obama has ordered 17,000 more U.S. soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan to bolster the 38,000 American troops already battling the resurgent Taliban."We are going to take this footprint out of Iraq," said Landers, whose battalion received word of its reassignment last month just after taking command of clearing roads in Baghdad of bombs and debris.
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