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GLOBAL WARMING ALERT!!!!
-----
A first! Snow falls in Baghdad
By CHRISTOPHER CHESTER, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 48
minutes ago
After weathering nearly five years of war, Baghdad residents
thought they'd pretty much seen it all. But Friday morning,
as muezzins were calling the faithful to prayer, the people
here awoke to something certifiably new.
For the first time in memory, snow fell across Baghdad.
Although the white flakes quickly dissolved into gray
puddles, they brought an emotion rarely expressed in this
desert capital snarled by army checkpoints, divided by
concrete walls and ravaged by sectarian killings ? delight.
''For the first time in my life I saw a snow-rain like this
falling in Baghdad,'' said Mohammed Abdul-Hussein, a
63-year-old retiree from the New Baghdad area.
''When I was young, I heard from my father that such rain had
fallen in the early '40s on the outskirts of northern
Baghdad,'' Abdul-Hussein said, referring to snow as a type of
rain. ''But snow falling in Baghdad in such a magnificent
scene was beyond my imagination.''
Morning temperatures uncharacteristically hovered around
freezing, and the Baghdad airport was closed because of poor
visibility. Snow is common in the mountainous Kurdish areas
of northern Iraq, but residents of the capital and
surrounding areas could remember just hail.
''I asked my mother, who is 80, whether she'd ever seen snow
in Iraq before, and her answer was no,'' said Fawzi Karim, a
40-year-old father of five who runs a small restaurant in
Hawr Rajab, a village six miles southeast of Baghdad.
''This is so unusual, and I don't know whether or not it's a
lesson from God,'' Karim said.
Some said they'd seen snow only in movies.
Talib Haider, a 19-year-old college student, said ''a friend
of mine called me at 8 a.m. to wake me up and tell me that
the sky is raining snow.''
''I rushed quickly to the balcony to see a very beautiful
scene,'' he said. ''I tried to film it with my cell phone
camera. This scene has really brought me joy. I called my
other friends and the morning turned to be a very happy one
in my life.''
An Iraqi who works for The Associated Press said he woke his
wife and children shortly after 7 a.m. to ''have a look at
this strange thing.'' He then called his brother and sister
and found them awake, also watching the ''cotton-like snow
drops covering the trees.''
For a couple of hours anyway, a city where mortar shells
routinely zoom across to the Green Zone became united as one
big White Zone. As of late afternoon, there were no reports
of violence. The snow showed no favoritism as it fell
faintly on neighborhoods Shiite and Sunni alike, and (with
apologies to James Joyce) upon all the living and the dead.
GLOBAL WARMING ALERT!!!!
-----
A first! Snow falls in Baghdad
By CHRISTOPHER CHESTER, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 48
minutes ago
After weathering nearly five years of war, Baghdad residents
thought they'd pretty much seen it all. But Friday morning,
as muezzins were calling the faithful to prayer, the people
here awoke to something certifiably new.
For the first time in memory, snow fell across Baghdad.
Although the white flakes quickly dissolved into gray
puddles, they brought an emotion rarely expressed in this
desert capital snarled by army checkpoints, divided by
concrete walls and ravaged by sectarian killings ? delight.
''For the first time in my life I saw a snow-rain like this
falling in Baghdad,'' said Mohammed Abdul-Hussein, a
63-year-old retiree from the New Baghdad area.
''When I was young, I heard from my father that such rain had
fallen in the early '40s on the outskirts of northern
Baghdad,'' Abdul-Hussein said, referring to snow as a type of
rain. ''But snow falling in Baghdad in such a magnificent
scene was beyond my imagination.''
Morning temperatures uncharacteristically hovered around
freezing, and the Baghdad airport was closed because of poor
visibility. Snow is common in the mountainous Kurdish areas
of northern Iraq, but residents of the capital and
surrounding areas could remember just hail.
''I asked my mother, who is 80, whether she'd ever seen snow
in Iraq before, and her answer was no,'' said Fawzi Karim, a
40-year-old father of five who runs a small restaurant in
Hawr Rajab, a village six miles southeast of Baghdad.
''This is so unusual, and I don't know whether or not it's a
lesson from God,'' Karim said.
Some said they'd seen snow only in movies.
Talib Haider, a 19-year-old college student, said ''a friend
of mine called me at 8 a.m. to wake me up and tell me that
the sky is raining snow.''
''I rushed quickly to the balcony to see a very beautiful
scene,'' he said. ''I tried to film it with my cell phone
camera. This scene has really brought me joy. I called my
other friends and the morning turned to be a very happy one
in my life.''
An Iraqi who works for The Associated Press said he woke his
wife and children shortly after 7 a.m. to ''have a look at
this strange thing.'' He then called his brother and sister
and found them awake, also watching the ''cotton-like snow
drops covering the trees.''
For a couple of hours anyway, a city where mortar shells
routinely zoom across to the Green Zone became united as one
big White Zone. As of late afternoon, there were no reports
of violence. The snow showed no favoritism as it fell
faintly on neighborhoods Shiite and Sunni alike, and (with
apologies to James Joyce) upon all the living and the dead.
