Imagine that

Clone from celebrated stump It would have been the biggest tree alive today had it not been so ignominiously felled in 1890 — reputedly to satisfy a drunken bet about making a table big enough to seat 40 guests from a single slice of tree-trunk. But after a century of being left for dead, a giant redwood that grew as tall as a 30-storey building over the course of nearly 4000 years in northern California is about to be reborn as a clone planted on the coast of Cornwall. Scientists have managed to cultivate cuttings from the Fieldbrook Redwood Stump, which is 10.7m in diameter, and 10 of its clones are now growing as knee-high saplings in the plant nursery at the Eden Project, near St Austell, as part of an ambitious plan to propagate and replant old trees of America and Britain. Middle East Having the leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force direct Iraqi forces battling Isis (Islamic State) is complicating the US mission against terrorism and contributing to destabilisation in Iraq, the director of the CIA says. The comments, by director John Brennan on Fox News, are among the strongest yet voiced by American officials about the involvement of shadowy Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in the war against the extremist group. Brennan described Soleimani as being “very aggressive and active” as he advised Shia militias battling the extremists, most recently in the ongoing offensive targeting Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown. Brennan said he “wouldn’t consider Iran an ally right now inside Iraq”. Africa A South Sudanese rebel group has freed 250 child soldiers — including a girl as young as 9, the UN children’s agency says — but warns that thousands are still being forced to fight. The rebel Cobra Faction is also set to release another 400 child soldiers in the next two days under a deal with the Government, out of a total of 3000 it holds, Unicef says. However, the scourge of child recruitment is far from over in South Sudan, as some 12,000 youngsters are still fighting in the ranks of the country’s warring factions, the UN says.