Dams of volcanic rock laid across the Grand Canyon have burst repeatedly and catastrophically over the past million years - most recently about 165,000 years ago
The "Tunguska event" in which a fragment of comet exploded over Siberia and devastated a wide area in June 1908 may have been caused by a fragment of leftover material from an interplanetary stream which has already destroyed civilizations twice. If this hypothesis is correct, the world is in for another bout of fire from the heavens in about a thousand years time.
From James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia (1988)
The claim that nuclear fusion can take place inside tiny imploding bubbles of acetone in bench-top experiments has suffered a deflating blow.
Numerous parallels are visible between the totalitarianism of Soviet communism and that of Wahhabism, a Saudi-funded movement to seize control of global Islam.
Eric Haseltine is moving from one top-secret organization to another. Uncle Sam has plucked Walt Disney Co.'s chief of research and development to become head of research for the National Security Agency, which uses highly sophisticated technology to gather intelligence and break codes to protect sensitive government information systems.
(AFP)
August 03, 2002
BRITAIN has increased its supply of anti-radiation pills and distributed them around the country over fears of a terrorist attack, the health department said today.
Potassium iodate tablets protect the thyroid gland from the effects of radioactive iodine, which is emitted by some nuclear weapons.
Britain has always held stocks of these tablets, typically in areas around nuclear power stations or naval bases where there are nuclear submarines.
However, today a spokesman for the Department of Health said: "Following September 11 and a wider review of supplies needed to counter any terrorist attack we increased the supply of the tablets to cover the possibility of a broader attack."
"These additional stockpiles are distributed around the country so that the public could be better protected against radioactive iodine poisoning in the event of a wider incident."
It was reported today that London hospitals had been told to stockpile the tablets, but the spokesman said this was not the case.
"London hospitals neither purchase nor stock the tablets, we purchase them centrally," he said.
He said he could not discuss the number or location of the potassium iodate tablets purchased "as that would compromise national security".
(thisisgloucestershire.co.uk)
02 August 2002
The brown moths, or Leaf Miners, attack horse chestnuts.
They may have crept into the UK through the Channel Tunnel.
In a novel defence plan, scientists aim to confuse the pests by coating them in a chemical which tricks them into emitting female mating signals.
The insect, cameraria ohridella, devastated trees in Macedonia 16 years ago and a similar outbreak is feared in the UK after the bugs were found in a garden in Wimbledon.
The threat is considered so serious that the issue has been raised in the House of Commons.
The small brown moth lays its eggs on the leaves of the tree, which the developing caterpillar will later eat.
Scientists will be making use of a device which attracts the male moths and coats them in a powder containing pheromones.
The males' senses become overwhelmed and they can no longer detect females.
Sexually frustrated and confused, they start emitting female call signals, attracting other males which would otherwise be seeking out females.
A spokesman from Southhampton university, studying the problem, said: "The feeding caterpillar causes the leaves to go brown and the stress on the trees may kill them, but at best the trees become extremely unsightly.
"It was discovered as a new species in Macedonia in 1986 where a mass outbreak was found around Lake Ohrid.
"Since then there has been a rapid invasion across Europe, " he added.
"It's believed the insect is carried around in the summer by cars, lorries and trains.
"The intense traffic flow across the English Channel is thought the likely source of the invasion into the UK." Meanwhile, palm trees in France are under attack from a different variety of moth which has already ravaged palms in Spain, and Italy.
The French government has declared the moth a pest and ordered it to be exterminated.
The caterpillar of the moth, which originates from Argentina and Uruguay, has attacked palms on the coast of the Var department, near Toulon.
The green and orange insect probably travelled from South America on a cargo ship in 1997.
It is a difficult bug to eradicate.
The tree has to be cut into small sections and burned for 48 hours.
Global warming and an increase in trade have been blamed for the influx of insects which sees two new insects enter the country each year, compared with one every decade in the past century.
The palm-eating moth is the most tenacious of all the bugs and the caterpillar, up to four inches long, burrows deep into the tree.
August 03, 2002
SADDAM HUSSEIN is suspected of planning to arm a Palestinian terrorist group with biological weapons to attack either American or Israeli targets.
A Whitehall dossier containing a detailed assessment of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction programme, which has been circulated to the Prime Minister and other senior Cabinet ministers, is understood to focus on Iraq’s biological weapons capability.
Details of the dossier came to light as the United Nations rejected a new offer from the Iraqi leader. Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, said that an Iraqi letter calling for a further round of technical talks with Hans Blix, the head weapons inspector, set conditions “at variance” with the demands of the United Nations Security Council.
Using mobile laboratories for their research, the team of scientists working for Saddam are believed to be developing a range of biological agents that can be “delivered” by an aerosol system.
The latest assessment in Washington and London is that Saddam’s plan is to produce a basic weapon that can be used by a terrorist group to attack the Iraqi leader’s enemies, the United States and Israel. In the same way that Iran has funded and trained terrorist groups to carry out attacks from Lebanon against Israel, Saddam, according to the assessment, could be banking on recruiting a Palestinian terrorist group to act on his behalf.
Analysis of US satellite imagery over the past four years has provided sufficient evidence to show what Saddam has been doing since the expulsion of the United Nations weapons inspectors in December 1998. While the Iraqi leader has pursued all elements of his weapons of mass destruction programme, he has made greatest progress in trying to “weaponise” his biological systems, using the mobile research laboratories to try to deceive America’s spy satellites.
The Iraqi leader knows from experience that it is far more difficult to hide work on nuclear weapons because of the substantial infrastructure required. Saddam’s attempts to develop long-range ballistic missiles, capable of reaching America, have also been carefully monitored from space and there is no sign that he has succeeded beyond trying to modify old Russian Scud missiles.
In assessing the threat posed by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction programme, the emphasis has, therefore, been on his biological warfare projects, which pose as great a threat as nuclear devices and can be developed relatively easily away from the sensors of America’s spy satellites.
The Palestinian connection is now at the heart of intelligence thinking. Despite the belief in some quarters in America that a senior officer in Saddam’s intelligence service met an al-Qaeda terrorist in Prague last year, before September 11, this is given no credence by the CIA, the FBI or by British Intelligence.
Saddam has funded Palestinian extremist groups for many years, and the assessment now is that, with the Middle East in turmoil, the Iraqi leader may see that the best way of taking revenge against the US and Israel is by using a Palestinian organisation as his proxy terrorists.
No handcuffs, no police escorts for 6,000 Middle-Easterners living in U.S. illegally.
(Right-Wing Christian News site WorldNetDaily.com)
8-2-2
WASHINGTON -- The Immigration and Naturalization Service plans to deport unrestrained and unescorted most, if not all, of the estimated 6,000 Arab nationals living illegally in the U.S. via commercial airliners, WorldNetDaily has learned.
The Middle Easterners are among the estimated 314,000 aliens recently identified by INS Commissioner James W. Ziglar as having ignored deportation orders.
After it rounds them up, INS will follow a longstanding but little-known policy of returning aliens from overseas countries on passenger jetliners.
The INS policy spelled out in the enforcement-standard section, "Escorting Detainees on Commercial Aircraft" allows INS officers to book a group of fewer than 10 "non-violent" aliens at a time on a jet with no escorts and no handcuffs.
Even aliens with criminal records are eligible for unsupervised removal, as long as they haven't been convicted of violent crimes, according to INS guidelines.
The policy requires only that the aliens be preboarded and seated in the last rows of the plane "whenever possible."
Once they're seated, the officer or officers who escorted them on the plane remove their handcuffs and exit the plane.
"Officers should use care and discretion when removing restraints from properly classified low-risk detainees to avoid notice by the traveling public and airline personnel," INS policy advises.
"Officers should be aware the general public may perceive persons transported to airline gates or boarded in restraints as threats to airline and passenger safety when traveling without escorts," it further states.
The policy has long been a sore spot with airline pilots, but particularly so after last year's hijackings by 19 Arab nationals, three of whom were in the U.S. illegally.
The INS refuses to say how many, if any, Arab aliens have been deported since Ziglar's announcement last December. Of the total of 314,000 aliens, only 806 have been "apprehended" so far, said Nancy Cohen, an INS official here. She would not say how many of those have actually been removed from the country.
Cockpit intrusions
Before Sept. 11, airlines reported some 30 instances in which deported aliens partially or completely forced their way into cockpits, according to Andrew R. Thomas, author of the bestseller "Air Rage."
Cockpit intrusions are bad enough, Thomas says. But passengers have also been abused by aliens. In one case, he says, a little girl seated among a dozen Salvadoran men was sexually assaulted.
"The INS policy of deporting illegals is deplorable," Thomas said in a phone interview.
The agency is aware of the potential for violence aboard the flights. Its policy on handling deportees advises: "Detainees who require officer escorts shall not be served meals that require metal utensils that could be used as weapons."
While INS spokesman Russ Bergeron acknowledges that there is "no difference" in the escort policy now compared to before Sept. 11, and that commercial airlines will still be used, he points out that many of the 314,000 "absconders" will be flown back on government planes operated by the Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation System.
But JPATS doesn't fly overseas leaving airlines to transport most, if not all, of the 6,000 Arab aliens back to the Middle East.
Can't fly over 'big pond'
"We can't go over the big pond," said Craig Charles, INS liaison to JPATS, referring to the Atlantic. "We don't have the airframes for it."
Charles, who works at JPATS's scheduling office in Kansas City, Mo., says MD-82s make up most of the JPATS fleet, and they have only about a 4¸ -hour flight range.
But he adds that INS can lease large jets for difficult deportees such as "a fighter," or a violent alien who resists leaving and thereby avoid putting commercial passengers at risk on a long overseas flight. Charles says the INS also has leased such planes to send back large groups of detainees overseas, such as the more than 100 Nigerians it recently deported.
Also, INS officials note that the escort policy requires officers to notify airlines of high-risk or criminal aliens "at the earliest point in the arrangement process."
And pilots can refuse such passengers.
"The aircraft's captain has the ultimate authority as to who may travel on his or her aircraft, and to determine the use of restraining devices on any flight," INS policy says.
August 03, 2002
(LondonTimes)
Britain's worst outbreak of legionnaires' disease grips town
AN OUTBREAK of legionnaires’ disease has killed an elderly man and infected 18 others in what could be the UK’s worst ever case.
A further 11 people in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, are suspected to have the disease and according to experts as many as 130 more cases could emerge in the next week or so, of which up to 20 could die.
Tens of thousands of people who have walked though the heart of the town in recent weeks could also be at risk of contracting the disease.
A public health team has been set up to search for the source. The only common feature is that all those with the disease had been in Barrow town centre recently. The man who died was 89 and lived locally. He has not been named.
One of the 18 confirmed as being infected with the disease was named last night as Myra Gawron, 71, who contracted it when she left her house for the first time in two years. Her husband, Edwin, 79, died two months ago and she had visited the council offices to organise changes to tax and benefits.
Suspicion is focusing on an air-conditioning unit housed on the roof of the council-owned civic centre in the heart of the town near the main shopping street. Last night health officials closed the building and cordoned off the area.
The unit was shut down on Thursday afternoon amid fears that it was pumping out contaminated water droplets over a walkway leading to the town’s main shopping parade.
The cooling system is fitted 40ft up on the roof of the two-storey complex, next to its rooftop car park. Each day thousands of people walk past the centre, called Forum 28, which houses a 550-seat theatre, a restaurant, bar and 280-seat concert hall.
The outbreak is highly unusual because the bacterium does not easily survive in the open air. It is thought that the recent humid weather may have helped it to flourish.
Legionnaires’ disease is caused by a bacterium, Legionella pneumophila, which can survive in the water in air-conditioning units. The bacteria are inhaled but are not passed on from patient to patient.
It is a serious disease that can lead to respiratory and liver failure. In the most severe cases it can prove fatal. “Legionella is the most severe organism that causes pneumonia, and pneumonia can lead to death if not treated properly,” Mark Britton, chairman of the British Lung Foundation, said.
Public health officials targeted the air-conditioning unit on the civic centre, opened in 1972, because it was the only one in the town centre that used a water-cooling system.
Ian Cumming, chief executive of the Morecambe Bay Hospitals Trust, said that health officials were preparing to treat as many as 100 more cases of the disease over the next ten days. All elective surgery at Furness General Hospital has been cancelled for Monday and Tuesday and other hospitals in Kendal and Lancaster are preparing to help.
“The disease has an incubation period of between five and ten days. We are looking at something in the region of another ten people a day for the next ten days,” Mr Cumming said.
Dr Frank Atherton, director of public health for Morecambe Bay Primary Care Trust, said: “People could still be exposed to the infection. There’s going to be a great deal of public concern. Anyone who has visited the area of Barrow since July 1 is potentially at risk from the disease.”
Legionnaires generally strikes in the summer or early autumn, seasons when pneumonia is not common. Dr Atherton said that suspicion was aroused when more than the expected number of pneumonia cases were diagnosed at the hospital.
Figures from the Public Health Laboratory Service show that there are up to to 200 cases of legionnaires’ disease in Britain each year. Provisional figures from the Office for National Statistics show there were 14 deaths from legionnaires in 2001.
Mr Cumming said he believed the hospitals in the area could cope with the outbreak and urged residents not to be alarmed but to see a doctor if they became worried.
Dr Britton said that 19 confirmed cases represented an extremely large and significant outbreak.
Dr David Telford, medical director of Morecambe Bay’s Hospitals NHS Trust, said the mortality rate for patients in hospital suffering from legionnaires’ disease was in the region of 10 to 15 per cent.
8-2-2
(AFP) - The death toll in the Indian Ocean nation of Madagascar from a mystery viral infection has reached 153 and will continue to climb, Health Minister Andry Rasamindrakotroka said.
Experts have been baffled so far by the viral infection, which leaves its sufferers with flu-like symptoms that lead to death within two weeks, and has emerged in the southeast of the country.
The minister said that 62 people alone had died in the southeastern village of Ikongo, around 500 kiolmetres (300 miles) from the capital, Antananarivo.
On Thursday he announced that 89 people had died in the Alakamisy Ambohimaha region, and that at least two more people had perished in Ikongo. Rasamindrakotroka stressed that the figures were still coming in.
Those stricken with the illness are hit with a barrage of flu-like symptoms which usually seem to begin with a severe headache.
The pain then spreads to the neck and chest and provokes a dry cough which results in death in a fortnight if left untreated -- while many are surviving by being treated with classic anti-flu medications.
Doctors specialising in contagious diseases and members of the Pasteur Institute of Madagascar are at work trying to determine the cause of the outbreak.
Rasamindrakotroka said that 60 of the first 62 victims announced had died because they were unable to reach a hospital or health dispensary in time.
A local journalist in the town of Fianarantsoa told AFP that the disease could claim more victims because sufferers often think they have caught simply a heavy cold and try to treat the illness with traditional herbal remedies.
The health minister issued an appeal on television and radio for the ill to seek treatment at a medical centre as soon as they show the first symptoms of the disease.
The health minister also confirmed a statement made last week by President Marc Ravalomanana to say that health care would be administered free of charge in the poor Indian Ocean island's hospitals until further notice.
The crisis is the latest for the island, which emerged last month from a long, economically debilitating and sometimes violent power struggle between Ravalomanana and his predecessor, Didier Ratsiraka, who eventually fled.
(Agencia EFE)
7-28-2
LIMA, Peru -- An international team of explorers claims to have found the legendary Inca city of gold that the Spanish knew as "El Dorado," deep in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon.
The quest began on June 30, when more than two dozen researchers began combing the wild and unexplored jungle region along the basin of the Madre de Dios River.
El Dorado, called "Paititi" by the region's Indian population, is known as the last bastion of the Incas as they sought refuge from advancing Spanish conquistadors.
The leader of the expedition, the Polish-Italian journalist and explorer Jacek Palkiewicz, told EFE Saturday he was very pleased with the expedition and felt "certain" he had found El Dorado.
After two years of research and exploration, Palkiewicz said, the lost city had been found in an area adjoining the Manu national park, southeast of Lima.
The journey to El Dorado has allowed the researchers to confirm all the written accounts and myths surrounding the lost city, including reports that it was a 10-day walk from Cuzco, the ancient capital of the Inca empire.
Palkiewicz said he was most surprised to learn that stories of the city being under a lake were completely accurate.
The lake has been discovered in a four-square-kilometer (1.5-square-mile) plateau totally covered in vegetation.
Russian specialists taking part in the expedition used terrestrial radar to confirm the existence of an underwater network of caverns and tunnels.
According to legend, the treasures of the last Inca rulers were buried under the lake.
He added that a final extensive expedition would be carried out in October and would include scientists specializing in the study of caves.
Palkiewicz said he had found traces of pre-Inca constructions, which indicate that the Incas had only begun to colonize the area shortly before arrival of the Spanish conquistadors.
The man described by Britain's Guardian newspaper as a "self-styled academic" did not rule out the existence of other Inca constructions, but said the dense jungle and the region's torrential rains prevented the team from investigating further.
The expedition, which was made up of scientists from Argentina, Italy, Poland, Russia and Peru, used terrestrial radar and satellites to locate the lost city.
The journey was planned after two previous visits to the area and was given a further boost by the discovery of a 16th-century manuscript ostensibly proving that El Dorado had been discovered by Jesuit missionaries.
In the manuscript, which was found in the Vatican archives of the Society of Jesus, the pope authorizes the Jesuits to evangelize the Indians of Paititi.
Palkiewicz, a teacher of survival skills who has written some 20 books about his journeys to the most remote areas of the planet, has extensive experience in the Amazon jungles.
In 1996, he led another expedition that succeeded in locating the true source of the Amazon River.
His most recent expedition had a budget of more than $1 million and received the symbolic support of Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo, Poland's Aleksander Kwasniewski and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Efforts to locate the legendary city began with the arrival of Spanish conquerors in 1532.
Rumors of a jungle city that supposedly held priceless treasures to be used to pay the ransom of the last Inca ruler, Atahualpa, prompted searches of the region.
Many previous El Dorado expeditions ended in disaster on account of the region's hostile environment and difficult terrain.
One such failed expedition took place in 1925, when famous British explorer Col. Peter Fawcett disappeared in western Brazil while looking for the city.
In 1970, a French-American expedition led by Serge Debru disappeared, most likely at the hands of Huachipairi Indians.
A 1997 expedition led by Norwegian anthropologist Lars Hafksjold also disappeared after setting out for the Madidi River, not far from the site of Palkiewicz's discovery.
http://www.anzwers.org/free/livedragons/evolutio.htm
Crash Victim Caught On Surveillance Cam? - Video (ABC local news via Rense)
Jul 25, 2002If you don't believe in ghosts, here is something that may change your mind.
A woman saw something strange while working at an Oklahoma car impound lot earlier this month. She saw a figure circling around, and it was caught on a surveillance tape.
The woman told another worker to check it out, but that person found nobody there.
Three vehicles on the lot that night where involved in fatal accidents.
A paranormal investigator says its possible the mysterious figure could have been one of those spirits, searching for its car.
Aug 1,2002
LONDON (Reuters) - The first six months of the year have been the second-warmest ever and average global temperatures in 2002 could be the highest ever recorded, British weather experts said Thursday.
"Globally 2002 is likely to be warmer than 2001, and may even break the record set in 1998," said Briony Horton, the Meteorological Office's climate research scientist.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body that advises governments on long-term climatic variations, blames global warming ( news - web sites), caused by rising emissions of greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere, for the rise in temperatures, a Met Office spokesman said.
"We agree with them," he told Reuters. "Since 1970 there has been a marked trend in the rise of global temperatures.
"The actual rise prior to 1970 was partly man-made and partly due to natural effects. But since 1970 scientists are in fairly general agreement that warming can be attributed to man's polluting activities."
The Met Office said global temperatures were 1.03 Fahrenheit higher than the long-term average of about 59 Fahrenheit in the period from January to June.
In the nearly 150 years since recording began, only in 1998 has the difference been higher, 1.08 Fahrenheit, and that was caused by the influence of the El Nino weather phenomenon.
The figures also showed that the northern hemisphere had its warmest-ever half year, with temperatures 1.31 Fahrenheit above the long-term average.
The Met Office compiles its figures from data collected from observatories round the world, as well as from ships at sea.
7/30/2002
BEIRUT, Lebanon, July 30 (UPI) -- Osama bin Laden's al Qaida network will carry out a series of operations in August and the suspected terrorist mastermind will appear in a taped recording soon after that, the London-based Ash Sharq al-Awsat newspaper reported Tuesday.
Sources, who the newspaper said were close to bin Laden's supporters, told Ash Sharq al-Awsat al Qaida had completed plans for its operation. Targets were not mentioned, however.
"Preparations are under way and what remains is only the execution," the sources said via e-mail.
They also said bin Laden was well.
"Sheikh bin Laden is alive and will appear in a videotape after carrying out this operation to confirm that he is still alive and will continue fighting the United States," they said.
Bin Laden has been missing since the United States and its allies ousted Afghanistan's Taliban regime, which gave al Qaida shelter in the country.
The sources said bin Laden would shed light on "the success of al Qaida in containing attacks launched by the United States, on rebuilding and reorganizing its ranks ... and carrying out attacks in various countries of the world against U.S. interests."
Ash-Sharq al-Awsat also referred to reports that al Qaida had been planning an attack on U.S. interests to coincide with the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
On Monday, the Saudi newspaper said bin Laden's eldest son, Saad, had taken over as leader of al Qaida.
July 30 2002
AFP
Osama bin Laden's eldest son, Saad, has taken over the command of the al-Qaeda terror network blamed by Washington for the September 11 attacks, the Saudi pan-Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat reported yesterday.
Saad bin Laden has been in charge of the organisation "since the US offensive against al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan," which began in October, and al-Qaeda's pullout from its main hideouts in the country, the paper quoted "informed sources" as saying in a London-datelined dispatch.
This disclosure "substantiates the theory that bin Laden was killed or seriously wounded" in the US-led military campaign, the paper said.
Bin Laden's second son, 20-year-old Mohammad, had previously been expected to succeed the suspected terror mastermind in case of his death or incapacitation, Asharq Al-Awsat said, adding that Saad was "unknown" outside al-Qaeda.
Bin Laden has some 20 sons from various wives, the paper said.
Speculation about bin Laden's fate has abounded since the US-led bombardment of al-Qaeda hideouts began.
Dale Watson, head of the FBI's anti-terrorist unit, said in mid-July that he believed bin Laden was probably dead but added he had no evidence to support his contention.
07/27/2002
SAN DIEGO — A small pellet of radioactive material disappeared just south of California's border with Mexico, prompting the U.S. Customs Service to put its inspectors on alert.
Mexican authorities confirmed Friday that an inch-long capsule of iridium-192 disappeared from a truck in Mexico earlier this week. It was unclear whether the equipment was stolen or fell off the truck.
As a precaution, the Customs Service notified agents at five border crossings in California, spokesman Vince Bond said. He said radiation detectors at ports of entry had not reported any large radiation readings.
"There's no indication that there's any reason for concern whatsoever," said San Diego police spokesman David Cohen.
Although not harmful if used properly, there has been concern that iridium and other commonplace radioactive materials could be used to create a radiological "dirty bomb."
Mexico's state civil protection director, Gabriel Gomez Ruiz, said that the capsule should not pose any danger to the public. The material is enclosed in a secure fireproof container designed to withstand heavy blows, he said.
"This container is very difficult to open because of the security measures that have been taken with it," he said.
Officials from the Mexican state of Baja California launched an effort to recover the 8-inch by 6-inch cylinder containing the capsule of iridium-192, which was used by Pemex, Mexico's state-owned oil company, to X-ray its pipelines.
Iridium-192 emits potentially hazardous gamma rays commonly used to check welded joints in structures such as oil pipelines. The capsule was lost from a truck between the Mexican border cities of Tijuana and Tecate, about 70 miles east of San Diego, Ruiz said.
"We have no indication that this is headed for the border to be smuggled across," said Lauren Mack, a spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service.Associated Press.
Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
Guardian
July 19, 2002
Chechen rebels have stolen radioactive metals, possibly including plutonium, from a Russian nuclear power station in the southern region of Rostov, according to US nuclear officials.
The theft, which took place within the last 12 months at the new Volgodonskaya nuclear power station near the city of Rostov-on-Don, has heightened US fears that weapons-grade plutonium may have fallen into the hands of terrorists or countries such as Iraq or Libya.
The precise details of the security breach remain unclear, but one US official said there was the "possibility that a significant amount of plutonium was removed", together with other radioactive metals. These included caesium, strontium and low-enriched uranium, which pose a threat to human health if detonated with conventional explosives to create a "dirty bomb".
The US source said Chechen rebels were believed to be responsible for the theft. "Chechen groups have relationships with countries we do not find exceptionally desirable. The possibility that these metals may have been given to another party is very troubling," he said.
The nuclear plant - one of the newest atomic facilities in Russia - went online last December after a nine-month trial period. The US official said the theft was reported by Russian officials to the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA), which informed the US department of energy about the incident.
The department has begun a massive operation in Russia to improve the security of nuclear facilities. The G8 group of nations pledged $20bn last month to help Russia protect its ageing weapons arsenals.
Russia has an estimated 400 tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium considered by western experts to be "at risk" from theft because of poor security. US government experts are negotiating with Russian officials to speed through urgently needed safety upgrades.
Southern Russia, bordering sensitive nations in central Asia and the Caucasus, is considered a flashpoint in non-proliferation. The US source said there had been a "number of occasions" in which Iranian agents tried to buy weapons-grade plutonium from facilities in southern Russia. "They seem to have been scammed a few times," he said.
The IAEA, the Russian civilian nuclear ministry, Minatom, and the Rostov nuclear power station deny the Rostov theft took place. An IAEA spokeswoman said their code of conduct would not oblige them to treat such an incident in confidence.
But the US official said: "This incident is tied to a broader issue. There are a couple of other occasions when the Chechens may have acquired nuclear or radioactive sources. Russia is rightly very concerned about that. We should not just blame Russia. The US does not protect its materials better than anyone else."
7-31-2
WASHINGTON (AP) - People with access to irradiation equipment used in medicine or commerce aren't required to undergo background checks, increasing the potential for theft or sabotage, a lawmaker said Tuesday.
Workers who transport materials for irradiation aren't checked either, and shipments aren't required to be screened for hidden explosives, said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., the co-chairman of a bipartisan congressional task force on nuclear nonproliferation.
"Such a detonation could blow a hole in the walls (or) roof of the facility and disperse radioactive materials over a large area," said Markey, who released a Nuclear Regulatory Commission response to questions he raised last month about the security of irradiators used by hospitals, research institutions, food plants and other facilities.
A dirty bomb uses conventional explosives to disperse radioactive materials. Most nuclear experts say such an attack would cause radiation contamination over several city blocks, but probably no deaths from radiation because of the low doses as the material is dispersed.
Concern about the security of radioactive materials used in medicine and industry increased in June with the announcement that an alleged terrorist, linked to al-Qaida, had been taken into custody, suspected of planning an attack using a dirty bomb. The Justice Department said there was no indication that the suspect, Jose Padilla, ever obtained the radioactive material for such a device.
Markey asked the NRC for detailed information on the tracking and security of cobalt 60, used to irradiate food, and cesium 137, used to sterilize medical equipment.
Forty-eight states have at least one facility using radioactive materials and 17 states have at least one facility that uses more than 1 million curies of the material for irradiation or sterilization, according to Markey's staff. About 1,000 curies is viewed as a sizable radiation source, according to nuclear experts.
In a four-page response, dated July 24, the NRC said that no background checks were required because, "Prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks, the risk of intentional misuse of the radioactive material was considered to be very low."
Since the attacks, the NRC has advised irradiator operators to increase security measures, including additional controls on persons and materials entering the irradiator facilities. It is evaluating further measures.
Later this year, the agency is to propose a rule on the transport of large quantities of radioactive material.
Markey said the NRC should have already ordered heightened security measures. Over the past 5 years, nearly 1,500 radioactive sources have been reported lost or stolen in the United States, but less than half of them have been found, he said.
"This failure on the part of the NRC to take action almost a year after Sept. 11 shows it has a blatant disregard for the unacceptable public health risks a dirty bomb poses to America," Markey said.
Beth Hayden, an NRC spokeswoman, said that licensees have followed the agency's advisories. She added that regulating irradiators is complicated by the fact that some are also regulated by states.
"We are working with the states to determine the best approach for subsequent orders," she said. "It's not like we can just point-blank order them."
Irradiators - both cabinet-sized units and larger ones - are to be kept locked or under constant surveillance, according to NRC rules. Smaller irradiators are usually inspected every 3-5 years, larger ones every 1-2 years.
The NRC said that removing a radioactive source with its heavy shielding from a larger unit would require equipment. Anyone who tried to remove a source without shielding would be quickly killed by radiation, it said.
Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
Guardian
Saturday July 27, 2002
Russia put its improving relations with the the US in jeopardy last night by announcing a 10-year plan of cooperation with Iran, including a bid to build several nuclear reactors at the controversial Busherh site.
The Bush administration calls Iran part of the "axis of evil" and been highly critical of Moscow's nuclear cooperation with Tehran.
The Russian-built nuclear reactor at Busherh is due to come on line in 2005, and Washington fears it may begin an Iranian nuclear arms pro gramme. The issue repeatedly cropped up at the Putin-Bush meeting in St Petersburg last month.
Russia insists that all the nuclear material at the plant will be removed after use and returned to Russia.
Yesterday's announcement will come as a blow to the US secretary of state Colin Powell who, just a fortnight ago, said that Moscow and Washington were "on the right path to making sure that the Russians don't continue to engage in this kind of activity".
After the St Petersburg summit and the G8 meeting in Canada, Mr Powell said that Mr Putin had assured Mr Bush that he would do all he could to prevent Iran acquiring a nuclear capability.
The Russian atomic energy ministry said it hoped to build three reactors at Busherh once the first reactor came online. A draft for long-term development and cooperation was signed yesterday by the Russian prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov. The draft includes plans to construct a further two reactors at Iran's Ahvaz site, Interfax reported.
There are also plans to enhance the "economic, scientific, industrial and trade relations between the countries".
Moscow also announced yesterday that it would sell unspecified conventional arms to Iran to help it modernise its arsenal, a decision that will further raise US hackles.
A state department spokesman declined to comment immediately after the announcement was made, saying that Washington would evaluate the text of the agreement and comment at a later date. But some US officials described the move as "significant".
Speaking in Germany in May Mr Bush said Moscow's nuclear links with Tehran could help Iran develop weapons of mass destruction.
LONDON, July 24 (Reuters) - A young black labrador paddled for 10 miles dodging ferries, oil tankers and yachts to reach land after falling overboard from his master's boat off the southern English coast.
Two-year-old Todd's six-hour, 16-km marathon surprised canine experts and delighted his owner, newspapers said on Wednesday.
"To swim that far is incredible, especially in the sea. I'm seriously impressed," Freda Scott-Park of the British Small Animal Vetinerary Association told The Times.
Owner Peter Loizou, who spent four hours searching for Todd after discovering his canine crewmember had jumped ship in the Solent, said it was a miracle he had survived.
"He swam across the waves, across the currents to get home," he said. "I am so pleased to see him, he is like a child to me."
Pet and master were finally reunited after Todd clambered ashore after swimming up the River Beaulieu in Hampshire and police scanned a microchip in the dog's ear.
2002-07-28
LAHORE: An additional district and sessions court Saturday awarded death sentence and Rs 2,70,000 fine to Wajih-ul-Hassan in a blasphemy case here. Wajih was awarded capital punishment along with 10-year imprisonment under Section 295-A and three-year imprisonment under Section 298-A, which will run consecutively.
(JanesDefenceWeekly)
29 July 2002
Boeing, the world’s largest aircraft manufacturer, has admitted it is working on experimental anti-gravity projects that could overturn a century of conventional aerospace propulsion technology if the science underpinning them can be engineered into hardware.
As part of the effort, which is being run out of Boeing’s Phantom Works advanced research and development facility in Seattle, the company is trying to solicit the services of a Russian scientist who claims he has developed anti-gravity devices in Russia and Finland. The approach, however, has been thwarted by Russian officialdom.
The Boeing drive to develop a collaborative relationship with the scientist in question, Dr Evgeny Podkletnov, has its own internal project name: ‘GRASP’ — Gravity Research for Advanced Space Propulsion.
A GRASP briefing document obtained by JDW sets out what Boeing believes to be at stake. "If gravity modification is real," it says, "it will alter the entire aerospace business."
GRASP’s objective is to explore propellentless propulsion (the aerospace world’s more formal term for anti-gravity), determine the validity of Podkletnov’s work and "examine possible uses for such a technology". Applications, the company says, could include space launch systems, artificial gravity on spacecraft, aircraft propulsion and ‘fuelless’ electricity generation — so-called ‘free energy’.
But it is also apparent that Podkletnov’s work could be engineered into a radical new weapon. The GRASP paper focuses on Podkletnov’s claims that his high-power experiments, using a device called an ‘impulse gravity generator’, are capable of producing a beam of ‘gravity-like’ energy that can exert an instantaneous force of 1,000g on any object — enough, in principle, to vaporise it, especially if the object is moving at high speed.
Podkletnov maintains that a laboratory installation in Russia has already demonstrated the 4in (10cm) wide beam’s ability to repel objects a kilometre away and that it exhibits negligible power loss at distances of up to 200km. Such a device, observers say, could be adapted for use as an anti-satellite weapon or a ballistic missile shield. Podkletnov declared that any object placed above his rapidly spinning superconducting apparatus lost up to 2% of its weight.
Although he was vilified by traditionalists who claimed that gravity-shielding was impossible under the known laws of physics, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) attempted to replicate his work in the mid-1990s. Because NASA lacked Podkletnov’s unique formula for the work, the attempt failed. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama will shortly conduct a second set of experiments using apparatus built to Podkletnov’s specifications.
Boeing recently approached Podkletnov directly, but promptly fell foul of Russian technology transfer controls (Moscow wants to stem the exodus of Russian high technology to the West).
The GRASP briefing document reveals that BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin have also contacted Podkletnov "and have some activity in this area".
It is also possible, Boeing admits, that "classified activities in gravity modification may exist". The paper points out that Podkletnov is strongly anti-military and will only provide assistance if the research is carried out in the ‘white world’ of open development.
(Washington Post)
July 27, 2002
For Renny Rogers, it was strange enough that military jets were flying low over his home in Waldorf in the middle of the night. It was what he thinks he saw when he headed outside to look early yesterday that floored him.
"It was this object, this light-blue object, traveling at a phenomenal rate of speed," Rogers said. "This Air Force jet was right behind it, chasing it, but the object was just leaving him in the dust. I told my neighbor, 'I think those jets are chasing a UFO.' "
Military officials confirm that two F-16 jets from Andrews Air Force Base were scrambled early yesterday after radar detected an unknown aircraft in area airspace. But they scoff at the idea that the jets were chasing a strange and speedy, blue unidentified flying object.
"We had a track of interest, so we sent up some aircraft," said Maj. Douglas Martin, a spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado, which has responsibility for defending U.S. airspace. "Everything was fine in the sky, so they returned home."
At the same time, military officials say they do not know just what the jets were chasing, because whatever it was disappeared. "There are any number of scenarios, but we don't know what it was," said Maj. Barry Venable, another spokesman for NORAD.
Radar detected a low, slow-flying aircraft about 1 a.m. yesterday, according to a military official. Controllers were unable to establish radio communication with the unidentified aircraft, and NORAD was notified. When the F-16s carrying air-to-air missiles were launched from Andrews, the unidentified aircraft's track faded from the radar, the military official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Pilots with the D.C. Air National Guard's 113th Air Wing, which flew the F-16s from Andrews, reported nothing out of the ordinary, NORAD officials said.
"It was a routine launch," said Lt. Col. Steve Chase, a senior officer with the wing, which keeps pilots and armed jets on 24-hour alert at Andrews to respond to incidents as part of an air defense system protecting Washington after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Rogers remains convinced that what he saw was not routine. "It looked like a shooting star with no trailing mist," he said. "I've never seen anything like it."
A FOXNEWS REPORT TRNASCRIPT FROM BRIAN WILSON... LIVE IN WASHINGTON.
BRIAN?
More questions than answers at this point -- but SOMETHING strange was going on in the Maryland night sky. Here is what we know.
1AM -- the Folks at NORAD -- saw something they could not identify in Maryland airspace -- not far from Washington, DC. The track it was taking caused them some concern. So they scrambled 2 DC Air National Guard jets to check things out.
The DC Air National Guard confirms two F-16's from the 113th wing were vectored to intercept whatever it was that NORAD was worried about -- however the pilots said they did not see anything when they arrived on the scene.
The folks at NORAD would not provide details about the exact location -- direction or the speed of the object they were tracking.
Now -- indepedently, a number of folks who live in Waldorf Maryland -- which is not far from Andrews Air Force Base -- and not far from the Nation's capitol ---- called local radio station WTOP to say that about the same time -- they witnessed a fast-moving bright blue light in the sky. they go on to claim that the light was being chased by military jets. One witness tells the radio station --- "the jets were right on it's tail. as the thing would move -- a jet was right behind it. "
An investigation is underway. But, National Guard spokesman Capt. Sheldon Smith says, and I quote "we dont have any information about funny lights."
By the way -- this is the 50th anniversary of a series of still unexplained sightings over ther nation's Capitol -- a story that made banner headline news in 1952.
(nnati Post)
07-31-2002
Was it a meteor, a flash of lightning or something not quite of this world that streaked across the skies of Greater nnati at about 1:30 a.m. Tuesday?
The National Weather Service received "a good number" of phone calls around that time from people around the tri-state, reporting the unusual phenomenon. Wright-Patterson Air Force Base outside of Dayton also received calls about "blue lights in the sky," said spokesperson Andrea Attaway-Young, but they couldn't be seen from the base.
National Weather Service meteorologist Greg Tipton said callers described it as a "blue streak moving across the sky."
Some said it was a "blue-white explosion" — but not accompanied by any sound. Others said it had a tail, like a comet, Tipton said. Another described it as "a bolt of blue lightning arcing above the clouds."
Area amateur astronomers — who didn't see the meteor — didn't want to speculate on what it could have been, but the American Meteor Society's Web site says meteors are frequently reported as being blue-white in color, are often described as "explosions" and sometimes have a tail — technically, a "train," a glowing trail of superheated oxygen.
Thousands of meteors streak across the sky every day, but most aren't seen either because they happen during the day or over an uninhabited area, such as the ocean. Last year, there were over 200 sightings of so-called "fireballs" that were big enough to be seen with the naked eye, the society's Web site said.
(SPACE.com)
25 July 2002
The annual Perseid meteor shower has begun in modest fashion and will soon start building toward a peak Aug. 12, when as many as 60 or more shooting stars could be visible each hour from the Northern Hemisphere.
The Perseids are not as spectacular as the November Leonids, but they are dependable. Nearly every year they generate a shooting star per minute at their peak.
Weather permitting, this will be a good year to look for the Perseids, because the Moon will be near its new phase, leaving the skies at their darkest. The best viewing times run from Aug. 11 through Aug. 13.
For city dwellers whose view is hampered by bright lights, only the brightest meteors can be seen, so a trip to the country is the only way to get the full effect of the Perseids.
Perseids are tiny things, ranging in size from sand grains to peas. The material was shed long ago by a comet named Swift-Tuttle. This comet, like all others that pass through the inner solar system on their orbits around the Sun, is slowly disintegrating. Over the centuries, the comet’s crumbly remains have spread all along its orbit to form a moving river of rubble millions of miles wide and hundreds of millions of miles long.
Earth’s orbit carries it through this stream every August. When a particle strikes the planet’s upper atmosphere, air friction vaporizes it in a quick, white-hot streak.
Technically, the peak occurs in the afternoon of Aug. 12 in North America. Meteors can only be seen at night, however. The best views will come late Sunday, Aug. 11 into the early hours of Monday. The shower should remain strong Monday night and into dawn on Tuesday, Aug. 13.
"Rates from rural observing sites should approach and perhaps even surpass 60 Perseids per hour during the last few hours before dawn on Aug. 12," said Robert Lunsford of the American Meteor Society.
For Europe, the peak comes near or soon after midnight on Aug. 13. Few Perseids are ever visible from the Southern Hemisphere.
The Perseids are considered active from about July 25 through Aug. 18, though hourly rates usually do not rise above 10 until about Aug. 8. Rates fall off much more rapidly after the peak, dropping again to below 10 per hour after about Aug. 14.
Early morning hours are best, astronomers say, because the part of Earth on which you stand is then facing the oncoming debris as the planet plunges through space on its orbit around the Sun. Experts suggest going out around 2 a.m. and staying until dawn breaks. Allow at least 15 minutes for your eyes to adjust to the darkness. Then face northeast, because Perseids radiate from a point in the constellation Perseus, which is high in the northeast during pre-dawn hours.
Since this year's best viewing is on a Monday morning, Lunsford offers strategies for working people.
"I would suggest watching during the last hour or two before dawn," Lunsford advises. "This will allow you to see the most Perseid activity from your particular location."
He also recommends doing some practice observing beginning around Aug. 8. By then, the Moon is gone from the morning skies, leaving dark conditions.
Finally, Lunsford has advice for the worst-case scenario -- a cloudy Aug. 12: "If anyone is clouded out Monday morning," he says, "rates on Tuesday will also be impressive, much better than those seen the day before maximum."
Perseid meteors are typically white or yellowish with some glowing trains and an occasional very bright meteor called a fireball. Up to 10 shooting stars per hour not associated with the Perseids grace the sky this time of year. These other meteors can approach from any direction in the sky.
WASHINGTON, July 28 — As the Bush administration considers its military options for deposing Saddam Hussein, senior administration and Pentagon officials say they are exploring a new if risky approach: take Baghdad and one or two key command centers and weapons depots first, in hopes of cutting off the country's leadership and causing a quick collapse of the government.
The "inside-out" approach, as some call this Baghdad-first option, would capitalize on the American military's ability to strike over long distances, maneuvering forces to envelop a large target. Those advocating that plan say it reflects a strong desire to find a strategy that would not require a full quarter-million American troops, yet hits hard enough to succeed. One important aim would be to disrupt Iraq's ability to order the use of weapons of mass destruction.
The advantages and risks of strikes aimed deep inside the country and radiating outward are now under active discussion, according to senior administration and Defense Department officials. No formal plan has yet been presented to President Bush or the senior members of his national security team, and several officials cautioned that a number of alternatives were still under consideration.
The inside-out ideas are essentially the reverse of the American strategy in the Persian Gulf war of 1991, which dislodged Mr. Hussein's occupying army from Kuwait.
The aim would be to kill or isolate Mr. Hussein and to pre-empt Iraq's use of weapons of mass destruction, whether against an incoming force, front-line allies or Israel. Those weapons are the wild card in all the outlines of a military confrontation.
Officials say it may be possible to paralyze an Iraqi command-and-control system that is highly centralized and authoritarian. Under such a system, midlevel officers are not taught to improvise, should they be cut off from commanders. It is also possible that those midlevel officers, if they fear that Mr. Hussein has been killed, would not bother to fire weapons of mass destruction.
If that can be accomplished with a smaller invasion force than the 250,000 troops suggested in early drafts, the approach could appeal to skittish gulf allies whose bases would be required for a war.
Those states are quietly advocating the quickest and smallest military operation possible, to lessen anti-American protests on their streets. In that sense, the war planning includes the political dimension of trying to tip reluctant allies into supporting, tacitly at least, the operation.
Something nearer the 250,000 figure might have to be deployed to the region anyway, to make sure that any forces that drop into Baghdad do not become isolated or surrounded, bereft of a land line providing military support, food and ammunition.
The Defense Department deputy spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said the Pentagon would have no comment on potential military plans for Iraq.
But it is clear that the debate over whether and how to dislodge Mr. Hussein is gaining speed within the administration and on Capitol Hill.
"There is a divergence of views on how can one best diminish the prospect that he uses weapons of mass destruction, with any efficacy," said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who stressed that he had not been briefed on administration thinking.
Senator Biden, who is preparing to hold hearings on Iraq this week, said in an interview: "That is where the argument for an inside-out operation gains credibility. There is a diminished possibility that he will use chemical or biological weapons."
In May, President Bush was presented with concepts that advocated a major invasion, but some senior officials are said to view the plan as unimaginative.
In contrast, a key national security aide, retired Gen. Wayne A. Downing, had reportedly argued that Mr. Hussein could be toppled with minimal numbers of Americans on the ground, provided they were backed up by huge airstrikes. However, senior officials concluded that a proxy battle would be insufficient to bring a change in power in Iraq, and General Downing left the White House last month.
"It's easy to rule out both ends of the spectrum," one senior Defense Department official said. "We are looking at the three or four options in between."
No timetable has been set for military action, and if President Bush decides to go ahead, his aides say, he will have to make a public, convincing case about why Mr. Hussein poses an intolerable threat to the United States and its allies. Some members of Congress, including conservative Republicans, are beginning to urge Mr. Bush to explain his reasoning and goals before committing American forces to topple a foreign government that has not attacked the United States.
"The time will come to do all of that," a senior administration official said in an interview on Friday. "And no one is opposed to doing it."
A plan to immobilize the Iraqi leadership would draw from lessons learned on maneuver warfare in the invasion of Panama, which Dick Cheney and Colin L. Powell directed, and on the surprise Inchon Sea landing in Korea in 1951, according to officials who monitor the internal debate.
"To the degree that you can have strategic and, especially, tactical surprise in any military operation, that is important," said another senior Defense Department official. President Bush has put Mr. Hussein on direct notice that regime change is American policy. But just as the Taliban and Al Qaeda had little doubt that the United States would respond to the attacks of Sept. 11, the timing and tactics achieved a great measure of surprise, military officials said.
Baghdad is ringed by Mr. Hussein's most elite forces, and the city itself is filled with antiaircraft batteries. While officials declined to discuss details of any new operation in detail, it would probably include intense air attacks followed by a combined airborne and ground assault on strategic targets.
Senior administration and Pentagon officials said they expected that a military action against Iraq would be mostly American-run, with Britain the only partner contributing significant forces. But cooperation from allies in the region — particularly in the form of bases — would be essential.
Persian Gulf governments have significant areas of agreement with Mr. Bush's policy, and equally important areas of concern, according to senior officials, diplomats and military officers from the region.
Those nations have issued warnings against American military action, have called for dialogue with Baghdad and they identified with Iraq at the Arab League summit meeting last spring, yet gulf state officials said Mr. Hussein, while contained today, remained a threat.
"We don't like Saddam," said one senior gulf diplomat. "We don't believe he is a peaceful neighbor."
To win support of those strategic allies, America has to ensure that next time, the military operation will take down Mr. Hussein once and for all, officials from the region say.
"Any war against Iraq has to be successful," said another senior gulf official. "America has to nail down the objective of the war."
Officials from those nations are equally adamant that any military action should be the minimum necessary to bring about a change in rule. "The worst scenario from our view would be a big war by air and land and with lots of bombs and civilian casualties," said a gulf official.
In any case, the gulf nations first want the United States to demonstrate some progress in the crisis between the Palestinians and Israelis before opening yet another front in the region, after Afghanistan.
In concentrating its attention on an air campaign and ground action, the military and administration officials have been weighing troop deployments ranging from 70,000 to 250,000. The new plan under discussion could conceivably be carried out at the lower range of that spectrum.
Pentagon officials warn that tracking Mr. Hussein with any certainty is difficult if not impossible, as shown by the global manhunt now under way for Osama bin Laden. Likewise, despite a decade of intense scrutiny of Iraq's missile program and its efforts to field biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, America's knowledge of hidden labs, storage areas and mobile missile sites is still spotty.
Iraq is thought to possess a small number of Scud missiles — "A handful. A couple of handfuls, maybe," according to a senior Defense Department official. Senior military officials express confidence that the United States would do a much better job hunting mobile Scuds next time than they did during the gulf war, because of coverage from satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles.
Iraq has studied ways to counter stealth aircraft and improve its tracking and jamming abilities. But for the most part, "They have mostly not used or tried to use air defenses very effectively," said another senior Pentagon official.
A secret CIA assessment presented to the US President and the British Prime Minister warns Saddam has a "doomsday plan."
In the event his death is imminent, he will issue instructions to terrorist cells already in place to launch chemical attacks in western capitals and in Israel.
(By Martin Dillon www.Globe-Intel.net)
07-29-02
Six months ago, President George Bush told Congress that the United States could not afford delay in confronting the menace Iraq posed to global security. Leaked policy documents policy documents appears to confirm plans are under way to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
But are those leaks deliberate? Are we being told the truth about US strategy and is the US prepared to go it alone?
Information leaking is part of political and military strategy. Governments that engineer "policy" leaks later predictably feign public horror or disapproval that "secrets" have been divulged.
The precursor of any conflict is to use information to create confusion and uncertainty in enemy ranks by suggesting a course of action completely at variance with what is really planned.
Another objective in the case of Iraq is to internally weaken Saddam Hussein s power base by implying that the US is determined to go it alone and take him down.
Within the Pentagon and State Department the anticipated effect is that those surrounding the Iraqi leader will see the writing of their own demise on the wall and turn against him.
There may be an even more important reason for permitting leaks, especially ones that initially find their way into the hands of European media.
The Bush Administration knows there is a widening gulf between the US and its European allies over its Middle East policy. European leaders and politicians have not shunned opportunities to publicly condemn the failure of US policy vis a vis Israel, citing America s unqualified support for the Ariel Sharon regime.
Historically, there has always been an underbelly of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli sentiment in European capitals but the prospect of being dragged into a war against Iraq has generated widespread concern in NATO countries even in Britain, America s staunchest ally.
Europeans, especially the French, have political and economic self- interest at heart when it comes to dealing with the Middle East. They see Europe being dragged into a war which will not have the support of what might be termed "moderate" Arab regimes.
The French and Germans have privately warned the US that a war against Iraq could fuel an unprecedented response from militant Islam and primary targets for terrorist retaliation would be European capitals.
European governments notably the French - fear this time, unlike the Gulf War, Saddam will use chemical, biological or battlefield nuclear weapons.
They point to the CIA s profile of Saddam as a man with a grandiose personality. In the event he knows he is going to be killed, he will want to go down "in a blaze of glory to be remembered forever as Islam s greatest leader."
Europe s growing disenchantment with US foreign policy has become apparent even within Britain and the British media. At street level, there is a collective voice opposed to war with Iraq.
Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, has faced opposition from within his Cabinet and there have been dissenting voices within the British military. Several British generals have argued civilian casualties could be enormous if British troops and US are forced to take Baghdad and other Iraqi capitals.
The dissenting voices in Europe and Britain have not prevented Tony Blair from privately assuring George Bush that Britain will stand alongside the US whatever it chooses to do militarily.
While Blair s European counterparts in NATO are concerned about Arab opposition to a war, the US and Britain dismiss the need for Arab support in a war against Iraq.
British and US war planners recognize that the real reason for nervousness in Arab capitals is that the replacement of the Iraqi regime with a democratic one would weaken the Middle East s autocratic leaders.
The Saudi rulers and their counterparts in Iran and Syria believe a change of regime in Iraq could have a domino effect with their own populations.
Already, there is growing disenchantment within Iran to the clerical leadership and the Saudi Royal family s hold on power remains tenuous.
Recently, Arab leaders in a disingenuous move secretly assured Saddam they would regard an attack against him as an attack on the Arab world. Their support was not out of a genuine admiration for Saddam but a real fear that his departure will weaken their hold on power.
His departure could also force them to deal with any subsequent retaliation against the West by terrorist organizations they have continued to secretly finance and support.
One of the interesting facets of the political history of Iraq is that it has traditionally had a more moderate character than its neighbors. Prior to the Gulf War, it had the most sophisticated health and education systems in the Arab world. A democratic Iraq without a strict Islamic leadership would potentially weaken tyrannical rulers in neighboring countries such as Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia.
The leaking of policy documents about US military plans for an invasion of Iraq is part of a US-British strategy to assess the likely fall-out in Europe and the Arab world when an invasion happens. And happen it will.
President George Bush has publicly committed himself to dealing with Iraq - part of what he calls the "axis of evil."
Like Tony Blair he knows the removal of Saddam will signal to Iran and others that the US will not sit idly by while dangerous regimes build a nuclear capability to threaten the US or provide terrorists with weapons of mass destruction.
There has been no smoking gun linking Iraq to the 9/11 attacks but US, British and Israeli intelligence services are convinced that Al-Qaeda had state-intelligence support in planning the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
For some time, the CIA, MI6 and Mossad have been receiving intelligence reports that Iraq intelligence has been financing and training groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al-Qaeda.
Before the 9/11 attacks spy satellite photos confirmed the presence of a secret base in the Iraqi desert where terrorists were trained to hijack airliners. It is also believed terrorists have been schooled in the techniques for handling and dispersing chemical and biological weapons in western cities should Iraq be invaded.
A secret CIA assessment presented to the US President and the British Prime Minister warns Saddam has a "doomsday plan."
In the event his death is imminent, he will issue instructions to terrorist cells already in place to launch chemical attacks in western capitals and in Israel.
Neither Bush nor Blair can leave the task of removing Saddam to future US or British leaders. Five or ten years down the line, it will not be possible to confront Iraq or Iran if both possess the capability to launch missiles at US or British cities.
So far, the leaking of "policy" documents has achieved the objectives set by British and US war planners to assess the likely fall-out from an attack on Iraq before year s end.
There has been no significant outcry in Europe or the Middle East just muted criticisms. And Arab leaders have avoided publicly confronting the US over the leaked "plans" for an invasion of Iraq.
Nothing the US or Britain has observed from the reaction to the leaks has deterred them from continuing to plan the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But that prospect may still be a long way off.
British Special Forces and US have been operating in Iraq and the surrounding region for some time and it should have come as no surprise to many that recent leaks from Washington confirmed the presence of members of the British SAS and the US Delta Force in the region.
Special forces units have been in place for five months in Iraq, Turkey and several friendly Arab states. Their task has been to assess Saddam s military preparedness and to train groups opposed to his regime. They have also been building a target list for British planes and US that will spearhead an invasion.
Deliberate leaks about invasion plans will continue to emanate from Washington and London as real plans are formulated. But the real plans will bear little resemblance to what finds its way into the media in the months to come.
Before President George Bush fulfills his promise to remove Saddam from power he will have to be assured of full congressional support. While there appears to be US public approval for a war against Iraq, there is also a need for a public debate about the reasons for a major military commitment and the plans to rebuild Iraq once the present regime is removed.
When that debate begins, as it may do this week with foreign intelligence committee hearings in Congress, a similar one in Britain will mirror it.
When the invasion of Iraq finally happens, the British will be there alongside the US even if the rest of NATO sits on the sidelines.
Leaks and more leaks will not reveal much. But as the political debate gets under way in the US and Britain, military planners will move closer to launching a full-scale attack on Saddam and his military machine.
24 July 02
(NewScientist.com)
The claim that nuclear fusion can take place inside tiny imploding bubbles of acetone in bench-top experiments has suffered a deflating blow.
The first chemical analysis of the reactions inside a single imploding bubble suggests that the temperature should fall several million degrees short that needed for fusion.
However, Kenneth Suslick from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign says his team's work does not rule out the possibility of reaching those searing temperatures in other liquids, like molten salts or metals. "It's a very long shot, but possible," he says.
The results are further evidence arguing against controversial research published in March, in which Rusi Taleyarkhan of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee claimed to see evidence of fusion inside acetone bubbles.
Suslick has already said he believes Taleyarkhan's lab was contaminated with tritium - the very thing used as evidence of fusion (New Scientist magazine, 13 April 2002). And other labs that have tried to replicate Taleyarkhan's results have failed (New Scientist magazine, 9 March 2002).
Pumped up
The principle behind the experiments is not controversial. Researchers have long known that when bubbles are pumped up with sound waves and then allowed to collapse they can emit energy as heat and light - a phenomenon known as sonoluminescence.
Clouds of such bubbles can be as hot as 5000 °C. And researchers think that a single bubble collapsing perfectly symmetrically should get much hotter. Theoretically, it could reach the 10 million degrees needed for fusion to take place. But it has proven incredibly tricky to measure the temperature inside a single, tiny bubble.
Suslick decided to estimate that temperature by measuring the photons, radicals and ions produced by energy-consuming reactions like the dissociation of water or nitrogen gas inside an air bubble in water.
Just seeing the reaction products is a breakthrough, since only tiny amounts of atoms are kicked out of the bubble. "It's a wonderful piece of work," says Andrea Prosperetti, a sonoluminescence expert from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Energy sapping
Suslick could only see reactions that spat products out into the water, rather than those that stayed within the bubble. These reactions sapped 0.01 per cent of the bubble's total potential energy, he says. But since the temperature is high enough for those reactions to occur, many more must be happening inside the bubble, hidden from view.
Suslick thinks the hotter the bubble gets, the more reactions will take place, sucking up more energy that would otherwise raise the temperature. "It's self-limiting. I don't think you can get beyond 15,000 to 20,000 degrees," he says.
The situation would be even worse for a volatile liquid like acetone, he says. But a liquid with low vapour pressure, like molten metal, would have fewer reactions going on inside and might get much hotter.
Suslick's lab has achieved sonoluminescence in molten salts, but has not yet been able to estimate those bubbles' temperature.
Marie Stopes International, the global family planning organisation, on Tuesday condemned as "absurd" a decision by the United States to withhold $34 million from the United Nations Population Fund.
LONDON, July 23 (Reuters) - Marie Stopes International, the global family planning organisation, on Tuesday condemned as "absurd" a decision by the United States to withhold $34 million from the United Nations Population Fund.
The Bush administration decided to scrap this year's payment to the fund after accusing it of indirectly helping China to force women to have abortions under Beijing's one-child policy.
"This absurd decision ranks alongside other dark chapters in American history, such as the McCarthy hearings and the Salem witch trials," said Patricia Hindmarsh, director of external relations at the British-based charity.
"As is always the case in situations of this kind, it is the innocent that suffer the consequences of such arbitrary and ill- informed reasoning; in this instance, thousands of the world's poorest women."
The warning echoed the reaction of the United Nations itself, which said on Monday abortion rates were actually declining in the 32 Chinese counties where the Population Fund (UNFPA) operated.
UNFPA said the money would have prevented two million unwanted pregnancies, nearly 800,000 induced abortions and more than 77,000 infant and child deaths.
Marie Stopes International, which promotes sexual and reproductive health in 38 developing countries, works with the UNFPA in China.
LONDON, July 22 (Reuters) - Muslim worshippers emerge chatting from prayers. A few yards away Jewish children play outside their school and the head teacher calls to a Muslim street vendor for an ice cream.
It is a typical Friday on Cazenove Road in the inner city London district of Hackney, where Muslims and Jews live as neighbours despite Middle East violence and the racial tensions that have flared in other European countries.
"These guys are no different from us," says Laurie Rosenberg, the head teacher of Simon Marks Jewish Primary School, gesturing towards the Muslim crowd. "They want to pray, go home and be with their family."
He wants to organise a football match between his pupils and some of the local Muslim children and he makes light of the unwelcoming security fence and closed circuit cameras that ring the school of around 100 children.
Reports of verbal and physical attacks on British Jews have increased as tit-for-tat violence between Israel and the Palestinians has intensified. In nearby Finsbury Park, a radical Islamic preacher was banned following accusations he was stoking racial hatred.
Several synagogues have been desecrated, most recently in the Welsh town of Swansea where vandals set fires and tore up a 300-year old holy scroll. But Jewish leaders blame the extreme right for most of the attacks.
"People feel vulnerable. The comfortable existence we have enjoyed for the last 50 to 60 years has been shattered," said Michael Whine of the Community Security Trust that advises Jews how to protect themselves.
The situation has also been tense for local Muslims. Mosques received a stream of abusive phone calls immediately after Islamic extremists carried out the September 11 U.S. attacks.
The callers were generally cut from the same cloth as the anti-semites, community leaders say. Last month, racists spat and threw beer bottles at worshippers outside a mosque in Dyfed, Wales.
"There is no problem between the Muslim and Jewish communities here," said Inayat Bunglawala, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain. "Muslims distinguish between the political situation in Palestine and our lives in Britain."
SAME GOALS
At Simon Marks, one of only a handful of state Jewish schools in the capital, Rosenberg says Islam and Judaism are striving for many of the same goals.
"So many values are similar between Islam and Judaism yet when both sides become politicised they lose sight of their core values. The message of both is 'we value life,"' he said.
Half of Britain's 1.5 million Muslims live in London, along with two-thirds of the country's 300,000 Jews. Cazenove Road and the surrounding area is a mix of orthodox and progressive Jews.
Dressed in the traditional black garb of 19th century central and eastern Europe, orthodox Jews chat on street corners in Yiddish. Their children are educated in their own private schools, Rosenberg said.
Children at Simon Marks by contrast are drawn from a variety of backgrounds, their parents not necessarily religious. "But they care deeply about the Jewish values of education, aspiration, care for the community and environment," Rosenberg said.
A tour around the school shows it to be like any other -- colourful pictures on the walls and toys scattered across the playground. A bright-eyed nursery pupil called Hannah runs up to show off a picture of her mum.
As the crowd of worshippers outside the mosque clears, the Muslim ice cream vendor promises to come back the following Friday for the last day of school term.
Jul 25 2002
AP-JERUSALEM - Joseph Cohen moved from the United States to Israel as a devout Jew in 1998, but within three years he had converted to Islam and become Yosef Mohammed Khatib, a supporter of the militant Hamas, according to a report broadcast Thursday on Israel TV.
Now he refuses to say the word Israel, choosing instead to call the area "Palestine." His four children study the Quran, the Muslim holy book, instead of the Torah, its Jewish counterpart.
It was while living in the desert town of Netivot that Khatib met a sheik from the United Arab Emirates through an Internet chat about Israel. Khatib said he spent hours corresponding with the sheik, discussing theology. Gradually he began to see Judaism as racist and turned toward Islam after reading the Quran, he told Channel 10 TV. The report did not say where he lived in the United States or give his age.
Last year he told his wife of 10 years, Luna, also a devout Jew from the United States, that he wanted to convert to Islam.
"I said, `Listen, I love you very much ... and I have to be honest with you,'" Khatib said in the TV interview. "I read the Quran and I agree with everything it says in the Quran, and if I continue saying that I'm a religious Jew, I would be a liar."
The family converted together and moved from Netivot to an Arab neighborhood in east Jerusalem. The children went from being top in their classes on Judaism studies to being well-versed in Islam, he said.
Instead of supporting the Israeli Orthodox Jewish political party Shas, Khatib now supports the radical Islamic Hamas and believes an Islamic state should be set up where Israel and the Palestinian areas are now located.
He praised Hamas for setting up social services for Palestinians but dodged questions about the other side of the Islamic group — suicide bombings and other attacks against Israelis. The United States has declared Hamas a terror group.
Khatib differed from most Israelis and Americans in his views about Osama bin Laden, the top suspect in the Sept. 11 terror attacks in New York and Washington.
"I think that he's number one, Muslim number one," Khatib said with a strong New York accent about bin Laden. "But I don't think that he's responsible for the World Trade Center (attacks)."
Wearing the white skullcap and robes of a religious Muslim, Khatib denied his Jewish past, insisting that he is 100 percent Muslim. He made a parody of a blessing that observant Jews say every morning, in which they thank God for not making them gentiles.
"Blessed are Thou, Lord Our God," Khatib began in the traditional Jewish blessing, but ended it with, "for not making me a Jew."
(CBC News-Canada Broadcasting Co)
7-26-2
JERUSALEM - Most Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would give up their homes if they were compensated for the loss, a new survey suggests.
The survey released on Thursday was conducted by Peace Now, a group opposed to the Jewish settlements.
Peace Now calls the survey the largest poll of settlers ever undertaken. The study contacted 3,200 households in 127 settlements in the West Bank and Gaza strip. A panel of academics supervised the way it was conducted.
Settlers are often painted as ultra-orthodox government-subsidized political diehards who would sooner die on the land they occupy than turn it over to the Palestinians.
But Amiram Goldblum, founder and head of Peace Now's settlements watch committee, says 68 per cent of the settlers polled would respect a government decision for them to leave the land. The only thing most would want is some government money to help them relocate.
"Most of the settlers understand that there is no future for the settlements," he said. "Most Israelis understand that there is no future to the settlements.
"All this financial support must be halted and some of that financial support should be funneled for settlers and compensation for settlers to come back into Israel.
Peace Now says it decided to conduct this survey because of the growing number of media reports featuring people who are already moving out of the settlements.
The survey also found that the people living in settlements for ideological reasons now constitute a minority. Most are living there because of the cheap housing and government tax breaks.
By TALLIE LIEBERMAN
August 1, 2002
JERUSALEM (AP) - Israel's cable TV companies announced Wednesday that they would quit carrying CNN news broadcasts in November, saying they could not longer afford it.
The decision, which comes amid criticism by some in Israel of CNN coverage of the Mideast conflict, means Israelis won't receive CNN news broadcasts via the cable companies starting in November.
The companies applied to the Council for Cable TV and Satellite Broadcasting, a government body, for permission to let their contracts with CNN lapse. The council agreed, said Efrat Shimoni, head of channel licensing.
There was still the possibility that the dispute could be settled before November.
Ron Ciccone, CNN's managing director for the Middle East, said the company would study the council's decision, but said it appeared to be continued "scapegoating of CNN." In a statement, Ciccone said, "We have every concern that the Israeli public be properly served with responsible and objective reporting. If in fact they lose CNN, it will be a sad loss for their freedom of choice."
Israeli officials and pro-Israeli groups have said CNN's coverage of the violence in the region sometimes favors the Palestinians, a charge the cable network has always denied.
In October, 2000, Gideon Meir, a foreign ministry official, told Jerusalem Post Radio that Israel had complained to CNN about the way it was reporting the violence. And the Yesha council, which represents Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, said earlier this year that CNN's reporting was unbalanced and barred its reporters from the settlements.
In June, CNN founder Ted Turner added to the dispute by equating Palestinian bombing and Israeli military retaliation. "I would make the case that both sides are engaged in terrorism," Turner said in an interview with British newspaper The Guardian.
The network was deluged with complaints and dispatched chief news executive Eason Jordan to Israel to smooth things over.
"Certainly, his comments aggravated matters," Jordan said, but added that "any suggestion that CNN is anti-Israel is absolutely ridiculous and baseless." Jordan said CNN receives criticism from both sides.
Viewers will still be able to watch CNN on YES. About 1.1 million Israelis are hooked up to cable, while the satellite company has about 310,000 subscribers.
(usnews.com)
For MSNBC execs, dropping the black republican former presidential candidate's news show, Alan Keyes is Making Sense from the primetime schedule was a no-brainer: Fox and CNN were killing Keyes in the 10-11 p.m. slot. But when they replaced him with Ashleigh Banfield, no O'Reilly or Donahue herself, his Jewish supporters began to mutter that TV's No. 1 pro-Israel host was being axed for his views. That beef is going national now that he has refused to take another slot and is essentially fired. He can't talk, choked by a contractual gag order. But his backers aren't, and they're mad. Rabbi Moshe Ben-Chaim accuses MSNBC of going anti-Israel in its latest hirings and firings. Ben-Chaim's Mesora.org has collected more than 72,000 names on protest petitions. MSNBC President Erik Sorenson took those concerns so seriously he penned a note saying Keyes's removal was based strictly on bad ratings. Much ado about nothing? Not to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. We learn he is showing support by blocking out an hour for an interview with Keyes, be it on MSNBC or not.
Aug. 5 issue — Attorney General John Ashcroft was about to announce the U.S. government’s biggest legal victory yet in the war on terrorism last week—until events in an Alexandria, Va., courtroom brought the well-laid plans to an abrupt halt.
EXPECTING ZACARIAS MOUSSAOUI to plead guilty to charges of involvement in the 9-11 conspiracy to blow up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Ashcroft aides were busily crafting a celebratory statement. The idea was for the A.G. to break off from a party dedicating a new Justice Department courtyard and then read the proclamation for the TV cameras—just in time for the network news.
But the erratic Moussaoui put a damper on the festivities when he suddenly withdrew his guilty plea after U.S. Judge Leonie Brinkema told him he had to admit direct participation in the 9-11 plot. This, Moussaoui said, he couldn’t do because of his “obligation toward my creator, Allah.” Now the case will go to trial Sept. 30. Justice officials say they are confident it won’t change the outcome. “Our guys are ready to go,” said one. But privately, some lawyers familiar with the evidence—including a few law-enforcement officials—are not so sure.
Brinkema last week appeared to adopt arguments submitted in secret by Moussaoui’s court-appointed lawyers that merely showing Moussaoui was a member of Al Qaeda and wanted to harm Americans is not enough to convict.
Can the government make the case? Sources familiar with tens of thousands of classified FBI documents that have been assembled for the case tell NEWSWEEK there’s nothing that shows Moussaoui ever had contact with any of the 9-11 hijackers. Some documents even suggest internal FBI doubts over whether Moussaoui really was supposed to be the “20th hijacker,” as Justice officials have suggested. “There was a lot of skepticism about this case,” said one high-level source. Moussaoui has openly admitted his allegiance to Al Qaeda, and prosecutors do have some compelling circumstantial evidence: Moussaoui received $14,000 in money orders from Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a fugitive Qaeda operative and former roommate of hijacker ringleader Mohamed Atta, in August 2001. The money arrived just weeks before Moussaoui was arrested when instructors at a Minneapolis flight school reported his suspicious interest in learning to steer large jetliners. But, backed by a team of more than 50 assistants, Moussaoui’s lawyers have been crafting a circumstantial counterargument: while the other hijackers met repeatedly with each other, Moussaoui is conspicuously absent from any of their gatherings. “It’s like the reverse of ‘Where’s Waldo?’ ” said lawyer Ed MacMahon. One big problem, though: Moussaoui, convinced that his own lawyers are out to kill him, refuses to talk to them and insists on representing himself. So far, Brinkema has agreed to let him try. Unless the judge changes her mind, some lawyers say, Moussaoui’s legal incompetence—rather than the evidence—may be the government’s strongest card.
(by Jim Crogan LAweekly.com)
WHAT HAPPENED AT THE NONDESCRIPT ROADSIDE motel outside Oklahoma City was just a fleeting encounter during the twisted cross-country odyssey of the terrorists who would carry out the September 11 attacks. Mohamed Atta, alleged leader of the plot, and two companions wanted to rent a room, but couldn't get the deal they wanted, so they left.
It was an incident of no particular importance, except for one thing. The owner of the motel remembers Atta being in the company of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker," who was arrested prior to September 11 and now faces conspiracy charges in connection with the terror assaults.
If this recollection is correct, the entire incident, and its absence from the public record, raises new questions about the FBI investigation of Moussaoui and even the 1995 destruction of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Already the FBI has endured a withering political and media critique for failing to aggressively investigate Moussaoui and his contacts during his four weeks in custody prior to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Some FBI officials have responded by characterizing Moussaoui as only a minor player. But the report from the motel owner, if proven, could change that. And it also could force the FBI to reopen its investigation of Middle Eastern connections to the 1995 Oklahoma City blast, because convicted bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols reportedly stayed at the same motel, interacting with a group of Iraqis during the weeks before the bombing.
AT PRESS TIME, THE ERRATIC MOUSSAOUI, WHO IS representing himself, was attempting to plead guilty and bring his trial to a close. The 34-year-old French citizen of Moroccan descent had previously filed some 94 hand-scrawled, rambling motions attacking the government's case and its right to prosecute him.
But that circus obscures a conundrum of a different sort. The government's case, as outlined in its new six-count conspiracy indictment, is largely circumstantial, lacking any definitive link between Moussaoui and the 19 hijackers identified by federal authorities. All of which makes the apparent shelving of the Moussaoui-Atta sighting all the stranger. In fact, even though multiple sources contend that the FBI interviewed the motel owner, there's no indication that prosecutors were told. It's possible that the FBI found the motel owner's identifications wrong or his story unreliable. But it's still odd that, in interviews with the Weekly, Justice Department prosecutors seemed to know nothing about the motel encounter, especially because agents reportedly told the motel owner they would pass the information on to Moussaoui's defense team.
The motel co-owner, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the incident occurred around August 1, 2001, just six weeks before 9/11.
"They came in around 10 or 11 a.m. and started talking to my desk clerk," he said. Even though he was working about 10 feet away from the trio, the owner didn't really pay any attention at first. "They were asking my clerk, who no longer works here, about a weekly rate for our rooms." (The former clerk could not be reached for comment.)
The motel, explained the owner, sets aside some rooms with small kitchenettes to rent on a weekly basis. "But they were all taken." He said the clerk explained the situation, but the visitors were persistent. "Finally, my clerk asked me to talk to them."
The motel owner said that Moussaoui and a man who appeared to be Marwan al-Shehhi -- who helped crash a jetliner into the south tower of the World Trade Center -- were friendly and said a few things, but Atta was clearly the leader. "He did most of the talking and seemed very serious," said the owner, adding, "I was standing face to face, about two feet away from Atta, and talked to the three of them for about 10 minutes. Atta asked if he could rent one of the other rooms at a weekly rate, and I told him no.
"I asked him what they were doing here in the area. And Atta told me they were going to flight school. I thought he meant [Federal Aviation Administration] training in Oklahoma City. But Atta told me no, they were taking flight training in Norman.
"I said I didn't understand why they wanted to rent one of my rooms, since we were about 28 miles from Norman and there are a lot of reasonably priced motels a lot closer. But he said they had heard good things about my place
and wanted to stay there. I told them I was sorry, but we couldn't accommodate them. Atta finally said okay. Then they all thanked me for my time and left."
After the attacks, said the motel owner, he recognized his visitors in photos from television reports. "I was really stunned," he said. Then he decided to call the FBI hot line. The motel owner said he didn't hear right back from the FBI. In the interim, he also spoke to a former law-enforcement officer who was investigating reported sightings of Mujahid Abdulquaadir Menepta at the same motel during the mid-1990s. Menepta, reportedly a friend of Moussaoui's, was arrested 30 years ago in Colorado for aggravated robbery and served more than three years in prison.
After September 11, Menepta publicly defended Moussaoui, calling him a "scapegoat." The FBI arrested him as a material witness and subsequently charged Menepta with a federal gun violation. He pleaded guilty and in April 2002 was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison. He was never charged with any terrorism-related crime. But during the preliminary hearing on the gun charge, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Agent Jeffrey Whitney testified that a confidential source placed Menepta at a meeting of a radical Islamic group in St. Louis where he allegedly threatened to shoot any police officer who entered the mosque. Menepta's attorney challenged the credibility of this report in court.
A former desk clerk at the motel -- a different clerk from the one who purportedly dealt with Atta and Moussaoui -- told the Weekly that he remembered Menepta because in 1994 and 1995 -- prior to the Oklahoma City attack -- Menepta frequently visited the motel office. There, he bought coffee and talked for hours to this clerk.
The clerk and his wife, who both formerly worked at the motel, said they picked Menepta's picture out of a photo lineup prepared by a law-enforcement officer who had interviewed the motel owner.
This officer, who also spoke to the Weekly on condition of anonymity, said that after the motel owner told him about the Moussaoui sighting, he contacted a member of Oklahoma's Joint Terrorism Task Force, which includes the FBI.
The FBI finally acted on the tip. The motel owner said that on December 19, 2001, he went to FBI offices in
Oklahoma City for a formal interview, where he was debriefed by an FBI agent and by Oklahoma City Police Sergeant Jerry Flowers. "We talked for several hours, and I told them everything I knew." The motel owner said he would have taken a polygraph exam but was not asked to do so. The Weekly's law-enforcement source corroborates the December 19
interview.
The motel owner never heard from prosecutors in Moussaoui's case but got one more call from the FBI several weeks later. "The agent told me they had passed on a copy of my statement to Moussaoui's defense team, and I might be getting a call from them. But I was under no obligation to talk to them. However, I don't know if that was the truth. Since then, I have never heard from anyone connected to Moussaoui's case."
ONE REASON FOR THE FBI'S APPARent lack of interest might be this motel's alleged connection to Timothy McVeigh and a group of Iraqis who worked in Oklahoma City. According to the motel owner and other witnesses and investigators interviewed by the Weekly, McVeigh and several of these Iraqis were motel guests in the months preceding the 1995 bombing. Witnesses also claimed they saw several of the Iraqis moving barrels of material around on the bed of a truck. The motel owner said the material smelled of diesel fuel and he had to clean up a spill. Diesel fuel was a key component of the truck bomb that blew up the Federal Building.
The motel owner said he and his staff reported this information to the FBI in 1995. "We did have an ATF agent come out and collect the originals of the room registrations for that period, but we never heard back from them. And I never could get the registrations returned." He added that his previous experience with the FBI made him reluctant to contact them about Moussaoui. "But I decided it was my duty to tell them what had happened. So I did."
Former Oklahoma City TV reporter Jayna Davis also interviewed motel staff and former guests. In the process, she collected signed affidavits about their contacts with McVeigh and the Iraqis. She tried twice to give the Bureau this information, but the FBI refused to accept her materials. (The Weekly first reported on her investigation in an article published in September 2001.)
The Weekly's law-enforcement source said he has reviewed Davis' material and considers it credible. "Last December I personally took the documents to the Joint Terrorism Task Force," he said. "I told them they should do their own investigation." The response was not encouraging. He said he was later informed that the Bureau brought in an analyst, "but I was told it would probably go nowhere. They were afraid the whole Oklahoma City bombing can of worms would be opened up and the FBI would have to explain why they didn't investigate this material before."
The Weekly contacted numerous local and federal investigators and agencies, including the Oklahoma task force, the U.S. Attorney's Office, the FBI and the Justice Department. All declined to comment. Prosecutors on the Moussaoui case also declined official comment, but their reactions suggested they knew nothing of the motel encounter.
After being told about the motel owner's interview and allegations, Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Spencer responded with a one-word question about the sighting: "When?" Spencer then declined further comment. Another Moussaoui prosecutor, David Novak, also declined comment. But Novak wanted to know the name of the motel owner.
Other substantial connections already tie the Sooner state to Moussaoui and, separately, several 9/11 hijackers.
According to the Moussaoui indictment, on September 29, 2000, Moussaoui made
e-mail contact with Airman Flight School in Norman. Then, on February 23, 2001, he flew from London to Chicago and then to Oklahoma City. What he did in the next few days is unknown or at least not accounted for in the indictment. But on February 26, Moussaoui opened a bank account in Norman, depositing $32,000. From February 26 to May 29, he attended flight school in Norman. Then he suddenly quit the school. Between July 29 and August 4, Moussaoui made calls from public pay phones in Norman to Germany. On August 1 and 3, Ramzi Bin al-Shibh wired Moussaoui a total of about $14,000 from two train stops in Germany to somewhere in Oklahoma. This wire transfer does imply a connection to terrorist plotters because al-Shibh, an alleged al Qaeda member, wired money to other hijackers. On August 3, Moussaoui purchased two knives in Oklahoma City. And on August 10 or 11, an acquaintance drove Moussaoui from Oklahoma to Minnesota for enrollment in a new flight school. Authorities arrested Moussaoui in Minnesota on August 17 on an immigration violation. As has been widely reported, Moussaoui attracted attention because he said he was interested in flying a plane but not learning how to take off or land. He was in federal custody when the 9/11 attacks occurred.
As for the terrorists who took part in 9/11, Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi visited the Airman Flight School in Norman in July 2000, according to the Moussaoui indictment. (The motel owner identifies al-Shehhi as the third person with Atta and Moussaoui when they allegedly inquired about a room.) And on April 1, 2001, Nawaf al-Hazmi, who helped hijack American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon, was stopped for speeding in Oklahoma and given two tickets. The Oklahoma state trooper found no outstanding warrants and turned al-Hazmi loose. The media has since reported that the CIA had been tracking al-Hazmi, but never told the immigration service or the FBI that he was a suspected terrorist during his 21-month U.S. stay. Authorities have never publicly accounted for Atta and al-Shehhi's whereabouts during the time of the alleged motel encounter.
The Moussaoui indictment lays out a tantalizing possible association between Atta and Moussaoui, but never puts the two in the same place at the same time. The link could exist, however, along a dusty Oklahoma roadside, off Interstate 40, at a small motel that is indistinguishable from hundreds of others, except for its possible connection to terrorists.
Fri Jul 26, 9:41 AM ET
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) - Tipsy the tortoise is back on his feet.
About a year after his handlers at Roger Williams Park Zoo noticed he had a bum left front leg, the 21-year-old year-old radiated tortoise has finished his rounds of physical therapy and is back munching on plants and scoping out the females in his pen.
The endangered tortoise from the African island of Madagascar had suffered tissue damage and spent a year getting around on a makeshift skateboard that allowed him to exercise without putting too much pressure on the injured limb.
After confirming the injury during tests at Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine in Grafton, Mass., caretakers cobbled together an oval-shaped roller.
Tipsy showed admiring onlookers Thursday just how well he could scoot around on his mini skateboard. He bounced off walls, crashed into a door, walked over shoes and wiggled between legs.
"He seemed to really enjoy (the therapy) from the beginning," Dr. Janet Martin, director of veterinary services at the zoo. "He really got the hang of it."
Tipsy's ailment was the first such injury veterinarians grappled with in the decades the zoo has housed tortoises.
23 July 02
(NewScientist.com)
Doctors in the US have detected the first Staphyloccocus aureus bacteria that are highly resistant to vancomycin, known as the antibiotic of last resort.
The superbugs were found by medical staff treating a 40-year-old hospital patient in Michigan with a leg ulcer. Scientists have been predicting the appearance of vancomycin-resistant S aureus (VRSA) ever since a vancomycin-resistant strain of the gut bacterium Enterococci was discovered 15 years ago.
David Livermore, director of the Antibiotic Resistance Monitoring and Reference Laboratory at the Public Health Laboratory Service in the UK says: "It is of great concern that your grandmother could go to hospital for a simple hip-replacement and develop VRSA."
He adds: "Enterococci is a low-grade opportunistic pathogen which is part of the normal gut flora and completely harmless unless a person has reduced immunity. S aureus is much more of a problem with greater pathogenic potential."
Wound infections
S aureus is a bacterium commonly found on the skin and in the noses of healthy people, but it can cause severe wound infections leading to septicaemia and death. A methicillin-resistant strain of the bacterium already causes problems because most antibiotics are ineffective against it.
There have been clinical occurrences of "vancomycin-intermediate" S. aureus in the past, where mutations have led to individual bacteria developing a thickened cell wall with low-level resistance.
But the newly-found VRSA "is a different and much more disturbing form of transferable high-level resistance in the bacterium," says Livermore.
Binding site
Tests on the VRSA found a vancomycin-resistance gene specific to Enterococci. It is suspected that the vancomycin-resistance was transferred from Enterococci via loops of DNA called plasmids.
"The plasmids code for an alternative way of making the bacterial cell wall, which deprives vancomycin of its binding site," explains Livermore.
The American patient survived after treatment with an older antibiotic called chloramphenical, though Livermore says the VRSA's susceptibility to this drug was fortunate. There have been no reports that the infection has spread to others.
Doctors have been warning for many years that the overuse and misuse of antibiotics is driving the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
(Sacramento Bee)
8-1-2
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Police fed up with trash-filled alleys have unveiled the first of 11 special motion-sensor cameras they hope will deter illegal dumping and graffiti in southern Los Angeles.
A power-pole mounted camera in Watts is designed to snap a picture of - and audibly warn - anyone spotted loitering in a junk-filled alley, police said Wednesday.
The steel-encased camera, designed to withstand a bullet, plays a recorded warning that police hope will act as a deterrent: "Stop! This is the LAPD," the recording says. "We have just taken your photograph. We will use this photograph to prosecute you. Leave now."
Similar cameras are planned for other South Los Angeles locations, some mounted near abandoned buildings to discourage squatters.
Legal experts say the pictures taken would be admissible in court. Those caught 'tagging' or illegally dumping could be jailed for six months and fined $1,000 per crime.
Motion-sensor cameras were previously installed in several other Los Angeles neighborhoods.
7-27-2
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. military on Friday denied reports from Abu Dhabi Television that seven American soldiers had been killed and 14 injured in an ambush at a U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan.
The television report, attributed only to "Afghan special sources," also said four U.S. soldiers had been seized from Bagram, site of an air base near the Afghan capital, Kabul, used by international forces.
It said the purported ambush at the base in Paktia province had destroyed two American military helicopters.
A spokesman for U.S. Central Command, in charge of American military activities in the region, told Reuters from Tampa, Florida: "It is not true. We have had no such ambush or incident."
Afghans who live about half a mile from the U.S. base at Gardez in Paktia province and were contacted by telephone told Reuters they had not heard or seen any sign of a disturbance.
U.S. soldiers are stationed in Afghanistan as part of a U.S. campaign to root out Osama bin Laden's Islamic al Qaeda network, believed to be responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and on the Pentagon as well as other attacks on U.S. forces.
The United States launched airstrikes on Afghanistan last year to flush out al Qaeda and punish its Taliban protectors. Some 12,000 U.S.-led coalition forces are still hunting for al Qaeda and Taliban remnants.
About 40 American soldiers have been killed in combat and noncombat incidents and over 340 have been wounded in the U.S. operation in Afghanistan.
U.S. bases have been the target of rocket and small arms attacks, and al Qaeda has vowed to avenge the U.S. military campaign, in which witnesses say several hundred Afghan civilians have been killed.
CNN Washington Bureau
7-26-2
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The killings of four military wives in the past six weeks -- allegedly by their husbands who are based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina -- have led commanders to take a new look at whether combat deployments may be causing undue stress.
Sources at Fort Bragg, home to the Army Special Operations Command, say there's no common thread among the cases, and suggest it may simply be an "anomaly" that so many incidents have occurred so close together.
Officials acknowledge that three of the men had recently served in Afghanistan, and at least one of them had been brought home early to deal with unspecified family problems. But authorities have not established any connection between their service in Afghanistan and the incidents.
Military and local authorities say two of the Special Operations soldiers committed suicide after their wives were killed.
Two of the women were fatally shot, one was strangled, and one was stabbed to death. All four killings took place off the base.
A preliminary autopsy report released on Monday indicates that Andrea Lynn Zeigler-Floyd, 29, was shot by her husband at Fort Bragg. Sgt. 1st Class Brandon Floyd, then turned the gun on himself.
In one incident, the man is suspected of setting the couple's house afire after his wife was killed.
The Fort Bragg garrison commander, Army Col. Tad Davis, is reviewing counseling and stress-management programs available at the base.
A spokesman said the Army wants to see if there is something it could do better. But one military official who had previously served at Fort Bragg pointed out that Special Operations soldiers may be reluctant to seek help.
Benjamin Abel, an Army Special Operations Command spokesmen, gave these details on the four incidents:
* On June 11, Sgt. 1st Class Rigoberto Nieves, 32, and his wife, Teresa, were found shot to death at their residence in a suspected murder-suicide. Nieves was assigned to the 3rd Special Forces Group. He was deployed to Afghanistan in early January and returned in mid-March.
* On June 29, Jennifer Wright, the wife of Master Sgt. William Wright, 36, was found strangled. Wright was charged with first degree murder. He was assigned to the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion. He was deployed to Afghanistan in mid-March and returned in mid-May.
* On July 9, Marilyn Griffin, wife of Sgt. Cedric Griffin, 28, was stabbed to death. Griffin is charged with first degree murder. He was assigned to the 37th Engineer Battalion, 20th Engineer Brigade. He had not been deployed to Afghanistan and no such deployment was planned.
* On July 19, Sgt. 1st Class Brandon S. Floyd, 30, and his wife, Andrea, were shot at their home in an apparent murder-suicide. Floyd was assigned to Headquarters Company, U.S. Army Special Operations Command. He was deployed to Afghanistan in November and returned in January.
SOLAR ACTIVITY HEADED TO A SKY NEAR YOU?
A group of sunspots measuring 15 Earths across has been producing some major solar activity within the past few days. A gigantic bubble of electrified gas called a coronal mass ejection (CME) left the Sun Monday around 4pm and passed by the SOHO spacecraft at about 11:30 am ET today as it was rushing toward Earth. It may cause geomagnetic activity near Earth with a 10% chance of auroras tonight. The CME followed a solar explosion, or flare, that measured X3 (X-class being the most powerful designation).
(TheSun-Jul 25, 2002)
Cow about that ... Queen and pals watch Honey relieve herself during trip to Macclesfield school
(Reuters)
7-24-2
LONDON (Reuters) - A massive asteroid could hit Earth in just 17 years' time, destroying life as we know it, a British space expert said Wednesday.
The asteroid -- the most threatening object ever detected in space -- is two km (1.2 miles) wide and apparently on a direct collision course with Earth.
"Objects of this size only hit the Earth every one or two million years," said Dr. Benny Peiser, an asteroid expert at Liverpool John Moore's University in northern England.
"In the worst case scenario, a disaster of this size would be global in its extent, would create a meltdown of our economic and social life, and would reduce us to dark age conditions," he told Reuters.
But Peiser and other space experts say they are pretty confident this nightmare scenario will not come about.
"This thing is the highest threat that has been cataloged, but the scale in terms of the threat keeps changing," said Peter Bond, spokesman for the Royal Astronomical Society.
"If it did hit the Earth it would cause a continental-size explosion...but it is a fairly remote possibility."
The asteroid -- named 2002 NT7 -- was first detected earlier this month by the United States Linear sky survey program.
Since then, Peiser said scientists at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration's near-Earth objects team and at Pisa University in Italy have carried out orbit calculations to work out the probability and potential date of impact to define the risk it poses.
Their calculations show it could hit the earth on February 1, 2019.
"The impact probability is below one in a million, but because the first impact date is so early -- only 17 years from now -- and the object is very large, it's been rated on the impact risk Palermo Scale as a positive," Peiser said. "It is the first object which has ever hit a positive rating."
Scientists warn, however, that the risk rating has not been reviewed by the International Astronomical Union, which is the main international body responsible for announcing such risks.
Peiser said 2002 NT7 would continue to be monitored by space experts across the world, and that over time, these observations would probably erase the threat posed by it.
"In all likelihood, in a couple of months additional observations will eliminate this object from the list of potential impacts," he said. "I am very confident that additional observations over time will...show that it is actually not on a collision course with Earth."
But he warned that the world should take this as wake-up call and set about preparing for the reality of an asteroid hit in the future.
"Sooner or later -- and no one can really tell us which it will be -- we will find an object that is on a collision course. That is as certain as "Amen" in church. And eventually we will have to deflect an object from its collision course," he said.
At the moment, he added, scientists fear it could take at least 30 years for the world to be able to devise and set up a mission to deal with such a threat -- a timescale which would be woefully inadequate if the 2019 strike were to happen.
(The Guardian - London)
7-25-2
The chances of a recently discovered mile-wide asteroid, forecast to hurtle towards Earth, actually hitting the planet are "minimal", a Nasa scientist said today.
But if it did, asteroid 2002 NT7 would strike on February 1 2019 unleashing tidal waves, massive fires, global volcanic activity and an electromagnetic pulse that would destroy most of the electronics on Earth.
Astronomers have given the object a 0.06 rating on the Palermo technical scale (a scale used to measure asteroid threats), making it the first to be given a positive value.
Initial calculations show that its 837-day course around the Sun - which tilts to just within the Earth's orbit - could put it on a collision course in less than 17 years.
Donald Yeomans of Nasa's jet propulsion laboratory said the margin of error was however tens of millions of miles, meaning the likely threat was minimal.
"An object of this size would be expected to hit the Earth every few million years, and as we get additional data I think this threat will go away," he told the BBC.
An asteroid that hit New Mexico 65m years ago is believed to have killed off the dinosaurs.
The Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik, who campaigns for the government to take asteroid threats seriously, said 2002 NT7 was the most dangerous object yet seen in space.
"There's a good chance this particular object won't hit us but we know that a large object will hit us sooner or later. This is the closest approach we have seen so far," he said.
"It does sound like a science fiction story and I may sound like one of these guys who walks up and down with a sandwich board saying the end of the world is nigh, but the end is nigh."
Last month an asteroid the size of a football pitch missed the Earth by 75,000 miles - less than one-third of the distance to the moon. It was not observed until three days later.
Scientists said if it had hit a populated area, it would have released as much energy as a large nuclear weapon.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/spacedocumentary/story/0,2763,762439,00.html
(MSNBC)
July 31 — An otherworldly crater has been discovered hundreds of feet beneath the floor of the North Sea, using sophisticated seismic mapping equipment designed for petroleum exploration. Researchers say the 12-mile-wide, multiringed crater is 60 million to 65 million years old — going back to the end of the dinosaur era — and looks more like impact craters on moons of Jupiter than anything seen on Earth.
THE STRUCTURE, dubbed the Silverpit Crater, was likely created by the splashdown of a massive meteorite, researchers report in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature. But that hypothesis still has to be confirmed through a detailed analysis of rock samples drawn from deep beneath the sea floor.
The three-dimensional seismic readings were made in 1992 as part of an effort to map petroleum resources in the North Sea, and over the years they have been reprocessed and acquired by BP. Phil Allen, a geophysicist at Production Geoscience, first noticed the strange features last year, in data from beneath a few hundred yards (meters) of sediment and 130 feet (40 meters) of water.
UNRAVELING THE MYSTERY
“Phil was mapping deeper stuff in search of gas fields as usual, but noticed the uncharacteristically bumpy nature of the top Cretaceous in the east of the survey,” BP structural geologist Simon Stewart, who is Allen’s collaborator in the Nature research, told MSNBC.com.
When Allen asked the computer to produce a top-down view of the area, “the dramatic rings around the central crater are what popped out,” Stewart said.
The 12-mile-wide (20-kilometer-wide) structure baffled Allen, and he pinned a picture of the crater to his office wall with a handwritten note asking, “Anybody seen anything like this?”
During a visit to Allen’s office, Stewart added missing pieces to the puzzle. He had already published research suggesting that impact craters might be detected beneath the North Sea’s floor, where the overlying layers of sediment would preserve structures from the erosion that tends to erase impact craters on land.
The feature’s central peak was a characteristic of large impact craters — but the network of concentric rings was like nothing else seen on Earth, the researchers said. Instead, they bore a remarkable similarity to larger multiringed craters on Europa and Callisto, two icy moons of Jupiter.
“Silverpit is likely to teach us a great deal about the mechanics of how such ring systems arise,” Jay Melosh, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, said in a written statement.
Stewart and Allen looked at other hypotheses for how such a structure could have been created — for example, through an up-from-below phenomenon known as salt diapirism. They say they are 99 percent certain the crater was created by a meteorite impact. However, planetary scientist John Spray of the University of New Brunswick said the genesis of such craters “is still a matter of debate.”
“The real test that Silverpit was created by an impact will be to look for shock effects in the rocks that form it,” he said in a Nature commentary on the research.
HOW LONG AGO?
An analysis of the geologic layers led the researchers to estimate the crater’s age at 60 million to 65 million years. If the object that created the crater was a typical rocky meteor, hitting Earth at a typical speed, its diameter would have been about 400 feet (120 meters), Stewart said. “Doesn’t sound big, but remember, that’s over 2 million tons,” he said.
The researchers’ estimates put the Silverpit Crater in roughly the same time frame as the Chicxulub impact in Mexico that many scientists think sparked the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Stewart said that if Silverpit was created 60 million years ago, there wouldn’t be any cause to link the two impacts.
“On the other hand, if it came out at 65 million years ago, we would have the possibility that Silverpit was in fact a fragment of Chicxulub, leading us to wonder how many other bits are yet to be found in oceanic basins,” he said. “But these aspects are speculation right now.”
Indian police scoff at monkey-man rumours
Almost a year after residents in the Indian capital were terrorised by the alleged attacks of an elusive monkey-like creature, the eastern city of Patna says it too is facing similar attacks from an ape-like animal.
Local newspapers are full of reports of "mysterious monkey attacks" but police have scotched the stories and warned of strict action against those spreading rumours.
ON Bhaskar, Patna's police chief said: "There are rumours of a monkey-like machine, referred to as monkey-man, that attacks those sleeping on rooftops and in open places at night.
"But it is a pure rumour as no-one has actually lodged a case in any police station.
"There has not been any recognised case of injury. We have warned the public at large to be on guard against any rumour and help cops arrest those who spread such rumours."
Headlines
Residents of Patna, however, were not reassured, with local newspapers headlining quotes from eyewitnesses and victims of the "monkey man".
"The monkey-man attacked and injured my son-in-law Joginder Singh on Friday night when he was sleeping on the rooftop of my house," a newspaper quoted Bhagwat Sharan Singh of Patna's Mainpura colony as saying.
"[The attacker] looked like a monkey."
Sparkles
Some even alleged the creature "jumps and sparkles red and blue lights".
Others described it as resembling a machine, operated by a remote control and "handled by anti-social elements to terrorise people".
Police chief Bhaskar said hospitals and doctors had been asked to report any case of injury attributed to the mysterious creature.
Meanwhile, fear of the "monkey man" took an ugly turn when a group of people beat up a Hindu Sadhu (saint) with a flowing beard, on suspicion that he was the "monkey man".
Deja vu
The incidents reported in Patna seemed almost identical to the attacks reported in the Indian capital last May, when for more than a month, a "mysterious monkey-like creature" besieged New Delhi.
Descriptions agreed the creature was "black" and "ape-like" with "sharp claws" but varied on its height, with some reporting it was over six feet tall with red eyes, while others said it was about two feet tall.
At least two people, including a pregnant woman, were killed in a crush when hysterical people tried to escape into their homes after hearing the monkey man was near.
A number of others were treated for scratch and bite wounds in hospital, but a special police enquiry dismissed the "monkey-man scare" as a figment of imagination and a product of mass hysteria.
7/25/2002
ORLANDO, Fla., July 25 (UPI) -- Florida Hospital Orlando listed a 12-year-old Oviedo, Fla., boy in critical condition Thursday from amoebas that attacked his brain after a swim in a central Florida lake.
The rare condition is not contagious, but it is usually fatal, said Dr. Jaime Carrizosa, an infectious disease specialist at the hospital.
"We're doing everything we can for him, but this is a very serious infection," Carrizosa said. "Once inside the body, these amoebas just divide and divide, and you will have an overwhelming infection very quickly."
Although the state has counted only 19 cases since 1962, the infectious amoebas are common in Florida's freshwater lakes and rivers. Doctors say they get into the brain after the swimmer takes them into his or her nostrils.
The amobebas live in the material on the bottoms of freshwater lakes, rivers and hot springs, and have also been found in swimming pools which have not been chlorinated.
The boy, who has not been identified, apparently picked up the infection at either Long Lake Park in Oveido or in the Conway Chain of Lakes in Orange County where he has been swimming recently.
Health officials said it did not make much sense to close a lake because of the amoebas, because so many bodies of water are infected. A 1999 study found that 46 percent of the lakes sampled contained the organism.
"If we wanted to avoid all potential exposures to this organism, we would have to close all bodies of water in the state of Florida," said Dr. Steven Wiersma of the Florida Department of Health.
Headaches and nausea are the first symptoms, followed by seizures and coma.
Doctors said little is known why one person will become infected and another will not. One theory is that it takes a lot of water jammed into the nasal passages, perhaps by falling off water skis or jumping into the water.
UPDATE:Florida Boy Dies From Amoeba Infection In Brain
7-26-2
(CNN) -- An unidentified 12-year-old died Friday after being infected with an amoeba while swimming in a Florida lake.
The boy had meningeal encephalitis -- a combination of meningitis and encephalitis, which causes the brain to swell, according to Dr. Jaime Carrizosa, an infectious disease specialist from Florida Hospital in Orlando. Carrizosa had treated the boy.
Dr. Steven Wiersma of the Florida Department of Health in Tallahassee, says the condition is very rare and has a high mortality rate.
Cases of illness from amoebas are rare. There have been 20 to 30 cases in the United States, with the majority of cases reported in Florida. The environmental conditions in Florida lakes -- especially in the hot summer months -- are ideal for amoebas to thrive and proliferate, Carrizosa said.
Amoebas enter the body through the nose. From there, they can travel directly to the brain and into the spinal fluid. That causes brain swelling and the increased pressure is often fatal.
Although patients are given antifungal drugs, "there is no effective treatment," Carrizosa added. "Amoebas have all the possibilities of producing some toxins so there has to be some of that occurring. It's so difficult to study particularly in a critically ill patient."
Although cases are rare, Florida doctors are aware of the danger. "When we have cases of meningitis and there is any history of having been swimming in a lake, diving and going underwater, we immediately look for amoebas in the spinal fluid," Carrizosa said.
The Volusia County Health Department warns against "swimming in lakes, retention ponds or swimming holes, particularly during the hot summer months."
Carrizosa recommends wearing a nose clip and keeping your head above water when swimming in these areas.
July 19, 2002
(NYT op/ed By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF)
It's bad enough that we can't find Iraqi anthrax hidden in the desert. But it turns out that we also misplaced anthrax and Ebola kept in a lab outside Washington D.C.
Internal Army documents about the U.S. biodefense program describe missing Ebola and other pathogens, vicious feuds, lax security, cover-ups and a "cowboy culture" beyond anyone's scrutiny. Moreover, germ warriors in the C.I.A. and the Defense Department decided — without bothering to consult the White House — to produce anthrax secretly and tinker with it in ways that arguably put the U.S. in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention.
It's time for Congress or an outside commission to investigate our nation's biodefense program and establish oversight.
"Shenanigans have been going on," declares one internal Army memo about the labs at ground zero of the biodefense world: Usamriid, the acronym for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, based at Fort Detrick, Md.
The 400 pages of documents, which I've obtained and which were described by The Hartford Courant earlier this year, quote a newly arrived officer named Michael Langford as saying that he found "little or no organization," "little or no accountability," "a very lax and unorganized system" and signs of covert work and cover-ups.
Mr. Langford requested an inventory of pathogens acquired in 1991. The resulting memo shows that 62 samples had vanished, including Ebola, hantavirus, anthrax, S.I.V. (the monkey version of the virus that causes AIDS), and several described only as "unknown."
Usamriid says that it rechecked this year and was able to account for virtually all of the missing specimens except one set that would have been irradiated to render it harmless. But a decade's delay in bothering to look for missing Ebola seems a bit much, and conversations with scientists who have worked at Usamriid do not inspire confidence (although, in fairness, many who talk publicly have lawsuits pending against the lab).
"When I was laid off, I walked out for three days in a row with boxes, and no one looked inside them," recalled Richard Crosland, who worked at Usamriid from 1986 to 1997. "I was there for 11 years, and never once did anyone ask, `Where is the substance you ordered?'
"I could have walked out with it when I left, and no one would have known. I didn't, but I could have. 7-Eleven had better inventory control. And I was working with botulinum, which is one of the deadliest substances on earth.
"If you couldn't find a microscope, you were in real trouble. But if you misplaced five micrograms of botulinum that could kill thousands of people, nobody would notice."
In truth, many microbiology labs are pretty chaotic, and ultimately labs have to pick reliable people and then trust them. But that's what piqued my interest in Usamriid in the first place — my research about a man I've called "Mr. Z," who has been interviewed four times by the F.B.I. and whose home has been searched twice in connection with the anthrax investigation. Usamriid hired Mr. Z in 1997 to work with Ebola and Marburg viruses, although he had spent years in the armed forces of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa.
Most researchers at Usamriid are dedicated patriots who could earn more in the private sector. When Mr. Z left Usamriid in 1999, he was making $58,000 a year — and jumped to a $150,000-a-year job with a private contractor. Many bio-defense scientists risk their lives working with deadly germs to improve vaccines for American troops, and they deserve our gratitude.
Still, the Army documents indisputably point out serious problems. They recount incidents in 1992 when someone appeared to be working secretly with anthrax at night and on weekends and then trying to cover it up. Memos describe how someone tried to roll back a numerical counter on an electron microscope to hide his work with anthrax.
As recently as April of this year, anthrax spores were found in a hallway and administrative area of Usamriid — shortly after Senator Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, visited the complex. Anthrax spores seem to have it in for Democratic senators.
(Baltimore Sun Staff)
7-21-2
Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, whose Frederick apartment was searched June 25 in the anthrax investigation, has a new employer who says the FBI told him the bioweapons expert is "not a suspect and not on any list" of suspects in the case.
Hatfill started July 1 as associate director of Louisiana State University's National Center for Biomedical Research and Training, which is supported by grants from the Justice Department to train emergency personnel to handle bioterrorist attacks.
Stephen L. Guillot Jr., director of the center, said he was contacted by the FBI a few days after agents searched Hatfill's apartment near Fort Detrick and a storage unit he had rented in Ocala, Fla.
"They told me Steve was not a suspect and was not on any list," Guillot said. He said he was satisfied that Hatfill had been cleared of any role in the anthrax mailings.
Hatfill is one of a number of scientists whose knowledge of and access to anthrax brought him to the attention of the FBI in its 9-month-old investigation of the anthrax-laced letters, which killed five people last fall.
He was first questioned and given a polygraph exam by FBI agents about six months ago, when a brief search of his apartment was conducted. After that, investigators appeared to lose interest in Hatfill until they showed up last month with a rented truck and several cars and spent hours carrying items out of his apartment.
The search was carried out with Hatfill's permission and without a warrant. An acquaintance of Hatfill said yesterday he had been assured by the FBI that the search would be done discreetly, but the agents quickly drew the attention of neighbors, who alerted news organizations. Television crews rushed to the scene and circled the site in helicopters.
Chris Murray, a spokesman for the FBI's Washington Field Office, which is heading the anthrax investigation, refused to comment on Hatfill's status or to confirm Guillot's statements.
Guillot declined to provide Hatfill's phone number, and he could not be reached for comment yesterday. His lawyer, Thomas C. Carter, of Alexandria, Va., did not return repeated phone calls.
Hatfill, who was raised in Illinois and earned medical and doctoral degrees in Zimbabwe and South Africa, worked with Ebola and other viruses at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick from 1997 to 1999. He did not work with anthrax but had access to labs containing the Ames strain of anthrax used in the attacks, according to former colleagues.
In 1999, he was granted a "secret" clearance by the Defense Department and went to work for Science Applications International Corp., a large defense and intelligence contractor. He spoke widely on bioterrorism, trained medical and police "first responders" who deal with emergencies and helped create a mock bioterrorist laboratory for the U.S. Special Operations Command.
In August 2001, Hatfill's security clearance was suspended by the Defense Department, according to sources at Science Applications International Corp. who said the company was not told the reason. In March, because the clearance had not been restored, the company dismissed Hatfill, the sources said.
Guillot said he does not know why the clearance was suspended. "He's not working on any secure programs for us," he said.
Guillot called Hatfill "a patriot. ... He's a guy who will go out of his way to make sure the lives of first responders are protected." He noted that Hatfill is one of many American biodefense experts who have been questioned and polygraphed by the FBI, but "he's the only one that got blasted in the news."
LSU officials said Hatfill's salary is $150,000 a year. He has not yet relocated to its Baton Rouge campus but is working on developing courses for first responders, they said.
In a 1999 resume that may have drawn the FBI's attention, Hatfill stated that he had "working knowledge" of "wet and dry BW [biological warfare] agents," as well as of how to produce Bacillus globigii, a nontoxic anthrax simulant.
While at SAIC, he commissioned a study by biodefense veteran William C. Patrick III that included a scenario of an anthrax-laced envelope being opened in an office. While most of the report did not deal with mail attacks, it described an experiment to test how much Bacillus globigii powder could fit in an envelope.
(AP)
(Aug 2 2002)
WASHINGTON - FBI and Postal Service agents wearing protective gloves conducted a second search Thursday at the apartment of a former Army researcher considered a ''person of interest'' in the investigation of last year's deadly anthrax mailings.
The FBI gained a search warrant to look inside Steven J. Hatfill's residence at Detrick Plaza Apartments in Frederick, Md., according to two U.S. government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. Hatfill consented to the first FBI search on June 25 and no warrant was needed.
Federal agents also searched trash bins outside Hatfill's apartment and a self-storage unit in Ocala, Fla., that Hatfill used, one official said. The unit also was searched in June.
It was unclear whether the FBI contacted Hatfill before gaining the warrant to search his home.
FBI Director Robert Mueller declined to say why a second search was conducted.
''We're making progress in the case but I can't comment on ongoing aspects of the investigation,'' he said.
Hatfill, 48, was not questioned and no arrests in the case are imminent, a government official said. Hatfill is not a suspect and no physical evidence links him to the letters, law enforcement officials said.
Five people were killed in last fall's anthrax mailings. Federal investigators did talk to Hatfill about the case when his name first surfaced last winter, but no details of the interview have been disclosed.
Lawyer Victor Glasberg, who said has been newly hired as Hatfill's primary attorney, said late Thursday that FBI agents recently asked for a meeting with Hatfill. In a phone conversation Hatfill agreed to a meeting, but was never contacted by the FBI with a meeting place or time. Instead, agents arrived at his apartment with a warrant.
He said FBI agents had never revealed their interest in Hatfill or why they wanted to search his home again. Glasberg refused to comment further.
During the first search, FBI agents, some in protective clothing, removed computer components and at least a half-dozen garbage bags full of materials from Hatfill's apartment.
But officials said no trace of anthrax was found in his home or at the storage unit.
On Thursday, agents searched Hatfill's apartment and the trash bins outside the building. A dark blue van was parked nearby with its back doors open and white cardboard boxes sat next to the bins.
Hatfill keeps a residence at the apartment building, but has not lived there since the first search, according to neighbors.
The apartment complex is outside Fort Detrick, where Hatfill worked for two years for the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, center of the nation's biological warfare defense research.
Hatfill worked at the facility until September 1999. Although he probably had access to anthrax, his primary duties didn't involve working with it, a spokesman for the base has said.
Hatfill and another scientist, Joseph Soukup, commissioned a study of a hypothetical anthrax attack in February 1999 as employees of defense contractor Science Applications International Corp., said Ben Haddad, spokesman for the San Diego-based company.
The FBI has identified Hatfill as one of 20 to 30 scientists and researchers with the expertise and opportunity to conduct the anthrax attacks. The bureau has searched about 25 homes or apartments after getting permission from the person interviewed, a federal law enforcement official said.
Hatfill has not spoken publicly about the searches. In March, however, he denied involvement in the anthrax mailings and complained to the Baltimore Sun in a telephone message that he was fired from a recent job because of media inquiries.
''I've been in this field for a number of years, working until 3 o'clock in the morning, trying to counter this type of weapon of mass destruction, and, sir, my career is over at this time,'' Hatfill said.
Last month Hatfill was named associate director of Louisiana State University's National Center for Biomedical Research and Training, which is sponsored and financed by the Justice Department. Instructors travel around the country and train first responders, like emergency medical teams.
Hatfill, who previously was one of the adjunct instructors in the program, is moving to Baton Rouge, La., said Gene Sands, a university spokesman.
A United Nations spokesman said Thursday that Hatfill attended a one-month training course in October 2000 to be a U.N. weapons inspector.
The U.N. weapons inspection agency has been training people with expertise in chemical and biological weapons to work as inspectors if Iraq allows their return. On Thursday, the Iraqi government invited the chief U.N. weapons inspector to Baghdad for discussion, hinting that inspections could be renewed after nearly four years.
Hatfill applied for the job independently and is one of 230 people available for future weapons inspections, said Ewen Buchanan, spokesman for the U.N. Monitoring and Verification Commission, known as UNMOVIC. ''He is not on our payroll.''
(UKDailyTelegraph)
7-21-02
Representatives of Britain's 2,000 health shops have been told in Brussels that there is now no chance of stopping an EU directive which will close most of them down.
This is because it is part of an avalanche of EU legislation which is being "fast-tracked" to give eastern European countries a chance to comply with it before they join an enlarged Union.
There are several odd features about this "Herbal Medicines Products" directive, for which pharmaceutical companies have been lobbying behind the scenes for years.
Although it is a British initiative, championed by our Medicines Control Agency, it seeks to apply to herbal remedies the principle of continental law that things can only be allowed when they are specifically authorised. This reverses the British tradition that everything is allowed unless specifically prohibited.
Under the directive such herbal remedies as Hypericum, Rhodiola and Echinacea, used by five million people in Britain for a wide range of conditions, could only be sold if they had been through the MCA's prohibitively expensive licensing procedures.
Thousands of safe herbal products will thus have to be removed from the market, which is why many health shops will be forced to close.
What makes this even odder is that the MCA tried it on before, when in 1994 it proposed a statutory instrument which it claimed was necessary to implement a 1965 Brussels directive, passed three years before Britain's Medicines Act specifically exempted herbal medicines from licensing requirements.
When the European Commission explained that this was not what the directive intended, the MCA was told, after heated discussion in Cabinet, to drop its proposal. Now seven years later, the MCA has got its way, by successfully lobbying for an EU directive.
There are no health reasons for banning the 3,000 herbal preparations currently on sale in Britain. Almost all adverse reactions linked to herbal remedies (infinitely fewer than those due to synthetic drugs made by pharmaceutical firms) are caused by preparations made up by Chinese practitioners. These are specifically exempted from the directive.
(By Martin Dillon www.Globe-Intel.net)
7-25-2
While the US military continues to prepare a strategy for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, President Bush has given the CIA the green light to promote dissent in Iran.
Since his "Axis of Evil" speech in which he named Iran as a major sponsor of terror, the US President has sought advice from a wide range of experts on how to deal with a regime that has fostered terrorism worldwide - especially in the Middle East.
Since the downfall of the Shah, and the arrival of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, Iran has symbolized militant Islam. Khomeini and his successors silenced dissent within the country and encouraged militant anti- Western values.
Iran became the country that not only financed and trained terrorist organizations like Hezbollah, which has killed more Americans than any other Islamic militant organization, but a safe haven for the world s dangerous terrorists.
Many master terrorists wanted by Western intelligence agencies for the killing of hundreds of innocent people have been given refuge in Iran s capital and in its military installations.
The CIA and the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, have known for years that clerics in power in Iran have also had long established links with Syria.
Like Iran, it has allowed Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and many other terrorist groups to operate freely within its borders. The Iranian and Syrian intelligence services have worked closely to provide terrorists with money, weapons and information on targeting.
*** This year, Iranian and Syrian intelligence officers met with terrorist leaders from a wide range of organizations at a secret facility outside Teheran. On their agenda was a plan to help Hamas and like-minded terrorists to continue their suicide bombings against Israel in the belief that Israel can be weakened by a sustained terrorist war. ***
More worrying for the US was a plan put forward at the terrorist meeting to enable Al-Qaeda and the Taliban to regain a foothold in parts of Afghanistan.
When news of the meeting reached the White House, George Bush called together top aides from the Pentagon, Defense Department and the CIA.
They all agreed that while Syria was a growing threat to stability in the Middle East and had to be carefully monitored, Iran was vulnerable to internal dissent and every effort should be made to destabilize Iran from within.
The Bush policy group recommended that the US harden its rhetoric about Syria and privately warn the Syrian government that there was a price to be paid for supporting terrorism.
US military planners have long held the view that a major air strike should be made against terrorist training camps in Syria and in Lebanon s Bekka Valley where Syrian intelligence officers are believed to have operated with their Iranian counterparts in training terrorists.
On the question of Iran, the policy group was optimistic. CIA monitoring of political events inside Iran had concluded that a younger generation in the country had tired of the tyranny of the mullahs. While those who disapproved of the mullahs were not necessarily pro-American their collective opposition to militant Islam offered a glimmer of hope.
The CIA told President Bush it was ready to mount a sustained covert and overt propaganda campaign to highlight the growing disillusionment of the Iranian population with its leadership. Their reading of the internal political friction in Iran proved accurate.
This month, 90-year-old Ayatollah Jalaleddin openly criticized his fellow clerics. His comments sent a shockwave through Iran and its neighbors.
His scathing assault on the regime was wrapped in words rarely heard in Iran. He talked of "crookedness and negligence."
Days later, under pressure from his fellow clerics, he was forced to release a second statement to soften the tone of the first.
Nonetheless the CIA saw in the Ayatollah s comments evidence of a shifting political mood that can be exploited.
The Bush administration is aware that Iran and Syria s sponsorship of terrorism has also been at the root of the conflict in Israel. Recently President Bush told a group of Arab leaders at a White House meeting that the prospect of a Palestinian state was remote while Iran and Syria continued to supply Hamas and the PLO with weapons and explosives.
There is an even greater reason for renewed focus by the Bush administration on Iran and Syria. In the event the US topples Saddam later this year, or early next year, it does not want to face a situation in which Syria, and especially Iran, meddle in Iraqi politics.
Iran has made no secret of the fact that with Saddam off the scene it would like to claim a large portion of southern Iraq.
In the coming months the US is likely to adopt a tougher public stance on Syria s role in terrorism. At the same time, the CIA will make every effort to highlight the growing disillusionment of Iranians with their clerical leaders.
Covertly the CIA will try to recruit Iranians inside and outside the country to give their voices to criticism of the regime. That will be achieved with psychological warfare techniques such as disinformation, pamphlets, broadcasts and the genuine use of news of dissent from within Iran itself.
Martin Dillon is a world authority on Russian and East European intelligence and the Ireland conflict. He is also the author of the bestsellers: The Shankill Butchers (Random House); The Dirty War (Random House) and God and the Gun (Orion). This trilogy is also published by Routledge, New York. His books are also available on Amazon.com
Martin Dillon also writes for www.Globe-Intel.net
(By Rosanne Linin The Shanghai Star)
7-25-2
North American skeptics take note - in 1976-77, the Chinese Government sponsored a yeren (wildman) - commonly known to the West as Bigfoot - expedition to Shennongjia Mountain Forest in central Hubei Province consisting of 100 people, including army personnel.
That trip and others have produced numerous samples of what Yuan Zhenxin, a well-known paleoanthropologist from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, claims are the hair, footprints and feces of an undiscovered species, possibly the missing link between man and ape - the wildman.
Eye-witness reports describe the wildman as about 9 feet tall, with five-toed feet measuring some 40 centimetres in length, red hair and terrible body odour. He is apparently a vegetarian who prefers corn-on-the-cob.
Since the 1970s, government sponsored expeditions have managed to detail scores of wildman sightings among local residents, although the wildman himself continues to shy away from both outsiders and cameras, complicating independent verification.
However, scientists remain resolute in their investigations. According to a August 2, 1988 report in Shanghai's Wenhui Bao, an analysis of hair samples allegedly taken from the wildman prove he exists.
And wildman is not alone.
Yuan believes some 1,000 to 2,000 of these Chinese Bigfoot creatures are currently roaming the dense forests of Hubei's mountain area - interactions with locals have ranged from crude attempts at communication to encounters of a more personal nature. Yuan notes that he has personally investigated stories of abduction, including two cases where farmers were kidnapped by the creature but managed to escape. Yuan fails to elaborate on the nature of these abductions, but according to victims of wildman's American cousin, Bigfoot, the creature has a voracious sexual appetite.
Some critics will inevitably attribute these sightings to poisonous Western influences, however they would be wrong. Reported sightings of the wildman date back thousands of years before China had any contact with the West.
A statesman-poet named Qu Yuan who lived in the third century BC in the Shennongjia area referred to "mountain ogres" in his verses. While a seventh century historian described a tribe of "hairy men" living in the same region, and an 18th century poet spoke of a creature "monkey-like yet not monkey" in adjoining Shaanxi province.
Liu Minzhuang, a biology lecturer in Shanghai who has been researching wildman for more than 20 years, notes the convincing testimony of one old peasant. According to the elderly witness, he accompanied Kuomintang soldiers as they tracked eight wildmen through thick forests for 10 days in 1947. One wildman was eventually killed and dismembered by the soldiers, the peasant said, but records of the incident were lost in the chaos of the civil war.
Such violent encounters may explain the wildman's reluctance to mix socially with the human species. Perhaps the wildman is a distant hominid cousin of homo sapiens from some lost prehistoric era who has already survived tough lessons. Should it surprise us that the wildman would go to extremes to avoid contact? Considering recent events - from the September 11 attacks to the bombing of innocent civilians in Afghanistan - how can we feign surprise.
Wed Jul 24
(KEYE radio San Antonio)
Two San Antonio men have been released on bond after charges accusing them of threatening to blow up San Antonio-area military bases were downgraded. 21-year-old Jadallah Abdalla and his 25-year-old cousin Ribhi Abdalla are now charged with misdemeanor making of a false report of a future crime. Prosecutors say the original felony charge of making a terroristic threat against a public entity will be dismissed. The two men and 20-year-old Makram Hijaz of Mesquite were arrested at a San Antonio strip club on July eighth. They had reportedly told a dancer that they planned to set off bombs at local military bases. The men denied the allegations. Authorities say the three men had no known connections to terrorist groups. Prosecutors say Hijaz won't be charged with a crime.
(Rense)
(ANANOVA)
19th July 2002
Scientists say a breakthrough in atom research could lead to lasers which can predict volcanic eruptions.
Nasa experts believe the same technology may also help map the ocean believed to be beneath Jupiter's moon Europa.
Researchers at Rice University in Houston manipulated the atoms to form tiny bundles of waves.
Atom waves normally spread out when they travel, but the wave bundles kept their shape and strength.
The team says the new waves could be used in advanced lasers with could 3D map underground features like water lakes and volcanic magma.
Dr Randall Hulet, who led the research, said: "We're getting our first glimpse of a wondrous and sometimes surprising set of quantum phenomena."
The project was funded by a Nasa grant. Dr Lute Maleki, of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said: "Eventually atom-wave lasers may enhance sensors for studying bodies in the solar system.
"With these advanced sensors, we'll be able to produce a 3D map of underground features. By measuring levels of underground magma, for example, scientists may be able to predict volcanic eruptions."
He added the same technology could be used on a spacecraft to map an ocean scientists believe is beneath Europa's icy crust, the Jupiter moon scientists believe could hold alien life.
17 July 02
(New Scientist)
The technique used to create the first synthetic polio virus, revealed last week, could be also used to recreate Ebola or the 1918 flu strain that killed up to 40 million people, experts have told New Scientist.
What is even more worrying is that there are easier ways of recreating microbes. You can simply add key genes to a close relative. The key in all cases is knowing the genetic sequence. That raises fundamental questions about the wisdom of publishing the genomes of deadly pathogens on the internet (see New Scientist magazine, 20 July, p 7).
To recreate polio, the team at Stony Brook University in New York bought bits of its sequence from companies that make any piece of DNA to order. At the moment, only short stretches of DNA can be custom-made, so the team had to assemble the genome, which is about 7500 base pairs long, by stitching together sequences of about 70 base pairs. When copies of the genome were made into RNA in a quick lab reaction and put into a vial full of cellular components that mimic a human cell, out came perfectly formed viral particles.
Dramatic as it sounds, this was no scientific tour de force. All the steps are routinely followed in thousands of labs worldwide. That means anyone armed with the knowledge of a virus's sequence, some science training and a few common tools could recreate the virus in a test tube. "What is shocking to people is that, suddenly, it's a reality," says Eckard Wimmer, leader of the team.
The report will not affect the World Health Organization's campaign to eradicate polio, officials said on Friday. "It's not an 'Oh my God' situation," adds Wimmer, who is a member of a WHO committee on the containment of polio samples held around the world. "They know that getting rid of the polio virus in all the freezers in the world will be too hard."
But it does mean that vaccine stocks will have to be maintained when vaccination ceases, he says. That's supposed to happen in 15 years, though this is already looking doubtful.
The real worry is that bioterrorists could use the method to recreate viruses such as Ebola and smallpox. Experts have been quick to point out that this would be much harder than making polio.
Its genome is relatively easy to assemble because it is so small. And the virus's way of hijacking cells' resources is also simple. An RNA copy of the genome is enough to set off the cascade of events leading to the production of viral particles. That is not how most viruses work: with Ebola or smallpox, for instance, replication requires key viral proteins as well as the genome.
But this obstacle has already been overcome. In January, scientists reported they had made Ebola using "reverse genetics". They took the virus's genome plus pieces of DNA coding for the key viral proteins and added them to cells.
Once made, those proteins kick-start the replication process. The team got their genome from the virus itself. But since the Ebola genome is only slightly larger than polio's, there is no reason why it too cannot be assembled from scratch.
Or take the 1918 influenza virus, fragments of which have been recovered from preserved tissue samples. The sequences of three out of eight gene segments have already been published, and two more have been sequenced and will probably be published this year, says Jeffery Taubenberger of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington DC.
It will take a couple of years to finish sequencing the remaining three, but after that anyone could use reverse genetics to bring it back, he says.
Recreating smallpox by painstakingly assembling its genome would be more difficult than polio or Ebola because its sequence, at around 185,000 base pairs, is much longer.
But it could be done, says Lev Sandakhchiev, a smallpox expert and head of Russia's Vector biodefence lab in Siberia. "I am sure scientists may do it sometime," he told New Scientist.
So how do you stop this happening? Right now, the companies making DNA molecules such as the ones used to recreate the polio virus do not check what their clients are ordering. "We don't care about that," says a technician at a company that ships DNA to more than 40 countries around the world, including some in the Middle East.
And even if all orders were monitored to make sure nobody is trying to make, say, smallpox, it would not be enough. Instead of trying to assemble a genome, you could simply take a closely related cousin and change the key portions of its sequence to those of smallpox.
Such cousins include camelpox and the easily obtained vaccinia virus. Bacteria resembling anthrax could also made this way. And if you are going to go to all this trouble, why not tweak the virus while you're at it? New Scientist magazine revealed last year (13 January 2001, p 4) that scientists experimenting with mousepox had created a far deadlier strain.
All this means that restricting access to dangerous pathogens and certain kinds of equipment will not stop determined bioterrorists. It does not even matter if a virus has been totally eradicated. All that is needed to bring it back is knowledge of its sequence and, in some cases, of what it needs to make more copies of itself.
(ChinaDaily.com)
7-20-2
Considering the recent rash of UFO sightings over China, it is worth noting the opinion of Sun Shili, a retired foreign ministry official who is now president of the Beijing UFO Research Society - he believes waixingren (extraterrestrials) are living among us.
Sun's first close encounter occurred in 1971, when he was sent to the remote countryside during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) to perform the grueling task of rice planting. One day while toiling in the field, his attention was diverted to a bright object in the sky, which rose and fell repeatedly. At first, Sun assumed the spectacle was some sort of monitoring device - a reasonable deduction considering the times - however years later, after reading foreign materials on UFO sightings, he knew he had experienced a close encounter.
Today, Sun does not rule out any possibility, including aliens living and working in Chinese society - a position often difficult to refute.
And Sun is not the only expert in the country taking these sightings seriously. According to the highly-accredited Shen Shituan, a real rocket scientist, president of Beijing Aerospace University and honorary director of the China UFO Research Association, every report of an alien encounter is worth investigating.
Shen doesn't dismiss any story as too absurd, including the claims of one worker that aliens entered his Beijing home while his wife and child were present, and whisked him 265 kilometres east and back in only a few hours.
But what do these aliens want? Why visit China? Are they interested in participating in the 2008 Olympics? Maybe they are interested in setting up a venue should Shanghai host the 2010 World Expo? Or perhaps, they harbour more sinister intentions. After all humans beings have been known to eat the flesh of intelligent life forms - whale blubber and dog meat. Need I say more?
Cook books aside, one media pundit has pointed to the interesting parallels between America's close encounters of the 1950s and the spate of recent visitations to China. In the 1950s, with the US set to dominate world affairs, observers from other worlds may have wanted to learn more about the growing superpower. Following this logic, China's extraordinary development could be attracting the attention of alien visitors. They may be looking to open a nightclub on Shanghai's Maoming Lu or an electronics factory in Guangdong. Perhaps, the Beijing worker was spirited away to act as some sort of investment adviser. Such possibilities cannot be ignored - foreign direct investment is growth capital no matter what the country or planet of origin.
Of course, all these speculations assume that aliens do exist and are observing the earth and its species. Yet, there are still those who reject this idea.
Such skeptics need to reflect on the ubiquitous child's ant farm. The minuscule creatures toil endlessly completely unaware that they are being watched and that, with a simple tap on the glass by the giant undetected observer, what would amount to half a life time's work for an ant could be destroyed. So, why do we think ourselves so superior?
And if these foreign visitors should show themselves it would add a whole new meaning to the term yangguizi (foreign devil). I guess as science fiction writers often predict, alien overlords would give mankind a reason to abandon racial and cultural prejudices - we would have someone new to hate.
July 22,
SYDNEY (Reuters) - A giant squid with tentacles measuring at least 15 metres (yards) has washed up on a southern Australian beach, exciting scientists who believe they may have stumbled across a new species.
The monster cephalopod washed up on Seven Mile Beach in the southern island state of Tasmania some time over the weekend. The squid, which weighs about 250 kg (550 pounds), was hauled by trailer to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery on Monday.
"It's definitely of the giant squid group, which is exciting enough," David Pemberton, the museum's senior zoology curator, told Australian Broadcasting Corp radio.
"But it does have some features about it which we're unsure about and we've called some specialists...to help decide, but it looks like it could be different," he said.
Pemberton said the most intriguing features were long, thin flaps of muscle attached to each of the eight tentacles, which measured between 15 metres and 18 metres. Giant squid also have two smaller feeding tentacles.
Only two other of the rare giant squid have been found in Tasmania, in 1986 and 1991. They usually live on the edge of the continental shelf off Australia's coast at depths of at least 500 metres.
Giant squid are found in all the oceans of the world and are believed to be the origin of many ancient maritime legends about mysterious creatures from the deep.
They have also featured in great works of fiction like Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" and Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea".
But Pemberton said there was no chance of the Tasmanian discovery ending up as a massive serving of calamari because its high ammonia content meant it would most likely taste like floor cleaner.
Expert: Giant Squid Not New Species
Tue Jul 23, 2:40 AM ET
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) - A giant squid found washed up on an Australian beach was not a new species as first thought but a damaged specimen, a scientist said Tuesday.
The 550-pound creature was found dead Saturday on a beach in Hobart in Tasmania state. It had lost its two tentacles but would have been about 50 feet long.
Experts at the Tasmanian Museum were studying long, thin flaps of muscle attached to each of its eight arms — like keels — that they believed were unique to the squid.
But Steve O'Shea, a squid specialist with New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, said all giant squid had the keels, which were used to help it swim.
"It definitely isn't a new species," said O'Shea, who had studied photos of the squid sent by Australian scientists. "The specimen has obviously been damaged ... and the membranes have come away from the arms."
Giant squid live on the edge of continental shelves, about 1,600 feet below the ocean's surface.
O'Shea said the squid found in Tasmania was a pregnant female that had washed up on the beach after mating. It had probably dropped its fertilized eggs in the water nearby.
Tasmanian Museum zoologist David Pemberton said the dead squid would be used for display.
Jul 27,2002
PERTH, Australia (AP) - Nearly 60 whales stranded on an Australian beach have died or were euthanized after failed attempts to return them to the water, officials said Saturday.
Local fisherman found the 58 false killer whales stranded late Friday on Tooregullup Beach, about 360 miles southeast of Perth, the Western Australia state capital, said Keiran McNamara, spokesman for the state's Conservation and Land Management department.
McNamara said the fishermen managed to return six of the whales to the water, but 44 of the animals had already died.
Attempts to rescue the remaining eight whales were hampered by the sighting of a white pointer shark in the area. The waters off the beach also are a breeding ground for bronze whaler sharks, McNamara said.
Wildlife officers and a veterinarian tried to stabilize the eight whales overnight and planned to rescue them in the morning. However, by dawn Saturday two of the animals had died, and the rest were weak and distressed and were killed to end their suffering.
An air survey of the area about 60 miles either side of the beach revealed no evidence of other whales stranded.
Whale beaching are largely a mystery to scientists, but some suspect there is a link between stranded whales and powerful sonar equipment used by navies that interferes with the whales guidance frequencies and disorients the animals.
False killer whales are 15 to 18 feet long and weigh about a ton. They are found worldwide in tropical and temperate waters.
8-1-2
CAPE COD, Massachusetts (ENS) - Forty-six pilot whales, stranded and rescued on Monday, again stranded themselves Tuesday in Wellfleet Bay a few miles from the site of their previous rescue.
This triggered a second day of response from the Cape Cod Stranding Network and its co-founding organization the International Fund for Animals Welfare (IFAW).
Despite the remote location, more than 100 volunteers worked for hours pouring water over the animals and covering them in wet towels to keep them cool during the heat. Even though 14 whales died at the scene, 31 were returned to the water after the tide had come in.
However, within hours of their release all 31 whales once again stranded in Wellfleet near the Massachusetts Audubon Sanctuary. After assessing the whales' condition, rescuers euthanized 25 and the other six died naturally.
"The mood is a mixture of sadness and success," said A.J. Cady, leader of the IFAW response team.
"We weren't able to return these animals to the water, but millions of people all over the world have reconnected to whales. It is important to remember we still have a chance to save thousands of these animals every year by working to stop continued commercial whaling in Japan and Norway," Cady said.
The Cape Cod Stranding Network today has returned to the scene to remove the whales and take them to a facility so they can perform necropsies.
These strandings were the most dramatic in recent years and the largest stranding of pilot whales on Cape Cod in more than a decade.
Pilot whales have extensive family structures and swim in groups, called pods, of five to 100 animals. They are still being hunted in some countries, and IFAW says little is known about the current total population of pilot whales worldwide.
(The Virginian-Pilot)
8-1-2
While a large group of pilot whales was heading for Cape Cod beaches to die Monday morning, another mass stranding of marine mammals had taken place on a remote island on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.
A mass stranding of 14 rough-toothed dolphins, a species rarely seen close to shore, occurred Sunday on the southern end of Wreck Island, an uninhabited nature preserve owned by the state.
The stranding was reported long after the animals had died, officials said. The Stranding Team from the Virginia Marine Science Museum, accompanied by a dolphin expert from the Smithsonian Institution, went to the barrier island opposite Oyster and examined the animals.
Rough-toothed dolphins get their name from ridges on their teeth. They have narrow heads and sloping foreheads, according to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.
Charles Potter, a Smithsonian marine mammal specialist, said Tuesday that there was no sign of trauma, such as net marks or boat strikes. Although the animals had not eaten recently, they were not emaciated.
``They might have just become trapped, or if one or two of them was ill, it might have been a follow-the-leader sort of thing to the beach,'' Potter said.
They were mostly juveniles, Potter said.
``You get the feeling that if they were older, they might not have ended up like this,'' he said.
Mark Swingle, director of the stranding team, said mass strandings are rare in Virginia. Three rough-toothed dolphins came ashore in Sandbridge in the late 1980s, he said.
They are deep-ocean animals, almost never found close to shore. ``Something must have been wrong,'' Swingle said.
Mon Jul 15,2002
(Associated Press)
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration cleared the way for Navy use of a powerful low-frequency sonar to identify enemy submarines, a move environmentalists say will lead to increased strandings and deaths of whales.
The Commerce Department ( news - web sites)'s National Marine Fisheries Service on Monday granted the Navy, which has spent dlrs 300 million developing the system, a five-year exemption from the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The exemption allows "harassment" of marine mammals by the Navy with its intense low-frequency sonar, called the Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System, or Surtass LFA.
The National Marine Fisheries Service said in a statement that, with proper monitoring and safeguards, "Marine mammals are unlikely to be injured by the sonar activities and ... the sonar will have no more than a negligible impact on marine mammal species and stocks."
The exemption is due to be reviewed on an annual basis.
The Navy plans to use the new sonar on two warships capable of sweeping 80 percent of the world's oceans. The original plan had called for four ships, but that was scaled back due to budget constraints.
The Navy says the sonar is important to national security because other nations, such as Russia, Germany and China, are developing super-quiet submarines to avoid traditional detection.
Whales are particularly susceptible to sonar interference because they rely on sound for communication, feeding, mating and migration. According to the Navy, each of the sonar's 18 speakers transmits signals as loud as 215 decibels, equivalent underwater to standing next to a twin-engine F-15 fighter jet at takeoff.
Environmentalists say, however, that with the convergence of sound waves from each of the speakers, the intense effects of the system would reach farther, as if the signals were 235 decibels.
"The Bush administration has issued a blank check for the global use of this system," said Michael Jasny, a senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Today's decision is far too broad to provide any meaningful protection for whales, dolphins and other marine life."
Fisheries officials outlined protective measures calling for Navy personnel to visually scan for marine mammals and sea turtles and to shut down the sonar whenever they are detected. Detection is expected to be almost 100 percent effective from a distance of 1.1 nautical miles (2 kilometers) away.
The Navy says it will restrict the sonar's routine use to at least 12 nautical miles (22 kilometers) away from coastline and outside biologically important areas.
The intense low-frequency sonar can travel several hundred miles (kilometers) and the transmissions are on the same frequency used for communication by many large whales, including humpbacks.
Some biologists believe whales are irritated by sounds louder than 110 decibels and that a whale's eardrums could explode at 180 decibels.
Environmentalists' fears are partly based on the Navy's deployment of a powerful mid-range sonar in March 2000 during a submarine detection exercise in the deep water canyons of the Bahamas.
At least 16 whales and two dolphins beached themselves on the islands of Abaco, Grand Bahama and North Eleuthera within hours. Eight whales died. Scientists found hemorrhaging around the brain and ear bones, injuries consistent with exposure to loud sounds.
Twelve Cuvier beaked whales beached themselves in Greece during NATO exercises in 1996 using the low-frequency sonar, but the whales decomposed before scientists could investigate.
Jul. 24, 2002
CAPE CANAVERAL - (AP) -- Vice President Dick Cheney made a short official trip to Florida on Tuesday, taking a ride on a Navy submarine to watch a rocket test, according to media reports.
Cheney, 61, arrived late Monday from Montgomery, Ala., and wasn't expected to make any public appearances, said Jennifer Millerwise, a spokeswoman for the vice president.
''He has a private schedule,'' Millerwise told WKMG-TV in Orlando. She said the visit did not involve any personal reasons such as campaign stops or fund-raisers.
Cheney left Port Canaveral at about 7:45 a.m. Tuesday on a nuclear submarine, the USS Wyoming, which is named after his home state. He was to watch the rocket launch, Florida Today reported in a story on its Web site.
Millerwise said more information would be available later Tuesday, when Cheney was expected to leave. His exact itinerary was not released for security reasons, the White House press office said.
Navy subs often use the range at Cape Canaveral to test their ballistic missile systems. The launches are typically not announced, and government officials are often aboard.
The trip came after sharp falls on the stock market and with increasing questions about Cheney's corporate past as the head of Halliburton Co., an energy company.
(ukdiving.co.uk-conservation forum)
Both American and former Soviet navies have had top secret projects using dolphins for covert military purposes.
A Soviet Special Forces diver is parachuted from extreme altitude into sensitive waters. His secret mission is to use highly sophisticated sonar equipment to locate a piece of valuable military hardware which has accidentally splashed down in the wrong place. In the event of meeting an enemy diver, this Hero of the People is equipped with a futuristic weapon which will inject his adversary with 3,000psi of carbon dioxide and literally blow him up.
Sounds like a scene from the latest re-make of Thunderball? Well, all this really happened, and it gets better ... or worse. The highly-trained operative was a dolphin.
The controversial use of dolphins and other sea mammals by the US Navy has been known about for a number of years, although the exact extent and nature of its activities is still shrouded in military secrecy. But details of the parallel Soviet developments in the field are only now starting to emerge, and they tell a fascinating, literally fantastic, Cold War story. They also beg the question as to whether the Americans have been doing the same things.
The idea of training airborne dolphins, for example, almost beggars belief. But conservation campaigners have seen the evidence and heard the tale first-hand from the former Soviet naval personnel who trained the animals to ‘jump’ from heights of up to three kilometres to avoid detection. Other dolphin ‘soldiers’ were pitched directly from helicopters hovering at 50 feet above the sea.
‘If I hadn’t seen the evidence myself I just wouldn’t have believed it,’ says Doug Cartlidge, a dolphin consultant and front-line campaigner with the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS). He visited the highly secret naval base at Sevastopol on the Black Sea, home to the once-proud Dolphin Division, to advise trainers on alternative uses for their expertise and on care of the animals, now that both are surplus to military requirement. While there he was shown around the unit’s museum and saw a full-size model of a dolphin wearing a parachute harness. He also saw official documents which described the programme.
‘I was amazed at how open and honest they were about the whole thing. But they are desperate for help,’ says Cartlidge, who once ran the dophinarium at Windsor Safari Park but has since campaigned for the release of captive dolphins. He was even taken on exercise with the few remaining military-trained animals.
The unit is now part of the independent Ukrainian navy, but there are no funds to run it. Indeed the whole future of the former Soviet Black Sea fleet, based at Sevastopol, remains mired in dispute with Russia. A special ship used by the unit to transport its animals to hot-spots, for example, was recently commandeered by the Russian navy. In the meantime the Dolphin Division has been selling off most of its animals to make ends meet. It has also gone into business with a private company to capture at least 32 more from the wild for training and eventual sale to dophinariums in Turkey, Malta and Israel at prices of up to £50,000 each. ‘The unit once had over 100 dolphins, but now it has only got about four left,’ says Cartlidge.
The most controversial of its past activities was the training of ‘killer dolphins’ for use against enemy divers. The US has always strenuously denied that its animals have been used in this way, and even some leading animal rights campaigners there have been sceptical about the possibility of doing it. A dolphin is so sensitive to distress signals from divers, they say, that even if it were possible to get an animal to unwittingly kill once, it would not do the same thing again. It would learn that its actions led to the diver’s distress, and would simply refuse to repeat them, making the whole operation impractical. The secrets of Sevastopol, however, have shown how the Soviets devised a way of doing just this. Does the US, after all, have a similar system?
A known use for dolphins by both superpowers was in guarding naval installations. The animals would be trained to patrol areas surrounding the base and to recognise intruders. If an intruder was located then they would ‘report back’ to their handlers, acting as an effective early warning system. The Soviets, however, gave this apparently benign activity a potentially fatal twist. Its ‘guards’ would carry a titanium clamp on a harness, and be trained to simply bump into any diver they found before returning to raise the alarm. The clamp was designed to attach itself to the diver when the dolphin bumped him in a way that it could not be removed, and in it was a device about the size of a table tennis ball capable of injecting the high-pressure charge of CO2 into the diver’s body. This was not done immediately, however, because the preference was to take any intruders alive. Only if a search failed to locate the enemy, or force him to the surface, was the device activated remotely.
‘As the commander there said to me: "That would bring him to the surface," ’ says Cartlidge, imitating a Ukrainian accent ‘It would, of course. But it would be with his guts spewing out both ends.’ Delightful. And friendly ‘Flipper’ would know nothing about it. Again, Doug was shown one of these devices and given a full explanation of its workings by those who used to deploy them.
More prosaically, it has previously been reported that Soviet dolphins were trained to carry out ‘kamikaze’ missions. Explosives were supposedly strapped to their backs and they were sent out to blow up enemy submarines. One estimate had it that a total of about 2,000 animals had died for the Motherland on these, and similar, operations.
It was, however, for the role of underwater guards that the Soviet dolphins were first recruited when the unit was established in 1966. That year the flagship of the Black Sea fleet mysteriously blew up and sank in Sevastopol harbour. Sabotage was suspected and the dolphins were trained to provide a novel extra layer of security. The unit’s officers and men are now proud holders of a 30-year service medal. Other uses for the animals were soon developed, including search and recovery work following the test firing of navy missiles and torpedoes. The military wanted the weapons back because of the sophisticated computer guidance systems on them, and often they could not be detected using conventional sonar equipment. A dolphin’s superior sonar, for instance, can penetrate up to a metre-and-a-half under the sea-bed, allowing the animals to find objects that had become embedded in mud or sand. ‘I was told that they had a very high level of reliability doing this,’ says Doug.
It seems that he is not the only one who finds all this fascinating. Last month the security system on WDCS’s computers detected an attempt to hack into them by the Pentagon. The US Navy had previously asked for an advance copy of a report then being prepared by the group into the whole trade in Black Sea bottlenose dolphins. The report uses some of Cartlidge’s research, and somebody at the Pentagon was apparently unwilling to wait for publication day. The incident is now the subject of an official investigation. The report, which finally came out in the middle of May, charts the fate of 43 animals exported from the area to foreign dolphinariums since 1990. Depressingly, it shows that up to 23 of them subsequently died, and WDCS is calling for an end to the trade.
The Americans’ own Marine Mammal Program, once a top-secret affair, has become more visible since the end of the Cold War. A flattering TV documentary has been made, showing the admitted and more acceptable aspects of its activity, but animal rights campaigners in the US are convinced that the full story has still not been told. One former civilian trainer from the unit has repeatedly claimed that ‘killer’ dolphins have been used by the US, in a wonderfully named ‘swimmer nullification program’, only to be met by official denials.
In 1994 the US Navy announced that it was to pension off up to 30 of its 100 dolphins as part of the process of military ‘right-sizing’, and that it was planning to transfer the animals to dolphinariums and leisure parks. Since then there has been a growing clamour for the animals to be released back into the wild and for the whole operation to be closed down. This being America, the issue has been the subject of numerous legal actions and it has even reached the floor of Congress. In the process quite a lot of information has come to light.
The US programme, known as NRAD, is based at San Diego, California, and was established in 1959 with a single dolphin for the purpose of conducting scientific research into sonar. The research has continued ever since, but by 1994 the unit had grown to 123 animals, including 20 sea lions and several beluga and false killer whales used for recovering test-fire hardware from depths of up to 500 feet. At its height, the programme was said to cost about $8m a year. The first recorded use of dolphins on guard duty was in Vietnam in 1970, when six animals were kept in nets suspended from pontoons to warn of approaching enemy divers. The only other ‘operational deployment’ that has been admitted involved another five dolphins used to protect US Navy ships in the Persian Gulf for eight months in 1987–1988 during the Iran-Iraq war. One died of a virus while on active service, but it has been said that having heard about the operation, Iranian patrol boats would machine-gun any dolphins they saw, fearing that they were ‘American’ animals on spying or mine-laying operations. The US Navy has denied that dolphins were ever used during the Gulf War, or that it ever trained ‘kamikaze’ dolphins to carry mines to enemy ships. But it does says the animals have been used for mine hunting.
In 1990, the use of dolphins to guard Trident submarine bases was brought to a halt after a successful legal challenge from a consortium of 14 animal rights groups. The move followed allegations of mistreatment of the animals by the US Navy, including starvation and punching that were used as aids to training. Official documents released at the time revealed that 13 had died in navy hands over the previous three years.
The most recent allegation of US military use came in February this year, after the mysterious deaths of 22 dolphins whose bodies were found washed up on the Mediterranean coastline of France. All had a neat, fist-sized hole on the underside of their necks. British dolphin expert Leo Sheridan, who lives in the area, put forward the theory that the animals had been part of the American naval operation sending warships to the Gulf at the time of threatened military action against Iraq, and had been killed after ‘deserting’.
He claimed that they were from a secret programme at the San Diego centre, called the Cetacean Intelligence Mission, which was launched in 1989 and involved dolphins being trained for guard duties at the Trident bases and with ships on active duty. They would be fitted with neck collars and small electrodes under the skin which would transmit stress signals back to base if they discovered an enemy diver. Later versions of the system, he said, had two-way communication enabling a control room to stimulate the dolphins to attack and force an intruding diver down to a dangerous depth. The harnesses also carried a small explosive charge on the underside of the neck which could be detonated if for some reason the dolphin decided it had had enough of navy life, as amorous males are prone to do. ‘They slipped away from their handlers,’ said Sheridan. ‘The deaths of these deserters came from the radio-controlled explosion of their signal collars so that no one could find out their missions.’
Who knows? Given the bizarre history of this form of underwater warfare anything seems possible. Perhaps it is time for an outbreak of perestroika from the Americans, so more of their secrets can finally be known. But then again, don’t hold your breath.
(RadioFreeEurope-Feb 2000)
When Ukraine recently sold a famous dolphinarium to Iran, the deal looked like a simple purchase of performing animals. But now some observers are taking a second look. The reason: the animals' trainer is one of the world's experts in using dolphins for military purposes. RFE/RL correspondents Askold Krushelnycky and Charles Recknagel report.
Prague, 15 March 2000 (RFE/RL) -- "If I were a sadist, I would stay in Sevastopol." With those parting words, one of the former Soviet Union's foremost trainers of dolphins left Ukraine's Crimea this month for Iran, taking with him the contents of Sevastopol's famous oceanarium -- "Akvamarin."
Packed up and heading to Iran -- for an as yet undisclosed sales price -- were three Black Sea dolphins, several seals, two walruses, six sea lions, a white whale, and three aquatic birds that happened to be visiting Akvamarin on moving day.
The trainer -- Boris Zhuryd -- told reporters his dolphinarium could no longer support itself in Ukraine's troubled economy. While children flocked to the park to see the sea mammals perform, their pennies could no longer cover the costs of feeding the artists. As Zhuryd said, each dolphin alone eats some $120 worth of fish a month and medicine costs thousands of dollars. If the animals remained in Sevastopol, he said, they would starve to death.
Zhuryd said he advertised throughout the world for a suitable new home for his charges and Iran came up with the best offer. He also said the Iranians had built an aquatic zoo to his specifications on the Persian Gulf and that he and his human team were accompanying the animals to train Iranians in the skills needed to look after them properly.
But as soon as the band of pinnepeds and their trainers departed Ukraine, alarm bells went off in Moscow.
The reason: Boris Zhuryd is no ordinary fish trainer, but one of the former Soviet Union's most famous marine biologists. And much of his research has been into how the ocean's most intelligent inhabitants can be trained for military purposes, including sabotaging ships and laying mines.
The Russian newspaper "Komsomolskaya Pravda" announced the news of the sale under the headline "Sevastopol Dolphin-Saboteurs Have Been Enlisted in the Iranian Army." The paper also charged: "Iran has bought our former secret weapon from Ukraine on the cheap."
The report has started a controversy over the real identity of the dolphins Iran purchased. But so far, determining whether the dolphins are trained soldiers is difficult.
There are some facts which are not in dispute. One is that from the 1960s onwards the Soviet military did carry out experiments and research designed to train dolphins to carry out an array of military tasks. Dolphins with explosives strapped to them were to destroy enemy vessels in suicide missions. Others were intended to work as underwater sentries and capture enemy frogmen, while others were trained for rescue work.
Zhuryd, who was a submariner before graduating from a military medical academy, was one of the pioneers in the field and worked many years at a naval oceanarium in Vladivostok, on the Pacific Ocean.
But as the Soviet Union disintegrated there was no cash to continue the research and many sea animals were "privatized" to earn their keep as entertainers. The Russian paper reports that when military financing ended, Zhuryd moved his remaining animals from Vladivostok to Sevastopol in 1991 and opened his sea park.
Officials in Ukraine who know the sea park well say its sole purpose was to entertain the public and allow Zhuryd to continue studying sea mammals for their own sake.
RFE/RL spoke with a Ukrainian naval spokesman in Crimea, Captain Mykola Savchenko, who said the dolphins are not secret military personnel.
"This is a civilian dolphinarium and had no military purpose. These are dolphins that put on a show, an attraction. There are no more naval dolphins and these were not trained in military tasks. They were for a circus. It's a circus on water."
Savchenko confirmed that Zhuryd had once worked for the military but had stopped 10 years ago. He also said that sea beasts used to be trained for military purposes at another Crimean sea park which is now owned by the Ukrainian navy. But the animals there have long since been transferred from military to civilian duty, helping sick children.
"At the moment they have no military tasks set by the Ministry of Defense. They are not carrying out military tasks and have been transferred to civilian duties. They work with sick children. A special center has been created there for children that are ill."
Whether or not the dolphins Iran bought have any military use may be impossible to determine, and the debate over their identity is likely to continue. But some scientists believe the whole affair may be of little importance anyway, because dolphins have generally proved to be poor soldiers.
Marine biologist Anatoly Bezushko, who works at the military oceanarium in Crimea, says that although dolphins are intelligent and are equipped with nature's most efficient sonar, the military researchers did not have great success with their watery recruits.
As he put it: "Kamikaze dolphins work in movies, but not in real life."
Bezushko said dolphins do not like the shallow, murky type of water where they would have to carry out attacks on moored enemy ships or against frogmen. Still, dolphins have had some success locating sunken ships or broken oil pipelines and have even saved downed airmen.
Jul 27, 2002
SAN DIEGO (AP) - Thousands of jumbo flying squid measuring up to 2 feet long have washed ashore at a La Jolla beach, surprising scientists and swimmers.
Workers on Friday removed 12 tons of dead and dying squid stranded at La Jolla Cove.
It may have been the largest local mass stranding in nearly 100 years, said Eric Hochberg, a scientist with the Santa Barbara Natural History Museum.
Hochberg believes the quivering, tentacled mollusks were stranded while chasing a school of grunion, a fish that spawns on the sand at high tide.
"They're just getting tumbled by the surf and washed ashore," he said.
"It was just unbelievable," said Bill Halsey, 26. "They made these strange noises like a dolphin or a seal as they were dying."
"The thing that weirds me out about the squid is that they have humanlike eyeballs," Clif Williams said.
The jumbo flying squid, known by their scientific name Dosidicus gigas, normally nestle in the eastern Pacific Ocean but they have been showing up on beaches from Orange County to the Mexican Border. Scientists suspect that they are coming north with El Nino warm water currents.
Aug 1, 2002
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Overfishing of shark prey in the Atlantic Ocean means sharks are coming closer to shore to find food and may mistake swimmers for a meal, according to new research by US oceanographers.
Stocks of a common shark prey known as menhaden fish are at critically low levels in the Atlantic, said Richard Condrey, associate professor of oceanography and coastal studies at Louisiana State University.
"That means sharks are getting more aggressive about finding alternative food sources, and are more likely to come closer to shore where they mistake swimmers for prey," said Condrey.
Condrey formed his hypothesis after he and LSU graduate student Kevin Barry studied the daily stomach contents of blacktip sharks off the Louisiana coast for three years to learn what and how often they ate.
The researchers found the rapid growth rate of blacktip sharks needed to be supported by a constant supply of food, primarily menhaden fish.
While the Gulf Coast had a large stock of menhaden with 50% of the adults reproducing under current fishing conditions, Condrey said the Atlantic menhaden population has dwindled to a 3% reproduction rate.
Menhaden, which are about 5 to 7 inches (13 cm to 18 cm) long and are similar to herring or anchovies, are a big component in chicken feed and have been at the center of an overfishing debate on the East Coast.
Condrey said shark attacks last summer in the Virginia Beach area may have been connected to the decline in menhaden.
"Virginia Beach is right next to what is considered a primary nursing ground for menhaden, which is Chesapeake Bay. The reduction in availability of menhaden for Atlantic sharks may have resulted in a change in their foraging strategy," he said.
"It occurred to me that we might be overlooking the obvious," Condrey said.
There were 76 unprovoked shark attacks worldwide last year, down from 85 attacks recorded the year before, according to the International Shark Attack File (ISAF), which is based at the University of Florida's Museum of Natural History.
The organization said the number of shark attacks in a given year is directly correlated to the amount of time that humans spend in the sea.
"As the world population continues its upsurge and interest in aquatic recreation concurrently rises, we realistically should expect increases in the number of shark attacks and other aquatic recreation-related injuries," ISAF said.
However, the group said there are several steps swimmers can take to minimize the chances of a shark attack. Their advice:
-- Stay in groups as sharks are more likely to attack a lone individual.
-- Avoid the water during darkness or twilight hours when sharks are most active.
-- Don't wear shiny jewelry because it reflects light and resembles the sheen of fish scales.
-- Avoid bright colored clothing as sharks see contrasting colors particularly well.
-- Be careful when swimming in the area between sandbars and steep drop-offs, because they are favorite hangouts for sharks.
Woody Norris wants to tell you something—and he can put the words inside your head from 100 yards away. Is his invention sound, or just a pipe dream?
Aug.5 issue — In this post-Enron era, there aren’t too many CEOs who will cheerfully volunteer to a reporter, “My company’s never made a dime!” But the American Technology Corp.’s Elwood (Woody) Norris isn’t your typical CEO.
BLESSED WITH THE bone-crunching handshake of a used-car salesman, the R-rated vocabulary of a drill sergeant and the potential innovative genius of a Thomas Edison (Norris’s previous claim to fame was creating a forerunner to the sonogram), Norris has an enthusiasm for his latest contraption that’s infectious.
He’s standing in a corner of his cluttered San Diego office, holding a gizmo that looks something like a retro-futuristic waffle iron with a portable CD player Velcroed to its back. “Are you ready?” he asks, then points his invention directly at the head of someone who’s just entered the room 10 feet away. “Now, can you hear it? Can you hear it? Isn’t that unbelievable?” What the person across the room hears is, well, unbelievable: all of a sudden, the sound of a waterfall has materialized in his head. And, it turns out, no one else in the room can hear it but him. It’s as if the sound is coming out of thin air. As Keanu Reeves said in “The Matrix”: whoa.
After more than a decade of trial and error and about $30 million in R&D, the 63-year-old Norris may be on the verge of changing the world as we hear it—and making some major money to boot. The Hyper-Sonic Sound System (HSS), as he calls it, can take an audio signal from virtually any source—home stereo, TV, computer, microphone, etc.—and convert it to an ultrasonic frequency that can be directed like a beam of light toward a target up to 100 yards away. Picture a car where parents can listen to the Eagles while their kids wild out to Eminem in the back seat. This is big audio dynamite—possibly the biggest breakthrough since modern speakers were conceived 77 years ago—and Norris knows it. “It’s rare when you have a Thomas Edison who actually gets fame and success in his own lifetime,” he says with customary modesty. “This is a big, honkin’ hit.”
What’s the secret? In the range that human beings can hear, sound scatters in all directions, like the light from an open flame. Traditional speakers work by moving air; they rapidly vibrate the flexible cones in your speakers to form sound waves. But no single speaker can accurately reproduce the —full range of audible sound (approximately 20Hz to 20,000Hz), so loudspeakers rely on separate units—large woofers for low frequencies, small tweeters for high frequencies and midrange speakers for the middle of the audio spectrum—to re-create the whole range of sound. That works fairly well, but it also has some drawbacks, most notably distortion from the multiple sound fields that become increasingly apparent as you pump up the volume.
Instead of using a vibrating membrane like traditional speakers, the HSS technology electronically converts audible tones into a pair of ultrasonic waves at frequencies far beyond human hearing. But when the ultrasonic waves interact after being processed by Norris’s creation, they reproduce the original audible frequency. Even better, since the audible frequency is being carried by those ultrasonic signals, it’s highly directional. That means you can effectively “shine” a spot of sound wherever you want it. What Norris has done over 10 years is to figure out a relatively inexpensive way to combine the two ultrasonic signals to produce the desired sound. Two weeks ago ATC start- ed limited production, and the company’s small lab is already strewn with the devices. Prices are expected to range from $600 to $900 per unit, depending on size.
It’s easy to see how HSS could make some magic. Imagine a home theater system optimized not for your entire living room but for the club chair that you kick back in. Or a giant nightclub with several different music areas on the dance floor, none of them overlapping. But Norris has $30 million in costs to recoup, and HSS isn’t yet perfected for the lower tones prevalent in music. So some of the cooler stuff will have to wait while he hooks up with retailers and the U.S. military for “Minority Report”-style applications: vending machines that call out to you as you walk by; sonic “guns” that can incapacitate the enemy with 150 decibels of sound without deafening the good guys. One person who came away impressed is U.S. Marine Capt. Todd Gillingham, after a recent demonstration for more than 40 military and law-enforcement representatives. “For instance, it can send the tape-recorded sound of a tank or explosion to another area to throw the enemy off,” he says. “I don’t know about us acquiring this technology in any large quantities at this point, but I do think it has great potential.”
Elwood (Woody) Norris may be on the verge of changing the world as we hear it
That’s music to the longtime inventor’s ears. After Norris sold his first patent for $330,000 in the early ’60s, he quit college and never looked back. His subsequent efforts range from an all-in-one earpiece-microphone for hands-free mobile-phone use (sold to another company for $1.5 million), the world’s smallest AM-FM radio (a modest success) and a personal aviation device (a James Bond-like mini-helicopter that has gotten off the ground, but has yet to truly take off). All this and more can be perused at woodynorris.com, his hilariously self-promotional Web site, where every article ever written about him or his products—from publications like Popular Mechanics and BusinessWeek to Playboy and Gallery—has been carefully scanned and posted. And Norris’s outsize dreams extend to Hollywood; he likes to show off his sci-fi screenplay about—surprise—the world’s greatest physicist.
Not everyone is a believer in the San Diego inventor. A local newspaper characterized him as “a dream spinner who regularly disappointed Wall Street with glowing predictions for various electronic products that subsequently flopped.” Floyd Toole, vice president of acoustical engineering at the high-fidelity audio company Harman International, met with Norris several years ago and remains skeptical. “It’s a party trick,” says Toole about HSS. “We don’t believe it represents a paradigm shift in mass-market audio.” Perhaps Norris’s harshest critic is former MIT Media Lab researcher Joseph Pompei, who’s developed a rival product under the name Audio Spotlight (automaker DaimlerChrysler is evaluating it in some concept cars) and accuses Norris of everything from taking credit for the work of others to dubious business practices, all of which Norris denies. “For over a decade, [Norris has] promoted impressive-sounding technology of which he has very little evidence of real understanding,” says Pompei. Norris shoots back: “His unit is where we were five years ago.”
“You know Panasonic’s slogan ‘Just slightly ahead of our time’?” Norris asks. “Everything I’ve ever invented has been about 10 years ahead of its time. I know the reputation I have in San Diego: that I take too long on these things, that nothing I’ve invented has ever made money. Well, this will be my vindication.” The world will be watching—and listening.
LONDON, July 17 (Reuters) - A volcanic super-eruption could pose twice as much of a threat to civilisation as a collision with an asteroid or comet.
Every 100,000 years, a cosmic body with a diameter of more than one kilometre (0.6 miles) slams into the Earth, but Michael Rampino, of New York University, warned that a massive volcanic eruption capable of causing as much devastation occurs once every 50,000 years.
"Volcanoes in Yellowstone Park and Long Valley in California have erupted three times in the past two million years, each time coating the whole of the U.S. with ash," New Scientist magazine said on Wednesday.
"But the biggest and most recent super-eruption happened at Toba, on the island of Sumatra, 73,000 years ago."
According to Rampino's research, Toba blasted a crater 100 km long and sent three billion tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere and a dense volcanic cloud around the globe.
"He also suspects that Toba's super-eruption was responsible for the population crash of 70,000 years ago, when the number of people fell to no more than 10,000," the magazine added.
Ash and aerosols from super-eruptions block the sun and send global temperatures plummeting. Another Toba super-eruption could push temperatures down and cause regional cooling, according to Rampino
"That's going to kill off most of the above-ground vegetation in Africa," he said, adding global vegetation could be reduced by 25 percent.
Hotspot Generated 142 Huge Eruptions, 40 Percent More Than Previously Known
(UnivofUtah)
July 15, 2002 -- The Yellowstone hotspot, which powers Yellowstone National Park's geysers and hot springs, produced 142 huge volcanic eruptions during the last 16.5 million years -- far more than the 100 previously known blasts, University of Utah geologists found.
The cataclysmic explosions -- known as "caldera eruptions" -- typically generated 250 to 600 times as much volcanic ash as the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state, and some were up to 2,500 times larger, covering as much as half the continental United States with inches to feet of volcanic ash.
While geologists Michael Perkins and Barbara Nash identified many more of these catastrophic eruptions than had been known previously, they also showed the rate of such eruptions has slowed: about 32 giant eruptions per million years before 15.2 million years ago, slowing to 10 to 20 huge eruptions per million years between 15.2 million and 8.5 million years ago, and then only 2.5 cataclysmic blasts per million years during the past 8.5 million years.
Caldera eruptions have that name because they create giant craters known as calderas that measure tens of miles wide. They are the most devastating but most rare type of eruption.
The Yellowstone hotspot -- which many scientists believe is a plume-like zone of hot and molten rising from at least 125 miles beneath Earth's surface -- produced its three most recent caldera eruptions at or near the present site of Yellowstone National Park 2 million, 1.3 million and 642,000 years ago. The other, earlier eruptions happened as western North America drifted southwest over the hotspot during the past 16.5 million years, creating a chain of volcanic fields or centers extending from the Oregon-Nevada-Idaho border northeast across southern Idaho toward Yellowstone's present location in Wyoming.
Researchers previously identified about 100 caldera eruptions, including the three most recent ones at Yellowstone. But in a study of distinct volcanic ash layers deposited by each eruption, Perkins and Nash showed there were at least 142 catastrophic caldera eruptions during the past 16.5 million years, and at least four more in the preceding 500,000 years.
"The most active source of volcanism in the continental United States -- the Yellowstone hotspot -- was much more active and produced much greater volumes of volcanic material in the last 16 million years than we had thought as it passed from Oregon across Idaho to its present site at Yellowstone National Park," Nash says.
The study was published in the March 2002 issue of Geological Society of America Bulletin.
Only the hotspot's three most recent caldera eruptions originated from the hotspot's current location beneath Yellowstone National Park. The 45-by-30-mile-wide Yellowstone caldera, formed by the caldera explosion 642,000 years ago, is the "new kid on the block," Nash says. To understand the Yellowstone hotspot's long-term behavior, Perkins and Nash looked for clues left by the older eruptions from now-inactive calderas.
Nash, a volcanologist, compares the hotspot phenomenon with moving hand over a candle. "If you move your hand slowly over the flame in one direction, the flame will leave a burn track that extends in the opposite direction along your hand."
As the hotspot location moved, new calderas were born, matured, and died. The 142 eruptions were clustered in six or seven volcanic fields or "centers" extending from the Oregon-Idaho-Nevada border northeast to Yellowstone. There were multiple eruptions from one or more calderas at each field.
Detecting the locations of these ancient cataclysmic eruptions is difficult because as Earth's crust drifted over the hotspot, smaller "post-caldera" eruptions covered or destroyed the older volcanic centers. However, each huge caldera eruption left behind widespread ash deposits, which researchers have found from the Pacific seafloor off the California coast to the high plains of Nebraska and south to the Gulf of Mexico.
Perkins and Nash spent a decade finding these ash fall tuffs -- rock beds formed as volcanic ash settled to the ground and cooled -- studying their chemistry and determining a chronology of the eruptions that produced them. The age and chemical composition link each tuff to a specific eruption and to one of the six or seven volcanic centers along the hotspot track.
Scientists date volcanic ashes using the radioactive decay of potassium-40 to argon-40 in a potassium mineral called sanidine. Because argon is a gas, researchers assume that no argon was present in the mineral when it was erupted. Argon accumulates in the mineral's crystal lattice as potassium decays. Thus the amount of argon reveals the age of the ash and the date of the eruption that produced it. The age of undated ashes can be estimated from the ages of ash layers above and below them.
The hotspot's history is marked not only by a slowdown in how often big eruptions occur, but by distinct changes in the compositions and temperatures of the magma, or molten rock, that erupted. Based on such changes, Perkins and Nash classify the hotspot's activity into three stages of volcanic activity or "magmatism" in the past 16.5 million years. Nash also hypothesizes about an earlier period based on ash fall tuffs from four big eruptions not included in the count of 142 because of their different chemical composition. She believes there may have been even more eruptions from this earlier stage some 17 million years ago.
Magma temperatures from millions of years ago can be deduced using mineral geothermometers. Some minerals have chemical compositions that vary depending on the temperature at which they crystallize from molten to solid rock. So the chemical composition of crystals in the ash indicates the temperature of the magma when it erupted and started to cool.
Not only have caldera eruptions become less frequent over time, the erupting magma has also become cooler, decreasing from more than 1830 degrees Fahrenheit about 16 million years ago to as little as 1470 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 7.5 million years.
Yellowstone hotspot caldera eruptions are believed to stem from molten basalt rising from depth, and then melting and mixing with the overlying granitic crust, which in turn erupts. Nash believes the decrease in magma temperatures over time means that less high-temperature basalt is incorporated in the melting process.
The three eruptions at Yellowstone during the past 2 million years were, respectively, 2,500, 280, and 1,000 times larger than the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. Some researchers speculate the earlier caldera eruptions were "a bunch of little guys," but Nash says some of their ash deposits were just as thick and widespread, "so we conclude they were large too."
Nash says there are a few possible explanations for why caldera eruptions have become less frequent. First, the hotspot's heat source within the Earth could be cooling down. Second, as North America drifts over the hotspot, the crustal rock above the hotspot may be thicker, cooler and harder to melt, although Nash says there is no persuasive evidence of that.
A third possibility, which Nash believes is most likely, links the hotspot's behavior to two kinds of motion of the overlying rock: the southwest movement of the North American plate of Earth's crust, and the east-west stretching apart of the crust in the western United States during the past 17 million years.
Hotspot volcanism occurs when molten basalt rises from Earth's mantle and melts granite in the crust, feeding caldera eruptions. If the crust remained still instead of moving, caldera eruptions would continue until the basalt ran out of fresh material to melt. On the other hand, if North America moved too quickly over the hotspot, then the hotspot wouldn't have time to melt the overlying crust and there would be no eruptions. Between these two extremes is an optimum plate speed that allows the maximum amount of crustal melt to be produced, resulting in more frequent and larger eruptions.
North America drifts southwest at a constant rate of almost 14 miles per million years. But the east-west stretching of Earth's crust in the West has slowed in the past 8.5 million years. The net effect, says Nash, is that crustal rock is now moving over the hotspot more slowly than it did prior to 8 million years ago, so crustal rock melts less efficiently and big eruptions are becoming less frequent.
"There is no reason to expect any sudden change" in the current rate, which has produced three caldera eruptions in the past 2 million years, she says. "I anticipate there will be future large-scale eruptions at Yellowstone, but not in my lifetime or not in the foreseeable future. That doesn't mean there couldn't be smaller eruptions as there have been during the last 600,000 years -- lava flows, small eruptions, and steam events."
Jul 26, 2002
NAIROBI (Reuters) - A volcano spurting lava 100 meters (300 feet) into the air has erupted spectacularly near the eastern Congolese town of Goma, just months after it was devastated by another volcano.
But despite spewing torrents of molten rock for miles through the jungle, experts said they were more concerned by fresh signs that the volcano that razed much of Goma in January could strike again.
"It was something like an explosion of the sun," said Dario Tedesco, a volcano consultant to the United Nations . "It was really spectacular, it was glowing everywhere, the sky was red, you could see the lava coming up from the fissure."
The Nyamuragira volcano, lying some 40 km (25 miles) from Goma, puffed a white ash cloud from its 3,050-meter (10,010 foot) summit that could damage crops, but aid workers said the lava posed scant risk to humans in the thinly-populated area.
Scientists said they were focusing more on the threat posed by the Nyiragongo volcano, which lies closer to Goma, saying a rising lake of red-lava could overflow and send a fresh avalanche of volcanic debris toward the town.
Nyiragongo razed much of Goma in January in Africa's most destructive volcanic eruption for 25 years. Tens of thousands of people were forced to flee into neighboring Rwanda, adding to the woes of a region beset by civil war and the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide in 1994.
Vulcanologists said the pool of molten rock bubbling in a 1.2-km (1,200-yard) wide crater at the top of Nyiragongo had risen rapidly in the last two weeks, but it was difficult to assess the risk in the notoriously unpredictable mountain.
"There is a possibility that there will be another eruption in Nyiragongo if that lava lake really increases its level and volume inside the crater," Tedesco said.
In 1977, scores of people were killed when a sea of lava burst through fissures in Nyiragongo's flanks at 60 km an hour (nearly 40 mph), which experts said was the fastest lave flow on record.
ASH THREAT
Aid workers said they feared the cloud of dust and ash pouring out of Nyamuragira could damage crops over a wide area or cause eye problems among residents around the base.
Nyamuragira, regarded by experts as one of Africa's most active volcanoes, erupted in a similar way last year between February 6 and March 10.
Aid workers said they had received no reports of casualties from the two lava flows heading north and south from the volcano, but said they had prepared emergency items such as makeshift shelters in case the volcanic activity worsened.
"There's no problem because all the lava flows are in the park and nobody lives there...so there's no humanitarian concern," Jean-Charles Dupin, U.N. humanitarian coordinator in eastern Congo, told Reuters.
Residents in Goma, a town that is no stranger to war and disaster, were typically stoical.
"There's no signs of panic," said Aloys Badege, a local journalist with Radio Rwanda. "It's just erupting toward the forest. It's not near Goma."
Scientists say that Nyamuragira, which has a giant crater at its peak with 100-meter (300-foot) high walls, has erupted about 27 times in the last century.
It lies in territory controlled by the Rwandan-backed rebels of the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), who have been at war for four years with the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo in Kinshasa.
(DISCOVERY magazine)
Dec 1998
When you look at genes you find that people all over the world are amazingly similar. Some anthropologists believe that this genetic homogeneity is the result of a "population bottleneck"--that at some time in the past our ancestors went through an event that greatly reduced our numbers and thus our genetic variation.
Based on estimates of mutation rates, Penn State geneticist Henry Harpending says the bottleneck happened sometime after modern humans left Africa 100,000 years ago and before a population increase spurred by the advent of better stone tools around 50,000 years ago. Now archeologist Stan Ambrose of the University of Illinois has linked Harpending's theory with geologic evidence to explain what caused the bottleneck--a giant volcanic eruption.
From geologist Michael Rampino of New York University, Ambrose learned that 71,000 years ago Mount Toba in Sumatra blew 800 cubic kilometers of ash into the air--4,000 times as much as Mount St. Helens--the largest volcanic eruption in more than 400 million years. Toba buried most of India under ash and must have darkened skies over a third of the hemisphere for weeks.
Rampino believes that a six-year global volcanic winter ensued, caused by light-reflecting sulfur particles lingering in the atmosphere. Average summer temperatures dropped by 21 degrees at high latitudes, and 75 percent of the Northern Hemisphere's plants may have died. But the worst was yet to come. "Right at the end of those six years, temperatures bottomed out," says Ambrose. A thousand-year ice age began, he says, caused perhaps by an increasing amount of snow that failed to melt over the summer. This snow cover would have reflected more sunlight off Earth's surface, making the world still colder. The effect on humans, who had been enjoying a relatively warm period, must have been devastating. "After 60,000 years of basking," says Ambrose, "they were suddenly thrown into the freezer."
Perhaps only a few thousand people, living in isolated pockets in Africa, Europe, and Asia, survived. When the climate warmed again, about 70,000 years ago, these isolated groups began to grow. Ambrose and Harpending think today's races are but a small sample of the human diversity that once existed. "Imagine the volcanic winter as a dirty, fractured prism," says Ambrose. "It's absorbing some wavelengths, or some genes, and others get through. Since the prism is dirty, a lot of the diversity gets absorbed. No one comes out with all the original colors."
The "Tunguska event" in which a fragment of comet exploded over Siberia and devastated a wide area in June 1908 may have been caused by a fragment of leftover material from an interplanetary stream which has already destroyed civilizations twice. If this hypothesis is correct, the world is in for another bout of fire from the heavens in about a thousand years time.
It sounds like science fiction, or the work of the same kind of crank that predicts the end of the world will occur when the pieces of comet Shoemaker-Levy strike Jupiter in July. But these views were aired at a specialist meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in London in March. They show that catastrophe is very much back on the agenda of serious science.
Interest in the effects of impacts from meteorites and comets striking the Earth has been high ever since the early 1980s, when it was suggested that a very large impact of this kind contributed to the death of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago. This is now well established, and the site of the impact has been identified in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. Clearly, such large impacts are extremely rare. But what are the chances of a lesser catastrophe occurring? Astronomers know that there are objects like very large cometary nuclei, lumps of icy matter more than 200 km across, in the outer part of the Solar System. One example is the object Chiron, orbiting beyond Jupiter. It seems likely that one comet in a thousand is such a giant, and that most of the mass of the cloud of comets that surrounds the Solar System is in the form of giants.
Mark Bailey, of Liverpool's John Moores University, has calculated how gravitational disturbances, chiefly caused by Jupiter and Saturn, will perturb such objects so that about once in every 200 000 years a giant falls in to the inner part of the Solar System. Computer simulations show that the orbits the comets end up in are not stable, but are influenced by chaotic dynamics. They must, however, end up in a Sun-grazing orbit, and get broken up into pieces by the Sun in the same way that Shoemaker-Levy has been broken into pieces by Jupiter. The result is a stream of debris orbiting round the Sun and crossing the orbit of the Earth.
When the Earth passes through such a stream of material, it will collect a rain of fine dust over a timescale of thousands of years, until this fine material is blown away by the solar wind. As the Earth sweeps up about 5700 million tonnes of dust each year, but dust steadily settles out of the atmosphere, the resulting "load" of material in the air will average out at about a thousand billion kilograms. Bill Napier, of the University of Oxford, pointed out that this is sufficient to reduce surface temperatures (by acting as a sunshield) by 3-5 degrees Kelvin, perhaps triggering an Ice Age.
But this is not the only problem. Mixed in with the dust stream, and still there when all the fine dust has blown away, there will be fragments of comet ranging from a few centimeters to a few tens of kilometers across. The impact that wiped out the dinosaurs was caused by an object only about 10 km in diameter, but the chances of a direct hit by such a large fragment are less than the chances of being hit by smaller fragments.
Victor Clube, also of the University of Oxford, argued that we are living in the aftermath of the breakup of a giant comet in the inner Solar System. He suggests that this event may have been associated with the most recent Ice Age, which began about 100 000 years ago. According to Clube, it produced a stream of Sun-orbiting material linked with the Taurid meteor stream, which peaks around 30 June in daylight hours but is visible as "shooting stars" in the night skies of November.
Clube calculates that the Earth passes through the thickest part of this belt of debris every 3000 years, and that this happened most recently in 500 AD and before that in 2500 BC. On both occasions, Tunguska-like events would have been common, with one impact in each region the size of England over a period of a hundred years or so. Could this explain the collapse of past civilizations, the "Dark Ages" of Europe, and recurring legends about fire from the skies? Clube and his colleagues have been promoting this idea for ten years, but now they have a solid weight of scientific evidence to support their case. The Tunguska event itself came at just the right time of year to fit the pattern, as an isolated straggler in the stream, but the next main date to watch out for is the year 3000, give or take 200 years. For once, the scientists involved are happy that they will not be here to test their prediction.
(psychologyonline)
Feb 1, 2002
A gene variant implicated in ADHD is a lot younger, evolutionarily speaking, than other variants of the same gene, a new study suggests.
Having attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is not usually thought of as providing an advantage in our society. But suppose some of the characteristics of ADHD were found in human ancestors. Could hyperactivity or shifting attention help a hunter survive in a world of mastodons and saber-tooth tigers?
This scenario is more than sheer fantasy, thanks to new findings from Robert Moyzis, Ph.D., a professor of biological chemistry at the University of California at Irvine, and his colleagues. The findings are reported in the January 8 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the past several years, evidence has been mounting that a deficiency in the neurotransmitter dopamine may underlie ADHD (Psychiatric News, March 16, 2001). There has also been reason to believe that a particular variant of a gene called the DRD4 gene, which makes brain receptors for dopamine, may play a causal role in ADHD. For instance, about half of all youngsters with ADHD have this particular gene variant. Moyzis and his coworkers wanted to find out when this particular gene version might have arrived in the human gene pool compared with other variants of the same gene.
They analyzed genetic material from 600 individuals throughout the world for the presence of the DRD4 gene. They found 56 different variations of the gene, including the one implicated in ADHD. They then determined, via gene-recombination techniques, that the gene version implicated in ADHD is probably much younger from an evolutionary viewpoint than the other variants are. That is, they hypothesized that it probably arose as a spontaneous mutation as recently as 10,000 to 40,000 years ago.
When this version popped up, they suspected, it might have provided those humans possessing it with some evolutionary advantage over other humans who did not have it—say, being able to spring quickly to spear a mastodon. After all, around the time that the gene variant putatively made its debut, mastodons were roaming North America.
The study by Moyzis and his team was financed by grants from the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institute of Mental Health.
December 7, 1999
(NYT)
Two genetic surveys of human populations bring new evidence to bear on a pivotal event in prehistory, the first dispersal of modern humans from Africa.
One study, based on analysis of people in East Africa and India, suggests that the first emigration of modern humans was eastward, toward Asia, and not northward through the eastern Mediterranean.
A second, drawing on DNA data from 50 ethnic groups around the world, concludes that the ancestral population from which the first emigrants came may have numbered as few as 2,000 people.
Both studies suggest that the most recent common ancestor of the emigrants lived 60,000 to 40,000 years ago.
Previous genetic studies have suggested 100,000 years or so for the most recent common ancestor, and about 10,000 for the ancestral population size.
The younger date of about 50,000 years seems to tally much better with an emerging synthesis of the archaeological data relating to human origins.
"A combination of fossil and genetic evidence locates the ancestral population in Africa, and archaeological discoveries imply an initial dispersal out of Africa about 50 ky years ago," Dr. Richard G. Klein of Stanford University writes in the latest edition of his book "The Human Career." The term 50 ky means 50,000 years ago.
Dr. Klein believes an important distinction can be discerned in the archaeological record between what he calls anatomically modern humans and behaviorally modern humans. Though the fossil remains of each type look the same, a more advanced set of stone tools appears with human remains dating back to 50,000 years or so.
Modern human sites older than this have a more primitive set of stone implements, similar to those used by archaic humans like the Neanderthals.
Dr. Klein and others believe that some major genetically based neurological change, like the development of language, occurred about 50,000 years ago. This transformation, he infers, was the spur that led behaviorally modern humans to innovate their characteristic suite of more advanced stone implements, develop the first forms of art and spread throughout the world.
Remains of modern humans dating to about 100,000 years ago have been found at a well-known archaeological site called Skhul in Israel. The finding has been interpreted as evidence of the first human migration out of Africa, and it fit with the old genetic data of a modern human origin.
But the Neanderthals occupied Europe and the eastern coast of the Mediterranean at that time, and they or the cold climate might have blocked any further advance in that direction.
Dr. Klein's data suggest that the humans of 100,000 years ago, anatomically modern but not like modern people in their behavior, did not spread out of Africa at that time.
A new genetic study, by Dr. A. Silvana Santachiara-Benerecetti of the University of Pavia in Italy and colleagues, confirms the view that the first dispersal of modern humans was not until about 50,000 years ago, and that the direction was eastward toward Asia.
The study, published in Nature Genetics last week, is based on mitochondrial DNA, the genetic material of the small energy-producing organelles inside every cell. Because mitochondria are inherited with the egg, from the mother alone, their DNA escapes the shuffling that occurs in sexual reproduction, and any changes reflect the occasional random mutation in the DNA.
On the basis of these mutations, biologists can construct a family tree of mitochondrial lineages and, by estimating the mutation rate, figure out the time that has elapsed since the mutation at the root of the tree.
Dr. Santachiara-Benerecetti and her colleagues studied a particular pattern of mitochondrial DNA that is well known in India. They found an earlier form of the pattern among people in Ethiopia, suggesting that East Africa was its place of origin.
Signs of the pattern also exist among many people in Saudi Arabia, but not among inhabitants of the eastern Mediterranean.
This provides the first genetic evidence, the Italian biologists say, that the human migration route out of Africa was from eastern Africa along the coast toward Southeast Asia and Australia.
Another new genetic study, by Dr. Marcus Feldman of Stanford University and others, makes an interesting counterpart to the Italian study because it is based on a different kind of DNA but reaches similar conclusions.
Dr. Feldman and his colleagues looked at segments of the Y chromosome, another part of the human genome that escapes the usual shuffling of the reproductive process. Studying Y chromosomes from around the world, they concluded that the most recent common ancestor of all these Y's was carried by a man who lived only 40,000 years or so ago.
Even though all Y chromosomes can be traced back to a single individual, this does not mean a single Adam was the species' only male representative. The founding population from which the world's present population is derived consisted of about 2,000 individuals, according to the new data, Dr. Feldman said.
One Y chromosome in such a population will eventually dominate in the descendants after all the other Y lineages are brought to a halt, whether because their owners have no children or beget only daughters.
The 40,000-year date, which has a large range of uncertainty, is much more recent than others, in part because the earlier estimates were forced to assume, quite unrealistically, that the size of the human population remained constant throughout prehistory. Dr. Feldman assumed an exponentially expanding population, which yields a more recent date of origin. His study is published in the current issue of the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.
The two new studies represent a convergence of the genetic and archaeological data bearing on modern human origins, said Dr. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a leading population geneticist at Stanford University, who was not an author of either study. The two independent lines of evidence support the idea that behaviorally modern humans arose in Africa around 50,000 years ago from their anatomically modern forebears.
These behaviorally modern humans "had three big improvements in culture -- language, boats or rafts, and Aurignacian technology," Dr. Cavalli-Sforza said, referring to the more sophisticated stone implements.
Shortly after they had acquired these innovations, they burst forth to inhabit the rest of the globe. The Neanderthals who may have blocked the human advance out of Africa 100,000 years ago were now rapidly displaced in Europe, presumably by behaviorally modern people invading Europe from Asia. There are convincing dates, Dr. Cavalli-Sforza said, that humans reached Europe by 40,000 years ago and Oceania and New Guinea by 40,000 to 50,000 years ago.
Although no boats from this period have yet been recovered, such craft would have been essential transport for the early people who reached Australia, and Dr. Cavalli-Sforza said he was convinced that "the people who went from Africa to Asia knew how to use some simple navigational means."
February 2 2000
(NYT)
In the beginning, there was one people, perhaps no more than 2,000 strong, who had acquired an amazing gift, the faculty for language.
Their numbers grew, and from their cradle in the northeast of Africa, they spread far and wide throughout the continent. One small band, expert boat-makers, sailed to Asia, where some of their descendants turned westward, ousting the Neanderthal people of Europe. Others travelled east toward Siberia and the Americas.
These epic explorations began 50,000 years ago and by the time the whole world was occupied, the one people had become many. Differing in creed, culture and even appearance, they no longer recognized one another as the children of one family. Speaking 5,000 languages, they had long forgotten the ancient mother tongue that once united them.
So might read one possible account of human origins as implied by new evidence from a veteran linguistics researcher. But the implication that all languages are branches of a single tree is a subject on which linguists overall appear strangely tongue-tied.
Many deride attempts to reconstruct the family tree of languages beyond the most obvious groupings, such as the Romance languages, and the Indo-European. Their argument is that language changes too fast for its roots to be traced back further than a few thousand years. If any single language ever existed, most linguists say, it is irretrievably lost.
But Joseph H. Greenberg, of Stanford University, has defied this pessimism. In the course of a long career, he has classified most of the world's languages into a handful of major groups.
Though it remains unclear how these superfamilies may be related to one another, he has identified words and concepts that seem common to all and could be echoes of a mother tongue.
This month, at the age of 84, Greenberg is publishing the first of two volumes on Eurasiatic, his proposed superfamily that includes a swath of languages spoken from Portugal to Japan.
Somewhat puzzlingly, is the fact that linguists generally accept his work on the relationships among African languages, but furiously dispute his ordering of American Indian languages, even though both classifications were achieved with the same method.
His method, which he calls mass or multilateral comparison, is to compare many languages simultaneously on the basis of 300 core words in the hope that they will sort themselves into clusters representative of their historical development. Many linguists believe such an exercise is futile because words change too quickly to preserve any ancestry older than 5,000 years or so.
"They sell their own subject short," Greenberg said. "Certain items in language are extremely stable, like personal pronouns or parts of the human body."
Decades ago, there was no agreement on the history of African languages. "So I started in a simple-minded way," said Greenberg. "I took common words in a number of languages and saw if the languages fell into groups." In a 1955 article, he reduced all the continent's languages first to 14 and later to four major clusters.
After a decade of controversy, Greenberg's African classification became widely accepted. "But then a lot of people said I had gotten the correct results with the wrong method," he said.
Greenberg's critics say the only way to prove that a group of languages is related is by establishing regular rules governing how words change as one language morphs into another. The "p" sounds in ancestral Indo-European, for example, change predictably into "f" in German and English. Similarities between the words in different languages fall short of proof, his critics say, because the similarities could arise from chance or borrowing.
Because of the looseness of sound and meaning that Greenberg allows in claiming similarities, his data "do not rise above the level of chance," said Sarah Thomason, a linguist at the University of Michigan.
Greenberg replies that sound regularities were perceived in the Indo-European languages only after the languages had been grouped by inductive methods similar to his.
"It's a misguided perfectionism that is so perfect they have had no result," Merritt Ruhlen, Greenberg's Stanford colleague, said of their critics. His and Greenberg's aim is to establish the probable links from which the history of human language can be inferred.
Proving the existence of a single original language family, "for the origin and history of our species would, of course, be very great," Greenberg wrote in his 1987 book Language in the Americas (Stanford University Press).
Amerind is the vast superfamily to which, in his view, most native languages of North and South America belong. One striking feature that such languages, in Greenberg's view, have in common is the use of words starting in "n" to mean I/mine/we/ours and words beginning in "m" to mean thou/thine/you/yours. Almost every Amerindian language family has one or more languages that have this pattern, suggesting that all are derived from an original language.
In the course of classifying the languages of the Americas, Greenberg realized that their major families were related to languages on the Eurasian continent, as would be expected if the Americas had been inhabited by people migrating through Siberia.
Greenberg has now classified most of the languages of Europe and Asia into the superfamily he calls Eurasiatic. It may seem hard to believe that languages as different as English and Japanese, say, share any commonalities. But in his new book on the grammar of Eurasiatic, Greenberg has found many elements that he argues knit the major Eurasian language families into a single group.
Words beginning in "m," for example, are found in every Eurasiatic family to designate the first person (English: me; Finnish: mina; Old Japanese: mi). Every branch of Eurasiatic, Greenberg said, uses n-words to designate a negative.
Ruhlen said that if the Eurasiatic grouping is accepted, the world's 5,000 languages can be seen to fall into just 12 superfamilies.
From James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia (1988)
"A bizarre consequence of the appearance of oxygen was the advent the world's first nuclear reactors. Nuclear power from its inception has rarely been described publicly except in hyperbole. The impression has been given that to design and construct a nuclear reactor is a feat unique to physical science and engineering creativity. It is chastening to find that, in the Proterozoic, an unassertive community of modest bacteria built a set of nuclear reactors that ran for millions of years.
"This extraordinary event occurred 1.8 eons (1.8 billion years) ago at a place now called Oklo in Gabon, Africa, and was discovered quite by accident. At Oklo, there is a mine that supplies uranium mainly for the French nuclear industry. During the 1970s, a shipment of uranium from Oklo was founded to be depleted in the fissionable isotope Uranium-235. Natural uranium is always of the same isotopic composition--99.27 percent Uranium-238, 0.72 percent of Uranium-235 and traces of Uranium-234. Only the Uranium-235 isotope can take part in the chain reactions necessary for power production or for explosions. Naturally, the fissionable isotope is guarded carefully and its proportion in uranium subjected to thorough and repeated scrutiny.
"Imagine the shock that must have passed through the French atomic energy agency when it was discovered that the shipment of uranium had a much smaller proportion of Uranium-235 than normal. Had some clandestine group in Africa or France found a way to extract the potent fissionable isotope, and were they now storing this for use in terrorist nuclear weapons? Had someone stolen the uranium ore from the mine and substituted spent uranium from a nuclear industry elsewhere? Whatever had happened, a sinister explanation seemed likely. The truth, when it came, was not only a fascinating piece of science but must also have been an immense relief to minds troubled with images of tons of undiluted Uranium-235 in the hands of fanatics.
"The chemistry of the element uranium is such that it is insoluable in water under oxygen-free conditions, but readily soluable in water in the presence of oxygen. When enough oxygen appeared in the Proterozoic to render the ground water oxidizing, uranium in the rocks began to dissolve and, as the uranyl ion, became one of the many elements present in trace quantities in flowing streams. The strength of the uranium solution would have been at most no more than a few parts per million, and uranium would have been but one of many ions in solution. In the place that is now Oklo such a stream flowed into an algal mat that included microorganisms with a strange capacity to collect and concentrate uranium specifically. They performed their unconscious task so well that eventually enough uranium oxide was deposited in the pure state for a nuclear reaction to start.
"When more than a 'critical mass' of uranium containing the fissionable isotope is gathered together in one place there is a self-sustaining chain reaction. The fission of uranium atoms sets free neutrons that cause the fission of more uranium atoms and more neutrons and so on. Provided that the number of neutrons produced balances those that escape, or are absorbed by other atoms, the reactor continues. This kind of reactor is not explosive; indeed it is self-regulating. The presence of water, through its ability to slow and reflect neutrons, is an essential feature of the reactor. When power output increases, water boils away and the nuclear reaction slows down. A nuclear fission reaction is a perverse kind of fire; it burns better when well watered. The Oklo reactors ran gently at the kilowatt power level for millions of years and used up a fair amount of the natural Uranium-235 doing so.
"The presence of the Oklo reactors confirms an oxidizing environment. In the absence of oxygen, uranium is not soluble. It is just as well that it is not; when life started 3.6 eons (3.6 billion years) back, uranium was much more enriched in the fissile isotope U-235. This isotope decays more rapidly than the common isotope U-238, and at life's beginning the proportion of fissile uranium was not 0.7 percent as now but 33 percent. Uranium so enriched could have been the source of spectacular nuclear fireworks had any bacteria been unwise enough to concentrate it. This also suggests that the atmosphere was not oxidizing in the early Archean.
"Bacteria could not have debated the costs and benefits of nuclear power. The fact that the reactors ran so long and that there was more than one of them suggests that replenishment must have occured and that the radiation and nuclear waste from the reactor was not a deterrent to that ancient bacterial ecosystem. (The distribution of stable fission products around the reactor site is also valuable evidence to suggest that the problems of nuclear waste disposal now are nowhere near so difficult and dangerous as the feverish pronouncements of the antinuclear movement would suggest.) The Oklo reactors are a splendid example of geophysical homeostasis. They illustrate how specific materials can be segregated and concentrated in the pure state--an act of profound negentropy in itself, but also an invaluable subsystem of numerous geophysical processes. The separation of silica by the diatoms and of calcium carbonate by coccolithophoridons and other living organisms, both in nearly pure form, are such processes and have had a profound effect on the evolution of the Earth.
(JERUSALEM POST)
Jul. 18, 2002
Judea and Samaria police have arrested a reservist major in a widening probe of Israelis suspected of selling weapons to Palestinians. Particularly startling in the case is that two of the suspects come from Adora, a Judea community in which four people were killed in a terrorist infiltration in April. Maj. Ya'acov Uriel, the latest suspect arrested, whose hometown was not given, is suspected of stealing weapons from the IDF which eventually made their way to Palestinian hands, Israel Radio reports. According to the radio, more arrests are expected in the case for which six Israelisn are held on suspicion of supplying Palestinians with hundreds of thousands of bullets. Three suspects are from Adora and one from the settlement of Telem in the Hebron-area. One suspect is said to have charged Palestinian truckers NIS 150 -200 apiece to let their vehicles past IDF roadblocks, the radio said. According to reports Wednesday, Oded Molay, 21, of Adora, was ordered held another nine days by Jerusalem Magistrate's Court, the Itim news agency reports. On Sunday police arrested two pairs of brothers serving in the IDF, from Adora and Telem. The radio identified them as Ro'i and Sela Amar, brothers from Adora, Moshe and Nadav Cohen, brothers from Telem. A Palestinian of the Tanzim from Tarkumiya, a village near Adora and Telem, has also been arrested in the case. The Palestinian had a forged Israeli identity card, and is suspected to have been buying weapons from Israelis living in Judea and Samaria for the past three years. The Israeli brothers told police other soldiers sold them weapons. They reportedly admitted to selling arms to other Palestinians still being sought by police. Another suspect, Moshe Cohen of Adora was arrested on Sunday after 1,000 bullets were found in his car. Police found another 3,000 bullets and various military equipment in a warehouse in but did not find any weapons. Cohen and four other suspects were arrested. Several weeks ago, Hebron police received intelligence that four Israelis had been selling weapons to Palestinians in the Hebron area over a four-year period.
Chinese birth-control personnel have forced at least six brides of Taiwan men to undergo pregnancy tests and ordered them to have abortions
(www.taipeitimes.com via Drudge)
Chinese brides of Taiwanese men who went to China to visit their families were ordered by Beijing to have abortions or to undergo surgery to have their fallopian tubes tied. They were also fined and threatened with punishment under China's one-child policy if they had more children, a Taiwan official said yesterday.
The Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF, ®ü°ò·|) yesterday distributed a news release to reporters saying that, since the beginning of last year, the foundation has received six complaints regarding such cases.
Patricia Lin (ªL²Q¶{), director of the SEF's Department of Legal Services, said yesterday the victims told the foundation that, if Chinese birth-control personnel found that a Chinese bride of a Taiwanese man already had one child, they would force her to undergo a pregnancy test and tell her to have an abortion if she is found to be pregnant.
According to Lin, Chinese birth-control personnel also told Chinese brides who already had given birth to two children to undergo surgery to have their fallopian tubes tied. The women were also fined and their children's identification cards were confiscated as punishment for violating China's family planning regulations.
In addition, even if such a bride was pregnant with her first child, the Chinese birth-control personnel would tell her to have an abortion because "they did not get permission from the government to give birth," which is required in China.
"The victims only described what the Chinese officials told them to do, but we don't know for a fact if anyone was truly forced to have an abortion because they keep it private," Lin said.
Lin said that China's birth-control personnel might not fully understand Taiwanese law, and viewed the Taiwan-based brides' babies as an added burden on an overpopulated China.
"Under current Taiwanese regulations, children from cross-strait marriages can be registered as permanent residents of Taiwan, so they won't be a burden to China," Lin said.
She added that China's actions have seriously abused the rights of those who are bound together in cross-strait marriages.
The SEF reminded these couples to prepare for similar treatment if they intend to visit China.
The foundation also sent a letter last week to its Chinese counterpart, the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS, ®ü¨ó·|), to ask it to protect the rights of Chinese brides.
HOW YOU HELP THE PRESIDENT HELP HIS BROTHER.
He Ain't Heavy
(The New Republic)
07.18.02
Intimate treasures, a sex shop in the resort town of Fort Walton Beach, is housed in a pink-and-blue, virtually windowless concrete building--just the kind of faux-cheery structure one finds in commercial strips throughout the Sun Belt. According to its website, the store specializes in sensual lingerie, erotic games, massage oils, and "videos, videos, videos." A few years ago a sales clerk at the store was charged with two counts of obscenity for selling allegedly beyond-the-pale pornography to undercover cops. Intimate Treasures is, in short, not the sort of place one associates with government largesse--particularly not from a Republican administration that pledged to restore "honor and dignity" to the White House. Yet last September 19 the sex shop received a low-interest, 25-year loan for $410,250, guaranteed by George W. Bush's Small Business Administration (SBA). Why? Perhaps because whatever its failings, Intimate Treasures possesses one attribute that makes it a highly attractive destination for federal dollars: It's located in Florida.
It is difficult to overestimate the importance the Bush administration places on Florida. It is the largest swing state in the country, the ground on which Bush won his contested victory in 2000, and a cornerstone of the White House's reelection strategy in 2004. But more than any of these things, it is the state in which the president's younger brother Jeb is running for reelection as governor this November. No matter what else happens at the ballot box this fall, if Jeb loses to the eventual Democratic nominee--either Janet Reno or Bill McBride--it will be seen as a humiliating defeat for the president and a vote of no confidence for his administration. As a result, it seems that no federal grant, no business loan, no tinkering with federal policy that might give Jeb a political leg up is too small to merit White House attention. "We believe we are not just in a battle with the Florida Bushies but the Washington Bushies too," says Ryan Banfill, Florida Democratic Party spokesman. "And we're not just running against the White House. It's like we're running against the State Department, the Education Department, and the rest of the Cabinet too." Over the past year and a half the administration has lavished attention on Florida--visits by the president and Cabinet members, high-profile federal conservation projects, joint policy and political planning with the governor's office, and lots and lots of money. Though overall figures on discretionary federal spending are difficult to calculate, Florida seems to be getting a disproportionate share in exactly those areas most likely to help Jeb this fall. In other words, if you pay taxes, you're probably helping to reelect the president's brother.
In 2000, when Hillary Clinton ran for the Senate in New York, pro-New York policies made by the Clinton administration made headlines as a presumed sop to Hillary's campaign. Some, such as the president's clemency for members of the Puerto Rican terrorist group faln, even prompted congressional investigations. By contrast, the press has paid relatively little attention to the way W. has used his office to boost his brother's political fortunes. Almost every week brings another example of federal policy being altered to Florida's--and specifically Jeb's--benefit. After 9/11, when Jeb complained that new restrictions on foreigners making international flight connections in the United States were hurting Florida's tourism, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) loosened the rules. In March the Bush administration gave Jeb a lift with environmentalists by backing restrictions on off-road vehicles in Big Cypress National Preserve--even though it simultaneously discarded a Clinton-era snowmobile ban in Yellowstone National Park. Earlier this year the Bush administration announced that nasa would move a major space shuttle maintenance program--and with it hundreds of high-paying jobs--from California to Florida. W. has toughened sanctions on Cuba and restricted oil drilling near Florida's beaches. Brotherly love has even led him to break a contract. Just this month a federal judge ruled that the administration had violated a legal agreement by acceding to Jeb's request that it not move forward with new protections for Florida manatees. "No justification has been offered for this delay other than Governor Bush's request," the judge wrote. "Whatever the political ramifications, such a justification cannot excuse a violation of the agreement."
According to a report in The Palm Beach Post last year, the Bush brothers' political advisers hold a joint weekly conference call to discuss Florida strategy and how Washington can help Tallahassee. One way Washington helps is by sending the president to Florida--often. Since being sworn in, W. has visited Florida ten times, more than any other state but Pennsylvania. Then there is the platoon of Bush Cabinet secretaries regularly parachuting into the state, including, by The New Republic's count, Commerce Secretary Don Evans (five times); Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, Interior Secretary Gale Norton, and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham (three times each); Labor Secretary Elaine Chao and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge (twice each); and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta (once each). Ever wonder why the Beltway press writes so little about Housing and Urban Development Secretary Mel Martinez--who as a Hispanic Bush administration official from the electoral battleground of Orlando is a sort of laboratory-perfect political tool for Jeb? Maybe it's because he's so frequently in Florida (nine trips so far). And even when administration officials don't show up in the state, their press offices regularly send quotes to Jeb for use in his press releases announcing new pots of federal money.
And the new pots of federal money come with remarkable frequency. Nowhere has the president's desire to help his little brother been more evident than in the wave of federal funds washing into Florida--and in the seamless integration between the White House and the governor's office in directing and hyping them. In particular, the White House has sent Washington dollars to buttress the three primary themes of Jeb's reelection effort: education, homeland security, and the environment.
Education is the issue Florida voters care about most, and, like his brother in the White House, Jeb campaigns relentlessly on the subject. Often he's not campaigning alone. Education Secretary Rod Paige has already been to Florida a whopping eight times. As the World Trade Towers were struck on September 11, President Bush was reading to children at a Sarasota elementary school, in part to draw attention to a reading initiative his brother had announced a few days earlier.
Indeed, the Bush brothers have masterfully linked their twin education plans, implying that Jeb's program is the ideal state complement to W.'s new federal law. Just as Jeb's top education priority is an early-reading initiative he calls "Just Read, Florida!", the Education Department's top priority is implementing the "Reading First" component of the new federal education law. In April, Jeb applied for federal Reading First funds with a proposal based on recommendations from his so-called Reading Leadership Team. What has gone unreported, however, is that two of the members of that 32 person "team" also sit on the federal panel that considers each state's proposal. In other words, two of the folks who helped write Jeb's proposal were also on the committee that decided whether to fund it. When Paige announced the first three states to win these major new reading grants in June, Florida--surprise!--made the list, picking up a tidy $45.6 million for Jeb's reading program (a fact he was quick to tout in press releases and at an Orlando event with Paige himself two weeks later).
In the wake of 9/11, homeland security displaced education as Florida's most important political issue--and here, too, the administration has done well by the Sunshine State. Take the SBA, the same agency that arranged a loan for Intimate Treasures. Following the attacks, the SBA made low-interest Economic Injury Disaster Loans available to any U.S. company hurt as a direct result of 9/11. Perhaps counterintuitively, no state has benefited as much from the program as Florida. With tourism to the state suffering in the aftermath of the attacks, Jeb aggressively advertised the federal program. The SBA conducted workshops throughout the state to educate businesses about the loans; the head of the SBA himself was dispatched to Miami in December to present the first checks at an event with Jeb. As of June 28, fully one-quarter of the SBA loans, worth $89 million, have gone to Florida--more money than to the next three biggest recipients (California, Texas, and New York) combined. (The hardest-hit New York businesses are eligible for separate SBA funding streams.) The total number of loan applications from Florida approved by the SBA for this program is equal to that of the next five states combined.
Then there's the Transportation Department's port-security grant program. Last month Secretary Mineta awarded $92.3 million to states to beef up the safety of the nation's waterways. Mineta made the announcement in New York, one of the busiest ports in the country. But the big winners were again Florida and Jeb Bush. As the governor himself noted, more than 21 percent of the new Transportation Department funding goes to Florida's ports. Indeed, Florida received more than twice as much as the New York/New Jersey port, even though more cargo goes in and out of that harbor than all of Florida's ports combined. In fact, measuring by cargo volume, not one of the nation's 15 busiest ports is in Florida. Were terrorists to smuggle a container packed with weapons of mass destruction into the United States, Florida isn't a likely point of entry. But insiders say the criteria for the grants was skewed toward ports with lots of passenger ships or petroleum tankers--characteristics that just happen to favor Florida's harbors.
But perhaps the Bush administration's costliest pro-Jeb policies have been its environmental ones. While many observers have noted the glaring discrepancy between the administration's conservationist impulse in Florida and its pro-development, pro-extraction impulses everywhere else, few have pointed out that White House efforts to burnish Jeb's environmental bona fides have come with a price tag--one being picked up by American taxpayers.
Jeb, like every other viable politician in Florida, opposes drilling for oil or gas off the state's coast. It is no coincidence that the Bush administration, despite its insistence on tapping energy sources on sensitive lands in Alaska and elsewhere, has steadily reduced drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico near Florida's shores. The first big decision came in July 2001 when the Department of Interior, which was preparing to sell a batch of new oil and gas leases in the Gulf, collectively known as "Sale 181," shrank the area to be opened for drilling from the Clinton-era proposal of 5.9 million acres down to 1.5 million--sparing giant chunks of the eastern and northern sections of the original plan (i.e., the ones closest to Florida) from exploration and reducing by hundreds of millions of dollars the revenues the government will collect.
President Bush's second set of Florida drilling decisions, announced this May 29 in the Oval Office with Jeb by his side, was even more politically advantageous. The administration agreed to pay $235 million in taxpayer dollars to buy back oil and gas leases in the Gulf and in southwestern Florida. (That $235 million equals more than one-third of the administration's entire land-acquisition budget for 2002.) The first part of the arrangement involves paying Chevron, Conoco, and Murphy Oil $115 million to relinquish leases in an area of the Gulf known as Destin Dome, 25 miles south of the white-sand beaches of Pensacola. Those oil companies had bought the Destin Dome leases in the 1980s with the understanding that exploration was subject to state and federal approval. Florida objected to the drilling plans at Destin Dome, and the companies sued. The administration is now settling the lawsuit by buying back the leases. But we are almost certainly shelling out too much money. The Destin Dome leases were originally bought from the government for just $13 million or about $1.2 million each. And last December the feds sold 95 leases in Sale 181 to oil companies for a little more than $340 million (an average of $3.6 million per lease). Under the recently announced settlement, however, some of the very same oil companies are selling the government seven leases a few miles north of Destin Dome for $115 million, an average of $16 million per lease--at least six times the per-lease average the Clinton administration paid to settle a virtually identical Florida drilling lawsuit in 1995. In short, under the current deal, Jeb and W. get to pose as conservationists, the oil companies make a massive profit--and taxpayers get stuck with the tab.
The Bush administration also announced another deal in May--its $120 million purchase of oil and gas leases in the Everglades. The leases, scattered across 400,000 acres, are owned by one of the biggest developers in Florida, the Collier family, which has been trying to get the government to buy the highly speculative mineral rights for years. In 1996 the Colliers lobbied the government to swap the leases for closed Navy bases that the family could develop. At the time Interior officials argued that the Everglades leases were overvalued by the Colliers and worth little to the government. The Colliers tried again in 2000, proposing to trade their leases for lucrative land at Homestead Air Force Base. That deal also failed. From these disappointments, the Colliers seem to have decided that the government wouldn't take them seriously unless they showed real intention to harm the land; so last year they moved forward with a dramatic plan to prospect for oil and gas, which would start by detonating dynamite in 14,700 newly drilled holes across 27,000 acres of Big Cypress National Preserve in the Everglades. That finally caught the attention of environmentalists, who began a crusade to force the government to pay the Colliers not to drill.
Meanwhile, between 1997 and 2002 the Collier family's companies gave about $110,000 to the Republican Party of Florida and to Jeb's campaigns. When George W. took office last year the Department of Interior, prodded by Jeb, reinvigorated negotiations with the family. If Congress approves the deal, the Colliers will get $120 million for highly speculative leases that, due to onerous regulations, were probably never worth exploring in the first place. The sale does nothing to stop the oil operations that are actually underway in Big Cypress and will actually increase drilling in the Gulf because the Interior Department wants to pay the Colliers with credits for Gulf leases. But this won't be Florida's problem: Since the Bushes have pushed most Gulf drilling away from Florida's beaches, any leases given to the Colliers will presumably be off the coasts of Alabama, Mississippi, and/or Louisiana. In Florida, where no environmental issue is more important to the state's increasingly eco-conscious voters than oil drilling, the deal was hailed as an enormous victory for Jeb.
It's not only oil speculators who are profiting from the administration's politically motivated Sunshine State environmentalism. Last year the Energy Department funded a $37.4 million grant to spur development of new technologies for environmental cleanup. Almost 30 percent of the money went to Florida, mostly to little-known Florida International University (FIU) in Miami. The university's president, Cuban-American Modesto Maidique, is a longtime supporter of the Bush family and sits on the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board (SEAB)--one of those obscure government panels that presidents fill with patronage hires. One can only speculate what advice the panel may have offered Secretary Abraham. But according to an Energy Department official, Abraham's office has sent out a request to Energy staffers to come up with a proposal for another $3 million in funding to FIU. "Congress never thought we were going to design a program for Florida to help the president's brother get elected," says the official, adding, in his words, that staffers have been told: "If you want to do a new initiative, and you want to get funding for it, you better show how it's going to help a state that was close in 2000, like Florida. Obviously, the word is out to help Jeb any way you can."
One might imagine Jeb Bush would downplay the extent to which federal policy and taxpayer dollars are being driven by his electoral needs. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Read through the hundreds of press releases his office has issued over the last 18 months, and you realize that Jeb is selling himself to Florida voters on the premise that he can leverage resources and favors from his brother's administration. Rather than denying the politicization of the budget process, Jeb plays it up. For instance, in February when the U.S. Department of Agriculture released $52.4 million in rural development aid to Florida, the governor's office bragged that the funds--which are supposed to be awarded following a careful review process--were granted after a meeting between Jeb and Secretary Veneman. Likewise, in May he boasted that the INS had changed its policy on international air travelers in response to his personal request. He is running on his influence. "I know someone in Washington," he likes to say.
And why shouldn't he? The beauty of it for Jeb is that all Florida Democrats can do is grit their teeth and express grudging support for the money flowing into their state. After all, they want to protect their state's environment, secure education dollars, win homeland security funds, and help out its small businesses, too; they can hardly argue that federal dollars should go somewhere else. The real surprise is that thus far national Democrats and the media have given so little scrutiny to the president's efforts to aid his brother's campaign--the kind of scrutiny, for example, that accompanied Bill and Hillary in 2000. If that changes, who knows what intimate treasures they'll find.
(tampatrib.com)
Jul 28, 2002
TALLAHASSEE - Florida's first attempt to hold a trouble-free election after the 2000 presidential debacle has crashed and burned on the tarmac of the Tallahassee airport.
A cargo jet carrying crucial filing papers for candidates who were straining to beat a Friday's noon deadline crashed short of the runway and caught fire, destroying the documents and shutting down the airport until well past the state deadline.
Gov. Jeb Bush was forced to declare a state of emergency in order to override the state deadline and extend the time for candidates to qualify. The alternative was to freeze out candidates already coping with errors by the Secretary of State's office that had triggered a last-minute scramble.
``The good news is, no votes were lost and we've got time to fix things,'' said Susan MacManus, a political scientist at the University of South Florida. ``The bad news is it looks like the Keystone Kops.''
The first sign of trouble occurred Monday, the opening day of qualifying week, when the Division of Elections turned away Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Janet Reno, telling her - incorrectly - that the preprinted check she handed over to cover the candidate filing fee was about $100 short. The division's director, Clay Roberts, apologized a short time later and personally retrieved the check.
Then he learned it wasn't an isolated error. His office had used incorrect figures supplied by the Legislature to assemble the 2002 filing fee schedule, triggering a chaotic two-day sprint to inform nearly 100 candidates that they needed to get new checks to Tallahassee by noon Friday.
Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a Republican who oversees the Division of Elections, was nowhere to be found in Tallahassee as Roberts sorted out the mess. She was in Washington, meeting with White House representatives about international trade and raising money for her congressional campaign.
Wait, It Gets Worse
And just when it seemed it couldn't get any worse, a Federal Express cargo jet carrying, among other things, candidate qualifying packets from across the state crashed and burned on approach to the Tallahassee airport early Friday.
The three-member crew suffered only minor injuries. But the cargo was lost.
Compounding the situation: Crash investigators closed the airport for more than five hours, forcing commercial airlines to cancel all morning flights to Tallahassee, stranding candidates who planned to fly to the Capitol by noon to file their paperwork in person.
Some hired small charter planes, and landed at a tiny airport near the Georgia border, where they were met by party operatives who shuttled candidates and campaign staffers into Tallahassee; others pleaded by phone with state officials for leniency.
Harris, who by Friday was back in Tallahassee, sent a hastily drafted letter to Bush urging him to extend the deadline.
Friday afternoon Bush issued a rare executive order declaring a state of emergency. That enabled him to suspend the statutory deadline and extend it to 5 p.m. today.
Only those who can prove they either were booked on canceled flights or had shipped mail that was aboard the crashed cargo jet will be allowed to take advantage of the extension.
``The intent here is to ensure that those candidates who can show that, except for this crash, [they] would have been here by the noon deadline will be able to qualify,'' said Bush spokeswoman Lisa Gates.
Try, Try, Try Again
Among those whose qualifying packet was aboard the jet is Michael Steinberg, a Tampa lawyer running as a Democrat for the state House seat being vacated by Republican Rob Wallace. He had two packets in the charred cargo hold, one that was misrouted to South Florida on Wednesday before being located and redirected, and a backup he overnighted to Tallahassee on Thursday just to be ``on the safe side.''
``My wife told me I put the `evil eye' on the plane because the night before I'd said the only thing that could wrong now is if the plane crashed,'' Steinberg said Friday afternoon. ``When I called [the carrier] to see if it had made it, they told me the plane crashed.
``I told them that's OK because I sent another,'' Steinberg recalls. ``That's when they told me it was on the same plane, and that everything had burned.''
Friday evening, after learning of the qualifying extension, Steinberg put a campaign aide on a plane to Tallahassee with yet another qualifying packet.
Botched fee schedules. A state of emergency. Candidates cutting deals with charter pilots to get them to Tallahassee out of fear they would be disqualified. Hardly the kind of image Florida was trying to portray this time around.
Democrats, who vilified Harris during the 2000 presidential election, quickly went on the attack again.
``Once again, here we are, the election system is coming apart at the seams and Katherine Harris is out running for Congress and trying to raise money,'' said state Democratic Party spokesman Ryan Banfill. ``It would have prudent for her as the state's top elections officer to have canceled her fundraiser and get to Tallahassee and sort this out.''
David Host, a spokesman for Harris, called the criticism unfair.
Harris was in Washington fulfilling a state duty as advocate for greater international trade, he said. He referred questions about political fundraising during her personal time to the campaign staff, which did not return phone calls seeking comment. Host said Harris was in regular phone contact with the Division of Elections while out of town.
July 15, 2002
(InsightMagazine-Moonie owned)
By J. Michael Waller
Media Credit: JOSEPH BARRAK/AFP
Oil wealth of the Saudis funds the Wahhabi movement to seize control of global Islam. Totalitarian regimes in the Middle East have targeted the United States with a well-financed influence campaign that is being rooted in American politics. Veteran watchers of the "active-measures" programs of the former Soviet Union say this Islamist propaganda offensive bears an uncanny resemblance to the old Soviet international front operations and the broad parade of fellow travelers who used themes of peace, tolerance and civil liberties to advance Soviet strategic goals by weakening the United States at home and abroad.
"Active measures" is a translation of aktivniye meropriyatya, a term of KGB tradecraft that spans the covert-action spectrum from disinformation and propaganda to assassination and sponsorship of terrorism.
Numerous parallels are visible between the totalitarianism of Soviet communism and that of Wahhabism, a Saudi-funded movement to seize control of global Islam, notes Stephen Schwartz, a former leftist, prolific chronicler of communist strategy and tactics and author of the forthcoming book Two Faces of Islam. "Aside from their ideological similarities and the common elements in the struggle of each power," says Schwartz, "there is a striking matter of their identical tactics in penetration of the United States."
In a column for FrontPageMag.com, Schwartz writes, "The Communist Party U.S.A. claimed to lead and, in effect, represent the entire labor and left movement when its constituency was restricted to a narrow band of fanatics and agents of a foreign regime." The same is true, he says, of campaigns that promote the Saudi brand of Islam, including U.S.-based Muslim political pressure groups he calls the "Wahhabi lobby."
For example, he says, "the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the American Muslim Council (AMC) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) claim to lead and, in effect, represent the entire community of American Muslims. In fact, its constituency is restricted to a narrow band of fanatics and agents of a foreign regime, the Saudi kingdom."
The U.S. government had a means of predicting, identifying and countering Soviet active measures both at home and abroad. But it is poorly equipped to deal with Saudi-sponsored (and smaller, noncentralized) political-influence operations of militant Islamists against U.S. interests overseas and against the public and decisionmakers domestically. Cold War concerns at least led U.S. officials to focus on Soviet fronts and covert operations, but little notice was taken of the Islamist propaganda development that began in the early 1960s.
Now, with the Soviet Union long gone and the information revolution having empowered small, decentralized groups to battle the United States with methods short of all-out military warfare, researchers at the Rand Corporation's National Security Research Division have taken the lead in defining a new phenomenon they call "netwar." Rand's John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, who coined the term "cyberwar" to discuss the military implications of the information revolution on warfare, also have coined the word "netwar" to define conflicts short of war involving actors who might or might not be military or even government.
Netwar's distinguishing element, they write in their new book, Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime and Militancy, takes advantage of the information revolution to empower small, networked organizations to battle hierarchical governments. Netwar, according to Arquilla and Ronfeldt, is "an emerging mode of conflict (and crime) at societal levels, short of traditional military warfare, in which the protagonists use network forms of organization and related doctrines, strategies and technologies attuned to the information age.
"These protagonists are likely to consist of dispersed organizations, small groups and individuals who communicate, coordinate and conduct their campaigns in an Internetted matter, often without a precise central command." The United States barely is beginning to grapple with the problem, intelligence sources say.
In its heyday, according to a CIA estimate provided to Congress, the Soviet Union spent an estimated $3.3 billion annually on active measures, including the Izvestiya, Pravda, New Times, Novosti and Tass propaganda vehicles; Radio Moscow and clandestine radio stations around the world; international Communist parties; more than a dozen international front organizations such as the World Peace Council; and the KGB's entire operating budget for foreign rezidentura outposts. The budget included support for guerrilla and terrorist organizations.
The Saudis are outspending the former Soviet Union in their worldwide influence operations, and much of that money has been spent in the United States, intelligence officials claim. At one point in the 1990s, some $1.85 billion was funneled through a single reputed Saudi front group in Northern Virginia, the SAAR Foundation, to fund Islamist activity, according to SAAR documents reviewed by Insight. Raided by federal agents for suspected terrorist money laundering and now closed, the SAAR Foundation was part of a network of Wahhabi-sponsored political front groups, mosques, charities, educational foundations, youth and student organizations, investment firms and holding companies. Many currently are under federal investigation as part of the Treasury Department's Operation Green Quest to track down alleged terrorist money.
"The Communist Party U.S.A. used labor unions as cover; the Wahhabi lobby uses charities," says Schwartz in his column. "The means and the ends are the same: Each represents the place where the ideological network encounters and seeks to control the masses. Each is used as a recruitment center and cover for terrorists." A leading active-measures expert says that while the Communist Party in the United States was very small and of "limited influence" on policy, "its value to the Soviets was that it provided the cadre to recruit people for front activities to promote Soviet interests."
The most publicized Islamist groups in the post-Sept. 11 federal raids received notoriety for their covert funding of, and even overt political support for, terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda. So far there have been vocal protests of innocence and no legal proof of guilt, but multiagency investigations are continuing vigorously. Meanwhile, federal officials have yet to reel in a larger web of political and educational groups that are not suspected of funding terrorism but that do appear to be running Saudi propaganda operations under various guises. U.S. officials are more interested at the moment in tracking direct terrorist financial and operational support activity, but the FBI also has a mandate and a legal precedent to investigate covert foreign political-influence operations aimed at government decisionmakers.
That, however, may be a while in coming. It is against the law to be an unregistered foreign agent, and the U.S. intelligence community defines such an individual as having a clandestine relationship with a foreign intelligence officer. However, current law contains loopholes that allow such individuals to operate without being monitored or stopped. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) inserted one such loophole into the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
"Kennedy made it very clear that merely carrying out instructions of a foreign intelligence officer in support of a political objective would not be 'covered' under the law," according to Herbert Romerstein, a former professional investigator with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. "That loophole remains in the USA PATRIOT Act," passed after the Sept. 11 attacks as a tough new legal tool to fight terrorism, Romerstein says.
The Saudis began their modern global propaganda campaign in the early 1960s, founding the Muslim World League (MWL) in 1962. Ten years later, the Saudi regime backed establishment of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) and financed its activities. The MWL has offices around the world, including in New York and Virginia. Wa'il Jalaidan, a cofounder of al-Qaeda, was head of the MWL office in Pakistan. Federal agents raided the MWL Virginia offices in March for alleged ties to terrorism. Abdullah bin Laden, brother of terrorist Osama bin Laden, headed WAMY's Virginia office. Insight sources say that an FBI probe into WAMY's alleged terrorist ties has "mysteriously ended."
At press time, the MWL was sponsoring a high-profile tour of the United States to promote Muslim understanding.
Under the wings of the early Saudi international fronts sprang networks of other organizations sharing interlocking leaderships and responsible for a range of activities: one group to coordinate and recruit students on college campuses nationwide, another for political agitation and others for political lobbying, education, cultural and religious outreach, cadre-building; charities (to include fund raising for terrorist organizations); and holding companies, investment funds and tax-exempt foundations to finance the networks.
Many of these active-measures operations reportedly are run through mosques, where they are not subject to IRS reporting requirements and until passage of the USA PATRIOT Act last autumn were practically off-limits to the FBI. Federal authorities raided or shut down at least 17 of the organizations for alleged financial improprieties since Sept. 11. All the affected organizations maintain their innocence.
Recent years have seen a merger between some old Soviet front organizations and left-wing activist groups and Islamic terrorist causes. The New York-based National Lawyers Guild (NLG) — officially cited as having been created in the 1930s under Josef Stalin as the foremost legal bulwark for the Communist Party U.S.A., its fronts and controlled organizations — survived its Soviet sponsors and now is considered by national-security specialists to be the main legal group facilitating terrorists and related causes. Among its projects, the NLG has published brochures advising people how to stand up to the FBI if questioned in terrorist cases. The brochure is available on the NLG Website in several languages, including Arabic, Farsi and Punjabi.
The NLG leadership runs the day-to-day operations of another group, the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom (NCPPF), founded in the 1960s to provide legal support for domestic terrorist groups such as the Weather Underground, Symbionese Liberation Army, Black Liberation Army and Puerto Rican Armed Forces of National Liberation (see "Domestic Front in the War on Terror," Jan. 7).
The NCPPF's current president, Sami al-Arian, has been identified as a leading figure in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, on the State Department terrorist list. Confronted publicly about his terrorist connections by Fox News' Bill O'Reilly and others, al-Arian said he was "shocked" that some of his friends turned up in the Middle East as terrorist leaders and protested that "We have been involved in intellectual-type activity."
The NLG, NCPPF and other reputedly Marxist operations of long-standing, such as the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), defend their clients as being unjustly accused, condemned through guilt by association or simply as misunderstood individuals whose politically unpopular views and actions must be protected under the Constitution. Critics of their clients, as well as law-enforcement agencies and anyone else acting against them, are labeled "racists and bigots" — now favorite terms of agents of the Wahhabi netwar.
This apparently is a 21st century adaptation of defense tactics that have served Soviet operatives well since the 1940s.
"Like the Communists before them, the Wahhabis have presented arrestees, detainees and indicted suspects as people persecuted because they are 'foreign-born' or victims of 'ethnic profiling,'" says Schwartz.
"In the long term, the communist juridical operation aimed at protecting their terrorist, treasonous and spying activities was successful," Schwartz adds. "It should therefore surprise nobody that when the Wahhabi lobby came under American investigative scrutiny in the 1990s, their response and that of their defenders (including a considerable number of ultrasecularist and leftist Jews) almost exactly reproduced the effort mounted earlier in American history by Stalinist Communists and their protectors. Aside from the claim that they were victims because they were 'foreign-born' or were 'ethnically profiled,' the Wahhabis have recycled a full range of Stalinist techniques for evading the law."
Indeed, the AMC denounced the Treasury Department's March 20 raids on suspected terrorist fund-raising fronts in Virginia. The raids, AMC said in a news release slamming federal agents for "McCarthy-like tactics" in search of "evidence of wrongdoing that does not exist," were anti-Muslim. AMC exhorted, "Brothers and Sisters, this is YOUR community that has been attacked."
Veteran congressional investigator Romerstein urges federal investigators not to be intimidated or fall further into pander mode: "The FBI should be planting informants in these groups and monitoring them."
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U.S. Fails to Expose Islamist Active Measures
The U.S. government is poorly equipped to monitor and evaluate foreign covert political-influence operations against Americans, and especially against U.S. decisionmakers.
"The reason we were successful in exposing Soviet active measures was that we did it in a coordinated way," says Herbert Romerstein, who founded and directed the Office of Counter Soviet Active Measures at the now-defunct U.S. Information Agency (USIA). "We raised the costs to the Soviet Union of spreading their lies, causing problems that snapped back on them, making it more of a problem to spread their propaganda and disinformation."
With no other government agency taking the lead, the Pentagon created an Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) that would, in part, wage the war of ideas in the Muslim world. Insight sources alleged Department of Defense (DoD) spokeswoman Torie Clarke covertly wrecked the OSI by leaking disinformation about the office's mission to the New York Times in February, leaving the government without a single tool for strategic-influence campaigns abroad. Clarke has refused to respond to Insight's many offers to allow her to refute these charges.
U.S. officials, including some supportive of OSI, tell Insight that the Pentagon is not the proper venue for an effort to counter pro-terrorist propaganda abroad on a daily basis, or to deal with Wahhabi and other Islamist covert operations inside the United States.
Looking back on the USIA Office to Counter Soviet Active Measures, Romerstein notes, "We don't have an apparatus now to counter the lies being spread by America's enemies in the Arab world." In fact, the United States has nothing in place to do this at home.
The FBI lacks its own analytical unit and its internal database is so antiquated that agents have to write files in longhand.
The bureau also was stung in the 1980s for investigating communist terrorist activity that operated under the cover of Christian churches, resulting in the famous CISPES case that cost the careers of key senior FBI antiterrorism officials. As for the CIA, with few exceptions it does not collect intelligence on organizations inside U.S. borders. The mandates of other federal law-enforcement and investigative agencies also are extremely narrow, pertaining to tax evasion, immigration violations, undeclared foreign funding, money-laundering and so forth, with no other agency connecting the dots.
Security experts tell Insight that the new Department of Homeland Security, with its planned intelligence-analyses office, must establish a unit dedicated to monitoring and assessing Wahhabi and other foreign-funded influence operations aimed at American citizens and decisionmakers, and to taking appropriate defensive measures.
That's fine, counters Romerstein, but the key to analysis is the actual collection of information. "If you can't gather the data in the first place, you can analyze to your heart's content, but you won't have the information."
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FBI Draws Line Between Muslims, Terrorists
FBI Director Robert Mueller heaped praise on those Muslims in America who have helped the bureau crack down on domestic and foreign terrorist groups — but what he didn't say was more revealing.
In a controversial June 28 appearance before the American Muslim Council (AMC), where he thanked American Muslims for their help, Mueller broke protocol and avoided praising the organization hosting his speech. Indeed, he said this: "Unfortunately, persons associated with this organization in the past have made statements that indicate support for terrorism and for terrorist organizations. I think we can — Muslims and non-Muslims alike — justifiably be outraged by such statements."
In the week prior to the speech, various TV personalities, including MSNBC's Alan Keyes and Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, tried to get AMC Executive Director Eric Vickers to denounce terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda. While denouncing acts of terrorism, Vickers avoided denouncing these notorious terrorist groups themselves.
The night before Mueller addressed the AMC, guest host Mike Barnicle on CNBC's Hardball asked Vickers to condemn Hamas and Hezbollah. Vickers would not. Barnicle followed, "How about al-Qaeda?"
According to the transcript, Vickers' only response was, "They are involved in a resistance movement."
An Islamic Republic in America?
"I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future."
-- Ibrahim Hooper, director of communications, Council on American-Islamic Relations.
"I think if we are outside this country, we can say oh, 'Allah, destroy America.' But once we are here, our mission in this country is to change it. There is no way for Muslims to be violent in America, no way. We have other means to do it. You can be violent anywhere else but in America."
-- The American Muslim Council's Abdurahman Alamoudi.
"The center of gravity of the Muslim world is shifting to this country."
-- Faiz Rehman, communications director, American Muslim Council. June 27, 2002
J. Michael Waller is a senior writer for Insight magazine
18 July 02
(NewScientist.com)
For the first time, it has been proved that bacteria in the human gut can take up DNA from genetically modified food.
However, the UK's Food Standards Agency, which commissioned the research, says that the overall findings are reassuring rather than alarming because the amount taken up was barely detectable and only occurred in special circumstances.
Nonetheless, opponents of GM foods say the results vindicate their warnings that this might happen, and that the risk of gut bacteria scavenging antibiotic resistance genes from GM food is no longer theoretical.
"This is a first," says Adrian Bebb of the Friends of the Earth. "We've said time and time again there's a risk of this happening. Now, they've looked just once and they've found it."
Harry Gilbert and colleagues at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne made the discovery, after feeding volunteers with a burger and a milk shake containing GM soya.
To see how the GM food was dealt with by different parts of the digestive system, he gave the food to 12 healthy volunteers and to seven volunteers who had previously had their colons surgically removed.
When he examined stools from the healthy volunteers, he found no traces whatever of DNA from the GM food. It had all been digested. Nor did he find any evidence that gut bacteria had taken up the DNA.
But when he examined waste products collected from the seven ileostomy bags, he found that up to 3.7 per cent of the GM DNA survived.
Crucially, in three of the seven, he found that bacteria had taken up GM DNA from the soya. But "despite exhaustive attempts", he could not isolate the precise bacteria which had taken up the GM DNA. He concludes that the DNA must have been taken up only by tiny proportions of gut bacteria.
To account for the differences between the "ileostomists" and volunteers with intact digestive systems, Gilbert's team speculate that DNA might survive the small bowel but gets completely destroyed in the large bowel. They say in a draft manuscript that people with ileostomies might produce less of the enzyme that degrades DNA.
As supporting evidence, they found that unmodified soya DNA survived in the small bowel as plentifully as the GM DNA. "It shows that the GM DNA acts in the body the same way as DNA from regular food," says a spokeswoman from the FSA.
In a separate experiment on colonies of intestinal cells, Gilbert's team showed that raw loops of GM DNA called plasmids can be taken up directly, but only by one gut cell in 3000.
Bacteria containing the same plasmids proved totally incapable of transferring their genetic cargo into the gut cells. "These data support the view that GM soya does not represent a significant risk to human health through gene transfer," says the Gilbert team.
7-19-2
WASHINGTON, DC (ENS) - Experimental plants engineered to produce pharmaceuticals are being grown at over 300 secret locations nationwide, a new report has revealed. Biotechnology firms are conducting experiments with corn, soy, rice and tobacco that are genetically manipulated to produce drugs designed to act as vaccines, contraceptives, induce abortions, generate growth hormones, create blood clots, produce industrial enzymes and propagate allergenic enzymes.
"Just one mistake by a biotech company and we'll be eating other people's prescription drugs in our corn flakes," said Larry Bohlen, director of health and environment programs at www.foe.org Friends of the Earth, a member of a coalition of consumer and environmental groups that produced the report, released late last week.
The experimental application of biotechnology in which plants are genetically engineered to produce pharmaceutical proteins and chemicals they do not produce naturally has been termed "biopharming." Companies engaged in biopharming keep their activities secret, citing the secret plantings as confidential business information.
The report, entitled "Manufacturing Drugs and Chemicals in Crops: Biopharming Poses New Threats to Consumers, Farmers, Food Companies and the Environment," was produced by the Genetically Engineered Food Alert coalition and presented to Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman on Thursday. To date, the secretary has made no public comment on the report.
Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman (Photo courtesy U.S. Government) In a letter to Veneman, the coalition called for an end to open air cultivation of crops engineered to produce prescription drugs or industrial chemicals.
"The USDA U.S. Department of Agriculture] should prohibit the planting of food crops engineered with drugs and chemicals to protect the food supply from contamination," Bohlen said.
The highest number of field trials are taking place in Nebraska, Hawaii, Wisconsin and Puerto Rico. But other states, including Iowa, Florida, Illinois, Texas, California, Maryland, Kentucky and Indiana, also have numerous tests being conducted near food producing farms.
The report details the many threats that biopharm crops pose, the extent to which crops have been planted across the United States, the failure of regulatory agencies to regulate the experiments, and a set of recommendations.
The coalition proposes that the USDA permit limited cultivation of non-food plants in the same controlled environment as other drug production.
The USDA has primary authority for experimental biopharm crop cultivation. Historically, the agency has kept all drug and chemical crop sites secret from the public and neighboring farmers, and has hidden the identity of the drugs or chemicals being produced. The agency has condoned companies' preferred practice of anonymously planting biopharm crops without identification, security measures or notification of neighbors, the report claims.
Coalition members are concerned that genetically engineered traits could spread from biopharms through pollen carried by wind or insects, spilled seed, unharvested seed sprouting the next year, and biopharm seed residues carried by farm equipment to conventional fields.
"Current gene containment strategies cannot work reliably in the field, the editors of the journal "Nature Biotechnology" said. "Can we reasonably expect farmers to [clean] their agricultural equipment meticulously enough to remove all GM seed?"
In response to the report, a National Academy of Sciences spokesperson who preferred not to be identified, said, "It is possible that crops transformed to produce pharmaceutical or other industrial compounds might mate with plantations grown for human consumption, with the unanticipated result of novel chemicals in the human food supply."
Biopharm companies normally contract with selected farmers to grow their genetically engineered drug or chemical crops. The coalition contends that when one field is sown, all farmers, through their proximity to the test field, are exposed to substantial liability from the biopharming.
Neighboring farmers whose fields become contaminated with drug or chemical traits have no choice but to file expensive lawsuits against the biopharming companies.
On the other hand, biopharm companies that discover their patented drug traits in conventional farmers' contaminated fields could sue those farmers, alleging violation of the company's intellectual property rights.
The majority of engineered biopharmaceuticals and chemicals are incorporated into corn, a prolific pollinator, followed by soybeans, tobacco and rice. The engineered plants are then integrated into farmers' fields where it is impossible to detect their presence.
Contamination of farmers' corn by engineered insecticides is already widespread. Iowa farmer Laura Krouse said, "I've seen sales of open-pollinated corn drop 50-75 percent due to genetic pollution with engineered traits."
Corn is especially risky for pharmaceutical applications because it readily cross-pollinates and its pollen can travel for miles. This has been demonstrated by engineered StarLink corn, which contaminated food products and corn seed stock with a potentially allergenic protein even while companies were taking gene containment measures.
Nevertheless, two-thirds of open air biopharm field trials have been in corn. Experts have warned that current isolation standards will not prevent contamination of normal corn. According to the coalition's report, engineered viruses used to infect plants with drug genes could easily spread to related crops.
In response to one report of biopharm contamination, Chris Webster, a representative of Pfizer Pharmaceuticals said, "We've seen, on the vaccine side, where modified live seeds have wandered off and have appeared in other products."
ProdiGene, the company with the most plantings of drug and chemical producing plants, projects that 10 percent of the U.S. corn crop will be devoted to biopharm production by 2010.
Far from supporting containment strategies such as buffer areas, ProdiGene's CEO Anthony Laos is pressing for their elimination. He wrote farmers in 2001, "We will be dealing with these distances until we can gain regulatory approval to lessen or abandon these requirements altogether."
Some companies propose extracting drugs or chemicals from plants, then selling the remainder of the plant material. Incomplete extraction would mean drug and chemical residue in food or feed.
"Farmers cannot afford another contamination incident hurting sales and throwing the harvest into turmoil like StarLink did in 2000," said Matt Rand, biotechnology campaign manager at the National Environmental Trust.
Plant physiologist Katrina Cornish and associate Christopher Mau examine guayule plantlets that they have genetically engineered while working at the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS). The report cites indications that standard methods of pharmaceutical cultivation may be more cost effective and safer than open field testing.
Laboratories conventionally develop new drugs through extraction from animal or human tissues or production in animal, bacterial and yeast cell cultures. Newer techniques include plant cell cultures and secretion of biopharm proteins from plant roots into hydroponic media.
In contrast to open air biopharming, these methods are contained to the laboratory environment, greatly reducing contamination risks, the coalition maintains. These practices allow complete control of growth conditions where purification is easier, producing a more consistent drug quality.
http://ens-news.com/ens/jul2002/2002-07-16-05.asp
An undated handout photograph shows a Light Emitting Polymer (LEP) TV screen displayed in a wrist watch developed by Cambridge Display Technology, July 19 2002. The watch is one of a range of applications also including roll-up, flexible televisions, which have become possible thanks to a glowing plastic compound perfected in the laboratories of Britain's Cambridge Display Technologies. (Reuters - Handout)
USAWeekend.com
7-21-2
In our Dec. 3-5, 1999, issue, USA WEEKEND published a cover story about the plight of Melinda Ballard and her family in Dripping Springs, Texas, and exposed the dangers of toxic mold to a national audience.
Since then, the Ballard family has won a landmark $32 million judgment against Farmers Insurance Group for failing to address their home's mold problem. The verdict has created a ripple effect throughout the insurance industry, making insurers more accountable for how they respond to toxic mold claims.
Our subsequent cover story about the mold activist students at Eastside High School in Greenville, S.C., also hit a national nerve. Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman has since declared school air quality one of her priorities.
And recently, in response to a reporter's inquiries for today's story on apartment mold, New York state Assemblymember Scott Stringer said he is planning to draft legislation to require anyone leasing or selling a residence in New York to disclose any mold history. A similar bill is now making its way through Congress.
Even Erin Brockovich, the legal activist portrayed by Julia Roberts in the movie of the same name, has taken on the mold fight. Brockovich nearly lost her dream house in Agoura Hills, Calif., to mold before spending $800,000 to save it, and lobbied for the state's new mold protection law. "This was my home, and I wasn't going to get run out of it," she says, adding that "by working with the insurance companies and legislators" the growing battle against mold can be won. -- A.M.
In 1993, Lauren Martin was doing well, with a terrific, rent-stabilized apartment on Manhattan's fashionable Upper West Side, a boyfriend, a dog and her own psychotherapy practice. But things changed. Nine years later, she found herself sick, alone and virtually homeless, a victim of toxic mold.
The problems started shortly after she moved into the 20-unit, turn-of-the-20th-century building. First came the migraine headaches, then the sinus and respiratory problems, nausea, constipation and severe joint pain. Doctors didn't know what was going on. By the time Martin fled the leak-plagued building last summer, she had been diagnosed with mold-related immunologic problems, impaired thyroid and adrenal function, chronic fatigue and memory impairment.
"I'm feeling like a refugee," Martin said in her downtown office, where she slept three nights a week for eight months until she found an affordable, mold-free apartment. The other four nights, she spent with friends.
"The biggest tragedy for me is to be this bright, competent professional just trying to establish my practice, to be sick and feel stuck."
Since 1999, when USA WEEKEND Magazine first published the story of a mold-stricken family in Dripping Springs, Texas, reports of mold-related illnesses and insurance claims have skyrocketed from California and Texas to Louisiana and New York. Families have abandoned mold-plagued houses. Affected schools have closed and relocated children. Insurance companies hit with mounting claims for moldy homes have raised premiums and, in some regions, stopped selling homeowner policies altogether.
The next mold front
It seemed only a matter of time before yet another mold front surfaced: the nation's apartment buildings. What is surprising, however, is the apparent scope of the problem -- and the uniquely intractable challenges faced by those who live in contaminated buildings. Tenants often find themselves pitted against landlords who are unable or unwilling to take on the trouble and expense of mold removal.
Toxic mold has been found in buildings old and new, from Sacramento to New York. No one knows exactly how many, but experts say the problem is nationwide, affecting everything from the most exclusive new apartments and condominiums in Washington, D.C., to old, neglected tenements in Harlem. An article posted on the Web site of the National Multi Housing Council, an association of real estate owners and developers, some of whom face millions in remediation costs and lawsuits, calls mold "the next environmental quagmire facing commercial property owners."
Among the affected: the upscale new Residences at the Ritz-Carlton in downtown Washington, where basketball star Michael Jordan owns an apartment and where, it's been reported, men in moon suits soon will tear out walls in one-third of the 162 units to clean up dangerous mold caused by leaky plumbing; and downtown Manhattan's Henry Phipps Plaza South, whose owners were sued by hundreds of tenants reporting a variety of illnesses (among them was a family that blames mold for the death of a 7-year-old daughter).
A common part of nature, molds become a problem when they start growing indoors because of water leaks or condensation. Occasional growth of common molds, like Cladosporium and Alternaria, rarely poses a significant health threat. But when a leak goes untended and timbers or wallboards become saturated, it doesn't take long -- a few weeks, perhaps -- for mold to grow and fill the air with spores.
Toxic mold exposure symptoms
Molds have been linked to several illnesses. They are primary suspects in the tripling asthma rate over the past 20 years. In 1994, researchers at Harvard University's School of Public Health studied 10,000 homes across the United States and Canada. Half had "water damage, mold and mildew associated with a 50% to 100% increase in respiratory symptoms," Harvard researcher John Spengler told USA WEEKEND. Recent studies suggest the same problems exist in apartment buildings. A 1999 Mayo Clinic study pegged nearly all of the chronic sinus infections afflicting 37 million Americans to molds.
When toxic molds such as Stachybotrys, Aspergillus versicolor and some species of Penicillium are involved, it's another matter entirely. These molds -- which grow in damp, dark places and often are hidden behind walls, under floors and above ceilings -- produce dangerous airborne "mycotoxins." Many doctors believe they cause a raft of serious ills, including flulike symptoms, chronic fatigue, memory impairment, dizziness, and bleeding in the nose and lungs, while others say the science isn't there yet to make that claim.
In Benson, Ariz., Michael Gray is a lone voice against state health officials. "We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg," says Gray, a doctor who is medical director of the Progressive Healthcare Group and a former state medical directions commissioner. According to Gray, mold attacks several main body systems, acting like a double-edged sword to the immune system, which becomes excessively activated in response to invading spores, while mycotoxins cause immune suppression, making the body vulnerable to infection. Mold spores lodge deep in the lungs, resulting in airway obstruction and infection, Gray says, while mycotoxins attack the brain, causing memory loss, seizures, movement disorders and other cognitive deficits.
One of Gray's patients is 28-year-old Kari Kilian, who says she was exposed to high levels of toxic mold in her Scottsdale apartment for five months between 1999 and 2000. She says the smell at the GlenEagles Apartments was there from the day she moved in to the day she moved out. The building has since undergone extensive mold repairs and has been sold, says current building representative Melanie Graham, who adds, "There is currently no mold problem at GlenEagles, to the best of my knowledge."
Today, Kilian, a former Miss Wisconsin American Coed, has been diagnosed with mold-related "mycotoxicosis" and lives in a motel on disability. She takes medication to suppress recurring seizures and suffers from a movement disorder.
"I have episodes where my face starts twitching, and I have uncontrolled upper-body movements," she says. "I always had a very active lifestyle. This is not the place I had ever envisioned my life as being."
Widespread: NYC to Calif.
In New York City's Spanish Harlem, a group of nuns has taken on the mold fight. The Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service works with landlords -- or, if necessary, testifies against them in court -- to clean up moldy tenements where the asthma rate is double the norm, according to epidemiologic reports provided by one of the nuns, Susanne Lachapelle.
More affluent tenants are hiring lawyers who specialize in mold-related suits. Thirteen families in the prestigious, 838-unit Pavilion apartments on Manhattan's Upper East Side are suing Glenwood Management Co., claiming health-related illnesses. At Henry Phipps Plaza South, a toxic mold lawsuit lodged by 400 residents was settled for a reported $1.2 million, and the landlord has agreed to spend $25 million more to rid the building of mold. Lauren Martin, the therapist who slept in her office, is suing her former landlord, Pablo Llorente, who is under a court order to clean up the toxic molds in his two buildings on West 80th Street.
Across the country, at the Fairway Apartments in Citrus Heights, Calif., outside Sacramento, legal battles over mold have been raging for years. Among those suing: former California health insurance executive Sylvia Lobland, who blames her health problems on mold at the upscale golf community, where she lived for a year. Lobland, who now lives elsewhere and is on disability, recalls waking up in the night feeling "like somebody was sitting on my chest." Often she would sleep for days, she says.
Newer buildings, whose elaborate heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems are prone to leaks, are not immune. "Some of the most famous buildings in New York have serious mold problems," says Bill Sothern, an industrial hygienist at Microecologies, an environmental investigation and cleanup company. Sothern has worked on more than 1,000 high-rise apartments. In half, he says, the health complaints have been due to mold. "Any building that has sustained water problems that haven't been promptly addressed will have serious mold problems."
Why don't people just move out?
Some who can afford to, do. A 10-year resident of Martin's former building, anesthesiologist Steven Stein, and his wife, Laura, a nurse, left last September, when high levels of Stachybotrys were discovered behind the walls in the bedroom and bathroom, industrial hygiene reports show. Their rent went from $1,800 to $4,000, but for them it was a no-brainer: At the time, Laura was eight months pregnant.
"We knew about pulmonary hemorrhaging in infants with this mold, and there was no way we could live in that apartment with our new baby," says Steven Stein, 35, who developed a thyroid disorder usually found in genetically predisposed women while he was living in the building. He has no history of the disease in his family.
Deborah and Brian Chenensky know they should leave their $1,600-a-month, two-bedroom Pavilion apartment in New York, where they have lived for 15 years. But anything comparable in the neighborhood would cost $5,000. "Their whole life is built around this neighborhood," says their attorney, Steven Goldman. "Their friends are here, their son's school -- it's all here." In a written statement, Charles Dorego, vice president and general counsel for the Pavilion's landlord, Glenwood Management, said that the mold has all been removed and that the building "has, and always will, respond immediately to remedy problems of this kind."
Still, says Deborah Chenensky, "I'm scared." She suffers from chronic headaches and sinusitis, diminished lung capacity, fatigue and memory problems. Her husband, Brian, has similar symptoms and was recently diagnosed with asthma at 45. Son Dean, 7, also has been diagnosed with diminished lung capacity and allergic rhinitis from mold exposure. Deborah would like to move to Florida. "I know we should leave," she says, her voice raspy and breaking. "I say to Brian, 'Please, let's go tomorrow. It's in my chest. I can feel it, burning. We should just get out.' "
Additional links: The American Industrial Hygiene Association has brochures for consumers as well as a list of certified industrial hygienists searchable by geographic location. http://www.aiha.org/ConsultantsConsumers/html/consultantsconsumershome.htm
The Environmental Protection Agency also has a wealth of information about toxic mold. www.epa.gov/iaq/molds/
http://www.usaweekend.com/02_issues/020721/020721moldapt.html#extra
(UKGuardian)
7-21-2
Glaciers in Alaska are melting at "an incredible rate" according to US researchers. They report in Science today that 85% of the glaciers they examined had lost vast portions of their mass in the last 40 years. Some were now thinning at double the rates of the 1950s.
"Most glaciers have thinned several hundred feet at low elevation in the last 40 years and about 60 feet at higher elevations," said Keith Echelmayer of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, who with four colleagues has systematically flown over 67 of Alaska's ice streams, and checked glacier thickness against measurements made by the US geological survey in the 1950s.
He calculated that at least 9% of the sea level rise in the last century could be explained by the melting of Alaska's glaciers. One glacier in southern Alaska - with an area bigger than the US state of Rhode Island - is surrendering 2.7 cubic kilometres of fresh water to the sea each year.
The scientists do not blame global warming - the shrinking of the glaciers, like the apparent retreat of sea ice around Antarctica, could be part of a local climatic cycle - but the discovery fits into the larger picture of a warmer world. Glaciers in the tropics - among them the snows of Kilimanjaro and the ice rivers high in the Andes - are melting so fast that they could disappear in the next 20 years.
The ice cover in the Arctic ocean itself is shrinking by an area the size of the Netherlands each year. The ice cap has also thinned from three metres on average, to two metres, in 30 years of nuclear submarine measurements. Ecologists have warned that Arctic bird populations are threatened, and that polar bear, seal and caribou poulations are losing their natural habitat.
Six of the 10 warmest years have been recorded in the last 10 years, the other four were in the 1980s. The growing season in Europe is now 11 days longer than it was 30 years ago.
There are around 160,000 glaciers on Earth. Only around 40 have been monitored closely in the last 20 years. But the glaciers of the high latitudes - Greenland, northern Canada, Alaska and Antarctica - are important in global warming calculations because the predicted warming will be greatest in the polar regions. Glaciers in Alaska and Canada cover 90,000 sq km, or 13% of the planet's mountain glaciers.
The team calculated that on average the glaciers were thinning at the rate of 1.8m a year, spilling an extra 96 cubic km of water into the oceans.
(Orlando Sentinel)
7-19-2
LOS ANGELES - Eric Haseltine is moving from one top-secret organization to another.
Uncle Sam has plucked Walt Disney Co.'s chief of research and development to become head of research for the National Security Agency, which uses highly sophisticated technology to gather intelligence and break codes to protect sensitive government information systems.
Haseltine worked for a decade at Walt Disney Imagineering, the company's design and development group. As such, he would seem an unlikely choice for his new government mission. But the worlds of the NSA and Walt Disney Imagineering aren't so dissimilar. Both organizations include a diverse group of top-level scientists and share a penchant for security and secrecy (Disney won't say how many scientists it employees). There's a certain institutional quality to the unmarked, drab buildings that make up the sprawling Walt Disney Imagineering complex in Glendale, Calif.
Beyond developing innovative ride systems for theme parks, Disney's research and development team also has expertise in areas with military applications, including virtual-reality technology and information systems. Disney scientists are at the forefront of interactive TV and developing systems for protecting the company against Internet piracy.
Haseltine, 50, who holds a doctorate in physiological psychology, also is no stranger to the defense world. He spent 13 years at Hughes Aircraft Co., where he also managed R&D projects and was known as a leading expert on flight simulation. He joined Disney in 1992.
His new job will not be built around family fun. His role will be to lead a research and technology team for the spy agency, a division of the Department of Defense that employs 30,000. Neither NSA nor Haseltine will detail his exact responsibilities.
"I'm taking the job because I want to contribute my skills to helping the country," said Haseltine. "I'm particularly motivated because of what happened on September 11. Under ordinary circumstances, I would never have dreamed of leaving Disney, but these aren't ordinary circumstances."
7-23-2
(teletext.co.uk)
Disney company Touchstone Pictures is planning to create crop circles around the world as part of its marketing campaign for its sci-fi movie Signs, starring Mel Gibson. In the M Night Shyamalan-directed film, Gibson plays farmer Graham Hess who discovers a "message" in one of his fields - an intricate pattern of circles and lines in his crops. A source at Disney's Buena Vista told Teletext: "We will carve out crop circles at unnamed sites."
Most circles appear in July and August - but this year, some will have been created by Signs' film-makers. How Touchstone proposes to alert the world to its landscaped crop circles is not known, but it's thought images of the crop patterns will be posted on the net and used on posters. Signs examines the effect crop circles have on a family.
The UK release date is September 13.
Movie website: www.signs.movies.com. (6-17-02)
(Ananova)
20th July 2002
Books aimed at helping people overcome depression can end up making them feel worse because they are too complicated, a psychiatrist has warned.
Dr Graeme Whitfield said the layout of a clutch of self-help manuals he analysed failed to cater for concentration problems, a common symptom of depression.
He is calling on authors to bridge the gap between professional experts and the general public by making their texts more accessible.
Dr Whitfield, who practises in Glasgow, was speaking on the final day of the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapists 30th annual conference at the University of Warwick.
With Dr Chris Williams and Ms Rebecca Dafters of the Department of Psychological Medicine at Glasgow University, he surveyed 4,500 of the organisation's members to find the seven most common manuals which they worked with and recommended to patients.
Dr Whitfield said popular titles such as Living With Fear, Overcoming Depression and Mind Over Mood were too densely packed with text, overlong sentences and a lack of illustrations.
He said it was common knowledge among experts that people with depression suffer from low concentration.
Self-help books should cater for this by using short, simple sentences, illustrations and spreading the text out, he said.
"They are also far too impersonal, using phrases like 'the patient may feel...' instead of using personal pronouns like 'you'," Dr Whitfield said.
"What can happen is that patients read these manuals and feel even worse if they give up after just one or two chapters. Most of these books are excellent in terms of their content, but they need to show a little more humanity. When people have depression they often feel they have failed. The last thing you need is self-help that defeats you."
July 20, 2002
(United Press International)
GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, Ariz. - Dams of volcanic rock laid across the Grand Canyon have burst repeatedly and catastrophically over the past million years - most recently about 165,000 years ago - carrying enormous onrushing floods and carving out much of the great landmark in the blink of a geologic eye, new research by U.S. Geological Survey and University of Utah geologists suggests.
The findings tend to support other new data indicating the canyon's Inner Gorge may be no more than 700,000 years old, much younger than earlier estimates of 3 million to 5 million years, said Robert Webb, a research geologist with USGS.
"The newer interpretation is that there was a basalt dike that crossed the Grand Canyon that's been dated at 770,000 year ago," Webb told United Press International. "So the Inner Gorge wasn't there then. It's been downcut since then."
Downcutting refers to the phenomenon that occurs when enormous volumes of water are unleashed by sudden removal or failure of natural barriers such as lava dams. In the case of the Grand Canyon, downcutting means the Colorado River did not form the canyon through gradual erosion over millions of years. Instead, intermittent dam failures unleashed massive flash floods, in at least one case carrying many times more water than the largest Mississippi River overflow ever recorded.
"Large sustained floods can cause rapid downcutting in bedrock," Webb said. A similar event on a smaller scale occurred in 1976 when Idaho's Teton Dam failed. The water flow left a distinctive profile in soils and on canyon walls, he said. The water level dropped extremely rapidly in a phenomenon called a decay curve.
"We have that curve preserved from a lava dam that failed in the Grand Canyon 165,000 years ago," Webb said.
The lava was deposited by a chain of volcanoes that runs across the Grand Canyon. Periodic eruptions created the dams, which blocked the river's flow. Over time, enormous quantities of water backed up, eventually breaching the dams and continuing the downcutting process.
Webb, who collaborated with University of Utah researcher Cassandra Fenton, said, "There's a big volcanic field that straddles the Grand Canyon" and was active relatively recently. A minor eruption probably occurred there around 1,300 years ago, he said.
The most recent basalt dam probably occurred between 100,000 and 120,000 years ago, Webb said. However, "The one we've worked on most was there 165,000 years ago." When the natural lava dam failed, it unleashed 15 million cubic feet of water per second - 37 times larger than the biggest Mississippi River flood - helping to carve the lower canyon.
"These were some high dams," Webb said. "We estimate some were more than 1,500 feet tall."
The lava dams also were inherently unstable. The researchers explained when the molten basalt lava met cold river water, it cooled almost instantly, forming fragile walls of glass. "When basalt hits water, it shatters into glass, and there is just glass all over the place in these deposits," Webb said.
Another piece of evidence is the short life spans of the lakes building up behind the dams. Webb said the lakes filled quickly under pressure from large snowmelts in the Pleistocene era, which lasted from about 2 million years ago to the end of the last ice age - around 9,000 B.C. The lakes did not have enough time to form deltas, he said.
USGS geologist George Billingsley, one of the leading experts on the age of the Grand Canyon, said although Webb and Fenton's work adds more data, he still regards the age issue as unresolved.
"We don't have enough hard-core evidence to prove it one way or the other," Billingsley told UPI. "All we're saying is that there has been a lot of Grand Canyon cutting in the last million years."
Other geologists share the skepticism, he said. "There are still a lot of holes to fill in. We need more data. That's why I'm hesitating to say 2,000 feet (of canyon depth) was cut in a million years." But some work, like the Webb-Fenton work, is supporting the hypothesis, he said.
One theory the catastrophic flood work does not support is the biblical flood story in Genesis. Some creationists have taken evidence of a "young Grand Canyon" as grounds for biblical literalism. One company, Another Viewpoint, offers trips through the canyon explaining its features as the result of Noah's flood.
"It isn't directly relevant to something like the Noachian flood because in this case we know what the source of the flood is," Webb said. "It is not like a rainfall flood that happened over an entire watershed. This is a river being blocked."
He added, "But it is a nice parallel to make. We do have in the geologic record where sometimes we can tell if they are rainfall related ... It's important to stress that a lot of the biggest floods worldwide have not been the result of unusual climatic events. They have been the result of the failure of a natural dam."
(sundayherald.com)
A couple trying to become the parents of the world's first human clone, using the same process that produced Dolly the sheep, have spoken for the first time ... to the Sunday Herald.
Bill, a high school teacher, and Kathy, a sales representative -- they do not want their last name revealed -- are one of six couples who will participate in a cloning experiment later this year led by American fertility expert Dr Panos Zavos.
The couple, from northeast America, have agreed to a clone of Kathy and are awaiting a call to tell them to fly out to a secret destination where the historic attempt will take place.
They insist they only turned to the radical procedure because they have no other way of producing their own child. Bill and Kathy have been trying to have children for the past nine years. After a series of gruelling IVF (in vitro fertilisation) treatments, fertility doctors told Kathy, who is in her mid-40s, that they could do no more for her.
Bill, in his mid-50s, said: 'If we could clone a child this would be our own child. We don't really regard this as cloning. To us this is an advanced IVF process.
'We are religious people and have searched deep into ourselves about this. We do not believe it should be used randomly. We think that this is something that should only be done for infertile couples.
'I have a huge family with brothers and sisters and they all have children. It is very important for us to have our own genetically-related children.'
Kathy added: 'My father was a very brilliant man, as were my uncles on my mother's side of the family. I have strong genes in my background, as does my husband. I come from a very warm, loving family and I hope that we can bring a child into this world that has that warmth and intelligence.'
Using the process that created Dolly the sheep at the Roslyn Institute in Midlothian, the embryo will be made up almost entirely of Kathy's DNA. It will contain an an insignificant number of genes from the donor egg but none of Bill's genetic material.
Three and a half years ago, on New Year's Eve 1998, Kathy and Bill sat anxiously by the phone waiting for a call to tell them whether their latest and final attempt to have a child had been a success. Bill, a high school teacher now in his mid-50s, and Kathy, a sales representative in her mid-40s, had been married for six years and had been trying to have children. Kathy had endured numerous gruelling IVF (in vitro fertilisation) treatments and was well aware that this was her final chance. Four embryos had been implanted in her womb and she was hoping and praying that just one of them would hold.
'It was the middle of December when the four embryos were put back. After two weeks I lay waiting to hear if they had held. Bill watched over me every day. I was scared to move in case something happened to these embryos. It came to December 31 and friends were asking us if we wanted to go out. I just said: 'I'm waiting to find out if I am pregnant. If I am pregnant I'm going nowhere and if I am not I will be too depressed to speak to anyone.'
'So we waited in and at about 4pm we got a phone call. None of us wanted to pick up the phone that day but Bill did. All four had not taken. The pain of losing all four was incredible because that was my last attempt at IVF.'
Today Bill and Kathy, from northeast America, are awaiting another call which they hope will realise their dream of having a family of their own. After fertility clinics told the couple they could do no more for them Bill and Kathy heard of a controversial attempt to help infertile couples conceive through reproductive cloning. Bill and Kathy, who describe themselves as a religious couple, had exhausted all other possibilities and saw this as their only hope. They attended the Andrology Institute of America, a fertility clinic run by Dr Panos Zavos in Kentucky, and were selected as one of six couples to be the first to try to produce cloned human beings later this year.
As the US will not give permission for cloning and the practice is banned in the UK, the experiment will take place in a developing country. Zavos is so keen to keep the spotlight away from the chosen location that as yet Bill and Kathy do not know where they will be flying to or when they will be leaving. They will receive a call from Zavos's clinic telling them that they have two weeks to book a ticket and pack their bags.
Kathy said: 'We don't know where it is going to be or when, but it's imminent. We don't know if we will be flying off to Hong Kong or South Africa. We don't know if we can go on vacation in the meantime.'
But the couple have put their trust in the man they refer to as Dr Z.
Bill adds: 'All we know is that Dr Z hopes it will be before the end of the year. We would like to do it as soon as possible. I'm already in my mid-50s and don't want to wait any longer. But he doesn't want this project to fail and so must wait until everything is exactly right. He has to do all the pre-work to make sure that this has the greatest chance of success.'
When Kathy and Bill arrive at the far-off clandestine laboratories the cloning process will begin by taking one of Kathy's cells and removing the nucleus containing her DNA. The nucleus will also be removed from a donor egg and the nucleus from Kathy's cell put in its place in a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, similar to that used to clone Dolly the sheep.
The fusion of the nucleus from Kathy's cell and the donor egg will then be jump-started by an electrical charge. Once the nucleus from Kathy's cell and the egg have fused, an embryo will develop. The embryo will then be cultured in chemicals for between three to five days before being transferred to the womb of a surrogate mother.
The resulting embryo will have none of Bill's genetic material and will be made up almost uniquely of Kathy's genes. Well over 99% of the baby's genes will come from the nucleus taken from Kathy's cell. The remainder will come from the wall of the donor egg but this genetic material, called mitochondrial DNA, is not thought to govern key aspects of a baby's development such as intelligence, personality or physical form.
Dr Zavos said: 'We will denucleate the eggs and will transfer the nucleus of a somatic cell. The nucleus contains around 30,000 genes. There will be some mitochondrial DNA in the denucleated egg but only about 16 to 18 genes so they will not be contributing significantly in the genetic make-up of the baby. Sixteen versus 30,000 genes is not a significant percentage.
'They have requested that they would like Kathy's child. They wanted a little girl and the only way to do that is to take her somatic cells. Bill said to me 'I would love to have a daughter of Kathy's.''
The embryos will then be checked for abnormalities using pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and only 'healthy, viable' embryos will be implanted in the surrogate mother.
The cloning team plan to make both male and female clones. Some of the couples have requested a baby boy, in which case a clone of the father will be made by taking the nucleus from one of his cells.
Kathy and Bill insist that they are not expecting the baby girl to be an exact replica of her mother. They point out that they turned to cloning only because they had no other way of producing a child that is genetically related to them.
'What you have got to realise is how much we want our own child. If we could clone a child this would be our own child. We don't really look at this as cloning. The child wouldn't be an exact copy of either one of us. Cloning evokes terrible images. To us this is an advanced IVF process. We are religious people and we have searched deep into ourselves about this. We do not believe that it should be used randomly on an indiscriminate basis. We think that this is something that should only be done for infertile couples.
'Of course, we are concerned about abnormalities, but Dr Zavos explained that when they did this in animals they did it so haphazardly that the chances of success were remote. The way they are going to do it with humans is far superior, there will be round-the-clock doctors ensuring that this process will work. We have discussed this with Dr Zavos and, if there are abnormalities, we will abort.
'I have a huge family with brothers and sisters and they all have children. It is very important for us to have our own genetically-related children,' Bill said.
The couple had considered adoption but, due to their age, they would not succeed in adopting a new-born baby in the US. They did not want to adopt a baby from abroad because they believe the child would be around one year old by the time they completed the arrangements and paper work. By that time they say the baby would already have spent a long time in care or in an orphanage and may have been neglected or maltreated. They do not want to adopt a baby who has had a troubled start in life.
'My father was a very brilliant man as were my uncles on my mother's side of the family. I have strong genes in my background as does my husband. The intelligence is just part of it. I come from a very warm, loving family and I hope that we can bring a child into this world who has that warmth and intelligence. If the baby is healthy and normal I'll be happy. I understand that she might not look like me.
'If we adopted a child we could not be sure that the child would have that love or intelligence. I'm not saying I am the best or the worst but I would not want to adopt a child whose parent was a murderer for example.'
Kathy has spent a total of 24 months on fertility treatments and for 17 months of this time she was taking injectable drugs. After years of seeing the best-known fertility specialists, including doctors at the prestigious Cornell University in New York, the couple were told that they should go home and make the most of their life together. But Bill and Kathy cannot accept life without a family.
While Kathy is trying not to build up her hopes that the cloning attempt will give her the child she longs for, the couple say that in every aspect of their life they are reminded of the absence of a family of their own. Kathy and Bill think others treat them differently as a result.
Bill said: 'The insensitivity of many people who have children to those who do not is incredible. When we say we do not have children some people just look at us and turn away. It is devastating not to have children and some people do not know how much they are hurting us. We want children so badly and we have tried so hard and for so long. No one has tried as hard as Kathy has to have children.
Kathy added: 'Bill's got huge hopes, I am trying not to have too many hopes. I'm refusing to hope. I am going to go wherever this takes me. If it works I will be the happiest camper in the world.
'If Dr Zavos cannot get a surrogate I will try to do it myself but I would prefer to have a surrogate as it would be better for the baby. I'm fine with the cloning procedure, I think it's very exciting. We will be part of science history and I can handle it. I have never been the most politically correct person anyway.
'We want to finish the circle of our family. When holidays come and go people talk about their family coming. Bill and I just look at each other. Our family has dwindled, we have lost older relatives and we really want to round out our family. I can accept how other people live their lives and I hope they can accept how I am living mine.'
Last week Dr Zavos's wife gave birth to their second daughter. The fertility expert, who is originally from Cyprus but has been working and living in the US for over 30 years, says cloning is an inevitable development in the struggle to give couples children of their own.
'They have already tried ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection) and IVF with no results because the quality of the eggs is not there. Doctors were just telling them that they could not have children and should go home. But this is a typical couple. They want their own children,' the doctor said.
Between rushing to the hospital with flowers to visit his own wife and day-old baby daughter, Dr Zavos was last week putting in place the final plans for the cloning of six babies.
But much of the project is still shrouded in mystery. The other members of the cloning team have not been revealed. According to Dr Zavos they come from different countries around the globe. Dr Zavos says it is now just a matter of logistics -- ensuring that gynaecologists, scientists, couples and surrogate mothers can all be flown out to the secret location at the same time.
'The project is progressing extremely well. We want the world to know that we are progressing responsibly. We believe this will happen before the year is out. This is a delicate situation. We have got to bring the couples into the locus, the experts, the gestational surrogates.'
Although the actual cloning procedure will take place in a developing country, the pregnant women are expected to return to the US or their home country for their pregnancy and to give birth. Dr Zavos states that they will attend local hospitals for regular pre-natal care, as well as to give birth, and no one need know that the babies are clones.
'There is no need to reveal whether this is a clone. No one is going to stop women at customs and ask if the baby they are carrying is a clone. There is no way that this can be regulated.'
Dr Zavos claims that he does not care if his team are not the first to clone a human being. He insists that he will just be happy that the breakthrough occurs, whether he is the pioneer or not.
Zavos was originally working on a joint cloning bid with the Italian fertility expert Professor Severino Antinori, but the two doctors fell out over unsubstantiated claims by Antinori of his cloning success. In April the Rome-based doctor told a Gulf News journalist at a genetics conference in Abu Dhabi that a woman on his programme was eight weeks pregnant with a cloned embryo. Antinori later refused to confirm whether or not this is the case.
In China, Professor Lu Guangxiu is reported to have succeeded in cloning more than 30 human embryos but this is for the purpose of therapeutic cloning -- growing spare tissue and organs -- rather than for creating cloned human beings. Clonaid, a US human cloning company linked to the Raelian cult, are also reported to be experimenting with human cloning in South Korea.
'I am aware that there are different efforts to do this going on around the world. I don't mind if this is done first by us or someone else, as long as it is done,' Dr Zavos said.
7-16-2
PARIS (Sapa-DPA) - The first human created by cloning is scheduled to be born in December, said controversial Italian doctor Severino Antinori in an interview with the French newspaper Liberation on Friday.
Antinori said 50 couples unable to conceive because of masculine infertility had volunteered for his cloning programme.
"I transferred 18 embryos created by cloning, and I obtained one pregnancy," he said. "The foetus has a good morphology."
With the embryo created by using tissue from the father, the child will presumably be his exact genetic duplicate, and his twin, if male.
Helping a 62-year-old woman become the oldest mother everAt the time the interview was carried out, at the beginning of July, the foetus was in its fifteenth week, making a December birth likely if the pregnancy is carried to term.
Antinori refused to divulge the identity of the parents, saying only that the baby would not be born in Italy.
A professor at the university of Torvergata, Antinori made headlines in the past by helping a 62-year-old woman become the oldest mother ever.
In addition, at a medical conference held last year in Rome, he declared that he would clone a human being within a year.
Researchers have since warned that humans born of cloning would suffer from a number of physical abnormalities, including fatty livers, under-developed lungs and a defective immune system.
In the Liberation interview, Antinori defended his work with cloning by saying that "the technique could enable men without any spermatozoids, with no sex cells, to have a child".
He claimed that 120 million men around the world currently suffered from this form of sterility.
May 2002
(American College of Emergency Physicians)
While being bitten by a bat is rare, people should be aware that most human rabies cases in the United States were caused by bat bites that probably were unrecognized or undetected, according to an article in this issue. (Cryptogenic Rabies, Bats, and the Question of Aerosol Transmission)
In the past decade, bats were the cause of 24 of the 26 human deaths from domestically acquired rabies. Only 2 of the 24 cases attributed to bats had bites definitively reported. This led to the author’s investigation of how bat rabies is likely transmitted to humans.
Robert V. Gibbons, MD, MPH, of Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Md., reviewed the 24 cases of humans with bat rabies, and medical and scientific literature. He found it is highly unlikely for bat rabies to be transmitted to humans through the air or passed to humans from an animal that was infected with bat rabies, such as a cat or dog. Instead, Dr. Gibbons concludes that bats most likely bit these individuals, but they probably did not know bat bites can transmit rabies or perhaps their bites were unrecognized or undetected.
Indigenous rabid bats have been reported from every state except Hawaii, according to the article. The most common bats in the United States, the silver-haired and eastern pipistrelle bats, weigh a third of an ounce or less and have tiny teeth; a person could potentially mistake their bites for a thorn prick, a spider bite or a bee sting, said Dr. Gibbons. These bats also may go unrecognized because they do not form large colonies and can be found alone in trees, foliage, and crevices in wood and rock. This would make evidence of being bitten and detection of a bite mark difficult, according to the article’s author.
Dr. Gibbons advises the public to seek emergency care for preventive treatment for rabies if direct contact with a bat occurs, a sleeping person awakens to find a bat in the room, or if a bat is found in a room with an unattended child, a mentally disabled person or an intoxicated person.
May 2002
(American College of Emergency Physicians)
The diagnosis of a brown recluse spider (Loxosceles reclusa) bite is often misapplied and difficult to identify, according to the author of an editorial in this issue. One of the most famous misdiagnoses occurred recently in New York when a 7-month-old who had contracted cutaneous anthrax was initially diagnosed as having a brown recluse spider bite, even though these spiders are not native to New York. (The Diagnosis of Brown Recluse Spider Bite Is Overused for Dermonecrotic Wounds of Uncertain Etiology)
Two new studies in this issue find new methods to help accurately diagnose brown recluse spider bites. One study unveils the first assay (a Loxosceles species ELISA) that physicians can use to accurately test for the presence of the spider venom in a patient who was possibly bitten. Emergency physicians from the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor and a dermatologist from the University of Missouri Health Sciences Center developed the assay. (A New Assay for the Detection of Loxosceles Species [Brown Recluse] Spider Venom)
In another study, a similar University of Michigan team of emergency medicine investigators found preliminary evidence that invasive biopsies may not be necessary to identify suspected brown recluse spider bites. Using the newly developed Loxosceles ELISA assay, the investigators find venom is detectable in hair, fluid from the wound and in skin biopsies in an animal model at least seven days after venom inoculation, but venom was not detectable in serum samples. (Detection of Loxosceles Venom in Dermal Lesions: A Comparison of 4 Venom Recovery Methods)
The study’s authors said although the less invasive collection of venom from a victim’s hair or fluid from the wound contains far less venom then the biopsy, it is clinically irrelevant as long as some venom is detectable to make a diagnosis.
“Cutaneous anthrax, Lyme disease, and various skin infections can mimic a brown recluse spider bite and are often diagnosed as such,” said Sean P. Bush, MD, Loma Linda University School of Medicine in Calif., and co-author of the editorial. “These misidentifications—as in the case of 7-month-old in New York—can mean delays in appropriate care and possibly grave consequences for these patients. The new assay and methods for detection reported in this issue will improve the accuracy of identifying brown recluse spider bites.”
Brown Spiders (Loxoscelidae) are also known as the recluse spiders. The best known and most notorious member of this family is the brown recluse that has a violin-shaped pattern on the back of the front body segment. These spiders have only 6 eyes, while other spiders have 8. They construct a sticky sheet of silk that helps trap their prey.
The bite of a brown recluse is serious. It is associated with tissue destruction and may require surgical treatment.
19 July 02
(NewScientist.com)
One of the most fundamental rules of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, has for the first time been shown not to hold for microscopic systems.
The demonstration, by chemical physicists in Australia, could place a fundamental limit on miniaturisation, because it suggests that the micro-scale devices envisaged by nanotechnologists will not behave like simple scaled-down versions of their larger counterparts - they could sometimes run backwards.
The second law states that a closed system will remain the same or become more disordered over time, i.e. its entropy will always increase. It is the reason a cup of tea loses heat to its surroundings, rather than being heated by the air around it.
"In a typical room, for example, the air molecules are most likely to be distributed evenly, which is the overall result of their individual random motion", says theoretical physicist Andrew Davies of Glasgow University. "But because of this randomness there is always a probability that suddenly all the air will bunch up in one corner." Thankfully this probability is so small it never happens on human timescales.
Physicists knew that at atomic scales over very short periods of time, statistical mechanics is pushed beyond its limit, and the second law does not apply. Put another way, situations that break the second law become much more probable.
But the new experiment probed the uncertain middle ground between extremely small-scale systems and macroscopic systems and showed that the second law can also be consistently broken at micron scale, over time periods of up to two seconds.
Researchers led by Denis Evans at the Australian National University in Canberra measured changes in the entropy of latex beads, each a few micrometres across and suspended in water.
By using a precise laser beam to trap the beads, the team were able to measure the movement of the beads very frequently, and hence repeatedly calculate the entropy of the system at short time intervals.
They found that the change in entropy was negative over time intervals of a few tenths of a second, revealing nature running in reverse. In this case, the bead was gaining energy from the random motion of the water molecule - the small-scale equivalent of the cup of tea getting hotter. But over time intervals of more than two seconds, on overall positive entropy change was measured and normality restored.
The team say their experiment provides the first evidence that the second law of thermodynamics is violated at appreciable time and length scales.
Their results are also in good agreement with predictions of the "fluctuation theorem", a theory developed at ANU 10 years ago to reconcile the second law with the behaviour of particles at microscopic scales.
"The results imply that the fluctuation theorem has important ramifications for nanotechnology and indeed for how life itself functions", claim the researchers.
Jul 21, 2002
WASHINGTON (AP) - Homeland security chief Tom Ridge says the threat of terrorism may force government planners to consider using the military for domestic law enforcement, now largely prohibited by federal law.
President Bush has called on Congress to thoroughly review the law that bans the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines from participating in arrests, searches, seizure of evidence and other police-type activity on U.S. soil. The Coast Guard and National Guard troops under the control of state governors are excluded from the Reconstruction-era law, known as the "Posse Comitatus Act."
Ridge said Sunday that it "goes against our instincts as a country to empower the military with the ability to arrest," and called the prospect "very unlikely."
But he said the government is wise to examine the law.
"We need to be talking about military assets, in anticipation of a crisis event," Ridge said on "Fox News Sunday." "And clearly, if you're talking about using the military, then you should have a discussion about posse comitatus."
Two influential Democratic senators agreed with Bush and Ridge that the law ought to be reviewed, but expressed no interest in granting the military new powers to arrest American citizens.
Sen. Carl Levin , chairman Senate Armed Services Committee , said posse comitatus "has served us well for a long time."
"It's kept the military out of law enforcement, out of arresting people except in the most unusual emergency situations like a riot or after some kind of a disaster where they have to protect against looting," Levin, D-Mich., said on CNN's "Late Edition."
However, he said: "I don't fear looking at it to see whether or not our military can be more helpful in a very supportive and assisting role even than they have been up to now — providing equipment, providing training, those kind of things which do not involve arresting people."
Sen. Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he favors expanding the military's role in responding to major catastrophes such as an attack by a weapon of mass destruction.
The law "has to be amended, but we're not talking about general police power," Biden, D-Del., said on "Fox News Sunday."
Air Force Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart, who heads the new military command charged with defending American territory, told The New York Times he favors changing the law to grant greater domestic powers to the military to protect against terror attacks. He offered no specific changes he favored.
Congress is racing to approve legislation by the end of its session this fall that would make Bush's proposed Department of Homeland Security a reality.
In the Senate, a version of the measure by Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., tracks closely with Bush's plan. It also would augment the agency's ability to gather and analyze intelligence from the FBI , CIA and others.
That bill is to be considered by the Senate committee Wednesday.
House Majority Leader Dick Armey said on NBC's "Meet the Press" there was a strong possibility Congress will resolve its differences and send Bush a bill enacting the sweeping government reorganization by Sept. 11.
Some lawmakers have expressed concern about rushing decisions on far-reaching changes in the bureaucracy, but Armey said: "It's time to move forward with this. The president's got a good plan."
Bush planned to give a speech Monday about his proposed new department and view demonstrations of high-technology devices for combatting terrorism that are being developed at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.
Did wild game feasts lead to fatal brain disorders?
By JOHN FAUBER and MARK JOHNSON
(MilwaukeelJournal Sentinel)
July 20, 2002
The wild game feasts were a fall ritual that drew outdoorsmen to the Waterhouse family cabin overlooking the Brule River, and filled the cedar-frame retreat with the aromas of partridge, Western elk, moose and Wisconsin white-tailed deer.
Now, years later, the legacy of those hearty spreads of the late 1980s and early '90s is a medical mystery linking three of the diners - James Botts, Wayne Waterhouse and Roger Marten.
One by one, the three have died from rare brain diseases, leaving their families and health officials wondering whether their deaths were an eerie coincidence or evidence that the deer and elk brain disorder known as chronic wasting disease has crossed the threshold from animals to people.
Either way, their tale is one more warning sign on a cautionary trailcutting through the heart of one of Wisconsin's most popular and revered traditions: deer hunting.
Waterhouse and Botts both died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, an always-fatal brain ailment that occurs in only onein a million people. Marten was believed to have died of Pick's disease, a somewhat more common neurological disorder that can be diagnosed in error when the true culprit is Creutzfeldt-Jakob.
Over the years, as many as 100 men may have taken part in the wild game feeds at the Waterhouse cabin. The odds are strongly against two men dying of Creutzfeldt-Jakob, according to Dennis Maki, a professor of medicine and an infectious disease expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Three would increase those odds dramatically.
"It's very suspicious," he said.
The families of the three men were devastated and baffled by their deaths - Waterhouse and Marten in 1993 and Botts in 1999 - all before chronic wasting disease was known to exist in Wisconsin's deer herd.
"Did hunting kill my dad? Did deer kill him?" asked Waterhouse's son, Gary. "If you'd have taken deer hunting away from him, that would have been the end of him. . . . Maybe the deer killed him. I don't know."
Raising more suspicion, however, is the fact that some of the meat served at the wild game feasts was elk and deer from Western states - including Colorado, where chronic wasting disease has been endemic for decades.
Presented last week with specifics of the cases, state public health officials expressed concern.
"We've immediately decided to proceed with an investigation," said Jeffrey Davis, chief medical officer and state epidemiologist for communicable diseases at the Wisconsin Division of Public Health.
He said the state will request death certificates and clinical and laboratory records for the three men.
Suspicions rising
So far, there has not been a documented case of a person contracting chronic wasting disease, but a handful of suspicious cases have surfaced in Wisconsin and around the country, all involving venison eaters who have contracted Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a deadly neurological disorder closely related to mad cow disease.
One of those cases involved D. Kevin Boss, a Minneapolis resident who died of CJD in 1996 at the age of 41. Boss occasionally ate venison from Wisconsin, including deer killed in Barron County, provided by his brother-in-law. Wayne Waterhouse lived in Barron County; Botts lived in Minnesota but grew up in Barron; Marten lived in nearby Buffalo County.
There have also been several documented cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob among people who cooked and ate brains from squirrels and wild goats.
The human version of mad cow disease, known as new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob, has killed more than 130 people in Europe and is believed to be caused by eating contaminated beef.
Scientists who watched mad cow disease jump from animals to humans are now deeply concerned that chronic wasting disease will make the same leap - if it hasn't already happened.
"We're actively looking for human beings who have acquired chronic wasting disease," said G. Richard Olds, chairman and Linda and John Mellowes Professor of Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
Today, research on chronic wasting, mad cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob centers on an unusual infectious agent suspected of causing all three diseases. All three are so-called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies and are believed to be caused by prions, microscopic pathogens that have no DNA and are neither bacteria nor a virus.
Prions are mutant proteins that get normal proteins to mimic their distorted shape, resulting in a buildup of spongelike holes in the brain. They are particularly adept at infecting nerve cells such as those found in the brain, spinal cord and eyes.
One reason prions are so feared is that they are highly resistant to heat and other sanitizing methods. It is believed that they can exist in the soil and other locations for years and resurface to infect animals.
In addition, prions may silently incubate for years or even decades in a person before producing symptoms of disease.
"These things behave differently from any other infectious agents we've ever dealt with before," Olds said. "They're practically indestructible."
Dreaded consequences
If chronic wasting disease prions were going to infect people, the men who gathered for the feasts at the Waterhouse cabin in northwestern Wisconsin were as likely candidates as any.
Several of the men were prolific hunters, bagging hoofed game in Wisconsin, the Western United States, Mexico and Canada.
The trophy room in the Chetek home of Gary Waterhouse, Wayne's son, includes a full-size musk ox, polar bear, grizzly bear and bobcat. It also contains two full-size mountain goats and numerous mounted heads of deer, elk and moose. All the trophies were shot by Gary.
The son inherited his love and dedication to hunting from his father.
"My dad was an avid hunter, and he was a very good hunter," Gary said.
Likewise, Marten, a native of nearby Mondovi, traveled North America hunting trophy animals. But he was equally happy to hunt in Wisconsin, even from home.
"He hunted deer every year from a lawn chair with a six-pack of beer," said his son, Randy.
Botts, who was raised in Chetek and later moved to the Minneapolis area, was not a hunter but regularly traveled to the Brule River to fish.
His wife, Judy, said he mentioned being invited to the wild game feasts at the Waterhouse cabin.
Initially, she said, she made no connection between the banquets and her husband's disease, but then news broke earlier this year about chronic wasting disease in Wisconsin.
"It just came to me and it came to me very strong," she said.
It'sa connection state officials dread having to make, given the grave health and economic consequences it could have for Wisconsin. The state Department of Natural Resources has gone so far as to say on its Web site that there is "no scientific evidence that CWD is transmissible through consumption of meat from an infected animal."
Still, the department is taking unprecedented precautions, telling hunters to wear rubber gloves when field-dressing carcasses, minimize handling of brain and spinal tissues and avoid consuming brain, spinal cord, eyes, spleen, tonsils and lymph nodes. The department is also requesting that hunters process their animals individually without mixing meat from different animals.
"Health experts advise that no part of any animal with evidence of CWD should be consumed by humans or other animals," the department mentions on its Web site.
Meanwhile, state health officials are escalating their surveillance of Creutzfeldt-Jakob cases in Wisconsin.
Earlier this year, the state division of public health urged doctors around the state to report probable cases of CJD, especially in patients under the age of 55.
None of the three men was younger than 55. Botts was 55when he died; Waterhouse and Marten were 66.
'It's very intriguing'
Regardless of their age, UW's Maki said the likelihood of two people who know each other contracting CJD is very low. Three would be even more unlikely and would suggest a common exposure - such as contaminated meat.
Maki posed these theoretical numbers:
If each of the three men knew 5,000 people, they would have had a circle of acquaintances totaling 15,000.
With a known incidence of one in 1 million people, you'd expect to find a CJD case among a group of 15,000 people roughly once every 70 years, he said. Two cases would take 140 years and three cases 210 years.
One case could just be a sporadic occurrence, he said. With two cases, "You'd have to sit up and prick up your ears," he said. With three cases, "the statistical likelihood is extremely low."
He said the northern Wisconsin scenario is complicated by one man being diagnosed with Pick's disease.
Like Creutzfeldt-Jakob, Pick's is a fatal neurological disorder. While prions are suspected as the cause of CJD, the cause of Pick's remains unknown, although prions have not been ruled out as playing a role.
The Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Foundation says that CJD can be mistaken for a variety of neurological disorders, including Alzheimer's and Pick's disease. Some doctors may not even consider CJD as a possible diagnosis since it is considered rare, the foundation says. In addition, the brain biopsy needed to make a definitive CJD diagnosis is invasive, costly and risky.
Jordan Grafman, chief of the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., said it would be "very rare" today for a CJD case to be misdiagnosed as Pick's. Medical authorities in the U.S. now are fairly vigilant about looking for the disease because of the mad cow disease outbreak abroad.
However, such a misdiagnosis would have been somewhat more possible in 1993, he said. And there may be other reasons to question Marten's diagnosis.
It is "highly unusual" for a Pick's patient to die within a year of the onset of symptoms, Grafman said. The vast majority of patients die within two to 10 years.
Marten died slightly less than a year after he first displayed symptoms, according to his son, Randy.
It's also unusual for someone to get Pick's after age 60. Marten died at age 66.
More important, the gold standard for diagnosing Pick's disease is to do an autopsy and a molecular analysis of brain tissue.
According to a certificate of death obtained from the state of Nevada, where Marten died after being taken to a clinic in Reno for treatment, no autopsy was performed.
UW's Maki said if Marten actually had CJD and was misdiagnosed, the possibility of chronic wasting disease having infected the three men becomes even more likely.
But even if the case was accurately diagnosed as Pick's, "It's very intriguing," he said. "That's all we can say at this time."
Body of research
Maki said he believes that if chronic wasting disease spreads among Wisconsin's deer herd, it's only a matter of time before the disease spreads to people.
"We eventually will see cases (in humans)," he said.
However, he predicted the number of cases is likely to remain small and the risk low.
Two years ago, federal government researchers at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Mont., analyzed prions from deer infected with chronic wasting disease. The analysis showed a substantial molecular barrier that helped prevent chronic wasting prions from converting normal human protein to the mutant form. Despite the barrier, deer prions ultimately were able to convert human protein to the mutant form. They did so with about the same level of efficiency as mad cow prions.
Maki and others point to a growing body of evidence linking the consumption of deer or other wild game with Creutzfeldt-Jakob.
In 1984, neurologists at Baylor College of Medicine investigated four suspicious deaths involving unrelated patients, all with a history of eating the brains of wild animals. All the patients eventually died, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob was the suspected cause.
"Our patients ate many brains from many wild animals over the course of many years and therefore could have come in contact with infected material," the researchers wrote.
In 1986, a study involving 26 CJD patients by researchers at Temple University and the National Institutes of Health found that exposure to deer through a hobby such as hunting resulted in up to a ninefold increased risk for CJD.
A 1997 study in the journal Lancet linked five unrelated CJD patients from different towns in rural Kentucky to a history of eating squirrel brains.
"Culinary preparations include scrambling the brains with eggs or putting them in a meat and vegetable stew referred to as 'burgoo,' " the researchers wrote.
In October 2001, a study in the journal Archives of Neurology reported on the cases of three people who contracted CJD and who had been deer hunters or had regularly eaten venison.
The three individuals, who were from Maine, Oklahoma and Utah, all were under the age of 30 and came down with the disease between 1997 and 2000. The vast majority of CJD patients get the disease in their 60s and 70s.
The researchers, some from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, concluded that although circumstances suggested a connection with chronic wasting disease, they could find no "causal link."
Now, the cases of Botts, Marten and Waterhouse raise some of the same questions.
Fred Bannister, a small-town doctor who knew all three men and took part in the wild game feeds, said a thorough investigation of the case is needed.
"I'm just a little guy out here in the woods who has suspicions," said the semiretired Chetek family physician. "There is something unusual."
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