Arctic ice 'disappearing fast'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4290340.stm

Arctic ice 'disappearing fast'

By Richard Black
Environment Correspondent, BBC News website




Part of what we're seeing is the increased greenhouse effect; I'd bet the mortgage on it


Mark Serreze, NSIDC

The area covered by sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk for a fourth consecutive year,
according to new data released by US scientists.

They say that this month sees the lowest extent of ice cover for more than a century.

The Arctic climate varies naturally, but the researchers conclude that human-induced
global warming is at least partially responsible.
They warn the shrinkage could lead to even faster melting in coming years.

"September 2005 will set a new record minimum in the amount of Arctic sea ice cover,"
said Mark Serreze, of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), Boulder, Colorado.

"It's the least sea ice we've seen in the satellite record, and continues a pattern of
extreme low extents of sea ice which we've now seen for the last four years," he told BBC
News.

September lows

September is the month when the Arctic ice usually reaches a minimum.

The new data shows that on 19 September, the area covered by ice fell to 5.35 million sq
km (2.01 million sq miles), the lowest recorded since 1978, when satellite records became
available; it is now 20% less than the 1978-2000 average.

Winds and ocean currents may redistribute sea ice around the Arctic

The current rate of shrinkage they calculate at 8% per decade; at this rate there may be
no ice at all during the summer of 2060.
An NSIDC analysis of historical records also suggests that ice cover is less this year
than during the low periods of the 1930s and 40s.

Mark Serreze believes that the findings are evidence of climate change induced by human
activities.

"It's still a controversial issue, and there's always going to be some uncertainty
because the climate system does have a lot of natural variability, especially in the Arctic,"
he said.

"But I think the evidence is growing very, very strong that part of what we're seeing now
is the increased greenhouse effect. If you asked me, I'd bet the mortgage that that's
just what's happening."

Confusing movement

One of the limitations of these records is that they measure only the area of ice, rather
than the volume.

"One other factor could be movements of sea ice," said Liz Morris, of the British
Antarctic Survey, currently working at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, UK.

"If it all piles up in one place, you might have the same total amount of ice," she told
the BBC News website, "and there is some evidence that ice is piling up along the north
Canadian coast, driven by changes in the pattern of winds and perhaps ocean currents."

Most data on sea ice thickness comes from records of military submarines, which regularly
explored passages under the Arctic ice cap during the Cold War years.



Europe's ice explorer

Submarines can cross the Arctic Ocean along tracks taken decades before, and note
differences in the ice thickness above; but that may mean little if the ice itself has moved.

Professor Morris is involved in a new European satellite, Cryosat, which should be able
to give definitive measurements of ice thickness as well as extent; its launch is
scheduled for 8 October.
But she also believes that the NSIDC data suggests an impact from the human-enhanced
greenhouse effect.

"All data goes through cycles, and so you have to be careful," she said, "but it's also
true to say that we wouldn't expect to have four years in a row of shrinkage.

"That, combined with rising temperatures in the Arctic, suggests a human impact; and I
would also bet my mortgage on it, because if you change the radiation absorption process of
the atmosphere (through increased production of greenhouse gases) so there is more
heating of the lower atmosphere, sooner or later you are going to melt ice."

Arctic warming fast

Though there are significant variations across the region, on average the Arctic is
warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, according to a major report released last
year.



Further warming for Arctic

The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a four-year study involving hundreds of scientists,
projected an additional temperature rise of 4-7C by 2100.
If the current trend can be ascribed in part to human-induced climate change, Mark
Serreze sees major reasons for concern.

"What we're seeing is a process in which we start to lose ice cover during the summer,"
he said, "so areas which formerly had ice are now open water, which is dark.

"These dark areas absorb a lot of the Sun's energy, much more than the ice; and what
happens then is that the oceans start to warm up, and it becomes very difficult for ice to
form during the following autumn and winter.

"It looks like this is exactly what we're seeing - a positive feedback effect, a
'tipping-point'."

The idea behind tipping-points is that at some stage the rate of global warming would
accelerate, as rising temperatures break down natural restraints or trigger environmental
changes which release further amounts of greenhouse gases.
Possible tipping-points include
the disappearance of sea ice leading to greater absorption of solar radiation
a switch from forests being net absorbers of carbon dioxide to net producers
melting permafrost, releasing trapped methane

This study is the latest to indicate that such positive feedback mechanisms may be in
operation, though definitive proof of their influence on the Earth's climatic future remains
elusive.

Media Exaggerated Some Of New Orleans' Woes

Media Outlets Exaggerated Some Of New Orleans' Woes
By ERIC DEGGANS
St. Petersburg Times Op/Ed Columnist

It's the story of the moment regarding coverage of Hurricane Katrina: The news media likely passed along exaggerated tales of lawlessness in New Orleans in the storm's early aftermath, repeating accounts of murder, rapes and child molestations often delivered by misinformed public officials and traumatized hurricane victims.

But despite a slew of recent stories outlining the fact that the death rates, rapes and murders there have totalled far fewer than initially reported - the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, New York Times , Los Angeles Times and NBC News have all reported on this issue in recent days - experts say they don't expect media credibility to take a huge hit.

Mostly because the corrections have come from many of the same news outlets that did the initial reporting.

"I see this as an admirable amount of self-examination ... (the press) has been very quick at calling public attention to their own dirty laundry," said Steve Lovelady, managing editor of CJR Daily, the media criticism Web site operated by Columbia Journalism Review . "You don't see FEMA saying to the public, here's seven ways we screwed up."

Matthew Felling, media director for the Center for Media and Public Affairs, agreed. "The media's credibility takes a short-term hit with these public corrections," he said. "But ... the media is becoming very skillful at policing itself - which will build its accuracy in the future."

On Sept. 6, the Times-Picayune published a story in which a National Guardsman pointed out bodies at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. The guardsman said 30 to 40 other bodies were stored in the center's freezer. But on Monday, the newspaper noted just four corpses were recovered there.

The Los Angeles Times said Tuesday it "adopted a breathless tone" in its lead news story on evacuations at the Louisiana Superdome, "reporting that National Guard troops "took positions on rooftops, scanning for snipers and armed mobs as seething crowds of refugees milled below, desperate to flee."'

"The guy who wrote that story is a friend. ... I hope he hasn't seen my story yet," said Jim Rainey, a media writer at the Los Angeles Times who co-wrote the Tuesday story. "The reporters and the editors can get caught up in the emotion of these stories, sometimes as much as the victims do. You're sorting hundreds of pieces of information and doing it under tremendous deadline pressure."

One blogger criticized National Public Radio reporter John Burnett for passing along the widely reported story of a young girl, estimated to be 13, who was dead and possibly raped in a bathroom at the Convention Center. The Times-Picayune reported Monday that despite numerous rumors about rapes the newspaper now could not confirm any such incidents with officials.

NPR managing editor Bill Marimow defended Burnett, calling him a "superb reporter" who provided "excellent" first-person observations.

"At the convention center, it was extremely dangerous ... not the kind of place one would venture into and begin searching for dead bodies," Marimow said. "If you have four or five credible eyewitnesses who tell you they saw something, if you subject that to high standards of proof, you report it - provided you attribute it."

And, as the Times-Picayune and Los Angeles Times stories noted, sometimes the misinformation came from public officials.

Both newspapers mentioned a Sept. 6 appearance by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and then-police Superintendent Eddie Compass on Oprah Winfrey's talk show, where the men talked about hundreds of armed gang members killing and raping people, including babies, inside the Superdome. During the show, they insisted the facility was so unsafe, even after evacuation, that Winfrey could only spend five minutes inside.

In the Los Angeles Times story, Times-Picayune editor Jim Amoss blamed the reporting errors on a lack of telephone service and the fact that evacuees were largely poor black people, which fed into stereotypical assumptions about animalistic behavior.

But CJR's Lovelady resisted that thesis. "There were two black officials saying this stuff ... and they weren't just anyone, they were the mayor and the police chief," he said of Nagin and Compass. "When you've got the mayor and police chief saying it, you can't just decide, I'm not going to write about this."

There have been times when the debunking has been tougher. On NBC's Meet the Press Sunday, host Tim Russert interviewed Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard, who had broken down in tears during a Sept. 4 appearance while describing how a parish employee's mother died after days of waiting for federal help.

Russert replayed his comments Sunday, then presented evidence unearthed by MSNBC and several bloggers indicating the woman died the day Katrina hit. Broussard responded angrily: "Somebody wants to nitpick a man's tragic loss of a mother ... are you kidding?"

Felling said Russert crossed the line from debunking myths to insensitivity. "(Broussard's comments) deserved an on-air correction, they did not deserve an on-air interrogation."

NPR's Marimow noted that journalists will likely be searching for the truth for a long while.

"Daily journalism is ... always subject to amplification and clarification," he said. "I suspect people are going to be amplifying the record on this for the rest of our lives."

--Times researcher Cathy Wos contributed to this report.

Spray-on solar cell manufacturing

http://www.trnmag.com/Roundup/2005/TRN_Research_News_Roundup_9-26-05.html#sprayonsolar


Spray-on solar cell manufacturing

Researchers from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have
developed a low-cost spray-on manufacturing technique for making solar
cells.

The solar cells have an energy conversion efficiency of five percent. This
is considerably lower than traditional silicon wafer solar cells, which
have efficiencies of up to 30 percent, but the much simpler manufacturing
process has the potential to lower the cost per kilowatt, according to the
researchers.

The key component, which is applied by spraying, is a mix of copper indium
sulfide and titanium dioxide nanoparticles sandwiched between a thin film
of titanium dioxide and a layer of titanium dioxide nanocrystals. The
copper indium sulfide nanoparticles absorb sunlight and the titanium
dioxide nanoparticles convert photons to electrons.

Other researchers have combined organic dyes with titanium dioxide to make
solar cells, but these organic materials degrade more readily when exposed
to moisture and oxygen than copper indium sulfide.

The technique could make solar cells an economically competitive form of
electricity generation, according to the researchers

(Nanocomposite Three-dimensional Solar Cells Obtained by Chemical Spray
Deposition, Nano Letters, September 14, 2005)

Protein logic digitizes cells

http://www.trnmag.com/Roundup/2005/TRN_Research_News_Roundup_9-26-05.html


Protein logic digitizes cells

Brain researchers often use the analogy of brain as computer to frame
their work. As it turns out, the analogy is also handy for examining the
complex biochemical interactions inside individual cells.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge in England have developed a
mathematical model of the biochemical interactions of protein molecules
within cells that shows that proteins are capable of carrying out the
basic binary logic functions of computing. They also showed that this type
of binary logic appears to be at work in E. coli. bacteria.

The logic is carried out by the actions of small molecules that bind to
the larger protein molecules and change the shapes of the proteins, which
switches them between active and inactive states. The protein binding
process can implement AND, OR and XOR logic gates.

The work isn't likely to lead to computers made from bacteria anytime
soon, but it does present a new perspective for understanding the complex
biochemical network of life, which in turn could lead to better
understanding and treatment of diseases.

(The Logical Repertoire of Ligand-Binding Proteins, Physical Biology,
September 2005)

In a Melting Trend, Less Arctic Ice to Go Around

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/29/science/29ice.html?ei=5094&en=67b8398525397980&hp=&ex=1127966400&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print

The New York Times
September 29, 2005
In a Melting Trend, Less Arctic Ice to Go Around
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

The floating cap of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean shrank this summer to what is probably its smallest size in at least a century of record keeping, continuing a trend toward less summer ice, a team of climate experts reported yesterday.

That shift is hard to explain without attributing it in part to human-caused global warming, the team's members and other experts on the region said.

The change also appears to be headed toward becoming self-sustaining: the increased open water absorbs solar energy that would otherwise be reflected back into space by bright white ice, said Ted A. Scambos, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., which compiled the data along with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

"Feedbacks in the system are starting to take hold," Dr. Scambos said.

The data was released on the center's Web site, www.nsidc.org.

The findings are consistent with recent computer simulations showing that a buildup of smokestack and tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases could lead to a profoundly transformed Arctic later this century, when much of the once ice-locked ocean would routinely become open water in summers.

Expanding areas of open water in the summer could be a boon to whales and cod stocks, and the ice retreat could create summertime shipping shortcuts between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

But a host of troubles lie ahead as well. One of the most important consequences of Arctic warming will be increased flows of meltwater and icebergs from glaciers and ice sheets, and thus an accelerated rise in sea levels, threatening coastal areas. The loss of sea ice could also hurt both polar bears and Eskimo seal hunters.

The Arctic ice cap always grows in the winter and shrinks in the summer. The average minimum area from 1979, when precise satellite mapping began, until 2000 was 2.69 million square miles, similar in size to the contiguous area of the United States. The new summer low, measured on Sept. 19, was 20 percent below that.

Before 1979, scientists estimated the size of the ice cap based on reports from ships and airplanes.

The difference between the average ice area and the area that persisted this summer was about 500,000 square miles, an area about twice the size of Texas, the scientists said.

This summer was the fourth in a row with the ice cap areas sharply below the long-term average, said Mark C. Serreze, a senior scientist at the snow and ice center and a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Dr. Scambos said the consecutive reductions in the ice cap "make it pretty certain a long-term decline is under way."

A natural cycle in the polar atmosphere called the Arctic oscillation, which contributed to the reduction in Arctic ice in the past, did not appear to be a factor in the past several years, Dr. Serreze said.

He said the role of accumulating greenhouse gas emissions had become increasingly apparent with rising air and sea temperatures. Still, many scientists say it is not yet possible to determine what portion of Arctic change is being caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide and other emissions from human sources and how much is just climate's usual wiggles.

Dr. Serreze and other scientists said that more variability could lie ahead and that the area of sea ice could actually increase some years. But the scientists have found few hints that other factors, like more Arctic cloudiness in a warming world, will reverse the trend.

"With all that dark open water, you start to see an increase in Arctic Ocean heat storage," Dr. Serreze said. "Come autumn and winter that makes it a lot harder to grow ice, and the next spring you're left with less and thinner ice. And it's easier to lose even more the next year."

The result, he said, is that the Arctic is "becoming a profoundly different place than we grew up thinking about."

Other experts on Arctic ice and climate disagreed on details. For example, Ignatius G. Rigor at the University of Washington said the change was probably linked to a mix of factors, including influences of the atmospheric cycle.

But he agreed with Dr. Serreze that the influence from greenhouse gases had to be involved.

"The global warming idea has to be a good part of the story," Dr. Rigor said. "I think we have a different climate state in the Arctic now. All of these feedbacks are starting to kick in and really snuffing the ice out by the end of summer."

Other experts expressed some caution. Claire L. Parkinson, a sea ice expert at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said a host of changes in the Arctic - including rising temperatures, melting permafrost and shrinking sea ice - were consistent with human-caused warming. But she emphasized that the complicated system was still far from completely understood.

William L. Chapman, a sea ice researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said it was important to keep in mind that the size of the ice cap could vary tremendously, in part because of changes in wind patterns, which can cause the ice to heap up against one Arctic shore or drift away from another.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

FBI anti-obscenity squad

"I guess this means we've won the war on terror. We must not need any more resources for espionage."

- An unnamed FBI agent, on the bureau's diverting eight of its members to a new anti-obscenity squad that will investigate pornographers. A memo described the initiative as "one of the top priorities" of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

California Housing at 'Tipping Point'

California Housing at 'Tipping Point'

Forecasting group says state's economy to take a hit once its hot real estate market starts to cool.

September 28, 2005
CNN

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California's housing market is overvalued by up to 45 percent and at a "tipping point" that will end its red-hot growth cycle, the UCLA Anderson Forecast projected Wednesday.

California's housing market, one of the strongest and most closely watched in the United States and the engine of the state's economic recovery, is heading toward a "soft landing" that will slow the state's economy, UCLA Anderson Forecast senior economist Christopher Thornberg wrote in a report.

The forecasting group said in June that California was facing a housing bubble and predicted it would deflate slowly rather than pop as many analysts have projected.

As the state's housing market cools, many of the building and finance jobs it created will start to disappear and consumers, who are currently emboldened by rising home values, will pull back on spending, Thornberg wrote in his latest forecast report.

"Our economy is being driven forward primarily by the housing sector, with construction and finance contributing to the recovery in a way not seen before," Thornberg wrote, adding that there are "signs that the housing party is ending."

"This is not good news for the state, since other externally oriented sectors that might be able to pick up some of the economic slack in the event of a cooling down of the housing markets have yet to show any signs of solid job growth either, even with solid profits," he wrote.

He forecast California's jobless rate would rise to 5.8 percent next year, followed by a rise to 6.4 percent in 2007, from 5.5 percent this year.

"It's a soft landing scenario," said Thornberg, who based his estimates on trends in the state's housing market.

That market, torrid in recent years in terms of both sales and prices, is poising the state for weak overall growth in 2006 and 2007, according to Thornberg.

"When you think about where jobs and income are heading - think real estate," Thornberg wrote, noting that California's housing market is "clearly starting to lose steam."

Soaring home prices are forcing new home buyers to take on risky variable-rate, interest-only loans, representing a market "starting to reach a breaking point," Thornberg wrote.

Additionally, the market appears to be at a "crossroads" in terms of sales and inventories. Sales in some regions are falling while inventories in some regions are building.

"It certainly looks as if we've peaked," Thornberg told Reuters, noting he expects job growth in home building in California to underscore his view.

Construction payrolls in the state will expand by 1.3 percent next year and shrink by 1.0 percent in 2007 after growing by 6.3 percent this year, Thornberg predicted.

Overall nonfarm payroll growth in California will slow to a rate of 1.2 percent next year and to 0.8 percent in 2007 from an estimated 1.6 percent this year, according to Thornberg.

http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/28/real_estate/california_housing.reut/index.htm?cnn=yes

Biochip spots cancer signs

http://www.trnmag.com/Roundup/2005/TRN_Research_News_Roundup_9-26-05.html#biochipspotscancer


Biochip spots cancer signs

The practice of chemically "functionalizing" carbon nanotubes and
semiconductor nanowires by attaching DNA or other biomolecules to them has
led to prototype biochips that can detect bacteria, viruses, specific
types of DNA, or particular proteins molecules.

Researchers from Harvard University had advanced the field with a nanowire
sensor array that can detect multiple biochemical signs of cancer. Cancer
cells produce different types of proteins, and today's blood tests often
look for only one, such as the prostate specific antigen (GSA).

The biochip works by measuring changes in electrical conductance of
nanowires as specific protein molecules bind to and release from the
chip's nanowires. The researchers tested the biochip using blood samples.
The device could eventually be used for clinical diagnostics, including
detecting and identifying cancers.

The researchers used a similar technique last year to make a biochip that
can detect individual virus particles.

(Multiplexed Electrical Detection of Cancer Markers with Nanowire Sensor
Arrays, Nature Biotechnology, published online September 18, 2005)

Giant Squid !

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Camera Catches Live Giant Squid

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/27/AR2005092701573.html

washingtonpost.com
In a First, Camera Catches Live Giant Squid
Rarely Seen Creature Is Documented Near Tokyo

By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 28, 2005; A02

Using a digital camera dangling from a line nearly 3,300 feet long, scientists for the first time have photographed a live giant squid, the tentacled deep-sea monster that is the largest invertebrate on Earth.

Researchers Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori, reporting in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, said a giant squid about 26 feet long attacked a baited jig, or lure, trailing below a marker buoy about 500 miles south of Tokyo, near the Ogasawara Islands in the Pacific.

"The initial attack was captured on camera and shows the two long tentacles wrapped in a ball around the bait," wrote Kubodera, of Japan's National Science Museum and Mori, from the Ogasawara Whale Watching Association. "The giant squid became snagged on the jig."

The camera took 550 digital images over the next several hours while the squid tried repeatedly to free itself. It finally escaped but lost 18 feet of tentacle in the struggle. DNA analysis matched the tentacle with fragments taken from the remains of other giant squids over the years.

The giant squid, known by its biological name, Architeuthis dux , has been famous in legend and was immortalized by Jules Verne's novel "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," in which an ax-wielding Captain Nemo and harpooner Ned Land lead the crew of the Nautilus in a vicious battle to free the submarine.

Despite the stories, however, very little is known about the giant squid. The first complete specimen, a dead animal captured by fishermen off Newfoundland, was found in 1874. Subsequent remains, either washed up on beaches or trapped in fishnets, have appeared occasionally in high latitudes -- Canadian and Japanese waters, or off Tasmania and Australia.

"But what does that mean?" asked Paul Loiselle, curator of freshwater fishes at the New York Aquarium. "Is that because they like colder waters, or do they simply rot faster in the tropics?"

Kubodera and Mori had been hunting the squid for three years by following sperm whales between September and December to a deep-water feeding ground off the Ogasawara Islands. Sperm whales hunt giant squids for food.

The researchers suspended a line in water nearly 4,000 feet deep, with a digital camera and a light looking down on two jigs baited with common squids about 10 inches long. The team also attached crushed shrimp as an odor lure.

The squid attacked the lower bait at a depth of 3,300 feet, wrapping its two long tentacles (squids also have eight shorter ones) around the jig and immediately snagging itself. In attempting to break free, it towed the lure up nearly 1,300 feet, brought it back down and swam sideways with it until it could no longer be spotted by the camera.

"Four hours and 13 minutes after becoming snagged, the attached tentacle broke, as seen by sudden slackness in the line," the authors wrote. Once on the surface "the recovered section of tentacle was still functioning," they continued, "with the large suckers of the tentacle club repeatedly gripping the boat deck and any offered fingers."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

New Orleans' Fake Officers get Federal Funding

QUESTIONS SURFACE IN WAKE OF COMPASS' RESIGNATION

SEPTEMBER 28, 2005

Eddie Compass has resigned as the New Orleans Police chief, the Associated Press Reports.

On the heels of N.O. police chief Eddie Compass' resignation, allegations are emerging. Fox News' Tony Snow has said that of the 1700 police working for New Orleans, maybe only 1000 really exist.

Rogers asked someone in the know, who agreed with Snow's statements.

"It's pretty much always been known, but never openly acknowledged, that NOPD's actual numbers were far below the "official" figure of 1500 - 1700," said the source.

"To get that number over 1500, and thus qualify for federal funding, Compass and his predecessors counted reservists and certain retirees as active duty officers. The REAL number is, and has been for some time, a lot closer to 1000."

Some time ago, the Feds were considering taking over the NOPD. Allegedly, that's when the "cooking of the books" on numbers of cops started in earnest, because one of the feds' complaints was the low number of officers, Rogers is told.

Some suspect that this should be the death knell for the" residency rule," which requires NOPD officers to live in New Orleans.

Developing...
------------------------
Filed by Chad E. Rogers
http://www.thedeadpelican.com for updates

The Start of a DNA Bank

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/23/AR2005092301665.html

washingtonpost.com
Bill Would Permit DNA Collection From All Those Arrested

By Jonathan Krim
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 24, 2005; A03

Suspects arrested or detained by federal authorities could be forced to provide samples of their DNA that would be recorded in a central database under a provision of a Senate bill to expand government collection of personal data.

The controversial measure was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee last week and is supported by the White House, but has not gone to the floor for a vote. It goes beyond current law, which allows federal authorities to collect and record samples of DNA only from those convicted of crimes. The data are stored in an FBI-maintained national registry that law enforcement officials use to aid investigations, by comparing DNA from criminals with evidence found at crime scenes.

Sponsors insist that adding DNA from people arrested or detained would lead to prevention of some crimes, and help solve others more quickly.

"When police retrace the history of a serial predator after he is finally caught, they often find that he never had a prior criminal conviction, but did have a prior arrest," Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said in a statement. "That means the only way they are likely to catch such a perpetrator after his first crime -- rather than his 10th -- is if authorities can maintain a comprehensive database of all those who are arrested, just as we do with fingerprints."

Privacy advocates across the political spectrum say the proposal is another step in expanding government intrusion.

"DNA is not like fingerprinting," said Jesselyn McCurdy, a legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "It contains genetic information and information about diseases." She added that the ACLU questions whether it is constitutional to put data from those who have not been convicted into a database of convicted criminals.

The provision, co-sponsored by Kyl and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), does not require the government to automatically remove the DNA data of people who are never convicted. Instead, those arrested or detained would have to petition to have their information removed from the database after their cases were resolved.

Privacy advocates are especially concerned about possible abuses such as profiling based on genetic characteristics.

"This clearly opens the door to all kinds of race- or ethnic-based stops" by police, said Jim Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a digital policy think tank.

Originally, the federal DNA database was limited to convicted sex offenders, who often repeat their crimes. Then it was expanded to include violent felons. Several states, including Virginia, also collect DNA from those arrested for violent crimes.

"It's a classic mission-creep situation," said Jim Harper, a privacy specialist with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. "These guys are playing a great law and order game . . . and in the process creating a database that could be converted into something quite dangerous."

Typically, DNA is taken from suspects via a swab of saliva. A DNA "profile" -- or unique numeric signature -- is generated, which can be stored without including private genetic information.

But privacy advocates say they are unclear how the growing number of state and federal samples are being handled, recorded and secured.

The Kyl measure was added to a bill to strengthen penalties for violent acts against women and was approved without a roll-call vote. McCurdy said she hopes that negotiations among Judiciary Committee members result in changes before the legislation is voted on by the Senate.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Is "Reality" Merely a Movie Inside Your Head?

Is "Reality" Merely a Movie Inside Your Head?

Is consciousness a seamless experience or a string of fleeting images, like frames of a movie? The emerging answer will determine whether the way we perceive the world is illusory

By Christof Koch
Scientific American
October 2005 issue
The brain is an amazingly dynamic organ. Millions of neurons in all corners of our gray matter send out an endless stream of signals. Many of the neurons appear to fire spontaneously, without any recognizable triggers. With the help of techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG) and microelectrode recordings, brain researchers are listening in on the polyphonic concert in our heads. Any mental activity is accompanied by a ceaseless crescendo and diminuendo of background processing. The underlying principle behind this seeming racket is not understood. Nevertheless, as everyone knows, the chaos creates our own unique, continuous stream of consciousness.

And yet it is very difficult to focus our attention on a single object for any extended period. Our awareness jumps constantly from one input to another. No sooner have I written this sentence than my eyes move from the computer screen to the trees outside my window. I can hear a dog barking in the distance. Then I remember the deadline for this article--which isn't going to be extended again. Resolutely, I force myself to type the next line.

How does this stream of impressions come to be? Is our perception really as continuous as it seems, or is it divided into discrete time parcels, similar to frames in a movie? These questions are among the most interesting being investigated by psychologists and neuroscientists. The answers will satisfy more than our curiosity--they will tell us if our experience of reality is accurate or a fiction and if my fiction is different from yours.

Did You See That Animal?
Nothing that we perceive, think or feel falls out of the blue into our inner eye. Each mental feat is grounded in particular processes in the brain. Scientific research methods are not well suited to studying the neuronal processes that accompany our conscious experience. Yet much has been learned concerning the neural basis of subjective experience. My old friend and colleague, the late Francis Crick, and I coined a term for these fascinating processes: neuronal correlates of consciousness, or NCCs--the set of firings among neurons that correlates with each bit of awareness that we experience.

How are we to understand the creation and disappearance of such NCCs? Do they spring--like Athena from the head of Zeus--completely formed from unconscious brain activity, only to dissolve instantly again? Such an all-or-nothing principle would certainly conform to our subjective experience, in which a thought or sensation is suddenly there and then disappears. On the other hand, NCCs might build up over a longer time until they intrude into our awareness and may then only slowly fade until they are so slight that we can no longer perceive them.

Something like this second theory is advanced by psychologist Talis Bachmann of the University of Tartu in Estonia. Bachmann believes that consciousness for any one sensation takes time, comparable to the development of a photograph. Any conscious percept--say, the color red--does not instantly appear; we become aware of it gradually. A large body of experimental work seems to support this hypothesis.

Measuring reaction times is the most obvious approach to studying the temporal structure of consciousness. As early as the 19th century, psychologists exposed test subjects to flashes of light that varied in duration and intensity. They were attempting to discover how long an individual had to be exposed to a stimulus to perceive it consciously and how close in time two stimuli had to be to be perceived as one continuous sensation.

Today researchers flash a small black bar on a computer screen and ask subjects to press a button as soon as they recognize whether the bar is vertical or horizontal. Measured this way, however, the reaction time includes not only the interval it takes for the eye and brain to process the stimulus but also how long it takes for the desired motor response--pressing the button.

To separate these components, researchers such as Simon J. Thorpe of the Brain and Cognition Research Center in Toulouse, France, measure so-called evoked potentials--changes in the electrical activity of neurons. This brain signal can be captured by electrodes attached to the scalp, as in an EEG recording. In one experiment, subjects were asked to decide quickly whether an image that flashed on a screen for fractions of a second contained an animal or not. This task did not prove difficult, even though they had no idea what kind of animal would be projected.

It became evident that the individuals needed less than half a second to give the correct answer. The time was about the same when they were asked to press a button to indicate whether an image showed a car or another means of transportation. The researchers then compared the brain reactions triggered by the animal images with those elicited by scenes containing no animals. In the initial fractions of a second after presentation, the EEG patterns were nearly identical.

It takes approximately 30 to 50 milliseconds for nerve impulses to travel from the eye's retina to the visual centers of the cerebral cortex at the back of the head. By 150 milliseconds, the evoked potential in response to animal images diverged from the electrical brain potential following non-animal images. In other words, after about one tenth of a second something in the cerebral cortex began to distinguish animal from nonanimal pictures. Given that the processing time of lone neurons is in the millisecond range, this categorization is remarkably swift and can be accomplished only via massive parallel processing.

This result does not mean, however, that the information "animal" or "not animal" is consciously accessible within 150 milliseconds. Sight occurs in a flash, but the brain needs more time to create conscious impressions.

Masking Reality
Odd things can happen when stimuli follow in rapid succession, and it doesn't matter whether they are visual, acoustic or tactile. For example, registering one image can distort previous or subsequent images or suppress them completely if they are flashed quickly on a monitor. Psychologists refer to this effect as masking.

Masking makes it clear that our perception can deviate significantly from reality. Such systematic distortions of perception teach researchers the rules that the mind uses to construct its view of the world. The most frequently used technique is backward masking, in which the mask follows an initial stimulus. Here both stimuli can fuse completely, as neuropsychologist Robert Efron of the University of California at Davis found out. When Efron flashed a 10-millisecond-long green light immediately after a 10-millisecond-long red light, his subjects reported a single flash. What color did they see? Yellow, rather than a red light that changed into green. Two images in rapid succession sometimes result in a single conscious impression.

Recently Stanislas Dehaene, a cognition researcher at INSERM in Orsay, France, used the masking technique to study word processing. Dehaene presented subjects who were lying in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner with a series of slides in rapid succession. On the slides were simple words like "lion." These words appeared for barely 30 milliseconds--just long enough for the individuals to decode them correctly. Yet if a series of random images appeared before and after the target word, recognition fell off dramatically.

When the word was seen, the fMRI machine recorded vigorous brain activity in multiple locations, including in vision and speech centers. Masked, however, by the random images immediately preceding and following the word "lion" on the screen, brain activity was muted and confined to parts of the visual cortex involved in early phases of vision. Masking eliminated conscious recognition of "lion"; only the input stages of the visual brain were activated.

Researchers have prolonged the interval between stimuli and still achieved masking--up to 100 milliseconds. This means that even an image that strikes the retina one tenth of a second after a prior image can cancel out conscious perception of the first image. And yet, although the masking thwarts the development of a visual impression, it cannot prevent unconscious processing: test subjects who were encouraged to guess often correctly identified the initial images, even though they had been masked from conscious perception.

How Long Is a Moment?
How can we explain such aberrations? How is it even possible for a second stimulus to alter the perception of one that has already arrived? Think of two waves approaching a beach; if they move at the same speed, the second one should never be able to catch up with the first. But feedback mechanisms are involved in neural processing. As soon as neuronal signals within the visual cortex or even between the cortex and deeper brain regions start shuttling back and forth, as they do, subsequent information can distort the processing of earlier information.

How far back in time masking can extend tells us something about temporal delay in the brain's feedback loops. If we add the experimentally derived maximum masking span of approximately 100 milliseconds to the 150 milliseconds that are required to discern a visual signal, this means that a minimum of about a quarter of a second is needed to consciously see a stimulus. Depending on its characteristics, the time span can be even longer but hardly ever shorter. Our perceptions, it seems, lag considerably behind reality--and we don't notice that.

Neuronal correlates of consciousness have a kind of minimum life span, and this existence corresponds in our experience more or less to what can be called the minimal perceptual moment. In all probability, subsequent brain activity during backward masking disturbs precisely those processes that signal the onset and disappearance of a target stimulus. Looked at the other way around, remnants of previous activity remain for a short time and may momentarily prevent the development of new NCCs. This competition among overlapping neural coalitions may be a significant feature of consciousness.

Sensory impressions come and go for various reasons: eye movements, a change in attention, or simply sensory cells becoming fatigued. With increasing visual input, for example, the firing activity of the visual cortex rises steadily and may shoot up precipitously once a certain threshold has been reached. This is why, for example, a light that is flashed briefly appears to be brighter than a steady beam of the same intensity. After the initial rapid increase, the perceived brightness of the steady beam gradually begins to drift to a lower value.

If sensing such a simple input can be so variable, imagine how complicated it must be for the brain to assess the actual world. One of the significant issues facing consciousness research is the fact that the world around us is so incredibly complex and multifaceted. Objects can only rarely be reduced to qualities that are as easily measured as simple brightness or color. A face, for example, is characterized by unique shapes, contours, colors and textures. The position and gaze of the eyes, the play of the mouth, the form of the nose, skin folds and blemishes--how do we integrate all these details into a unified image that conveys a person's identity, gender and emotional state?

This question goes to the core of the so-called binding problem. If NCCs arise within the various processing centers in the brain at different times, shouldn't each of the attributes be perceived with a time lag? How is the brain able to integrate all these individual activities?

Neurobiologist Semir Zeki of University College London has been researching this problem for many years. By measuring how subjects perceive squares that can randomly change color as they move on a screen, he has shown that a change in color of such an object is seen 60 to 80 milliseconds faster than a change in the direction of that object's movement. That is, one attribute is registered at a different time than another attribute of the same moment. This finding suggests that there may not be much truth to the presumed unity of consciousness--at least not when we are looking at extremely short time spans.

Such discrepancies rarely make themselves felt in our everyday lives, however. When a car races past me, its form does not seem to lag behind its color, even though each processing step--awareness of form, color, sound, speed and direction of movement--requires separate assessments by different regions of my brain, each with its own dynamic and delay. A unified impression is rapidly reached because the brain has no mechanism for registering the asynchrony. We are almost never aware of the differing time lags. We simply perceive all the qualities of an object simultaneously--as incoherent as that composite image might be.

Snapshots in Time
A common metaphor for consciousness is that we live and experience things in a river of time. This implies that perception proceeds smoothly from our first waking moment of the day until we sink our heads onto the pillow at night. But this continuity of consciousness may be yet another illusion. Consider patients who experience "cinematographic vision" resulting from severe migraine headaches. According to Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and noted author who coined the term, these men and women occasionally lose their sense of visual continuity and instead see a flickering series of still images. The images do not overlap or seem superimposed; they just last too long, like a movie that has been stuck on freeze-frame and then suddenly jumps ahead to catch up to a real-time moving scene.

Sacks describes one woman on a hospital ward who had started to run water into a tub for a bath. She stepped up to the tub when the water had risen to an inch deep and then stood there, transfixed by the spigot, while the tub filled to overflowing, running onto the floor. Sacks came upon her, touched her, and she suddenly saw the overflow. She told him later that the image in her mind was of the water coming from the faucet into the inch of water and that no further visual change had occurred until he had touched her. Sacks himself has experienced cinematographic vision following the drinking of sakau, a popular intoxicant in Micronesia, describing a swaying palm as "a succession of stills, like a film run too slow, its continuity no longer maintained."

These clinical observations demonstrate that under normal circumstances, temporal splitting of sensations is barely, if ever, noticeable to us. Our perception seems to be the result of a sequence of individual snapshots, a sequence of moments, like individual, discrete movie frames that, when quickly scrolling past us, we experience as continuous motion. The important point is that we experience events that occur more or less at the same moment as synchronous. And events that reach us sequentially are perceived in that order.

Depending on the study, the duration of such snapshots is between 20 and 200 milliseconds. We do not know yet whether this discrepancy reflects the crudeness of our instruments or some fundamental quality of neurons. Still, such discrete perceptual snapshots may explain the common observation that time sometimes seems to pass more slowly or quickly.

Our perceptions lag behind reality, casting doubt on our presumed unity of consciousness.

Assume that the snapshot of each moment increases in duration for some reason, so that fewer snapshots are taken per second. In this case, an external event would appear shorter and time would seem to race by. But if the individual images were shorter in duration--there were more of them per unit of time--then time would appear to pass more slowly.

People who have been in automobile accidents, natural catastrophes and other traumatic events often report that at the height of the drama, everything seemed to go in slow motion. At present, we know little about how the brain mediates our sense of time.

If, in fact, changing coalitions of larger neuron groups are the neuronal correlates of consciousness, our state-of-the-art research techniques are inadequate to follow this process. Our methods either cover large regions of the brain at a crude temporal resolution (such as fMRI, which tracks sluggish power consumption at time-scales of seconds), or we register precisely (within one thousandth of a second) the firing rate of one or a handful of neurons out of billions (microelectrode recording). We need fine-grained instruments that cover all of the brain to get a picture of how widely scattered groups of thousands of neurons work together. Eventually this level of interrogation may enable us to manipulate our flow of consciousness with technology. As things stand now, this is only a dream.

Christof Koch is professor of computation and neural systems at the California Institute of Technology and is a passionate runner and mountain climber. More of his work can be found at www.klab.caltech.edu

Source: Scientific American

N.O. Mayor Nagin bought Dallas Digs

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,169194,00.html


N Mayor Nagin bought Dallas Digs

Dallas Digs

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

By Brit Hume

Now some fresh pickings from the Hurricane Grapevine:

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin (search) greeted President Bush when he arrived in Louisiana last night, and was at his side as he fielded questions on the Katrina relief efforts this morning. That quality time with the president, however, marks the mayor's first visit to the disaster area since Wednesday when Nagin pulled up stakes and moved his family to Dallas. The Dallas Morning News reports that Nagin has already bought a house in the city, and enrolled his daughter in school.

When the Mayor appeared on "Meet the Press" on Sunday from Dallas, he was never asked about his presence there, or his decision to move his family.

No Correction from the Times

The New York Times continues to stand by TV columnist Alessandra Stanley's (search) claim that FOX correspondent Geraldo Rivera "nudged an Air Force rescue worker out of the way so his camera crew could tape him as he helped lift an older woman in a wheelchair to safety," even though the video shows no such thing.

Times executive editor Bill Keller tells The Washington Post, "It was a semi-close call, in that the video does not literally show how Mr. Rivera insinuated himself... Whether Mr. Rivera gently edged the airman out of the way with an elbow (literally 'nudged'), or told him to step aside, or threw a body block, or just barged into an opening -- it's hard to tell, since it happened just off-camera." Keller adds, "Frankly, given Mr. Rivera's behavior since Ms. Stanley's review appeared ... Ms. Stanley would have been justified in assuming brute force."

Contract Connections?

Reuters reports that companies with a web of connections to the Bush administration are winning the first contracts to rebuild New Orleans. The story notes that the Shaw Group (search) of Baton Rouge, which has been awarded $200 million in clean-up contracts, employs former Bush campaign manager and FEMA director Joe Allbaugh (search) to provide "general business consulting."

The Shaw Group's founder and CEO is J.M. Bernhard of Baton Rouge, Louisiana who is the chairman of the Louisiana Democratic Party and was co-chairman Governor Kathleen Blanco's transition committee, a fact left out of the Reuters story.

Emotional Instructions?

Los Angeles Times editorial page editor Michael Kinsley (search) says that a fellow journalist at the Times was told to "get angry" by a CNN producer before appearing on the network to talk about Hurricane Katrina last week. In his Sunday column, Kinsley writes that TV news networks are breaking form to encourage anchors and contributors to express outrage over the disaster. A spokesman for CNN says they never told anyone to get angry, but says, "When we book opinion writers, we expect that their commentary will reflect the sentiment in their columns."

— FOX News' Michael Levine contributed to this report

Pointing out the obvious to the dense

New York Congressman Rep. Peter King appeared on MSNBC's Chris Matthews' Hardball Sept. 26th:

PK: Let me tell you, Chris. Mike Chertoff is with the president every step of the way. I met with Secretary Chertoff. Mike Chertoff has been with the president each stage over the last several days. He was there in the planning. I was with him last week when he was involved with the planning. He's been with President Bush at every stage. And Chris, there's sort of a frenzy here by the media. Let's not forget the incompetence of the mayor of New Orleans. the Governor in New Orleans. They were the ones in the first instance you were required to do the job, and they didn't. As far as President Bush, it's wrong for you to say he wasn't caring. He certainly was caring. But what he was not equipped for was to explain for the incompetency of local officials, or to explain the hysteria, or anticipate the hysteria created by you in the media, who go off the deep end. Let's treat this with a little rationality, and a little bit of decency.

BT: Well, Chris, let me give you a little...

CM: You can make that charge, but the fact is that most people trust the media on this story, because the pictures of what was happening down there in New Orleans apparently got to them before they heard of any federal action. But go ahead.

PK: Chris, you are totally distorting reality, and that's the problem with you. You're distorting reality. You're wrong on this story. You and MSNBC are carried away with this. You should be ashamed of yourself. You've disgraced yourself and the media.

CM: You said a moment ago before the break that we're guilty of, let me get the words, of hyping this thing, of hysteria, of creating a hysteria about this, of totally distorting reality in our coverage of the hurricane and the damage done in the South. Do you want to go on on that?

PK: I'm not talking about distorting the damage. I'm talking about distorting President Bush's role. Somehow, this was almost entirely blamed on him. That was a certain impression given by the media from the very first moment, when the levees broke. And you had Andrea Mitchell on talking about how that was because President Bush didn't put enough money into the water projects in Louisiana, or the levee control projects, when it turns out that he put more money in, in his first five years, than Bill Clinton did in his last five years. And no state gets more money in the country than Louisiana does. And use that as an example, and then go right through. There was much more focus put on what President Bush was supposedly not doing, when the fact is it was the mayor who didn't provide the trucks, the buses to evacuate the people, sent the people to the Superdome without adequate food or water. And then also, there's the governor. The governor of Louisiana, and I was down there last week, she said every report that was done before this, said that a storm of this magnitude would kill 20,000 people. The fact is, so far there's less than 800. Every death is tragic, but why isn't your story less than 4% of those who were supposed to have been killed were not killed, because of the efforts of the federal government? The Coast Guard, remember, is part of Homeland Security. They were in the very first day rescuing thousands and thousands of people. That's just an example of the distortion. It's continuing today, the way you're questioning the contracts, assuming something is wrong when the president is fully following the law.

CM: Well, let me go into a couple of things here. First of all, do you believe that the president was on top of this matter from the time after the hurricane hit, Hurricane Katrina hit? Do you think it's fair to give the guy good ratings for the way he responded?

PK: I think it's good to give him at least adequate ratings, because he was relying on what everyone, including Page 1 of the New York Times said, which was that New Orleans had ducked the storm. It wasn't until Tuesday that we realized how bad the situation was. And by then, the president had no way of knowing that the New Orleans Police and Fire Departments were going to disappear, that the governor wasn't going to adequately use the National Guard, and that the mayor had not put sufficient water and food into the Superdome. It takes a good 36 to 48 hours to move troops, the amount that were necessary, to provide relief in the Superdome.

CM: Look, first of all, Peter, Congressman, let's get a couple of things straight. I have been very tough on the mayor. I've talked about the schoolbuses being left behind to be flooded. If I have said a good thing about Governor Blanco, I can't remember it. But I want to ask you about the President of the United States, because most people watching right now get to vote for president. They vote for President Bush, and he's the majority...he won most of the votes. He's president. And they want to think about how good a job he's doing in his second term. Let me ask you. Weren't you dismayed, I was, when I read that the president had to be shown a DVD, a recording of all the press coverage, television coverage, of the hell going on down there with those people stuck at the convention center, on his way down to visit New Orleans?

PK: I think it's important that he see the way the media is covering it, but the fact is the president...

CM: No, no, no. Let me ask you. Weren't you dismayed as a Republican Congressman, that the President of the United States didn't watch television for all those 48 hours? That he had to be shown a picture of what we'd all been watching? One of the reasons these people are volunteering is because of what they saw on television. I'm very proud of the media this last couple of weeks. We're not always perfect, but I've got to tell you something. The latest polling shows almost 80% of the American people say the media has done a fabulous job in handling this hurricane, because it's the pictures that people have seen on television, in their homes, that have alerted them to this tragedy. And maybe to a large extent, push the politicians to move a little faster.

PK: Now the fact is, Chris, you guys are giving yourselves too much credit. You guys dwell in self-congratulation. The fact is, the media's shots were distortive...

CM: No. It's rare that we have anything to congratulate...

PK: No. If you...most...

CM: Most of the time, people give us...let me ask you about this. Congress...let's get back to...

PK: Wait, wait. Let me...

CM: Okay.

PK: Chris, you won't give me a chance to answer the questions. Just because the president doesn't watch you on television, it doesn't mean he's not doing his job. You know, Franklin Roosevelt wasn't hired to listen to radio accounts of D-Day. You're hired to do the job, and the president can do his job without having to listen to Chris Matthews or Andrea Mitchell or Tim Russert, or any of the others. He is doing his job. Now I agree the military should have been brought in sooner, but that was primarily the fault of the local government not being more responsive, and then the president did the best he could. Could he have been there a few hours earlier? Perhaps. But nowhere near the criticism he's getting from you people.

NSA patent can locate Internet users

NSA patent can locate Internet users
By UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
Published September 22, 2005


WASHINGTON -- Internet users thinking they can hide anonymously may soon get an
awakening.

On Sept. 20 the United States awarded patent 6,974,978. The patent was filed on
December 29, 2000 by Stephen Mark Huffman and Michael Henry Reifer, with the assignee being
United States of America as represented by the director of the National Security Agency.

According to the patent's abstract, the invention is a "Method for geolocating
logical network addresses on electronically switched dynamic communications networks, such as
the Internet, using the time latency of communications to and from the logical network
address to determine its location.

"Minimum round-trip communications latency is measured between numerous stations on
the network and known network addressed equipment to form a network latency topology map.
Minimum round-trip communications latency is also measured between the stations and the
logical network address to be geolocated. The resulting set of minimum round-trip
communications latencies is then correlated with the network latency topology map to determine
the location of the network address to be geolocated."


http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20050922-024816-1505r

Katrina Takes a Toll on Truth, News Accuracy

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-rumors27sep27,0,5492806,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines

RITA'S AFTERMATH
Katrina Takes a Toll on Truth, News Accuracy
Rumors supplanted accurate information and media magnified the problem. Rapes, violence and estimates of the dead were wrong.
By Susannah Rosenblatt and James Rainey
Times Staff Writers

September 27, 2005

BATON ROUGE, La. — Maj. Ed Bush recalled how he stood in the bed of a pickup truck in the days after Hurricane Katrina, struggling to help the crowd outside the Louisiana Superdome separate fact from fiction. Armed only with a megaphone and scant information, he might have been shouting into, well, a hurricane.

The National Guard spokesman's accounts about rescue efforts, water supplies and first aid all but disappeared amid the roar of a 24-hour rumor mill at New Orleans' main evacuation shelter. Then a frenzied media recycled and amplified many of the unverified reports.

"It just morphed into this mythical place where the most unthinkable deeds were being done," Bush said Monday of the Superdome.

His assessment is one of several in recent days to conclude that newspapers and television exaggerated criminal behavior in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, particularly at the overcrowded Superdome and Convention Center.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune on Monday described inflated body counts, unverified "rapes," and unconfirmed sniper attacks as among examples of "scores of myths about the dome and Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the media and even some of New Orleans' top officials."

Indeed, Mayor C. Ray Nagin told a national television audience on "Oprah" three weeks ago of people "in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."

Journalists and officials who have reviewed the Katrina disaster blamed the inaccurate reporting in large measure on the breakdown of telephone service, which prevented dissemination of accurate reports to those most in need of the information. Race may have also played a factor.

The wild rumors filled the vacuum and seemed to gain credence with each retelling — that an infant's body had been found in a trash can, that sharks from Lake Pontchartrain were swimming through the business district, that hundreds of bodies had been stacked in the Superdome basement.

"It doesn't take anything to start a rumor around here," Louisiana National Guard 2nd Lt. Lance Cagnolatti said at the height of the Superdome relief effort. "There's 20,000 people in here. Think when you were in high school. You whisper something in someone's ear. By the end of the day, everyone in school knows the rumor — and the rumor isn't the same thing it was when you started it."

Follow-up reporting has discredited reports of a 7-year-old being raped and murdered at the Superdome, roving bands of armed gang members attacking the helpless, and dozens of bodies being shoved into a freezer at the Convention Center.

Hyperbolic reporting spread through much of the media.

Fox News, a day before the major evacuation of the Superdome began, issued an "alert" as talk show host Alan Colmes reiterated reports of "robberies, rapes, carjackings, riots and murder. Violent gangs are roaming the streets at night, hidden by the cover of darkness."

The Los Angeles Times adopted a breathless tone the next day in its lead news story, reporting that National Guard troops "took positions on rooftops, scanning for snipers and armed mobs as seething crowds of refugees milled below, desperate to flee. Gunfire crackled in the distance."

The New York Times repeated some of the reports of violence and unrest, but the newspaper usually was more careful to note that the information could not be verified.

The tabloid Ottawa Sun reported unverified accounts of "a man seeking help gunned down by a National Guard soldier" and "a young man run down and then shot by a New Orleans police officer."

London's Evening Standard invoked the future-world fantasy film "Mad Max" to describe the scene and threw in a "Lord of the Flies" allusion for good measure.

Televised images and photographs affirmed the widespread devastation in one of America's most celebrated cities.

"I don't think you can overstate how big of a disaster New Orleans is," said Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, a Florida school for professional journalists. "But you can imprecisely state the nature of the disaster. … Then you draw attention away from the real story, the magnitude of the destruction, and you kind of undermine the media's credibility."

Times-Picayune Editor Jim Amoss cited telephone breakdowns as a primary cause of reporting errors, but said the fact that most evacuees were poor African Americans also played a part.

"If the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of middle class white people," Amoss said, "it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumor-mongering."

Some of the hesitation that journalists might have had about using the more sordid reports from the evacuation centers probably fell away when New Orleans' top officials seemed to confirm the accounts.

Nagin and Police Chief Eddie Compass appeared on "Oprah" a few days after trouble at the Superdome had peaked.

Compass told of "the little babies getting raped" at the Superdome. And Nagin made his claim about hooligans raping and killing.

State officials this week said their counts of the dead at the city's two largest evacuation points fell far short of early rumors and news reports. Ten bodies were recovered from the Superdome and four from the Convention Center, said Bob Johannessen, spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals.

(National Guard officials put the body count at the Superdome at six, saying the other four bodies came from the area around the stadium.)

Of the 841 recorded hurricane-related deaths in Louisiana, four are identified as gunshot victims, Johannessen said. One victim was found in the Superdome but was believed to have been brought there, and one was found at the Convention Center, he added.

Relief workers said that while the media hyped criminal activity, plenty of real suffering did occur at the Katrina relief centers.

"The hurricane had just passed, you had massive trauma to the city," said Lt. Col. Pete Schneider of the Louisiana National Guard.

"No air conditioning, no sewage … it was not a nice place to be. All those people just in there, they were frustrated, they were hot. Out of all that chaos, all of these rumors start flying."

Louisiana National Guard Col. Thomas Beron, who headed security at the Superdome, said that for every complaint, "49 other people said, 'Thank you, God bless you.' "

The media inaccuracies had consequences in the disaster zone.

Bush, of the National Guard, said that reports of corpses at the Superdome filtered back to the facility via AM radio, undermining his struggle to keep morale up and maintain order.

"We had to convince people this was still the best place to be," Bush said. "What I saw in the Superdome was just tremendous amounts of people helping people."

But, Bush said, those stories received scant attention in newspapers or on television.

Times staff writer Scott Gold contributed to this report.



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Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

Brown Blames 'Dysfunctional' Louisiana

See Blanco's acceptance for blame earlier in Sept.

Brown Blames 'Dysfunctional' Louisiana
Sep 27 11:17 AM US/Eastern


By LARA JAKES JORDAN
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON

Former FEMA director Michael Brown aggressively defended his role in responding to Hurricane Katrina on Tuesday and put much of the blame for coordination failures on Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.

"My biggest mistake was not recognizing by Saturday that Louisiana was dysfunctional," Brown told a special congressional panel set up by House Republican leaders to investigate the catastrophe.

The storm slammed into the Gulf Coast on Monday, Aug. 29.

Brown's defense drew a scathing response from Rep. William Jefferson, D-La.

"I find it absolutely stunning that this hearing would start out with you, Mr. Brown, laying the blame for FEMA's failings at the feet of the governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of New Orleans."

Brown, who for many became a symbol of government failures in the natural disaster that claimed the lives of more than 1,000 people, rejected accusations that he was too inexperienced for the job.

"I've overseen over 150 presidentially declared disasters. I know what I'm doing, and I think I do a pretty darn good job of it," Brown said.

Brown resigned as the head of FEMA earlier this month after being removed by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff from responsibility in the stricken areas.

Brown, who joined FEMA in 2001 and ran it for more than two years, was previously an attorney who held several local government and private posts, including leading the International Arabian Horse Association.

Brown in his opening statement said he had made several "specific mistakes" in dealing with the storm, and listed two.

One, he said, was not having more media briefings.

As to the other, he said: "I very strongly personally regret that I was unable to persuade Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin to sit down, get over their differences, and work together. I just couldn't pull that off."

Both Blanco and Nagin are Democrats.

"The people of FEMA are being tired of being beat up, and they don't deserve it," Brown said.

The hearing was largely boycotted by Democrats, who want an independent investigation conducted into government failures, not one run by congressional Republicans.

But Jefferson _ who is not a committee member _ accepted the panel's invitation to grill Brown.

Referring to Brown's description of his "mistakes," Jefferson said: "I think that's a very weak explanation of what happened, and very incomplete explanation of what happened. I don't think that's going to cut it, really."

Committee Chairman Tom Davis, R-Va., cautioned against too narrowly assigning blame.

"At the end of the day, I suspect that we'll find that government at all levels failed the people of Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama and the Gulf Coast," said Davis.

Davis pushed Brown on what he and the agency he led should have done to evacuate New Orleans, restore order in the city and improve communication among law enforcement agencies.

Brown said: "Those are not FEMA roles. FEMA doesn't evacuate communities. FEMA does not do law enforcement. FEMA does not do communications."

In part of his testimony, Brown pumped his hand up and down for emphasis.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

Flu Drug Tamiflu at Center of International Clamor

Sep 23, 3:55 PM EDT

Flu Drug Tamiflu at Center of International Clamor

By PAUL ELIAS
AP Biotechnology Writer

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- A few years ago the maker of Tamiflu could hardly give it away. Now it can't be produced fast enough, as countries around the world clamor for it as the best hope of combating bird flu in people.

That's touched off a nasty dispute between two drug companies fighting for control of the pill's growing profits while demand outstrips supply.

Meanwhile, U.S. health experts fret over the nation's small Tamiflu stockpile. Developing nations are threatening to ignore U.S. patents and manufacture generic versions to sate their need, especially amid the threat of a bird flu epidemic.

Global health experts fear bird flu, which has swept through poultry across Asia since 2003 and killed at least 63 people, could be the start of a worldwide epidemic that could kill millions more.

While current flu vaccines offer no protection against bird flu, lab and animal experiments have shown Tamiflu appears effective against it, and doctors in Asia have already been using the drug to treat people infected with bird flu.

Tamiflu also is the only drug approved in the United States to prevent the spread of human flu strains in people, which would add to its value if there's a vaccine shortage. Tamiflu makes symptoms less severe and shortens the duration of the illness by two days, a benefit that health officials said will slow the spread of an outbreak.

"It appears that this is the only effective intervention we have once someone has been infected. It's the one treatment," said Jeffrey Levi, a policy analyst for Washington D.C.-based nonprofit Trust for America's Health. "The problem is that we don't have enough of it."

Tamiflu was invented in 1996 by scientists at Foster City-based Gilead Sciences Inc., which quickly sold all commercial rights and manufacturing responsibility in exchange for annual royalties to the Swiss giant Roche Holding AG.

Roche makes Tamiflu at its Basel, Switzerland, plant and until last year, this sole source for the drug wasn't a public health issue.

Sales of the prescription drug limped along at about $76 million in 2001 and $134 million in 2002 and were so lackluster that Gilead complained about Roche's commitment to the drug.

"It has been a historically tough sell in a traditional flu market," said Sharon Seiler, an analyst for Punk, Ziegel & Co. "You need a prescription, you need to take it within 48 hours of symptoms and not all pharmacies stocked it."

But when the World Health Organization in January 2004 urged countries to stockpile Tamiflu, sales skyrocketed. For the first half of this year, sales surged to $456 million and it's expected to ring up another $234 million to $273 million in stockpile sales.

Roche has doubled its Tamiflu manufacturing capacity in each of the last two years and plans a similar expansion next year, including manufacturing Tamiflu in some of its U.S. factories.

Still, orders are coming in faster than Roche can immediately fill, and the drug requires considerable time to produce.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt has called for a Tamiflu stockpile to treat 20 million Americans, yet there are only enough pills on hand to treat 2.3 million people. The United States ordered another 3 million treatments, which Roche expects to fill by next year.

It will take Roche two years to complete the United Kingdom's stockpile order to treat 14.6 million of its citizens.

Similar shortages are befalling other countries, too, including Southeast Asian nations thought to be the most likely site for a major bird flu outbreak. Some 30 countries have placed or plan to place stockpile orders to treat more than 28 million people.

Several developing countries are worried they will be overlooked and have suggested that WHO press Roche to relinquish its patent rights to Tamiflu, clearing the way for other companies to produce cheaper, generic versions of the drug.

On Monday, though, WHO Director-General Lee Jong-wook said global organization wouldn't pressure Roche to relinquish its patent. Last week, Roche donated enough pills to WHO to treat 3 million people.

But even as fear and preparation plump Roche's profits, Gilead is attempting to wrest control of Tamiflu's production and commercial rights. Gilead made $44.6 million on royalty revenues from Tamiflu in 2004, but is on pace to more than double that in 2005, having made $48.1 million in the first six months of the year.

In June, Gilead charged Roche with failing to adequately promote and produce the drug and invoked a contract clause to demand the return of all commercial and manufacturing rights.

Roche denied the charges and the issue appears headed to an arbitrator.

"We are confident we fulfilled our obligations under the licensing agreement," Roche spokesman Terry Hurley said.

If Gilead were to win, Roche would still manufacture Tamiflu for two years while Gilead ramped up its factory.

"We believe this is an opportunistic move on Gilead's part given that Tamiflu is entering a period of heightened demand," analysts at Credit Suisse First Boston wrote in a note to investors last week.

Gilead spokeswoman Amy Flood declined to comment this week, but executives of both companies have testified to Congress and repeatedly said that Tamiflu production won't be effected by the spat.

---

Associated Press Writer Ryan Nakashima in Milwaukee contributed to this report.

---

On the Net:

Roche: http://www.roche.com/home.html

Gilead: http://www.gilead.com/wt/home

WHO: http://www.who.int/en/

© 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Why you fall in love

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/relationships/couples/love_why.shtml

Why you fall in love

As well as physical attraction, many people are drawn to someone who
shares the same interests. Relationship psychotherapist Paula Hall
explores why we fall in love with some people and not with others.

In some relationships, arguments always seem one sided - with one
partner making all the noise as the other quietly calms the storm.
It's possible they both have a problem expressing their feelings,
but together they're able to reassure each other that emotions are
being managed. Different couples will experience it in different
ways, but that inexplicable feeling of wholeness you have when
you're together is what Henry Dicks, a guru in relationship
psychotherapy, called the 'unconscious fit'.

Unconscious fit
All of us carry with us a psychological blueprint, holding details
about our life experiences and the marks they've left. It contains
information we often haven't acknowledged about our fears and
anxieties and our coping mechanisms and defences.

Each of us has an unconscious capacity to scan another person's
blueprint. The people we're most attracted to are those who have a
blueprint that complements our own. We're looking for similarities
of experience but, more significantly, we're also looking for
differences.

Opposites attract
The purpose of this unconscious fit is to find someone who can
complement our experiences. That might be someone who's the same as
us, but most commonly we're looking for someone from whom we can
learn; someone who has developed coping mechanisms that are
different from our own.

The ideal partner will be someone who has struggled with similar
life issues, but has developed another way of managing it. It seems
that our other half is often our best chance of becoming
psychologically whole.

Although no two relationships are ever the same, psychologists have
noticed that there are some common types of unconscious fit. Do you
recognise any of these?

Parent and child - this type of couple often has shared issues with
dependency and trust. One partner copes with those issues by
behaving in a childlike way. Their hidden belief is that if they
remain insecure, dependent and needy their partner will look after
them. Their partner takes on the role of parent and by doing so is
able to deny their own needs for dependency as they're acted out by
the other.

Master and slave - this couple has a problem with authority and
control. One partner may feel very insecure if they're ever
subordinate, so they're bossy and take charge of every household
circumstance. Their partner, who fears responsibility, dutifully
toes the line while smugly comparing what they describe as their
laid-back attitude to their partner's control-freak attitude.

Distancer and pursuer - both partners are afraid of intimacy but
have found their perfect match. The unspoken agreement is that one
of them will keep chasing and nagging the other one for more
intimacy while the other runs away. Occasionally the chase will swap
round.

Idol and worshipper - when one partner insists on putting the other
on a pedestal, this often indicates an issue with competition. To
avoid any form of comparison, both partners unconsciously agree to
play this game.

There are two other common types of fit based on finding a partner
who has a similar problem and a similar way of coping.

Babes in the wood - you may have seen this couple around. They look
alike and often wear matching sweaters. They share the same
interests and, more importantly, they dislike the same things. They
keep anything bad out of their perfect relationship by joining
forces against the big, bad world outside.

Cat and dog - on the surface these partners look as though they
should never have even met. They argue incessantly over anything.
They both avoid intimacy by living in a war zone.

You may see elements of your relationship in all of these types. As
we progress through our relationships, it's not uncommon to slip
into a certain pattern of behaviour. For example, in a time of
illness and vulnerability you may act out the parent and child
model, while many couples become like babes in the wood following
the birth of a child.

Good or bad chemistry?
All fits serve a psychological purpose designed to protect ourselves
from discomfort. Most couples aren't aware of their fit until
something happens to change it. We all grow and mature, our needs
change and our relationships need to adapt to those changes.

Problems may start when one or both partners feell they are no
longer able to communicate their feelings and alter patterns of
behaviour that are now outdated. If you think that may be happening
in your relationship, see When you first met.

Further help
If this article has raised some difficult issues for you then try
talking it through with a partner or trusted friend. Alternatively
you may want to consider counselling. If you're not sure whether
this would be right for you, or if you want to find out more about
it, have a look at our article Do you need counselling?

Second thoughts on leap seconds

Second thoughts on leap seconds

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/09/21/leap.seconds.ap/index.html


LONDON (AP) -- Hold on a second!

The Royal Astronomical Society on Wednesday called for a public debate on the proposed
abolition of leap seconds, a tiny end-of-year adjustment to keep clocks in synch with the
earth's rotation.

The International Telecommunications Union will meet in Geneva in November to debate a
proposal to abolish leap seconds after 2007.

Mike Hapgood, secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society, said the debate has practical
implications for computers, global positioning systems and for those who study phenomena
-- such as tides -- that are related to the earth's rotation.

There have been 21 leap seconds since they were introduced in 1972, and the next is
planned for the end of 2005.

Atta files destroyed by Pentagon

Atta files destroyed by Pentagon

By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 22, 2005

Pentagon lawyers during the Clinton administration ordered the destruction of intelligence reports that identified September 11 leader Mohamed Atta months before the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, according to congressional testimony yesterday.
A lawyer for two Pentagon whistleblowers also told the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday that the Defense Intelligence Agency last year destroyed files on the Army's computer data-mining program known as Able Danger to avoid disclosing the information.
Retired Army Maj. Erik Kleinsmith, former director of the Army Land Information Warfare Center, told the panel he was directed by Pentagon lawyers to delete 2? terabytes of computer data -- the equivalent of one-quarter of the information in the Library of Congress -- on Able Danger in May or June 2000 because of legal concerns about information on U.S. citizens.
Maj. Kleinsmith said keeping the data beyond 90 days would have violated an Army directive limiting the collection of information on U.S. citizens.
"Yes, I could have conveniently forgot to delete the data, and we could have kept it," Maj. Kleinsmith said. "But I knowingly would have been in violation of the regulation."
The attorney for two Pentagon officials involved in Able Danger testified that the program did not identify Atta as being in the United States, only that he was linked by analysts to an al Qaeda cell in Brooklyn, N.Y.
"At no time did Able Danger identify Mohamed Atta as being physically present in the United States," said Mark Zaid, who represents Army Reserve Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, an intelligence analyst, and J.D. Smith, a defense official, who both claim Able Danger data was mishandled.
"And no information at the time that they obtained would have led anyone to believe that criminal activity had taken place or that any specific terrorist activities were being planned. All they developed were associational links."
Mr. Zaid said Able Danger-related data, including possibly a chart containing a photo of Atta, that was compiled by Orion Scientific, was destroyed by DIA some time in the spring of 2004 after the official who held the material had his security clearance revoked.
The Senate hearing included testimony from Rep. Curt Weldon, Pennsylvania Republican, who first went public with information that the Army intelligence unit had uncovered information on Atta in Brooklyn, and three other of the September 11 suicide hijackers in 2000 through the computer-based program that sifted both secret intelligence and unclassified databases for information.
"Over the past three months, I have witnessed denial, deception, threats to [Defense Department] employees, character assassination, and now silence," said Mr. Weldon.
He said that if the information had been handled properly "it might have had an impact on the most significant attack ever against our country and our citizens." He charged that the government commission that investigated September 11 had overlooked the Able Danger material on Atta.
A recent Pentagon inquiry into the matter found no reports linking Atta to a Brooklyn al Qaeda cell. However, investigators uncovered one report linking al Qaeda leader Mohammed Atef, to Islamists in Brooklyn. Atef was killed in Afghanistan in 2001.
Mr. Weldon said he thinks Able Danger was shut down after a "profile" of Chinese weapons proliferation linked two Americans to Chinese students at Stanford University engaged in technology acquisition for China.
During the profile, the names of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, at the time the Stanford University provost, and former Defense Secretary William Perry were mentioned in the data and created "a wave of controversy," he said.
After Congress sought the data, "tremendous pressure was placed on the Army, because this was a prototype operation, and they shut down the Able Danger operation," Mr. Weldon said.

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20050921-102450-4688r.htm

Bird Flu

World has slim chance to stop bird flu pandemic
20 Sep 2005 04:21:33 GMT
Source: Reuters

By Michael Perry

NOUMEA, New Caledonia, Sept 20 (Reuters) - The initial outbreak of a bird flu pandemic may not be very contagious, affecting only a few people, giving the world just weeks to contain the deadly virus before it spreads and kills millions.

But the chance of containment is limited as the pandemic may not be detected until it has already spread to several countries, like the SARS virus in 2003, and avian flu vaccines developed in advance will have little impact on the pandemic virus.

It will take scientists four to six months to develop a vaccine that protects against the pandemic virus, by which time thousands could have died. There is little likelihood a vaccine will even reach the country where the pandemic starts.

That is the scenario outlined on Tuesday by Dr Hitoshi Oshitani, the man who was on the frontline in the battle against SARS and now leads the fight against avian flu in Asia.

"SARS in retrospect was an easy virus to contain," said Oshitani, the World Health Organisation's Asian communicable diseases expert.

"The pandemic virus is much more difficult, maybe impossible, to contain once it starts," he told Reuters at a WHO conference in Noumea, capital of the French Pacific territory of New Caledonia. "The geographic spread is historically unprecedented."

Oshitani said nobody knew when a pandemic would occur, it could be within weeks or years, but all the conditions were in place, save one -- a virus that transmitted from human to human.

The contagious H5N1 virus, which has killed 64 people in four Asian countries since it was first detected in 2003, might not be the one to trigger the pandemic, he said. Instead a genetically different strain could develop that passes between humans.

While bird flu cases continued to spread throughout Asia, with Indonesia this week placed on alert after reporting four deaths, Oshitani said the winter months of December, January and February would see an acceleration in cases, and the more human cases the greater risk that the virus would mutate.

Vietnam, Indonesia and Cambodia were most vulnerable due to the large domestic poultry populations, he said.

MASSIVE, RAPID CAMPAIGN

When a pandemic is first detected, health authorities will need to carry out a massive anti-viral inoculation campaign within two to three weeks to have any chance of containment, said Oshitani.

"Theoretically it is possible to contain the virus if we have early signs of a pandemic detected at the source," he said.

Scientists estimate that between 300,000 and one million people will immediately need anti-virals, but there are only limited stocks. WHO will receive one million doses by the end of 2005 and a further two million by mid-2006.

Even when an avian flu vaccine is fully developed, production limitations will mean there will not be enough vaccine.

"Right now we have a timeframe of four to six months to develop and produce a certain quantity of vaccine and that may not be fast enough," said Oshitani.

Last week French drug maker Sanofi-Aventis won a $100 million contract to supply the United States a vaccine against H5N1. The United States has also awarded a $2.8 million contract to Britain's GlaxoSmithKline for 84,300 courses of an antiviral. The purchases are part of a U.S. plan to buy vaccine for 20 million people and antivirals for another 20 million.

Oshitani said the early vaccines were unlikely to protect against the pandemic virus. "The vaccine should match the pandemic strain. So a vaccine developed for the virus in Vietnam now may not protect you from another virus," he said.

But Oshitani fears that once a pandemic occurs, the world's rich nations may dominate vaccine supply.

"The distribution of a vaccine will be a major issue when a pandemic starts. There is no mechanism for distribution," he said. Asked whether poorer Asian nations such as Cambodia and Vietnam would get a vaccine, Oshitani said "probably not".

Avian flu has moved west from Asia and into Russia, with many fearing migratory wild birds will spread the virus to Europe and possibly the United States via Alaska.

But Oshitani casts doubt on the impact migratory birds are having on the spread of avian flu, saying different sub-types of the H5N1 virus are in Asia and Russia.

"There are so many uncertainties about the pandemic. We don't know how it will start. We don't know exactly how it is spreading," he said.

Oshitani said that the successful containment measures used against SARS, such as quarantining those infected and cross-border checks, would fail against an avian pandemic, as people spreading bird flu may not show early symptoms.

"The pandemic is likely to be like the seasonal influenza, which is much more infectious than the SARS virus," he said.

Raid on Al Qaida camp discoveries

Compiled by Bill Gertz:

Raid on Al Qaida camp finds Chinese-made drone, links to Pakistani legislator

Pakistani military forces raided an Al Qaida base in the northern part of the country near the Afghanistan border Sept. 12 and found an unmanned aircraft that authorities believe was used for reconnaissance.

The Chinese-made aircraft had not been outfitted with a camera and was not capable of carrying weapons. But it is believed the terrorist group had planned to configure the plane with a camera. The range and capability of the aircraft were limited, and officials believe it could have provided limited security against approaching forces.

Pakistani security forces also seized an explosive-laden suicide jacket and passports from Jordan, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Green tea compound Alzheimer hope

Source: BBC
Tuesday, 20 September 2005, 23:10 GMT 00:10 UK

Green tea compound Alzheimer hope

An ingredient of green tea may help to protect the brain against the
ravages of Alzheimer's disease, research in the US suggests.
University of South Florida scientists found the component prevented
Alzheimer's-like damage in the brains of mice bred to develop
symptoms.

The component - EGCG - is already strongly suspected of offering
protection against certain cancers.

The study is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

It provides evidence that EGCG decreases production of the beta-
amyloid protein thought to play a key role in the development of
Alzheimer's symptoms.

It is this protein that forms the characteristic plaques found in the
brain of Alzheimer's patients which are thought to lead to nerve
damage and memory loss.

After treating Alzheimer's mice for several months with daily
injections of pure EGCG, the researchers observed a dramatic
decrease - as much as 54% - of brain-clogging Alzheimer's plaques.

Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4261558.stm