Military reviewing rules on deadly toxin shipments

Military leaders have suspended some activities at biological research laboratories to review safety rules for some of the world’s deadliest germs and toxins, including how they are shipped through FedEx and other civilian carriers.

Defense officials said the action is part of a larger review, ordered when a researcher at an Army lab committed suicide last month after being told that he would be charged in the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people.

Navy and Air Force officials said Thursday that they are temporarily halting shipments of dangerous biological agents to and from their medical and research labs.

They also said that during the review, they won’t allow any employees to handle such materials inside their labs unless the employee is enrolled in a special program to do so or monitored by someone who is enrolled.

The Army also said for the first time Thursday that it had halted it shipments from August 8-14 for a similar review of procedures — and then tightened some.

The Army has six, the Navy five and the Air Force two labs where biomedical research is done to support counterterrorism efforts, research protection for the armed forces and keep track of infectious diseases around the globe. Employees work with a range of dangerous materials such as anthrax and germs that cause avian flu and encephalitis.

All such Navy material “is accounted for, and none has been compromised. A thorough inventory will be a part of this stand-down,” said Cmdr. Jeff A. Davis, a Navy spokesman, using the military term for a suspension of activities. – cnn

Prosecutors trying to get obese defendant to court

Prosecutors are trying to decide how to jail and bring to court a nearly half-ton, bedridden woman accused of killing her 2-year-old nephew.

A grand jury on Thursday indicted Mayra Lizbeth Rosales, 27, on one count of first-degree murder and on one count of injury to a child in the death of Eliseo Gonzalez Jr. She previously had been charged with capital murder.

Rosales weighs nearly 1,000 pounds and cannot fit through a door to leave her home, leaving prosecutors wondering how to bring her to court. As of Thursday evening, she was not in custody.

Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Trevino said holding her at the county jail for her trial would be impossible because she needs extensive medical care.

“She would die,” said Trevino in Thursday’s online edition of The Monitor in McAllen.

The grand jury indicted Rosales after an autopsy confirmed investigators’ suspicions that the child died March 18 because he had been struck. Investigators believe the toddler was struck at least twice, crushing his head.

Authorities recommended Rosales’ bond be set at $150,000. – ap

A successful face transplant: Pictures

A successful face transplant in a 30-year-old Chinese man who was attacked by the bear in October 2004. SOME MAY FIND THE FOLLOWING IMAGES DISTURBING.

Small plane hits house in Las Vegas; 3 dead

An experimental aircraft crashed into a house and exploded shortly after takeoff Friday, killing the pilot and two people inside the home, authorities said. The pilot of the home-built plane radioed that he was in trouble shortly after taking off from the North Las Vegas Airport, said Ian Gregor, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman in Hawthorne, Calif.

“He said he was unable to gain altitude and was going down,” Gregor said.

Firefighters quickly doused an intense fire in the single-family stucco home in a working-class neighborhood southeast of a main runway at the airport. No other homes appeared damaged. The plane appeared to have crashed through the roof over the living room. A deputy fire chief, Kevin Brame, said authorities believe three people lived in the home, but one was not home at the time of the crash.

Neighbor Letizia Gonzalez, 17, said she awoke to a sound “like a bomb.” “We came outside and we saw flames coming out of the house. We went to look and it started exploding even more,” she said. “They were nice people. It’s really sad.”

Gonzalez described the residents as a couple and the man’s adult son, who kept the yard neat and were friendly to neighbors. The pilot and one resident of the house died in the 6:28 a.m. crash, and another person in the house died after being taken to University Medical Center in Las Vegas, Brame said. The names of the dead were not immediately released.

Gregor characterized the rear-propeller Velocity 173 RG aircraft as “experimental” and said it can be built from a kit. FAA records showed the aircraft was certified for flight in 2002, he said, and was owned by a Las Vegas resident. The name of the owner was not released. – ap

The crash caused an intense fire in the single-family home in a neighborhood southeast of a main runway at the airport, but the fire was soon put out by firefighters. – xin

What up, homes? McCain’s bad day at the ranch

… It was a simple question: How many homes do you own? Although polling is not yet available, conventional wisdom would indicate that most Americans can answer that question. An unscientific newsroom poll here at the Monitor backed that conventional wisdom: 100 percent of those polled could answer the question without hesitation. Remember, this was an unscientific poll, however. And the margin for error was 3 percentage points. So technically speaking the results could be 97 percent to 3 percent.

But the answer wasn’t simple for presidential candidate John McCain. …

Barack Obama’s campaign hit hard and fast. Within minutes of the story going live on the Internet, an email was sent out from the Obama campaign:

“This story about John McCain losing track of how many houses he owns is a telling moment that helps to explain why he still thinks ‘the fundamentals of our economy are strong’ and why he offers just more of the same economic policies that we’ve gotten from President Bush for the last eight years.” …

At a town hall meeting in Virginia, Obama was on message:

“If you don’t know how many houses you have then it’s not surprising that you might think that the economy was fundamentally strong,” Obama said. “But if you are like me and have one house or you are like the millions of people who are struggling to keep up with their mortgage so they don’t lose their home, you might have a different perspective.” – csmonitor

It is always funny to me that the little things are what cause political change. McCain may have a personal money manager who buys and sells homes for him, so he wouldn’t know how many he has at any point. The simple fact that he is pro-torture should have ended his chances at being president in a sane world.

Fish Tale Has DNA Hook: Students Find Bad Labels

Many New York sushi restaurants and seafood markets are playing a game of bait and switch, say two high school students turned high-tech sleuths.

In a tale of teenagers, sushi and science, Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss, who graduated this year from the Trinity School in Manhattan, took on a freelance science project in which they checked 60 samples of seafood using a simplified genetic fingerprinting technique to see whether the fish New Yorkers buy is what they think they are getting.

They found that one-fourth of the fish samples with identifiable DNA were mislabeled. A piece of sushi sold as the luxury treat white tuna turned out to be Mozambique tilapia, a much cheaper fish that is often raised by farming. Roe supposedly from flying fish was actually from smelt. Seven of nine samples that were called red snapper were mislabeled, and they turned out to be anything from Atlantic cod to Acadian redfish, an endangered species.

What may be most impressive about the experiment is the ease with which the students accomplished it. Although the testing technique is at the forefront of research, the fact that anyone can take advantage of it by sending samples off to a laboratory meant the kind of investigative tools once restricted to Ph.D.’s and crime labs can move into the hands of curious diners and amateur scientists everywhere. …

They hit 4 restaurants and 10 grocery stores in Manhattan. Once the samples were home, whether in doggie bags or shopping bags, they cut away a small piece and preserved it in alcohol. They sent those off to the University of Guelph in Ontario, where the Barcode of Life Database project began. A graduate student there, Eugene Wong, works on the Fish Barcode of Life (dubbed, inevitably, Fish-BOL) and agreed to do the genetic analysis. He compared the teenagers’ samples with the global library of 30,562 bar codes representing nearly 5,500 fish species. (Commercial labs will also perform the analysis for a fee.)

Three hundred dollars’ worth of meals later, the young researchers had their data back from Guelph: 2 of the 4 restaurants and 6 of the 10 grocery stores had sold mislabeled fish. – nytimes

Video: Feds: Fires Brought Down Building Next to WTC

Sunder noted that the collapse resembled a controlled demolition because, as the thermal expansion caused the failure of three critical internal columns, the collapse started internally and progressed to the exterior, just as in a controlled demolition.

This phenomenon of thermal expansion has not previously caused buildings to collapse. It reveals a potential fire-safety issue for other similar high-rise buildings.

Sunder notes that the problem arises because structural engineers have a job of making sure structural loads are adequate for dealing with conditions such as wind, while architects have the job of making sure fire proofing is specified. What is missing is the connection between these disciplines. No one actually evaluates the response of the structural system during a fire, he says. – sm

Bull feathers. Watch this:

The company doing the clean up of the WTC buildings was “Controlled Demolitions Incorporated.”

Obama Says He Has Chosen His No. 2

Aug. 21 — Sen. Barack Obama announced on Thursday that he has decided on a running mate — but declined to provide a name, fanning already intense speculation about the choice.

“I’ve made the selection, and that’s all you’re going to get,” the Democratic presidential candidate teased reporters during a stop at Virginia Favorites Ltd., a peanut and gift shop in Emporia.

The Obama campaign also joined with the campaign of Sen. John McCain in announcing that the two candidates will appear in three debates: on Sept. 26 in Oxford, Miss.; on Oct. 7 in Nashville; and on Oct. 15 in Hempstead, N.Y. A vice presidential debate is scheduled for Oct. 2 in St. Louis.

The first presidential debate will focus on foreign policy and national security. The second will have a town hall format with questions coming from the audience and online, and the third will center on the economy and other domestic issues.

Although his advisers would like to wait as long as possible before overshadowing the controversy over McCain’s inability to say how many houses he owns, Obama is expected to announce his vice presidential decision by Saturday. His campaign has scheduled a joint appearance in Springfield, Ill., where he announced his presidential bid more than a year and a half earlier. – washpost

Could it be … Bill Clinton? Technically, yes.

Two McCain offices evacuated after letter threat

Two offices of John McCain‘s U.S. presidential campaign, in Colorado and New Hampshire, were evacuated on Thursday, and several staffers were hospitalized, after a threatening letter arrived in the mail containing an unidentified white powder.

But within hours, the letter was traced by authorities to a Colorado jail inmate who has a history of sending threatening mail, and initial tests of the envelope and its contents turned up negative for hazardous materials, the U.S. Secret Service said.

The New Hampshire scare over a second envelope there was later deemed to be an unrelated incident brought about by anxiety over the threatening letter received in Colorado.

McCain, 71, a Republican senator from Arizona and his party’s presumed nominee for president, was taking the day off from the campaign, spending the day at his home in Sedona, Arizona. – reuters

Bigfoot Hoax: Tom said he laid hands on it and it was real.