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The Pentagon confirmed Wednesday that live anthrax was shipped from a lab in Utah to other states.

When Bruce E. Ivins, an Army microbiologist, took a fatal overdose of Tylenol in 2008, the government declared that he had been responsible for the anthrax letter attacks of 2001, which killed five people and set off a nationwide panic, and closed the case. Now, a former senior F.B.I. agent who ran the anthrax investigation for four years says that the bureau gathered “a staggering amount of exculpatory evidence” regarding Dr. Ivins that remains secret. The former agent, Richard L. Lambert, who spent 24 years at the F.B.I., says he believes it is possible that Dr. Ivins was the anthrax...

he U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention plans to hire a chief of laboratory safety, a new post that has taken on more urgency after a CDC scientist was possibly exposed to Ebola in a laboratory last week. Creating a new high-level safety position was a key recommendation of a months-long internal investigation into the mishandling of anthrax and bird flu in CDC labs this past summer, according to an internal CDC memo obtained by Reuters. Those incidents called into question safety practices at more than 1,000 laboratory and support facilities across the CDC's sprawling network of scientists.

The suicide bombings in London raise questions of assimilation for the 3 million Muslims in the US. WASHINGTON - It's called the "Virginia Jihad" case: Iraqi-American medical researcher Ali al-Yimimi, who preached in northern Virginia mosques and disseminated his radical thinking on the Web, was sentenced to life imprisonment last week. His crime: inciting followers, many of them young American-born Muslims, to a violent defense of Islam and war against the United States and its intervention in Islamic countries. Mr. Timimi's sentencing in an Alexandria, Va., courtroom came against the backdrop of the London bombings, which British police now say...

U.S. Judge Reduces 'Va. Jihad' Sentences New Terms Still Called 'Draconian' By Jerry Markon Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, July 30, 2005 A federal judge yesterday reduced the sentences of three members of a "Virginia jihad network," ordering the resentencings to comply with a recent Supreme Court ruling that allowed judges more discretion on such issues. U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema was pleased that she had the chance to lessen sentences she had criticized as excessive...

Political Correctness: The only thing more revolting than building a mosque next to the World Trade Center would be honoring the mosque that helped the 9/11 hijackers. Yet that's just what Virginia has done. Outrageously, the Virginia state legislature has passed a Democrat-sponsored resolution "commending" the notorious 9/11 mosque — Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center — "as an expression of the General Assembly's admiration for the" center. The Saudi Embassy-funded, Muslim Brotherhood-owned mosque is universally known by federal and local law enforcement — and even the media — as a turnstile for terrorists. Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan once worshipped...

Something is terribly wrong with the Virginia state legislature. On Wednesday, March 5th, in House Joint Resolution 484, the elected representatives of the people of Virginia commended the notorious, terror-tied Dar al Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church. Dar al Hijrah has a history of ties to multiple known and convicted terrorists, led by its former Imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, who became head of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, before he was killed in a US air strike in 2011. It was this institution that the Virginia House and Senate agreed to commend by voice vote. This amounts to an...

Virginia Muslim leader gets life in prison "Islamic Scholar Sentenced to Va. Prison," from AP, with thanks to all who sent this in: ALEXANDRIA, Va. - A prominent Islamic scholar who exhorted his followers after the Sept. 11 attacks to join the Taliban and fight U.S. troops was sentenced Wednesday to life in prison. Ali al-Timimi of Fairfax was convicted in April of soliciting others to levy war against the United States, inducing others to aid the Taliban, and inducing others to use firearms in violation of federal law. The cleric addressed the court for 10 minutes before his sentencing....

The elite media continues to insist that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. attacked in March, citing the scant evidence of any actual weapons finds by U.S. arms inspector David Kay. But if it's true that Saddam Hussein was actually innocent on the WMD charge, then why did he confess in 1998 that his country had amassed huge stockpiles of highly toxic weaponized poisons - along with the delivery systems to take them beyond Iraq's borders. That's right - lost in the debate over why U.S. weapons inspectors have yet to uncover the Iraqi version of...

A US government laboratory mistakenly mixed a common flu strain with a dangerous and deadly type of bird flu and shipped it to another lab, authorities said Friday. The latest news followed admissions of mishandled anthrax and forgotten smallpox vials at separate US government labs, and raised new concerns about the safety of dangerous agents which could be used as bioterror weapons. No one was endangered by the mixed flu strain, said Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Tom Frieden, who nevertheless said he was "astonished" that protocols could have been violated in that way. "Everything we have looked...

The accident happened in January at the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. A lab scientist accidently mixed a deadly strain of bird flu with a tamer strain, and sent the mix to another CDC lab and to an outside lab in Athens, Georgia.

After back-to-back potentially serious laboratory accidents, federal health officials announced on Friday that they had closed the flu and anthrax laboratories of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and have halted shipments of all infectious agents from the agency’s highest-security labs. The accidents, and the C.D.C.'s emphatic response to them, could have important implications for other laboratories around the world engaged in research into dangerous viruses and bacteria. If the C.D.C — which the agency’s director, Dr. Thomas Frieden, called “the reference laboratory to the world” — had multiple accidents that could have, in theory, killed not just laboratory...

... Across a series of blogs and far-right message boards, someone going by the moniker of “the Real Luigi Warren” (a.k.a. “Luigi ‘Anthrax’ Warren”) had operated a lurid rumor mill about Hatfill for more than a decade—promoting, in particular, hearsay about the years he lived and worked in southern Africa during the throes of apartheid. In 2010, after the aggressor surfaced in the comments section of theatlantic.com, Hatfill’s lawyers made their move. They sent a six-page letter to the man they assumed to be the real Luigi Warren, a stem-cell researcher at Harvard Medical School named, not incidentally, Luigi Warren....

U.S. authorities increased to 84 people their count of government workers potentially exposed to live anthrax at three laboratories in Atlanta as they investigated a breach in safety procedures for handling the deadly pathogen.

A US presidential commission has paved the way for testing an anthrax vaccine on children, prompting criticism that participants would be "guinea pigs".But the bioethical issues report said researchers would have to overcome many hurdles before conducting any trial.Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius must decide whether to act on the paper's recommendations.

House Panel to Ask for NSA Spying Probe A congressional panel will ask the National Security Agency's internal watchdog to investigate whether the super-secret spy agency eavesdropped without warrants on a Muslim scholar and later hid that evidence in a 2005 terror prosecution that got him a life sentence.The House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel and the judge overseeing the case want the NSA's inspector general to find out if the government failed to disclose evidence that might have cleared the name of a Northern Virginia spiritual leader Ali al-Timimi, Rep. Rush Holt (D- New Jersey) told the New York Times.That...

Air Leak Sparks Safety Fears at CDC Bioterror Lab CDC's Emerging Infectious Disease Lab has experienced repeated problems with airflow systems The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal agency charged with preventing the spread of infectious diseases has come under attack today for "serious" airflow problems in an Atlanta building that houses anthrax, SARS and monkeypox. Documents and emails obtained by USA Today suggest that a poorly engineered airflow system in the CDC's Building 18 could expose unprotected staff and visitors to dangerous airborne pathogens. "As the door closed a very noticeable puff of air could be felt...

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — They knelt in prayer, ignored the judge and wouldn't listen to Arabic translations as they confronted nearly 3,000 counts of murder. The self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and four co-defendants defiantly disrupted an arraignment that dragged into Saturday night in the opening act of the long-stalled effort to prosecute them in a military court. It wasn't until more than seven hours into the hearing that prosecutors at the U.S. military base in Cuba began reading the charges against the men, including 2,976 counts of murder and terrorism in the 2001 attacks...

Pakistan government spokesman says anthrax sent to prime minister's office last year.

Teen Pilot Kept to Himself By PAT LEISNER Associated Press Writer January 6, 2002, 12:10 AM EST PALM HARBOR, Fla. -- The high school freshman who stole a small airplane and crashed it into a high-rise building Saturday was a quiet boy who kept to himself and bartered for his flight lessons by cleaning airplanes. Flight school officials said Charles J. Bishop, 15, was well versed in the operations at National Aviation Academy, where he had been taking lessons since March 2001. Bishop was presumed dead in the crash, authorities said Saturday night. He was a year shy of being ...