Free Republic

A United States federal panel of scientists and security experts has identified 11 microorganisms that it wants designated as Tier 1 select agents, a new category of biological agents that would be subject to higher security standards than other pathogens and toxins used in biomedical research. The category would include anthrax, Ebola, Variola major and Variola minor (the two viruses that cause small pox), the Marburg virus, the virus that causes foot and mouth disease, and bacterial strains that produce the botulinum neurotoxin. At the same time, the panel has recommended dropping 19 pathogens and six toxins from the broader...

More on the adventures of Al Qaeda (see post just below), but this should chill us. From London's Telegraph: An al-Qaeda cell killed by the Black Death may have been developing biological weapons when it was infected, it has been reported. The group of 40 terrorists were reported to have been killed by the plague at a training camp in Algeria earlier this month. It was initially believed that they could have caught the disease through fleas on rats attracted by poor living conditions in their forest hideout. But there are now claims the cell was developing the disease as...

None of the men of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Hampshires was surprised that the fight would be tough. As they doggedly advanced up 'Gold' beach on D-Day, every man knew that surviving the murderous criss-cross of machine-gun fire would demand a miracle. The village of Le Hamel, although no more than a few hundred yards beyond the surf, never seemed to get any closer. The bullets mercilessly cut down their commanding officer as well as several middle-ranking officers, and as the day wore on, it looked as if the entire battalion would be slaughtered on the beach. ...........................................................

....These attacks, orchestrated by Japan’s infamous Unit 731 between 1932 and 1945, are the only documented mass use of germ weapons in modern times. Scholars say that we will never know exactly how many were killed. Sheldon H. Harris, the late American historian, estimated in a pioneering work that between 10,000 and 12,000 Chinese prisoners perished in the bloodcurdling experiments that Unit 731 performed in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Another 300,000 to 500,000 civilians died, he wrote, as a result of Japan’s massive germ assaults on more than 70 Chinese cities and towns. China itself has disclosed no official tally. In fact,...

The US is to end its 22-year ban on people with HIV entering the country, President Barack Obama has confirmed. Mr Obama made the announcement as he extended funding for an act that provides HIV/Aids related health care. "If we want to be the global leader in combating HIV/Aids, we need to act like it," Mr Obama said. The US is one of only about a dozen countries barring entry on HIV status. The ban is expected to be lifted at the beginning of 2010. 'End the stigma' Mr Obama confirmed the move as he signed the Ryan White HIV/Aids...

Al Qaeda eyes bio attack via Mexico border Seeks white militias as allies By Sara A. Carter Wednesday, June 3, 2009 U.S. counterterrorism officials have authenticated a video by an al Qaeda recruiter threatening to smuggle a biological weapon into the United States via tunnels under the Mexico border, the latest sign of the terrorist group's determination to stage another mass-casualty attack on the U.S. homeland. The video aired earlier this year as a recruitment tool makes clear that al Qaeda is looking to exploit weaknesses in U.S. border security and also is willing to ally itself with white militia...

LONDON (AP) - An unemployed chemist was jailed Tuesday for spraying a mix of urine and feces on food, wine and children's books in several British stores. Sahnoun Daifallah was sentenced to nine years in prison after being found guilty of four counts of contaminating goods. The 42-year-old Algerian carried a mix of his waste in a container of weed killer concealed in a laptop bag, a court found.

Q: Which have been perhaps the fiercest six-legged soldiers in the history of warfare? A: In Rudyard Kipling’s "Second Jungle Book,” the hero enlists the aid of a colony of bellicose bees to beat back a pack of wild dogs, says Jeffrey Lockwood in "Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War.” The creature Kipling may have had in mind is the giant honeybee of Asia, or "Apis dorsata,” described as "the most ferocious and deadly stinging insect on Earth.” These bees are not only larger but attack in huge numbers (a colony comb can be 10 feet across) and...

Chemical composition of spores doesn't match suspect flask. The deadly bacterial spores mailed to victims in the US anthrax attacks, scientists say, share a chemical 'fingerprint' that is not found in bacteria from the flask linked to Bruce Ivins, the biodefence researcher implicated in the crime. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) alleges that Ivins, who committed suicide last July, was the person responsible for mailing letters laden with Bacillus anthracis to news media and congressional offices in 2001, killing five people and sickening 17. The FBI used genetic analyses to trace the mailed spores back to a flask called...

The enzyme DFPase from the squid Loligo vulgaris, is able to rapidly and efficiently detoxify chemical warfare agents such as Sarin, which was used in the Tokyo subway attacks in 1995. A detailed understanding of the mechanism by which enzymes catalyze chemical reactions is necessary for efforts aiming to improve their properties. A group of researchers at the University of Frankfurt, the Bundeswehr Institute for Pharmacology and Toxicology in Munich, and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA, have successfully determined the structure of DFPase using neutron diffraction. The team used the neutron source at Los Alamos National Laboratory,...

ANTI-TERROR bosses last night hailed their latest ally in the war on terror — the BLACK DEATH. At least 40 al-Qaeda fanatics died horribly after being struck down with the disease that devastated Europe in the Middle Ages. The killer bug, also known as the plague, swept through insurgents training at a forest camp in Algeria, North Africa. It came to light when security forces found a body by a roadside. The victim was a terrorist in AQLIM (al-Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb), the largest and most powerful al-Qaeda group outside the Middle East. It trains Muslim...

In a move believed to be the first by a college campus in the nation, San Jose State University President Don Kassing has suspended all campus blood drives because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration bars any man who has had sex with another man from donating blood. "The FDA's lifetime blood donor deferral affecting gay men violates our non-discrimination policy," said Kassing in an e-mail sent to faculty, staff and students. The suspension, which is effective immediately, applies to blood drives arranged by employees representing the university as well as blood drives organized by student groups. The FDA's ban...

WASHINGTON // Federal investigators are probing whether Chinese producers laced a key ingredient in pet food with an industrial chemical in order to boost the price of their shipments snip Referring to the contamination that has prompted the recall of more than 100 brands of pet food, investigators are trying to determine whether Chinese producers purposely added melamine to their wheat gluten shipments to Menu Foods. more.....

Scotland's ban on smoking in pubs has backfired, so to speak, on a regular customer whose constant habit of breaking wind has now resulted in his expulsion from his favorite watering hole. Stewart Laidlaw, 35, is being barred from Thirsty Kirsty's in Dunfermline, Fife, for failing to control his flatulence. "No one could smell anything when the pub was full of cigarette smoke," Laidlaw told Wales on Sunday. "I never used to complain about the smell of their cigarette smoke, but now everyone complains about me. It's just a natural thing. What can I do about it? I must be...

After more than 60 years of silence, World War II's most enduring and horrible secret is being nudged into the light of day. One by one the participants, white-haired and mildmannered, line up to tell their dreadful stories before they die. Akira Makino is a frail widower living near Osaka in Japan. His only unusual habit is to regularly visit an obscure little town in the southern Philippines, where he gives clothes to poor children and has set up war memorials. Mr Makino was stationed there during the war. What he never told anybody, including his wife, was that during...

Sixty ago years, a group of physicists concerned about nuclear weapons created the Doomsday Clock and set its hands at seven minutes to midnight. Now, the clock’s keepers, alarmed by new dangers like climate change, have moved the hands up to 11:55 p.m. My first reaction was a sigh of relief. After all, the 1947 doomsday prediction marked the start of a golden age. Never have so many humans lived so long — and maybe never so peacefully — as during the past 60 years. The per-capita rate of violence, particularly in the West, seems remarkably low by historical standards....

NEW technology that would give terrorists the power to create deadly bacteria and viruses from scratch is only years away from completion and threatens to make existing controls on biological weapons obsolete, experts warned yesterday.Synthetic biology is an emerging field that allows scientists to build micro-organisms from simple genetic material, in theory enabling the creation of deadly pathogens such as ebola or anthrax without access to existing stockpiles of the bugs. The technology could also allow terrorists or scientists in rogue states to jumble the genetic signature of the bugs in order to render them unrecognisable to health experts dealing...

The new leader of al-Qaida in Iraq said that more than 4,000 foreign insurgents have been killed in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003. The claim was made in an audiotape posted on the Internet. The man speaking on the tape identified himself as Abu Hamza al-Muhajir - also known as Abu Ayyub al-Masri - the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, although the voice could not be independently identified. The Arabic word he used indicated he was speaking about foreigners who joined the insurgency in Iraq, and not coalition troops. It was believed to be the first major statement...

A phony doctor whose phony flu vaccine was injected into more than 1,100 people is facing prison after pleading guilty in a Houston federal court. Iyad Abu El Hawa could receive a maximum of 10 years in prison for health-care fraud and three years for misbranding a drug when he is sentenced on Dec. 4. He admitted guilt on one count of each charge Wednesday in U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt's court. El Hawa, 36, the owner of a Houston home health-care business, admitted that he used a doctor's name without authorization and purchased thousands of syringes and needles. One...

(Daily Mail Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) URGENT calls have been made for the law to be changed to stop ingredients for deadly biological weapons being bought over the Internet. A shocking investigation has exposed how elements of the deadly smallpox virus can be purchased online then delivered through the post in Britain. It is feared terrorists could use the same tactics to create a biological weapon. Concern over the potential risk to public health last night prompted calls for the law to be changed to close current loopholes. Smallpox is one of the biggest killers in history, having claimed...

Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller is on the lecture circuit, pulling down $15,000-$20,000 a speech plus first class airfare. When she left the paper, after spending 85 days in jail, she wrote that “In my future writing, I intend to call attention to the internal and external threats to our country’s freedoms¯Al Qaeda and other forms of religious extremism, conventional and W.M.D. terrorism, and growing government secrecy in the name of national security¯subjects that have long defined my work.” Those are noble sentiments. But it’s the Times, more than any other media organization, which has prevented the government...

<p>The former number two official in Saddam Hussein's Iraqi air force claims the former Iraqi dictator moved weapons of mass destruction from Iraq to Syria in the months preceding the current Iraq war.</p>

Man Charged In Fake Flu Shot Case Shots Contain Purified Water POSTED: 4:56 pm CDT October 28, 2005 UPDATED: 5:15 pm CDT October 28, 2005 HOUSTON -- A man was charged Friday, accused of intentionally administering fake flu shots to hundreds of ExxonMobil employees, KPRC Local 2 reported. Iyad Abu El Hawa, 35, is accused of attempting to defraud Medicare by giving fake flu vaccines, according to U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg. Officials said El Hawa substituted a purified form of water for the vaccine. Investigators said the bogus flu shots were given at an ExxonMobil health fair on Oct. 19...

Two teams of federal and university scientists announced today that they had resurrected the 1918 influenza virus, the cause of one of history's most deadly epidemics, and had found that unlike the viruses that caused more recent flu pandemics of 1957 and 1968, the 1918 virus was actually a bird flu that jumped directly to humans. The work, being published in the journals Nature and Science, involved getting the complete genetic sequence of the 1918 virus, using techniques of molecular biology to synthesize it, and then using it to infect mice and human lung cells in a specially equipped, secure...

Gays faced with new STD strains By JACOB GOLDSTEIN jgoldstein@herald.com In the past five years, without much fanfare, a syphilis epidemic has emerged among gay men in South Florida and around the country. Nationwide, rates of drug-resistant gonorrhea have risen rapidly in gay men. And a rare form of chlamydia has spread among gay men in Europe, moved to Canada and New England, and may have made its way to South Florida. Syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia are all curable, but they can be painful and, if not treated promptly, can cause long-term damage. And having a sexually transmitted disease makes...

A radical anti-American group working for the establishment of a separate Hispanic nation in the southwest U.S. has threatened attendees of an anti-illegal immigration conference in Las Vegas planned for this weekend, saying Mexican food workers might cause "Montezuma's Revenge" among those they serve.

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR TIMOTHY McVEIGH'S bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City seems as if it happened less than 10 years ago, but its 10th anniversary, which happened a week ago, seems as if it didn't happen at all. And for practical purposes it didn't. Lots of stories made a bigger ripple in the week's zeitgeist - some of them understandably (new pope chosen), some less so (on "American Idol," Anwar's journey ends). This attention deficit is partly explained by what took place in Lower Manhattan six years after the bombing. Osama bin Laden's atrocity dwarfed Timothy McVeigh's along...

WASHINGTON, March 15 - The Department of Homeland Security, trying to focus antiterrorism spending better nationwide, has identified a dozen possible strikes it views as most plausible or devastating, including detonation of a nuclear device in a major city, release of sarin nerve agent in office buildings and a truck bombing of a sports arena. The document, known simply as the National Planning Scenarios, reads more like a doomsday plan, offering estimates of the probable deaths and economic damage caused by each type of attack. They include blowing up a chlorine tank, killing 17,500 people and injuring more than 100,000;...

WEDNESDAY, Feb. 2 (HealthDayNews) -- Researchers report that they've been able to stop a smallpox-like virus in mice in just eight days, a development that could lead to more effective treatments for other kinds of illnesses in humans. While the treatment is not ready for use in people, "it represents a new approach toward antiviral therapies," said Dr. Ellis Reinherz, a researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and co-author of the study in the February issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Doctors banished the deadly smallpox virus from the earth in the 1970s, and universal vaccination against the disease...

UNITED NATIONS - U.N. weapons inspectors are planning for possible monitoring of Iraq's biological, chemical and missile programs despite being barred from the country by the United States, according to a report to the U.N. Security Council. The quarterly report released Wednesday by the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, known as UNMOVIC, outlines a range of activities undertaken by the U.N. inspectors to seek new information about Iraq's weapons programs and to prepare for a possible future role. U.N. inspectors were pulled out of Iraq in March, just before the U.S.-led war that toppled Saddam Hussein's regime. After the...

Notwithstanding former President Jimmy Carter's recent statement to the contrary, Undersecretary of State John Bolton's remarks about Cuba's biological weapons capabilities underscore lingering concerns with the rogue island only 90 miles from the United States. Bolton, on May 6, told an audience at the Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation that the U.S. is suspicious about Cuban biomedical laboratories and their ability to transfer biological weapons technology to Iraq, Syria and Libya, all countries that Cuban President Fidel Castro visited last year. Bolton also made remarks, which may be interpreted as a clear signal of hardening State Department policy toward Cuba, faulting...

Hoping to hasten the doomsday their leader foretold, scientists who were members of Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult brewed batches of anthrax in the early 1990s and released it from an office building and out the back of trucks upwind of the Imperial Palace. But the wet mixture kept clogging the sprayers the Aum Shinrikyo scientists had rigged up, and, unbeknown to them, the strains of anthrax they had ordered from a commercial firm posed no danger to anyone. Frustrated by their failure at biowarfare, they turned to a less arduous method of mass killing -- chemical attack -- and in...

In ordering a new $877 million anthrax vaccine last month, the federal government said it was a major step toward creating a "bioshield" to protect Americans from germ warfare. But delivering that protection may be difficult: the vaccine is unproven in humans, the maker has legal and accounting troubles, and health officials are not prepared to distribute the vaccine quickly if it is needed. Bush administration officials, as well as the top executives at VaxGen, the manufacturer in California, say they are confident they can fulfill their promise. "This program needs to be a success for all of us -...

The prowestern candidate in the Ukrainian elections thinks he may have been poisoned because his face has aged so drastically. The former USSR had an enormous bio-warfare program. It was often carried out by scientists who did genuine life-saving research. For example, the Russian who led the World Health Organization to erradicate smallpox also was a leader of the USSR's bioweapons program. His name was Vladimir Zhdanov when he published articles on biowarfare and Victor Zdanov when he worked on erradicating Smallpox. He did a great thing in erradicating smallpox, but a terrible thing in creating biological warfare agents. They...

The New York Police Department, the F.B.I. and the city's health department have agreed for the first time on a set of rules that will govern investigations of suspected biological attacks in the city, detailing the roles the agencies will play as well as how confidential medical information is to be shared. The "protocol," a six-page document that officials regard as something of a remarkable cooperation agreement, resulted in part from lessons learned in New York during the 2001 anthrax letter attacks, which killed five people in Florida and the Northeast and infected more than a dozen others in the...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 12 - The government will spend $15 million over the next year for research on the illnesses of veterans of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the secretary of veterans affairs, Anthony J. Principi, announced Friday. He said it would concentrate on the role of neurotoxins, and not the stress and psychological conditions often implicated as a cause of the veterans' health complaints. Mr. Principi also said the department would establish a research center to develop treatments for gulf war illnesses. "The men and women who fought there deserve our undivided attention to their questions, to their symptoms, to...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 - In a development that could undercut reporters' ability to obtain confidential information, Justice Department officials agreed Thursday to distribute to dozens of federal investigators in the 2001 anthrax case a document they can sign to release journalists from pledges of confidentiality. Lawyers for Steven J. Hatfill, a former Army bioterrorism expert, had sought the releases as a step toward questioning reporters about their sources in the case. Dr. Hatfill, who has been described by Attorney General John Ashcroft as a "person of interest'' in the anthrax investigation, is suing the government over leaks of a variety...

OP-ED COLUMNIST Saddam Hussein saw his life as an unfolding epic narrative, with retreats and advances, but always the same ending. He would go down in history as the glorious Arab leader, as the Saladin of his day. One thousand years from now, schoolchildren would look back and marvel at the life of The Struggler, the great leader whose life was one of incessant strife, but who restored the greatness of the Arab nation. They would look back and see the man who lived by his saying: "We will never lower our heads as long as we live, even if...

While health officials reported this week West Nile virus has sickened 108 people in 10 states this summer, they continue to withhold opinions on how, where and why the mosquito-born disease originated. Maybe, say some U.S. intelligence sources of Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, that's because they know. The Centers for Disease Control gave samples of West Nile virus – among other deadly biological agents – to Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the 1980s. Some national security sources – as well as health professionals – believe Saddam Hussein weaponized those samples and sent them back to the United States, via his ally...

CARSON -- Los Angeles County's Department of Health Services will hold a mass smallpox vaccination drill Wednesday at the Carson Center. "We will have more than 1,000 volunteers practice how we would vaccinate the residents of the county in case of an outbreak of disease,' said Heidi Stevenson of the county Health Services Department. On its Web site, the county notes: "Although the risk of an actual smallpox outbreak is very low, the consequences of such an event would be great. It would be very important for us to be able to vaccinate millions of people in a very short...

IT IS EXCEEDINGLY rare these days to find something that the House and the Senate, the Republicans and the Democrats, can all agree on. But after the Senate's final passage of the Project Bioshield bill last week -- by a vote of 99 to 0 -- it seems that there really is near-unanimous, bipartisan support for speeding up development and stockpiling of the vaccines, antidotes and diagnostic devices that could be used to deter or help cope with a biological terrorist attack in the United States. The bill, a version of which was passed by a comparable margin in the...

<p>HAGERSTOWN, Md. (AP) — The FBI, revisiting an old lead in the anthrax investigation, recently interviewed a former Fort Detrick researcher and his co-workers about his whereabouts when the letters were mailed, he and his lawyer said Sunday.</p> <p>Ayaad Assaad, who now works for the federal Environmental Protection Agency, said the agents also quizzed him Tuesday about his knowledge of producing finely powdered anthrax like that used in the letters.</p>

Dangerous pathogens or infectious agents can be made more deadly, and relatively benign agents can become major public health problems. Bacteria that cause diseases such as anthrax could be altered in such a way that would make current vaccines against them ineffective

December 3, 2002 C.I.A. Hunts Iraq Tie to Soviet SmallpoxBy JUDITH MILLER he C.I.A. is investigating an informant's accusation that Iraq obtained a particularly virulent strain of smallpox from a Russian scientist who worked in a smallpox lab in Moscow during Soviet times, senior American officials and foreign scientists say. The officials said several American scientists were told in August that Iraq might have obtained the mysterious strain from Nelja N. Maltseva, a virologist who worked for more than 30 years at the Research Institute for Viral Preparations in Moscow before her death two years ago. The information came to...

LONDON (AFP) - Intelligence services have warned that the British parliament faces a "specific threat" of a chemical or biological attack by the Al-Qaeda network. Members were alerted over a possible strike using anthrax or the deadly chemical ricin on the House of Commons, the lower chamber of parliament, by MI5, Britain's domestic security agency, newspapers said. Details of the warning emerged during a debate Thursday on whether to spend 1.3 million pounds (2.3 million dollars, 1.9 million euros) on a permanent glass security barrier between the House of Commons and its public gallery. The vote was passed. Peter Hain,...

The Bush administration continues to be worried that Fidel Castro's communist regime is developing biological weapons, according to U.S. Undersecretary of State for arms control and nuclear proliferation John Bolton. Geostrategy-Direct, the global intelligence news service, reports while intelligence on the biological program is uneven, Bolton said last week "there is additional intelligence information that strengthens my belief that Cuba's BW effort must be carefully monitored." Bolton said Ana Montes, a Cuban penetration agent inside the Defense Intelligence Agency, drafted a 1998 intelligence analysis that played down the threat from Cuba. "Additionally, Montes' espionage materially strengthened Cuba's denial and deception...

US develops lethal new viruses 29 October 03http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994318  A scientist funded by the US government has deliberately created an extremely deadly form of mousepox, a relative of the smallpox virus, through genetic engineering.The new virus kills all mice even if they have been given antiviral drugs as well as a vaccine that would normally protect them.The work has not stopped there. The cowpox virus, which infects a range of animals including humans, has been genetically altered in a similar way.The new virus, which is about to be tested on animals, should be lethal only to mice, Mark Buller of the University...

SOURCE: BioDefense Corporation First Ever Mail Defender(tm) System To Protect From Mailed Anthrax Debuts at Global Homeland Security Conference Today in D.C. New Mail Defender(tm) System Invented and Patented by Michael Lu Who Studied at Harvard and MIT LEXINGTON, MASS - September 24, 2003 /Xpress Press/ - BioDefense Corporation (www.biodf.com) today introduces the world's first defense against mailed anthrax and other biological agents at the 3rd Annual Global Homeland Security Conference. The conference runs September 24 -26 at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington D.C. The Mail Defender(tm) will provide protection for government agencies, corporations, and key individuals around...

Fears grow that extremists are ready to cross another threshold of terror Evidence gathered in Iraq and Afghanistan lends credence to claims that radical Islamic groups are dabbling in lethal toxins BEIRUT: A few days ago, Japanese prosecutors demanded the death sentence for the guru of the Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme Truth) doomsday cult, Shoko Asahara, for masterminding the sarin gas attack on Tokyo’s subway system on March 20, 1995. Twelve people were killed and 2,500 sickened. A year earlier, sect activists had released sarin in a residential neighborhood in the Nagano Mountains, killing seven people. Those atrocities crossed a moral...