Free Republic

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...

DENVER - A Japanese cult attacked Tokyo in 1993 with an innocuous, readily available strain of anthrax sold by a Colorado animal vaccine company, an Arizona researcher said. The anthrax was used by the Aum Shinri Kyo doomsday cult that in 1995 used sarin nerve gas to kill 12 people in an attack on a Tokyo subway station. Paul Keim, an anthrax expert at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, told colleagues about the 1993 anthrax attack at Sunday's session of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (news - web sites) convention in Denver. Using DNA, researchers at the...