Anthrax could be killing heroin users: “Scientists at Porton Down biological defence laboratory, in Wiltshire, have discovered signs of anthrax infection in

two victims of a disease which killed 10 Scottish heroin users in the last month. One person in Norway also died

from the same disease.

A further nine Scots are ill, and one bears the black scab typical of localised anthrax infection, the report said.”

“This is a repugnant act against human and Christian ethics,” the pastor of the local evangelical church told reporters.

For Doctors, a Chance to Spot Victims in Denial. An article in a British trauma journal instructs ER workers on recognizing injuries consistent with “shaken adult syndrome”, indicative of covert physical victimization.

Two Accused of Murder in 1963 Alabama Church Blast:

One more in a growing, and welcome, wave of current prosecutions of white suspects believed responsible for

attacks on blacks in Alabama, Mississippi and other Southern states in the 1960s.

Kalle Lasn is Mad as Heck and Isn’t Going to Take It Any More. A portrait of the culture-jamming founder of Adbusters.

Web Skews Sex Education, Psychiatrist Warns: ‘A rising tide of Internet pornography is creating a growing public health

problem in sex education, a psychiatrist said on Tuesday.

“I’m very concerned about children,” Donna Woods of the University of Michigan said, adding that

easily accessed pornography was portraying sex as a public event, disconnected from human

commitment. …”There is going to be a be a big public health issue … explaining (to children) what sex is and

isn’t,” Woods told a session at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association.’

I’m trying to point you to something on the net about the Seymour Hersh investigation of “Drug Czar” Gen. Barry McCaffrey’s command during the Persian Gulf War, but the search engines are not coming up with anything. Renowned investigative reporter Hersh started out to dig up dirt on McCaffrey’s war on drugs but a former colleague told him to look instead at McCaffrey’s role in Desert Storm. It appears that there were at least three incidents during which American forces under McCaffrey’s command fired on disarmed or surrendering Iraqi troops; two of the incidents appear to have been after the ceasefire. Hersh interviewed more than 200 enlisted men and officers in reaching his conclusions about the inappropriateness of attacks that McCaffrey ordered; the general ends up appearing to have been consumed with bloodlust. Overwhelming Force, a long piece reporting on this, will appear in next week’s New Yorker. I heard both Hersh and McCaffrey interviewed last night on NPR’s All Things Considered; of course McCaffrey denies the allegations, to my mind evasively and unconvincingly. Update: Here’s the text of Hersh’s article.

Another reason to cool your jets.

“X-Files” Back…with Duchovny. Fox announces that X-philes won’t be bereft; E! Online claims to have scooped everyone to the fact that Duchovny will be back for at least “a handful of episodes”; but the real news is that producer Chris Carter will have a spinoff revolving around The Lone Gunmen ready for Fox’s midseason schedule!

‘The artist formerly known as “The artist formerly known as Prince”‘ “Forget the symbol, erase the acronym. The artist formerly known as Prince

announced Tuesday that he will be, now and forever, known again as Prince.”

You Can Run, But Not Fast Enough: “A British man who has been imprisoned, shot at and robbed during a 3-1/2-year quest to become the first person

to run round the world decided on Monday to abandon plans to traverse Colombia.

‘There were tanks. Everyone seemed to be in uniform and carrying a machine gun,’ he told Reuters by telephone from Maracaibo in

western Venezuela. ‘It’s too dangerous. It’s just not worth it.'”

Ecological disaster in the Los Alamos fire? “The basic question in the Los Alamos fire is whether and

to what extent depleted uranium strewn about the Los

Alamos National Laboratory site has been sucked up

into the plume by the fire. In addition, whether the

following materials—also known to be on the site—are

in the smoke plume: lead, beryllium, arsenic,

thorium, uranium, plutonium, PCBs, barium, high

explosives.

Other questions: are the firefighters themselves

being monitored for contamination. There is no real

protection for fire fighters working in such a

volatile situation. And is the government monitoring

fall out from plume as it passes across Colorado,

Oklahoma and Texas?” With a number of links to sites covering various aspects of the fire.

A Dallas Morning News investigative report concludes that there’s been more than a decade of whittling away at the fundamental right to a trial by jury. “More and more matters once decided by juries are being

handled by judges or private arbitrators or are being banned

from the courtroom entirely. ‘The American jury is in serious

trouble,’ says Valerie Hans, a

University of Delaware

psychology professor and

recognized authority on the role

of juries in the national culture.” Trends include limiting the amount of civil jury monetary awards; the removal of entire areas of decision-making from juries; corporations that require customers to surrender their right to jury trial in future disputes as a condition of doing business; and an increase in judicial reversals of jury findings, a right judges have but have historically used only sparingly. Attacks on rule by jury arise from fears that modern lawsuits are too complex for the lay public to understand; that juries are too easily manipulated by lawyers; and that jurors are too prone to find for the “little guy” against a corporation.