Florida cases likely to be first ever anthrax attack. The New Scientist is reporting that, in addition to the death of Robert Stevens, the detection of anthrax bacilli on his computer keyboard and in the nasal passages of a second worker in the company, another employee has developed suggestive pneumonia symptoms and so has a man in Virginia who recently visited the company. This appears to be “the first documented and fatal attack with anthrax, long feared as a biological weapon.”

Other goodies from the latest New Scientist:

• ” The Kursk, the Russian navy’s doomed sunken submarine, has been raised and is set to begin its final journey to a naval base near Murmansk.”
  

• “A (drunken) man who shot a hole in the Trans-Alaska Pipeline last week caused one of the biggest spills since the pipeline opened in 1977, say local clean-up workers.
  
  The Aleyska Pipeline Service Company has patched the hole, but workers will spend months cleaning up the 8000 square metre site covered with an estimated 1.1 million litres (285,000 gallons) of crude oil.”
  

• “An unobtrusive prototype (wristwatch) device that allows the wearer to run a computer with hand gestures is revealed in Switzerland.”
  

• Sue postmortem reveals extensive injuries: “A postmortem of the most complete T. rex yet found reveals evidence of numerous injuries and infections.”

Afghan Buddhas resurrected in China — “A Chinese entrepreneur is attempting to resurrect the giant Buddhas destroyed by the Taleban regime in Afghanistan by building replicas of them in China.

The project is the idea of Liang Shi-mian, who expects them to be finished early next year.

He has begun building a towering red stone version of one of the Bamiyan statues in his country’s Buddhist heartland.

Some 375 stonecutters and carvers are working all hours to complete the 121ft sculpture by March, the one year anniversary of the destruction of the originals.” ITN

U.S. details damage; revenge vowed. More on the acknowledged civilian deaths: ‘The Associated Press reported from Kabul that the intended target might have been a Taliban anti-aircraft position and transmission tower 300 yards away.

But the demining agency’s director suggested to NBC News that the United States might have mistaken the two-story building for a radio station. The official, Farid Elmi, said that the office housed Kabul Radio 10 years ago and that an old antenna had still stood nearby, MSNBC.com’s Preston Mendenhall reported from Islamabad, Pakistan.

The office, two miles from downtown Kabul, was on the U.N. list of its facilities in Afghanistan, Elmi added.

Bunker said the guards had not been warned or told to relocate. “It was assumed they were safe where they were. Otherwise, they would have been relocated for sure,” she said, adding that the guards were not affiliated with the Taliban. ‘ MSNBC

diveintomark/Now extremely available: “Welcome to my weblog. I hope you enjoy it. I just got fired for it.”

Declan McCullagh writes in Lycos News: New weapons for a new war — “America’s war against the Taliban and al-Qaida will allow U.S. forces to test newly developed weapons never used on a battlefield before.

Following is a review of many of the weapons that have been introduced since the 1991 Gulf War — and systems currently being designed that could be introduced over the next few years.”

McDermott first U.S. lawmaker to criticize attack: ‘Breaking bipartisan solidarity on Capitol Hill, Rep. Jim McDermott yesterday criticized the U.S.-led attacks on military targets in Afghanistan, questioning whether President Bush had “thought this action out completely or fully examined America’s cause.”

The Seattle Democrat issued a two-paragraph statement that suggested Bush and his military advisers reacted too quickly to the Sept. 11 suicide jet attacks against the Pentagon and World Trade Center. The statement was the first public criticism of the retaliatory strikes by a federal lawmaker.’ Seattle Times

Switzerland has moved.

The Science Behind the Song Stuck in Your Head: “For years, humans have been tortured by Stuck Tune Syndrome, in which a seemingly innocuous piece of music lodges in the brain and won’t leave. So far, no reliable cure exists, but a University of Cincinnati professor hopes to change that. James Kellaris has embarked on a study to figure out why songs sometimes commandeer people’s thoughts.” LA Times Since this article mentioned it, I can’t get My Sharona to stop playing in my head. There, I’ve done it to you too…

From the tried-and-true null device, one more in a series of folks who have recently grown uncomfortable with Jorn Barger: ‘Some of Jorn’s links and comments have gotten a bit ugly in recent months, but now he has really crossed the line, by posting a link to an “apparently well-researched survey of Jewish media domination”, on a white-supremacist group’s web site. For one, by honouring such extremist tracts as legitimate discourse, he does a disservice to mainstream critics of Israeli government/military policies, and plays right into the hands of those who would brand all such criticism as the work of rabid racists.’

“Mullah Omar is Unfit”

Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar is mentally unstable and suffers fits, a British daily said here on Sunday.

“He locks himself away for two or three days at a time. The official line is that he is having visions, but he is suffering from brain seizures,” the doctor who attends Omar was quoted by the Sunday Telegraph as saying.

This mental instability is the real reason why Omar, the 43-year-old cleric, is so reclusive, the Telegraph said in a report from its correspondent in Quetta.

Doctors believe Omar’s mood swings may be because of a shrapnel lodged in his brain during a Russian rocket attack on his mosque in 1989, when he also lost an eye.

Apart from these fits, the Taliban leader also suffers from serious depression, alternating with bouts of childlike behaviour where he sits in the driving seat of one of his cars, turning the wheel while making the noise of an engine. Hindustani Times

Hacker Cracks Islamist Mailing List: “The anonymous hacker has published a list of hundreds of e-mail addresses, including that of a suspect in last week’s World Trade Center attack.” The Standard

In The New Republic, Colin Powell is essentially branded a traitor for his statesmanship:

‘ “You’re not secretary of state,” Dick Cheney admonished Colin Powell during the run-up to the Gulf war. “…So stick to military matters.”

Cheney spoke too soon. Freed from the constraints of military professionalism, such as they were, Secretary of State Powell is today busily forfeiting America’s capacity to respond effectively to the attacks of September 11. Indeed, he’s gone out of his way to contradict just about every principle President Bush has enunciated for the battle ahead. Will the United States employ “every necessary weapon of war” to defeat terror? Probably not. “It’s a war that will use legal means, financial weapons,” Powell told Qatari television the week after the attack. Will the United States, as the president insists, eliminate the distinction between terrorists and the states that give them haven? Not really, given that Powell has been wooing several such states into America’s coalition. In other words, having portrayed the threat as malignant, Bush is now being urged toward equivocal action.’

And the Sunday Times of London portrays “Donald Rumsfeld: the hawk with his finger on the trigger: Technically, Rumsfeld is outranked by Vice-President Dick Cheney and Colin Powell, the secretary of state. But Cheney is a mere protégé of 69-year-old Rummy, and Powell looks easy meat compared to the opposition he’s seen off before.

In his first incarnation as defence secretary, in the Ford administration 25 years ago, Rumsfeld completely outfoxed the extremely foxy Henry Kissinger. The two later made it up, but as Kissinger ruefully noted in his memoirs: “Rumsfeld afforded me a close-up look at a special Washington phenomenon: the skilled full-time politician-bureaucrat in whom ambition, ability and substance fuse seamlessly.” In less complimentary vein, Kissinger is supposed to have added: “Of all the despots that I’ve had to deal with, none was more ruthless than Donald Rumsfeld.”

And let’s not forget the exemplary comportment in times of war of lesser dignitaries. For example, U.S. Rep. J.C. Watts, (R.- Okla.) — “who supports the aviation security bill scheduled for a vote this week — violated security measures outside Will Rogers World Airport on Sept. 28, aides confirmed.

(Watts) was so angry about receiving a parking ticket outside the airport that he shoved the ticket under an Oklahoma City police officer’s badge, two of his aides told The Oklahoman.”

<img src=”http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/images/herblock/4_22_70.gif&#8221; border=”0″ alt=”tunnel at the end of the tunnel” title=”from: Five Decades of Herblock, the Washington Post“>

R.I.P Herblock Washington Post [Just when we need him most?]

Aid Agencies Reject ‘Risky’ US Air Drops: ‘The launch of military attacks on Afghanistan will worsen the humanitarian crisis in the country and plans for air drops of aid will be “virtually useless” as an aid strategy, leading British aid agencies warned yesterday.

Instead America and Britain should assign clear corridors on the ground and ensure safe passage for aid to flow in and for refugees to return home without any danger of being hit by air strikes, senior aid workers said.’ Common Dreams

Sources in the intelligence community, the FBI and those preparing the legal case against bin Laden urge that U.S. efforts focus on targeting him and that broadening the scope of the war, if we lose sight of such an objective, would be disastrous. Guardian Observer Nevertheless, our bombsights seem to have more and more-wide-angle lenses, with glances in the direction of Iraq (of course) The Times of London, Latin American drug lords Washington Post, and even the Nicaraguan Sandinistas. Cleveland Plains Dealer

Fighting terrorism: the propaganda war The Economist In war on terrorism, information becomes a prime weapon. Newhouse News Service. Finally, what is perhaps the ultimate infowar weapon:

Specializing in the newly developed arena of Non-lethal Obfuscation Technologies (NOT), (the Alternative WarWorks) aims to harness the creative fluidity and subversive methodologies of Generations X, Y, Z to provide preemptory psychological assaults upon targets of further military action.

The strategy of AWW is to discern and delineate the complex delusions, cultural presuppositions, and rampant superstitions preoccupying our non-media savvy Third-World foes. Due to their dictatorship-imposed lack of exposure to Western culture and humor, enemies in poor and uneducated countries are easily confused and/or swayed by unusual phenomenon.

[courtesy of David Walker]

3 Scientists Win Nobel Physics Prize: “Three U.S.-based scientists shared the

2001 Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for creating a new state of

matter:” the Bose-Einstein condensate, ” an ultra-cold gas that could aid in developing smaller and faster

electronics.

The award went to Americans Eric A. Cornell, 39, of the National Institute

of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo. and Carl E. Wieman, 50,

of the University of Colorado along with German scientist Wolfgang

Ketterle, 43, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” New York Times [name: “FMHreader”, password: “FMHreader”]

Second Case of Anthrax Leads F.B.I. Into Inquiry — “The F.B.I. took over the investigation of anthrax contamination in South Florida today after a co-worker of a man who died from the illness last week was also found to have spores of the disease.

Law enforcement officials said privately that the presence of anthrax in two co-workers, and on the computer keyboard of the man who died, was highly suspicious even though they had no evidence of criminal or terrorist activity.” The office site is “…within several miles of where some of the men involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks had lived, taken flight lessons and looked into the purchase of a crop-dusting plane, an indication to some that the men were considering an act of bioterrorism. ” There is also an unsubstantiated report from an area pharmacy that a man fitting the description of one of the hijackers filled a prescription for the antibiotic Cipro, which can be used against anthrax infection, there earlier this year. New York Times [name: “FMHreader”, password: “FMHreader”]

The Washington Post reports that the Florida media firm where the anthrax has appeared has had harsh words for bin Laden in the past.

Science Times is also covering “ideas, some far off and some surprisingly close at hand, that are being pursued in what could become the nation’s newest medical battle — the war against bioterrorism.

The new battle will be fought with the tools of biotechnology, genomics and immunology. The genomes of microbes can now be sequenced in a matter of weeks, giving new insights into their structure. In the last two weeks one group of scientists at Harvard Medical School reported finding a gene variation that makes mice resistant to anthrax, and another group said it had designed a molecule that protected rats against normally lethal doses of anthrax toxin.

Indeed, unlike some other areas of defense-related research, bio-defense work will have numerous civilian spinoffs, since doctors must respond to new pathogens that arise naturally, like H.I.V. and West Nile virus.”

4 U.N. Workers Killed in Initial Strike on Afghanistan. What does it say about our targeting strategy if the Afghan Technical Consultancy, which oversees humanitarian mine clearing operations in Afghanistan, is on the site list? What does it say about our ability to avoid civilian casualties if it isn’t? Is it unpatriotic to ask? See Wartime Lies: A Consumer’s Guide to the Bombing:

Here come “surgical strikes”! Check out that “laser-guided” “pinpoint precision.”

“Collateral damage”? Hardly any.

It’s a glorious war, a noble cause, the only solution to a world crisis….

So we heard in the Gulf War.

So we hear at the onset of the Afghan war. Many of the same characters who ran and propagandized the last war — Colin Powell and Dan Rather, for instance — have returned to our living rooms. AlterNet [via BookNotes]

[Some people have begun to call this one “Desert W. Storm“…]