Key Figures in the boston Marathon Bombing

 

The Boston Marathon bombing is an unusually complex case, involving two main suspects and their relatives on two continents, friends  and hundreds of investigators. The investigators continue to focus on the main suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who died after a police shootout, and his younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, who is now recovering from bullet wounds.

Meanwhile, the number of people involved in the case as suspects, lawyers and experts continues to grow. Here are the individuals playing an important role:

Judy Clarke, defence lawyer

Ms Clarke, a 60-year-old lawyer based in San Diego, is defending Tsarnaev. A "master strategist" in death penalty cases, according to the New York Times, she has represented some of the most difficult clients in recent US history.
"She has stood up to the plate in the kinds of cases that bring the greatest disdain from the public," as Gerald Goldstein, a Texas lawyer who knows her well, told the NY Times. She represented Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, and al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui. Another one of her clients, Jared Lee Loughner, shot and killed six people and wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Richard DesLauriers, FBI special agent in charge

 

Mr DesLauriers, 53, has for years been involved in high-profile cases. He announced the arrest of Boston crime boss James Bulger in June 2011, for example. He is known as "meticulous" and "a perfectionist" in his approach to investigations.

Katherine Russell, widow of Tamerlan Tsarnaev

A native of Rhode Island, Ms Russell, 24, met her future husband while a student at Suffolk University. Her father is a physician and her mother a nurse. Ms Russell married Tsarnaev in 2010 and afterwards converted to Islam. They have a three-year-old daughter. They liked to take walks on Norfolk Street in Cambridge, where they lived. "She wore her ethnic scarf," a neighbour, Lila Lyman, told the BBC. Her attorney, Amato DeLuca, has said she does not speak Russian and had nothing to do with the bombings.

Dias Kadyrbayev, former student

 

Kadyrbayev, centre, and Tazhayakov, left, visited New York together
 

The 19-year-old Kazakh was arrested on 20 April on suspicion of immigration violations. He was later charged with destroying evidence in the bombings case. He is a former student at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, where Tsarnaev had been enrolled. He reportedly drove a car with a license plate that read "Terrorista #1".

Azamat Tazhayakov, student

A University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth student who is also originally from Kazakhstan, Tazhayakov, 19, was a roommate of Mr Kadyrbayev. He was in the US on a student visa and has also been charged with destroying evidence in the bombing case.

Robel Phillipos, former student

A former University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth student, Mr Phillipos, 19, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, went to high school with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. They were both students at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. Mr Phillipos was recently charged with lying to impede the investigation.

Ask Maxy

Dear Maxy,
I need to vent . My daughter, my 8 year-old granddaughter and I recently went to a broadway show . After we were seated , a woman and her young daughtre sat next to us . The woman was rather large , but instead of taking the aisle seat , she gave that to her mother and sat next to me .
She was practically sitting on top ot the chair arms due to her size and was taking up part of my space . At the end of the show she told us we would need to climb over her because her knees hurt and she couldn't move yet . I'm sure her knee problem is due to her size .
This woman looked to be in her mi-30s . At this rate , she might not live long enough to see her daughter reach adulthood . Don't you think she should have taken the aisle seat ?
Loved the Show , Disliked the Seat
Dear Loved It ,
It seems logical that the person with the most difficutly moving would prefer the aisle seat , but perhaps the woman's mother insisted on taking it . When stuck in these situations, there isn't much you can do other than show tolerance for two hours .
Maxy

Dear Maxy,
Recently , my wife and I stayed for four days at the home of one of her school chums . The gals yakked until late at night, so I was the first one up every morning . I'm an early riser anyway .
I like reading the newspaper with my breakfast , so when I get up, I'd go outside and pick up the paper and bring it in . My wife said it was wrong to get the paper before my hostess . Anyway , after a couple of days, the school friend seemed in a snit about something, and my wife says that was the reason , even though she never said so when I asked whether something was bothering her .
Recently , we were invited to stay with different friends for a weekend, and I am getting no end of hassle from my wife to make sure I wait for our hosts to finish the paper . I figure I'll just go out for coffee somewhere and buy a paper . My wife says it would be rude to take off at breakfast . Is this idiotic or what ?
California
Dear California ,
It would be rude to read the paper in such a way that your hosts must wait for you to finish, or that you drag sections of it all over the house and fill in all the clues to the crossword puzzle . But there is nothing wrong with reading the paper early and putting it back together nicely and having it available to your hosts when they awaken .
you can resolve this simply enough. When you arrive, inform your hosts that you are an early riser and ask whether they would mind if you fetch their paper and read it with your coffee , promising to keep it in pristine condition for when they are ready to read it . You could also offer to go to the local coffee shop and bring back coffee and muffins (and a newspaper) for everyone else .
Maxy

Dear Maxy ,
My wife and I frequently visit her 80-something parents around .
Here is the problem ; From the time my father-in-law gets in the car until we reach our destination , he sings , whistles and hums . This grates on me like fingernails on a blackboard .
I have tried turning up the radio , but he just increases his volume . I attempt conversation , but he only stops singing long enough to answer my question and then immediately resumes his serenade .
I know if I was to ask him to stop , it would be the beginning of World War III . He has a bad temper and a short fuse .
I get along with him fine otherwise , but I find this incredibly rude and increasingly unbearable .
I try to avoid driving them , but our proximity and common gathering make it hard . My wife seems oblivious .
She has been subjected to it all her life . No one has ever had the gumption to poke this wasp nest with a stick . What can I do ?
Want Duct Tape
Dear Want Duct Tape ,
You could try singing along at the top of your lungs . But really , I don't think Dad does this deliberately to annoy you , it sounds like an ingrained habit .
Either tolerate it , drive separate cars or ask your wife to drive while you listen to something else through a set of headphones .
Maxy

Stress

H7N9 bird flu is a 'serious threat' - researchers warn

The outbreak of a new type of bird flu in China poses a "serious threat" to human health, but it is still too soon to predict how far it will spread, experts have said. Of the 126 people known to be infected so far, 24 have died, with many more still severely ill in hospital.

The H7N9 virus has not, however, yet proved able to spread between people - which limits its global threat. The threat should be "treated calmly, but seriously", researchers advised. There is concern over both the pace and severity of the outbreak. There has been a relatively high number of known infections since the first case was detected in April.  Prof John McCauley, the director of a World Health Organization (WHO) said: "It is unusual to get these numbers."

How the virus spreads is key. As long as it can spread only from a bird to a person through direct contact it posses a relatively small risk globally - particularly in richer countries where such contact is rare. If it can spread from one person to another then the threat becomes much more potent. This has not yet happened and it is impossible to tell whether it will happen tomorrow or never.

Of those infected, a fifth died, a fifth recovered and the rest are still ill. The infection results in severe pneumonia and even blood poisoning and organ failure.

"The WHO considers this a serious threat," said Prof McCauley, "but we don't know at this stage whether this is going to spread from human to human."
So far nearly all cases have been traced back to contact with poultry. If the virus adapts to spread readily between people it will pose a much greater threat and scientists warn that the virus is mutating rapidly.

The last major bird flu, H5N1, made the jump to people in 1997 and killed more than three hundred people - yet, it is still unable to spread between humans.  Predicting which viruses will become deadly on a global scale is impossible.

Prof Jeremy Farrar, a leading expert in bird flu and the director-elect of one of the world's largest research charities, the Wellcome Trust, said N7N9 needed to be taken very seriously.
 "The N7N9 is the nastiest virus in many years. Whenever an influenza virus jumps across from its normal host in bird populations into humans it is a cause for concern," he said.

Often in pandemics older people have some immunity as they have lived longer and have been exposed to similar viruses before. However, in this outbreak the ages of those infected ranges from two to 81.
Prof Farrar said: "That suggests there truly is no immunity across all ages, and that as humans we have not seen this virus before.

A study published in the Lancet medical journal suggests that H7N9 influenza is a mix of at least four viruses with origins in ducks and chickens. Unlike the previous H5N1 outbreak, it is not deadly to poultry. It means it is much harder to track the spread of the virus. A highly controversial piece of research in 2012 showed that it would take five mutations to transform H5N1 into a pandemic.

Prof Wendy Barclay, an influenza researcher at Imperial College London, said: "H7N9 might be one step closer to being able to become a pandemic than H5 is in nature at the moment. It already has one of the five mutations when it is infecting birds. In people who have caught the H7 virus so far we can see [another] one of the important mutations occurring in those people in a matter of days," she said.

Viruses get more deadly each time they mutate. Mutating is a unique ability viruses have...they can change their  DNA with each generation so that  they can attach themselves to our cells, defeating any resistance we have built to the previous generation. And we cannot be immunized against future mutations so we are constantly vulnerable.  How will the world end one day?? It may be something you can't even see coming.

'Proof' Jamestown settlers turned to cannibalism

A painting of Jamestown circa 1610, a period known as the Starving Time 

"The evidence is absolutely consistent with dismemberment and de-fleshing of this body" - Doug Owsley, forensic anthropologist

 

 

 

Newly discovered human bones prove the first permanent English settlers in North America turned to cannibalism over the cruel winter of 1609-10, US researchers have said. Scientists found unusual cuts consistent with butchering for meat on human bones dumped in a rubbish pit.

The four-century-old skull and tibia of a teenage girl in James Fort, Virginia, were excavated from the dump last year.  James Fort, founded in 1607, was the earliest part of the Jamestown colony.

 

 

Researchers fashioned a three-dimension replica of the girl's face

 

"The evidence is absolutely consistent with dismemberment and de-fleshing of this body," said Doug Owsley, a forensic anthropologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC.

Written documents had previously suggested the desperate colonists resorted to cannibalism - but the discovery of the 14-year-old girl's bones offers the first scientific proof. Smithsonian researchers believe the dead child became food for a community struggling to survive the harsh winter of 1609-10, known to historians as the Starving Time.

"There were numerous chops and cuts - chops to the forehead, chops to the back of the skull and also a puncture to the left side of the head that was used to essentially pry off that side," Dr Owsley said. "The purpose was to extract the brain. The marks also indicate that the tongue and facial tissue were removed. The clear intent was to remove the facial tissue and the brain for consumption," he said. "These people were in dire circumstances. So any flesh that was available would have been used."

The same flesh taken from animals would have been considered a delicacy in the 17th Century. Hogs' heads in particular featured prominently in recipes from the period.  The cuts to the girl's bones also indicate the work was hesitant - whoever performed the dismemberment was not a skilled butcher of animals. It is also possible the ersatz butcher was a woman, as they made up the majority of the fort's inhabitants. How the girl died is unknown, but the assault on her body would have taken place very soon afterwards.
 "The attempt to [remove] the brain is something you would need to do very quickly because brains do not preserve well," Dr Owsley said.

 The original colony survived, though starvation depleted its ranks to 60 people

 

 

Dr Owsley worked closely with chief archaeologist William Kelso of the Jamestown Rediscovery Project. Dr Kelso discovered the girl's bones last year during excavations at James Fort. Little is known about the victim apart from her age and the fact she was English. Her origin has been confirmed by comparative studies on bones in Cambridge.  Further analysis indicates she was at one time well-nourished and ate a lot of meat, a diet consistent with richer classes.

Researchers also have a sense of what she looked like thanks to digital and forensic facial reconstruction. The fragmented skull was scanned, with the digital information providing a virtual model from which to fashion a three-dimensional replica.

  The Starving Time was one of the most horrific periods of early colonial history. The James Fort settlers were under siege from the indigenous Indian population and had insufficient food to last the winter. First they ate their horses, then dogs, cats, rats, mice and snakes. Some, to satisfy their cruel hunger, ate the leather of their shoes. As the weeks turned to months, nothing was spared to maintain life. How many of the growing numbers of dead were cannibalised is unknown. But it is almost certain the girl was not the only victim.

Relief came in the form of Lord De La Warr, who sailed into the settlement with food and new colonists. After six months of siege and starvation, only 60 of the original 300 settlers had survived.

"It's somebody doing what they had to do," said Dr Owsley of the cannibalism.

 

Jamestown: America's First Colony

• Considered America's first permanent English colony
• Established in 1607, 13 years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock
• Named after King James, who sponsored the for-profit Virginia Company of London
• Capt John Smith, who took over leadership of the colony in 1608, established a working relationship with the native Powhatan tribe
• After Smith returned to England in the autumn of 1609, the Starving Times began

 

 



Obama says Guantanamo Bay prison must close

 

 

 

 

 

 

President Obama: "Guantanamo is not necessary to keep America safe... it is a recruitment tool for extremists; it needs to be closed"

 President Obama has pledged a new push to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, amid a growing prisoner hunger strike there. At the White House, Mr Obama said the detention centre was "contrary to who we are" and harmful to US interests.

He cited recent convictions of terror suspects to argue the civilian justice system was adequate for such trials. Congress has blocked efforts to close the prison, but Mr Obama said he would renew discussions with lawmakers.

Mr Obama told reporters he had asked a team of officials to review operations at Guantanamo Bay and said he was not surprised there were problems there.
"It is inefficient, it hurts us in terms of our international standing, it lessens co-operation with our allies on counter-terrorism efforts, it is a recruitment tool for extremists, it needs to be closed," Mr Obama said.

He described the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay as a "lingering problem" that would worsen if it remained open.
"I think it is critical for us to understand that Guantanamo is not necessary to keep America safe," Mr Obama told reporters.

 He said that with the war in Iraq over and detention authority in Afghanistan transferred to Afghan forces, the facility in Cuba was no longer necessary. Mr Obama said he would need the help of Congress to devise a long-term legal solution to the prosecution of detainees.

The president's comments come amid a hunger strike that has spread in recent weeks to include more than 100 of the 166 inmates at the facility. They are protesting against their indefinite detention. Most are being held without charge.

UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay has said Guantanamo Bay should be shut immediately.
The UN has called the continued detention of so many people without trial a clear violation of international law, though it understands Congress has blocked Mr Obama from closing the prison.

Aid agencies are convinced the situation there cannot go on. The International Committee of the Red Cross, the only agency with access to individual detainees, says there is now an unprecedented level of desperation at Guantanamo.

 

A medical officer at Guantanamo holds a feeding tube in 2007

On Tuesday, a UN spokesman said the force-feeding of prisoners was also a probable human rights violation.
"If it's clearly against the will of the people who are being forcibly fed, then in a view of the World Medical Association and indeed our view, this would amount to cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment which is not permissible under international law," said Rupert Colville, the UN spokesman on human rights.

In his remarks, the president seemed to support the US practice of force-feeding some hunger-strikers.
"I don't want these individuals to die," he said. "Obviously the Pentagon is trying to manage the situation as best we can."

The US has had to reinforce medical staff at Guantanamo Bay, with about 40 nurses and other specialists arriving at the weekend, according to a camp spokesman. The strike began in February but spread in recent weeks to include more than 100 of the 166 people held at the facility.

 

 

Guantanamo officials deny claims that the strike began after copies of the Koran were mishandled during searches of prisoners' cells.

A spokesman for the detention camp told Reuters news agency that 21 prisoners were being force-fed through tubes inserted through their noses, while five had been brought to hospital for observation but did not have life-threatening conditions. Shorter hunger strikes have happened at Guantanamo since early 2002, when the US began bringing al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners there.

Violence erupted at the prison on the 13th of April as the authorities moved inmates out of communal cellblocks where they had covered surveillance cameras and windows. Some prisoners used "improvised weapons" and were met with "less-than-lethal rounds", camp officials said, but no serious injuries were reported.

Nearly 100 of the detainees have reportedly been cleared for release but remain at the facility because of restrictions imposed by Congress as well as concerns of possible mistreatment if they are sent back to their home countries. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote to National Security Council Director Tom Donilon last week asking for the administration to "renew its efforts" to transfer the cleared prisoners.

Sen Feinstein and another committee member had earlier asked the Obama administration to temporarily halt the transfer of 56 cleared Yemeni nationals after an attempted bombing claimed by al-Qaeda in Yemen in December 2009.

Soon after his election, Mr Obama made closing Guantanamo Bay a top priority for his new administration, pledging to close it within a year of his inauguration in January 2009. But his plan to transfer prisoners to maximum security prisons in the US and try some detainees in the civilian justice system met fierce resistance from lawmakers of both parties.

It is interesting that Congress does not offer any better solutions or, indeed, any other solutions at all. They are content to watch people sit in cells and rot as their lives slip past. They don't mind that detainees who have been cleared for release are starving themselves to death. They have no problem with the fact that Gitmo is a hell-hole of torture that reduces America to the same level as the people they so despise for doing the same things.  They don't care that Guantanamo Bay trashes America's good guy image in the international community and destroys any credibility it has as a
peacemaker.  Stop being a hinderance, Congress, and start being a help to your president.  The war in Iraq and Afghanistan is over.  Guantanamo has to close.

Does antimatter fall up? Researchers launch study into 'mirror image' atoms

Scientists have embarked on one of the strangest experiments ever - to see whether atoms of exotic antimatter fall up instead of down. Antimatter is weird stuff, being a kind of mirror image of ordinary matter with an opposite electric charge. When an atom of normal matter meets its antimatter counterpart the two annihilate each other in a flash of light.

 

 

At the Alpha laboratory, antimatter protons - antiprotons - are combined with antielectrons, or 'positrons', to make atoms of antihydrogen

 

That much scientists already know.  What is much less certain is whether antimatter has fundamental properties that are different from normal matter - especially the way it is affected by gravity. A few experts have proposed the outlandish idea that antimatter might be repelled by the gravity - in other words, that it falls up. One reason for the mystery is that antimatter is extremely rare in nature and to date has only been made in tiny quantities in laboratories.

 

Artificially-created atoms of antimatter are suspended in magnetic traps so they do not touch atoms of matter and annihilate, and nobody has ever looked to see what happens when it is 'dropped'. Now scientists have taken the first steps towards answering this question.

A paper reported in the journal Nature Communications describes the first direct measurement of gravity's effect on antimatter. Unfortunately, the results are still too uncertain to resolve the riddle of what happens to antimatter in free-fall. Lead scientist Professor Joel Fajans, from the University of California at Berkeley, US, said: 'This is the first word, not the last.

"We've taken the first steps toward a direct experimental test of questions physicists and non-physicists have been wondering about for more than 50 years. Is there such a thing as anti-gravity? Based on free-fall tests so far, we can't say yes or no. We certainly expect antimatter to fall down, but just maybe we will be surprised." The work was conducted at Cern, the European Centre for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland, home of the Alpha (Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus) experiment.

At the Alpha laboratory, antimatter protons - antiprotons - are combined with antielectrons, or 'positrons', to make atoms of antihydrogen. These can be stored for just a few seconds in a magnetic trap. The scientists set about studying how the antihydrogen falls out of the trap when the magnetic field is switched off. What sounds simple is actually a very tricky operation.
When the magnets are turned off, the anti-atoms quickly touch the ordinary matter of the trap's walls and are immediately destroyed.

 

The scientists set about studying how the antihydrogen falls out of the trap when the magnetic field is switched off. What sounds simple is actually a very tricky operation. When the magnets are turned off, the anti-atoms quickly touch the ordinary matter of the trap's walls and are immediately destroyed.

 

To discover the fate of the antimatter atoms it is necessary to pinpoint where and when they are annihilated and to measure their precise location and velocity the moment the trap is turned off.

Alpha's magnetic fields do not turn off instantly, and almost 30 thousandths of a second pass before they decay to near zero. Meanwhile, annihilation flashes occur all over the trap walls at different times and places depending on the antiatoms' original but unknown locations, velocities and energies. So far the scientists have been able to determine two things.

If an antihydrogen atom falls downward, its gravitational mass can be no more than 110 times greater than its inertial mass. If it falls up, its gravitational mass is at most 65 times greater. Gravitational mass is the mass of a body as measured by its gravitational attraction to other bodies.  It generates the 'weight' of a massive body attracted to the Earth. Inertial mass is the mass of a body as measured by how strongly it is accelerated by a given force.

Alpha is now being upgraded and should provide more precise data once the experiment resumes next year.
'We need to do better and we hope to do so in the next few years,' said co-author Professor Jonathan Wurtele, also from the University of California at Berkeley.