Friday, May 22, 2009

United States law enforcement officials announced the arrest Thursday of four men in connection with a plot to blow up two synagogues in The Bronx, a borough of New York City, and shoot down military airplanes flying out of the Stewart Air National Guard Base.

The men allegedly placed car bombs wired to cell phones outside the Riverdale Temple and nearby Riverdale Jewish Center in the Bronx area of the city. New York City Police Department commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said one of the suspects placed what he believed were homemade bombs, or improvised explosive devices, in separate vehicles parked outside the synagogues. The other three suspects served as lookouts.

According to a joint statement released by the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the FBI and the New York City Police Department, the men were returning to the vehicle and were planning to attack aircraft at the Air National Guard base at Stewart airport in Newburgh, with Stinger surface-to-air guided missiles when law enforcement stopped them.

As the men were returning to the vehicle, the signal was given for the arrest. An 18-wheel New York City Police Department vehicle blocked the end of the street. The FBI informer also served as the driver of the suspects’ vehicle. Another armored vehicle arrived, and officers from the department’s Emergency Service Unit, according to witnesses, smashed the blackened windows of the SUV, removed the men from the vehicle, and handcuffed them on the ground. None offered resistance.

The men had previously conducted surveillance of military planes at the Air National Guard base including taking photographs.

Both the car bombs and the missiles were actually fakes given to the plotters with the help of an informant for the FBI, who posed as a Pakistani militant affiliated with Al-Qaeda. Each of the two homemade bombs was equipped with about 37 pounds of inert material labeled as C-4 plastic explosives, but the devices had been ‘totally disabled by the FBI,” and “there was no danger to anyone,” Commissioner Kelly said.

“While the bombs these terrorists attempted to plant tonight were – unbeknownst to them – fake, this latest attempt to attack our freedoms shows that the homeland security threats against New York City are sadly all too real,” said Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City.

The suspects are reported to be four Muslim men; three U.S. citizens, one Haitian. The Daily News reports that three of the men are jail-house converts to Islam.

James Cromitie, 53, the reported leader, claims that his parents live in Afghanistan and told the FBI informant that he was angry about the U.S. military killing Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He had lived in Brooklyn and had a record of “as many as 27 arrests” for minor crimes “both upstate and in New York City.”

The other suspects are David Williams, Onta Williams, and Laguerre Payen a native of Haiti.

At the arraignment held Thursday, attorney for Laguerre Payen, Marilyn Reader, told the court that Payen has “a very low borderline” intelligence quotient and receives medication for schizophrenia.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Gidget, the chihuahua featured in the Taco Bell adverts in the United States has died from a stroke. The dog died at the age of 15 on Tuesday night. Sue Chipperton, the owner and trainer of Gidget commented saying, “She made so many people happy.” She passed at Chipperton’s home in Santa Clarita, California.

The dog was featured in the 1990s adverts that ran from 1997 to 2000. Gidget was portrayed as a male dog and is remembered for the dubbed saying “Yo quiero Taco Bell” which is Spanish for “I want Taco Bell.” The advert was meant to be shown only once but was turned into a campaign.

Gidget was also featured in Legally Blonde 2 and adverts for the board game Trivial Pursuit.

Friday, July 17, 2009Following similar threats by workers at New Fabris and Nortel, workers at JLG in Tonneins, France, threatened to blow up several platform cranes. The JLG factory announced in April 2009 that it will fire 53 of its 163 workers by the end of 2009, while the remaining 110 jobs will not be secure over the next 2 years.

JLG Tonneins was acquired in 2006 with its parent JLG Industries, a maker of aerial work platforms, by the U.S.-based Oshkosh Corporation. Despite being hugely profitable in the past, production has been much reduced since 2008 with the contraction of the construction industry and lower demand for its products. Despite excellent past results the new American management demanded sweeping cuts at the company.

In the view of locals, “the company’s actions are a disgrace given the expensive perks, such as official cars, for its corporate fat cats, compared to the sacrifice, silence, and dignity demanded by the company of those it has made redundant.”

The management offered severance pay of € 3,000 (US $4,200), however the workers demanded a severance package commensurate with “the wealth that their labor has generated.” Worker’s delegates requested a “supra-legal” payment of € 30,000, on Thursday 16 of July the management responded with a counter offer of € 16,000. On Thursday night the worker’s actions secured the € 30,000 settlement initially demanded.

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

“Localization of ‘SEMI Safety Guideline'”, executed by Safety and Health Technology Center of Taiwan (SAHTECH) and supervised by Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI), was announced today in Hsinchu, Taiwan.

This localization included several fields on health and safety of semiconductor manufacturing, certification testing on electrical devices, evaluations on fire or natural diseases, and environmental issues on semiconductor manufacturing devices, etc.. Companies and manufacturers from the semiconductor industry also paid more attentions on this guideline because issues on carbon-savings, earthquakes, fire diseases, and environment-efficiencies were included into this guideline.

On the other side of the incoming trade show of 2008 SecuTech Expo, scheduled after 2 weeks at Taipei World Trade Center, not only main fields on security devices, information security, and fire & disease preventions, the digital monitoring will be a hot topic in security industry. For applications on fire & disease preventions, because its issues contained industrial applications and ESH (Environmental, Safety & Health) managements, if a company want to decrease the ratio of fire disease or earthquake, companies from safety and related industries should pay more attentions on disease preventions.

Thursday, December 30, 2004

Mosul — With a Friday dump truck car bombing that left a massive crater and many dead, Iraqi insurgents frontally assaulted U.S. troops in Mosul, Iraq. Initial reports showed 25 Iraqis and one U.S. soldier dead. (As of this writing, additional information on the bombing was expected.)

Friday, February 18, 2022

Findings published Monday by a team composed mostly of University of Washington Center for Forensic Science researchers in Nature Human Behaviour report using a form of DNA analysis techniques originally designed for human teeth to track ivory poached from African elephants.

The scientists, in collaboration with the United States Department of Homeland Security, identified the criminal networks that killed the endangered animals and smuggled their valuable tusks across national borders.

The scientists took DNA samples from 4,320 tusks taken from both African bush (Loxodonta africana) and African forest (Loxodonta cyclotis) elephants that were confiscated from 49 separate ivory smuggling events in twelve countries from 2002 to 2019. The scientists found that teeth from the closely related elephants, or even two tusks from the same individual, often surfaced in different shipments that transited through the same ports. The data also showed when criminal networks shifted their operations from between port cities. They inferred poachers were making kills, then separating the tusks at some point along the smuggling route.

The team had been studying DNA analysis on poached tusks for years: in 2018, they found two tusks from different shipments had come from the same animal, which indicated both shipments were from the same kill and transited by the same criminal network. This is the first report of DNA identification tusks that came from elephants in the same families.

Lead author Dr Samuel Wasser said: “Identifying close relatives indicates that poachers are likely going back to the same populations repeatedly — year after year — and tusks are then acquired and smuggled out of Africa on container ships by the same criminal network.” He added: “This criminal strategy makes it much harder for authorities to track and seize these shipments because of the immense pressure they are under to move large volumes of containers quickly through ports.”

Wasser said similar studies will provide law enforcement groups access to a greater range of evidence with which to prosecute poachers and their criminal partners by providing verifiable links between different caches of captured ivory. The researchers concluded in their paper that law enforcement could use their information to discern the ways in which poachers are collaborating.

Humans have used the ivory from elephant tusks to make art, decorations, and tools since prehistory. Many countries have since outlawed the sale of ivory, but poachers continue to kill tens of thousands of elephants each year.

The paper’s authors were from the University of Washington, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Kenyan-based organisation SeeJ-Africa, the Kenya Wildlife Service, and Singapore’s National Parks Board.

Friday, February 9, 2007

The first large-scale trial of a vaccine for HIV has been launched in South Africa. About 3,000 HIV-negative people will be administered the test vaccine MRKAd5 HIV-1 created by the pharmaceutical company Merck. The study will examine if the vaccine prevents infection or lowers HIV levels in those who do get infected.

A parallel study will also be conducted in the United States and South America, to compare the vaccine’s effectiveness on various strains of HIV. The vaccine’s functioning in a heterosexual population and its effectiveness among women will also be studied. Preliminary trials for the vaccine have been conducted in the Americas and Australia as well as in Africa.

AIDS is estimated to have killed 25 million people worldwide since 1981, and between 33 and 46 million more are estimated to be infected with HIV, more than half of them in Sub-Saharan Africa. Between three and six million people are thought to have been infected in 2005.

The trial, named the Phambili (“Going forward”) Trial, is being conducted by the International HIV Trials Network and the South African AIDS Vaccine Initiative (SAAVI).

The vaccine has been developed from an adenovirus, a type of virus that causes the common cold. The virus has been genetically engineered to prevent it from causing the flu or from passing on from person to person. Instead, three genes of the HIV virus have been introduced into the adenovirus. When the vaccine containing these genes is injected into the body, it is hoped that the body’s immune system will learn to recognise and kill cells that contain the vaccine, thereby also developing an immune response against the HIV virus, which also contains these three genes.

The three genes, called gag, pol and env contain information needed to make the structural proteins for the capsid, the “shell” of the HIV viron. The vaccine does not contain the remaining six HIV genes that cause HIV to infect cells, replicate and cause disease.

The vaccine does not contain any live HIV and therefore cannot cause any infection, SAAVI said in a press release, adding that the vaccine was found to be safe and produced an immune response against HIV in earlier trials.

SAAVI has expressed its commitment to the “highest level of preventive care” for those who take part in the trial, promising “extensive, state-of-the-art” counselling as well as some forms of medical care and for those taking part, through the duration of the trial.

The trial starts a week after a different trial, involving a microbicide gel called Ushercell was stopped after more women who used the gel were found to be infected compared to those who were given a dummy gel as placebo. Eleven previous trials of the gel had not shown any problems, the chief scientist for the trial in South Africa told Business Day.

The trial is expected to cost $35 million and SAAVI will be supported by Eskom and the South African government.