Major Catalina Island Fire...

Interesting, but it occurred the day after I got a response from the Catalina Stables about my plans to take the family there while visiting.

It's "Business as Usual" on Catalina Island! Both Avalon and Two Harbors Welcome Visitors
Our community is so grateful to the hundreds of firefighters who risked their lives to save our community and our island! We are now doing everything we can to facilitate a smooth and fast transition of equipment back to the mainland, where they can be immediately available for other communities who find themselves in need. All communities in Southern California need to support each other during this period of unprecedented drought.
Catalina Express resumes boat service to Two Harbors TODAY!
Avalon Schools reopens TODAY!
Wednesday, May 16 @ 8:30 am
The fire is 100% contained! Several new photographs have been posted to the Fire Photos page.
Tuesday, May 15 @ 10:45 am
Fire Quick Facts as of 6:00 pm, Monday, May 14:
4,750 acres burned
97% contained
Total personnel & equipment currently assigned include 317 firefighters, 30 engines, and 18 camp crews
Total fire suppression costs to date: $4,400,000
14 Firefighter injuries, all minor
The Catalina Island Golf Course will reopen Wednesday, May 16.
Monday, May 14 @ 10:30 am
Here are the fire "quick facts" as of 6:00 am this morning:
4,750 acres burned
81% containment
Full containment expected at 6:00 pm Tuesday, May 15
Total personnel/equipment currently assigned include 435 firefighters, 37 engines, 18 camp crews, and 2 helicopters
Total fire suppression cost to date: $3,300,000
Demobilization continues, with personnel and equipment returning to the mainland by barge from both Avalon and Two Harbors
Electricity and gas have been restored to all areas of Avalon
The City of Avalon is open for business as usual! Employees of local businesses still on the mainland are urged to return to work as soon as possible
Sunday, May 13 @ 10:20 am
There WILL be a decision about allowing visitors back on the island later this afternoon. Probably around 1:00 pm;
The island's water supply is in great shape! There was no fire damage to Wrigley Reservoir or any of the Baker storage tanks on the West side of Avalon. Testing shows great water quality. Generators are operating the pumping equipment that brings water to both ends of the island. In fighting the fire, the usage was about equal to that used by visitors on a busy day in July or August. Water supplies are more than adequate for the island's consumption and fire suppression;
Avalon Schools will reopen WEDNESDAY, May 16. SCE is still restoring power and LBUSD needs to complete its assessment of the facility;
LA County Fire has begun its demobilization process. Equipment in the field is returning to the mainland by barge from Two Harbors. Equipment in Avalon will be going out on barges from Pebbly Beach. This process is going to take several days.
Fire Fast Facts as of 6:00 am Sunday, May 13: * 4,200 acres burned * 69% containment. Full containment expected Tuesday, May 15 at 6:00 pm * Current assets include 660 firefighters, 41 engines, 22 camp crews, and 5 helicopters * Fire suppression cost to date: $2,100,000
Saturday, May 12 @ 10:15 pm
The following was learned from a briefing by LA County Fire at 6:00 pm Saturday evening:
From the 6:00 pm briefing this evening we have learned the following:
* The fire line above Silver Canyon on the South side of the island is contained;
* The fire line above White's Landing is contained, despite having jumped the Airport road. Tomorrow's efforts will concentrate on the White's Landing canyon area;
* Tomorrow's efforts will also concentrate on a line from Frog Rock to Willow Cove; Camps at Toyon Bay and Gallagher's are OK;
* Weather forecast for tonight is a copy of last night - no wind, lots of humidity and fog. Great for the fire!!!
* Demobilization will begin Sunday, with the release of several units to return to the mainland. All equipment will be shipped back to the mainland by barge;
* GAS SERVICE: RESIDENTS NEED TO CALL SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA EDISON TO HAVE THEIR GAS SERVICE RESTORED. EDISON WILL NOT ENTER HOMES UNLESS THEY ARE REQUESTED TO DO SO, AND EDISON, NOT RESIDENTS, NEEDS TO RELIGHT PILOTS. IF YOU DON'T HAVE GAS SERVICE, IT'S ONLY BECAUSE YOU HAVE NOT CALLED TO REQUEST IT. GAS SERVICE WILL BE RESTORED NO LATER THAN MONDAY FOR ALL WHO REQUEST RESTORATION. CALL 1-800-367-8851;
* Verizon Cellular Service: Verizon's cell tower was severely damaged and needs to be replaced. SCE is attempting to replace the tower tonight, and normal Verizon cell service is expected Sunday;
* Two Harbors & the West End: SCE needs to install 50 power poles and 60,000 feet (12 miles) of line in order to restore power to Two Harbors & the West End. It is anticipated that this will take one week (that's amazing!!). This is a temporary fix. The final fix will take a couple of months. SCE is bringing several crews from the mainland to do this work. Housing on weekends is becoming a problem. If you have any housing you can devote for these crews, please contact Pat Jamieson at the Chamber: 310-510-7609 or pjamieson@CatalinaChamber.com. Pat will be coordinating this housing effort. We'll need housing on weekends for a couple of months.
* Visitors: We're still waiting on the official word of when visitors will be allowed on the island. We're anticipating this will be Tuesday, but this still needs to be confirmed. The main issue is congestion in getting all the fire equipment off the island. Everyone in the decision-making chain of command wants to allow visitors as soon as possible, so long as it does not interfere with firefighting and demobilization efforts. The Chamber has impressed on decision-makers that a decision one way or the other needs to be made soon, so visitors can make plans. We hope to have a decision sometime Sunday.
And finally, in preparation for the return of visitors, consider talking to your employees about sharing their experiences with our visitors. We know they will be interested. All of us should feel free to share our experiences, fears, joys and sorrows with our visitors. That's the personal side of this story - the human interest side. We should be willing to share.
We'll have another update Sunday, probably mid-day.

Saturday, May 12 @ 11:45 am
Catalina Express will continue to offer free transportation back to the island through their last scheduled sailing tonight, May 12 to anyone who evacuated Thursday. Residents returning Sunday or later will need to pay the normal boat fare.
Air quality in Avalon is very good! Prevailing winds have blown the smoke away from town and there is no health hazard.
The cruise ships that call at Avalon weekly are more than welcome to visit this coming Tuesday and Wednesday! All visitor activities will be available, except for golf cart rentals and tours into the island's Interior. Golf cart rentals are being restricted so as to not cause congestion with emergency services vehicles.
During a meeting this morning with Avalon City Fire Department Chief Steven Hoefs, we learned the following:
The fire has consumed 4,471 acres and the suppression cost to date is $1,000,000.
There are some 771 firefighters, 46 engines, 29 camp crews, 9 helicopters and 5 fixed wing aircraft fighting the fire.
Today's efforts are concentrated above White's Landing on the North side of the island, and above Silver Canyon on the South side.
Southern California Edison has restored power to all of Avalon with the exception of Avalon Schools. Avalon Schools will be closed on Monday, while a Long Beach Unified School District assessment team inspects the facility. Gas service should be fully restored by late Sunday.
Business owners who lost property in Avalon Canyon, Quail Canyon or Falls Canyon may arrange for an escorted inspection of their property by contacting Deputy Burt Lyon, LA County Sheriff's Department.
Several restaurants have reopened, including Steve's Steak House, Eric's on the Pier, Avalon Seafood, Coyote Joe's,Catalina Cantina, El Galleon, and Antonio's.
Photos of the fire and aftermath will be posted here this afternoon.
Saturday, May 12 @ 8:20 amAccording to NBC News and CNN, the fire is now 50% contained and full containment is expected sometime Monday, one day earlier than previously expected. Cool, moist weather greatly assisted firefighters overnight in making great progress on containing the fire. Visitors are still not permitted to travel to the island. Residents who evacuated last Thursday are encouraged to return home.
Friday, May 11 @ 5:15 pmAt a press conference at 4:00 pm this afternoon, the following information was released:
The fire, which began at 12:31 Thursday, May 10, has burned 4,200 acres and is approximately 35% contained. Full containment is expected by sometime Tuesday.
One residence in Avalon Canyon was destroyed, and 6 industrial buildings in Quail Canyon suffered damage, some severe.
A 50-Member management team from LA County Fire worked with Avalon Fire Department in fighting the fire. Other agencies participating include the California Department of Forestry, US Navy, US Coast Guard, and many local businesses provided support to these agencies.
Island residents who evacuated to the mainland may return to the island, and residents evacuated from the West end of town may return to their homes. Avalon Canyon and all roads leading into the Interior remain closed.
Avalon Schools is without power, and school will be closed on Monday, May 14.
Restaurants currently open include: 1. Antonio's: Open for take-out pizza tonight; Open at 8:00 am for breakfast, lunch & dinner Saturday; 2. El Galleon is open with a full menu; 3. Avalon Bake Shop is open for donuts & coffee.
About 10% of Southern California Edison's electric customers in Avalon are without power, and about 15% of SCE's gas customers have no gas. Initial estimates are that there are 50-60 downed power lines in the Avalon area. Residents returning to their homes may find they have no power or gas, and should be prepared to seek shelter with family or friends, or go to the Casino Theater. DO NOT attempt to relight pilots yourself - SCE will do it for you. DO NOT use candles for light. SCE is working 24 hours a day to restore power and will do so until it is restored to all customers.
Visitors will not be permitted to visit Catalina Island until further notice. Please continue to check this site for updates on this situation. There are various reasons for this restriction: 1. Safety is still a concern. Just 35% of the fire has been contained; 2. Approximately 30% to 40% of local residents voluntarily left the island Thursday evening. That represents a significant portion of Avalon's labor force. Local businesses are simply unable to provide a high level of service until all employees have returned. 3. The business community is very much involved in housing and feeding the 700+ firefighters on the Island. Their efforts must be directed to helping these individuals until their services are no longer needed.
The community of Two Harbors on the West End of Catalina Island is without power and telephone service due to numerous downed lines in the interior of the island.
The First Communion scheduled at St. Catherine's Catholic Church this Sunday has been cancelled.
The Chamber of Commerce Mixer scheduled for next Wednesday, May 16 has been cancelled.

Britain’s Prince Harry won’t serve in Iraq

LONDON - Britain’s Prince Harry will not be sent with his unit to Iraq, Britain’s top general said Wednesday, citing specific threats to the third in line to the throne and the risks to his fellow soldiers.
Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt, the army chief of staff who recently traveled to Iraq, said the changing situation on the ground exposed the prince to too much danger. Media scrutiny of Harry’s potential deployment exacerbated the situation, he said.
“There have been a number of specific threats, some reported and some not reported, that relate directly to Prince Harry as an individual,” Dannatt said. “These threats exposed him and those around him to a degree of risk I considered unacceptable.”

Clarence House, the office of Harry’s father, Prince Charles, issued a statement declaring Harry’s disappointment that “he will not be able to go to Iraq with his troop deployment as he had hoped.”
“He fully understands Gen. Dannatt’s difficult decision and remains committed to his army career,” the statement said. “Prince Harry’s thoughts are with the rest of the battle group in Iraq.
The Defense Ministry had long said the decision would be kept under review amid concerns for the security of Harry, a second lieutenant, and other soldiers serving with him. The 22-year-old prince is a tank commander trained to lead a 12-man team in four armored reconnaissance vehicles.
The move comes as Britain is preparing to hand over much of its security responsibilities to Iraqi security forces, concentrating troops at Basra Palace and Basra Air Base.
Insurgent groups looking to target Cornet Wales — as his rank is called in the Blues and Royals regiment — would have had a concentrated area in which to look for him.
'Widespread knowledge' citedDefense officials had previously said Harry could be kept out of situations where his presence could jeopardize his comrades. There had been speculation he would have been shadowed by bodyguards.
“A contributing factor to this increase in threat to Prince Harry has been the widespread knowledge and discussion of his possible deployment,” Dannatt said.
Harry would have been the first member of the British royal family to serve in a war zone since his uncle, Prince Andrew, flew as a helicopter pilot in the Falklands conflict with Argentina in 1982.
There have been reported threats by Iraqi insurgents to kill or kidnap the prince, including claims his photograph had been widely circulated among militants.
The younger son of Charles and the late Princess Diana, Harry has been a frequent face on the front of Britain’s tabloid newspapers, which have constantly covered his party-going lifestyle at glitzy London nightclubs.

Harry would have been the first member of the British royal family to serve in a war zone since his uncle, Prince Andrew, flew as a helicopter pilot in the Falklands conflict with Argentina in 1982.
Photo making the rounds?There have been reported threats by Iraqi insurgents to kill or kidnap the prince, including claims his photograph had been widely circulated among militants.
The younger son of the late Princess Diana, Harry has been a frequent face on the front of Britain’s tabloid newspapers, which have constantly covered his party-going lifestyle at glitzy London nightclubs.
Dannatt paid tribute to Harry in his statement, describing him has a professional soldier whose presence will be missed in Iraq.
“I commend him for his determination and his undoubted talent, and I don’t say that lightly,” Dannatt said. “His soldiers will miss his leadership in Iraq, although I know his commanding officer will provide a highly capable substitute troop leader.”

Good 'Ol Chicago (and its constabulary)

CHICAGO - A police officer pleaded not guilty Wednesday to beating a female bartender, and to threatening to arrest bar employees in a failed attempt to suppress a video of the attack that has been viewed around the world.
In a brief hearing, Anthony Abbate’s attorney entered not guilty pleas to all 15 felony counts of aggravated battery, official misconduct, intimidation, conspiracy and communicating with a witness.
“He’s pleading not guilty because he is not guilty,” Peter Hickey said after the hearing. “And we expect at the end, the conclusion of the trial, that that’s what the outcome will be.”

The charges stem from an alleged beating Feb. 19 at a tavern on Chicago’s northwest side that occurred after bartender Karolina Obrycka apparently refused to serve the off-duty officer any more drinks.
Incident caught in tapeVideotape from a surveillance camera in the tavern shows a man police say is the 250-pound Abbate punching, beating and throwing the 115-pound Obrycka to the floor.
The video was broadcast repeatedly, embarrassing the city and prompting criticism of the police department because Abbate originally faced only a misdemeanor until the footage became public.
The indictment alleges that Abbate, using a woman as an intermediary, threatened to plant drugs on bar employees and arrest customers for drunken driving if the video was turned over to authorities.
Abbate, a 12-year department veteran, has not commented on the charges and declined to comment Wednesday.
More officers charged in attacksThree other officers were scheduled to appear in the same courthouse Wednesday on charges stemming from another alleged bar fight.
The officers, charged with aggravated battery, are accused of beating up four businessmen at a Chicago bar in December.
In a federal lawsuit filed this month, the businessmen claim the off-duty officers attacked them while they were playing pool. They contend they suffered broken ribs, broken facial bones, injured vertebrae and bruises, according to the lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages.

Khat: Is it an illicit drug... or an herbal double-espresso?

When federal drug enforcement agents announced last summer that they had arrested scores of suspects in an “international narcotics-trafficking organization” with operations in New York and Seattle, they hailed it as the first major crackdown on khat — a plant grown in the Horn of Africa and chewed like tobacco for its stimulant buzz.
But more than nine months later, prosecutors in Seattle have dismissed charges against all but a handful of defendants, and the few expected to go to trial next month are considered to have a good chance of avoiding jail. The New York case, meantime, is teetering on a fine legal argument over whether khat is a powerful illicit stimulant or something more akin to a double espresso.

The dual cases have rocked close-knit Somali communities in the United States, raising fears among the mostly Muslim immigrants that the defendants could be deported back to the violence and chaos they fled. They also are concerned that the lives of those left behind will be complicated by the government’s implications that the khat trade is somehow linked to terrorist networks in northeastern Africa.
The government’s zeal in pursuing khat smugglers also has raised questions about its priorities. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration led the 18-month-long investigation that spanned three continents, involved a dozen federal, state and local agencies and required thousands of hours of wiretapping. Dozens of court-appointed attorneys have represented defendants who could not afford lawyers.
‘An extremely expensive fight’“There’s no question that it is an extremely expensive fight,” said Eric Sterling, president of the nonprofit Criminal Justice Policy Foundation. “My understanding of the use of khat is that it should be a very low priority for federal law enforcement. … I think these cases are largely a waste of very precious federal criminal justice resources.”
The crackdown, which was dubbed “Operation Somali Express,” by the DEA, went public with the unsealing of federal indictments on July 26. Prosecutors in the Southern District Court of New York charged 44 people with a range of khat-related crimes — including money laundering and conspiracy to import and distribute the leaves. In Seattle, 18 defendants were charged with conspiring to import and distribute the substance.
“Operation Somalia Express struck at the heart of a significant trafficking organization that was sending drugs to the United States,” DEA special agent Rodney Benson in Seattle said in a press release announcing the indictments. “This drug has the same dangerous and damaging effects as other drugs and some of the huge profits from the khat trade were being returned overseas.”
But many experts challenge that assertion, noting that khat has been used in social and religious settings in Somalia and surrounding countries for centuries and is legal in the majority of Western countries.

The World Health Organization has studied khat repeatedly over the years, most recently in 2006 when it assessed its health impact as quite modest. It also has concluded that it does not merit international control.
“No one except the U.S. government asserts khat is particularly addictive,” said Bob Burrows, a professor of Middle East politics at the University of Washington, who spent eight years in Yemen, another khat-chewing society. “Another thing is there is no hallucinating. Khat gives a sense of well being. It’s a very social thing.”

Major federal resourcesOperation Somalia Express was large, even in the context of the war on drugs.
The DEA, which received the lion's share of the $13.8 billion budget for U.S. drug control efforts in fiscal 2007, declined to estimate the cost of the operation. But when asked if this was a major law enforcement effort, DEA special agent Erin Mulvey replied, “Absolutely. …It was one of the largest concerted efforts among DEA and (other enforcement) agencies.”
In addition to yielding 62 suspects, the operation resulted in the seizure of 5 tons of khat —roughly $2 million worth of the plant, according to the DEA — in the New York case.
Information from that probe prompted a sting in Seattle, where the federal Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force, working with a dozen other agencies, seized another 1,000 pounds of khat.

Trafficking in what?For most Americans, the only reference point for khat could well be “Black Hawk Down,” the 2001 movie in which glassy-eyed Somali boy-soldiers face off with U.S. Special Forces. In the fictionalized account of the 1993 battle for Mogadishu, an Army Ranger warns his comrades before a confrontation with local militiamen that they should exercise abundant caution because by late afternoon their foes will be “all f----d up on khat.”
Khat has been used in social and religious settings in Somalia and surrounding countries for centuries, mainly by men. Taxi drivers, students — and boy-soldiers — use it stay alert and quash hunger. Migrants from the Horn of Africa, including some 150,000 Somalis who have come to the United States since the early 1990s, brought the habit with them.
Most khat users chew it — storing the wad of leaves in a cheek while swallowing the juices, though it also can be made into tea. They describe the effects as wakefulness, euphoria and talkativeness. Its defenders liken it to coffee drinking in other cultures.

There are side effects associated with khat use, however, such as insomnia, followed by exhaustion and testiness, and a list of more serious risks for long-term users. Women complain that it makes men lazy, sexually impotent and is a waste of scant financial resources.
Like most vices, its impact on society is hotly debated.
Sgt. Ben Casuccio, a narcotics officer with the Columbus, Ohio, Police Department, said the drug has had a negative impact on the large Somali community in his city and is a potential "gateway drug" to stronger substances.
"These people, as soon as it comes in, they start using it. ... Other people in the community complain about problems it causes," including domestic disputes and making users not to want to go to work, he said.
But many experts say there is no evidence that its appeal extends beyond its cultural pull.
“This is a very culturally specific drug,” said Peter Reuter, a professor at the University of Maryland’s department of criminology. “It’s so hard to think that there’s a great public issue here. It’s not that khat has become the new yuppie drug. … It’s got no cachet.”

Khat is legally imported in many Western countries, including Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy, and is freely used among African immigrants in those nations. It is barred in some other countries, such as Sweden, while Australia allows khat importation only for personal use.
The United States has taken a hard line on khat, but the law that applies to it is ambiguous. It is this legal gray area that is being debated in court.
“There are issues in this case that are not issues (in other drug cases),” said Sam Schmidt, an attorney for one of the defendants in the New York case. “If it’s a cocaine or marijuana case, you don’t have issues about whether it is a drug or not.”
Fresh khat contains cathinone, a stimulant that is internationally controlled under United Nations agreements and listed as a Schedule I controlled substance in the United States, alongside heroin and LSD.
Disappearing evidenceBut the cathinone in khat begins breaking down the moment the plant is harvested and begins its long journey from the highlands of east Africa to U.S. cities. Even the DEA agrees that after about 48 hours — and no more than 72 — the cathinone is essentially gone, leaving behind a milder stimulant, cathine, possession of which is a misdemeanor. The typical shipping time, from the field in Africa, via Europe to end users in the United States, is about four days.
Rapid cathinone decay creates urgency for sellers and enforcers alike. Traffickers often wrap it in banana leaves to try to preserve its freshness during shipping.
And law-enforcement agencies that intercept khat typically rush it to the nearest lab in refrigerated containers to test it before the active ingredient vanishes.
The levels of cathinone in khat seized during raids in New York were “detectable,” which the government maintains is enough to convict. But defense attorneys have challenged the tests, arguing that they may have reversed the breakdown process and produced traces of cathinone from cathine.
Defense attorneys also have filed motions seeking to suppress evidence gained from wiretapping, arguing that DEA did not have probable cause to believe that any of the banned substance would be present in the khat by the time it arrived in the United States.
One such motion already has been rejected, but U.S. District Judge Denise Cote made it clear in remarks accompanying her ruling that prosecutors must prove that the defendants conspired to import and traffic cathinone, not just khat.
Not always a federal priorityIn the past, khat has not been taken very seriously by federal authorities.
Federal sentencing guidelines equate possession of 100 kilograms of khat — roughly three or four large suitcases full — with possession of 1 kilogram of marijuana or 1 gram of heroin.
For years, when travelers were caught at the airport carrying khat, the plant would be seized and the travelers sent back home. And khat is not once mentioned in the 95-page National Drug Control Strategy for 2007.
Some states also are taking a tougher stance.
Mike Weinman, legislative liaison from the Columbus Police Department, is pressing for changes in Ohio — home to about 40,000 Somali immigrants — that would make it easier to prosecute khat possession cases.
"The problem is getting worse," he said. "We've got officers who are walking into bars where everyone is chewing khat. What do you do with these people? The officers call narcotics and there's not really much they can do."
The exception to that rule is the 2001 case of Mahad Samatar, who was prosecuted in Ohio's first khat trial. Samatar was arrested after picking up a 66-pound khat shipment that was intended for guests at a Somali wedding. Despite being a first time offender, Samatar received a mandatory-minimum 10-year sentence. Many in the community believe the heavy penalty, which came right after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, was the result of a prevailing anti-Muslim mood.

Terrorists profiting from khat?Lawyers, defendants and some law enforcers argue that the reason behind the federal turnaround on khat was the belief that the khat profits are funding terrorist groups operating in the Horn of Africa.
After the indictments, FBI Assistant Director Mark Mershon said that the continuing probe would seek to determine the "ultimate destiny of the funds," which intelligence suggested was based in "countries in east Africa which are a hotbed for Sunni (Muslim) extremism and a wellspring for terrorists associated with al-Qaida."
Media coverage of Operation Somali Express amplified the alleged terrorism connection. ABC’s “Nightline” program, which was allowed by federal officials to cover the operation before it became public, broadcast a program on July 26, titled, “Drug of the Terror Lords.”

“What was at stake?” it asked rhetorically. “Stopping the spread of a new drug menace which could be helping fund terrorism.”
“East Africa is the home to several of the East African al-Qaida cell members,” John Demarest, an FBI agent working with the Joint Terrorism Task Force, said in the report. “Somalia offers shelter, logistics, through various local jihadi group there, within Mogadishu and surrounding communities. They offer a training venue, funding, jobs and the like.”
Many Somali immigrants also see an anti-terrorism agenda behind the khat crackdown.
‘Part of the ongoing war on terror’“It is clearly part of the ongoing war on terror,” said Omar Jamal, executive director of the Minneapolis-based Somali Justice Advocacy Center. “… The feds are looking for any excuse to lock people up and hopefully stumble across some connection to terror.”
In the more than two years since Operation Somalia Express got under way, no terrorism-related charges have been filed and no connections between the khat trade and terrorists has been revealed.
A DEA spokeswoman would not comment on whether any evidence has surfaced tying the khat trade to terrorism, saying that was the domain of the FBI. The FBI said it could not comment on an ongoing investigation.
Some experts remain confident the links will turn up. Among them is Harvey Kushner, a criminal justice professor at Long Island University, who has long argued that khat money is funding al-Qaida or associated terror organizations.

Kushner, a TV pundit who has acted as a counterterror consultant for the FBI, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, devoted an entire chapter to the notion of a khat-terrorism link in his 2004 book “Holy War on the Home Front.”
“This has been my baby,” he said. “I’ve been lobbying for years to get cooperation between governments, especially United States and (Great Britain), on this. My hope is we’ll be able to show a money trail funneled back to terrorist activities including Somalia, East Africa and other places in the world where al-Qaida has a strong foothold.”
But many Somalis and Africa scholars question the logic of such a link. They point out that the Islamic Courts Union, the fundamentalist Islamic government that briefly took power in Somalia last year, tried to ban the use of khat.
Islamic government toppledThe government was subsequently toppled — in part because of its unpopular position on khat — and supplanted by an interim government with the assistance of U.S.-backed Ethiopian forces.
“I think the whole premise (of a khat-terror link) is really quite questionable,” said Ruth Iyob, professor of African politics at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. “The biggest crowd to profit from khat was the warlords who were supported by the U.S. government.”
Proving such a link, if one exists, is complicated by the way that khat arrives in the United States.
In the New York case, authorities allege that the tons of khat came in 20- to 30-pound bunches, usually carried by dozens of couriers before finally arriving in commercial air express packages from Europe. The challenge for prosecutors will be to create a paper trail linking the shipments to one another.
With the trials scheduled to begin next month in both the New York and Seattle cases, the pool of defendants is shrinking.
Of 18 original defendants in the Seattle case, only five are now headed for trial on June 19. Two were dismissed for mistaken identity and five others were freed after prosecutors decided they were peripheral to the case.
Two defendants who were described in the indictments as ringleaders of the khat-smuggling operation pleaded guilty to agricultural felonies — a crime punishable by 12 months probation and $1,000 fine. Four others have pleaded guilty to misdemeanor possession of a controlled substance.
In a new indictment filed on April 5, the five remaining defendants are charged with conspiring to import and distribute cathinone. The charges could bring up to 40 years in prison, but given sentencing guidelines and other considerations, it would be surprising if they received a harsher punishment than the alleged ringleaders, observers say.
“They need to avoid disparity in sentencing,” said attorney Jeffrey Coopersmith, who represented a defendant in the Seattle case against whom all charges were dropped.
N.Y. prosecutors focus on eight In New York, meanwhile, Judge Cotes ordered the prosecution to divide the defendants into smaller groups for trial. The prosecution selected eight defendants against whom it believes the evidence is most convincing for a trial scheduled to start on June 4, including the only four who have been held in prison since last year’s roundup. One of those major players — who had been indicted for a continuing criminal conspiracy, which carries a minimum 20 years — recently agreed to a plea deal that should substantially reduce his prison time.
The outcome of that trial will likely determine whether the other 36 defendants will stand trial or, if guilty verdicts are handed down, seek plea bargains.
Critics say common sense suggests there will be only one trial, but also indicates that common sense is not necessarily the driving force behind the khat cases.
"Hell hath no fury like a zealous federal prosecutor on a mission," said Tim Gresback, a Moscow, Idaho, defense attorney who has been following the federal cases. "If your ideology impels you to conclude that an expensive prosecution of Somalis for chewing on a shrub will somehow reduce terrorism, common-sense financial considerations become irrelevant. When obsessed with terrorism you see it everywhere, even hiding in a shrub."
© 2007 MSNBC Interactive


The tale of khat
From farm to market
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Horn of Africa: Producers and users
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Legal khat trade
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Smuggling to the United States
Primary khat producers are highland areas in east Africa—mainly Ethiopia, Yemen, Kenya. The cash crop has replaced coffee growing in parts of Ethiopia, and profits from khat exports have surpassed those from tea in Kenya. The biggest consumer market in the continent is Somalia, which produces some khat, but imports most from Kenya and Ethiopia. Somalia’s long tradition of chewing khat once was confined to adult men for socializing or praying, but it has become popular among other groups, especially teenaged boys. The plant is an economic mainstay for many in the region, from growers in the highlands to some 50,000 vendors in Somalia. The khat trade in war-torn Somalia is partly controlled by warlords who use the proceeds to fund their militias.

Man Drugged Wife & 2 Kids For 4 Years

But was it the man's fault?

Read on and you'll find a suggestion that it all began with the wife - possible - who eventually became the victim of her own web of addiction (awesome story, just horrible):

CHESTER, S.C. - For nearly four years, a South Carolina man held his wife and two sons captive in a house infested with maggots and human waste, authorities said.
The boys slept on a bare mattress as their mother was kept in a drug-induced stupor in a house that was decrepit except for a tidy one-room illegal gambling parlor run by Danny William Dove, police said.
Police found maggots infesting the refrigerator. Human waste and used toilet paper littered the bathroom floor and the house smelled like a dead animal, according to police photographs and authorities who visited the home after Dove was arrested this week.

The living room was covered in trash and upturned furniture, the kitchen's cabinets were falling apart and dirty clothing was piled in waist-high heaps.
"There was chaos everywhere," Chester County Sheriff's Detective Scott Thompson said Thursday. "I don't think we'll ever really determine how it happened — how you get to live like that. I think he got so wrapped up in drugs and wanting to control everything, nothing else mattered."
Boys monitored via videoThe young boys, ages 4 and 8, didn't go to school. Police say they rarely were allowed out of the house and that a video camera monitored their room and the doors to the home. The boys' own grandmother says they're hard to understand unless they're cursing.
Dove, 45, plied his wife, Tamara, with prescription painkillers, cocaine and crack, and forbade her to go outside, police said. Thompson said he didn't expect the 37-year-old mother would be lucid enough to be interviewed for weeks.
"People don't understand why she just doesn't leave," Thompson said. "But with a little intimidation and a lot of drug use, this is what they grew to know as normal life."
Dove was charged with two counts of distribution of a controlled substance, two counts of criminal conspiracy, operating a gambling establishment and two counts of child neglect. He remained in jail Thursday without bond. If convicted, he faces up to 40 years in prison.
But Dove's mother said her son held no one hostage and that his wife was the root of the couple's drug addiction.
"She's driven my son crazy," Helaine Young said in an interview at her home.
Once owned convenience storesYoung said she threw up when she visited the home with police, her first visit since Christmas 2005, when she said she left after being threatened by her daughter-in-law.
Young said her son was once a wealthy owner of several convenience stores, paying for anything his wife requested including baby sitters and house cleaners. Her son installed the cameras for the family's security when he renovated the home in a rural town near the North Carolina line, she said. The pair met about 13 years ago, Young said.
Young, who has taken care of the couple's 12-year-old son since he was an infant, said she's asked the Department of Social Services repeatedly over the last six years to investigate.
Messages left with Department of Social Services were not immediately returned Friday.
Dove's oldest child, 20-year-old Brittney Dove, said she and a friend used to take care of the boys when she stayed in the home. But she last saw them about three years ago, she said.
"She would not get out of the bed," Brittney said of the boys' mother. "It disgusts me that he's in jail. I'm not condoning what he did. There's no excuse for the child neglect. But she should be there, too. He honestly loved her. He was nothing but good to her."
'Cuss words' from boysThompson said the boys were socially inept.

"The oldest one can communicate, but it's on a 3- to 4-year-old, broken-English level," he said. "The 4-year-old jibber jabbers. It's rambling stuff."
Young said the two knew how to curse because that's what they heard at home.
"The cuss words were the plainest words you can hear from them," she said, recalling phone conversations with the boys.
The boys are living safely with a relative, Thompson said.
"Maybe now we've given these kids the chance of a normal life," Thompson said.

Oliver Stone brings his passion to anti-war ad

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- From "JFK" to "Natural Born Killers," director Oliver Stone's films have made him a lightning rod for controversy -- and his latest project is unlikely to change that.
Stone directed a new television ad that takes direct aim at the Bush administration's policy in Iraq.
Stone said the ad's message is simple:
"Support the troops. Listen to them. Bring them home," he told CNN. "Give them a life, not death." (Watch Oliver Stone explain why he's been angry for years )
Stone's ad, created for the political action group MoveOn.org, features John Bruhns, an Iraq war veteran whose tour ended in 2004.
"What I'm hoping people will see with this ad is that there are veterans that are coming home from this war that are very patriotic but are not going to blindly follow this president and this failed policy continually," Bruhns said.
Stone fought in Vietnam, an experience he turned into the Oscar-winning film "Platoon."
"Like in Vietnam," Stone said, "we are reaping a harvest of death and shame around the world."
"I get passionate sometimes about it," he said. "In my lifetime, I had two wars. What's going to be next?"
Stone and Bruhns are equally critical of President Bush for vetoing the supplemental appropriation bill that would have set a timetable for the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. (Full story)
"I don't think he has any excuse at all to veto this bill," the Iraq veteran said.
"By vetoing it, he has said a defiant 'To hell with you' to the American people," said Stone.
Speaking later on CNN's The Situation Room, Stone disagreed with administration officials who say Iraq would descend into chaos if American troops were to pull out.
"If we would get out of there, there would be less pressure and they [the Iraqis] would seek to solve their own problems," he said.
"It is pretty bad right now. People are being killed every day in huge numbers. You can't be a civilian there. ... It's not a livable situation. We brought that havoc there. What could be worse?"
Stone acknowledged that "bloodshed could go up" immediately after an American withdrawal. But, he noted, "they said the same thing about Vietnam."
Given his opposition to the war and pessimism about its accomplishments, the director said that none of the soldiers who have died in Iraq died in vain.
"No man dies in vain," he said. "You die because you believe in something. You hope that the cause is worth it. ... You should be remembered for your sacrifice. That's not to say the war was right, but you honor the men who fought in the war."

2005 London Transport Bombers Convicted... And Security Questions Raised

May 1, 2007 - The convictions should have been an unqualified victory for Britain’s intelligence and police agencies. Five British men were sentenced to life imprisonment after a jury found them guilty of planning to use one or more homemade fertilizer bombs to kill thousands in a public shopping mall or nightclub in 2004. Instead of bolstering confidence in British intelligence and security efforts, however, the yearlong trial—which, at a cost of £50 million ($100 million) was the most expensive criminal trial in British history—raised new questions about the competence of British counterterrorism agencies.

The arrests and this week’s conviction thwarted the plot, but the trial also revealed that two bombers who went on to carry out London’s deadly mass-transit attacks in July 2005 had come to the attention of British authorities on several occasions in the years before the bombings. Two of the July bombers, leader Mohammed Siddique Khan and his right-hand man Shehzad Tanweer, had at least four meetings with those convicted this week. These meetings took place while the government was conducting an intensive antiterror operation codenamed “Crevice”.
The problem was that, while tracking the Operation Crevice bombing conspiracy suspects, MI-5, Britain's domestic spy service, ran across more than 50 potential terror suspects, all of whose activities they thought should be monitored. As many as 2,000 different individuals who came into contact, however briefly, with the principal conspiracy suspects were entered in the Operation Crevice database, according to investigators who worked on the case. Of the 50 most interesting suspects, U.K. authorities classified 15 as “essential” targets for further investigation. But at the time, Khan and Tanweer, the future London transport bombers, weren’t thought to be very dangerous, so MI-5 simply listed them as “desirable” targets for further tracking. Due to limited resources, full-scale surveillance of the future bombers was never undertaken—with devastating results.
The ties between the Operation Crevice suspects and the July 7 bombers—and the surprising extent to which the latter were known by the authorities—unraveled slowly during the trial. At first, British officials appeared to claim that there were no connections. Three days after the 2005 attacks, then-Home Secretary Charles Clarke said the July 7 bombers “simply came out of the blue.” Clarke and other U.K. officials initially described the July 7 bombers as “clean skins”—intelligence parlance for operatives unknown to the authorities. But, over the last year, trial testimony painted a picture of a much more tightly interwoven web that linked the future London bombers with the "Crevice" conspirators closely. Last spring, for instance, Mohammed Junaid Babar, an Islamic militant raised in Queens, New York, who later became an FBI informant, testified that members of the Crevice cell and the July 7 attack had trained together in Pakistan in the summer of 2003.
Among the most disturbing information to surface in court during the lengthy "Crevice" trial was evidence indicating that the U.K.-based conspirators were in contact with high-level Al Qaeda operatives who were apparently close to what remains of the bin Laden terror network's central leadership, perhaps including Osama bin Laden himself.

Evidence introduced at the trial included a voluminous statement given to police by one of the suspects, in which he talked about meeting an apparent Al Qaeda leader in the years after 9/11 at a mosque in Luton, a gritty town north of London, which radical Islamic activists have sometimes used as a base. The Al Qaeda leader, identified at the trial as Abu Munthir (pronounced Munzr), in turn was described by U.S. and U.K. officials as a deputy to one of Al Qaeda's top leaders, Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, who, according to evidence presented in court was also in contact with some of the Crevice suspects during visits by them to Pakistan. The Bush administration announced last week that Abdul Hadi, who at one point was believed by U.S. agencies to be the principal contact between what remains of Al Qaeda's high command and allied jihadi fighters in Iraq, had recently been transferred from the secret custody of the CIA to the U.S. military prison encampment at Guantanamo, Cuba. Intelligence sources indicated that Abdul Hadi was captured at an unspecified location sometime late last year and then detained and questioned in secrecy by the CIA until his recent transfer to Guantanamo. The fact that a close associate of such a high-ranking Al Qaeda leader was able to visit Britain after 9/11 may be one of the most disquieting revelations to surface during the Crevice trial.

As is standard procedure in British criminal trials, the judge in the Operation Crevice case issued an order prohibiting publication of information about the defendants’ links to suspects in other cases until the Crevice verdicts were delivered Monday. At one point, prosecutors had sought to introduce trial evidence indicating that the Crevice suspects had some contacts with the July 7 London bombers, but the judge ruled this information inadmissible and banned the U.K. press from disseminating it on the grounds that it could gravely prejudice the Crevice jury against the defendants they were about to judge. But when the larger story hit the headlines today, the news of MI-5’s early knowledge of Khan and Tanweer led to cries for a fresh inquiry into the July 7 bombings from victims of the attack as well as opposition politicians, who are now questioning whether the terrorist attacks of two summers ago might have been preventable after all.
Later today, a group of July 7 survivors and victims’ families delivered a letter to the Home Office demanding "an independent and impartial public inquiry" to provide “a comprehensive, accurate and definitive factual account” of the events surrounding July 7. Among them is Rachel North, a 36-year-old writer who survived the attack at London’s King’s Cross station, where 26 of the 52 deaths occurred. “The latest revelations are that the bombers were not ‘clean skins.’ Two were under surveillance and were known terrorists,” says North. “They should have been blinking red as serious threats. Clearly, decisions [MI-5] made led to 52 people being killed. It is very troubling.”
Likewise, the Conservative Party’s counterterrorism spokesman, David Davis, is also calling for an independent inquiry into the bombings. In a strongly worded editorial published in The Times of London today, Davis writes, “Public safety demands that we assess any shortcomings and put them right as a matter of urgency … The British public deserve no less.” The trial may be over, but the questions are likely to linger.
With Alison Moodie

To Treat the Dead

May 7, 2007 issue - Consider someone who has just died of a heart attack. His organs are intact, he hasn't lost blood. All that's happened is his heart has stopped beating—the definition of "clinical death"—and his brain has shut down to conserve oxygen. But what has actually died?

As recently as 1993, when Dr. Sherwin Nuland wrote the best seller "How We Die," the conventional answer was that it was his cells that had died. The patient couldn't be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn't receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can't be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover. That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "After one hour," he says, "we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong." In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later.
But if the cells are still alive, why can't doctors revive someone who has been dead for an hour? Because once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed. It was that "astounding" discovery, Becker says, that led him to his post as the director of Penn's Center for Resuscitation Science, a newly created research institute operating on one of medicine's newest frontiers: treating the dead.
Biologists are still grappling with the implications of this new view of cell death—not passive extinguishment, like a candle flickering out when you cover it with a glass, but an active biochemical event triggered by "reperfusion," the resumption of oxygen supply. The research takes them deep into the machinery of the cell, to the tiny membrane-enclosed structures known as mitochondria where cellular fuel is oxidized to provide energy. Mitochondria control the process known as apoptosis, the programmed death of abnormal cells that is the body's primary defense against cancer. "It looks to us," says Becker, "as if the cellular surveillance mechanism cannot tell the difference between a cancer cell and a cell being reperfused with oxygen. Something throws the switch that makes the cell die."
With this realization came another: that standard emergency-room procedure has it exactly backward. When someone collapses on the street of cardiac arrest, if he's lucky he will receive immediate CPR, maintaining circulation until he can be revived in the hospital. But the rest will have gone 10 or 15 minutes or more without a heartbeat by the time they reach the emergency department. And then what happens? "We give them oxygen," Becker says. "We jolt the heart with the paddles, we pump in epinephrine to force it to beat, so it's taking up more oxygen." Blood-starved heart muscle is suddenly flooded with oxygen, precisely the situation that leads to cell death. Instead, Becker says, we should aim to reduce oxygen uptake, slow metabolism and adjust the blood chemistry for gradual and safe reperfusion.
Researchers are still working out how best to do this. A study at four hospitals, published last year by the University of California, showed a remarkable rate of success in treating sudden cardiac arrest with an approach that involved, among other things, a "cardioplegic" blood infusion to keep the heart in a state of suspended animation. Patients were put on a heart-lung bypass machine to maintain circulation to the brain until the heart could be safely restarted. The study involved just 34 patients, but 80 percent of them were discharged from the hospital alive. In one study of traditional methods, the figure was about 15 percent.
Becker also endorses hypothermia—lowering body temperature from 37 to 33 degrees Celsius—which appears to slow the chemical reactions touched off by reperfusion. He has developed an injectable slurry of salt and ice to cool the blood quickly that he hopes to make part of the standard emergency-response kit. "In an emergency department, you work like mad for half an hour on someone whose heart stopped, and finally someone says, 'I don't think we're going to get this guy back,' and then you just stop," Becker says. The body on the cart is dead, but its trillions of cells are all still alive. Becker wants to resolve that paradox in favor of life.

STORY: Raising Another Man's Child

More than a million American men are investing their love, time, and money in a child who isn't their own. But the worst part about this betrayal? How many people may be in on it


Patrick Connaro, a 42-year-old robotics engineer living in Colorado Springs, was sitting in the bleachers one warm Saturday afternoon in 2003, watching his son's Little League game, when the ground opened beneath him.
"My little boy was there, he was up at bat, and I started yelling for him, 'Go Matthew [not his real name]! Knock it out of the park!' And another man started screaming for Matthew. Louder than me. I looked over, and I looked at him, and I was like, Who is this guy? And I looked at my son, and I looked at him … and they were identical."
After the ball game, Connaro ordered a paternity test. The results came back 2 weeks later. "I opened up the letter from Labcorp, and it said, ' … 99.9 percent chance you are not the biological father of this child.' I started crying. My head started spinning."
Connaro admits that the possibility had crossed his mind before, given his son's dissimilar facial features, but each time he questioned his wife about it, she vehemently denied the suggestion. Even when he showed her the test results, she still denied it. "She said, 'You forged this,' " Connaro recalls, shaking his head in amazement.
To this day he remembers that game with a kind of nightmarish clarity. Matthew struck out. Connaro had planned on going over and giving him a hug, along with a few words of fatherly consolation, but when he heard the other guy yelling, he just stood up and walked away.
"I was so disillusioned, I just didn't know what to say. It was horrible. I don't think anybody could experience what I experienced there."
Some call this paternity fraud. But a more accurate term is "paternal discrepancy." Paternity fraud emphasizes the financial aspect of the phenomenon, but paternal discrepancy (PD) describes the anomaly itself—the disconnect between what men think is true and the genetic reality. And research shows that it's a lot more common than we might believe.
After recently reviewing 67 studies on the subject, University of Oklahoma researchers found that PD rates tend to be much higher among men who have reason to believe there's been more than one dog in the yard. No surprise there. But leave out these men and you end up with a number that can safely be assumed to represent the rest of us. That number is 3.85 percent. Another review of 19 studies by a group at Liverpool John Moores University backs this up, putting the figure at 3.7 percent of dads. It may not seem like a lot—until you do the math. According to a 2005 U.S. Census Bureau report, there are 27,940,000 fathers nationwide with a child under 18. That means over a million guys out there are taking care of some other man's kid.
Compared with this, infidelity by itself is a mere white lie, a misdemeanor, maybe even forgivable. But this … this lie unravels years of commitment in a single stroke. Does forgiveness even apply here?
There are those who believe that biology shouldn't make a difference, that fatherhood is just a social construct. Connaro himself refuses to let genetics stand between him and his son. "I'm the only man that he knows as his dad," he says. "Why should I lose that bond and that love?"
Many men in Connaro's position might not feel the same way. Studies show that evolution has designed men to care deeply about who their children are. In 2003, for instance, researchers at the State University of New York at Albany recruited 20 men and 20 women, then morphed their facial features with photographs of children. Subsequent testing showed that the women responded equally to photos of kids whose faces resembled theirs and those that resembled the faces of strangers. The men, on the other hand, reacted far more positively to children whose faces resembled their own.
"It's not reproductively beneficial to invest all your resources in a child who is not carrying on your genetic line," says study author Rebecca Burch, Ph.D. "Men throughout the history of the species who have invested all their time and energy in children who weren't theirs no longer have genes in the population."
They are, in other words, extinct.
When the stakes are this high, there is no greater deception than PD. It's a lie that reaches right down to your chromosomes, and when the truth finally comes out, the revelation can be devastating.
Seven years ago, on an otherwise idyllic summer Saturday afternoon, Tony Winbush, 34, was throwing a football with his 5-year-old son in the backyard of his home in Tallahassee, Florida, when he discovered he was not the child's father. The boy himself told Winbush.
"He said, 'My mom told me that I have two dads.' I said, 'Son, you can't have but one dad. I'm the only dad you've got.' He said, 'That's what my mama told me—I have two.' " Within a month, the family ceased to exist. "It got to a point," says Winbush, "where it bothered me so bad, I had to seek psychiatric help."
But while men may be the primary victims of PD, women aren't the only villains. Paternal discrepancy makes liars of everyone, and that includes the people from whom we'd most expect the truth.
Morgan Wise, a 44-year-old train engineer from Big Spring, Texas, might have remained ignorant forever if his fourth child hadn't been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis (CF). Presumed to be a carrier of the CF gene, Wise had his own DNA tested to identify which of the many gene mutations of the disease the boy had inherited. (There are more than 1,000.) The test revealed that Wise was not a carrier, which could only mean one thing: This was not his child.


"I nearly fell out of my chair," Wise says, recalling his doctor giving him the news. "I said, 'What are you getting at?' And he told me, 'Morgan, you're not the first, and you won't be the last.' "
Men rely on their doctors to level with them when things are dire. The steady stare, the hand on the shoulder … breaking bad news is their business. And yet, Wise's doctor is actually the exception to the rule. The fact is, the overwhelming majority of physicians will not tell a man the truth about PD.
"Most doctors are going to say to themselves, Jeez, I don't want to cause a problem in this family by disclosing this information that I just stumbled across," says Alan Meisel, J.D., director of the Center for Bioethics and Health Law at the University of Pittsburgh. "Why create problems if I don't have to?"
Being lied to once is bad enough, but this second betrayal can bring a man to his knees. If you can't trust your doctor, whom can you trust?
"If the father asked me point-blank, 'Is this my son, my biological son? Can you tell by the tests?' I would have to tell him the truth," says Mikel Prieto, M.D., a kidney-transplant surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. "Would I volunteer that information if it did not come up in the conversation, and did not affect what we were going to do? Probably I wouldn't."
Just 6 months after making this statement, Dr. Prieto said he had changed his mind. "Now, as a general rule, our group favors full disclosure of paternity issues."


Genuine or not, it's an ethical 180 that more doctors need to make, especially when you factor in the potential medical consequences of staying silent. If a child is born with a genetic disorder, like cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy, the father may end up mistakenly believing he carries the gene for that disorder. If that father has siblings, this misinformation could affect their decision to have children. Children, on the other hand, may grow up not knowing they carry a high genetic risk of a particular disease, such as depression, diabetes, or cancer. These days, with the growing role that genetics plays in our health outlook, knowing the identity of your biological father can be as important as knowing your blood type. One day it might save your life.
But most doctors simply don't find such risks to be as compelling as the risk of disrupting the family, which to them would violate the most basic rule of medicine: Do no harm. From day 1 of medical school, this rule is pounded into doctors' heads, and they won't break it easily.
You have to go back to a 1983 report by a presidential commission on ethics in medicine to find anything contradicting the "Don't tell" policy. "At that time, we always thought more information was better," says Lori Andrews, J.D., a professor at Chicago Kent College of Law and the lead author of a 1994 report for the Institute of Medicine arguing against disclosure. "Since then, I think the whole societal approach to genetic information has changed."
For instance, when scientists created the test for Huntington's disease, an inherited neurological disorder for which there is no cure, it was assumed that everyone would want to know whether or not they were going to develop the condition. "But only about 15 percent of the people at risk had any interest," says Andrews, "because they would rather live with hope than actually know their genetic future." Doctors today, she suggests, may have taken a lesson from this and no longer assume that if they stumble across PD, a patient wants to be informed: i.e., "Do no harm."
The available evidence, however, suggests otherwise. Several reports on organ-transplant cases show that some families not only survive the disclosure of PD but often thank doctors for their decision to disclose. "The donor and the recipient were both adamant that we did the right thing in informing them of the result," one group of researchers writes in the Journal of Urology, "and felt that it should always be done."
Even so, there are doctors who counter that disclosing paternity isn't in their job description. "They're not having paternity testing. They're having histological [tissue] testing," says Jeff Punch, M.D., director of the University of Michigan transplant center. "The two are one and the same from a practical standpoint. But from a relationship point of view, patients are paying us for a transplant typing, not for paternity testing."
Patient confidentiality is the second reason physicians cite as the reason they remain silent, with part of the problem being how they define the "patient." With Huntington's, it's pretty clear. Less so with PD.
Doctors determine who's the patient by two criteria: who came to see them, and who is most at risk of immediate harm. If a mother visits a doctor alone, then she's the patient, and it's easier for the doctor to justify disclosing PD only to her than if she showed up with her partner. The second criterion is more complicated. In the past 20 years, says Arthur Caplan, Ph.D., a professor at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, controversy surrounding reproductive technology has led to the view that the most vulnerable person is the child.
For example, battles over who the "real parent" is when you had a surrogate mother who changed her mind turned on how the outcome would affect the child. And, says Caplan, even fights about how old is too old for in vitro fertilization inevitably boiled down to one question: "Is it really in the best interest of the kid?"
As attention shifted to the well-being of children, they increasingly came to be regarded as the primary patient whenever disclosure entailed some risk of family disruption. But what is this risk?
Kids may be able to accept a nonbiological parent, says Robert Butterworth, Ph.D., a child psychologist in Los Angeles who sees PD cases every year. What they can't accept is finding out that they've been lied to, after a lifetime of hearing that lying is wrong. "Children are very good at pointing out when their parents are hypocrites," Butterworth says. "So the sense of betrayal can lead to anger and disruption. They may withdraw from both parents, the nonbiological as well as the one who lied."
Still, those who oppose disclosure of PD claim that at the very least, the mother will suffer, and that this will indirectly affect the child. "It's a family-values rationale," says Mary Mahowald, Ph.D., a professor emerita at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, in Chicago. "It's likely to break up a marriage if it's disclosed, or the woman might be battered as a result." Such are the arguments, says Mahowald, that have been given over the years. Whether or not that fear is justified, of course, is another story.
"The literature documenting the possibility or probability of a family breaking up or the battering of women is really not good," says Mahowald, "and you could make the argument that if partners are going to separate on grounds of disclosure, maybe they should separate regardless. It might be better for the family. So, to my mind, the family-values rationale is questionable."
It was a cold day in Michigan in February 2002, Shane Shamie remembers. His marriage had fallen apart a few years earlier, and he was still trying to pull his life together. His main concern was his 12-year-old daughter, a tall, awkward child who had become withdrawn after the divorce. When she came over on weekends, they'd hang out and watch a game on TV, or just talk. The idea, says Shamie, was to get her to open up a little. And in time she did—by posing a question Shamie had always somehow managed to avoid asking himself.
"Why does everybody in the family have blue eyes and I have brown eyes?"
Shamie reassured the girl as best he could, struggling to conceal his shock. He and his first wife had been married for 8 years. He'd heard rumors now and then that she'd been stepping out, but he hadn't wanted to believe it. His life back then, after all, had seemed perfect—a high-paying job at a commercial loan company, a beautiful wife, two adoring children. … "You don't suspect something like this," Shamie says. "With my family background and her family background, this is just an unaccepted thing."
By the time his daughter started studying genetics in school and thought to ask about her eye color, Shamie had already remarried. His new wife agreed that he should send immediately for a paternity test. It arrived on a Thursday. Two weeks later, the results came back, by e-mail.


"You raise a kid for 12 years and you think it's your kid, and then this news comes. It was heartbreaking," Shamie says. "It was like I had an adoption forced on me. I adopted a child that I didn't even know I adopted."
For all the power they wield in cases of PD, medical doctors aren't the only gatekeepers deciding who should be let in on family secrets. Genetic counselors, master's-level professionals who specialize in advising patients about their risk of genetic disorders, also encounter the tell/don't-tell dilemma.
It's an issue of unusual ethical complexity—and yet, genetic counselors are strangely uniform in their responses. According to a 1992 study in the Journal of Genetic Counseling, nearly 100 percent of 199 counselors felt that the confidentiality of the mother outweighed the presumed father's right to know. These results are all the more dismaying in light of a separate survey showing that 75 percent of patients (mostly women) felt that doctors should tell the dad. Granted, the study of genetic counselors was 15 years ago, but the comments of those practicing today give little reason to believe anything has changed.
Eriskay Burton, M.S., a genetic counselor at the Brooklyn Hospital Center, recalls a case in which testing uncovered an irregularity on a child's Y chromosome, inherited from the father. When subsequent testing revealed that the father was not a carrier of this irregularity, paternal discrepancy was almost certain. "It's our obligation to call him with these results," Burton acknowledges. But, she says, "we're not obligated to suggest to him that it's due to nonpaternity."

This kind of hairsplitting is distressingly common. Another counselor, Suzanne Carter, M.S., of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, cites scientific uncertainty as her justification for sometimes withholding the truth about a test's implications. "With what the standard is—99.9 percent—can I say that he's been absolutely excluded as the baby's father?" Carter asks. Her answer? "No."
There's a fine ethical line between a sin of omission and a sin of commission. Another genetic counselor, Elsa Reich, M.S., related one case in which a physician explained away a genetic inconsistency by lying to a man, saying that it "was probably a new mutation." When I asked Reich if she would ever resort to this sort of subterfuge herself, she replied, "I've never done that. But might I? I might, I might."
Of course, lying is nothing new in the world of medicine. As late as 1970, doctors infamously withheld cancer diagnoses "for the good of the patient." (After all, they figured, these patients were doomed anyway, so what good would knowing do them?) This ended when it collectively dawned on doctors that, good intentions notwithstanding, paternalism was probably not the best approach. But given the nondisclosure policy of most genetic counselors these days, it might as well be 1970 again—except that now, with women dominating 92 percent of the field, paternalism seems to have been replaced by maternalism.
Patrick Wilson, M.M.Sc., is one of the exceptions to this practice. A search of the National Society of Genetic Counselors' Web site shows that of the 76 genetic counselors specializing in prenatal testing, which is how PD is often exposed, Wilson is one of only three men. So where does he come down on this issue? Does the father have a right to know? "He should know what the results are, and the implications of those results," Wilson says. "If he's under the mistaken assumption that he carries a genetic mutation, he may think that his future children—especially if he has a child with another woman—are at an increased risk of having that particular condition."
Wilson wouldn't go on record as to whether there's a gender bias in his profession, but a comparison from the aforementioned 1992 study suggests that there might be. Of the genetic counselors with M.S. degrees who were surveyed, 93.5 percent were women, while 65 percent of the M.D. and Ph.D. geneticists were men. And how did they come out on disclosure? Some of the geneticists said that they would tell the father if PD was accidentally discovered, but the researchers noted, "Most M.S. counselors chose to tell the mother alone."
In Carnell Smith's view, the only way to solve the PD problem would be to make paternity testing mandatory at birth. Smith, himself a victim of PD, is with the advocacy group U.S. Citizens Against Paternity Fraud. "The child is born and you're being told, 'Look, he's got your eyes, he's got your nose, he's got all your facial features.' That is an emotionally disarming time for any man to be able to make an 18- to 21-year decision, when he doesn't have all the facts."
But Burton doesn't think it's ethical to make such testing compulsory without informed consent from both mother and father. "It would have to be something that they wanted to do," she says. Yet even if both parents were present for the birth and agreed to sign off on testing, she says, there's an even bigger problem: Who's going to pay for it? "Paternity testing can cost up to $400. And medical insurance doesn't cover that. It would be too costly."
Wade Horn, Ph.D., an assistant secretary for children and families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, doesn't see this as being about money. For him, it's about the power of the state. "I'm a father," he says. "I've got two kids, been married 30 years. If somebody had walked in 6 hours after my baby was born in the hospital and said, 'We're going to do genetic testing, open your mouth. … ' This is the government forcing you to submit to a genetic test. I'd tell them to go to hell."
More important, he says, mandating genetic testing would deliver the wrong message. "Fatherhood is not simply about shared genetic makeup. It is far more significant than that. And the message that that would send to men all across America, and to our culture, about the meaning of fatherhood would be abhorrent." Besides, he says, in any contested paternity case, federal law requires that the state must provide a paternity test whenever a man requests it.
But in the real world, says Ron Henry, a Washington, D.C based lawyer and fathers'-rights activist, it rarely works out that way. "A huge number of these things are resolved by default judgment, or by a guy who just shows up without a lawyer and has no prayer of knowing what's going on. Or you've got a situation where there's social pressure, and the guy is beat up if he asks for a genetic test. You know, 'How dare you challenge me! You were in the hospital when I had this baby, blah blah blah.' So the reality is that surprisingly few people are actually having the test done."
Dylan Davis didn't, and he's regretted it ever since. A 36-year-old Desert Storm vet, Davis now works as a software engineer in Denver. His marriage was already crumbling when a friend of his had the good grace to let him in on a little secret that everyone but him seemed to know: Davis's twins, a boy and a girl, actually belonged to a cook at a seafood restaurant where his wife used to work as a waitress.
"I was completely numb," Davis says. "I felt like such an idiot after all those years, just an absolute fool. Anger hadn't even set in. Depression set in. Because these were not my kids."
Still, Davis didn't claim his right to a paternity test. "I didn't want to raise the issue, for fear of what the judge would say if I came forward and said, 'I don't think those kids are mine.' Yet at the same time, I wanted as much custody of those kids as I could get." The end result: In 2002, Davis was ordered by the court to pay more than $1,000 a month in child support. And 5 years later, he's still paying, even though any relationship he had with the twins has long since disintegrated.
I'm on the phone with Owen Williams (not his real name), who just found out yesterday that the tired child I hear crying in the background, the child he's been rocking to sleep every night, the child who carries his name, belongs to some other man. For a person who's just had his life turned upside down, he seems surprisingly calm.
Williams is a level-headed guy. He's 24 years old and working toward a degree in network engineering. He has clear professional goals. He knows what he wants out of life. And this definitely isn't it.
The child's mother comes home from work in another 6 1/2 hours. She doesn't realize that Williams knows the truth, and he has no plans to tell her. As soon as he finds a new place to live, within a day or two, he hopes, he's going to leave, and that's it. "In fact, when I move out, I'm not saying anything, because there's nothing to be said. For over 15 months, over a year, she deceived me. Every doctor visit I've been to, every cookout I've been to, every reunion I've been to—with her, on her account—I've been deceived."
Yesterday's discovery changed things for Williams. "Knowing that I'm not his father is the part that I'm having trouble with," he explains. "He has nothing to do with what happened between me and her. So I treat him just like any other kid."
The effects of PD on the father-child relationship have never been formally studied, but common sense suggests that the more time a man has to form a bond with the child, the more he'll try to salvage that bond in the aftermath of PD. After raising his daughter for 12 years, Shamie still wants her in his life, but acrimony between him and his ex-wife continues to confound that hope. As for Wise, he later found out that none of his three boys were his. Despite the trauma of this revelation, he still thought of himself as their dad. Today, though, the oldest boy, 18, won't have anything to do with him, and the youngest was 12 when he died of cystic fibrosis in 2004, killed by the disease he inherited from a stranger. "He had to pay the ultimate price," Wise says. "It took his life."
If there's any lesson here for a man, it's this: The medical establishment is not on your side, the legal establishment may or may not be on your side, and you can be damn sure that the woman who lied to you isn't on your side, which makes it all the more important that you stick up for yourself. More important, perhaps, asking a few painful questions in the beginning could save you—and the ones you love—a lot of pain later on. No man can be blamed for believing in the woman he loves. You can't go into love doubting. But nor can you live without truth.

Jellyfish have human-like eyes

A set of special eyes, similar to our own, keeps venomous box jellyfish from bumping into obstacles as they swim across the ocean floor, a new study finds.
Unlike normal jellyfish, which drift in the ocean current, box jellyfish are active swimmers that can rapidly make 180-degree turns and deftly dart between objects. Scientists suspect that box jellyfish are such agile because one set of their 24 eyes detects objects that get in their way.
“Behavior-wise, they’re very different from normal jellyfish,” said study leader Anders Garm of Lund University in Sweden.

The eyes of box jellyfish are located on cup-like structures that hang from their cube-shaped bodies.
Whereas we have one set of multi-purpose eyes that sense color, size, shape and light intensity, box jellyfish have four different types of special-purpose eyes. The most primitive set detects only light levels, but one set of eyes is more sophisticated and can detect the color and size of objects.
One of these eyes is located on the top of the cup-like structure, the other on the bottom, which provides the jellyfish with “an extreme fish-eye view, so it’s watching almost the entire underwater world,” said Garm, who will present his research at the Society of Experimental Biology’s annual meeting, in Scotland.
To test if these eyes helped the jellyfish avoid obstacles, Garm put the jellyfish in a flow chamber and inserted different objects to see if the jellyfish could avoid them. While the jellyfish could avoid objects of different colors and shapes, transparent objects proved more difficult.
“They can’t respond to the see-through ones,” Garm said.
Because jellyfish belong to one of the first groups of animals to evolve eyes (the phylum Cnidaria), Garm said, understanding how their eyes operate will show scientists what eyes were like early in evolutionary time.

Scientists unearth Superman's 'kryptonite'

LONDON - Kryptonite, which robbed Superman of his powers, is no longer the stuff of comic books and films.
A mineral found by geologists in Serbia shares virtually the same chemical composition as the fictional kryptonite from outer space, used by the superhero's nemesis Lex Luthor to weaken him in the film "Superman Returns."
"We will have to be careful with it — we wouldn't want to deprive Earth of its most famous superhero!," said Chris Stanley, a mineralogist at London's Natural History Museum.

Stanley, who revealed the identity of the mysterious new mineral, discovered the match after searching the Internet for its chemical formula — sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide.
"I was amazed to discover that same scientific name written on a case of rock containing kryptonite stolen by Lex Luther from a museum in the film 'Superman Returns,'" he said.
The substance has been confirmed as a new mineral after tests by scientists at the Natural History Museum in London and the National Research Council in Canada.
But instead of the large green crystals in Superman comics, the real thing is a white, powdery substance which contains no fluorine and isn't radioactive.
The mineral, to be named Jadarite, will go on show at the London's Natural History Museum starting tomorrow.

32 Killed by English Major at Virginia Polytechnic Institute

Sometime after he killed two people in a Virginia university dormitory but before he slaughtered 30 more in a classroom building Monday morning, Cho Seung-Hui mailed NBC News a large package, including photographs and videos, lamenting that “I didn’t have to do this.”
Cho, 23, a senior English major at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, killed 32 people in two attacks before taking his own life.
NBC News President Steve Capus said the network received the package, which was not addressed to a specific person, in Tuesday afternoon’s mail delivery, but it was not opened until Wednesday morning. The network immediately turned the materials over to FBI agents in New York.
The package included an 1,800-word manifesto-like statement diatribe in which he expresses rage, resentment and a desire to get even. The material is “hard-to-follow ... disturbing, very disturbing — very angry, profanity-laced,” Capus said in an interview late Wednesday afternoon.
The material does not include any images of the shootings Monday, but it does contain vague references.
“I didn’t have to do this. I could have left. I could have fled. But no, I will no longer run. It’s not for me. For my children, for my brothers and sisters that you [molest] — I did it for them,” Cho says on one of the videos.
NBC cooperating with investigatorsCapus said the network was cooperating with Virginia State Police and the FBI, which is assisting the state police.
The package bore a U.S. Postal Service stamp recording that it had been received at a Virginia post office at 9:01 a.m. ET Monday, about an hour and 45 minutes after Cho shot two people in the West Ambler Johnston residence hall on the Virginia Tech campus and shortly before Cho entered Norris Hall, where he killed 30 more people.
“We probably would have received the mail earlier had it not been that he had the wrong address and ZIP code,” Capus said.
Among the materials are 23 QuickTime video files showing Cho talking directly to the camera, Capus said. He does not name anyone specifically, but he mentions “hedonism” and Christianity, and he talks at length about his hatred of the wealthy.
“You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today,” Cho says. “But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off.”
The production of the videos is uneven, with Cho’s voice so soft that at times it is hard to understand him. But they indicate that Cho had worked on the package for some time, because he not only “took the time to record the videos, but he also broke them down into snippets” that were embedded paragraph by paragraph into the main document, Capus said.
Chilling photographsThe package also includes 29 photographs. Cho looks like a normal, smiling college student in only the first two. In the rest, he presents a stern face; in 11, he aims handguns at the camera that are “consistent with what we’ve heard about the guns in this incident,” Capus said.
Other photographs show Cho holding a knife, and some show hollow-point bullets lined up on a table.
“This may be a very new, critical component of this investigation,” said Col. Steven Flaherty, superintendent of Virginia State Police, the lead agency investigating the shootings. “We’re in the process right now of attempting to analyze and evaluate its worth.”
Detention order issuedAs early as 2005, police and school administrators were wrestling with what to do with Cho, who was accused of stalking two female students and was sent to a mental health facility after police obtained a temporary detention order.
The two women complained to campus police that Cho was contacting them with “annoying” telephone calls and e-mail messages in November and December 2005, campus Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said.
Cho was referred to the university’s disciplinary system, but Flinchum said the woman declined to press charges, and the case apparently never reached a hearing.
However, after the second incident, the department received a call from an acquaintance of Cho’s, who was concerned that he might be suicidal, Flinchum said. Police obtained a temporary detention order from a local magistrate, and in December of that year, Cho was briefly admitted to Carilion St. Albans Behavioral Health Center in Radford, NBC News’ Jim Popkin reported.
To issue a detention order under Virginia law, a magistrate must find both that the subject is “mentally ill and in need of hospitalization or treatment” and that the subject is “an imminent danger to himself or others, or is so seriously mentally ill as to be substantially unable to care for himself.”
According to a doctor’s report accompanying the order, which was obtained by NBC News, Cho was “depressed,” but “his insight and judgment are normal.” The doctor, a clinical psychologist, noted that Cho “denies suicidal ideations.”
Cho was released, said Dr. Harvey Barker, director of the health center.
“If a person is able, at that moment, to persuade a psychiatrist [and] the hospital treating team that they are OK to be released — I imagine sometimes that does happen,” Barker told NBC News.
Under the law, the magistrate could have issued a stronger detention order mandating inpatient treatment, but there was no indication Wednesday that such an order was ever entered. A spokesman for Carilion St. Albans told NBC News that he could not discuss Cho’s case because of patient confidentiality and privacy laws, but he said the hospital was cooperating with the investigation.
Otherwise, Flinchum said, there were no further police incidents involving Cho until the deadly shootings Monday, first in a young woman’s dormitory room and then at a classroom building across campus. Neither of the alleged stalking victims was among the victims Monday.
In addition to the 33 people confirmed dead, including the gunman, nine people remained in hospitals in stable condition, hospital authorities said.

Health records soughtCampus police applied Wednesday for search warrants for all of Cho’s medical records from Schiffert Health Center on campus and New River Community Services in Blacksburg.
”It is reasonable to believe that the medical records may provide evidence of motive, intent and designs,” investigators wrote in the documents, according to The Associated Press.
Police searched Cho’s dorm room Tuesday and recovered, among other items, a chain and a combination lock, according to documents filed Wednesday. The front doors of Norris Hall, the classroom building, had been chained shut from the inside during the shooting rampage.
In an affidavit seeking the warrant to search the room, police found a “bomb threat” note — directed at engineering school buildings — near the victims in the classroom building. In the past three weeks, Virginia Tech had received two other bomb threats; investigators said they had not connected those to Cho.
Family sought better life in U.S.Cho arrived in the United States as an 8-year-old boy from South Korea in 1992 and was raised in an off-white, two-story townhouse in Centreville, Va., a suburb of Washington, where his parents worked at a dry cleaners. He graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly in 2003.
Cho’s family moved to the United States in search of a better life, said the family’s landlady in South Korea. The family was poor and lived in a cheap basement apartment on the outskirts of Seoul, the woman told South Korean television Wednesday.
Cho had an older sister, Sun-Kyung, who graduated from Princeton University with an economics degree in 2004, Princeton officials confirmed.

The Princeton student newspaper reported Wednesday that she is pursuing a career as a State Department contractor working on the reconstruction of Iraq. It said that Sun-Kyung Cho was “palpably upset” when it contacted her and that she refused its requests for an interview.
Student concerned classmates, teachersHer brother, however, was described as a sullen loner by several students and professors. They had long been alarmed by his class writings — pages filled with twisted, violence-drenched writing.
Nikki Giovanni, the famous poet who is a professor at Virginia Tech, said Wednesday that while she did not fear for her life or the lives of her other students, she had Cho removed from her class because he was a disruptive force.
“He was mean,” Giovanni told NBC News’ Peter Alexander. “He was trying to bully me. He was trying to bully the class, for what purpose I have no idea.
“I wanted him out of my classroom,” she said.
Lucinda Roy, a co-director of creative writing at Virginia Tech, said she tutored Cho after that. She called Cho “a gifted student in some ways. But he was very lonely and depressed, in my opinion. We didn’t build up a rapport because he wasn’t the kind of student who would permit that.”
“I think it’s crazy” that there are no stronger procedures for dealing with seriously troubled students, she said in an interview with NBC News. “I think there needs to be a change. We must intervene, and that is all there is to it.”
In a screenplay Cho wrote for a class last fall, characters throw hammers and attack with chainsaws, according to fellow students in the class. In another, Cho concocted a tale of students who fantasized about stalking and killing a teacher who sexually molested them.
Stephanie Derry, a classmate of Cho’s, told the campus newspaper, The Collegiate Times, that classmates were so horrified that they even joked that they “were just waiting for him to do something, waiting to hear about something he did. But when I got the call it was Cho who had done this, I started crying, bawling.”

List of Titanic’s Doomed Passengers

LONDON - The names, ages and professions of passengers listed on the Titanic’s fateful journey have gone online for the first time, 95 years after the luxury ocean liner sank on its maiden voyage.
Dozens of pages featuring the original handwritten passenger list are available, revealing the cabin class of passengers.
They poignantly show the emigration plans of many hopefuls setting sail from Southampton for a new life in America in 1912.

The White Star liner, touted as “unsinkable,” left port on April 10, only to sink after hitting an iceberg, with the loss of 1,523 lives.
Among the passengers, for example, was George Mackay, a 20-year-old butler from Scotland travelling third class and hoping to start a new life in America.
In first class the Countess of Rothes is recorded as travelling with her cousin Gladys Cherry and her personal maid Roberta Maioni. They survived after being picked up by the ship Carpathia.
The list, which is available for free for one week at findmypast.com, could help genealogists trace family members. Previously, the list could only be seen at the National Archives in Kew, southwest London.
Findmypast is an online research site that provides information on genealogy.
The online listing coincides with a commemoration service to be held in the British port of Southampton on Sunday for the hundreds of residents who took the voyage as either passengers or crew and who died when the Titanic went down mid Atlantic.
The list completes the set of passengers lists for the ships leaving the UK during the decade between 1910 and 1919.
A spokesman for findmypast said the lists were considered so high-profile by the National Archives that they qualified for the same level of security as Henry VIII’s divorce papers and the Domesday Book and could only be consulted under supervision.
He said it also gives details of the lucky few who narrowly escaped the fate of the other passengers when they disembarked from the ship in France.
The original documents also show that some passengers who intended to board at Queenstown (Cobh in County Cork) did not actually embark, despite having purchased tickets, he said.