Real-story, off-the-wires news tidbits illustrating the bizarre, vivid, edifying and sometimes comical nature of today's events around the globe. Updated periodically.
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Chiquita to pay $25M in terror case
By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer 47 Aug 07 |
WASHINGTON - Banana company Chiquita
Brands International said Wednesday it has agreed to a $25 million fine after
admitting it paid terrorists for protection in a volatile farming region of
Colombia.
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The settlement resolves a lengthy Justice Department investigation into the company's financial dealings with right-wing paramilitaries and leftist rebels the U.S. government deems terrorist groups.
In court documents filed Wednesday, federal prosecutors said the Cincinnati-based company and several unnamed high-ranking corporate officers paid about $1.7 million between 1997 and 2004 to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, known as AUC for its Spanish initials.
The AUC has been responsible for some of the worst massacres in Colombia's civil conflict and for a sizable percentage of the country's cocaine exports. The U.S. government designated the right-wing militia a terrorist organization in September 2001.
Prosecutors said the company made the payments in exchange for protection for its workers. In addition to paying the AUC, prosecutors said, Chiquita made payments to the National Liberation Army, or ELN, and the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, as control of the company's banana-growing area shifted.
Leftist rebels and far-right paramilitaries have fought viciously over Colombia's banana-growing region, though the victims are most often noncombatants. Most companies in the area have extensive security operations to protect employees.
In Colombia, authorities reported Wednesday that nine geologists searching for gold were captured by the FARC. In addition, the army confirmed that four contractors hired by Colombian oil giant Ecopetrol were missing near Colombia's border with Venezuela.
Colombia has one of the highest kidnappings rates in the world. Arrangements between companies and either guerrillas or paramilitaries are not uncommon, but it is impossible to know how much money is paid each year.
"The information filed today is part of a plea agreement, which we view as a reasoned solution to the dilemma the company faced several years ago," Chiquita's chief executive, Fernando Aguirre, said in a statement. "The payments made by the company were always motivated by our good faith concern for the safety of our employees."
Chiquita sold its Colombian banana operations in June 2004.
Details of the settlement were not
included in court documents, but Aguirre said Chiquita would pay $25 million
in fines, which it set aside this year. The company reported the deal to the
Securities and Exchange Commission. A plea hearing was scheduled for Monday.
The payments were approved by senior executives at Chiquita, prosecutors wrote in court documents. Prosecutors said Chiquita began paying the right-wing AUC after a meeting in 1997 and disguised the payments in company books.
"No later than in or about September 2000, defendant Chiquita's senior executives knew that the corporation was paying AUC and that the AUC was a violent paramilitary organization," prosecutors wrote in Wednesday's court filing.
Company attorneys made it clear the payments were improper, prosecutors said.
"Bottom line: CANNOT MAKE THE PAYMENT," the company's outside counsel advised in February 2003, according to an excerpt of a memo included in court documents.
In April 2003, company officials and lawyers approached the Justice Department and told prosecutors they had been making the payments. According to court documents, the payments continued for months.
The document filed by federal prosecutors is known as an information. Unlike an indictment, it is normally worked out through discussions with prosecutors and is followed by a guilty plea.
Associated Press writer Toby Muse in Bogota, Colombia, contributed to this report.
Reuters By Stefano Ambrogi Mon Mar 5, 11:22 AM ET |
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LONDON (Reuters) - A team of British scientists has set sail on a voyage to examine why a huge chunk of the earth's crust is missing, deep under the Atlantic Ocean -- a phenomenon that challenges conventional ideas about how the earth works.
The 20-strong team aims to survey an area some 3,000 to 4,000 metres deep where the mantle -- the deep interior of the earth normally covered by a crust kilometres thick -- is exposed on the sea floor.
Experts describe the hole along the mid-Atlantic ridge as an "open wound" on the ocean floor that has puzzled scientists for the five or so years that its existence has been known because it defies existing tectonic plate theories of evolution.
"We know so little about it," said Bramley Murton, a senior research scientist at Southampton's National Oceanography Center.
"It's a real challenge to our established understanding of what the earth's surface looks like underneath the waves," he told Reuters by telephone from the brand new, hi-tech British research ship RRS James Cook.
Mid ocean ridges are places where new oceanic crust is born, with red-hot lava spewing out along the seafloor.
What scientists are keen to know is whether the crust was ripped away by huge geological faults, or whether it never even developed in the first place.
The primary motivation for the project was to understand how the earth continues to evolve.
"The area that we are looking at is part of a mountain range that spans thousands of square kilometres, but we are beginning to realize that there are probably millions of square kilometres where the ocean floor is missing," Murton said.
The six week mission, led by geophysicist Roger Searle of Durham University and Chris MacLeod of Cardiff University's School of Earth, Ocean and Planetary Sciences, will recover sample cores of rock by drilling into the mantle using a rig lowered on to the sea floor.
Asked if the discovery posed a threat to the environment, Murton replied: "It's not problematic for the earth because it is a natural earth process -- but in terms of knowing how the earth works and how the world is put together it is important."
Murton also said the expedition would shed light on the composition of sea water amongst other initiatives.
Crust formation is a fundamental mechanism of the earth which affects the chemistry of the world's oceans.
Progress by the research team can be monitored via a live web link to the ship at: http://www.noc.soton.ac.uk/gg/classroom@sea/JC007/.
Stonehenges
all around us L.A. Times
Architectural relics and modern structures show that we may not be much different
than our ancestors.
By Craig Childs, CRAIG CHILDS is the author, most recently, of "House of
Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest."
February 16, 2007
ARCHEOLOGISTS recently discovered what appears to be the other half of Stonehenge, illuminating what they believe is a much larger Neolithic complex than has long been envisioned. What is coming to the surface seems strangely familiar. Looking closely at Stonehenge and other Neolithic sites, we find the formative patterns of our modern world.
Step out of your house and you might notice your street is fixed on a cardinal grid: north, south, east, west. This pattern defines many American and European cities, as well as Neolithic sites such as Anyang in China and the Mexican city of Teotihuacan.
The new discovery, two miles from Stonehenge itself, is an elaborate residential compound now being excavated. It is a site where the builders of Stonehenge may have lived and where pilgrims may have stayed while attending feasts and ceremonies. Fascinating tidbits have been unearthed: a timber version of Stonehenge, evidence of different kinds of occupations in the 4,600-year-old village and a processional "road" leading to the nearby Avon River. These finds add to the picture of an enigmatic Neolithic religion, in which stone-paved roads are aligned with celestial features and great circles frame the rising and setting sun at key times of the year.
This all has an uncanny resemblance to Neolithic sites in different parts of the world. The Big Horn Medicine Wheel in Wyoming, dating back several hundred years, is a complex celestial calendar, its 28 spokes of aligned stones pointing to risings and settings of the sun and various stars. This medicine wheel, in turn, is similar to the Nonakado Stone Circle of Japan, from the 1st millennium BC, where standing stones mark important, calendrical events on the horizon.
My friend and colleague, Kim Malville, recently discovered an Egyptian Stonehenge in the Sahara dating back more than 6,000 years. Malville believes that it acted as both a calendar and a temple for people living along the edge of an ancient lake, and it is the oldest known megalithic site in the world.
My personal favorite Stonehenge look-alike — at least in concept — is in northern New Mexico, where in the 11th century, the Chaco culture built hundreds of miles of processional "roads." Rather than rings of giant standing stones, the Chacoans erected enormous masonry temples known as great houses. Many of these great houses are aligned to view celestial events through portals and windows.
Looking at the way ancient people assembled themselves, archeologists see cults and primitive, celestial religions. But how primitive were these people's beliefs, and how different from them are we?
I once ambled around the Colorado Capitol in Denver with a compass and notebook in hand. I had come to a modern landmark to apply the same questions we had been asking at ancient sites. I found that every aspect of the building's neoclassical architecture has alignments you see at many Neolithic ceremonial centers. Every bench is symmetrically arranged around the cruciform building, which is, in turn, set to cardinal directions. It lies within an array of other government buildings and open processionals, each holding to the same cardinal patterns.
At the Chaco site, certain ruins were found swept clean, while nearby buildings were loaded with trash. The same thing was just unearthed near Stonehenge: some buildings littered with broken pottery and discarded bones — what archeologists believe to be the leavings of feasts and pilgrimage — and others remarkably clean.
Julian Thomas of the University of Manchester commented that these clean rooms near Stonehenge may have belonged to special people, chiefs or priests. He also suggested that they were possibly shrines and cult centers.
That day in Denver, tens of thousands of people were gathered in an open area at the foot of the Capitol for some kind of weekend fair. The atmosphere boomed with music and smelled of food cooking in numerous tents. What was I seeing? Pilgrims, feasts and cult centers? Were the meticulously kept buildings erected for priests and chiefs?
The same kind of architecture can be seen in Washington, where countless astronomical alignments are constructed into the Capitol and its surrounding buildings and monuments. Most recently, Gerald Ford joined a long line of presidents whose bodies have lain in state inside the majestic, symmetrical Rotunda. Will future archeologists imagine the worship of ancient leaders whose bodies were kept within circular chambers before burial?
So often we see ourselves as a lonely, cultural pinnacle, superior beyond all comparison. But if recent excavations at Stonehenge offer anything, they put our era in perspective, reminding us of an unbroken lineage shared across continents and cultures. We are simply an extension of an ancient age, living now in the next lost civilization.
Shiite cult source of mystery in Iraq
By BASSEM MROUE, Associated Press Writer Wed Jan 31, 5:48 PM ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The messianic Shiite
cult that battled U.S. and Iraqi forces last weekend had been known to authorities
for two years and was believed to have no links to other Shiite groups, an Interior
Ministry official said Wednesday.
Hundreds of cultists were killed,
as well as two Americans and 11 Iraqi troopers, in the daylong fight that ended
Monday near Najaf. Officials said the cultists planned attacks during Tuesday's
Ashoura commemoration. The Americans died when their helicopter crashed during
the battle. But so much conflicting information has been released that significant
details — including the identity of the leader and the group's intentions
— remain murky. Official accounts have raised numerous questions. On Wednesday,
Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal, the Interior Ministry's undersecretary for security,
told The Associated Press that authorities had been aware of the cult —
the "Soldiers of Heaven" — for about two years but did not consider
them a threat until authorities received a tip about the group's plans to launch
attacks. "They were a group by themselves and their leader used to claim
to be a messenger of the Hidden Imam," Kamal said. The "Hidden Imam"
is a descendant of Islam's Prophet Muhammad who disappeared as a child in the
9th century and Shiites believe that he will return one day to bring justice
to each. "They started surfacing two years ago as a political movement
in southern
Iraq and gained followers," Kamal said. "In the end they carried arms
against the state." Confusion continued Wednesday about who the gunmen
were and how they managed to mount such a ferocious defense. Some Shiite clerics
linked them to anti-American Shiite cleric Ahmed al-Hassani. But his office
issued a statement denying any link to the group, saying such claims aim to
harm the cleric's image. Some officials had identified the leader as Diya Abdul-Zahra
Kadhim, who used the nickname Ali bin Ali bin Abi Taleb. Arabic language Web
sites offered speculative versions that authorities may have provoked a confrontation.
Strategic Forecasting, Inc., a security consulting firm, said it heard that
the trouble started when members of a local tribe, the Hawatim, were killed
at a checkpoint after trying to organize their own Ashoura procession to Karbala.
The report could not be independently confirmed. The provincial governor of
Najaf, Assad Sultan Abu Kilel, said the cult's leader told his followers they
were invincible. "The gunmen fought much better after they shot down the
U.S. helicopter but after (the leader) was killed, some of the detainees knew
that they were deceived," he said. Abu Kilel added that the leader had
a barber who always took care of his makeup so that he always looked his best.
Music tapes and a guitar were found in his room. Niama Hannoun al-Hatami, a
resident in the area , said some of the cult members had been living there since
1992 but were isolated in their farms and never mixed with villagers. "In
the past days their numbers increased sharply and police surrounded the area
and hit them," he said. In Babil province, police commander Maj. Gen. Qais
al-Maamouri identified the cult's leader as Ahmed Ismail Qatea, 37, who used
to live in the southern city of Basra. It was unclear which of the names, if
any, was the real one — or even whether the various names were used by
the same person. "His
supporters at the base (near Najaf) were between 1,300 to 1,500 members and
he claims to be one of the agents of Hidden Imam and also calls himself Ahmad
al-Yamani," al-Maamouri said. He added that among the goals of the group
was to destroy the Shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf, one of the holiest sites for
Shiite Muslims. The Babylon
police chief said the cult does not have a spiritual leader. Instead, Qatea
himself claimed to be the spiritual leader.
Complexity of Teardrops Revealed
Abigail W. Leonard
Special to LiveScience
LiveScience.com Sun Jan 28, 9:55 AM ET
Tears can signal everything from sorrow to joy to bitter frustration, but until recently little was known about the composition of the tear itself. So little in fact that scientists discovered an entirely new class of lipids—a type of fat—while researching the tear’s design.
The findings, published in this month’s issue of Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, could lead to treatments for dry eye, a condition that affects up to 14 million Americans, researchers say.
Each tear is composed of a watery layer sandwiched between an inner layer of mucus and an oily outer layer made of lipids and other fats. Each time we blink, the oily layer blankets the eye, sealing in moisture.
* Why Do We Cry?
Researchers identified the substances that make up the oily layer and were surprised to find a class of lipids no one had come across before, called fatty acid amides, said lead author Kelly Nichols, an assistant professor of optometry at Ohio State University.
They also found oleamide, a lipid previously seen only in the brain and central nervous system. Oleamide has been linked to sleep regulation and has also been shown to enable communication between nerve cells. The scientists speculate it may allow for similar communication between cells at the front of the eye.
If there is insufficient or excess oleamide—or any of the other fatty components—the oily lipid layer could lose its ability to keep moisture locked in, resulting in dry eye, Nichols said.
* Why Do We Blink?
Dry eye, she explained, is not just one condition but several that involve irritation at the front of the eye. The symptoms include aching, burning, dryness and excessive tearing. Sufferers may also complain of variable vision.
“Tears make a smooth refracting surface for vision, so if it’s not smooth, you can have variability in vision,” Nichols said. Contact lens wearers are more likely to suffer and women are more susceptible than men.
Nichols believes the findings could someday lead to a simple screening test in which doctors “will take a sample of your tears, press a button, and be able to look for biomarker that will tell us whether or not you have dry eyes and which kind of treatment will help you.”
news item: AP Jan 24.07 Police
in Tijuana issued sling shots
TIJUANA, Mexico - The police department has issued about 60 slingshots to officers in the violent border city of Tijuana, where soldiers confiscated police weapons two weeks ago on allegations of collusion with drug traffickers.
Municipal police spokesman Fernando Bojorquez said Monday that the slingshots, along with bags of ballbearings, were given to officers patrolling areas of the city visited by tourists.
Tijuana's police force of 2,000 officers has been without guns since Jan. 5, but some patrol alongside armed state police.
President Felipe Calderon sent 3,300 soldiers and federal police to Tijuana at the beginning of January to hunt down drug gangs. The soldiers swept police stations and took officers' guns for inspection amid allegations by federal investigators that a corrupt network of officers supports smugglers who traffic drugs into the U.S. The weapons are still being checked.
About 100 police demonstrated outside Tijuana town hall on Monday demanding the return of their guns. "The arms are our tools for work," said officer Juan Manuel Nieves. "Do they want more police to be killed?"
More than 300 people were slain in Tijuana last year including 13 police officers.
Below: Rare David Lynch/Donovan pictures at the Kodak Theatre. Jan.07. Photo Zenteno
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