US takes war on terror into Sahara

JASON MOTLAGH
IN ABIDJAN, IVORY COAST

THE United States has set aside $500 million over the next five years to secure a vast new front in its global war on terrorism: the Sahara Desert.

Critics say the region is not the terrorist zone that some senior US military officers assert. They add that heavy-handed military and financial support that reinforces authoritarian regimes in north and west Africa could fuel radicalism where it scarcely exists.

The Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI) was begun in June to provide military expertise, equipment and development aid to nine Saharan countries where lawless swathes of desert are considered fertile ground for militant Muslim groups involved in smuggling and combat training.

“It’s the Wild West all over again,” said Major Holly Silkman, a public affairs officer at US Special Operations Command Europe, which presides over US security and peacekeeping operations in Europe, former Soviet bloc countries and most of Africa.

During the first phase of the programme, dubbed Operation Flintlock, US Special Forces led 3,000 ill-equipped Saharan troops in tactical exercises designed to co-ordinate security more effectively along porous borders and beef-up patrols in ungoverned territories.

Maj Silkman said Africa has become the most important concern of the US European Command (EuCom) because of rampant corruption, drug and human trafficking, poverty and high unemployment, which create a significant “potential for instability”, particularly in the Saharan region, where 50 per cent of the population is younger than 15.

The head of Special Operations Command Europe, Major General Thomas R Csrnko, said he was concerned that al-Qaeda is assessing African groups for “franchising opportunities,” notably the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat – known as GSPC by its initials in French – cited on the US State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organisations.

The Algeria-based GSPC, estimated to have about 300 fighters and said to be linked to al-Qaeda, was accused of kidnapping European tourists in 2003 and has taken responsibility for a spate of attacks in the Sahara this year.

General Csrnko considers the group the main threat to security in the region, and has cited the potential for terrorist camps in the Sahara comparable to those once run by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Eucom officials say there is evidence that 25 per cent of suicide bombers in Iraq are Saharan Africans. Terrorist attacks such as the 11 March, 2004, Madrid train bombings that killed 191 persons have been linked to north African militants.

But some observers say terrorism in the Sahara is little more than a mirage and that a higher-profile US involvement could destabilise the region.

“If anything, the [TSCTI] … will generate terrorism, by which I mean resistance to the overall US presence and strategy,” said Jeremy Keenan, a Sahara specialist at the University of East Anglia.

A report by the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, said that although the Sahara is “not a terrorist hotbed”, repressive governments in the region are using the “war on terror” to tap US largesse and deny civil freedoms.

The report said the regime of Mauritanian President Maaouiya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya – a US ally in west Africa deposed on 3 August in a bloodless coup – used the threat of terrorism to legitimise the denial of human rights.

Mr Keenan said the government of Algeria is an even worse offender, misleading Washington about the GSPC threat to acquire modern weapons and shed its pariah status.

Aside from the 2003 kidnapping issue, US and Algerian authorities have failed to present “indisputable verification of a single act of alleged terrorism in the Sahara”, Mr Keenan said.

“Without the GSPC, the US has no legitimacy for its presence in the region,” he added, noting that an escalating American strategic dependency on African oil requires that the United States bolster its presence in the region.

Maj Silkman, however, said cultivating security, not oil resources, is the prime objective of the TSCTI. She said it is vital that other members of the international community get involved.

“Reducing the threat is not as much about taking direct action as it is in eliminating conditions that allow terrorism to flourish,” she said.

Androgynous You scored 53 masculinity and 63 femininity!

You scored high on both masculinity and femininity. You have a strong personality exhibiting characteristics of both traditional sex roles.

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 30% on masculinity You scored higher than 58% on femininity

Link: The (Not) Bem Sex Role Inventory Test (because if it were the Bem Sex Role Inventory it would not be on okcupid, because they’re really uptight about copyright issues) written by weirdscience on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

You are Senior Nazi Official Hans Frank You are a sellout and a traitor. You would have killed the Fuhrer if you had the chance. You live in the now and justify your actions. You’ll repent shortly before you die but will it be enough? Bastard? [ find out which Nazi Bastard you are ]

this may be related to “straight edge” culture, but it’s still something worth considering… i’ve seen a number of people who have gotten various different cosmetic implants, and i’ve been considering getting rhinestone implants surrounding my scar, as well as a scalp tattoo… very definitely something worth considering…

cute overload is a place that actually wants pictures of our… disgustinly, sickeningly, overwelmingly cute little doggie… i’ll have to get on it.

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Mice created with human brain cells
PAUL ELIAS
Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO – Add another creation to the strange scientific menagerie where animal species are being mixed together in ever more exotic combinations. Scientists announced Monday that they had created mice with small amounts of human brain cells in an effort to make realistic models of neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.

Led by Fred Gage of the Salk Institute in San Diego, the researchers created the mice by injecting about 100,000 human embryonic stem cells per mouse into the brains of 14-day-old rodent embryos.

Those mice were each born with about 0.1 percent of human cells in each of their heads, a trace amount that doesn’t remotely come close to “humanizing” the rodents.

“This illustrate that injecting human stem cells into mouse brains doesn’t restructure the brain,” Gage said.

Still, the work adds to the growing ethical concerns of mixing human and animal cells when it comes to stem cell and cloning research. After all, mice are 97.5 percent genetically identical to humans.

“The worry is if you humanize them too much you cross certain boundaries,” said David Magnus, director of the Stanford Medical Center for Biomedical Ethics. “But I don’t think this research comes even close to that.”

Researchers are nevertheless beginning to bump up against what bioethicists call the “yuck factor.”

Three top cloning researchers, for instance, have applied for a patent that contemplates fusing a complete set of human DNA into animal eggs in order to manufacturer human embryonic stem cells.

One of the patent applicants, Jose Cibelli, first attempted such an experiment in 1998 when he fused cells from his cheek into cow eggs.

“The idea is to hijack the machinery of the egg,” said Cibelli, whose current work at Michigan State University does not involve human material because that would violate state law.

Researchers argue that co-mingling human and animal tissue is vital to ensuring that experimental drugs and new tissue replacement therapies are safe for people.

Others have performed similar experiments with rabbit and chicken eggs while University of California-Irvine researchers have reported making paralyzed rodents walk after injecting them with human nerve cells.

Doctors have transplanted pig valves into human hearts for years, and scientists have injected human cells into lab animals for even longer. But the brain poses an additional level of concern because some envision nightmare scenarios in which a human mind might be trapped in an animal head.

“Human diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease, might be amenable to stem cell therapy, and it is conceivable, although unlikely, that an animal’s cognitive abilities could also be affected by such therapy,” a report issued in April by the influential National Academies of Science that sought to draw some ethical research boundaries.

So the report recommended that such work be allowed, but with strict ethical guidelines established.

“Protocols should be reviewed to ensure that they take into account those sorts of possibilities and that they include ethically sensitive plans to manage them if they arise,” the report concluded.

At the same time, the report did endorse research that co-mingles human and animal tissue as vital to ensuring that experimental drugs and new tissue replacement therapies are safe for people.

Gage said the work published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is another step in overcoming one of the biggest technical hurdles confronting stem cell researchers: when exactly to inject the cells into patients.

The results suggest that human embryonic stem cells, once injected into people, will mature into the cells that surround them. No known human has ever received an injection of embryonic stem cells because so little is known about how those cells will mature once inside the body.

For now, Gage said his work is more geared toward understanding disease than to finding a cure.

“It’s a way for us to begin to tease out the way these diseases develop,” Gage said.

Human embryonic stem cells are created in the first days after conception and give rise to all the organs and tissues in the human body. Scientists hope they can someday use stem cells to replace diseased tissue. But many social conservatives, including President Bush, oppose the work because embryos are destroyed during research.

Stem cell researchers argue that mixing human and animal cells is the only way to advance the field because it’s far too risky to experiment on people; so little is known about stem cells.

“The experiments have to be done, which does mean human cells into non-human cells,” said Dr. Evan Snyder, a stem cell researcher at the Burnham Institute in San Diego. “You don’t work out the issues on your child or your grandmother. You want to work this out in an animal first.”

Snyder is injecting human embryonic stem cells into monkeys and is convinced that there’s little danger.

“It’s true that there is a huge amount of similarity, but the difference are huge,” Snyder said. “You will never ever have a little human trapped inside a mouse or monkey’s body.”

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moe’s purse was stolen from the dog agility arena the other day. she got her credit cards cancelled, but only after whoever stole them tried to use them twice. and the dog agility arena is in a remote enough location that it was very likely one of her students that stole it. she still hasn’t gotten her driver’s license replaced, and social security is being really annoying about the whole thing: they give you a number that you are supposed to use as a formal form of identification, that the local law enforcement drones say you have to be able to prove at a moment’s notice… and then they say that they recommend you not carry your social security card with you (which is exactly the opposite of what the police say), and they don’t take any responsibility for helping you get things sorted out if someone steals it. they say that if someone steals your social security card that you are supposed to “keep an eye” on your social security earnings to see if someone else is reporting earnings, and you are supposed to notify the credit reporting agencies so they won’t just automatically approve credit without “checking with you” first, but you’ve got to do all of this stuff… it’s not something that social security can do for you, despite the fact that they’re the ones that issued the number to you in the first place… 8/ and they won’t issue you a new social security number under any circumstances… as though there are a limited number of combinations or something…

and the guy showed up and opened up my car… $141 dollars later, and $17 for the duplicate keys, i’ve already far overspent for this month…

merry x-mas…