terrorism

In the current issue of Microbiologist, researchers report that tea could be an antidote to anthrax.

Anthrax, scourge of tabloid staffers, has infected exactly one person in the U.S. during the last five years -- a New York musician who contracted it from the raw African animal skins he used to make drums. Those of us who procure our hides from reputable sources face no danger. But if anthrax does break out, commonly consumed plants (slightly modified) do seem to be one of our best defenses. A few years ago, researchers rejiggered the genomes of tobacco cells to produce anthrax antigens, a first step toward making a safer vaccine. And now it appears that Earl Grey, in addition to his supposed aphrodisiac effects, could fight off the bacillus, without any modification at all. MORE

Australian novelist Peter Carey's new book His Illegal Self tells the story of the kidnapping of the eight-year-old son of radical parents.

The boy at the center of this novel is a sort of Sixties royalty, a princeling of the radical left. The son of two figures sufficiently extreme to have concocted bombs and appeared on national news, his name is Che ("Jay," insists his patrician grandmother, his legal custodian after abandonment by his mother), and he's too young to know that the obligations of royalty are manifold, and rarely chosen. MORE

The Las Vegas police found ricin, a chemical weapons agent, in a Las Vegas hotel room rented by Roger Von Bergendorff, a 57-year-old computer graphics artist and pet enthusiast.

Extracting ricin -- so potent that a single drop could kill you and your whole family -- isn't difficult, which is why a man with obvious social handicaps and no relevant training apparently succeeded in producing enough to poison himself half to death. Governments have made breathless claims about Al Qaeda's desire to weaponize the chemical, and the dubious success of this poor man's homebrew will stoke the fears of the stokeable. MORE

Pakistan held elections, and the Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif parties trounced Pervez Musharraf.

The two victorious parties ruled Pakistan between the late 1980s and the late 1990s -- a disastrous period for Pakistan, with corruption out of control and sectarian violence endemic in Karachi. The situation was so bad that when Musharraf staged his coup, the country's civil-society intellectuals greeted it with relief. The two parties are still feudal, and there is little to indicate they will govern better than they did a decade ago. In Pakistan, neither military nor democratic rule has worked.

But there seems to be no other way forward. I expect a weakening of security with an unwieldy coalition, and a vacuum filled by extremists.   At least the Islamic parties fared badly.

A car bomb killed Imad Mughniyeh, the elusive chief of Hizbullah's military operations, in Damascus.

Who got his scalp?  Laura Rozen points out that everyone wanted him dead, even Hizbullah, who had a hard time selling the we-build-hospitals-and-schools-line with a mass murderer on its payroll.  Israel would certainly have delighted in his demise, but so would the US, and nearly every one of the Lebanese factions, which are about as numerous as air molecules, and in many cases well-armed.

Scattered among the vague reports of his life are mentions of state-actors who supported him -- principally Syria and Iran, but also Saudi Arabia, which declined to arrest him in the 1990s.  Traveling across borders without incident takes assistance from people in power.  He operated in the Triple Frontier as well, almost certainly not with the connivance of South American governments, but apparently with freedom of movement between there and the Levant.  As we reconstruct this guy's life from the wreckage in Damascus, it might pay to ask how such a wanted man managed to wrack up thousands of frequent flyer miles and collect hundreds of visa stamps before someone finally caught up with him.

The Senate voted to immunize telecom companies from lawsuits alleging that they spied illegally on their customers on behalf of the US government.

Sunshine is the best disinfectant, and the US senate inflicted one gnarly, purulent wound on American civil liberties today.  The vote does more than shield companies from having to pay damages for customers' claims.  It ensures that no one need ever know whether those claims are valid in the first place.  If the companies can defend their actions, then they should do so.  Now, in the absence of legal compulsion to explain themselves, they will almost certainly feel no moral compulsion either.

The bill will proceed, immunity intact.  Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) has threatened a filibuster.  John McCain voted for immunity, Barack Obama voted against it, and Hillary Clinton didn't vote at all.  Civil libertarians will not forget.