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=====================================================================
- UMM, UMM, GOOD DEPARTMENT -
New Mad Cow Fears In Corned Beef & Other Meat Products
"I would urge consumers who have any concerns - or just interest - to ask
retailers where the meat they buy comes from" - Food Standards Agency
Deputy Chair Suzi Leather
Consumers are being urged to check if corned beef and other meat products
come from France after research found about 100 French cattle with BSE
were killed for human consumption this year. Britain has imported nearly
two and half thousand tonnes of corned beef from France in the last 12
months.
And because it is produced in France it is not covered by the British BSE
controls banning the sale of meat from cattle over 30 months old - those
most likely to be infectious. Imported salami and pate produced from
French beef also escape these controls.
The Food Standards Agency said the risk was still too small to demand an
outright ban - but consumers should have the right to choose.
Food Standards Agency deputy chair Suzi Leather said: "We are pressing
the UK government very hard and also pressing Brussels very hard for
country of origin labeling.
"I would urge consumers who have any concerns - or just interest - to ask
retailers where the meat they buy comes from."
It is up to the makers to label the cans, and under present European law
they do not have to specify the country of origin. Research published in
the science journal Nature shows that in France an estimated 100 cattle
carrying BSE have been wrongly slaughtered for human consumption this
year.
And in Britain local authorities are tightening controls on imported beef
after spot checks ordered by the Food Standards Agency showed a fifth of
consignments were not properly documented.
The loophole allowing corned beef from older animals to be sold in the UK
will be partially closed next month when a ban on meat from cattle over 30
months old is imposed throughout Europe. However, there are no plans to
withdraw millions of cans already on the market.
=====================================================================
- SAFE, CLEAN ENERGY DEPARTMENT -
PA Nuke Plant Shutdown After Reactor Coolant Leak
FirstEnergy Corp. said late Monday it moved the 820-megawatt (MW) Beaver
Valley 2 nuclear unit in Pennsylvania to cold shutdown earlier this
afternoon following a leak in the reactor coolant system.
It was too early to tell how long the outage might last, according to
plant spokesman Todd Schneider. He blamed the shutdown on a leak in a
valve on a two-inch pipe used to drain the reactor coolant system. The
pipes in the reactor coolant system were 31-inch (78.74 cm) pipes.
The steam, radioactive when it was leaked, condensed into water and was
captured in the containment system, the spokesman said.
There were no injuries to the public or employees and no radiation was
released into the environment. The NRC's daily-events report said at 3:20
a.m. EST on Monday unit 2 received indications of a primary leak in
containment that exceeded allowable values. At 4:00 a.m., the unit began
a plant shutdown from full power at 2 percent per minute.
At 5:36 a.m., FirstEnergy reported an unusual event due to unidentified
leakage exceeding 10 gallons per minute. That unusual event was ended
later Monday morning.
As of 5:43 a.m., when the leak rate was estimated at between 12 and 20
gallons per minute, the plant was at 22 percent power. The situation is
under control, but there is thousands of gallons of slightly radioactive
water on the floor of the reactor building.
The operators are planning to process the spill through its rad-waste
water system and then release it. They are uncertain if they can process
all of the coolant with normal sump pump operation at this point.
It is suspected that the valve was leaking for quite some time before the
rate increased to it high level. Its fairly standard practice now to
prolong maintenance and instead deal with a problem when it becomes
critical.
The Beaver Valley station is located in Shippingport, Pa. FirstEnergy's
nuclear units are operated by the FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co.
=====================================================================
- FIRE FROM THE SKY DEPARTMENT -
Mystery of the Fireball From the Sky Deepens
Ron Baalke of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab saw the story about the meteorite
in a small New Hampshire town online. It seemed a spectacular occurrence -
meteorites are rare to begin with, but it's unheard of to see one land on
Earth still burning. So, on his California computer, he forwarded the
news to a London-based electronic network that disseminates information on
catastrophic asteroids and cosmic disasters.
The "CCNet" published Baalke's post about the supposed Granite State
meteorite, and sky-minded scientists across the world read the news.
Salisbury, New Hampshire, was famous. Since Paul Kornexl and Donna Ayoub
saw a fireball plummet from the sky into the woods behind their houses
Monday evening, Salisbury and its potential meteorite have gained
worldwide attention. While Kornexl, Ayoub and her husband, Dave, continued
to scour the muddy ground yesterday for extraterrestrial signs, scientists
from New Mexico to Moscow - aided by the more-familiar science of the
Internet - were conjecturing on just what happened behind quiet Hensmith
Road.
The first report that had come out of Salisbury said a meteorite had
landed in the woods behind 129 and 137 (which are next to each other)
Hensmith Road. The blazing softball-sized object had started two small
fires in the dried leaves Monday evening, and neighbors had rushed to
douse the flames.
"It's a little weird for my book," said the fire dispatcher Monday. "I've
never had anything drop out of the sky on my watch."
By the time firefighters arrived on scene the blaze was extinguished. But
the curiosity wasn't. Kornexl had been standing next to his shed when he
saw the fireball land.
"I was dumbfounded," he said.
The next day, when a scientist from the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium
examined the scene, and other experts pieced together the reported
details, the explanation of a meteorite seemed less and less plausible.
A meteorite would not have been burning when it hit the ground, scientists
said. It would have left a crater when it landed and it would not have
come in on an arc like residents described.
But the woods were deserted. Kornexl, who spent six years in the Army,
said the scene didn't fit with any weapon he knew of. And air control and
military officials said there was nothing overhead at the time. So the
question lingered. What sort of unearthly visitor had shown up in
Salisbury?
The conjectures started coming in yesterday morning. Robin Griffith, who
lives outside Houston, Texas, said the New Hampshire fireball was similar
to a flash of light she saw from her deck back in July.
"If it had streaked I would have thought it was a shooting star," she
said. But she added that her siting was exactly the same - she didn't see
her ball of light fall to the horizon.
"I don't believe mine was what y'all had," she said. She gave the name of
a scientist in Russia who had studied her incident. Andrei Ol'khovatov had
read the posting on CCNet and had asked her to get more information about
the New Hampshire incident.
Ol'khovatov had his own opinion. "It was probably not a meteorite," he
wrote in an e-mail, "but a geophysical meteor (high-speed ball lightning).
I investigate these events for some years."
Ol'khovatov's Web page has scores of information about incidents of
geographic meteors, what he describes as a rare type of electric
atmospheric discharge like ball lightning. He suggests TWA Flight 800 and
other airline disasters may have been caused by this natural phenomena.
Salisbury's fire could be just the latest incident.
Richard Spalding, a senior engineer at the Sandia National Laboratories in
New Mexico, a U.S. Department of Energy national security lab, had his own
theory. Apart from the lab, Spalding has studied flashes in the atmosphere
- of which meteors are one sort and lightning another.
"This particular article is reminiscent of quite a number of events I've
looked into in which people claim they've seen a fireball come all the way
to the ground," he said. "I think they are an electrical manifestation -
akin to lightning but with nothing to do with thunderstorms."
Spalding said evidence of this sort of event could be gained by analyzing
some leftover material at the site.
"It's quite possible there are some radioactive trace elements that are
formed by the ions," he said. The Ayoubs, he said, agreed to send him some
ground samples. "If found, there's no mistaking something very strange had
occurred. There's only one way those elements could be created. It
requires high energy radiation."
Scientists conjecturing on the Salisbury mystery got more information from
residents yesterday as more people came forward with reports of seeing the
fireball.
Phil Plait, who works at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland
and who developed the badastronomy.com Web site to clear up misconceptions
about his science, said he spoke to more Hensmith Road residents who saw
the flame.
"I really, strongly feel it's not a meteorite," he said after hearing the
residents' descriptions. "I, unfortunately, don't have a good alternative
explanation. Unless it was something thrown from a distance. Sometimes
these things are mysteries forever."
But if the bright light New Durham resident Ron Nordquist saw Monday
night was the same fireball, it couldn't have been an object simply thrown
over the trees. Nordquist said he saw the glowing ball as he walked his
dog around 5 p.m.
"It was like the brightest star you've ever seen," he said. "It was going
down instead of going across the sky. It seemed like it was going in slow
motion, even though it happened in seconds. I looked at the dog and I said
'did you see that?' "
Nordquist mentioned the site to his brother on the phone that night. It
wasn't until he read the paper that he made a connection.
"I got my map book and looked for Salisbury. And right away, when I saw M6
or whatever the page was, right away I started getting goose bumps. I
looked up New Durham, I looked at Salisbury. And I said to myself, 'my
goodness, I'd Seen that.' "
Sandt Michener, a scientist at the planetarium, said while he still
doesn't believe the object was a meteorite, he thinks the incident is
worth investigating further.
"There are a lot of ideas, but it's just so many possibilities," he said.
"If it is a meteorite, or if it's something else, it's unusual enough to
merit an investigation."
=====================================================================
- SPIRITUAL MYSTERIES DEPARTMENT -
Weeping Virgin Mary Statue Draws Crowds in Uruguay
A tear crossing the features of a statue of the Virgin Mary, running from
her right eye down to her chin, is causing a commotion in the city of
Rosario, in the department (state) of Colonia in Uruguay, where the
phenomenon occurred and which many have not hesitated to classify as 'a
miracle.
The discovery took place on Friday, December 8, 2000, on the Feast of the
Immaculate Conception on a painted image of the Virgin Mary located within
a grotto and inside a glass box on the edge of a stream in the department
of Colonia in southwestern Uruguay.
The news spread rapidly among the residents of the city of Rosario, on a
fiercely hot day. They began rushing by the hundreds to the grotto to
witness the phenomenon.
The Roman Catholic bishop of Rosario, Monsignor Carlos Collazi, who also
presides over the Uruguayan Episcopal Conference, visited the location and
cautiously that 'the Church is always very prudent in such matters.'"
The sculpture of the Virgin holding the baby Jesus in her left hand--is
made of wood, but the figures' faces are coated with a paste similar to
porcelain.
Omar Graso, who recently restored the image, said that his work consisted
mostly of paint and at no time did he touch the face. He did not hesitate
to reject the notion that the weeping was caused by 'water coming out from
within (the statue), "but I can't find any rational explanation."
Sources: La Cuarta of Chile, December 10, 2000, and Scott Corrales
=====================================================================
- DON'T LET GOOD SATELLITES GO TO WASTE DEPARTMENT -
Pentagon Saves Iridium Satellite Network With $3 Million A Month Contract
U.S. space scientists put the odds at nearly 1 in 250 that debris from the
proposed burn-up of the world's first global satellite telephone mesh
would hit someone on Earth.
The prospects of a casualty from the now-averted mass "de-orbiting" of the
system known as Iridium were spelled out in a previously secret study by
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
The analysis was done in April as a government task force weighed fears
that a hurry-up, 14-month schedule for bringing back cast-off hardware
might trigger "widespread anxiety."
"With the information currently available, the probability of someone
being struck by surviving Iridium debris is assessed to be 1 in 18,405 per
reentry and 1 in 249 for all 74 spacecraft combined,'' NASA calculated.
Last week, the Pentagon, citing its own needs, stepped in to rescue the
necklace of 66 cross-linked, low Earth orbiting satellites plus its
spares from the ashes of bankruptcy court.
Motorola Corp., which built, bankrolled and operated the $5.5 billion
system, had said it would begin nudging the 560-kg satellites into
decaying orbits this month in the absence of a buyer.
In staving off a fiery end for now, the Pentagon signed a
$3-million-a-month deal for unlimited air time for up to 20,000 U.S.
government users of wireless satellite telephones, including military
forces worldwide.
The deal could be worth as much as $252 million if the Defense Department
picks up options for service through 2007. It was a condition for court
approval of the purchase of Iridium, for $25 million, by an investors
group led by Dan Colussy, president of Pan American World Airways from
1978 to 1980.
The Pentagon already owned about 1,600 Iridium satellite phones. The State
Department has another 2,000. They have been used by Navy ships at sea,
polar teams, special operations forces and combat search-and-rescue
missions in areas without U.S. military satellite coverage or when
military channels are full.
Iridium "will provide a commercial alternative to our purely military
systems," said Dave Oliver, principal deputy under secretary of defense
for acquisitions, technology and logistics. The Navy, for example, needed
more than twice as much such point-to-point secure communications
capability as was available, the Pentagon said.
But a Defense Department briefing paper prepared last month also cited a
"strong government desire to avoid having more than 70 satellites de-orbit
within 14 months,'' as had been planned by Motorola.
A U.S. interagency group led by the Justice Department feared that this
"might create widespread anxiety and lead to a public outcry for
ill-considered government action,'' the Pentagon paper said.
===================================================================== -
WHO'S YOUR DADDY DEPARTMENT -
Tut DNA Test Canceled - To Prevent Rewrite Of Egyptian History?
Egypt has indefinitely postponed DNA tests designed to throw light on
questions that have intrigued archaeologists for years: Who was
Tutankhamun's father, and was he of royal blood?
The head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, Gaballah Ali Gaballah,
said Tuesday that plans for DNA tests on the mummies of Tutankhamun and
his presumed grandfather, Amenhotep III, had been canceled.
"There will be no test now and we have to see if there will be one later,"
Gaballah told The Associated Press. He declined to give a reason.
Sabri Abdel-Aziz, the council's chief archaeologist in southern Egypt,
where the tests were to be conducted, said the Japanese experts assigned
to the work had not been granted the required security clearance. He did
not say why.
The announcement of the planned tests had sparked a controversy among
Egyptian archaeologists. Some said they were an unnecessary risk that
might harm the mummies. Others said the results might be used to rewrite
Egyptian history.
"I have refused in the past to allow foreign teams to carry out such tests
on the bones of the Pyramids builders because there are some people who
try to tamper with Egyptian history," the chief archaeologist of the Giza
pyramids, Zahi Hawas, told the Akhbar Al-Yom weekly.
DNA testing of mummies has the potential to answer a number of questions
about ancient Egypt - proving information on matters such as family
relations, marriage patterns and mixing of ethnic groups. But
archaeologists caution that DNA testing has not proved very successful
and warn against over-reliance on it.
Gaballah said last month that the tests, aimed at comparing Tutankhamun's
DNA with that of Amenhotep III, were his department's last resort to end a
long-lasting mystery.
Tutankhamun ruled Egypt 3,300 years ago from about the age of 8 to his
death at 17. He succeeded Amenhotep IV, better-known as Akhenaten, and
official policy at the time said Tutankhamun was related by blood to his
predecessor.
Many Egyptologists question whether Akhenaten really did father
Tutankhamun, although they widely agree the boy-king had some sort of
royal lineage.
The tests were to have been conducted by a team from Japan's Waseda
University and Cairo's Ein Shams University. The first test was to be
carried out at Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of Kings near the southern
town of Luxor, and would have meant closing the tomb for a few hours.
The tomb was discovered virtually intact by Briton Howard Carter in 1922.
Its treasures provided invaluable insight into Egyptian ancient history.
The second test would have been on the mummy of Amenhotep III, which is
exhibited at the Egyptian museum in Cairo. Amenhotep III is believed to
have been Akhenaten's father.
A general named Horemheb largely ran the country during Tut's reign. He
and other generals were known to claim royal blood.
=====================================================================
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