A university professor believes he has solved one of the oldest Stonehenge mysteries - the exact location in Wales where the bluestones were quarried.

BBC . June 24, 2005

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Tim Darvill has found what he thinks is an ancient quarry at Carn Menyn high in the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire.

The bluestones - which form the inner circle of Stonehenge - were transported over 240 miles to Salisbury Plain.

Local archaeologists say Professor Darvill had made a “convincing and compelling” argument.

Writing in the July/August issue of British Archaeology, he describes the very spot from which be says the stones were quarried centuries ago.

He believes there is evidence at the site that it was used as a prehistoric quarry. Added to that the rock formations there are identical to those of the bluestones and the location of the quarry meant it would have been prized source of stone.

Earlier this year he and his colleague Geoff Wainwright led a field expedition to the site, which he describes as “a veritable Aladdin’s Cave of made-to-measure pillars for aspiring circle builders”.

He describes a “small crag-edged promontory with a stone bank across its neck” and measuring less than half a hectare as the exact location.

“Three things are clear from just looking around the site,” he said.

“First, those outcrops have been exploited as a source of stone for a long time and much has been taken away.

“Second, our understanding of what a ‘quarry’ is perhaps needs to be modified because here the extraction of pillars simply involves leavening suitably shaped but naturally detached blocks from the ground or a fractured outcrop.

“And third, the remoteness of the place and its mountain top situation invite comparison with other known sources of prized stone, exploited for axe heads during the fourth and third millennia BC.”

Gwilym Hughes, Director of Cambria Archaeology, the south west Wales archaeological trust, said Mr Darvill still had some work to do to prove his theory beyond doubt.

But he said: “They have put forward a very reasoned argument which I found very convincing and very compelling.

“When you stand up on the site you can see what kind of hold and significance it would have had for prehistoric man, it’s got a kind of aura about it.

“There are alternative theories put forward for the arrival of the Bluestones at Salisbury Hill including the possibility they have been taken there by natural forces such as glaciers.

“Personally I would like to think they have been taken there by human action.”

Matthias Schulz

Photo Gallery 1

Photo Gallery 2

Treasure hunter Franck Goddio has spent years bringing the sunken city of Alexandria to the surface. The results of his labors, now premiering in Berlin, reveal incest, fratricide and iniquity. And breathtaking beauty.

It’s a good thing that the Martin Gropius Building has such high ceilings. It’ll need them. The exhibit at the Berlin museum includes 15-ton statues sculpted from rose-colored granite that have spent millennia on the ocean floor.

The pieces that will be on display in the exhibit entitled “Egypt’s Sunken Treasure,” opening to the public on May 13, but ceremoniously unveiled by German President Horst Köhler and visiting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Thursday, were flown directly to Germany on board a “Beluga” cargo plane provided by Airbus. The aircraft’s unusual cargo also includes astronomic calendars, jewels, gold coins, penises made of lead and the spout of a baby’s bottle. The statue of Hapi, more than five meters (16.4 feet) tall, is considered the largest freestanding sculpture of an Egyptian god in existence.

The man who discovered all of these ancient artifacts is marine expert Franck Goddio, 58. The Frenchman has spent more than 10 years uncovering the remains of ancient Alexandria off the sunken coast of North Africa. Over the years, Goddio and his team have used hot-air balloons to extract algae-encrusted sphinxes from the waters of the Mediterranean and cranes to lift steles and decaying door hinges, coated with barnacles, from the ancient site.

The artifacts pulled to the surface are the remains of the most astonishing city of the ancient world — a city dubbed the Pearl of the Mediterranean with a population of almost 600,000. It was a magnificent world as much as it was a setting for bloody royal dramas. The lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, rose 130 meters (426 feet) into the sky, its wood fires, amplified by mirrors, shining far out into the Mediterranean. In the first century B.C., the writer Diodor raved about Alexandria, whose “beauty, size and riches far surpassed those of all other cities.” The city’s diverse population included Jews and Egyptians, Gallic mercenaries, Nubians and Persians.

“Enormous cultural undertaking”

All of this has been re-created in the Gropius exhibit, which uses wood and paper maché to replicate scenes from the ancient city. Screens above the display cases depict Goddio’s divers at the excavation site.

Museum Director Gereon Sievernich calls the recovery effort an “enormous cultural undertaking.” “In the past, many finds have gathered dust in protected storage rooms,” he explains, “we are proud to be able to celebrate a world premier.”

Portions of the exhibit are not for the squeamish. Some of the objects on display bear witness to a gruesome chapter in history. The city’s royal quarter, the “Bruckeion,” was home to a dynasty of pleasure-seeking god-kings with bizarre lifestyles. The Berlin exhibit, for example, includes:

    * a stele of Ptolemy VIII. The king had his own sons hacked to pieces and sent a trunk containing the remains to his wife.

    * King Ptolemy XII in the shape of a sphinx. The monarch, known to be homosexual, murdered his eldest daughter.

Cups of poison and daggers were de rigueur in this powerful city in the Nile delta. Even Cleopatra had blood on her hands. She had her brother murdered and devoted herself to sorcery in her boudoir.

Historians have portrayed the queen as an empty-headed flirt with a penchant for luxury. Legend has it that Cleopatra, wearing a jewel-encrusted tanga, bewitched Roman general Marc Antony, drinking a cocktail of pearls dissolved in vinegar. Close to 60 films, most notably the Hollywood classic starring Liz Taylor, have been devoted to a woman Horatio called the “demon of doom.” But the ancient original wasn’t nearly as beautiful as many of the modern-day divas who have portrayed her on the silver screen. Goddio’s divers recovered more than 30 coins with Cleopatra’s likeness and reconstructed her face using computer technology. The resulting image shows a woman with a hooked nose and flabby cheeks.

Heading for the deep

It’s the sort of conclusion that only state-of-the-art technology can deliver. Goddio’s exploration craft, outfitted with Side Scan Sonar and Echolot, pulls “radar sleds” along the ocean floor. Whenever the sleds encounter promising sites, his team drops buoys and the divers head for the deep.

The “Pearl of the Mediterranean,” shattered into glittering fragments of its ancient glory, is finally returning to light. The province of Euclid and Archimedes and the site of the largest library of antiquity, Alexandria was also a monster of greed and moral decrepitude, a hotbed of racism and anti-Semitism.

Though in Africa, the city was dominated by the Greeks. After Alexander the Great subjugated the land of the pharaohs in 332 B.C., the country came into the hands of business-minded colonialists. Jewish author Philo called the city with its throngs a “city of many faces.” A comedy of the day belittles its inhabitants as “people crowded together like pigs.” Egyptians and Jews lived in separate neighborhoods.  The Greeks, who lived in the “Royal Quarter,” were barred from entering into mixed marriages. There were arenas where athletes hurled spears and discuses and boxing matches were staged for public entertainment. Giant cities of the dead were built outside the city’s walls, places where the embalmers lived, surrounded by the stench of death.

One hundred and twenty scholars worked at the “Museion,” the archetype of all universities. They included physicians who performed dissections of human corpses, philologists who translated the bible and the works of Zarathustra — all 2 million verses. Pleasure seekers ventured out to Kanopos, a suburb linked to the capital by a canal lined with brothels. Strabon describes the town as a place of lasciviously dancing woman, of bars “filled with licentiousness and indulgence.”

Universe Today . March 1, 2007

Lake on Titan. Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI
Click to enlarge

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has been turning up new images of features that look like lakes on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. This latest image shows a large lake that appears to be surrounding an island.

This radar image was captured during Cassini’s most recent Titan flyby on February 22, 2007. The island is about 90 kilometers (62 miles) by 150 kilometers (93 miles) across, which is the same size as the Big Island of Hawaii.

Unlike the familar lakes here on Earth, this lake is likely filled with liquid hydrocarbons. You wouldn’t want to go swimming there.

Original Source: NASA/JPL/SSI News Release

RICHARD SHEARS

Associated Newspapers . March 5, 2007

When a tall stranger calling himself ‘Black Jesus’ lured Rita Hemen away from her remote jungle village, he promised to make her one of his special ‘flower girls’ and convinced her that her family would one day be rich beyond their wildest dreams.

The pretty Papua New Guinean girl, just 13 years old, could never have imagined, as she innocently followed the attractive figure up the mountain, that she would become tangled in a pagan web of evil from which there was no escape.

After being stripped naked, she was tied to a crude bed in a dark hut, raped by the 31-year-old man claiming to be the true Messiah - and then, with birds of paradise calling in the valley below, her throat was brutally cut with a bush knife.

Rita was Black Jesus’s first human sacrifice. As the girl lay dying, her blood was drained into a coconut shell and drunk by the murderer and his evil henchmen. In a final horrific act, they cut strips of flesh from her body and feasted on it.

And in a grotesque twist, witnesses claim that Rita’s mother not only encouraged her to have sex with the ‘Messiah’ but also participated in the blood-drinking ceremony that followed her daughter’s murder.

This is not one of the many dark episodes from Papua New Guinea’s ancient past when cannibalism was rife.

Rita was killed only a matter of months ago - and two more young women have since been sacrificed in similarly barbaric ceremonies. The last body was found just three weeks ago.

Today, Black Jesus is in hiding, deep in the most impenetrable mountain jungle. Armed with spears, bows and arrows and stone-headed clubs, his loin-clothed henchmen are said to be ready to fight to the death - for the brutal figure claiming to be the most powerful of all men has promised them Paradise, win or lose.

But while the local police have confirmed that the bodies of three murdered young girls have been exhumed from crude jungle graves, are these reports of child sacrifice and cannibalism true, or simply borne out of fertile imagination and rumour? And who is this brutal, murdering self-styled prophet?

Steven Tari was born on the island of Manus, north-east of Papua New Guinea, where Prince Charles once danced with the local women before he married Princess Diana.

After Tari’s parents split up, he made his way to the mainland town of Madang, where he enrolled at the Amron Bible College to study to be a Lutheran pastor.

However, according to the college principal, Pastor Kyther Worrety, Tari quickly set himself apart from the other students.

“He saw himself as different from the other young men here,” says Pastor Worrety. “He went off at a tangent, didn’t agree with the Bible’s teachings and eventually vanished, leaving behind all his clothes and belongings.

“I learned in time that he had gone to a village called Matepi, up in the mountains, and had started preaching to people there, saying that he was the real Christ.

“He called himself Black Jesus, obviously because of the colour of his skin - although from what we know of him now, the title is more appropriate because of the darkness of his mind.”

Concerned that his former student was spreading the wrong word among the tribes, Pastor Worrety made the torturous journey into the mountains, where the sight he was met by took his breath away.

“Steven had made a platform on the tip of the highest peak and was addressing an enormous crowd of at least 6,000 people. His hair was much longer, and his face was tattooed with coloured markings.

“He was wearing a long, white shroud, like the kind Jesus wears in all the paintings, and his feet were bare.

“On the ground in front of him were two crossed spears and two bush knives, and on each side of him were 25 of his flower girls, all naked except for a small cloth.

“He had his arms wide, as if he were embracing all the people, and he was telling them that the Jesus the missionaries had told them about was a liar and that he was the chosen son of God.

“With the wind blowing his robes, he shouted that the people should burn their Bibles because they were filled with untruths. He commanded the gathering to follow him because, he promised, they would benefit from great gifts from God.”

When Pastor Worrety was spotted by Tari’s bodyguards, they stormed up to him, pointed to the spears and bush knives, and said: “Those are for you if you dare talk about this.”

Undeterred, the pastor returned straight to Madang and reported all that he had seen to the police. While cults have existed in Papua New Guinea for centuries, it is now illegal to make false promises to people in order to gain personal fame and fortune.

A team of heavily-armed police worked their way up the mountain, where they took Tari by surprise and led him away in handcuffs. He was driven to Madang and charged with spreading misleading statements, falsely soliciting property by demanding sustenance from villagers, and hindering arrest.

But before he appeared in court, he escaped and disappeared into the mountains again - accompanied by a church pastor who was meant to be counselling him but who had fallen under his influence.

Now Tari was back in his jungle domain, he gathered the fiercest men he could find to protect him, and travelled through the mountain villages preaching his own kind of warped Gospel, again insisting he was the true Messiah and persuading parents to let their daughters join his flock and become his ‘flower girls’.

He punished those who resisted him by destroying the simple Lutheran village churches, burning down homes, stealing money and food, and driving hundreds of tribal people out of the jungle to the safety of the coast.

Having built up a devout congregation scattered across the mountains, Tari set up a new headquarters in a village called Gal - which he promptly renamed Galilee - and conducted a bizarre series of interviews there with the young girls he had gathered.

Stripping them naked, he asked if they had been married, had ever had a boyfriend and if they had ever had sex.

“What he was trying to establish,” explains Police Sergeant Darius Lasisi, as we travel together to the village of Gohe, where two of the murdered girls came from, “was which ones were virgins. He’d send the ones who weren’t on their way, warning them not to talk about his attempts to recruit them”.

Sgt Lasisi is fearful of the damage Tari is causing across the mountain.

“His whole philosophy is based on a twisted religious ego - reversing all that the Bible teaches - and on sex. Those poor girls truly believed that if they became his flower girls - which is just a nice way of saying sex slaves - good things would come to their families.

“He appointed one girl, Dorothy Gasan, as his queen, but we’ve caught her and she’s now in jail, regretting the day she ever met this Black Jesus.”

But there is a deeper regret in the heart of Brigitta Laspain, whose sisters Rita and Evenick, 16, were sacrificed by Tari.

“The girls who have come back have all talked about it,” she says. “Some of my family who were influenced by him have also talked about the sacrifice. And, of course, we have the absolute proof of the bodies that have been found.” Rita’s decomposing corpse was found during another police raid - dubbed Operation Black Rose - on Tari’s camp.

This time, the officers were met by fierce resistance from 1,500 war-painted warriors. As arrows, spears and police bullets flew, Tari slipped away into the jungle.

A post mortem carried out on Rita’s body, exhumed from a crude grave, confirmed the stories of sacrifices.

There were severe knife wounds to her neck and torso and both her palms had been slashed. Since then, Tari has emerged from his jungle hideout to sacrifice another girl, called Siralas, aged only 13.

“He may say he is the son of God, but he has the devil’s heart,” says Brigitta.

“One day the police will catch him, no matter how deep in the jungle he hides. But, until then, I fear that other innocent young women will fall under his wicked spell and their lives will be taken, too.”

In Gohe village, home to many of Tari’s supporters, Brigitta’s father makes the astonishing admission that he feels no anger towards Black Jesus for killing two of his daughters.

“I believe that he is the Messiah, and if he took my daughters in that way to give him more power, then I understand that he had to do it,” he says.

“The girls were not forced to go with Steven. When he came to this village, he asked me if it was all right to take them with him and I gave him permission. First, Rita went with him but I believe she did not want to have sex with him and she came back.

“Then he came and took her away again, but this time I wasn’t present because the police had thrown me in jail for being one of Steven’s supporters.

“She may have been sacrificed because she ran away, or he may have thought she was a special person who had to die in this way.”

It is clear that these are simple, poor people who are easily influenced by anyone charismatic who offers some form of salvation from their daily struggles.

The girls’ father allowed Black Jesus to appoint Rita and Evenick as flower girls because he wanted to believe in Tari’s new vision in which no one would ever want for anything again.

Friends of the murdered teenagers are filled with grief, but they, too, show no anger towards the evil man who is still at large, and perhaps even gathering more followers and flower girls in the mountains.

“I believe he would have taken me with him if I had not already had a child,” says 25-year-old Della Rodly. “And I would have gone with him if he had asked.”

“What I am concerned about,” says Police Sergeant Lasisi, “is that this is not going to have a clean ending. Judging by the battle we have already had, he is determined not to be caught.

“He is also very clever. He has struck a deal with his bodyguards that if God comes after him, he will deal with Him - but if the police arrive, his warriors must do the fighting and let Tari get away.”

©2007 Associated Newspapers Ltd

MICHAEL SEAMARK

UK Daily Mail . March 5, 2007

Mohamed Al Fayed has vowed to make Prince Charles and Prince Philip give evidence at the inquest on Princess Diana.

The Harrods tycoon spoke out after the High Court dramatically backed his demand for the inquest to be heard by a jury.

He declared: “I want Charles and Philip together in court. These are the people who ordered the murder.”

Three judges overturned deputy royal coroner Baroness Butler-Sloss’s decision to sit alone to determine how the Princess and Mr Fayed’s son Dodi died.

Now Mr Fayed will fight to have the two princes and members of MI6 called as witnesses in his bid to prove the couple were killed in an Establishment conspiracy.

He said: “Diana was the people’s princess. The people must be allowed to hear all the evidence and then, and only then, decide how she died, why she died and who ordered her murder.”

Lady Butler-Sloss, until her retirement Britain’s most senior woman judge, decided in January that she would rule over the joint inquests alone in her capacity as deputy coroner of the Royal Household.

She said it would be “an almost impossible task” for a jury.

But in a firmly-worded rebuke three High Court judges overruled her, telling her she must sit with a jury.

They cited the legal obligation for a jury to be called for reasons of public safety if it was possible the circumstances of a death could recur.

The judges pointed to similarities between photographers’ pursuit of Diana in Paris and the recent “hounding” of her son William’s girlfriend Kate Middleton.

They also said Lady Butler-Sloss must not sit as deputy royal coroner, saying it could make her appear biased to the public worldwide.

Officials last night dismissed reports that the former judge would stand down as a result of yesterday’s ruling.

That would plunge the much-delayed hearing, due to take place May, into a new crisis and prolong the agony for Prince William and Prince Harry.

Peter Farr, from the Office of the Lord Chief Justice, said there was “no question” of Lady Butler-Sloss pulling out and that she would go ahead with a scheduled pre-inquest hearing on Monday.

But there may still be a delay if she rejects Mr Fayed’s demand for members of the royal family and the security services to be called as witnesses - and he launches another appeal.

Princes William and Harry made no comment on yesterday’s ruling, insisting it was a matter for the courts.

But Clarence House referred to a letter given to Lady Butler-Sloss in January in which the princes said the inquest into their mother’s death should not only be “open, fair and transparent but that it should move quickly to a conclusion”.

It is now almost a decade since Diana, 36, and Dodi, 42, died when their Mercedes crashed in the Pont de l’Alma underpass as they sped away from pursuing paparazzi.

A three-year inquiry, led by former Metropolitan Police chief Lord Stevens, recently concluded it was a tragic accident because driver Henri Paul was drunk and driving too fast.

But Mr Fayed has been implacable in his insistence that Prince Philip “masterminded” the couple’s death. He says Dodi and Diana planned to marry, but the British establishment could not accept the prospect of the mother of a future king marrying a Muslim.

Friends of Diana, however, have emphatically denied any such wedding plans.

At his High Court appeal last month, Mr Fayed’s lawyers argued that Lady Butler-Sloss had acted unlawfully by deciding to sit alone and said an inquest without a jury would “lack independence”.

The Queen’s lawyers agreed that the full inquest should be heard by a jury.

Yesterday Lady Justice Smith, sitting with Mr Justice Collins and Mr Justice Silber, said the coroner was obliged under the 1988 Coroners Act to summon a jury if there was reason to suspect a death occurred in circumstances “the continuance or possible recurrence of which, is prejudicial to the health or safety of the public”.

A jury could make recommendations that might end the danger posed to royals, celebrities and members of the public from pursuing paparazzi.

The judges said: “It is likely that there will be a recurrence of the type of event in which the paparazzi on wheels pursued the princess and Dodi al Fayed.

“In our view, occurrences such as this are prejudicial to the safety of a section of the public. It is possible that this danger could be prevented by legislation or other means.”

The judges said a jury was also important because Prince Philip was being accused of “masterminding” the deaths.

They said: “In order that there should be public confidence in the outcome of the inquest, a jury should be summoned in cases where the state, by its agents, may have had some responsibility for the death.

“The allegation is that agents of the state have been involved in the deaths.

“If, when Lady Butler-Sloss determines the scope of the inquests, she decides that Mr al Fayed’s allegations must be inquired into, the possible role of state agents would be an important consideration material to her discretionary decision whether to summon a jury.

“Indeed, we think that that consideration might well be determinative in favour of a jury.”

The judges also accepted Mr Fayed’s argument that it would comprise Lady Butler-Sloss’s independence and impartiality if she presided over the inquest as a royal coroner.

They agreed that her decision was “flawed” and she should have “considered the impression that the title might make on the worldwide public.

“It might look to them as though the coroner is on the side of the Royal family.”

Westminster Coroner Dr Paul Knapman later accepted jurisdiction for the inquests.

He will appoint Lady Butler-Sloss as assistant deputy coroner to enable her to hold the hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice.

Ancient Retrovirus Is Resurrected

Physorg . March 5, 2007

Science Daily — Retroviruses have been around longer than humanity itself. In fact, the best-known family member, HIV, is a relative youngster, with its first known human infections occurring sometime in the mid-20th century.

But although many retroviruses went extinct hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago, researchers studying the pathogens don’t use the traditional tools of paleontologists: They need look only as far as our own DNA. Retroviruses infect cells and replicate by inserting their DNA into their host cell’s genome. If that cell happens to be a germ cell, such as a sperm, an egg or their precursors, then the retroviral DNA is inherited by offspring just like a normal gene. Humans have many defunct retroviruses deposited in our DNA, remnants of ancient retroviruses that replicated in our ancestors millions of years ago. Now, researchers have brought one of those retroviruses back to life.

“In our DNA, there’s a fossil record of retroviruses that used to infect us,” says Paul Bieniasz, associate professor and head of the Laboratory of Retrovirology at Rockefeller University and the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center. In fact, about eight percent of human DNA is made up of retroviral sequences. Bieniasz and Youngnam Lee, a graduate student in the Bieniasz lab, have excavated some of that DNA and — in an attempt to better understand how humans and retroviruses co-evolved — they have resurrected an ancient retrovirus, one that can create new viral particles and infect human cells. They describe their work in a paper published by PLoS Pathogens last month.

The extinct retroviruses embedded in our DNA can’t reproduce because of mutations in one or more of their genes. The younger of these human endogenous retroviruses (or HERVs) have fewer changes, and judging by the paucity of genetic alterations, at least one subfamily — HERV-K — was likely still active less than a few hundred thousand years ago. Different members of this subfamily have slightly different mutations. “But as of a few months ago,” Bieniasz says, “there was no replication-competent form of this virus.”

To eliminate those mutations that kept HERV-K from replicating, the two researchers deduced a genetic sequence that was a consensus of 10 different HERV-K proviruses and synthesized the whole viral genome from scratch. Then, they took that sequence (which they dubbed HERV-KCON) and inserted it into cultured human cells to see if it would result in the creation of HERV-K structural proteins. Their consensus sequence resulted in not only functional proteins, but in a retrovirus that was capable of creating new viral particles and integrating itself into a host cell’s genome. “This is the first time this has been done with a viral genome that was effectively dead, and now is alive — or at least has all the functions that suggest it should replicate,” Bieniasz says.

The project began, Lee says, because certain human and non-human primate cells produce proteins that appear to block HIV from replicating. “And the question is where did the proteins come from?” she asks. “By studying these extremely old viruses, we can tap into what happened in our ancestors millions and millions of years ago.”

Citation: Public Library of Science Pathogens 3(1): e10 (January 26, 2007)

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Rockefeller University.

Copyright © 1995-2007 ScienceDaily LLC — All rights reserved

The biotech company Ventria Biosciences sponsored tests, on babies and children hospitalized at two pediatric institutes in Peru, of two new experimental drugs derived from transgenic rice that was genetically engineered with synthetic human genes to produce artificial human milk proteins.

Silvia Ribeiro

slogefree.org . March 5, 2007

The biotech company Ventria Biosciences sponsored tests, on babies and children hospitalized at two pediatric institutes in Peru, of two new experimental drugs derived from transgenic rice that was genetically engineered with synthetic human genes to produce artificial human milk proteins.

The experiments - results of which were revealed this May in the US - were carried out at the Institute for Child Health and at the Nutrition Research Institute, both in Lima, Peru. The Peruvian public found out about the experiments when they were denounced by the Peruvian Human Rights Association and the Network for a GMO-Free Latin America.

Ventria is a biotech company that specializes in so-called “Pharming,” which refers to planting genetically-modified crops that are cultivated to produce pharmaceutical agents or chemicals. Such plant varieties are even more controversial than the GM (genetically-modified) crops designed for agricultural use. This is because the “Pharm” crops could contaminate food crops, via the movement of pollen or accidental mixing of crop residue, with significant health risks, particularly if they enter the human food chain.

So far, no drug produced by transgenic crops has been approved for human use in the US or anywhere else in the world. Ventria began planting GM pharma crops in California, but was forced to move them to Missouri and then to North Carolina in response to resistance by farm groups and by consumer and environmental organizations.

Because of the long and uncertain approval process for new drugs, especially those of this type, the company apparently decided to carry out their experiments on children in the Third World, where regulations are more lax and where it seems easier to find institutions that lack adequate funding (or ethics).

In a recent public relations move to makeover its image, Ventria now calls these products “medical foods,” most likely in order to evade the stricter regulations for drug approvals. The company is carrying out experimental production of two recombinant human proteins, Lactoferrin and Lysozyme, which are present in their natural forms in mothers’ milk, saliva, semen and other human bodily fluids. The recombinant versions are produced in genetically engineered rice, which contains the synthesized human gene sequences responsable for their production. Two of these, extracted from the modified rice, were tested on Peruvian children.

Ventria experimented with 140 children from the age of 5 months to 3 years who were suffering from diarrhea and were hospitalized at the above mentioned pediatric institutes. The tests lasted 48 hours in the hospital, with two follow-up visits during the following two weeks. The children were divided into three groups. One so called “control group” received an oral glucose-based re-hydration solution, a second group received a (non transgenic) rice-based solution, and a third group got the same rice solution with the addition of the recombinant Lactoferrin and Lysozyme.

According to the brief summary of the results that was published by the company, the children who received the recombinant treatment took an average of 3.67 days to recover, while the control group took an average of 5.21 days. Ventria announced the results while ignoring the fact of having used Peruvian children as guinea pigs, when they wouldn’t have been allowed to administer the same tests in their own country. The purpose of the tests is to hasten approval and attempt to gain moral legitimacy for the commercial use of their controversial product, which they now say is mostly for the Third World.

Nevertheless, their preferred market is not that of children in poor countries suffering from diarrhea, but rather the more lucrative market for so-called “nutriceuticals”, including sports drinks and dietary supplements, among others. The Third World children simply offer more public relations value for the company.

According to US pediatrician Jim Diamond, a surprising aspect of the results published by Ventria is that they used a group of children given a glucose solution as a control group, when there is an abundant medical literature showing that rice-based (non-transgenic) solutions work faster and more effectively in treating acute diarrhea.

This means that the company, with the complicity of the Peruvian institutes, may have intentionally used a less effective control for comparison purposes, in order to make the positive effects of their product appear more dramatic. On the one hand, they exposed one group of children to unapproved transgenic drugs, while on the other, another group may have had their recovery delayed, because of an inferior treatment, for the purpose of obtaining better looking results.

There are many scientific articles - readily available on the Internet - that reveal cases of adverse reactions like allergies, formation of anti-bodies, etc. caused by exposure to transgenic human proteins, such as anti-coagulants, growth hormones and insulin. In some cases this has led to the removal of products from the market.

During the process of public consultation motivated by Ventria’s experimental use applications to grow experimental field trials of pharma crops in the US, a number of organizations, including Consumers Union, the Center for Food Safety and Friends of the Earth-USA, provided authorities with comprehensive reports, referencing the scientific literature, in which they described in detail the possible adverse health effects of Ventria’s recombinant Lactoferrin and Lysozyme. (1) They pointed out that the recombinant proteins are not identical to their natural counterparts, which means they could provoke immune system disorders or allergic reactions. The increased levels of Lactoferrin and Lysozyme could also favor the growth of pathogens, like the Helicobacter pyloris bacteria, which can cause gastritis and stomach cancer, the bacteria that cause meningitis, and others that cause illnesses that are difficult to treat because of antibiotic resistance.

Obviously Ventria knew about these reports when they decided to go ahead and place Third World children and infants at risk in experimental drug trials. If the Peruvian institutes also knew about these reports, then their complicity is criminal. If they didn’t carry out due diligence concerning risks, then their negligence is of the same order.

*This article is an English translation from the Spanish, which appeared in La Jornada (Mexico City) on July 1, 2006. Translated by Peter Rosset.

(1) Consumers Union’s Comments on USDA Animal Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) Environmental Assessment for Field Test of Permit of Ventria Bioscience rice genetically engineered to express human lactoferrin, USDA/APHIS Docket No. 05-006-1, http://www.consumersunion.org/pub/2005/03/002090print.html

Freese, Bill; Hansen, Michael and Gurian-Sherman, Doug. “Pharmaceutical Rice in California”, July 2004, http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/pubs/CARiceReport7.2004.pdf

Bill Freese at the Center for Food Safety has written an excellent summary on this issue. The briefing paper “An Assessment of Genetically Engineered Pharmaceutical Rice and Its Potential Use in Oral Rehydration Solutions to Treat Severe Diarrhea” will soon be available at www.centerforfoodsafety.org

Rusty Pugh

OneNewsNow.com . March 5, 2007

A federal appeals court ruling has cleared the way for pro-life demonstrators in Ohio to sue police officers who illegally detained them during a protest.

Hear This Report

In June 2002, members of the pro-life group Center for Bioi-Ethical Reform were detained for hours by police in Springboro, Ohio, near Dayton. The trucks in which the group was traveling displayed pictures of aborted babies on the sides. According to executive director Mark Harrington, the group was within its legal rights to conduct the peaceful demonstration, yet members of the local police force detained them because, according to Harrington, the authorities did not like the pictures on the trucks.

The Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the detention was illegal, and now the police officers can be held liable. Harrington contends the incident, during which the pro-lifers were held for almost three hours, constituted harassment.

“[T]he fact that we were discriminated against because of our pro-life views [is demonstrative of that],” he says. Harrington recalls that many of the police officers discussed the pictures on the trucks and “how awful they were and how children shouldn’t see them and that we ought to find another method, and so forth.” The pro-life leaders is convinced the officers’ feelings about the group’s pro-life speech “had a lot to do with … why we were detained for so long.”

Harrington says the Thomas More Law Center has taken up the case, and legal action against the officers should be moving forward.

DaveyD

San Jose Mercury News . March 5, 2007

Hip-hop icon Nas made the provocative statement, “Hip- hop is dead,” in September and set off a firestorm of controversy. It was intensified by the January release of his album bearing the same title.

Many questioned why Nas would say hip-hop — a worldwide phenomenon that has generated billions of dollars — could be “dead.” After all, more hip-hop albums are being released then ever before, and the music’s influence extends to movies, corporate marketing and theater. That it’s dead seems absurd — until you realize Nas was looking beneath the surface.

He was speaking of the corporate side of the music and the mentality of executives more interested in turning a quick buck than nurturing rap culture. Nas realized sex, violence and bling, as themes for the music, had pretty much run their course. Album sales had plummeted, and ratings at hip-hop radio stations in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere had hit all-time lows.

A number of people, including this writer, also had spoken out about mediocre product coming from some of the genre’s biggest stars. Yet such talk was rebuffed by so-called industry experts, who blamed digital downloading and satellite radio.

We critics, however, were vindicated by a study published earlier this year by the University of Chicago. Data from the “Black Youth Project” indicated that while 58 percent of blacks between ages 15 and 25 listen to hip-hop daily, most are dissatisfied with it.

They find the subject matter is too violent, and women too often portrayed in offensive ways.

Such feelings hint at a dirty little secret of the music business: Blacks are used largely to validate musical themes being marketed to the white mainstream.

In other words, while 90 percent of commercial rap artists on TV and radio are black, the target audience lies outside the black community.

Paul Porter, a longtime industry veteran and former music programmer at BET and Radio One, is now with the watchdog organization Industryears.com. He says the University of Chicago findings offer proof positive that commercial hip-hop has become the ultimate minstrel show, and rap artists are pushed by the industry to remain perpetual adolescents.

As a result, we watch Diddy, Cam’ron, DMX and others brag about wealth and throw bills at a camera while bikini-clad women gyrate in the background. Should these artists attempt to break out of the mold, they’d risk having their work questioned by record and radio executives.

In our conversation, Porter also pointed to something more sinister: payola. He claimed hip-hop is dead only because payola is rampant at labels intent on investing in songs with sexual and violent themes.

During a separate conversation, Questlove of the Roots supported Porter’s allegation with his own story about the process behind the group’s Grammy-winning hit with Erykah Badu, “You Got Me.” He said the Roots had to pony up close to “a million dollars” to a middle man who “worked his magic” at radio stations.

Initially, the overtly positive song had been rejected, he explained, so palms were greased with the promise that key stations countrywide would get hot “summer jam” concert acts in exchange for airplay. According to Questlove, more than $1 million in cash and resources were eventually laid out for the success of that single song.

In the documentary “Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes,”

shown recently on the PBS series “Independent Lens,”

filmmaker Byron Hurt confronts Stephen Hill, BET’s senior vice president for programming, to ask why the cable network plays so many videos with misogynist and otherwise degrading themes. The fortysomething Hill walks away without answering. This is the same executive who refused to broadcast videos by the group Little Brother, because he considered their material “too intelligent” for the BET audience.

With thinking like that, no wonder commercial hip-hop appears dead. It’s the ideas of the gatekeepers that are dead.

____

DaveyD writes a bi-weekly column for the MercuryNews.

Rick Weiss

Washington Post . March 5, 2007

The Agriculture Department has given a preliminary green light for the first commercial production of a food crop engineered to contain human genes, reigniting fears that biomedically potent substances in high-tech plants could escape and turn up in other foods.

The plan, confirmed yesterday by the California biotechnology company leading the effort, calls for large-scale cultivation in Kansas of rice that produces human immune system proteins in its seeds.

The proteins are to be extracted for use as an anti-diarrhea medicine and might be added to health foods such as yogurt and granola bars.

“We can really help children with diarrhea get better faster. That is the idea,” said Scott E. Deeter, president and chief executive of Sacramento-based Ventria Bioscience, emphasizing that a host of protections should keep the engineered plants and their seeds from escaping into surrounding fields.

But critics are assailing the effort, saying gene-altered plants inevitably migrate out of their home plots. In this case, they said, that could result in pharmacologically active proteins showing up in the food of unsuspecting consumers.

Although the proteins are not inherently dangerous, there would be little control over the doses people might get exposed to, and some might be allergic to the proteins, said Jane Rissler of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a science policy advocacy group.

“This is not a product that everyone would want to consume,” Rissler said, adding that other companies grow such plants indoors or in vats. “It is unwise to produce drugs in plants outdoors.”

Consumer advocacy groups, including Consumers Union and the Washington-based Center for Food Safety, have also opposed Ventria’s plans. “We definitely have big concerns,” said Joseph Mendelson, the center’s legal director.

Ventria has developed three varieties of rice, each endowed with a different human gene that makes the plants produce one of three human proteins. Two of them — lactoferrin and lysozyme — are bacteria-fighting compounds found in breast milk and saliva.

A recent company-sponsored study done in Peru concluded that children with severe diarrhea recovered a day and a half faster if the salty fluids they were prescribed were spiked with the proteins.

Deeter said production in plants is far cheaper than other methods, which should help make the therapy affordable in the developing world, where severe diarrhea kills 2 million children each year.

“Plants are phenomenal factories,” Deeter said. “Our raw materials are the sun, soil and water.”

The company is also talking to the Food and Drug Administration about putting the proteins into health foods. Its third variety of rice makes serum albumin, a blood protein used in medical therapies.

Until now, plants with human genes have been restricted to small test plots. In October, Ventria sought permission to grow its rice commercially on as many as 3,200 acres in Geary County, Kan., starting with 450 acres this spring.

A previous plan to grow the rice in southern Missouri was dropped when beermaker Anheuser-Busch — the nation’s largest rice buyer, which has expressed concern about the safety and consumer acceptance of gene-altered rice — threatened to stop buying rice from the state if the deal went through.

Because no other rice is grown in Kansas and because rice can only grow in flooded areas, the risk of escape or cross-fertilization with other rice plants is nil there, Deeter said. The company will mill virtually all the seeds on site — using dedicated equipment — to minimize the risk of seeds getting mistakenly released or sold.

On Wednesday, the Agriculture Department published its draft environmental assessment, which concluded that the project posed no undue risks. The public can comment until March 30.

Also on Wednesday, the agency revealed that a type of rice seed in Arkansas had become contaminated with a different variety of genetically engineered rice, LL62, that was never released for marketing. The error was discovered in the course of an ongoing investigation into the widespread contamination of U.S. rice by yet another gene-altered variety, LL601, which has seriously disrupted rice exports.

Those problems, along with the previous discovery of unapproved, gene-altered StarLink corn in food and the accidental release of crops that had been engineered to make a vaccine for pig diarrhea, undermine the USDA’s credibility, critics said.

“USDA’s record is not good,” Rissler said, pointing to several recent court judgments against the department and a December 2005 inspector general report that savaged the department for its poor oversight of biotechnology. “We don’t think they can enforce even the inadequate system that is in place.”

© 2007 The Washington Post Company