Hamas gunmen were back at major Gaza intersections The Hamas-led government has sent its private militia back into the streets of Gaza, a day after withdrawing the force to help calm an increasingly bloody standoff with forces loyal to Mahmoud Abbas, the president. Hamas officials on Saturday said the move was not meant as a provocation. But Abbas’ Fatah movement said the deployment risked igniting new violence. The 3,000-strong Hamas militia has been at the centre of the Palestinian infighting. Hamas’ decision to withdraw the black-clad force on Friday, which was banned by Abbas, was widely seen as a conciliatory gesture. Youssef Zahar, spokesman for the militia, said Saturday’s deployment did not contradict the previous day’s decision. At the time, Hamas said the force would remain on standby at fixed locations and resume limited patrols in the future. ‘The police stations are closed to us, so we’re making use of some streets,’ Zahar said. The Gaza Strip has been plagued by armed chaos and lawlessness since the Israeli army cracked down and destroyed much of the Palestinians security infrastructures in retaliation for the Palestinian uprising Israel did withdraw from the Gaza […]
A new vaccine that could put the pox on shingles for many adult sufferers of the often painful infection caused by the chickenpox virus has received federal approval, its manufacturer said Friday. Merck & Co. Inc. spokeswoman Christine Fanelle said the vaccine, Zostavax, was approved late Thursday by the Food and Drug Administration. The vaccine is only for adults who previously have had chickenpox. Shingles, also called herpes zoster, strikes when the chickenpox virus reactivates and resumes reproducing after lying dormant for decades in nerve cells in the body. There are roughly 1 million new U.S. cases of shingles each year. It typically affects the elderly, though anyone with a weakened immune system is vulnerable. Shingles can cause itching, burning and tingling, as well as a distinctive red rash that develops into pus-filled blisters that later break open and form scabs. Pain, too, is common and can persist in some patients for months or years. Merck research showed the vaccine reduced the incidence of shingles by half and pain and discomfort by nearly two-thirds. The vaccine’s long-term effectiveness remains unclear. Merck has shown that it works for at least four years, and plans to […]
WASHINGTON — Twenty-five years after the first AIDS cases emerged, scientists have confirmed that the HIV virus plaguing humans really did originate in wild chimpanzees, in a corner of Cameroon. Solving the mystery of HIV’s ancestry was dirty work. Scientists employed trackers to plunge through dense jungle and collect the fresh feces of wild apes – more than 1,300 samples in all. Before that, it took seven years of research just to develop the testing methods to genetically trace the primate version of the virus in living wild chimps without hurting the endangered species. Until now, ‘no one was able to look. No one had the tools,’ said Dr. Beatrice Hahn of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She led the team of international researchers that reported the success in Friday’s edition of the journal Science. ‘We’re 25 years into this pandemic,’ Hahn said. ‘We don’t have a cure. We don’t have a vaccine. But we know where it came from. At least we can make a check mark on one of those.’ Scientists long have known that nonhuman primates carry their own version of the AIDS virus, called SIV or simian immunodeficiency virus. But […]
New materials that can change the way light and other forms of radiation bend around an object may provide a way to make objects invisible, researchers say. Two separate teams of researchers have come up with theories on ways to use experimental ‘metamaterials’ to cloak an object and hide it from visible light, infrared light, microwaves and perhaps even sonar probes. Their work suggests that science-fiction portrayals of invisibility, such as the cloaking devices used to hide space ships in Star Trek, might be truly possible. Harry Potter’s cloak or the Invisible Man of films and fiction might be a bit harder to emulate, however, because the materials must be used in a thick shell. The concept begins with refraction–a quality of light in which the electromagnetic waves take the quickest, but not necessarily the shortest, route. This accounts for the illusion that a pencil immersed in a glass of water appears broken, for instance. ‘Imagine a situation where a medium guides light around a hole in it,’ Physicist Ulf Leonhardt of Britain’s University of St. Andrews, wrote in one of the reports, published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science. The light rays […]
WASHINGTON — Deserts in the American Southwest and around the globe are creeping toward heavily populated areas as the jet streams shift, researchers reported Thursday. The result: Areas already stressed by drought may get even drier. Satellite measurements made from 1979 to 2005 show that the atmosphere in the subtropical regions both north and south of the equator is heating up. As the atmosphere warms, it bulges out at the altitudes where the northern and southern jet streams slip past like swift and massive rivers of air. That bulging has pushed both jet streams about 70 miles closer to the Earth’s poles. Since the jet streams mark the edge of the tropics, in essence framing the hot zone that hugs the equator, their outward movement has allowed the tropics to grow wider by about 140 miles. That means the relatively drier subtropics move as well, pushing closer to places like Salt Lake City, where Thomas Reichler, co-author of the new study, teaches meteorology. ‘One of the immediate consequences one can think of is those deserts and dry areas are moving poleward,’ said Reichler, of the University of Utah. Details appear in Thursday’s Science Express, the online […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
