WASHINGTON (AP) — Terrorists "found a second chance" to thrive in Iraq, the nation's prime minister said Thursday in asking for new U.S. aid to beat back a bloody insurgency that has been fueled by the neighboring Syrian civil war and the departure of American troops from Iraq two years ago.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told a packed auditorium at the U.S. Institute of Peace that he needs additional weapons, help with intelligence and other assistance, and claimed the world has a responsibility to help because terrorism is an international concern.
"If the situation in Iraq is not well treated, it will be disastrous for the whole world," said al-Maliki, whose comments were translated from Arabic. "Terrorism does not know a single religion, or confession, or a single border. They carry their rotten ideas everywhere. They carry bad ideas instead of flowers. Al-Qaida is a dirty wind that wants to spread worldwide."
The new request comes nearly two years after al-Maliki's government refused to let U.S. forces remain in Iraq with legal immunity that the Obama administration insisted was necessary to protect troops. President Barack Obama had campaigned on ending the nearly nine-year war in Iraq and took the opportunity offered by the legal dispute to pull all troops out.
Nearly 4,500 U.S. troops were killed in Iraq between the 2003 invasion and the 2011 withdrawal. More than 100,000 Iraqi were killed in that time.
Al-Maliki will meet Friday with Obama in what Baghdad hopes will be a fresh start in a complicated relationship that has been marked both by victories and frustrations for each side.
Within months of the U.S. troops' departure, violence began creeping up in the capital and across the country as Sunni Muslim insurgents lashed out, angered by a widespread belief that Sunnis have been sidelined by the Shiite-led government. The State Department says at least 6,000 Iraqis have been killed in attacks so far this year, and suicide bombers launched 38 strikes in the last month alone.
"So the terrorists found a second chance," al-Maliki said — a turnabout from an insurgency that was mostly silenced by the time the U.S. troops left.
Al-Maliki largely blamed the Syrian civil war for the rise in Iraq's violence, although he acknowledged that homegrown insurgents are to blame for the vast number of car bombs, suicide bombings and drive-by shootings that have roiled Baghdad and the rest of the nation.
The prime minister warned about the consequences of a political power grab by al-Qaida fighters who are aligned with the Sunni rebellion that is seeking to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad. But al-Maliki insisted Iraq is remaining neutral in the Syrian unrest, although Baghdad has been accused of allowing Iranian aid to Assad's forces through its country. The Syrian civil war largely breaks down along sectarian lines.
Sectarian tensions also have been rising in Iraq, but al-Maliki vehemently denied they are the cause for the spread of violence and noted that Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds all have been killed by insurgent attacks.
"There is no problem between Sunnis and Shiites," al-Maliki said flatly. He added: "Al-Qaida believes they should kill all those who do not think alike."
Al-Maliki said he will ask Obama for new assistance to bolster Iraq's military and fight al-Qaida. That could include speeding up the delivery of U.S. aircraft, missiles, interceptors and other weapons, and improving national intelligence systems. Separately, Iraq's ambassador to the U.S. also did not rule out the possibility of asking the U.S. to send military special forces or additional CIA advisers to Iraq to help train and assist counterterror troops.
Shortly after al-Maliki's speech, White House spokesman Jay Carney called continued U.S. aid to Iraq "necessary" and said "denying that assistance would be contrary to our interests."
Obama is expected to raise concerns about Iraq's violence — and ways to reduce it — in his Friday meeting with al-Maliki, Carney said. "And inclusive democratic governance is a key piece of the picture there and always has been," he said.
"What's important to remember, though, is that the violence we're talking about, the attacks we're talking about, are not coming from within the political system," Carney said. 'They're coming from al-Qaida and its affiliates."
Administration officials consider the insurgency, which has rebranded itself as the Islamic State of Iraq in the Levant, a major and increasing threat both to Iraq and the U.S.
Al-Maliki has been accused for years of a heavy-handed leadership that refuses to compromise and, to some, oversteps his authority against political enemies. "I never stepped on the Constitution," he responded Thursday to a question about his government, and defended Iraq's warming relationship with Iran's Shiite clerical regime as necessary for a government looking to work amicably with its neighbors.
He sidestepped a question about whether he will seek another term as prime minister in national elections scheduled for April 2014, calling it a decision best left to the Iraqi people.
Anthony Cordesman, a longtime Iraq scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the U.S. must convince al-Maliki to move toward a more inclusive government to stabilize Iraq and the rest of the region.
"We have to be careful to set clear lines, and not arm Maliki against the growing mass of legitimate Sunni opposition and the much smaller mix of violent Sunni Islamist extremists," Cordesman wrote in an analysis released Thursday. "But, we need to try."
___
Follow Lara Jakes on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/larajakesAP
Contact: Carol Thorbes cthorbes@sfu.ca 778-782-3035 Simon Fraser University
Simon Fraser University molecular biologist Lynne Quarmby's adventures in pond scum have led her and four student researchers to discover a mutation that can make cilia, the microscopic antennae on our cells, grow too long. When the antennae aren't the right size, the signals captured by them get misinterpreted. The result can be fatal.
In a newly published paper in the science journal Current Biology, the researchers discovered that the regulatory gene CNK2 is present in cilia and controls the length of these hair-like projections.
This discovery is important because cilia, or flagella, dangle from all of our cells. Their ability to propel some cells, such as sperm, and allow molecular communication in others, for example cellular responses to hormones, determines how we develop from embryos and how our bodies function in adulthood.
When cilia are too short or too long they cause various human hereditary diseases and deformities, such as too many fingers or toes, blindness and Polycystic Kidney Disease, which affects one in 600 people.
Quarmby and her doctoral student Laura Hiltonsenior and lead authors, respectively, on this paperare among the few scientists globally who study cilia-disassembly as opposed to -assembly.
A crucial part of all cells' lifecycle is their cilia's disassembly before cell division and assembly after it. The gene LF4 is a known assembly regulator, and, prior to this study, scientists thought that assembly speed controlled cilia's ultimate length or shrinkage. But Quarmby and Hilton have discovered that disassembly speed is also important, and that the regulatory gene CNK2 plays a key role in controlling it.
Similar to how a balance between water pressure and gravity determines the height of a fountain's stream, a balance of assembly and disassembly speed determines cilia's length. When growing and shrinking happen simultaneously cilia length remains constant.
Pond scum's algae make good lab models for analyzing this because they reproduce quickly, and they have cellular structure and cilia that closely parallel ours. Quarmby and Hilton have been mucking about with pond scum for years and recently started studying algae cilia with defective CNK2 and LF4 genes.
After discovering that cilia with either defective gene are abnormally long, they created an algae cell with four cilia, instead of the normal two, with two of the four engineered to glow green.
Along with two SFU undergrad students and a University of Toronto undergrad, Quarmby and Hilton watched as the fluorescent green tag began to appear at the tip of the untagged pair of cilia.
"We were able to deduce how the mutations affected the cilia's assembly and disassembly by measuring how much and how quickly green fluorescence appeared at the tip of the untagged cilia," explains Quarmby.
"We knew that we had something important when we saw that cells bearing mutations in both CNK2 and LF4 had the most extraordinarily long cilia. They were unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.
"My student Laura ran this experiment and oversaw our undergrad researchers. It gave us unique insights into the potentially key role disassembling cilia have in deciding the tails' length. Further investigation will help us understand how ciliary malfunction causes a progression of diseases."
The SFU undergrads working with Quarmby and Hilton were Kavisha Gunawardane and Marianne Schwarz. The UofT student was Joo Wan (James) Kim.
###
Simon Fraser University is Canada's top-ranked comprehensive university and one of the top 50 universities in the world under 50 years old. With campuses in Vancouver, Burnaby and Surrey, B.C., SFU engages actively with the community in its research and teaching, delivers almost 150 programs to more than 30,000 students, and has more than 120,000 alumni in 130 countries.
Simon Fraser University: Engaging Students. Engaging Research. Engaging Communities.
Simon Fraser University
Public Affairs/Media Relations (PAMR)
778.782.3210 http://www.sfu.ca/pamr
Contact:
Lynne Quarmby (West Van. resident), 778.782.4474, quarmby@sfu.ca
Laura Hilton (North Van. resident), 778.782.4598, lkh@sfu.ca
Carol Thorbes, PAMR, 778.782.3035, cthorbes@sfu.ca
Photos: http://at.sfu.ca/UzEqCZ
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Cellular tail length tells disease tale
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
31-Oct-2013
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Contact: Carol Thorbes cthorbes@sfu.ca 778-782-3035 Simon Fraser University
Simon Fraser University molecular biologist Lynne Quarmby's adventures in pond scum have led her and four student researchers to discover a mutation that can make cilia, the microscopic antennae on our cells, grow too long. When the antennae aren't the right size, the signals captured by them get misinterpreted. The result can be fatal.
In a newly published paper in the science journal Current Biology, the researchers discovered that the regulatory gene CNK2 is present in cilia and controls the length of these hair-like projections.
This discovery is important because cilia, or flagella, dangle from all of our cells. Their ability to propel some cells, such as sperm, and allow molecular communication in others, for example cellular responses to hormones, determines how we develop from embryos and how our bodies function in adulthood.
When cilia are too short or too long they cause various human hereditary diseases and deformities, such as too many fingers or toes, blindness and Polycystic Kidney Disease, which affects one in 600 people.
Quarmby and her doctoral student Laura Hiltonsenior and lead authors, respectively, on this paperare among the few scientists globally who study cilia-disassembly as opposed to -assembly.
A crucial part of all cells' lifecycle is their cilia's disassembly before cell division and assembly after it. The gene LF4 is a known assembly regulator, and, prior to this study, scientists thought that assembly speed controlled cilia's ultimate length or shrinkage. But Quarmby and Hilton have discovered that disassembly speed is also important, and that the regulatory gene CNK2 plays a key role in controlling it.
Similar to how a balance between water pressure and gravity determines the height of a fountain's stream, a balance of assembly and disassembly speed determines cilia's length. When growing and shrinking happen simultaneously cilia length remains constant.
Pond scum's algae make good lab models for analyzing this because they reproduce quickly, and they have cellular structure and cilia that closely parallel ours. Quarmby and Hilton have been mucking about with pond scum for years and recently started studying algae cilia with defective CNK2 and LF4 genes.
After discovering that cilia with either defective gene are abnormally long, they created an algae cell with four cilia, instead of the normal two, with two of the four engineered to glow green.
Along with two SFU undergrad students and a University of Toronto undergrad, Quarmby and Hilton watched as the fluorescent green tag began to appear at the tip of the untagged pair of cilia.
"We were able to deduce how the mutations affected the cilia's assembly and disassembly by measuring how much and how quickly green fluorescence appeared at the tip of the untagged cilia," explains Quarmby.
"We knew that we had something important when we saw that cells bearing mutations in both CNK2 and LF4 had the most extraordinarily long cilia. They were unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.
"My student Laura ran this experiment and oversaw our undergrad researchers. It gave us unique insights into the potentially key role disassembling cilia have in deciding the tails' length. Further investigation will help us understand how ciliary malfunction causes a progression of diseases."
The SFU undergrads working with Quarmby and Hilton were Kavisha Gunawardane and Marianne Schwarz. The UofT student was Joo Wan (James) Kim.
###
Simon Fraser University is Canada's top-ranked comprehensive university and one of the top 50 universities in the world under 50 years old. With campuses in Vancouver, Burnaby and Surrey, B.C., SFU engages actively with the community in its research and teaching, delivers almost 150 programs to more than 30,000 students, and has more than 120,000 alumni in 130 countries.
Simon Fraser University: Engaging Students. Engaging Research. Engaging Communities.
Simon Fraser University
Public Affairs/Media Relations (PAMR)
778.782.3210 http://www.sfu.ca/pamr
Contact:
Lynne Quarmby (West Van. resident), 778.782.4474, quarmby@sfu.ca
Laura Hilton (North Van. resident), 778.782.4598, lkh@sfu.ca
Carol Thorbes, PAMR, 778.782.3035, cthorbes@sfu.ca
Photos: http://at.sfu.ca/UzEqCZ
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Sure, it's got a protective Gorilla Glass 3 coating, but there's only one way to really protect that new Nexus 5: cases. If you're breathlessly refreshing the Play store for a shot at ordering Google's new handset, you may want to check out the associated bumper case (available in black, grey, red ...
Nikon's finance department has been forced to revise its quarterly revenue forecast in a southerly direction due to the fact that entry-level DSLRs are selling for lower prices than it originally expected. One of the culprits is likely to be the D3200 shown above, which is currently going on Amazon ...
Racism linked with gun ownership and opposition to gun control in white Americans
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
31-Oct-2013
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Contact: Alison Barbuti alison.barbuti@manchester.ac.uk 44-016-127-58383 University of Manchester
A new study has found that higher levels of racism in white Americans is associated with having a gun in the home and greater opposition to gun control policies.
The research, published in PLoS One, was led by Dr Kerry O'Brien from The University of Manchester and Monash University and used data from a large representative sample of white US voters.
After accounting for numerous other factors such as income, education and political ideology, the researchers found that for each one point increase (on a scale from one to five) in symbolic racism there was a 50 percent increase in the odds of having a gun in the home and a 28 percent increase in support for policies allowing people to carry concealed guns.
Each one point increase in symbolic racism (a modern measure of anti-black racism) was also associated with a 27 percent increase in the odds of opposing bans on hand guns in the home. After accounting for those who already had a gun in the home, the odds were reduced to a non-significant 17 percent increase. However, the authors note that this reduction is unsurprising as opposition to bans on guns equates to self interest on behalf of those who already own a gun and do not wish to give it up. And racism was already strongly associated with having a gun in the home.
The research was stimulated by gun control debates in the US after mass shootings such as the Sandy Hook tragedy, and research showing that with all things being equal black Americans are more likely to be shot than whites. The most recent figures show that there are approximately 38,000 gun related deaths in the US each year. With other research suggesting that having a gun in the home is related to a 2.7 and 4.8 fold increase in the risk of a member of that home dying from homicide or suicide, respectively.
Dr O'Brien said: "Coming from countries with strong gun control policies, and a 30-fold lower rate of gun-related homicides, we found the arguments for opposing gun control counterintuitive and somewhat illogical. For example, US whites oppose gun control to a far greater extent than do blacks, but whites are actually more likely to kill themselves with their guns, than be killed by someone else. Why would you keep them? So we decided to examine what social and psychological factors predict gun ownership and opposition to gun control."
Conservatism, anti-government sentiment, party identification, being from a southern state, were also associated with opposition to gun controls, but the association between racism and the gun-related outcomes remained after accounting for these factors and other participant characteristics (age, education, income, gender).
Symbolic racism supplanted old-fashioned or overt/blatant racism which was associated with open support for race inequality and segregation under 'Jim Crow Laws', but it still captures the anti-black sentiment and traditional values that underpinned blatant racism. Symbolic racism has also been found to be related to stronger opposition to policies that may benefit blacks (e.g. welfare), and greater support for policies that seem to disadvantage blacks (e.g. longer prison sentences).
Study co-author Dr Dermot Lynott, from Lancaster University, said: "We were initially surprised that no one had studied this issue before; however, the US government cut research funding for gun-related research over decade and a half ago, so research in this area has been somewhat suppressed."
Dr O'Brien said: "According to a Pew Research Center report the majority of white Americans support stricter gun control, but the results of our study suggest that those who oppose gun reform tend to have a stronger racial bias, tend to be politically and ideologically conservative and from southern states, and have higher anti-government sentiment."
He added: "The study is a first step, but there needs to be more investment in empirical research around how racial bias may influence people's policy decisions, particularly those policies that impact on the health and wellbeing of US citizens."
###
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Racism linked with gun ownership and opposition to gun control in white Americans
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
31-Oct-2013
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Contact: Alison Barbuti alison.barbuti@manchester.ac.uk 44-016-127-58383 University of Manchester
A new study has found that higher levels of racism in white Americans is associated with having a gun in the home and greater opposition to gun control policies.
The research, published in PLoS One, was led by Dr Kerry O'Brien from The University of Manchester and Monash University and used data from a large representative sample of white US voters.
After accounting for numerous other factors such as income, education and political ideology, the researchers found that for each one point increase (on a scale from one to five) in symbolic racism there was a 50 percent increase in the odds of having a gun in the home and a 28 percent increase in support for policies allowing people to carry concealed guns.
Each one point increase in symbolic racism (a modern measure of anti-black racism) was also associated with a 27 percent increase in the odds of opposing bans on hand guns in the home. After accounting for those who already had a gun in the home, the odds were reduced to a non-significant 17 percent increase. However, the authors note that this reduction is unsurprising as opposition to bans on guns equates to self interest on behalf of those who already own a gun and do not wish to give it up. And racism was already strongly associated with having a gun in the home.
The research was stimulated by gun control debates in the US after mass shootings such as the Sandy Hook tragedy, and research showing that with all things being equal black Americans are more likely to be shot than whites. The most recent figures show that there are approximately 38,000 gun related deaths in the US each year. With other research suggesting that having a gun in the home is related to a 2.7 and 4.8 fold increase in the risk of a member of that home dying from homicide or suicide, respectively.
Dr O'Brien said: "Coming from countries with strong gun control policies, and a 30-fold lower rate of gun-related homicides, we found the arguments for opposing gun control counterintuitive and somewhat illogical. For example, US whites oppose gun control to a far greater extent than do blacks, but whites are actually more likely to kill themselves with their guns, than be killed by someone else. Why would you keep them? So we decided to examine what social and psychological factors predict gun ownership and opposition to gun control."
Conservatism, anti-government sentiment, party identification, being from a southern state, were also associated with opposition to gun controls, but the association between racism and the gun-related outcomes remained after accounting for these factors and other participant characteristics (age, education, income, gender).
Symbolic racism supplanted old-fashioned or overt/blatant racism which was associated with open support for race inequality and segregation under 'Jim Crow Laws', but it still captures the anti-black sentiment and traditional values that underpinned blatant racism. Symbolic racism has also been found to be related to stronger opposition to policies that may benefit blacks (e.g. welfare), and greater support for policies that seem to disadvantage blacks (e.g. longer prison sentences).
Study co-author Dr Dermot Lynott, from Lancaster University, said: "We were initially surprised that no one had studied this issue before; however, the US government cut research funding for gun-related research over decade and a half ago, so research in this area has been somewhat suppressed."
Dr O'Brien said: "According to a Pew Research Center report the majority of white Americans support stricter gun control, but the results of our study suggest that those who oppose gun reform tend to have a stronger racial bias, tend to be politically and ideologically conservative and from southern states, and have higher anti-government sentiment."
He added: "The study is a first step, but there needs to be more investment in empirical research around how racial bias may influence people's policy decisions, particularly those policies that impact on the health and wellbeing of US citizens."
###
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
This Oct. 29, 2013, photo taken in Evanston, Ill., shows an actual child's coffin filled with candy at the McCormick Library of Special Collections. The coffin is one of the artifacts from the “Death Collection” - an archive of death-related oddities once owned by horror novelist and screenwriter Michael McEachern McDowell that were purchased by Northwestern University. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)
This Oct. 29, 2013, photo taken in Evanston, Ill., shows an actual child's coffin filled with candy at the McCormick Library of Special Collections. The coffin is one of the artifacts from the “Death Collection” - an archive of death-related oddities once owned by horror novelist and screenwriter Michael McEachern McDowell that were purchased by Northwestern University. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)
This Oct. 29, 2013, photo taken in Evanston, Ill., shows Scott Krafft, curator of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, holding a daguerreotype of a dead child from the mid-1800s. The daguerreotype is just one of the artifacts from the “Death Collection” - an archive of death-related oddities once owned by horror novelist and screenwriter Michael McEachern McDowell that were purchased by Northwestern University. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)
In this Oct. 29, 2013, photo taken in Evanston, Ill., Scott Krafft, left, curator of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, and manuscript librarian Benn Joseph display a painting of a dead Spanish boy from the 1,600s. The portrait is one of the artifacts from the “Death Collection”- an archive of death-related oddities once owned by horror novelist and screenwriter Michael McEachern McDowell that have been purchased by Northwestern University. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)
This Oct. 29, 2013 photo, shows a copy of a photograph taken at the hanging of the co-conspirators in the Abraham Lincoln assassination in Washington, DC. The image is part of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections display of artifacts from the “Death Collection." The collections is an archive of death-related oddities once owned by horror novelist and screenwriter Michael McEachern McDowell that was purchased by Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)
This Oct. 29, 2013, photo taken in Evanston, Ill., shows sheet music written for funerals of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections. The scores are but a few of the artifacts from the “Death Collection” - an archive of death-related oddities once owned by horror novelist and screenwriter Michael McEachern McDowell that were purchased by Northwestern University. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)
EVANSTON, Ill. (AP) — Acclaimed horror writer Michael McDowell couldn't get enough of death.
He collected photographs of people after their demise, whether from natural causes or after crossing paths with someone with a noose, knife or a gun. He gathered ads for burial gowns and pins containing locks of dead people's hair. He even used a coffin housing a skeleton as his coffee table.
Now Northwestern University, which months ago purchased the "Death Collection" McDowell amassed in three decades before his own death in 1999, is preparing to open the vault.
Researchers studying the history of death, its mourning rituals and businesses that profit from it soon will be able to browse artifacts amassed by an enthusiast author Stephen King once heralded as "a writer for the ages."
McDowell's long career included penning more than two dozen novels, screenplays for King's novel "Thinner" and director Tim Burton's movies "Beetlejuice" and "The Nightmare Before Christmas." He also wrote episodes for such macabre television shows as "Tales from the Darkside" and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents."
"We are very removed from death today, and a lot of this stuff we see in this collection gives us a snapshot in how people have dealt with death generations ago in ways very different from today," said Benn Joseph, a manuscript librarian at the school. "We look at it nowadays and think this is inappropriate or gory ... but when it was done, it was very much acceptable."
Joseph spent months getting the 76-box collection — one containing a child's coffin — ready to be studied. The archive, which officials said ultimately will go on public display, includes at least one artifact dating to the 16th century: a Spanish painting of a dead boy, his eyes closed, wearing a cloak with a ruffled collar.
The school bought the collection from McDowell's partner for an undisclosed price.
McDowell's younger brother, James, said he didn't realize but wasn't surprised by the extent of the collection.
"He always had kind of a gothic horror side to him," James McDowell said in a telephone interview.
There are photographs and postcards from around the world. One, taken in 1899 in Cuba, shows a pile of skulls and bones. In another, a soldier in the Philippines poses with a man's severed head.
There also are reminders of the infamous. Photographs show the people convicted of conspiracy for Abraham Lincoln's assassination being hanged, with dozens of soldiers looking on and the U.S. Capitol looming in the background.
Some pictures are gruesome, including one of a man whose legs are on one side of the train tracks and the rest of him in the middle. But much of the collection is devoted to the deaths of regular Americans and how they were memorialized in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
There are, for example, dozens of photographs that families had made into postcards of their dead children. Dressed in their finest clothes, many appear to be sleeping, absent any hint of the pain some undoubtedly experienced in their last days. Some have their eyes open, serious looks on their faces.
There's one of a small boy, standing up, with his hands resting on a small stack of books. Joseph said it could be a bit of photographic sleight of hand and that the boy may actually be lying down but made to look like he is standing.
"With the advent of photography, regular folks could have access to that sort of thing (and) families either took the kid's body to the studio or they arranged for a visit from the photographer," said Scott Krafft, the library curator who purchased the collection for Northwestern. "And they may have been the only photograph of the child that existed."
The collection also offers a glimpse into what families did after their loved ones died, at a time when they were preparing their homes to display the remains and getting ready to bring them to the cemetery.
After choosing a burial gown — worn in ads by living models — many families then looked for a headstone. Traveling headstone salesmen in the early 20th century often carried around design samples in a box about the size of one that holds chocolates.
Those paying their respects in the 19th and early 20th centuries frequently selected a tribute song for the dead to play inside the family homes, Joseph said. There were some 100 popular pieces of topical sheet music, with such titles as "She Died On Her Wedding Day."
Weirder still, at least by today's standards, is McDowell's collection of what were called "spirit" photographs that include both the living and a ghostly image purportedly of a dead person hovering nearby.
In one photograph, Georgiana Houghton, a prominent 19th century medium, shakes hands with an apparition of her dead sister. She explains the photograph "is the first manifestation of inner spiritual life."
"I'm sure Michael, when he came across this, was totally excited," Krafft said.
While the collection isn't yet on display, members of the public can see one piece when they enter the library reading room where it is housed. That children's coffin that once belonged to McDowell now holds Halloween candy.
This Oct. 29, 2013, photo taken in Evanston, Ill., shows an actual child's coffin filled with candy at the McCormick Library of Special Collections. The coffin is one of the artifacts from the “Death Collection” - an archive of death-related oddities once owned by horror novelist and screenwriter Michael McEachern McDowell that were purchased by Northwestern University. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)
This Oct. 29, 2013, photo taken in Evanston, Ill., shows an actual child's coffin filled with candy at the McCormick Library of Special Collections. The coffin is one of the artifacts from the “Death Collection” - an archive of death-related oddities once owned by horror novelist and screenwriter Michael McEachern McDowell that were purchased by Northwestern University. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)
This Oct. 29, 2013, photo taken in Evanston, Ill., shows Scott Krafft, curator of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, holding a daguerreotype of a dead child from the mid-1800s. The daguerreotype is just one of the artifacts from the “Death Collection” - an archive of death-related oddities once owned by horror novelist and screenwriter Michael McEachern McDowell that were purchased by Northwestern University. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)
In this Oct. 29, 2013, photo taken in Evanston, Ill., Scott Krafft, left, curator of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, and manuscript librarian Benn Joseph display a painting of a dead Spanish boy from the 1,600s. The portrait is one of the artifacts from the “Death Collection”- an archive of death-related oddities once owned by horror novelist and screenwriter Michael McEachern McDowell that have been purchased by Northwestern University. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)
This Oct. 29, 2013 photo, shows a copy of a photograph taken at the hanging of the co-conspirators in the Abraham Lincoln assassination in Washington, DC. The image is part of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections display of artifacts from the “Death Collection." The collections is an archive of death-related oddities once owned by horror novelist and screenwriter Michael McEachern McDowell that was purchased by Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)
This Oct. 29, 2013, photo taken in Evanston, Ill., shows sheet music written for funerals of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections. The scores are but a few of the artifacts from the “Death Collection” - an archive of death-related oddities once owned by horror novelist and screenwriter Michael McEachern McDowell that were purchased by Northwestern University. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)
EVANSTON, Ill. (AP) — Acclaimed horror writer Michael McDowell couldn't get enough of death.
He collected photographs of people after their demise, whether from natural causes or after crossing paths with someone with a noose, knife or a gun. He gathered ads for burial gowns and pins containing locks of dead people's hair. He even used a coffin housing a skeleton as his coffee table.
Now Northwestern University, which months ago purchased the "Death Collection" McDowell amassed in three decades before his own death in 1999, is preparing to open the vault.
Researchers studying the history of death, its mourning rituals and businesses that profit from it soon will be able to browse artifacts amassed by an enthusiast author Stephen King once heralded as "a writer for the ages."
McDowell's long career included penning more than two dozen novels, screenplays for King's novel "Thinner" and director Tim Burton's movies "Beetlejuice" and "The Nightmare Before Christmas." He also wrote episodes for such macabre television shows as "Tales from the Darkside" and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents."
"We are very removed from death today, and a lot of this stuff we see in this collection gives us a snapshot in how people have dealt with death generations ago in ways very different from today," said Benn Joseph, a manuscript librarian at the school. "We look at it nowadays and think this is inappropriate or gory ... but when it was done, it was very much acceptable."
Joseph spent months getting the 76-box collection — one containing a child's coffin — ready to be studied. The archive, which officials said ultimately will go on public display, includes at least one artifact dating to the 16th century: a Spanish painting of a dead boy, his eyes closed, wearing a cloak with a ruffled collar.
The school bought the collection from McDowell's partner for an undisclosed price.
McDowell's younger brother, James, said he didn't realize but wasn't surprised by the extent of the collection.
"He always had kind of a gothic horror side to him," James McDowell said in a telephone interview.
There are photographs and postcards from around the world. One, taken in 1899 in Cuba, shows a pile of skulls and bones. In another, a soldier in the Philippines poses with a man's severed head.
There also are reminders of the infamous. Photographs show the people convicted of conspiracy for Abraham Lincoln's assassination being hanged, with dozens of soldiers looking on and the U.S. Capitol looming in the background.
Some pictures are gruesome, including one of a man whose legs are on one side of the train tracks and the rest of him in the middle. But much of the collection is devoted to the deaths of regular Americans and how they were memorialized in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
There are, for example, dozens of photographs that families had made into postcards of their dead children. Dressed in their finest clothes, many appear to be sleeping, absent any hint of the pain some undoubtedly experienced in their last days. Some have their eyes open, serious looks on their faces.
There's one of a small boy, standing up, with his hands resting on a small stack of books. Joseph said it could be a bit of photographic sleight of hand and that the boy may actually be lying down but made to look like he is standing.
"With the advent of photography, regular folks could have access to that sort of thing (and) families either took the kid's body to the studio or they arranged for a visit from the photographer," said Scott Krafft, the library curator who purchased the collection for Northwestern. "And they may have been the only photograph of the child that existed."
The collection also offers a glimpse into what families did after their loved ones died, at a time when they were preparing their homes to display the remains and getting ready to bring them to the cemetery.
After choosing a burial gown — worn in ads by living models — many families then looked for a headstone. Traveling headstone salesmen in the early 20th century often carried around design samples in a box about the size of one that holds chocolates.
Those paying their respects in the 19th and early 20th centuries frequently selected a tribute song for the dead to play inside the family homes, Joseph said. There were some 100 popular pieces of topical sheet music, with such titles as "She Died On Her Wedding Day."
Weirder still, at least by today's standards, is McDowell's collection of what were called "spirit" photographs that include both the living and a ghostly image purportedly of a dead person hovering nearby.
In one photograph, Georgiana Houghton, a prominent 19th century medium, shakes hands with an apparition of her dead sister. She explains the photograph "is the first manifestation of inner spiritual life."
"I'm sure Michael, when he came across this, was totally excited," Krafft said.
While the collection isn't yet on display, members of the public can see one piece when they enter the library reading room where it is housed. That children's coffin that once belonged to McDowell now holds Halloween candy.
PARIS (AP) — France's presidential chef is retiring after four decades of culinary service, having fed five French presidents and peppered the steaks tartare of some of the world's most powerful leaders.
Bernard Vaussion, 60, was filled with emotion while cooking his last lunch for the President Francois Hollande on Thursday at the Elysee Palace. The farewell meal included raspberry millefeuille, a rich pastry. Hollande has a well-known sweet tooth and has been mocked for his portly figure.
"It's easy to work with Francois Hollande. There are not many things that he doesn't like. He's somebody who loves eating," said Vaussion.
He said that over the years the most important skill for the job — besides cooking — was the ability to adapt to the tastes of each French leader.
Francois Mitterrand loved seafood. Jacques Chirac preferred snails and sauerkraut. More recently, Nicolas Sarkozy caused a stink by rejecting French gastronomy and asked Vaussion to serve him a healthier menu based on fish, vegetables and salad. Sarkozy also drinks no wine — a revelation that initially caused controversy and offended Gallic pride.
France is one country where food and drink get political.
Sarkozy also said "non" to cheese and only allowed it on the menu during visits to Paris from a well-known cheese fan, German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Vaussion noted that Hollande, Sarkozy's successor, was his polar opposite in food as well as in politics.
Hollande is a hearty eater who enjoys gastronomy as an art of living. Cheese is, of course, back on the table, which may be one reason Hollande has visibly gained weight since his May 2012 election.
But the leadership is not the only cause of change.
France's economic crisis has taken its toll on the Palace menu, as the kitchen tries to cut expenses.
"Some luxury foods have disappeared from the menu, such as truffles and lobster," said Vaussion.
But the Elysee kitchen remains a place of note.
Underground and the size of two tennis courts, the famed kitchen is home to hundreds of copper pots that hark back to the time of 19th-century King Louis Philippe, France's last monarch. They're still in use.
As Vaussion retires, he will take with him insider information about the tastes of the famous. An example? Queen Elizabeth II loves foie gras.
In geopolitics, just as on the playground, even best friends don't tell each other everything. And everybody's dying to know what the other guy knows.
Revelations that the U.S. has been monitoring the cellphone calls of up to 35 world leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, have brought into high relief the open-yet-often-unspoken secret that even close allies keep things from one another — and work every angle to find out what's being held back.
So it is that the Israelis recruited American naval analyst Jonathan Pollard to pass along U.S. secrets including satellite photos and data on Soviet weaponry in the 1980s. And the British were accused of spying on U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in the lead-up to the Iraq War. And the French, Germans, Japanese, Israelis and South Koreans have been accused of engaging in economic espionage against the United States.
But now the technology revealed by former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden has underscored the incredible new-millennium reach of the U.S. spy agency. And it is raising the question for some allies: Is this still OK?
National Intelligence Director James Clapper, for his part, testified this week that it is a "basic tenet" of the intelligence business to find out whether the public statements of world leaders jibe with what's being said behind closed doors.
What might the Americans have wanted to know from Merkel's private conversations, for example? Ripe topics could well include her thinking on European economic strategy and Germany's plans for talks with world powers about Iran's nuclear program.
There is both motive and opportunity driving the trust-but-verify dynamic in friend-on-friend espionage: Allies often have diverging interests, and the explosion of digital and wireless communication keeps creating new avenues for spying on one another. Further, shifting alliances mean that today's good friends may be on the outs sometime soon.
"It was not all that many years ago when we were bombing German citizens and dropping the atomic bomb on the Japanese," says Peter Earnest, a 35-year veteran of the CIA and now executive director of the International Spy Museum in Washington.
News that the U.S. has tapped foreign leaders' phones was an eye-opener to many — the White House claims that even President Barack Obama wasn't aware of the extent of the surveillance — and has prompted loud complaints from German, French and Spanish officials, among others.
It's all possible because "an explosion in different kinds of digital information tools makes it possible for intelligence agencies to vacuum up a vast quantity of data," says Charles Kupchan, a former Clinton administration official and now a senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations. "When you add together the Internet, wireless communications, cellphones, satellites, drones and human intelligence, you have many, many sources of acquiring intelligence."
"The magnitude of the eavesdropping is what shocked us," former French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said in a radio interview. "Let's be honest, we eavesdrop, too. Everyone is listening to everyone else. But we don't have the same means as the United States, which makes us jealous."
Protests aside, diplomats the world around know the gist of the game.
"I am persuaded that everyone knew everything or suspected everything," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said of the reports of U.S. monitoring.
And while prime ministers and lawmakers across Europe and Asia say they are outraged, Clapper told Congress that other countries' own spy agencies helped the NSA collect data on millions of phone calls as part of cooperative counterterror agreements.
Robert Eatinger, the CIA's senior deputy general counsel, told an American Bar Association conference on Thursday that European spy services have stayed quiet throughout the recent controversy because they also spy on the U.S.
"The services have an understanding," Eatinger said. "That's why there wasn't the hue and cry from them."
And another intelligence counsel says the White House can reasonably deny it knows everything about the U.S. spying that's going on.
"We don't reveal to the president or the intelligence committees all of the human sources we are recruiting. ... They understand what the programs are, and the president and chairs of the intelligence committees both knew we were seeking information about leadership intentions," said Robert Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. "They both saw reporting indicating what we were getting if not indicating the source."
Still, Claude Moraes, a British Labor Party politician and member of the European Union delegation that traveled to Washington this week for talks about U.S. surveillance, was troubled by the broad net being cast by U.S. intelligence.
"Friend-upon-friend spying is not something that is easily tolerable if it doesn't have a clear purpose," he said. "There needs to be some kind of justification. ... There is also a question of proportionality and scale."
Obama has promised a review of U.S. intelligence efforts in other countries, an idea that has attracted bipartisan support in Congress.
The United States already has a written intelligence-sharing agreement with Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand known as "Five Eyes," and France and Germany might be interested in a similar arrangement.
Paul Pillar, a professor at Georgetown University and former CIA official, worries that a backlash "runs the risk of restrictions leaving the United States more blind than it otherwise would have been" to overseas developments.
The effort to strike the right balance between surveillance and privacy is hardly new.
University of Notre Dame political science professor Michael Desch, an expert on international security and American foreign and defense policies, says the ambivalence is epitomized by Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson's famous line, "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail." Stimson, who served under President Herbert Hoover, shut down the State Department's cryptanalytic office in 1929.
"Leaks about NSA surveillance of even friendly countries such as Brazil, Mexico, and now France make clear that we no longer share Stimson's reticence on this score," Desch said. "While such revelations are a public relations embarrassment, they also reflect the reality that in this day in age, gentlemen do read each other's mail all of the time, even when they are allies."
In fact, a database maintained by the Defense Personnel Security Research Center covering Americans who committed espionage against the U.S. includes activity on behalf of a wide swath of neutral or allied countries since the late 1940s. U.S. citizens have been arrested for conducting espionage on behalf of South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Israel, the Netherlands, Greece, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Ghana, Liberia, South Africa, El Salvador and Ecuador, according to the database.
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Associated Press Writers Deb Riechmann and Kimberly Dozier contributed to this report.
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Follow Nancy Benac on Twitter at http://twitter.com/nbenac
Forensic experts, members of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), and Bosnian workers search for human remains at a mass grave in the village of Tomasica, near the Bosnian town of Prijedor, 260 kms north west of Sarajevo, on Thursday, Oct. 31, 2013. Forensic experts have unearthed the 360 body remains so far , but believe there are many more yet undiscovered as they excavate a 7 meters deep trench to find the remains of Bosniaks and Croats killed by Serb forces during their campaign to eliminate all non-Serbs from parts of the country they controlled during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Authorities are still searching for 1,200 Bosniaks and Croats missing from the area of Prijedor. (AP Photo/Amel Emric)
Forensic experts, members of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), and Bosnian workers search for human remains at a mass grave in the village of Tomasica, near the Bosnian town of Prijedor, 260 kms north west of Sarajevo, on Thursday, Oct. 31, 2013. Forensic experts have unearthed the 360 body remains so far , but believe there are many more yet undiscovered as they excavate a 7 meters deep trench to find the remains of Bosniaks and Croats killed by Serb forces during their campaign to eliminate all non-Serbs from parts of the country they controlled during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Authorities are still searching for 1,200 Bosniaks and Croats missing from the area of Prijedor. (AP Photo/Amel Emric)
Bosnain Muslim woman Vahida Behlic, 51, cries as she searches for the remains of her mother during an exhumation at a mass grave in the village of Tomasica, near the Bosnian town of Prijedor, 260 kms north west of Sarajevo, on Thursday, Oct. 31, 2013. Forensic experts have unearthed the 360 body remains so far , but believe there are many more yet undiscovered as they excavate a 7 meters deep trench to find the remains of Bosniaks and Croats killed by Serb forces during their campaign to eliminate all non-Serbs from parts of the country they controlled during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Authorities are still searching for 1,200 Bosniaks and Croats missing from the area of Prijedor. (AP Photo/Amel Emric)
Forensic experts, members of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), and Bosnian workers search for human remains at a mass grave in the village of Tomasica, near the Bosnian town of Prijedor, 260 kms north west of Sarajevo, on Thursday, Oct. 31, 2013. Forensic experts have unearthed the 360 body remains so far , but believe there are many more yet undiscovered as they excavate a 7 meters deep trench to find the remains of Bosniaks and Croats killed by Serb forces during their campaign to eliminate all non-Serbs from parts of the country they controlled during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Authorities are still searching for 1,200 Bosniaks and Croats missing from the area of Prijedor. (AP Photo/Amel Emric)
Forensic experts, members of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), and Bosnian workers examine human remains at a mass grave in the village of Tomasica, near the Bosnian town of Prijedor, 260 kms north west of Sarajevo, on Thursday, Oct. 31, 2013. Forensic experts have unearthed the 360 body remains so far , but believe there are many more yet undiscovered as they excavate a 7 meters deep trench to find the remains of Bosniaks and Croats killed by Serb forces during their campaign to eliminate all non-Serbs from parts of the country they controlled during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Authorities are still searching for 1,200 Bosniaks and Croats missing from the area of Prijedor. (AP Photo/Amel Emric)
Forensic experts, members of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), and Bosnian workers search for human remains at a mass grave in the village of Tomasica, near the Bosnian town of Prijedor, 260 kms north west of Sarajevo, on Thursday, Oct. 31, 2013. Forensic experts have unearthed the 360 body remains so far, but believe there are many more yet undiscovered as they excavate a 7 meters deep trench to find the remains of Bosniaks and Croats killed by Serb forces during their campaign to eliminate all non-Serbs from parts of the country they controlled during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Authorities are still searching for 1,200 Bosniaks and Croats missing from the area of Prijedor. (AP Photo/Amel Emric)
TOMASICA, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — Two decades after Serb soldiers conducted house-to-house searches in a campaign of ethnic killings in Bosnia, forensic scientists are digging up what could turn out to be the largest mass grave from the 1992-95 war.
So far, the remains of 360 people have been found at the Tomasica mass grave discovered in September near the northern town of Prijedor, far more than expected, authorities said Thursday. The number is expected to rise and could one day surpass the 629 bodies found at Crni Vrh in Srebrenica.
The Missing Persons' Institute said the Tomasica grave is linked to a secondary one found in 2003 about 10 kilometers (six miles) away, where 373 bodies were extracted. Authorities believe the perpetrators of the killings moved parts of the remains from one grave to the other in a bid to hide the crime. In some cases, remains from the same person have been found in both graves.
Institute official Mujo Begic said he expects more remains to be found at the Tomasica site, and the bodies are of Bosniak and Croat men, women and children killed in their villages during the war.
"Together with the relocated ones, the number of the bodies here indicates the biggest mass grave so far found in Bosnia," Begic said. "We have found some identification documents in the grave, so we know who these people are."
The grave covers over 5,000 square meters (53,820 sq. feet) and is 10 meters (about 30 feet) deep.
Tomasica is near Prijedor, which was a site of severe crimes against humanity committed by Christian Orthodox Serbs against Muslim Bosniaks and Catholic Croats. Many of the victims were killed in one of the three Nazi-style concentration camps Serb authorities had set up near Prijedor. Authorities hope some of the 1,200 still missing from the area are now found in the Tomasica grave. The remains will be definitively identified through DNA matching from samples provided by living relatives.
Most of the victims were killed in their villages and brought to this location to be buried, but teams have also found bullets in the grave which indicates that some were brought here alive and that this was also an execution site, prosecutor Eldar Jahic said, citing evidence and witnesses.
Near the grave, Vahida Behlic, 51, was sobbing as she watched forensic experts dressed in white uniforms and green rubber boots carefully lifting bones from the site, where skeletons were piled on top of each other. She came from Slovenia, where she has lived with her family since she escaped her native village of Zecovi, near Prijedor.
Behlic came with her husband and son because she thinks one of the skeletons could be of her mother Fatima who was 60 when Serb soldiers came, dragged her out of the basement and shot her in front of her house.
"I heard the story from a witness who survived because his own grandmother threw herself on him and covered him with her body," she said.
A boy back then, the witness arrived in Slovenia injured but told her what he saw.
"He said 32 people were killed that day. Standing here, I have the feeling they are watching us from down there."
These HIV viruses even look a little like bull's-eyes.
A. Harrison and P. Feorino/CDC
These HIV viruses even look a little like bull's-eyes.
A. Harrison and P. Feorino/CDC
Scientists have a new idea for beating HIV: Target the virus with guided missiles called monoclonal antibodies.
At least in monkeys infected with an experimental virus similar to the human AIDS virus, the approach produced what researchers call "profound therapeutic efficacy."
The results appear Thursday in two papers published by Nature — one from a Boston group, and a confirmatory report from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases.
The virus plummeted to undetectable levels in animals that got potent antibodies of a type recently discovered in some humans with HIV. And the virus remained undetectable for weeks after a single antibody injection.
“ This is a really new wrinkle in a field that needs new wrinkles
- Dr. Francis Collins
Most impressive, several monkeys who started out with low levels of HIV in their blood maintained extremely low levels of the virus in their systems months after a single antibody injection.
The researchers think they may have turned these animals into so-called elite controllers – like the 1 percent of HIV patients who are able to suppress the virus even without antiviral drugs.
The scientists say their results justify experiments in humans with HIV. And the potential implications seem to be large, in at least two ways:
Periodic injections of monoclonal antibodies might be a new kind of treatment for HIV-infected humans, either alone or in combination with conventional antiviral drugs.
Monoclonal antibodies might be incorporated into strategies, now being eagerly pursued by a number of scientists, to cure HIV infection – that is, to clear the virus from patients' cells, allowing them to stop taking antiviral drugs.
"The findings of these two papers could revolutionize efforts to cure HIV," two cure-seekers write in a Naturecommentary. Why? Louis Picker of Oregon Health and Science University and Steven Deeks of the University of California, San Francisco speculate that combining monoclonal antibodies with conventional antiviral drugs might turbocharge the suppression of HIV, stimulate the destruction of reservoirs of HIV-infected cells, and suppress the generalized immune activation that accompanies chronic HIV infection.
"At the very least, these results will catalyse collaborations between the massive teams of experts who have for decades worked on HIV prevention and treatment in separate venues," Picker and Deeks predict.
The findings stem from discoveries over the past year or so that some humans with HIV occasionally make antibodies to the virus that are highly potent. That insight came after years of disappointing efforts to find what researchers call broadly neutralizing antibodies against HIV — or to stimulate their production with experimental vaccines.
Dan Barouch of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and his colleagues generated several types of the newly discovered antibodies in mice. They then injected the antibodies into 18 rhesus monkeys who had been infected ninemonths earlier with a specially concocted virus with features of both HIV (the human AIDS virus) and SIV (the simian, or monkey, version). The hybrid virus, which doesn't appear in nature, is called SHIV.
The antibody injections resulted in rapid clearance of free-floating SHIV from the animals' blood that was sustained for weeks or months, until the antibodies gradually disappeared.
There was also evidence that the antibodies stimulated the monkeys' own immune systems to target and kill the cells infected by SHIV. That needs confirmation, but if it happens that would be important, because long-term control of infection requires the elimination of these hiding places – the cells that harbor viral genes that can give rise to new HIV.
The durability of the antibody treatment varied according to how much SHIV the monkeys had in their system to start with.
The Boston researchers were so surprised by their findings that they didn't publish them until the NIH group replicated them in a smaller study.
Other scientists say the implications of this early immunotherapy study are potentially far-reaching. NIH Director Francis Collins toldThe Wall Street Journal that he could imagine shifting HIV treatment from daily antiviral pills to injections of monoclonal antibodies every three months. "This is a really new wrinkle in a field that needs new wrinkles," Collins says.
In this Jan. 5, 2003, photo released by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service shows a black rhino male and calf in Mkuze, South Africa. The organizer of a Texas hunting club’s planned auction of a permit that will allow a hunter to bag an endangered black rhino in Africa is hoping it raises up to $1 million for rhino preservation. (AP Photo/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Karl Stromayer)
In this Jan. 5, 2003, photo released by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service shows a black rhino male and calf in Mkuze, South Africa. The organizer of a Texas hunting club’s planned auction of a permit that will allow a hunter to bag an endangered black rhino in Africa is hoping it raises up to $1 million for rhino preservation. (AP Photo/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Karl Stromayer)
HOUSTON (AP) — Plans to auction a rare permit that will allow a hunter to take down an endangered black rhino are drawing criticism from some conservationists, but the organizer says the fundraiser could bring in more than $1 million, which will go toward protecting the species.
John J. Jackson III belongs to the Dallas Safari Club, which earlier this month announced it would auction the permit — one of only five offered annually by Namibia, the southwestern African nation. The permit is also the first to be made available for purchase outside of that country.
"This is advanced, state-of-the-art wildlife conservation and management techniques," Jackson, a Metairie, La.-based international wildlife attorney, said Wednesday. "It's not something the layman understands, but they should.
"This is the most sophisticated management strategy devised," he said. "The conservation hunt is a hero in the hunting community."
Some animal preservation groups are bashing the idea.
"More than ridiculous," Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States, said Wednesday.
"At a time when the global community is rallying to protect the elephant and rhino from the onslaught of people with high-powered weapons, this action sends exactly the wrong signal. It's absurd. You're going to help an endangered animal by killing an endangered member of that population?"
An estimated 4,000 black rhinos remain in the wild, down from 70,000 in the 1960s. Nearly 1,800 are in Namibia, according to the safari club.
Poachers long have targeted all species of rhino, primarily for its horn, which is valuable on the international black market. Made of the protein keratin, the chief component in fingernails and hooves, the horn has been used in carvings and for medicinal purposes, mostly in Asia. The near extinction of the species also has been attributed to habitat loss.
The auction is scheduled for the Dallas Safari Club's annual convention in January.
According to Jackson, who said he's been working on the auction project with federal wildlife officials, the hunt will involve one of five black rhinos selected by a committee and approved by the Namibian government. The five are to be older males, incapable of reproducing and likely "troublemakers ... bad guys that are killing other rhinos," he said.
"You end up eliminating that rhino and you actually increase the reproduction of the population."
Jackson said 100 percent of the auction proceeds would go to a trust fund, be held there until the permit is approved and then forwarded to the government of Namibia for the limited purpose of rhino conservation.
"It's going to generate a sum of money large enough to be enormously meaningful in Namibia's fight to ensure the future of its black rhino populations," Ben Carter, the club's executive director, said in a statement.
Jeffrey Flocken, North American regional director of the Massachusetts-based International Fund for Animal Welfare, disagreed, describing the club's argument as "perverse, to say the least."
"And drumming up a bidding frenzy to get to the opportunity to shoot one of the last of a species is just irresponsible," Flocken said. "This is just an attempt to manipulate a horrific situation where rhino poaching is out of control, and fuel excitement around being able to kill an animal whose future existence is already hanging in the balance."
Rick Barongi, director of the Houston Zoo and vice president of the International Rhino Foundation, said the hunt was not illegal but remained a complex idea that "sends a mixed message in a way."
On Tuesday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced it was providing "guidance" to the safari club on whether it would agree to a permit, required under federal law, to allow the winning bidder to bring the trophy rhino to the United States.
"An import permit will be issued if, and only if, we determine that the sport-hunted trophy is taken as part of a well-managed conservation program that enhances the long-term survival of the species," the agency said.
Earlier this year, the service granted such a permit for a sport-hunted black rhino taken in Namibia in 2009.
Pacelle said the Humane Society would work to oppose the permit.
An administrator at the Namibian Embassy in Washington referred questions about the hunt and auction to the government's tourism office in Windhoek, the nation's capital. There was no immediate response to an email Wednesday from The Associated Press.
"The two hot issues here are the fact it's an endangered species, and the second thing is it's a trophy," Barongi, the zoo director, said. "It's one individual that can save hundreds of individuals, and if that's the case, and it's the best option you have ... then you go with your best option.
"Because the alternative is you can lose them all," he said.
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