Scientists: Arafat may have been poisoned
Scientists: Arafat may have been poisoned
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Swiss scientists have found evidence suggesting Yasser Arafat may have been poisoned with a radioactive substance, a TV station reported Wednesday, prompting new allegations by his widow that the Palestinian leader was the victim of a “shocking” crime.
Palestinian officials have long accused Israel of poisoning Arafat, a claim Israel has denied. Arafat died under mysterious circumstances at a French military hospital in 2004, a month after falling ill at his Israeli-besieged West Bank compound.
The findings reported Wednesday appear to be the most significant so far in an investigation into Arafat’s death initiated by his widow, Suha, and the satellite TV station Al-Jazeera.
Last year, Switzerland’s Institute of Radiation Physics discovered traces of polonium-210, a deadly radioactive isotope, on some of Arafat’s belongings. Soil and bone samples were subsequently taken from Arafat’s grave in the West Bank.
On Wednesday, the TV station published the Swiss team’s 108-page report on the soil and bone samples. The results “moderately support the proposition that the death was the consequence of poisoning with polonium-210,” the report said.
US military scrapping equipment in Afghanistan
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — The withdrawing U.S. military is destroying most of the equipment it is leaving behind in Afghanistan after 13 years of war, selling the scrap for millions of dollars to those willing to buy it.
The policy stands in stark contrast to the Americans’ withdrawal from Iraq, when they donated or sold still-usable items worth about $100 million.
The equipment is being trashed, U.S. officials say, because of fears that anything left behind in Afghanistan could fall into the hands of insurgents and used to make bombs. Leaving it behind also saves the U.S. billions of dollars in transportation costs.
Afghans are angry at the policy, arguing that even furniture and appliances that could improve their lives is being turned into useless junk.
In the last year, the U.S. has turned equipment and vehicles into 387 million pounds of scrap that it sold to Afghans for $46.5 million, according to Mimi Schirmacher, a spokeswoman for the military’s Defense Logistics Agency in Virginia.
The scrapped material was too worn out to repair or not worth the expense of carrying it back to the U.S., officials said.
Not everything in Afghanistan was destroyed. Coalition forces have handed over $71 million in equipment intact to the Afghans, said Col. Jane Crichton, a public affairs officer for U.S. forces in Afghanistan. She said $64 million of that came from the U.S.
Scientists say risk of meteor strikes greater than once thought
WASHINGTON — Scientists studying the terrifying meteor that exploded without warning over a Russian city last winter say the threat of space rocks smashing into Earth is bigger than they thought.
Meteors about the size of the one that streaked through the sky at 42,000 mph and burst over Chelyabinsk in February — and ones even larger and more dangerous — are probably four, five or even seven times more likely to hit the planet than scientists believed before the fireball, according to three studies published Wednesday in the journals Nature and Science.
That means about 20 million space rocks the size of the Chelyabinsk one may be zipping around the solar system, instead of 3 million, NASA scientist Paul Chodas said at a news conference.
Until Chelyabinsk, NASA had looked only for space rocks about 100 feet wide and bigger, figuring there was little danger below that.
This meteor was only 62 feet across but burst with the force of 40 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs, scientists say.
By wire sources
Its shock wave shattered thousands of windows, and its flash temporarily blinded 70 people and caused dozens of skin-peeling sunburns just after dawn in icy Russia. More than 1,600 people in all were injured.
Up until then, scientists had figured a meteor causing an airburst like that was a once-in-150-years event, based on how many space rocks have been identified in orbit. But one of the studies now says it is likely to happen once every 30 years or so, based on how often these things are actually hitting.
Lindley Johnson, manager of NASA’s Near Earth Object program, which scans the heavens for dangerous objects, said the space agency is reassessing what size rocks to look for and how often they are likely to hit.
In addition, NASA this fall reactivated a dormant orbiting telescope called WISE specifically to hunt for asteroids, Johnson said. And the agency is expanding ground-based sky searches.
By wire sources