Word: anthrax
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...suspicion is still there, like a jagged tooth you can't stop playing with. Some seasoned observers, like R. James Woolsey, former head of the CIA, have been convinced from the start that the case for Iraqi involvement had to be taken seriously. Imagine that incontrovertible evidence connected the anthrax attacks, or Sept. 11, to the murderous panoply of Saddam's state. What would happen...
...biggest leads have come from the crime-scene evidence: the tiny spores of anthrax and the letters that accompanied them. Scientists have started to decipher the story behind the spores and found that they are deadlier than we had thought. The way they were processed tells us volumes about the sophistication behind them and warns us that we need to expand the list of those at risk and the possibilities for what's next. An amateur working in his garage could not craft spores like these, but a microbiologist with a Ph.D. could, working out of a decent...
...York and New Jersey had expanded like a forest fire. Trace amounts of the bacterium (considered insufficient to cause infection) had been detected in 11 places in Washington, including the Supreme Court's off-site mail center. But it was not until a State Department employee developed inhalation anthrax that health officials began speculating that one or more undiscovered letters had yet to be found. The single letter to Senator Tom Daschle, while surprisingly potent, could not have left so many tracks, they presumed. In one week Washington officials had come a long way from calling this anthrax "garden variety...
...large, the vengeful and neurotic have not magically been reformed. Law-enforcement agents have turned into butlers for a public that, unlike its leaders, has no shortage of imagination. Samples of dirt, detergent and sugar are clogging Fort Detrick and the few other labs that can test for anthrax. An oozing Albuquerque package is found to contain homemade tamales. White powder that brings to a halt a Little Rock, Ark., rally for drug-free schools turns out to be powdered sugar from a funnel cake...
Likewise, before and after the anthrax scares, 800,000 U.S. postal employees worked at a place infamous for turning people into maniacs. And the African-American citizens of the Washington area still live and sort mail in the shadow of the largely white U.S. Capitol, which has long inhabited a cleaner and safer parallel universe...