No avoiding this story — CNN is announcing 31 dead, 29 wounded on the Virginia Tech campus and we don’t have final counts. A crazy visited the college early this morning, shooting in two locations over a two hour period — both teachers and students were his victims. This will be the deadliest such shooting incident [school or non] in US history. GW’s televised harangue about the traitorous withholding of war money was preempted earlier to report these details, when the body count was only 2. The shooter is dead, details are limited and the numbers of dead/wounded change frequently as the columns shift, reported from four local hospitals.
Dubby will address the nation later this afternoon, face squinchy, no doubt — in case you think I’m being harsh to mention, read the press report, second, below … a nice time to make comment on the right to bare arms, eh? Political animal, that Dubby … never misses a chance to make partisan hay. Meanwhile, the House and Senate both paused for a moments silence.
As terrible as this is, it serves as a reminder that in this country, such as incident brings everything to a halt … while in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Sudan and Darfur, such an incident is just another day in Hell.
Life is personal. We still don’t get that those senseless deaths are as poignant as these; the lines we draw on a map indicate the borders of our heart.
Jude
Gunman kills at least 21 at Virginia Tech
CNN
April 16, 2007
[open for further links, including video]
Story Highlights
• NEW: Four hospitals report 29 wounded
• Police chief says at least 22 people are dead, including gunman
• Attacks mark deadliest school shooting in U.S. history
• Student describes situation as “mayhem”; says 2 students jumped from window
(CNN) — A lone gunman is dead after police said he killed at least 21 people Monday during twin shootings on the Virginia Tech campus — the deadliest school attacks in U.S. history.
“Some victims were shot in a classroom,” university police Chief Wendell Flinchum said during a news conference in Blacksburg.
Police believe there was only one gunman, Flinchum said. (Watch the police chief explain where bodies were found )
Spokespersons for hospitals in Roanoke, Christiansburg, Blacksburg and Salem told CNN that they were treating 29 people from the shootings.
Sharon Honaker with Carilion New River Medical Center in Christiansburg said one of the four gunshot victims being treated there was in critical condition.
“Today the university was struck with a tragedy that we consider of monumental proportions,” said university President Charles Steger. “The university is shocked and indeed horrified.” (Map of Blacksburg)
The killings mark the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, surpassing attacks at Columbine High School in 1999 and at the University of Texas in 1966.
One person was killed and others were wounded at multiple locations inside a dormitory about 7:15 a.m., Flinchum said. Two hours later, another shooting at Norris Hall, the engineering science and mechanics building, resulted in multiple casualties, the university reported. (Campus map)
The first reported shooting occurred at West Ambler Johnston Hall, a four-story coed dormitory that houses 895 students. The dormitory, one of the largest residence halls on the 2,600-acre campus, is located near the drill field and stadium.
Amie Steele, editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper, said one of her reporters at the dormitory reported “mass chaos.”
The reporter said there were “lots of students running around, going crazy, and the police officers were trying to settle everyone down and keep everything under control,” according to Steele. (Watch police, ambulances hustle to the scene )
Kristyn Heiser said she was in class about 9:30 a.m. when she and her classmates saw about six gun-wielding police officers run by a window.
“We were like, ‘What’s going on?’ Because this definitely is a quaint town where stuff doesn’t really happen. It’s pretty boring here,” said Heiser during a phone interview as she sat on her classroom floor.
Student reports ‘mayhem’
Student Matt Waldron said he did not hear the gunshots because he was listening to music, but he heard police sirens and saw officers hiding behind trees with their guns drawn.
“They told us to get out of there so we ran across the drill field as quick as we could,” he said.
Waldron described the scene on campus as “mayhem.” (Watch a student’s recording of police responding to loud bangs )
“It was kind of scary,” he said. “These two kids I guess had panicked and jumped out of the top-story window and the one kid broke his ankle and the other girl was not in good shape just lying on the ground.”
Madison Van Duyne said she and her classmates in a media writing class were on “lockdown” in their classrooms. They were huddled in the middle of the classroom, writing stories about the shootings and posting them online.
The university is updating its more than 26,000 students through e-mails, and an Internet webcam is broadcasting live pictures of the campus.
The shootings came three days after a bomb threat Friday forced the cancellation of classes in three buildings, WDBJ in Roanoke reported. Also, the 100,000-square-foot Torgersen Hall was evacuated April 2 after police received a written bomb threat, The Roanoke Times reported.
Last August, the first day of classes was cut short by a manhunt after an escaped prisoner was accused of killing a security guard at a Blacksburg hospital and a sheriff’s deputy.
After the Monday shootings, students were instructed to stay indoors and away from windows, police at the university said.
“Virginia Tech has canceled all classes. Those on campus are asked to remain where they are, lock their doors and stay away from windows. Persons off campus are asked not to come to campus,” a statement on the university Web site said.
Before Monday, the deadliest school shootings came in 1966 and 1999.
In the former, Charles Joseph Whitman, a 25-year-old ex-Marine, killed 13 people on the University of Texas campus. He was killed by police.
In 1999, 17-year-old Dylan Klebold and 18-year-old Eric Harris — armed with guns and pipe bombs — killed 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. ++
Bush Said Shocked at College Shootings
DEB RIECHMANN. AP
April 16, 2007
WASHINGTON — President Bush was described Monday as shocked and saddened by the mass shooting at Virginia Tech, the deadliest incident of campus violence ever in this country.
“He was horrified and his immediate reaction was one of deep concern for the families of the victims, the victims themselves, the students, the professors and all the people of Virginia who have dealt with this shocking incident,” White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino said. “His thoughts and prayers are with them.”
“The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed,” Perino said, noting that Bush and Education Secretary Margaret Spellings held a conference on school gun violence last October. “Certainly, bringing a gun into a school domitory and shooting … is against the law and something someone should be held accountable for,” Perino said.
A gunman opened fire in a dormitory and classroom at Virginia Tech, situated in the city of Blacksburg in southwest Virginia, killing at least 21 people. The gunman was killed but it was unclear whether he was shot by police or took his own life. After the shootings, all entrances to the campus were closed and classes were canceled through Tuesday.
The university reported shootings at opposite sides of the 2,600-acre campus — first at about 7:15 a.m. at a coed residence hall that houses 895 people and about two hours later at an engineering building. One student was killed in the dorm and the others were killed in a classroom, according to Virginia Tech Police Chief W.R. Flinchum.
She said that federal assistance is available if Virginia authorities request help. Perino said it was premature to discuss whether Bush would travel to the Blacksburg area. ++
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
April 16th, 2007
… but a whimper.
THIS scenario is so disturbing it should be a disaster movie-of-the-week!
Jude
A stinging loss for U.S. farms as honeybees vanish
Experts fear their disappearance will take a toll on the nation’s food chain
Sunday, April 15, 2007
AMY ELLIS NUTT, NJ Star-Ledger Staff
Jean-Claude Tassot felt the sunshine spilling over his shoulders. It was unseasonably warm for January — a good day, he decided, to check his honeybees. So Tassot jumped in his truck and rumbled over the back roads of Morris County to the first of the eight farms where he stores his boxes of hives.
“When you first take the cover off, usually you can see the bees,” said Tassot. “But when I looked, there was nothing. I kept looking (but) the hives were all dead.”
Tassot drove to the next farm, then the next and the next. At every stop it was the same thing.
Out of 171 hives, 140 were wiped out. Even the few dozen that remained were weak at best.
“It was a catastrophe,” he said.
In New Jersey, as in at least 26 other states around the country, commercial beekeepers and hobbyists are reporting catastrophic losses of honeybees this year. As many as 700,000 of the nation’s 2.4 million bee colonies have been affected, according to the American Beekeeping Federation.
“I’ve talked to several beekeepers up and down the state, and they’re reporting from 30 to 99 percent bee losses,” said Bob Hughes, president of the New Jersey Beekeepers Association.
Built around the state insect of New Jersey, the honeybee industry is a $2.5 million business and provides pollination for 80 percent of the state’s crops worth some $200 million, according to the state department of agriculture. Even so, there is currently no state apiarist, or beekeeper, (the previous one retired and no replacement has been named) and no state university or government bee researcher.
“In the Garden State no one is doing research on the honeybee?” said Janet Katz, who owns Two Cats Apiaries in Chester. “It’s mind-boggling. They research everything else in agriculture, but not bees. We’re desperate.”
Beatrice Tassot is even more blunt: “People are panicking.”
While honey and honey products account for only a small fraction of the nation’s agriculture, 140 billion commercially raised honeybees are responsible for pollinating about $20 billion worth of crops, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics.
Throughout the spring and summer months, waves of migratory beekeepers follow the blossoming trees and orchards up and down the United States. Driving 18-wheelers, they truck crates of millions of bees to farms in rural and suburban hamlets — to fields of sweet clover in Colorado; to the sun-drenched citrus groves in Florida; the cucumber and melon patches in Virginia; the apple orchards in Maine, New York and Wisconsin; the cotton fields in West Texas; the almond trees in California; and the cranberry bogs in New Jersey.
In the thick heat, the bees are released to fertilize the crops. Flower by flower, they forage for food, and in the process coat themselves with bits of pollen that drop randomly, like fairy dust, on every blossom they touch.
It has been estimated that a third of all food (nuts, fiber, fruit and vegetables) eaten by Americans is dependent on the honeybee.
“This whole country depends on the commercial beekeeper for its food,” said Landi Simone, a master beekeeper with 40 hives in the Montville area.
What has astonished and alarmed apiarists about this year’s dead hives is that they are, by and large, empty hives.
“In January, with that warm day, when I went into the hives, there wasn’t a pile of dead bees in the hive. And there weren’t any dead bees in front of the hive,” said Katz. “I had never seen anything like this before.”
All around the country, both large and small beekeeping operations are registering staggering losses. An apiarist at Mississippi State University reported that one beekeeper he knew lost nearly 1,000 of his 1,200 colonies. A beekeeper in Missouri reported the loss of 596 of his 700 colonies. And in Ohio, a longtime beekeeping operation reported 700 of its 800 colonies had been decimated.
At present there is no known cause for what scientists are now calling, for lack of a better term, “Colony Collapse Disorder.” The main symptom of CCD, which was first noticed by beekeepers in the Eastern states late last year, is the complete absence of adult bees in formerly healthy hives, with few or no dead bees in the vicinity despite the presence of food.
Honeybees have been around for at least 150 million years. But in the past half-century, nearly all the wild bees have disappeared, the result of a combination of disease and loss of habitat. There are few places anymore where one can live next to a “bee-loud glade,” as the poet William Butler Yeats once wrote.
The rapid decline of feral honeybees has meant an increased reliance on commercial beekeepers to service the agricultural industry. Where there are no honeybees, there are no apple orchards or pumpkin patches, no squash, no broccoli, no cucumbers, melons, blueberries or cherries.
In the late 1980s, two pests, the varroa and tracheal mites, began decimating honeybee colonies all over the United States. With the falloff in honeybees, and without the government subsidies farmers get, beekeepers began abandoning the business. In the past 20 years nearly half of New Jersey’s apiarists have closed up shop.
Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on Horticulture and Organic Agriculture heard testimony from commercial apiarists, as well as scientists, regarding the new threat to the American beekeeping industry. One of the experts, Penn State University entomologist Diana Cox-Foster, said that a recently convened research group is looking into three hypotheses for the unprecedented die-off:
New or re-emerging pathogens
Environmental pesticides suppressing the immune system of bees
A combination of stresses working together to weaken bee colonies and cause final collapse.
Tassot and his wife believe they know why their bees have disappeared.
“We have suspicions about pesticides,” he said. “We noticed most of the dead hives are close to cornfields. … And when we asked other beekeepers what was the principle crop near their hives, they said corn, corn, corn.”
Simone, of Morris Township, agrees. “When I spoke with other beekeepers they say all their hives with heavy losses are near cornfields.”
Many farmers in the United States and around the world rely on genetically engineered corn to survive the assault of crop-killing insects. The seeds are coated with a systemic pesticide that is essentially built into the corn as it grows.
One of the chief chemicals used is a neurotoxin called imidacloprid, which is manufactured by the German company Bayer CropScience. Imidacloprid works by blocking a pathway in insect brains that results in an accumulation of a neurotransmitter which, in insects, leads to paralysis and death.
At sublethal doses, however, imidacloprid is toxic to honeybees. In a 2001 article in the Journal of Pesticide Reform, German scientist Eric Zeisstoff wrote that his research “indicated that bees affected by imidacloprid suffer problems with orientation. Bees with a particular level of imidacloprid contamination at 500 meters from the colony did not return to the hive at all.”
In the mid-1990s, imidacloprid was implicated in a catastrophic honeybee die-off in France where honey production was cut in half between 1995 and 2002. In 2003 alone, more than 150 million honeybees were lost in France, and since then some uses of imidacloprid have been banned.
The reason for the die-off may not be so simple, however. Scientists also have discovered that adult bees in hives suffering from Colony Collapse Disorder carried fungal infections that may indicate the immune system of the bees may be compromised, contributing to the collapse.
“It’s a scary thing to contemplate,” said Simone, “because the potential for harm is really huge. … If we don’t find some real answers pretty soon, we’ll see prices of fruit go way up.”
Part of the problem, says Katz, is that while the U.S. Department of Agriculture keeps statistics on honey production, it does not track trends in pollination.
“The government has no ideas how many hives are put into crops, where they come from, or where they travel to,” said Katz. “To me that is the major value of the honeybee in the U.S. … It will be very difficult to quantify the loss. It will start to snowball.
“We’ll see skyrocketing prices. It’s going to be very problematic, and we’re already behind the curve on the state and federal level.”
Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?
Scientists claim radiation from handsets are to blame for mysterious ‘colony collapse’ of bees
Geoffrey Lean and Harriet Shawcross, Independent UK
15 April 2007
It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world’s harvests fail.
They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.
The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees’ navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives.
Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.
Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive’s inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes.
The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.
The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.
CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London’s biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned.
Other apiarists have recorded losses in Scotland, Wales and north-west England, but the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs insisted: “There is absolutely no evidence of CCD in the UK.”
The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world’s crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, “man would have only four years of life left”.
No one knows why it is happening. Theories involving mites, pesticides, global warming and GM crops have been proposed, but all have drawbacks.
German research has long shown that bees’ behaviour changes near power lines.
Now a limited study at Landau University has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried it out, said this could provide a “hint” to a possible cause.
Dr George Carlo, who headed a massive study by the US government and mobile phone industry of hazards from mobiles in the Nineties, said: “I am convinced the possibility is real.”
The case against handsets
Evidence of dangers to people from mobile phones is increasing. But proof is still lacking, largely because many of the biggest perils, such as cancer, take decades to show up.
Most research on cancer has so far proved inconclusive. But an official Finnish study found that people who used the phones for more than 10 years were 40 per cent more likely to get a brain tumour on the same side as they held the handset.
Equally alarming, blue-chip Swedish research revealed that radiation from mobile phones killed off brain cells, suggesting that today’s teenagers could go senile in the prime of their lives.
Studies in India and the US have raised the possibility that men who use mobile phones heavily have reduced sperm counts. And, more prosaically, doctors have identified the condition of “text thumb”, a form of RSI from constant texting.
Professor Sir William Stewart, who has headed two official inquiries, warned that children under eight should not use mobiles and made a series of safety recommendations, largely ignored by ministers.
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
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April 16th, 2007