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Tuesday, October 5, 2010
News U.S... From page 1
AP –
A police officer inspect the area where a grenade was detonated by unidentified people
Explosion at plaza injures 15 in northern Mexico AP
MONTERREY, Mexico – An explosion at a plaza in northeastern Mexico injured 15 people, an attack authorities blamed Sunday on drug cartels targeting the civilian population to cause chaos. Police believe the attackers threw a grenade Saturday night at the main square in the town of Guadalupe, but were still trying to confirm the type of explosive, said Adrian de la Garza, the director of the investigations agency of Nuevo Leon, where the town is located. Six children, the youngest 3 years old, were among the injured, said Francisco Gonzalez, the state deputy health director. He said the injuries were not life-threatening, and most of the victims had returned home from the hospital. It was the fourth such attack in two days in the area around the city of Monterrey, which has been reeling from a turf war between the Gulf and Zetas drug gangs. On Friday night, three separate grenade attacks happened: near the federal courts, outside a prison and near the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey. A security guard was injured in the attack at the courts. Nuevo Leon Attorney General Alejandro Garza y Garza said they may be revenge for recent operations against drug traffickers. He did not specify which ones, but 22 suspected drug gang members were killed in a Sept. 15 shootout with soldiers in Ciudad Mier, another town in Nuevo Leon. Last
week, marines captured 30 suspected Gulf cartel members in Tamaulipas state, which borders Nuevo Leon. “We believe this might have been an attack against the civilian population. They are trying to create chaos and anxiety in the population,” Garza y Garza said. Soldiers arrested eight suspected Zetas members in Guadalupe early Sunday, although the operation appeared unrelated to the attack on the plaza. The soldiers were patrolling the town when they saw three cars brake suddenly and try to reverse and flee, according to the Defense Department statement. Soldiers arrested eight people and found 8 rifles and ammunition in the cars. Although drug gangs frequently hurl grenades at police headquarters and government installations, they rarely target crowds of bystanders. The last such major attack was two years ago, when assailants threw grenades at thousands of revelers during Independence Day celebrations in the western city of Morelia. Eight people were killed. Still, civilians have been increasingly caught up in Mexico’s bloody drug war, which has claimed more than 28,000 lives
since President Felipe Calderon deployed thousands of troops and federal police to fight the cartels in December 2006. In Acapulco, meanwhile, police continued to search Sunday for 20 men who were kidnapped while traveling together in the Pacific coast resort city. Authorities were investigating whether the missing men had ties to drug gangs, said Fernando Monreal, director of the investigative police in Guerrero state, where Acapulco is located. The kidnapping was reported to police Friday by a man who had been among the group but said he was at the store when his companions were abducted. He said the men, ages 17 to 47, were mechanics from Morelia, capital of Calderon’s home state of Michoacan, and saved up each year to vacation together. Police have since been unable to contact the man, and Monreal said he found his story suspicious. “They were not tourists. It’s very suspicious that 20 men go on vacation in Acapulco without their families,” he told The Associated Press. “We are not ruling out the possibility that they had ties to organized crime.”
The plot involved al Qaeda and allied militants, possibly including European citizens or residents, the sources said. In Washington, U.S. officials said Osama bin Laden and the top al Qaeda leadership were likely behind the plot, adding that the decision to issue the alert was based on an accumulation of information, rather than a specific new revelation. Some security officials have drawn comparisons to the brazen Mumbai attacks in 2008 that targeted city landmarks such as luxury hotels and a cafe and killed 166 people. The U.S. State Department travel alert said public transportation systems and other tourism-related facilities could be targets, noting that past attacks had struck rail, airline and boat services. “The State Department alerts U.S. citizens to the potential for terrorist attacks in Europe,” it said in an advisory on its website. A U.S. official said President Barack Obama held
meetings on Friday night and Saturday morning about the European security threat and was briefed on the situation again on Sunday morning. The alert was posted on the State Department website at http:/ travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/pa/ pa_europe.html. Europe is worried about how reports of the threats might affect tourism. The U.S. alert falls short of a more severe one in which the State Department might have warned citizens against traveling to Europe. Instead, the alert urges them to take precautions when they do travel. “We’re not saying don’t travel to Europe. We are not saying don’t visit ... major tourist attractions or historic sites or monuments,” Patrick Kennedy, undersecretary of state, told reporters on a conference call. Said U.S. tourist Tom Steier: “You should take these threats seriously, but right now I feel very safe in Paris.”
Test-tube... From page 1 “(Edwards’) achievements have made it possible to treat infertility, a medical condition afflicting a large proportion of humanity, including more than 10 percent of all couples worldwide,” the medicine prize committee in Stockholm said in its citation. “Approximately 4 million individuals have been born thanks to IVF,” the citation said. “Today, Robert Edwards’ vision is a reality and brings joy to infertile people all over the world.” Today, the probability that an infertile couple will take home a baby after a cycle of IVF is 1 in 5, about the same odds that healthy couples have of conceiving naturally. Prize committee secretary Goran Hansson said Edwards was not in good health and would not be giving interviews on Monday. “I spoke to his wife and she was delighted and she was sure he would be delighted too,” Hansson told reporters in Stockholm. Steptoe and Edwards developed IVF from the early beginning experiments into a practical course of medical and founded the first IVF clinic at Bourn Hall in Cambridge in 1980. Their work stirred a “lively ethical debate,” the citation said, with many religious leaders and some scientists demanding the project be stopped. When the British Medical Research Council declined funding, a private donation allowed Steptoe and Edwards to continue their research. In a statement, Bourn Hall said one of Edwards’ proudest moments was discovering that 1,000 IVF babies had been born at the clinic since Brown, and relaying that information to a seriously ill Steptoe shortly before his death in 1988. “I’ll never forget the look of joy in his eyes,” Edwards said.
Brown, 32, reportedly is a postal worker in the English coastal city of Bristol. In 2007 she gave birth to her first child — a boy named Cameron. She said the child was conceived naturally. William Ledger, head of reproductive and developmental medicine at Sheffield University, called the award “an appropriate recognition for a man who’s done so much to change the lives of so many people.” “The only sadness is that Patrick Steptoe has not lived to see this day because it was always a joint team effort between the two of them,” Ledger said. Aleksander Giwercman, head of reproduction research at the University of Lund in Sweden, said Edward’s achievements also have been important for other areas, including cancer and stem cell research. “We received a tool that could be used for many other areas,” Giwercman said. “Many of the illnesses that develop when we are adults have their origin early on in life, during conception.” The medicine award was the first of the 2010 Nobel Prizes to be announced. It will be followed by physics on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday, literature on Thursday, the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday and economics on Monday Oct. 11. The prestigious awards were created by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, and first handed out in 1901, five years after his death. Each award includes 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1.5 million), a diploma and a gold medal. Famous Nobel winners include President Barack Obama, who received last year’s peace prize; Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and Winston Churchill. But most winners are rela