In my opinion this should be told to each politician and every-one in charge: "Start thinking outside the box"...

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Account frozen...

In my opinion this should be told to each politician and every-one in charge: "Start thinking outside the box"...

Yes, but what do we do when "thinking outside" becomes part of the box.

(The topic that started it all... guns)

Scope of 2nd Amendment disputed in case on D.C. handgun ban

By Matt Apuzzo
ASSOCIATED PRESS

December 8, 2006

WASHINGTON – In a case that could shape firearms laws nationwide, attorneys for the District of Columbia argued yesterday that the Second Amendment right to bear arms applies only to militias, not individuals.

The city defended as constitutional its long-standing ban on handguns, a law that some gun opponents have advocated elsewhere. Civil liberties groups and pro-gun organizations call the ban unconstitutional.

At issue in the case before a federal appeals court is whether the Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms” applies to all people or only to “a well-regulated militia.” The Bush administration has endorsed individual gun-ownership rights, but the Supreme Court has never settled the issue.

If the dispute makes it to the high court, it will be the first case in nearly 70 years to address the amendment's scope. The court disappointed gun-owner groups in 2003 when it refused to take up a challenge to California's ban on high-powered weapons.

In the Washington, D.C., case, a lower-court judge told six city residents in 2004 that they did not have a constitutional right to own handguns. The plaintiffs include residents of high-crime neighborhoods who want guns for protection.

Courts have upheld bans on automatic weapons and sawed-off shotguns, but this case is unusual because it involves a prohibition on all pistols. Voters passed a similar ban in San Francisco last year, but a judge ruled that it violated state law. The Washington case is not clouded by state law and hinges directly on the Constitution.

“We interpret the Second Amendment in military terms,” said Todd Kim, the district's solicitor general, who told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that the city would also have had the authority to ban all weapons.

“Show me anybody in the 19th century who interprets the Second Amendment the way you do,” Judge Laurence Silberman said. “It doesn't appear until much later, the middle of the 20th century.”

Of the three judges, Silberman was the most critical of Kim's argument and noted that despite the law, handguns are common in the district.

Silberman and Judge Thomas B. Griffith seemed to wrestle, however, with the meaning of the amendment's language about militias. If a well-regulated militia is no longer needed, they asked, is the right to bear arms still necessary?

“That's quite a task for any court to decide that a right is no longer necessary,” replied Alan Gura, an attorney for the plaintiffs. “If we decide that it's no longer necessary, can we erase any part of the Constitution?”

The case is Shelly Parker et al. v. District of Columbia.

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me@rescam.org

More journalists are in jail worldwide, watchdog reports

By Michelle Nichols
REUTERS

December 8, 2006

NEW YORK – The number of journalists jailed worldwide for their work rose for the second year with Internet bloggers and online reporters now one-third of those incarcerated, a U.S.-based media watchdog said yesterday.

A Committee to Protect Journalists census found that a record 134 journalists were in jail on Dec. 1 – an increase of nine from the 2005 tally – in 24 countries.

For the eighth year in a row, China led the way in jailing journalists with 31 imprisoned on Dec. 1, followed by Cuba with 24, Eritrea with 23 and Ethiopia with 18.

Though print reporters, editors and photographers again made up the largest number of jailed journalists – with 67 cases – there were 49 imprisoned Internet journalists, making them the second-biggest category, the New York-based committee said.

“We're at a crucial juncture in the fight for press freedom because authoritarian states have made the Internet a major front in their effort to control information,” Committee Executive Director Joel Simon said. Among those jailed in China was Zheng Yichun, a Chinese freelance contributor to overseas online news sites who wrote a series of editorials criticizing the Communist Party.

The census also found there were eight television journalists, eight radio reporters and two film/documentary makers in jail.

Other countries where journalists were imprisoned were Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Burma, Burundi, Cambodia, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gambia, Iran, Maldives, Mexico, Russia, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Turkey, United States, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.

The census also showed that 20 imprisoned journalists were held without any charge or trial and that Eritrea accounted for more than half those cases.

The committee said the United States imprisoned two journalists without charge or trial – Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein, now held for eight months in Iraq, and Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj, jailed for five years and now held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Joshua Wolf, a freelance blogger who refused to turn over video of a 2005 protest to a U.S. federal grand jury, was also in jail.

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me@rescam.org

Watching a loved one fade away

ELLEN GOODMAN
THE BOSTON GLOBE

December 8, 2006

Long, long ago, I wrote a column describing my mother this way: “My mother is someone who will listen to your problems until you are bored with them.”

Reader's Digest wanted to use it, and a fact-checker called me for my mother's telephone number. She actually wanted to ask my mother whether it was true.

I told this tale for years as a funny story about fact-checkers. But now, of course, I know it was really a story about my mother. About Edith Weinstein Holtz, who died last week at age 92, just two days after Thanksgiving, on what would have been the 70th anniversary of her wedding.

It had been a long, long time since my mother was able to listen to my problems. Dementia, that terrible thief, stole her memory and then her personality, one piece at a time. Obituaries rarely list dementia as a cause of death. But she was a victim of its burglary until, at last, she let go of food, of fear, of need, of life.

My mother, born before suffrage, before World War I and World War II, before the feminine mystique and feminism, taught me everything I know of family values.

She taught me that family came first. She taught me to make cheesecake and keep peace. She taught me that a real home was a place where you were welcome for Sunday brunch and conversation. She taught me to accept your children's life choices without criticism and with confidence in their judgment. She taught me patience – although I am afraid I never passed the finals in that class.

When my sister and I went to the funeral home, the director asked us how to list her “occupation.” Together, we said, “homemaker.” Making a home was all she ever wanted to do. My mother, beautiful and vulnerable, also taught us – not on purpose – the risk of having love as your only job.

When my father died, she was only 50. She didn't worry about how to live without this vital, funny, loving center of her life because, I found out later, she didn't think she would survive a year. She lived 42 more years.

I think my mother regarded “independence” as a synonym for “loneliness.” She tried to create a second life. She tried school. She tried a job or two. She tried another marriage. Nothing really worked. But over these years she was also the one who nourished her granddaughters and nephews with peppermints and attention. She listened to their problems until they were bored with them.

Old age is not for sissies. My mother's long, slow, terrible decline lasted over a decade. There was the television she could no longer work and then the telephone. There were the small spiral notebooks whose pages were covered with names from a past she struggled to retain. One page listed her favorite movie star: Cary Grant. Another listed my father's best friend: Lou Novins.

In the last year, what mattered to my mother? The $3 faux pearl stud earrings, final artifacts of her femininity, bought by the dozen and lost by the dozen. The boxes of chocolate and the family photos. My mother never lost the taste for chocolate nor did she lose the smile with which she welcomed her family.

We were gathered for Thanksgiving weekend when she died. That would have mattered to her. It mattered to us. Together, we were able to rewind the tape to the days when our mother, aunt, grandmother, sister was our listener.

There is little that is harder in life than watching the slow disappearance of someone you love. Dementia is a contagious disease that spreads its suffering to anyone within the range of love. Millions of families have caught it. Ours is just one. And yet here, too, she taught us more than simply how to bear a burden.

Not long before her death, my daughter and I took my 3-year-old grandson to visit. We outfitted him with a bag of doughnuts to pass out to my mother and everyone on her floor. Although she no longer knew his name, she watched him with joy.

The next morning at a breakfast table covered with cereal and Play-Doh, he looked up and asked me, “Grandma, is your mommy going to die soon?”

Taken aback, I answered, “I'm afraid she is, Logan.” He thought for a moment and said, “But, Grandma, then you won't have any mommy.”

After the silence filled only with my tears, this little, little boy turned and said, “Grandma, when I grow up, I'll be your daddy.”

So my mother's gift for family, my mother's talent for empathy, was passed down from one generation to the next and the next. It is her abiding legacy.

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me@rescam.org

Watching a loved one fade away

ELLEN GOODMAN
THE BOSTON GLOBE

December 8, 2006

My heart goes out to this woman. My father died this last year and I know what that loss is.

More journalists are in jail worldwide, watchdog reports

By Michelle Nichols
REUTERS

December 8, 2006

Even in Germany some polititians and lobbyists caused trouble to an established weekly magazine ("Spiegel") after an insider article series, arresting some reporters and even confiscating computers to force them to name their information sources. At courtyard, the "Spiegel" later won because of the right of free speech and free press.

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Account frozen...

Happy Holidays!

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me@rescam.org

Happy Holidays!

That's what I mean: there is enough money for always new weapons and for silly representative matters and for gifts to the rich ones, but the poor people are treated like beggars and shall be glad that they can get food stamps!

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Account frozen...

Thank You Misfit for this Post

Watching a loved one fade away

ELLEN GOODMAN
THE BOSTON GLOBE

December 8, 2006

Watch Out, Dems!:

"All along the watchtower,
Princes kept their view...
Way off in the distance,
A wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching,
And the wind begin to howl."

"All Along The Watchtower" - Bob Dylan



Candidates Woo Bush Donors for ‘Invisible Primary’
By Chris Cillizza
and Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writer


Last month, a group of Republican royalty gathered to be wined and dined by Gov. Mitt Romney in Boston. On Friday night, they ate at Copia, a pricey Mediterranean steakhouse. On Saturday, they had breakfast at the Four Seasons and then lunched at Fenway Park.

Key Romney advisers made presentations about the path to the presidential nomination they see for the Massachusetts governor. Others walked attendees through how a race would be financed.

Among the 160 or so wealthy Republicans the Romney campaign had invited for the weekend was a particularly important group of potential supporters — the 40 or so men and women who were “Rangers” or “Pioneers” in the 2000 and 2004 campaigns of President Bush.

These Rangers, who raised $200,000 or more for Bush in 2004, and Pioneers, who each collected more than $100,000 as part of campaigns that redefined modern political fundraising, are being intensely courted.

The big donors received toplevel strategy briefings and were feted at campaign events. Many received appointments to the transition team after Bush was elected, and many others received ambassadorships, including Ron Weiser to Slovakia and Howard Leach to France.

Both Romney and McCain now count more than two dozen Pioneers and Rangers as supporters and have sought commitments from many others.

Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has on staff Anne Dickerson, who ran the high-dollar program for the Bush campaign in 2004, and he has the backing of a handful of Bush Pioneers and Rangers. Other potential 2008 GOP candidates, including former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.), Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, and Sens. Sam Brownback (Kan.) and Chuck Hagel (Neb.), are far behind in the pursuit of these fundraising big shots.

Although Democrats do not have an equivalent for the Rangers and Pioneers, their leading candidates have already begun making the rounds of wealthy donors.

Last week, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) ventured to New York to meet with a group of potential donors assembled by liberal philanthropist George Soros.

And Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) has spent much of the past two years building a fundraising infrastructure that raised nearly $50 million for her lopsided reelection campaign. The donors who contributed to that campaign can give again, should she run for president in 2008.

Ed Rogers, a Republican lobbyist not affiliated with a potential presidential candidate, said that with just 14 months remaining before the first ballots are cast, any candidate not knee-deep in conversations with Rangers and Pioneers is already falling behind.

“We are going to have a nominee by February 6th,” 2008, Rogers said. “You have to have all of your money at the opening gun.”

McCain and Romney are mimicking the Bush model not only in terms of the individuals they are courting but also in the approach they are taking to their pitch: a heavy emphasis on personal attention, meeting one-on-one with prospective donors, inviting them on trips and even soliciting them in that old K Street favorite: at sporting events.

Sig Rogich, a Las Vegas image consultant who has worked for presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, said he first discussed becoming a major fundraiser for McCain nearly two years ago when the two men were ringside at a boxing match featuring former champion Oscar De La Hoya.

“I told him that if the time came that he became a candidate, I’d be there for him,” Rogich said.

Ron Kaufman, who is supporting Romney, made up his mind on a flight with the Massachusetts governor over South Carolina not long ago.

Kaufman, political director in the George H.W. Bush White House, had picked up a copy of Thomas L. Friedman’s “The World Is Flat” and planned to give it to Romney. “Before I could even mention the book, he waxed eloquently in a soliloquy that I call ‘The World Is Flat: The Oral Edition,’ ” Kaufman recounted. That episode about Friedman’s treatise on globalization “cinched” his support for Romney, he said.

Anne Dunsmore, a California fundraiser, got to know Romney during his work as chairman of the Republican Governors Association and was impressed by what she called his sense of optimism. Although he never asked, Dunsmore decided that she would plug Romney into her well-cultivated network of political contributors, should he decide to run for president.

“It was an easy choice being part of this family, no matter what he chooses to do,” said Dunsmore, a Bush Ranger who has worked on five presidential campaigns.

Although most Rangers and Pioneers expect and demand personal contact with the candidates seeking their help, their decisions on whom to support are often shaped more by a desire to be on the winning team than by a sense of friendship.

“It’s much more like a professional recruitment than it is a romance,” Berman said. “A lot of it has to do with discussions about how the campaign’s fundraising is going to work, the team, what the candidate’s approach on fundraising is going to be.”

Rogich put it more bluntly. “At the end of the season, there is a column with an ‘L’ and one with a ‘W.’ I want to be in the ‘W’ column,” he said.

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Politicians who take pay-off jobs.

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me@rescam.org

For NASA, moon base to be 'pay as you go'
No price tag called brilliant and a waste

By Seth Borenstein
ASSOCIATED PRESS

December 10, 2006

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – It'll be cheaper to build a permanent moon base and keep it running than it will be to get to the moon. Just don't ask how much, NASA's boss says.

The U.S. space agency's newly unveiled grand plan for an international base camp on one of the moon's poles that would be continually staffed starting about 2024 doesn't come with a similarly grand price tag. It doesn't come with a price tag at all.

“You ask what things will cost, I don't know yet,” said NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, a detail-oriented engineer. “We just rolled out a very preliminary architecture.”

Griffin's lack of specifics is partly because NASA is budgeting its large cosmic construction projects differently, more “pay as you go” than “get there at all costs.”

It's a departure that outsiders call either a brilliant way to avoid cost overruns and sticker shock – or a blank check that will end up squeezing taxpayers.

“Typically, a habitat is less than the cost of large rocketry,” Griffin said in an interview as he awaited a space shuttle launch, which went without a hitch last night.

Last year, NASA said it would cost about $104 billion just to get back to the moon for the first trip, scheduled to happen by 2020. That doesn't include the cost of multiple and continuous moon flights and the price of building and running the newly unveiled lunar outpost.

The Government Accountability Office, the independent auditing arm of Congress, puts the cost of NASA's lunar program through 2025 at $230 billion.

NASA's plan grew out of President Bush's announcement three years ago of his “Vision for Exploration,” which calls for sending astronauts back to the moon and later to Mars.

There is no estimate from anyone for the second phase of Bush's proposal – an expedition to the Red Planet.

NASA is counting on redirecting billions of dollars from the space shuttle and International Space Station programs to fund development of a new space ship, but some critics have complained that the agency is already cutting its science programs to pay for the moon-Mars project.

Griffin contends that NASA should be able to pay for the lunar phase of this space vision by using its existing yearly budget of about $16.8 billion. If something has to give, he said, it will be the target dates.

American University public policy professor Howard McCurdy said that method – which he said is smarter and far different from the Apollo days when unlimited moon spending “was eating everybody's budget” – gives NASA “a real incentive to invest that money wisely.”

And it gives the space agency a mission without an end date when the budget axes start coming out, he said.

“You don't know when to draw the line in the sand and say, 'The program is over,' ” McCurdy said. “It is a program like Buzz Lightyear that does whatever it can and reaches infinity,” he added in a joking reference to the “Toy Story” movie character.

This way there are not the massive budget overruns that have forever dogged the international space station, which was once projected to cost $17 billion but is now in the $50 billion range, McCurdy said. It also avoids the sticker shock of a $500 billion moon-and-Mars program proposed by President Bush's father that collapsed when the cost was revealed.

But Taxpayers for Common Sense, a fiscal watchdog group, calls the moon plans a waste.

“You've got to have some price tag on what you're going to do, otherwise you're going to continue to waste money,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of the group. “This is like building a house and not knowing how much it is. You don't have plans.”

Griffin said many details of the lunar station are purposely being left to future rocket scientists. He envisions the outpost not as a city, but more like America's research station in Antarctica.

“It is the choice of the next generation to decide to avail themselves of that option,” Griffin said. If they don't want to stay and research on the moon “then we'll move on more rapidly to Mars.”

What Griffin doesn't want is a repeat of the mistaken choice to mothball Apollo, made by the White House in the early 1970s.

“We're rebuilding systems that we had 40 years ago and that we built at that time and then discarded,” he said. “That was not a NASA mistake. It was a policy mistake at the highest level of the U.S. government. . . . My generation now has the task before it of fixing that mistake.”

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me@rescam.org

Earmarks cut in lame-duck session

ROBERT D. NOVAK
THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

December 11, 2006

The sterile, confused lame-duck session of the Republican-controlled 109th Congress ended with a quiet victory by reformers that staved off an estimated 10,000 earmarks. But it could not be called a farewell to pork. Last Thursday, as the House neared adjournment, Democrats signaled they may countenance a return to free and easy spending ways when they assume the majority Jan. 4.

The hero of the lame-ducka session was freshman Republican Sen. Jim DeMint. He was instrumental in blocking a Senate-House conference on a military construction appropriations bill, which would then be used as the last train out of town to carry pork. But just as the reformers were cheering last Thursday, a coalition of Republicans and Democrats defeated a procedure designed to inhibit Pentagon earmarks.

That leaves an unanswered question for the new Democratic majority. Rep. Rahm Emanuel, of Illinois, the dynamic new member of the House Democratic leadership, has exhorted colleagues not to forget that their campaign against the Republican “climate of corruption” brought them into power. But does Emanuel's concept of reform go beyond new lobbyist control regulations and extend to the bipartisan addiction to pork-barrel spending?

The first closed-door meeting of Republican senators following their drubbing in the election erupted in discord after the leadership laid out plans for an omnibus spending bill, putting all unfinished appropriations bills in one package. That would provide a cornucopia of earmarks for members of Congress to bring home to their constituents.

But DeMint rose to make clear that he and his fellow freshman Republican, Sen. Tom Coburn, would use the many parliamentary devices at their disposal to block an omnibus bill. Their alternative was what is called a continuing resolution, extending spending at its present level into next February. That meant the lame-duck session would be porkless.

Sen. Ted Stevens, the old appropriator renowned for delivering pork home to Alaska, erupted with an exhibition of his famous hair-trigger temper. Sen. Thad Cochran, a courtly Southern gentleman and Stevens's successor as Appropriations Committee chairman, made the case in calmer language. Sen. John McCain, happy to have two Senate rookies pick up the anti-pork mantle he has carried for many years, was making snide comments in a stage whisper. But DeMint was not about to be moved by either threats or persuasion.

The military construction bill was the last vehicle suitable for earmarks. The formidable Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, the Appropriations subcommittee chairman handling that measure, was determined to conclude action on it in a Senate-House conference. With uncharacteristic anger last week, a frustrated Chairman Cochran said he was not about to take dictation from two freshman senators. But they blocked the conference from taking place.

As this became clear last Thursday, a second triumph for the reformers loomed with apparent imminent passage of Coburn's “report card,” under which the Pentagon would grade earmarks on a scale of A to F. Before the election recess, the Senate voted 96-1 to add that proposal to the Defense appropriations bill. But the fix was in. The House removed the Coburn amendment by a 394-32 vote, while promising to consider it as a free-standing bill in the lame-duck session.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter went on the House floor Thursday to approve the report card. But the appropriators struck back. Rep. Bill Young, chairman of the Defense appropriations subcommittee, argued: “I don't want the Pentagon to spend all that time grading the work that we in the Congress do.” Rep. Ike Skelton, Hunter's Democratic successor, said the next Congress “will offer a better approach.” Young and Skelton both predicted the report card would inhibit earmarking. The proposal was voted down Friday, 330-70, with only two Democrats voting for it.

The issue of spending reform is now in Democratic hands. Emanuel, the newly elected House Democratic Caucus chairman, on Nov. 17 e-mailed colleagues with a call for reform. The takeover of the House that he led as Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman, Emanuel said, sent a message that “it's time for a change, and change starts by cleaning up Washington.” But in reiterating the Democratic campaign's promises to “reform lobbying and ethics rules,” Emanuel did not mention the corrupting influence of earmarks.

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me@rescam.org

Honeybees can sniff out explosives, study finds

By Deborah Baker
Associated Press

December 11, 2006

SANTA FE, N.M. – Here's the latest buzz on detecting explosives: bomb-sniffing bees.

A study at Los Alamos National Laboratory has found that honeybees can be trained to detect explosives, even in tiny quantities.

“These bees really perform,” said bee biologist Timothy Haarmann, the study's leader.

Whether honeybees will ever be enlisted in the war on terror looks doubtful at this point.

In thousands of trials conducted over the past 18 months at the nuclear weapons lab, bees stuck out their tongues when they smelled explosives. The bees even underwent field trials, successfully sniffing out explosives in a simulated roadside bomb, in a vehicle, and on a person rigged like a suicide bomber.

The insects have a phenomenal sense of smell, rivaling that of dogs, Haarmann said.

“The beauty of the bee is that when it has a sugar water reward, it sticks out its proboscis,” the scientist said. “It's not a little tiny tongue. It's bigger than the antennae.”

The study was funded by a grant of about $1.5 million from the Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which studies innovative and sometimes positively strange technology that could yield national security benefits.

Despite the positive test results, DARPA said it does not see a future for bomb-detecting bees in the military.

“Bees are not reliable enough for military tactical use at this point,” the agency said in a statement last week. “We see no clear pathway to make them reliable enough to make it worth risking the lives of our service men and women.”

In a follow-up interview, DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker said: “We're done in this research area. We don't plan any further investment.”

However, Haarmann said that does not preclude another federal agency, or a private company, from refining the technology and developing other uses for bomb-sniffing bees – at airports, for example, or at the nation's borders.

“It's not far off in the future, if somebody decides to do it,” he said.

The researchers found that ordinary honeybees can readily be trained by being exposed to the odor of an explosive, then given sugar water as a reward. After a few times, the bee, anticipating the sugar water, will stick out its tongue at the smell of the explosive.

Haarmann said the study showed that trained bees can detect explosives in a parts-per-trillion concentration, even when masked by other odors.

While that is similar to what dogs can do, Haarmann said, there are situations in which using bees might be preferable. The bee box, he suggested, could be held by a robotic device right next to a suspected bomb while the operator watched the laptop from a safe distance.

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me@rescam.org

Honeybees can sniff out explosives, study finds

By Deborah Baker
Associated Press

December 11, 2006

SANTA FE, N.M. – Here's the latest buzz on detecting explosives: bomb-sniffing bees.

A study at Los Alamos National Laboratory has found that honeybees can be trained to detect explosives, even in tiny quantities.

“These bees really perform,” said bee biologist Timothy Haarmann, the study's leader.

Whether honeybees will ever be enlisted in the war on terror looks doubtful at this point.

In thousands of trials conducted over the past 18 months at the nuclear weapons lab, bees stuck out their tongues when they smelled explosives. The bees even underwent field trials, successfully sniffing out explosives in a simulated roadside bomb, in a vehicle, and on a person rigged like a suicide bomber.

The insects have a phenomenal sense of smell, rivaling that of dogs, Haarmann said.

“The beauty of the bee is that when it has a sugar water reward, it sticks out its proboscis,” the scientist said. “It's not a little tiny tongue. It's bigger than the antennae.”

The study was funded by a grant of about $1.5 million from the Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which studies innovative and sometimes positively strange technology that could yield national security benefits.

Despite the positive test results, DARPA said it does not see a future for bomb-detecting bees in the military.

“Bees are not reliable enough for military tactical use at this point,” the agency said in a statement last week. “We see no clear pathway to make them reliable enough to make it worth risking the lives of our service men and women.”

In a follow-up interview, DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker said: “We're done in this research area. We don't plan any further investment.”

However, Haarmann said that does not preclude another federal agency, or a private company, from refining the technology and developing other uses for bomb-sniffing bees – at airports, for example, or at the nation's borders.

“It's not far off in the future, if somebody decides to do it,” he said.

The researchers found that ordinary honeybees can readily be trained by being exposed to the odor of an explosive, then given sugar water as a reward. After a few times, the bee, anticipating the sugar water, will stick out its tongue at the smell of the explosive.

Haarmann said the study showed that trained bees can detect explosives in a parts-per-trillion concentration, even when masked by other odors.

While that is similar to what dogs can do, Haarmann said, there are situations in which using bees might be preferable. The bee box, he suggested, could be held by a robotic device right next to a suspected bomb while the operator watched the laptop from a safe distance.

Next time they will remember Biblical strategies and throw bee-hives among their opponents to confuse them! What a strange idea!
Why don't they simply research to find an electronic (whatever) gadget to find out those explosives? Even to make them unexplodable, unusalbe? Are they afraid, so-called "enemies" would use the same gadgets then, too, to make the own weapons unusable?

Geese I so wish it would be, that from one moment to the next all weapons would become unusable - and all soldiers were only able to self-defense anymore.

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Next time they will remember Biblical strategies and throw bee-hives among their opponents to confuse them! What a strange idea!
Why don't they simply research to find an electronic (whatever) gadget to find out those explosives? Even to make them unexplodable, unusalbe? Are they afraid, so-called "enemies" would use the same gadgets then, too, to make the own weapons unusable?

Geese I so wish it would be, that from one moment to the next all weapons would become unusable - and all soldiers were only able to self-defense anymore.

Unfortunately, animal olfactory organs are still far superior to devices designed by people, with the exception of a very few very specific compounds.

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me@rescam.org