A slew of psychology studies, some dating as far back as the 1920s, suggest that if you want to stick to your New Year?s diet ? or whatever your big 2012 goal may be ? you might want to shut up about it, already.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/vp/45809260#45809260
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(Forimmediaterelease.net) Navies from the Community of Nations are being invited to be in Seychelles from March 2-4, 2012 to echo a message of solidarity against the continued presence of Somali pirates off the coast of Africa and the Gulf countries.The invitation is for Navy ships from the Community of Nations to again be present at the carnival in Seychelles and to parade together in the carnival procession as was done this year.
?It is a different way to send a message of unity against the piracy epidemic, but what a better way to send a message than to be seen as Navies from a United Community of Nation when the biggest contingent of world press will be present in Seychelles,? Alain St.Ange, CEO of the Seychelles Tourism Board said.
At the 2011 carnival in Seychelles, the Navies from Russia, India, France, and Seychelles marched together in the carnival procession behind carnival delegations from the best and most-known carnivals such as those from Brazil, Notting Hill of the UK, Trinidad&Tobago, and Italy, as well as cultural groups from the rest of the world. The British Navy had also arrived in Seychelles to show its solidarity but was called to duty at sea and had to leave Port Victoria on Carnival Day.
How many Navies from the Community of Nations will be present in Seychelles this year from March 2-4, 2012 and say to Somalia and the world that the piracy problem is one for the Community of Nations to tackle jointly?
MEDIA CONTACT: Alain St.Ange, CEO, Seychelles Tourism Board, Email: alain.s@seychelles.com
Source: http://www.forimmediaterelease.net/pm/6003.html
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BASTROP, Texas ? Concrete foundations that have been cleared of rubble sit eerily empty amid charred remains of once majestic loblolly pines. Driveways, some still complete with patio furniture and basketball hoops, snake their way to nothing but a slab of stone.
More than three months after record-setting wildfires roared through this otherwise charming corner of central Texas, many of the hardest-hit areas stand largely abandoned by homeowners who have moved elsewhere. Others left homeless are starting to rebuild bigger and better houses ? or vow to do so soon ? even as the memories of the raging blazes remain fresh.
"I get to kind of build my dream house, I just haven't been in the spirit yet," said Denise Rodgers, a hospice chaplain. She was among an estimated 5,000 people displaced by the flames that killed two people, destroyed 1,673 homes and charred 33,000 acres ? an area more than twice the size of Manhattan ? in and around Bastrop, about 30 miles southeast of Austin.
Some parts of town are in the midst of a rebuilding boom, with streets crammed with trucks hauling in lumber or earthmoving equipment and carting away debris. Even ABC's "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" show got in on the action, taking a week to build a 2,500-square-foot home for a volunteer firewoman and her family who lost their bungalow.
But other areas have made little recovery. No one knows for sure how many residents have moved away already or still could.
"Certainly there are going to be a lot of people leaving," Bastrop Mayor Terry Orr said. "But we certainly want to encourage people to rebuild."
The city of Bastrop and surrounding county of the same name are home to 80,000 people, Orr said, meaning about 7 percent of residents lost homes.
In the days after the wildfires, some displaced families snapped up vacant homes for sale in the area. Others have moved in with friends or relatives, or rented homes while they decide what to do permanently.
Rodgers is living in a vacant home lent by a friend with only some rented basic furniture: "I have stuff only for one drawer." She said her New Year's resolution is getting her new home built ? and that she may put a pool and garden where her original house stood and build on an adjacent lot.
"In the beginning, I was so horrified, I couldn't think of living there," Rodgers said of her home, which was reduced to ash and clumps of melted belongings. "But you get used to seeing certain things and you change ideas."
Returning after the fire, she remembers, "I sat in the driveway and wailed. There was nothing that I could see and recognize."
A Buddha statue, a cross, an angel Christmas ornament missing only a broken wing and a Hindu goddess statue survived the flames.
"Is it uncanny that an eclectic, non-denominational hospice chaplain would find only spiritual icons in the debris? I think not," Rodgers said. "These were all divine signs that all would be OK."
Some have already begun building improved homes, fitted with energy-efficient technology and other upgrades.
Marvin Beck and his wife Anne spent two years beginning in 1992 building their home largely by hand. The fire destroyed it, so the 79-year-old architect drew up new plans and bought a new plot 12 miles from the old one.
Construction will begin in January ? though this time the couple is letting professional builders handle it.
"We had hoped the last house would be our last house," Beck said with a wry chuckle. "Hopefully this one will be."
The Becks said they had far too many friends in Bastrop to think of leaving. But they also conceded that going back to the same spot where their home once stood was too painful.
"We couldn't digest that," Beck said.
Insured losses from the fire should reach $325 million, according to the Insurance Council of Texas, making it the costliest blaze in state history. About 3,080 residents have applied for Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance, said spokesman Ray Perez, and the agency has paid out close to $9.4 million in housing and other relief funds. FEMA provided trailers to 52 displaced families across Bastrop County.
Eric and Cyndi Poe lost everything and wanted to stay but were undecided about rebuilding on their same lot ? until the builder who constructed their original home told them he could do it again in record time. The couple moved into a new home the week before Thanksgiving, barely 10 weeks after the fire.
"It didn't seem possible," Cyndi said. "That's how lucky we've been."
Except for charred trees in the yard, it's now hard to tell the fire even hit the Poe's house. Their new house is virtually identical to the old one, except the Poes asked for a larger garage and said they could do without a bathtub in the master bathroom.
And, of course, their possessions are gone. Cyndi said that on Thanksgiving, she instinctively opened a cabinet expecting to see a family heirloom.
"I reached up to get the turkey platter we've used all of my life and it wasn't there, and I had a little moment where I was sad," she said.
The Poes live in Tahitian Village, a sprawling subdivision where the fires claimed 282 homes. Some 240 owners whose homes were destroyed have sought refunds for their water deposits ? meaning they won't rebuild.
Still, many leaving the subdivision could move elsewhere in and around Bastrop. Among them is Victor Gonzalez, a 59-year-old attorney who has yet to clear all the rubble of his Tahitian Village home because there's still hope sifting could turn up spared valuables.
The fire leveled dozens of pines and melted a BMW in the driveway. Only the swimming pool survived.
"We had a very secluded portion of heaven," Gonzalez said. "Now we've got a moonscape."
Neighbors on either side of him lost their homes and won't rebuild. Gonzalez is mulling a move to another part of the subdivision.
"Tahitian will be back," he said. "It's just not going to look the same."
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To #troops deployed tonite -- including my nephew w/ the Marines in Afg -- thx for making it possible for us to enjoy holidays. 
DoDSpokesman CAPT John Kirby
Source: http://twitter.com/blogbat/statuses/150794056002310144
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It?d be great if our elected officials could act like adults. But as the latest payroll tax extension food fight shows, Congress really is just like high school.
In real high school, superlatives are given to seniors, but in Congress, the freshmen are just so much more interesting. So here?s POLITICO?s look at the best and worst from the historic freshman Class of 2010.
Continue Reading1) Most likely to succeed:
Karen Bass ? If the name doesn?t sound familiar, it?s because this California representative is one of the nine (10, if you include special election winner Kathy Hochul) freshman Democrats so obscured by the enormous class of Republicans that they sometimes are referred to as ?the forgotten nine.? But Bass, who holds an urban Los Angeles district, is working hard behind the scenes to ingratiate herself with fellow Democrats by recruiting women leaders for the party. The former speaker of the California State Assembly looks more and more like a Pelosi-in-waiting each day.
James Lankford ? This Oklahoma freshman looks like an adolescent, sounds like Barry White, and has the unlikeliest of r?sum?s for success in politics. But the former Christian camp counselor has proven to be a quiet, disciplined and effective voice for his colleagues, earning respect on the Budget Committee. He also holds a safe Republican seat in his state, meaning that if he can keep the conservatives in his district happy, the freshman lawmaker should have a long career in Washington.
Runner-up: Tom Reed ? Ask those close to leadership who their favorite freshmen are, and this New York Republican immediately comes to mind. Ever since he won a special election to replace Eric Massa last year, Reed has been central to leadership?s dealings with the freshmen. And he was rewarded for that with a conference committee position on the payroll tax bill (though he may not thank them for it forever.) If Reed survives New York?s redistricting process, expect him to be a player in future sessions.
2) Biggest Jock:
Adam Kinzinger ? This former Air Force pilot is tight with leadership, often organizing press conferences in support of their efforts, inevitably finds his way into every ?Hottest on the Hill? list and stresses over how to stay fit while living Washington?s sedentary lifestyle. If the Capitol really were a high school, he?d be the freshman starting on the varsity football team, speaking at the pep rallies and hanging out with the seniors after school. You might want to hate this Illinois Republican, but then he?d be nice to you in the hallways and your rebellious little teenage heart wouldn?t know what to make of it. Kinzinger just got engaged to his girlfriend, a fellow Air Force captain. Sorry, ladies.
3) Most likable:
Sean Duffy ? Fellow freshmen and leadership alike talk about Duffy like he?s their earnest younger brother in need of protection from the cynicism and chicanery that dominates Washington, probably with good reason ? the fresh-faced Republican and former Real World star faces tons of pressure to hang on to a Wisconsin seat he took from the now-retired Democrat David Obey in 2010.
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Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/uk-16325307
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When an international collaboration of physicists came up with a result that punched a hole in Einstein's theory of special relativity and couldn't find any mistakes in their work, they asked the world to take a second look at their experiment.
Responding to the call was Ramanath Cowsik, PhD, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences and director of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
Online and in the December 24 issue of Physical Review Letters, Cowsik and his collaborators put their finger on what appears to be an insurmountable problem with the experiment.
The OPERA experiment, a collaboration between the CERN physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) in Gran Sasso, Italy, timed particles called neutrinos traveling through Earth from the physics laboratory CERN to a detector in an underground laboratory in Gran Sasso, a distance of some 730 kilometers, or about 450 miles.
OPERA reported online and in Physics Letters B in September that the neutrinos arrived at Gran Sasso some 60 nanoseconds sooner than they would have arrived if they were traveling at the speed of light in a vacuum.
Neutrinos are thought to have a tiny, but nonzero, mass. According to the theory of special relativity, any particle that has mass may come close to but cannot quite reach the speed of light. So superluminal (faster than light) neutrinos should not exist.
The neutrinos in the experiment were created by slamming speeding protons into a stationary target, producing a pulse of pions ? unstable particles that were magnetically focused into a long tunnel where they decayed in flight into muons and neutrinos.
The muons were stopped at the end of the tunnel, but the neutrinos, which slip through matter like ghosts through walls, passed through the barrier and disappeared in the direction of Gran Sasso.
In their journal article, Cowsik and an international team of collaborators took a close look at the first step of this process. "We have investigated whether pion decays would produce superluminal neutrinos, assuming energy and momentum are conserved," he says.
The OPERA neutrinos had energies of about 17 gigaelectron volts. "They had a lot of energy but very little mass," Cowsik says, "so they should go very fast." The question is whether they went faster than the speed of light.
"We've shown in this paper that if the neutrino that comes out of a pion decay were going faster than the speed of light, the pion lifetime would get longer, and the neutrino would carry a smaller fraction of the energy shared by the neutrino and the muon," Cowsik says.
"What's more," he says, "these difficulties would only increase as the pion energy increases.
"So we are saying that in the present framework of physics, superluminal neutrinos would be difficult to produce," Cowsik explains.
In addition, he says, there's an experimental check on this theoretical conclusion. The creation of neutrinos at CERN is duplicated naturally when cosmic rays hit Earth's atmosphere.
A neutrino observatory called IceCube detects these neutrinos when they collide with other particles generating muons that leave trails of light flashes as they plow into the thick, clear ice of Antarctica.
"IceCube has seen neutrinos with energies 10,000 times higher than those the OPERA experiment is creating," Cowsik says.."Thus, the energies of their parent pions should be correspondingly high. Simple calculations, based on the conservation of energy and momentum, dictate that the lifetimes of those pions should be too long for them ever to decay into superluminal neutrinos.
"But the observation of high-energy neutrinos by IceCube indicates that these high-energy pions do decay according to the standard ideas of physics, generating neutrinos whose speed approaches that of light but never exceeds it.
Cowsik's objection to the OPERA results isn't the only one that has been raised.
Physicists Andrew G. Cohen and Sheldon L. Glashow published a paper in Physical Review Letters in October showing that superluminal neutrinos would rapidly radiate energy in the form of electron-positron pairs.
"We are saying that, given physics as we know it today, it should be hard to produce any neutrinos with superluminal velocities, and Cohen and Glashow are saying that even if you did, they'd quickly radiate away their energy and slow down," Cowsik says.
"I have very high regard for the OPERA experimenters," Cowsik adds. "They got faster-than-light speeds when they analyzed their data in March, but they struggled for months to eliminate possible errors in their experiment before publishing it.
"Not finding any mistakes," Cowsik says, "they had an ethical obligation to publish so that the community could help resolve the difficulty. That's the demanding code physicists live by," he says.
###
Washington University in St. Louis: http://www.wustl.edu
Thanks to Washington University in St. Louis for this article.
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Agustin Victor Casasola was one of the first in Mexico to realize the power of images and to crusade for their collection and preservation.
Ninety-two photographs from the Casasola Archives, the massive photojournalistic collection he amassed during his lifetime, are on exhibit at the Idaho State Historical Museum through Jan. 14.
The exhibit is the result of a partnership between the museum and the Consulate of Mexico?s Boise office. Previous partnerships included celebrations and exhibitions for Dia de los Muertos, this year and last.
The museum recognized Casasola?s historic importance and his understanding of ?the decisive moment,? to borrow a phrase from Casasola?s admirer, the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Cartier-Bresson wrote of understanding not only the significance of a happening, but the right second to photograph it.
?It?s also important that we have this particular exhibit here because of the number of Hispanic people living in southwestern Idaho. It gives them a sense of inclusion,? said Anne Schorzman, museum staffer.
The consulate is eager to share the exhibit and other aspects of Mexican culture and history with Idahoans of Mexican and other backgrounds, said cultural attache Valerie Mejer.
The photographs, which capture an immediacy and intimacy despite being as much as a century old, are powerful for all audiences.
Images include a man, smoking, awaiting his execution; urban policemen with the gaze of a young Michael Corleone; and circus performers, revolutionaries and courtroom observers.
?He wanted to capture real people doing real things, even in a time of great unrest,? said Schorzman. One of her favorite photos was shot from a rooftop, looking at the street below, with men in sombreros packed together, demonstrating for higher wages.
?Casasola somehow understood those moments,? she said. ?The only explanation is talent.?
A CRITICAL ERA
The exhibit?s focus is a significant time in Mexican history, said Mejer.
Photographs span the years 1910 to 1940, from the beginning of the Mexican Revolution to the decades following as Mexico entered the age of industry and modernism.
?Casasola is one of Mexico?s treasures,? said Mejer. ?Not every Mexican knows his name, but even the most humble people would recognize a photo from his archives. They would be as familiar as the photographs of Abraham Lincoln would be to Americans.?
Casasola became a photographer at the turn of the last century. By 1911, one year into the Mexican Revolution, he had founded one of the world?s first photography agencies, the Agencia Fotografica Mexicana.
?He was among the first to understand the value of photographs as intellectual property,? said Mejer.
Casasola was bold. He once climbed a pole in Guatemala to photograph an execution where photography was banned. He was a fine photographer in his own right, but part of his gift was recognizing the talents of others.
His press agency gathered work by photographers like Guillermo Kahlo (father of artist Frida Kahlo), American Edward Weston and many others.
The exhibition now in Boise arrived from Mexico City and has shown in Rome, Paris and New York City, among other cities, said Mejer.
She hopes the consulate, which opened its Boise office in 2009 to serve Mexican citizens living in the United States and strengthen relations between the two countries, will partner with the museum on other projects.
?We?re so happy a museum is embracing us in this way. We have art collections, writers and more, and we can bring them all here,? she said.
?We just need sponsors, and a museum to say yes.?
Anna Webb: 377-6431
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We asked you to send in your picks for the greatest sports moments in L.A. history, and 1,181 ballots later we are unveiling the top 20 vote-getters. Each weekday?we will unveil a new moment until we reach No. 1.
No. 3: The 1984 Summer Olympics opening ceremony (17 first-place votes, 3,586 points)
The 1984 Summer Olympics were kicked off by what many still consider the greatest opening ceremony in Olympics history. Where else will you ever see 84 pianists playing "Rhapsody in Blue," a guy flying with a jet pack, Rafer Johnson lighting the Olympic torch, President Reagan, Sam the Eagle?and a standing ovation for Romania, the only Communist-bloc country to attend the Games?
In response to the American-led boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, 14 countries including the Soviet Union, Cuba and East Germany?boycotted the Games. For differing reasons, Iran and Libya also boycotted. When the competitors representing Romania marched into the Coliseum during the parade of countries, the capacity Coliseum crowd all rose to give them a lengthy standing ovation.
The David L. Wolper-produced opening ceremony mesmerized those inside the Coliseum as well as those at home, with ABC's Jim McKay and Peter Jennings handling the commentary.
But perhaps the most inspiring performance came courtesy of composer-conductor John Williams, already famous for his Hollywood scores ("Jaws," "Star Wars" and others). His "Olympic Fanfare and Theme" -- particularly its signature fanfare of trumpets at the start -- produced goose bumps and became synonymous with the Olympics. It later brought Williams one of his many Grammy Awards. Williams himself conducted the orchestra during the opening ceremony.
RELATED:
No. 4: John Wooden goes out a winner
No. 5: Angels win the World Series
No. 6: The 1967 USC-UCLA game
No. 7: Anthony Davis defeats Notre Dame
No. 8: Lakers finally defeat Celtics
No. 9: Fernandomania
No. 10: Magic scores 42 in Game 6 of 1980 NBA Finals
No. 11: Lakers win first title in L.A.
No. 12: Dodgers first game in L.A.
No. 13: Marcus Allen's Super Bowl run
No. 14: Lakers win 33 in a row
No. 15: Robert Horry's game-winner
No. 16: Honoring Roy Campanella
No. 17: Miracle on Manchester
No. 18: Lakers three-peat
No. 19: Rick Monday saves the flag
No. 20: Kobe to Shaq alley-oop
--Houston Mitchell
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wwltv.com
Posted on December 19, 2011 at 12:42 PM
Updated Monday, Dec 19 at 12:42 PM
Chelsea Gaudin / Eyewitness News
SLIDELL, La. ? Two female college students, in town for the holidays, met for dinner on Dec. 13 to catch up and ended up being carjacked, kidnapped and robbed at gunpoint, according to the Slidell Police Department.
On Tuesday at 11:30 p.m., the women were sitting in a car in the parking lot of Main Street Centre?, located near Gause Boulevard and I-10, when a masked gunman approached the car and demanded they open the door.
They obliged out of fear for their lives and the man jumped into the back seat, demanded their cell phones so they couldn?t call 911 and forced them to drive to an ATM, police said.
An undisclosed amount of cash was withdrawn from the ATM at ASI Credit Union at 1322 Gause Blvd.
The women, who were unharmed, were then forced to drive to a dark, remote location on Powell Road where the suspect exited the car and fled, police said.
They drove to a nearby gas station and called the police.
The suspect is described as a black man in his mid to late 20s with a black ski mask, black jacket with a hoodie, and black jeans. The gun is described as a black semi-automatic pistol.
If anyone has any information, call the Slidell Police Department at 985-643-3131 or CrimeStoppers at 504-822-1111
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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) ? Giving parents of newborn preemies some help right from the start may make a difference in their children's behavior by school age, a new study suggests.
Children born prematurely tend to have higher rates of behavioral problems, like attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), than their peers who were born full-term.
But not much has been known about whether intervening early with parents -- helping them interact better with their infants -- can make a difference in preemies' behavior in the long run.
For the new study, researchers in Norway tested a program that gave parents of preemies help right away, starting in the hospital.
After parents took their babies home, they received four home visits from a nurse over three months. The nurses gave them training in things like "reading" cues from their infant and interacting with the baby through play.
"Preterm infants are often more fussy, give less eye contact and are harder to understand for parents," explained lead researcher Dr. Marianne Nordhov, of the University Hospital of North Norway in Tromso.
"They display signs of stress in a subtle way, such as color changes, 'jittery' movements, and increased respiration rate," Nordhov told Reuters Health in an email.
The idea of the program was to help parents better understand their preemies -- and to give them a chance to "vent" their worries and stresses, Nordhov explained.
She and her colleagues randomly assigned parents of 146 preemies (born weighing less than 4.4 pounds) to either take part in the program or stick with standard care alone. They also recruited parents of 75 full-term infants to study for comparison.
At the age of 5, Nordhov's team found, children whose parents had been in the program were showing fewer behavior problems, like inattention, aggression or withdrawn behavior.
Based on parents' reports, 29 percent of those kids scored in the "borderline" range on the behavior-problem scale. That compared with 48 percent of premature kids whose parents had not been in the program.
Scores in the borderline range point to an increased risk for behavior problems like ADHD, Nordhov said.
In an earlier study that followed these children to age 2, the researchers had found no clear benefit. But the current findings underscore the importance of following kids' longer-term progress, according to Nordhov.
"Our study has shown that only 12 hours of parental education improves their knowledge and confidence, which in turn improve the interaction with their infant in a beneficial way," Nordhov said.
"It is important that nurses and doctors spend time with parents and teach them how to better interact and understand this 'difficult' task of language," she added.
A child psychologist not involved in the study agreed that early help is key.
"I'm not really surprised by the findings. They make total sense," said Lori Evans, of the New York University Child Study Center.
But what's different in this study is that the program focused on parenting skills right from the beginning of an infant's life. In the U.S., Evans told Reuters Health, the most common comparable program is called Parent Child Interaction Therapy -- which research suggests does improve kids' behavioral issues.
That's generally offered later, starting when children are about 3 years old and already have behavioral problems.
"Starting parent training early would be a wonderful thing," Evans said.
With children's behavioral problems, in general, she noted, "what we know is, the earlier we get them, the better."
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/uzVQge Pediatrics, online December 19, 2011.
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RALEIGH, N.C. ? If a national animal rights group gets its way, people in a small mountain town in North Carolina will have to greet the new year without lowering a scrappy marsupial to the ground.
Clay Logan, who owns the Clay's Corner store in the far western tip of the state, has been lowering an opossum in a transparent box to the ground every New Year's for 18 years, in a local homage to the famous ball drop in Times Square.
This year, though, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has called on the state Wildlife Resources Commission to put a halt to the tradition, saying the activity is both cruel and illegal.
"Ignorance of the law is not a defense, and cruelty to animals is indefensible," PETA Director Delcianna Winders said. "Using a captive opossum as the centerpiece of a raucous party is cruel and illegal."
PETA's letter, sent this week, is being reviewed, according to a commission spokesman, who said no decision has been made yet. The group claims that Logan lacks the necessary permit to have wild animals, and that the annual event fails to meet the legal standard of "humane treatment" of animals.
"Oh yeah, they love me," Logan said of PETA.
Logan disputes the group's characterization of the event, saying the opossums ? it's generally a different animal from year to year ? are treated well, and that despite the name, nothing is "dropped." Instead, he said, the critter is gently brought to the ground from a height of about 18 feet, although PETA claims it's 40 feet.
"It's a lot of good clean family fun. No alcohol," Logan said. "We advertise it as the only New Year's party you'll remember the next day no matter how much fun you had."
The opossum drop is the centerpiece of the annual event, but it has grown to become what Logan's website calls "the epicenter of the entertainment scene in Brasstown," which has about 250 residents. The program for this year also includes a bull riding competition, a church choir and the traditional cross-dressing beauty competition.
"It fills the place up," Logan said. "On a warm night, it's about 3,000 people. If it's cold, maybe 2,000."
PETA says they've also sent a letter to Logan in hopes of persuading him to find an alternative to using a live animal at the event. They want him to emulate Tallapoosa, Ga.'s New Year's Eve Possum Drop.
"The great thing about Tallapoosa is that they don't use a live possum," PETA lawyer Brittany Peet said. "They use a taxidermied possum." And because it's the same stuffed critter every year, it's become something of a local mascot, Peet said.
The Opossum Drop may be North Carolina's most distinctive New Year's celebration, but the state has plenty of other "drops" planned for that day as well, including a giant acorn, a 30-pound flea made of fabric and wool and a light-up pickle replica in the vegetable-canning hotbed of Mt. Olive.
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FRIDAY, Dec. 16 (HealthDay News) -- HIV-infected drug users are 74 percent more likely to have an overdose than those without HIV, a new evidence review finds.
Behavioral and biological factors may be among the reasons for this increased risk, according to the Rhode Island Hospital researchers. Drug overdose is a frequent cause of non-AIDS death among people with HIV.
The link between HIV infection and drug use is well documented, but the association between HIV and overdose has received less attention and was the focus of this study, which involved a review of 24 previous studies.
"Over the past 30 years, we have made impressive strides in caring for and prolonging the lives of people with HIV. Our study found that premature death by overdose is an issue that affects people with HIV disproportionately," study leader Traci Green, a researcher with Rhode Island Hospital and the Lifespan/Tufts/Brown Center for AIDS Research, said in a hospital news release.
"It is not entirely clear why the risk is greater, and few studies have endeavored to figure out why this might be happening," she added.
Biological factors may include clinical status, weakened immune systems, opportunistic infections and poorer physical health among HIV-infected drug users. Some research has suggested that hepatitis C infection and other conditions that affect metabolic ability may also increase the risk of overdose, according to the release.
Behavioral factors -- such as high-risk lifestyles and an increased rate of psychiatric conditions -- may also contribute to the higher risk of overdose among HIV-infected drug users, Green said.
Other possible factors could include homelessness and poverty, and poor access to medications and therapy used to treat opioid dependence, she suggested. Many HIV patients take opioid painkiller drugs as part of their treatment, while others use illegal opioids.
The study appears online in advance of print in the journal AIDS.
"Bringing overdose awareness and prevention into the HIV care setting is critical to reducing overdose deaths," Green said.
"Health care providers who treat HIV-infected patients with a history of substance abuse or who are taking opioid medications should consider counseling patients on how to reduce their risk of overdose. They may also consider prescribing naloxone (Narcan) to patients, or offering a referral to MAT (medication-assisted therapy) to reduce the risk of overdose," she advised.
Naloxone is a prescription medication that reverses an opioid overdose and has no abuse potential.
More information
The New Mexico AIDS Education and Training Center has more about recreational drugs and HIV.
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NASA shows first global image taken from new satellite; Captain Planet approves originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 17 Dec 2011 13:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Enlarge AP A chimpanzee eats a coconut at the Alamogordo Primate Facility at Holloman Air Force Base, N.M., in an undated photo from the National Institutes of Health. A plan to move chimps that had retired to the facility after being subjects of medical experiments sparked controversy and a review of research policies.
APA chimpanzee eats a coconut at the Alamogordo Primate Facility at Holloman Air Force Base, N.M., in an undated photo from the National Institutes of Health. A plan to move chimps that had retired to the facility after being subjects of medical experiments sparked controversy and a review of research policies.
Updated 1:30 p.m.: The National Institutes of Health accepts the recommendations of the Institute of Medicine report on chimpanzee research, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins said in a statement. "We will not issue any new awards for research involving chimpanzees until processes for implementing the recommendations are in place," he said.
Most of the biomedical research currently being done on chimpanzees is unnecessary and the need for chimps in medical studies will soon decline even further, according to a highly-anticipated new report from an independent panel of experts.
The report says that the National Institutes of Health should allow experiments on chimps only if a new set of strict criteria are met, and recommends setting up an independent oversight committee that includes members of the public.
"The bottom line is, the necessity of chimpanzees is diminishing. We were able to only identify two areas of biomedical research where there is any continuing necessity, and one of those is actually going away quite rapidly," says Jeffrey Kahn of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, who chaired the committee convened by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.
?The committee's study was requested by Congress and the NIH in the wake of a controversial plan to take nearly 200 aging chimps housed in New Mexico and make them again available for medical research. Animal welfare activists argued that these "retired" chimps had endured enough and should be left alone.
That uproar came just as groups such as the Humane Society of the United States have been pushing to end all invasive research on lab chimps and retire them to sanctuaries. Congress has been considering legislation that would ban research using chimps and other great apes. Many other countries already ban invasive research on these species, which are closely related to humans.
The expert committee wasn't asked to look at the ethics of research on chimps. It was only supposed to assess the scientific need. "But the committee felt very strongly at its first meeting that we couldn't talk about the necessity of chimpanzees without also thinking about the ethics of the use of chimpanzees, and so we did include that in our deliberations," says Kahn.
The new report says that about 1,000 chimps, ranging in age from less than a year old to more than 41 years old, are currently available for research in the U. S., which is largely conducted at four facilities.
The NIH sponsored 110 research projects from 2001 to 2010 that involve chimps, the report says. About half of the projects were hepatitis research ?chimps are the only animal other than humans that can be infected with hepatitis C ? and others ranged from studies of HIV/AIDS to comparisons of chimps' genes to those of other species.
The committee members could not agree and were evenly split on whether chimps are needed to develop a vaccine that can prevent hepatitis C infection, although they did agree that chimps were not currently necessary for research to develop antiviral drugs for the disease.
The committee also found that, given the state of the science and the availability of other research models, chimpanzees are currently unnecessary for studies of respiratory syncytial virus, which is the leading cause of hospitalizations for U. S. children less than 1 year old.
The panel did say chimp research was justified for a limited number of monoclonal antibody therapies that are in development, but said labs are already adopting new technologies that should eliminate the need for chimps in just a few years.
According to the new report, biomedical researchers should not use chimps unless their proposed work meets three criteria:
And chimps should only be used for behavioral research, such as psychology experiments, if there's no other way to obtain insights into things like cognition and mental health. Chimps used in such experiments should be "acquiescent," the report says, and not forced to participate against their will.
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BRUSSELS ? The European Union's antitrust watchdog is probing whether Apple helped five major publishing houses illegally raise prices for e-books when it launched its iPad tablet and iBookstore in 2010.
The probe, announced Tuesday by the European Commission, offers a glimpse into the fierce fight for shares of the growing e-book market, especially as Apple has tried to take on Amazon and its Kindle e-book reader. It also highlights the struggle for profits between retailers and publishers, as more and more readers download books electronically.
In particular, the Commission is investigating a significant shift in the way the price of e-books is determined that occurred in 2010, just as Cupertino, California-based Apple introduced the iPad and its own online bookshop, iBookstore.
Apple was the first retailer that allowed publishers to move to so-called agency agreements, which let publishers set the price that online bookshops sell e-books to consumers. Until then, publishers were able to set the wholesale price of e-books, while retailers decided what price to sell them on to readers.
"The Commission has concerns that these practices may breach EU antitrust rules that prohibit cartels and restrictive business practices," the regulator said in a statement.
Giving publishers the power to set retail prices could effectively restrict competition between online bookshops, since it takes away individual retailers' powers to set lower prices. Since Apple's deal with the publishers, several other online retailers have also shifted to the agency model, possibly in an attempt to secure the rights to sell popular e-books.
The EU investigation targets publishers Hachette Livre, a unit of France's Lagardere Publishing; Harper Collins, owned by Rupert Murdoch's U.S.-based News Corp.; CBS Corp.'s Simon & Schuster; Penguin, which is owned by U.K. publishing house Pearson Group; and Germany's Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, which owns Macmillan.
The Commission stressed the probe was in its early stages and did not mean the companies actually broke EU competition law. It follows a similar investigation by Britain's Office of Fair Trading and a class action lawsuit against the same five publishers and Apple filed this summer in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
The U.K. agency on Tuesday closed its own probe, since the Commission has taken over the case, but said it was cooperating closely with the EU investigation. It said its investigation was triggered by several complaints, without naming any names.
Apple representative Bethan Lloyd said the company would decline to comment at this time.
Pearson said the fact that the Commission has opened a probe did not prejudge its outcome. "Pearson does not believe it has breached any laws, and will continue to fully and openly cooperate with the Commission," it said.
Holtzbrinck echoed that statement, saying it found the Commission's case "without reason."
HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster said they are cooperating with the investigation, while Hachette Livre declined to comment.
The e-book market has been dominated by Amazon.com Inc. and its Kindle reader, with both Apple and Barnes & Noble's Nook reader fighting to break in.
In a summary of its complaint, the U.S. law firm Hagens Berman, which filed the U.S. class-action suit, claims that "Apple believed that it needed to neutralize the Kindle when it entered the e-book market with its own e-reader, the iPad, and feared that one day the Kindle might challenge the iPad by digitally distributing other media like music and movies."
The lawsuit also alleges that, following Apple's deals, Amazon was forced to abandon its discount pricing model and move to the agency model.
___
Robert Barr in London, Hillel Italie in New York, Elaine Ganley in Paris, and Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin contributed to this report.
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The natural born killers waited until the parents were asleep upstairs before heading down to the basement to put on their show. The first videotape is almost unbearable to watch.
Dylan Klebold sits in the tan La-Z-Boy, chewing on a toothpick. Eric Harris adjusts his video camera a few feet away, then settles into his chair with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a sawed-off shotgun in his lap. He calls it Arlene, after a favorite character in the gory Doom video games and books that he likes so much. He takes a small swig. The whiskey stings, but he tries to hide it, like a small child playing grownup. These videos, they predict, will be shown all around the world one day -- once they have produced their masterpiece and everyone wants to know how, and why. (See TIME's photoessay "Columbine 10 Years Later: The Evidence")
Above all, they want to be seen as originals. "Do not think we're trying to copy anyone," Harris warns, recalling the school shootings in Oregon and Kentucky. They had the idea long ago, "before the first one ever happened."
And their plan is better, "not like those f____s in Kentucky with camouflage and .22s. Those kids were only trying to be accepted by others."
Harris and Klebold have an inventory of their ecumenical hatred: all "niggers, spics, Jews, gays, f___ing whites," the enemies who abused them and the friends who didn't do enough to defend them. But it will all be over soon. "I hope we kill 250 of you," Klebold says. He thinks it will be the most "nerve-racking 15 minutes of my life, after the bombs are set and we're waiting to charge through the school. Seconds will be like hours. I can't wait. I'll be shaking like a leaf." (See pictures of America's Gun Culture.)
"It's going to be like f___ing Doom," Harris says. "Tick, tick, tick, tick... Haa! That f___ing shotgun is straight out of Doom!"
How easy it has been to fool everyone, as they staged their dress rehearsals, gathered their props -- the shotguns in their gym bags, the pipe bombs in the closet. Klebold recounts for the camera the time his parents walked in on him when he was trying on his black leather trench coat, with his sawed-off shotgun hidden underneath: "They didn't even know it was there." Once, Harris recalls, his mother saw him carrying a gym bags with a gun handle sticking out of the zipper. She assumed it was his BB gun. Every day Klebold and Harris went to school, sat in class, had lunch with their schoolmates, worked with their teachers and plotted their slaughter. People fell for every lie. "I could convince them that I'm going to climb Mount Everest, or I have a twin brother growing out of my back," says Harris. "I can make you believe anything."
Even when it is over, they promise, it will not be over. In memory and nightmares, they hope to live forever. "We're going to kick-start a revolution," Harris says -- a revolution of the dispossessed. They talk about being ghosts who will haunt the survivors -- "create flashbacks from what we do," Harris promises, "and drive them insane."
It is getting late now. Harris looks at his watch. He says the time is 1:28 a.m. March 15. Klebold says people will note the date and time when watching it. And he knows what his parents will be thinking. "If only we could have reached them sooner or found this tape," he predicts they will say. "If only we would have searched their room," says Harris. "If only we would have asked the right questions."
Since then, we've never stopped asking, of course, in our aching effort to get back on our feet, slowly, carefully, only to be pushed back down again. And what if the answers turn out to be different from what we've heard all along? A six-week TIME investigation of the Columbine case tracked the efforts of the police and FBI, who are still sorting through some 10,000 pieces of evidence, 5,000 leads, the boys' journals and websites and the five secret home videos they made in the weeks before the massacre. Within the next few weeks, the investigators are expected to issue their report, and their findings are bound to surprise a town, and a country, that has heard all about the culture of cruelty, the bullying jocks, and has concluded that two ugly, angry boys just snapped, and fired back.
It turns out there is much more to the story than that.
Why, if their motive was rage at the athletes who taunted them, didn't they take their guns and bombs to the locker room? Because retaliation against specific people was not the point. Because this may have been about celebrity as much as cruelty. "They wanted to be famous," concludes FBI agent Mark Holstlaw. "And they are. They're infamous." It used to be said that living well is the best revenge; for these two, it was to kill and die in spectacular fashion.
This is not to say the humiliation Harris and Klebold felt was not a cause. Because they were steeped in violence and drained of mercy, they could accomplish everything at once: payback to those who hurt them, and glory, the creation of a cult, for all those who have suffered and been cast out. They wanted movies made of their story, which they had carefully laced with "a lot of foreshadowing and dramatic irony," as Harris put it. There was that poem he wrote, imagining himself as a bullet. "Directors will be fighting over this story," Klebold said -- and the boys chewed over which could be trusted with the script: Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino. "You have two individuals who wanted to immortalize themselves," says Holstlaw. "They wanted to be martyrs and to document everything they were doing."
These boys had read their Shakespeare: "Good wombs hath borne bad sons," Harris quoted from The Tempest, as he reflected on how his rampage would ruin his parents' lives. The boys knew that once they staged their final act, the audience would be desperate for meaning. And so they provided their own poisonous chorus, about why they hated so many people so much. In the weeks before what they called their Judgment Day, they sat in their basement and made their haunting videos -- detailing their plans, their motives, even their regrets -- which Harris left in his bedroom for the police and his parents to find when it was all over.
The dilemma for many families at Columbine is ours as well. For months they have searched for answers. "It's not going to bring anything or anybody back," says Mike Kirklin, whose son survived a shot in the face. "But we do need to know. Why did they do this?" Still, the last thing the survivors want is to see these boys on the cover of another magazine, back in the headlines, on the evening news. We need to understand them, but we don't want to look at them. And yet there is no escaping this story. Last week another child shot up another school, this time an Oklahoma junior high where four were injured, and all the questions came gushing out one more time.
At Columbine, some wounds are slow to heal. The old library is walled off, while the victims' families try to raise the money to replace it by building a new one. The students still have trouble with fire drills. Some report that kids are drinking more heavily now, saying more prayers, seeing more counselors -- 550 visits so far this year. Two dozen students are homebound, unable, whether physically or emotionally, to come back to class yet. Tour-bus groups have changed their routes to stop at the high school, and stare.
Some people have found a way to forgive: even parents who lost their beloved children; even kids who won't ever walk again, or speak clearly, or grow old together with a sister who died on the school lawn. But other survivors are still on a journey, through dark places of anger and suspicion, aimed at a government they fear wants to cover up the misjudgments of police; at a school that wants to shift blame; at the killers' parents, who have stated their regrets in written statements issued through their lawyers but who still aren't saying much and who surely, surely had to know something.
It's easy now to see the signs: how a video-game joystick turned Harris into a better marksman, like a golfer who watches Tiger Woods videos; how he decided to stop taking his Luvox, to let his anger flare, undiluted by medication. How Klebold's violent essays for English class were like skywriting his intent. If only the parents had looked in the middle drawer of Harris' desk, they would have found the four windup clocks that he later used as timing devices. Check the duffel bag in the closet; the pipe bombs are inside. In his CD collection, they would have found a recording that meant so much to him that he willed it to a girl in his last videotaped suicide message. The name of the album? Bombthreat Before She Blows.
The problem is that until April 20, nobody was looking. And Harris and Klebold knew it.
THE BASEMENT TAPES
The tapes were meant to be their final word, to all those who had picked on them over the years, and to everyone who would come up with a theory about their inner demons. It is clear listening to them that Harris and Klebold were not just having trouble with what their counselors called "anger management." They fed the anger, fueled it, so the fury could take hold, because they knew they would need it to do what they had set out to do. "More rage. More rage," Harris says. "Keep building it on," he says, motioning with his hands for emphasis.
Harris recalls how he moved around so much with his military family and always had to start over, "at the bottom of the ladder." People continually made fun of him -- "my face, my hair, my shirts." As for Klebold, "If you could see all the anger I've stored over the past four f___ing years..." he says. His brother Byron was popular and athletic and constantly "ripped" on him, as did the brother's friends. Except for his parents, Klebold says, his extended family treated him like the runt of the litter. "You made me what I am," he said. "You added to the rage." As far back as the Foothills Day Care center, he hated the "stuck-up" kids he felt hated him. "Being shy didn't help," he admits. "I'm going to kill you all. You've been giving us s___ for years."
Klebold and Harris were completely soaked in violence: in movies like Reservoir Dogs; in gory video games that they tailored to their imaginations. Harris liked to call himself "Reb," short for rebel. Klebold's nickname was VoDKa (his favorite liquor, with the capital DK for his initials). On pipe bombs used in the massacre he wrote "VoDKa Vengeance."
That they were aiming for 250 dead shows that their motives went far beyond targeting the people who teased them. They planned it very carefully: when they would strike, where they would put the bombs, whether the fire sprinklers would snuff out their fuses. They could hardly wait. Harris picks up the shotgun and makes shooting noises. "Isn't it fun to get the respect that we're going to deserve?" he asks.
The tapes are a cloudy window on their moral order. They defend the friends who bought the guns for them, who Harris and Klebold say knew nothing of their intentions -- as though they are concerned that innocent people not be blamed for their massacre of innocent people. If they hadn't got the guns where they did, Harris says, "we would have found something else."
They had many chances to turn back -- and many chances to get caught. They "came close" one day, when an employee of Green Mountain Guns called Harris' house and his father answered the phone. "Hey, your clips are in," the clerk said. His father replied that he hadn't ordered any clips and, as Harris retells it, didn't ask whether the clerk had dialed the right number. If either one had asked just one question, says Harris, "we would've been f___ed."
"We wouldn't be able to do what we're going to do," Klebold adds.
THE WARNING SIGNS
You could fill a good-size room with the people whose lives have been twisted into ropes of guilt by the events leading up to that awful day, and by the day itself. The teachers who read the essays but didn't hear the warnings, the cops who were tipped to Harris' poisonous website but didn't act on it, the judge and youth-services counselor who put the boys through a year of community service after they broke into a van and then concluded that they had been rehabilitated. Because so many people are being blamed and threatened with lawsuits, there are all kinds of public explanations designed to diffuse and defend. But there are private conversations going on as well, within the families, among the cops, in the teachers' lounge, where people are asking themselves what they could have done differently. Neil Gardner, the deputy assigned to the school who traded gunfire with Harris, says he wishes he could have done more. But with the criticism, he has learned, "you're not a hero unless you die."
Nearly everyone who ever knew Harris or Klebold has asked himself the same question: How could we have been duped? Yet the boys were not loners; they had a circle of friends. Harris played soccer (until the fall of 1998), and Klebold was in the drama club. Just the week before the rampage, the boys had to write a poem for an English class. Harris wrote about stopping the hate and loving the world. Klebold went to the prom the weekend before the slaughter; Harris couldn't get a date but joined him at the postprom parties, to celebrate with students they were planning to kill.
To adults, Klebold had always come across as the bashful, nervous type who could not lie very well. Yet he managed to keep his dark side a secret. "People have no clue," Klebold says on one videotape. But they should have had. And this is one of the most painful parts of the puzzle, to look back and see the flashing red lights -- especially regarding Harris -- that no one paid attention to. No one except, perhaps, the Brown family.
Brooks Brown became notorious after the massacre because certain police officers let slip rumors that he might have somehow been involved. And indeed he was -- but not in the way the police were suggesting. Brown and Harris had had an argument back in 1998, and Harris had threatened Brown; Klebold also told him that he should read Harris' website on AOL, and he gave Brooks the Web address.
And there it all was: the dimensions and nicknames of his pipe bombs. The targets of his wrath. The meaning of his life. "I'm coming for EVERYONE soon and I WILL be armed to the f___ing teeth and I WILL shoot to kill." He rails against the people of Denver, "with their rich snobby attitude thinkin they are all high and mighty... God, I can't wait til I can kill you people. Feel no remorse, no sense of shame. I don't care if I live or die in the shoot-out. All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you as I can, especially a few people. Like Brooks Brown."
The Browns didn't know what to do. "We were talking about our son's life," says Judy Brown. She and her husband argued heatedly. Randy Brown wanted to call Harris' father. But Judy didn't think the father would do anything; he hadn't disciplined his son for throwing an ice ball at the Browns' car. Randy considered anonymously faxing printouts from the website to Harris' father at work, but Judy thought it might only provoke Harris to violence.
Though she had been friends with Susan Klebold for years, Judy hesitated to call and tell her what was said on the website, which included details of Eric and Dylan's making bombs together. In the end, the Browns decided to call the sheriff's office. On the night of March 18, a deputy came to their house. They gave him printouts of the website, and he wrote a report for what he labeled a "suspicious incident." The Browns provided names and addresses for both Harris and Klebold, but they say they told the deputy that they did not want Harris to know their son had reported him.
A week or so later, Judy called the sheriff's office to find out what had become of their complaint. The detective she spoke with seemed uninterested; he even apologized for being so callous because he had seen so much crime. Mrs. Brown persisted, and she and her husband met with detectives on March 31. Members of the bomb squad helpfully showed them what a pipe bomb looked like -- in case one turned up in their mailbox.
The police already had a file on the boys, it turns out: they had been caught breaking into a van and were about to be sentenced. But somehow the new complaint never intersected the first; the Harrises and Klebolds were never told that a new complaint had been leveled at Eric Harris. And as weeks passed, the Browns found it harder to get their calls returned as detectives focused on an unrelated triple homicide. Meanwhile, at the school, Deputy Gardner told the two deans that the police were investigating a boy who was looking up how to make pipe bombs on the Web. But the deans weren't shown the Web page, nor were they given Eric's name.
As more time passed and nothing happened, the Browns' fears eased -- though they were troubled when their son started hanging out with Harris again. Then came April 20. As the gunmen entered the school, Harris saw Brown and told him to run away. But when all the smoke had cleared and the bodies counted, the Browns went public with their charge that the police had failed to heed their warnings. And even some cops agree.
"It should have been followed up," says Sheriff Stone, who did not take office until January 1999. "It fell through the cracks," admits John Kiekbusch, the sheriff's division chief in charge of investigations and patrol.
Some people still think Brooks Brown must have been involved. When he goes to the Dairy Queen, the kid at the drive-through recognizes him and locks all the doors and windows. Brown knows it is almost impossible to convince people that the rumors were never true. Like many kids, his life now has its markers: before Columbine and after.
THE INVESTIGATORS
Detective Kate Battan still sees it in her sleep -- still sees what she saw that first day in April, when she was chosen to lead the task force that would investigate the massacre. Bullet holes in the banks of blue lockers. Ceiling tiles ajar where kids had scampered to hide in the crawl space. Shoes left behind by kids who literally ran out of them. Dead bodies in the library, where students cowered beneath tables. One boy died clenching his eyeglasses, and another gripped a pencil as he drew his last breath. Was he writing a goodbye note? Or was he so scared that he forgot he held it? "It was like you walked in and time stopped," says Battan. "These are kids. You can't help but think about what their last few minutes were like."
Long after the bodies had been identified, Battan kept the Polaroids of them in her briefcase. Every morning when starting work, she'd look at them to remind herself whom she was working for.
On the Columbine task force, Battan was known as the Whip. As the lead investigator, she kept 80-plus detectives on track. The task force broke into teams: the pre-bomb team, which took the outside of the school; the library team; the cafeteria team; and the associates team, which investigated Harris' and Klebold's friends, including the so-called Trench Coat Mafia, as possible accomplices.
Rich Price is an FBI special agent assigned to the domestic terrorism squad in Denver, a veteran of Oklahoma City and the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta. He was in the North Carolina mountains searching for suspected bomber Eric Rudolph on April 20 when he heard about the rampage at Columbine. In TV news footage that afternoon, he saw his Denver-based colleagues on the scene and called his office. He was told to return to Denver ASAP -- suddenly two teenage boys had become the target of a domestic-terrorism probe.
Price became head of the cafeteria team, re-creating the morning that hell broke loose. The investigators have talked to the survivors, the teachers, the school authorities; they have reviewed the videotapes from four security cameras placed in the cafeteria, as well as the videos the killers made. And they have walked the school, step by step, trying to re-create 46 minutes that left behind 15 dead bodies and a thousand questions.
Battan is very clear about her responsibilities. "I work for the victims. When they don't have any more questions, then I feel I've done my job."
It quickly became obvious to the investigators that the assault did not go as the killers had planned. They had wanted to bomb first, then shoot. So they planted three sets of bombs: one set a few miles away, timed to go off first and lure police away from the school; a second set in the cafeteria, to flush terrified students out into the parking lot, where Harris and Klebold would be waiting with their guns to mow them down; and then a third set in their cars, timed to go off once the ambulances and rescue workers descended, to kill them as well. What actually happened instead was mainly an improvisation.
Just before 11 a.m. they hauled two duffel bags containing propane-tank bombs into the cafeteria. Then they returned to their cars, strapped on their weapons and ammunition, pulled on their black trench coats and settled in to wait.
Judgment Day, as they called it, was to begin at 11:17 a.m. But the bombs didn't go off. After two minutes, they walked toward the school and opened fire, shooting randomly and killing the first two of their 13 victims. And then they headed into the building.
Deputy Gardner was eating his lunch in his patrol car when a janitor called on the radio, saying a girl was down in the parking lot. Gardner drove toward her, heard gunshots and dived behind a Chevy Blazer, trading shots with Harris. "I've got to kill this kid," he kept telling himself. But he was terrified of shooting someone else by accident -- and his training instructions directed that he concentrate on guarding the perimeter, so no one could escape.
Patti Nielson, a teacher, had seen Harris and Klebold coming and ran a few steps ahead of them into the library. One kid was doing his math homework on a calculator; another was filling out a college application; another was reading an article in PEOPLE about Brooke Shields' breakup with Andre Agassi. "Get down!" Nielson screamed. She dialed 911 and dropped the phone when the two gunmen came in. And so the police have a tape of everything that happened next.
The 911 dispatcher listening on the open phone line could hear Harris and Klebold laughing as their victims screamed. When Harris found Cassie Bernall, he leaned down. "Peekaboo," he said, and killed her. His shotgun kicked, stunning him and breaking his nose. Blood streamed down his face as he turned to see Brea Pasquale sitting on the floor because she couldn't fit under a table. "Do you want to die today?" he asked her. "No," she quivered. Just then Klebold called to him, which spared her life.
Why hadn't anyone stopped them yet? It was now 11:29; because of the open line, the 911 dispatcher knew for certain -- for seven long minutes -- that the gunmen were there in the library and were shooting fellow students. At that early stage, though, only about a dozen cops had arrived on the scene, and none of them had protective gear or heavy weapons. They could have charged in with their handguns, but their training, and orders from their commanders, told them to "secure the perimeter" so the shooters couldn't escape and couldn't pursue the students who had fled. And by the time the trained SWAT units were pulling in, the killers were on the move again.
Leaving the library, Harris and Klebold walked down a flight of stairs to the cafeteria. It was empty, except for 450 book bags and the four students who hid beneath tables. All the killing and the yelling upstairs had made the shooters thirsty. Surveillance cameras recorded them as they drank from cups that fleeing kids had left on tables. Then they went back to work. They were frustrated that the bombs they had left, inside and outside, had not exploded, and they watched out the windows as the police and ambulances and SWAT teams descended on the school.
Most people watching the live television coverage that day saw them too, the nearly 800 police officers who would eventually mass outside the high school. The TV audience saw SWAT-team members who stood for hours outside, while, as far as everyone knew at the time, the gunmen were holding kids hostage inside. For the parents whose children were still trapped, there was no excuse for the wait. "When 500 officers go to a battle zone and not one comes away with a scratch, then something's wrong," charges Dale Todd, whose son Evan was wounded inside the school. "I expected dead officers, crippled officers, disfigured officers -- not just children and teachers."
This criticism is "like a punch in the gut," says sheriff's captain Terry Manwaring, who was the SWAT commander that day. "We were prepared to die for those kids."
So why the delay in attacking the gunmen? Chaos played a big part. From the moment of the first report of gunshots at Columbine, SWAT-team members raced in from every direction, some without their equipment, some in jeans and T shirts, just trying to get there quickly. They had only two Plexiglas ballistic shields among them. As Manwaring dressed in his bulletproof gear, he says, he asked several kids to draw on notebook paper whatever they could remember of the layout of the sprawling, 250,000-sq.-ft. school. But the kids were so upset that they were not even sure which way was north.
Through most of the 46 minutes that Harris and Klebold were shooting up the school, police say they couldn't tell where the gunmen were, or how many of them there were. Students and teachers trapped in various parts of the school were flooding 911 dispatchers with calls reporting that the shooters were, simultaneously, inside the cafeteria, the library and the front office. They might have simply followed the sounds of gunfire -- except, police say, fire alarms were ringing so loudly that they couldn't hear a gunshot 20 feet away.
So the officers treated the problem as a hostage situation, moving into the school through entrances far from the one where Harris and Klebold entered. The units painstakingly searched each hallway and closet and classroom and crawl space for gunmen, bombs and booby traps. "Every time we came around a corner," says Sergeant Allen Simmons, who led the first four SWAT officers inside, "we didn't know what was waiting for us." They created safe corridors to evacuate the students they found hiding in classrooms. And they moved very slowly and cautiously.
Evan Todd, 16, tells a different story. Wounded in the library, he waited until the killers moved on, and then he fled outside to safety. Evan, who is familiar with guns, says he immediately briefed a dozen police officers. "I described it all to them -- the guns they were using, the ammo. I told them they could save lives [of the wounded still in the library if they moved in right away]. They told me to calm down and take my frustrations elsewhere."
At about noon Harris and Klebold returned to the library. All but two wounded kids and four teachers had managed to get out while they were gone. The gunmen fired a few more rounds out the window at cops and medics below. Then Klebold placed one final Molotov cocktail, made from a Frappuccino bottle, on a table. As it sizzled and smoked, Harris shot himself, falling to the floor. When Klebold fired seconds later, his Boston Red Sox cap landed on Harris' leg. They were dead by 12:05 p.m., when the sprinkler turned on, extinguishing what was supposed to be their last bomb.
But the police didn't know any of this. They were still searching, slowly, along corridors and in classrooms. They found two janitors hiding in the meat freezer. Students and teachers had barricaded themselves and refused to open doors, worried that the shooters might be posing as cops.
Upstairs in a science classroom, student Kevin Starkey called 911. Teacher Dave Sanders had been shot running in the upstairs hallway, trying to warn people; he was bleeding badly and needed help fast. But by this time the 911 lines were so flooded with calls that the phone company started disconnecting people -- including Starkey. Finally the 911 dispatcher used his personal cell phone and kept a line open to the classroom so he could help guide police there.
Listening to another dispatcher in his earpiece, Sergeant Barry Williams, who was leading a second SWAT team inside, tried to track Sanders down -- but he says no one could tell him where the science rooms were. Still, he and his team searched on, looking for a rag that kids said they had tied on the doorknob as a signal.
The team finally found Sanders in a room with 50 or 60 kids. A paramedic went to work, trying to stop the bleeding and get him out to an ambulance. But it had all taken too long. Though Harris and Klebold had killed themselves three hours earlier, the SWAT team hadn't reached Sanders until close to 3 p.m.
Sanders' daughter Angela often talks to the students who tried to save her dad. "How many of those kids could have lived if they had moved more quickly?" she asks. "This is what I do every day. I sit and ponder, 'What if?'"
The SWAT team members wonder too. By the time they got to the library, they found that the assault on the school was all over. Scattered around the library was "a sea of bombs" that had not exploded. Trying not to kick anything, the SWAT team members looked for survivors. And then they found the killers, already dead. "We'll never know why they stopped when they did," says Battan.
Given how long the cops took and how much ammunition the killers had, the death toll could have been far worse. But some parents still think it didn't need to have been as high as it was. They pressed Colorado Governor Bill Owens, who has appointed a commission to review Columbine and possibly update SWAT tactics for assailants who are moving and shooting. "There may be times when you just walk through until you find the killers," Owens says. "This is the first time this has happened." The local lawmen "didn't know what they were dealing with."
THE PARENTS
Before the SWAT teams ever found the gunmen's bodies, investigators had already left to search the boys' homes: the kids who had managed to flee had told them whom they should be hunting.
When they knocked on each family's door, it was Mr. Harris and Mr. Klebold who answered. By then, news of the assault at Columbine was playing out live on TV. Mr. Harris' first reflex was to call his wife and tell her to come home. And he called his lawyer.
The Klebolds had not been told that their son was definitely involved. They knew his car had been found in the parking lot. They knew witnesses had identified him as a gunman. They knew he was friends with Harris. And they knew he still had not come home, though it was getting late. Mr. Klebold said they had to face the facts. But neither he nor his wife was ready to accept the ugly truth, and they couldn't believe it was happening. "This is real," Mr. Klebold kept saying, as if he had to convince himself. "He's involved."
Within 10 days, the Klebolds sat down with investigators and began to answer their questions. It would be months before the same interviews would take place with the Harrises, who were seeking immunity from prosecution. District Attorney David Thomas says he has not ruled out charges. But at this point, he lacks sufficient evidence of any wrongdoing. And he is not sure whether charging the parents would do any good. "Could I really do anything to punish them anymore?"
Sheriff Stone questioned the Harrises himself. "You want to go after them. How could they not know?" says Stone. "Then you realize they are no different from the rest of us."
Still, of all the unresolved issues about who knew what, the most serious involves Mr. Harris. Investigators have heard from former Columbine student Nathan Dykeman that Mr. Harris may once have found a pipe bomb. Nathan claims Eric Harris told him that his dad took him out and they detonated it together. Nathan is a problematic witness, partly because he accepted money from tabloids after the massacre. His story also amounts to hearsay because it is based on something Harris supposedly said. Investigators have not been able to ask Mr. Harris about it either; the Harrises' lawyer put that kind of question off limits as a condition for their sitting down with investigators at all.
As for the Klebolds, Kate Battan and her sergeant, Randy West, were convinced after their interviews that the parents were fooled liked everyone else. "They were not absentee parents. They're normal people who seem to care for their children and were involved in their life," says Battan. They too have suffered a terrible loss, both of a child and of their trust in their instincts. On what would have been Klebold's 18th birthday recently, Susan Klebold baked him a cake. "They don't have victims' advocates to help them through this," Battan says. They do, however, have a band of devoted friends, and see one or more of them almost every day. In private, the Klebolds try to recall every interaction they had with the son they now realize they never knew: the talks, the car rides, the times they grounded him for something minor. "She wants to know all of it," a friend says of Mrs. Klebold.
Many of the victims' parents wish they could talk to the Klebolds and Harrises, parent to parent. Donna Taylor is caring for her son Mark, 16, who took six 9-mm rounds and spent 39 days in the hospital. She has tried to make contact. "We just want to know," she explains. "From Day One, I wanted to meet and talk with them. I mean, maybe they did watch their boys, and we're not hearing their story."
Throughout the videotapes, it seems as though the only people about whom the killers felt remorse were their parents. "It f___ing sucks to do this to them," Harris says of his parents. "They're going to be put through hell once we do this." And then he speaks directly to them. "There's nothing you guys could've done to prevent this," he says.
Klebold tells his mom and dad they have been "great parents" who taught him "self-awareness, self-reliance...I always appreciated that." He adds, "I'm sorry I have so much rage."
At one point Harris gets very quiet. His parents have probably noticed that he's become distant, withdrawn lately -- but it's been for their own good. "I don't want to spend any more time with them," he says. "I wish they were out of town so I didn't have to look at them and bond more."
Over the months, the police have kept the school apprised of the progress of their investigation: principal Frank DeAngelis has not seen the videotapes, but the evidence that the boys were motivated by many things has prompted some at the school to quietly claim vindication. The charge was that Columbine's social climate was somehow so rancid, the abuse by the school's athletes so relentless, that it drove these boys to murder. The police investigation provides the school with its best defense. "There is nowhere in any of the sheriff's or school's investigation of what happened that shows this was caused by jock culture," says county school spokesman Rick Kaufman. "Both Harris and Klebold dished out as much ribbing as they received. They wanted to become cult heroes. They wanted to make a statement."
That's an overstatement, and it begs the question of why the boys wanted to make such an obscene statement. But many students and faculty were horrified by the way their school was portrayed after the massacre and have tried for the past eight months to correct the record. "I have asked students on occasion," says DeAngelis, "'The things you've read in the paper -- is that happening? Am I just naive?' And they've said, 'Mr. DeAngelis, we don't see it.'"
Maybe they saw the kids who flicked the ketchup packets or tossed the bottles at the trench-coat kids in the cafeteria. But things never got out of hand, they say. Evan Todd, the 255-lb. defensive lineman who was wounded in the library, describes the climate this way: "Columbine is a clean, good place except for those rejects," Todd says of Klebold and Harris and their friends. "Most kids didn't want them there. They were into witchcraft. They were into voodoo dolls. Sure, we teased them. But what do you expect with kids who come to school with weird hairdos and horns on their hats? It's not just jocks; the whole school's disgusted with them. They're a bunch of homos, grabbing each other's private parts. If you want to get rid of someone, usually you tease 'em. So the whole school would call them homos, and when they did something sick, we'd tell them, 'You're sick and that's wrong.'"
Others agree that the whole social-cruelty angle was overblown -- just like the notion that the Trench Coat Mafia was some kind of gang, which it never was. Steven Meier, an English teacher and adviser to the school newspaper, says, "I think these kids wanted to do something that they could be famous for. Other people tend to wait until they graduate and try to make their mark in the working world and try to be famous in a positive way. I think these kids had a dismal view of life and of their own mortality. To just focus on the bullying aspect is just to focus on one small piece of the entire picture." Meier points out that Harris' brother, from all accounts, is a great kid. "Why would a family have one good son and one bad son?" asks Meier. "Why is it that some people turn out to be rotten?"
The killers made their last videotape on the morning of the massacre. This is the only tape the Klebolds have seen; the Harrises have seen none of them. First Harris holds the camera while Klebold speaks. As the camera zooms in tight, Klebold is wearing a Boston Red Sox cap, turned backward. "It's a half-hour before our Judgment Day," Klebold says into the camera. He wants to tell his parents goodbye. "I didn't like life very much," he says. "Just know I'm going to a better place than here," he says.
He takes the camera from Harris, who begins his quick goodbye. "I know my mom and dad will be in shock and disbelief," he says. "I can't help it."
Klebold interrupts. "It's what we had to do," he says. Then they list some favorite CDs and other belongings that they want to will to certain friends. Klebold snaps his fingers for Harris to hurry up. Time's running out.
"That's it," concludes Harris, very succinctly. "Sorry. Goodbye."
-- With reporting by Andrew Goldstein, Maureen Harrington and Richard Woodbury/Littleton
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