New Hampshire Health News Digest

U.S. Officials See Hussein : "Saddam Hussein may be playing a significant role in coordinating and directing attacks by his loyalists against American forces in Iraq, senior American officials said Thursday. The officials cited recent intelligence reports indicating that Mr. Hussein is acting as a catalyst or even a leader in the armed opposition, probably from a base of operations near Tikrit, his hometown and stronghold. A leadership role by Mr. Hussein would go far beyond anything previously acknowledged by the Bush administration, which has sought in its public remarks to portray the former Iraqi leader as being on the run and irrelevant. Officials acknowledged that the reports of a significant role by Mr. Hussein could not be corroborated, and one senior official cautioned that recent intelligence reports contained conflicting assessments. Nonetheless, three senior officials described reports of a larger role by Mr. Hussein as credible, and a Defense Department offic...

Iraqis Get Used to Life Without Hussein, and Many Find They Like It : "On Friday evening, the American authorities lifted the curfew on Baghdad starting early Sunday morning, saying life here was returning to normal. Across the city on Saturday, numerous Iraqis agreed and provided ample evidence. Streets swarmed with people shopping and socializing. Coffee houses were packed. Families strolled; vendors clogged the sidewalks. The manager of a travel agency said he is busy for the first time in more than a decade, primarily booking thousands of vacations to the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq, where Iraqis had been forbidden to travel since 1991. 'People feel free to travel now, and they want to go because there's amazing scenery up there, and it's clean and safe,' said Ahmed Abdel Hamid, the manager. Outside the city passport office on Saturday afternoon, dozens of Iraqis milled about, waiting to apply for travel papers. Rouda Jasim Ali sat under a tree outside...

WorldNetDaily: Al-Qaida planned U.S. forest fires : "In August, Australian authorities launched an investigation into reports al-Qaida planned to spark bushfires in a new wave of devastating terror attacks. A June 25 FBI memo to United States law enforcement agencies revealed a senior al-Qaida detainee claimed to have developed a plan to start midsummer forest fires in the U.S >>> The memo, obtained by the Arizona Republic newspaper, said an unidentified detainee revealed he hoped to create several large, catastrophic wildfires at once. "The detainee believed that significant damage to the U.S. economy would result and once it was realized that the fires were terrorist acts, U.S. citizens would put pressure on the U.S. government to change its policies," the memo said. The detainee told investigators his plan called for three or four operatives to travel to the U.S. and set timed explosive devices in forests and grasslands. >>> In fact, Ar...

Telegraph | News | After Tony and Kofi fail, Brad and Jennifer try Mid-East diplomacy : "After Tony and Kofi fail, Brad and Jennifer try Mid-East diplomacy By Inigo Gilmore in Jerusalem (Filed: 26/10/2003) Bill Clinton failed, Tony Blair drew a blank and Kofi Annan made little progress. But now a team of Hollywood film stars is about to visit the Middle East on a private peace mission, in the belief that their charms will work magic on the Israeli-Arab conflict. Brad Pitt, his wife, Jennifer Aniston, and Danny DeVito are among the stars who aim to succeed where world statesmen have stumbled. >>> In a region suffering from peace initiative fatigue, however, Israelis and Palestinians have greeted news of the Hollywood initiative with bemusement and incredulity. For some, the prospect of DeVito sitting down to talk peace with Hamas militants over a cup of sweet tea, or Pitt breaking bread at a sabbath dinner with hardline Jewish settlers, is preposterous. Oz ...

: "42 die in Baghdad carnage By Paul Sims, Evening Standard Up to 42 people are feared dead today after five large explosions ripped through the centre of Baghdad in the bloodiest day of terrorism since the end of Saddam Hussein's regime. The blast blew down a 40ft section of the wall in front of the three-storey Red Cross building, destroying a dozen cars and shattering a water main. Emergency services fought to control the blaze as ambulances swept through the city, ferrying the injured to hospital. Witness Salah Mansour as he said: 'When the driver reached near the Red Cross building he got down from the vehicle and a guard went up to ask him why he had stopped there. 'The driver said he was trying to fix the car and then the blast just went off.' In apparently co-ordinated attacks across the city at the height of the morning rush hour, four police stations were also targeted, bringing the total dead to at least 37. At least 225 other people were in...

FT.com Home US : "Bill Gates (pictured) on Monday offered the first public look at Longhorn, the next generation of the Windows PC operating system that he said would be Microsoft's 'biggest release of this decade and the biggest since Windows 95.' However, the Microsoft chairman gave no timetable for the launch of the software, which has already slipped to a later timetable than originally thought. With Longhorn now not expected before 2006, Microsoft faces a gap in its new product cycle that has left a question over its growth rate in the meantime. Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer, has called Longhorn a 'bet the company' product for Microsoft and insisted it will not be released before the company is confident it is ready. Despite the delays, Microsoft gave an early look at the next Windows on Monday in an effort to build backing for the operating system among the many independent software developers who write their own applications to run on P...

ABCNEWS.com : Attack Drives U.S. Forces From Baghdad HQ : "BAGHDAD, Iraq Oct. 27 BAGHDAD, Iraq Oct. 27 � The U.S. occupation authority retreated from its headquarters after Iraqi insurgents attacked the heavily guarded hotel with a missile barrage that killed an American colonel, wounded 18 people and sent the visiting U.S. deputy defense secretary scurrying for safety. The bold blow at the heart of the U.S. presence here clearly rattled U.S. confidence that it is defeating Iraq's shadowy insurgents. Paul Wolfowitz, the shaken-looking but unhurt Pentagon deputy, said the strike Sunday against the Al Rasheed Hotel, from nearly point-blank range, "will not deter us from completing our mission" in Iraq. "We'll have to get the security situation under control," Secretary of State Colin Powell told NBC TV.

Wired News: Three R's: Reading, Writing, RFID : "Radio-frequency identification tags -- which have been hailed as the next-generation bar code -- consist of a microchip outfitted with a tiny antenna that broadcasts an ID number to a reader unit. The reader searches a database for the number and finds the related file, which contains the tagged item's description, or in the case of Enterprise Charter, the student's information. Unlike bar codes, which must be manually scanned, RFID-tagged items can be read when they are in proximity to a reader unit, essentially scanning themselves. The school uses passive RFID tags that are activated when radio waves from the reader reach the chip's antenna. (Active RFID tags incorporate a battery that constantly broadcasts the chip's ID number and are much more expensive.) The technology has raised a ruckus in recent months, as companies such as Wal-Mart move from bar codes to RFID to track merchandise and libraries plac...

Wired News: The Great Library of Amazonia : "Getting to this point represents a significant technological feat. Most of the material in the archive comes from scanned pages of actual books. This may be surprising, given that most books today are written on PCs, e-mailed to publishers, typeset on computers, and printed on digital presses. But many publishers still do not have push-button access to the digital files of the books they put out. Insofar as the files exist, they are often scattered around the desktops of editors, designers, and contract printers. For books more than a few years old, complete digital files may be lost. John Wiley & Sons contributed 5,000 titles to the Amazon project -- all of them in physical form. Fortunately, mass scanning has grown increasingly feasible, with the cost dropping to as low as $1 each. Amazon sent some of the books to scanning centers in low-wage countries like India and the Philippines; others were run in the United States usi...

CNN.com - Iraqi official says limited German, French help won't be forgotten - Oct. 23, 2003 "MADRID, Spain (CNN) -- A top Iraqi official attending an international conference on raising funds to rebuild Iraq warned Thursday that France and Germany's limited donations would not be forgotten. Ayad Allawi, the current head of Iraq's U.S.-appointed governing council, said he hoped German and French officials would reconsider their decision not to boost their contributions beyond funds already pledged through the European Union. 'As far as Germany and France are concerned, really, this was a regrettable position they had,' Allawi said. 'I don't think the Iraqis are going to forget easily that in the hour of need, those countries wanted to neglect Iraq.' U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan -- also attending the conference -- urged the international community to give billions of dollars to rebuild the nation, saying reconstruction cannot wait ...

News : "Iran bows to Europe over nuclear crisis By Angus McDowall in Tehran 22 October 2003 Iran has agreed to more intrusive nuclear checks and to freeze its uranium enrichment programme in an important concession to the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany."

Yahoo! News - Soldiers Must Wait for Their Iraqi Wives : "PENSACOLA, Fla. - Two National Guard soldiers who married Iraqi women against their commander's wishes will have to wait at least eight months to return home with their brides, according to a lawyer for one of the soldiers. The women's visas will take at least that long to process by mail because the State Department is not issuing visas in Iraq (news - web sites), said Richard Alvoid, an attorney hired by Sgt. Sean Blackwell's family. The wait could be even longer if the military decides to charge the men with disobeying orders, Alvoid said. Blackwell, 27, and Cpl. Brett Dagen, 37, were Christians who converted to Islam so they could be married under Iraqi law. Their commanders took the unusual step of ordering the men not to marry. The soldiers, members of the 3rd Battalion of the Florida Guard's 124th Infantry, are expected to remain in Iraq at least until February. The men had wanted to s...

Economist.com | Handheld computers : PDA, RIP The next big thing that wasn't�or was it? IS IT time to declare the demise of the handheld computer, also known as the personal digital assistant (PDA)? A lot of people suddenly think so, for despite high hopes that the devices�made by such firms as Palm, Sony, HP and Dell�would someday become ubiquitous, annual sales have stayed flat at around 11m units worldwide. This compares poorly with PCs, around 130m of which are sold every year, and mobile phones, with sales of around 460m units. �The PDA market will never be a mass market,� says Cindy Wolf, an analyst at In-Stat/MDR, a market-research firm. Almost everyone who wants a PDA, she says, now has one. Palm springs eternal In contrast, sales of smartphones, high-powered mobile handsets capable of doing most things PDAs can do, are rising fast. Smartphones can be used to store addresses and phone numbers, download small pieces of software (such as games), browse the interne...

New Scientist : Meet the people shaping the future of science This interview was first published in New Scientist print edition, subscribe here I want to live forever Photo: Timothy Archibald Cynthia Kenyon thinks we can have it all: health, wealth, hordes of children - and a long life. A very long life. She disagrees with prevailing ideas that we can only live longer by paying a high price in terms of reduced fertility or a sluggish metabolism. What made this professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, so sure? A little worm. James Kingsland was keen to discover the secret >>> "How would you go about developing an anti-ageing drug? It's just a question of finding a drug that would mimic the changes that we've made in worms, flies and mice. Basically we should have a hard look at the insulin and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) endocrine systems. The receptors for both have been shown to...

Yahoo! News - Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says : "LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq (news - web sites) has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report. The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were 'over-confident.' The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq. Washington must impose security in Iraq to prevent the country from 'ripening into a cause celebre for radical Islamic terrorists,' it concluded. 'Nation-building' in Iraq was...