Monday, December 17, 2012

Newtown Tragedy May Soften Hearts in Washington - NYTimes.com

Memo From Washington

Newtown Shooting May Cool Washington’s Partisan Passions 


WASHINGTON — To the extent that Americans have diverted their attention since Friday from the horror in Connecticut toward their capital, it has been to wonder whether the school shooting would provoke the first serious gun control debate in years. But the tragedy could have an impact on another crucial legislative issue: the current contest over taxes and spending. 


While seemingly unrelated — the emotionally wrenching holiday-season massacre of 20 first graders and six of their guardians, and Washington’s mind-numbing fiscal fight to reduce deficits — the first cannot fail to have a salutary effect on the latter, say veterans of Washington’s partisan wars from both parties.


“Members of Congress, when you get down to it, are just people,” said Mickey Edwards, a former House Republican leader. “There are those things that, at least momentarily, trump ideology.”
...  Newtown Tragedy May Soften Hearts in Washington - NYTimes.com

Friday, December 14, 2012

Paper Links Nerve Agents in ’91 Gulf War and Ailments - NYTimes.com

Paper Links Nerve Agents in ’91 Gulf War and Ailments

Reviving a 20-year debate over illnesses of veterans of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, a new scientific paper presents evidence that nerve agents released by the bombing of Iraqi chemical weapons depots just before the ground war began could have carried downwind and fallen on American troops staged in Saudi Arabia.

The paper, published in the journal Neuroepidemiology, tries to rebut the longstanding Pentagon position, supported by many scientists, that neurotoxins, particularly sarin gas, could not have carried far enough to sicken American forces. 

The authors are James J. Tuite and Dr. Robert Haley, who has written several papers asserting links between chemical exposures and gulf war illnesses. They assembled data from meteorological and intelligence reports to support their thesis that American bombs were powerful enough to propel sarin from depots in Muthanna and Falluja high into the atmosphere, where winds whisked it hundreds of miles south to the Saudi border.

 .... Paper Links Nerve Agents in ’91 Gulf War and Ailments - NYTimes.com