these defendants personally maimed, kidnapped or killed
anyone in the United States or elsewhere," U.S. District Judge Marcia
Cooke said. "There was never a plot to overthrow the United States
government."
Judge Cooke took into account the
harsh, isolated conditions Mr. Padilla faced during the 31⁄2 years he was held
in a brig in Charleston, S.C., without charge, as an enemy combatant after his
2002 arrest. Defense lawyers claim he was tortured by the military, but U.S.
officials denied that, and Judge Cooke never used the word torture.
After a three-month trial, Mr.
Padilla, 37 years old, and co-defendants Adham Amin Hassoun, 45, and Kifah Wael
Jayyousi, 46, were convicted in August of being part of a support cell that
sent recruits, money and supplies to Islamic extremists world-wide, including
al Qaeda. Mr. Padilla was billed as a star recruit, while Mr. Hassoun was the
recruiter and Mr. Jayyousi served as a financier and propagandist in the cell's
early years, according to trial testimony.
Mr. Padilla was added to the case in
late 2005, just as his legal challenges to continued detention without criminal
charge were reaching the Supreme Court. Mr. Padilla was declared an enemy
combatant a month after his highly publicized arrest on the purported
radioactive dirty-bomb plot, but those allegations were quietly discarded.
The strongest evidence in the case was
a form Mr. Padilla completed in 2000 to attend an al Qaeda training camp in
Afghanistan that was recovered by the CIA shortly after the U.S. invasion in
late 2001. Prosecutors repeatedly invoked the al Qaeda connection and used a
video of an old Osama bin Laden interview in an attempt to link the three to
the world's most notorious terrorist.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/ImageGallery/CategoryList.aspx?id=a1206a74-5f7f-443f-97f5-9b389a4d4f9e&m=0
Ultimately, Judge Cooke said at the
sentencing hearing, there was not enough evidence linking Mr. Padilla and the
other two men to specific acts of terrorism or victims.
Sentencing guidelines had suggested a
range of 30 years to life for all three, but Judge Cooke used her discretion to
go below even the minimum. Mr. Padilla got 17 years and four months; Mr.
Hassoun, 15 years and eight months; and Mr. Jayyousi, 12 years and eight
months. Their prison time will probably be even less counting months already
served in pretrial detention and automatic reductions for good behavior, their
lawyers said.
Judge Cooke said life sentences should
be reserved for the most serious terrorist offenders, such as Sept. 11
conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui or Terry Nichols, convicted in the 1995 Oklahoma
City bombing.
"I feel good about everything.
This is amazing," said Mr. Padilla's mother, Estela Lebron. "He's not
a terrorist. ... He's just a human being."
All three men are likely to appeal
their convictions and sentences, their lawyers said. But even they were surprised
at the leniency shown by Judge Cooke. "It is definitely a defeat for the
government," said Mr. Hassoun's lawyer, Jeanne Baker.
The Justice Department praised the
efforts of prosecutors and investigators in the case, which centered on tens of
thousands of FBI wiretap intercepts collected over eight years. "Thanks to
their efforts, the defendants' North American support cell has been dismantled
and can no longer send money and jihadist recruits to conflicts overseas,"
said Kenneth L. Wainstein, assistant attorney general for national security.
London's East End is notorious for its
criminals, from serial murderer Jack the Ripper to mobsters the Kray twins.
The latest candidate for this rogue's
gallery is Janet Devers, a 63-year-old woman who runs a vegetable stall at
Ridley Road market. Her alleged crime: selling goods only by the pound and the
ounce.
Ms. Devers, whose stall has been in
the family for 60 years, faces 13 criminal charges stemming from not selling
her produce by the kilogram and the gram. She stands accused of breaking a
European Union-instigated rule that countries must use metric measures to
standardize trade. The rest of Europe is metric.
But Brits drink their milk and beer by
the pint. On the road they rack up miles. Imperial measurement "is what we
know, how we are. Who's to tell us to change?" said Scott Lomax, a fellow
vegetable-stall owner.
Ms. Devers, who pleaded not guilty in
a court appearance on Friday, is being lionized for her stand in Britain's
feisty tabloids. If convicted, she could be fined as much as $130,000.
"It's disgusting," said Ms.
Devers of the charges. "We have knifings. We have killings," she
said. "And they're taking me to court because I'm selling in pounds and
ounces."
And, equally illegally, in bowls. Ten
of the counts against her relate to purveying produce, such as hot
Scotch-bonnet peppers, by the bowl.
The United Kingdom wrote an exemption
into its measurements law to meet the EU metric requirement in 2000, as
Brussels allowed. It stated that traders must use metric weights, but they
could use imperial measures as well. The problem is that Ms. Devers allegedly
didn't have metric prices on all of her produce when she was charged late last
year, and two of her scales only measured in pounds and ounces.
The British imperial system dates back
at least to medieval times. Notable holdouts still using it are Britain and the
U.S. It doesn't help that the metric system was created over 200 years ago
across the Channel in France, England's ancient archrival.
Aversion to the metric system is one
of many signs of the U.K.'s lingering reluctance to integrate with its
continental neighbors. Britain shuns the euro in favor of the pound sterling,
drives on the left-hand side of the road and has a tradition of
"euroskeptic'' politicians who thrill some sections of the public by
bashing the Continent.
One recent overcast Thursday afternoon
at Ridley Road market in Hackney, a low-income district in East London,
shoppers from Turkish, Asian and Afro-Caribbean communities browsed the stalls.
Shouts from traders touting deals like "50p a basket of mangoes"
mingled with reggae music blasting from a stall that sells posters and
T-shirts.
Insulated from the chilly January day
in a faux-fur- trimmed hat, Ms. Devers chatted up customers from behind her
covered stall piled with eggplant, ginger, green beans (£1 a pound for the
beans). Though her signs currently carry prices in pounds as well as the
equivalent in kilograms, she said her customers prefer pounds -- and sometimes
complain when she uses kilos that she's trying to cheat them.
"I always shop in pounds,"
said Sophia Levicki, a 60-year-old part-time shop clerk and a regular at Ms.
Devers's stall. "If it's good enough and cheap enough, I'll buy it,"
she added, as she asked for two pounds of shiny, purple-skinned eggplant.
Nearby stall owner Mr. Lomax added
prices in kilos as well as pounds to his signs after warnings from local
authorities in recent years. "The customers don't understand kilos,"
he said. Like many stall owners he uses metric scales, which he got after the
EU metric directive was introduced into U.K. law in 2000.
Ms. Devers's trouble with the law
began one Thursday this September, when two representatives from the local
government council, accompanied by two policemen, came up to her stall and
seized her imperial scales. They told Ms. Devers she was using illegal scales
and that she wasn't allowed to weigh in pounds and ounces, she said. "I
was furious," said Ms. Devers, who asked the police officers if the
council was allowed to do that, to which they responded that it was.
Around Christmas, a 67-page letter
landed in her mail. It outlined 13 criminal charges against her, including one
charge of improper pricing of goods and two charges related to using imperial
scales. She also faces 10 counts related to selling by the bowl.
"I think it's so
ridiculous," she said, noting that pricing per bowl is common practice
because customers perceive it as good value. "If they're going to do me
for bowls, they have to do the whole country."
Alan Laing, an official with the local
authority that is prosecuting Ms. Devers, said that "making sure traders
comply with weights-and-measures legislation is also part of the job."
Ms. Devers wouldn't be the first to be
pounded down by the metric law. Four market-stall owners -- including her
brother -- lost an appeal to the High Court in 2002 for not using metric
measurements. They received conditional discharge -- which means no further
action is taken as long as they don't break the law again within a specific
period of time. A group campaigning to pardon them is helping coordinate
financing for Ms. Devers's case and calls them "metric martyrs."
It's about "who governs
Britain," says campaigner Neil Herron, from Sunderland, England.
With the help of her brother, Ms.
Devers found lawyers willing to take on the case for a nominal fee. Their
planned legal strategy is to argue various technicalities such as a loophole
for imperial scales that predate the law. They plan to lean on what they see as
a recent softening in Brussels. After pressure from U.K. companies as well as
others that trade with Britain and the U.S., the European parliament recently
adopted legislation that would let the U.K. continue to use imperial alongside
metric measures indefinitely, instead of phasing it out by next year. The
measure is awaiting European Council approval.
Her legal team may also call customers
as witnesses to say that they like paying pounds for pounds, one of the lawyers
involved said.
Ms. Devers faces fines of up to
$10,000 per charge, or a total of about $130,000. "It would ruin me,"
said Ms. Devers, who declined to detail her earnings. She says she canceled a
planned trip to New York with her twin sister, because having a criminal record
could make entering the U.S. difficult.
On Friday afternoon, Ms. Devers appeared
in Thames Magistrates Court in East London. She pleaded not guilty.
Her barrister, Nicholas Bowen, mocked
the nature of her alleged crimes. "If somebody sells a punnet of
strawberries at Wimbledon is that a criminal offense?" he asked. A punnet,
as all Britons know, is roughly the equivalent of a couple of handfuls -- or
about half a liter.
Ms. Devers and her legal team won a
victory of sorts. The magistrate granted their request that the case be tried
by a jury. Jurors, with perhaps some shoppers among them, will likely be
sympathetic, Mr. Herron says.
Ms. Devers smiled as she left the
courthouse to go back to her stall. The scales of justice sit, she said,
"in the hands of the people."
Defendants in
high-profile lawsuits typically keeps their mouths shut, letting their lawyers
and or public relations experts do the talking. But not John Yoo, the Berkeley
Law professor and former Bush administration official who was sued by convicted
terrorist Jose Padilla and Padilla's Yale Law School lawyers earlier this
month. He's not taking this lawsuit lying down, and he vented this weekend on
the WSJ's op-ed page. (Click here for prior Law Blog coverage on the suit.)
Yoo summarizes the
lawsuit nicely: "Padilla wants a declaration that his detention by the
U.S. government was unconstitutional, $1 in damages, and all of the fees
charged by his own attorneys." He warns of the dangers of this litigation.
"The lawsuit by Padilla and his Yale Law School lawyers is an effort to
open another front against U.S. anti-terrorism policies," he writes.
"If he succeeds, it won't be long before opponents of the war on terror
use the courtroom to reverse the wartime measures needed to defeat those
responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on 9/11."
Yoo, an architect of
the White House's policies on detaining terrorist suspects, spends much of the
essay detailing Padilla's odyssey and the history of detaining alleged wartime
criminal like him. He then decries the lawsuits filed against him and other
Bush administration officials (e.g., Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and Wolfowitz).
Yoo says the
"qualified immunity" doctrine, which holds that government officials
cannot be sued personally unless they had intentionally violated someone's
clearly established constitutional rights, isn't enough:
The legal system
should not be used as a bludgeon against individuals targeted by political
activists to impose policy preferences they have failed to implement via the
ballot box . . . .
The prospect of having
to waste large sums of money on lawyers will deter talented people from
entering public service, leading to more mediocrity in our bureaucracies. It
will also lead to a risk-averse government that doesn't innovate or think
creatively. Government by lawsuit is no way to run, or win, a war.
Genentech Inc.'s discovery of two new
genes linked to lupus raised hopes of earlier diagnosis and better targeted
treatment of the autoimmune disease, which affects an estimated 1.5 million
Americans.
Genentech already has two experimental
drugs in Phase III, or late stage, studies to treat lupus: a compound called an
anti-CD20 antibody, and its older drug Rituxan, widely used as a cancer
treatment. The latest advance restores the company's momentum in combating
lupus after two patients who had taken Rituxan -- not yet an approved treatment
for the illness -- died of brain infections in December 2006. The two patients
weren't study subjects and had other risk factors, Genentech has said.
Chief Executive Art Levinson this
month highlighted his hopes that the lupus trials will help boost the flow of
important data emerging from Genentech's pipeline of new drugs in development
this year after "a quiet period."
Analysts fear the South San Francisco,
Calif., biotech giant's earnings growth could flatten unless it can score
another big hit to supplement revenue from its blockbuster Avastin.
A number of other companies also are
developing lupus treatments, including Amgen Inc., a biotech rival based in
Thousand Oaks, Calif.
Discovery of the new genes, labeled
BLK and ITGAM, was reported by Genentech scientist Timothy W. Behrens and his
colleagues in the New England Journal of Medicine's online edition on Sunday.
The report coincided with that of a rival team from the International
Consortium for Systemic Lupus Erythematosus Genetics in the journal Nature
Genetics.
Dr. Behrens's team believes the BLK
gene influences one component of the immune system -- B cells -- while the
ITGAM gene affects another, T-cells, in ways that trigger the immune system to
attack a lupus patient's own body like friendly fire.
Scientists hope the findings will
improve the diagnosis and targeted treatment by predicting patient response to
drugs. Lupus attacks many organ systems and can cause death, often from
cardiovascular damage. Women and minorities suffer the brunt of lupus cases.
"Way too many young women have
strokes and heart attacks," Dr. Behrens said. "This disease attacks
blood vessels and every organ has a blood supply, so it manifests itself in the
kidney, brains, joints, heart."
Dr. Behrens added that lupus is often
difficult to diagnose and that "it's not unusual for someone to go several
years with vague and undiagnosed symptoms."
Genentech's findings are relevant to
continuing studies because Rituxan targets B cells, the very cells that express
the newly discovered BLK gene. But BLK and ITGAM are just two of about 10 genes
linked to the immune disorder, which may eventually be discovered to be linked
to another 20 or 30 genes, Dr. Behrens said. The findings may help predict who
can benefit from treatment, though Dr. Behrens cautioned the timeline for such
applications is uncertain.
The Behrens paper not only adds to the
growing number of genes linked to lupus, but is significant in that it uses a
powerful genetic-testing technology that is yielding insights into many
previously unrecognized genes linked to disease, said Anthony Fauci, director
of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a unit of the
National Institutes of Health.
The findings aren't expected to
produce a full picture of the disorder just yet, because none of the study
subjects was African-American, a group that suffers disproportionately from
lupus.
Researchers said they identified a
genetic variant that is linked to both an increased risk of a heart attack and
a person's chances of preventing such an attack by taking a
cholesterol-lowering pill called a statin.
The variation, in a gene called KIF6,
is present in nearly 60% of the population, the researchers found. In four large
studies involving a total of more than 30,000 patients, carriers of the
mutation had a risk of heart attacks, strokes or death related to heart disease
as much as 55% higher than those who didn't have it.
The impact of the variant was
independent of such conventional cardiovascular risk factors as smoking status,
cholesterol levels and diabetes.
Discovery of the KIF6 variant was
announced by Celera Group-Applera Corp., an Alameda, Calif., diagnostics
company known for having mapped the human genome in 2000 in a high-profile race
with a government-funded project. Details are reported in three studies being
published Jan. 29 by the Journal of the American College of Cardiology and now
available on the publication's Web site.
The interaction of KIF6 with statin
therapy "is a very interesting and unexpected finding," said Marc
Sabatine, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, and a
co-author of one of the papers. While it would be "premature" to base
treatment decisions on a patient's KIF6 status, he said, the results "take
us one step closer to personalized medicine" in which doctors use genetic
data to tailor therapy for patients.
Celera plans to launch "in the
coming months" a genetic test for about $200 for the KIF6 variant through
its recently acquired Berkeley HeartLab unit, said Kathy Ordoñez, president at
Celera.
But the KIF6 gene -- for
"kinesin-like protein family member 6" -- hasn't previously been
linked to heart disease, nor has it shown up in several other genome scans probing
DNA for heart-disease genes. Some experts said more study is needed to confirm
the findings and determine KIF6's role in evaluating and treating patients at
risk for cardiovascular disease.
"It's quite provocative,"
said Eric Topol, a cardiologist and director of Scripps Genomic Medicine and a
cardiologist at the Scripps Clinic, La Jolla, Calif. "It could be a marker
but there are a lot of question marks surrounding it."
The report is the latest in a flurry
of studies linking tiny single-letter variations called single nucleotide
polymorphisms, or SNPs, in a person's DNA with risk of disease. Researchers
hope that such discoveries will shed light on the biology illnesses, reveal
potential new drug targets, and drive the field of personalized medicine.
The hunt for SNPs related to heart
disease is especially intense. Earlier this month, deCode Genetics Inc. of
Iceland reported that a variant of the gene 9p21 is associated with risk of two
serious vascular conditions, aneurysms of the abdominal aorta and the brain.
The gene is established as increasing heart-attack risk, Dr. Topol said. DeCode
recently began selling a $200 test for the gene.
disease has proved difficult. A report
last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at 85 SNPs
that had been cited as possible heart-attack genes and found evidence for all
of them wanting.
But otherwise, finding validated SNPs
linked to cardiovascular
As part of its studies, Celera tested
35 different SNPs in patients who had suffered heart attacks. Only the KIF6
mutation turned out to have a strong statistical link. The 9p21 gene wasn't
among those Celera tested.
"We think this marker will stand
up to [validation] in spades," said Thomas J. White, chief scientific
officer at Celera and a co-author of one of the new papers.
The KIF6 finding resulted from a
collaboration between Celera and academic researchers who led four previously
published landmark studies, including three large randomized trials that
demonstrated the effectiveness of statin drugs in preventing heart attacks.
DNA samples were obtained at or near
the trials' beginnings. Since researchers now know which patients had heart
attacks and which were treated with statins, they could see what genetic
differences might have influenced outcomes.
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For instance, in a study called Care
that originally compared Bristol-Myers Squibb Corp.'s Pravachol against placebo
in patients who had already had heart disease, 12.4% of KIF6 mutation carriers
treated with placebo suffered heart attacks compared with 8.1% of those who
didn't have the mutation. Researchers said that translated to a relative 50%
increased risk after adjusting for other factors.
Among KIF6 carriers who got Pravachol,
there were 37% fewer heart attacks compared with placebo. Among noncarriers,
there were 14% fewer heart attacks on the drug than on placebo, suggesting
those with a genetic variant responded better to the drug.
Researchers conducted a similar look
at a study called Prove-It, in which the maximum dose of Pfizer Inc.'s Lipitor
proved superior to a moderate dose of Pravachol in preventing heart attacks and
death among people on the verge of a heart attack. The genetic analysis showed
that nearly all of the benefit from Lipitor occurred in carriers of the KIF6
mutation.
In each case, the benefits weren't
related to how much a statin lowered cholesterol.
Separately, the researchers looked at
DNA taken from participants in the 25,000-patient Women's Health Study at
Harvard Medical School and found that the KIF6 variant was associated with a
34% increased risk of heart attacks among women.
Researchers said further study of KIF6
could help identify mechanisms for how heart disease develops and possibly new
targets for drugs to treat it.
Bristol-Myers sponsored the original
statin trials and provided access to the DNA for two of the current papers, but
neither Bristol-Myers nor Pfizer funded the new analysis, which Celera paid
for.
More than one in 20 patients
undergoing breast surgery later developed infections at incision sites,
according to a new study, a complication that was more common than thought.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention estimates the infection rate following breast removal surgery at
2%, although earlier surveys put it at anywhere between 1% and 28%.
In the two-year study published in
this month's issue of the Archives of Surgery, 5.3%, or 50, of nearly 950
patients developed infections within a year of their procedures, inside and
outside the hospital. The average time between surgery and infection was 47
days.
"The surgical site infection
rates following breast surgery seem to be much greater than the nationally
reported incidence of 2% and much higher than what is expected for clean
surgical procedures," Margaret Olsen of the Washington University School
of Medicine in St. Louis wrote in her report.
The cost of follow-up medical care was
put by the study at roughly $4,000 a patient.
Roughly one in eight women in the
study who had a cancerous breast removed and then underwent breast
reconstruction with an implant developed an infection. The infection rate was
7% among those who had breast reconstruction using tissue from the abdomen,
where infections also struck. Infections occurred in 4% of women having a
mastectomy, and among 1% of those having breast-reduction surgery.
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of
Massachusetts wants to start paying doctors and hospitals a flat fee per
patient per year, the Boston Globe reports. The sum would depend on the age and
illnesses of the patient, and there would be big bonuses for progress on
measures such as access to the care and control of diabetes and high blood
pressure.
The system evokes “capitation,” the
per-patient payment systems that had a brief wave of popularity in the 1990s.
But Blue Cross says its new plan would protect against problems such as
undertreatment and underpayment that sunk capitation the first time around. “We
have no interest in returning to the heyday of managed care or denying care,”
Blue Cross exec Andrew Dreyfus told the Globe.
The big insurer says it’s bringing
back the flat fee in yet another effort to slow the growth of health care
spending and create more financial incentives for doctors to focus on patient
outcomes.
Big health systems the Globe spoke
with said they supported the principles behind the plan, but worried about the
impact on revenues, and about being held responsible for care and costs over
which they have limited control.
Health-care policy wonks and advocates
seemed warm to the plan. John McDonough, who runs Mass.-based Health Care for
All, told the paper it was promising. “What we have now is killing us
financially, and in some cases medically,” he said.
* Against the Odds magazine (ATO)
o #19: Not
War But Murder
o #20: A
Fatal Attraction
o Biafra!
o Look Away!
The Fall of Atlanta
o
Wintergewitter
* Alea magazine (Ludopress)
o #32: Dios
Patria y Rey
* Armchair General Magazine
o Brothers
By My Side
o Lee at
Gettysburg
o Operation
Iraqi Freedom
* Avalanche
o Alamein
o Alaska's
War (supplement in the Panzer Grenadier series)
o East of
Suez (in the Second World War at Sea series)
o Eastern
Fleet (in the Second World War at Sea series, reprint)
o Edelweiss
Expanded Edition (supplement in the Panzer Grenadier series)
o Fronte
Russo (supplement in the Panzer Grenadier series)
o Iron
Curtain (in the Panzer Grenadier series)
o
Mediterranean (in the Great War at Sea Series, reprint)
o Napoleonic
Battles: Austerlitz
o Queen of the
Celts (in the Rome at War series)
o Sea of
Troubles (supplement inthe Great War at Sea series)
o Soldier
Kings (reprint)
o South
Africa's War (supplement in the Panzer Grenadier series)
o They shall
not pass
o Tiger of
Malaya
o White
Eagles (supplement in the Panzer Grenadier series).
o Zeppelins
(in the Great War at Sea series)
* Battle-Market
o #1:
Hanba'al/Chinggis Khan/Zeppelin
o #2: Ma'alinti
Rangers: Black Hawks Down/Tannenberg/Grunwald 1410: Downfall of the Teutonic
Order
* Bayonet Games
o Strike
Force Hunter
o Warfighter
101: Maneuver Warrior
* BSO
o
Blackshirt, The Italian Invasion of Egypt, 1940
* Roger Campbell
o Brown
Water Submarines
* Canons en Carton
o Auerstaedt
1806 (in the Jours de Gloire series)
o Friedland
1807 (in the Jours de Gloire series)
o Swords and
Crown (in the Au fil de l'Epée series)
o Saalfeld
1806 (in the Jours de Gloire series)
o Schleiz
1806 (in the Jours de Gloire series)
* Clash of Arms
o Campaigns
of King David
o Close
Action: Monsoon Seas
* Lou Coatney
o Moscow Defended!
* Columbia Games
o Athens
& Sparta
o Wizard
Kings (2nd ed.)
* Compass Games
o Red Storm
Over the Reich
o Silent War
(reprint)
* Cool Stuff Unlimited
o Doro Nawa
(reprint)
o Jerusalem
(reprint)
o Verdun
(reprint)
* Command and Strategy magazine (UGG)
o #6:
Operation Walküre
* Critical Hit
o Action at
Carentan (scenario in the Squads & Leaders series)
o Advanced
Tobruk (3rd ed.)
o Arnhem
Master Set (2nd ed. of Arnhem-Defiant Stand and Oosterbeek Perimeter)
o Arnheim
Third Bridge (supplement compatible with Advanced Squad Leader. 2nd ed.)
o Battle For
The High Ground (scenario pack for the Advanced Tobruk series)
o Busting
the Bocage (supplement compatible with Advanced Squad Leader, 3rd ed.)
o CSIR
Nikitovka (in the Advanced Tobruk series).
o Facing the
Blitz (maps/scenarios in the Advanced Tobruk series)
o
Grossdeutschland at Stonne 1940 (compatible with Advanced Squad Leader)
o Hot Stove Pack (in the Advanced
Tobruk series)
o Parkers
Crossroad (expansion for Darkest December in the Advanced Tobruk series)
o Roman
Glory (supplement compatible with Advanced Squad Leader)
o So Full of
Fire (expansion in the Advanced Tobruk series)
o Sudden
Full Contact (compatible with Advanced Squad leader)
o Stonne (in
the Advanced Tobruk series)
o Toktong
Pass 1950 (in the Advanced Tobruk series)
o
Warfighting Guide #1 (in the Advanced Tobruk series)
o The
Western Front 1944 (scenario pack for the Advanced Tobruk series)
o Witches
Cauldron (compatible with Advanced Squad leader)
* Days of Wonder
o Memoir '44
Air Pack (Memoir '44 Expansion Set)
* Decision Games
o Land
Without End
o Luftwaffe
(rev. ed.)
o Nine
Navies War
o Storm of
Steel
* Devir
o Espana
1936
* Ediciones Rotura
o 1936
Guerra Civil (English ed.)
* Kelly Everit
o Imperial
Ambitions
* Fantasy Flight Games
o Tide of
Iron
* Feucht
o First
Strike
* Fiery Dragon
o Algeria
(reprint)
o Barnard's
Star (reprint)
o Byzantium
Reborn (rev ed.)
o Operation
Whirlwind (reprint)
* Firefight Games
o Blow by Blow: Pakistan Invades India,
September 1965
o Cossack
Revenge: Denikin's Abyss, March 1920
o Crazy
Horse, Black Shield, White Cloud
o Kakhovka
o Heroic
Frenzy
o The Koltov
Corridor: Disaster at Brody (East Front), July 1944
o
Meatgrinder
o One
Bullet, One German
o Operation
Fischfang: Smashing the Allies at Anzio, Feb. 1944
o Operation
Westindien
o Remagen
1945
o Storm Over
Taierzhuang: Samurai Stalingrad 1938
o Vencr O
Morir: Kundt's Pocket at Campo Via, Dec. 1933
o Wicked
Narrows: Rome's Disaster at Kalkreis, Sept. 9, 2 AD
* @games online
o Malaya
o Watchtower
(in the Action Front! Series)
* GMT
Games
o 1914,
Twilight in the East
o Asia
Engulfed
o Combat
Commander: Vol. II - Mediterranean
o Combat
Commander Battle Pack #1: Paratroopers
o Conquest
of Paradise
o Gergovia
(module for Caesar: Conquest of Gaul)
o Glory III
o The Great
War in Europe (rev. ed of The Great War in Europe and The Great War in the Near
East)
o Monmouth
(in the American Revolutionary War series)
o Ran (in
the Great Battles of History series)
o Samurai
(in the Great Battles of History series, reprint)
o Squadron
Pack 2: Bombers (in the Down in Flames series)
o Sword of
Rome Expansion
* Grenier Games
o Operation
Weserübung
* Guild of Blades
o The
American Revolution
o Battle of
Thermopylae (2nd ed.)
o Beyond
Hadrian's Wall (rev. ed.)
o The War To
End All Wars (3rd ed.)
* Hasbro
o Axis &
Allies: Guadalcanal
* Hexasim
o Marne 1918-Friedensturm
(English ed.)
* Eric Hotz & Phil Hall
o Blue
Max/Canvas Eagles
* Interformic
o
Unbreakable
* Dave Kershaw
http://louis-j-sheehan.net
http://louis-j-sheehan.net
o ACW
Solitaire
* Khyber Pass Games
o Prairie
Aflame, The Northwest Rebellion, 1885
o Rosebud:
Prelude to Little Bighorn
* L2
Design Group
o War at Sea
(3rd ed.)
o Waterloo:
Fate of France
* Little Page of Games
o
Hohenfriedeberg
* Lock 'n Load Publishing
o Battle
Pack Alpha (scenario pack for the Lock 'n Load series)
o Corps Command: Totensonntag
o Island War
Deluxe
o Not One
Step Back
o Omaha
Beach (reprint from Armchair General)
o Swift and
Bold (expansion to Band of Heroes)
o Valley of
Tears (reprint from Armchair General)
o World at
War: Eisenbach Gap
* Lost Battalion Games
o The
Kaiser's Pirates
* LPD Games
o Across the
Wide Missouri
o Battle of
Gettysburg
o Battle of Honey Springs
o Grant's
Early Battles
* Minden Games
o Bat tleship
Captain: Tactical Naval Combat, 1890-1945
o Pacific
Salvo!
* MMP
o Case Blue
(in the Operational Combat series)
o Few
Returned (in the Advanced Squad Leader series)
o Red Star Rising,
The War In Russia, 1941-1944
o Starter
Kit #3 - Tanks (in the Advanced Squad Leader series)
o
Talavera/Vimeiro (in the Napoleonic Brigade series)
* New England Simulations
o Overlord:
D-Day and the Beachhead Battles (expansion for The Killing Ground)
* OSG
o 1813: The
Year That Doomed The Empire
o The Habit
of Victory
* Outpost 31
o The thing
* Panzer Digest (Minden Games)
o #1:
Falaise Pocket/Advanced Salvo! 1939-194/Penal Battalion/Longstreet's Disaster
o #2:
Swordfish at Taranto/Field of Honour/The Evacuation of Konigsberg
* Pegasus
o The War
Game: World War Two
* Perfect Captain
o Spanish
Fury: Voyage
Pratzen
Editions
o Le Grand
Empire
* Red Sash Games
o
Türkenkrieg: The Russo-Austro Turkish War, Balkan Theatre 1737-39
* Riachuelo Games
o Monte
Castelo and Gothic Line
o
Riachuelo's Naval Battle
o Unternehmung 25
* Schutze Games
o Aleutian Campaign
o Sands of
Iwo Jima
* Sierra Madre Games
o How We
Became Human
* Luiz Silva
o Congo
* Simmons Games
o Napoleon's
Triumph
* Strategos
o #2: Iwo
Jima
* Strategy and Tactics magazine (Decision Games)
o #241:
Twilight of the Ottomans: World War I in the Middle East
o #242: They
Died With Their Boots On 2: Pershing and Mad Anthony
o #243: Sea
Lords: The Vietnam War in the Mekong Delta
o #244:
Drive on Moscow
o #245: The
Triple Alliance War
o #246:
Manila '45: Stalingrad of the Pacific
o #247: Holy
Roman Empire: Wars of the Reformation, 1524-38
* TCS (Roberto Chiavini)
o Edgehill
(reprint)
o First Newbury
o Dunbar
o Gliders
from the Sky: the Fall of Eben Emael
o I Obey
(reprint)
o Innocence
lost (reprint)
o Montebello
(reprint)
o Prussia
Rising
* Richard Trevino
o Charge at
the Alamo
* Vae Victis magazine
o #73:
Magenta 1859/Reichshoffen 1870/St. Nazaire 1942
o #74:
Ultimus Romanorum
o #75: Orel
1919/Incredible Armada
o #76: Les
deux Bretagne (1341-1364)
o #77: Eylau
1807
o #78: La Bataille de Hongrie
1944-5/Otterburn
* Valley Games
o Hannibal:
Rome vs. Carthage
* Dan Verssen Games
o Down With
The Empire
o Marine Air
(expansion set for Hornet Leader II)
o World War
I Bombers (a Down In Flames expansion)
* Warfrog
o 1630
Something (rev. ed.)
* Worthington Games
o Cowboys:
The Way of the Gun
o Prussia's
Defiant Stand
* Z-Man Games
o Duel in
the Dark
The effects of the Indian Ocean
tsunami of December 2004 are only too well known: It knocked the hell out of
Aceh Province on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, leveling buildings,
scattering palm trees, and wiping out entire villages. It killed more than
160,000 people in Aceh alone and displaced millions more. Similar scenes of
destruction were repeated along the coasts of Southeast Asia, India, and as far
west as Africa. The magnitude of the disaster shocked the world.
What the world did not know was that
the 2004 tsunami—seemingly so unprecedented in scale—would yield specific clues
to one of the great mysteries of archaeology: What or who brought down the
Minoans, the remarkable Bronze Age civilization that played a central role in
the development of Western culture?
Europe’s first great culture sprang up
on the island of Crete, in the Aegean Sea, and rose to prominence some 4,000
years ago, flourishing for at least five centuries. It was a civilization of
sophisticated art and architecture, with vast trading routes that spread Minoan
goods—and culture—to the neighboring Greek islands. But then, around 1500 B.C.,
the Minoan world went into a tailspin, and no one knows why.
In 1939, leading Greek archaeologist
Spyridon Marinatos pinned the blame on a colossal volcanic eruption on the
island of Thera, about 70 miles north of Crete, that occurred about 1600 B.C.
The event hurled a plume of ash and rock 20 miles into the stratosphere,
turning daylight into pitch darkness over much of the Mediterranean. The
explosion was recently estimated to be 10 times as powerful as the 1883
eruption of Krakatau in Indonesia, which obliterated 300 towns and villages and
killed at least 36,000 people. So extreme was the Thera eruption that many
writers linked it to Plato’s legend of Atlantis, the magnificent island city
swallowed up by the sea. Marinatos’s theory was bolstered in 1967 when he dug
up the ruins of Akrotiri, a prosperous Minoan town on Thera that had been
buried in volcanic ash. Akrotiri became famous as a Bronze Age Pompeii because
the ash preserved two-story dwellings, exquisite frescoes, and winding streets
almost intact.
On further examination, though, the
ruins did not confirm the theory. It turned out that the pottery on Akrotiri
was not from the final phase of Minoan culture; in fact, many Minoan
settlements on Crete continued to exist for at least a generation or two after
the Thera cataclysm. Archaeologists concluded that the Minoans had not only
survived but thrived after the eruption, expanding their culture until they
were hit by some other, unknown disaster—perhaps some combination of fire,
earthquake, or foreign invader. Thera’s impact, it seemed, had been
overestimated. But startling new evidence is forcing archaeologists to rethink
the full fury of the Thera explosion, the natural disaster it may have
triggered, and the nature of the final blow to the once-great Minoan
civilization.
Each summer, thousands of tourists
encounter the Minoans at the spectacularly restored ruins of Knossos, an
11-acre complex four miles south of Crete’s capital, Heraklion.
Late-19th-century excavations by Sir Arthur Evans revealed Knossos to be a
vast, intricately engineered, multistory building, complete with flushing
toilets, statuettes of bare-breasted priestesses, and frescoes of athletes
vaulting over bulls. In 1900, Evans discovered an impressive stone throne, from
which he believed the legendary King Minos and his descendants had presided
over Bronze Age Crete. In the 1980s, however, a new generation of
archaeologists, including Joseph Alexander “Sandy” MacGillivray, a
Montreal-born scholar at the British School at Athens, began questioning many
of Evans’s assumptions. Smaller-scale versions of Knossos have turned up at
nearly every Minoan settlement across Crete, and scholars now suspect there was
no single king but rather many independent polities.
MacGillivray also became interested in
how the civilization ended. At Palaikastro, in the island’s far northeastern
corner, MacGillivray and his colleague Hugh Sackett have excavated seven blocks
of a Minoan town of perhaps 5,000 inhabitants, their plastered and painted
houses arranged in a network of tidy paved and drained streets. One striking
find was the foundations of a fine mansion, paved with fancy purple schist and
white limestone and designed around an airy central courtyard “of Knossian
pretensions,” as MacGillivray puts it. “But after the house was destroyed by an
earthquake, it was abandoned and never rebuilt, and that preserved some things
we had a hard time explaining.”
The house was dusted with a powdery
gray ash, so irritating that the diggers had to wear face masks. Chemical
analysis showed that the ash was volcanic fallout from the Thera eruption, but
instead of resting in neat layers, the ash had washed into peculiar places: a
broken, upside-down pot; the courtyard’s drain; and one long, continuous film
in the main street outside. It was as if a flash flood had hosed most of the
ash away, leaving these remnants behind. Some powerful force had also flipped
over several of the house’s paving slabs and dumped fine gravel over the
walls—but this part of the site lies a quarter of a mile from the sea and far
from any stream or river.
That wasn’t the only oddity. Another
building “looked like it had been flattened, the whole frontage facing the sea
had been torn off, and it made no sense. And we asked ourselves, could a wave
have done this?” MacGillivray says.
The strangest and most significant
find, however, was a soil layer down by the beach that looked like nothing
MacGillivray had ever seen in four decades as a field archaeologist. A
horizontal band of gravel about a foot thick was stuffed with a mad jumble of
broken pottery, rocks, lumps of powdery gray ash, and mashed-up animal teeth
and bones. Perhaps an exceptionally violent storm had inflicted this chaos,
MacGillivray considered, but he began to suspect that a tsunami was the more
likely culprit.
MacGillivray invited Hendrik Bruins to
Palaikastro. The Dutch-born geoarchaeologist and human ecologist had a
reputation as a skillful analyst of the thorny dating controversies that beset
archaeology in the Middle East, but figuring out the chaotic layer overlooking the
beach presented a novel scientific challenge. “Identifying a tsunami deposit is
a completely new field,” Bruins explains. “Until the early 1990s, earth
scientists didn’t even recognize that tsunamis do more than just destroy the
coast—they leave distinctive deposits behind as well. I needed to do a lot of
different tests to convince myself, as well as my colleagues, that we were
dealing with a tsunami and not something else, like debris from a storm surge.”
Another building looked like it had been
flattened. Could a wave have done this?
Bruins sent thin sections of the
chaotic deposit to micropaleontologist Chaim Benjamini, a colleague at
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. Benjamini identified the tiny
round shells of foraminifera and fragments of red coralline –algae; these marine organisms
suggested that the ocean, rather than a river or a flash flood, had been
involved. If the marine organisms had been scooped up from below sea level and
dumped on the elevated promontory, something much bigger than a storm surge
must have pounded the coast of ancient Crete.
The strange pattern of gravel deposits
in the town offered further evidence of a deep oceanic disturbance. Then there
were lumps of gray ash in the beach layer, “resembling unstirred instant-soup
lumps at the bottom of a cup,” according to Bruins. He sent samples of these
lumps to two state-of-the-art geochemistry labs in Germany, which analyzed the
sample’s geochemical signature. The results of both tests were identical: a
perfect match between Theran ash and the “soup lumps” on the beach.
Finally, there was the question of
when all this disruption occurred. Bruins sent fragments of cattle bones and
seashells from the chaotic layer to the radiocarbon dating lab at the
University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Because of well-known problems in
calibrating dates from 3,500 years ago, he knew the lab would be unable to pin
down the exact calendar age of the samples, but the uncalibrated measured age
of the cattle bones closely matched the latest equivalent dates for the
cataclysm on Thera.
All the clues pointed to one answer: A
giant wave had struck Palaikastro Bay while freshly fallen ash from Thera was
still lying about, inundating the town for miles inland and streaking it with
strange patterns of ash. But could even a giant wave be big enough to wipe out
an entire civilization?
MacGillivray consulted Costas
Synolakis, an energetic Greek-born earth scientist at the *University of
Southern California, where he pioneered the predictive computer model used by
the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii. Synolakis’s first attempts to
model tsunamis in the early 1990s began as a solitary exercise. Everything
changed after the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. Synolakis visited Banda Aceh,
the city in northwestern Sumatra closest to the epicenter of the undersea
quake, where hundred-foot waves had destroyed a city of more than 150,000
people in minutes. “It was a surreal, absurdist landscape,” he says. “It took
an effort of imagination to conceive that people had ever lived there.” Almost
overnight, Synolakis’s expertise in computer modeling of tsunamis became a
focus of worldwide scientific and media attention.
In 2000, Synolakis had con- sulted on
a study to model a hypothetical Minoan tsunami. He found that no matter how
steep the waves were when they started out at Thera, they dissipated quickly,
reaching only three to nine feet at most when they hit Crete, some 70 miles
away. The study concluded that such waves could have been “disruptive,” but not
devastating, to Minoan Crete.
Synolakis was still thinking that way
when he visited Palaikastro in May 2006. Then MacGillivray took him down to the
beach. “The moment I looked at that debris layer, I was absolutely stunned,”
Synolakis says. “The image that came to me, right then and there, is what I saw
everywhere after the December 2004 tsunami: a blanket of cultural debris,
broken dishes, broken glass, bits of bone, people’s belongings scattered
everywhere. It looked exactly like that kind of debris carpet, and you don’t
get it in a smaller tsunami. The presence of this chaotic deposit suggested
that the tsunami was at least three or four meters [10 to 13 feet] at the
shoreline.” What had begun as a casual visit now turned into a full-blown
research project. Synolakis hired a boat and took depth measurements of the
seabed in Palaikastro Bay. When he tested the hillside behind the Minoan town
to establish how far the wave had penetrated inland, he found what appeared to
be more layers of chaotic debris at an astounding 90 feet above sea level.
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