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Al-Qaeda terrorism in the U.S. may have started a decade ago, with the assassination of a radical Rabbi Meier Kahane in New York City. On November 5, 1990, as a crowd gathered in a hotel to hear him speak, deadly shots rang out. The gunman, El Sayyid Nosair, was wounded in a battle with police. A search of his home led to a “treasure trove of information,” according to Ed Norris, who was then a chief in the NYPD. They found evidence that there was an Islamic terrorist cell operating on U.S. soil in the form of Arabic-language terrorist manuals, bomb-making instructions, videotapes and photographs of New York City landmarks.”We knew we had something–something substantial, something unusual,” says Norris.read more

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You don’t have to “believe” in ghosts to run into them. In Virginia, Indian ghosts regularly appear on the newly-opened Pocahontas Parkway. One truck driver recently saw three of them. “The truck driver came through and said he saw [three] Indians in the middle of the highway lined up by the woods, each of them holding a torch,” says a parkway toll taker. The warriors were illuminated clearly by the light from their fiery torches, and looked so real that the driver blasted his horn to tell them to get off the road. But the woman in the toll booth knew they were ghosts, since she’d heard the same story from so many other drivers.
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Scientists in Japan have discovered an underwater fault off the coast that could unleash a giant “tsunami” tidal wave that would engulf the mainland with almost no warning. The newly-detected fault, which is only a few miles from the land, may have been responsible for the 8.1 magnitude earthquake which struck Japan in 1944.

“Any tsunami would hit the mainland with only a few minutes’ warning,” says Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Greig Hazard Research Center in the U.K. “Most people in Japan live along the coast and evacuating them in only a few minutes would be impossible.”
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A genetic mutation may be the reason why only one-fifth of the people who are infected with West Nile virus go on to develop symptoms, and only one-fifth of this group develop a severe, and often fatal, brain inflammation. A team at the Institut Pasteur in Paris studied mice infected with the virus and found that all those that died quickly had a mutation in a gene that encodes a set of enzymes that destroy viruses in infected cells. The gene is common to all vertebrates, and the human version is very similar to that found in mice.
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