Britain’s royal family attends Christmas services

LONDON (AP) — Britain‘s royal family is attending Christmas Day church services — with a few notable absences.

Wearing a turquoise coat and matching hat, Queen Elizabeth II arrived at St. Mary Magdelene Church on her sprawling Sandringham estate in Norfolk. She was accompanied in a Bentley by granddaughters Beatrice and Eugenie.

Her husband, Prince Philip, walked from the house to the church with other members of the royal family.

Three familiar faces were missing from the family outing. Prince William is spending the holiday with his pregnant wife Kate and his in-laws in the southern England village of Bucklebury. Prince Harry is serving with British troops in Afghanistan.

Later Tuesday, the queen will deliver her traditional, pre-recorded Christmas message, which for the first time will be broadcast in 3D.

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Chicken Farms Try Oregano as Antibiotic Substitute

Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times

Chickens raised for Bell & Evans, like these in Pennsylvania, eat feed laced with oregano oil.

FREDERICKSBURG, Pa. — The smell of oregano wafting from Scott Sechler’s office is so strong that anyone visiting Bell & Evans these days could be forgiven for wondering whether Mr. Sechler has forsaken the production of chicken and gone into pizza.

Oregano lies loose in trays and tied into bunches on tabletops and counters, and a big, blue drum that held oregano oil stands in the corner. “Have you ever tried oregano tea?” Mr. Sechler asked, mashing leaves between his broad fingers.

Off and on over the last three years or so, his chickens have been eating a specially milled diet laced with oregano oil and a touch of cinnamon. Mr. Sechler swears by the concoction as a way to fight off bacterial diseases that plague meat and poultry producers without resorting to antibiotics, which some experts say can be detrimental to the humans who eat the meat. Products at Bell & Evans, based in this town about 30 miles east of Harrisburg, have long been free of antibiotics, contributing to the company’s financial success as consumers have demanded purer foods.

But Mr. Sechler said that nothing he had used as a substitute in the past worked as well as oregano oil.

“I have worried a bit about how I’m going to sound talking about this,” he said. “But I really do think we’re on to something here.”

Skeptics of herbal medicines abound, as any quick Internet search demonstrates. “Oil of oregano is a perennial one, advertised as a cure for just about everything,” said Scott Gavura, a pharmacist in Toronto who writes for the Web site Science-Based Medicine. “But there isn’t any evidence, there are too many unanswered questions and the only proponents for it are the ones producing it.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Gavura said he would welcome a reduction in the use of antibiotics in animals.

At the same time, consumers are growing increasingly sophisticated about the content of the foods that they eat.

Data on sales of antibiotic-free meat is hard to come by, but the sales are a tiny fraction of the overall meat market. Sales in the United States of organic meat, poultry and fish, which by law must be raised without antibiotics, totaled $538 million in 2011, according to the Organic Trade Association. By comparison, sales of all beef that year were $79 billion.

Still, retailers like Costco, Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, as well as some restaurant chains, complain that they cannot get enough antibiotic-free meat.

Noodles & Company, a fast-growing chain of more than 300 restaurants, recently added antibiotic-free pork to the choices of ingredients that customers can add to their made-to-order pastas. It ensured its supply by ordering cuts of meat that were not in relatively high demand and by committing in advance to buy a year’s worth, said Dan Fogarty, its executive vice president for marketing.

“We’re deliberately voting with our pocketbooks,” he said.

In a nationwide telephone survey of 1,000 adults in March, more than 60 percent told the Consumer Reports National Research Center that they would be willing to pay at least 5 cents a pound more for meat raised without antibiotics.

“Before, it was kind of a nice little business, and while it’s still microscopic in the grand scheme of things, we’re seeing acceptance from retailers across the country, not just in California and on the East Coast,” said Stephen McDonnell, founder and chief executive of Applegate, an organic and natural meats company.

Mr. McDonnell said a confluence of trends, from heightened interest in whole and natural foods to growing concerns about medical problems like diabetes, obesity and gluten allergies, were contributing to the demand for antibiotic-free meat.

There is growing concern among health care experts and policy makers about antibiotic resistance and the rise of “superbugs,” bacteria that are impervious to one or more antibiotics. Those bacteria can be passed on to consumers, who eat meat infected with them and then cannot be treated.

In November, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and 25 national health organizations and advocacy groups issued a statement on antibiotics that, among other things, called for “limiting the use of medically important human antibiotics in food animals” and “supporting the use of such antibiotics in animals only for those uses that are considered necessary for assuring animal health.”

In 2011, there were several prominent recalls involving bacterial strains that are resistant to antibiotics, including more than 60 million pounds of ground beef contaminated with salmonella Typhimurium and about 36 million pounds of ground turkey spoiled with salmonella Heidelberg.

Consumer Reports released a study last month that found the bacteria Yersinia enterocolitica in 69 percent of 198 pork chop and ground pork samples bought at stores around the country. Some of the bacteria were resistant to one or more antibiotics.

Analysis of Food and Drug Administration data by the Center for Science in the Public Interest found that 80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the United States are used in animals. The majority of those antibiotics are used to spur growth or prevent infections from spreading in the crowded conditions in which most animal production takes place today.

The European Union has banned the use of antibiotics to accelerate growth, and the European Parliament is pushing to end their use as tools to prevent disease as well.

The oregano oil product Mr. Sechler uses, By-O-Reg Plus, is made by a Dutch company, Ropapharm International. In the late 1990s, Bayer conducted trials on the product, known as Ropadiar in Europe, comparing its ability to control diarrhea in piglets caused by E. coli with that of four of the company’s products.

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U.S. drone strategy in Yemen is fraught with peril

AL SARRAIN, Yemen — The U.S. drone flew over a cluster of mud houses on a ridge and, according to Yemeni officials, locked onto Adnan Qadhi, a mercurial man of many guises, including radical militant, peace mediator, preacher of violence and army general.

Villagers said Qadhi climbed out of his utility vehicle the night of Nov. 7 to make a cellphone call shortly before the missile struck. His photo — broad face peering from beneath a tilted red beret, stars on his epaulets — now hangs in a small grocery store in a land where farmers work narrow fields below the villas of politicians, tribal leaders and a former president that rise like fortresses on nearby hilltops.

Some here call him a martyr, others a fanatic. But the life and death of Qadhi, a senior officer in the 1st Armored Division who preached holy war in mosques and donned government-issued fatigues, epitomizes the political instability, tribal intrigue, crisscrossing allegiances and radical Islamist passions the United States must sort out when targeting militants in Yemen. At times, Washington risks being drawn into internal conflicts and becoming increasingly despised in the Arab world's poorest nation.

Extremists here have a history of shifting tactics and circumstances. They were pressed into service by the government of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh when needed, then arrested and jailed when the political winds changed. Later they vanished from prisons by the scores, set loose across tribal lands. Yemeni security officials say that era is ending, and they're stepping up military offensives to rout extremists — fighters from Libya, Somalia and other nations, and assassins on motorcycles intent on killing intelligence officials.

At the same time, the Obama administration has intensified airstrikes against the Yemeni group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which plotted in 2009 and 2010 to blow up American airliners. A 2011 drone attack killed Anwar Awlaki, an American-born Muslim preacher and militant recruiter. Weeks later, a U.S. airstrike killed Awlaki's 16-year-old son, who tribesmen and relatives say had no links to terrorism.

The Long War Journal, a website that tracks U.S. drone activity, reports that since 2002, America has launched 57 airstrikes in Yemen, killing 299 militants and 82 civilians. The number of strikes has risen dramatically from four in 2010 to 40 so far this year.

"Why do these Americans come and interfere in Yemen?" said Radhwan Dahrooj, the grocer in Al Sarrain. "Why do they kill our people? If they have charges against someone why do they not arrest him and bring him to justice?"

Qadhi was sentenced to prison four years ago for plotting an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Sana, the capital, that killed at least 16 people, no Americans among them. With the help of clansmen and army officials, he was released shortly afterward and resumed his old life: militant and officer in the 1st Armored Division, led by Maj. Gen. Ali Mohsin Saleh Ahmar, a commander described in a 2005 U.S. diplomatic cable as "dealing with terrorists and extremists."

When uprisings against President Saleh swept the country in 2011, the brigade mutinied and battled with competing tribes and security units for control of Sana.

What began as a peaceful revolution against Saleh tipped the nation — already fighting a rebellion in the north and a secessionist movement in the south — into deeper turmoil. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and its affiliate Ansar al Sharia exploited the unrest, taking over territory in the south. That gave Qadhi an opportunity to expand his militant ambitions even as he slipped into another of his guises, currying favor with the government by mediating a truce between Yemeni officials and an Al Qaeda faction.

The U.S., which this year has given Yemen $337 million in military and security aid, would not confirm that a drone targeted Qadhi. Yemeni officials and villagers, who heard a plane circling that night, said a U.S. airstrike killed him not far from his home in Beit al Ahmar. Though Qadhi was an active Al Qaeda recruiter and often accused Washington in his sermons of wanting to keep Yemen divided and in chaos, it is not clear what specific danger he was seen as presenting to the United States.

Washington has no precise rules on the criteria for targeting militants with drone strikes. But President Obama has said that an extremist must present an imminent threat to the U.S. or its allies, as Yemen's Al Qaeda branch is considered to do, and that arrest would be impossible.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official said Qadhi's arrest for the 2008 embassy attack would not have been enough to put him on an assassination list. White House counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan has said that militants battling solely to overthrow the government in Sana are not targeted. But Qadhi's 1st Armored Division was certainly a threat to the Yemeni government and the country's stability.

Yemeni officials said the nation's new president, Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi, approved the strike against Qadhi after determining that an attempt to arrest him in his neighborhood could have led to more deaths. The officials said they were unaware of intelligence linking Qadhi to any active plot.

The danger in the drone program is the potential for U.S. intelligence and airstrikes to be manipulated by Yemenis seeking to weaken the competing clans and political factions. For example, Obama and his top generals felt misled in 2010 when Obama signed off on an airstrike against a senior militant that killed six people, including the deputy governor of Mareb province. The strike was based entirely on intelligence provided by the Yemenis, who had not told the U.S. that the governor would be there, a former senior U.S. official said.

Since Hadi took office in February, the cooperation and trust between the Yemeni government and the U.S. has vastly improved, U.S. and Yemeni officials say.

There are many potential drone targets. For decades, young men have left Yemen to become foot soldiers and bomb makers among the militants in Afghanistan, Algeria, Pakistan, Iraq and Libya. Some of them have come home.

One was Rashad Mohammed Saeed, who left at 15 and became a confidant of Osama bin Laden, fighting beside him in Afghanistan. He returned to Yemen around 2000 and in an interview said he had put aside his weapons to start the Renaissance Union Party, made up of former militants who run for parliament seats.

Like militants in other countries, he is struggling to reconcile a decades-long philosophy of violence and the more peaceful, and successful, political approach — at least in Tunisia and Egypt — of the protest movements that ignited the so-called Arab Spring. He worries about what many here describe as an incessant invisible buzz in the sky.

"We have entered politics. Do you think the U.S. will leave us alone to choose our own leaders and way of life?" Saeed asked. "Our party is close to Al Qaeda. We're trying to get them to lay down their weapons. Yemen doesn't need this violence now. We just need protection from drones. I may be a target myself."

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A Look Inside Tarantino's <em>Django Unchained</em> Comic Book

Django Unchained opens in theaters today, but the big screen isn’t the only way to see the newest work by Quentin Tarantino. The issue of the Django Unchained comic book mini-series from DC/Vertigo Comics is available now in comic book stores (and online), and in advance of tomorrow’s film debut, Wired has a look at the Tarantino’s introduction to the comic, along with the original character sketches by artist R.M. Guéra and a six-page preview of the first issue.

The comic is an incredibly faithful adaptation of Tarantino’s movie script – the first issue is the first few scenes of the film, almost line for line. Drawing on the director’s story, the book’s interior art comes from Guéra, who made characters that hew closely to their actor counterparts but are their own characters entirely. The artist’s Django, the slave that becomes a bounty hunter, has a more steely cowboy vibe than smooth, cool Jamie Foxx; ruthless plantation owner Calvin Candie looks even more maniacal than Leonardo DiCaprio; and Candie’s house slave Stephen looks far more jowly and grizzled on the page than Samuel L. Jackson does on screen.

“Growing up I read the adventures of Kid Colt Outlaw, TOMAHAWK, The Rawhide Kid, BAT LASH, and especially, Yang (which was basically the Kung Fu TV show done as a comic), and Gunhawks featuring Reno Jones (a Jim Brown stand-in) and Kid Cassidy (a David Cassidy stand-in), which for my money was the greatest Blaxploitation Western ever made,” Tarantino says in the first issue’s intro. “And it’s in that spirit of cinematic comics literature that I present to you Django Unchained.”

Tarantino’s version of the story hits theaters Dec. 25.

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A huge collection of odd TV stuff needs a home

LOS ANGELES (AP) — James Comisar is the first to acknowledge that more than a few have questioned his sanity for spending the better part of 25 years collecting everything from the costume George Reeves wore in the 1950s TV show “Superman” to the entire set of “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.”

Then there’s the pointy Spock ears Leonard Nimoy wore on “Star Trek” and the guns Tony Soprano used to rub out a mob rival in an episode of “The Sopranos.”

“Along the way people thought I was nuts in general for wanting to conserve Keith Partridge’s flared pants from ‘The Partridge Family,’” the good-natured former TV writer says of the 1970s sitcom as he ambles through rows of costumes, props and what have you from the beginnings of television to the present day.

“But they really thought I needed a psychological workup,” Comisar, 48, adds with a smile, “when they learned I was having museum curators take care of these pieces.”

A museum is exactly where he wants to put all 10,000 of his TV memorabilia items, everything from the hairpiece Carl Reiner wore on the 1950s TV variety program “Your Show of Shows” to the gun and badge Kiefer Sutherland flashed on “24″ a couple TV seasons ago.

Finding one that could accommodate his collection, which fills two sprawling, temperature-controlled warehouses, however, has sometimes been as hard as acquiring the boots Larry Hagman used to stomp around in when he was J.R. on “Dallas.” (The show’s production company finally coughed up a pair after plenty of pleading and cajoling.)

Comisar is one of many people who, after a lifetime of collecting, begin to realize that if they can’t find a permanent home for their artifacts those objects could easily end up on the trash heap of history. Or, just as bad as far as he’s concerned, in the hands of private collectors.

“Some of the biggest bidders for Hollywood memorabilia right now reside in mainland China and Dubai, and our history could leave this country forever,” says Comisar, who these days works as a broker and purchasing expert for memorabilia collectors.

What began as a TV-obsessed kid’s lark morphed into a full-fledged hobby when as a young man writing jokes for Howie Mandel and Joan Rivers, and punching up scripts for such producers as Norman Lear and Fred Silverman, Comisar began scouring studio back lots, looking for discarded stuff from the favorite shows of his childhood. From there it developed into a full-on obsession, dedicated to preserving the entire physical spectrum of television history.

“After a couple years of collecting, it became clear to me,” he says, “that it didn’t much matter what TV shows James watched in the early 1970s but which shows were the most iconic. In that way, I had sort of a curator’s perspective almost from the beginning.”

In the early days, collecting such stuff was easy for anyone with access to a studio back lot. Many items were simply thrown out or given away when shows ceased production. When studios did keep things they often rented them out for small fees, and if you lost or broke them you paid a small replacement fee. So Comisar began renting stuff right and left and promptly losing it, acquiring one of Herman Munster’s jackets that way.

These days almost everything has a price, although Comisar’s reputation as a serious collector has led some people to give him their stuff.

If he simply sold it all, he could probably retire as a millionaire several times over. Just last month someone paid $ 480,000 for a faded dress Judy Garland wore in the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz.” What might Annette Funicello’s original Mickey Mouse Club jacket fetch?

He won’t even think about that.

“I’ve spent 25 years now reuniting these pieces, and I would be so sick if some day they were just broken up and sold to the highest bidder,” he says.

He, and every other serious collector of cool but somewhat oddball stuff, face two major obstacles, say museum curators: Finding a museum or university with the space to take their treasures and persuading deep-pocketed individuals who might bankroll the endeavor that there’s really any compelling reason to preserve something like Maxwell Smart’s shoephone.

“People hold television and popular culture so close to their hearts and embrace it so passionately,” says Dwight Bowers, curator of entertainment collections for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, who calls Comisar’s collection very impressive. “But they don’t put it on the same platform as military history or political history.”

When the Smithsonian acquired Archie Bunker’s chair from the seminal TV comedy “All in the Family,” Bowers said, museum officials took plenty of flak from those offended that some sitcom prop was being placed down the hallway from the nation’s presidential artifacts.

The University of California, Santa Cruz, took similar heat when it accepted the Grateful Dead archives, 30 years of recordings, videos, papers, posters and other memorabilia gifted by the band, said university archivist Nicholas Meriwether.

“What I always graciously say is that if you leave the art and the music aside for one moment, whatever you think of it, what you can say is they are still a huge part of understanding the story of the 1960s and of understanding the nation’s counterculture,” says Meriwether.

Comisar sees his television collection serving the same purpose, tracing societal changes TV shows documented from the post-World War II years to the present.

The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Foundation looked into establishing such a museum some years back, and Comisar’s collection came up at the time, said Karen Herman, curator of the foundation’s Archive of American Television.

Instead, the foundation settled on an online archive containing more than 3,000 hours of filmed oral history interviews with more than 700 people.

While the archive doesn’t have any of Mr. Spock’s ears, anyone with a computer can view and listen to an oral history from Spock himself, the actor Leonard Nimoy.

Comisar, meanwhile, believes he’s finally found the right site for a museum, in Phoenix, where he’s been lining up supporters. He estimates it will cost $ 35 million and several years to open the doors, but hopes to have a preview center in place by next year.

Mo Stein, a prominent architect who heads the Phoenix Community Alliance and is working with him, says one of the next steps will be finding a proper space for the collection.

But, really, why all the fuss over a place to save one of the suits Regis Philbin wore on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”?

“In Shakespeare’s time, his work was considered pretty low art,” Comisar responds.

Oh, he’ll admit that “Mike and Molly,” the modern TV love story of a couple who fall for each other at Overeaters Anonymous, may never rank in the same category as “Romeo and Juliet.”

“But what about a show like ‘Star Trek’?” he asks.

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Area sports cheating cases drag secretive NCAA into spotlight

The men and women of the NCAA enforcement staff prefer to work in secret.

They almost never speak publicly about tips they receive or evidence they gather against cheaters in big-time college sports. Rarely will they acknowledge the existence of an investigation.

Now several recent incidents — all in Southern California — have dragged them into the spotlight, raising questions about how they police athletes and coaches on campuses nationwide.

In one of the cases, at UCLA, the lead investigator has been accused of prejudging UCLA freshman Shabazz Muhammad before all of the facts were gathered.

Across town, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge in a defamation suit has portrayed other NCAA officials as potentially malicious for the way they dealt with a USC assistant coach linked to the Reggie Bush sanctions.

Things could get worse. The judge could unseal files from that lawsuit, providing greater insight into this powerful, quasi-judicial organization.

"The NCAA does not operate like a prosecutor's office or a police department where there are clearly understood constitutional limits," said Geoffrey C. Rapp, a University of Toledo law professor and editor of the Sports Law blog. "They don't have a structure in place to ensure consistency."

The NCAA declined to answer questions, responding instead with a brief statement that read, in part, "We are committed to providing a fair enforcement process for our members."

The father of UCLA basketball player Kyle Anderson, who was investigated this fall, sees the process from a different angle.

"I'm a schoolteacher, and the big thing in school now is bullying," Kyle Anderson Sr. said. "That's exactly what the NCAA is … the prototype of a bully."

Money and television

The influx of television and donor money makes college sports vulnerable to corruption. Though almost no one denies the need for supervision, critics have often questioned the NCAA's enforcement policies.

The two-part procedure begins with an enforcement staff of 57, which includes "former coaches, student athletes and compliance officers — as well as investigators that are former practicing attorneys," the NCAA statement said.

Investigators gather information and submit a report for the second part: adjudication. The Committee on Infractions, its members drawn from colleges, conferences and the public, hears testimony and renders a decision.

The committee has been criticized for inconsistent penalties in recent cases against USC, Ohio State, Auburn and Penn State. The recent cases in Los Angeles deal primarily with the investigative part of the process.

Staff members face at least one major hurdle: They lack subpoena power, meaning they cannot compel outsiders such as former athletes and agents to talk.

To compensate, member schools have authorized the use of an ethics bylaw to penalize current athletes and coaches who refuse to cooperate.

"There's not, in my opinion, any sort of conspiracy on the part of the NCAA or the enforcement staff to incriminate people who have not committed violations," said Dan Matheson, a former investigator who now teaches at Iowa.

Not everyone agrees.

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Army Goes Goth With 'Super-Black' Materials

Get ready to break out the eyeliner and the candelabras, because the Army is going goth.

In its latest round of solicitations for small businesses, the Army is asking for proposals for super-black material. That is, material so black that it absorbs 99 percent of all light. But it isn’t really black paint, exactly. The plan is to use either an “antireflective coating or surface treatment process for metals” to absorb stray light “in the ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and far-infrared regions.” This, the Army hopes, will boost the quality of high-resolution cameras, while also cooling down sensitive electronics. Or to put it another way: The Army needs the color black to reflect its icy-cold heart.

Another curious thing is that the program is being run out of the Army’s Program Executive Office Ammunition at the Picatinny Arsenal, a main center for the Pentagon’s experiments in all sorts of weapons: from rifles and tank cannons to directed-energy weapons. But the purpose of the solicitation isn’t much more specific than described. “Simply put, it’s too early yet to speculate on where the technology(s) will go,” Frank Misurelli, an Army spokesman at Picatinny said in a statement provided to Danger Room. ”Possibly in a few months, after an contract has been awarded, more information may become available.”

But for whatever the Army wants to fade to black, it seems that regular black isn’t good enough. This is because most black paint will absorb only around 90-95 percent of light, with the other 5-10 percent reflected back outwards. For a high-resolution camera, that stray light can bounce back into the lens and interfere with the quality of an image. It’s even a problem for NASA’s ultra-deep-space sensors. In the extreme coldness of space, black paint turns a silver-y color, which increases heat and can interfere with infrared-detecting instruments.

But wait, doesn’t black get really hot when hit with light, like wearing black clothes during the summer? The answer is: sorta. Black is really good at absorbing heat, but is also really good at radiating heat away. This is why cooling fins, radiators and engines for cars and trucks are often painted black. In 2011, NASA developed a carbon-nanotube coating that absorbed between 98-99.5 percent of light, depending on the wavelength. Nor do the coating’s thin layers of nanotubes change color in extreme cold. They absorb more light, and help radiate heat away from instruments, keeping them cold.

The Army could go another route. A second option uncovered by Britain’s National Physical Laboratory involves immersing an object in a solution of nickel and sodium for several hours, which blackens the color, and then taking it out and dunking it in nitric acid for a few seconds. According to New Scientist, this creates an alloy pock-marked with tiny microscopic craters that prevent light from bouncing away.

Finally, the Army also hopes to expand the materials to “optical glass surfaces” — camera lenses, in other words — while testing to see whether “it will be able to survive in a military environment.” The material should also come in “multiple surface colors” and be able to “selectively exhibit earth color instead of broadband absorption.” And another hope is to use the materials to absorb water to cool down equipment. See, it’s tough out there being goth, but it doesn’t mean you can’t do it in comfort.

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Pro-gun rights US petition to deport Piers Morgan

LONDON (AP) — Tens of thousands of people have signed a petition calling for British CNN host Piers Morgan to be deported from the U.S. over his gun control views.

Morgan has taken an aggressive stand for tighter U.S. gun laws in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting. Last week, he called a gun advocate appearing on his “Piers Morgan Tonight” show an “unbelievably stupid man.”

Now, gun rights activists are fighting back. A petition created Dec. 21 on the White House e-petition website by a user in Texas accuses Morgan of engaging in a “hostile attack against the U.S. Constitution” by targeting the Second Amendment. It demands he be deported immediately for “exploiting his position as a national network television host to stage attacks against the rights of American citizens.”

The petition has already hit the 25,000 signature threshold to get a White House response. By Monday, it had 31,813 signatures.

Morgan seemed unfazed — and even amused — by the movement.

In a series of Twitter messages, he alternately urged his followers to sign the petition and in response to one article about the petition said “bring it on” as he appeared to track the petition’s progress.

“If I do get deported from America for wanting fewer gun murders, are there any other countries that will have me?” he wrote.

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Raging fire guts Kabul market

KABUL, Afghanistan—

Firefighters battled through the night to contain a raging fire that swept through a market in the Afghan capital, Kabul.

No injuries were reported, but the blaze destroyed hundreds of stores and millions of dollars worth of merchandise, Afghan police and firefighters said at the scene. 

Dealers at the neighboring currency exchange, the city’s largest, said they evacuated cash, computer equipment and records from their shops  as the flames approached during the night.  But in the morning, the market was jammed with people haggling over thick stacks of notes as smoke billowed overhead.

Col. Mohammed Qasem, general director of the Kabul fire department, said he suspected an electrical short was to blame for the fire. 

Gas canisters used to heat the stores propelled the flames, along with the cloth and clothing sold by many of them, Qasem said. “It made it very big in a short time.”

Firefighters from the Afghan defense department and NATO forces were sent to assist.  But the city’s notorious traffic and the market’s narrow lanes made it difficult for responders to maneuver their vehicles, Qasem said.

Abdulrahman, who like many Afghans has only one name, squatted near a firetruck with his head in his hands  as responders aimed a hose at the blackened ruins of a building still smoldering at noon Sunday, more than 12 hours after the fire broke out.

He said the building had contained three shops that he owned and a warehouse full of glassware, crockery and kitchen utensils. 

“I lost everything,” he said.

Shirali Khan complained that police hadn't allowed him to remove the goods from his four clothing stores.

“They thought we were all robbers,” he said.  “There’s only ashes left.”

Special correspondent Hashmat Baktash contributed to this report.

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Wired Science Space Photo of the Day: Hourglass Nebula

This Hubble telescope snapshot of MyCn18, a young planetary nebula, reveals that the object has an hourglass shape with an intricate pattern of "etchings" in its walls. A planetary nebula is the glowing relic of a dying, Sun-like star.

The results are of great interest because they shed new light on the poorly understood ejection of stellar matter that accompanies the slow death of Sun-like stars. According to one theory on the formation of planetary nebulae, the hourglass shape is produced by the expansion of a fast stellar wind within a slowly expanding cloud, which is denser near its equator than near its poles.

Image: Raghvendra Sahai and John Trauger (JPL), the WFPC2 science team, and NASA [high-resolution]

Caption: Hubble Heritage site

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