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Kunduz
Transitioning to Alliance Control
Excerpts
from an article describing both the surrender of larger numbers
of Taliban in Kunduz and the possibility of resistance by the
hard core foreign al Qaeda fighters there:
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The
first northern alliance troops entered Kunduz on Sunday, and
the city's Taliban and foreign defenders were surrendering "continuously,"
alliance spokesmen said. No fighting was initially reported
as the alliance moved in.
The
alliance also said the top Taliban commander had surrendered,
and that it hoped the city's handover would be complete by nightfall.
The
fall of Kunduz would mark the loss of the last Taliban citadel
in the north of Afghanistan, leaving the Islamic militia with
a stronghold only in the southern city of Kandahar. Over the
past three weeks, the Taliban have lost three-quarters of their
territory.
Northern Alliance soldiers watch a convoy
of Taliban soldiers surrender, 11/24/01
...
Kunduz has been under siege by the alliance for the past 12 days,
defended by Taliban and foreign fighters, some loyal to Osama
bin Laden. As Alam entered the city, the defenders were giving
up in droves without a fight, alliance spokesman Zaher Wasik said.
"A
lot of Taliban are surrendering. Continuously they are coming
to us. There is no fighting," he said, adding that alliance
soldiers were converging on Kunduz from all directions.
...
It was unclear whether the hard core of foreign fighters loyal
to bin Laden – most of them Arabs, Chechens or Pakistanis
– would opt to fight to the finish. At least one staged a
suicide surrender on Saturday – giving up, then setting off
a hand grenade while waiting to be searched. Two of his comrades
were killed, and an alliance officer seriously hurt.
A
former Taliban deputy interior minister who defected –
the most senior Taliban defector thus far – on Saturday
said he blamed bin Laden and his foreign fighters as well as
extremist Taliban for bringing on the U.S.-led war.
"I
have being saying for a long time that the foreigners have to
leave our country, that they have plans of their own and are
destroying our country," Mullah Mohammed Khaqzar told reporters
in Kabul, the capital. ...
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Source:
Last
Taliban Holdout, Kandahar, Likely to be a Difficult Fight
Excerpts
from articles describing the state of affairs in and around
the last Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, as well as the likelihood
of a US and British buildup which which may precede a final
push, by forces opposed to the Taleban, in the coming weeks:
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There
have been reliable reports of clashes between Taleban forces
and opposing Pashtun tribal fighters along the road between
the Pakistan border and the southern Taleban stronghold of Kandahar.
In recent days there has been heavy American bombing in the
area.
...
The road from Kandahar to Spin Boldak, on the Pakistani border,
is the last remaining supply line for the southern city. If
it is cut, or if territory along the way can be taken and held,
immense pressure will be put on Kandahar city.
...
The Taleban have said there will be no surrender in Kandahar
whatever happens further north in Kunduz. But in this they may
have little choice.
...
Allied commanders are finalising plans for British paratroopers
to fight alongside American soldiers in a major ground offensive
to crush the Taliban.
US
chiefs of staff believe that they will need to send in thousands
of soldiers to bring about the destruction of the Taliban fighters
massed in and around Kandahar. The southern city is the organisation's
spiritual capital and their last significant stronghold.
...
The battle for the southern city of Kandahar, the Taliban's
last stronghold in Afghanistan, was launched yesterday as US-backed
tribal forces advanced on two approaches to the city.
Allied
soldiers are expected to suffer heavy casualties if, as now
seems likely, American and British ground troops are forced
to move against the city to finish off the Taliban.
The
city is the spiritual capital of the Taliban - it is where the
movement was founded seven years ago - and its troops are unlikely
to give it up without a fight.
Only
last week Mullah Bismillah, a former Taliban commander who escaped
from the city recently, said his former soldiers would defend
the city to their last breath.
...
Working on the doctrine of overwhelming superiority, the US chiefs
of staff based at their Central Command Headquarters in Tampa,
Florida, have drawn up plans to commit both the 101st and 82nd
Airborne Divisions to the battle as well as British paratroopers.
The combined force would have a strength of about 25,000 men.
To
move the troops from their US bases, Fort Campbell in Kentucky
for the 101st - known as the Screaming Eagles - and Fort Bragg
in South Carolina for the 82nd, will probably take a couple
of weeks. ...
Sources:
Reports
that bin Laden Sighted near Jalalabad
Take
the following with a grain of salt, as bin Laden sightings tend
to be little more than rumor (reference - the report last week
that bin Laden was trapped in a 30 square mile area southeast
of Kandahar).
Excerpts
from an article detailing the latest supposed locale of bin
Laden and his protectors:
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 |
Osama
bin Laden was seen this week at a large, well-fortified
encampment 35 miles southwest of this city, a minister of
this region's self-proclaimed government said yesterday.
|
Hazarat
Ali, law and order minister for the Eastern Shura, which claims
dominion over three major provinces in eastern Afghanistan,
said trusted informants had told him bin Laden was spotted near
Tora Bora, a village where two valleys meet in deep mountains
in Nangarhar Province.
"We
have some people who told us that three or four days ago, Osama
bin Laden was in Tora Bora," Ali said. "I trust them
like my mother or father. He
is moving at night on horseback. He sleeps in caves."
Overlooking
the village of Tora Bora is a large network of mountain caves
and forts used by the Afghans who fought the Soviet Union in
the 1980s.
Eastern
Shura commanders say operatives of al-Qaida, bin Laden's organization,
paid the villagers of Tora Bora $50 a family to vacate the village
weeks ago.
Ali's
lieutenants say as many as 2,000 foreign fighters — "Arabs,"
as they are called here — are at Tora Bora, too, armed
with machine guns and surface-to-surface missiles. He described
the fighters as "experienced and suicidal." ...
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Source:
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First
Human Cloned Embryo
The
cloning of a human embryo for therapeutic purposes has been
successfully accomplished. This critical step is a milestone
which may some day lead to creation of replacement tissue and
organs for a range of diseases:
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Cloned
early-stage human embryos—and human embryos generated only
from eggs, in a process called parthenogenesis—now put
therapeutic cloning within reach.
They
were such tiny dots, yet they held such immense promise. After
months of trying, on October 13, 2001, we came into our laboratory
at Advanced Cell Technology to see under the microscope what
we’d been striving for—little balls of dividing cells
not even visible to the naked eye.
Insignificant
as they appeared, the specks were precious because they were,
to our knowledge, the first human embryos produced using the
technique of nuclear transplantation, otherwise known as cloning.
...
Therapeutic cloning—which seeks, for example, to use the
genetic material from patients’ own cells to generate pancreatic
islets to treat diabetes or nerve cells to repair damaged spinal
cords—is distinct from reproductive cloning, which aims
to implant a cloned embryo into a woman’s uterus leading
to the birth of a cloned baby.
We
believe that reproductive cloning has potential risks to both
mother and fetus that make it unwarranted at this time, and
we support a restriction on cloning for reproductive purposes
until the safety and ethical issues surrounding it are resolved.
...
We are eager for the day when we will be able to offer therapeutic
cloning or cell therapy arising from parthenogenesis to sick
patients. Currently our efforts are focused on diseases of the
nervous and cardiovascular systems and on diabetes, autoimmune
disorders, and diseases involving the blood and bone marrow.
Once
we are able to derive nerve cells from cloned embryos, we hope
not only to heal damaged spinal cords but to treat brain disorders
such as Parkinson’s disease, in which the death of brain
cells that make a substance called dopamine leads to uncontrollable
tremors and paralysis. Alzheimer’s disease, stroke and
epilepsy might also yield to such an approach.
Besides
insulin-producing pancreatic islet cells for treating diabetes,
stem cells from cloned embryos could also be nudged to become
heart muscle cells as therapies for congestive heart failure,
arrhythmias and cardiac tissue scarred by heart attacks.
...
The cloning process also appears to reset the "aging clock"
in cloned cells, so that the cells appear younger in some ways
than the cells from which they were cloned. In 2000 we reported
that telomeres—the caps at the ends of chromosomes—from
cloned calves are just as long as those from control calves.
Telomeres normally shorten or are damaged as an organism ages.
| Therapeutic
cloning may provide "young" cells for an aging
population. ... |
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Source:
Therapeutic
Cloning:
How Is It Done?
(click for details)
Cloning:
Ethical Considerations
(click for details)
Cloning
and the Law
(click for details)
Dead
Sea Scrolls to Cause Vatican to Revise the Bible
The
facts thus far revealed (many heretofore widely known) regarding
the complete dead sea scrolls (recently published):
-
No Jesus (supposedly due to the burying of the scrolls prior
to the time the Jesus stories were written up [one must wonder
how such a supposedly important character was missing as of
68AD, close to 40 years after he would have died, had he ever
lived], although the scrolls were buried after Paul's christ
stories were written),
- No
virgin birth (apparently a translation error of Greek from
Hebrew),
- Contradictory
pentateuchs,
- Further
revelation of the ever-changing nature of "the bible"
- A
5-year plan by the Vatican to revise impacted parts of "the
bible"
Excerpts
from an article describing some of these tidbits of information
leaking out about the scrolls:
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Publication
of the Dead Sea Scrolls – 15,000 papyrus documents discovered
in the desert that have changed scholars' views on the Bible
– is finally being completed, after more than half a century
of bitter squabbling, censorship and academic controversy.
Fifty-four
years after the first of them was found in a cave in Qumran,
on the north-western shore of the Dead Sea, publication of all
the scrolls and fragments has been completed in 37 volumes.
All
but two have been published in scholarly editions, and those
two are being edited.
The
scrolls are believed to have been written by a Jewish sect sometime
between 200BC and early in the 1st century AD, and the first
were rediscovered in a cave by a shepherd boy in 1947.
The
theory is that they were hidden there in 68AD during the Jewish
revolt against the Romans. Others were found in nearby caves
during the 1950s.
The
completion of publication is a landmark for academics and for
Christians and Jews, whose most dearly held beliefs have been
challenged by the scrolls – including that of the Virgin
birth of Christ, which arose from the use of the word for virgin
in early Greek versions of the Bible. The
scrolls reveal that this was a mistranslation: the original
Hebrew word used simply meant young woman.
Now
the completion of the scrolls' publication coincides with an
admission by the Vatican that it is to revise parts of the Bible
accordingly, a task likely to take five years.
Fragment of the
book of Daniel
...
Experts have studied the scrolls and discovered much about the
way the Bible was written, including its discrepancies, contradictions
and repetitions.
The
first five books – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers
and Deuteronomy – were ascribed to the same writer, Moses,
but they have many inconsistencies.
The
scrolls include several different editions of the books of Exodus
and Numbers, and the Psalms. They revealed that the Bible was
not a rigidly fixed text, but was edited and adjusted to make
the text more relevant to its audience.
It
was not only the religious significance of the work that the
scrolls questioned but also their historical truth, for they
revealed that the writers would have coloured their accounts
with their prejudices too. ...
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Source:
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