Reported and Edited by Linda Moulton Howe
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News Update - May 24, 2001 Lexington, Kentucky - Tonight laboratory experts confirmed that liver enzymes which indicate cyanide poisoning were confirmed in pathology analyses of aborted fetuses and foals. The main suspect for the cyanide source remains the Eastern Tent Caterpillar combined with the cyanide in wild cherry tree leaves containing more cyanide than normal because of the freeze after record high temperatures in mid-April. Still unknown is exactly how the caterpillar cyanide gets into the pregnant mares. While scientists begin more tests on pasture grasses, Lexington horse breeders are going to cut down wild cherry trees near their pastures and spray the Tent Caterpillar moths before they lay eggs that would hatch next spring.
"We are the first people ever to see the bottom of Cuban waters over 50 meters...It's so exciting. We are discovering...even possibly a sunken city built in the pre-classic period and populated by an advanced civilization similar to the early Teotihuacan culture of Yucatan."
- Paulina Zelitsky, ocean engineer, Advanced Digital Communications, May 2001
May 18, 2001 Washington, D. C. - Reporter Andrew Cawthorne reporting from Havana, Cuba for Reuters bylined a May 15 story entitled "Explorers Comb Cuban Seas for Treasure, Mysteries." (See complete text below.) He interviewed ocean engineer Paulina Zelitsky, employed by Advanced Digital Communications and based in Tarara along the Cuba coast east of Havana. According to the article, Ms. Zelitsky said, "We are the first people ever to see the bottom of Cuban waters over 50 meters. It's so exciting. We are discovering ...even possibly a sunken city built in the pre-classic period and populated by an advanced civilization similar to the early Teotihuacan culture of Yucatan. ...Researchers using sonar equipment have discovered at a depth of about 2,200 feet (700-800 meters) a huge land plateau with clear images of what appears to be urban development partly covered by sand. From above, the shapes resemble pyramids, roads and buildings. "
May 16, 2001 Lexington, Kentucky - Seventeen thousand thoroughbred mares live in the Kentucky blue grass fields around Lexington, the largest racehorse breeding area in the United States. Since the end of April 2001, pregnant mares have lost 477 fetuses and stillborn foals. Last year, only 46 aborted foals or fetuses were reported to the University of Kentucky Livestock Disease Diagnostic Center. That means something has caused a 700% increase in fetal deaths.
May 6, 2001 Caral, Peru - Archaeologists reported in the April 27, 2001 journal Science that the mounds and ruins in the Supe Valley 120 miles north of Lima are as old as the pyramids. Now Caral, Peru is the oldest city in the Western Hemisphere. Even though the site and seventeen others were first discovered in 1905, age was never precisely dated. Now Jonathan Haas, Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago and co-author of the report, says that disintegration of carbon in plant fibers in the ruin walls definitely date between 2627 B.C. and 2020 B. C. That makes the Peruvian Supe Valley home to a civilization as old and advanced as those in Egypt where the pyramids were being built, to Mesopotamia where the Sumerian culture dominated, to the Indus Valley, China and the newly discovered Central Asian civilization near Iran and Afghanistan which was making fine ceramics and had its own independent writing symbols. See: Earthfiles Science report 05-05-01.
May 5, 2001 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - A large, sophisticated civilization equal to Sumeria and Mesopotamia and thriving at the same time at least 5,000 years ago was lost in the harsh desert sands of the Soviet Union near the Iran and Afghanistan borders. But now details are beginning to emerge. This week I visited archaeologist Fredrik Hiebert at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology. There he has some exquisite pottery shards the Russian government gave him permission to bring back to the United States from his recent excavations in the Kara Kum desert of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan on the Iran and Afghanistan borders.
April 24, 2001 Plum Island east of Orient, Long Island, New York - Today in England, three suspected cases of human foot-and-mouth disease are being investigated by the British Public Health Laboratory. One of the patients is a man from Cumbria who developed blisters in his mouth and sore, itchy hands while working on a crew slaughtering hoofed animals infected with foot-and-mouth disease. Officials are waiting to hear from laboratory test results which should be in next week. If the humans test positive for foot-and-mouth disease, it means the virus moved from animals to people.
April 24, 2001 Denver, Colorado - Another infectious agent made headlines in North America in April 2001. That is the fatal prion brain destroyer known as "Chronic Wasting Disease," or CWD. The first case of chronic wasting disease confirmed in a wild mule deer was shot by a hunter last fall in Saskatchewan near the border of Alberta, Canada. Over the past four years, dozens of CWD cases have been confirmed in Saskatchewan's 19 captive game farms. About 3000 animals have been slaughtered there in an attempt to keep the dreaded disease from spreading. Elk are raised on the game farms for their meat and their antler velvet which is used in homeopathic remedies and to provide aphrodisiacs for Asia. But now even Korea has banned imports of elk antlers from Canada because of concerns about spreading chronic wasting disease.
April 15, 2001 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - A brand new theory about the creation of the universe emerged recently from cosmologists and particle physicists at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and Cambridge, England. The new theory is called the Ekpyrotic Universe, from a Greek word meaning "conflagration" used to describe the universe's creation from a huge fireball that cooled down. Periodically, the Greeks thought, the process could repeat itself.
April 11, 2001 College Station, Texas - The number of outbreaks in the UK has now reached 921 with three new cases confirmed this week. More than 955,000 animals have been earmarked for slaughter to contain and eradicate the highly contagious virus, with 345, 000 waiting to be killed and 178,000 carcasses awaiting disposal. Computer experts project that the virus won't reach its peak until June 2001. By then, England might reach 4,000 cases of foot-and-mouth disease.