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Anna Nicole Smith Doc Examines the Troubled, Misunderstood Life of the Late Superstar Model – Rolling Stone
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Bomb Squad Examines Suspicious Item – NBC Boston
Some travelers were forced to evacuate Boston’s Logan Airport on Easter Sunday after a potentially suspicious item was discovered inside a piece of luggage.
Massachusetts State Police said their bomb squad was examining the item that was located inside a piece of luggage around 5 p.m. Sunday.
Video posted to social media showed a long, crowded line of people exiting Terminal A. In the video, a Logan employee can be heard over the airport’s loud speaker telling everyone they must exit the secure checkpoint, including any employees or staff personnel, and be rescreened by TSA agents.
“You have to exit, this is mandatory,” the speaker says.
Another video posted on social media also shows a crowded sidewalk outside the terminal. State police said people were evacuated to the sidewalk.
A traveler who was inside Terminal A when law enforcement entered the airport told NBC10 Boston there was panic, with people running and leaving things behind. He even saw one man fall down.
Photos shared with NBC10 Boston by another traveler showed an empty terminal, with unattended baggage strewn about and line dividers knocked to the ground. Sheryl Ding said she took the pictures when she realized she wasn’t in imminent danger.
State police said at 5:30 p.m. that the suspicious item had been cleared and the terminal was reopened and check-in could resume.
It was not immediately clear how much of a delay this incident caused as people traveled on Easter Sunday but there were still visibly long lines at 6:30 p.m. Some travelers told NBC10 Boston they had been delayed over an hour.
No other information was immediately available.
Canadian scientist examines melting Antarctic glacier, potential sea level rise
HALIFAX —
As icebergs drifted by his Antarctica-bound ship, David Holland spoke this week of how the melting glacier he’s cruising towards may contain warning signals for the coasts of far-off Canada.
The atmospheric and ocean scientist from Newfoundland is part of an expedition to one of the world’s most frigid and remote spots — the Thwaites glacier in the western portion of the continent — where he’ll measure water temperatures in an undersea channel the size of Manhattan.
“The question of whether sea level will change can only be answered by looking at the planet where it matters, and that is at Thwaites,” said Holland, director of the environmental fluid dynamics laboratory at New York University, during a satellite phone interview from aboard the South Korean icebreaker Araon.
It’s over 16,000 kilometres from Holland’s hometown in Brigus, N.L., on Conception Bay, to the site about 100 kilometres inland from the “grounding zone” where the Thwaites’ glacier leaves the continent and extends over the Pacific.
The team’s 20,000 tonnes of drilling gear will be assembled to measure the temperatures, salinity and turbulence of the Pacific waters that have crept underneath and are lapping away at the guts of the glacier.
“If it (the water) is above freezing, and in salt water this means above -2 centigrade, that’s not sustainable. A glacier can’t survive that,” said Holland.
Since 2018, more than 60 scientists from the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration group have been exploring the ocean and marine sediments, measuring warming currents flowing toward the deep ice, and examining the stretching, bending, and grinding of the glacier over the landscape below.
The Florida-sized Thwaites glacier faces the Amundsen Sea, and researchers have suggested in journal articles over the past decade it may eventually lose large amounts of ice because of deep, warm water driven into the area as the planet warms.
Some media have dubbed Thwaites the “doomsday glacier” due to estimates that it could add about 65 centimetres to global sea level rise.
Holland notes current research models mainly suggest this would happen over several centuries, however there are also lower probability theories of “catastrophic collapse” occurring, where the massive ice shelf melts in the space of decades. “We want to pay attention to things that are plausible, and rapid collapse of that glacier is a possibility,” he said.
While Holland looks at the undersea melting, other scientists are examining how the land-based portions of Antarctic glaciers are losing their grip on points of attachment to the seabed, potentially causing parts to detach. Still other researchers point to the risk of initial fractures causing the ice shelf to break, much like a damaged car windshield.
All of the mechanisms must be carefully observed to prove or disprove models on the rates of melting, said Holland.
“If the (water-filled) cave beneath the glacier we’re studying gets bigger, then Antarctica is losing ice and retreating, and if the cave collapses on itself, then (the cave) will disappear. This is how Antarctica can retreat, these kinds of specific events,” he said.
The implications of the glacier work reach back to Atlantic Canada — which along with communities along the Beaufort Sea and in southwestern British Columbia is the region most vulnerable to sea level rise in the country, according to federal scientists.
Everything from how to calculate the future height of dikes at the low-lying Chignecto Isthmus — the narrow band of land that connects Nova Scotia to the rest of the country — to whether the Fraser River lowlands may face flooding is potentially affected by glacial melting in Antarctica, he said.
Scenarios where Antarctica ice melts more quickly than expected are briefly discussed in the 2019 federal report Canada’s Changing Climate. Based largely on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that refer to them as low-probability “tipping point” theories, the 2019 report invoked the possibility of one metre of sea level rise by 2100.
However, Blair Greenan, a federal oceanographer who oversaw the relevant chapter of the report, said in a recent interview that a rise in global sea levels approaching two metres by 2100 and five metres by 2150 “cannot be ruled out” due to uncertainty over ice sheet processes like Thwaites.
“We don’t know, nobody knows,” Holland said. “But it’s plausible these things can change, and several feet of sea level change would have a major impact on Atlantic Canada. What’s needed is glacier forecasting that resembles the kinds of accuracy that weather forecasting currently provides.”
However, collecting glacier forecast data is a daunting undertaking in the short period — from late January until mid-February — when scientists can safely take readings. Helicopters will be ferrying a hot water drill, 30 barrels of fuel and water to Holland’s site beginning near the end of January.
The drill will have to penetrate over a kilometre of ice to reach the 300 metres of undersea channel to take measurements.
As the data is collected, some scientists question whether there’s really much for Canadian coastal residents to worry about at this stage.
One study by Ian Joughin, a University of Washington glaciologist, has suggested Thwaites will only lose ice at a rate that creates sea level rise of one millimetre per year — and not until next century. At that rate it would take 100 years for sea levels to rise 10 centimetres.
In a telephone interview last week, Joughin said planning coastal protection and other measures for the more extreme scenarios may not be cost effective at this point, as it may take up to a century before the major risks starts to unfold.
However, Joanna Eyquem, a Montreal-based geoscientist who is studying ways to prepare infrastructure for rising sea levels, said in a recent email that glacier research shows sea level forecasts “are constantly evolving,” and adaptation efforts need to be quicker.
“The question is: How desperate does the situation need to be before we take action?” she asked.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 23, 2022.
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After Stabbing Attack, New Zealand Examines Its Antiterrorism Efforts
AUCKLAND, New Zealand — When Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen grabbed a knife at a Countdown supermarket on Friday in West Auckland and began stabbing shoppers, the police were just outside.
They had followed him there. They had, in fact, been following him for months, since he was released from prison. Officials at the highest levels of New Zealand’s government knew about Mr. Samsudeen, an Islamic State sympathizer — including Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who had received briefings about his case.
Mr. Samsudeen, whose name was made public on Saturday night after the lapsing of a New Zealand court order, was considered so dangerous that on the very day he wounded seven people at the supermarket and was shot dead by the police, Ms. Ardern’s government had been trying to expedite counterterrorism legislation in Parliament to give law enforcement officials a legal way to take him back into custody.
“Agencies used every tool available to them to protect innocent people from this individual,” Ms. Ardern said at a news conference on Saturday afternoon. “Every legal avenue was tried,” she added.
Three of the people wounded in the attack were in critical condition on Saturday.
New Zealand has low and declining crime rates, and is far from the flash points of global terrorism. But questions about how the country handles potential assailants have grown in volume since 2019, after an anti-Muslim terrorist murdered 51 people at two mosques in the city of Christchurch.
Now, like other countries, New Zealand is grappling with the trade-offs between monitoring suspects and preventing terrorist attacks, and with concerns about containing the power of the government and the police to surveil and detain people based on suspicions.
More details about Mr. Samsudeen’s case, including his name and immigration status in New Zealand, came to light on Saturday night. A judge had ruled on Friday that an order restricting reporting of his personal information should be lifted, but left some of the restrictions in place for a further 24 hours to give Mr. Samsudeen’s family time to challenge the decision.
Mr. Samsudeen, who was a Sri Lankan national, traveled to New Zealand on a student visa in 2011. A Tamil Muslim, he was granted refugee status in 2013 on the grounds that he and his father had “experienced serious problems with the Sri Lankan authorities due to their political background,” according to court documents. He said that he had been “attacked, kidnapped and tortured” and that he feared that deportation to Sri Lanka would put him in increased danger.
Four years later, in 2017, Mr. Samsudeen was arrested at the airport in Auckland on suspicion of planning to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State militant group, which then controlled parts of Syria and Iraq. He subsequently spent three years in prison on a variety of charges, including assaulting a corrections officer, before being released in July.
In a pre-sentencing report, Mr. Samsudeen was described as having an “isolated lifestyle, a high sense of entitlement and a propensity for violence,” with “minimal insight” into why what he had done was wrong. He thought of himself as “an activist or journalist,” a probation officer said.
Officials had taken steps toward removing Mr. Samsudeen from New Zealand in 2018 and 2019. But a deportation appeal process was still playing out at the time of the attack, with a hearing scheduled for this month after delays because of an earlier criminal trial and because of coronavirus restrictions.
In a statement on Saturday night, Ms. Ardern said Mr. Samsudeen’s refugee status had been obtained on false pretenses. “In July this year I met with officials in person and expressed my concern that the law could allow someone to remain here who obtained their immigration status fraudulently and posed a threat to our national security,” she said. “I asked for work to be undertaken to look at whether we should amend our law, in the context of our international obligations.”
She said that New Zealand’s immigration service had received legal advice that under current law, it could not detain Mr. Samsudeen while he awaited the appeal hearing, something she described as “incredibly disappointing and frustrating.”
As Mr. Samsudeen’s release date drew near this year, officials had become increasingly concerned, Ms. Ardern said earlier on Saturday. Having refused psychological evaluation, he could not be committed to a mental health facility, she said.
Weeks after Mr. Samsudeen’s release in late August, Police Commissioner Andrew Coster and other officials recommended speeding up amendments to New Zealand’s counterterrorism laws that were already working their way through Parliament, Ms. Ardern said. The legislation, initially introduced as part of a wider review of the antiterrorism laws, includes a provision that would make planning a terrorist attack a criminal offense — plugging a gap in the law that a court called “an Achilles’ heel” in a ruling on Mr. Samsudeen’s case in July 2020.
“Within 48 hours of these discussions, the minister of justice contacted the chair of the select committee with the intention of speeding that law change up,” Ms. Ardern said. “That was yesterday, the same day the attack happened.”
Mr. Coster said at the news conference that Mr. Samsudeen had been under constant surveillance since his release, with as many as 30 officers sometimes monitoring his behavior. He said Mr. Samsudeen believed he was being watched and had confronted members of the public, asking if they were following him.
Mr. Coster said there had been “nothing unusual” about Mr. Samsudeen’s activities on Friday before he arrived at the supermarket. Armed officers were outside the store when the attack began — an indication of how dangerous he was believed to be, as the police in New Zealand rarely carry guns.
Mr. Coster said the officers had not followed Mr. Samsudeen into the supermarket because, under Covid restrictions, relatively few people were inside. That meant the officers would have been much more conspicuous and might have been compromised, he said. A member of the elite Special Tactics Group killed the assailant less than three minutes after the attack began, he said.
Ms. Ardern praised the police response. “This was a highly motivated individual who used a supermarket visit as a shield for an attack,” she said. “That is an incredibly tough set of circumstances.”
Countdown and three other New Zealand supermarket chains said after the attack that they would suspend the sale of sharp knives. Countdown said it would also temporarily stop selling scissors.
Ms. Ardern said her government intended to pass the counterterrorism amendments by the end of this month. Opposition lawmakers have said they would support the changes, while questioning why the attacker had not been deported.
Referring to the lifting of the name suppression order on Saturday afternoon, Ms. Ardern said she would not use the assailant’s name in public, a rule she also applied to the Christchurch gunman. “No terrorist, whether alive or deceased, deserves their name to be shared for the infamy they were seeking,” she said.
USU geologist examines ‘stunning’ Cold War relic with ominous implications
LOGAN — A relic of the Cold War dug up during a secret military operation a half-century ago under the Greenland ice sheet provided what scientists called “stunning” and potentially ominous insights into the future of a warming Earth.
An international team of scientists announced their conclusions after studying a sample of ice and sediments that was captured in a drilling operation in the 1960s and then lost and forgotten. It wasn’t until 2017 that scientists rediscovered the sample in a freezer. They have now correlated that evidence with ice cores from other parts of Greenland to reach worrisome conclusions.
Utah State University geologist professor Tammy Rittenour, who played a significant role in the studies, called the findings “shocking” because they suggest that the entire Greenland ice sheet suffered a total meltdown at least twice and is much less stable than scientists previously thought.
If it melts again, Rittenour believes the consequences could be catastrophic for humans around the globe.
Apart from its scientific value, the saga of the frozen evidence also has jaw-dropping elements that could have come from a cold war thriller.
“It’s a cool story in a cold place,” Rittenour said, describing a top-secret 1960’s military operation that took place literally inside the ice.
Camp Century: A hidden base with a secret purpose
The Greenland ice sheet is an astonishing natural phenomenon, a gigantic slab of ice up to 1 mile deep that covers an area more than four times the size of California.
During the Cold War, Pentagon planners decided it was a perfect place to burrow inside and create a military base known as Camp Century. Tunnels and large workspaces were carved from the ice and covered over with snow and ice.
“You could dig out a huge bunker underneath the ice sheet and no one would know,” Rittenour said in an interview on the USU campus. “It would be invisible from above.”
The base itself was not a secret; CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite even went into the ice sheet and toured Camp Century in 1960. Military officials portrayed it as a site for scientific research. Its true purpose was a highly classified military secret.
Known as Project Iceworm, the top-secret plan was to hide 600 mobile nuclear missiles under the ice and keep them ready for launch if the cold war with the Soviet Union suddenly turned into a hot war. Eventually, though, the Pentagon abandoned the plan.
“They had to,” Rittenour said, “because it was cut into ice and the ceiling kept collapsing.”
Camp Century left behind a unique piece of evidence for future scientists. In 1966 a huge drill rig inside the base cored all the way through the ice sheet, straight down nearly a mile, and even a few feet deeper, into sediments below.
“They collected that, looked at it, and put it in a freezer and forgot about it,” Rittenour said.
Project Iceworm: Clues for future scientists
In 2017, scientists rediscovered the forgotten sand and ice in a freezer in Denmark. They were astounded to find fossilized plants at the bottom of the ice-core. Rittenour calls it a “treasure trove” of evidence because it shows that the ice sheet must have melted away completely, two different times. Rittenour’s role was to determine how long ago that happened.
.@UStateScience’s Tammy Rittenour has been tapped as an expert to help study ice core specimens from a doomed 1960s @USArmy nuclear launch site in Greenland. #USUResearch#USUAggieshttps://t.co/JV5WDqazOS
— Utah State University (@USUAggies) December 19, 2019
In her darkened “Luminescence Lab” on the USU Innovation Campus, she bombarded the sand with lasers to measure its luminescent properties.
“And that tells us how old it is,” she explained. “When it was last exposed to light.”
Rittenour said scientists previously thought the ice sheet had been stable for perhaps two-and-a-half million years. She said she was “shocked” to discover the sand was last exposed to sunlight less than 1 million years ago — possibly much less.
“Maybe only a half-million or several hundred thousand years ago that the ice-sheet melted away,” Rittenour said.
She said it implies that the ice sheet might be somewhat less stable than scientists had supposed and could be subject to meltdown over a relatively short span of time.
Meltdown: ‘An urgent problem for the next 50 years’
The findings have implications for the human race that could be catastrophic. Using various clues, including air-bubbles from glacial ice around the world, scientists have charted the rise and fall of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last million years. When CO2 declined, the ice sheet grew. As CO2 increased, glacial ice began melting away. In the modern industrial era, atmospheric data shows a dramatic spike, an apparently unprecedented increase in carbon dioxide.
“Today (it’s) well outside the natural range of CO2 concentrations,” Rittenour said.
In recent years, the Greenland ice sheet seems to be melting at an accelerating pace. If a total meltdown happens again, oceans will rise an estimated 20 to 25 feet — a lot more if Antarctica melts down too. That threatens the lifestyle, and the lives, of hundreds of millions of people in coastal villages, towns and cities all over the world.
“If the Greenland ice sheet melted,” Rittenour said, “all of those coastal areas would be inundated, whole countries would be underwater and most of the world’s population would be disturbed.”
The half-century-old ice core doesn’t answer all the questions or predict the future. More studies are coming and this secret from the past, once buried under the ice, could tell us a lot about humanity’s future.
“This is not a twenty-generation problem,” said geoscientist Paul Bierman in the study team’s news release from the University of Vermont. “This is an urgent problem for the next 50 years.”
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