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5200 Pentagon Employees PURCHASED Child Pornography! (Why Is This Not A Bigger Story?)
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5200 Pentagon Employees PURCHASED Child Pornography! (Why Is This Not A Bigger Story?)
Video of the Day: UFC Champ Wants to “Knock Some Sense” into Obama, “That Idiot”
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Video of the Day: UFC Champ Wants to “Knock Some Sense” into Obama, “That Idiot”
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York County's top religion news stories of 2010
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York County's top religion news stories of 2010
1. Snyder v. Phelps reaches high court
In October, justices of the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a Spring Garden Township man's lawsuit against the members of a Kansas church who protested his son's military funeral.
Experts say the case could have a significant impact on the laws governing speech, protest and religion, depending on how the justices rule. Their decision is expected in early summer.
2. New bishop takes the throne
In August, the Most Rev. Joseph P. McFadden was installed as the 10th bishop of the 15-county Roman Catholic Diocese of Harrisburg.
He replaced Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades, who led Catholics inthe region for five years before a transfer to the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend in Indiana.Bishop Joseph P. McFadden knocks on the door of the cathedral in Harrisburg on the day of his installation in August. (YDR - FILE)
McFadden, a former Catholic school teacher and basketball coach, arrived in the midstate from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, where he had spent his entire career. In November, McFadden was elected to chair the U.S. bishops' committee on Catholic education.
3. ELCA churches leave the fold
Three York County churches left the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the country's largest Lutheran denomination, in 2010.
Members of Christ Lutheran in Dallastown, St. Paul Lutheran in West Manchester Township and Zion (Shaffer's) United Lutheran Church in Codorus Township voted to disassociate.
The departures followed the ELCA's approval of policies allowing non-celibate gay clergy in the pulpit and allowing churches to recognize same-sex relationships -- moves that typified a long, leftward drift by the church, conservatives say.
4. Apologies offered to Native Americans
While marking 300 years since Europeans settled in Lancaster, Presbyterians, Mennonites, Quakers and others apologized to American Indians in October for wrongs committed against native groups that once thrived in the region.
Presbyterians from the Presbytery of Donegal atoned in particular for the acts of a Paxton militia -- made up of Scots-Irish Presbyterians -- that massacred 20 peaceful Indians in Lancaster in 1763.
5. Hindu temple plans expansion in Fairview Township
The growing Hindu American Religious Institute in northern York County counts 565 member families and is planning a $1 million expansion on its wooded, 7-acre tract off a suburban street in Fairview Township.
The temple draws worshippers from a 50-mile radius, and leaders hope more space will better serve the growing community -- estimated at more than 1,200 families. HARI serves as a house of worship but also a community center for local Hindus.
6. Lutheran clergy charge pastor with misconduct
For only the second time in the 22-year history of the ELCA, clergy charged a fellow pastor with misconduct, requesting a disciplinary hearing in the church.
Hummelstown police had charged Rev. Alan C. Wenrich in 2009 with misdemeanor solicitation and prostitution charges after he solicited sex from a woman he was counseling in his home office, according to public documents.
In the church case, an advisory committee made confidential recommendations to the regional bishop. As a result, Wenrich retired in September and is no longer available for call or assignment.
7. LCBC announces plans for York County campus
The Manheim-based megachurch LCBC bought the site of the shuttered Sutliff Saturn dealership at the intersection of North Hills Road and Route 30 in Springettsbury Township.
The York County campus -- to open in fall 2011 -- would be one of five for LCBC, which is working on another campus in Ephrata.
LCBC (formerly known as Lancaster County Bible Church) started in 1986. About 9,000 worshippers now regularly attend.
8. Giving sags at Protestant congregations
A growing number of Protestant churches saw their weekly collections drop, according to a LifeWay Research survey published in December.
This was the case at several local congregations that cut staff or froze salaries. The Lifeway survey says pastors blame high unemployment and a drop-off in per-capita givingby members. More than a third of churches surveyed said donations dropped in 2010, and overall donations were down 3 percent.During a hajj ritual, barefoot pilgrims circle around the ancient Kabba. The cubical building in the courtyard of the Grand Mosque in Mecca contains a sacred granite stone, which is what Muslims around the world face during prayer. According to the Quran, the Kaaba was built by Abraham and his son Ishmael. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
9. York firm designs A/C chillers for Grand Mosque
A local arm of Johnson Controls secured a contract to craft 27 huge chillers to pump cold air into the Grand Mosque in Mecca -- the largest open-air mosque in the world and the destination of millions of Muslim worshippers who make the annual pilgrimage to the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
The York chillers will provide 135,000 tons of refrigeration capacity -- enough to cool 27,000 homes.
10. Pastor is dismissed from traditionalist Catholic church
A priest with a criminal past was dismissed as chaplain of the traditionalist Catholic congregation he served for several years in York.
In May, Sts. Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Mission announced that the Rev. Virgil Bradley Tetherow would no longer celebrate Mass for the congregation. The chair of the congregation's board would only say that Tetherow was discharged "for personal reasons."
Five years ago, Tetherow was charged with 10 counts of possessing child pornography and 10 counts of criminal use of a communication facility, according to court records. He later pleaded guilty to one charge of criminal use of a communication facility -- a felony -- and the other charges were dropped.
In other religion news around the region:
Pastor's passing: The Rev. Joseph W. Seitz died Dec. 28 at York Hospital. He was 82.
Seitz, a graduate of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, was ordained in 1957.
He served at several York County congregations, including St. Luke and St. James churches in Chanceford Township, St. Paul in York and St. Paul in Spring Grove and Grace Lutheran in Red Lion, from which he retired after 12 years.
Changes for presbytery: The three-county Presbytery of Donegal has eliminated the position of associate executive presbyter, which had been held by the Rev. Charlie W. Gross Jr.
His job was eliminated Dec. 31 in part because the presbytery no longer needed the position, said the Rev. Guy Dunham, chair of the presbytery committee that oversees budget and personnel.
The job was created around 1982 to develop new churches during a time of anticipated growth in the presbytery -- growth that never materialized, Dunham said.
Gross, an ordained minister, had worked for the presbytery since 1999. He is launching a professional coaching company called Empowerment Encouragement Coaching in Lancaster and plans to target ministers, lay leaders and others who need "an encouraging voice and coach," he said.
For details, visit www.empoweringencouragement.com, e-mail coach@empoweringencouragement.com or call 742-0711.
New book: Deanna Walton of Hanover has self-published a compilation of poems, "Faith, Family and Friends," inspired by her faith, family and friends.
She says the poems about faith will help readers cope with troubled times. Those about family recognize that while all families struggle with issues, love abides. For details, visit www.authorhouse.com.
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Nanoparticles in Sewage Sludge May End Up in the Food Chain
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Nanoparticles in Sewage Sludge May End Up in the Food Chain
By Dave Mosher
Plants and microbes can absorb nano-sized synthetic particles that magnify in concentration within predators up the food chain, according to two new studies.
Nanoparticles can be made of countless different materials, and their safety isn’t well-understood. Yet the minuscule specks are infused into hundreds of consumer products ranging from transparent suncreens to odor-eating socks.
From there, they can wash down drains, ultimately ending up in the sewage sludge of wastewater treatment plants. About 3 million tons of dried-out sludge is subsequently mixed into agricultural soil each year.
“We wanted to look into the possibility of nanoparticles getting into the food chain in this way,” said environmental toxicologist Paul Bertsch of the University of Kentucky. “What we found really surprised us.”
Synthetic nanoparticles are about 1 to 100 nanometers in size (as small as some viruses) and made of silver, titanium dioxide, zinc oxide and other substances. By virtue of their small size and stability, they can nullify odors, prevent food spoilage and absorb harmful ultraviolet radiation, among other feats.
But knowledge about their impacts to the environment is still in a state of infancy, Bertsch said.
To explore nanoparticle absorption in the food chain, Bertsch’s team raised tobacco plants in a hydroponic greenhouse. While the plants grew, the team added super-stable gold nanoparticles to the water to mimic consumer nanoparticles in wastewater sludge.
Gold nanoparticles built up in tobacco leaf tissue, and tobacco hornworms that ate the plants accumulated concentrations of the nanomaterials about 6 to 12 times higher than in the plant.
“We expected [nanoparticles] to accumulate, but not biomagnify like that,” said Bertsch, co-author of the Dec. 3 study in Environmental Science & Technology.
Predatory microbes in a separate study, published Dec. 19 in Nature Nanotechnology, also built up concentrated levels of cadmium selenide nanoparticles after eating smaller microbes that ingested them.
“For me, it’s really interesting to see two different models using two different nanoparticles arrive at conclusions reinforcing each other,” said Patricia Holden, an environmental microbiologist at University of California, Santa Barbara who co-authored the microbe-based study.
At least five government agencies (EPA, FDA, NIH, NIOSH and NIST) host efforts to investigate nanotechnology’s risks to health and the environment, and their funding is increasing each year. And while heavy metals and other toxins in sludge are federally regulated, manmade nanoparticles are not. That may be cause concern as farms increasingly mix sludge into their soils, where nanoparticles may build up over time.
“At this point, the science right now is not saying ’stop using nanoparticles,’” said David Holbrook, a chemical engineer at NIST who wasn’t involved in either study. Holbrook said the new research is important and creates new avenues for nanotechnology safety research. “We’ve got to continue this kind of work,” he said.
There’s some evidence that nanoparticles are toxic under lab-controlled conditions, Bertsch said, but realistically assessing risks to health and the environment demands more advanced models. He and other scientists are already collaborating on an experiment at Cranfield Univeristy in England that will use the institution’s wastewater stream to gauge nanoparticle effects on earthworms and nematodes.
“I expect the results may not be as dramatic,” Bertsch said. “But so far, the jury is still out on safety.”
Image: A tobacco hornworm. Credit: Flickr/cbede
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Dave is an infinitely curious Wired Science contributor who's obsessed with space, physics, biology and technology. He lives in New York City.
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Galactic Smashups Leave Giant Black Holes Hungry
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Galactic Smashups Leave Giant Black Holes Hungry
Colliding galaxies don’t shake up enough food to feed enormous black holes lurking in their centers. A new study suggests that less violent events, like gravitational disturbances within the galaxy, are probably black holes’ primary source of fuel.
Almost every galaxy is centered on a supermassive black hole hundreds of millions of times more massive than the sun. Some of them, like the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, are relatively docile. But others draw a huge, hot disk of gas that glows white-hot just before it vanishes forever. These disks, called active galactic nuclei, can outshine the rest of the host galaxy.
Astronomers have suspected for decades that these ravenous black holes get their fuel from major mergers between two large galaxies. In all the chaos of a galactic pile-up, plenty of gas should get funneled toward the center and gobbled up, astronomers reasoned. Simulations have found that black holes and galaxies grow together. Some observations even suggested that galaxies with active galactic nuclei were slightly distorted, a sign of a recent collision.
“It’s totally intuitive,” said astrophysicist Knud Jahnke of the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, a coauthor of the new study. “But it was a gut-feeling idea. In court you would say there was some circumstantial evidence for it, but no proof.”
Earlier studies looked only at galaxies with the brightest active nuclei, which could have biased their results, Jahnke said. They also didn’t compare active galaxies to those with quiet black holes.
In a paper to appear in the Jan. 10 Astrophysical Journal, Jahnke and colleagues selected galaxies from the COSMOS dataset, the largest continuous galaxy survey the Hubble Space Telescope has ever completed. The survey covered an area of the sky 10 times the size of the full moon, and found hundreds of thousands of galaxies.
The team chose 140 active galactic nuclei, or AGNs, by selecting galaxies that emit a lot of X-rays, which can pierce the galactic gas and dust that might otherwise block the nuclei from view. They then chose more than 1,200 inactive galaxies at the same distance and brightness levels to ensure all images were of the same quality.
Next, the astronomers checked the galaxies for the subtle signs of a recent galactic collision, such as a warped disk or a trailing tail of stars. Jahnke and nine other astronomers examined each galaxy by eye, a low-tech but reliable method of picking out galaxy shapes.
“There’s no magic algorithm that will tell you if a galaxy is merging,” said Mauricio Cisternas, a graduate student at the Max-Planck Institute and lead author of the paper. “The human brain is much better at these things than any algorithm you could write.”
The human galaxy sorters didn’t always agree on which galaxies were merger survivors, but they all found merging galaxies are no more likely to aggressively feed black holes at their hearts than ordinary galaxies. At least 75 percent of the active galaxies get their fuel somewhere else.
“We don’t observe more mergers in the AGN host galaxies,” Cisternas said. “From there it’s straightforward to infer that mergers are not triggering AGNs, and are not responsible for black-hole fueling.”
Instead, black holes could be fed by smaller mergers, like a large galaxy gobbing a smaller one. Or perhaps a series of gravitational disturbances, which Jahnke calls an “angular momentum transport chain,” could ferry fuel to the black hole over great distances.
“This is a significant step forward,” said galaxy astronomer Romeel Davé of the University of Arizona, who was not involved in the new study. “The fact that we can do this now is unique and new. This represents a significant addition to the literature for sure.”
There are two caveats, though. One is that black holes could start feeding long after a merger, when the galaxy’s shape has smoothed out. Cisternas and Jahnke said that’s unlikely, however, because so many of their galaxies had prominent spiral shapes, and mergers tend to destroy a galaxy’s spiral forever. But Davé is not so sure.
“Just because one sees spiral structure does not mean that you don’t have merger activity,” he said.
The second is that the new study used galaxies whose light is 8 billion years old when it reaches Earth. Galaxies farther away than that are too fuzzy to see, but black holes were growing fastest about 10 billion years ago. That’s when mergers may still have been an important source of food, Davé said.
An ongoing survey with Hubble’s new Wide-Field Camera 3 could see further and resolve the question.
“That sort of information will be coming down the line fairly soon,” Davé said.
Image: A sample of the galaxies studied; sorted based on whether they show no signs of a recent merger (top row), minor signs (middle) or major disruptions (bottom). The black spot in the center of each galaxy ensured that the test was blind. The team blocked out the bright nuclei from active galaxies and added a spot to galaxies with dim centers, so the sorters couldn’t tell which was which. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Cisternas (Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy)
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NDM-1: More Evidence It Started in India
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NDM-1: More Evidence It Started in India
So it looks like the researchers who named NDM-1 — New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase, the “Indian super-enzyme” that renders common gut bacteria impervious to all but one or two antibiotics — were right all along.
According to a study just published in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, the problematic gene that produces it has been circulating in Indian hospitals since at least 2006.
Kinda undermines the claims by Indian politicians and the country’s health ministry that the resistance factor did not originate in India, but was given its name in an act of “malicious propaganda” aimed at undermining the subcontinent’s multimillion-dollar medical-tourism industry.
A brief recap:
Back in 2008, clinicians in Sweden and collaborators at the University of Cardiff identified a novel resistance factor in an isolate of Klebsiella pneumoniae from the urine of a Swedish resident of Indian origin who had returned to New Delhi for a visit and was hospitalized there, and subsequently hospitalized again at home. In accordance with convention, they named the enzyme and the gene that directs its production for its apparent source, making it the latest on an internationally recognized list of resistance factors named for cities in Italy, Germany, Brazil and so on.
That initial finding didn’t get much notice, even though Britain’s Health Protection Agency published a worried alert in 2009 about the resistance factor’s spread there. Ditto for a bulletin from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last summer. Both the British cases and the three in the United States had connections — personal travel or medical treatment — tying them to South Asia.
Then last August, the original team plus collaborators from six Indian institutions published a substantial update in which they found 180 instances of bacteria manufacturing the enzyme in Britain, India and Pakistan; clear epidemiologic links from South Asia into the West; and further spread of bacteria carrying NDM-1 to other patients with no ties to India.
The mud flew. The British researchers at the head of the team were denounced as “unscientific,” “irrational” and the perpetrators of a “sinister design of multinational companies” — claims that conveniently ignored three alarmed reports of NDM-1 that were published in Indian medical journals by Indian scientists earlier in 2010.
But now: In this new paper, another multinational team — Iowa, Massachusetts, Australia, India — delves into bacterial samples that came from 14 Indian hospitals in 2006 and 2007 and were sent to SENTRY, an international surveillance network (run by Iowa’s JMI Laboratories). Out of 1,443 isolates of Enterobacteriaceae (the bacterial family that includes Klebsiella, in which NDM-1 was first identified), they found 15 carrying the key gene, blaNDM-1, one carrying blaVIM-5 — that produces the resistance factor named after Verona, Italy — and 10 carrying yet another new resistance gene, blaOXA-181. The isolates came from patients in hospitals in Mumbai, Pune … and New Delhi.
The authors emphasize that:
These are the earliest NDM-1-producing isolates reported to date, indicating that isolates producing this carbapenemase have been present in India earlier than previously appreciated.
As with the original Swedish isolate (which these predate by two years) and the U.S. and British ones, these Indian isolates were highly resistant to multiple families of drugs, including to the last-resort category called the carbapenems. They could be treated only by the new and imperfect drug tigecycline and the old and toxic drug polymyxin B. And as in the other NDM-1 reports, the genes were contained on mobile genetic elements, meaning they would be capable of moving easily between individual bacteria and entire bacterial species — something that other researchers have reported observing.
The value of this study isn’t only to show the need for national bacterial-surveillance systems. If India had one in 2006 — or even had one now — NDM-1 might have been identified years earlier than it was, and its spread to a dozen other countries and dissemination into everyday life might at least have been slowed down. And it isn’t to show that the original discoverers of NDM-1 were vilified unfairly — though that’s important, because they were.
Primarily it demonstrates the utter pointlessness of pretending that bacteria respect either borders or the pontifications of politicians who deny their existence.
That’s a lesson that China learned the hard way, when it denied and tried to conceal the start of SARS in late 2002 — an effort that worked for approximately six months, until a physician who had been infected in his own hospital fled to Hong Kong carrying the virus and sparked an epidemic that girdled the globe in a month and killed almost 800 people. It’s absurd that, seven years later, another country has to demonstrate the same lesson again.
Cite: Castanheira M et al. “Early Dissemination of NDM-1- and OXA-181-producing Enterobacteriaceae in 14 Indian Hospitals: Report from the SENTRY Antimicrobial Surveillance Program (2006-2007).” doi:10.1128/AAC.01497-10
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Judge Grants Public Defender To Former Guard Accused In Attorney's Death
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Judge Grants Public Defender To Accused Killer
Former Guard Accused In Attorney's Death
A Cumberland County judge granted Raymond Peake a public defender.His original attorney removed himself from the case after the district attorney announced he was seeking the death penalty.Peake killed Todd Getgen, a former Harrisburg attorney, at a rifle range in June and stole his gun, police said.The trial is scheduled for this spring.Copyright 2011 by WGAL.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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