Free Republic

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) – Two workers were hospitalized after opening a package at John F. Kennedy International Airport Sunday, but the substance inside – initially feared to be nerve gas – turned out only to be beauty supplies. As CBS 2’s Steve Langford reported, it was a tense scene at the U.S. Postal Service facility at the eastern edge of the airport Sunday. Port Authority police, the FDNY, and an FBI hazardous response team all rushed to the scene after the workers reported feeling ill. In this post-9/11 world, authorities respond quickly and forcefully out of an abundance of caution,...

BREAKING NEWS: Two postal inspectors at JFK Airport sickened by nerve gas after opening package

<p>Russia's U.N. ambassador said Tuesday that Russian experts determined that Syrian rebels made sarin nerve gas and used it in a deadly chemical weapon attack outside Aleppo in March.</p> <p>Ambassador Vitaly Churkin blamed opposition fighters for the March 19 attack in the government-controlled Aleppo suburb of Khan al-Assal, which he said killed 26 people, including 16 military personnel, and injured 86 others.</p>

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Thursday the U.S. intelligence community believes the Syrian regime used the chemical weapon sarin, a revelation that immediately raised the question of whether a "red line" had been crossed in the country's civil war. Hagel confirmed the intelligence assessment, which was detailed in a letter to select members of Congress, while speaking to reporters on a visit to Abu Dhabi. The administration swiftly released those letters, which said U.S. intelligence determined with varying degrees of confidence that "the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin."...

I was watching TV this evening and started to flip cable channels when I saw a streaming on MSNBC on our forces finding castor beans. The following is a part of what their website said about it. NBC News’ Jim Miklaszewski that within just the past week, U.S. investigators had found two shipping containers filled with millions of much more recent documents relating to chemical and biological weapons. One of the documents, from 2001, was titled “Document burial and U.N. activities in Iraq,” the sources said. It gave detailed instructions on how to hide materials and deceive U.N. weapons inspectors,...

Members of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps advance through a cloud of smoke during a gas mask drill, 1942. U.S. Army Nurse Corps members in formation. World War II Army Nurses onning their gas masks. Mary Brown, Nurse and Soldier

The Syrian military is prepared to use chemical weapons against its own people and is awaiting final orders from President Bashar Assad, U.S. officials told NBC News on Wednesday. The military has loaded the precursor chemicals for sarin, a deadly nerve gas, into aerial bombs that could be dropped onto the Syrian people from dozens of fighter-bombers, the officials said. As recently as Tuesday, officials had said there was as yet no evidence that the process of mixing the "precursor" chemicals had begun. But Wednesday, they said their worst fears had been confirmed: The nerve agents were locked and loaded...

The al-Sadd battalion was guarding the chemical weapons factory and warehouse. However, the battalion has since withdrawn to Misratah, leaving a stockpile of deadly weapons vulnerable to theft. The current number of guards at the chemical weapons site, which contains 9 tons of mustard gas and dozens of barrels contaminated with chemicals, is just two men armed with Kalashnikov rifles. Hamzah al-Shaibani, spokesman for the “17 February revolution committee” said in a telephone interview with Asharq al-Awsat yesterday that: "We appeal to the United Nations and the Transitional National Council to protect and secure the area, because it represents a...

A top Egyptian security official is warning he expects "a wave of Islamic terror attacks against the country, planned and prepared outside of Egypt," according to G2 Bulletin's intelligence sources. The terror threat in Egypt is being taken so seriously among western and Israeli intelligence agencies that they are actively considering the possibility of the fall of President Hosni Mubarak's regime and pondering what might become of Cairo's weapons of mass destruction in such an eventuality. During a special session of the People's Assembly, Egyptian Minister of the Interior Habib al-Adeli reportedly told legislators that his assessment is based on...

Baghdad leaders reveal that coup plot duped MI6 Julie Flint explains how rumours of Saddam's overthrow caused British intelligence to miss vital information about Iraq's weapons programme British intelligence took its eyes off Saddam Hussein's weapons programmes because it had been duped into believing a military coup would leave Sunni Muslims in power in Iraq. Sources in the country say what they missed was a push to convert chemical and biological organisms into dry agents that could be hidden until pressure on the regime was lifted. 'From the second half of 2000, the focus of the British was not on...

None of the men of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Hampshires was surprised that the fight would be tough. As they doggedly advanced up 'Gold' beach on D-Day, every man knew that surviving the murderous criss-cross of machine-gun fire would demand a miracle. The village of Le Hamel, although no more than a few hundred yards beyond the surf, never seemed to get any closer. The bullets mercilessly cut down their commanding officer as well as several middle-ranking officers, and as the day wore on, it looked as if the entire battalion would be slaughtered on the beach. ...........................................................

China detects deadly nerve gas at border with NKorea: report 1 hr 51 mins ago TOKYO (AFP) – China has detected deadly nerve gas at its border with North Korea and suspects an accidental release inside the secretive state, a Japanese news report said Friday. The Chinese military is strengthening its surveillance activities after detecting the highly virulent sarin gas in November last year and in February in Liaoning province, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported, citing anonymous sources from the Chinese military.

A new molecule that detects and destroys lethal nerve gases has been developed by researchers in the US. It is hoped that the research will help develop new early-warning systems against chemical weapon attacks, and possibly give rise to an effective antidote. Originally developed during the lead up to the second world war, organophosphorus nerve gases such as sarin, tabun and soban are odourless and colourless - and exposure to even a small amount can be fatal within minutes. Despite being outlawed by chemical weapons conventions in the 1990s, their relatively straightforward chemical structure means they could conceivably be deployed by...

Authorities seized a small amount of radioactive material and nerve gas from a taxi in the Georgian capital and detained the driver, officials said Monday. Tedo Mokeliya was detained May 31 after police in this former Soviet republic discovered two containers with 3 curies of cesium-137 and 12 microcuries of strontium in his taxi, said Givi Mgebrishvili, chief of the Interior Ministry's main criminal investigation department. Cesium and strontium, which have medical and industrial applications, are considered likely ingredients for a so-called "dirty bomb," in which conventional explosives are combined with radioactive material. Mgebrishvili said at a news conference that...

Al-Qaeda Draws New Recruits Via Internet Al-Qaeda is using the Internet to recruit vulnerable young people to its terrorist network, according to a programme aired on Saudi Arabian TV late on Tuesday. Umm Osama, the founder of al-Qaeda's first women-only website, al-Khansa, joined several others on the programme to discuss how they renounced jihadist ideology. Among those who sought a response to this question was an imam from the Medina mosque, Saleh Ibn Awad al-Mudamsi, and the father of a young al-Qaeda suspect held in an Iraqi prison. Read More Qaeda Targets U.S. Oil Interests in North Africa U.S....

Top secret US military plans to test deadly nerve gas by dropping it on soldiers in a remote Queensland rainforest during the Cold War have been uncovered in Australian Government archives. Newly declassified Australian Defence Department and Prime Minister’s office files show that the United States was strongly pushing the Government for tests on Australian soil of two of the most deadly chemical weapons ever developed, VX and GB — better known as Sarin — nerve gas. The plan, which is disclosed for the first time on tomorrow’s SUNDAY program on Nine, called for 200 mainly Australian combat troops to...

NEWPORT, Ind. (AP) - Army contractors halted operations Saturday at a western Indiana complex built to destroy a deadly nerve agent after nearly 500 gallons of caustic wastewater spilled in a contained area. No workers were injured or exposed to the hydrolysate, a byproduct of the destruction of the agent, when it leaked onto the floor of a sealed area at the Newport Chemical Depot, depot spokesman Dennis Lindsey said. The facility was to be shut down until the spill was cleaned up and its cause determined, Lindsey said. The western Indiana facility destroys the Cold War-era chemical weapon VX...

<p>On Sept. 6, something important happened in northern Syria. Problem is, no one knows exactly what. Except for those few who were involved, and they're not saying.</p> <p>We do know that Israel carried out an airstrike. How then do we know it was important? Because in Israel, where leaking is an art form, even the best-informed don't have a clue. They tell me they have never seen a better-kept secret. Which suggests that whatever happened near Dayr az Zawr was no accidental intrusion into Syrian airspace, no dry run for an attack on Iran, no strike on some conventional target such as an Iranian Revolutionary Guard base or a weapons shipment on its way to Hezbollah in Lebanon.</p>

<p>Proof of cooperation between Iran and Syria in the proliferation and development of weapons of mass destruction was brought to light Monday in a Jane's Magazine report that dozens of Iranian engineers and 15 Syrian officers were killed in a July 23 accident in Syria.</p>

Okay, you can come out from under the bed now. The United Nations says the nerve gas stored - unmarked and unidentified - in one of its offices for about 10 years posed "no immediate risk or danger." Neither were "toxic vapors" found in the air. Is this not completely reassuring? No one seems to know why the stuff - believed to be phosgene, which killed a lot of folks back in World War I and, due to Saddam Hussein, more recently in Kurdish villages - was at UN headquarters instead of locked away in a lab. Apparently it had...