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For nearly seven years, scientist Bruce E. Ivins and a small circle of fellow anthrax specialists at Fort Detrick's Army medical lab lived in a curious limbo: They served as occasional consultants for the FBI in the investigation of the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks, yet they were all potential suspects. Over lunch in the bacteriology division, nervous scientists would share stories about their latest unpleasant encounters with the FBI and ponder whether they should hire criminal defense lawyers, according to one of Ivins's former supervisors. In tactics that the researchers considered heavy-handed and often threatening, they were interviewed and polygraphed...

Saying she still has no idea who sent her a box of dead fish, former top homeland security bioweapons official Maureen McCarthy says she has resigned from the department and begun legal action to clear her name. Occasionally breaking into tears during a 45-minute telephone interview, McCarthy called her resignation "involuntary" and said she had suffered severe financial distress since being suspended without pay in February over the incident. "I resigned against my will," she said. "I had no income, and I couldn't use my accrued annual leave" for cash. "By resigning I got that back," she said, and could...

Its origins pointed to one conclusion: that only the government scientist could be behind the 2001 attacks. Federal investigators cinched their case against alleged anthrax mailer Bruce E. Ivins after sophisticated genetic tests by a California firm helped them trace a signature mixture of anthrax spores, the Los Angeles Times has learned. Well before the deadly 2001 anthrax mailings, Ivins, through his work as a government scientist, had combined anthrax spores obtained from at least one outside laboratory, people familiar with the evidence said. With the help of leading outside geneticists and a fresh look at the evidence by a...

NY Times suspended ethics for Web 2.0 plug Here's Johnny By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco Published Thursday 24th November 2005 01:12 GMT Back to the nebulous tech hype that Register readers love to hate. The New York Times appears to have breached three of its own ethics guidelines when it gave op-ed space to John Battelle last week to promote the Web 2.0 buzzword. Battelle, who produced the Web 2.0 conference with MediaLive, used the space to assure us that Web 2.0 wasn't really a bubble, in a curiously nervous and defensive piece. But the Times failed to disclose...

When the anthrax mailers penned the message, "YOU CAN NOT STOP US. WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX," the threat included a chilling nuance that remains largely unrecognized. "ARE YOU AFRAID?" asked the attackers. "Yes," should have been the answer, according to some biodefense experts, who think that the anthrax spores mailed to Senators Thomas Daschle (D-- SD) and Patrick Leahy (D--VT) in the fall of 2001 represented the state of the art in bioweapons refinement, revealing telltale clues about the source. This view is controversial, however, because others dispute the sophistication of the Senate powder, and a schism now exists among...

A week after the terrorist attacks on America, a highly educated scientist told Milwaukee police that he was building an anthrax delivery system in his basement, according to documents filed in federal court. In these times of heightened alert, the remark earned the man a visit from FBI agents armed with a search warrant, who took the man's computer, and keypads from a telephone and a microwave oven, according to court records. But no deadly anthrax. As it turns out, police were responding to a neighbor dispute, and the man was intoxicated when he made the anthrax comments to police. ...