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A federal appeals court heard oral arguments last week for reinstating a lawsuit filed against the U.S. Postal Service in relation to its handling of the October 2001 anthrax attacks. The original suit filed in October 2003 was dismissed a year ago by District Judge Rosemary Collyer of the District of Columbia, who found that Postal Service officials were immune to the charges that they left employees in harm's way during the attacks. The workers had alternative avenues of recourse, such as the Federal Employees' Compensation Act, she said. She did not rule on whether the charges were accurate. The...

WEST PALM BEACH — Four years after the FBI launched the largest investigation in its history to unmask whoever sent anthrax-laced letters that killed five people and sickened 17 others, the widow of the nation's first anthrax-attack victim said the federal government has kept her in the dark. Breaking her four-year silence, Maureen Stevens said Friday that the agency has told her "pretty much nothing" and that if the FBI does find out who killed her husband, tabloid photo editor Robert Stevens, "I don't know if they will tell me." *** The FBI asked to meet with her next week,...

CALGARY -- On the same day that Mexican president Vicente Fox visited the campus, more than 600 people were evacuated from the University of Calgary's Sciences building when staff found two envelopes containing a suspicious-looking powder. The powder turned out to be harmless. Fire, EMS, and police personnel cordoned off the facility at about 11:30 a.m. yesterday after a male professor opened one of the letters and subsequently complained of feeling sick, said fire department spokesman John Conley. The man, reportedly in his 50s, and a woman in her mid-20s who was also complaining of nausea, were taken to hospital...

Letter to the editor: The FBI Is Still on the Anthrax Trail Thursday, September 29, 2005 The Sept. 22 editorial "The Anthrax Metaphor" may have misled readers on the progress of one of the largest, most complex investigations ever conducted by law enforcement. First, the men and women of the FBI and the Postal Inspection Service assigned to this case remain fully committed to bringing the perpetrator(s) of these murderous attacks to justice. While, as the editorial pointed out, we have not yet made arrests in the case, the investigators continue to go the extra mile in pursuit of every...

FOUR years after the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks, which brought fresh terror to the US days after the September 11 hijackings, the biggest criminal investigation in American history has gone cold. The failure to solve one of the most baffling and sinister terrorist cases of modern times has not only led to intense frustration for the FBI, but has also prompted the British widow of one of the victims to sue the US Government. Bob Stevens, a British picture editor from Berkshire who worked in Boca Raton, Florida, was one of five people who died in and seventeen who became...

"SET ASIDE the "what if" speculation about bioterrorism. It already happened, and the response to the first bioterrorism attack on U.S. soil is less than reassuring. Four years after mail laced with anthrax bacteria took the lives of five people, sickened 17 others, brought the U.S. mail system to its knees, and forced the evacuation and shutdown of Congress and the Supreme Court, whoever was responsible for the attacks remains at large..... But in one significant respect, the anthrax investigation and the post-Sept. 11 response share a likeness: Both have failed to achieve their goals. The anthrax culprit remains at...

FBI officials said yesterday that investigators are still working diligently to find whoever was responsible for the anthrax-bacteria-laced mailings, which killed five people, sickened 17 others and led to the temporary shutdown of the House, Senate and Supreme Court buildings and numerous postal facilities. They said they are getting assistance from forensics experts and scientific researchers from law enforcement agencies, the intelligence community, university laboratories and private corporations...... *** In the past year, the number of FBI agents on the case has dropped from 31 to 21, authorities said. During the same time, the number of postal inspectors has fallen...

Roger Evans was sentenced to life in prison by US District Court judge in Panama City, Florida last month. Evans, already an inmate at a Florida state correctional facility, received the life sentence for mailing an anthrax threat letter in April 2004 to the office of the Clerk of the US District Court in Pensacola, Florida. The letter contained a substance later determined to be non-toxic. In December 2004, Evans pled guilty to violating three federal statutes in connection with the anthrax threat: he threatened use of a weapon of mass destruction against property that is owned, leased, or used...

I-Team 10 has a follow up to the anthrax investigation that led agents to the southern tier a year ago. On August 5, 2004 FBI agents raided the home of a doctor in the town of Wellsville. Since then, Doctor Kenneth Berry has neither been charged, nor formally cleared. The FBI never said, what, if anything they found from their search of Dr. Berry's home but the investigation apparently never yielded anything that implicated berry in any wrongdoing. Still, the publicity surrounding the raid has left him in legal limbo. Dr. Berry’s home sits quietly on a hill in the...

Paris - A reddish powder trickling from a letter caused a terror alert in a Paris postal sorting office - but turned out to be dried elephant dung, police said Wednesday. Six staff and two policemen were medically examined after contact with the powder - but it was found on analysis to be of the sort used in religious rites in Sri Lanka, a spokesperson said. Paris has been in its second-highest state of terrorism alert following the July 7 and 21 bombings in London.

(Angus Reid Global Scan)Many adults in the United States disagree with the theory of evolution, according to a poll by Harris Interactive. 54 per cent of respondents reject the notion that human beings developed from earlier species. Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species" was first published in 1859. The book details the British naturalist's theory that all organisms gradually evolve through the process of natural selection. Darwin's views were antagonistic to creationism, the belief that a more powerful being or a deity created life. 64 per cent of respondents think humans were created directly by God, while 22 per cent...

CHENNAI: In the wake of reports about prevalence of anthrax in Tamil Nadu, members of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) on Wednesday launched a novel campaign to caution people against eating meat. A handful of PETA activists, sporting biohazard suits, converged on the arterial Anna Road here and flashed placards, which read meat kills, eat meat and die and meat: a mouthful of anthrax. PETA campaigns co-ordinator, Sneha Singh, who spearheaded the campaign here, said People who eat meat are committing slow suicide. Anthrax or no anthrax, the sad fact remains that meat helps kill the people...

'Missing from his (The Presidents Quantico) address, however, was any reference to the strikes on U.S. soil that occurred in the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, from a biological agent called anthrax -- a grave, ongoing and unsolved threat.. A small amount of powder in five letters managed to kill five people in Washington, Florida and New York, and sickened... The U.S. postal system was brought to its knees in several cities... Congressional offices were evacuated. The cost of responding to the attacks on the U.S. Postal Service alone reached an estimated $1 billion, and that's not counting the additional...

PHILADELPHIA - Clayton Lee Waagner, a self-proclaimed terrorist who mailed phony anthrax letters to abortion clinics in 24 states, was sentenced to 19 years in prison Thursday. Waagner sent many threatening letters from a FedEx facility in Philadelphia in October and November 2001 during the height of the anthrax scares that followed the Sept. 11 attacks. "He wanted to exploit the moment," Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard P. Barrett said, "to use the anxiety and panic caused by those other terrorist acts to fuel his own brand of terror." The frightening letters signed by the "Army of God" contained a mysterious...

The US Justice Department filed a motion Friday to quash testimony by wife of bioweaponeer William Patrick III in the lawsuit: Steven J. Hatfill, M.D. v. Attorney General John Ashcroft, The Department of Justice; The Federal Bureau of Investigation (et al). Headed by former federal prosecutor Tom Connelly, pro bono attorney's for Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, the former person of interest in the anthrax letters case, have been quietly doing battle behind the scenes with attorney's for the US Justice Department, in the United States District Court for The District of Columbia. Dr. Steven Hatfill's life was publically dismantled, rendering...

Looking Back: The story after the story Dr. Kenneth Berry hasn't been linked to any crime. The former Wellsville physician whose homes were searched in connection with the anthrax killings has visited Wellsville recently, and is living on unemployment in New Jersey, according to a friend. "Who's going to hire him?" asked the friend, the Rev. Richard "Pastor Dick" Helms of Wellsville. Dr. Kenneth M. Berry lost his job as an emergency room doctor at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in McKeesport, Pa., last year after his name surfaced in the anthrax investigation. His home on East Pearl Street...

NPR Morning Edition, April 6, 2005 · A congressional hearing details a string of errors leading to March's anthrax scare at the Pentagon but is unable to determine why two tests came up positive for the deadly spores when none were present.(AUDIO)

Leo Buchignani, junior in communications and president of The Orange and Blue Observer, calls the winner of the AK-47 raffle Thursday afternoon on the Quad. The Orange and Blue Observer, a conservative journal at the University, will use the raffle money to buy the gun and to help fund their paper. The Orange and Blue Observer (OBO), a conservative political journal at the University, staged a controversial raffle Thursday - first prize was an AK-47 assault rifle. Michael Hooper, a police officer from Mattoon, Ill., was announced the winner of the firearm by OBO members at a booth outside the...

WASHINGTON -- Anthrax has been confirmed in samples collected from the two Pentagon mail facilities that were at first closed last week and then declared free of the pathogen, United Press International has learned. The head of the company that was accused of contaminating the samples sent from those facilities -- a detached building on the Pentagon grounds in Arlington, Va., and the other in Falls Church, Va. -- said the presence of anthrax was detected independently by two government laboratories. Robert B. Harris, president and chief executive officer of Commonwealth Biotechnologies Inc. in Richmond, Va., also said the anthrax...

The day after the latest anthrax scare, public officials focused on the role of a private Richmond laboratory and its powerful client, the U.S. Department of Defense, in a slow-moving response to what could have been a threat to hundreds of government workers. The negative results of additional tests taken from a Pentagon mail facility and a Defense Department mailroom in Fairfax County have prompted questions about the source of the anthrax. The positive results came from a swab of a 2-foot square filter last Thursday that was tested by Commonwealth Biotechnologies Inc., based in Chesterfield's Gateway Center. For reasons...