Johanna Faust, a mixed race Jew, prefers to publish pseudonymously. She is committed: first, to preventing war, ecological disaster, and nuclear apocalypse; last to not only fighting for personal privacy & the freedom of information, but, by representing herself as a soldier in that fight, to exhorting others to do the same. She is a poet, always. All these efforts find representation here: "ah, Mephistophelis" is so named after the last line of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, whose heretical success flouted the censor for a time.

Eyewitness: About What Happened To Lara Logan:



LATEST UPDATE : 


I am reconsidering the tone of the following article; I can say right now that I do not wish to be used to back up anyone's argument in this matter.
  
Thanks to everyone who commented, especially 'Julia' (here and here; publication on the latter delayed because blogger thought it was spam, my apologies).

PREVIOUS UPDATE: 
I will be checking from time to time to reply to comments.
Am attempting to secure interview with the belowmentioned person, also there.
Was struck with how consistent that account was with this – that was what prompted this post.  Well that and the aroma this story had, and not from close.  Smelled like................ 
                                             ..................................um, no, nuh-uh.  No way.
(Scroll to end of post for more excerpts and links) 
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The place is Tahrir Square, Cairo, and the context is revolution, long sought, long expected, and long overdue.  

Nobody is perfect; we all make mistakes, and compassion is called for when reviewing the errors of others: we cannot know with certainty what another experiences in any given situation; we cannot be sure that any account is complete and unembellished, not even our own.    That kind of precision, however, is thankfully not necessary for an accurate assessment.  
What really happened to Lara Logan?   
The  Main Stream Media's (MSM's) internal inconsistencies alone should disabuse  one of the notion of their authority. A basic, if determined, search session or two and I can tell you what did not happen: krugerrands to Krispy Kremes, she was not gang raped.  Double or nothing: she did something to get herself singled out as and accused of being an Israeli operative, a crime for which, from what I understand, discovery, trial, verdict, and sentencing are performatively implicit in the accusation itself.  In other words, they hold such crimes to be self-evident: that all Israeli spies merit being dragged off, for starters.  The dragging away and the subsequent protection by soldiers - men - let me repeat that - protection by male soldiers, not women - was a detail corroborated by another eyewitness account, personally related to me. FWIW. 
Like many others who no doubt will emerge in the coming weeks, Témoris Grecko was there. 

He describes in detail everything he himself observed – Read more at Ubuntu, Témoris' Blog  http://temorisblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/rape-women-stripped-what-really-happened-to-lara-logan/ –  and records interviews he conducted of colleagues and fellow bystanders:


Rape? Women? Stripped? What really happened to Lara Logan

I witnessed part of the mob attack against CBS’s Lara Logan at Cairo’s Tahrir square on the evening of Friday, February 11th. I was struck when I read CBS’s February 15th communiqué describing the attack as a “brutal and sustained sexual attack”, and attributing her rescue to “a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers.” This account does not fit with what I, and others, witnessed.
The TV network’s communiqué, which came rather late, as noted by Richard Cohen in The Washington Post, was promptly interpreted by many in the international media to mean rape, and in these terms it became a debate that soon adopted racist and sexist overtones. Egyptian and Muslim men are portrayed as wild beasts and Islam as an inherently violent religion. Attractive women, many commentators have said, should avoid taking on risky tasks, and if they insist, then they had it coming.
I was buying tea from a vendor in Tahrir with two friends, Amr Fekry, a 26 year old Egyptian call center agent, and Andi Walden, a San Francisco political science student. Then we heard the noise and saw the mob coming. A blonde woman, neatly dressed with a white coat, was being dragged and pushed. It didn’t seem to me she was panicking, but rather trying to control the situation. They passed us in an moment. They were yelling “agent!, agent!”
I tried to run to intervene, but some Egyptians I didn’t know prevented me from doing it.  There was nothing I could do and, as a foreign journalist, I’d surely end up being accused of being an agent too, and attacked. Fekry did go there and disappeared into the crowd, 50 or 100 people strong.
Later I spoke with two young male activists who helped the person I later learned was Lara Logan (I didn’t know her before, I don’t usually follow US networks).  They were Omar El Shennawy, a 21 year old teacher of English, and Abdulrahman Elsayed, a 25 year old teacher of physical education. They said they had formed a human chain with other young men to protect Logan, and then delivered her to the Egyptian Museum military post.
When I read CBS’s story and it’s interpretation by other media outlets, I felt troubled.  It seemed misleading. “It didn’t make sense to me”, said Benjamin Starr, from Boston who arrived as a tourist on January 24th, and stayed to witness the uprising.  He also saw the mob pass by with Lara Logan. “I want to give her the benefit of the doubt, maybe something happened in another part of the square, but from what I saw, she was being taken by men to the soldiers, and her clothes were not torn off. There were no women, I didn’t see a single woman in the crowd around her.”
Similarly, in hearing the CBS’s communiqué, Amr Fekry wrote on my Facebook wall: “It’s a little bit ridiculous what we hear that she was raped in Tahrir!! We were there! You remember she was about two meters away from us when we were buying tea! Maybe someone harassed her, but she ran and people protected her from being hit! I tried to go and help her but many people pushed me hard to go away as they thought I was trying to hit her. The only thing that some people only thought she was an Israeli spy!”
“I think it is a big exaggeration”, said Alshimaa Helmy, a 21 year old Egyptian biotechnology student and cyber-activist. “It couldn’t happen. How can someone risk to rape a foreign woman in the most important square of Egypt, in front of tens of witnesses? If those were bad guys, what about all the good people who were celebrating? She doesn’t deserve what happened to her, no one does, but if you are going to a revolution, you should protect yourself.”
I went to ask Abdulrahman Elsayed, and he related a similar account. “I was in front of her, one metre away. This was after I saw her running with a man beside her. They stopped, maybe because someone blocked their way. We formed a human chain to protect her. Only young people, 10 or 15, all men. We surrounded her. People behind us were pushing and trying to grab her, someone might have touched her. I saw her top was uneven. There was a women and children’s tent (Tahrir sq. had become a campsite) and we tried to take her there, but we couldn’t because of the pressure. Someone had a taser and he held it high, making electric noises and threatening the attackers. He told them to move away. So we could go to the Museum’s military post and deliver her to the soldiers. Then we stood there blocking the people who tried to follow her. We brought her two doctors, first a young male, then an older female. The doctor and Lara were the only women around.”
(Read more http://temorisblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/rape-women-stripped-what-really-happened-to-lara-logan/)
I have heard reports that corroborate this story from sources close to me.  It checks out, as it does internally. More than what can be said for other versions of the story, including the official. 



For the record, I am not saying Ms. Logan is responsible, although it would certainly be a ray of integrity were she to own up to it.  Or even maybe just tell us what really happened. 

 What a revolutionary concept.

_________________________________________


UPDATE: LINKS
Pardon me, I forgot not every Reader can access my mind. or visit me literally (*wink* to mr. suavite ---)

If A Mob Yells ‘Jewish Spy!’ and the MSM Is There, Do They Not Hear "Spy" Or Just Not Report It??
(Formerly titled "If A Mob Yells Jew! Jew! In A Cairo Square, Will Any MSM Hear It" emphasis mine -----ff)
Posted by Diana West Feb 19th 2011 
Why CBS kept mum for four days about the brutal sexual assault of network correspondent Lara Logan by a Tahrir Square mob on Feb. 11 we just don’t know.
Did Logan, flown out of Cairo by a network-chartered jet to a U.S. hospital hours after the attack, request secrecy as a brutalized victim?

Were news executives, or even Logan herself, concerned that the bombshell news of the assault, which took place almost exactly as Hosni Mubarak was relinquishing all powers, would detract from the “jubilant” crowd’s “democracy” drama? Such a news blackout is hard to imagine if, for example, a star correspondent had been similarly violated by a mob of tea party-goers at, say, a massive Glenn Beck rally — and particularly if other correspondents had previously suffered unprecedented assaults and threats from the same crowd. A keening outcry would have arisen from the heart of the MSM (mainstream media) against the mob, accompanied by a natural zeal to investigate cultural or other reasons for the brutality. Not excuses. And not disinterest.
But in this singular Logan case we’ve seen both. First, only after news queries indicated the story was breaking did CBS on Tuesday release a brief rap sheet on the Friday crime. We were told of Logan’s accidental separation from her crew in the crowd. The prolonged assault by over 200 people “whipped into a frenzy.” The rescue by a group of women and 20 soldiers. What CBS didn’t mention — what was later attributed to an unnamed network source — was that as the thugs assaulted the 39-year-old journalist and mother of two, they shouted, “Jew! Jew!” (Read more).










For instance even Susan Milligan from US News (Hardly a Muslim friendly person, had to admit ..)  "In Muslim Albania, I found that rebels who stopped to check us for weapons would barely touch me, although they would examine my male colleagues in a way that would make a TSA screener blush. As Muslims, they automatically recoiled at touching a strange woman  .. (I’d pull open my field vest to show I had no weapons, which was enough)"

"The Wall Street Journal cited an unnamed source as saying Logan, a married mother, was not raped, however, details regarding the exact nature of the assault remain unclear. ... Neither CBS nor Logan reported the crime to Egyptian authorities "      The Post Chronicle 

"The difference was Coopers attack and the arrest and assault on journalist at that time, supposedly came from pro Mubarak forces trying to squelch the uprising. Logan 's assault came at a time when .. the Egyptian people were jubilant and celebrating in the streets of Cairo"     Yahoo Associated Content

"It is unclear whether Friday's assault against Ms. Logan had political aims."     WSJ

I could fill up 3 more pages of these quotes but as Mike Rivero @ Whatreallyhappened.com commented .. "This Logan story is a repeat the Jessica Lynch hoax used to help sell the Iraq war, only it turned out Jessica wasn’t such an innocent lady after all."  (Complete with pix of her) and I tend to agree with him.
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Remember Katrina?  The reports that surfaced of gangs raping women openly? They were false too. Maybe somebody needs better porn.  Which reminds me, let us not forget who watches the most porn in America, i.e., what community standards really indicate -- that rank steaming lies such as the Lara Logan story can ruin lives, wreck careers (even if people admit they were wrong - par for the course in fucked up America), and land innocent people in jail (here's another example).  This could get someone killed. 


But only if those who know the truth stand silently by, and do nothing.




And the moral of this story is?






















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"Plague Death" Of Scientist: Unanswered Questions

by Johanna Faust.




I would alert the perspicacious reader to the still unanswered questions, crazy hypothesis, and not-so-crazy ones.  Thus my little round of research may prove useful to another, or perhaps this is only for my own peace of mind.

Why his death is of a sudden in the news is a question I have no answer for, but am glad of it for the sake of his family, and their unanswered questions.  A detailed biography, including a technical overview of his life's work, is hereThe article by Steve Zeltner, Chairman of the California Coalition for Workers Memorial Day, is the most professional piece I have seen on Indybay, and well worth the read in its entirety.  

An excerpt:

Professor Casadaban had been working on a live attenuated vaccine strain of Yersinia Pestis, a strain of plague, which was approved by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) safe for humans and for researchers in the lab that no one had died from it. CDC and Researchers called it a vaccine strain (live-attenuated vaccine strain) and excluded the strain from their Containment list of pathogens in 2008. Professor Casadaban had worked at the University of Chicago Department of MGCB and Committee of Virology at the University of Chicago from 1980-2009.

When the family came to Chicago for the funeral, a family member requested the Hospital autopsy team to investigate and later identified that Yersinia Pestis, its live-attenuated vaccine strain, KIM D27, had been the actual cause of death. University of Chicago is a power house of Infectious Disease Experts and is the Center of Excellence in federal Grant support for bioterrorism, ironically, nothing appeared to these experts that Yersinia Pestis and its live attenuated Strain of KIM D27can be dangerous to the lab researchers and public at large. No one from the University and the Center of Research attended him while he was sick. No one warned the University of Chicago Hospital Emergency Room doctors to treat him for the dangerous pathogen, which can be acquired from work. Furthermore, upon his death, no one from the University and its Institutions even suspected Yersinia Pestis pathogen to be the cause of death.

Once Yersinia Septicemia on the live-attenuated vaccine strain had been identified to be the cause of death, 20 people made up of the investigational team from CDC, OSHA and Chicago Public Health (CPH) as well as from University of Chicago visited the site in the investigation of his death. Still today, one year later, CDC, CPH and OSHA have not released their report to the family. OSHA issued a letter of BSL2 compliance though no specific details on their approval were substantiated in their claim.

NIH, which supported the federal research activities of Professor Casadaban and that of the Center of Excellence Grants had not even began their investigation of the case regarding serious concerns and issues relating to the health and safety conditions of the laboratories at the University and nationwide laboratories. The containment and bio-safety rules regarding pathogenic bacteria in public health and safety should be investigated, seriously evaluated and explored particularly on the eve of the death of Professor Casadaban. 

(Read more)  


More questions emerge in Newscientist's Short Sharp Science Blog.  Don't believe any source that says the cause of death is certain, I would say, not only because details of which Yersinia strain are being withheld, but also because (as I have blogged before, elsewhere), Yersinia's responsibility for the Black Death is, or should be, in question. 

Casadaban was reported to have been working with a weakened vaccine strain of Yersinia pestis, intended for the development of vaccines against plague. However, doctors are not sure the bacilli in Casadaban's blood were the cause of death, or how they got there. So what's going on?

Y. pestis has been linked to the medieval Black Death, though proof has been elusive. We do know that it kills several thousand a year by causing bubonic plague, and it is considered a potential biological weapon.

The University of Chicago has not revealed which strain the Yersinia was, but says it should have been safe....http://news.uchicago.edu/news.php?asset_id=1711

[snip]

The strain seems likely to have been EV76, which is used as a vaccine in Russia and Madagascar. It is considered unlikely to revert to the virulent strain - but even without reverting, it kills some mice immunised with it.

Worse, up to a fifth of people vaccinated with EV76 develop flu symptoms such as fever, headache, weakness and malaise, according to Rick Titball of the University of Exeter, UK, a leading Yersinia expert. Some even need hospitalisation, he says, though no deaths have ever been reported that we know of.

(Read more)

While I do not agree completely agree with another post of the same title, I agree with the general thrust, as I find that I too must ask "Who Killed Malcolm Casadaban and Why?" even as the blog which forms its context dissuades hyperlinking our respective work.

I will, however, call your attention to a similar article, if more daring: 

What's so strange, about this case, is that the 'strain' was weakened so as to not cause this. None of his friends, co-workers or family has it.

What caught my eye was the mention that they are looking into something that was in the professors biological make-up to make him susceptible to this disease. 

Was this a DNA specific attack?"

(Read more)

Well, no, attack is not the right word. And the plague is not easily transmissible in its most common form, so it probably was not, being an attenuated vaccine.  But plague is remarkably 1918-influenza-like, and the "California" or "Ukraine" version of H1N1 that surged right after Casadaban's death is remarkably plague-like.

To recap: details of which Yersinia strain are being withheld; Yersinia's responsibility for the Black Death is, or should be, in question; the strain he was working with, used in vaccines, was so weak it was not given special handling (and if it should have been, more people should be dead);  he died right before the outbreak of 'Ukrainian Flu,' that many thought resembled pneumonic plague, of 2009; this flu resembled Spanish Flu (recently exhumed) which itself resembled the Black Death enough to prompt some to consider them one and the same (e.g., "Did the 1918 flu virus cause the Black Death?" here).

And so I leave you, Gentle Reader, as my last source left me, with a link to Steve Quayle's Updated List of Dead Scientists.




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SNOW in SF: due to Global Warming no doubt...



... from a search I just did (Thursday, 2.24.11, 2:08 pm)



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  1. San Francisco Snow Watch 2011: When?!


    SFist - Brock Keeling - 1 hour ago
    When it does snow in San Francisco, will we need chains for our tires? What aboutsnow shoes? Can we eat it? Does it, as Vanessa Williams insists, ...
    Note to Gore: Snow Coming to San Francisco‎ - Fox News (blog)
    Snow in downtown San Francisco not a certainty but there's a 'fair ...‎ - San Francisco Examiner
    Snow on the way, at least for the peaks‎ - San Francisco Chronicle
    USA Today KTVU San Francisco
    all 99 news articles »




    Fox News (blog)
  2. Tahoe bracing for snow storm; San Francisco, Sacramento could see ...


    Examiner.com - 7 hours ago
    Both San Francisco and Sacramento could be getting hit with a modest amount of snow in the next day or two. Snow is expected to arrive late this afternoon ...
  3. San Francisco braced for first snow in 35 years as another storm ...


    Daily Mail - Mark Duell - 3 hours ago
    More snow is forecast for the Midwest, severe storms are developing in two southern states and San Francisco is expected to see snowfall for the first time ...




    Daily Mail
  4. What if it doesn't snow in San Francisco?


    San Francisco Chronicle (blog) - 4 hours ago
    The Snoopy Sno Cone Machine: The cure for a kid who is crying because it didn'tsnow in San Francisco. The kids are talking about sledding in Dolores Park ...




    San Francisco Chronicle (blog)
  5. Cooling Trend (more light snow Friday into the weekend)


    Minneapolis Star Tribune (blog) - Paul Douglas - 6 hours ago
    Snow In San Francisco? Unusually cold air is sweeping down the west coast; for the first time since 1976 downtown San Francisco may see a light accumulation ...
    Storm System Brings Threat of Tornadoes, Flooding‎ - AOL News
    Friday storm could bring snow to the sand, but most likely just to ...‎ - San Jose Mercury News
    Bit of snow possible Saturday in Fresno‎ - Fresno Bee
    all 382 news articles »




    Norwalk Reflector
  6. Snow Heading for San Francisco, Seattle and Portland


    AOL News - 20 hours ago
    A major winter storm is poised to descend upon the Northwestern United States over the next two days, bringing snow as far south as San Francisco after ...
  7. Global Warming Hysteria: IT'S GOING TO SNOW IN SAN FRANCISCO!


    First Things (blog) - Wesley J. Smith - 16 hours ago
    Kristi said: RT @CO2HOG: SHS: Global Warming Hysteria: IT'S GOING TO SNOW INSAN FRANCISCO! http://bit.ly/hgQ9BM #tcot [...] Specifically, who suggested ...




    First Things (blog)
  8. U.S. weather taking another wrong turn


    UPI.com - 15 hours ago
    The weather could get weird in San Francisco, where the first snow since 1976 is a possibility Friday. The Los Angeles area and Las Vegas also might see a ...
  9. Arts/Culture/Weekend: Let it snow, a little bit


    San Francisco Chronicle (blog) - Martina Castro - 4 hours ago
    They meet twice a week to paint outdoors in the parks and cities east of the San Francisco Bay Area. Their upcoming show, "Immigrant Neighborhoods", ...
  10. Cold, wet weather—even snow—in forecast for Pleasanton, Tri-Valley ...


    Pleasanton Weekly - Jeb Bing - Patricia Decker - 1 day ago
    Talk began swirling Tuesday that snow could drop even on San Francisco for the first time in 35 years, but forecaster Bob Benjamin said that while snow will ...
  11. ------------------
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