The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War
In December of 1981 in El Salvador, twenty-one months after the murder of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero in San Salvador and twelve months after the murder of the four American Maryknoll women outside San Salvador and eleven months after the murder of the head of the Salvadoran land-reform agency and two of his American aides at the Sheraton Hotel in San Salvador, which is to say at a time when the government of the United States had already demonstrated the ability to tolerate grave insults to its Central American policy, certain events occurred in certain remote villages north of the Torola river in Morazán province. In what has since become the most familiar of those villages, El Mozote, the events in question began late on a Thursday afternoon, December 10, a time when the village was crowded with refugees from areas believed less safe, and were concluded at dawn on Saturday.
Later that day, in Los Toriles, two kilometers to the southeast, similar events occurred, as similar events had already occurred or would within a few hours occur in Arambala and La Joya and Jocote Amarillo and Cerro Pando and Joateca and La Ranchería. These events were later and variously described to Mark Danner by the two American embassy officials assigned to investigate them, Todd Greentree and Major John McKay, as “something bad,” “something horrible,” a case in which “there had probably been a massacre, that they had lined people up and shot them,” a case in which “abuses against the civilian population probably took place”; a case that presented as its most urgent imperative the need to craft a report that would “have credibility among people who were far away and whose priorities were—you know, we’re talking about people like Tom Enders—whose priorities were definitely not necessarily about getting at exactly what happened.”
On December 10, 1992, eleven years to the day after the commencement of what has become known as the Mozote massacre (the largest number of those killed on that long December weekend were killed during the thirty-six hours spent by members of the Salvadoran army’s Atlacatl Battalion in El Mozote), four American forensic experts submitted to the United Nations Truth Commission the results of their analysis of skeletal remains and artifacts recovered by a team of Argentinian forensic anthropologists originally assembled to reconstruct evidence of their own country’s dirty war. Working exclusively with material exhumed from what had been the sacristy of the Mozote church, the Americans were able to identify the bones of 143 human beings, 136 of whom were children and adolescents. Of the remaining seven adults, six were women, one in the third trimester of pregnancy. The average age of the children was six.
The report prepared for the United Nations noted that there may have been a greater number of deaths in the sacristy, which was one of several sites mentioned by survivors as places where bodies would be found, since “many young infants may have been entirely cremated” (much of the village had been burned before the Atlacatl left El Mozote) and “other children may not have been counted because of extensive fragmentation of body parts.” Of the ten officers who, according to the report prepared for the United Nations, commanded the units participating in the Morazán operation, three are now dead, and four are still serving in the Salvadoran army. None has been officially charged on any count related to the massacre.
A year before, Tutela Legal, the human rights office of the Archbishopric of San Salvador, had compiled what may be the final and most comprehensive list of all those known or believed to have died in El Mozote and the surrounding villages. The Tutela Legal list numbered 767 men, women, and children, the youngest the two-day-old grandson of a day laborer named Miguel Márquez (the grandfather was also killed, as were his son, his daughter-in-law, two of his daughters, and seven of his other grandchildren), the oldest a man named Leoncio Díaz, who was said to be 105 years old and to have had a 100-year-old companion named Leoncia Márquez, who was also killed. Of the 767 victims cited on the Tutela Legal list, 358 were infants and children under the age of thirteen.
This of course is not a new story, and the fact that it is not a new story is in many ways the point of Mark Danner’s dispassionate, meticulously documented, and for these reasons conclusive book, The Massacre at El Mozote. The essential facts of the Mozote massacre were published on January 27, 1982, on the front pages of both The New York Times and The Washington Post, accompanied by photographs taken by Susan Meiselas, who had walked into Morazán from Honduras with Raymond Bonner of the Times. Bonner reported seeing the charred skulls and bones of what appeared to him to be several dozen men, women, and children. Allowing that it was “not possible for an observer who was not present at the time of the massacre to determine independently how many people died or who killed them,” he reported that the surviving relatives and friends of the victims believed the dead to number 733 and the killing to have been done “by uniformed soldiers” during an Atlacatl sweep of the region.
Alma Guillermoprieto, who was then a stringer for The Washington Post and who entered Mozote a few days after Bonner and Meiselas had left, also reported seeing bodies and body parts and quoted the same survivors, as well as the Salvadoran ambassador to Washington, Ernesto Rivas Gallont, who dismissed the reports from Morazán as the “type of story that leads us to believe there is a plan,” the plan being either to derail the Salvadoran election scheduled for March 1982 or “to take credit away from the certification President Reagan must make to Congress.” This “certification,” during 1982 and 1983 a semiannual requirement for continued aid to El Salvador, involved asserting that its government was “making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights” and was “achieving substantial control over all elements of its own armed forces, so as to bring to an end the indiscriminate torture and murder of Salvadoran citizens by these forces.”
The Reagan administration made its certification to these points on January 28, 1982, the day after Bonner’s and Alma Guillermoprieto’s extensive reports from Morazán appeared in the Times and the Post. Mark Danner’s true subject in The Massacre at El Mozote, then, is not the massacre itself but the way in which the story of the massacre, which was carried out by troops trained by the US Special Forces and equipped with US manufactured M-16s and with ammunition manufactured for the US government at Lake City, Missouri, came to be known and discounted in the United States, the way in which the story of El Mozote “was exposed to the light and then allowed to fall back into the dark.”
Reports that something bad had happened in Morazán began to circulate almost immediately. The Reverend William L. Wipfler at the New York office of the National Council of Churches first heard the story from a contact at Socorro Jurídico, which was then the legal aid office of the Archbishopric of San Salvador. Wipfler left a message for Raymond Bonner at the Mexico City bureau of the Times, and also sent a cable, dated December 15, 1981, asking Ambassador Deane Hinton in San Salvador for “confirmation or otherwise” of “reliable reports received here [indicating] that between December 10 and 13 a government joint military and security forces operation took place in Morazán Department which resulted in over 900 civilian deaths.”
Hinton did not reply until January 8, by which time the guerrillas’ Radio Venceremos was back in operation (to at least temporarily knock out the Venceremos transmitter had been one goal, perhaps the single successfully realized goal, of the Atlacatl’s Morazán operation) and broadcasting a detailed account of the massacre from a survivor named Rufina Amaya. Rufina Amaya had witnessed the killing of her husband and four of her children, ages nine, five, three, and eight months, but in the confusion and terror of the event had been inadvertently overlooked as the soldiers corralled groups of struggling and screaming women, many of them torn from their infants and children, to be killed and then burned.
“I do not know what your sources are but the only sources that I have seen alleging something like this are clandestine Radio Venceremos reports,” Hinton’s January 8 cable to the National Council of Churches read in part. “Frankly, I do not consider Radio Venceremos to be a reliable source.” Since Radio Venceremos did not restore its ability to broadcast until well after the National Council of Churches query was sent, that Hinton would devote an extraordinary ten of this cable’s twelve paragraphs to illustrations of Radio Venceremos unreliability seems in retrospect to suggest a certain crisis of confidence, if not a panic, at the embassy.
In fact, definitely before January 8 and probably closer to mid-December, Todd Greentree, then a junior reporting officer at the embassy in San Salvador and now the desk officer for Nicaragua at the State Department, had relayed to Hinton not only a report from his own sources on the left about a massacre in Morazán but also an offer from the FMLN to guide Greentree there. “I knew the guerrillas would never have masqueraded something like this, would never have fabricated it, if they were offering safe-conduct,” Greentree told Danner. “I was convinced that something had gone on, and that it was bad. I mean, it was pretty clear, if they were going to do this, that something must have happened.”
Hinton’s decision was that Greentree could not go in under guerrilla protection. “I should emphasize that Inever got the feeling that they just wanted this to go away,” Greentree told Danner about the meeting in which this decision was taken. “But there were political and military restraints that we were operating under.” What discussion there may have been of an independent investigation (at least ten of the fifty-five American military advisers Congress then allowed in El Salvador were assigned to the Atlacatl) is unknown, although Danner was told by one of the advisers assigned to the Atlacatl that someone from the embassy Milgroup (Military Advisory Group) had called the Atlacatl base at La Libertad a few days after the massacre “and talked to the Special Forces people and told them they wanted Monterrosa [Lt. Col. Domingo Monterrosa Barrios, the Atlacatl commander] to come in—they wanted to talk to him about something that had happened during the operation.”
Monterrosa had declined to come in, a suggestive illustration of the level of control the United States then had over the military forces it was funding. Whether or not the embassy decision to refuse the FMLN offer to guide Greentree to the site of the massacre was discussed with Washington also remains shrouded in the subjunctive. “However much we might have wanted more information, no one in State was going to make that call,” Danner was told by Peter Romero, at the time of Mozote an El Salvador specialist at the State Department.
Most of the interested players, then, knew about Morazán, in outline if not in detail, well before January 6, when Bonner and Susan Meiselas, followed a few days later by Alma Guillermoprieto, first walked into El Mozote. Not until January 30, however, three days after the story had appeared on the front pages of the Times and the Post, did the embassy dispatch Todd Greentree and Major John McKay, who was then in the defense attaché’s office at the embassy and is now a colonel attached to NATO in Brussels, to Morazán. Greentree and McKay did not exactly get to El Mozote, although they did fly over it. Greentree’s impression from the air was that “El Mozote had been pretty much destroyed.”
Once on the ground in Morazán, Greentree and McKay, accompanied by a squad of the Atlacatl, interviewed those residents of the northern villages who had reached the refugee camp outside San Francisco Gotera. Although the Americans later recalled being able to “observe and feel this tremendous fear,” they did not elicit eyewitness accounts of a massacre, nor had they expected to. “You had a bunch of very intimidated, scared people, and now the Army presence further intimidated them,” McKay told Danner. “I mean, the Atlacatl had supposedly done something horrible, and now these gringos show up under this pretense of investigating it, but in the presence of these soldiers. It was probably the worst thing you could do. I mean, you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to know what the Army people were there for.” Greentree and McKay then set out for El Mozote, and got to within an hour’s walk of what had been the village before the Atlacatl soldiers accompanying them refused to go further. “In the end, we went up there and we didn’t want to find that anything horrible had happened,” McKay told Danner. “And the fact that we didn’t get to the site turned out to be very detrimental to our reporting—the Salvadorans, you know, were never very good about cleaning up their shell casings.”
That evening, back at the embassy in San Salvador, Greentree wrote a report, the overriding aim of which appears to have been “credibility,” summarizing his and McKay’s findings. Here is the point at which El Mozote entered the thin air of policy. “The end of Bob White’s tour, and the transition period before Hinton arrived [Robert White had preceded Hinton as ambassador], and the first six months of Hinton’s tour—those were the absolute worst days, really out of control,” Greentree told Danner by way of explaining why the conviction that what was known or suspected in country would not be “credible” in Washington had by then increased exponentially. “And the fact that Bob White and everybody in the Embassy had been so thoroughly traumatized by the murders of the nuns, and the AFL-CIO guys [the two Americans who were killed with the head of the Salvadoran land-reform agency at the Sheraton in San Salvador], and just the general sort of out-of-control way the military was—it meant that everything we reported could be taken as suspect.”
The following day, after review and revisions, Greentree’s report went to the State Department over Hinton’s name. This was the cable containing the careful and soon to be repeated assertions that it was “not possible to prove or disprove excesses of violence against the civilian population of El Mozote by government troops” and that “no evidence could be found to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians in the operation zone, nor that the number of civilians killed even remotely approached number being cited in other reports circulating internationally.” The Greentree cable also contained, deep in its text, a curious warning from one of the interviewees, the mayor of Jocoaitique, who according to the cable “intimated that he knew of violent fighting in El Mozote” but was “unwilling to discuss deportment of government troops” and who then made a comment so coded that it could stand as a veiled but exact expression of the embassy position on what did or did not take place in Morazán. What the cable quoted the mayor of Jocoaitique as having said to Todd Greentree and Major McKay was this: “This is something one should talk about in another time, in another country.”
That part of the embassy cable did not make it into the statement made two days later to the House Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs by Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Thomas O. Enders. (Nor would it appear in the sanitized version of the cable released under the Freedom of Information Act to Raymond Bonner in 1983.)1 The Enders statement is arresting not only for what it says and does not say but for its tone, which suggests an extreme version of a kind of exaggerated hauteur commonly translated as entitlement in the northeastern United States. “Many of you have read,” he said, addressing what he called “special pleading” in the matter of death and disappearance statistics, “about something called the Legal Aid Office of the Archbishopric—Socorro Judico [sic] is its Spanish name; it is often cited in the international media. It strangely lists no victims of guerrilla and terrorist violence. Apparently they do not commit violence.”
This was a level of seigneurial dismissal often emulated but never quite mastered by Jeane Kirkpatrick and Elliott Abrams and other regular defenders of administration policy in Central America. “There is another organization, the Central American University, that collects statistics too,” Enders continued, referring to UCA, the Jesuit José Simeón Cañas University of Central America. “Its bias may be apparent from the fact that it does include a category of persons killed by what I believe Congressman Bonker referred to as paramilitary organizations. And they are called in Spanish ajusticiados, referring to persons that have received justice at the hands of their executioners.” Only then did Enders turn his attention to what he described as “allegations” of massacres, including Mozote. “We sent two embassy officers down to investigate the reports,” Enders said, inadvertently illuminating the particular distance between Washington and Morazán, which in local usage is said to be not “down” but “up” from San Salvador. Enders continued:
It is clear from the report they gave that there has been a confrontation between the guerrillas occupying Mozote and attacking Government forces last December. There is no evidence to confirm that Government forces systematically massacred civilians in the operations zone, or that the number of civilians remotely approached the 733 or 926 victims cited in the press. I note they asked people how many people there were in that canton and were told probably not more than 300 in December, and there are many survivors including refugees now.
Enders said this on February 2. On February 1, however, Deane Hinton, in response to what he apparently construed as careless use of his reply to the National Council of Churches, had sent a corrective cable to the State Department. This cable read in part:
I would be grateful if department would use extreme care in describing my views on alleged massacre. Case in point is description in para 3 of REFTEL referring to my letter…as “denying the incident.” My letter did not “deny” incident: it reported that at that time I had no confirmation and argued from available evidence from Radio Venceremos and from lack of other reports that I had no reason to believe Venceremos reports. I still don’t believe Venceremos version but additional evidence strongly suggests that something happened that should not have happened and that it is quite possible Salvadoran military did commit excesses. Allegations that it was unit from Atlacatl battalion in El Mozote remain to be confirmed or discredited.
Several days later, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs Elliott Abrams echoed Enders in his statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The El Mozote case was, Abrams said, “a very interesting one in a sense.” (“Interesting” was at the time a word much in use, as were “strange” and “unusual.” Enders for example had noted that Socorro Jurídico “strangely lists no victims of guerrilla and terrorist violence.” I recall watching Jeane Kirkpatrick during this period whip an audience to a frenzy with little silken whips of innuendo as she described how “interested,” even “bemused,” she was by the “unusual standards,” the “extraordinarily, even uniquely demanding standards” imposed by the certification requirement.) The reason El Mozote was “interesting” to Abrams was this:
…because we found, for example, that the numbers, first of all, were not credible, because as Secretary Enders notes, our information was that there were only three hundred people in the canton.
Abrams went on to wonder why a massacre that had occurred in mid-December, if indeed a massacre had occurred at all, had not been “publicized” until late January.
Ten years later, in an interview, Abrams was asking the same question, to the same innuendo: “If it had really been a massacre and not a firefight, why didn’t we hear right off from the FMLN? I mean, we didn’t start hearing about it until a month later.” Abrams, in other words, was still trying to negotiate what became with the exhumation of the sacristy unnegotiable, still trying to return discussion to the familiar question of whether or not a massacre had actually occurred. Enders, when he talked to Danner, had transcended this now inoperative line of attack, ascending effortlessly to the big-picture argument against the existence of a massacre: “Coming on top of everything else, El Mozote, if true, might have destroyed the entire effort. Who knows? I certainly thought that when I first heard about it.” In other words it had been necessary to deny the massacre because had there been a massacre the “effort” would have become, again in Enders’s word, “unfundable.”
The effort did not become unfundable. The effort instead became the most expensive attempt to support a foreign government threatened by an insurgency since Vietnam.2 Progressively cruder interpretations of what had been the surgically precise statements made by the embassy came to dominate, during the spring and summer of 1982, discussion of this country’s role in Central America. By February 10 of that spring The Wall Street Journal was noting editorially that “extremists” in El Salvador had “learned long ago the trick of dressing in military uniforms to confuse their victims.” (This appears to have been the source for Ronald Reagan’s later assertion that “communist operatives” were dressing in “freedom fighter uniforms” to discredit the Nicaraguan contras.) Shrill excoriations of Raymond Bonner, who necessarily had to be cast as having what George Melloan of The Wall Street Journal called “a political orientation,” became commonplace.
Bonner was a graduate of Stanford Law School, had been a prosecutor in the San Francisco district attorney’s office, and had served as a Marine officer in Vietnam. The Marine major who went up to Morazán with Todd Greentree, John McKay, had been with Bonner in Vietnam, where McKay lost an eye. “We could not have said, ‘My God, there’s been a massacre,”‘ McKay told Danner about the cable the embassy sent to Washington as a report of his and Greentree’s trip to Morazán. “But, truth be known, the ambiguity of the cable that went out—in my own conscience I began to question it. And then when I saw the New York Times piece, and the picture, that really got me thinking. Bonner and I had gone to Quantico together, went to Vietnam together.” In the late summer of 1980, at a time when Bonner had spent time in Bolivia and Guatemala but made only a few short visits to El Salvador, he was asked his opinion of US policy in El Salvador. “Ask me about Bolivia, or Guatemala, or any country, I’ll probably have an opinion,” Bonner recalled having said. “But El Salvador, boy, I just don’t know. I guess we’re doing the right thing.”3
Bonner, then, might have seemed an unlikely target for the campaign then being mounted against him in Washington and New York. For those waging this campaign (notably The Wall Street Journal), however, the question of “political orientation” was answered once and for all in August 1982, when the Times abruptly withdrew Bonner from Central America. According to A.M. Rosenthal, then the executive editor of the Times, Bonner was withdrawn because he “didn’t know the techniques of weaving a story together…. I brought him back because it seemed terribly unfair to leave him there without training.” Actually Bonner had spent a good part of 1981 on the Metro desk at the Times, but Rosenthal suggested that those who believed Bonner to have been withdrawn for reasons other than “training” did so because they resented him, Rosenthal. “I was an agent of change in the Times,” he said, “and a lot of people didn’t like my politics.”
In many ways this tends to beg the point, burying the issue as it does in the self-referential. Whatever reason or reasons Rosenthal may have had for withdrawing Bonner, it was the sheer fact of that withdrawal, the fact of that apparent failure to back up a reporter who had put the paper on the line with a story denied by the government, that spoke so eloquently to those who wanted to discredit the reporting on El Mozote. That the Times withdrew Bonner was seen, immediately and by wider numbers of people than were actually knowledgeable about El Salvador or administration policy, as “proof” that he had been wrong about El Mozote: as recently as a few years ago it was possible to hear it casually said about Bonner that the Times “had to pull him out,” that he had “bought into a massacre.”
“For more than a year now we’ve been following the campaign that we victimized former New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner,” The Wall Street Journal noted editorially in 1993. “The excavation of children’s bones in Mozote is supposed to vindicate Mr. Bonner and discredit what we said…we did not fire Mr. Bonner in the first place. The New York Times did. Or, more precisely, after then-Managing Editor A.M. Rosenthal undertook his own reporting visit to Salvador, it pulled Mr. Bonner off the beat and back to New York, where he left the paper.” In defense of its own reasonableness, the Journal noted that in its original 1982 attack on Bonner it had “offered not one word of criticism of Alma Guillermoprieto of the Washington Post.”
Danner includes, among the documents reproduced at the end of The Massacre at El Mozote, the full text of both Bonner’s and Alma Guillermoprieto’s stories. There is no substantive difference between the two in either the reporting or the qualifying of the story, but there were certain marginal distinctions on which critics of Bonner could seize. Guillermoprieto referred to herself as “this correspondent” and said that she had been taken into Morazán by “the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front”; Bonner referred to himself as “a visitor who traveled through the area with those who are fighting against the junta that now rules El Salvador,” i.e., the Farabundo Martí Liberation Front. Guillermoprieto began: “Several hundred civilians, including women and children, were taken from their homes in and around this village and killed by Salvadoran Army troops during a December offensive against leftist guerrillas, according to three survivors who say they witnessed the alleged massacres.” She then proceeded to describe the bodies she herself had seen. Bonner began: “From interviews with people who live in this small mountain village and surrounding hamlets, it is clear that a massacre of major proportions occurred here last month.” He then proceeded to describe the bodies he himself had seen. Bonner’s statement is the less varnished of the two, but to call it different is to resort to a point of journalistic convention so narrowly defined as to be merely legalistic.
There seemed at the time at least two clear reasons that Bonner, not Guillermoprieto, became the target of choice. One reason was that Bonner, unlike Guillermoprieto, continued to report on a daily basis from El Salvador and so, all through the spring and into the summer of 1982, remained a stubborn mote in Deane Hinton’s ability to project the situation as the State Department wanted it projected. “I’m just afraid he’s going to get himself killed,” I recall an embassy official saying about Bonner during a lunch with Hinton in June of 1982; the tone here was the macho swagger never entirely absent from American embassies on hardship status. “That would be a tragedy.” The other clear reason was that Benjamin C. Bradlee and The Washington Post backed up their reporter; A.M. Rosenthal and The New York Times did not.
The Mozote massacre occurred only six years after most of us watched the helicopters lift off the roof of the Saigon embassy and get pushed off the flight decks of the US fleet into the South China Sea. There are now more than twice as many years between us and Mozote than there were between Mozote and those helicopters. This is not an insignificant time line, and suggests, in retrospect, a third reason that Raymond Bonner’s report from Morazán elicited an acrimony that Alma Guillermoprieto’s did not. Bonner was an American. Alma Guillermoprieto was born in and was then living in Mexico, a fact that was in some way understood to render her ineligible for casting as a member of what was sometimes called “the adversary culture,” the culture that was construed as hostile to the interests of American business and the American government, the culture that was even then drawing parallels between El Salvador and Vietnam.
Certain parallels were inescapable, since El Salvador was seen, by both the American military and the American policy community, as an opportunity to “apply the lesson” of Vietnam. The counterinsurgency doctrine that rationalized such operations as the 1981 sweep of Morazán was intended as a “revision” of the failed counterinsurgency effort in Vietnam (the revision for El Salvador placed a central emphasis on correcting “root causes,” or winning popular support by “democratizing” Salvadoran society), yet it had come to sound dispiritingly the same. The word “pacification” was in use, as was the phrase “third force,” usually in reference to José Napoleón Duarte.
“The only territory you want to hold is the six inches between the ears of the campesino,” Colonel John C. Waghelstein, who became commander of the Milgroup not long after Mozote, said when he spoke at the American Enterprise Institute in 1985 on “LIC [Low-Intensity Conflict] in the Post Vietnam Period.”4 As late as 1986, in The Wall Street Journal, an American military adviser was quoted describing a community event sponsored by a Salvadoran army unit as “winning hearts and minds.” The event involved clowns, mariachis, and speeches from army officers calling on peasants to reject the guerrillas. “This is low-intensity-conflict doctrine in action,” the adviser said.5
Again as in Vietnam, the doctrine was met with resistance on the part of those charged with carrying it out. “Attempts to address root causes during [this] period enjoyed less success than did efforts to stabilize the military situation,” four American military officers observed in their 1988 American Military Policy in Small Wars: The Case of El Salvador, the so-called “colonels’ report” prepared for the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis.
American officers recognized… [that] the government had to transform itself into an institution perceived as effective, impartial, and committed to bringing about genuine reform. Meaningful implementation of this concept has eluded the Salvadorans and their American advisers.
In a 1991 Rand Institute report prepared for the Department of Defense,6 Benjamin C. Schwarz noted that “the greed and apparent tactical incompetence of Salvadoran officers has so exhausted American experts posted to El Salvador that all the individuals interviewed for this report who have served there in the past two years believe that the Salvadoran military does not wish to win the war because in so doing it would lose the American aid that has enriched it for the past decade.”
In San Salvador as in Saigon, this had long been accepted as one of many taxing givens that made the posting so difficult to share with those who were planning the effort in Washington. Deane Hinton, who would not talk to Danner, emerges in The Massacre at El Mozote as the ultimate example of the career foreign service officer trying to execute an extremely doubtful policy in an even more doubtful situation. (In his role as the good soldier of American foreign policy, Deane Hinton left El Salvador in 1983 for Pakistan, a more remote but equally doubtful situation, and then returned to Central America to mop up the debris left by the contra and then the Panama efforts. Alma Guillermoprieto, whose work since El Mozote has been especially acute on the immediacy with which Washington dreams become Central and South American responsibilities, notes in her essential The Heart That Bleeds that, as late as 1992 in Hinton’s Panama embassy, the preferred way to refer to the 1989 invasion was as “la liberación.”7 )
“This is a suicide mission,” an unidentified embassy official in San Salvador said when Warren Hoge of The New York Times asked, not long after Mozote, if assignment to El Salvador could advance a foreign service career. “Someone’s got to be nuts to be here. How many people do you think profited from having worked in Vietnam?”8 What made the San Salvador embassy a suicide mission was, of course, the certain knowledge that the facts of the situation would be less than welcome at the other end of the cable traffic. “There was no secret about who was doing the killing,” Danner was told by Howard Lane, the public affairs officer at the embassy at the time of El Mozote. “I mean, you formed that view within forty-eight hours after arriving in the country, and there was no secret at all about it—except, maybe, in the White House.”
What Danner details in The Massacre at El Mozote is the process by which actual eyewitness accounts (Bonner, Guillermoprieto) and photographs (Meiselas) came to be discounted by large numbers of Americans for no other reason than that the government, presenting no conflicting evidence, referred to the accounts (the photographs seemed rather eerily not to exist in anyone’s argument) as describing an event that was intrinsically unconfirmable, rendering the accounts by definition untrue. “Accurate information,” Enders said as he began his February 2, 1982, statement on Capitol Hill. “I think we have all found out that is very hard to establish.” He continued, first questioning the possibility of ever determining who, if indeed there had been “deaths,” had been responsible for them, then raising the ultimate question, the coup de grâce question, the one that had to do with the true interests of those who reported such deaths:
The responsibility for the overwhelming number of deaths is never legally determined nor usually accounted for by clear or coherent evidence. Seventy percent of the political murders known to our embassy were committed by unknown assailants. And there is much special pleading going on also in this.
What is especially striking about Enders, as he presents himself in The Massacre at El Mozote, is his apparent inability to recognize any contradiction between what he said in 1982 to the House Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs and what he said a decade later to Danner. Danner at one point asked Enders about a rumor, believed by a number of prominent Salvadorans, that two American advisers had observed the Mozote operation from a base camp below the Torola river. This was the answer Enders gave: “Certainly, one of the issues I remember raising between us and the Embassy was: Were there any American advisers on this sortie? The Embassy made a great effort to talk to advisers who were with the Atlacatl to try to find out the truth.” Any admission of knowledge, Enders conceded, “would have ruined those guys’ careers—they would have been cashiered. So no one’s going to volunteer, ‘Hey, I was up there.”‘ The effect of such a disclosure on administration efforts to continue funding the war, Enders said, “would have been devastating. American advisers with a unit that committed an atrocity? Devastating. Can you imagine anything more corrosive of the entire military effort?”
Enders had recognized at the time, then, the existence of a “sortie,” even the possibility of an “atrocity” (the atrocity if not the sortie was in the subjunctive), and had raised the question of whether there had been “American advisers” present. Yet what Enders had said in 1982 was this: “…frankly, we do not have people who go out with the units as advisers, you know. These are military trainers. They stay behind.” The idea that there was a difference between “advisers” and “trainers,” another of the many legalistic distinctions at that time employed to rhetorical advantage, seems not to have been consistently held even by Enders.
Danner describes what happened to the story of El Mozote during the days and months after its initial disclosure as “a parable of the cold war.” It was that, and as such a parable Mozote is irresistibly legible, but it was also something else. “There have also been many fewer allegations of massacres during this reporting period than last,” Thomas Enders was able to say in July 1982, when the question of certification once again came before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. “This may be in part,” he said, still the loyalist but still careful, fewer allegations of massacres, may be, in part, “because many earlier reports proved to be fabricated or exaggerated.”9
At the same hearing, Nestor Sanchez, then deputy assistant secretary of defense for Inter-American affairs, was able to single out “the first quick-reaction battalion trained by US instructors in El Salvador” not only for “its tactical capability in fighting the guerrillas” but also for “its humane treatment of the people.”10 That was the Atlacatl. Just six years after Vietnam and in the face of what was beginning to seem a markedly similar American engagement, Mozote, by which we have come to mean not exactly the massacre itself but this systematic obfuscation and prevarication that followed the disclosure of the massacre, was the first evidence that we had emerged a people again so yearning to accept the government version as to buy into a revision of history in which those Americans who differed, those Americans who for reasons of their “political orientation” would “fabricate” reports of a massacre carried out by a unit noted for its “humane treatment of the people,” were once again our true, and only truly sinister, enemy.
Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit: US Policy in El Salvador (Times Books, 1984), p. 342. ↩
Benjamin C. Schwarz, American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and El Salvador: The Frustrations of Reform and the Illusions of Nation Building (RAND, 1991), p. 2. ↩
Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. xxi. ↩
Benjamin C. Schwarz, American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and El Salvador, p. 22. ↩
Clifford Krauss and Tim Carrington, “US Effort to Win ‘Hearts and Minds’ Gains in El Salvador,” The Wall Street Journal, September 8, 1986, quoted in Schwarz, American Counterinsurgency Doctrine, p. 55. ↩
Benjamin C. Schwarz, American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and El Salvador. ↩
Alma Guillermoprieto, The Heart That Bleeds: Latin America Now (Knopf, 1994). ↩
Warren Hoge, The New York Times, February 28, 1982. ↩
Hearings and Markup before the Committee on Foreign Affairs and its Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-seventh Congress, Second Session, on HJ Res. 494, June 2 and 22; July 29; and August 3, 10, and 17, 1982, p. 17. ↩
Hearings and Markup before the Committee on Foreign Affairs and its Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs, p. 49. ↩


DUSKY DAMSELFISH: BAHAMAS REEF FISH (34)
The dusky damselfish Stegastes fuscus is one of a number of damselfish species found in Bahamian waters. These small reef fish, in adult form, are dark coloured as their name suggests. Their appearance is brightened by having distinctive blue edges to their fins.
These fish feed mainly on algae, with a preference for red. They top up their diet with small invertebrates. Their value to the reef is that their feeding patterns help to prevent coarser seaweeds from becoming dominant in areas where these are prevalent.
Like many damselfish, the dusky is a territorial species, guarding its chosen area of seabed and the food sources within it by repelling intruders – often seeing off far larger algae-grazing fishes such as parrotfish and wrasse. Yet besides their aggressive traits, they are also rather cute, as photo #2 shows!
All photos: Melinda Riger / Grand Bahama Scuba


huge (adjective) LISTEN
Huge means ‘extraordinarily large.’
- There are huge spiders in tropical regions.
- The cruise ship was so huge, it felt like they were in a small city.
- The mayor has a huge ego.
Huge also means ‘very great.’
- The play was a huge success thanks to the actor's performance.
- The father took a huge risk when he loaned his son money for a new car.
- Eating fruits and vegetables provides a huge benefit to your health.
Don't confuse it with
hug: to embrace. Example: “She hugged her husband before leaving on her flight.”
In pop culture
Watch this news report about a huge alligator in a park in Florida.
There are other meanings of huge.


I am making my first battery powered circuit. I am confused as to what happens when a battery is getting close to empty. Here is a quick example of what I am confused about:
From my understanding a 12 V battery in a car does not go to 0 Volts when it is empty. A car battery will go between say 12.6 V and 12 V. When it is at 12.6 V it is fully charged and when at 12 V it is considered empty.
Let's say the battery is at 12 V and it is considered empty. Am I still able to reliably use this 12 V in a circuit, but the battery will not be able to supply any current, or am I unable to use this 12V once the battery is empty?
Basically what I am trying to figure out is how to turn off this circuit with a switch. My real application is using a 36 V battery and in normal operating conditions will use 15 A of current. This means I can't really use a normal switch because the voltage and current ratings are too high and it will burn it up.
Instead I was thinking I could use a P channel MOSFET on the positive side of the battery with a switch and a voltage divider shown below:
The circuit will be on when SW1 is not connected to 36 V and it will be off when SW1 is connected to 36 V.
The thing I am unsure of is if I can expect this behavior if the battery is empty? Can I reliably use the voltage of this empty battery, or would it give me unexpected behaviors that turn on the MOSFET when it should be off? Is there a better way to do turn off a circuit rather then using a P-CH MOSFET?


Kennel cough is a highly infectious disease of dogs, spread by infected dogs coughing or sneezing.
It is only very rarely fatal but commonly causes a harsh and distressing hacking cough that frequently ends in a rather undignified retch. Many dog owners become convinced that their dog has ‘something stuck in their throat’. If untreated, Kennel cough typically lasts for 2-3 weeks, but apart from their cough, most dogs do not appear otherwise ill.
Kennel cough can be more serious in dogs that already have respiratory difficulties, such as the very short nosed dogs (eg Pugs or Bulldogs) or older dogs with heart disease or poor immune systems.
It is called kennel cough because it is very easily spread between dogs that are housed together, as they are in kennels. Symptoms start 3-5 days after exposure and dogs can remain infectious for weeks, so affected dogs should be kept away from others until completely clear.
The disease can be caused by a number of different micro-organisms, but the most important of these is a bacteria called Bordatella bronchiseptica. Where this infection occurs alongside a viral infection such as canine parainfluenza, the
symptoms tend to be more severe. Canine distemper virus, adenovirus and coronavirus have also been implicated.
Treatment commonly involves antibiotics for the bacterial infection, sometimes with cough suppressants if there is no increased volume of mucus produced. If a virus is also involved, more non-specific treatments to support the immune system and help your dogs general comfort can help.
Where dogs have a lot of contact with large numbers of other dogs (for example visits to a kennels, day care, communal dog walking, training classes or shows) vaccination in the form of drops up the nose reduces the likelihood of infection and
may reduce the severity of symptoms where infection does occur.
There are many other reasons for a dog to cough, including advanced heart disease, growths, allergies and parasites, so it is important to take your dog to the vet for a thorough examination if any coughing starts.
If you are worried that your dog is coughing, you can always call us on 0207 723 0453 for advice


Linked in the distant past through colonial-era trade enterprises, Brazil and Africa are becoming close partners again. More than two centuries after establishing a slave trade route across the Atlantic, both regions are again re-engaging, this time around to exchange knowledge and potentiate economic and social development.
Sub-Saharan African countries are looking to replicate Brazil’s successes in boosting agriculture production and exports, and private investments, which have made Brazil a key economic player in the international arena.
This is no coincidence. The world is going though rapid changes resulting in a new financial architecture, with emerging economies and countries in the South increasingly participating and influencing global decisions. South-South partnerships for development and growth are becoming more the norm than the exception, challenging the traditional approach to development cooperation based on “aid” form the North to the South.
Our report “Bridging the Atlantic. Brazil and Sub-Saharan Africa, South-South Partnering for Growth”, shows how South-south partnerships are effectively being forged by the two sides of the Atlantic, once united by the transatlantic slave trade. Knowledge exchange, trade and investments are the areas in which Sub-Saharan African countries and Brazil are building ties, highlights the report.
The emergence of Brazil as one of the world’s largest economies and its successes in several fronts attracted the attention of Sub-Saharan African countries. In less than 10 years, Brazil decreased social inequality by lifting 20 million Brazilians out of poverty into a middle class with access to formal jobs, health and education.
The country is now one of the largest exporters of agricultural and food products like soya, coffee, sugar, chicken and meat. In tropical medicine, Brazil is recognized worldwide by its advances in developing generic pharmaceuticals for combating HIV/AIDS and other tropical diseases.
Sub-Saharan African countries are increasingly approaching Brazil to learn from these successes and the Amazon giant is willing to share them. Brazil has now knowledge partnerships with 25 Sub-Saharan African countries.
According to the report, trade between Brazil and Africa increased from US$2 billion to US$10 billion between 2000 and 2010. Brazilian investments in Africa are also increasing, with private sector companies active in infrastructure, mining, energy and agriculture. Traditionally present in Lusophone African, firms are now operating in Anglophone and Francophone countries as well.
Brazilian and African governments are working together to increase investments from Brazilian small and medium enterprises (SME’s). There are important challenges remaining to make investments flourish.
For example: Information in Brazil about Africa and vice versa is still limited; telecommunication costs remain high compared to the US and Europe, mainly due to monopolies. Maritime and air transport is not frequent enough and routes are still not direct.
A cargo ship departing from a major Brazilian port like Rio de Janeiro or Santos, to Bissau should take 10 days but currently it takes 80 days due to bureaucracy and indirect routes.
Flying from Brazil to Africa usually takes 30 hours connecting through Europe. A direct fly from Dakar to Recife in the north of Brazil would take 3 hours and 5 to Rio de Janeiro. In 2013, a submarine cable of approximate 12,800 gigabits will connect the south of Africa with the north of Brazil. This will improve internet connections and hopefully the flow of information between business communities from the two sides.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has stated that Africa remains a priority for Brazil as well as Latin America. With African economies growing, more democratic regimes in power and fewer conflicts, the future for Brazilian and African partnerships remains positive.


Indeed, what kind of tourism in its habitual presentation can be talked about in the regions of eternal cold, in the regions in which blizzards are immeasurably greater than hotels, where there are no sunrises in the winter, and in the summer of sunsets, where there is no Internet or mobile communication, where water can exist simultaneously in all three aggregate states, and so on … But it is, and now, for almost thirty years, it has been fairly stable and successfully developing. At the moment, two main directions for the development of Arctic tourism can be identified, which reliably and firmly merge as the meridians, the North Pole includes cruise flights on nuclear icebreakers along the Murmansk-North Pole-Franz Josef Land archipelago -Murmansk and ski expeditions, and helicopter tours to the Pole, organized through the ice base «Barneo». Both directions were formed mainly during the darkest period of the post-Soviet period in the Arctic — namely, thanks to the collapse of the structures of the Northern Sea Route that occurred in the early 90s and the complete reduction of scientific research and production in the high-latitude Arctic.
The nuclear icebreaker fleet and polar aviation remained suddenly unclaimed, and this situation was aggravated by the inevitable loss of highly skilled professionals who had lost their jobs, which, especially in polar conditions, like nowhere, «solve everything»! And then there was the idea of a kind of re-profiling of the available technical resources from the solution of temporarily unavailable national economic tasks, to ensure tourism projects, especially since it was primarily about the possibility of visiting the North Pole — an unattainable dream for the absolute majority of people. In the summer of 1990, the first tourist voyage of the nuclear-powered icebreaker “Rossiya” to the North Pole was completed. This cruise lasted more than three weeks and included, besides the North Pole, also a visit to the Franz Josef Land and Novaya Zemlya archipelagos, and Vaigach Island. The first tourists were mostly residents of Western Europe and the United States. Since then, until now, this route operates smoothly during the summer months from late June to mid-August. Its duration was reduced to 11 days due to exclusion from the program visits to Novaya Zemlya and Vaigach. Depending on demand, 4-5 cruises to the Pole are realized every year. The average number of tourists, on the board, is about 120 people. The first helicopter expedition to the Pole took place in 1992. The organizers were two Russian companies «VICAAR» and «BARK». The first group of tourists was only 12 people (all from France). The flight from Dixon to the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago -North Pole-Dixon was performed on 3 MI-8 helicopters, two of which served as tankers for refueling a passenger helicopter — a total flight time took of about 90 hours, out of which 20 hours a helicopter with tourists flew. It is clear that such a version of the tourist program had no prospects, primarily in terms of its duration and safety. A year later, in 1993, a tourist program was implemented on the North Pole using an intermediate icefield and a temporary ice base that later became known as Barneo. The first tourists — participants in the Barneo project were the paratroopers who made the jump to the North Pole. The implementation of such a project became possible with the use of technologies for the construction of temporary bases and icefields on drifting ice, developed and successfully used in the high-latitude Arctic in the 1960s-1980s for various kinds of scientific research. With their cessation in the 90s, a kind of conversion of these technologies arose, which ultimately led to the development and implementation of an international project with a somewhat unusual one, bearing in mind the very specific conditions in which it has been implemented for 25 years , the name «Barneo». Yes it was Barneo. through «a». This little trick is called to put to sleep with its very warm sound the vigilance of one or another doubting the correctness of its choice, a tourist, and at the same time giving us the full right to reject all possible claims and suits if the conditions of the real «Barneo» do not coincide with its expectations. In fact, this name came along with the mentioned technologies, as the callsign of one of the former bases.
Modern Barneo is a complex that includes an icefield and residential modules built from frame tents, warmed by mobile heating devices. Standard residential modules of about 40 square meters designed for quite comfortable living at the same time for 10 people, two modules of cabins of companies each with an area of 80 square meters. m are connected through a common kitchen unit. In addition, the camp includes separate modules with electric generators and a garage for a snowmobile and a bath. Depending on the need, the camp can take up to 100 people or more. The construction of a standard residential tent takes only 2-3 hours. The ice aerodrome is a runway, constructed with the help of tractors and brought to the possible perfection in these conditions manually. The parameters of the strip on average fit into the required standards for a length of more than 1000 meters and a width of 60 meters. Tents of the flight crew and flight dispatcher are located next to the strip. The construction of the strip is the final stage of a complex transport and logistics operation beginning in mid-March with the departure of two MI-8 helicopters from the airfield of the base (Krasnoyarsk or Surgut) with stopover on Sredny Island on the Northern Land archipelago for refueling and flying further north along the meridian of 95 degrees east longitude to the point on the drifting ice of the Arctic Ocean at the maximum distance,possibly in terms of fuel reserve. Depending on the wind, this point can be at a latitude of 87-88 degrees. Simultaneously with the flight of helicopters, a transport plane IL-76 flies to Murmansk and all cargo need to be dropped on the ice , is delivered to Murmansk. As main cargo there are the over 300 barrels with fuel for fueling helicopters , and they are unloaded on platforms for dropping. Two Dt-75 tractors using for the construction of the runway are also delivered and are deployed on special platforms for dropping. IL-76 is loaded with first part of barrels and is on standby until the helicopters report accurate coordinates of the point and weather conditions to Murmansk. In the presence of favorable conditions, the IL-76 aircraft flies along the Murmansk route — a point to the sea — the North Pole region — Murmansk. After fuel dumping in the amount sufficient for the full refueling of two helicopters, the aircraft goes to a point close to the North Pole, where it throws paratroopers and the remaining fuel and then returns to Murmansk. Helicopters, having come to the point of the second discharge, refuel and take off in search of an ice field suitable for the construction of an airfield. For the construction of an icefield, it is necessary to find a field of thick, one-year-old ice with a thickness of at least 150 cm, which is sufficiently large at least 2 x 2 km. This is the thickness necessary for the safe landing of the AN-74 aircraft, which will carry out all passenger transport operations on Barneo. When a suitable field is found, its coordinates are reported to Murmansk and the IL-76 aircraft makes the second dropping of the general cargo — two tractors and fuel and returns to Murmansk for loading the remaining fuel and flies to the base construction area for the final third dropping. Meanwhile, the construction of the runway begins, continuing depending on the conditions from two to five days. When the lane is ready to receive airplanes, an AN-74 airplane will fly from Longyearbyen (Svalbard) by technical flight carrying representatives of the Flight Inspection (Rosaviation) carrying out technical acceptance of the strip, as well as part of the equipment and equipment for the construction of the camp together with representatives of the advance group personnel of the future camp of Barneo. The construction of the Barneo camp begins, in which all the expedition members on the ice and free from other work take part. The next two flights are loaded with all the remaining equipment. As soon as the camp is ready, passenger flights begin with tourists and scientists. The duration of the season in Barneo, as a rule, does not exceed 3 weeks. During this time, the camp is visited on average by 200-250 people. During the season on Barneo, a variety of ski programs of varying duration are being realized, the participants of which are skiing from 200 kilometers to 5 kilometers with an indispensable finish on the North Pole. Delivery of participants to the start point, their evacuation from the Pole, as well as provision, their insurance on the route is carried out by two MI-8 helicopters stationed on Barneo in constant duty mode. In addition to skiing, the programs of visiting the Pole by helicopters, parachute jumping and scuba diving at a point close to the Pole and even wedding ceremonies are successfully implemented. In 2010 I had to play the role of Polar priest, blessing the marriage union, concluded with complete non-resistance of the parties on the North Pole itself. The newlyweds wanted to invite to the ceremony a real priest from Longyearbyen, but he refused on the pretext that … «The North Pole is not his Diocese.» Perhaps he was right because only God knows where his Diocese is! In this situation, I, as an expedition leader on Barneo, had nothing else to do except how to perform this high and very cool Perhaps he was right because only God knows where his Diocese is! In this situation, I, as an expedition leader on Barneo, had nothing else to do but to fulfill this high and very cool mission myself. Newlyweds were quite pleased with the wedding ceremony, despite some natural in this situation, the inconvenience of putting on ice rings on frozen fingers. The bride, according to tradition, gave me (as a priest) her garter! Another difference of this exciting ceremony by itself is carried out in more temperate latitudes, was that we were forced to move into a helicopter to drink (and not nibble) the traditional champagne. At minus 30 degrees even seasoned «Soviet champagne» instantly freezes on contact with the cold walls of the ceremonial crystal glasses.
Barneo regularly organizes a marathon race in the area of the camp followed by a visit of runners to the North Pole by helicopter. In 2016, on Barneo, a very unusual, even for those who had seen the kinds of organizers, a figure skating program in the North Pole region was carried out. The Japanese figure skater performed several elements of an arbitrary program on a small — a few meters across, an artificial skating rink, arranged by experts from Barneo. To do this, we had to solve the problem of obtaining a small enough area for filling, the amount of fresh water. Uneven and soft sea ice is not suitable for skating, especially for the performance of the elements of figure skating. The water was prepared by melting snow. Recently, we learned about the project for an international ice hockey match at Barneo in 2019. To implement of the project it will require a very large amount of fresh water, and this can be achieved using a mobile desalination, which should be delivered to Barneo on the plane, that is, desalination must be sufficiently compact. This will determine its relatively low productivity, which will require the development of an adequate method of pouring. In other words, it is possible to realize this idea, and technical details, and accordingly, the cost of its implementation, we are ready to discuss with the initiators of the project.
During the whole season, groups of Russian and foreign scientists working on ocean and sea ice research work at Barneo. It should be noted that after the suspension of 2013 due to the deteriorating ice conditions and the resulting climate change works for the organization of the drifting scientific research stations, ice base Barneo remains today the only reference point of the Russian presence in the high Arctic, and I am sure will remain so for a long time, because the point of the geographical North Pole — the tops of our planet will attract to itself representatives of new and new generations who dream of being, even a very short time, at the point where the wily GPS within just a few seconds shows the cherished 90 degrees north latitude and fast and oddly change figures indicate the longitude, which, as well as the concept of time at this point, is not existing!


PBG urine test
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Porphobilinogen (PBG) is one of several types of porphyrins found in your body. Porphyrins help form many important substances in the body. One of these is hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen in the blood. Porphyrins usually leave your body through urine or stools. If this process does not occur, porphyrins such as PBG can build up in your body.
This article describes the test to measure the amount of PBG in a urine sample.
How the Test is Performed
After you provide a urine sample, it is tested in the lab. This is called a random urine sample.
If needed, your health care provider may ask you to collect your urine at home over 24 hours. This is called a 24-hour urine sample. Your provider will tell you how to do this. Follow instructions exactly so that the results are accurate.
How to Prepare for the Test
Your provider may tell you to temporarily stop taking medicines that may affect the test results. Be sure to tell your provider about all the medicines you take. These include:
- Antibiotics and anti-fungal drugs
- Anti-anxiety drugs
- Birth control pills
- Diabetes medicines
- Pain medicines
- Sleep medicines
Never stop taking any medicine without first talking to your doctor.
How the Test will Feel
This test involves only normal urination, and there is no discomfort.
Why the Test is Performed
This test may be done if your provider suspects porphyria or another disorder associated with an abnormal PBG level.
For a random urine sample, a negative test result is considered normal.
If the test is done on a 24-hour urine sample, the normal value is less than 4 milligrams per 24 hours.
Normal value ranges may vary slightly among different laboratories. Some labs use different measurements or may test different specimens. Talk to your doctor about the meaning of your specific test results.
What Abnormal Results Mean
An increased level of PBG in the urine may be due to:
Fuller SJ, Wiley JS. Heme biosynthesis and its disorders. In: Hoffman R, Benz EJ Jr, Silberstein LE, Heslop HE, Weitz JI, Anastasi J, eds. Hematology: Basic Principles and Practice. 6th ed. Philadelphia, PA: Elsevier Saunders; 2013:chap 36.
McPherson RA, Ben-Ezra J. Basic examination of urine. In: McPherson RA, Pincus MR, eds. Henry's Clinical Diagnosis and Management by Laboratory Methods. 22nd ed. Philadelphia, PA: Elsevier Saunders; 2011:chap 28.
- Last reviewed on 1/27/2015
- Yi-Bin Chen, MD, Leukemia/Bone Marrow Transplant Program, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA. Also reviewed by David Zieve, MD, MHA, Isla Ogilvie, PhD, and the A.D.A.M. Editorial team.
The information provided herein should not be used during any medical emergency or for the diagnosis or treatment of any medical condition. A licensed medical professional should be consulted for diagnosis and treatment of any and all medical conditions. Call 911 for all medical emergencies. Links to other sites are provided for information only -- they do not constitute endorsements of those other sites. © 1997- 2013 A.D.A.M., Inc. Any duplication or distribution of the information contained herein is strictly prohibited.


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People have a right to information and the government should not and can not be trusted to decide what information we can see
Sometimes it may be necessary. Let's say, there are two societies. One society can greatly influence another society by means of informational impact on the other society - it will just flood the other society with the misinformation and thus influence the internal processes of that society.
Censorship is horrible, but it's hard to prevent online therefore people aren't trying as hard to censor it anymore.
Governments need the ability to detect, monitor, and control illegal acts taking place online, such as the e-transfer of funds to a smuggler's bank account. Mechanisms that can censor individual transfers of information are essential to finding and preventing crimes in evidence-based justice systems
Bob wants to kill Alice. Bob takes the remote controlled tank from Charlie. Bob drives the Tank to the house Alice is sleeping in ready to fire but Bob forgot what button to press to fire. He asks Charlie who answers via eMail.
What about child pornography?
Sometimes it may be necessary. The major part of information is getting to our mind unconsciously. Some of it (or even the major part of it) can be excessive or even harmful.
Let's say, marketologists can exploit our psychological needs (rooted in our genes) to stimulate some behaviour.
Bob sends compuer viruses via email to old people the govement knows it and they could censore his emails that contain the virus.
in that case it would be ethically right to censore Bobs email.
Not ethically wrong in every form. Censoring information that has a great chance of producing harm to the individual or other humans upon learning it can be justified. However this is dangerous slippery slope, and something like a popular vote should be required to enact it.
hindering someone for calling X and telling him Y is (indirect) censorship
but calling 911 and telling them "i just call to block the line for real issues lol" gets punished (hindering indirect) and it is ethically right to do this


Waterfowl Production Areas
Production Areas (WPAs) are properties that have been purchased with
money from the sale of Duck Stamps. Established to protect and restore
waterfowl habitat, these small but important parts of the National
Wildlife Refuge System play a critical role providing much needed habitat
for wildlife. Nearly 95 percent of the WPAs in the United States are
located in the prairie pothole region.
WPAs in the Long Lake WMD consist of approximately 34 percent wetlands, 35 percent native grass, 14 percent tame grass, 12 percent DNC, four percent cropland, and one percent woodlands.
|Wetlands, the second largest habitat component of WPAs, occupy 34 percent of the total acreage. Spring 2001 wetland levels were full. This is due in part to above normal snowfall received during the last two months of 2000. Also, 83 percent of the precipitation received during 2001 happened during the first six months of the year. The late summer and fall were exceptionally dry and mild. By freeze up many of the smaller wetlands were dry; however, some of the larger wetlands were still at there highest levels in recent history. At the time of this writing in mid-February, 2002 below average snowfall is pointing to the lowest springtime wetland levels in the last several years.|
|Forest or woodland occupies less than 1 percent of the total WPA acreage. Most woodlands exist as shelterbelts or tree rows that were planted prior to FWS purchase or occur as individual trees volunteering along wetland margins or in moist low areas. Excluding riparian areas where historically trees occupied the corridors along rivers and streams trees land management practices discourage development of trees on the prairie landscape. Recent policies and ecosystem management philosophies provide direction to manage, protect, and restore the natural prairie landscape which excludes development of tree plantings and invasion of competitive nonnative trees on the prairie landscape.|
|Approximately 4 percent of the WPA acreage is classified as cropland in any given year. In reality, cropland rotates in and out of cover or is established for a somewhat longer period to provide consistent winter food for resident wildlife on larger areas. Except for a small amount of force account farming on the WPAs, all work is done by cooperators. General direction of management is to re-establish native grass on prior farmed and tamegrass which will reduce and eventually eliminate cropland fields on WPAs.|
grasslands dominate the habitat acreage on WPAs, occupying approximately
35 percent of the overall acreage. Staff manage this habitat type with
prescribed burning, grazing, and haying. Tame grasslands occupy 26
percent of the total WPA acreage. Personnel manage these areas with
haying, burning, grazing, farming and re-seeding. Annually, approximately
300 acres of tamegrass are targeted for re-establishment of mixed-grass
natives, until all tamegrass
has been converted. These seedings will be on both WPA’s and
refuges in the Long Lake WMD.In 2001 three WPA’s had fields seeded
to grasses. The WPAs included: Rath - 90 acres; Nelson - 21 acres;
and Bechold - 16 acres. All of the fields were formerly cropped fields.
All fields were seeded at a rate of 8 pounds/acre PLS. The mixture
consisted of 2 pounds western wheatgrass, 1.8 pounds green needlegrass,
0.6 pounds blue grama, 0.6 pounds side oats, 1 pound big bluestem,
0.8 pounds switchgrass, and 1 pound little bluestem. All seeding
was “no tilled” into a prior years small grain crop. A
Truax drill was used. The fields had a chemical application of 1 qt./AC
Round-Up, three to five days prior to seeding. Ammonium Sulfate was
added to the tank mix at 1 - 2 %.
After seeding, the fields were mowed to reduce weed competition. The biggest problem weed after seeding seemed to be pigeon grass.
The North Dakota Natural Resource Ecologist identified a site on Kleppe/Lang WPA as habitat for Loesel's twayblade orchid (Liparis loeselii). The Loesel’s twayblade orchid is listed as “Imperiled” in North Dakota by the the North Dakota Natural Heritage Program. This area is one of four ND sites and will be protected. In 1997 staff discussed management for this plant with the ecologist. Areas with this plant are not adversely affected by management activities, and potentially benefit from haying and grazing.
deer are abundant and occupy nearly all of the WPA units distributed
across the three county District. The nesting cover provided as seeded
DNC and native undisturbed grasslands for waterfowl and upland nesting
birds also provides excellent habitat for white-tailed deer. Habitat
enhancement through edge “affect” is provided by surrounding
private lands managed for annual production of crops and livestock
and by occasional habitat management treatments including prescribed
burning, grazing, and haying.
The Missouri River breaks characteristic of the west edge of the WMD in Burleigh and Emmons Counties provides habitat for small herds of mule deer. Occasionally, pronghorn are observed in the western most reaches of the WMD along the breaks and mixed grass prairie areas adjacent to the Missouri River.
and red fox are locally abundant across the WMD with inverse population relationships.
Mange appears to be a temporary widespread issue reducing populations
of the canids in localized areas across the WMD.
Porcupine are commonly observed despite a general lack of woodland habitat in this prairie environment. Raccoon, skunk, mink, weasel, badger, and beaver are also abundant.
Ring-necked pheasant are abundant and have a wide distribution on lands in the western part of the WMD referred to as the Missouri Slope. Their populations extend to the Missouri Coteau during periods of mild winters, but populations often become localized due to the extended periods of harsh winter weather generally experienced there.
Sharp-tailed grouse populations are distributed across the WMD with population levels generally determined by the quantity and quality of native grasslands and inter-mingled tamegrass areas.
Gray partridge populations fluctuate widely during the climatic periods which range from drought to deluge and appear to respond favorably to drier periods and negatively to wet periods.


my friend i fail to perform this simple task can you please direct me how to approach a simple question like this the quetion said "a registrar set up the curriculum for the term . One course may have up to 10 subject . Students must select a minimum of 6 subjects from a particular course .Once a student registers for the term , the billing system is notified so that the student may be billed .Student may use the system to add or drop subjects for the period of time of registration.\ write a C program that will check the number of subject s the student has chosen for a course .This program will run after the student has updated the subject selection. If the number of subject is less than 6 then an appropriate message should be displayed on the screen . The program should include a function that will count the number of subjects.


CARE FOR YOURSELF
1. Watch out for the symptoms of anxiety, depression and fatigue. Pay attention to warning signs that your body is giving you. Recovery can be long, hard and chaotic. Listen to other people when they notice signs of stress in you or family members. Seek professional help if needed. Contact the Red Cross for available programs in your area.
Warning Signs of Stress:
- Short tempers, frequent arguments
- Greater consumption of alcohol
- Smoking more
- Insomnia, nightmares
- Aches,pains and stomach problems
- Apathy, trouble concentrating
2. Keep the family together to provide mutual support for all members.
3. Discuss your problems with family and friends. Crying is a natural response and a great way to release pent-up emotions.
4. Rest often. Eat healthy. You need a strong body to cope with stress and possible health problems. Don't overdo activity. You must have proper rest. Wash your hands throughly and often with soap and water. Avoid biting your nails. Confirm that water is safe to drink. Don't wash dishes in water unless you know that it is safe. Disinfect dishes and all items that floodwater has touched.
5. Don't over-schedule yourself. You can't do everything at once. Make a schedule for clean-up and repair. Do the jobs one at a time. When your body is tired, you are more prone to accidents.
6. Don hurt yourself. Items are heavier when wet. Be careful of trying to move heavy objects by yourself.
7. Report any health hazards to your local Health Department. These can include animal carcasses, rats, dangerous chemicals etc.


Helix Core — version control from Perforce — tracks, manages, and secures changes to all your digital assets, including large binary files. Scale your infrastructure, support your remote teams, and move faster.
Full Video Transcript
To fully appreciate the power of streams, let's review some important codeline concepts and terminology.
The term codeline commonly describes a group of files that evolve together over the life of the software application or application component. A codeline might include source code, build scripts, images, compiled code, and other files that are required to create the application.
The concept of a codeline, however, has context outside of a software development project as well.
A codeline can describe almost any set of files that evolve together in almost any type of project.
As you add objects to a project, they become part of the codeline.
As you modify and save objects, the modifications are incorporated into the codeline.
At the end of the project, the codeline typically contains all the objects necessary to generate the final product.
For the purpose of this discussion, we use the terms codeline and branch synonymously. You can think of a stream as a codeline with some additional features and functionality.
You typically illustrate classic codeline or branch hierarchies using horizontal lines to depict branches, with time moving forward from left to right. Perforce displays streams in a Stream Graph using rounded rectangles, each rectangle representing a separate stream.
Branching is the process of creating a new branch from an existing branch. In the streams world, you branch by defining a new stream.
A stream is a child of the stream from which it was branched. Conversely, the source for a stream is the parent of the stream. A stream that has no parent is called the mainline.
When you create a new stream that is a child of an existing stream, the child stream, by default, automatically inherits some of the properties of the parent stream, which includes the definition of the scope of files contained in the stream.
Integration is the process of propagating changes from one stream to another. When you integrate, you might merge the changes in the source stream into the existing files in the target stream or copy the files from the source stream to replace the files in the target stream.
The Stream Graph displays stream relationships and the workflow required to integrate changes across streams.
A stream's type helps you understand how a stream is used. In streams, there are three, predefined stream types: mainline, development, and release. You use release streams to refine and publish the final product while others continue development on future versions in the mainline. You use development streams to work on new product features and functionality without destabilizing the mainline. For example, you would use a development stream to work on new product features and a release stream to hold the files associated with a specific product release.
A streams's type might also establish the relative stability of a stream.
To illustrate some of these concepts let's look at a common codeline model called the mainline model as it would appear using streams.
The general strategy involves:
Copying the non-stream mainline to a stream mainline
Performing your active development in the stream mainline or into related child streams
Merging bug fixes and post-release changes from the non-stream mainline to the stream mainline
Branching new release streams from the stream mainline


Sieving for Clast Size
This activity was created by Marcia Barton at Santa Fe High School, with the help of Dr. Dave Love and Dr. Nelia Dunbar of the New Mexico Bureau of Geology. This activity begins with an outdoor activity that is accessible to all students, one that they can use to scaffold their knowledge upon. It includes both qualitative and quantitative analyses, and gives all students access points to learning about geology based on their learning style. This activity requires access to two uncemented sedimentary geologic formations with different grain sizes and clast compositions. The exercise, as described here, studies the Ancha and Tesuque formations in the Santa Fe area, but could be adapted to similar sediments in other parts of the state. You could consult a local geologist, or a geologist from the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources, for suggestions of appropriate sediments near your school.
Download the lesson plan (1.3 MB PDF)


What Is FIFO?
First In, First Out (FIFO) is a valuation strategy and asset management in which the first assets created or purchased are sold first. FIFO assumes that assets with the oldest cost are included in the COGS income statement, which saves money on taxes.
Significance of FIFO in E-commerce Logistics
The FIFO method ensures that stock rotation is frequently employed to control perishable items with an expiry date.
Several other benefits of this method are:
- Enhanced quality control – By distributing the oldest products first, FIFO ensures that customers receive consistent products. FIFO rules out any obsolete stock with proper inventory rotation.
- Accurate stock turnover – With a systematic approach to stock rotation, FIFO aids in perfect stock turnover with well-timed replenishment.
- Prevents stock from expiring – With the oldest stock processed first, FIFO prevents stock expiration and saves costs on quality control.
Prerequisites to Calculate FIFO and How it Works
FIFO is often used for the cost flow assumption procedure. It refers to the method of moving a company’s inventory cost to its cost of goods sold.
The prerequisites include the following –
- Manufacturing details of products, like date and time
- The cost of purchased goods to resell
- The cost of manufactured goods, including labor, material & manufacturing overhead expenses.
In FIFO accounting, older units are assumed to have been sold first in the inventory. Therefore, COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) is calculated based on these inventory costs.
Use Case With FIFO
Assume a company XYZ produces 50 items for AUD10 each. For the next batch, XYZ will produce 50 items for AUD20 each.
They sell 30 items first.
Using the FIFO method, the COGS for the first 30 items is AUD10 per unit.
Later on, they sell 30 more. The first 20 items will cost AUD10, and the remaining 10 will be AUD20.
With 60 items sold, the remaining 40 units are valued at AUD20 each.


A dwindling number of fishermen work the floating gardens of Xochimilco in Mexico City, catching carp and and tilapia—invasive species that are threatening an already strained ecosystem Roberto Altamirano has the lake to himself as he casts his glistening net onto the still water in a perfect circle, lets it sink, then slowly pulls it in. It comes back bearing a large haul of tilapia and carp—and that is exactly the problem.
Altamirano is one of just 20 or so fishermen who remain in the floating gardens of Xochimilco, an idyllic network of lakes, canals and artificial islands improbably tucked into the urban sprawl of Mexico City.
At 42, he has watched the number of fishermen here plunge over the years, leading to booming populations of tilapia and carp—invasive species that are threatening the already strained ecosystem of Xochimilco, a green lung vital to the health of smog-choked Mexico City.
”There’s more Xochimilco than there are fishermen,” says Altamirano.
First settled by the Aztecs, who created the original artificial islands, Xochimilco is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site visited by millions of tourists each year, who ply its maze of canals in colorful tour boats.
Chinese carp and African tilapia were first introduced here in the 1970s in what turned out to be a misguided plan to supply a new food source for local residents.
Today, no one in Mexico City will eat them, since the rampant growth of the Latin American mega-city has badly polluted the waters of Xochimilco with heavy metals.
Altamirano and his colleagues sell the fish to be ground up and used as compost.
The carp and tilapia are meanwhile threatening to wipe out a small, critically endangered salamander called the axolotl that is found only in Xochimilco.
The fish eat the eggs of this small amphibian, whose peculiar ability to regenerate its body parts has led researchers to study it for possible biomedical applications in humans with organ damage or missing limbs.
Carp and tilapia ”were introduced as a resource for human consumption. However, since they are invasive species, they turned out to be a problem,” said researcher Maria Figueroa. Xochimilco is an idyllic network of lakes, canals and artificial islands improbably tucked into the urban sprawl of Mexico City, and it is a green lung vital to the health of smog-choked Mexico City ’Last crazy one’
Altamirano’s response to the crisis is to do what he has done all his life: fish.
”I learned to fish from my grandfather, who’s 98 years old. The tradition had died out because it was no longer profitable. I’m the last crazy one in the family line,” he told AFP.
Eight years ago, he launched a group to fish as many tons of carp and tilapia as possible out of these waters. Their record: nine tons in half an hour.
With these fishermen, Xochimilco’s ecosystem would face collapse—something scientists have warned could raise average temperatures in Mexico City by as much as four degrees Celsius.
Altamirano says it is getting harder to find recruits to join his crusade.
Fishing here is hot, dirty work. And the salary is meager: around $145 a month, paid by the city.
”When we die out, that will be the end of the fishermen. Young people don’t want to get into this line of work anymore,” he said.
Fishing at his side, 23-year-old Ramses Coloapa said he was doing the job ”mostly out of necessity, because I have to buy food.”
Altamirano hates the idea of watching the axolotl go extinct.
The little salamander—whose name means ”water monster” in the indigenous Nahuatl language—was considered sacred by the Aztecs, who believed it was the last incarnation of their fire god, Xolotl.
”There was a local legend here that said the day the axolotl disappeared, that would be the end of Xochimilco,” said Altamirano.
”We’re almost there.”
Explore further:Mexico’s ’water monster’ may have disappeared (Update)
© 2017 AFP


Two common food additives known as emulsifiers – compounds which preserve foods like mayonnaise and stop them from separating – could be seriously messing with the bacteria in your gut, according to a recent study.
The emulsifiers the study looked at are known as carboxymethycellulose and polysorbate-80, and both are frequently added to processed foods.
It turns out that these additives can cause serious disruptions in the gut bacteria of mice, even in relatively low concentrations.
The Significance Of Gut Bacteria
Most people don’t think a lot about the colonies of bacteria that live in their gut, but these colonies are vitally important to the overall function of our entire bodies, from weight management(1) to the immune system(2) to our digestive health(3).
The new study, published the journal Nature, seeks to help explain why processed foods contribute so much to weight gain(4) – as well as why inflammatory conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, or IBS, have increased significantly in recent years(5).
How Emulsifiers Affect Our Guts
To better understand how emulsifiers can affect gut bacteria, researcher Andrew Dewirtz at Georgia State University added the two common emulsifiers to lab mice’s drinking water. All the mice were fed the same diet, but were fed different concentrations of emulsifiers.
What the researchers eventually discovered was that even healthy mice who had been fed emulsifiers became obese, developing such metabolic problems as glucose intolerance.
But that wasn’t all – they also tested the emulsifiers on mice that were genetically engineered to be predisposed to inflammatory gut diseases, finding that these mice suffered flare ups of inflammatory bowel disease after being fed the emulsifiers.
These results were consistent even in mice who were fed the lowest concentration of emulsifiers – about one-tenth of the concentration that the FDA permits in food products.
Reporting on the study for Nature, Sara Reardon writes:
“Gewirtz and his colleagues suspect that the emulsifiers can break down the heavy mucus that lines the mammalian gut and prevents bacteria from coming into contact with gut cells. If this happens, the bacteria cause inflammation in the gut, which can also lead to changes in metabolism.”(6)
The Next Steps
In the past 50 years, no study has managed to conclusively prove that these additives pose a significant risk to human health. But armed with this recent study, researchers are calling for more trials to be conducted on the subject.
Some researchers believe that if large-scale population studies were to look at changes on the gut bacterial level, they would find that such additives do pose a risk to our health after all.
Some studies done on other common food additives, such as artificial sweeteners, have proven recently that these common ingredients can also negatively impact our gut bacteria(7).
What is clear to most researchers studying the effects of food additives is that the less processed food you eat, the better.


Located 321 million light years from Earth, the Coma Cluster of Galaxies, or Abell 1656, contains more than 1,000 identified galaxies.
Credit: Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona
The massive Coma cluster of galaxies glows in this spectacular skywatching photo.
Located 321 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Coma Berenices, this gigantic cluster comprises more than 1,000 identified galaxies. A light year A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, or about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).
Abell 1656 is one of two major clusters that make up the Coma supercluster. The cluster has several very bright galaxies. The central area of the cluster has NGC 4874 and NGC 4889, two large elliptical galaxies. Like most clusters, this one produces large amounts of dark matter and hot X-ray emitting gas.
Editor's note: If you have an amazing skywatching photo you'd like to share for a possible story or image gallery, please contact managing editor Tariq Malik at firstname.lastname@example.org.


Benjamin Franklin WADE
Senate Years of Service:1851-1855; 1855-1857; 1857-1869
Party:Whig; Opposition; Republican
WADE, Benjamin Franklin, (brother of Edward Wade), a Senator from Ohio; born in Feeding Hills, near Springfield, Hampden County, Mass., October 27, 1800; received his early education from his mother; moved with his parents to Andover, Ohio, in 1821; taught school; studied medicine in Albany, N.Y., 1823-1825; returned to Ohio; studied law; admitted to the bar in 1828 and commenced practice in Jefferson, Ashtabula County, Ohio; prosecuting attorney of Ashtabula County 1835-1837; member, State senate 1837-1838, 1841-1842; judge of the third judicial court of Ohio 1847-1851; elected as a Whig to the United States Senate to fill the vacancy in the term commencing March 4, 1851, caused by the failure of the legislature to elect; reelected as a Republican in 1856 and 1863 and served from March 15, 1851, to March 3, 1869; unsuccessful candidate for renomination in 1868; served as President pro tempore of the Senate during the Thirty-ninth and Fortieth Congresses; chairman, Committee on Territories (Thirty-seventh, Thirty-eighth, and Thirty-ninth Congresses); unsuccessful Republican candidate for the vice presidential nomination in 1868; resumed the practice of law in Jefferson, Ohio, in 1869; appointed a government director of the Union Pacific Railroad; member of the Santo Domingo Commission in 1871; died in Jefferson, Ashtabula County, Ohio, on March 2, 1878; interment in Oakdale Cemetery.
BibliographyAmerican National Biography; Dictionary of American Biography; Shover, Kenneth. “The Life of Benjamin F. Wade.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1962; Trefousse, Hans L. Benjamin Franklin Wade: Radical Republican from Ohio. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1963.
Source: Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1771-Present