Cockroaches were alive before the dinosaurs

WASHINGTON, Nov 8: Giant cockroaches were not only living in your kitchen long before you ever moved in, they were alive millions of years before the dinosaurs and were big enough to have made even a tyrannosaurus rex jump.

Scientists said yesterday they had found the largest-ever complete fossil of a cockroach. The 300 million-year-old fossil is so complete that the team at Ohio State University can make out the veins on its wings and the bumps on its body.

The roach lived during the carboniferous period, when Ohio was a giant tropical swamp, cary easterday, a graduate student who helped study the fossil, said in a statement.

"Normally, we can only hope to find fossils of shell and bones, because they have minerals in them that increase their chances for preservation, but something unusual about the chemistry of this ancient site preserved organisms without shell or bones with incredible detail," Easterday said.

The 3.5 inch-long (9 cm) insect known as arthropleura pustulatus was so well preserved that easterday could see its legs and antennae, folded around its bodudubarts.

Easterday, who yesterdaypresented his team’s findings to the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Boston, said the fossil cockroach is about twice as big as the average american roach, although just a bit smaller than cockroaches that live in some tropical areas. (REUTERS)

US raids, blocks assets of terror-funding groups

WASHINGTON, Nov 8: US agents have raided offices and frozen assets of two "terrorist-supporting" financial networks that officials said provided money, weapons and communications for Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda group.

In raids from Minnesota to Massachusetts yesterday, the US treasury blocked the assets of 62 people and groups suspected of funding the Saudi-born militant, who is believed to have masterminded the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

US officials identified the two networks as Al Taqwa, an association of offshore banks and money management firms that have moved Al Qaeda cash around the world, and Al Barakaat, a group of money-wiring and communications companies owned by a friend and supporter of Bin Laden.

Authorities also gave an alternative spelling, Barakat, for the latter financial group.

While the most visible face of the war on terrorism has been the bombing campaign launched a month ago on Afghanistan, which has long sheltered Bin Laden, US President George W. Bush said the financial crackdown was equally important.

"Ours is not a war just of soldiers and aircraft. It is a war fought with diplomacy, by the investigations of law enforcement, by gathering intelligence, and by cutting off the terrorists’ money," Bush said in a speech at the US treasury’s financial crimes centre in suburban Virginia.

"The entry point to these networks may be a small storefront operation, but follow the network to its center and you discover wealthy banks and sophisticated technology, all at the service of mass murderers," Bush said. "By shutting these networks down, we disrupt the murderer’s work."

As part of a global crackdown, US agents closed offices connected to Al Taqwa and Al Barakaat in four US states, in one case posting guards outside a Minnesota money transfer firm used by African immigrants to send money home.

Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill said US agents had shut down eight Al Barakaat offices in United States. The Treasury Department later put the number of offices shut down at nine. Although few details were available, the White House said the United Arab Emirates had seized assets and records of Al Barakaat, while Italy and Lichtenstein had taken "enforcement action" against al taqwa as part of the global crackdown.

Bush said the group of eight leading industrial nations and Russia joined the effort, although he offered no details.

In recent weeks, US officials stepped up their efforts to examine the informal "hawala" networks common in the Middle East and South Asia that allow for unregulated and largely invisible financial transfers around the world.

The White House said that US treasury and customs agents began executing orders to freeze assets and to collect evidence at sites around the country on Wednesday morning for possible prosecutions.

"Acting on solid and credible evidence, the Treasury Department of the United States today blocked the US assets of 62 individuals and organisations connected with two terrorist-supporting financial networks," Bush said.

The 46 groups and 16 individuals whose assets were frozen have addresses from Columbus, Ohio, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Dorchester, Massachusetts, in the United States to the Bahamas, Dubai, Lichtenstein, Somalia and Switzerland Overseas.

In Minneapolis, US customs agents swooped down on an office of Aaran Money Wire Service Inc. and posted guards at the entrance to keep out some of the bewildered African immigrants who use the facility to send and receive money.

Abdirashid Mohamoud came to the office to wire 100 to his mother-in-law in Kenya for food and rent. "There’s no way today that she will be able to survive," he told Reuters. "We don’t know anything about organized terrorists."

Federal agents later pulled up a rental truck and began emptying the office of desks, chairs and boxes of material. In Boston, US agents arrested Mohammed M Hussein, an illegal alien, and charged him with running an outlaw foreign money transmittal business that regularly wired funds from the United States to the United Arab Emirates.

Federal agents arrested Hussein, the treasurer of Barakaat North America, at the unlicensed money transferring operation in the working-class boston neighbourhood of Dorchester, and were searching for his colleague Liban M Hussein, who was listed as the firm’s President and who also faces charges.

As part of its financial crackdown yesterday, US officials said they have blocked more than 26 million dollars in assets held by Al Qaeda and by Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers while foreign nations have frozen at least 17 million dollars more.

A White House document named Al Barakaat’s founder as Shaykh Ahmed Nur Jimale, saying he was closely linked to Bin Laden and had used his group’s 60 offices in Somalia and 127 offices elsewhere around the world to "transmit funds, intelligence and instructions to terrorist cells."

It said Al Taqwa was a network of companies in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, the Bahamas and Italy controlled by Youssef Nada, a naturalised Italian citizen. It said Al Taqwa provided investment advice and money transfers for Al Qaeda "and other radical Islamic groups."

In his speech at the Treasury Department’s financial crimes nerve centre, Bush noted he has warned foreign banks that the United States will take action against them if they refuse to freeze Al Qaeda-related assets. (REUTERS)

US panel to urge intelligence shakeup: Post

WASHINGTON, Nov 8: A high-level presidential commission plans to recommend putting the Pentagon’s three largest intelligence-collection agencies under the control of the CIA, The Washington Post reported today.

The move, which would be the largest overhaul of the US intelligence community in decades, is aimed at consolidating programs and reducing rivalries within a massive bureaucracy that currently involves 12 separate agencies, the newspaper said, citing sources familiar with the panel’s findings.

The three agencies that would be transferred to the director of central intelligence, according to the Post report, are the national security agency, which eavesdrops on communications worldwide the national reconnaissance office, which manages intelligence satellites and the national imagery and mapping agency, which handles imagery intelligence systems and mapping.

The Commission, created by US President George W Bush in May and chaired by former White House National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, plans to submit its report to the President later this month, the Post said.

The panel’s conclusions have taken on added significance in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, which exposed serious shortcomings in the country’s intelligence operations, the newspaper said.

The Post said the house of representatives and senate intelligence committees are expected to support the Scowcroft panel’s recommendations, as these bodies have been pushing for greater authority for the CIA Director over intelligence collection.

But it said the Pentagon is expected to strongly oppose the moves, which would take away its oversight of the multibillion-dollar bureaucracies.

The agencies, whose budgets are classified, account for nearly half the 30 billion dollars spent by the Government on intelligence each year and dwarf the CIA’s 3.5 billion dollars budget, the Post said, citing congressional intelligence sources. (REUTERS)

Taliban envoy regrets Pak ban on briefings

ISLAMABAD, Nov 8: Afghanistan’s Ambassador to Pakistan Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef has expressed regret over Pakistan’s ban on his daily press briefings, saying he was being denied the opportunity to present his Government’s view.

Mr Zaeef told reporters at his residence last night that Pakistan was discriminating against the Taliban by denying him an opportunity to express his regime’s point of view, while the United States was allowed to issue bulletins against the regime in Pushto in Peshawar. "This kind of discrimination is beyond comprehension," he said.

"If we are banned, then the US should also be banned. We only presented our story of victimization to the world. We are getting the sympathies of the world and chances of peace are increasing."

Mr Zaeef said his daily press conference used to benefit Pakistan and the world as the real face of the Americans was being exposed and the people across the world used to come to know the hard facts about the bombings in Afghanistan.

He said the US was indulging in propaganda of high order against the Taliban by publishing literature from the American consulate in Peshawar using foul language. "If Pakistan has stopped my press conference under the diplomatic norms, why not the same rules are applied to the Americans," he asked

He claimed that the US had used all the weapons from its arsenal but had failed to achieve any objective. "The Americans have boasted that they would completely destroy us but events have proved that all our military might is safe and intact, he said." (UNI)

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