6,000-year-old dirty pots show
that humans used local spice


Thank God for bad Stone Age chefs, says archaeologist Hayley Saul at the University of York.

“We like dirty pots. People who can’t cook very well," she said. "They burn food onto their pots. That’s what we’re after.”

It’s from those charred remnants of prehistoric dinners that she and her colleagues isolated the first evidence of a spice used in cooking.

They found microscopic traces of garlic mustard in crusts on 6,000-year-old pots found in Germany and Denmark.

Garlic mustard grows wild today throughout Europe and western Asia. And it’s an invasive species in North America.

“The leaves smell like garlic, but the seeds taste like mustard,” Ms. Saul explained. “Hence the name garlic mustard.”

Prehistoric use of spices has been hard to study because plants decompose quickly and are not usually preserved.

But when plant cells decay, they leave behind petrified outlines of themselves in silica.

Studying these outlines, Ms. Saul found modern garlic mustard seed was an excellent match.

She said these early Europeans were using garlic mustard seed to flavor soups of fish or game meat and starchy plants.

Compared to the other ingredients in the soup, she said they “have pretty much no other nutritional value. Basically, its taste value is all it’s got going for it.”

That’s why she considers it a spice.

Ms. Saul added that there have been older finds of seeds and plants that may have been used for flavoring but none found in cooked food.

“The thing that makes our results quite interesting is that because we’re working on pottery residues, we can relate the spice use to an actual culinary use.”

And it suggests that, rather than just cooking to fill bellies, people were cooking for flavor, even 6,000 years ago.

That’s right about at the time that cultures in the region were changing from hunting and gathering to farming.

According to Ms. Saul, there’s evidence that the use of spices migrated along with the arrival of agriculture.

In the Americas, chili peppers were among the first domesticated plants. That culinary breakthrough happened around the same time, about 6,000 years ago, according to retired University of Missouri anthropologist Deborah Pearsall.

“It’s not surprising that people eating kind of a bland diet of domesticated plants would be interested in spices,” she said.

Ms. Pearsall was part of a group that made that discovery by looking at microscopic fossils from the New World like Ms. Saul and her team did in the Old World.

She said the new research opens up the use of these tiny fossils to discover how human ancestors around the world used plants for cooking as well as medicine.

For Ms. Saul, her spice find suggests that people back then were remarkably sophisticated.

“I like the idea that people are just being incredibly creative,” she said. “I do really like the idea that the knowledge that people had in prehistory was very complex. There were so many plants, and so many properties to all of these different foods that people were manipulating to really enhance their cooking.”



Military panel is considering
the fate of terrorist major


The jury is now deliberating in the trial of U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan, accused of murdering 13 people in a shooting spree at Fort Hood, Texas in November 2009.  The judge turned the case over to the panel, as it is called in military courts, after the prosecution completed its closing statement.  The defendant, who is representing himself, declined to speak.

Isolated in a room in a heavily guarded building at Fort Hood, the panel members are now going over the evidence against Nidal Hasan.  There is no evidence to contradict the prosecution case because Hasan, representing himself, offered none in his defense and openly admitted that he had done the shooting.

In order to show premeditation, which is necessary for conviction on the capital murder charge, the prosecution provided evidence that Hasan had purchased the murder weapon and practiced with it well in advance of the attack.  They also showed he had been motivated by radical Muslims who preach violent jihad against anyone they consider an enemy of Islam.  The presiding judge, Col. Taraaa Osborn, imposed some restrictions, but did allow evidence of Hasan's recent exposure to radical Islam through Internet searches.

The compiled evidence showed that this was a well-planned, jihad-motivated attack, according to Jeffrey Addicott, a military law expert at the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas.

"The government did say in their closing argument today that he was motivated by jihad to engage in these murders.  There is overwhelming evidence to back up that contention," said Addicott.

A few days ago, the prosecution and Hasan agreed on a definition of jihad that could be given to the jury.  It includes the idea of fighting violently against non-believers and a guarantee that anyone killed while carrying out jihad will have a place in paradise.

In order to convict Hasan of the capital murder charge, which carries the death penalty, the jury must make a unanimous decision.  A three-fourths agreement is sufficient for other charges.

Addicott says that if the panel convicts Hasan of the capital charge, it will then move on to the trial's punishment phase.


Polio breaks out of Somalia
to infect Ethiopian child


A polio outbreak on the Horn of Africa has spread to Ethiopia.

An 18-month-old child in the Warder district of Ethiopia is the country’s first polio case since 2008.

Warder district is just across the border from Somalia, where 108 polio cases have been reported this year.

Carol Pandak heads Rotary International’s polio eradication program.

“It’s not surprising that the virus is spreading. This area has been considered high risk because of its proximity to Somalia," said Pandak.

A Somali refugee camp in Kenya has also seen 12 cases of the paralyzing disease this year.

The outbreak began in Somalia in May, when a 2-year-old girl came down with the disease, the country’s first since 2007.

But this strain of the virus did not originate there, Pandak says.

“That virus comes from West Africa. And so, we need to deal with the remaining endemic countries because that’s where the virus originates. And so, you have to deal with both at the same time," she said.

Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan are the last three countries where the polio virus is still endemic.


Computer glitch shuts down
major U.S. stock exchange


Trading in a large part of the U.S. stock market came to a halt for much of Thursday after an unexplained issue shut down trading of NASDAQ-listed securities, the latest black eye for the U.S. securities trading business.
 
The abrupt halt shortly after noon caused trading in shares of Apple, Google, Microsoft and more than 3,000 other U.S. companies to stop.
 
NASDAQ resumed trading at around 3:25 p.m. EDT, ending a roughly 3-hour, 11-minute shutdown that was the longest in recent memory.
 
“Any brokerage firm gets paid by executing orders,” said Sal Arnuk, co-head of equity trading at Themis Trading in Chatham, New Jersey. “So yes, we are frustrated, and this hurts us, it hurts the market and it hurts public confidence.”
 
All traffic through NASDAQ had stopped at 12:14:03 p.m., and the exchange and its larger rival, the New York Stock Exchange, said all trades executed between then and 12:23:31 p.m. would stand.
 
Trading in a single stock resumed at about 3 p.m., and other stocks followed. NASDAQ's own stock, which had been up 0.8 percent prior to the halt, traded down as much as 5.4 percent after trading resumed.
 
NASDAQ blamed a problem with distributing stock price quotes for the shutdown. A source familiar with the matter described the problem as a data feed issue.
 
During the shutdown, trading of shares not listed on NASDAQ continued, but transactions could not be executed on the NASDAQ platform. Options trading was also halted.
 
“I can't remember this happening in recent memory,” said Christopher Nagy, president of consultancy firm KOR Trading and a former head of trading at TD Ameritrade.
 
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said it was in touch with the exchanges with Chairman Mary Jo White overseeing developments from her home office near New York City.
 
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said President Barack Obama had also been briefed about the disruption.
 
The interruption means that investors had very limited  market access to trade such familiar names as Apple, Inc., Facebook, Inc., Google, Inc., and Microsoft Corp. In all, NASDAQ lists about 3,200 companies.
 
“As we continue to eliminate human beings from the execution of security trading, this is the problem you run into,” said Stephen Massocca, managing director of Wedbush Equity Management LLC in San Francisco. “These events are going to take place, given the level of automation.”

The outage was the latest black eye for NASDAQ, which in May agreed to pay $10 million, the largest penalty ever levied against a stock exchange, to settle SEC civil charges over mistakes in handling the Facebook initial offering.
 
James Angel, a Georgetown University finance professor who also sits on the board of rival exchange operator Direct Edge, said NASDAQ appeared to take steps to ensure that trading reopen in an orderly fashion and with correct pricing.
 
“We can live with the market being closed for a little bit, but we can't live with bad pricing,” he said. “It's far better to have the market shut down and take its time re-opening, than to have what happened with the Facebook incident. It looks like they've learned their lesson.”
 
William Lefkowitz, options strategist at National Securities in New York, said options trading in such companies as International Business Machines Corp. dried up during the halt. But he said the reopening was “very orderly and liquidity is back to normal. It is almost like it did not happen.”

 Tuesday, a technical problem at Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., resulted in a flood of erroneous orders being sent to U.S. equity options markets.
 
Two weeks earlier, on Aug. 6, stock exchange operator BATS Global Markets was hit with a nearly hour-long outage.
 
Last year, a trading blowup at Knight Capital Group, Inc., was a contributing factor to the eventual sale of that company.
 
“The frequency of technical issues affecting trading is a wake-up call to business leaders in capital markets,” said Lev Lesokhin, executive vice president of Cast, a specialist in business software analysis. “They need to carefully scrutinize the structural integrity of their software systems.”
 
Other trading venues were also affected by Thursday's outage, and several dark pools, which execute orders anonymously, were forced to stop trading, according to several market participants.
 
Thursday's outage could cause problems for NASDAQ at the SEC, which has recently cracked down on stock exchanges to beef up their compliance with regulations and make sure they are policing themselves.


Manning sex-change case
a first for the U.S. military


Bradley Manning says wants to live as woman named Chelsea. Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier sentenced to 35 years in military prison for the biggest breach of classified documents in the nation's history, said Thursday he is female and wants to live as a woman named Chelsea.
 
Manning, 25, launched an unprecedented bid to get female hormone treatment in a military prison a day after he was sentenced for leaking documents to the WikiLeaks Web site.
 
“As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning, I am a female,” Manning said in the statement read by anchorwoman Savannah Guthrie on NBC News' “Today” show.
 
During the sentencing phase of Manning's court-martial for leaking more than 700,000 secret documents, defense attorneys pointed out that the soldier suffered from gender identity disorder. A psychologist testified Manning had a difficult time adjusting to the hypermasculine environment of a combat zone.
 
Manning said in the statement that he wished to begin receiving hormone therapy while serving his sentence in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
 
A spokeswoman said the Army did not provide hormone therapy or gender-reassignment surgery, but that military inmates have access to mental health professionals, including a psychiatrist, psychologist, social workers and behavioral science specialists.
 
“Given the way that I feel and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible,” Manning said in the statement. “I also request that starting today you refer to me by my new name and use the feminine pronoun.”
 
Manning's lawyer David Coombs said on the TV program he expected his client to get a pardon from U.S. President Barack Obama. Manning, who was convicted last month at Fort Meade, Maryland, on 20 charges, including espionage and theft, could be eligible for parole in seven years.
 
During the trial, Coombs had argued that Manning had been increasingly isolated and under intense stress when he leaked the files, and that his superiors had ignored warning signs.
 
Coombs said his client was not seeking gender-reassignment surgery, but he would press Fort Leavenworth to provide hormone therapy for Manning.
 
“I'm hoping that Fort Leavenworth will do the right thing and provide that. If Fort Leavenworth does not, then I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure that they are forced  to do so,” Coombs said.
 
Asked if Manning wanted to be sent to a women's prison, Coombs said no.
 
“I think the ultimate goal is to be comfortable in her skin and to be the person that she's never had an opportunity to be,” he said.
 
Coombs said he was not worried about Manning's safety in a military prison since inmates there were first-time offenders who wanted to complete their sentences and get out.
 
Experts generally view military prisons as safer than civilian prisons since the inmates are accustomed to hierarchy and discipline.
 
Manning had not wanted his sexual identity issues to become public, but they did after his arrest in 2010, Coombs said.
 
“Now that it is, unfortunately you have to deal with it in a public manner,” he said.
 
A psychiatrist, Navy Reserve Capt. David Moulton, testified during Manning's trial that the soldier suffered from gender dysphoria, or wanting to be the opposite sex, as well as narcissism and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
 
Geoffrey Corn, a military law expert at the South Texas College of Law in Houston, called Manning's bid for hormone treatment the first of its kind for the military. Openly gay members were barred from serving until the Pentagon's “don't ask, don't tell” policy was repealed in 2011.
 
“We don't have any precedent for the application of military medical care for elective gender reassignment therapy,” he said.
 
Corn was skeptical that Manning would get approval for hormone therapy since federal courts have traditionally given the military deference for its life and activities.
 
Chase Stangio, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union's Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Project, said in a statement that the Army's saying it did not provide hormone therapy raised serious constitutional issues.
 
Courts have consistently found that denying medical care for gender dysphoria to prisoners based on blanket exclusions violates the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which bars cruel and unusual punishment, Stangio said.