A salmonella outbreak that has sickened 810 Americans since early April is still ongoing, and may not be linked to tomatoes after all, federal health authorities said Friday.
Tomatoes still have the strongest association with the outbreak, said Patricia Griffin, of the Centers for Disease Control.
"We don't have any evidence that whatever the source is, it's been removed from the market," said Griffin, chief of the CDC's Enteric Diseases Epidemiology Branch, during a conference call with reporters.
But investigators are looking at other foods that might have been eaten along with raw tomatoes, especially produce items in foods commonly consumed by outbreak victims, such as pico de gallo, guacamole and fresh salsa.
Consumers were still getting sick as recently as June 15, just 12 days ago. On average, it takes 16 days to get laboratory confirmation of a food borne illness, Griffin said. That means it's too soon to tell if the outbreak is winding down.
For now, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not changed its advice about tomatoes. The FDA says that cherry and grape tomatoes and tomatoes on the vine are safe to eat, and that it's also OK to eat round red tomatoes and Roma, or plum tomatoes, from approved growing regions.
A license plate that touts “Hispanics Discovered Florida” may soon join the 109 specialty tags drivers can choose from.
The idea to celebrate the contributions of Hispanics came from National Hispanic Corporate Achievers, a Longwood group that sponsors minority job fairs. The plate would become a fundraising tool to support job and mentorship programs.
Danny Ramos, the group’s president, said the tag’s message is about cultural pride for Florida’s 3.6 million Hispanics — even if not all of Latin American or Spanish descent identify with the term.
“Every community wants to be recognized for its contributions to society,” Ramos said. “I think this is just part of our assimilation process and our acceptance in Florida.”
A preliminary concept for the plate seeks to unify Hispanics by going back to their historical roots — when Spaniards colonized the peninsula before the arrival of English-speaking settlers.
One concept features the image of a Spanish galleon and the date 1513 — the year Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon first landed in what is now Florida.
Some Florida tags already recognize racial and ethnic groups. One is dedicated to the memory of civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Others include American Indian tribes.
The Hispanic-tag proposal is being reviewed by Florida highway officials. It also has the support of state Sen. Gary Siplin, a Democrat in a district with many Hispanic residents.
Bill Clinton is so bitter about Barack Obama's victory over his wife Hillary that he has told friends the Democratic nominee will have to beg for his wholehearted support...
The Telegraph has learned that the former president's rage is still so great that even loyal allies are shocked by his patronising attitude to Mr Obama, and believe that he risks damaging his own reputation by his intransigence.
A senior Democrat who worked for Mr Clinton has revealed that he recently told friends Mr Obama could "kiss my ass" in return for his support.
You keep hearing democrats say how beautiful ANWR is and that we can not destroy it. Well Pam has some pictures of ANWR and the area we would be drilling. You be the judge would it be ok if we drill here?
And as you can tell from this picture the caribou are really bothered by drilling
What are the thinking? First Abu Qatada Bin Ladens right hand man in Britain. Now another....
Secret negotiations have taken place to arrange the release from a British jail of one of al-Qaeda’s most important operatives in Europe, The Times has learnt.
The prisoner, who can be identified only as U, is expected to be released from the high-security wing at Long Lartin jail next week.
Appeal Court judges ruled in April that the man, a 45-year-old Algerian veteran of al-Qaeda’s Afghan training camps, should be freed on bail. But discussions between security agencies and U’s lawyers became deadlocked over the conditions restricting his movements and whom he can meet when he leaves prison.
The authorities are understood to have sought bail terms more stringent than the 22-hour curfew imposed on the radical cleric Abu Qatada when he was freed last week. These conditions would require U to spend all his time indoors.
I have covered the Imam Musa who this man learned under before HERE. You will see why he wanted to hide his connections.
A Southeast Washington man who did not disclose his Muslim name on an application for a job as a private security guard at Andrews Air Force Base was convicted yesterday of making a false statement.
Darrick Jackson, 38, left his Muslim name off the application, prosecutors said, to conceal his ties to a local imam known for inflammatory comments.
Jackson, whose first trial ended last year with a hung jury, was tried again this week in federal court in Greenbelt. After deliberating for about a day and a half, the jury found Jackson guilty.
He faces up to five years in prison. U.S. District Judge Deborah K. Chasanow, who presided over the trial, is scheduled to sentence Jackson on Sept. 22.
Jackson was trying to avoid being linked to Abdul Alim Musa, prosecutors said. Musa has led a mosque in Southeast for almost 20 years and is known for his provocative comments about the United States, Israel and other subjects.
NEW YORK (AP) — In March 2003, Zeinab Taleb-Jedi was a middle-aged widow who found herself trapped in a cold, dusty bunker in Iraq as invading U.S. forces began blowing up buildings and inflicting casualties all around her.
"The noise was overwhelming and frightening," the Iran-born U.S. citizen said in a statement recounting the air raids around Camp Ashraf, a stronghold for Iranian exiles about 60 miles north of Baghdad. "The attacks terrified me."
Taleb-Jedi, 52, escaped serious harm. But more than five years later, she remains stuck in legal limbo in New York, facing federal terrorism charges labeling her a leader of a militant group advocating the violent overthrow of the Iranian government.
Her largely overlooked arrest and protracted prosecution have outraged civil rights advocates, who accuse federal authorities of trampling free speech by overzealously enforcing laws against providing material support to terrorist groups.
Defense attorney Justine Harris has questioned why "the government would want to put this woman in jail for associating with a group whose goal is regime change in Iran, arguably a central tenet of our own foreign policy."
Taleb-Jedi has been linked to the People's Mujahedeen Organization of Iran, a group designated a terrorist organization by the State Department in 1997. Prosecutors say she became an English teacher in 1999 at the organization's Iraq headquarters, Camp Ashraf, and that two informants have since identified her as a member of a leadership council.
In a pending motion to dismiss the case, Harris claims the government has never specified how her client purportedly supported terrorism, "other than teaching English — itself an entirely innocuous act."
And apparently he is still on the police payroll :)
If the Taliban catches an American spy, they slit the informer's throat. If we catch a pro-Taliban spy, he gets a slap on the wrist after getting a letter from a Muslim pressure group urging leniency. Who says we're winning this war?
Last month, Taliban fighters claimed to have killed a "female U.S. spy" for helping American forces in Afghanistan. Once all the evidence against the alleged spy was gathered, they slit her throat with a knife.
Compare that with the kid glove treatment of Sgt. Muhammad Weiss Rasool, a Muslim cop in the nation's capital who tipped off the target of an FBI terrorism investigation into a pro-Taliban mosque.
Despite his arrest, confession and recent conviction in federal court, Rasool, an Afghan immigrant, will do no jail time and will continue to collect a paycheck from taxpayers pending the results of an internal-affairs probe by the Fairfax County Police Department outside Washington.
Rasool took an oath to protect this country several years ago when he joined the FCPD, which is the largest force in Virginia and a key partner with the FBI in investigating major terror cases in the Washington area, including the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon.
But Rasool put his religion ahead of his adopted country when he alerted a fellow member of his mosque that he was under federal surveillance. At his Muslim brother's request, he searched a police database and confirmed that FBI agents were tailing him.
When agents went to arrest the target early one morning, they found him and his family already dressed and destroying evidence. They knew they had a mole and worked back through the system to find Rasool.
That's when agents discovered the police sergeant had breached their database at least 15 times to look up names of other contacts, including relatives, to see if they showed up on the terrorist watch list. (As part of post-9/11 data-sharing, local police now have access to classified federal case files on terrorists maintained within the NCIC, or National Crime Information Center system.)
Rasool's actions "damaged the integrity of the NCIC system and jeopardized at least one federal investigation," U.S. prosecutors said in court papers filed last month. "The defendant's actions could have placed federal agents in danger."
Rasool, 31, at first claimed he didn't know the terrorist target. He confessed only after hearing a recording of his message for the suspect, who was a cleric in his local Taliban-sympathizing mosque. Rasool finally pleaded guilty to illegally searching a federal database.
Despite his subsequent conviction, however, Fairfax County has left him on the force, pending the outcome of an internal investigation. The leniency afforded Rasool is unprecedented, given how he copped to the crime – and not just any crime, but one that betrayed his fellow officers and country.
It also contrasts starkly with the recent handling of other Arab and Muslim government employees caught breaching classified databases.
The city of Rochester, N.Y., for example, summarily fired a Muslim 911 operator, Nadire Zenelaj, well before she was formally charged last month with illegally searching the names of hundreds of friends in the terrorist watch list. And as part of a federal plea deal, Lebanese national Nada Prouty resigned from the U.S. government after confessing she accessed a restricted FBI database to see if relatives were being investigated for terrorist activities.
Unlike these alleged spies, however, Rasool has a powerful patron in Washington -- the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which lobbied on his behalf during his prosecution.
"I have always found Sgt. Rasool eager to promote a substantive relationship between the Fairfax County Police Department and the local Muslim community," wrote CAIR Governmental Affairs Coordinator Corey Saylor in a letter to the federal judge, who ended up denying prosecutors the jail time they requested for Rasool. (He got off lightly with a fine and two years probation.)
Indeed, Rasool acted as CAIR's representative on the police force, and even worked with the group to kill a successful counterterror-training program within the department.
