History – An interview with Charles C. Mann
Monday, December 26th, 2005Indian Country – In this interview with Mann, author of the book ‘1491,’ focuses on the impact disease had in the European colonization of the Americas.
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Indian Country – In this interview with Mann, author of the book ‘1491,’ focuses on the impact disease had in the European colonization of the Americas.
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Sekai senso hanzai jiten – In the following careful resumÈ essay, the author concentrates on the organization and function of Unit 731.
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BBC – In 430BC, during the Peloponnesian war against their great rival Sparta, the people of Athens were hit by a deadly disease that has defied diagnosis to this day.
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New York Times – Another review of the book ‘1491,’ which amongst the many topics it covers shows how the native population of the Americas was devasted by diseases brought from Europe.
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Washington Post – Reviews of the book version of 1491, which was published this month.
Seattle Times – “1491″: Discovering what Americas were like before Columbus.
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The Atlantic – Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought-an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe. What happened to this population? It was devastated by diseases carried by settlers from the Old World, including smallpox. A look at how disease can reshape a continent???
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Australian Broadcasting Corporation- The United States gave money and other benefits to former members of Japanese germ warfare Unit 731 two years after the end of World War II to obtain data on human experiments the unit conducted in China.
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Globe and Mail – Chinese survivors of germ warfare are still suffering six decades later. The Japanese army’s Unit 731 killed an estimated 250,000 people and left others diseased for life.
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Reuters – China criticized a Japanese court rejection of demands by Chinese plaintiffs for germ warfare compensation on Wednesday, allowing no let-up in tension between the neighbors over territory, regional influence and history.
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Associated Press – A Japanese high court has rejected appeals by 180 Chinese demanding compensation for damage caused by Japan’s World War II germ warfare program.
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Reuters – The Tokyo High Court was set to rule on Tuesday on a lawsuit by Chinese plaintiffs demanding that Japan’s government pay compensation and apologize for the activities of the Imperial Japanese Army’s biological warfare units including the infamous Unit 731.
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BBC – UK Government scientists in the Cold War considered spraying civilians inside closed rooms to immunise them against biological attack.
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California Literary Review – Former Russian spy Alexander Kouzminov describes the surreal world of biological espionage.
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Aljazeera – The latest round of anti-Japanese demonstrations in China may have
started to wind down, but one woman’s campaign against Japan’s wartime
legacy of biological warfare continues.
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Reuters – China will seek UNESCO World Heritage protection for the ruins of a Japanese germ warfare center during World War II called Unit 731, Xinhua news agency said on Tuesday.
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Boston College Chronicles – Prof. Jeanne Guillemin (Sociology), one of America’s foremost authorities on the history of biological weaponry, is a senior fellow in the Security Studies Program at MIT and author, most recently, of Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism, newly released by Columbia University Press. In a recent interview with Chronicle staff writer Mark Sullivan, Guillemin discussed the origins of, and misconceptions surrounding, bioterrorism.
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Radio Netherlands – Thirty years ago, for the first time in history, an entire category of weapons of mass destruction was banned. On 26 March 1975, the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention entered into force, ushering in an official prohibition on the use of these weapons. Now, three decades later, these weapons are in the news again because of their possible use by terrorists, while the treaty itself continues to reflect the Cold War era in which it was born.
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Associated Press – The South African state on Monday applied to the Constitutional Court for the retrial of Wouter Basson, the alleged apartheid-era head of germ warfare and mastermind of schemes to poison and sterilize black opponents.
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Stuff – Former KGB spy and expert on biological warfare, Alexander Kouzminov, who has been living quietly in New Zealand for a decade, tells his story again on Soviet plans to use biological weapons against the West.
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Daily Telegraph – Britain and America’s most guarded germ warfare secrets have been known to the Russians for decades and spies continue to operate at the heart of the West’s biotechnology industry, a former KGB spymaster says today. Alexander Kouzminov also discloses that covert Soviet sabotage agents prepared secret sites where phials of lethal bacteria would be left, ready to poison western military establishments, civilian settlements and even assassinate political leaders in the event of war with the Soviet Union.
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Asia Times – A review of the book “A Plague Upon Humanity: The Hidden History of Japan’s Biological Warfare Program” by Daniel Barenblatt.
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San Franciso Chronicle – In 1950, government officials believed that serratia did not cause disease. That belief was later used as a justification for a secret post-World War II Army experiment that became a notorious disaster tale about the microbe. The Army used serratia to test whether enemy agents could launch a biological warfare attack on a port city such as San Francisco from a location miles offshore.
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The Guardian – The memories of Japanese biological attacks on China in the 1940s are still fresh. Many Chinese want an apology.
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Associated Press – A member of Japan’s Unit 731 in northeast China in the 1930s and ’40s, perhaps the most advanced biological weapons operation of its time, expresses his regret.
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Baltimore Sun – From 1949 to 1969, at the jittery height of the Cold War, the biowarriors in the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Division aton tested the nation’s vulnerability to covert germ warfare – and devised weapons for secret biological attacks if the United States chose to mount them.
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Naval War College Review – Another review of this book, from a military perspective.
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[Journal of the American Medical Association] – For decades, the characteristics of the virus that caused the largest recorded outbreak of any infectious disease in history have remained mysterious. But now scientists have unveiled important structural properties of a key viral protein that may help explain why the 1918 “Spanish” influenza pandemic was so devastating, killing 20 to 40 million individuals worldwide.
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Sydney Morning Herald – A documentary on germ warfare goes to the heart of the debate about weapons of mass destruction, writes Steve Meacham.
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New York Times – Book reviews of two books describing the past and future threats from influenza.
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Reuters – A look at the extensive biowarfare program conducted by Japan in World War II.
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Boston Globe – Another review of “The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History” which is about the 1918 influenza epidemic.
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San Francisco Chronicle – A review of the book “The Great Influenza,” about the 1918 flu.
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StrategyPage – A history of the use of biological weapons in warfare.
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