ebola crisis in monrovia...,

bbc |  There are conflicting reports over the fate of 17 Ebola patients who vanished after a quarantine centre in the Liberian capital Monrovia was looted.

An angry mob attacked the centre in the city's densely populated West Point township on Saturday evening.

A senior health official said all of the patients were being moved to another medical facility.

But a reporter told the BBC that 17 had escaped while 10 others were taken away by their families.

More than 400 people are known to have died from the virus in Liberia, out of a total of 1,145 deaths recorded by the World Health Organization.

Assistant Health Minister Tolbert Nyenswah said protesters had been unhappy that patients were being brought in from other parts of the capital.

Other reports suggested the protesters had believed Ebola was a hoax and wanted to force the quarantine centre to close.

The attack at the Monrovia centre is seen as a major setback in the struggle to halt the outbreak, says the BBC's Will Ross, reporting from Lagos.

Health experts say that the key to ending the Ebola outbreak is to stop it spreading in Liberia, where ignorance about the virus is high and many people are reluctant to cooperate with medical staff.

black face chronicles: captain ron johnson not in charge in ferguson...,

Start video at the 2:00 minute mark.

he spotted the cigars: chief struggley set the stage for darren "barney fife" wilson to walk...,

vox |  In the 1980s, a pair of Supreme Court decisions set up a framework for determining when deadly force by cops is reasonable. Those decisions have governed how state laws are applied. Furthermore, many agencies simply use identical standards to the Supreme Court's for their own use-of-force policies — though some departments don't let officers use deadly force even when the Court decisions say they'd be allowed to.

Constitutionally, "police officers are allowed to shoot under two circumstances," says Klinger. The first circumstance is "to protect their life or the life of another innocent party" — what departments call the "defense-of-life" standard. The second circumstance is to prevent a suspect from escaping, but only if the officer has probable cause to think the suspect's committed a serious violent felony.

cops can't shoot every felon who tries to escape

The logic behind the second circumstance, says Klinger, comes from a Supreme Court decision called Tennessee vs. Garner. That case involved a pair of police officers who shot a 15-year-old boy as he fled from a burglary. (He'd stolen $10 and a purse from a house.) The Court ruled that cops couldn't shoot every felon who tried to escape. But, as Klinger says, "they basically say that the job of a cop is to protect people from violence, and if you've got a violent person who's fleeing, you can shoot them to stop their flight."

Some police departments' policies only allow deadly force in the first circumstance: defense of life. Others have policies that also allow deadly force to prevent escape in certain cases, within the limits of the Supreme Court decision.

Does the convenience store robbery matter?

Shortly after releasing the documents that identified Brown as the primary suspect in a convenience-store robbery, the Ferguson Police Department clarified that Wilson had not known that Brown was a robbery suspect when he made "initial contact" with Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson. (Instead, the department says, Wilson stopped the teenagers because they were walking in the middle of the street.)

That phrasing doesn't make it clear whether or not Wilson believed Brown to be a robbery suspect when he started to shoot at him. If he did, it might then be up to the investigators and county prosecutor McCulloch to decide whether a "strong-arm robbery," as the Ferguson Police Department described the incident, counts as a violent felony. If they decide it does, that will go some way toward a legal justification for Wilson's action. On the other hand, Wilson would only be able to claim that he was justified if Brown was fleeing — which eyewitnesses say he wasn't.

It's most likely, however, that the whole question is moot. From the Ferguson Police Department's statements on the afternoon of August 15th, it doesn't sound like Wilson even knew about the robbery at all. In that case, there's no way for him to claim that he was justified in keeping a violent felon from fleeing, because he didn't even know Brown was a suspect in a crime at all.

Wilson could instead, however, claim "defense of life" — that he feared for his life when Brown (according to his story) assaulted him in his car. In that case, the next question will be whether it was reasonable for him to be afraid of Brown.

failed black political leadership: st. louis missouri is and always has been hypersegregated....,

Skip to 6:40 and listen to Dorrien Warren

time |  St. Louis is a region of division: The depopulated, deindustrialized city (mostly African American) is legally divided from the far more prosperous (mostly white) county, with the city ardently seeking a reunion that the county vehemently spurns. North St. Louis city (largely African American) is estranged from south St. Louis city (mostly white) in a city that is now 48% African American. The maze of suburbs that make up north St. Louis county, where Ferguson is, is mostly African American and estranged from the maze of suburbs that make up south and west St. Louis counties, which are mostly white.

These interlocking networks of fragmentation that characterize the St. Louis, frequently deplored but diligently maintained, have managed to keep African Americans here contrarily concentrated and diffuse, politically empowered (there have been African American mayors, police chiefs, etc.) but also politically contained, and, in many respects, isolated from the cultural and political currents of the region. There remains in St. Louis a sense that African Americans are strangers in a strange land. The region is what sociologists call “hyper-segregated.”

Enter this iron triangle of control, neglect and racial alienation, and one uncovers several recent racial narratives that should have warned St. Louisans about what was coming—narratives about crossing the racial divide here. Metrolink, St. Louis’s light rail system, completed its second line in 2006. It provided African Americans of East St. Louis, one of the poorest cities in the country, and of north St. Louis county much easier access to the St. Louis Galleria Mall and the central cultural corridor of the city, including the hip Delmar Loop district. Concurrently, the Galleria has since seen an astronomical increase in shoplifting, and there has also been an increase in general crime and hooliganism in the Delmar Loop. This has led many to think that the Metrolink, as it has crossed racial boundaries, has enabled African American teenaged crime. This vicious cycle of young African Americans’ antisocial hostility and acting out, hardly unique to African Americans or even to Americans, and ever increasing white fear and barricade building, have intensified racial tensions, as people find the problem intractable and increasingly impossible to discuss honestly. The current riot in Ferguson is largely a war between police and the young African Americans who think cops exist mostly to prevent African American from harming whites.

hormones, adolescent stupidity and sheer boredom...,

NYTimes |  The Highway Patrol officer named to take over security in Ferguson, Capt. Ronald S. Johnson, also expressed his displeasure with how the information had been released. Captain Johnson, who grew up in the area, had been brought in by Gov. Jay Nixon on Thursday to restore peace after days of confrontations between demonstrators and the police in riot gear and military-style vehicles. The captain said he had not been told that the authorities planned to release the video of the robbery along with the name of the officer. But he sought to calm people down, saying, “In our anger, we have to make sure that we don’t burn down our own house.”

Protests on the streets Friday night started peacefully. Cars clogged streets as horns blared and music played. Hundreds of demonstrators clutched signs and chanted slogans, but many others danced to music. On one street, six people danced atop a delivery truck.

Although the police presence was limited, Captain Johnson walked through the community, taking photographs with children and offering hugs and handshakes. “I’m pleased with how it’s going,” he said early in the night.

But tensions rose around midnight when the police released a small amount of tear gas as they backed away from the crowd. Some protesters threw rocks and other objects, according to media reports. Some demonstrators fired weapons into the air.

Captain Johnson told The Associated Press that the police backed off to try to ease the tension. “We had to evaluate the security of the officers there and also the rioters,” he told The A.P. “We just felt it was better to move back.”

Using people and vehicles, protesters quickly blocked a major thoroughfare here, prompting the police to return and form a barricade of their own. For a time, the protesters and the police faced off in the road. The police urged protesters to go home, and demonstrators, many of them chanting slogans like “We ready for y’all,” approached the officers. Some tossed glass bottles toward the police.

ferguson is mostly black, so why it its government so white?

slate |  Ferguson, Missouri, is a majority-black city governed mostly by whites. The mayor is white. The police chief is white. The police force is 94 percent white. Only one of its six city council members is black. These facts, as much as anything, have shaped the protests over the police shooting of Michael Brown. Ferguson, with a 67 percent black population, is a place where the largest community has little political voice.

Why is that? David Kimball, a political science professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, has studied the dynamics of race and elections in St. Louis proper. He says that the pattern in Ferguson is common throughout the city’s inner-ring suburbs, where blacks have gradually replaced whites in recent decades.

The issue boils down to who votes. Ferguson is roughly two-thirds black, but compared with the city’s whites, the community is younger, poorer (the city has a 22 percent poverty rate overall), and, as the New York Times recently wrote, somewhat transient, prone to moving “from apartment to apartment.” All of these factors make black residents less likely to go to the polls, especially in low-turnout municipal elections. And so whites dominate politically. “The entire mobilization side of it is what accounts for the difference,” Kimball said.

chief struggley blames "outside agitators" for his tactical failures and throws chief delmar under the bus....,

slate | Indeed, the whole interview is a chance for Jackson to reiterate that the cops are doing the right thing. Here's how it ends:

HANNITY: You are certain that an altercation occurred and a shot was fired within the car, meaning Mr. Brown was in the car at some point?

JACKSON: He was, he was -- yes.

HANNITY: In other words, he wasn't handcuffed in the car. He went in the car of his own volition.

JACKSON: Yes.

HANNITY: And do you believe there was a struggle for that gun?

JACKSON: That's what the county police chief said in his opening statement. He's the one that took the -- his officers are the ones that took the statement from both the officer and the witnesses.

HANNITY: What about the unrest that has taken place now in your city? Do you believe a lot of the looting and a lot of what has happened is a result of outside agitators, as some have suggested, or do you think this is just a community angry at what happened?

JACKSON: No, it's a lot of outside agitators that are causing the violence. We've had some -- several very peaceful protests. I mean, they're angry. They want -- they have questions they want answers to. And I understand that. I get that.

Outside agitators! That's a whip-smart line to use on Fox News, which ran so much footage of the New Black Panther Party's bumbling 2008 "protection" of a Philadelphia polling place, and the subsequent legal cases against the NPP, that the Panthers practically qualified for the Screen Actors Guild.

Hannity's warm-milk interview gets at a division in conservative America. I mentioned that the reporter who's been on the "militarized police" beat the longest is Radley Balko. (While at the Cato Institute, in 2006, he published a paper on paramilitary police raids.) And in a popular column for National Review, Charles C. Cooke argued that the conservatives trying to change the subject in Ferguson to black-on-black crime are making themselves and their peers sound callous. "The question of who guards the guardians pertains now as keenly as it ever has," he wrote. "The Right’s answer should be 'we do' — and we’re happy to hang them high if we know that they have transgressed."

chief struggley has permanently sharted okeydoke overseer britches...,

Chief Struggly and the department that couldn't shoot straight is the gift that keeps on giving for solving the escalating crisis of over-militarized police departments acting like incompetent occupation forces in occupied enemy territories.

Chief Jon "boo-boo in his britches" Delmar reading and believing the reports handed up to him through Ferguson Chief Struggly.

Sistah Tiffany Mitchell putting the lie to all of this gas via her eyewitness account to Lawrence O'Donnell.  Fist tap Ken.

not rocket science: the thing that I am first, is a man....,

reuters |  Missouri's governor Jay Nixon hours earlier put Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson in charge of security in the town of Ferguson after almost a week of clashes between protesters and police firing tear gas and stun grenades. Dozens of people have been arrested amid looting, shooting and vandalism.

In a tactical U-turn, Johnson and a handful of black officers without body armor walked among thousands of protesters filling the streets of the mostly black St. Louis suburb, demanding justice for the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

"We just want to be able to come and demonstrate together without the fear of being shot. It's that simple," said 53-year-old protester Cat Daniels, an Iraq veteran. "What you see tonight is people coming together. When that kid was killed the hurt and the pain was real."

Mark Hall, a 21-year-old student, said: "I'm so happy they left us alone so we could prove that all we wanted was the opportunity to exercise our rights peacefully ... a chance to be heard."

how this struggly little bleener ever get to play at "protecting and serving"?

cbsnews |  Washington lawmakers let out a collective gasp on Thursday after seeing startling images of police officers decked out with combat gear and tanks to respond to largely peaceful protesters in Ferguson, Missouri. 

While there may have been some looters and violent individuals among the demonstrators who gathered to protest the killing of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown, the police looked more equipped to enter a war zone than a protest, liberal Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and conservative Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., agreed. Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement, "At a time when we must seek to rebuild trust between law enforcement and the local community, I am deeply concerned that the deployment of military equipment and vehicles sends a conflicting message."

"So much of the militarization of policing is fueled by federal programs, I think it's important for the federal government to take the lead here," ACLU criminal justice expert Kara Dansky told CBS News.

Already, Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., has produced legislation that would put some constraints on the federal program that allows the Pentagon to give police forces equipment for free. Johnson's bill represents just one step Washington could take to address an issue that he's been warning about for months.

"Something potentially sinister is happening across America, and we should stop and take notice before it changes the character of our country forever," Johnson co-wrote in a USA Today op-ed in March. "County, city and small-town police departments across the country are now acquiring free military-grade weapons that could possibly be used against the very citizens and taxpayers that not only fund their departments but who the police are charged with protecting."

The congressman made note of the several towns, and even at least one college (Ohio State University), that have acquired Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected vehicles (or MRAPs) in just the last few months thanks to the Pentagon's 1033 program. The program was approved by Congress in the 1990s and has since given police forces more than $4.3 billion worth of property such as MRAPs, pistols, automatic rifles, and flashbang grenades. 

"Why is there surplus, especially when the Defense Department is threatening to cut jobs anytime Congress talks about defense cuts as part of sequestration or the Budget Control Act?" Johnson asked in his op-ed. "The primary reason is that we're drawing down from two major equipment-laden wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and while some of this equipment is being destroyed in the war zone, at a loss of billions in American taxpayer dollars, much of it is now being returned to the U.S."

On top of receiving equipment directly from the 1033 program, police forces can buy equipment like drones and MRAPs with terrorism grants from the Department of Homeland Security. The department has doled out $34 billion in grants since the program started after 9/11. 

In addition to limiting transfers in the 1033 program, Johnson's bill would call for some accountability in the program. 

"One of the big issues that inspired this legislation is some of the smaller equipment, the assault weapons, were unaccounted for, they were given away to friends," Michael Shank of the Friends Committee on National Legislation told CBS News. "Just the accountability of these free weapons going to police chiefs and police forces was really problematic."

At one point, the office that oversees the 1033 program suspended the transfer of firearms to police forces because there were so many problems, the Associated Press reported last year, such as former military firearms being sold on eBay. In New York last year, lawmakers thought the job of tracking equipment from the 1033 program could be handled by an unpaid intern.

Johnson's bill would prohibit the Defense Department from giving any more equipment to an agency that couldn't certify the whereabouts of prior equipment it received. 

While Congress considers actions to reform the program, the administration could act on its own, Danksy said.

it's all about enhancing overseer safety in the occupied territories...,

firstlook |  Police militarization is increasingly aimed at stifling journalism as well. Like the arrests of Lowery and Reilly last night, Democracy Now‘s Amy Goodman and two of her colleagues were arrested while covering the 2008 St. Paul protests. As Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation (on whose board I sit) explained yesterday, militarization tactics “don’t just affect protesters, but also affect those who cover the protest. It creates an environment where police think they can disregard the law and tell reporters to stop filming, despite their legal right to do so, or fire tear gas directly at them to prevent them from doing their job. And if the rights of journalists are being trampled on, you can almost guarantee it’s even worse for those who don’t have such a platform to protect themselves.”

Ultimately, police militarization is part of a broader and truly dangerous trend: the importation of War on Terror tactics from foreign war zones onto American soil. American surveillance drones went from Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia into American cities, and it’s impossible to imagine that they won’t be followed by weaponized ones. The inhumane and oppressive conditions that prevailed at Guantanamo are matched, or exceeded, by the super-max hellholes and “Communications Management Units” now in the American prison system. And the “collect-it-all” mentality that drives NSA domestic surveillance was pioneered by Gen. Keith Alexander in Baghdad and by other generals in Afghanistan, aimed at enemy war populations. 

Indeed, much of the war-like weaponry now seen in Ferguson comes from American laws, such as the so-called “Program 1033,” specifically designed to re-direct excessive Pentagon property – no longer needed as foreign wars wind down – into American cities. As the Missouri Department of Public Safety proudly explains on its website, “the 1033 Program provides surplus DoD military equipment to state and local civilian law enforcement agencies for use in counter-narcotics and counter-terrorism operations, and to enhance officer safety.”

uhmurka's overseers(officers) sanitized, anonymized, militarized and errbody niggerized...,

NYTimes |  Despite persistent and increasingly angry calls from the public to release the officer’s name, Chief Jackson said the officer required protection after numerous death threats had been made. 

Computer hackers, saying they were outraged by police conduct, now have also joined the fray.

Anonymous, the loosely organized group of international hackers, said on Twitter that it had broken into Ferguson’s municipal computer system. It released details about city workers and posted photos of Jon Belmar, the chief of the St. Louis County police who is conducting the investigation into the shooting, as well as his wife, son and daughter. It also posted his address and phone number. The group threatened to bring down city, county and federal networks if the police overreacted to rallies and protests. 

On Wednesday night, scores of police officers in riot gear and in armored trucks showed up to disperse protesters who had gathered on the streets near the scene of the shooting. Some officers perched atop the vehicles with their guns trained on the crowds while protesters chanted, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” A police spokesman said that some demonstrators had thrown Molotov cocktails at officers and that some had tried to set fires. The police used tear gas on demonstrators, and some protesters said rubber bullets had been fired at them. Police said one officer appeared to have suffered a broken ankle after being hit by a brick.

The police made more than 10 arrests. Among those arrested was Antonio French, a St. Louis alderman, who had been documenting the protests on social media, his wife said on Twitter.

Two reporters covering the protests also said they had been arrested inside a McDonald’s for trespassing and later released without charges or an explanation. The reporters, Wesley Lowery of The Washington Post and Ryan J. Reilly of The Huffington Post, both said they had been handled roughly by the police.

right about now we're all looking dead at who and what you overseers are...,

WaPo |  The St. Louis suburb of Ferguson where the working-class, majority-black population has been clashing with law enforcement for the last three days has 53 commissioned police officers.

According to the city’s police chief, three of them are black.

These numbers matter not just for the terrible optics of white officers clutching tear gas canisters opposite black residents shouting back. They speak to a fundamental problem rooted deep in history and driving the perception of injustice in Ferguson today: This community isn’t represented in its own institutions of power.

For many decades, this was true in cities all over the country. Blacks were systematically excluded from good government jobs, civil service roles and their most visible ranks on police and fire forces — first through outright discrimination, then through more devious means. Police and fire departments in particular found all kinds of ways to block minorities, inviting lawsuits and the repeated scrutiny of the Department of Justice.

au contraire mon frere, it DOES represent EXACTLY who and what you are...,

WaPo |  Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D) called the situation in Ferguson, Mo.,  "deeply troubling" late Wednesday and announced he would change his schedule in order to visit the city on Thursday, signaling a new, more intense level of engagement than in previous days.

“The worsening situation in Ferguson is deeply troubling, and does not represent who we are as Missourians or as Americans," Nixon said in a statement. "While we all respect the solemn responsibility of our law enforcement officers to protect the public, we must also safeguard the rights of Missourians to peaceably assemble and the rights of the press to report on matters of public concern."

Nixon said he is "committed to ensuring the pain of last weekend’s tragedy does not continue to be compounded by this ongoing crisis. Once again, I ask that members of the community demonstrate patience and calm while the investigation continues, and I urge law enforcement agencies to keep the peace and respect the rights of residents and the press during this difficult time."

nothing short of an urban rebellion against a conspicuously corrupt just-us system?

csm |  Police are concerned about making a fellow officer and his family vulnerable to death threats made on social media and may be concerned that details of the autopsy could spark more civil unrest. But residents have credible claims in demanding to know information that would be available if the shooter weren’t a lawman.

The looting and mayhem in Ferguson, where a nearly all-white police force patrols the largely black St. Louis suburb, suggests deep frustration. Eyewitnesses have said that the officer pursued an injured Brown and shot him after he put his hands up in surrender. Police have done little to counter that narrative except to suggest there was a struggle for the officer's gun and a shot fired inside the cruiser. Amid that vacuum, questions about police transparency have only intensified.

Ferguson police are “are walking a tightrope of how much they should be releasing versus how much information they are releasing,” says Rob Kane, a policing expert at Drexel University in Philadelphia and coauthor of “Jammed Up: Bad Cops, Police Misconduct, and the New York City Police Department.”

“Police departments operate in an environment where they are often tried in the media, and where they have a very real concern about civil litigation, so that’s where it gets tricky,” Professor Kane adds. At the same time, “the police are teetering on the total loss of legitimacy, and it has to do with not releasing information that the public wants.”

As a result, he says, Ferguson is seeing “nothing short of an urban rebellion against the justice system.”

In a statement Tuesday, United States Attorney General Eric Holder warned Ferguson police that the department “should be prepared to complete a thorough and fair investigation in their own right…. Aggressively pursuing investigations such as this is critical for preserving trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve.”

it takes perfect timing to see the usually invisible face of systemic corruption

pitch |  Remarks made by Jackson County Circuit Court Judge Bryan Round during a sentencing hearing July 30 have raised the eyebrows of some legal-ethics experts.

Round was sentencing Nicholas Rose on convictions of careless and imprudent driving and disturbing the peace for an incident last year, in which Rose and several dozen stunt-bike riders were creating a traffic hazard on U.S. Highway 40, near Interstate 70.

According to transcripts of the hearing obtained by The Pitch, Round became angry after discovering that Rose was considering filing a civil lawsuit against the Kansas City Police Department. Rose believed that officer Donald Hubbard used excessive force during his arrest.

Round called Rose “a vulture” and said the defendant “played me for a fool,” according to the transcript. Round sentenced him to a two-week jail sentence and two years of probation.

“I can’t tell you how upset that information made me,” said Round, who was the attorney for the Kansas City Police Board for about eight years before becoming a judge. “I am going to impose a two week period of shock incarceration because I don’t think you get it. I just don’t think you get it.”

Several legal experts and local lawyers who reviewed the transcripts say the fact that a defendant is considering a civil lawsuit should never be a factor in a criminal proceeding.

“What the judge did was outrageous,” says Shaun Martin, a law professor at the University of San Diego School of Law. “You can’t sentence someone to prison just because they exercise their right to file a lawsuit. Filing a lawsuit … is expressly protected by the First Amendment.”

Round would not comment for this story. He didn’t say during the hearing how he learned of the potential civil lawsuit.

Rose’s encounter with Hubbard came six months before the officer shot and killed Kansas City firefighter Anthony Bruno during an altercation. The Pitch raised questions about that shooting in last week’s issue (“It Didn’t Need to End This Way,” August 7) and with the release of enhanced video of the fight.

Last week, in a separate case, Bruno’s family filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the Marriott Hotel and Hubbard, who was working off-duty at the hotel when he shot Bruno.

Round has been assigned to that case.

timing is everything...,

pitch |  What happened next has been widely reported and, thanks to a bystander's cellphone footage, seen. Two bullets from off-duty police officer Donald Hubbard's .40-caliber Glock ended Anthony Bruno's life a little after 2 a.m. December 1.

Hubbard had been working an overnight security shift at the Marriott Downtown Hotel, at 12th Street and Wyandotte (which shares an owner with the Muehlebach, on the opposite corner), when he was alerted to the taxi scuffle outside. He was on the hotel's 18th floor with another hotel security guard when the radio went off, he later told Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department investigators. He said someone asked him to check on the disturbance.

Following the department's inquiry, a grand jury in February cleared Hubbard of criminal wrongdoing. But scrutiny of his actions leading up to the shooting shows that the policeman broke with procedure in several key ways — ways that might have prevented the firefighter's death.

Experts who have testified in high-profile police-shooting cases nationwide have told The Pitch that videos and documents obtained by this newspaper show that Hubbard should not have found himself one-on-one with Bruno on the street — and that the confrontation did not require lethal force.

The video footage also shows that Bruno, who had been drinking and had struck both Hubbard and the driver in separate encounters, had several opportunities to avoid being shot.

By the time Hubbard arrived outside at the scene of the fare disagreement, Bruno had walked away and turned down that alley. The cab driver told Hubbard that Bruno had punched him. Witnesses indicated to the officer which direction Bruno had gone. Hubbard, against protocol, decided to pursue Bruno.

According to newly enhanced video footage not yet seen by the public, Hubbard caught up with Bruno a block east of the Muehlebach. When Bruno tried to run away, Hubbard grabbed him and forced him down to the ground. Three minutes later, Bruno was dead on the sidewalk, shot twice in the chest.

deep cooperation: the mammalian equivalent of honeybees?

nytimes |  Researchers have known for some time that wild dogs are exceptionally social and civic-minded. Among most group-living carnivores, big adults feed first, gulping down the choicest organs and leaving junior diners to scrounge through gristly leftovers. Among wild dogs, said Patrick R. Thomas, the curator of mammals at the Bronx Zoo, “it’s the exact opposite.”

“The adults let the puppies feed first,” he said. “It’s very peaceful to watch.” 

For puppies too young to leave the den, or for injured pack members unable to hunt, hale-bodied adults go further, provisioning the needy by regurgitating a portion of a recent meal.

Researchers have also known that wild dogs are so-called cooperative breeders. In any given pack of closely related animals, a single male and female will do the bulk of the reproducing, while the other half-dozen or so adults serve as guardians, babysitters, even wet nurses for the alpha pair’s pups. Family is family, after all. 

Yet researchers continue to be impressed by the depths of the dogs’ self-sacrificing behavior. In one recent study, Dr. Creel and his colleagues determined that the bigger a pack grew, the more efficiently it hunted and the greater the number of offspring it raised. However, the researchers were startled to see that not everyone benefited from the swelling ranks. 

“Big packs with lots of offspring turn out to have poor adult survival,” Dr. Creel said. The cost of regurgitating food for a surging number of pups, it seemed, exceeded the advantages of bringing down more prey. As a result, nonbreeding adults in big packs would gradually become malnourished and end up dying at a somewhat younger age than their peers in smaller clans. 

The dogs are “true altruists,” essentially willing to shorten their lives for the sake of the hive, Dr. Creel said, adding, “They’re even further along the line of evolving into the mammalian equivalent of honeybees than we thought.”

cooperative social networking key to helping microbes spread...,

sciencedaily |  Fresh discoveries about how bacteria co-operate with each other when causing infection could help scientists identify animal diseases that might transmit to people.

Bugs that can co-operate best with each other are most likely to be able to jump to new species, including humans, a new study shows.

Bacteria interact by releasing molecules to help them adapt to their environment -- for example, when killing competing infections in their victim. They co-ordinate these actions by releasing tiny amounts of chemicals as signals.

Bacteria that can co-operate to create an environment in which they can thrive are potentially able to infect lots of different species, including humans. Discovering why some diseases are better equipped to infect more species than others -- and therefore could affect humans -- could be valuable in predicting and managing health threats.

Most new human infections arise from diseases that transmit from animals to humans. Many of these cause serious infections and are difficult to control, such as anthrax and the superbug MRSA.

Research led by the University of Edinburgh used a combination of mathematical models and scientific analysis of genetic code in almost 200 types of bacteria. They found that those bugs that carry lots of genes that help them to co-operate are best equipped to adapt to various environments.

Dr Luke McNally of the University of Edinburgh' School of Biological Sciences, who led the study, said: "Humans have been able to colonise almost all of their planet by collectively modifying the environment to suit themselves. Our study shows bugs try to do the same -- co-operation is important for the spread of bacteria to new species."

behavior and the biome: love and early childhood diarrhea

scientificamerican |  It’s not everyday that love and diarrhea come together in theoretical matrimony. Recently, however, a study by an interdisciplinary team of scientists managed to form this near-perfect union. Oh relax. I’m not about to share the sordid details of a revolting new sexual fetish. (That’s for another post.) The research I’m about to tell you about is actually bigger than that. In fact, it’s a pity that the report appeared without much fanfare last year in Evolution and Human Behavior, because when looked at in the right light, there’s a certain quiet beauty to these data in the way that they subtly illuminate gene-environment interactions.

Before we can hope to understand the curious connection between the hellish expunging of our intestinal contents and the type of person that we’re in turn most likely to marry—or simply to screw—it’s necessary to first step back to look at the wider framework in which the study’s main hypothesis was based. Unless you reject evolutionary psychology out of ignorance or spite (or some combination thereof), it’s noncontroversial to say that, all else equal, it’s biologically more adaptive to sexually reproduce with a healthy than with an unhealthy partner. Needless to say, “biologically adaptive” is rarely isomorphic with “nice and kind”, but kind or not, most of us don’t instinctively gravitate to strangers with a death rattle for a cough or get turned on by the sight of someone with random body parts sloughing off. Beyond such truisms, having children with a chronically ill person makes it not only difficult or impossible for that poor individual to “invest” in your mutual offspring, leaving you to shoulder the “costs” of rearing them on your own, the health of your kids (who, let’s not mince words, are the cooing keepers of your eternal genetic promise) may also be compromised if your partner’s disease is heritable.

While it’s all well and good to aim for a healthy baby-mama or baby-daddy, one hitch is that, in the real world, we can’t always count on a conspicuous cue like emaciation or puddles of pus to tip us off about a prospect’s dubious hardiness. Even if that guy giving you eyes looks fit enough now, who’s to say he won’t be the first to drop when the next scourge rolls in? Our ancestors would have faced similar challenges discerning the relative health of viable members of the opposite sex.

The solution to this adaptive problem was mindlessly ingenious. Among other fixes, our brains became aesthetically predisposed to faces that were the best genetic gambles in a world brimming with deleterious pathogens. When looking at aggregate data, these appealing faces tend to belong to folks who are more disease-resistant across the lifespan. Lucky bastards. Now, how to spot these anti-pathogenic lovers. That’s to say, what’s a “pretty face” exactly, and why do we often disagree on others’ attractiveness? Yes, there’s that old facial symmetry giveaway, but debate rages on about the relationship between this variable trait and perceptions of beauty. If you really want to stack the fitness odds in your offspring’s favour, there seems to be a more reliable marker of a person’s health than mere symmetry: having an extremely sex-typical mug. An already impressive, yet still-mounting, body of evidence reveals that the degree of “masculinity” in a man’s face correlates positively with his lifelong health, while the degree of “femininity” in a woman’s face does the same for hers.

“That’s nice,” you’re probably saying to yourself. “But where does diarrhea come into it?” I thought you’d never ask. The authors of this new study, led by the psychologist Mícheál de Barra of Stockholm University, suspected that our behavioral immune system, which is a hypothetical collection of evolved cognitive biases that spur us on to make adaptive decisions in the domain of disease avoidance, may get a sort of laxative fine-tuning during our early child development.