The shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum this past week by an avowed hater of Jews came not long after the Anti-Defamation League reported that anti-Semitic incidents in the country were down for the fourth year in a row.
In its annual count, the group said there were 1,352 incidents of vandalism, harassment and physical assaults against Jewish individuals, property and community institutions last year -- a 7 percent drop from the 1,460 incidents in 2007.
The report counted 37 physical assaults on Jewish people, about 700 cases of vandalism and 613 cases of harassment. It also noted that a potentially horrific attack -- a planned bombing of New York synagogues -- had been thwarted by police.
This year, however, has witnessed two alleged murders in five weeks by suspects espousing hatred for Jews -- the June 10 museum attack and the May 6 killing of a Jewish Wesleyan University student in Middletown, Conn., allegedly by a man who had written of his anti-Jewish antipathy.
Not included in the 2008 survey was what the ADL called an "explosive expansion" of Internet and social-networking sites spewing anti-Jewish sentiments. The ADL said this "new frontier of anti-Semitism" -- where accused museum shooter James von Brunn posted anti-Jewish rants for years -- is difficult to quantify.
A reality check on raindrops reveals that weathermen's estimates from radar on how hard it's raining may be all wet. The models had assumed that bigger drops always fall faster than smaller ones, and no faster than gravity minus air resistance can pull them.
But after studying 64,000 raindrops falling over three years at Mexico's National University, Mexican and U.S. scientists say smaller drops broken up from big drops can fall faster than models assume, meaning that not all big rains are made up of the bigger drops meteorologists had thought.
Under the spreading chestnut tree may lie at least a potential solution to climate change. So say researchers at Purdue University, who claim that planting lots of a new hybrid American chestnut tree would not only bring back a near-extinct species, but, because they grow faster and larger and longer than many hardwoods, would be able retain more carbon that would otherwise go into the atmosphere.
Chestnut blight wiped out the trees early in the last century, creating an eco-hole in forests from New England to Alabama. A hybrid species that's mostly American, but with Chinese-chestnut resistance to the fungus, will soon be ready to go into widespread reforestation efforts.
The wheels appear to have been greased to include in the health-care reform legislation now congealing in Congress a requirement for big chain restaurants to publicly list the number of calories per menu item.
Health groups, the restaurant industry and a bipartisan coalition of U.S. senators have thrown their weight behind a new rule that chains with 20 or more locations must list every item's calorie content on the menu or menu board, and make available upon customer request a written tally of the amount (and type) of fat, cholesterol, sodium, sugars and other nutrition information for each item.
(E-mail Lee Bowman at bowmanl(at)shns.com and Lisa Hoffman at hoffmanl(at)shns.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
Washington Calling
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