There were some civilians near Edwards
who also saw something and some stories in local papers, of which I would like
to obtain copies. Many other events like this have taken place at other locations,
but the information is . . . where?
For nine decades after Bolshevik
executioners shot Czar Nicholas II and his family, there were no traces of the
remains of Crown Prince Aleksei, the hemophiliac heir to Russia’s throne.
Some said the prince, a delicate
13-year-old, had somehow survived and escaped; others believed he was buried in
secret as the country lurched into civil war.
Now an official says DNA tests have
solved the mystery by identifying bone shards found in a forest as those of
Aleksei and his sister Grand Duchess Maria.
The remains of their parents, Nicholas
II and Empress Alexandra, and three siblings, including the czar’s youngest
daughter, Anastasia, were unearthed in 1991 and reburied in the imperial
resting place in St. Petersburg. The Russian Orthodox Church made all seven of
them saints in 2000.
Researchers unearthed the bone shards
last summer in a forest near Yekaterinburg, where the royal family was killed,
and enlisted laboratories in Russia and the United States to conduct DNA tests.
Eduard Rossel, governor of the region
900 miles east of Moscow, said Wednesday that tests done by an American
laboratory had identified the shards as those of Aleksei and Maria.
“This has confirmed that indeed it is
the children,” he said. “We have now found the entire family.”
Mr. Rossel did not specify the
laboratory, but a genetic research team working at the University of
Massachusetts Medical School has been involved in the process. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com/Evgeny Rogaev, who headed the team that tested the remains in
Moscow and at the medical school in Worcester, Mass., was called into the case
by the Russian Federation Prosecutor’s Office.
He said Wednesday that he had
delivered the results to the Russian authorities, but that it was up to the
prosecutor’s office to disclose the findings.
“The most difficult work is done, and
we have delivered to them our expert analysis, but we are still working,” he
said. “Scientifically, we want to make the most complete investigation
possible.” Despite the earlier discoveries and ceremonies, the absence of
Aleksei’s and Maria’s remains gnawed at descendants of the Romanovs, history
buffs and royalists. Even if the announcement is confirmed and widely accepted,
many descendants of the royal family are unlikely to be fully assuaged; they
seek formal rehabilitation by the government.
“The tragedy of the czar’s family will
only end when the family is declared victims of political repression,” said
German Lukyanov, a lawyer for royal descendants.
Nicholas abdicated in 1917 as
revolutionary fervor swept Russia, and he and his family were detained. They
were shot by a firing squad on July 17, 1918, in the basement of a house in
Yekaterinburg.
In the introduction to his biography
of Boris N. Yeltsin, Timothy J. Colton lists more than 100 of the similes and
analogies that have been applied over the years to Yeltsin, among them martyr
and jester, Lincoln and Nixon, Alexander the Great and Ivan the Terrible,
Hamlet and Hercules, bear, bulldog and boa constrictor. The wry list is an
early signal that Mr. Colton knows he is treading into a subject that has
inspired rival mythologies.
To some Western academics and more
than a few Russians, Yeltsin’s role was almost wholly destructive. Interrupting
Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s cautious reforms of the Communist Party and the Soviet
state, Yeltsin smashed both institutions. He sold off the country’s
resource-rich industrial heritage to a few moguls in a corrupt insider auction.
His economic “shock therapy” plunged the country into a period of falling
output and runaway inflation that Mr. Colton likens to the Great Depression. He
unleashed the army against a mutinous parliament and waged a brutal,
scorched-earth war against separatist Chechnya. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/page1.aspx
For years after Yeltsin crashed onto
the political scene, the Gorbachev-infatuated West was overwhelmingly dismissive.
Mr. Colton, a professor of government and director of Russian studies at
Harvard and the author of a grand history of the city of Moscow, cops to being
one of those early dismissers. But he declares up front that his research
brought him around to the view that Yeltsin, while flawed and enigmatic, was a
hero.
“As a democratizer,” Mr. Colton
writes, “he is in the company of Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, Mikhail Gorbachev
and Vaclav Havel. It is his due even when allowance is made for his blind spots
and mistakes.”
Mr. Colton is not the first to
undertake Yeltsin’s redemption. Leon Aron’s “Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life”
took up the case for Yeltsin in 2000, as his presidency was petering out, and
his popularity was at a low ebb. But Mr. Colton has used the extra time to
excellent effect. He has mined declassified Kremlin transcripts; fact-checked
many memoirs; conducted extensive interviews with participants, including
Yeltsin, shortly before his death last year; and synthesized a story that
anyone curious about contemporary Russia will find illuminating. And though
this is densely researched scholarship, Mr. Colton writes a fluid narrative
that only occasionally wanders into the briar patch of academic-speak.
Yeltsin’s grievance against the
Communists began before he was born, in an all-too-common history of family
heartbreak that Mr. Colton pieces together with a good deal of original
reporting. The Yeltsins were dispossessed for the bourgeois crime of having
built a farm, mill and blacksmithing business. Yeltsin’s grandfather died a
broken man. His father was charged with the catch-all crime of “anti-Soviet
agitation and propaganda” for grousing at his job on a construction site, and
sent to a forced-labor camp for three years.
When Yeltsin joined the Communist
Party, it was not out of devotion to the professed ideals but because a party
card was a requirement for promotion to chief engineer in the construction
industry. And when he moved into the hierarchy, he was already a man who chafed
at party orthodoxy. No radical, he “nibbled at the edges of what was
admissible,” Mr. Colton writes, pushing for market prices in the local farm
bazaars, encouraging entrepreneurial initiative in the workplace, complaining
that the top-down system smothered self-reliance.
In his moderation he was at first
rather like Mr. Gorbachev, Yeltsin’s exact contemporary (the two were born 29
days apart, in 1931), his sponsor for a time, but ultimately his foil and
nemesis. Mr. Colton nicely sums up the two men metaphorically: Yeltsin is
feline, with an instinct for the great and unexpected leap; Mr. Gorbachev is
canine, “trainable, tied to the known and to the previously rewarded.”
Mr. Gorbachev promoted Yeltsin to be
Moscow party boss, but soon came to see him as an impetuous showboat. Yeltsin
saw Mr. Gorbachev as a vacillating windbag, and made little effort to hide it.
He infuriated his party leader by complaining about Mrs. Gorbachev’s meddling
in Moscow affairs. They clashed in the Politburo over Yeltsin’s populist jibes
at the privileges of party leaders.
The decisive break came in October
1987 when Yeltsin, in a disjointed speech to a (closed) party plenum, declared
that people were losing faith in reforms and accused Mr. Gorbachev of
tolerating a personality cult. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/page1.aspx
Mr. Gorbachev orchestrated a ritual
humiliation and demotion, but half a year later the audacious outcast seized a
more public moment — a conference of 5,000 party delegates — to repeat his
broadside, assuring both his permanent estrangement from the party and his
status as a popular hero.
Shrewdly, Yeltsin recast himself as
the champion of the Russian republic — the heart of the Soviet Union — and
campaigned for a seat in a new federal Congress of People’s Deputies. Mr.
Gorbachev chose to enter the congress in an uncontested seat reserved for party
leaders. His unwillingness to subject himself to a popular vote (which, at the
time, he probably could have won) was, Mr. Colton recognizes, “a blunder of
biblical proportions.” Yeltsin sailed into the parliament despite the
Communists’ best efforts, and the tide of credibility had shifted decisively
his way.
Mr. Gorbachev’s last gambit, shoring
up the Soviet leadership with hard-line appointees, backfired when several
tried to overthrow him. That ham-handed coup gave Yeltsin his famous tank-top
photo op and his ultimate triumph.
Once he won the Kremlin, Yeltsin began
drinking heavily. Mr. Colton concludes that while Yeltsin’s drinking was a
distraction and an embarrassment, it did not critically influence his decisions
as president.
“No sensible historian would reduce
Ataturk’s or Churchill’s career to his drinking escapades,” Mr. Colton writes,
generously. The booze did, however, ruin Yeltsin’s health; he had at least four
heart attacks before bypass surgery.
The last half of the book has Yeltsin
confronting the blank slate of post-Communist Russia. His three highly
improvisational terms as Russian president were marked by periods of political
gridlock, government by decree and constant intrigues, including a
near-impeachment. His crash economic program, which Russians joked was all
shock and no therapy, was meant to unleash entrepreneurial energy. But it also
unleashed colossal avarice and corruption, along with five years of economic
misery.
In defense, Mr. Colton writes, “By the
day Yeltsin called it quits in 1999, the cradle of state socialism boasted a
market economy of sorts,” inflation had been subdued, economic growth
rebounded.
“Reforming the system from within, as
Gorbachev meant to do,” he writes, “was a respectable choice. Heading for the
exits was a cleaner and better one.”
Within this democratizer — whom Mr.
Colton ranks alongside Mr. Mandela — there resided a deeply Russian and
sometimes ruthless fear of instability. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
He rebuffed entreaties from his
liberal supporters to uproot the K.G.B. Indeed, in his appointments he often
reached for young security apparatchiks, men he regarded as possessing “steel
backbone.”
Most of these securocrats he discarded
when he grew disenchanted or needed a scapegoat. But the last in the line,
Vladimir V. Putin, endured and became Yeltsin’s successor because he captured
public esteem and loyally stood by Yeltsin through severe tests, including the
bloody crushing of Chechnya.
In retirement, Mr. Colton says,
Yeltsin confided mounting disapproval as his protégé tightened the screws on
the press and political opposition. No doubt — and Yeltsin can’t be entirely
blamed for his successor (any more than Mr. Mandela could have foreseen how his
hand-picked successor would disappoint South Africa). But Mr. Putin is doubly
Yeltsin’s legacy. Yeltsin anointed him, and the persistent popularity of his
hard regime owes something to the stomach-churning ride of Yeltsin-style
democracy.
Researchers have identified two common
genetic mutations that increase the risk of osteoporosis and related bone
fractures, according to a study released Tuesday.
These changes were present in 20
percent of the people studied and highlight the potential role of screening for
osteoporosis, the bone-thinning disease that mainly affects women after
menopause, they said in the journal Lancet.
''Eventually, a panel of genetic
markers could be used in addition to environmental risk factors to identify
individuals who are most at risk for osteoporotic fractures,'' wrote Tim
Spector and Brent Richards, researchers at King's College London.
Osteoporosis is a condition in which
bone density thins as more bone cells are lost than replaced when people age.
It affects about one in three women
and one in five men around the world, according to the International
Osteoporosis Foundation.
Drugs called bisphosphonates are used
primarily to increase bone mass and cut the risk of fractures in patients with
osteoporosis.
These include Fosamax, produced by
Merck & Company, which American researchers on Monday showed could increase
the risk of a type of abnormal heartbeat.
In the Lancet study, the team scanned
the genes of 2,094 female twins and identified a link between decreased bone
mineral density and changes in chromosomes 8 and 11.
In chromosome 11, the change was
associated with a 30 percent increased risk of the condition and related
fractures, and for chromosome 8, the mutation raised risk by 20 percent.
For people who had both changes, their
risk went up by 30 percent.
These two genes are important targets
for treatments, and drugs are already under development, the researchers said.
President Jimmy Carter was the first
President of the United States of America to have officially reported the UFO
he saw to the authorities. He was also the President who said that if elected
he would see that UFO-Alien Full Disclosure would take place. That the American
public would be told the truth about everything was one of the campaign cries
of Jimmy Carter. Carter made a promise he could not or would not be able to
keep.
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