6A THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
NEWS
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2005
Female bomber kills six
LEE KEATH
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
BAGHDAD, Iraq — A woman disguised in a man's robes and headdress slipped into a line of army recruits Wednesday and detonated explosives strapped to her body, killing at least six recruits and wounding 35 — the first known suicide attack by a woman in Iraq's insurgency.
The attack in Tal Afar near the Syrian border appeared aimed at showing that militants could still strike in a town where U.S. and Iraqi offensives drove out insurgents only two weeks ago. A female suicide bomber may have been chosen because she could get through checkpoints — at which women are rarely searched — then don her disguise to join the line of men, Iraqi officials said.
Iraq's most notorious insurgent group, al-Qaida in Iraq, claimed responsibility for the attack in an Internet statement, saying it was carried out by a "blessed sister."
The bombing came a day after U.S. and Iraqi officials announced their forces killed the second-in-command of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abdullah Abu Azzam, in a raid in Baghdad over the weekend. His death has not slowed insurgent violence, with at least 84 people
- including seven U.S. service members - killed in attacks since Sunday.
President Bush warned violence will increase in the days leading up to a key Oct. 15 referendum on a new constitution, a document that has sharply divided Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority and the Sunni minority that forms the backbone of the insurgency.
"We can expect they'll do everything in their power to stop the march of freedom," Bush said. "And our troops are ready for it."
Legendary creature caught on film
A 26-foot-long Architeuthis attacks prey hung by a white rope at 900 yards deep off the coast of Japan's Bonin islands, 670 miles south of Tokyo, in the fall of 2004. The camera was operated by remote control.
SCIENCE
The U.S. military announced Wednesday that two more American soldiers and an airman were killed in violence and a Marine was killed by a noncombat gunshot. The deaths brought to 1,922 the number of U.S. service members who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Association Press count.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
BY ERIC TALMADGE THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
It was a rare giant squid, a creature that until then had eluded observation in the wild.
TOKYO — When a nearly 20-foot long tentacle was hauled aboard his research ship, Tsunemi Kubodera knew he had something big. Then it began sucking on his hands. But what came next excited him most — hundreds of photos of a purplish-red sea monster doing battle 3,000 feet deep.
Kubodera's team captured photos of the 26-foot-long beast attacking its bait, then struggling for more than four hours to get free. The squid pulled so hard on the line baited with shrimp that it severed one of its own tentacles.
"It was quite an experience to feel the still-functioning tentacle on my hand," Kubodera, a researcher with Japan's National Science Museum, said. "But the photos were even better."
For centuries giant squids, formally called Architeuthis, have been the stuff of legends, appearing in the myths of ancient Greece or attacking a submarine in Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." But they had never been seen in their natural habitat, only caught in fishing nets or washed ashore dead or dying.
The Japanese team, capping a three-year effort, filmed the creature in September of last year, finding what one researcher called "the holy grail" of deep-sea animals.
The results were not announced until this week, when they were published in Wednesday's issue of the British journal, the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. Kyoichi Mori, of the Ogasawara Whale Watching Association, co-authored the study.
Giant squid are the world's largest invertebrates, having been known to exceed 50 feet. Kubodera said the one he caught on camera was probably an adult female. He said the squid's tentacle would not grow back, but its life was not in danger.
The photos earned the team cheers from researchers around the world, largely because of the
difficulty of finding the mysterious giant.
"That's getting footage of a real sea monster," said Randy Kochevar, a deep-sea biologist with the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. "Nobody has been able to observe a large giant squid where it lives. There are people who said it would never be done. It's really an incredible accomplishment."
The photos taken with strobe lights at 30-second intervals also shed some new light on the animal's behavior.
"That's getting footage of a real sea monster."
"We think it is a much more active predator than was previously thought," Kubodera said Wednesday. "It had previously been seen as more lethargic, and not as strong."
In the pictures, the squid's tentacles can be seen stretching out toward the bait, grasping it and pulling away in a ball. It is then seen struggling to get itself free of the jig attached to the line
under the remote-controlled camera. The struggle took place at a depth of between 2,000 to 3,000 feet.
He added that he had some help — from a population of sperm whales.
"We knew that they fed on the squid, and we knew when
and how deep they dived," he said. "So we used them to lead us to the squid."
Kudodera and his team found the squid about 10 miles off the remote island of Chichijima, which is about 600 miles southeast of Tokyo. They had been conducting expeditions in the area for about three years before they actually succeeded in making their first contact at 9:15 a.m. on Sept. 20 last year.
"We were very lucky," he said. "A lot of research went into it, but still, others have tried and not succeeded."