Cicadas can survive a superstorm ? but not changes wrought by humans

Marc Dennis

Brood II cicadas get busy in Staten Island after spending 17 years waiting for their chance to mate.

By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

The march of the cicadas is hitting prime time on the East Coast, and that means researchers are getting their best opportunities to study how the burrowing insects have weathered the past 17 years. They're finding some amazing comebacks, and some puzzling absences as well.

Over the past few weeks, billions of cicadas have been rising out of the ground, over a swath of territory ranging from Georgia to Connecticut. These bugs are part of a group known as Brood II, which emerges every 17 years to crawl and fly, mate and die over the course of just a few weeks. Between one emergence and the next, the immature bugs are dug into the soil, living off the watery fluid in plant roots.

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The pace of the emergence is dictated by soil temperature: This year's cicada outbreak has been a bit slower than expected, due to a cooler-than-usual spring. But University of Maryland entomologist Michael Raupp says the conditions now appear to be right for cicadas to make their appearance across most of Brood II's traditional territory. Magicicada.org's map of cicada sightings points to hot spots in Virginia, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Rhode Island. For residents in those states, this may be as good as it gets.

"If they don't have 'em now, they're going to be in for a very bad case of cicada envy," Raupp joked.

Loud life, quick death
The emergence of the nymphs is just the first step in the insects' 17-year ritual: After they come out, the cicadas shed their hard shells, unfurl their wings, crawl up trees or buildings, and seek out their mates. Raupp and other cicada fans have been reveling to the insects' mass choruses, which can get as loud as 90 decibels. (One aficionado has compared the cacophony to the sound of "Star Trek" phasers set on stun.)

And then there's the denouement. "We're starting to see the first dropouts," Raupp said. "They've completed the biological imperative in the tree canopy, and we're starting to see mortality."

Magicicada.org

Magicicada.org's map shows where cicada sightings have been reported.

Take a closer look at the curious 17-year life of the flying bug as the East Coast weathers an invasion.

If you're expecting to see cicadas all over the place, you'll be disappointed. "These things are very, very patchily distributed," Raupp said. "You can go a distance as little as a quarter-mile or a half-mile, and one location will have thousands or tens of thousands of cicadas in the treetops, and the other location will have nothing."

If you come across a bug infestation, be not afraid. Cicadas are not harmful to humans. Some folks may find them disgusting, but?others find them delicious.

Surviving Sandy
The signs of emergence have been seen in some surprising locations. "Cicada cells are very airtight, as they survived Hurricane Sandy in Staten Island," Elias Bonaros reported on the Entomology-Cicadidae discussion forum. "I found loads of exit holes right where the sea met the shore and were supposedly submerged under many feet of water!"

That resilience is in line with reports going back almost two centuries. In his classic work, "The Periodical Cicada,"?entomologist C.L. Marlatt mentions a case where a "gentleman in Louisiana" dammed up some property in 1818, covering the soil with 6 feet (2 meters) of water. When the water was drained away more than a year later, cicadas were found "in a fine, healthy state, ready to make their appearance above ground, that being the year of their regular appearance."

Other changes wrought by humans can be more injurious to the cicadas. "The most damaging of all perturbations would be the creation of hardscape," Raupp said. "When that happens, it's devastating to the cicada population. For example, what was a cornfield 17 years ago, that has now been regraded to be a condominium or townhouse complex. Any disturbance of 60 centimeters [2 feet in depth] is going to extirpate any cicadas in that area."

Some bug-watchers are already coming across problem areas. John Cooley, a cicada expert from the University of Connecticut, said there are some "surprisingly silent" patches of land in Virginia where Brood II was expected to emerge. "We're not sure what explains these absences?? the woods look perfectly fine for periodical cicadas," he wrote on the Entomology-Cicadidae forum.

Have you experienced the emergence? Or have you missed the bug-out? Either way, feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Video tributes to the cicada:

Previous chapters in the cicada saga:

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Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

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Policing Hate Speech Is Harder Than Nipples

No automated system can identify what will offend people. What some humans find disgusting, others find controversial, and others still find funny. Computers just don't understand. That caused trouble for Facebook this week when women's activism groups got advertisers to boycott after the social network failed to suspend accounts accused of publishing hate speech.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/ImZ_JYe_vbg/

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Over 7,000 Syrian refugees return from Iraq as security improves

By Suadad al-Salhy

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - More than 7,000 Syrian refugees in Iraq have crossed back to the rebel-held Syrian border town of Albu Kamal in recent weeks due to better security there, an Iraqi official said on Sunday.

The reverse flow coincides with a lull in battles and air raids by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's military, which has been on the offensive elsewhere in Syria, especially in the western town of Qusair, around Damascus and in the south.

The mayor of the Iraqi border town of al-Qaim said 7,000 out of 11,000 Syrian refugees hosted there had returned home.

"Each week, we receive refugee requests to go back to their towns across the border, they are freely going back," Farhan Ftaikhan told Reuters by telephone.

"The security situation in Albu Kamal is very calm. There have been no clashes or air strikes for about three months."

Around 152,000 Syrian refugees have been registered in Iraq, according to the U.N. refugee agency, most of them Kurds and Sunni Muslims who fled to Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region and the Sunni-dominated western province of Anbar.

Dealing with Syrian refugees has been a tricky question for Iraq's Shi'ite-led government, which fears Sunni Islamist fighters seeping back across the border from Syria's conflict to worsen Iraq's own increasingly sectarian violence.

Iraqi security officials worry that Syrian rebel-held border towns will become bases for Sunni Islamist insurgents and al Qaeda to launch attacks in Iraq. Al Qaeda's local wing has already benefited from the flow of arms and fighters into Syria.

More than 1,000 people were killed in Iraq in May, making it the deadliest month since the Sunni-Shi'ite slaughter of 2006-2007, the United Nations said on Saturday.

The renewed bloodletting reflects worsening tensions between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunnis angered at their treatment since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003 overthrew Saddam Hussein.

(Editing by Patrick Markey and Alistair Lyon)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/over-7-000-syrian-refugees-return-iraq-security-115658357.html

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Novocure : breakthrough in brain tumor treatment ? Jewish Business ...

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Novocure CEO Asaf Danziger says the company will remain independent, despite interest from big pharma.

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/By Gali Weinreb /

Novocure Ltd. may be the most successful Israeli life sciences company which you have never heard of. The company, which has taken care to stay below the radar, has developed a proprietary device for the treatment of a rare brain cancer, which is currently incurable. This scientific breakthrough has already resulted in an estimated tens of millions of dollars in sales.
Novocure has more than a hundred employees all over the world and a development center in Haifa. Its product does not cure the cancer, but inhibits its development. This potential has not been missed by big pharma companies Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) and Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE; LSE: PFZ), which have invested in the company through their venture capital funds.
Although Novocure has kept quiet until now, it is not difficult to identify its patients. They shave their heads and attach electrodes to their scalps. They carry everywhere a case, which contains a device that resembles a radio, which prevents the tumors cells from dividing. Most patients report that they feel good, considering their condition, except for the need to carry the case.
?We tell our patients that the longer they wear the product, the more effective the treatment will be,? Novocure CEO Asaf Danziger told ?Globes? in an exclusive interview. ?Most of them use the device for 20 hours a day, on average.?
For the first time, Danziger talks about Novocure?s success. The company was founded by serial entrepreneur Prof. Yoram Palti, after he retired, on the basis of his doctoral thesis written many years ago. Palti always intended to apply his research, but the timing was never right.
?The idea burned in him,? says Danziger, ?until he decided to work on the product in his basement, literally, even though people told him, ?Look, although you?re an entrepreneur with many rights, you don?t have a chance this time?.?
Palti had previously founded Carmel Biosensor Ltd. and CellSense Ltd., Novocure is unquestionably his great success. Palti decided to found Novocure in 2000.
?Yoram knew me, and it was a great honor for me that he asked me to join him,? says Danziger, who previously served as CEO of Cybro Medical Ltd.
Very early on, William F. Doyle, the founder and managing director of the eponymous WFD Ventures LLC, and formerly a member of Johnson & Johnson?s Medical Devices and Diagnostics Group, joined Novocure as chairman. WFD Ventures provides financial and administrative support to early-stage medical devices companies. The fund invested in Novocure, and Doyle is considered one of the important reasons for its success. Other investors include Becton, Dickinson and Company?s (NYSE: BDX) investment arm, BD Ventures LLC, and private investors.
Novocure commenced its first clinical trial in 2003. The publication of positive results on the initial patients and the expanded animal studies took the scientific community by storm, and the studies were extensively discussed in several leading journals.
The fact that Novocure aroused such great interest from the beginning did not make it immune from trouble. ?At first, every day was hard,? says Danziger. ?We were pioneers, and we had no indication that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would accept our way, even though we worked closely with them from a very early stage. It was not clear whether the technology would work. It can even be said that most of the studies we conducted did not have the results we wanted, but surprised us in different ways.
?It?s no small matter that Doyle and the other investors supported us. Doyle constantly injected his own money into the company, from his own pocket,? adds Danziger. Doyle?s gamble paid off. ?We suddenly began seeing patients living another month and another month, even though they were expected to day long before, and reports about excellent quality of life, which I consider to our real differentiating advantage. The efficacy of chemotherapy on Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) tumors (the most common brain tumor, responsible for over half of brain cancer cases ? G.W.) was relatively good, but the quality of life was awful.?
Patients who use Novocure?s device also receive chemotherapy, so they are not completely free of the cancer?s effects. But the company hopes that its device can, in future, function as a stand-alone therapy.
Doyle believed in Novocure form the beginning, and was later joined by some of the world?s biggest pharmaceutical companies. In 2010, as the multicenter pivotal trial was drawing to a close, Novocure raised $10 million from Pfizer Ventures, Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation, and Index Ventures. According to IVC, the company has raised $16 million to date.
In April 2011, the FDA approved Novocure?s tumor treating fields (TTF) therapy for the treatment of GBM, but only for patients with aggressive tumors who had already received chemotherapy. Although the approval covered only a small group of patients ? there are only GBM 100,000 patients in the US and Europe, and not all of them are suitable for the treatment ? Novocure estimates the market at $1 billion a year in the US alone. The company also has EU CE Mark certification and approval from the Australian and Israeli authorities.
A year after neuroAD?s launch, Novocure has reached tens of millions of dollars in sales. ?The response from doctors and payers (insurance companies) was good,? said Danziger. ?Private insurers first began reimbursing for the product, and US government insurance also began reimbursement.?
Novocure is now trying to enter new markets. ?We?re conducting a Phase III clinical trial on earlier stage GBM, which is not really the same disease,? said Danziger. Certification for this indication could double the device?s market potential. The first study included 250 patients, the largest study ever conducted on GBM, which is a rare disease, he said. The new study includes 750 patients, and will cost tens of millions of dollars.
The huge potential is not limited to a $2 billion market. Novocure believes that its treatment is also suitable for other cancers. ?Today, cancer is treated with drugs, radiation, or surgery, and there are biological treatments for some cancers,? said Danziger. ?We?ve developed a unique and separate method, which supplements these methods. It?s a completely new channel for the treatment of cancer. We already have preliminary data indicating possible treatment for lung, pancreas, and liver cancer. We cannot treat leukemia, because the tumor is not centralized, nor bone tumors. But except for these, we?re suitable for all types of tumors, including metastases. A Phase II trial on lung cancer has already been carried out.?
?Globes?: Why haven?t you been sold yet?
Danziger: ?We want to go all the way and become a big company, and there?s nothing stopping us now.?
His response implies that Novocure is well financed, does not have heavy losses, and may even be profitable.
?Big pharma is familiar with us,? said Danziger, ?but they?re leaving us alone because we work well. This company will stay independent for a long time.?
Published by www.globes-online.com?

Source: http://jewishbusinessnews.com/2013/05/31/novocure-breakthrough-in-brain-tumor-treatment/

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The IRS -- its glory days and its checkered past

WASHINGTON (AP) ? For a time, the Internal Revenue Service inspired awe and admiration in Americans, not just trepidation and lame jokes about death and taxes.

Everyone loved the revenue agents when they put away Al Capone, the Chicago underworld's master of brutality and bribes, in a coup so spectacular it scared other gangsters straight.

In the year after, federal coffers swelled as delinquent taxpayers stepped forward to make good on their debts. Criminals came out of the woodwork to pay taxes on their ill-gotten gains. Authorities in what was then the Intelligence Unit of the Bureau of Internal Revenue nailed the slippery Public Enemy No. 1 when no one else could, scooped up New York City racketeers by the dozen and stood tall in the popular imagination as incorruptible, fearless stewards of the treasury and the law.

Fine, but that was the 1930s. What have they done for us lately?

Or to us?

The essential mission hasn't changed. The IRS still collects the money that goes back out to build roads, help look after people in their old age, fight menaces from Nazism to terrorism, and operate the vast levers of government. It still locks up a few thousand delinquents a year, among them drug kingpins who wouldn't be caught any other way.

But no one loves the IRS anymore, not for ages. It's our culture's king-sized pain that makes you do hard math, issues nonsensical directions, takes your money and gives it to politicians to waste even as they borrow unspeakable sums from China to waste even more.

On top of that overdrawn caricature, the agency now is saddled with its episode of tea party tumult, exposing IRS behavior that is memorably bumbling at best and criminal at worst.

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"Taxes grow without rain." Proverb.

More than 97,000 people work for the IRS, more than double the workforce of that other deeply inquisitive and all-seeing institution, Google.

That includes 13,000 revenue agents and more than 1,500 lawyers, about as many attorneys as practice statewide in North Dakota. It's bigger than some Cabinet departments ? Transportation for one. Employment has dropped by about 10,000 since 2010.

The perception of the "taxman" probably should give way to tax woman because more than six in 10 employees are female, a substantially higher share than in both the civil service and U.S. labor force at large.

The IRS is something of a hybrid in its relationship with political masters, not the "independent agency" claimed by President Barack Obama when he dissociated himself from its discriminatory audits of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status during the 2012 campaign.

It is partially independent, which is not at all like being a bit pregnant. On one hand, the president and his people at the White House are barred by law from pressing the IRS to start or stop a tax audit. This is to prevent the president from putting the heat on a political foe or going easy on a political friend, both tactics of the past.

The commissioner serves five-year terms, ensuring that leadership is out of synch with four-year election cycles. The commissioner and chief lawyer are the only political appointees and must be confirmed by the Senate.

But the commissioner reports to the treasury secretary through the department's deputy and can be fired at will by the president, which is not the case in more hands-off federal bodies. Indeed, the acting chief, Steven Miller, was ousted within days of the report coming to light showing the misbegotten actions of lower level employees; he was one of three senior officials to be sidelined in the continuing investigation.

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"This is too difficult for a mathematician. It takes a philosopher." Nobel Prize physicist Albert Einstein on preparing his taxes.

The income tax was unloved from its inception.

Pushing for it in 1861 to help pay for the Civil War, Rep. Thaddeus Stevens declared, "It is unpleasant to send the tax gatherer to the door of the farmers, the mechanics, and the capitalists ... but these things must come or this government must soon be buried in its grave."

President Abraham Lincoln signed into law a 3 percent tax on income over $800, a sum few people made. A progressive income tax followed a year later in a law establishing an enforcement arm, the office of commissioner of internal revenue in the Treasury Department. The wealthiest Americans paid 5 percent.

Before the end of the 1800s, the income tax was repealed, revived and struck down as unconstitutional, only to return in 1913 with the enactment of a constitutional amendment.

The tax form of 100 years ago ? three pages long, with another page of instructions ? loosely resembles the short form of today, except for its provisions for deducting uninsured shipwrecks and its guidance to a still-agricultural nation about claiming income from the wool and hides of slaughtered animals.

The basic tax rate was 1 percent on personal income over $3,000, and there was a 6 percent surtax on astronomical incomes over $500,000.

Rates would not remain so benign for long. In 1918, the top rate soared to 77 percent to help pay for World War I. During World War II, compliance leaped forward when Congress introduced payroll withholding and quarterly tax payments.

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"If you drive a car, I'll tax the street. If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat. If you get too cold, I'll tax the heat. If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet." The Beatles, "Taxman."

Back to biblical times, revenue collection was often contracted out to independent "tax farmers" so as to insulate authorities from the howls of an aggrieved population, Atlanta accountant Jay Starkman says in his history of taxes, "The Sex of a Hippopotamus," so named because it's about as hard to divine whether a hippo is male or female as it is to comprehend the tax code.

A certain distance remains. No president visited the IRS headquarters until John Kennedy did so in 1961, embracing the tax collector as the underpinning of a nation locked in Cold War competition, a space race and monumental obligations at home and abroad. "We are strongly behind you," Kennedy told the agency. "We expect the best from you."

It was a historic, morale-building visit to the put-upon agency but JFK's record with the IRS is not entirely noble. Although the bureau was reorganized in the 1950s to replace patronage appointments with career professionals (and to rename it the Internal Revenue Service), Kennedy's administration used it to try to cower critics on the right.

Later, President Richard Nixon's IRS manipulations against those on his "enemies list" rose to the level of an impeachable offense in the eyes of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In the 1990s, the IRS went through another overhaul, this time to introduce more accountability, more recourse for the taxpayer and a customer-service ethic.

"Some people believe that the IRS slogan is, 'We're not happy until you're not happy,'" Starkman writes in his book. Yet it's probably more responsive to the consumer than the annoying help lines for digital gadgets. "Although IRS is the largest paper-shuffling organization in the world," he says, "when I call, I still get a live American person fairly quickly."

To IRS haters, the overhaul was not much more than public relations gloss, lipstick on a fanged pig.

But it made some changes that are consequential to this day. Among them, it established the Office of the Inspector General for Tax Administration, a more autonomous organization than existed before to scrutinize the behavior of the tax collectors.

That's the outfit that investigated and exposed the audits slanted against conservatives in the 2012 campaign. It's why the IRS is in such a pickle now.

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Associated Press researcher Monika Mathur contributed to this report.

___

Online:

The IRS and Al Capone: http://tinyurl.com/k39dhr7

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/irs-glory-days-checkered-past-131427658.html

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Mac Pro inventory drying up pre-WWDC? What does it mean?

Channel inventory of the Mac Pro entry-level model seems to be on the wane at major American retailers, according to a report from J. Glenn K?nzler at MacTrast. What does it mean? Maybe something, maybe nothing.

K?nzler infers that the shortage of entry-level Mac supply might mean that something new is coming down the pike, since WWDC is the week after next. But it's also worth noting that Apple retail stores, Apple's online store and major online/mail-order retailer MacConnection all have the units in stock and ready to ship.

I'm almost certain we're going to see some refreshes and change to the Mac product line at WWDC, just like my colleague Jim Dalrymple at The Loop. But I'm not convinced the time is right to see a new Mac Pro model take the place of the old one, with Intel planning changes to its Xeon products (the CPUs the Mac Pro has long used) coming in the third calendar quarter of 2013.

Intel recently introduced the Xeon E3 chip family, which is intended for micro servers and cloud server configurations. It's based on the company's Haswell architecture, but it's a fairly low-power chip that lacks the brute force computational power we're used to seeing in the Mac Pro. The Xeon E5 family, built around Ivy Bridge EP, seems like a more suitable Mac Pro candidate, and that one's due later this year.

That's not to say that Apple won't do the same thing as they did last year, and offer a slight refresh to the Mac Pro around WWDC. Though at this stage of the game, that might just be rubbing salt in the wounds of Mac Pro enthusiasts who are waiting for the next big thing.

As in all things, your mileage may vary.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/a_Pagp-tZYA/story01.htm

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11 vanish from Mexico City bar in suspected kidnap

Friends put pictures in the bar entrance of their recently disappeared relatives in Mexico City,Thursday, May 30, 2013. Relatives who joined a march to demand solutions to the thousands of detained and disappeared in Mexico say 11 young people were kidnapped in broad daylight from a Mexico City bar last Sunday a half-block from the city's main boulevard and a few blocks from police headquarters. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

Friends put pictures in the bar entrance of their recently disappeared relatives in Mexico City,Thursday, May 30, 2013. Relatives who joined a march to demand solutions to the thousands of detained and disappeared in Mexico say 11 young people were kidnapped in broad daylight from a Mexico City bar last Sunday a half-block from the city's main boulevard and a few blocks from police headquarters. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

A woman holds up a sign with details of her recently disappeared relative during a protest in Mexico City, Thursday, May 30, 2013. Eleven young people were kidnapped in broad daylight from a Mexico City bar, just 20 days after the grandson of civil rights leader Malcolm X was beaten to death at a nightclub in the capital, anguished relatives said Thursday. The sign reads in Spanish "Looking for Said Sanches, 19-years-old, 1.85 meters, has not been seen since Saturday in Zona Rosa in Heaven." The mother of one of the missing youths says 11 people in all vanished from the after-hours club about 1 ? blocks from the U.S. embassy, on the other side of Reforma Avenue. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

A man holds up a sign with details of his recently disappeared relative during a protest in Mexico City, Thursday, May 30, 2013. Eleven young people were kidnapped in broad daylight from a Mexico City bar, just 20 days after the grandson of civil rights leader Malcolm X was beaten to death at a nightclub in the capital, anguished relatives said Thursday. The sign reads in Spanish "Help us find him. Rafael Rojas Marines. Disappeared in the after-hours Heaven. Asking for your support!" The mother of one of the missing youths says 11 people in all vanished from the after-hours club about 1 ? blocks from the U.S. embassy, on the other side of Reforma Avenue. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

A woman holds up a sign with details of her recently disappeared relative during a protest in Mexico City, Thursday, May 30, 2013. Eleven young people were kidnapped in broad daylight from a Mexico City bar, just 20 days after the grandson of civil rights leader Malcolm X was beaten to death at a nightclub in the capital, anguished relatives said Thursday. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

MEXICO CITY (AP) ? Eleven young people were brazenly kidnapped in broad daylight from an after-hours bar in Mexico City's Zona Rosa, a normally calm district of offices, restaurants, drinking spots and dance clubs, anguished relatives said Thursday.

The apparent mass abduction purportedly happened sometime between 10 a.m. and noon on Sunday morning just off the Paseo de la Reforma, the city's main boulevard, near the Angel of Independence monument and only about 1? blocks from the U.S. Embassy.

The incident was the second recent high-publicity blemish for the city's largely unregulated entertainment scene, coming 20 days after the grandson of American civil rights activist Malcolm X was beaten to death at another tough bar in the downtown area.

Calling for authorities to find their loved ones, family members marched Thursday morning from the Interior Department building to the Zocalo, the city's main square. Later they protested outside the bar, which bears a sign that reads Bicentenario Restaurante-Bar, and demanded to see the bar's surveillance video.

"How could so many people have disappeared, just like that, in broad daylight?" said Josefina Garcia, mother of Said Sanchez Garcia, 19, her only son. "The police say they don't have them, so what, the earth just opened up and swallowed them?"

She said her son wasn't involved in any criminal activity, and worked at a market stall selling beauty products.

City prosecutors said they had received 11 missing-person reports, but Garcia said residents of the tough downtown neighborhood of Tepito where the victims live thought as many as 15 or 16 people could have been abducted.

The known missing include six men, most in their 20s, a 16-year-old boy and four young women.

While no clear motives had been revealed in the attack, residents of Tepito said there has been a wave of abductions of neighborhood young people in recent months that could be related to organized crime activities. Tepito is the center of black market activities in the city, where guns, drugs, stolen goods and contraband are widely sold.

Mass abductions have been rare in Mexico City, but are common in parts of the country where drug cartels operate and are fighting with rival gangs over territory.

Prosecutors slapped closure stickers on the front doors of the Mexico City bar Thursday, with inscriptions saying the city's anti-kidnapping unit was investigating abductions at the site.

Late Thursday night, dozens of members of a special police intervention unit, many carrying automatic weapons and wearing helmets and bullet-proof vests, blocked off the street in front of the bar and searched inside. Officers would not comment on what they were looking for.

Isabel Fonseca, whose brother is among those missing, said a man who escaped told her that masked men arrived in several white SUVs and took the group away. She said her brother, Eulogio Fonseca, is a street vendor who sells cellphone accessories.

"We want them alive," Fonseca said. "They went out to have fun; they are not criminals."

Mexico City's chief prosecutor, Rodolfo Rios, said investigators had been able to glean very little information on the disappearances.

Relatives believe the youths were at the club, which they said is called "Heaven," around midmorning Sunday, when waiters and bar employees herded them out to the street and armed men bundled them into waiting vehicles and spirited them away.

Rios said police had not located any employees of the bar and no other witnesses had presented themselves.

"We aren't sure what exactly occurred," he said. "No witness has come forward to say anything about any armed gang."

The bar is down a side street from two high-rise office buildings that look out on Reforma and sits across the narrow road from beauty salons and a sushi restaurant.

Guillermo Bustamante, owner of one the beauty parlors, said the street bustles every Saturday morning with people coming and going from the bar.

"Every time we arrived on Saturdays, we would see weird people coming out of that bar," Bustamante said. "There would be many Hummers parked outside and men walking out with a woman on each arm."

Bars of questionable character are often allowed to continue operating, even though drugs may be sold inside and the businesses frequently violate rules governing closing times, parking and serving alcohol to minors.

Malcolm Shabazz, grandson of the late Malcolm X, died May 9 in a fight that erupted after he and a friend were presented with a $1,200 bill at a seedy bar near Plaza Garibaldi, a gathering place for mariachi bands in a rough neighborhood in the downtown area. Two waiters at the bar have been arrested in connection with Shabazz's death.

In June 2008, police raided another Mexico City bar to investigate drug and alcohol sales to minors. A stampede ensued as panicked youths rushed for the exits and police tried to stop them. A dozen young people died in the stampede.

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Associated Press writer Adriana Gomez Licon contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-05-30-LT-Mexico-Violent-Bars/id-7c8569e2e5ef4ef8ab999be633c653c4

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