Sabotage

WASHINGTON -- After 15 months of tests and analysis, Navy and independent scientists will present their findings in the next few weeks suggesting that the explosion that killed 47 men on the battleship USS Iowa in 1989 may have been an accident, not sabotage as the Navy believed.New discoveries suggesting that conclusion include the existence in Navy stockpiles of a small number of gunpowder bags that are prone to ignition under extreme pressure.The bags are used as propellant in a battleship's 16-inch guns, and the Navy had previously said it had none prone to accidental ignition.

During Heather Kirn Lanier's two years in Baltimore as a neophyte teacher, she taught at a city high school that backed up against Mount Olivet Cemetery. She could clearly see tombstones from her classroom window. Each time Lanier took in the view, she could practically watch another one of her illusions being buried. She's written about her experience at the former Southwestern High School from 2000 to 2002 in a new book called "Teaching in the Terrordome: Two Years in West Baltimore with Teach for America.

Marylanders Against Handgun Abuse charged yesterday that gun control opponents tried to sabotage a rally scheduled for Monday by tampering with the office's voice mail system.Between 5 p.m. Wednesday and yesterday morning, someone got access to the system and changed a greeting that announced the Annapolis rally, said Vinnie DeMarco, executive director of the group.Mr. DeMarco said the altered greeting, left by a deep-voiced man, told callers, "Thank you for calling Marylanders Against Handgun Abuse.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently said aloud what many Americans must be thinking these days - that at least some Republicans in Congress would like to see the U.S. economy worsen in order to boost their chances of success in the November election. The evidence? The GOP's continued resistance to approving a multiyear transportation authorization bill. Senator Reid told The Hill that he's heard House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is leading the charge to delay the Senate bill - and the tens of thousands of jobs it would create.

WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State James A. Baker III said yesterday that Middle East extremists will try to torpedo chances of a late October peace conference as the time for it draws near."

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Computer sabotage has been discovered in reporting the results of South Africa's first democratic election, further delaying the already stiflingly slow count of votes, the chairman of South Africa's Independent Electoral Commission charged yesterday.Judge Johann Kriegler told a news conference that just after 6 a.m. Tuesday, the computer that was sending results to the news media was altered in a way that gave some parties extra votes."There was some tampering with the data in our main system," he said.

WASHINGTON -- The Navy, revising its findings about the 1989 explosion that killed 47 sailors aboard the battleship Iowa, has concluded after months of tests and analysis that it does not have definitive proof of sabotage, say Navy officials.The new findings, which were to be announced today by Adm. Frank B. Kelso II, the chief of naval operations, overturn the Navy's earlier conclusion that the explosion was probably an act of suicidal sabotage by a despondent sailor.Investigators say a precise explanation for the blast will never be known, but Kelso's conclusions implicitly discredit a Navy criminal investigation that focused on the sailor, Clayton M. Hartwig, a gunner's mate second class, as the culprit.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraqi officials blamed loyalists of jailed former leader Saddam Hussein yesterday for sabotaging a vital stretch of oil pipeline and blowing up a huge gasoline storage tank in Baghdad. The attacks that set the north-south oil pipeline ablaze in at least four places threatened to worsen a dire gasoline shortage that has angered Iraqi drivers and fomented criticism that the U.S.-led coalition is mismanaging postwar reconstruction. Coalition troops continued raids yesterday through insurgent strongholds along the border with Syria and in the Sunni Triangle, arresting hundreds of Iraqis accused of attacking U.S.-led forces.

HIT, Iraq - An oil pipeline fire possibly linked to sabotage burned out of control near this western city yesterday, as a U.S. soldier was killed and another was wounded in a grenade attack on a military convoy south of Baghdad. Authorities here called the blast that rocked the pipeline Saturday evening a deliberate attack, but the commander of the U.S. garrison in the area said it was too early to tell. "We're working now to get the pipeline turned off," said Lt. Col. Henry Kievenaar, commanding officer of the 3rd Squadron of the 3rd Armored Calvary, based near this agricultural town 90 miles northwest of Baghdad.

It's easy to know when someone's getting in our way at work -- sooner or later, we usually see what's going on, even if no one else does. But when we're the ones who are getting in our way at work, we're often the last to know.Here are some of the ways we sabotage ourselves at work:*Blaming others. When we cast the blame for our workplace defeats, relationship problems, social blunders and financial mistakes on others and refuse to take responsibility for our own actions, we keep ourselves childlike and helpless.

Whether you're counting calories, tallying points, cutting carbohydrates or sweating it out at the gym, dieting is a tough road to navigate. What's even worse is when you sabatoge your own efforts by making some classic diet-busting mistakes you might not even be aware of. Here are seven behaviors that may cause you to fall off that I-wanna-lose-weight wagon — and advice from experts on how to stay on it. The diet-buster: Drinking too...

Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller should promptly step down following his outrageous, irresponsible, unprofessional, petulant, self-centered performance during the final days and hours of the just-completed 90-day session of the General Assembly ("Debacle in Annapolis," April 11). He purposely sabotaged the budget compromise for his personal campaign to expand gambling to a sixth site in Maryland. Senator Miller's arrogance and egotism are breathtaking. Mr. Miller then has the audacity to suggest yet another, special session of the General Assembly at an additional cost of $21,000 to $100,000 per day to the already-overburdened Maryland taxpayers.

Not long ago, an astute reader noted that it has been nearly two years since I wrote in a column that "most experts now estimate that Iran needs about 18 months to complete a nuclear device and a missile to carry it. " His point - that those estimates were way off - was a good one, especially since experts are still estimating that Iran is 18 months away from being able to build a nuclear weapon. So what gives? Why does Iran always seem to be about 18 months away from a nuclear bomb, at least in the eyes of U.S. officials?

The Constitution says the legislative branch of government makes the laws and the executive branch implements and administers them. While the tea party wing of the Republican party was holding the country hostage and taking us on a suicidal dive, no one noticed they were also turning our Constitutional principle of separation of powers on its head by using an appropriations bill to subvert legislative intent and roll back environmental protections....

North Carolina State athletic director Debbie Yow, who feuded with men's basketball coach Gary Williams while holding the same position at Maryland, has accused Williams of sabotaging the Wolfpack's recent search for a new men's basketball coach. "I don’t have a reputation across all men’s basketball as being difficult to work with," Yow said during today's press conference introducing coach Mark Gottfried. "I have a reputation of not getting along with Gary Williams, who has tried to sabotage the search.

Writer-director Atom Egoyan's "Adoration" plays like a post-9/11 talk show done as modernist cinema. All it does is relentlessly pose questions about terrorism, prejudice, family dynamics, the subjectivity of experience, the objectivity of facts, and the speed and shallowness of communication on the Internet. The movie's fractured structure and contrived subplots obscure a potentially affecting story and do nothing to advance the debate on any of its incendiary issues. Egoyan hooks the audience with a fiction within a fiction.

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon suspects that Saddam Hussein will sabotage his oil fields should the United States invade Iraq, potentially creating an economic and ecological disaster that could dwarf his destruction of Kuwaiti oil fields at the close of the Persian Gulf war, a senior defense official said yesterday. As a result, the Pentagon is working on plans to quickly seize and secure the two vast oil fields in southern and northern Iraq, the official said. Special Operations forces or rapidly deployable conventional troops, such as the 82nd Airborne Division, might be used.

Parent leaders at one of the state's top middle schools, Glenwood Middle in western Howard County, are charging that pupil "sabotage" triggered a sharp drop in the latest Maryland School Performance Assessment Program scores. A letter released yesterday by the Glenwood Middle School PTSA executive board said that the school's 13.8-point drop was directly related to pupil boycotts of the test last spring - disruptions that followed the firing of popular teacher Kristine Lockwood. The letter pointed to "a portion of the [eighth-grade]

Even before Sunday's fatal accident in which two teenage boys were hit by a Maryland Transit Administration light rail train in Lutherville, a serious crime apparently took place a short distance away. According to the MTA, someone - whose identity is not yet known to the public - placed a large section of highway guardrail across the northbound tracks just south of the station. That act of vandalism - if not outright sabotage - has been overshadowed by the tragedy that occurred about an hour later, but it set in motion the chain of events that led to the deaths of Kyle Patrick Wankmiller and Connor Peterson, both 17. According to MTA spokeswoman Jawauna Greene, the boys were struck by a northbound train as they walked on southbound tracks that had been put into two-way operation because the roughly 10-foot-long guardrail had damaged an earlier train.