Bones Found On Island Could Be Amelia Earhart's

The three bone fragments turned up on a deserted South Pacific island that lay along the course Amelia Earhart was following when she vanished. Nearby were several tantalizing artifacts: some old makeup, some glass bottles and shells that had been cut open.

Now scientists at the University of Oklahoma hope to extract DNA from the tiny bone chips in tests that could prove Earhart died as a castaway after failing in her 1937 quest to become the first woman to fly around the world.

"There's no guarantee," said Ric Gillespie, director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, a group of aviation enthusiasts in Delaware that found the pieces of bone this year while on an expedition to Nikumaroro Island, about 1,800 miles south of Hawaii.

"You only have to say you have a bone that may be human and may be linked to Earhart and people get excited. But it is true that, if they can get DNA, and if they can match it to Amelia Earhart's DNA, that's pretty good."

It could be months before scientists know for sure — and it could turn out the bones are from a turtle. The fragments were found near a hollowed-out turtle shell that might have been used to collect rain water, but there were no other turtle parts nearby.

Earhart's disappearance on July 2, 1937, remains one of the 20th century's most enduring mysteries. Did she run out of fuel and crash at sea? Did her Lockheed Electra develop engine trouble? Did she spot the island from the sky and attempt to land on a nearby reef?

"What were her last moments like? What was she doing? What happened?" asked Robin Jensen, an associate professor of communications at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., who has studied Earhart's writings and speeches.

Since 1989, Gillespie's group has made 10 trips to the island, trying each time to find clues that might help determine the fate of Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan.

Last spring, volunteers working at what seemed to be an abandoned campsite found one piece of bone that appeared to be from a neck and another unknown fragment dissimilar to bird or fish bones. A third fragment might be from a finger. The largest of the pieces is just over an inch long.

The area was near a site where native work crews found skeletal remains in 1940. Bird and fish carcasses suggested Westerners had prepared meals there.

"This site tells the story of how someone or some people attempted to live as castaways," Gillespie said Friday in an interview with The Associated Press. "These fish weren't eaten like Pacific Islanders" eat fish.

Millions of dollars have been spent in failed attempts to learn what happened to Earhart, a Kansas native declared dead by a California court in early 1939.

The official version says Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel and crashed at sea while flying from Lae, New Guinea, to Howland Island, which had a landing strip and fuel.

Gillespie's book "Finding Amelia: The True Story of the Earhart Disappearance," and "Amelia Earhart's Shoes," written by four volunteers from the aircraft group, suggest the pair landed on the reef and survived, perhaps for months, on scant food and rainwater.

Gillespie, a pilot, said the aviator would have needed only about 700 feet of unobstructed space to land because her plane would have been traveling only about 55 mph at touchdown.

"It looks like she could have landed successfully on the reef surrounding the island. It's very flat and smooth," Gillespie said. "At low tide, it looks like this place is surrounded by a parking lot."

However, Gillespie said, the plane, even if it landed safely, would have been slowly dragged into the sea by the tides. The waters off the reef are 1,000 to 2,000 feet deep. His group needs $3 million to $5 million for a deep-sea dive.

The island is on the course Earhart planned to follow from Lae, New Guinea, to Howland Island, which had a landing strip and fuel. Over the last seven decades, searches of the remote atoll have been inconclusive.

After the latest find, anthropologists who had previously worked with Gillespie's group suggested that he send the bones to the University of Oklahoma's Molecular Anthropology Laboratory, which has experience extracting genetic material from old bones. Gillespie's group also has a genetic sample from an Earhart female relative for comparison with the bones.

The lab is looking for mitochondrial DNA, which is passed along only through females, so there is no need to have a Noonan sample.

Cecil Lewis, an assistant professor of anthropology at the lab, said the university received a little more than a gram of bone fragments about two weeks ago. If researchers are able to extract DNA and link it to Earhart, a sample would be sent to another lab for verification.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That's why we're trying to downplay a lot of the media attention right now," Lewis said. "For all we know, this is just a turtle bone, and a lot of people are going to be very disheartened."

Under the best circumstances, the analysis would take two weeks. If scientists have trouble with the sample, that time frame could stretch into months, Lewis said.

"Ancient DNA is incredibly unpredictable," he said.

Other material recovered this year also suggested the presence of Westerners at the isolated island site:

— Someone carried shells ashore before cutting them open and slicing out the meat. Islanders cut the meat out at sea.

— Bottles found nearby were melted on the bottom, suggesting they had been put into a fire, possibly to boil water. (A Coast Guard unit on the island during World War II would have had no need to boil water.)

— Bits of makeup were found. The group is checking to see which products Earhart endorsed and whether an inventory lists specific types of makeup carried on her final trip.

— A glass bottle with remnants of lanolin and oil, possibly hand lotion.

In 2007, the group found a piece of a pocket knife but didn't know whether it was left by the Coast Guard or castaways. This year, it found the shattered remains of the knife, suggesting someone had smashed it to extract the blades. Gillespie speculated a castaway used a blade to make a spear to stab shallow-water fish like those found at the campsite.

Following Earhart's disappearance, distress signals picked up by distant ships pointed back to the area of Nikumaroro Island, but while pilots passing over saw signs of recent habitation, the island was crossed off the list as having been searched, Gillespie said.

In 1940, a British overseer on the island recovered a partial human skeleton, a woman's shoe and an empty sextant box at what appeared to be a former campsite, littered with turtle, clamshell and bird remains.

Thinking of Earhart, the overseer sent the items to Fiji, where a British doctor decided they belonged to a stocky European or mixed-blood male, ruling out any Earhart connection.

The bones later vanished, but in 1998, Gillespie's group located the doctor's notes in London. Two other forensic specialists reviewed the doctor's bone measurements and agreed they were more "consistent with" a female of northern European descent, about Earhart's age and height.

On their own visits to the island, volunteers recovered an aluminum panel that could be from an Electra, another piece of a woman's shoe and a "cat's paw" heel dating from the 1930s; another shoe heel, possibly a man's, and an oddly cut piece of clear Plexiglas.

The sextant box might have been Noonan's. The woman's shoe and heel resemble a blucher-style oxford seen in a pre-takeoff photo of Earhart. The plastic shard is the exact thickness and curvature of an Electra's side window.

The body of evidence is intriguing, but Gillespie insists the team is "constantly agonizing over whether we are being dragged down a path that isn't right."

———

Associated Press Writer Kelly P. Kissel contributed to this report from Oklahoma City.

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WikiLeaks: U.S., Cuba cooperated against drug smuggling

Dozens of the U.S. diplomatic cables obtained and published by WikiLeaks cover a worldwide phenomenon that has been persistently troubling to the United States: drug-trafficking. And those cables come not just from Mexico City, but from many corners of the world -- including Cuba and several embassies in west Africa.

Perhaps most revealing is the cooperation between the United States and Cuba over trafficking through Jamaica. A cable from August 2009 talks about multiple contacts between the U.S. Coast Guard and Cuban Interior Ministry.

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Why We Love To Hate Congress

As the 111th Congress wraps up its term, incoming lawmakers have nowhere to go but up — maybe.

Only 13 percent of Americans currently approve of the job their federal lawmakers are doing, according to the latest Gallup survey. That's the lowest point since the poll started in 1974.

The poll, based on phone interviews with more than 1,000 people Dec. 10-12, comes as Congress finishes a contentious lame-duck session following bitter midterm elections in which voters vented their dissatisfaction by booting many incumbents — mostly Democrats — out of office. The 83 percent disapproval rate is the worst since July 2008, according to Gallup.

"Congress has never been a popular institution. No one defends it, not even the congressmen themselves, who tend to run against it," said Lee Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat who served in the House for more than three decades.

So what will it take for lawmakers to get back in Americans' better graces?

Congress Is A Favorite Target

Congress' popularity could rebound in the next few months the way it did after midterm power shifts in 1994 and 1997, but it's a long climb back to the break-even point. The last time voters approved as much as they disapproved of the legislative branch for an extended period was in the mid-1980s, when Barry Goldwater was still the senior senator from Arizona and Tip O'Neill was speaker of the House.

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South Korea Conducts Drill Near North Korea Border

South Korea fired artillery in a 90-minute drill from a front-line island Monday and launched fighter jets to deter attacks after North Korea warned of catastrophic retaliation for the maneuvers.

There was no sign of any North Korean military response during the drill, a South Korean Defense Ministry official said, speaking on condition of anonymity, citing office rules. The South had evacuated hundreds of residents near its tense land border and sent residents of islands near disputed waters into underground bunkers amid soaring fears of war.

The live-fire exercises came nearly a month after the North responded to earlier maneuvers by shelling Yeonpyeong island, killing two marines and two civilians in its first attack targeting civilian areas since the 1950-53 Korean War. It had said it would respond even more harshly to any new drills from the Yellow Sea island.

U.N. diplomats meeting in New York failed to find any solution to ease fears of renewed warfare on the Korean peninsula.

Hours later, Seoul's Defense Ministry said the drills were under way on Yeonpyeong, a tiny enclave of fishing communities and military bases about seven miles from North Korean shores.

The North considers waters around Yeonpyeong its own territory. Similar drills on Nov. 23 sparked the North's artillery barrage, after what it says were clear warnings to the South to halt the firing. The North warned of a "catastrophe" if South Korea went ahead with new drills.

South Korea's military said ahead of Monday's planned drills that it would "immediately and sternly" deal with any provocation by the North. Fighter jets flew over South Korean airspace on a mission to deter North Korean attacks, a Defense Ministry official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity, citing department rules.

Residents, local officials and journalists on Yeonpyeong and four other islands were ordered to evacuate to underground shelters because of possible attacks by North Korea, Ongjin County government spokesman Won Ji-young said.

Hundreds of South Koreans living near the tense land border with North Korea were either evacuated to bomb shelters or taken to areas farther south ahead of the drills, local officials said.

On Yeonpyeong, residents filed into an underground shelter after authorities announced the drill and huddled on the floor as a South Korean soldier showed them how to use a gas mask, according to footage shot by Associated Press Television News.

"I feel the same as last Nov. 23, when North Korea fired artillery at us," said Oh Gui-nam, a 70-year-old island resident. "My emotions are all tangled up."

The Defense Ministry said the artillery drills involved several types of weapons, including K-9 self-propelled guns, ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok told reporters, according to his office.

Ahead of the drills, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak on Monday asked all South Koreans to be more united and vigilant about North Korea.

"The highest-level of national security comes from unity among the people," Lee said in a previously scheduled meeting with home affairs officials, according to Lee's office. North Korea provokes South Korea when "our public opinion is divided," Lee said.

The U.N. Security Council failed Sunday to agree on a statement to address rising tensions on the Korean peninsula.

U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice said the United States and other council members demanded that the council condemn North Korea for two deadly attacks this year that have helped send relations to their lowest point in decades. But diplomats said China strongly objected.

After eight hours of closed-door consultations Sunday, Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, who called the emergency council meeting, told reporters "we were not successful in bridging all the bridges."

Although some countries still need to consult capitals, Rice said "the gaps that remain are unlikely to be bridged."

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