Student arrested in Boston bombings case entered US without visa, official says

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WASHINGTON –  One of three college students arrested Wednesday in the Boston Marathon bombings case was allowed to return to the United States from Kazakhstan in January despite not having a valid student visa, a federal law enforcement official told The Associated Press.

Authorities charged the student -- a friend and classmate of one of the men accused of setting off the deadly explosions -- with helping after the attacks to remove a laptop and backpack from the bombing suspect's dormitory room before the FBI searched it.

The government acknowledged that U.S. Customs and Border Protection was unaware that the student was no longer in school when he was let back into the United States.

The disclosure was another instance of possible lapses by the federal government in the months before the Boston bombings. The Obama administration earlier this week announced an internal review of how U.S. intelligence agencies shared sensitive information and whether the government could have disrupted the attack. Republicans in Congress have promised oversight hearings starting next week.

Federal authorities on Wednesday arrested three college friends of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a bombing suspect, including Azamat Tazhayakov, a friend and classmate of Tsarnaev's at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Tazhayakov left the U.S. in December and returned Jan. 20. But in early January, his student-visa status was terminated because he was academically dismissed from the university, the official told the AP.

The law enforcement official said information about Tazhayakov's status was in the Homeland Security Department's Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, called SEVIS, when Tazhayakov arrived in New York in January.

The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because this person was not authorized to discuss details of Tazhayakov's immigration history.

DHS spokesman Peter Boogaard said when Tazhayakov arrived on Jan. 20, Customs and Border Protection officials had not been notified that he was no longer a student.

"DHS has recently reformed the student visa system to ensure that CBP is provided with real time updates on all relevant student visa information," Boogaard said. "At the time of re-entry there was no derogatory information that suggested this individual posed a national security or public safety threat."

Tazhayakov and another student from Kazakhstan, Dias Kadyrbayev, were detained last month on immigration charges. They were arrested on federal criminal charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice. Robel Phillipos, 19, was also arrested and charged with willfully making materially false statements to federal law enforcement officials during a terrorism investigation.

Questions about Tazhayakov's immigration status came up Wednesday during an immigration hearing in Boston when a judge questioned how he was able to return to the U.S. in January. A lawyer for Tazhayakov said he had re-enrolled in the university with a different major after returning to the country.

International students who aren't enrolled or are dismissed from a college or university generally have 30 days to rectify their status and re-enroll as long as they are already in the United States.

Lawmakers have questioned information sharing among U.S. law enforcement before the bombings. In 2011, Russian officials notified the FBI and CIA that they were concerned about now-deceased bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev. In early 2012 Homeland security was alerted of Tamerlan Tsarnaev's travel to and from Russia -- information that was shared with Boston's joint terrorism task force. But the FBI investigation into him had closed and therefore he didn't warrant additional scrutiny, officials have said.

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Sex in space snafu: Plant love gets freaky without gravity

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  Despite movies such as the 1968 classic space-sex romp Barbarella, NASA has barely touched on the topic of sex in space.Paramount Pictures

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  A pollen grain extending a pollen tube.University of Montreal

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A real-time look at plant sex in an environment simulating microgravity reveals that agriculture in space might face challenges.

The study also illuminates how gravity works on intercellular transport, a crucial process for mating plants and communicating human brain cells alike.

There's no word yet, however, on how human sex in space would work out — though that may have to change if a private plan to send a married couple on a journey around Mars pans out.

Sex in space
Though not as titillating as humans getting busy, plant sex is a great way to examine how cells transport materials inside their walls. When a pollen grain lands on a stigma, the female part of a flowering plant, it grows a pollen tube that acts as a tunnel for sperm cells to travel down to reach the egg. The pollen tube is the fastest-growing cell in the plant kingdom. [50 Sultry Facts About Sex]

Fast growth is key for studying the way cells move in real-time. Using any other plant cell, you'd have to wait weeks to see a response to gravity, said study researcher Anja Geitmann, a biologist at the University of Montreal. In pollen tubes, a response takes mere seconds.

Pollen tubes are also good models in which to examine how intercellular transport works, because they don't sense gravity. Any response pollen tubes have is due only to the physical effects of the gravitational force, not the cell sensing gravity and changing its behavior accordingly.

Some plant cells do sense gravity; tiny structures called statoliths in root cells ensure that plant roots grow down, for example. But growth of pollen tubes follows the chemical signal from a female plant, so they don't need gravitational information. In that way, they work like any cell with a nucleus, including animal cells.

Beyond 1 g
No pollen tubes were blasted into space in the making of this study. Instead, Geitmann and her co-researchers availed themselves of the tools of the European Space Agency (ESA). They used a spinning centrifuge 26 feet in diameter to expose growing pollen tubes to forces of gravity up to 20 times normal Earth gravity (known as 1 g). They also put pollen tubes in the ESA's Random Positioning Machine, which turns specimens in all directions at a particular speed, essentially canceling out the effects of gravity from each side. This creates conditions that simulate the microgravity of space.

"It's not true zero gravity," Geitmann told LiveScience. "There is continuously 1 g on the sample, but it simply changes direction."

The researchers used microscopy to watch their samples in real-time. The results revealed that while the pollen tube may not sense which way is up, gravity affects it nonetheless. The diameters of the tubes grown in simulated microgravity were 8 percent smaller than a tube grown in 1 g. At five times Earth's gravity, the tubes were 8 percent wider, and at 20 times Earth's gravity, they were 38 percent wider.

The surface expansion rate of the tubes also dropped 39 percent in the simulated microgravity.

Because forming a pollen tube is essentially a tiny cellular construction project, cells transport little bubbles, or vesicles, of material to build out the cell walls in the direction the tube is growing. The researchers found that the distribution of two of these materials, cellulose and callose, was disrupted in hyper- and microgravity.

"The intercellular trafficking, which occurs in very precisely defined paths in these cells, was affected," Geitmann said. She and her colleagues reported their findings today (March 13) in the journal PLOS ONE.

Animal reproduction isn't similar enough to plant reproduction to draw any conclusions about the result of human sex in space from this study, Geitmann said. Concerns about human reproduction in space include the effects of radiation exposure on a developing fetus as well as unknowns about microgravity, according to a 1996 paper in the journal Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica. [Animal Sex Quiz: Test Your Smarts]

But don't shrug off microgravity plant sex just yet. Intercellular transport is important in a variety of human cells, particularly lengthy neurons, Geitmann said. Researchers studying fish brains reported in the journal Advanced Space Research in 2002 that synaptic formation was influenced by microgravity. Anecdotal reports and small studies of astronauts also suggest that cognitive performance declines in space, but individuals varied widely, according to a 2012 report by NASA.

Causes for that decline could range from sleep deprivation and stress to radiation, NASA found, but no one has looked at whether intercellular transport in neurons might play a role, Geitmann said.

"Many neuronal diseases, such as Huntington's or Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, are related to trafficking," she said.

Humans also need to understand plant sex in space should our species ever need to feed itself on long-duration missions or colonies on other planets.

"If we ever want to do agriculture in space, so to say — it's a long-term vision! — then we have to take this into account," Geitmann wrote in an email. "In order to actually do long-term plant cultivation, we have to look for species that can actually reproduce under zero gravity conditions."

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Without entitlement reform, America could experience a permanent sequester

Parks are closing. Government workers are being furloughed. The Department of Defense is issuing warnings about compromised military readiness. The Department of Homeland Security is making similar claims about border security.

Everywhere you look there is talk about the consequences of the recently imposed automatic federal spending cuts. Although most of these are really cuts in the Washington sense of the word—a slower rate of spending increase—sequestration is designed to make deficit reduction choices on auto pilot when federal lawmakers are unable to make them in real life.

The effected programs are being squeezed because mandatory spending on entitlements was largely taken off the table. This resulted in bigger cuts in everything from military spending to transportation infrastructure investments to national parks. But the sad fact is that this is the fiscal path the country was already embarking upon, with sequestration being just one small part of the problem.

Reforming entitlements before it’s too late would keep Americans from living in a permanent state of sequestration.

That’s because as the Baby Boomers retire, entitlement spending and interest payments will gobble up the entire federal budget, leaving little room for anything else. 

Ten years from now, automatically growing programs like Social Security and Medicare will make up 62 percent of annual spending. The Pentagon budget will be just 12 percent. We’re just seven years away from interest payments on the national debt outpacing defense.

According to an estimate by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, interest payments and entitlements will consume the entire federal budget by 2025. That means no funds left over for the programs hit by sequestration without substantial additional borrowing.

Conservatives will rightfully be concerned about putting defense on a starvation diet. But many liberal priorities will be hurt too. 

The group Third Way published a paper titled “Collision Course: Why Democrats Must Back Entitlement Reform,” arguing, “as the cost of entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security has skyrocketed, we’ve spent less and less of our budget educating kids, building roads, and curing disease.

"That means no money for national defense. No money for homeland security. No money to fix the nation’s crumbling bridges and roads. No money for medical research to find a cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s diseases," Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) concurred in a March 2012 House floor speech.

The nonpartisan fact-checkers at PolitiFact Virginia rated Wolf’s statement as “true.”

While optimists hope that faster economic growth or reduced health care costs could improve this bleak budget outlook, there is also the potential for things to get worse.

If interest rates rise significantly above their current lows, so will the cost of borrowing. The U.S. government could also face further credit downgrades, such as when Standard & Poor’s stripped Uncle Sam of his AAA bond rating in 2011.

Social Security and Medicare are currently projected to face their own cash crunches soon enough. That means that even as they consume more federal tax revenues, these programs may see a decline in quality as the government struggles to pay for the promises it has made to the nation’s seniors.

By one estimate, nearly one-third of doctors nationwide refuse to accept new Medicaid patients because the government health care program for the poor doesn’t pay enough to cover the costs of treating them. This hasn’t just hurt doctors, who received from Medicaid just 58 percent of what private insurance paid in 2008, but also people covered under the program, as their health care options have dwindled.

If Medicare has to cut its payments to doctors as well, there may be a similar decline in quality health care for senior citizens too. “If caring for Medicare patients is too costly, doctors will simply opt out and care for the disabled and those over 65 will become hard to find,” writes the physician Peter Lipson.”

At a time when the country is changing, spending commitments that were made in a very different bygone era are actually handcuffing politicians and limiting the next generation’s choices.

Reforming entitlements before it’s too late—and before current beneficiaries would be impacted—would keep Americans from living in a permanent state of sequestration.

Sometimes, less is more.

W. James Antle III is editor of the Daily Caller News Foundation and author of the forthcoming book "Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped? Regnery Publishing (March 19, 2013)"

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