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Sunday, August 31, 2025

Anthrax claims 2 postal employees

Two District of Columbia postal workers have died of what appears to be anthrax, and two others have contracted the most serious form of the disease, officials said Monday, making the city's principal mail-processing facility on Brentwood Road the newest epicenter of the letter-borne anthrax terrorism that has afflicted the East Coast.  

 

 

 

On another day of heightened anxiety in a string that began with the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge announced that although tests will determine the precise reason the workers died, '[it]is very clear the symptoms are suspicious' and anthrax was the 'likely' cause.  

 

 

 

Both workers died within hours of reporting to emergency rooms. Joseph P. Curseen, 47, arrived at Southern Maryland Hospital Center in Clinton, Md., Monday morning with flu-like symptoms and respiratory distress, and he died six hours later. On Sunday, Thomas L. Morris Jr., 55, arrived at Greater Southeast Community Hospital in Washington, D.C., at 5:55 a.m. with 'potential exposure to anthrax and other medical concerns.' He died 15 hours later.  

 

 

 

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Two other Brentwood workers were being treated for inhalation anthrax Monday, and at least seven other people were under observation locally, although none has tested positive for anthrax infection, city officials said. At least six of the seven are employees of the Brentwood mail facility. 

 

 

 

 

 

U.S. warplanes attacked front-line Taliban positions in northern Afghanistan Monday, pursuing a strategy that Pentagon officials said was aimed at helping Northern Alliance rebels advance toward key cities.  

 

 

 

U.S. jets dive-bombed Taliban posts near the Bagram air base, 25 miles north of Kabul, for the second straight day. The planes struck in two waves, dropping a half-dozen bombs that created brilliant flashes over their targets, witnesses said. The attacks triggered exchanges of mortar and rocket fire between Taliban and alliance forces, but there were no indications that either side advanced.  

 

 

 

U.S. planes also hit Taliban positions in the north-central city of Mazar-e Sharif. Northern Alliance commanders had predicted last week that the city would be captured swiftly, allowing them to open a supply line to neighboring Uzbekistan. But Monday, Alliance forces reportedly were still miles from Mazar-e Sharif.  

 

 

 

While its forces were under attack at Bagram and Mazar-e Sharif, the Taliban charged that U.S. and British warplanes had bombed a hospital in the western Afghan city of Herat, killing 100 doctors, nurses and patients.  

 

 

 

The Taliban insisted that the hospital had been hit in a deliberate attack.  

 

 

 

'It is now clear that American planes are targeting the Afghan people,' the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef, charged at a news conference in Islamabad. 'The goal is to punish the Afghan nation for having chosen an Islamic system. ... America has resorted to genocide of the Afghans.'  

 

 

 

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld denied the claim, as well as an assertion by Taliban officials that they had shot down U.S. helicopters over the weekend and taken American prisoners during Special Forces raids. 

 

 

 

 

 

The limited nature of Monday's air strikes against Taliban front lines north of Kabul provided the clearest sign yet that the two-week-old U.S. war in Afghanistan is using military action not only to destroy terrorist networks but also to lay the groundwork for a postwar Afghan government that would prevent them from returning.  

 

 

 

The strikes consisted of just a handful of aircraft hitting selected targets far from the waves of heavy bombers that experts say would be needed to punch a hole in the Taliban trenches and artillery positions, and so clear the way for the opposition Northern Alliance to drive about 25 miles south to take the capital.  

 

 

 

Despite the televised images, with bombs sending up smoke and dust in and around Kabul and the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, airstrikes have been restricted. The Pentagon has flown 100 or fewer aircraft, mostly carrier-based fighters'not heavy bombers'each day to sites outside Afghanistan's handful of major cities. The strikes have been so curtailed that there has been grumbling inside the Air Force.  

 

 

 

Both the selection of targets and the campaign's pace have been constrained, if not determined, as much by political and diplomatic calculations as by the Bush administration's primary goal of dismantling the terrorist network of militant Osama bin Laden and the ruling Taliban militia that harbors him.

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