Coast Guard identifies cause of cruise ship fire

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• NEW: Coast Guard: The fuel line ran from an engine to a fuel tank


• There is no indication the leak was intentional, a Coast Guard official says


• The crew is praised for doing a "very good job" containing the fire

Washington (CNN) -- The fire that crippled the Carnival cruise ship Triumph started with a leak in a fuel-oil return line running from one of the ship's engines, the U.S. Coast Guard said Monday.

Leaking oil hit a hot surface, starting the fire, said Teresa Hatfield, the lead investigator for the Coast Guard. Hatfield said there was no indication the leak in a flexible hose section was intentional.

"Fire suppression was immediately activated by the crew, first by waterfog and then by (carbon dioxide). They did a very good job," Hatfield said.

"We are looking at the cause of the fire and why the ship was disabled for so long, and we are also looking at the crew response to the fire as well."

Moments from aboard the ship

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Hatfield said the investigation will last for several months. The Coast Guard said it has conducted 21 interviews with passengers and crew members since Thursday, when investigators boarded the ship while it was still at sea.

Hatfield said the oil return line is one of the items that is routinely inspected, but she did not say when it was last inspected or describe its condition at that time.

Vance Gulliksen, a spokesman with Carnival Cruise Lines, told CNN Monday that the ship's last scheduled Coast Guard inspection was on November 15. Gulliksen also said the cruise line agreed with the Coast Guard's determination of the origin of the fire.

Coast Guard spokesman Carlos Diaz said the line ran from the ship's "number-6 engine" to a fuel tank.

The Triumph was on the third day of a planned four-day cruise from Galveston, Texas, to Mexico when the fire broke out and brought the trip to a halt. It was carrying more than 4,200 people, including 3,100 passengers. The Triumph was eventually towed into port in Mobile, Alabama, Thursday night, and the last passengers disembarked Friday.

Stranded on the crippled ship, passengers and crew lived with worsening conditions, as toilets stopped working, and waste spilled onto floors and into hallways. Passengers had to use plastic bags to collect their waste.

Passenger Cassie Terry described the ship as "a floating toilet, a floating Petri dish, a floating hell" in a lawsuit filed Friday against Carnival for unspecified damages related to the cruise.

Passengers reported long lines for food, shortages of fresh water and widespread boredom. Many passengers slept in hallways or outside to escape the odors and heat below decks.

Patrick Cuty, a senior marine investigator for the Coast Guard, told CNN Sunday that investigators had located the area where flames erupted in the engine room.

"We know that the fire originated in front of a generator," Cuty said. "You can see the ignition marks on the wall."

There are three generators in the engine room where the fire broke out. Three other generators are in a second engine room that wasn't involved in the fire, Cuty said.

The same ship encountered a problem in January with its propulsion system, according to a notice posted on the website of Carnival senior cruise director John Heald.

On Saturday, Carnival crew members were bused to and from the ship to help with the clean-up. One housekeeper told CNN it wasn't pleasant work but said it had to be done, and the crew was willing to do it.

Passengers have praised the crew for its response during the ordeal.

Because the Carnival Triumph is a Bahamian-flagged vessel, the Bahamas Maritime Authority is the primary investigative agency and will work with the Coast Guard and the National Transportation Safety Board.

Investigators pulled the voyage data recorder, a device that records alarms, voice communications on the bridge, engine speed, navigation information and rudder angle, Cuty said.

It appears that the fire suppression worked as designed, Cuty said Friday. The engineer who was on watch around dawn February 10 saw the fire ignite over a video feed and immediately notified the bridge, Cuty said.

On crippled cruise ship, icky jobs fell to 'amazing' crew

Lawsuit filed over 'floating hell' cruise

CNN's Jim Barnett contributed to this report.

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WH: Leaked immigration plan is only partial draft

(CBS News) WASHINGTON -- Over the weekend, a partial White House plan for immigration reform leaked to the press and caused an uproar.

White House officials tell CBS News that what was leaked is real -- it's a partial draft of half a bill. What we know is the administration's current thinking about what to do about the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States right now.

The administration wants a temporary four-year visa to provide legal status -- meaning no more deportations -- that could be renewed. After eight years, they can apply for what's known as permanent legal residency, or, more commonly, a Green Card.

(At left, watch White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough discuss the leaked immigration plan on "Face the Nation.")

There's also administration thinking on border security and an unspecified increase in border security, subject to negotiations with Congress. For workers who try to find jobs in the future and who might not have documents, the plan includes an E-Verify system to make sure undocumented workers aren't given jobs.

GOP: Leaked WH immigration plan "counterproductive"
W.H. immigration plan circulating in case Congress talks "break down," McDonough says

What's missing is a section dealing with all future legal immigration issues: high-skilled workers, seasonal farm workers and workers who work in hotels or restaurants. Without that, this plan doesn't have much of a chance.

The plan is not likely to get through Congress without the section dealing with legal immigration. That's why Republicans were so critical this weekend.

Last year, Republicans criticized the president for being missing in action and failing to draft a bill. Now that he admits he is, Republicans say he's contaminating that process; they argue that if you don't have a comprehensive bill -- one that can pass Republicans and Democrats in both the House and Senate -- this is a futile effort.

The White House says Republicans are going to be dared to vote up or down eventually, and that they better get used to that.

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Obama's Speech on Guns Doesn't Stop Ill. Killing

A Chicago teenager was shot and killed Friday only hours after her sister attended President Obama's speech on the city's rampant gun violence.
Janay McFarlane, 18, was killed while walking with a friend during a visit to her dad, Herbert McFarlane, in North Chicago.

"All this gun violence going on, you never think it would be your child," he told ABC's Chicago station WLS. "This is the hardest thing for me in my life."

Herbert McFarlane told WLS that the loss of Janay is especially hard because she leaves behind a 3-month old son, who likes to wear an "I love Mommy" shirt. The shooting occurred in Lake County, a northern suburb miles from the epicenter of the gun violence on the city's South Side.

"I'm in Lake County to get away from violence and now it happened in Lake County where I moved to," he told WLS.

McFarlane and her child spent time both in Lake County and on the South Side where her mother lives.

Janay Proudmommie Mcfarlane/Facebook

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Only hours before McFarlane was shot and killed, President Obama returned to his hometown to speak on the South Side at a Hyde Park high school. McFarlane's sister, Destini Warren, 14, sat behind the president during the speech.

More than 500 people were shot and killed here last year, and this year the situation has worsened with the most deadly January the city has seen in over a decade. The shooting death of Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year old who performed in Washington, D.C. at events connected to the president's inauguration last month, garnered national attention.

"Too many of our children are being taken away from us," Obama said in Hyde Park, with McFarlane's sister in the audience.

"Last year there were 443 murders with a firearm on the streets of this city, and 65 of those victims were 18 and under," he said. "So that's the equivalent of a Newtown every four months." He was referring to Newtown, Conn., where 20 first graders were gunned down by Adam Lanza along with seven adults.

Only hours later in Chicago, another 18-year old was shot and killed.

"I felt like someone took a knife and stabbed me in the heart, and a piece of my heart I will never get back," Angela Blakely, Janay McFarlane's mother, told WLS.

North Chicago Police on Sunday reportedly questioned two people in connection to McFarlane's death. Her family said McFarlane was an unintended target of the shooting.

Messages left by ABC News with the North Chicago Police Department and the Lake County Coroner's Office went unreturned Monday.

Another Chicago teenager, Frances Colon, was also shot and killed Friday just hours after she had told her father that she saw President Obama's helicopter fly over her neighborhood.

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Wiping out top predators messes up the climate

Wiping out top predators like lions, wolves and sharks is tragic, bad for ecosystems – and can make climate change worse. Mass extinctions of the big beasts of the jungles, grasslands and oceans could already be adding to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Trisha Atwood of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, studied the effect of removing predator fish from ponds and rivers in Canada and Costa Rica. Across a range of ecosystems, climates and predators, she found a consistent pattern: carbon dioxide emissions typically increased more than tenfold after the predators were removed.

"It looks like predators in many types of ecosystems – marine and terrestrial as well as freshwater – can play a very big role in global climate change," she told New Scientist.

The widespread and dramatic ecological impacts of the loss of top predators are well known. In the ensuing "trophic cascade", the vanished top predator's prey proliferate, which in turn puts pressure on the species that the prey eats, and so on down the food chain. In this way, changes at the top of a food chain destabilise the balance of populations right the way down.

But the geochemical impacts of trophic cascades, including any impact on emissions from ecosystems, are much less well known. Atwood's study of freshwater ecosystems showed how changes to species at the bottom of the food chain, such as photosynthesising algae, following the removal of a top predator dramatically increased the flow of CO₂ from the ecosystem to the atmosphere.

The effect will not always be to increase CO₂ emissions, however – sometimes the loss of top predators could decrease emissions, she says. "But we show that something so seemingly unrelated, like fishing all the trout from a pond or removing sharks from the ocean, could have big consequences for greenhouse-gas dynamics."

Help from kelp

Other recent studies have hinted at similar effects. Last October, Christopher Wilmers of the University of California, Santa Cruz, reported how the disappearance of sea otters is linked with increased CO₂ emissions from North American coastlines (Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, doi.org/khz). With no otters eating them, sea urchins thrive and eat out kelp forests – often known as the "rainforests of the oceans" – resulting in major CO₂ releases.

Global climate models do not take such impacts into account yet. Atwood says they could be major, as freshwater emissions may be on a par with the influence of deforestation, which is thought responsible for around 15 per cent of human-caused CO₂ emissions.

Environmentalists will herald the findings as further evidence that it is vital to protect pristine habitats and the charismatic species at the top of their food chains. But there is a dark side. A recent study found that some island ecosystems around New Zealand store 40 per cent more carbon than others because of their top predators – invading rats that are wiping out seabird colonies. Rats, it seems, are good for the climate (Biology Letters, doi.org/bbmtw9).

Journal reference: Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/NGEO1734

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

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Australian opposition leaps ahead in polls

SYDNEY: Australia's opposition coalition has increased its lead as support for Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her Labor Party wanes ahead of September elections, according to a poll.

The Herald-Nielsen poll for Fairfax newspapers found the opposition would win 55 percent of the vote, against 45 percent for the Labor-led government.

As a single party, without minority backers, Labor would win just 30 percent of first preference votes -- a fall of five points since the last Nielsen survey in December.

The coalition climbed four points by the same measure, taking its primary vote to 47 percent.

Opposition leader Tony Abbott overtook Gillard in the preferred prime minister stakes, surging nine points to 49 percent while the prime minister dropped five points to 45 percent.

Gillard sought to downplay the figures, which suggest that her gamble in announcing the election nearly eight months before polling day was not well received by voters.

"We see a lot of opinion polls," Gillard told Seven Network television.

"If I spent time worrying about them and commentating on opinion polls then I wouldn't have the time to get my job done.

"So each and every day I just let that wash through and I focus on what I need to do as prime minister."

Gillard broke with tradition by fixing the September 14 election date well ahead of time, hoping to force the opposition to detail its policies and costings.

However Labor's retreat from a much-vaunted promise to restore the budget to surplus this year, the failure of a controversial mining tax to raise much revenue and corruption scandals have dominated headlines.

The prime minister's approval ratings plunged six points to 40 percent and her disapproval level rose six to 56 percent.

The national poll of 1,400 voters, taken from Thursday to Saturday, found the gap between Gillard and former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd had widened.

Sixty-one percent of respondents favoured Rudd against 35 percent for Gillard. Despite his protests to the contrary, speculation is rife of another Rudd tilt at the Labor leadership either before the polls or after election defeat.

Rudd was deposed by Gillard, then his deputy, in a shock party-room ouster before the 2010 elections. He mounted a challenge last February but lost 71-31 in a secret leadership ballot.

Nielsen pollster John Stirton told the Sydney Morning Herald the results were a bad sign for Labor.

"It confirms that the trend to Labor that ran from May to November last year and appeared to stall over Christmas is now heading in the opposite direction."

- AFP

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Pope delivers one of his final messages

By Hada Messia and Josh Levs, CNN

updated 7:21 PM EST, Sun February 17, 2013

Pope Benedict XVI waves as he arrives to lead the Angelus prayer at the Vatican on Sunday.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• It's the pope's second-to-last Angelus prayer as pontiff


• Pope Benedict XVI thanks his flock for prayers and support


• He discusses "decisive moments of our lives"


• Cardinals may meet before March 15

(CNN) -- Pope Benedict XVI led tens of thousands in a prayer for strength Sunday and thanked followers for their support during his second-to-last Angelus prayer as pontiff.

"Today we contemplate Christ in the desert, fasting, praying, and being tempted," the pope said to an unusually large crowd at St. Peter's Square in Vatican City.

"As we begin our Lenten journey, we join him and we ask him to give us strength to fight our weaknesses. Let me also thank you for the prayers and support you have shown me in these days. May God bless all of you!"

Benedict, 85, shocked millions across the world last week when he announced his intention to stand down at the end of the month, citing the frailty of old age.

The decision makes him the first pope to step down in nearly 600 years.

Referring Sunday to a Bible passage, the pope said, "During the decisive moments of our lives, and in fact at every moment, we are in front of a crossroads: Do we want to follow the I or God? The individual interest or the true good, that which really is the good?"

The crowd appeared to have about 100,000 people

He also tweeted a message to followers worldwide, calling on them to "rediscover faith" as a foundation.

Cardinals may meet before March 15 to choose the next pope if they are all in Rome, a Vatican spokesman said Saturday. The conclave will bring together the 117 cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church.

Part of complete coverage on

What do you think about the Pope's decision to resign? If you are a Catholic, how will it affect you? Send us your thoughts and recollections.

Read all of the latest updates, including standards for the next pope and possible successors on CNN's Belief Blog.

They are the largest group in the Roman Catholic Church, and the next pope might even come from their midst. Yet few have heard how Latino Catholics regard the legacy of Pope Benedict XVI.

updated 11:07 AM EST, Tue February 12, 2013

Before he was Pope Benedict XVI, before he earned the nickname "Cardinal No" as the enforcer of church doctrine, he was Joseph Ratzinger.

The news stunned both the Church's 1.2 billion followers and the rest of the world. Here's a collection of your views from social media.

updated 11:02 AM EST, Tue February 12, 2013

Pope Benedict XVI's decision to resign caught a lot of Vatican watchers, apparently even some in his inner circle, off-guard. They should not have been so surprised.

updated 9:36 AM EST, Mon February 11, 2013

Pope Benedict's German background has always been a talking point. CNN's Fred Pletigen takes a look at Pope's German roots.

updated 7:27 PM EST, Mon February 11, 2013

Pope Benedict XVI on Monday said he plans on resigning the papal office on February 28. Click here for the full text of Benedict's declaration.

updated 12:30 PM EST, Mon February 11, 2013

Assuming Pope Benedict XVI steps down as planned at the end of February, his tenure on Twitter will have been fleeting.

updated 6:26 AM EST, Tue February 12, 2013

After his resignation, Benedict, 85, will probably retire to a monastery and devote himself to a life of prayer. Look back at his time as Pope.

updated 2:12 PM EST, Mon February 11, 2013

The surprising news from Rome, Monday, leaves the church and the world in unfamiliar, but not entirely uncharted, territory.

updated 9:13 AM EST, Mon February 11, 2013

Pope Benedict directed the church's response to decades of abuse by its priests. CNN's Nic Robertson reports.

updated 11:06 AM EST, Tue February 12, 2013

We explore what the surprise announcement means for the Catholic Church.

updated 8:58 AM EST, Mon February 11, 2013

CNN's Jim Bittermann looks at the legacy and controversies that have marked Pope Benedict XVI's reign.

updated 10:56 AM EST, Fri November 23, 2012

A book released by Pope Benedict XVI last year looks at the early life of Jesus -- and debunks several myths about how the Nativity unfolded.

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Danica Patrick makes NASCAR history

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. Danica Patrick has made history before — as a woman and a racer, in Indianapolis and Japan.

The spotlight is nothing new. But never has it been this bright before.

Patrick won the Daytona 500 pole Sunday, becoming the first woman to secure the top spot for any race in NASCAR's premier circuit. It's by far the biggest achievement of her stock-car career.

29 Photos

Danica Patrick

"I was brought up to be the fastest driver, not the fastest girl," she said. "That was instilled in me from very young, from the beginning. Then I feel like thriving in those moments, where the pressure's on, has also been a help for me. I also feel like I've been lucky in my career to be with good teams and have good people around me. I don't think any of it would have been possible without that.

"For those reasons, I've been lucky enough to make history, be the first woman to do many things. I really just hope that I don't stop doing that. We have a lot more history to make. We are excited to do it."

Her latest stamp in the history books came with a lap at 196.434 mph around Daytona International Speedway. Patrick went out eighth in the qualifying session, then had to wait about two hours as 37 fellow drivers tried to take her spot.

Only four-time Cup champion Jeff Gordon even came close to knocking her off. Gordon was the only other driver who topped 196 mph in qualifying. He locked up the other guaranteed spot in next week's season-opening Daytona 500.

"It's great to be a part of history with Danica being on the pole," said Gordon, who joked that at least he was the fastest guy. "I think we all know how popular she is, what this will do for our sport. Congratulations to her. Proud to be on there with her."

• Danica Patrick crashes in Daytona qualifier

The rest of the field will be set in duel qualifying races Thursday.

However the lineup unfolds, all drivers will line up behind Patrick's No. 10 Chevrolet SS.

And she knows her latest achievement will mean more public relations work.

The routine is nothing new for Patrick, who was the first woman to lead laps in the Indianapolis 500. She finished third in 2009, the highest finish in that illustrious race for a woman. And she became the only woman to win an IndyCar race when she did it in Japan in 2008.

Hardly anyone witnessed that victory.

Leading the field to the green flag in NASCAR's showcase event should be must-watch television.

"That's a huge accomplishment," team owner and fellow driver Tony Stewart said. "It's not like it's been 15 or 20 years she's been trying to do this. It's her second trip to Daytona here in a Cup car. She's made history in the sport. That's stuff that we're proud of being a part of with her. It's something she should have a huge amount of pride in.

"It's never been done. There's only one person that can be the first to do anything. Doesn't matter how many do it after you do, accomplish that same goal. The first one that does always has that little bit more significance to it because you were the first."

Even before her fast lap Sunday, Patrick was the talk of Speedweeks. Not only did she open up about her budding romance with fellow Sprint Cup rookie Ricky Stenhouse Jr., but she was considered the front-runner for the pole after leading practice sessions Saturday.

And she didn't disappoint.

She kept her car at or near the bottom of the famed track and gained ground on the straightaways, showing lots of power from a Hendrick Motorsports engine.

"It's easy to come down here in your first or second year as a driver and clip the apron trying to run too tight a line or do something and scrub speed off," Stewart said. "That's something she did an awesome job. Watching her lap, she runs so smooth. ... She did her job behind the wheel, for sure."

The result surely felt good for Patrick, especially considering the former IndyCar driver has mostly struggled in three NASCAR seasons. Her best finish in 10 Cup races is 17th, and she has one top-five in 58 starts in the second-tier Nationwide Series.

She raced part-time in 2010 and 2011 while still driving a full IndyCar slate. She switched solely to stock cars last season and finished 10th in the Nationwide standings.

She made the jump to Sprint Cup this season and will battle Stenhouse for Rookie of the Year honors.

Starting out front in an unpredictable, 500-mile race doesn't guarantee any sort of result, but securing the pole will put her in the limelight for at least the rest of the week.

She also won the pole at Daytona for last year's Nationwide race.

This is considerably bigger.

The previous highest female qualifier in a Cup race was Janet Guthrie. She started ninth at Bristol and Talladega in 1977.

"It's obviously a history-making event that will last a long, long time," Guthrie said, praising Patrick's feat. "It's a different era, of course. Different times. I can't imagine what I would do with a spotter or somebody telling me how to drive. It's rather a different sport now. Back then, there was a much greater difference from the front of the field to the back."

Guthrie received a lukewarm reception from fellow drivers back then.

Patrick was much more welcomed, undoubtedly because of her background and popularity.

She's comfortable being in the spotlight, evidenced by her racing career, her television commercials and her sudden openness about her personal life.

"I think when pressure's on and when the spotlight's on, I feel like it ultimately ends up becoming some of my better moments and my better races and better results," Patrick said. "I just understand that if you put the hard work in before you go out there that you can have a little peace and a little peace of mind knowing that you've done everything you can and just let it happen."

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Troubled Country Singer Shot Herself, Cops Say

Mindy McCready, the country singer who soared to the top of the charts with her debut album, "Ten Thousand Angels," but struggled with substance abuse, served time in jail and fought a lengthy battle with her mother over custody of her son has died of what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said. She was 37.

Deputies from the Cleburne County Sheriff's Office were dispatched to a report of gun shots fired at McCready's Heber Springs, Ark., home at around 3:30 p.m. today.

There they found McCready on the front porch. She was pronounced dead at the scene from what appeared to be a single self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to a statement from the sheriff's office.

McCready's boyfriend, David Wilson, died in January of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. McCready was ordered to enter rehab shortly after Wilson's death, and her two children, Zander, 6, and 9-month-old Zayne were taken from her. She was released after one day to undergo outpatient care.

McCready scored a number-one Billboard country hit in 1996 with "Guys Do It All the Time," but in recent years, the country crooner has received more media attention for her troubled personal life than her music.

She has been arrested multiple times on drug charges and probation violations and has been hospitalized for overdoses several times, including in 2010, when she was found unconscious at her mother's home after taking a painkiller and muscle relaxant.

Angela Weiss/Getty Images

Her mother, Gayle Inge, was appointed to be her son Zander's legal guardian in 2007 after McCready was arrested for violating probation on a drug-related charge. The boy's father is McCready's ex-boyfriend Billy McKnight.

Following a custody hearing in May 2011, McCready released a statement, saying, "We have progressed in a positive manner to reunite me and my son, Zander. I feel very optimistic this will happen in the near future."

But just six months later, in November 2011, was accused of violating a court order for failing to bring Zander back to her mother in Florida after a visit. The boy was placed in foster care while McCready and her mother worked out the custody dispute.

McCready's struggle with substance abuse was broadcast in 2010 on the third season of "Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew."

McCready also claimed to have carried on a decade-long affair with baseball star Roger Clemens that began was she was 15 years old and he was 28. Clemens denied that the relationship was sexual in nature.

"You know what, I don't think I'm ever going to be one of those people that has a normal, quiet existence," McCready told ABC Radio in 2010. "I've been chosen for some reason to be bigger and larger than life in every way. Negative and positive."

McCready, who was born and raised in southern Florida, moved to Nashville when she was 18 to start her music career.

Within a few months, she was starting to work with producer David Malloy, who got her tapes to RLG Records. The company signed her to a contract after seeing her in concert, giving her a record deal less than a year after her arrival in Nashville.

Her debut album, "Ten Thousand Angels," went gold within six months of its release in April 1996, and eventually went multi-platinum. Two more followed: "If I Don't Stay the Night," in 1997; and "I'm Not So Tough" in 1999.

Her most recent album, "I'm Still Here," featuring new versions of her early hits "Ten Thousand Angels" and "Guys Do It All the Time," was released in March 2010.

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False memories prime immune system for future attacks

IN A police line-up, a falsely remembered face is a big problem. But for the body's police force – the immune system – false memories could be a crucial weapon.

When a new bacterium or virus invades the body, the immune system mounts an attack by sending in white blood cells called T-cells that are tailored to the molecular structure of that invader. Defeating the infection can take several weeks. However, once victorious, some T-cells stick around, turning into memory cells that remember the invader, reducing the time taken to kill it the next time it turns up.

Conventional thinking has it that memory cells for a particular microbe only form in response to an infection. "The dogma is that you need to be exposed," says Mark Davis of Stanford University in California, but now he and his colleagues have shown that this is not always the case.

The team took 26 samples from the Stanford Blood Center. All 26 people had been screened for diseases and had never been infected with HIV, herpes simplex virus or cytomegalovirus. Despite this, Davis's team found that all the samples contained T-cells tailored to these viruses, and an average of 50 per cent of these cells were memory cells.

The idea that T-cells don't need to be exposed to the pathogen "is paradigm shifting," says Philip Ashton-Rickardt of Imperial College London, who was not involved in the study. "Not only do they have capacity to remember, they seem to have seen a virus when they haven't."

So how are these false memories created? To a T-cell, each virus is "just a collection of peptides", says Davis. And so different microbes could have structures that are similar enough to confuse the T-cells.

To test this idea, the researchers vaccinated two people with an H1N1 strain of influenza and found that this also stimulated the T-cells to react to two bacteria with a similar peptide structure. Exposing the samples from the blood bank to peptide sequences from certain gut and soil bacteria and a species of ocean algae resulted in an immune response to HIV (Immunology, doi.org/kgg).

The finding could explain why vaccinating children against measles seems to improve mortality rates from other diseases. It also raises the possibility of creating a database of cross-reactive microbes to find new vaccination strategies. "We need to start exploring case by case," says Davis.

"You could find innocuous pathogens that are good at vaccinating against nasty ones," says Ashton-Rickardt. The idea of cross-reactivity is as old as immunology, he says. But he is excited about the potential for finding unexpected correlations. "Who could have predicted that HIV was related to an ocean algae?" he says. "No one's going to make that up!"

This article appeared in print under the headline "False memories prime our defences"

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

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Australia seeks answers from Israel on 'Prisoner X'

SYDNEY: Canberra said Sunday it was seeking answers from Israel over the death in 2010 of an Australian known as "Prisoner X" in a Tel Aviv jail as part of its own probe into the case.

Foreign Minister Bob Carr said his office was preparing a formal report into the circumstances surrounding the death of the prisoner, identified in Australian media as Ben Zygier, 34, who Israel says committed suicide.

That the detainee, held in a high security prison under continuous surveillance, managed to hang himself has raised questions and fed conspiracy theories that have been reported by the Israeli and Australian media.

Many questions remain unanswered in the mysterious case, with a senior unnamed Israeli official telling The Australian newspaper that Australian officials had interrogated the prisoner on suspicion of spying for Mossad.

Carr said foreign office chief Peter Varghese was preparing a report which would "canvass all the consular contact between Australia and between Israel" including contact between security agencies.

"We have asked the Israeli government for a contribution to that report," Carr told reporters in Sydney.

"We want to give them an opportunity to submit to us an explanation of how this tragic death came about."

If the report showed "any areas where we can improve our contact in consular cases like this", Carr said, "it will have practical effect when there are cases in the future where an Australian citizen is treated in a comparable way."

"I need to know what the contact was between Australian agencies and those of Israel, and I need to see what the Israelis want to tell Australia," he said. "The key is to get all the information."

Carr, foreign minister since early 2012, originally said the Australian government had not been informed of the prisoner's plight.

He later backtracked on this claim, conceding that Canberra was told in February 2010 -- 10 months before the death -- that Israel had detained an Australian-Israeli citizen on national security grounds.

Carr's predecessor Kevin Rudd, foreign minister at the time of the prisoner's death, said Sunday it was important that Australia "get to the bottom of this".

"(I was) deeply surprised to hear not only had this person been incarcerated, but subsequently died in custody," Rudd told Sky News.

"The tradition of this government has to be robust on these matters, even with a country with whom we've had the friendliest of relationships."

- AFP/ir

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