Latest news with #Bickel
New York Post
20-05-2025
- New York Post
Feds find trove of explosive materials, including devastating PETN, at IVF clinic bomber's house: ‘Full-blown bomb lab'
Authorities found huge quantities of highly explosive materials in the house of alleged IVF clinic bomber Guy Bartkus, including what appears to be PETN – a devastating compound used in terror attacks around the world. Bomb crews found multiple precursor chemicals in the home of the 'pro-mortalist' madman, who allegedly used a car bomb to blow up an IVF clinic in Palm Springs, Calif., on Saturday, killing himself and wounding four others, law enforcement sources said. Batkus' neighbor in the town of Twentynine Palms – an hour drive from Palm Springs – said FBI agents evacuated the neighborhood and warned him of what he described as a 'full-blown bomb lab' just a stone's throw from his house. 'Five FBI agents came knocking on my door…They told me, 'The house behind you has suspected bomb-making materials,' the neighbor, Thomas Bickel, told The Post. 'I talked about it with agents. There was a full-blown bomb lab in this guy's house.' 5 The damaged front of the American Reproductive Centers fertility clinic stands following a bomb blast on May 17, 2025 in Palm Springs, California. Getty Images 5 Guy Edward Bartkus, 25, of 29 Palms, California, poses in an undated driver's license photograph released by the FBI. via REUTERS 5 A bomb squad near Guy Bartkus' house in Twentynine Palms. KABC 'I know how powerful and destructive IEDs can be,' added Bickel, who said he was an Army veteran injured by bomb shrapnel while serving in Afghanistan. 'Sitting here with my kids, knowing that this guy was 50 feet away — a bomb of that magnitude could have destroyed our house. Just knowing that he was working on that right here while I was hanging out with my kids — it was pretty insane,' Bickel said. PETN, which stands for pentaerythritol tetranitrate, is an extremely dangerous compound similar to nitroglycerin. It had been used in terror attacks and attempted attacks throughout the world, including the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings, the attempted 'shoe bombing' by Richard Colvin Reid in 2001, and the 2009 Christmas Day bomb plot by the al-Qaeda terror group. Saturday's car bomb blast destroyed at least one building of American Reproductive Centers in Palm Springs and severely damaged two others. It shattered windows on buildings three blocks away, and its reverberations could be felt in the next town seven miles away, one local told The Post. The explosion reduced Bartkus himself to human confetti. Authorities believe bizarre, pro-death ideology may have inspired the attack. The bomber allegedly uploaded a chilling, foul-mouthed, 30-minute rant in which he tried to justify detonating a car bomb outside the American Reproductive Centers on Saturday, law enforcement sources told The Post. 'I'm angry I exist,' the avowed vegan said in the recording, before claiming he did not give his parents permission for him to be born. 5 A firefighter inside a ruined building of American Reproductive Clinics. / MEGA 5 Debris is seen outside a damaged American Reproductive Centers fertility clinic after the bomb blast. AFP via Getty Images He took specific aim at IVF, calling it 'extremely wrong.' 'Basically, I'm anti-life. And IVF is like kind of the epitome of pro-life ideology,' he said. Fortunately, the clinic's stored embryos and sensitive medical records survived the attack – thanks partly to a firefighter and FBI agent who rushed into the partially collapsed building to extract the records and make sure the cooling system for the embryos was still online. 'They go into a building that was collapsed … It wasn't safe, but they went inside,' Palm Springs Police Chief Andrew Mills told The Post. 'It's because of them expecting mothers didn't lose their dream of starting a family,' he added.
Sky News AU
19-05-2025
- Sky News AU
Palm Springs IVF clinic bomber ID'd as Guy Edward Bartkus, a ‘pro-mortalist' who opposed people being born ‘without their consent'
A 25-year-old self-described 'pro-mortalist' has been identified as the attacker who detonated a car bomb outside a fertility clinic in Palm Springs Saturday — killing himself and injuring four other people, according to sources. Guy Edward Bartkus, of Twentynine Palms, is believed to have detonated an explosive device in his car outside the American Reproductive Centers, which performs IVF treatments, egg collections and other procedures, law enforcement sources told The Post. Bartkus allegedly described his fanatical pro-death beliefs in written and recorded manifestos as being against bringing people into the world without their consent to spare them from future suffering, KCAL news reported. On Saturday, FBI agents swarmed his home and evacuated the neighborhood, declaring it a 'blast zone' over concerns that he could have left explosives behind, ABC7 reported. During a late-night press conference, Akil Davis, assistant director in charge of the FBI's Los Angeles Field Office, confirmed the agency was handling the investigation but declined to say whether the raid was directly connected to the recent fatal explosion outside an IVF clinic in Palm Springs. The FBI had confirmed the suspect was the sole fatality of the bombing. Tactical teams, armored vehicles, including bomb squad units in full gear, surrounded the house. Those on the ground heard a loud bang and officials yell 'fire in the hole,' which is common during a controlled detonation, the outlet reported. The home is located about an hour away from the American Reproductive Centers, where a bomb explosion has been labeled an 'intentional act of terrorism' by the FBI. Firefighters responded to the blast at the reproductive health facility around 11 a.m. local time. Debris and broken glass could be seen strewn over the street in front of the center, while firefighters worked outside, according to photos and videos from the scene. Unconfirmed reports on social media claimed smoldering body parts were found at the scene. Smoke was visible over the town, and residents told The Desert Sun they smelled a strange odor following the explosion, which could be felt up to three miles away. Police found two rifles — an AK-47 and an AR-style rifle — along with ammunition next to the exploded vehicle, according to an internal briefing obtained by the LA Times. Thomas Bickel, a nearby resident, told ABC7 about the moment deputies knocked on his door and told him he had to leave his home. 'There was just a bunch of sheriff's deputies going door to door, telling everyone to leave,' Bickel told the outlet. 'There wasn't a whole lot of activity, like at that point, none of this was closed down yet. My little house happened to be the closest house to the house that they're investigating, so I was one of the first ones to get told to evacuate,' he said. Bickel said the situation has left him shaken, especially considering how close his family was to potential danger. 'I have kids and they come hang out at my house sometimes, and knowing that someone was building a bomb that close to where me and my kids are, it's pretty scary,' Bickel said. The FBI has not yet confirmed the materials found in the Twentynine Palms home. Originally published as Palm Springs IVF clinic bomber ID'd as Guy Edward Bartkus, a 'pro-mortalist' who opposed people being born 'without their consent'
Yahoo
20-02-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Michigan State lands commitment from 3-star OT Eli Bickel
On Tuesday night, the Michigan State football program picked up a nice commitment at a key position when 2026 offensive tackle Eli Bickel committed to the Spartans. Bickel is a 6-foot-6, 270-pound tackle out of North Branch, Michigan. Bickel is the No. 46 ranked tackle in the 2026 class and the No. 601 ranked player overall by 247Sports. He is also their No. 11 ranked player in the state of Michigan. The Spartans earned Bickel's commitment over teams like Cincinnati, Northwestern, Miami of Ohio, Cornell, Eastern Michigan, and Toledo. Bickel is the fourth commitment for MSU in the 2026 class, which is now ranked No. 37 in the country. Contact/Follow us @The SpartansWire on Twitter, and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Michigan state news, notes, and opinion. You can also follow Andrew Brewster on Twitter @IAmBrewster. This article originally appeared on Spartans Wire: Michigan State lands commitment from 2026 3-star offensive tackle
Yahoo
12-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Mars Is Rocked by Epic Quakes, And They Don't All Come From Within
Incredibly powerful marsquakes that violently shake the red planet don't always begin under the surface, research shows. A new study using artificial intelligence to analyze seismic data reveals just how strongly and deeply quakes rattle around the red planet's interior – a finding that has implications for our understanding of the gooey Martian core, and how worlds like Earth, Mars, and Venus form. The research also shows that many more rocks smack into Mars than previously thought, which changes how we must think about what Mars has going on beneath its dusty surface. "Our observations show that some of the recorded marsquakes are actually caused by meteoroid impacts and not tectonic activity," explains planetary scientist Valentin Bickel of the University of Bern in Switzerland. "This has far-reaching implications for estimates of the frequency of marsquakes and our understanding of the dynamics of the Martian surface in general." Although Mars is the second-most thoroughly studied planet in the Solar System (after Earth), there's so much we don't know about its dynamics, its history, and its evolution. Our data is limited to what we can sense from afar, after sending machines millions of kilometers across the Solar System to beam data back home. One such machine was the Mars InSight lander, a seismometer station active between 2018 and 2022, designed to detect the activity rumbling away beneath the Martian surface. Scientists had thought Mars was pretty close to geologically dead, so imagine their surprise when InSight detected more than 1,300 quakes during its deployment. Quakes on Mars can either start from inside the planet, from geological or magmatic activity, or occur as the result of an impact from an incoming space rock. Scientists have even been able to link tremors detected by InSight to fresh craters. Bickel and his colleagues used a machine learning algorithm to look for impact craters that newly appeared during InSight's tenure. They examined images of the Mars surface in that time, collected during ongoing observations by the HiRISE instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. They then cross-referenced the 123 new craters they found with the seismic recordings from InSight, and tried to find matches in space and time. They were able to correlate 49 seismic events to at least one impact event each. "Our data show that more impacts occur on Mars than were determined in previous studies using orbital images," Bickel says. In fact, the new estimated rate of significant impacts on Mars is 1.6 to 2.5 times higher than previous estimates. Mars, with its tenuous atmosphere, takes an absolute pummeling. In a second, complementary paper, the researchers zoomed in on one of the impacts, a 21.5-meter (70.5-foot) impact crater near Cerberus Fossae, a region in a young volcanic plain rife with seismic activity. The team was able to link this crater to a specific, high-frequency marsquake – which means scientists may need to rethink their previous interpretation of Cerberus Fossae. "We thought Cerberus Fossae produced lots of high-frequency seismic signals associated with internally generated quakes, but this suggests some of the activity does not originate there and could actually be from impacts instead," explains planetary scientist Constantinos Charalambous of Imperial College London. The researchers also studied the quake data collected by InSight to learn more about how impacts affect Mars. Their analysis showed that impact-generated seismic waves were not, as previously thought, confined to Mars' outer layer, the planetary crust. Rather, they were able to penetrate into and below the mantle via a 'seismic highway', reaching more distant regions of the planet. Once again, this suggests that rethinking is in order. The way seismic waves propagate through a body can be used to map the different densities of the materials they travel through. Misunderstanding that seismic propagation means that the interior of Mars was likely mischaracterized. "These findings challenge previous assumptions about the propagation of seismic waves and suggest that numerous recorded marsquakes were actually further away from the Mars lander InSight than previously thought," Charalambous says. "In addition to relocating the epicenters of a range of quakes, this also means that the internal structural model of Mars needs to be revised." The two papers have been published in Geophysical Research Letters. They can be found here and here. Scientists Reveal an Ambitious Plan to Detect Dark Matter in Space Odds of a Tunguska-Scale Impact in 2032 Just Doubled Deep Chasms Could Lead to a Hidden Ocean on Uranus's Moon Ariel
