April 12, 2013

Bird Flu Causing Suffocation Shows Severe Spectrum of New Virus

(Bloomberg) Bird flu turned fatal for a 52- year-old Shanghai woman whose lungs became so damaged that she began to suffocate, causing her vital organs to rapidly shut down, doctors in China said.

The retiree became ill March 27, with a fever that soared as high as 40.6 degrees Celsius (105.1 Fahrenheit), doctors at Huashan Hospital in Shanghai wrote in a report on the case in the journal Emerging Microbes & Infections. Treatment with intravenous antibiotics, steroids, antibody therapy, and mechanical ventilation failed to help, and she died April 3.

Her illness, the first H7N9 avian influenza case to be described in a medical journal, highlights the seriousness of the new strain, which has sickened at least 38 people in eastern China, killing 10, in the past two months. Hospital doctors didn’t know the cause of the woman’s illness when she was admitted. Tests identified the H7N9 virus after she died.

“What they had here was a seriously ill patient and they didn’t know what was going on,” said Dominic Dwyer, director of the Institute of Clinical Pathology and Medical Research at Sydney’s Westmead Hospital, who reviewed the case report. “This person was so ill, they just threw everything” at her. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-11/bird-flu-causing-suffocation-shows-severe-spectrum-of-new-virus.html

April 11, 2013

Goat's head delivered to Wrigley Field in Chicago

CHICAGO (AP) -- The Chicago Cubs found a severed goat's head at Wrigley Field on Wednesday, and they're treating the cruel reference to a longtime curse as a crime.

Chicago police were called in to investigate after a man stopped the white van he was driving, walked a box to a security entrance on Waveland Avenue and wordlessly put it down, Cubs spokesman Julian Green said.

Security workers opened the box, addressed to team owner Tom Ricketts, and discovered the severed head. The team immediately called police.

Green said Thursday that police were given surveillance video, and that he doesn't know why someone would deliver a goat's head. Police did not comment on who might have left the goat head or a possible motive - other than to refer to the head in a brief statement as an ''intimidating package.'' .......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://sports.yahoo.com/news/goats-head-delivered-wrigley-field-134301774--mlb.html

April 11, 2013

The "Iron" Lady (cartoon)

http://www.truthdig.com/cartoon/item/the_iron_lady_20130411/

April 11, 2013

Background Check (cartoon)

April 11, 2013

Man slices arms with saws at CA Home Depot

WEST COVINA, Calif. (AP) -- A man deliberately cut himself with saws in the aisles of a Home Depot Inc. store in suburban Los Angeles on Wednesday, creating a gruesome scene in front of several customers that left him severely injured, police said.

The man was in the store's tool section and went unnoticed until he began grabbing several small saws, including one meant to cut sheet rock, and started using them on his arms.

"He cut both arms with hand saws down to the bone," said West Covina police Cpl. Rudy Lopez.

Officers received several 911 calls and arrived to find the man lying unconscious in the aisle in a pool of blood. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://news.yahoo.com/man-slices-arms-saws-calif-144338366.html

April 11, 2013

German Waters Teeming with WWII Munitions

from Der Spiegel:




More than 50 million bombs, shells, detonators and cartridges from World War II are rusting away on the floor of the North and Baltic Seas or washing up on beaches. Authorities are opting not to remove the ordnance -- and hoping no one gets hurt.

Lorenz Marquardt has been sailing the Baltic Sea for more than 53 years, but the 68-year-old fisherman has an "uneasy feeling" whenever he leaves Eckernförde, in the northern Germans state of Schleswig-Holstein, for the Danish island of Bornholm.

An invisible threat lies dormant beneath him as soon as he reaches the rich fishing grounds around the island. To fish for cod, his cutter drags a bottom trawl through the Bornholm Basin, which is 60 to 70 meters (197 to 230 feet) deep -- in precisely the spot where tens of thousands of bombs and shells were sunk after the end of World War II.

Nautical maps identify the area above the bomb cemetery as "contaminated (munitions)" or "contaminated (gas munitions)," and warn: "Anchoring and fishing are hazardous." German and Danish Baltic Sea fishermen take the risk because they can return to port with up to 10 metric tons of cod on their best days. That translates into several thousand fish, weighing one to 10 kilograms apiece (two to 22 lbs.), and a very good catch can fetch €6,000 to €10,000 ($7,800 to $13,000), depending on the market price. .......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/dangers-of-unexploded-wwii-munitions-in-north-and-baltic-seas-a-893113.html

April 11, 2013

Permanent Unemployment for Everyone, Brought to You by Vulture Capitalism

from truthdig:



......(snip)......

Columnists should avoid predictions, if possible. But here I go. One of the next big things will be "work" as an important American political issue: who gets to work and who doesn’t. What will that work be like? What obligations and rights will employees have?

We talk and debate "unemployment" now, but the issue will go far beyond, far deeper than just a fraction of people without the skills or ambition to find a job capable of supporting a family. We have already effectively more than doubled the earnings needed to support a family by bringing women into the workplace. I would argue that is a good thing for most of us, but an unintended consequence of that one step forward was the fact that it now usually takes two wage-earners to support one middle-class family or break it, partly because of work tensions and time constraints.

I find that what I see as a looming crisis is rarely mentioned in the press or even in government circles. So, I was surprised to see a front-page story in the Los Angeles Times last Sunday under this headline:

EVERY MOVE TRACKED

"Companies count employees’ keystrokes, time bathroom breaks and monitor social media. It boosts efficiency but shreds job satisfaction."

In the piece, Times reporter Alana Semuels begins by interviewing a 52-year-old forklift operator named Phil Richards, who works in a meat warehouse. "We’re just like human machines," he says. "But with machines, they don’t care whether you feel good or if you’re having a bad day." ...........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/permanent_unemployment_for_everyone_brought_to_you_by_vulture_capitalism_20/

April 11, 2013

China detains 10 for bird flu rumors, death toll at 9

(Reuters) - Chinese police detained at least 10 people for spreading rumors about the H7N9 bird flu virus, state media said on Wednesday, as the death toll from the new strain rose to nine.

Authorities detained the people in six provinces - Shaanxi, Guizhou, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui and Fujian - some of whom had posted "fake information" online about new cases of the virus in their areas, the official Xinhua news agency said.

The death toll and number of infections in China from the strain of bird flu first found in humans last month has ticked up daily.

Nine people have died out of 33 confirmed cases of the virus, all in eastern China, according to data from the National Health and Family Planning Commission. State media quoted authorities as saying a vaccine should be ready within months. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/10/us-birdflu-china-idUSBRE93901V20130410

April 11, 2013

Amtrak Ridership Continues to Set Records — Despite Sandy Damage

Rail ridership continues to grow in America.

March was the best single month ever in the history of Amtrak, and October, December and January each set records for their respective months, according to a company spokesperson.

All of that is despite the damage and closures caused by Sandy.

It’s also because Amtrak has been setting ridership records for just about every year for the past dozen years, so any growth — whatever size — is also a new record. Amtrak set 11 consecutive monthly records last year. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://transportationnation.org/2013/04/09/amtrak-ridership-rises-continues-to-set-records-despite-sandy-damage/

April 11, 2013

Robert Parry: The Madness of NYT’s Tom Friedman

from Consortium News:


The Madness of NYT’s Tom Friedman
April 10, 2013

Exclusive: Looking back at the Iraq War and other disastrous U.S. foreign policy choices, you might wonder about the sanity of American leadership. But if you read star columnist Thomas L. Friedman, you’ll learn that it’s the rest of the world that’s crazy, as Robert Parry explains.

By Robert Parry


When ranking which multi-millionaire American pundit is the most overrated, there are, without doubt, many worthy contenders, but one near the top of any list must be the New York Times’ Thomas L. Friedman – with his long record of disastrous policy pronouncements including his enthusiasm for George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

Friedman, of course, has paid no career price for his misguided judgments and simplistic nostrums. Like many other star pundits who inhabit the Op-Ed pages of the Times and the Washington Post, Friedman has ascended to a place where the normal powers of gravity don’t apply, where the cumulative weight of his errors only lifts him up.

Indeed, there is something profoundly nonsensical about Friedman’s Olympian standing, inhabiting a plane of existence governed by the crazy rules of Washington’s conventional wisdom, where – when looking down on the rest of us – Friedman feels free to cast aspersions on other people’s sanity, like the Mad Hatter calling the Church Mouse nuts.

Friedman describes every foreign adversary who reacts against U.S. dictates as suffering from various stages of insanity. He accepts no possibility that these “designated enemies” are acting out of their own sense of self-interest and even fear of what the United States might be designing. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2013/04/10/the-madness-of-nyts-tom-friedman/