Wednesday, May 25, 2005
On this day:

WHO report charts disturbing changes in avian flu virus, urges preparations

Helen BranswellCanadian PressMay 21, 2005

TORONTO (CP) - The World Health Organization urged countries to make full haste with pandemic influenza preparations Wednesday as it released a report outlining disturbing changes to the H5N1 virus circulating in Asia.
The report raises concerns that molecular and disease pattern evidence may indicate the virus is becoming more adept at infecting people. It also reveals some strains of the H5N1 virus may be developing resistance to oseltamivir, the drug wealthy nations are flocking to stockpile as fears of a pandemic mount.
An influenza expert who helped draft the report said it's meant to convey the message that the level of anxiety regarding the virus has risen.
"I think it's fair to say that the report signifies a definite step up in concern," said Dr. Keiji Fukuda, a flu specialist from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control who is being seconded to WHO's global influenza program.
The report concedes the authors had limited scientific evidence on which to determine whether H5N1 is becoming an even graver risk to mankind. [...]
Full story Signs Of The Times

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Tuesday, May 24, 2005
On this day:

Mass Extinction The Big Five

Going...

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Mass Extinction

Going....

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Mass Extinction

Going.....

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Conservationist says climate changes may make elephants, tigers extinct

Mass extiction may be on the way according to Leaky. I don't think humankind cares enough to change. Photos of these great and noble creatures may be all we have left.

GONE


NEW YORK: Well known paleontologist and conservationist Robert Leakey says climatic changes in the wake of global warming and decreasing forest cover could threaten the existence of animals like elephants, tigers and the rhinoceroses. It could be larger threat than poaching, he adds.
Leakey, a former director of Kenya's wildlife service, who has convened an environment conference at Stony Brook University, urged the setting up of a new global fund to protect wildlife.
He feels the millions of dollars spent in creating national parks to safeguard animals like elephants and tigers against poaching are going waste. Because, these animals are facing extinction anyway due to the climatic changes. Funds must, therefore, be diverted to research the causes of climate changes and contain the adverse impacts.
He cited computer projections that Africa, home for the symbolic "big five" species of elephant, rhinoceros, lion, leopard and buffalo, is already dry and will become drier and warmer. In usual circumstances, these animals, in the face of such threats, would have migrated. But increased human habitations foreclose any such option for them.
At the three-day seminar at the university, Leakey is attempting to convince representatives of the World Bank and the United Nations Environment Programme to establish a new fund to research the issue and find solutions so that the wildlife is protected from climate change.
"I think we may well be looking at a mass extinction; and I think the question is, can we do anything to adapt to it," he asks.
Leakey had been an activist through his life. He had led an excavation team on the eastern shore of Kenya's Lake Turkana which found nearly 200 fossils, the important find among them being the homo erectus dubbed "Turkana Boy" roughly 1.6 million years old and still one of the most complete fossils ever found.
He was later director of the National Museums of Kenya and director of the Kenya Wildlife Service. He says he is not an expert in climate changes, but he can spot the “inherent complacency in governments around the world" which dismiss climate changes as part of a natural system. He says this attitude must change and change fast.

Keep up with the Signs Of The Times

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Saturday, May 21, 2005
On this day:

Russian Villagers Spooked As Lake Vanishes Overnight

This seems very strange.

Residents of a village in central Russia are trying to solve the mystery of a lake that disappeared overnight. Russia's NTV channel showed a huge, muddy basin where the lake once was, in the village of Bolotnikovo.
"It looks like somebody has pulled the plug out of a gigantic bath," said the TV's correspondent, next to a deep debris-filled hole.
Local officials in Nizhny Novgorod region say the lake was probably sucked into an underground cave.
The name of the village - which lies about 250 km (155 miles) east of Moscow - roughly translates as "boggy".
No water
The discovery was made by local fishermen when they arrived at the lake early in the morning.
"I looked and there was no water. I thought: Oh my God, what's going on?" one of them told the TV.
Rescuers were called out to search the uncovered lake bed to see if anybody could have been sucked under, but it is thought no-one was on the lake when the waters vanished.
"It's very dangerous. If somebody is caught by such a calamity, the chances of survival are practically nil," fireman Dmitry Zaitsev said, pointing out that lakeside trees appeared to have been dragged down with the water.
The lake's disappearance may have been caused by subsidence allowing the water to drain into a cave system or underground river, local official Dmitry Klyuev said.
According to Mr Klyuev, several houses were swallowed up in similar circumstances 70 years ago.
'Dark mystery'
But more supernatural explanations were circulating among the villagers, including the influence of dark forces.
Village youngsters said the lake had appeared during the reign of the feared Tsar Ivan the Terrible and had been "shrouded in dark mystery" ever since.
"We used to go swimming there, but we were rather afraid of its depth, and there were various rumours. For instance people said there used to be a church there underwater," one girl told the TV.
But one elderly villager sitting outside her house had another kind of force in mind.
"I thought the Americans had got here," she said, laughing

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Wednesday, May 18, 2005
On this day:

They Backed Bush -- And Expect Him To Deliver

Here we go!!

They Backed Bush -- And Expect Him To Deliver

Evangelicals' influence in American political life has become increasingly visible in recent years. Now the battle over President George W. Bush's judicial appointments threatens to kick up a firestorm over the intrusion of religion into politics. But to many evangelicals, the campaign isn't controversial at all -- it's just one step in a long-range plan to leverage their growing numbers and political clout. In fact, many of the evangelical activists who form the bedrock of the Religious Right are frustrated that their electoral successes haven't translated into greater gains. After all, their effort to get Christian voters to the polls played a key role in both of Bush's elections, as well as the GOP's control of both houses of Congress. Yet they can claim only a few victories, such as the 2003 ban on so-called partial-birth abortions -- and even that has been overturned by the courts.
That's one reason the activists are putting on a full-court press to get the Senate GOP to outlaw Democratic filibusters of the President's judicial nominees. Indeed, as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) mulled his strategy over the week of May 9, the offices of 22 senators were deluged with calls on the issue that were prompted by Christian groups such as Focus on the Family's CitizenLink Action Center. The phone barrage followed an Apr. 24 telecast on the judges issue from a Kentucky megachurch, which Frist addressed via videotape. While the battle is ostensibly over the 10 judges Senate Democrats have rejected, the bigger goal is to give the GOP sufficient power to put a religious conservative on the U.S. Supreme Court should a vacancy occur soon.
Article here

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Saturday, May 14, 2005
On this day:

What a Hoot!!


Oh, ha, ha!! What a great joke this was. And the funniest part is the prisoner was in on it. Well, who knew until now?? What a HOOT this has been.


Thu May 12, 2005By Debbie Stevenson

FORT HOOD, Texas (Reuters) - A U.S. Army reservist accused of attaching wires to a hooded Iraqi prisoner did so in a joke shared with the prisoner, her lawyer said at the start of a court-martial on Thursday.
Spc. Sabrina Harman, who pleaded innocent to charges of conspiracy, dereliction of duty and maltreatment of subordinates, also photographed abuses because she wanted to document what she felt was wrongful behavior, attorney Frank Spinner said.
"She was upset as early as 20 October, 2003, at some of the things she was seeing. She was offended by what she saw and she hoped at some point that she could prove it," Spinner told a military jury at the start of her trial.
The former pizza restaurant worker, who joined the Army reserves after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, is linked to several of the most notorious Iraqi prisoner abuse photos.
She appears in a photo near naked Iraqi prisoners and is charged with photographing as they were forced to masturbate. She is also charged with placing wires on a detainee dubbed Gilligan and telling him he would be electrocuted if he stepped off a box in a picture seen worldwide.
"This was a joke. Gilligan understood it to be a joke. It was all part of their relationship," Spinner said. "It was a relationship beyond what the pictures showed."

Full Story at Signs Of The Times

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Saturday, May 07, 2005
On this day:

Master Of Torture

This should keep the heat off of Rumsfeld- master of torture.
 Former Abu Ghraib prision commander demoted.

AFPFri May 6, 3:27 AM ET WASHINGTON - President George W Bush ordered the demotion of Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the former commander of the Abu Ghraib prison, after an army investigation found her guilty of dereliction of duty and shoplifting, the army said.
The action made Karpinski, an army reservist, the highest ranking officer to be punished in the wake of the prisoner abuse scandal at the Iraqi prison.
"Today, the president approved a recommendation to vacate the promotion of Brigadier General Karpinski from her rank of brigadier general," the army said in a statement. "This decision reduces her to the rank of colonel in the US Army Reserve."
Karpinski was arrested for shoplifting at a US air force base in the United States but failed to report it to her superiors or on official forms that asked if she had ever been arrested, an official familiar with the investigation said.
The army's inspector general also substantiated allegations against her of dereliction of duty, the army said, citing leadership failures rather than specific actions that contributed to the abuse at the prison.
"Though Brigadier General Karpinski's performance of duty was found to be seriously lacking, the investigation determined that no action or lack of action on her part contributed specifically to the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib," the army said.
Karpinski commanded the Abu Ghraib prison during the period in late 2003 and early 2004 when military guards were photographed abusing and sexually humiliating Iraqi prisoners.
She has said she had no knowledge of the abuse and insisted she was being made a scapegoat to protect higher-ups and the role in the abuse of military intelligence.

Full Story Signs Of The Times

And this from The Observer

Paul Harris in New YorkSunday May 8, 2005

Saar arrived at Guantánamo Bay in December 2002, and worked there until June 2003. He first worked as a translator in the prisoners' cages. He was then transferred to the interrogation teams, acting as a translator.
Saar's book, Inside the Wire, provides the first fully detailed look inside Guantánamo Bay's role as a prison for detainees the White House has insisted are the 'worst of the worst' among Islamic militants. His tale describes his gradual disillusionment, from arriving as a soldier keen to do his duty to eventually leaving believing the regime to be a breach of human rights and a disaster for the war on terror.
Among the most shocking abuses Saar recalls is the use of sex in interrogation sessions. Some female interrogators stripped down to their underwear and rubbed themselves against their prisoners. Pornographic magazines and videos were also used as rewards for confessing.
In one session a female interrogator took off some of her clothes and smeared fake blood on a prisoner after telling him she was menstruating. 'That's a big deal. It is a major insult to one of the world's biggest religions where we are trying to win hearts and minds,' Saar said.
Saar also describes the 'snatch teams', known as the Initial Reaction Force (IRF), who remove unco-operative prisoners from their cells. He describes one such snatch where a prisoner's arm was broken. In a training session for an IRF team, one US soldier posing as a prisoner was beaten so badly that he suffered brain damage. It is believed the IRF team had not been told the 'detainee' was a soldier

Full Story Here

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Monday, May 02, 2005
On this day:

Outbreak of rare bacterial disease

Exploding frogs, strange flesh eating bacteria, fireballs, and now some Bacterial meningitis to throw in the mix. Earth-- what is to become of it.

NEW DELHI (AFP) - An outbreak of rare bacterial meningitis in the Indian capital has killed at least one of a dozen people infected, doctors said.
The Maulana Azad Medical College in New Delhi reported Monday that one of three patients admitted in the last fortnight had died, which head of medicine N.P. Singh described as "alarming."
Two other Delhi hospitals have admitted 10 patients with symptoms of bacterial meningitis.
"Technically, more than three cases in three months can be defined as an outbreak," Singh said.
S.P. Byotra, a senior consultant at Delhi's Sri Ganga Ram hospital warned that bacterial meningitis was "very serious."
"It might begin as a respiratory infection with cold, cough and a headache. Then, the bacteria can affect the brain. Skin rash and low blood pressure are the other symptoms," he said.
Unlike the common viral meningitis, the bacterium which causes the disease infects the fluid surrounding the brain and the spinal cord, he said.
It is spread by direct contact with droplets from the nose and mouth of infected people.
Delhi's health authorities were to meet Tuesday to decide on measures to try to control the disease, senior official H.C. Mehra said.
The outbreak was raised by federal lawmakers in India's parliament Monday.
Marxist MP Hannan Mollah urged the government to take "immediate steps" to prevent an epidemic, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.
Bacterial meningitis claimed 16 lives among 258 people affected in Chia earlier this year.
The disease was last reported in large numbers in India a decade ago.

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