Thursday, June 11, 2009
WHO likely to declare fake swine flu pandemic
GENEVA — The World Health Organization held an emergency swine flu meeting Thursday and was likely to declare the first flu pandemic in 41 years as infections climbed in the United States, Europe, Australia, South America and elsewhere.
Health officials from Scotland, Indonesia and Thailand said the agency would declare a swine flu pandemic — a global epidemic — on Thursday after a teleconference with leading flu experts. Officials at U.N. missions in Geneva also said they expected the imminent announcement of a pandemic.
WHO spokesman Thomas Abraham said only that the emergency meeting began at noon (1000 GMT, 6 a.m. EDT) in Geneva and WHO member nations would then be informed of the result.
"It is likely in light of sustained community transmission in countries outside of North America — most notably in Australia — that level 6 will be declared," Scotland's Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon told Scottish lawmakers, adding it would be Thursday.
Indonesian health minister Siti Fadilah Supari said she had been notified by WHO that "today will be declared to be phase 6."
Phase 6 is WHO's highest alert level and means that a swine flu pandemic is under way. The last pandemic — the Hong Kong flu of 1968 — killed about 1 million people. Ordinary flu kills about 250,000 to 500,000 people each year.
Since swine flu first emerged in Mexico and the United States in April, it has spread to 74 countries around the globe. On Wednesday, WHO reported 27,737 cases including 141 deaths. Most cases are mild and require no treatment, but the fear is that a rash of new infections could overwhelm hospitals and health authorities — especially in poorer countries.
The long-awaited pandemic announcement is scientific confirmation that a new flu virus has emerged and is quickly circling the globe. It will trigger drugmakers to speed up production of a swine flu vaccine and prompt governments to devote more money to containing the virus.
In May, several countries urged WHO not to declare a pandemic, fearing it would spark mass panic.
Panic has already gripped Argentina, where so many people worried about swine flu flooded into hospitals this week that emergency health services have collapsed. Last month, a bus arriving in Argentina from Chile was stoned by people who thought a passenger on it had swine flu. Chile has the most swine flu cases in South America.
In Hong Kong, the government on Thursday ordered all kindergartens and primary schools closed for two weeks after a dozen students tested positive for swine flu.
In Australia, swine flu cases jumped to more than 1,000 on Monday and reached 1,260 by late Wednesday.
WHO says its pandemic announcement would not mean the situation was worsening, since no mutations have been detected in the virus to show it is getting more deadly.
In Edinburgh, Sturgeon told lawmakers that a WHO announcement means countries should immediately activate their pandemic plans.
"A move to level 6 is not a verdict on the severity of the virus," she said. "It simply means that the extent of global spread now fulfills the definition of a pandemic."
http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-general/20090611/UN.UN.Swine.Flu/
Monday, June 8, 2009
DID Secret Society KILL BILL?
A secret sect of kung fu assassins could have silenced actor David Carradine as he delved into their shadowy activities, according to his family's lawyer.
In a twist that could be straight out of one the "Kill Bill" star's movies, attorney Mark Geragos suggested that Carradine may have been killed as he tried to uncover groups working in the martial-arts underworld.
The lawyer said the actor's family refuses to believe he died in a sadomasochistic sex stunt gone wrong -- despite his being found naked with a rope tied around his neck, wrists and genitals.
Loved ones have urged the FBI to travel to Thailand and pick up the pieces of the police investigation there.
"They've done it because of the conflicting reports and the nature of those reports that have given the family great pause," Geragos said.
The secret societies of martial artists should be the first place they start looking for answers, said the prominent Hollywood lawyer, who has represented Michael Jackson, actress Winona Ryder, wife killer Scott Peterson and singer Chris Brown.
The bizarre claim was made on "Larry King Live" on CNN Friday after a panel member said, "David was very interested in investigating and disclosing secret societies."
"Absolutely," said Geragos.
"What that means is connected to martial arts and his interest in martial arts," he continued. "And so there is a suspicion that if there was some foul play, that that may be the first area where they should look."
Secret societies in kung fu date back centuries and were originally formed as humanitarian groups, fighting on the side of the people against corrupt Chinese dynasties. But in the last 200 years, many started to turn to criminal activities.
The suggestion they killed Carradine echoes conspiracy theories that Bruce Lee -- who, ironically, competed with Carradine for the lead role in the 1970s TV series "Kung Fu" -- was killed in 1973 by the Triads, a Chinese secret society.
Authorities said Lee, 32, died of brain swelling triggered by a reaction to medication.
Carradine, who was found dead in a Bangkok hotel last week, had been fascinated with martial arts since he first began studying the discipline upon landing the "Kung Fu" role.
"It's a way of life," the actor once said in an interview.
He had dusted off his martial arts moves 30 years later for the title role in Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" movies.
His ex-wife, Marina Anderson, told The Post yesterday, "If he was involved in secret societies, it was a secret that even I didn't know about.
"But he did have some big secrets."
Carradine was found dead in the closet of a Bangkok hotel last week.
Thai authorities think he might have died while pleasuring himself in an act of autoerotic asphyxiation -- a practice which involves temporarily cutting off the brain's supply of oxygen to create a sexual turn-on.
He had been accused of being a fan of "potentially deadly" kinky sex acts in divorce papers Anderson filed against him in 2003.
Carradine's family has lined up famed forensic expert Dr. Michael Baden -- head pathologist for the New York State Police -- to carry out his own examination of the actor's body.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/06072009/news/regionalnews/whacky_kung_fu_172948.htm
The Economy Is Still at the BrinK
WHETHER at a fund-raising dinner for wealthy supporters in Beverly Hills, or at an Air Force base in Nevada, or at Charlie Rose’s table in New York City, President Obama is conducting an all-out campaign to try to make us feel a whole lot better about the economy as quickly as possible. “It’s safe to say we have stepped back from the brink, that there is some calm that didn’t exist before,” he told donors at the Beverly Hilton Hotel late last month.
Mr. Obama thinks that the way to revive the economy is to restore confidence in it. If the mood is right, the capital will flow. But this belief is dangerously misguided. We are sympathetic to the extraordinary challenge the president faces, but if we’ve learned anything at all two years into the worst financial crisis of our lifetimes, it is that a capital-markets system this dependent on public confidence is a shockingly inadequate foundation upon which to rest our economy.
We have both spent large chunks of our lives working on Wall Street, absorbing its ethic and mores. We’re concerned that nothing has really been fixed. We’re doubly concerned that people appear to feel the worst of the storm is over — and in this, they are aided and abetted by a hugely popular and charismatic president and by the fact that the Dow has increased by 35 percent or so since Mr. Obama started to lay out his economic plans in March. But wishing for improvement and managing by the Dow’s swings are a fool’s game. (Disclosure: One of us, Mr. Lewis, was convicted on federal charges of stock manipulation in 1989, pardoned by President Bill Clinton in 2001 and had his lifetime trading ban overturned by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2006; documents relating to the case can be found at sblewis.net.)
The storm is not over, not by a long shot. Huge structural flaws remain in the architecture of our financial system, and many of the fixes that the Obama administration has proposed will do little to address them and may make them worse. At another fund-raising event, for Senator Harry Reid, President Obama said: “We didn’t ask for the challenges that we face. But we are determined to answer the call to meet those challenges, to cast aside the old arguments and overcome the stubborn divisions and move forward as one people and one nation .... It will take time but I promise you, I promise you, I’ll always tell you the truth about the challenges we face.”
Keeping that statement in mind — as well as an abiding faith in the importance of properly functioning capital markets — we have come up with a set of questions meant to challenge a popular president, with vast majorities in Congress, to find the flaws in the system, to figure out what’s being done to fix them and to get to the truth about the difficulties we face as we set out to restore the proper functioning of our markets and our standing in the world.
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Six months ago, nobody believed that our banking system was well designed, functioning smoothly or properly regulated — so why then are we so desperately anxious to restore that model as the status quo? Nearly every new program emanating these days from the Treasury Department — the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, the Public Private Investment Program, the “stress tests” of major banks — appears to have been designed to either paper over or to prop up a system that has clearly failed.
Instead of hauling out the new drywall to cover up the existing studs, let’s seriously consider ripping down the entire structure, dynamiting the foundation and building a new system that rewards taking prudent risks, allocates capital where it is needed, allows all investors to get accurate and timely financial information and increases value to shareholders and creditors.
As a start, the best-compensated executives at the top of these big banks, hedge funds and private-equity firms should be treated like general partners of yore. If a firm takes prudent risks that pay off, this top layer of management should be well compensated. But if the risks these people take are imprudent and the losses grave, they should expect to lose their jobs. Instead of getting guaranteed salaries or huge bonuses, they should have the bulk of their net worth completely at risk for a long stretch of time — 10 years come to mind — for the decisions they make while in charge. This would go a long way toward re-aligning the interests of these firms with those of their shareholders and clients and the American people, who have been saddled with their risks and mistakes.
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Why is so much effort being put into propping up those at the top of the economic pyramid — the money-center banks, the insurance companies, the hedge funds and so forth — when during a period of deflation like the one we are in, any recovery will come only by restoring the confidence of the people down at the bottom of the pyramid?
Confidence will return only when jobs can be found and mortgage payments are made. Even if Mr. Obama’s claim is true that his $780 billion stimulus package “saved or created” some 150,000 jobs, we seem a long way away from the point where those struggling to get by will feel like spending again. What happens when people buy a car once every 10 years instead of once every two or three, especially now that we taxpayers own such a big percentage of the American auto industry?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/opinion/07cohanWEB.html?_r=1
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