Eideard

Mexican soldiers delivering masks for public distribution
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Countries planned quarantines, tightened rules on pork imports and tested airline passengers for fevers as global health officials tried Sunday to come up with uniform ways to battle a deadly strain of swine flu. Nations from New Zealand to France reported new suspected cases.

World Health Organization Director-General Margaret Chan held teleconferences with staff and flu experts around the world but stopped short of recommending specific measures to stop the disease, urging governments to step up their surveillance of suspicious outbreaks.

Governments including China, Russia and Taiwan began planning to put anyone with symptoms of the deadly virus under quarantine…

Some nations issued travel warnings for Mexico.

Chan called the outbreak a public health emergency of ”pandemic potential” because the virus can pass from human to human. Her agency was considering whether to issue nonbinding recommendations on travel and trade restrictions, and even border closures. It is up to governments to decide whether to follow the advice…

New Zealand said that 10 students who took a school trip to Mexico ”likely” had swine flu. Israel said a man who had recently visited Mexico had been hospitalized while authorities try to determine whether he had the disease. French Health Ministry officials said four possible cases of swine flu are currently under investigation, including a family of three in the northern Nord region and a woman in the Paris region. The four recently returned from Mexico. Tests on two separate cases of suspected swine flu proved negative, they said…

Mexico closed schools, museums, libraries and theaters in a bid to contain the outbreak after hundreds were sickened there. In the U.S., there have been at least 11 confirmed cases of swine flu in California, Texas and Kansas. Patients have ranged in age from 9 to over 50. At least two were hospitalized. All recovered or are recovering.

The WHO’s pandemic alert level is currently at to phase 3. I’m betting on phase 4 within the week. Phase 5 is what we get when the virus is confirmed in at least two countries in the same region.

Phase 6 would indicate a full-scale global pandemic. Which no one wants to see or experience.

Helen was out, this morning, in the side meadow – tidying up the mulch around our north windbreak. And this is what [or who] she discovered.

Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir
Daylife/Reuters Pictures

It is a tale of light and dark — of a small but rugged country far from anywhere that has suffered as severely as any in the developed world at the hands of buccaneering free-marketeers, but which is now slowly digging itself out from the financial wreckage.

An important milestone was reached on Saturday, when the country’s voters went to the polls to elect a new government, three months after riotous street protests over the country’s banking collapse forced the country’s conservative-led administration from office.

With about a third of the final vote counted late Saturday, it seemed that the country’s leftist caretaking government would be formally voted into power, with the Social Democrats projected to gain 22 seats and their partners, the Left-Greens, appearing to gain 13 seats in the 63-seat Parliament. The conservative Independent Party, ousted after a wave of demonstrations in January, was projected to gain just 14 seats with less than 23 percent of the vote, down considerably from its total in 2007. Final results are to be announced later today.

The conservatives were one of the first governments anywhere to lose office because of the global financial crisis, and it seemed clear Saturday that voters in this country of 320,000 were imposing a further reckoning.

The Independent Party has been blamed for a perceived complicity in the banks’ accumulating unsustainable, multibillion debts, and their partnership with a group of freewheeling Icelandic entrepreneurs known as the “New Vikings…”

About the only thing the New Vikings didn’t do in their attempt to imitate American neocons – was declare war on the Faroe Islands.

Hope they make it through to the other side, soon.

A man in northern Idaho says he has seen a massive hand of God in his life, and he is willing to share it with the highest bidder.

Paul Grayhek, 52, listed the rock formation he dubbed the “Hand of God Rock Wall” on the online auction Web site eBay. The highest bid was $250 early Sunday, with three days left to go in the auction…

However, the winning bidder on eBay should not start clearing out his backyard. Grayhek is not planning to part with the formation.

The buyer will “basically be buying the rights, complete and exclusive rights” to the rock, including literary and movie rights, according to Grayhek…

“People think I’m some holier-than-thou person trying to get rich. I’m not,” Grayhek said. “The purpose is to spread the story of God and eBay is just a vehicle.”

I’ve seen “vehicles” like this my whole life. The Pope rides in one. So, does Al Sharpton.

Taliban withdraws from Buner with latest “peace” agreement with Islamabad
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by agreement

Initially, Buner was a hard place for the Taliban to crack. When they attacked a police station in the valley district last year, the resistance was fearless. Local people picked up rifles, pistols and daggers, hunted down the militants and killed six of them.

But it was not to last. In short order this past week the Taliban captured Buner, a strategically vital district just 60 miles northwest of the capital, Islamabad. The militants flooded in by the hundreds, startling Pakistani and American officials with the speed of their advance…

The Taliban took over Buner through both force and guile — awakening sleeping sympathizers, leveraging political allies, pretending at peace talks and then crushing what was left of their opponents, according to the politicians and the residents interviewed.

Though some of the militants have since pulled back, they still command the high points of Buner and have fanned out to districts even closer to the capital.

That Buner fell should be no surprise, local people say. Last fall, the inspector general of police in North-West Frontier Province, Malik Naveed Khan, complained that his officers were being attacked and killed by the hundreds.

Mr. Khan was so desperate — and had been so thoroughly abandoned by the military and the government — that he was relying on citizen posses like the one that stood up to the Taliban last August.

Today, the hopes that those civilian militias inspired are gone, brushed away by the realization that Pakistanis can do little to stem the Taliban advance if their government and military will not help them.

RTFA. A wealth of detail, a dialectic that ranges from incompetence to collaboration – at all levels of the Pakistan government.

If this is not challenged by the powers that be, there will be an Islamist government – in a tribalist part of the world – armed with nuclear weapons.

Just like the purchased .AAC music libraries that kept traditional iPod owners from straying to other MP3 players, the iPhone’s apps are likely to help Apple keep its touch device customers loyal to its products.

Apple announced the Billionth app downloaded this week and at the same time filed with the SEC that it had sold 37 million iPhones and iPod touches together. That means, on average, each device has around 27 downloaded apps. Some people haven’t installed any, while others have maxxed out their iPhone with 144 applications (soon to be 172 with OS3). Most of us are closer to the 27 in the middle.

That is an average two screens of Facebook, Amazon, Skype, NYTimes, WSJ and Google Earth for every iPod touch and iPhone out there.

More importantly, there have been a lot of paid applications that won’t go with users to the next smartphone platform. I say this as I contemplate moving to the Palm Pre or Android platforms next year (mostly just to escape AT&T, who charge way too much for substandard service)…

When the ZuneHD comes out later this year, it won’t likely woo many iPod touch owners who have a gaggle of games, utilities and other apps stuck on Apple’s platform. Conversely, when Apple releases its new touch products later this year, current touch product owners will be able to take their apps with them.

I’m in the same boat. Sort of.

Though, using two browsers ain’t as costly as owning two cellphones.

Microsoft has finally revealed one of the “secret ingredients” in Windows 7, and it’s Windows XP SP3. This only applies to the Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions, and involves downloading the code from Microsoft’s web site.

XPM (for Mode) is based on Microsoft’s Virtual PC and includes a free copy of XP SP3. It provides a bit more functionality than simply installing your own copy of XP (if you have one that legally allows that) in Virtual PC, VMware or VirtualBox…

It will also be a big help even where companies don’t need XPM. They’ll be able to upgrade to the more secure and more capable Windows 7 with the confidence that they have a backwards-compatibility option if they run into an unforeseen snag…

It remains to be seen how well XPM runs on netbooks that don’t provide hardware assistance for virtualisation. But in any case, netbooks typically have too little processor power and not enough memory to make XPM attractive.

Uh, enjoy yourself, folks. Save it for some weekend self-flagellation sport.

“I will keep fighting”
Daylife/Reuters Pictures

A pregnant woman attends the Carnation revolution 35th anniversary in Lisbon April 25, 2009. Portugal celebrates on April 25 the Carnation Revolution coup, which put an end to 48 years of dictatorship in 1974.

Yes, during all those 48 years of the Salazar dictatorship, you could count on more or less nothing being done to oppose Fascist rule in Portugal by either Democrat or Republican-controlled governments in the United States.

No matter. The Portuguese people eventually ended up running their own land – as a democracy.

“It’s engraved – Property of Halliburton Leasing”

In a confidence game that made a mockery of the United States military’s most secure compound in Iraq, a ring of Americans posing as contractors and their Nepalese drivers used tanker trucks, forged documents and sheer brazenness to steal at least $40 million worth of jet and diesel fuel from an Army depot, according to an indictment returned by a federal grand jury in Virginia.

Until they were caught, the dozen or so men in the ring operated an astoundingly successful con game in a war zone, the papers contend, apparently showing up in Iraq with nothing more than fake IDs and a talent for forging official requisition forms. Each time they filled up the tanker trucks at the depot in American headquarters near the Baghdad International Airport, the men would simply drive downtown and sell the fuel on the local black market…

The operation described in the indictment contained elements of an international crime thriller and a Cheech & Chong movie: expletive-filled e-mail messages detailing payment schedules to ring members; a phony security contractor whose nickname was Bong; and the forged signature of a military contracting officer named Sergeant Bonus. The ring members said they worked for a company called Future Services.

An Army spokesman said, “…it would be inappropriate for the Army to comment at this time.”

So, what does “most secure” mean if you can simply drive in and out the gate with stolen goods? Show someone a legit looking piece of paper and you could walk off with the Pentagon bathrooms.

Tequila has fuelled many a wild night out and now it could be set to fuel our cars as well.

Two cane growers in the Childers [Australia] area, who did not want to be named, are working with Ausagave and CQUniversity to trial the growth of agave tequilana in the area. Agave tequilana is more commonly known for producing tequila, but the trials will determine if it is economically viable to grow the plant in Childers to produce ethanol, to be used as a biofuel.

Central Queensland University researcher Associate Professor Nanjappa Ashwath said the reason cane- growing areas had been chosen was because of similar infrastructure requirements.

“Sugar cane mills only work six months of the year and the tequila can take over the other six months,” Assoc Prof Ashwath said…

“It is very easy to grow, does not produce any seeds, is very hardy and will use very similar infrastructure to sugar, so why not let it fill the gap?”

“We need to prove it can grow here, how much land you will need, the yield it produces…” he said. “Once we do all those things and we find it is going well, we need to find out how we can harvest and the most economical way of harvesting.”

Folks who can turn GreenTech into greenbacks are going to move sound ecology forward as quickly as any other means. Maybe faster.

Poisonally, I could care less about their motivation as long as the end product is benefiting our lives and our planet.