Eideard

State health officials Wednesday ordered a San Antonio produce company to halt production and ordered a recall of all products shipped from the plant since January after five people — three of them in Bexar County — died from a foodborne illness.

Over the past nine months, 10 people in Bexar, Travis and Hidalgo counties were infected with the same strain of listeria, including the five who died. Six of the 10 were conclusively linked to chopped celery sold by Sangar Fresh Cut Produce at 1500 S. Zarzamora St., health officials said.

They said most of the listeriosis patients were elderly with serious underlying health problems, and many were hospitalized before and during the onset of their infection.

As of Wednesday night, health officials weren’t releasing any further information about the patients…

Of the shutdown, Texas Department of State Health Services spokeswoman Carrie Williams said: “This is a rare action that we took. … We closed the plant, we ordered a recall, but we’re not at the end. We’re still investigating the situation.”

The emergency order prohibits the plant from resuming operations without permission.

The recalled products were cut produce in sealed packages, and were not believed to have been sold in grocery stores, but rather used in restaurants and institutions such as schools and hospitals…Oh!

Inspectors found sanitation problems at the plant, including a condensation leak above a food product area, soil on a preparation table and improper hand washing by employees.

Officials said the bacteria found in the celery may have contaminated other food processed at the plant…

The long investigation was made more difficult by the fact most of the victims were frail with poor memories or had died.

Getting medical history from dead people is always difficult.

A small airliner crashed into a house, killing a British pilot and 19 others after a crocodile smuggled into the aircraft in a sports bag escaped and started a panic. The plane came down despite no apparent mechanical problems during an internal flight in the Democratic Republic of Congo…

A lone survivor apparently relayed the bizarre tale to investigators.

The crocodile survived the crash, only to be dispatched with a blow from a machete…

The plane was on a routine flight from the capital, Kinshasa, to the regional airport at Bandundu when the incident unfolded, on August 25. It crashed into a house just a few hundred feet from its destination. The occupants of the property were outside at the time.

According to the inquiry report and the testimony of the only survivor, the crash happened because of a panic sparked by the escape of a crocodile hidden in a sports bag.

One of the passengers had hidden the animal, which he planned to sell, in a big sports bag, from which the reptile escaped as the plane began its descent into Bandundu.

A report of the incident said: “The terrified air hostess hurried towards the cockpit, followed by the passengers.”

The plane was then sent off-balance “despite the desperate efforts of the pilot”, said the report.

Hey, it happens to ferry boats all the time.

“Look! A nude bathing beach.” Splash.

Nothing illegal here, eh?

Women who wear miniskirts or show too much cleavage will face fines of up to 500 euros under new rules to be introduced by an Italian town.

In a move sharply at odds with a country which produced the likes of Monica Bellucci and Sophia Loren, the town of Castellammare di Stabia, near Naples, intends to prohibit women from wearing provocative clothing.

The town’s council also wants to ban men and women from wearing low-slung jeans as part of a list of 41 new rules that “every good citizen must respect”…

Playing football in parks and gardens and swearing in public will also be banned under new regulations which will be put forward for approval at a council meeting on Monday…

Warms the cockles of your heart to see political correctness returned to it’s proper Fascist roots.

A local parish priest, Don Paolo Cecere, said he supported the crackdown…

Italy has become entangled in a web of petty rules and regulations in the last two years, after the government of Silvio Berlusconi gave councils extra powers to tailor laws to tackle crime and anti-social behavior.

Across the nation, towns have banned a range of seemingly innocuous activities such as building sandcastles on the beach, kissing in cars and feeding stray cats.

Yes, I miss my old Toyota Cressida

Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, will call back about 750,000 cars in North America, and 599,000 cars in Japan, mostly models made from 2004 to 2006, the automaker said. About 140,000 cars in the rest of Asia and Australia, and 50,000 cars in Europe, also are being recalled…

The president of the company, Akio Toyoda, subsequently promised to improve quality and customer service, including paying more attention to customer complaints and speeding up recall decisions. In February, the automaker set up a special global committee to oversee quality, led by Mr. Toyoda.

“Every time we announce a recall, that is a step toward increasing quality,” a spokesman for Toyota in Tokyo, Paul Nolasco, said Thursday. The pedal-related recalls had “brought it home to Toyota that we need to refocus on quality,” he said.

Most of vehicles in Thursday’s recall need to be fixed for a problem in the brakes’ master cylinder, Mr. Nolasco said. The cylinder, which contains brake fluid, could leak under certain circumstances, causing a loss in braking power.

Toyota has also found an electrical fault with the fuel pump that could cause the engine to stall, Mr. Nolasco said. That defect was concentrated in models sold in Japan.

The automaker is not aware of any accidents linked to these problems, he said…

Owners will be notified by mailings beginning early next month, and dealers will replace part of the brake’s master cylinder free of charge, Toyota said.

The recall apparently is another reflection of Toyota losing their way, trying to get to GM’s historic size without considering GM’s historic quality problems.

I haven’t researched the fuel pump problems; but, it seems clear the brake cylinder leaking is strictly a beancounter problem. Someone figured out how to save a fraction of a penny on one small part or other – and diminished quality and life of the master cylinder. Typical of the breed. Didn’t used to be typical of Toyota.

A former Chicago, Illinois, attorney has admitted that he helped create, push and hide fraudulent tax shelters that ended up costing the federal government billions of dollars in tax revenue…

Loopholes provided by Congress are never quite sufficient for the richest Americans. Reflect upon that while Republicans fall over each other to extend tax cuts for the richest 2% of our nation.

Erwin Mayer, 47, pleaded guilty in a New York federal court to conspiracy and tax evasion charges…

Law enforcement authorities — including investigators from the U.S. attorney’s office, the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Department of Justice’s tax division — said that Mayer designed, marketed, ran and defended illegal tax shelters, the clients of which wrongly claimed billions of dollars in fraudulent losses.

“These professionals, who were supposed to be the gatekeepers preventing fraud, instead helped their well-heeled clients avoid their tax obligations through deceit and trickery,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharra said in a statement, referring to Mayer, some of his colleagues at the now defunct law firm Jenkins & Gilchrist, and others involved in the scam.

After being a partner at Altheimer and Gray in Chicago between 1994 and 1998, Mayer joined a new Chicago office of Texas-based Jenkins & Gilchrist. Up until 2006, Mayer and colleagues set up, pitched and ran high-fee tax shelters so clients could skirt taxes on significant income or gains, according to statements made during his guilty plea proceeding…

The Winnetka, Illinois, resident will be sentenced on February 10. He faces a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison on the conspiracy charge, plus another five years for tax evasion. Mayer has agreed to forfeit his two residences and various financial accounts worth more than $10 million as part of his plea deal.

That sentencing may be deferred. In the legalese of one of the web’s law blogs…”Given that Mayer will be providing ongoing cooperation with the prosecution, no date has been set for sentencing.”

I hopes he turns over every client who used his services to screw the overwhelming number of honest Americans who pay their fair share of taxes – and more. Time to pay up!

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Archaeologists in the Swiss city of Zurich have unearthed a 5,000-year-old door that may be one of the oldest ever found in Europe.

The ancient poplar wood door is “solid and elegant” with well-preserved hinges and a “remarkable” design for holding the boards together, chief archaeologist Niels Bleicher said Wednesday.

Using tree rings to determine its age, Bleicher believes the door could have been made in the year 3,063 B.C. — around the time that construction on Britain’s world famous Stonehenge monument began…

Harsh climatic conditions at the time meant people had to build solid houses that would keep out much of the cold wind that blew across Lake Zurich, and the door would have helped, he said. “It’s a clever design that even looks good.”

The door was part of a settlement of so-called “stilt houses” frequently found near lakes about a thousand years after agriculture and animal husbandry were first introduced to the pre-Alpine region…

The latest find was discovered at the dig for what is intended to be a new underground car park for Zurich’s opera house.

Archaeologists have found traces of at least five Neolithic villages believed to have existed at the site between 3,700 and 2,500 years B.C., including objects such as a flint dagger from what is now Italy and an elaborate hunting bow.

No sign of saints or angels. Just people on their way to inventing UBS.

Oh – the winds that blow across Lake Zurich – they still ain’t especially balmy.

Not the same baby — but you get the idea

A man who jumped into a Calgary dumpster to rescue a newborn that had been discovered by another passerby says he later found out the baby boy was his son, he told CBC News on Wednesday…

Police said Wednesday that the mother likely didn’t know she was pregnant and could face criminal charges related to her actions following the birth.

The man who claims to be the father of the baby said he was unaware his girlfriend was even pregnant.

“I pulled into my parking spot and hadn’t even got to the back of my truck and a girl said, ‘I think hear a baby in the dumpster.’ So I, you know — no knowledge at this time that this is my kid whatsoever — I went running over,” he said.

“And I jumped in and I removed the stuff and I personally opened the bag. My first sight of my baby was covered in garbage…”

The man and the woman who first heard the infant called 911, while another passerby used his shirt to keep the child warm.

The baby was taken to hospital and is in stable condition in the neonatal intensive-care unit at Foothills hospital.

RTFA. There’s a bit of detail; but, it will be a few days before anyone truly sorts this strange story.

An ancient “tunnel-like” structure has been unearthed in the garden of the General Post Office in the Indian city of Mumbai.

The authorities say it is clear that the previously undiscovered structure is not a sewage or storm-water drain. It was only revealed when a local newspaper reporter asked to see it.

The heritage committee is yet to inspect it, or decide what exactly the structure is. Experts say such tunnels were often part of fortified basements…

Chief Postmaster General Faiz-ur-Rehman told the BBC that the discovery of the structure came as a surprise. “I have been here for more than 20 years,” he said, “but was never aware of its existence…

Some reports say there is a possibility of it being an escape route connected to another tunnel. Three ways out, with covers, have been found so far in the garden…

Mr Rehman said that the original drawings for the building were not available in India. Officials say they could be in the UK – the former colonial power.

“Maybe if we could access the original plan we may be able to find out if there are more – and what purpose these structures served.”

Surely, no one expected the Brits to let their “subjects” know much about what they were doing or planning back in the day.

OTOH, some beancounter probably squirreled away a copy of the plans.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Afghan electoral officials, releasing preliminary results of last month’s parliamentary election, said Wednesday that they had tossed out more than a million ballots because of proven or likely fraud.

The decision by Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission laid bare the enormous extent of malfeasance in the Sept. 18 vote, which initially was billed as a showpiece of the country’s nascent democracy.

But it also demonstrated the ability of formerly pliant electoral officials to disqualify ballots because of ballot box stuffing, wholesale vote buying or threats to voters from gunmen, among other offenses.

The large number of nullified ballots was an embarrassment to the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, which had pledged that all efforts would be made to ensure that the election would be free and fair…

In the tainted 2009 presidential vote, the disqualification procedure fell mainly to a United Nations-appointed oversight body, which also must give its blessing to the final results of last month’s election.

The Independent Election Commission, or IEC, like many Western officials, had painted a somewhat successful scenario in the wake of the balloting, simply because so many Afghans turned out to vote despite Taliban threats, and because the insurgents staged no successful large-scale attacks on voting day…

“We can state with pride that the turnout exceeded our expectations,” IEC Chairman Fazel Ahmad Manawi told reporters. “In the current situation in Afghanistan, this amounts to success.”

Yup. We’re really getting good at this here nation-building thing.

Those tiny figures are human-size for comparison to the telescope

A new telescope will use the world’s largest digital camera to capture 20 terabytes of image data every day.

Much has been made of the ‘unprecedented’ scale of the IT infrastructure required to store all the data coming from the world’s largest physics experiment – the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland. But another gigantic science experiment, one you’ve probably never heard of, will some day pump out data on a similar scale. And, unlike the LHC, the data it produces will be comprehensible by non-scientists, and made freely available.

Once it’s complete, The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope on top of Cerro Pachón ridge in Chile will sport the world’s largest digital camera. It will peer deep into space yet have a field of view unprecedented in modern telescopes — ten square degrees of the heavens encompassed by a collecting area of forty square meters. The telescope will take 800 panoramic pictures a night, covering the entire night sky twice each week.

The result will be an unfathomably huge photo collection: 20 terabytes of data stored every 24 hours. Running all-out (and telescopes this expensive are usually booked year round) that’s 7.3 petabytes of data a year — half as much data as the 15 petabytes the LHC is producing each year. (To put that in perspective, over its lifetime LHC will produce as much data as all the words spoken by humankind since its appearance on earth.)

In order to handle that much data, once a day all the raw images from the telescope will be transferred to the Archive Center at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where 100 teraflops of processing power will digest and archive it on what will initially be 15 petabytes of storage (to be expanded as the experiment continues).

The results will be freely available to the public via existing open standards, and could help with everything from tracking killer asteroids to unraveling the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter. According to the LSST’s homepage, “Anyone with a computer will be able to fly through the Universe, zooming past objects a hundred million times fainter than can be observed with the unaided eye.”

There will be an app for that. No doubt.