Eideard

The confusion is understandable, right?

The imposter who posed as a Taliban leader to open peace negotiations with Kabul was put forward by British agents who failed to note he was several inches shorter than the man he was impersonating.

The man masquerading as Akhtar Mohammad Mansour was paid a six figure sum and was flown three times to secret meetings with Nato and Afghan representatives before he was rumbled.

Afghan intelligence agents later determined he was a shopkeeper from the Pakistani city of Quetta.

A senior aide to Hamid Karzai said the man had been recommended by the British.

Mohammad Umer Daudzai, Mr Karzai’s chief of staff, said British officials brought the impostor to meet the president in July or August, where he was spotted as a fraud. Senior American officials confirmed the impostor was “the Brits’ guy”.

The British embassy in Kabul declined to comment.

Har! What could they say?

We noted this tale earlier this week; but, accepting a ringer, paying him big bucks to “negotiate” – and failing to notice he was a shrimp compared to the real deal. Laughable.

FedEx could learn today [Friday] what happened to a package containing radioactive materials that went missing a day before.

The company said it is searching in the Tennessee area and that the item is safe as long as nobody tampers with the protective packaging around it.

The item is a cylinder containing rods used for hospital machinery that were being sent to a person in Knoxville, Tennessee, said Sandra Munoz, a company spokeswoman. “The rods are used for quality control calibration,” Munoz said. “We have lots of experience in handling this kind of shipment.”

Munoz said the company may learn more Friday morning when two employees who handled the shipment return to work.

Uh, no one swiped the bar code in transit?

My experience, memory of screw-ups like this – unfortunately – usually ends in tragedy. Often, someone walked off with the radioactive marker source, putting themselves and their families at serious risk.

Phew! They found it. It had been double-boxed and the outer box with shipping info went to the destination. The inner box containing the radioactive rod inside a protective tube – was left aside because of no shipping info – in a FedEx terminal in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

The cholera epidemic that has killed 1,110 people and sickened thousands in Haiti is part of a 49-year-old global pandemic and likely was brought to the Caribbean country in a single instance, scientists say…But that was all it took to set off the epidemic, with an already weak sanitation system thrown into chaos by a devastating earthquake in January…

The epidemic in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere could easily worsen and cholera could linger there for years, they said…

CDC infectious disease specialist Dr. Scott Dowell said it may be impossible to trace how the cholera came to Haiti. An infected person, contaminated food or even a ship’s bilge water could all carry the bacteria, Dowell said.

Genetic fingerprints show the outbreak can be traced to a pandemic that started in Indonesia 49 years ago and has spread around the world, the CDC and PAHO said…

“As far as stamping it out or eliminating it from Haiti, we are not hopeful about that,” Dowell said. “We feel that Haiti is going to be dealing with cholera for several years or several months at least.”

Cholera is spread when the bacteria get into water, almost always via human waste.

Haiti had not seen cholera for 100 years but experts say conditions are ideal for its spread — lack of proper sewerage, people forced to defecate in the open, a tightly packed population, torrential rains and a lack of clean water.

A centuries-long history of political corruption, a culture constantly misled and misdirected by priests, politicians and populist hustlers – and Haiti was a Tsunami of self-destruction waiting to fall upon its people.

Within a context of American and European nations that couldn’t have cared less over time, the poor population of Haiti was always on track for this sort of disaster.

French firefighters have freed an elderly woman who was locked in her bathroom for nearly three weeks.

Police said the 69-year-old woman had been stuck in her windowless bathroom in the town of Epinay-sous-Senart for 20 days.

She became trapped in the bathroom when a doorknob fell off while she was inside, police said. She repeatedly banged on her door and cried for help, but the neighbors apparently thought workmen were the source of the noise.

French media reported that the woman survived her ordeal by drinking warm water from the bathroom tap.

Neighbors grew concerned and alerted authorities after going several weeks without seeing the woman.

Finally!

Efforts to make hospitals safer for patients are falling short, researchers report in the first large study in a decade to analyze harm from medical care and to track it over time.

The study, conducted from 2002 to 2007 in 10 North Carolina hospitals, found that harm to patients was common and that the number of incidents did not decrease over time. The most common problems were complications from procedures or drugs and hospital-acquired infections.

“It is unlikely that other regions of the country have fared better,” said Dr. Christopher P. Landrigan, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. The study is being published on Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

It is one of the most rigorous efforts to collect data about patient safety since a landmark report in 1999 found that medical mistakes caused as many as 98,000 deaths and more than one million injuries a year in the United States. That report, by the Institute of Medicine, an independent group that advises the government on health matters, led to a national movement to reduce errors and make hospital stays less hazardous to patients’ health…

Dr. Landrigan’s team focused on North Carolina because its hospitals, compared with those in most states, have been more involved in programs to improve patient safety.

But instead of improvements, the researchers found a high rate of problems. About 18 percent of patients were harmed by medical care, some more than once, and 63.1 percent of the injuries were judged to be preventable. Most of the problems were temporary and treatable, but some were serious, and a few — 2.4 percent — caused or contributed to a patient’s death…

RTFA. Disappointing? Yes. Surprising? No. Liable to support further improvements in healthcare beyond the tentative steps taken by the Obama administration? Don’t hold your breath.

The ignoranuses who just voted in a flock of less-than-useless Republicans may yet have a chance to join folks who voted out the least competent Blue Dog papier-mache Democrats – in 2012.

A new Conservative peer has claimed that Coalition changes to the welfare system will encourage “breeding” among those on benefits.

Howard Flight, a former Tory MP, made the comments just days after being given a peerage by David Cameron. Downing Street moved swiftly to distance itself from the remarks.

Mr Flight, who has yet to be ennobled, was asked in an interview about changes to the child benefit system which will see top rate taxpayers no longer receiving the state-hand-out.

The father of three told the Evening Standard: “We’re going to have a system where the middle classes are discouraged from breeding because it’s jolly expensive…But for those on benefits, there is every incentive. Well, that’s not very sensible.”

His comments come a week after David Cameron was infuriated by comments from Lord Young in an interview with the Daily Telegraph. The peer was forced to resign as a Downing Street adviser after referring to the “so-called recession” and people never having it “so good.”

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: “Howard Flight has shown himself to be an insensitive throwback to the worst of 1980s politics within days of being made a peer by the Prime Minister.

“This is exactly the kind of remark that leads to political parties being thought of as nasty, and shows just how shockingly out of touch with the lives of ordinary low and middle-income people some supporters of this Government can be.”

See. Sarah Palin and thugs like Jim Dement aren’t alone in the world. There’s no shortage of class-based 19th Century ideologues across the pond. Though we tend to specialize more in the populist phonies.

State Rep. Dan Flynn hopes to ensure that any Texas teacher who wants to can display the Ten Commandments in a classroom. Flynn, R-Van, in East Texas, recently filed a bill that says school board trustees may not stop copies of the commandments from being posted in “prominent” locations in classrooms.

Calling it a “patriotic exercise,” Flynn said the bill is geared to teach youths about history and principles…

“And anything that helps build the morals of our young people would be helpful,” Flynn said. “For too long, we’ve forsaken what our Judeo-Christian heritage has been. Our rights do come from God, not from government…”

“If the bill became law and if a court looked at that law and determined that its primary purpose was to promote religion … a federal court probably would rule that it violates the First Amendment establishment clause,” which prevents government from making laws respecting establishment of religion, said David Masci, a senior researcher at the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life…

Masci said courts are especially sensitive to religious materials in schools.

“Children are a captive audience,” Masci said. “They have to be there a certain amount of time every day. They also don’t fully have the capacity to understand what is necessarily a requirement and what is a gesture.

“If a teacher puts a Ten Commandments poster in the classroom, a child might say, ‘This is something I need to learn and understand.’”

Masci said government institutions, such as schools, may acknowledge religion but cannot promote it. “We’ve been fighting about this for years,” he said…

I wonder if Texas will ever realize they are part of the United States? But, then, I wonder if and when Texas politicians will ever decide it’s in the best interest of the electorate to join the 21st Century?

Modern, knowledge, information and practices would already have set that state apart if it weren’t for the 19th Century political practices which have funneled federal money into the state as payoff for votes and union-busting. It’s been standard practice since just after WW2 with the relocation of the Chance-Vought Aero industries down there.

Heroin addict Bobby Butler had vowed to turn his life around before. But this time — at the ripe age of 55 — it seemed finally to have stuck.

Just five months out of prison, where he had spent much of the last 20 years for a series of drug offenses, the fast-talking father of four was drug-free and church-going, proudly working as a telemarketer downtown and saving up to move into a new apartment with his mom.

His days on the street were done, he had told family and friends.

But as he walked home from the Central Park L stop in Lawndale at 6 p.m. Monday, the street claimed him anyway.

Gunned down by a robber as he ran to the aid of a young woman whose purse had been snatched, Butler died not a criminal, but a hero.

Chicago police search the alley where Bobby Butler died

“When he got out of prison we had a big long talk,” his brother, Jeffrey Butler, said Tuesday as detectives hunted for the killer. “He regretted that he wasn’t there when his other brother died of cancer, and he really wanted to make a difference — but he’d have helped this woman even when he wasn’t in his right frame of mind, before he got clean. It’s just how he was.”

Butler died of a gunshot wound in his chest during surgery Tuesday at Mount Sinai Hospital…

“There was one shot, and as the shooter ran away down the alley he was lying in the middle of the street, saying, ‘I can’t feel my legs!’ ” said a witness who spoke with police but asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.

Regular readers know I haven’t much respect for cons doing time for robbery and violent crime. And my tolerance for junkies is even lower. I spent too much hard time with both growing up in a factory town in decline.

When they catch the thug who did in Brother Butler, they should throw away the key.

A German woman who splashed out on breast implants with a loan from her then boyfriend now fears her assets could be re-possessed after she failed to fully reimburse him, the 20-year-old woman told Bild newspaper.

Her ex-boyfriend is demanding that she return the 4,379 euros he gave her to pay for her breast enlargement surgery in 2009 or he’ll call the police and get the repossessors involved, Bild reported on Wednesday.

“It’s true that Carsten signed a loan agreement shortly before the operation,” the woman named only as Anastasia is quoted saying. “The condition was that I wouldn’t have to pay him back if I stayed with him for a year.”

But the pair split shortly after she underwent the plastic surgery. The woman said she had transferred 3,000 euros into her ex-boyfriend’s account last week.

Does that mean he only gets to repossess one boob?

Eeoough! Half of one boob?

Five related species of tree-dwelling snakes found in Southeast and South Asia may just be the worst nightmares of ophidiophobes (people who have abnormal fears of snakes). Not only are they snakes, but they can “fly” — flinging themselves off their perches, flattening their bodies, and gliding from tree to tree or to the ground.

To Virginia Tech biologist Jake Socha, these curious reptiles are something of a biomechanical wonder. In order to understand how they do what they do, Socha and his colleagues recently studied Chrysopelea paradisi snakes as they launched themselves off a branch at the top of a 15-meter-tall tower.

Four cameras recorded the curious snakes as they glided. This allowed them to create and analyze 3-D reconstructions of the animals’ body positions during flight — work that Socha recently presented at the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics (DFD) meeting in Long Beach, CA.

The reconstructions were coupled with an analytical model [.pdf] of gliding dynamics and the forces acting on the snakes’ bodies. The analyses revealed that the reptiles, despite traveling up to 24 meters from the launch platform, never achieved an “equilibrium gliding” state — one in which the forces generated by their undulating bodies exactly counteract the force pulling the animals down, causing them to move with constant velocity, at a constant angle from the horizon. Nor did the snakes simply drop to the ground.

Instead, Socha says, “the snake is pushed upward — even though it is moving downward — because the upward component of the aerodynamic force is greater than the snake’s weight.”

“Hypothetically, this means that if the snake continued on like this, it would eventually be moving upward in the air — quite an impressive feat for a snake,” he says. But our modeling suggests that the effect is only temporary, and eventually “the snake hits the ground to end the glide.”

Scaring the crap out of any ordinary human being who happens to be standing nearby!