ROME — Greece and Italy said on Saturday they had found swans with the H5N1 bird flu virus, the first known cases in the European Union of wild birds with the deadly strain of the disease. As the slow creep of the virus around the globe continued, Romania said more infections were suspected in birds in the Danube delta and Bulgaria said the lethal strain had been confirmed among swans in wetlands close to the Romanian border. The region is a haven and transit point for migrating birds. Nigeria started testing people who have fallen ill close to where the virus has been found among birds, in the first outbreak in African of a disease that has spread seemingly inexorably across the Eurasian landmass from China and Vietnam. Finance ministers of the Group of Eight (G8), meeting in Moscow, discussed the risk of a worldwide pandemic and issued a new call for wealthy countries to help poor ones fight bird flu. “We acknowledge the risk of a possible avian flu pandemic and its potential economic and financial impacts,” they said. Italy said wild swans found in the southern island of Sicily and the mainland regions […]
When I first saw them, I was struck by their crudeness. Surely Jyllands-Posten could have hired better artists. And surely cartoonists and editors ought to be able to spot the difference between Indian turbans and Arab ones. In some ways, that was the essence of the problem to begin with. It is this patronising tendency – stronger in Denmark than in countries such as Britain or Canada – that decided the course of the controversy and coloured the Danish reaction. One could see that the matter would take a turn for the worse when, late last year, the Danish prime minister refused to meet a group of Arab diplomats who wished to register their protest. In most other countries they would have been received, their protest accepted. The government would have expressed “regret” and told them it could not put pressure on any media outlet as a matter of law and policy. In their turn, having done their Muslim duty, these diplomats might have helped lessen the reaction in their respective countries. By not meeting them, the prime minister silenced all moderate Muslims just as effectively as they would be later silenced by militant Muslims around the world. […]
FULTON, Mo. When Wendy DeVore, the drama teacher at Fulton High here, staged the musical “Grease,” about high school students in the 1950’s, she carefully changed the script to avoid causing offense in this small town. She softened the language, substituting slang for profanity in places. Instead of smoking “weed,” the teenagers duck out for a cigarette. She rated the production PG-13, advising parents it was not suitable for small children. But a month after the performances in November, three letters arrived on the desk of Mark Enderle, Fulton’s superintendent of schools. Although the letters did not say so, the three writers were members of a small group linked by e-mail, all members of the same congregation, Callaway Christian Church. Each criticized the show, complaining that scenes of drinking, smoking and a couple kissing went too far, and glorified conduct that the community tries to discourage. One letter, from someone who had not seen the show but only heard about it, criticized “immoral behavior veiled behind the excuse of acting out a play.” Dr. Enderle watched a video of the play, ultimately agreeing that “Grease” was unsuitable for the high school, despite his having approved […]
A DYSFUNCTIONAL RELATIONSHIP The most serious problem with U.S. intelligence today is that its relationship with the policymaking process is broken and badly needs repair. In the wake of the Iraq war, it has become clear that official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community’s own work was politicized. As the national intelligence officer responsible for the Middle East from 2000 to 2005, I witnessed all of these disturbing developments. Public discussion of prewar intelligence on Iraq has focused on the errors made in assessing Saddam Hussein’s unconventional weapons programs. A commission chaired by Judge Laurence Silberman and former Senator Charles Robb usefully documented the intelligence community’s mistakes in a solid and comprehensive report released in March 2005. Corrections were indeed in order, and the intelligence community has begun to make them. At the same time, an acrimonious and highly partisan debate broke out over whether the Bush administration manipulated and misused intelligence in making its case for war. The administration defended itself by […]
SEOUL – Married South Korean women are the least happy with their sex lives, Japanese men are the most likely to try and dodge a certain sex problem and French men are the most fond of their frolicking, according to a recent survey. The survey released this week by the pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly and Co., one of the makers of the anti-impotence drug Cialis, of 1,200 married men and women in South Korea, Japan, France and the United States also found the French had the best sex lives followed by the Americans. Lilly Korea said the findings would be released globally next week ahead of Valentine’s Day. Less than one in three South Korean women said they were at least slightly happy about sex with their husbands, which was the lowest of the four groups of women. About half the South Korean men, however, said they were satisfied in bed with their wives. Not often enough topped the list of complaints by men in all four countries while the main complaint of wives was not enough romance. Less than one in three Japanese men said they would seek help for erectile dysfunction, which […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
