President Bush’s plan for dealing with a flu pandemic warns that the federal government won’t be able to bail out communities reeling from illness and economic upheaval, and calls on businesses and individuals to take steps now to keep vital services running. The updated plan, released Wednesday, stresses basic human needs such as medical care and food, but doesn’t address some major hurdles – how to meet those needs if massive absenteeism stops transportation by closing oil refineries, or crashes the Internet so workers can’t telecommute. ‘Our efforts require the participation of, and coordination by, all levels of government and segments of society,’ Bush said in a letter to Americans unveiling his updated national pandemic response strategy. ‘No less important will be the actions of individual citizens, whose participation is necessary to the success of these efforts.’ Influenza pandemics strike every few decades when a never-before-seen strain arises. It’s impossible to predict when the next will occur, or its toll. But last fall, amid concern that the Asian bird flu might lead to one if it starts spreading easily from person to person, Bush proposed a $7.1 billion, multi-year strategy to prepare for the next pandemic. […]
NEW YORK — An important wind circulation pattern over the Pacific Ocean has begun to weaken because of global warming caused by human activity, something that could alter climate and the marine food chain in the region, new research suggests. It’s not clear what climate changes might arise in the area or possibly beyond, but the long-term effect might resemble some aspects of an El Nino event, a study author said. El Ninos boost rainfall in the southern United States and western South America and bring dry weather or even drought to Indonesia, Malaysia and elsewhere in the western Pacific. As for the Pacific food chain near the equator, the slowdown might reduce populations of tiny plants and animals up through the fish that eat them, because of reduced nutrition welling up from the deep, said the author, Gabriel Vecchi. Vecchi, a visiting scientist at a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lab in Princeton, N.J., and colleagues present their results in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature. The slowdown was detected in shipboard and land-based data going back to the mid-1800s. It matches an effect predicted by computer climate simulations that trace global warming to […]
Americans may have won the Revolutionary War, but 230 years later they’re losing the battle for good health to the British. An extensive new study comparing the health of middle-aged, white residents of both countries finds that ‘we get sicker, sooner,’ according to American co-researcher James Smith, a senior economist at Rand Corp. The gap between the two countries is significant, despite the fact that people in the United States have a standard of living that is 25 percent higher than their counterparts across the Atlantic, and that they spend more than double on health care than the British — $5,274 per capita vs. $2,164, respectively. The health gap between the two nations ‘persists even after you take out things such as the large role of African-Americans with very poor health in the United States, or that people may be reporting health differences differently in the two countries,’ Smith said. ‘We also looked at biological markers of disease — you take away the fact that there may be risk-factor differences in obesity, smoking and drinking.’ Even with those factors taken into account, ‘you are basically back where you started,’ Smith said. ‘You find enormous differences in […]
Music labels would much rather have variable price, so they can charge more for hits and perhaps less for older tracks,’ said Ted Schadler, an analyst at Forrester. ‘Apple likes the $0.99 price because it is simple, uniform, not too high to discourage buyers, and very easy to administer and merchandise.’ Apple scored a quiet victory over the weekend, the company announced on Monday, when it was able to renew licensing agreements with the Big Four recording companies to continue selling songs on the iTunes music store for 99 cents each. The contract renewals, coming after several months of sometimes contentious negotiations between the two camps, marks a defeat for the music companies — Sony BMG, Universal, Warner Music, and EMI — that wanted to institute a variable-price structure for the downloads. ‘We’ve renewed our agreements with the major music companies and we’re pleased to continue offering iTunes customers music at 99 cents per song from a library of over three million songs,’ said Natalie Kerris, an Apple spokesperson. ‘Greedy’ Music Industry In recent months, executives at EMI, Sony, and other companies have been pushing Apple to adopt a variable-price model. Under that plan, new […]
MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s president will approve a law that decriminalizes possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine and other drugs to concentrate on fighting violent narco gangs, the government said on Tuesday. President Vicente Fox will not oppose the bill, passed by senators last week, presidential spokesman Ruben Aguilar told reporters, despite likely tensions with the United States. ‘The president is going to sign that law, there would be no objection,’ he said. ‘It appears to be a good law and an advance in combating narcotics trafficking.’ The approval of the legislation, passed earlier by the lower house of Congress, surprised Washington, which counts on Mexico’s support in its war against gangs that move massive quantities of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines through Mexico to U.S. consumers. Under the law, police will not penalize people for possessing up to 5 grams of marijuana, 5 grams of opium, 25 milligrams of heroin. Nor does the law penalize possession of 500 milligrams of cocaine — enough for a few lines. The legal changes will also decriminalize the possession of limited quantities of LSD, hallucinogenic mushrooms, amphetamines, ecstasy and peyote — a psychotropic cactus found in Mexico’s […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
