Eeyores news and view

Plan to protect D.C. from nuke EMP attack
Defense initiative focuses on saving government
Posted: June 25, 2009 12:00 am Eastern © 2009 WorldNetDaily
Editor's Note: The following report is excerpted from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, the premium online newsletter published by the founder of WND. Subscriptions are $99 a year or, for monthly trials, just $9.95 per month for credit card users, and provide instant access for the complete reports.
Air Force One
WASHINGTON – As North Korea threatens a missile launch on Hawaii and Iran continues to develop its own nuclear war capabilities, President Obama has greenlighted a plan to save the federal government from the devastating capabilities of a nuclear electro-magnetic pulse attack on the U.S, according to a report in Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.
As WND has reported, a high-altitude nuclear EMP attack potentially could disrupt or damage electronic systems over much of the U.S., William Graham, chairman of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States From Electromagnetic Pulse Attack, told a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee in July 2008.
The commission concluded Iran is not only covertly developing nuclear weapons. Since 2005 Tehran has been testing ballistic missiles designed to destroy America's technical infrastructure, effectively neutralizing the world's lone superpower.
Detonated at a height of 60 to 500 kilometers above the continental U.S., one nuclear warhead could cripple the country – knocking out electrical power and circuit boards and rendering the U.S. domestic communications impotent.
Keep in touch with the most important breaking news stories about critical developments around the globe with Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, the premium, online intelligence news source edited and published by the founder of WND.
In 2005, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security chaired by Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., held a hearing on the EMP threat.
"An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack on the American homeland, said one of the distinguished scientists who testified at the hearing, is one of only a few ways that the United States could be defeated by its enemies – terrorist or otherwise," wrote Kyl. "And it is probably the easiest. A single Scud missile, carrying a single nuclear weapon, detonated at the appropriate altitude, would interact with the Earth's atmosphere, producing an electromagnetic pulse radiating down to the surface at the speed of light. Depending on the location and size of the blast, the effect would be to knock out already stressed power grids and other electrical systems across much or even all of the continental United States, for months if not years."
While few preparations have been made since 2005 to protect the American heartland, the Defense Information Systems Agency plans to install a presidential network in the Washington area this year that will be able to survive an attack by a nuclear weapon that generates a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse.
The agency started work on the network last year to install communications equipment resistant to damage by an EMP attack. The network was developed at the direction of the "National Security Presidential Directive on Survivable Senior Leadership Communications in a HEMP Environment." It features Promina network switches from Network Equipment Technologies Inc. and manage communications over a specially designed and deployed Voice over Internet Protocol network.
DISA developed the HEMP system, which includes upgrades to a UHF network serving senior leadership in the Washington area, as part of a National Emergency Action Decision Network to serve the president, secretary of defense and other senior leaders. John Garing, DISA chief information officer and director of strategic planning, said the network supports radio systems on helicopters and feeds into the HEMP network. Funding for all systems in the National Emergency Action Decision Network is pegged at less than $1 million.
The systems will be installed in ground installations and executive aircraft, including Air Force One, four VIP Boeing 757s and two VIP Boeing 737 aircraft.
DISA also asked for $49.5 million in its fiscal 2010 budget for the Crisis Management System, a "high-performance, closed network that provides classified multimedia teleconferencing for the president, Cabinet secretaries, designated agency directors and their staffs," budget documents noted.
http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=102023

Well almost Judicial Restraint, i guess as close as we will come too it.
Court says strip search violated girl's rights
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court's decision Thursday striking down the strip search of an eighth-grade girl for prescription-strength ibuprofen requires schools nationwide to weigh more carefully how intrusively they search for drugs.
By an 8-1 vote, the justices ruled that school officials in a rural Arizona district violated the Fourth Amendment rights of Savana Redding when they forced her to take off her clothes after an unverified tip that she had the pain relief pills. The court emphasized the difference between a routine search of a backpack and a search that exposes a student's private parts. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.
The decision, which differs from signals the justices sent during oral arguments in April, also departs from a recent trend giving administrators wide latitude to search for drugs in schools.
Writing for the court, Justice David Souter said an official must have a "reasonable suspicion of danger" regarding the drugs sought and a belief they could be hidden in a student's underwear before making "the quantum leap from outer clothes and backpacks to exposure of intimate parts."
Matthew Wright, lawyer for the Safford school district, predicted the decision would have a "chilling effect" on administrators responding to threats of drugs. Francisco Negron, lawyer for the National School Boards Association, said the decision could be confusing for school officials, who typically lack formal training in drugs yet would have to consider whether the contraband they seek is dangerous enough to do to a strip search.
Savana Redding, who was 13 at the time of the search and is now 19, said, "I'm so glad that they recognized that my rights were violated. I don't want this to happen to anyone else." Her lawyer, Adam Wolf, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who argued the case, added, "Today's ruling affirms that schools are not constitutional dead zones."
In October 2003, after Assistant Principal Kerry Wilson heard from a student that Redding might have ibuprofen, he asked a school nurse and administration assistant, both women, to search Savana in the nurse's office. They asked her to take off her shirt and pants, then to pull out her bra and underpants to see whether she was hiding any pills.
No pills were found. Savana's mother, April Redding, sued, saying school officials breached Savana's rights under the Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable searches. A lower U.S. appeals court ruled for Redding and said Safford officials were financially responsible for harm to her.
In affirming that her rights were violated, Souter said a strip search requires officials to have an "indication of danger (and) reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear."
Souter was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito. Dissenting Justice Thomas said the decision allows judges "to second-guess" officials trying to ensure student safety.
By a separate vote of 7-2, the court said that because rulings in this area of the law have not been clear, Safford officials are shielded from financial responsibility for their actions. Stevens and Ginsburg dissented from that part of the ruling in Safford Unified School District No. 1 v. Redding.
During oral arguments April 21, many justices voiced more sympathy for school administrators than for Redding. Several, including Souter and Roberts, appeared open to arguments that administrators need considerable leeway to look for drug abuse. Ginsburg was most forceful on the other side. In a concurring opinion Thursday, Ginsburg emphasized the humiliation Savana endured, including being forced to sit on a chair outside Wilson's office even after the search found no pills.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/judicial/2009-06-25-scotus-strip-search_N.htm

US swine flu cases may have hit 1 million June 26, 2009 - 12:53am AP Medical Writer
ATLANTA (AP) - Swine flu has infected as many as 1 million Americans, U.S. health officials said Thursday, adding that 6 percent or more of some urban populations are infected. The estimate voiced by a government flu scientist Thursday was no surprise to the experts who have been closely watching the virus.
"We knew diagnosed cases were just the tip of the iceberg," said Dr. William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University infectious diseases expert who was in Atlanta for the meeting of a vaccine advisory panel.
Lyn Finelli, a flu surveillance official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, made the 1 million estimate in a presentation to the vaccine panel. The number is from mathematical modeling, based on surveys by health officials.
Regular seasonal flu sickens anywhere from 15 million to 60 million Americans each year.
The United States has roughly half the world's swine flu cases, with nearly 28,000 reported to the CDC so far. The U.S. count includes 3,065 hospitalizations and 127 deaths.
The percentage of cases hospitalized has been growing, but that may be due to closer scrutiny of very sick patients. It takes about three days from the time symptoms appear to hospitalization, Finelli said, and the average hospital stay has been three days.
Other health problems have been a factor in most cases: About one in three of the hospitalized cases had asthma, 16 percent diabetes, 12 percent have immune system problems and 11 percent chronic heart disease.
The numbers again highlight how the young seem to be particularly at risk of catching the new virus. But data also show that the flu has been more dangerous to adults who catch it.
The average age of swine flu patients is 12, the average age for hospitalized patients is 20, and for people who died, it was 37. It seems to be deadliest to people 65 and older, with deaths in more than 2 percent of elderly people infected, Finelli said.
Also at the meeting, CDC officials made projections about flu vaccines expected to be available to protect against both seasonal and swine flu this fall.
More than 25 million doses of seasonal flu vaccine should be available by early September, CDC officials and vaccine manufacturers said.
The same five manufacturers that make the seasonal vaccine are producing swine flu vaccine as well. As many as 60 million doses of vaccine to protect against the new virus could be ready by September, said Robin Robinson, an official with the federal agency that oversees vaccine manufacture and distribution. That prediction seemed a bit optimistic, others at the meeting said.
The vaccinations might be given as two shots, spaced 21 days apart. But the vaccine has to be tested before it's made available to the public.
http://wtop.com/?nid=106&sid=1661303

H1N1 / 6,000 Deaths / The Pandemic is Here
Those who dismiss H1N1 as a panic-fest are profoundly wrong - even the mild version in a country like Canada could kill thousands. And the nightmare scenario? That would be really scary
So it's here at last. After months of will-it-won't-it anticipation, H1N1 officially went pandemic on June 11.
Yet despite increasing numbers of cases in over 70 countries, many still think it a fuss over nothing: "What's the big deal? It's just ordinary flu." It is worrying that even Canadians are saying this, although they know from recent memory what it is to experience a big disease outbreak.
Many in Britain are saying the same thing. One high-profile commentator, Simon Jenkins in the Guardian newspaper, asserted that swine flu was a panic stoked in order "to posture and spend," saying that health scares such as this enable media-hungry doctors, public-health officials and drug companies to benefit by manipulating fright.
Those who dismiss H1N1 as a panic-fest are profoundly wrong. This "ordinary flu" might have real consequences to many Canadians.
Canada has an excellent flu vaccination program and good access to medical care. Nonetheless, 6,000 to 8,000 Canadians die of seasonal flu each year, mostly older people or those with other health problems. These are people's mothers and grandfathers, uncles and fathers. Ordinary flu causes a great many deaths, even in a country such as Canada.
Let's say that H1N1 continues to be mild and is no worse than seasonal flu. "Mild" means having up to five days feeling really unwell with fever, cough, sore throat and muscle aches, and then a further week before one feels able to return to work and normal life.
The old story about the difference between flu and a cold holds good: If a $50 bill is dropped outside your front door, if you've got a cold, you'll go pick it up; if you've got flu, not even $50 will get you out of bed.
This is a novel flu. While people over 50 seem to have some immunity, perhaps because of the Asian flu of 1957, those who are younger have not been exposed before and have no defences in place. Current H1N1 attack rates are about 20 per cent. That is, one in five people exposed to this new flu will come down with symptoms like the ones above; exposure can result from merely touching a surface where there are viruses, because someone else has touched it. Pretty much everyone who comes into contact with other people will be exposed to this flu, sooner or later.
4-PER-CENT IMPACT ON GDP
That means 20 per cent of the population becoming sick, with perhaps another 10 per cent of the working population home looking after them. Think about the effects on business, on transport, on day-to-day life, of so many people being off sick at the same time. Flu is estimated to have a 4-per-cent impact on a country's GDP.
And think about its effect on hospitals. Not on its effect on patients requiring intensive care, but its effect on staffing. A tanker drivers' strike in Britain bought our hospitals to a halt in less than a week. Why? Because schools didn't have fuel for heating and were closed, working mothers had to stay home to look after their children. Where are there are large proportion of working mothers? In nursing and allied health services.
There are 33 million people in Canada. At an attack rate of 20 per cent, six million people would develop flu. The death rate in Canada is currently tiny, at roughly 0.1 per cent (12 deaths, 4,905 cases). But 0.1 per cent of six million is 6,000. These 6,000 will not be just the old and the sick, whose deaths, extraordinarily, don't seem to greatly concern many commentators, but will include previously healthy twentysomethings (such as three of those admitted to intensive care units in Britain), pregnant women and a disproportionate number of those sections of the population that are genetically particularly susceptible. Such effects are already appearing in Canada with outbreaks of severe illness among previously healthy native people in Manitoba.
This is not scaremongering. This is reality.
Many people expect that all medical staff will turn up for work during a flu pandemic. Toronto's experience of SARS in 2003 shows that they won't, and cannot be made to do so. Many of them won't be able to, because they are looking after family at home, and some will fear catching flu and its effects. Normal hospital schedules will grind to a halt, meaning that far fewer elective procedures such as hip replacements and heart surgery can take place. It will inevitably cause deaths that should have been preventable. This is without the strain on services from many more people requiring respiratory support because of flu.
So why couldn't the hospital authorities make flu vaccines mandatory for health-care staff when they become available? Britain does not make this mandatory, and only 13 per cent of National Health Service Staff front-line staff voluntarily had seasonal flu vaccination in 2008-2009. Why? It's principally because staff think of flu as "ordinary," not something that causes severe illness. Recently, unvaccinated NHS staff were shown by Britain's Health Protection Agency to have been the cause of a major outbreak of flu among patients who were already critically ill in a hospital in Liverpool.
When people look upon the threat to themselves as "mild," they will not consider vaccination, which they feel has greater risks than the illness.
Playing in the background are current attitudes to vaccines, coloured by the long-running contention that the MMR vaccine is linked to autism, but also by the experience of swine flu in the United States in 1976.
THE FORT DIX PRECEDENT
In January, 1976, scores of army recruits at Fort Dix, N.J., complained of flu symptoms - not unusual at that time of year. But 18-year old Private David Lewis, with the bravado of youth, decided to ignore medical advice to go to bed; he went out on a strenuous all-night exercise in the bitter cold. At the end of the exercise, he collapsed. He died a few hours later. An autopsy revealed that his death was caused by a previously unknown variant of swine flu A/H1N1. But what really spooked the Centers for Disease Control was its similarity to the strain that had killed more than 40 million people across the world in 1918.
The CDC rightly decided to develop a swine-flu vaccine for use in the following flu season. But there were many production problems. It was on the point of being cancelled, when there was an outbreak of fatal pneumonia after the Pennsylvania convention of the American Legion. The media linked it with swine flu (although today it is known to have been what is called legionnaires' disease), and politicians joined in the clamour to push forward the swine-flu vaccination program.
The threat from swine flu was vastly exaggerated in the media, although it was already clear that the outbreak (which involved no more than 300 people) was over. President Gerald Ford took personal charge of a mass vaccination program, and it had deadly consequences.
With all manufacturing capacity devoted to swine flu, seasonal flu production stopped. That year, there was a particularly virulent strain of seasonal flu, and there were thousands more regular flu deaths than normal, largely in unvaccinated seniors. There was also the problem of vaccine side effects.
SIDE EFFECTS BECOME NUMEROUS
When millions of people are vaccinated, very rare side effects become numerous. About nine in every million of those vaccinated then developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, a paralytic disease. There were 500 cases and 25 deaths.
The batches may have been contaminated with a bacterium. In any case, the vaccination program was stopped, having only treated 24 per cent of the population.
This is not then. There are already thousands of cases, and vaccine technology is better than it was. But no vaccine is absolutely safe. There will be very rare side effects with new H1N1 vaccines too, and most have not yet been tested on children, who are one of the groups that are most likely to be vaccinated as a priority, because they seem to be especially affected. But people can only ever see risk from their own perspective.
It seems probable that, despite knowing that 6,000 or more Canadians might be prevented from dying and tens of thousands more prevented from having serious illness, people will concentrate on their own individual risks, with many choosing to remain unvaccinated. This places individuals at risk but also friends, family and loved ones and those who are unable to be vaccinated for one reason or another.
All this comes from a mild illness that many people think is not a risk and claim to be overhyped. Everyone should think again about the seriousness of pandemic flu.
Let us hope that the nightmare scenario of a new virus with the virulence of H5N1 (bird flu) and the transmissibility if H1N1 does not come to pass. That really would be scary.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/h1n1-6000-deaths-the-pandemic-is-here/article1190655/

Dollar Falls on China Call for World Currency; Stocks Pare Gain
June 26 (Bloomberg) -- The dollar weakened and stocks pared their advance after China’s central bank reiterated a call for a “super sovereign currency” and said the country’s financial institutions face a tougher environment this year.
The Dollar Index that measures the currency’s performance against six trading partners fell as much as 0.8 percent at 1:01 p.m. in London after China’s central bank also said the International Monetary Fund should manage part of members’ foreign reserves. The Dow Jones Stoxx 600 Index of European shares added 0.3 percent, trimming an advance of as much as 1.3 percent. Standard & Poor’s 500 Index futures fell 0.2 percent.
China, the biggest foreign owner of U.S. Treasuries, cut its holdings of government notes and bonds by $4.4 billion to $763.5 billion in April, according to data released on June 15 in Washington. People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan in March urged the IMF to expand the functions of its unit of account and move toward an international reserve currency to reduce dependence on the dollar.
“In the longer term there will be diversification among global central banks,” said Beat Siegenthaler, chief emerging markets strategist at TD Securities Ltd. in London. “These comments tend to remind traders of that, but there’s still a question about the time horizon.”
The Dollar Index fell below 80 as the People’s Bank of China said that the IMF relies on too few foreign currencies. The central bank was commenting in an assessment of the country’s financial situation at the end of 2008 posted on its Web site today.
Special Drawing Rights
Group of 20 leaders on April 2 gave approval for the IMF to raise $250 billion by issuing Special Drawing Rights, or SDRs, the artificial currency that the agency uses to settle accounts among its member nations. It also agreed to put another $500 billion into the IMF’s war chest.
"There’s a very strong case to be made for reducing the reliance on the dollar,” said Steven Barrow, a currency strategist with Standard Bank Plc in London. “But the market is making a mountain out of a mole hill. Among the BRIC countries, China seems the least positive about the idea. If they talk down the dollar they’re talking down a vast bulk of their assets.”
The asset quality and profitability of China’s financial institutions face challenges and the correction in the country’s property market may raise banks’ credit risks, the central bank also said today.
The yen also headed for a weekly loss against the euro. Japan’s benchmark interest rate is 0.1 percent and the U.S.’s is between zero and 0.25 percent, compared with 1 percent in the euro region and Norway’s 1.25 percent.
OECD Forecast
Today’s gains in European stocks trimmed the Stoxx 600’s second-straight weekly drop to 1.5 percent after a three-month, 36 percent rally drove price-earnings valuations to the highest level in five years. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development boosted its forecast for the economy of its 30 member nations for the first time in two years this week, while a U.S. government report today may show consumer spending rose in May for the first time in three months.
“Risk appetite is coming back,” Peter Redward, the head of Asian emerging-markets research at Barclays Plc in Singapore, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “We’re now seeing the effects of fiscal and monetary stimulus beginning to kick in and those themes are going to continue.”
Stocks gained in Asia and Europe after Bridgestone Corp., the world’s largest tiremaker, narrowed its loss forecast. Bridgestone gained 8.5 percent in Tokyo.
Emerging Markets
The MSCI Emerging Markets Index rose 1.8 percent. While the 22-country benchmark has dropped 1.2 percent this month, it’s headed for the best quarterly gain on record, up 34 percent since March.
OAO Lukoil, Russia’s second-biggest oil producer, advanced 1.6 percent as crude gained, while OAO GMK Norilsk Nickel, the country’s biggest mining company, added 6.7 percent as copper climbed 1.8 percent this week to $5,119 a metric ton on the London Metal Exchange. The Micex is recovering from a retreat this month that sent it down more than 20 percent from its June 1 peak, the world’s first benchmark equity index to enter a bear market since global stocks began rallying in March.
Crude oil for August delivery rose as much as 1.5 percent to $71.29 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange after Nigerian militants said they attacked a Royal Dutch Shell Plc offshore oil field late yesterday, hours after an offer of an amnesty by President Umaru Yar’Adua.
New Zealand’s dollar weakened 0.3 percent versus the U.S. dollar after the nation’s statistics bureau said gross domestic product declined 1 percent in the first quarter. The median of 11 estimates in a Bloomberg News survey was for a 0.7 percent contraction.
U.S. Consumer Spending
A report at 8:30 a.m. in Washington will show consumer purchases in the U.S. increased 0.3 percent after falling 0.1 percent in April, according to the median forecast of 76 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.
A U.S. report yesterday showed gross domestic product shrank last quarter at a 5.5 percent pace, slower than the 5.7 percent decrease previously estimated by the government.
Futures on the S&P 500 slid 0.3 percent today after the GDP report helped send the gauge up 2.1 percent yesterday.
Stocks and credit markets have rebounded since the U.S. government and Federal Reserve pledged $12.8 trillion to combat the first global recession in five decades and almost $1.5 trillion in losses and writedowns at financial firms from the collapse of subprime mortgages.
The cost of borrowing in dollars for three months in London fell below 0.6 percent for the first time today, according to the British Bankers’ Association. The London interbank offered rate, or Libor, that banks charge for three-month loans fell less than half a basis point to 0.598 percent.
Libor-OIS
The Libor-OIS spread, which measures banks’ reluctance to lend, has narrowed to 38 basis points, from a record 364 basis points in October, following the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Analysts covering S&P 500 companies began to boost 2009 profit estimates for the first time this year in May as economists predicted the U.S. economy will start to expand next quarter, weekly data compiled by Bloomberg show.
Global market liquidity is at its strongest level since November, according to an index updated today by the Bank of England. The index, which measures market prices, including gaps between bid and offer prices, the ratio of returns to trading volumes, and spreads in the credit market, reached a low in April.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aLpv3.MFL1Oc