Eeyore's News and view

Italy quake death toll at 260; pope to visit area
By VANESSA GERA
L'AQUILA, Italy (AP) - Aftershocks from the earthquake that has killed at least 260 people in central Italy sent new fears through the tent camps that shelter thousands of survivors, and Pope Benedict XVI said Wednesday that he would visit the shocked and injured people of the area as soon as possible.
As rescue teams pressed ahead with their searches in the crumbled buildings, some of the almost 28,000 left homeless emerged from tents after spending a second night in chilly mountain temperatures.
"I slept so badly because I kept feeling the aftershocks," said Daniela Nunut at one of the tent camps set up across the city of L'Aquila. The 46-year Romanian-born woman said she and her companion plan to stay in the tent for now. "What can you do? You can't go into the building."
The magnitude-6.3 quake hit L'Aquila and several towns in central Italy early Monday, leveling buildings and reducing entire blocks to piles of rubble and dust.
The pope praised the relief operations as an example of how solidarity can help overcome "even the most painful trials."
"As soon as possible I hope to visit you," Benedict said Wednesday at the Vatican.
The Vatican said he would make the trip after Easter Sunday and that he does not want to interfere with relief operations.
Premier Silvio Berlusconi said 260 people have died, including 16 children. The premier, speaking in L'Aquila after a third day in the quake area, said nine bodies remained to be identified. He said about 100 injured were in serious condition.
Berlusconi said looting in the quake zone was on the rise and that the government was looking to increase penalties for the crime. He said details were still being worked out, adding the new penalties would be "very severe."
A funeral for the victims is scheduled for Friday morning, and is to be conducted by L'Aquila Bishop Giuseppe Molinari, the premier said. At least one victim's funeral was going to be held Wednesday in one of the small villages in the stricken area.
Berlusconi said about 17,700 people left homeless by the quake had found shelter in tent camps set up by authorities. An additional 10,000 people were housed in hotels along the coast, bringing the overall number of homeless to almost 28,000.
Fifteen people remain missing, officials said.
The ANSA news agency reported that four students trapped in the rubble of a dormitory of the University of L'Aquila had died.
By Tuesday evening, rescue crews gave up painstakingly removing debris from the dormitory by hand and brought in huge pincers that pulled off parts of the roof, balconies and walls, showering debris down.
"Unless there is a miracle, I've been told (by rescuers) that they probably are dead," university rector Ferdinando Di Orio said.
Since the quake early Monday, some 430 aftershocks have rumbled through, including some strong ones, said Marco Olivieri of the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology in Rome.
A strong aftershock at 7:47 p.m. Tuesday rained debris on screaming residents and rescue crews, who ran from the site.
Many survivors at the camp said they had been cold during the night as heaters in some of the tents were not working. Some read a newspaper as they lined up for hot coffee or tea and a croissant.
To shelter the homeless against the chilly nights in the mountains, about 20 tent cities have sprouted in open spaces around L'Aquila and surrounding towns. Field kitchens, medical supplies - and clowns with bubbles to entertain traumatized children - were brought in.
Officials estimated Monday that 50,000 people had been left homeless by the quake. By Tuesday evening, that number was lowered to between 17,000 and 25,000, because many moved in with friends or relatives.
Rescue workers continuing their search still held out hope to find somebody alive. Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said the rescue efforts would likely continue until Easter Sunday, beyond the period originally indicated by Berlusconi.
"It all depends on the conditions, if the person under the rubble has any air or water," Cristian Martinez, from the Spanish rescue organization Unidad Canina, said as his dogs ran across a pile of rubble that had once been a four-story building in L'Aquila.
Martinez explained that his dogs, which have been sent across the world after quakes and other catastrophes, "would bark if they found a live body and would start digging if they found a dead body."
So far, the dogs had found no signs of any living human beings in the debris.
"But we don't give up hope," said Martinez, adding that his dogs had once found somebody alive 11 days after a quake in Pakistan.
On Tuesday, rescue officials pulled a young woman alive from a collapsed building about 42 hours after the main quake struck the mountainous region.
Eleonora Calesini, a 20-year-old student, was found alive in the ruins of the five-story building in central L'Aquila.
Officials said some 10,000 to 15,000 buildings were either damaged or destroyed in the 26 cities, towns and villages around L'Aquila, a city of 70,000 that is the regional capital of Abruzzo.
Teams started inspecting some buildings still standing Wednesday, including an 18th-century church in downtown L'Aquila, which had been damaged in the quake. Teams also began surveying houses to see if residents can move back in, Berlusconi said.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090408/D97EA01O0.html

From another news source and amazing recued person, what she did until rescued
Another of those rescued today was Maria D’Antuono, 98, who said that she had spent 30 hours knitting as she waited to be freed from her ruined home.

So much for being 5 years away
Iran to say mastering final stage of nuclear cycle
TEHRAN (Reuters) – President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is expected to announce Iran has mastered the final stage of nuclear fuel production when the Islamic state celebrates its National Nuclear Day on Thursday.
"I will have good nuclear news for the honored Iranian nation tomorrow (April 9)," Ahmadinejad said on Wednesday in a televised speech at the central city of Isfahan.
Foreign nuclear analysts believe Tehran has yet to prove it has mastered industrial-scale enrichment of uranium, the key to making fuel in large, usable quantities and the most technically difficult aspect of churning out nuclear energy.
Tehran has slowly expanded its Natanz enrichment plant in defiance of U.N. resolutions demanding it stop over concerns Tehran's goal is atomic bombs, something it denies.
But analysts expected Ahmadinejad to say that Iran has perfected the last of several phases of fuel output.
"A possible announcement will be production of natural uranium pellets (in Isfahan) for Iran's Arak heavy water reactor and also production of fuel rods and assembling rods into bundles," said an analyst who asked not to be named, citing the issue's political sensitivities. "It is the final stage in a long process to produce nuclear fuel."
The nuclear fuel cycle includes mining and milling of uranium ore, uranium enrichment, fabrication and use of nuclear fuel, reprocessing of used fuel, and disposal or management of radioactive waste or unreprocessed spent fuel.
In a February 19 report, the International Atomic Energy Agency said it could not verify Iran's planned Arak heavy water reactor was being designed only for peaceful uses because Tehran had been denying visits by IAEA inspectors since August.
CONCERNS OVER HEAVY-WATER REACTOR
The report said Iran's fuel fabrication plant in Isfahan had begun producing fuel rods and that a process line for making uranium pellets was ready for operations.
Tehran says the Arak complex will be geared to making only isotopes for medical care and agriculture.
Western powers fear Iran may configure the Arak reactor to derive plutonium from spent fuel rods as another possible source of bomb-grade fuel, besides its Natanz uranium enrichment plant, which is under daily IAEA surveillance.
Iran's student news agency ISNA said, without giving a source, that Ahmadinejad would inaugurate the nuclear fuel manufacturing facility.
Nuclear energy chief Gholamreza Aghazadeh said in 2007 that Iran had produced and tested fuel pellets of enriched uranium.
Iran has long been working on its uranium enrichment capability to fuel its developing nuclear power program.
The U.N. Security Council has so far issued three sanctions resolution against Tehran for defying its demand to suspend all activities related to enrichment and fuel reprocessing, which could also be turned to producing nuclear weapons.
Iran, the world's fourth largest oil exporter, says its nuclear program is only aimed at generating electricity.
U.S. President Barack Obama is striving for a "new beginning" in bilateral ties with Iran and could play a role in mending bridges almost three decades after Washington severed all relations soon after Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution.
Iran has responded cautiously to the overture, saying Washington must show real policy change toward Iran. "If you (Obama) say you are after change ... change your method, change your literature and your way," Ahmadinejad said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090408/wl_nm/us_iran_nuclear

Everything is fine Russia say they are not a threat to us, so all is well. After all we have Russia's word on it.
Iran poses no threat to US: Russia
Iran poses no threat to the United States, Russia said Tuesday, rebuffing a key argument of President Barack Obama on whether to go ahead with a European missile shield bitterly opposed by Moscow.
Former president George W. Bush had infuriated Russia by striking a deal to install 10 missile interceptors in Poland and related radar stations in the Czech Republic, saying they were needed to counter "rogue states" such as Iran.
The Obama administration says it is reviewing the shield project, studying whether it is militarily justified and cost effective.
But Sergei Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States, said that the Iran threat was a myth.
"I don't see any threat to the United States coming from Iran anytime soon," Kislyak told a conference of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
He said the shield in the former Soviet bloc nations also failed to cover all of the NATO alliance.
"It didn't accomplish a single stated goal that we were told was the reason to deploy. If that was the case, that means there was something else behind this," Kislyak said.
Western nations widely suspect that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, although Obama has also reached out to try to repair relations with the Islamic republic.
Kislyak said that Russia was encouraged by Obama's approach. Under Bush, Russia engaged in some of the harshest rhetorical attacks on the United States since the Cold War.
"We sense that the American administration is willing at least to engage in serious discussions and we welcome this," he said.
"We are looking forward to these discussions because things which have been developing so far were of great concern to us," he said.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev hailed Obama as "my new comrade" after their first face-to-face talks last week, saying the new president "can listen."
Obama also met on his recent European trip with leaders of Poland and the Czech Republic who pressed him to go ahead with the missile shield.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.89f94643ff57e11b42acfa11b92f8e26.fd1&show_article=1

Pirates hijack ship with 20 Americans onboard
By Daniel Wallis
NAIROBI (Reuters) - Somali pirates hijacked a U.S.-flagged, Danish-owned container ship on Wednesday with 20 American crew on board in a major escalation in attacks at sea off the Horn of Africa nation, officials said.
Andrew Mwangura, coordinator of the Mombasa-based East African Seafarers' Assistance Program, told Reuters the 17,000 ton Maersk Alabama had been seized off Mogadishu far out in the Indian Ocean, but all its crew were believed to be unharmed.
Denmark's A.P. Moller-Maersk confirmed that the U.S.-flagged Maersk Alabama had been attacked by pirates about 500 km (300 miles) off Somalia and had probably been hijacked. The company said it had 20 American crew on board.
A spokesman for the U.N.'s World Food Program (WFP) in Nairobi told Reuters that among the vessel's cargo were 232 containers of WFP relief food destined for Somalia and Uganda.
In the latest wave of pirate attacks, gunmen from Somalia seized a British-owned ship on Monday after hijacking another three vessels over the weekend.
In the first three months of 2009 just eight ships were hijacked in the Gulf of Aden, which links the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and is used by ships traveling between Europe and Asia.
Last year, heavily armed Somali pirates hijacked dozens of vessels, took hundreds of sailors hostage -- often for weeks -- and extracted millions of dollars in ransoms.
MORE ATTACKS
Foreign navies rushed warships to the area in response and reduced the number of successful attacks. But there are still near-daily attempts and the pirates have also started hunting further afield near the Seychelles.
On Monday, they hijacked a British-owned, Italian-operated ship with 16 Bulgarian crew on board.
Over the weekend, they also seized a French yacht, a Yemeni tug and a 20,000-tonne German container vessel. Interfax news agency said the Hansa Stavanger had a German captain, three Russians, two Ukrainians and 14 Filipinos on board.
The Maersk Alabama is owned and operated by Maersk Line Ltd, a Norfolk, Virginia-based subsidiary of A.P. Moller-Maersk and the world's biggest container shipper.
A Moller-Maersk spokesman said it had been transporting general goods to Mombasa from Djibouti when it was attacked.
The pirates typically launch speed boats from "mother ships," meaning they can sometimes evade warships patrolling the strategic shipping lanes and strike far out to sea.
They then take captured vessels to remote coastal village bases in Somalia, where they have usually treated their hostages well in anticipation of a sizeable ransom payment.
Pirates stunned the shipping industry last year when they seized a Saudi supertanker loaded with $100 million worth of crude oil. The Sirius Star and its 25 crew members were freed in January after $3 million was parachuted onto its deck.
Last September, they seized a Ukrainian cargo ship carrying 33 Soviet-era T-72 tanks and other heavy weapons. It was released in February, reportedly for a $3.2 million ransom.
Many of the pirates are based in northern Somalia's semi-autonomous Puntland region, where the authorities called on Wednesday for more funds to tackle the gangs onshore.
"It's better for the international community to give us $1 million to clear out the pirates on the ground, instead of paying millions of dollars to keep the warships at sea," Puntland's security minister, Abdullahi Said Samatar, told Reuters.
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE53721Z20090408

Update on the latest Samonella
FDA: Recall of tainted pistachio nuts far from over
The recall last week of 2 million pounds of pistachios because of concerns about salmonella contamination has been expanded, and federal officials say more recalls of foods containing pistachios are on the horizon.
Setton Pistachio of Terra Bella, the California company that is the nation's second-largest processer of pistachios, originally had recalled all of its pistachios harvested since September.
The recall was expanded this week to cover Setton's entire 2008 crop, except for raw in-shell pistachios. Most pistachios sold in stores are roasted.
Setton spokeswoman Fabia D'Arienzo said she did not know how many pounds of pistachios were involved in the expanded recall.
"This is going to resemble the peanut recall in that products are going to be added every day as companies discover they used Setton pistachios," says Caroline Smith DeWaal of the non-profit Center for Science in the Public Interest. "It's going to take a while for the dust to settle."
Products are still being recalled that contained peanuts or peanut paste produced by the Peanut Corp. of America, the processor tied to a salmonella outbreak this year that sickened almost 700 people.
No illnesses from pistachio consumption have been reported. The salmonella was detected in testing by an Illinois foodmaker that buys from Setton.
Setton had been processing raw and roasted pistachios on the same production lines without adequate cleaning between uses, says David Acheson, the FDA's associate commissioner for foods, adding: "Not a good idea." A Setton official said earlier that roasted pistachios may have picked up salmonella from contact with raw nuts.
Federal and state inspectors have found salmonella in the plant, including on machines used to feed pistachios through the production line.
"There were a number of other factors that demonstrated a lack of microbiological control in the facility," Acheson says.
The FDA is telling consumers and industry to not use any pistachios or foods with pistachios unless the agency can confirm that the products do not contain nuts recalled by Setton. In addition to selling in the USA, Setton sold to Canada, Korea, Hong Kong, Germany, Australia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, France, Cyprus, Greece, Lebanon, Norway, Ukraine and Ecuador.
Setton did not respond to detailed questions, but Acheson says it's his impression that the company is "really busting to try to clean up the facility."
The FDA has fast-tracked research into one possible solution. The chemical propylene oxide was proven an effective pasteurization method for almonds in 2004 after salmonella outbreaks in almonds alerted growers and producers to the risk of bacterial contamination.
There is no proven process in pistachios for using propylene oxide, but FDA has a contract with the University of California-Davis to create one and hopes to have at least initial information within a month, Acheson says.
Customers can call Setton Pistachio at (888) 228-3717 for more information.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-04-07-pistachio-salmonella_N.htm

Eeyore's News and View

Iranian nuke plot vaporized in the city: NY banks unwittingly aided in material transfers, says DA
The Manhattan district attorney's office has smashed a sinister plot to smuggle nuclear weapons materials to Iran through unwitting New York banks, the Daily News has learned.
Officials plan to unseal a 118-count indictment Tuesday accusing a Chinese national of setting up a handful of fake companies to hide that he was selling millions of dollars in potential nuclear materials to Tehran.
"This case will cut off a major source of supply to Iran and it shows how they are going ahead full steam to get a nuclear bomb. Long-range missiles they pretty much have already," a law enforcement source close to the case said.
"We think it is one of the largest suppliers of weapons of mass destruction to Iran."
Experts say Iran, under the leadership of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, appears close to amassing enough nuclear material to make an atom bomb. A United Nations embargo bans Iran from acquiring the high-tech metals needed to make a long-range nuclear weapon a reality.
The indictment will outline the financial conspiracy behind 58 different transactions, including shipments of various banned materials from China to Iran between 2006 and late 2008.
Among them:
33,000 pounds of a specialized aluminum alloy used almost exclusively in long-range missile production.
66,000 pounds of tungsten copper plate, which is used in missile guidance systems.
53,900 pounds of maraging steel rods, a superhard metal used in uranium enrichment and to make the casings for nuclear bombs.
The recipient is believed to have been a subsidiary of the Iranian Defense Ministry.
The suspect, who is not believed to be in the U.S., set up four bogus import-export companies that did business with six Iranian shell firms, one source said.
"They took elaborate steps to conceal the identity of the shipper and the recipient," the source said.
The deals went through "several" New York banks, which cooperated when the alleged plot was uncovered.
"The New York banks were completely unaware," the source said.
Authorities first stumbled over the scheme seven months ago in an unrelated probe into Iranian money-laundering through Lloyd's, a British bank.
In January, Lloyd's paid a $350 million fine to settle accusations it "stripped" information from Iranian money transfers to New York banks, hiding where the cash came from.
Officials said they suspected that money was also used to finance Iran's nuke program.
"The important thing is to put sunlight on these deals," the law enforcement source said.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2009/04/07/2009-04-07_iranian_nuke_plot_vaporized_in_the_city_-2.html

I posted two articles from the 411man, today the first here and the other at the bottom of the page
The Economy Is Contracting A Lot More Rapidly Than The Government Is Reporting, Per TrimTabs
Posted by Tyler Durden at 3:53 PM
TrimTabs is out with their most recent employment data, which compares to the earlier ADP report, that the market forgot about after the first 30 minutes of trading. According to TrimTabs "the U.S. economy lost 700,000 to 750,000 jobs in March as wages and salaries plunged 4.5% year-over-year. TrimTabs estimated that the economy shed 4.3 million jobs in the past 12 months, the largest annual job loss since 1970."
"Job losses have been accelerating in recent months," said Charles Biderman, CEO of TrimTabs. "Investors who think the economy is bottoming out are going to get quite a shock this spring." TrimTabs uses daily income tax withholdings into the U.S. Treasury to estimate changes in employment. According to TrimTabs, the country lost 2.1 million jobs in the past three months and 3.4 million jobs in the past six months.
Much more interestingly, TrimTabs estimates that Joe Schmoe's conviction that the market has bottomed is translating into returns to good ole spending behavior and savings rates are in fact lower than reported, meaning the as savings rates inevitably run up, the pain for the economy will just get so much worse.
TrimTabs reported that the personal savings rate in February was much lower than the 4.2% reported by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. "Real-time income tax data indicates that personal income is plummeting and that the savings rate was no more than 0.9% in February," said Biderman. "The only reason the savings rate was positive was that income tax refunds were up sharply relative to last year."
And to add to the gloom and doom, which Zero Hedge does not disagree with, TrimTabs concludes: "The key macroeconomic and liquidity indicators TrimTabs tracks show no sign of a bottom for the economy. The economy is still contracting a lot more rapidly than the government is reporting."
http://frc4u.org/phpbb/index.php?topic=792.0;topicseen

Salmonella found in central Calif. pistachio plant
April 7, 2009 - 6:39am
FRESNO, Calif. (AP) - Federal officials confirmed Monday they found traces of salmonella in a central California pistachio processing plant that sparked a nationwide recall of the nut.
The Food and Drug Administration said state and federal inspectors discovered the bacteria in "critical areas" at Setton Pistachio of Terra Bella, Inc., the second-largest pistachio processor in the nation.
FDA officials also said they found places at the facility where raw and roasted nuts could have become cross-contaminated with salmonella.
Setton Pistachio, which sells its nuts to Kraft Foods Inc. and 35 other wholesalers across the country, temporarily shut down after voluntarily recalling more than 2 million pounds of nuts last week.
The company expanded its recall on Monday to include all raw and roasted pistachios from its 2008 crop. A company spokeswoman did not immediately return messages seeking further details.
"The company is working closely with the FDA on this matter and is cooperating fully," Setton spokeswoman Fabia D'Arienzo said in a statement. "Setton Pistachio of Terra Bella, Inc. is committed to quality products and consumer safety, and is taking aggressive action to prevent the need for any future recalls."
Federal regulators say consumers should avoid eating pistachios or foods made with the nuts until they can determine that they don't contain any nuts that Setton has recalled. The FDA on Monday also advised wholesalers, retailers, and operators of restaurants and food service establishments against selling or serving any pistachios or pistachio products until they can figure out whether they came from Setton.
No illnesses from consumers eating tainted pistachios have been reported.
The contamination was discovered by a Kraft manufacturer in Illinois, where workers doing routine testing found the bacteria in roasted pistachios about to go into trail mix. Officials traced the source back to the Terra Bella plant that supplied the nuts.
Pistachios are used in everything from ice cream to cake mixes, and the FDA believes more recalls are imminent.
Salmonella, the most common cause of food-borne illness, causes diarrhea, fever and cramping. Most people recover, but the infection can be life-threatening for children, the elderly and people with weakened immune systems.
Roasting is supposed to kill the bacteria in nuts. But problems can occur if the roasting is not done correctly or if roasted nuts are re-contaminated.
http://wtop.com/?nid=104&sid=1637137

Fed announces credit lines with 4 central banks
WASHINGTON (AP) — Five central banks in Europe, Japan and the United States have agreed currency swap lines that enable the Federal Reserve to provide euro, yen, sterling and Swiss francs to U.S. financial institutions, the Fed said Monday.
Under the agreement, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Swiss National Bank and the Bank of Japan would offer their domestic currencies to the Fed for lending to U.S. financial institutions, should the need arise, the Fed said.
The Fed said it will provide up to $45 billion to the Bank of England, $108 billion to the European Central Bank, $99 billion to the Bank of Japan and $35 billion to the Swiss National Bank.
Under currency swap arrangements, which were common last fall when the credit crisis intensified, the Fed provides dollars in exchange for reserves of the other nations' currencies.
The credit lines are intended to improve credit conditions in global financial markets by increasing the international availability of U.S. dollars.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2009-04-06-fed-swap_N.htm

Found this one Posted by 411man at FRC
World Bank President Admits Agenda For Global Government http://www.infowars.com/world-bank-president-admits-agenda-for-global-government/
Paul Joseph Watson Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
World Bank President and Bilderberg elitist Robert Zoellick openly admitted the plan to eliminate national sovereignty and impose a global government during a speech on the eve of the G20 summit.
Speaking about the agenda to increase not just funding but power for international organizations on the back of the financial crisis, Zoellick stated, “If leaders are serious about creating new global responsibilities or governance, let them start by modernising multilateralism to empower the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank Group to monitor national policies.”
In other words, give global institutions the power to regulate national policy as part of the creation of global government.
What Zoellick is outlining is essentially the end of national sovereignty and the reclassification of national governments as mere subordinates to a global authority that is completely unaccountable to the voting public of any country.
The more cynical amongst us would call this a global dictatorship. Zoellick couches the plan in flowery rhetoric of helping the poor and alleviating poverty, but as we have documented for years, the global elite’s goal of world government has little to do with saving the planet and everything to do with creating a global fascist state.
Zoellick, former Executive Vice President of Fannie Mae and advisor to Goldman Sachs, is a top elitist who was intimately involved in the Enron scandal and the 2000 presidential election debacle. He was also a signatory to the Project For A New American century document that called for invading Iraq as part of implementing a brutal world empire in 1998. He was later a foreign policy advisor to George W. Bush.
As to be expected, Zoellick is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. He also attended the annual invitation-only conferences of the Bilderberg Group in 1991, 2003, 2006 and 2007.
Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will use the G20 summit in London to extend an olive branch to China, offering them a central role in the construction of a new world order and a global government, according to reports.
“Brown will hold talks with Hu Jintao, China’s president, following discussions with Barack Obama, amid signs that developing countries see the G20 summit as a chance to impose a new world order and end the era of Anglo-European dominance,” reports the Guardian.
Under the proposal, China will vastly increase its IMF funding in return for more voting rights.
A central focus of the G20 summit will be the proposal to supplant the dollar with a new global currency. Both the IMF and the United Nations threw their weight behind the implementation of a new global reserve currency system to replace the dollar, in the same week that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told CFR globalists that he was “open” to the idea.
China and Russia brought the issue to the forefront of this week’s G20 when they jointly called for a new global reserve currency a week ago.
Brown has consistently called for global regulation of the financial system as a means towards global governance. In a speech at St Paul’s Cathedral in London yesterday he again called for a new “global society”.
http://frc4u.org/phpbb/index.php?topic=750.0

Eeyore's News and view

Mar. 05, 2009
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Four valley men arrested in weapons, tax evasion case
By ADRIENNE PACKER
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
Four Las Vegas residents were arrested Thursday on charges that include possession of weapons and tax evasion in a raid conducted by the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
JanLindsey was arrested on tax evasion charges. Harold Call faces a possession of a machine gun charge. Samuel Davis and Shawn Rice were charged with conspiracy and money laundering.
Authorities did not explain why the Joint Terrorism Task Force was involved.
Lindsey appeared in federal court Thursday afternoon and refused to allow a federal public defender to represent him during the hearing. When U.S. Magistrate Judge Peggy Leen granted prosecutors’ request to keep Lindsey in custody, he shouted: “I object, your honor.”
All four men are scheduled to enter pleas on the charges today.
According to the indictment, Lindsey either failed to pay his income tax or filed false tax forms from 1999 through 2006. He also attempted to fool the government by “concealing and attempting to conceal from the Internal Revenue Service the nature, extent and location of his assets by various methods, including placing funds and property in the names of nominee third party entities,” the indictment states.
According to court records, a Lindsey filed a lawsuit against the federal government in 2002 after his property was seized because he failed to pay taxes. In court documents, Lindsey quotes books related to taxpayers rights. In transcripts of various hearings, Lindsey frequently asked procedural questions and challenged the law.
In court on Thursday, Lindsey repeatedly interrupted Leen to ask questions until the judge told him, “This isn’t 20 questions.”
Undercover FBI agents approached Davis and Rice last year and informed the men that they had stolen blank checks from Wachovia Bank. The agents said they needed assistance to launder the money from the checks and Davis said he had experience in money laundering, according to the indictment.
Davis planned to pass the money through the financial accounts of several trusts and corporations that he controlled, then return the money to the undercover agents, the indictment states. Davis said he would also conceal the proceeds as loans.
Davis “explained that the money would not be subject to tax liability, and that the loans would be concealed by having all parties involved sign nondisclosure agreements,” the indictment states.
Between March 2008 and September 2008, agents wired about $585,000 to Davis and he returned $540,000, keeping the balance as payment for his services, according to the indictment.
Rice signed on as Davis’ associate to help with the money laundering.
Call was found in possession of an unregistered machine gun, according to the indictment. The gun is a combination of parts commonly known as “lightning link,” which is designed to shoot multiple shots without reloading.
Agents searched Call’s home at 8208 Gunther Circle, near Alta and Buffalo drives, on Thursday. In the garage was a small canister of black powder and two ammunition reloading machines. A bumper sticker on a vehicle read: “My president is Charlton Heston.” Heston was not only known for his acting, but as a strong advocate for gun rights.
Neighbors said dozens of federal agents arrived outside the home about 8 a.m. Dave Beyl, 26, said he saw a Humvee and people in camouflage uniforms shouting over a megaphone for Call to leave the house.
Call was known in the neighborhood for not being fond of the government, said Mike Mulligan, who moved away from the neighborhood in August.
“He definitely believed in the right to bear arms, we knew that,” Mulligan said.
But Call never showed his weapons to Mulligan. Call, who Mulligan believed is 67, was a kind old man who would try to keep the neighborhood in order, he said.
He also had a tendency to write letters to everybody, from neighbors who would have loud parties to the government, Mulligan said.
“He was a wonderful guy,” he said. “And to everybody there, Harold was always a good neighbor. He was friendly as hell.”
Review-Journal writer Lawrence Mower contributed to this report. Contact reporter Adrienne Packer at apacker@reviewjournal.com or 702-384-8710.
http://www.lvrj.com/news/40808932.html

CHAVEZ CALLS ON OBAMA TO FOLLOW PATH OF SOCIALISM
Fri Mar 06 2009 17:13:48 ET
Caracas - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Friday called upon US President Barack Obama to follow the path to socialism, which he termed as the "only" way out of the global recession. "Come with us, align yourself, come with us on the road to socialism. This is the only path. Imagine a socialist revolution in the United States," Chavez told a group of workers in the southern Venezuelan state of Bolivar.
The controversial Venezuelan leader, who taunted the United States as a source of capitalistic evil under former president George W Bush, added that the United States needs a leader who can take it to a "higher" destiny and bring it out of "the sad role that it has been given, as a murderous, attacking power that is hated all around the world."
Chavez said that people are calling Obama a "socialist" for the measures of state intervention he is taking to counter the crisis, so it would not be too far-fetched to suggest that he might join the project of "21st century socialism" that the Venezuelan leader is heading.
"Nothing is impossible. Who would have thought in the 1980s that the Soviet Union would disappear? No one," he said.
"That murderous, genocidal empire has to end, and some day there has to come a leader ... who interprets the best of a people who also include human beings who suffer, endure, weep and laugh," the outspoken Chavez said.
http://www.drudgereport.com/flashco.htm

Obama's Radicalism Is Killing the Dow
A financial crisis is the worst time to change the foundations of American capitalism.
It's hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president's policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy, not just mitigate the recession and financial crisis.
Martin KozlowskiThe illusion that Barack Obama will lead from the economic center has quickly come to an end. Instead of combining the best policies of past Democratic presidents -- John Kennedy on taxes, Bill Clinton on welfare reform and a balanced budget, for instance -- President Obama is returning to Jimmy Carter's higher taxes and Mr. Clinton's draconian defense drawdown.
Mr. Obama's $3.6 trillion budget blueprint, by his own admission, redefines the role of government in our economy and society. The budget more than doubles the national debt held by the public, adding more to the debt than all previous presidents -- from George Washington to George W. Bush -- combined. It reduces defense spending to a level not sustained since the dangerous days before World War II, while increasing nondefense spending (relative to GDP) to the highest level in U.S. history. And it would raise taxes to historically high levels (again, relative to GDP). And all of this before addressing the impending explosion in Social Security and Medicare costs.
To be fair, specific parts of the president's budget are admirable and deserve support: increased means-testing in agriculture and medical payments; permanent indexing of the alternative minimum tax and other tax reductions; recognizing the need for further financial rescue and likely losses thereon; and bringing spending into the budget that was previously in supplemental appropriations, such as funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The specific problems, however, far outweigh the positives. First are the quite optimistic forecasts, despite the higher taxes and government micromanagement that will harm the economy. The budget projects a much shallower recession and stronger recovery than private forecasters or the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office are projecting. It implies a vast amount of additional spending and higher taxes, above and beyond even these record levels. For example, it calls for a down payment on universal health care, with the additional "resources" needed "TBD" (to be determined).
Mr. Obama has bravely said he will deal with the projected deficits in Medicare and Social Security. While reform of these programs is vital, the president has shown little interest in reining in the growth of real spending per beneficiary, and he has rejected increasing the retirement age. Instead, he's proposed additional taxes on earnings above the current payroll tax cap of $106,800 -- a bad policy that would raise marginal tax rates still further and barely dent the long-run deficit.
Increasing the top tax rates on earnings to 39.6% and on capital gains and dividends to 20% will reduce incentives for our most productive citizens and small businesses to work, save and invest -- with effective rates higher still because of restrictions on itemized deductions and raising the Social Security cap. As every economics student learns, high marginal rates distort economic decisions, the damage from which rises with the square of the rates (doubling the rates quadruples the harm). The president claims he is only hitting 2% of the population, but many more will at some point be in these brackets.
As for energy policy, the president's cap-and-trade plan for CO2 would ensnare a vast network of covered sources, opening up countless opportunities for political manipulation, bureaucracy, or worse. It would likely exacerbate volatility in energy prices, as permit prices soar in booms and collapse in busts. The European emissions trading system has been a dismal failure. A direct, transparent carbon tax would be far better.
Moreover, the president's energy proposals radically underestimate the time frame for bringing alternatives plausibly to scale. His own Energy Department estimates we will need a lot more oil and gas in the meantime, necessitating $11 trillion in capital investment to avoid permanently higher prices.
The president proposes a large defense drawdown to pay for exploding nondefense outlays -- similar to those of Presidents Carter and Clinton -- which were widely perceived by both Republicans and Democrats as having gone too far, leaving large holes in our military. We paid a high price for those mistakes and should not repeat them.
The president's proposed limitations on the value of itemized deductions for those in the top tax brackets would clobber itemized charitable contributions, half of which are by those at the top. This change effectively increases the cost to the donor by roughly 20% (to just over 72 cents from 60 cents per dollar donated). Estimates of the responsiveness of giving to after-tax prices range from a bit above to a little below proportionate, so reductions in giving will be large and permanent, even after the recession ends and the financial markets rebound.
A similar effect will exacerbate tax flight from states like California and New York, which rely on steeply progressive income taxes collecting a large fraction of revenue from a small fraction of their residents. This attack on decentralization permeates the budget -- e.g., killing the private fee-for-service Medicare option -- and will curtail the experimentation, innovation and competition that provide a road map to greater effectiveness.
The pervasive government subsidies and mandates -- in health, pharmaceuticals, energy and the like -- will do a poor job of picking winners and losers (ask the Japanese or Europeans) and will be difficult to unwind as recipients lobby for continuation and expansion. Expanding the scale and scope of government largess means that more and more of our best entrepreneurs, managers and workers will spend their time and talent chasing handouts subject to bureaucratic diktats, not the marketplace needs and wants of consumers.
Our competitors have lower corporate tax rates and tax only domestic earnings, yet the budget seeks to restrict deferral of taxes on overseas earnings, arguing it drives jobs overseas. But the academic research (most notably by Mihir Desai, C. Fritz Foley and James Hines Jr.) reveals the opposite: American firms' overseas investments strengthen their domestic operations and employee compensation.
New and expanded refundable tax credits would raise the fraction of taxpayers paying no income taxes to almost 50% from 38%. This is potentially the most pernicious feature of the president's budget, because it would cement a permanent voting majority with no stake in controlling the cost of general government.
From the poorly designed stimulus bill and vague new financial rescue plan, to the enormous expansion of government spending, taxes and debt somehow permanently strengthening economic growth, the assumptions underlying the president's economic program seem bereft of rigorous analysis and a careful reading of history.
Unfortunately, our history suggests new government programs, however noble the intent, more often wind up delivering less, more slowly, at far higher cost than projected, with potentially damaging unintended consequences. The most recent case, of course, was the government's meddling in the housing market to bring home ownership to low-income families, which became a prime cause of the current economic and financial disaster.
On the growth effects of a large expansion of government, the European social welfare states present a window on our potential future: standards of living permanently 30% lower than ours. Rounding off perceived rough edges of our economic system may well be called for, but a major, perhaps irreversible, step toward a European-style social welfare state with its concomitant long-run economic stagnation is not.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123629969453946717.html

When food illnesses spread, Minnesota team gets the call
ST. PAUL — Three days before Christmas, a call to Minnesota's food-borne illness hotline set off bells: A nursing home had three residents sickened by salmonella.
Salmonella cases had been bubbling up in Minnesota for a month, longer in other states. Here was a potential cluster. Minnesota's food-borne illness team sprang into action. State workers pored over the nursing home's menus, looking for clues. Another case popped up at a different nursing home, then two at a school. More menus were compared.
FOOD PROBES: Salmonella victim's mom seeks reform
Within three weeks, Minnesota identified King Nut peanut butter as the culprit, and Peanut Corp. of America as the producer. It was the first big break in a case that has sickened more than 677 nationwide, might have led to nine deaths and has caused one of the largest food recalls in U.S. history, affecting more than 3,000 products.
Without the Minnesota break — and the presence of a cluster of cases from a confined population such as the nursing home's — the outbreak "could have dragged on for who knows how long," says Tom Safranek, state epidemiologist in Nebraska.
Minnesota's prowess in investigating food-borne illness outbreaks — in contrast to less successful efforts by other states — exposes weaknesses in the nation's ability to quickly track and contain outbreaks, food safety specialists say.
That's because the national system for identifying food-borne illnesses relies on the efforts of hundreds of local, regional and state health departments, all with differing capabilities, budgets, priorities and procedures. If an outbreak starts in a region ill-prepared to investigate cases, it may not be stopped as quickly as if it had started elsewhere, food safety officials say.
"People die who don't need to die. It happens all the time in food-borne illness outbreaks," says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy at the University of Minnesota, who testified last year before Congress on the issue. "If each state was as effective as Minnesota, more of these could be detected."
Minnesota's fast work has protected the public from contaminated food before. Last year, its team was among the first to blame hot peppers — not tomatoes, the initial suspect — for the largest salmonella outbreak in a decade. In 2007, the team found pot pies to be the source of another salmonella outbreak. In both cases, Minnesota took less than a month to find what turned out to be a confirmed culprit when people had been falling ill in other states for months.
When it comes to food-borne illness investigation, "Minnesota is leap years ahead of … most of the rest of the nation," says James Phillips, head of infectious diseases for the Arkansas Department of Health.
'Team Diarrhea'
Food-borne illness investigations start after someone gets sick, goes to a doctor and submits a stool sample. If that sample comes up positive for potential food-borne illness, such as E.coli or salmonella, state investigators go to work.
In about three-quarters of the states, patient interviews are done by workers in hundreds of local or regional health departments. In other states, work is centralized at the state level.
In Minnesota, things happen that don't always happen elsewhere. Every salmonella or E.coli victim is interviewed by a state health worker. A standardized form, which takes 25 to 30 minutes to fill out, collects data on activities such as what the person ate during the past seven days, where they bought groceries, traveled or came in contact with animals.
"We assume that every potential case is the first of an outbreak we haven't identified yet," says Carlota Medus, Minnesota state epidemiologist.
In other places, officials won't get deep histories until an outbreak is suspected.
"If somebody calls and says, 'I got sick, and I think it was McDonald's,' nothing happens," says Chris LeFevre, environmental director for Ohio's Carroll County Health Department, which investigates food-borne illnesses. "You need at least two people to start an investigation."
Even with three calls in an afternoon, "Good luck solving that mystery," he says.
By law, Minnesota requires that salmonella samples collected by hospital and clinic laboratories be sent to the state lab for further testing to see if they match other cases nationwide. That's not true for 40% of states, says the Association of Public Health Laboratories.
Minnesota's lab turns test results in one or two days, says Kirk Smith, supervisor of the Foodborne Diseases Unit at the Minnesota Department of Health.
Some state labs batch samples, meaning officials wait for several before they run tests. That saves money, but samples can sit for days, says Ali Khan, assistant surgeon general at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which monitor such illnesses.
Every day, Minnesota's lab issues a report to the state's epidemiologists about new cases, and how they match with older and national ones. That gives a quick read on connections, Medus says.
The epidemiologists direct "Team Diarrhea," a team of seven to nine graduate students. They work afternoons, evenings and Sundays — when consumers are more reachable — to interview victims. They work the phones from one large cubicle in the state's health department headquarters. Snippets of conversation bounce around as they build patient histories.
"Did you vomit?"
"Did you have any diarrhea?"
"Wow. That's a lot."
"Where would you have purchased chicken?"
"What else do you put on the turkey sandwich?"
Often, victims are interviewed twice as patterns emerge. In last year's pepper salmonella outbreak, one of Minnesota's first victims didn't recall eating at a restaurant that eventually pointed to peppers until he was asked about it after other victims mentioned it.
Minnesota "has a lot of best practices … to get to people quickly to find out what they ate," the CDC's Khan says.
Dangerous delays
Investigation delays can have national implications.
Last year, the pepper salmonella outbreak sickened 1,442. Some states took weeks to interview victims and fully test their stool samples, says Osterholm. In Minnesota, that process typically takes days, Medus says.
Texas accounted for more than one-third of reported cases in that outbreak, the CDC says. In Texas, hospital and clinic laboratories aren't required by law to send salmonella samples to the state lab for testing to see if they match other cases nationwide. Instead, Texas only requests that labs send samples to the state lab, and they're not always sent.
As the pepper outbreak spread, Texas officials e-mailed local health departments and asked them to contact labs to make sure samples were sent to the state. That resulted in a surge of cases that the state had been unaware of, says Susan Neill, state lab director.
Nationwide, almost 10% of outbreak cases took more than a month from when the people fell ill to when they were in a national database, the CDC says. "Faster transfer of bacterial strains to public health laboratories and faster subtyping in those laboratories would result in more timely investigation," the CDC wrote in its report on the outbreak.
The outbreak cost the U.S. tomato industry more than $100 million, according to industry estimates. It wasn't until late July that the Food and Drug Administration warned consumers nationwide not to eat fresh jalapeño peppers. Tomatoes may have caused illnesses early in the outbreak, the CDC maintains.
Many outbreaks are missed
Minnesota also has good resources for tracking outbreaks.
It's one of 10 states that won federal contracts to get extra funds to track food-borne diseases and do related studies. That totals about $500,000 a year per state, the CDC says. In Minnesota, some of that pays for workers who help in outbreak probes. The state spends about $1 million a year to look for and investigate food-borne illnesses, Smith says.
But nationwide, nearly 30% of states in fiscal 2008 had smaller health department budgets than in 2007, and most expected more cuts, the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials reported.
In Columbus, Ohio, public health recently lost 60 of 230 positions, says Teresa Long, health commissioner. During last year's salmonella outbreak, workers were diverted from checking restaurants for compliance with FDA warnings to avoid tomatoes to focus on a diarrheal disease outbreak in the city's pools, she says.
In Kansas, a local health worker might be assigned to interview a potential food-borne illness victim while facing a whooping cough outbreak at a school, says Charles Hunt, interim state epidemiologist. "They (local health departments) have to balance out their priorities," Hunt says. As a result, "I'm sure we do miss some outbreaks," he says.
Nationwide, the CDC estimates U.S. consumers suffer 76 million food-borne illnesses a year. Most aren't reported, the CDC says. For every reported illness, dozens go unreported because people don't see doctors, or doctors don't test for them, the agency says.
Even when outbreaks are noticed, they're not always figured out. Of 1,247 food-borne illness outbreaks tracked by the CDC in 2006, investigators pinpointed a specific food and pathogen in only one-third of the cases, says the non-profit Center for Science in the Public Interest, which tracks outbreaks. "This is only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of cases," says CSPI's food safety director, Caroline Smith DeWaal. She says most states don't have resources to fully investigate.
If cases aren't fully investigated, outbreaks may be missed. Texas, with 22 million people, reported four food-borne outbreaks to the CDC in 2006. Wyoming, population 500,000, also reported four. Minnesota, with less than one-fourth the population of Texas, reported 79.
"Food safety is about the same everywhere," says Tim Jones, epidemiologist for the Tennessee Department of Health, which reported 30 outbreaks in 2006. "Some states don't have the capacity to look for (outbreaks) and don't recognize them," he says.
Osterholm says more money for food-borne illness detection would pay for itself. For one E.coli case in which someone suffers severe kidney damage, medical costs often top $500,000, he says. He says regional "Team Ds" or a national "Team D" could support local health departments.
The CDC's Khan says more "boots on the ground" are needed to interview victims. State labs need more tools, and states need more databases, he says.
"Unless we make it easier for states to investigate these outbreaks, we won't see an improvement in their ability to prevent and contain them," he says.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2009-03-04-food-illness-detection_N.htm

Eeyore's News and View

US Inflation Could Hit 200%: Dr. Doom
The US risks being hit by Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation and there are signs that the world's biggest economy risks turning into a banana republic, Marc Faber, author of the Gloom, Doom & Boom report, told CNBC's "Asia Squawk Box."
Current DateTime: 02:45:58 10 Feb 2009
"In the US, we have a totally new school, and it’s called the Zimbabwe school," Faber said. "And it’s founded by one of the great leaders of this world, Mr Robert Mugabe, that has managed to totally impoverish his own country. And that is the monetary policy the US is pursuing."
The government's increased intervention in the economy is likely to slow down economic growth because history shows that every time the private sector shrinks to make way for the government sector, the economy suffers, he said.
Asked whether the US risked being faced with 200 percent inflation, Faber answered: "Well, not yet. Not yet. But I think eventually. If I look at government debt in the US, and debt in general, I think the only way they will not default physically on their debt is to inflate."
The Federal Reserve's policy of printing money and the government's intervention in the economy might undermine the US's economic and political clout, Faber warned.
"Well, I wrote two years ago a report entitled 'Is America becoming a banana republic?' And there are some features that characterize banana republics- totalitarian states, very strong government intervention into the economy, and the polarization of wealth," he said.
"And we have all these trends occurring in the US. We are not yet there. And in theory it could be reversed, but I doubt it will be," Faber added.
Because of these factors, US government and corporate bonds, including that of CNBC parent General Electric [GE 12.64 --- UNCH (0) ], should be downgraded, he said.
"Yeh, I think GE should be a junk bond. But I also think the US government should be junk," Faber said, adding: "I don’t pay much attention to rating agencies. The rating agencies have totally failed over the last 3-4 years to identify sick companies."
http://www.cnbc.com/id/29047443/

Health risks may reach far beyond reported victims
By Elizabeth Weise and Julie Schmit, USA TODAY
Like any mother facing a long day in the car and then on a plane with two young kids, ages 4 and 5, Jennifer Krieger of Alexandria, Va., was prepared.
"I bought peanut butter crackers," she says, "thinking it would be a great healthy snack to take on the trip, easy to throw in my bag, and it won't go bad."
But things went bad, in ways that Krieger couldn't have imagined. A long-awaited Christmas vacation ski trip turned into a five-day vigil at a Colorado hospital after David Krieger, 4, got salmonellosis, a life-threatening infection caused by exposure to the salmonella bacteria.
"The hardest part was seeing him in such pain," Krieger says. "He would cry out, 'My tummy hurts! My tummy hurts!' and he'd be in a fetal position on the floor."
Federal officials say David, who has recovered, was one of more than 538 people across the nation who became sick after they ate contaminated peanut butter or foods containing tainted peanut paste made in a Peanut Corp. of America (PCA) manufacturing plant in Georgia. The infection also may have contributed to eight deaths, they say. Recalled products now number more than 1,700, including peanut butter crackers and many other snacks, although officials say major brands of peanut butter are not affected.
PCA is under a criminal investigation by the Food and Drug Administration and the Justice Department. A second congressional hearing on the recall is scheduled for Wednesday. The impact of the salmonella contamination could reach well beyond the 538 people who got sick.
The conventional wisdom among epidemiologists, first outlined in a 2004 paper by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researcher Andrew Voetsch, is that for each case of salmonellosis that is reported, more than 38 other people get sick but don't go to their doctor or get tested. So this outbreak could be responsible for more than 20,000 illnesses.
In Belle Plaine, Minn., pre-Christmas snacking was the likely path to infection for Sarah Kirchner's son Michael, 3. "We ease up around Christmastime," Kirchner says, so Michael got to eat more peanut butter crackers and candy than he'd normally be allowed.
He was in the hospital for four days, three with a temperature of 104. "He couldn't even move because he was in so much pain. He would scream and cry every time the nurses touched him," Kirchner says.
Michael's baby sister Lily, who was 4 months old, got the bug from him. The bacteria can be passed along via contaminated hands and surfaces. And it was present and growing in Michael days before his parents knew he was sick.
Lily got to stay at home but had such intense diarrhea every five to 10 minutes that her skin was raw and she had to have a baking-soda bath after each bout to counteract the acid in her stool.
Kirchner and husband David — who had not eaten the crackers or candy — took turns at home and in the hospital so that neither child was ever alone.
"I kept wishing it was us," she says. "Why didn't we get it?"
Most fight off infection
Once ingested, the salmonella bacteria start growing in the intestines. For the vast majority of people exposed, their bodies fight it off, and they never know they had it.
But depending on how many bacteria you have, or how old or sick you are, salmonella can overwhelm the body's defenses and infect the colon, says Tim Dellit, an infectious-disease specialist at Harborview hospital in Seattle.
"Normally you've got this nice, smooth intestine and colon, and then you get inflammation, and it's like eczema on your skin," Dellit says.
In some cases, blood vessels leak into the colon, he says.
"It can actually be bright red blood that comes out in the watery diarrhea. That's typically what people will notice, that there will be blood in the toilet bowl."
In most cases, salmonella infection lasts four to seven days. The body eventually fights it off. In fact, treating it with antibiotics often can make it worse. "In some situations, the antibiotics can prolong the carrier state, the time that the body takes to clear the bacteria," Dellit says.
How hard salmonella hits a given person depends on several factors: how much bacteria they consumed, how good their immune system is at fighting it off and how old or young they are.
But there's another interesting thing about salmonella: There are thousands of different strains of the bacteria, and each seems to attack the body in a slightly different way, says Robert Tauxe of the CDC's division of foodborne, bacterial and mycotic diseases.
There are salmonella strains that hit younger people harder, and there are salmonellas that hit older people harder. Some make boys sick more than girls; some, women more than men. In the ConAgra salmonella outbreak associated with peanut butter in 2007, more than 25% of the cases showed up as a urinary tract infection in older women, researchers at the CDC found.
Why the same basic bacteria cause such different illnesses is a mystery. "It's a real head-scratcher," Tauxe says. "I can't pretend we understand why."
The current outbreak's potential impact on children likely has been reduced by the rise in peanut allergies in the USA. Salmonella is most dangerous for very young children.
"Pediatricians have told everybody under 2 to stay away from peanut butter" for the past few years, Tauxe says.
"So we see very few kids under the age of 2 in this outbreak," he says. "And those are likely to be the kids who get into trouble."
What are the chances?
Leslie Kurland of Hoosick, N.Y., went to culinary school, so she knows all about food safety and sanitation.
But it never occurred to her that peanut butter crackers could be the cause of the horrific bout of salmonella that has son Gabriel, who is about to turn 2, on his second round of antibiotics.
In his case, doctors prescribed antibiotics because very young children are at the highest risk for developing a blood infection from salmonella.
Overall, however, salmonella has a very low attack rate, says Bill Keene of Oregon's acute and communicable disease program.
"Look at the total number of people ill, we're talking 500 reported cases," says Donald Schaffner, a food microbiologist speaking for the Institute of Food Technologists.
"But the amount of product that came out of that (PCA) plant fed more than 20,000 people. So we're looking at a level of contamination that's low and sporadic."
Peanut butter and peanut paste, which are low in water and high in fat, are an almost perfect medium to preserve salmonella bacteria even when they are exposed to heat.
That's a problem, because the "kill step" for peanut butter — the action that's supposed to ensure that it's free of harmful bacteria — is roasting, Schaffner says.
That means that either the roasting of the contaminated products wasn't done at a high enough temperature or the peanut products were infected later in the process.
A recent FDA inspection found unsanitary conditions at the PCA plant. An FDA inspection report says PCA shipped products in 2007 and 2008 that tested positive for salmonella.
In some situations, the products first tested positive and then negative — and then were shipped anyway. In others, the company shipped products before receiving positive test results, the FDA report says.
A wake-up call
Peanut paste goes through more heat exposure when it's baked in a cracker or some other kind of snack.
However, "Salmonella is a million times more heat-resistant when it's in peanut butter than when it's in chicken (a common carrier) or another high-moisture environment," Schaffner says.
This outbreak is a wake-up call to the nut industry and the food industry in general, Schaffner says.
"People (in the industry) ought to be asking themselves, 'What is my kill step? Am I really sure that my kill step is as effective as I think it is?'
"If there's anybody out there in the industry who's manufacturing nuts or nut butter of any kind, they really need to get on the stick and study the thermal processes they're using and document that it's effective against salmonella."
For now, the only thing that's going to end this outbreak is for people to go through their cupboards and toss out potentially infected food.
"The shelf life of these products is months, if not years, in somebody's cupboard," says the CDC's Tauxe.
"They're going to be little time bombs going off for months unless people get rid of them."
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2009-02-09-peanut-butter-salmonella_N.htm

Grandma's moistening kettle may have held off flu
February 9, 2009 - 11:41pm
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID AP Science Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - Grandma may have been right about keeping a teakettle warming on the stove in winter to moisten the air. Studies of seasonal influenza have long found indications that flu spreads better in dry air. Now, new research being published Tuesday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, indicates that the key is the absolute humidity _ which measures the amount of water present in the air, regardless of temperature _ not the more commonly reported relative humidity.
Relative humidity varies depending on air temperature; absolute humidity doesn't.
"The correlations were surprisingly strong. When absolute humidity is low, influenza virus survival is prolonged and transmission rates go up," said Jeffrey Shaman, an Oregon State University atmospheric scientist who specializes in ties between climate and disease transmission
The finding "is very important for the scientific community and the medical community to know to develop better prediction models of influenza," Shaman said in a telephone interview. It will offer the chance to better understand and forecast the spread of the disease.
For the public, he added, it offers a "more elegant explanation for why we see these seasonal spikes" in flu. And, he added, it shows that in some cases it may be worthwhile to add humidity to the air. Beware of overdoing it, though _ too much humidity can lead to other problems, such as mold.
The correlation with flu and low humidity is important because in cold winter weather, when flu is most common, even a high relative humidity reading may indicate little actual moisture in the air, and the less moisture there is, the happier the flu virus seems to be.
Shaman and co-author Melvin Kohn, an epidemiologist with the Oregon Department of Health Services, reanalyzed data from a study published in 2007 in the journal PLoS Pathogens by researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. That report found there were more flu cases when it was colder and drier.
The Oregon researchers said relative humidity could only explain about 12 percent of the variability of influenza virus transmission and 36 percent of virus survival in the 2007 study.
In their new analysis, Shaman and Kohn said using absolute humidity explains 50 percent of influenza transmission and 90 percent of virus survival.
So why is relative humidity misleading?
The answer is that more moisture can be present in warm air than in cold. Some people like to say warm air can hold more moisture than cold air. While that's not scientifically correct, it is a convenient way to think about it.
What that means is warm air at 30 percent relative humidity and cold air at 60 percent relative humidity may actually have the same amount of water in the air.
So, while the cold air sounds moist, it might be pretty dry _ just what the flu likes.
Absolute humidity is expressed in weight of water, grams or pounds, in a volume of air, such as a cubic meter or yard. The higher the reading the wetter. The wetter, the worse for flu virus.
"In some areas of the country, a typical summer day can have four times as much water vapor as a typical winter day _ a difference that exists both indoors and outdoors," Shaman said. "Consequently, outbreaks of influenza typically occur in winter when low absolute humidity conditions strongly favor influenza survival and transmission."
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: http://www.pnas.org

In recession, many fix old autos instead of trading in
More motorists are fixing their old cars instead of buying new ones, in hopes their jalopies will survive a long recession.
Auto dealers and garage owners say they are seeing drivers pay more attention to regular maintenance and be more willing to spring for costly major repairs now that they are reluctant to trade in their junkers. "People are hanging on to them right now, and they've got to keep them running," says Tim Smith of Bob Smith BMW/Mini in Calabasas, Calif.
Working to saving Old Bessie:
•Dealer servicing. Parts and service departments are expected to see a revenue gain of about 3% this year, forecasts Paul Taylor, chief economist for the National Automobile Dealers Association. That would be up from 1.8% for the first 11 months of 2008.
Dealers count on servicing to offset falling new car sales. Jason Brickl of Ballweg Chevrolet in Middleton, Wis., says his service department has seen a 17% sales gain the past 12 months.
•Repair shops. Some 60% of the independent mechanics responding to a survey by Automotive Service Association reported sales up last year over the previous year. Only 14% reported a decline. This year, 76% say they expect more work.
Shop owners say, "It's common these days to hear from motorists, 'I don't want to buy a new car right now so … should I spend the money and fix this one?' " says ASA spokeswoman Angie Wilson.
•Roadside assistance. Though AAA says roadside assistance calls have remained fairly steady at nearly 30 million a year, memberships, which usually include towing benefits, rose by about 500,000 last year to 51.3 million. "People are taking a little better care of their cars," says Michael Calkins, manager of AAA's approved auto repair shop program.
Motorists are hanging on to vehicles longer. The average age of the entire U.S. fleet of cars and trucks averaged a record 9.2 years in 2007 for the second year in a row, the most recent figure from research firm R.L. Polk. The 4.8% of vehicles scrapped was the lowest since 1996.
Business is up about 10% over last year at Parkway Auto Care in St. Paul, says owner Ron Alcorn. "A few years ago, if it was going to be $1,000 to fix it, they would trade it off. Now they say, 'I can't buy a new car for $1,000 or even a decent used car,' " and go ahead with repairs, Alcorn says. But the garage is still losing some business when customers who now can't afford a major repair choose to ride public transit instead, he adds.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2009-02-08-used-car-repairs_N.htm

Amazon's new Kindle e-book reader gets slimmer
February 9, 2009 - 6:34pm
NEW YORK (AP) - Amazon.com Inc. is releasing a slimmer version of its Kindle electronic reading device, but it still costs $359 _ making it unclear how mainstream even an improved Kindle can be during a brutal recession.
Rather than lowering the price, Amazon touted several upgrades to the e-book reader and a novella from Stephen King that will be available exclusively for the device. The new Kindle is expected to begin shipping Feb. 24, with owners of the first Kindle at the front of the line if they want to upgrade.
"This device is a significant improvement versus the first generation," Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos said in an interview.
He said there was no way to lower the price given the upgraded components in the Kindle 2, which is a bit more than one-third of an inch thick _ about half the thickness of the first Kindle. Its 6-inch screen can display 16 shades of gray, compared with the previous Kindle's four shades. It will be able to read text aloud from two small speakers on the back, and it can store 1,500 books, instead of 200.
The new Kindle is slightly taller, but like the old version, it weighs about 10 ounces. It downloads books _ the catalog has 230,000 titles _ and newspaper stories and blog posts over Sprint Nextel Corp.'s wireless network.
E-books still don't exceed 1 percent of overall book sales, but publishers say they are a fast-growing niche, a rare area of improvement in an otherwise terrible market. Although some publishers have expressed nervousness about Amazon.com's market power, they have supported the Kindle and expanded the number of books available for it and competing devices such as Sony Corp.'s Reader. The Reader costs $300 or $400, depending on the model.
The Kindle has enjoyed a steady buzz, with an endorsement last fall from Oprah Winfrey and Amazon's claim over the holidays that it was out of stock.
Seattle-based Amazon has carefully guarded key details, including how many Kindles have sold since they debuted late in 2007. Amazon wouldn't comment on an analyst report last week that it had sold about 500,000 Kindles, which was based on a regulatory filing by Sprint Nextel that indicated 210,000 were bought in the third quarter of 2008.
Sony spokeswoman Valerie Motis said that since the original Reader's launch in October 2006, the company had shipped 300,000 of the devices as of the end of November.
Bezos said Monday that Kindle orders were strong around the holidays and that he expects that to continue. Even in the recession, he said, "people are buying Kindles."
The Kindle is available only in the U.S.; Bezos said an international release is "clearly something we're thinking about."
Ross Rubin, an analyst with The NPD Group, called the Kindle 2 "an improvement across the board." He said that there was enough room for improvement over the first Kindle that the second probably will still appeal to people who already have one.
But for e-book readers to reach broader audiences, the price needs to come down, he said. He expects this won't happen until must-haves like textbooks become available for the devices.
Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Lazard Capital Markets, said Amazon could cut the Kindle's price before the next holiday season if sales are healthy enough that Amazon can save on some component costs. He noted that driving down the price could lead to more sales of books for the Kindle _ and books are more profitable than the device itself, he said.
Amazon recently said it would make Kindle e-books available on other kinds of devices, including cell phones, as rival Google Inc. also is doing.
Amazon also hopes to make the Kindle enticing through exclusive content, beginning with King's novella, called "Ur," which incorporates the device into the story.
King has been known as a digital publishing innovator. In 2000 he released a novella, "Riding the Bullet," as a free download. Web sites such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble.com were swamped by high demand for the 66-page story.
Amazon shares rose 16 cents to close at $66.71.
http://wtop.com/?nid=108&sid=1596778

Eeyores News and Views

Another piece of the puzzle
Russia to start Iran nuclear plant by year end
Reuters
Published: February 5, 2009
By Denis Dyomkin and Guy Faulconbridge
Russia plans to start up a nuclear reactor at Iran's Bushehr plant by the end of the year, the head of Russia's state nuclear corporation said on Thursday.
"If there are no unforeseen events...then the launch will go according to the timetable," Rosatom chief Sergei Kiriyenko told reporters in the Kremlin.
"The launch is scheduled for this year," he said, adding that this was the original plan laid down in a timetable agreed with Iran. "I plan to be at the Bushehr plant in February."
The West, which suspects Iran of seeking to produce its own nuclear bomb, has been critical of Russia's involvement in Bushehr. Russia says the plant is purely civilian and cannot be used for any weapons programme.
Analysts say Iran could become a key issue in relations between Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and new U.S. President Barack Obama, who said last month that the United States was prepared to talk to Tehran.
A Rosatom spokesman said Kiriyenko was talking about the so- called "technical" start-up, which will be the first time the reactor is fully switched on and aims to test its systems before electricity is supplied to the grid.
The start up the Bushehr plant's nuclear reactor has been delayed frequently, though Russia last year completed delivery of nuclear fuel to the station under a total contract estimated to be worth about $1 billion (683 million pound).
BARGAINING CHIP
Analysts say Russia has used Bushehr as a lever in relations with Tehran, which is suspected by the United States and some European countries of seeking to build nuclear weapons.
Russia started deliveries of nuclear fuel for the plant in late 2007, a step both Washington and Moscow said removed any need for Iran to have its own uranium enrichment programme.
European diplomats say Russia's leverage with Tehran has played a constructive role in talks on Iran and cite joint work on Iran as an example of good cooperation between powers.
But switching on the Bushehr plant could still dismay some in the United States, Israel and Europe who are deeply suspicious of Iran's intentions.
Russia agreed to build the plant in 1995 on the site of an earlier project begun in the 1970s by German firm Siemens. The Siemens' project was disrupted by Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution and the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
Work on readying the reactor for start up has been complicated by having to integrate German infrastructure that was as much as 25 years old, Kiriyenko said.
"We are working to integrate the old equipment, it is a unique project that no-one has ever done before -- we are integrating in the project old German infrastructure that was delivered 25 years ago,"
"The absolute priority is security. No matter how many times we need to prepare for a safe start up we will do it," he said.
Russia says the plant poses no proliferation risk as Iran will return all spent fuel rods to Russia.
http://iht.com/articles/reuters/2009/02/05/africa/OUKWD-UK-IRAN-NUCLEAR-RUSSIA.php

Loopholes allow contaminated food to go unchecked
February 5, 2009 - 12:52pm
By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR and BRETT J. BLACKLEDGE
WASHINGTON (AP) - Lawmakers reacted angrily Thursday when told that food makers and state safety inspectors are allowed to keep tests results secret. That keeps federal health officials in the dark even when products have been contaminated by salmonella or other dangerous bacteria.
"I'd like to see some people go to jail," Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said during a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing on a deadly salmonella outbreak linked to a Georgia peanut plant that has sickened more than 550 people and killed at least eight.
Federal law does not require reporting of contaminants if companies receive private test results showing them or states find them in their inspections, said Dr. Stephen Sundlof, food safety director for the Food and Drug Administration.
"That's one of the very serious loopholes we need to plug," said Sen. Saxby Chambliss, a Georgia Republican and the committee's ranking minority member.
Sundlof defended the FDA's handling of the current outbreak, but also noted gaps in the country's food safety system that hamper the agency's efforts. The FDA learned only weeks ago that the Peanut Corp. of America had received a series of private tests dating back to 2007 showing salmonella in their products from the Georgia plant, but later shipped the items after obtaining negative test results.
"We would like to have as much information as possible" from food makers, Sundlof said.
Leahy said food manufacturers should face possible jail time and other tough penalties to beef up compliance with federal food safety rules. "Fines won't do it," he said.
Sundlof pointed out that a federal criminal investigation of the outbreak is under way.
Also Thursday, the Department of Agriculture suspended Peanut Corp. from participating in government contract programs for at least a year. Secretary Tom Vilsack also removed Stewart Parnell, president of the company, from USDA's Peanut Standards Board.
"The actions of (Peanut Corp. of America) indicate that the company lacks business integrity and business honesty, which seriously and directly hinders its ability to do business with the federal government," said David Shipman, Acting Administrator of USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service.
Peanut Corp. has denied any wrongdoing in the outbreak and has said its Blakely plant had received regular visits and inspections from state and federal authorities in 2008 and had gotten a "superior" rating from an independent inspection.
Sundlof told senators the FDA was hot on the trail of a Georgia processor even before they were certain that peanuts were to blame for hundreds of illnesses.
The first signs of the outbreak were detected in November by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But disease detectives initially suspected chicken was the culprit in clusters of salmonella infections that states were reporting.
On Jan. 7 and 8, after discussions between federal and Minnesota authorities, peanut butter was added to the short list of suspects when some people who had gotten sick reported eating peanut butter in nursing homes and at an elementary school. On Jan. 8, the FDA visited an Ohio distributor for Peanut Corp. of America.
The next day federal inspectors were at the company's Blakely, Ga. facility, which ultimately was identified as the source of the food poisoning. That same day, Jan. 9, Minnesota health officials found salmonella in an open container of peanut butter made at the plant. On Jan. 10, Minnesota made a positive match to the salmonella strain that caused the outbreak.
Sundlof said the FDA has made many improvements in its food-safety system, and acted quickly in the current outbreak.
"The American food supply continues to be among the safest in the world," Sundlof said.
Lawmakers, however, may not be reassured. They are concerned about the state of the national food safety system, a collaboration between the FDA, CDC and authorities in each state. As the list of recalled items containing peanut products surpasses 1,000, lawmakers are vowing to press for stronger food safety laws and more money for inspections.
"To say that food safety in this country is a patchwork system is giving it too much credit. Food safety in America has become a hit or miss gamble, and that is truly frightening," said Agriculture Committee Chairman Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa. "It's time to find the gaps in the system and remedy them."
Waving a peanut butter sandwich at one point and a jar of peanut butter later, Harkin said he was "nothing short of outraged" at the increasing number of food-poisoning outbreaks. He said consumers should be able to rely on the safety of food staples like peanut butter found in nearly every home.
"If that's not safe, we have to ask what is," Harkin said, adding he would eat his peanut butter sandwich to show major brands found in grocery stores are not affected by the current outbreak or recall.
Harkin asked how a Texas plant owned by Peanut Corp. could have operated unlicensed and uninspected for nearly four years. The Associated Press reported this week that the company did not register with Texas health officials after it opened in March 2005 and state officials inspected it only after discovering it during the current outbreak.
"Should I be alarmed about that?" Harkin asked Sundlof. "I mean, how many plants are operating like this?
Sundlof, who didn't answer Harkin's question directly, said states have different licensing and inspection requirements.
More illnesses could be linked to the salmonella-contaminated peanut products over the next two to three weeks, although the outbreak is slowing, Assistant Surgeon General Ali Khan said.
On the Net:
The FDA's recall page: http://tinyurl.com/8srctw
http://www.wtop.com/?nid=116&sid=1578833

'There's no reason only poor people should get malaria': The moment Bill Gates released jar of mosquitoes at packed conference
By David Gardner
Last updated at 6:36 PM on 05th February 2009
It was a show-stopping move by any standards.
Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft and a renowned philanthropist, let loose a swarm of mosquitoes at a technology conference in California to highlight the dangers of malaria.
‘Malaria is spread by mosquitoes,’ the Microsoft founder yelled at a well-heeled crowd at a technology conference in California.
I brought some,’ he added. ‘Here, I’ll let them roam around – there is no reason only poor people should be infected.’
He let the shocked audience sweat for a minute or so before assuring them that the freed insects were malaria- free.
But that didn’t satisfy all the attendees.
‘That’s it. I am not sitting up front anymore,’ eBay founder Pierre Omidyar said.
The stunt was an attempt by Gates – who quit Microsoft last year to concentrate on his charity work - to hammer home the importance of malaria prevention.
It is one of the pet projects of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that announced last year it was donating £115 million to help develop a vaccine for the deadly disease.
Up to 2.7 million people a year still die of malaria each year, 75 per cent of them African children.
Although malaria has been eradicated in most countries with temperate climates, it is still prevalent on continents like Africa and Asia, which have tropical or subtropical climates.
Gates was speaking at the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in Long Beach, California which attracts the great and the good from the worlds of science, technology, business, entertainment and academia.
The organisers of the TED conference said it was an 'amazing moment' and provided the audience with 'food for thought'.
Chris Anderson, curator of the show, quipped that the moment should be headlined, 'Gates releases more bugs into the world'.
Gates said more money was being spent finding a cure for baldness than developing drugs to combat malaria.
'Now, baldness is a terrible thing and rich men are afflicted,' he joked. 'That is why that priority has been set.
'The market does not drive scientists, thinkers, or governments to do the right things. Only by paying attention and making people care can we make as much progress as we need to.'
He called for greater distribution of insect nets and other protective gear, and revealed that an anti-malaria vaccine funded by his foundation and currently in development would enter a more advanced testing phase in the coming months.
'I am an optimist; I think any tough problem can be solved,' he said.
Malaria: The facts
Malaria is one of the biggest killers in the developing world. Most casualties occur in sub-Saharan Africa, where the most deadly strain of malaria is prevalent.
The disease is caused by a parasite transmitted by certain types of mosquitoes. Symptoms usually begin with a high fever, neck and back pain and progress to shivering, vomiting and convulsions. Children are particularly vulnerable.
Although pills exist that can help prevent malaria, there is currently no vaccine. Preventative medication is used mainly by travellers and is not available to the vast majority of people living in the Third World.
Resistance to antibiotics by the malaria parasite is also becoming a problem, with some preventative medications no longer effective in certain parts of the world.
However, there is hope. Australian researchers this week announced they had discovered a new way to treat malaria by deactivating an enzyme that the malaria parasite uses to feed on red blood cells.
When the new method is used to target the enzyme, 'the parasite simply cannot complete the proper digestion of its food and dies,' lead researcher James Whisstock said.
The study, published this week in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was conducted at Monash University in Melbourne.
Also this week, British scientists claimed to have identified genes that make some malaria-carrying mosquitoes resistant to insecticide. They hope the breakthrough could boost efforts to prevent the disease.
Knowing which genes help the mosquitoes dodge pesticides could point to ways to make better ones that are safer for people, too, said Charles Wondji of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and colleagues.
Killing mosquitoes with insecticides is one way to prevent malaria but finding potent, low-cost chemicals safe for humans is difficult, Wondji and his colleagues said.
In their study published in the journal Genome Research, the team studied strains of the mosquito Anopheles funestus that are both susceptible and resistant to a commonly used insecticide.
This allowed them to link defence against insecticides to two genes in a family of genes known as P450, considered a first line of resistance to toxins.
Importantly, this gene family has also been associated with resistance in the other major malaria-causing mosquito strain in Africa, suggesting that a well-designed insecticide could make a big impact in tackling the disease.
nd because humans do not have these particular genes, scientists may be able to develop new chemicals to kill mosquitoes that are not poisonous to people, the researchers said.
'Routine use of these molecular markers for resistance will provide early warning of future control problems due to insecticide resistance,' said Hilary Ranson of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, who helped lead the study.
'(This) should greatly enhance our ability to mitigate the potentially devastating effects of resistance on malaria control.'
Meanwhile, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has announced it will review one malaria prophylactic, Lariam, because of the risk it can cause severe psychiatric reactions in some people.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1136463/Theres-reason-poor-people-malaria-The-moment-Bill-Gates-released-jar-mosquitoes-packed-conference.html

DEA continues pot raids Obama opposes
President vowed to end policy
Stephen Dinan and Ben Conery, THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Drug Enforcement Administration agents this week raided four medical marijuana shops in California, contrary to President Obama's campaign promises to stop the raids.
DEA Acting Administrator Michele Leonhart
The White House said it expects those kinds of raids to end once Mr. Obama nominates someone to take charge of DEA, which is still run by Bush administration holdovers.
“The president believes that federal resources should not be used to circumvent state laws, and as he continues to appoint senior leadership to fill out the ranks of the federal government, he expects them to review their policies with that in mind," White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said.
Medical use of marijuana is legal under the law in California and a dozen other states, but the federal government under President Bush, bolstered by a 2005 Supreme Court ruling, argued that federal interests trumped state law.
Dogged by marijuana advocates throughout the campaign, Mr. Obama repeatedly said he was opposed to using the federal government to raid medical marijuana shops, particularly because it was an infringement on states' decisions.
“I'm not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue," Mr. Obama told the Mail Tribune newspaper in Oregon in March, during the Democratic primary campaign.
He told the newspaper the "basic concept of using medical marijuana for the same purposes and with the same controls as other drugs prescribed by doctors, I think that's entirely appropriate."
Mr. Obama is still filling key law enforcement posts. For now, DEA is run by acting Administrator Michele Leonhart, a Bush appointee.
Special Agent Sarah Pullen of the DEA's Los Angeles office said agents raided four marijuana dispensaries about noon Tuesday. Two were in Venice and one each was in Marina Del Rey and Playa Del Ray -- all in the Los Angeles area.
A man who answered the phone at Marina Caregivers in Marina Del Rey said his shop was the target of a raid but declined to elaborate, saying the shop was just trying to get back to operating.
Agent Pullen said the four raids seized $10,000 in cash and 224 kilograms of marijuana and marijuana-laced food, such as cookies. No one was arrested, she said, but the raid is part of an ongoing investigation seeking to trace the marijuana back to its suppliers or source.
She said agents have conducted 30 or 40 similar raids in the past several years, many of which resulted in prosecutions.
"It's clear that the DEA is showing no respect for President Obama's campaign promises," said Dan Bernath, a spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, which advocates for medical marijuana and for decriminalizing the drug.
California allows patients whose doctors prescribe marijuana to use the drug. The state has set up a registry to allow patients to obtain cards allowing them to possess, grow, transport and use marijuana.
Kris Hermes of Americans for Safe Access, a medical marijuana advocacy group in California, called the raids an attempt to undermine state law and said they were apparently conducted without the knowledge of Los Angeles city or police officials.
He said the DEA has raided five medical marijuana dispensaries in the state since Mr. Obama was inaugurated and that the first took place on Jan. 22 in South Lake Tahoe.
"President Obama needs to keep a promise he made, not just in one campaign stop, but in multiple speeches that he would not be spending Justice Department funds on these kinds of raids," Mr. Hermes said. "We do want to give him a little bit of leeway, but at the same time we're expecting him to stop this egregious enforcement policy that is continuing into his presidency."
He said he is aware that Mr. Obama has not installed his own DEA chief but that new Attorney General "Eric Holder can still suspend these types of operations."
The Justice Department referred questions to the White House.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/feb/05/dea-led-by-bush-continues-pot-raids/

More consumers fall behind on paying credit cards
By Kathy Chu, USA TODAY
Credit card delinquencies are hitting record highs as more borrowers fall behind on bills amid rising unemployment and falling home values.
The amount of credit card debt delinquent at least 60 days reached 3.75% in December, the latest month available, surpassing the previous high of 3.73% set in February 1998, according to Fitch Ratings, which rates corporate debt. Late payments on credit cards, a precursor to charge-offs, rose during most of 2008 before sharply accelerating in the fourth quarter.
THE CREDIT TRAP: Changing credit card terms squeeze consumers
In December, credit card charge-offs — when banks write off the debt — rose to 7.5%, the highest level since 2005, when thousands of consumers rushed to file for bankruptcy and erase their card debt before a new law made it harder to do.
Fitch expects charge-offs to approach 9% in the second half of 2009.
"Consumers are under a lot of stress from the overall economic situation," says Michael Dean, a Fitch managing director.
It's not surprising for consumers to struggle to pay bills during economic downturns. But the record delinquency level "is a reflection of the severity" of the latest credit crunch, says Mark Lauritano, an executive managing director at IHS Global Insight, a financial services research firm.
"In previous recessions, consumers were still able to obtain some credit," he notes.
During the housing boom, consumers could tap home equity to pay off debt. But this funding source dried up for many borrowers as home prices plunged and lenders pulled back on loans.
Some experts also blame consumers' inability to pay their credit card bills partly on banks getting more aggressive with fees and penalty interest rates in recent months.
"If you start raising fees and rates, you will get an increase in delinquencies," says Christopher Brendler, managing director at Stifel Nicolaus, an equity research firm. Yet, "from the credit card perspective, it makes sense. (Issuers) need to protect their profitability as best they can."
Because most borrowers will be able to manage the higher rates and fees — at least at first — those profits will make up for defaults from others, says Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
Scott Talbott, senior vice president of government affairs at the Financial Services Roundtable, which represents the nation's largest banks, says higher fees can "contribute" but are not the "main cause" behind consumers paying their bills late or not at all.
Banks may be forced to raise credit card rates or fees, he says, "as customers start feeling the effects of the economy, and their risk profile changes."

DELINQUENCIES JUMP
Credit card delinquencies hit a record high in December, and charge-offs are soaring. percentage of debt more than 60 days late in 2008:
July 3.12%
Aug. 3.13%
Sept. 3.18%
Oct. 3.35%
Nov. 3.28%
Dec. 3.75%
Based on $283 billion of credit card debt that is securitized, or sold off, by issuers; Source: Fitch Ratings' credit card index

REDIT CARD RATES
Type Fixed Variable
Standard 13.29% 10.89%
Gold 11.90% 9.54%
Platinum 11.15% 11.00%
All 12.09% 10.71%

http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/credit/2009-02-04-credit-card-debt-overdue_N.htm