Category Archives: Fail!

Bird Flu Confirmed at Iowa Farm With 5.3 Million Chickens – NYTimes.com

Bolding mine – how can you call this a farm? It is clearly a factory for producing chickens. And when you have that many birds in one place – how long would it take for disease to spread

Up to 5.3 million hens at an Iowa farm must be destroyed after the highly infectious and deadly bird flu virus was confirmed, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said Monday.

via Bird Flu Confirmed at Iowa Farm With 5.3 Million Chickens – NYTimes.com.

H5N2 strikes again in Iowa, Minnesota | CIDRAP

Who ships both turkey and chicken brooding eggs and chicks to Canada and US?

The H5N2 avian influenza virus has again widened its footprint, invading a large chicken farm in Iowa—the second outbreak in that state—and affecting two more turkey farms in Minnesota, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported today.

In addition, a highly pathogenic H5 virus has hit a chicken farm in Ontario near where H5N2 struck a turkey farm earlier this month, Canadian authorities reported over the weekend. They have not yet specified the virus subtype, but H5N2 seems likely.

via H5N2 strikes again in Iowa, Minnesota | CIDRAP.

Katie Hopkins calling migrants vermin recalls the darkest events of history | Zoe Williams | Comment is free | The Guardian

It is no joke when people start talking like this. We are not “giving her what she wants” when we make manifest our disgust. It is not a free speech issue. I’m not saying gag her: I’m saying fight her. Articulate the fellowship, the human empathy, that makes these deaths important. Stop talking about how many children were among the dead, as though only children matter. Start talking about everybody’s life as cherishable, irrespective of anything they might produce.

via Katie Hopkins calling migrants vermin recalls the darkest events of history | Zoe Williams | Comment is free | The Guardian.

Middle East – Saudis fund French weapons for use in Lebanon – France 24

It is still all about profit and subsidizing the production of arms that will fuel corruption in Lebanon, not liberty…

France, Lebanon’s former colonial ruler, is actually a late-comer to the conflict.

To date, almost all Lebanon’s international support has come from the United States and Britain.

France only won the contract to supply the Lebanese army, analyst Aram Nerguizian told AFP, because Saudi Arabia had been frustrated by US and British refusals to attack the Syrian regime in 2013.

“It was good fortune for the French, but they have a lot to prove. The momentum of the US and UK defence programmes in Lebanon is far more consolidated,” said Nerguizian, who is a senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

via Middle East – Saudis fund French weapons for use in Lebanon – France 24.

Turkey accuses EU of ′religious fanaticism′ in Armenia genocide resolution | News | DW.DE | 16.04.2015

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused the European Parliament of being unfair with regards to history. The MEPs demonstrated “religious and cultural fanaticism,” the Turkish government said.

via Turkey accuses EU of ′religious fanaticism′ in Armenia genocide resolution | News | DW.DE | 16.04.2015.

Hundreds of thousands of people have reported sides hurting because they could not stop laughing at President Erdogan’s latest attempt to be taken seriously.

www.german-foreign-policy.com Germans want Greeks to be their new Turks – cheap labor!

Since, according to German employment office calculations, around 33,000 apprenticeships had remained vacant between 2012 and 2013, the BMZ, until recently, had been pushing for a workforce transfer between Greece and Germany. The means of recruitment were characterized as a “mobility initiative” for young Europeans and given such bogus names as “MobilPro-EU,” obfuscating German interests in having supervision over the potentials of the foreign labor force throughout Europe. Spanish youth are also being enticed into coming to Germany with the “Job of my Life” program. The costs of recruitment are shared between Germany’s Ministry for Economic Affairs and its Ministry of Labor – the unsuspecting Greek unemployed are offered promises of paradise. (german-foreign-policy.com documents the Greek show of gratitude here.) (Photo: France 1942: The tradition of the recruitment of the labor force abroad extends back to the German Empire.)

via www.german-foreign-policy.com.

Greek Study Provides Evidence of Forced Loans to Nazis – SPIEGEL ONLINE

The central question in the report is that of forced loans the Nazi occupiers extorted from the Greek central bank beginning in 1941. Should requests for repayment of those loans be classified as reparation demands — demands that may have been forfeited with the Two-Plus-Four Treaty of 1990? Or is it a genuine loan that must be paid back? The expert commission analyzed contracts and agreements from the time of the occupation as well as receipts, remittance slips and bank statements.

They found that the forced loans do not fit into the category of classical war reparations. The commission calculated the outstanding German “debt” to the Greek central bank and came to a total sum of $12.8 billion as of December 2014, which would amount to about €11 billion.

As such, at issue between Germany and Greece is no longer just the question as to whether the 115 million deutsche marks paid to the Greek government from 1961 onwards for its peoples’ suffering during the occupation sufficed as legal compensation for the massacres like those in the villages of Distomo and Kalavrita. Now the key issue is whether the successor to the German Reich, the Federal Republic of Germany, is responsible for paying back loans extorted by the Nazi occupiers. There’s some evidence to indicate that this may be the case.

In terms of the amount of the loan debt, the Greek auditors have come to almost the same findings as those of the Nazis’ bookkeepers shortly before the end of the war. Hitler’s auditors estimated 26 days before the war’s end that the “outstanding debt” the Reich owed to Greece at 476 million Reichsmarks.

Auditors in Athens calculated an “open credit line” for the same period of time of around $213 million. They assumed a dollar exchange rate to the Reichsmark of 2:1 and applied an interest escalation clause accepted by the German occupiers that would result in a value of more than €11 billion today.

via Greek Study Provides Evidence of Forced Loans to Nazis – SPIEGEL ONLINE.

World Health Organisation ‘intentionally delayed declaring Ebola emergency’ | World news | The Guardian

{Even newspapers have short memories. The governments of the impacted countries pushed back hard internally within the UN and in the press to not declare an emergency for fear of losing trade and tourist business. WHO gave in to the pressure and that’s their bad but governments who think of money before people in situations like this one and this one, share much of the blame.}

Dr Sylvie Briand, head of the pandemic and epidemic diseases department at WHO, acknowledged that her agency made wrong decisions, but said postponing the alert made sense at the time because it could have had catastrophic economic consequences. “What I’ve seen in general is that for developing countries, it’s sort of a death warrant you’re signing,” she told AP.

On 10 June, Briand, her boss, Dr Keiji Fukuda, and others sent a memo to WHO chief Dr Margaret Chan, noting that cases might soon pop up in Mali, Ivory Coast and Guinea-Bissau. But the memo went on to say that declaring an international emergency or even convening an emergency committee to discuss the issue “could be seen as a hostile act”.

But others argue that although declaring an international emergency is no guarantee of ending an outbreak, it functions as a kind of a global distress call.

“It’s important because it gives a clear signal that nobody can ignore the epidemic any more,” said Dr Joanne Liu, MSF’s international president.

In a meeting at WHO headquarters on 30 July, Liu said she told Chan: “You have the legitimacy and the authority to label it an emergency … You need to step up to the plate.”

After WHO declared an international emergency on 8 August, Barack Obama sent 3,000 troops to west Africa and promised to build more than a dozen 100-bed field hospitals. Britain and France also pledged to build Ebola clinics, China sent a 59-person lab team, and Cuba sent more than 400 health workers.

Dr Bruce Aylward, WHO’s top Ebola official, maintains however that labelling the Ebola outbreak a global emergency would have been no magic bullet. “What you would expect is the whole world wakes up and goes: ‘Oh my gosh, this is a terrible problem, we have to deploy additional people and send money,’” he said. “Instead what happened is people thought: ‘Oh my goodness, there’s something really dangerous happening there and we need to restrict travel and the movement of people.’”

via World Health Organisation ‘intentionally delayed declaring Ebola emergency’ | World news | The Guardian.

{Haters in} House Judiciary Committee Signs Off on Comprehensive Mass Deportation Plan : Immigration Impact

Almost no one seems to think that deporting 11 million people is a viable strategy. Policy makers from President Obama to Texas Governor Rick Perry have recognized this. A group estimated the costs as $400 to $600 billion, let alone the human costs. As Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) said yesterday, “The country has considered and rejected mass deportation or self-deportation… So how can it make any more sense to imprison all of those people?”

At some point, Congress will have to deal with the realities that we can’t and shouldn’t deport 11 million people, and that criminalizing undocumented immigrants will not make us safer. Hopefully that time will come sooner rather than later.

via House Judiciary Committee Signs Off on Comprehensive Mass Deportation Plan : Immigration Impact.

Role of wild birds in US H5N2 outbreaks questioned | CIDRAP

Wild bird chase? {Lots of people would like to deflect  blame from industrialized poultry farming and role of people – about time someone said – whoa – how about some science?}

But not so fast, say experts like David Stallknecht, PhD, of the University of Georgia’s College of Veterinary Medicine, and Michele Carstensen, PhD, wildlife health program supervisor in the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR). They point out, among other things, that migratory birds don’t migrate from west to east or from north to south in late winter.

“This could all have been from wild birds—nobody can say it’s impossible,” said Stallknecht. “But we do need some proof. . . . People seem to be willing to accept things without a whole lot of proof.”

He said it is unknown how the H5N8 strain that gave rise to H5N2 reached North America. Noting that the H5N2 outbreaks in British Columbia marked the “index case” or first appearance of the virus, he said, “How much proof do we have of wild bird involvement with that virus in North America? None.”

Referring to the mixing of H5N8 with North American viruses, he said, “Why do we make the jump to wild ducks to explain this? Reassortment could also occur in a backyard flock of domestic ducks after a more direct introduction [of H5N8] via people.” He suggested that travelers could possibly have brought the virus to Canada from Asia.

He cautioned that this is “pure speculation,” but added that the idea that wild birds introduced the parental H5N8 virus to North America is also speculative. “It is based on circumstantial evidence that is rapidly becoming accepted dogma.”

Carstensen said the notion that wild birds could have brought the H5N2 virus from Minnesota to Missouri is “beyond me. . . . They [migratory birds] go from south to north this time of year.” Arkansas and Kansas, on the other hand, are close enough to migratory-bird wintering grounds to make a connection with wild birds more plausible, she added.

There could be “totally different causes” for the outbreaks in Minnesota and the more southerly states, Carstensen suggested.

via Role of wild birds in US H5N2 outbreaks questioned | CIDRAP.