news of a non-geopolitical nature

[phil]

Dolly ~ You may want to read this ...


Bird flu is the price of your £5 roast

These fearful diseases are a consequence of our demand
for cheap, plentiful meat and poultry

Clive Aslet
Sunday February 4, 2007
The Observer


There is something biblical about modern farming. One calamity seems to follow another. Plagues sweep through livestock with terrifying speed. Barely had we got used to television images of sick cows, staggering with BSE, than our screens filled with the pyres of thousands of dead animals, incinerated in an attempt to stop the spread of foot and mouth.

The numbers are barely comprehensible by anyone not involved in the industry. Foot and mouth saw the destruction of seven million sheep and cattle (quite unjustifiably, but that's another story). Avian flu, which has now been diagnosed on one of Bernard Matthews's turkey farms in Suffolk, could, if it takes hold in poultry farms across Britain, be equally devastating. The one infected farm holds 160,000 birds. They will all have to be slaughtered. Frogs, locusts and boils could hardly be worse.

Except that there is something worse. The H5N1 strain of bird flu could, as may have happened with BSE, leap the species barrier. Indeed, in a statistically small number of cases, this has already happened: 164 people have died from the human form of the disease since 2003. The official word for a disease which originates in animals but is passed to humans is zoonosis.
Zoonoses include many of the world's most fearful killers - anthrax, bubonic plague, Ebola, Lassa fever, probably HIV. So far, nearly all the people who have died from human bird flu live or work close to poultry. They caught the disease directly from birds. The fear is that the avian flu virus will mutate into a form that can be transmitted easily from person to person. The result could be a pandemic on the scale of the influenza of 1918-19, which killed 70 million people around the world.

'Could be' are important words. It has not happened yet. To the relief of epidemiologists, who were widely predicting a pandemic two years ago, its onset, assuming it does come, has been delayed longer than expected. This has allowed governments to build up stocks of vaccine. We may yet be protected, should the doomsday scenario happen.

This will be of little consolation to Bernard Matthews and other poultry farmers. They will have to live with the ongoing risk to their businesses, just as pig farmers had to during the swine fever outbreak of 2000. Then, the disease is thought to have been caught from a ham sandwich, casually chucked into a field; there, a pig gobbled it up. (This cannot be proved: the evidence disappeared.) Swine fever is endemic in some other countries - the ham in the sandwich must have been imported from one of them - but not in the UK.

Although nearly 80,000 pigs had to be killed, it could have been vastly worse. The disease was contained to 16 farms. One can only hope that happens with bird flu. Farmers will lose millions, and vast numbers of birds - healthy and sick - will be slaughtered if it isn't.

But this apocalyptic outcome for the British poultry industry ought not to scare the rest of the population unduly. If the worst happens and bird flu teams up with a human virus, the transference is unlikely to take place in Suffolk. Before Christmas, I visited a turkey farmer in Essex - Paul Kelly, whose superlative Kelly bronze brand is sold through Harvey Nichols. Having acquired his passion for turkeys from growing up on a farm, he would like his children to acquire the same experience. But British regulations forbid it. The nanny state keeps children away from livestock wherever possible. Pick up a pheasant poult on a school trip and the teacher must ensure that hands are liberally swabbed with antiseptic.

Few people of any age have direct contact with any poultry before it has been clingfilmed and put on sale in supermarkets. Conditions are very different in south east Asia where huge numbers of chickens are kept. Live poultry is sold at markets. Restaurants keep cages of clucking birds next to the kitchen door. Peasants take chickens on to the bus with them. Small children help look after their parents' birds, without antiseptic in sight. A year ago, three Turkish children died of bird flu after playing with infected chicken heads on a farm. These are the sort of conditions in which a human form of bird flu will develop. The rest of the world can only wait to see if it does.

Phew, the British public are let off the hook. Well, not quite. We may yet be affected in a quite different way and I rather hope that we are. We may wake up to the consequences of paying so little money - little more than £5 in the case of some frozen turkeys being offered before Christmas - for food.

The other day, I visited a chicken farm in Derbyshire. It was, in many ways, an excellent farm, entirely free range, with beautiful new barns. But a barn crowded with chickens, half their feathers gone, the smell of excrement hitting you like a wall, is not an attractive place.

Commercial farms cram poultry into tiny spaces. They may never see daylight. Bernard Matthews has a very good brand. But his white turkeys grow fast and die young. They have been bred to put on weight as quickly as possible. While old-fashioned turkey breeds, such as the bronze, mature slowly, only reaching their optimum size after six months, modern commercial equivalents have been bred to plump up in just half the time. Can it be right?

For the farmer, there is little option, unless he is able to establish a niche product which discerning consumers will pay for. Whatever one might think of factory farming in Britain, welfare conditions will be no better in Thailand and Brazil. Since the farms there are considerably larger than ours, it is reasonable to suppose they might be worse. But they produce very cheap meat. Bernard Matthews's success is not typical of the turkey industry. We used to be self-sufficient in turkeys; now, two-thirds of the 10 million we eat every year come from abroad. So, to stay healthy, shoppers should be more concerned with the struggle of British farming to stay solvent, with its high welfare standards, rather than with bird flu passing to humans in Suffolk.

[phil]

The skeletons' bones were discovered interlaced

Italy mystery of prehistoric hug


Archaeologists in Italy have unearthed two skeletons thought to be 5,000 to 6,000 years old, locked in an embrace.

The pair from the Neolithic period were discovered outside Mantua, about 40km (25 miles) south of Verona.

The pair, almost certainly a man and a woman, are thought to have died young as their teeth were mostly intact, said chief archaeologist Elena Menotti.

The burial site was discovered on Monday during construction work for a factory building.

Hugging

"It's an extraordinary case," said Ms Menotti. "There has not been a double burial found in the Neolithic period, much less two people hugging - and they really are hugging," she told Reuters news agency.

Flint tools, including arrowheads and a knife, were also found alongside the couple.

Scientists will now study the skeletons and artefacts to work out how and when the two people died, Ms Menotti said.

"I must say that when we discovered it, we all became very excited," she said.

"I've been doing this job for 25 years. I've done digs at Pompeii, all the famous sites, but I've never been so moved because this is the discovery of something special," she said.

[strat-0]

I totally missed this when it first happened. Now has to become contentious. Shame...

Delp's death brings discord to Boston
Some band members say they feel snubbed

By KATHARINE WEBSTER
The Associated Press

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
March 25. 2007 10:00AM

The band Boston spoke to people's souls during the 1970s with smash hits like "More Than a Feeling" and "Peace of Mind." But two weeks after lead singer Brad Delp's suicide at his New Hampshire home, bad feelings abound.

Current members of the band, including the chief songwriter and founder, Tom Scholz, were not informed about or invited to Delp's funeral, which was attended by early band members who opposed Scholz in a 1980s legal battle.

Last week, Delp's ex-wife Micki was quoted on a radio station saying Delp was distressed about the conflicts in his professional life and became despondent after a longtime friend, Fran Cosmo, was cut from Boston's summer concert lineup. The story spread online, where fans trying to figure out the reason for Delp's suicide took up the cudgels.

Scholz, who called Delp his "closest friend and collaborator in music for over 35 years," said he was crushed by Delp's suicide and his exclusion from the funeral. Now he feels he is being unfairly blamed for Delp's death.

"It went from devastating on the initial phone call to an absolute nightmare," Scholz told the Associated Press on Friday in a tearful telephone interview, his first since Delp's death on March 9. (An interview conducted by e-mail was published earlier in Rolling Stone.)

"We had been told it would only be his immediate family (at the funeral), and of course it wasn't," he said.
A lawyer for Scholz sent a letter to Micki Delp on Friday demanding a retraction. She did not respond Friday to an e-mail message from the Associated Press via the publicist who has handled statements for the family.

Boston has canceled its summer engagements, and Scholz said he still hopes the rift can be mended and the band can be part of a public memorial service that Delp's children, their mother Micki, and Delp's fiancee, Pamela Sullivan, said last week was in the works.

Sullivan said no one intentionally excluded the current band members from the funeral.

"It was about getting the children through it as quickly and quietly as possible with the people they were up to facing at the time and the people who could be the most comfort to them," she told the AP in a telephone interview.

Sullivan also said in a statement issued Friday night on a fan website and boston.com, The Boston Globe's website, that she hoped to quell rumors and speculation about the reasons for Delp's suicide, saying "People are looking for answers, and there are none to be had.

"Bradley blamed no one, held no one accountable, for what was in his own heart," the statement said. "His music, his business, his relationships, these were the things that brought him joy. His sadness came from within; it was his own. He wanted no one to carry his burdens, in life or in death."

Tensions between Scholz and some of the early band members date from the early 1980s, when CBS Inc. sued the band over delays in recording new albums. The company's Epic Records label recorded the band's first two releases: Boston, in 1976, and Don't Look Back, in 1978.

Scholz countersued for the rights to the band's name and music. Three members of the original band - Barry Goudreau, Sib Hashian and Fran Sheehan - testified for the record company, which lost. Goudreau is Micki Delp's brother-in-law, and she reportedly remains close to the ousted band members.

Delp, the only band member besides Scholz whose name was on the CBS recording contract, remained friends with everyone, touring and recording with Scholz and the others over the decades. He also started a Beatles tribute band, Beatle Juice.

Scholz wrote, engineered, and laid down nearly all the instrumental tracks on the first album, but he said Delp helped him refine the songs and brought his music to life.

"It went from a guitar lick that didn't mean a thing to a real song as soon as he opened his mouth. That was always the case," Scholz said. "We had a very, very close working relationship. I swear it was like we were hooked up by a cable. We didn't even have to talk most of the time."

Scholz and Delp were both vegetarians and pacifists, both dedicated their money and talents to causes they believed in, and both proposed to their longtime girlfriends on Christmas Day 2006 by putting rings in their stockings - only learning about the coincidence in a conversation afterward.

The band's first album was wildly successful, and remains one of the best-selling debut albums of all time, according to Billboard, selling more than 16 million copies. Boston's early music also remains a staple on classic rock stations, especially in New England.

96.5 FM ("The Mill") in Manchester plans a two-hour tribute to Boston today featuring excerpts from the station's interviews with Delp over the years. Program Director J.C. Haze said he remembers hearing the first album.

"Tom and Brad, they made such a unique sound it just took the world by storm," Haze said. "Nothing ever sounded like it, and nothing ever did since."

By KATHARINE WEBSTER

[RocDoc]

Nothing like big money and public acclaim (plus an inability to handle pressure in a 'normal' way, say when a label is squeezing you) to totally misread what the important things in life are...

Plus this doesn't give near the amounbt of info to know WHO it is we should feel more sorry for, Scholz or then Goudreau and those other two guys.

Seeing that Scholz was always portrayed as the 'wizard, a true star' of that band, it's hard to understand how he drove the other three guys to help the label rather than him...

[strat-0]

Yeah, I really don't think it had anything whatever to do with Boston's lineup or schedule. I guess it's hard to know...

[Galactus]

I've read before that Scholz really just considers Boston a hobby, he says his job is an inventor and electrical engineer. What I've read over the years is that those guys wanted to do it full time and Scholz didn't. They were tired of waiting for Scholz to feel like doing a new album or tour or whatever.

[phil]

Yes, it's a Hobbit. The debate that has divided science is solved at last (sort of)

· Scientists shed new light on disputed skeleton find
· Bone analysis supports distinct species theory

James Randerson, science correspondent
The Guardian Friday September 21 2007


It was the most astonishing anthropological find of a generation - a diminutive new species of human that apparently shared the planet with us until 13,000 years ago.

But the discovery of the fossilised "Hobbit", as she quickly became known, has provoked a long-running and sometimes acrimonious debate among scientists: was she really one of a race of mini-humans or was she merely one of us, but with a brain-shrinking disease?

Now scientists have analysed fossilised wrist bones that were part of the original discovery in 2003 but had not been looked at in detail. They say they prove the Hobbit really was a distinct and previously unknown type of human, and not just an abnormally small member of our own species.

That analysis has revealed significant differences between the bones and human or Neanderthal equivalents. At the same time there are crucial similarities with older species of human and living apes such as chimps and gorillas. The researchers say this puts paid to the idea that Homo floresiensis could be a "normal" human being with a brain-shrinking disease called microcephaly or some form of dwarfism.

The Hobbit was remarkable because of where it was found and when it was supposed to have lived. Its existence alongside modern humans 13,000 years ago is more than 15,000 years after the Neanderthals died out and more than 140,000 years after modern humans evolved in Africa.

Complete article ...

www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/sep/21/2


So ... Exactly how many "Adam & Eve" did God created on Earth ...

[phil]

Alicia Silverstone strips off to promote vegetarianism: Photo



19 September 2007 (Sawf News) - Alicia Silverstone has stripped off to show how being a vegan helped her lose weight. The Clueless star bares all in a 30-second US TV advert for animal welfare campaign group PETA. The actress claims rejecting meat has made her both slimmer and healthier.

The clip begins with Silverstone sensually pulling herself out of a swimming pool, carefully protecting her modesty with her arms.

It follows with soft shots of the blonde star perched at the edge of the pool with her back to the camera revealing her butt and close-ups of her face.

The 30-year-old actress says over the film, "I am Alicia Silverstone, and I am a vegetarian", before claiming, "There's nothing in the world that's changed me as much as this. I feel so much better and have so much more energy. It's amazing."

The PETA ad' - which was directed by Dave Meyers, who has previously worked on videos for Missy Elliot - airs on Food Network, Lifetime and E! in Houston, Texas, on Wednesday (19.09.07), before being shown across the US.

Silverstone also appears in a poster for the campaign, in which she is seen sprawled on the ground in front of the pool, under the words: "I am Alicia Silverstone, and I am a vegetarian."



And a nice one tÔÔ ... !

Now back to prepare the Greek marinade for
the 2" thick lamb chops I'm BBQuing tonight ...

[dolly]

Wow Phil, not the most groundbreaking news story of the week, but never one to pass up the opportunity to post naked pictures of a pretty girl, right? ÔÔ

[dolly]

phil said:

Dolly ~ You may want to read this ...


Bird flu is the price of your £5 roast

These fearful diseases are a consequence of our demand
for cheap, plentiful meat and poultry

Clive Aslet
Sunday February 4, 2007
The Observer


There is something biblical about modern farming. One calamity seems to follow another. Plagues sweep through livestock with terrifying speed. Barely had we got used to television images of sick cows, staggering with BSE, than our screens filled with the pyres of thousands of dead animals, incinerated in an attempt to stop the spread of foot and mouth.

The numbers are barely comprehensible by anyone not involved in the industry. Foot and mouth saw the destruction of seven million sheep and cattle (quite unjustifiably, but that's another story). Avian flu, which has now been diagnosed on one of Bernard Matthews's turkey farms in Suffolk, could, if it takes hold in poultry farms across Britain, be equally devastating. The one infected farm holds 160,000 birds. They will all have to be slaughtered. Frogs, locusts and boils could hardly be worse.

Except that there is something worse. The H5N1 strain of bird flu could, as may have happened with BSE, leap the species barrier. Indeed, in a statistically small number of cases, this has already happened: 164 people have died from the human form of the disease since 2003. The official word for a disease which originates in animals but is passed to humans is zoonosis.
Zoonoses include many of the world's most fearful killers - anthrax, bubonic plague, Ebola, Lassa fever, probably HIV. So far, nearly all the people who have died from human bird flu live or work close to poultry. They caught the disease directly from birds. The fear is that the avian flu virus will mutate into a form that can be transmitted easily from person to person. The result could be a pandemic on the scale of the influenza of 1918-19, which killed 70 million people around the world.

'Could be' are important words. It has not happened yet. To the relief of epidemiologists, who were widely predicting a pandemic two years ago, its onset, assuming it does come, has been delayed longer than expected. This has allowed governments to build up stocks of vaccine. We may yet be protected, should the doomsday scenario happen.

This will be of little consolation to Bernard Matthews and other poultry farmers. They will have to live with the ongoing risk to their businesses, just as pig farmers had to during the swine fever outbreak of 2000. Then, the disease is thought to have been caught from a ham sandwich, casually chucked into a field; there, a pig gobbled it up. (This cannot be proved: the evidence disappeared.) Swine fever is endemic in some other countries - the ham in the sandwich must have been imported from one of them - but not in the UK.

Although nearly 80,000 pigs had to be killed, it could have been vastly worse. The disease was contained to 16 farms. One can only hope that happens with bird flu. Farmers will lose millions, and vast numbers of birds - healthy and sick - will be slaughtered if it isn't.

But this apocalyptic outcome for the British poultry industry ought not to scare the rest of the population unduly. If the worst happens and bird flu teams up with a human virus, the transference is unlikely to take place in Suffolk. Before Christmas, I visited a turkey farmer in Essex - Paul Kelly, whose superlative Kelly bronze brand is sold through Harvey Nichols. Having acquired his passion for turkeys from growing up on a farm, he would like his children to acquire the same experience. But British regulations forbid it. The nanny state keeps children away from livestock wherever possible. Pick up a pheasant poult on a school trip and the teacher must ensure that hands are liberally swabbed with antiseptic.

Few people of any age have direct contact with any poultry before it has been clingfilmed and put on sale in supermarkets. Conditions are very different in south east Asia where huge numbers of chickens are kept. Live poultry is sold at markets. Restaurants keep cages of clucking birds next to the kitchen door. Peasants take chickens on to the bus with them. Small children help look after their parents' birds, without antiseptic in sight. A year ago, three Turkish children died of bird flu after playing with infected chicken heads on a farm. These are the sort of conditions in which a human form of bird flu will develop. The rest of the world can only wait to see if it does.

Phew, the British public are let off the hook. Well, not quite. We may yet be affected in a quite different way and I rather hope that we are. We may wake up to the consequences of paying so little money - little more than £5 in the case of some frozen turkeys being offered before Christmas - for food.

The other day, I visited a chicken farm in Derbyshire. It was, in many ways, an excellent farm, entirely free range, with beautiful new barns. But a barn crowded with chickens, half their feathers gone, the smell of excrement hitting you like a wall, is not an attractive place.

Commercial farms cram poultry into tiny spaces. They may never see daylight. Bernard Matthews has a very good brand. But his white turkeys grow fast and die young. They have been bred to put on weight as quickly as possible. While old-fashioned turkey breeds, such as the bronze, mature slowly, only reaching their optimum size after six months, modern commercial equivalents have been bred to plump up in just half the time. Can it be right?

For the farmer, there is little option, unless he is able to establish a niche product which discerning consumers will pay for. Whatever one might think of factory farming in Britain, welfare conditions will be no better in Thailand and Brazil. Since the farms there are considerably larger than ours, it is reasonable to suppose they might be worse. But they produce very cheap meat. Bernard Matthews's success is not typical of the turkey industry. We used to be self-sufficient in turkeys; now, two-thirds of the 10 million we eat every year come from abroad. So, to stay healthy, shoppers should be more concerned with the struggle of British farming to stay solvent, with its high welfare standards, rather than with bird flu passing to humans in Suffolk.

Thankfully I don't buy 'cheap' chickens, Phil. But it's still worrying. I think there's been another suspected foot and mouth breakout nearby actually. Almost makes me want to join Alicia in the vegan stakes. Except... there's always cow flesh. Ribeye beef... mmmmm.

[maarts]

Australia's been flattened by an equine flu-epdiemic that has shut down horseracing for the last few weeks here.
Even the legendary Melbourne Cup (The Race That Stops A Nation), always held on the first Tuesday of November now looks to be under threat.
And whilst everyone's lamenting the loss of punting dollars and the damage to the industry caused by EI, nary a word is spread about how many horses have died since the flu has been discovered.
The same modus operandi as with foot and mouth-disease is being actioned- quarantining, no movement of livestock, constantly cleaning and people in the vicinity of these horses have to wear protective clothing as not to spread it to other animals.

It just feels like modern society has come up with so many more new diseases and viruses that now everything on the planet is under constant threat.

I'm still waiting for the discovery of cockroach cancer though....

[dolly]

Strewth, Maarts. The Melbourne Cup is threatened? Must be bad - I thought this kind of thing was confined to the shores of Europe.

It just feels like modern society has come up with so many more new diseases and viruses that now everything on the planet is under constant threat.

I know - it's really quite worrying. Like we're heading towards doom at an ever increasing rate and we're powerless to stop it.

As for cockroach cancer, I'll bet those bastards would survive a nuclear holocaust. Them and ants. Ants are the real life equivalent of The Borg. Evil. Imagine if they ever evolved in size.

[phil]

dollybeadz said:

Wow Phil, not the most groundbreaking news story of the week, but never one to pass up the opportunity to post naked pictures of a pretty girl, right? ÔÔ

Check out this publicity campaign to raise awareness to Anorexia
from the Italian newspaper "La Repubblica" ...

www.repubblica.it/2006/05/gallerie/cronaca/anoressia-shock/3.html

Yikes

[phil]

Verizon Blocks Messages of Abortion Rights Group

By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: September 27, 2007

Saying it had the right to block “controversial or unsavory” text messages, Verizon Wireless has rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon’s mobile network available for a text-message program.

Spreading the Word The other leading wireless carriers have accepted the program, which allows people to sign up for text messages from Naral by sending a message to a five-digit number known as a short code.

Text messaging is a growing political tool in the United States and a dominant one abroad, and such sign-up programs are used by many political candidates and advocacy groups to send updates to supporters.

But legal experts said private companies like Verizon probably have the legal right to decide which messages to carry. The laws that forbid common carriers from interfering with voice transmissions on ordinary phone lines do not apply to text messages.

The dispute over the Naral messages is a skirmish in the larger battle over the question of “net neutrality” — whether carriers or Internet service providers should have a voice in the content they provide to customers.

Article continues ...

www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/us/27verizon.html?ex=1348632000&en=a1232dee7638e939&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

[phil]

Hubble captures dance of the galaxies

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Guardian Unlimited Tuesday October 30 2007



Hubble's view of two interacting galaxies.
Photograph: Hubble Heritage Team/NASA/ESA

Two galaxies swing past each other in a cosmic dance choreographed by gravity, 300m light years from Earth in the constellation of Leo.

This image, taken by the Hubble space telescope, reveals in unprecedented detail the bright regions of star formation, interstellar gas clouds and prominent dust arms that spiral out from the galaxies' centres.

The larger galaxy on the right is seen nearly face-on, with a giant arm of stars, dust and gas reaching out and around its smaller neighbour, which is viewed edge-on.

The shapes of both galaxies have been distorted by their gravitational interaction with one another.

The pair are known collectively as Arp 87, and are just one celestial coupling among hundreds of interacting and merging galaxies known in the nearby universe.

Arp 87 was first discovered and catalogued by the astronomer Halton Arp in the 1970s, and was described in Arp's Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies.

The Hubble image, a composite of red, blue, green and infra-red exposures, was taken using the telescope's wide field planetary camera 2.

It shows a corkscrewing bridge of material spanning from one galaxy to the other, suggesting stars and gas are being drawn from the larger galaxy into the gravitational pull of the smaller one.

Interacting galaxies are often hosts to the highest levels of star formation found anywhere in the nearby universe.