Lord May of Oxford, former president of the UK’s Royal Society, has denounced the results conducted by a team under Professor Chen Hualan, the director of China’s National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory. H7N9, most commonly referred to as bird flu, has been making headlines around the world recently after China confirmed 126 cases which had killed 24 people as of May 1, 2013. That virus, however, has not yet been confirmed to be human-to-human transmissible, which would greatly increase the risk of a pandemic. That missing leap into human contagion is precisely what scientists as Harbin Veterinary Research Institute in China were interested in experimenting with, which ultimately led that laboratory to produce new viral strains by mixing the H5N1 bird-flu, which can be lethal, but is not easily transmitted between humans, with a 2009 strain of the H1N1 flu virus, which is highly communicable between humans. According to Lord May, who spoke with The Independent, the experiment represents a breach of safety. “The record of containment in labs like this is not reassuring. They are taking it upon themselves to create human-to-human transmission of very dangerous viruses. It’s appallingly irresponsible,” said May. The research was conducted by Chen’s team within a laboratory with the second highest security level to prevent the virus escaping containment. According to results published by the periodical Science on Thursday the study produced 127 different viral hybrids among H5N1 and H1N1, five of which demonstrated airborne transmission between guinea pigs test subjects.According to Chen, the value of what some experts seem to think is an unnecessary risk is to observe these human transmissible strains to head off a potential pandemic.“High attention should be paid to monitor the emergence of such mammalian-transmissible virus in nature to prevent a possible pandemic caused by H5N1 virus,” Chen told The Independent.Others viral experts are less than enthusiastic about Chen’s work, however. Professor Simon Wain-Hobson, a prominent virologist at the Pasteur Institute in France, lauded the work, but also questioned its usefulness.“It’s a fabulous piece of virology by the Chinese group and it’s very impressive, but they haven’t been thinking clearly about what they are doing. It’s very worrying,” said Wain-Hobson to The Independent.“The virological basis of this work is not strong. It is of no use for vaccine development and the benefit in terms of surveillance for new flu viruses is oversold,” he added.A similar H5N1 experiment published in March was conducted by virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands. That experiment led scientists to impose a year-long moratorium on hybrid viral experiments due to the belief that safeguards were insufficient for that type of work.Microbiologist Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, who was critical of Fouchier’s work, was equally skeptical of the Chinese laboratory’s research.“The sole major difference is the use of guinea pigs in this paper and ferrets in that paper,” said Ebright.“In my assessment, neither paper contains substantive new information that justifies the risks posed by the research,” he told Wired.According to Wain-Hobson, hybrid viral experiments such as Chen’s could not, in the end, be extrapolated to determine the danger to humans.“We don’t know the pathogenicity [lethality] in man and hopefully we will never know. But if the case fatality rate was between 0.1 and 20 per cent, and a pandemic affected 500 million people, you could estimate anything between 500,000 and 100 million deaths,” Wain-Hobson said. … Read More
Jan Brewer blocks anti-Planned Parenthood provision of Medicaid bill
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer blocked efforts by anti-choice activists to include an anti-abortion provision in her proposal to expand the state’s Medicaid program.In a comment to critics, Brewer explained that she already signed legislation to prevent funds from the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System from being used to support Planned Parenthood-affiliated services, a move that was reversed in federal court for violating Medicaid law.”We went down that route last year,” she said in remarks about the decision. “We lost.”"It’s probably time that we just move on,” she added.But her decision may lose her support among state Republicans hellbent on more abortion show pony legislative antics, similar to the measure the Arkansas State Senate passed on Wednesday.Continue Reading… … Read More
Biden insists Obama “is not bluffing” on Iran
WASHINGTON (AP) — Seeking to reassure anxious Israelis and their American supporters, Vice President Joe Biden vowed Monday that the United States won’t back down from its pledge to use military action to thwart Iran’s nuclear program should all other options fail.”President Barack Obama is not bluffing,” he said.In a prelude to Obama’s upcoming trip to Israel — his first as president — Biden told a powerful pro-Israel lobby that the U.S. doesn’t want a war with Iran, but that the window for diplomacy is closing. He said prevention, not containment, is the only outcome the U.S. will accept.But in a sign the U.S. is still reluctant to embroil itself in another Mideast military effort, Biden cautioned more than 13,000 Israel supporters at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual conference that if Israel or the U.S. acts too hastily, without exhausting every other reasonable option, they could risk losing the backing of the international community.”That matters because God forbid we have to act, it’s important that the rest of the world is with us,” Biden said to muted applause.Continue Reading… … Read More
ObamaCare’s Uncertain Budget Projections
So is ObamaCare going to reduce the deficit? Democrats
often point to estimates saying that, thanks to its combination of
Medicare reductions and tax hikes, it will actually reduce the
deficit over time. Republicans look at the history of entitlements
and the cost of the law and argue that it will certainly raise the
deficit.
Another answer, though, is that is all depends on your
assumptions about how and whether the law’s cost controls—its
Medicare reductions and delivery system reforms—will work. That’s
more or less what the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said
in a report on the
health law’s budgetary impact earlier this week. If the law’s
cost-controls stick, then the agency says that the will result in
“notable improvement” in the long-term budget outlook. But if the
cost-controls derail, or fail to work as planned, then the budget
outlook will be far worse as a result of the law, increasing
deficits by about $6.2 trillion over the next 75 years.
With the law’s major spending and coverage provisions still
almost a year away, it’s still too early to know exactly how it
will work. But there’s reason to suspect that the cost controls
won’t be as effective as hoped. As GAO’s report notes, a number of
nonpartisan budget and entitlement officials, including Medicare’s
Trustees, the Congressional Budget Office, and Medicare’s Office of
the Actuary, have “all expressed concerns about whether certain
cost-containment mechanisms” in ObamaCare can be sustained. The
health sector productivity improvements probably won’t work out,
Medicare officials have warned, and reimbursement cuts will cause
providers to shut down or cease taking Medicare patients.
The GAO report doesn’t really attempt to quell the concerns of
those other agencies. Instead, it notes the many uncertainties that
should undermine confidence about predicting the ObamaCare’s
long-range budgetary effects. Policies that affect enrollment in
government health programs could change, and so could the rate of
health care cost growth. State decisions about Medicaid enrollment
complicate things further, as will employer decisions about whether
to continue offering health benefits.
The projections are built out of a web of assumptions, and the
assumptions basically determine how the estimates turn out: If you
assume the law more or less works as planned, then the budgetary
effect will be positive. If not, then it will add trillions to
annual deficits over the coming decades. It’s still early, of
course, but given the trouble ObamaCare’s administrators have had
making the law work so far, I tend to assume that it won’t work as
well as hoped.
One thing that the GAO reports is not so dependent on
assumptions, however, is the overall debt picture going forward.
Even if the health law’s cost-containment mechanisms work as well
as hoped, they are “not sufficient to prevent an unsustainable
increase in debt held by the public even under [the agency’s] more
optimistic assumptions.” So that’s the best case scenario: that
ObamaCare’s cost-controls work just fine—and the federal budget is
still screwed. ; … Read More
Crystal River Nuclear Plant, Owned By Duke Energy, Closing Due To Botched Repairs
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — The largest U.S. electricity company said Tuesday it will permanently close a Florida nuclear power plant after botched repairs and use $835 million from an insurance settlement to refund consumers forced to pay for higher-cost replacement power.
Charlotte, N.C.-based Duke Energy said Tuesday it will close its Crystal River Nuclear Plant north of Tampa, starting a process that may take 60 years before the site is decontaminated and dismantled. The company said it is considering whether to build a new, natural-gas-fueled power plant to replace the power lost by closing the nuclear plant.
The nuclear plant operated by Duke Energy’s subsidiary Progress Energy Florida has been shut down since 2009, when its concrete containment building cracked during a maintenance and upgrade project. A 2011 repair attempt resulted in new cracks in other parts of the containment structure. Estimates put repair costs at between $1 billion and $3.4 billion.
Adolf Hitler Rose to Power 80 Years Ago Today: A Cautionary Tale for Democracy
Germany marked a grim anniversary today:
eighty years since Adolf Hitler’s accession to the chancellery.
Angela Merkel, the current German chancellor, talked about the
lessons Germany draws from its history. From
the Telegraph:Mrs Merkel was speaking at the inauguration of an
exhibition in Berlin to commemorate eight decades since Hitler
became chancellor on January 30, 1933 – an anniversary which has
aroused much interest in Germany.”Human rights don’t assert themselves. Freedom doesn’t preserve
itself all alone and democracy doesn’t succeed by itself,” Mrs
Merkel said.”That must be a constant warning for us, Germans,” she added
referring to Hitler’s arrival at the chancellery.Der Spiegel, meanwhile,
explains how it wasn’t so clear to diplomats in Berlin in 1933
what an unmitigated disaster Hitler’s rise would be. In fact, it
wasn’t even clear the Nazi-led government would last long:Along with other observers, diplomats in Berlin in 1933
did not immediately recognize that the appointment of the new
government marked a historical turning point. At that early stage,
no one predicted that the Nazi regime would last for 12 years and
end with a disaster on the scale of World War II. Initially,
Hitler’s cabinet was viewed as just another in a series of more or
less short-lived German governments…In [US Ambassador Frederic] Sackett’s opinion, the real power lay
in the hands of Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen and Minister for
Economics Alfred Hugenberg. It was a view that echoed his American
colleagues’ earlier observations. On Jan. 30, 1933, the embassy in
Berlin sent out a telegram reporting on the appointment of Hitler
and the new cabinet, emphasizing the “reactionary and monarchist
influence” at work in the new government. At first, many diplomats
believed that this conservative containment of Hitler would ensure
that the government’s agenda would not be determined by the
National Socialists’ radical ideology.It didn’t take long for those observers to change their tune.
Der Spiegel
continues:But, in subsequent weeks, the regime began to unleash
its campaign of violence and terror — on a governmental and
administrative level as well as on the street. It was only once
foreign consulates started seeing rising demand for immigration
visas and a growing exodus to neighboring countries that the
significance of the events of January 30 began to sink
in.About five and a half years later, Europe’s leaders gathered to bless
Germany’s annexation of the largely ethnically German
“Sudetenland” of Czechoslovakia. Less than a year after that
Germany invaded Poland and World War II began. The world would
never be the same.Today, of course, despite Merkel’s invocation of Hitler as
ultimate cautionary tale, comparisons of him to present day leaders
and events are generally frowned
upon. … Read More
Clean-up from US coal-ash disaster continues
http://www.youtube.com/v/TKXs6_ajRwk?version=3&f=videos&app=youtube_gdata Original article: Clean-up from US coal-ash disaster continues
