Category: News

Grenada thanks China for new stadium with a rendition of wrong anthem

Shanghaiist: Grenada thanks China for new stadium with a rendition of Taiwan anthem
The tiny Caribbean island of Grenada suffered a huge diplomatic embarrassment at the inauguration of a US$40 million China-financed stadium built as a gift from Beijing when its police band decided it would perform the Taiwan anthem instead of the March of the Volunteers. Oops.

The Associated Press reports that Chinese Ambassador Qian Hongshan and scores of blue-uniformed Chinese laborers who built the new stadium were “visibly uncomfortable as Taiwan’s anthem echoed inside the 20,000-seat venue on Saturday”. Continue reading “Grenada thanks China for new stadium with a rendition of wrong anthem”

Iraq’s battlefield slang

Iraq’s battlefield slang – Los Angeles Times
World War II veterans invoked Murphy’s Law: “If something can go wrong, it will.” As you’ll see in the brief lexicon I’ve pulled together below, the New Greatest Generation (the generation fighting the war on terror) dubs it “the suck.” (Author and columnist Austin Bay has a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. A colonel (retired) in the U.S. Army Reserve, in 2004 Austin served on active duty in Iraq.)

“Embrace the suck” isn’t merely a wisecrack; it’s an encyclopedic experience rendered as an epigram, gritty shorthand for “Face it, soldier. I’ve been there. War ain’t easy. Now deal with the difficulty and let’s get on with the mission.” Thanks to Caroline Collier for passing this on. Continue reading “Iraq’s battlefield slang”

Re-inventing the notorious Carlyle Group

Carlyle Changes Its Stripes
n the two decades since private equity firms first stormed the business world, they’ve been called a lot of things, from raiders to barbarians. But only one firm has been tagged in the popular imagination with warmongering, treason, and acting as cold-eyed architects of government conspiracies.

Its ranks were larded with the politically connected, including former Presidents, Cabinet members, even former British Prime Minister John Major. It used its partners’ collective relationships to build a lucrative business buying, transforming, and selling companies–particularly defense companies that did business with governments. 

Carlyle might have continued happily in that niche except for the confluence of three events. First there were the terrorist attacks of September 11. In the aftermath, conspiracy theorists seized on Carlyle’s huge profits, intense secrecy, and close dealings with wealthy Saudi investors. The scrutiny reached a crescendo in Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, which made Carlyle seem like the sort of company image-conscious investors like public pension funds might choose to avoid. The second factor was the tsunami of capital that has been sloshing around the globe for five years, providing almost limitless funding for the kind of dealmaking that is Carlyle’s specialty. All that liquidity has brought with it immense opportunity as well as stiff new competition. Finally, there’s the succession issue. Carlyle’s baby boomer founders can see retirement around the corner. And they badly want the firm, their legacy, to outlast them. Continue reading “Re-inventing the notorious Carlyle Group”

Widow held in lottery winner’s slaying

Rio rages against accused ‘gold digging’ widow – World – theage.com.au
POLICE have arrested the young widow of a multimillionaire lottery winner while prosecutors decide whether to charge her with his killing, a crime that has gripped the country and generated public fury against a woman viewed as a ruthless gold digger.

Ms Almeida, 29, was the girlfriend of Mr Senna, a former subsistence farmer and butcher before he became rich. Mr Senna, who had part of both legs amputated because of diabetes, got around town in a motorised cart.

In July 2005, 54 year-old Mr Senna was the sole winner of a national lottery worth the equivalent of about $A30 million. He bought a sprawling ranch in Rio Bonito, a rural town 75 kilometres north-east of Rio, and married Ms Almeida.

Mr Senna’s family accused Ms Almeida of pressuring Mr Senna to change his will, removing 11 brothers and sisters as potential beneficiaries. Mr Senna wrote a new will leaving the money only to Ms Almeida and a daughter, Renata. Continue reading “Widow held in lottery winner’s slaying”

Did anyone tell the Amazon swimmer about the candirú?

Did anyone tell the Amazon swimmer about the candirú? « piran café
In its preview of Slovenian marathon swimmer Martin Strel’s upcoming attempt to swim the entire length of the Amazon river, they left out the candirú, the Amazon’s most notorious fish, and the only known vertebrate to parasitize humans. It’s a fish that has no enemies, and is more feared than the piranha. Particularly by men who are foolhardy enough to urinate in the river while skinny-dipping. Attracted to the smell, Vandellia cirrhosa will follow the urine’s path, swim into the penis, and, with it’s umbrella-like spines, lodge itself inside the urethra. Removal is grim.

There even is a song about the experience. Click on the drawing to hear.

Listen to NPR coverage:

Swimmer Sets Off to Conquer the Amazon River

Pork Producer Says It Plans to Give Pigs More Room

Pork Producer Says It Plans to Give Pigs More Room – New York Times
The processor, Smithfield Foods, which raises sows at 187 farms in eight states, said it would replace individual metal cages with pens where the sows would be housed in groups, allowing more mobility. Smithfield, which had revenue of $11.4 billion in 2006, raises 14 million hogs in the United States each year and processes 27 million hogs into pork products, for a 26 percent share of the market.

Animal welfare activists praised the move. “This is perhaps the most important moment in animal welfare in the agribusiness sector in 50 years,” said Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States.

The Humane Society and others have long criticized the use of gestation crates. The sows spend up to three years continuously reproducing — much of the time confined in stalls where they cannot turn around — before being slaughtered. Veal cows are confined to two-foot-wide crates for four months and then slaughtered. Hens spend about a year laying eggs in “battery cages” — where they do not have room to flap their wings — before they are slaughtered.

‘Cat owners at risk of bird flu’

‘Cat owners at risk of bird flu’ | the Daily Mail
Cat owners are at a greater risk of catching bird flu as the deadly virus is most likely to mutate in felines, experts say. A study on cats in areas where outbreaks have occurred found that the virus is changing in felines more quickly than thought. It raises the chilling prospect that the disease could soon easily be spread from cats to people, leading to a human pandemic.


Cuba Waiting game

FT.com / Arts & weekend / Magazine – Waitinggame

Good British insight into the changing face of the Miami Cuban experience.
Television reports on Cuban Miami traditionally take in Versailles, a 1950s-style Cuban restaurant on Calle Ocho, itself the imitation of an old restaurant on the island. Every time Castro is rumoured to be dead, historicos wearing the guayabera shirts popular in pre-revolutionary Cuba are interviewed outside Versailles’s coffee-window. But these old men are no longer representative: the exiles who arrived before 1980 now account for perhaps a third of Miami Cubans. Versailles might die with its customers.

Cuba is no longer the Cuba that the early exiles knew. One thing that has changed is skin colour: almost all the Cubans who left were white. “Always forgotten, and that’s a very key factor,” says Gomez. “Eighty-six per cent of the Cuban-American community is Caucasian. Sixty-two per cent of Cubans on Cuba are black. These are the guys who were promised the most by the Castro revolution.”

El exilio is dying and becoming a Miami tribe: just another American ethnic group with roots in a messed-up country and Americans for children. Fidel Castro can die knowing that just as he is falling victim to the “biological solution”, so is the generation he banished. Thanks to Sixto Labiste for this.

New TB Pandemic Fear

The dilemma of a deadly disease: patients may be forcibly detained | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited
More than 300 cases of the highly infectious disease, which is spread by airborne droplets and kills 98% of those infected within about two weeks, have been identified in South Africa.

But doctors believe there have been hundreds, possibly thousands, more and the numbers are growing among the millions of people with HIV, who are particularly vulnerable to the disease. Their fear is that patients with XDR-TB, told that there is little that can be done for them, will leave the isolation wards and go home to die. But while they are still walking around they risk spreading the infection.

Now a group of doctors has warned in a medical journal that if enforced isolation is not introduced XDR-TB could swamp South Africa and spread far beyond its borders. Regular TB is already the single largest killer of people with Aids in South Africa.

Jerome Amir Singh of the Centre for Aids Programme of Research in South Africa and two colleagues wrote in the peer-reviewed journal Public Library of Science Medicine that the government must overcome its understandable qualms over human rights in the interests of the majority. Without exceptional control measures, including enforced isolation, XDR-TB “could become a lethal global pandemic”, they say.

Virulent TB in South Africa May Imperil Millions

Blue Monday: The unhappiest day of the year

Blue Monday: The unhappiest day of the year | the Daily Mail
Dr Cliff Arnall, a Cardiff University psychologist, devised the formula that shows today is the most depressing.

His equation takes into account six factors: weather, debt, time since Christmas, time since failing our new year’s resolutions, low motivational levels and the feeling of a need to take action.

Taken together they pinpoint today as ‘Blue Monday’.