? June 8, 2010
June 10, 2010 ?
June 9
Saturday, June 25, 2005
Seven months after suspicions were first raised, United States Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns confirmed that a second American cow has tested positive for BSE (also known as ‘mad cow disease’), as determined by a lab in Weybridge, England. The department believes that this cow was born in the United States.
The delay in confirmation followed two conflicting test results from last November. The “Western blot” test, which is a more sophisticated test, could have helped reach a final determination, but the U.S. refused to perform it in November. The department’s inspector general, Phyllis Fong, ordered the Western blot test in June without advising Johanns and by the time Johanns found out about it, the testing was under way.
Johanns was annoyed that the round of testing which confirmed “Mad Cow” had been ordered without him being consulted first.”I was asked by the Senate and the president to operate the department,” Johanns said. “I believe, in this area, very clearly, the secretary should be consulted, whoever the secretary is, before testing is undertaken. From my standpoint, I believe I was put there to operate the department and was very disappointed.”
A senior research associate with Consumers Union, Michael Hansen, said USDA officials “almost sound like some Keystone Kops.”
Johanns reassured Americans that they should not be afraid of eating beef, saying: “This animal was blocked from entering the food supply because of the firewalls we have in place. Americans have every reason to continue to be confident in the safety of our beef.”
On June 17, the Associated Press reported: “American cattle are eating chicken litter, cattle blood and restaurant leftovers that could help transmit mad cow disease — a gap in the U.S. defense that the Bush administration promised to close nearly 18 months ago.”
John Stauber, co-author of “Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?” said: “Once the cameras were turned off and the media coverage dissipated, then it’s been business as usual, no real reform, just keep feeding slaughterhouse waste. The entire U.S. policy is designed to protect the livestock industry’s access to slaughterhouse waste as cheap feed.”
Critics of the U.S. testing regimen said the fumbles this time increase their concerns about America’s screening process.
“How can we be sure they were really negative?” Craig Culp, a spokesman for the Center for Food Safety asked; “After all, (here is a cow that was) negative in November that is positive in June.”
The companies which render slaughter waste say new restrictions are not warranted. “We process about 50 billion pounds of product annually — in visual terms, that is a convoy of semi trucks, four lanes wide, running from New York to L.A. every year,” said Jim Hodges, president of the American Meat Institute Foundation.
Friday, March 23, 2007
In a press release earlier today, New York State Agriculture Commissioner Patrick Hooker, along with Dean of Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine Donald F. Smith, confirmed that scientists at the New York State Food Laboratory identified Aminopterin as a toxin present in cat food samples from Menu Foods.
Menu Foods is the manufacturer of several brands of cat and dog food subject to a March 16, 2007 recall.
Aminopterin is a drug used in chemotherapy for its immunosuppressive properties and, in some areas outside the US, as a rat poison. Earlier reports stated that wheat gluten was a factor being investigated, and officials now state that the toxin would have come from Chinese wheat used in the pet food, where it is used for pest control. Investigators will not say that this is the only contaminant found in the recalled food, but knowing the identity of the toxin should assist veterinarians treating affected animals.
The Food Laboratory tested samples of cat food received from a toxicologist at the New York State Animal Health Diagnostic Center at Cornell University. The samples were found to contain the rodenticide at levels of at least 40 parts per million.
Commissioner Hooker stated, “We are pleased that the expertise of our New York State Food Laboratory was able to contribute to identifying the agent that caused numerous illnesses and deaths in dogs and cats across the nation.”
The press release suggests Aminopterin, a derivative of folic acid, can cause cancer and birth defects in humans and can cause kidney damage in dogs and cats. Aminopterin is not permitted for use in the United States.
The New York State Food Laboratory is part of the Federal Food Emergency Response Network (FERN) and as such, is capable of running a number of unique poison/toxin tests on food, including the test that identified Aminopterin.
Friday, December 1, 2006
The U.S. government warned private financial services that al Qaeda is planning a cyber attack on the U.S. stock and bank accounts, officials said on Thursday.
Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke says: “There is no information to corroborate this aspirational threat. As a routine matter and out of an abundance of caution, US-CERT issued the situational awareness report to industry stakeholders.”
The officials said that the attacks are aimed at destroying the databases of U.S. banking and stock market web sites. The Homeland Security group claims that the threat was for all of December.
A U.S. official said that the threat was posted on an website and called for the attack to avenge the imprisonment of Muslims in the Guantanamo detention camp.
Monday, October 17, 2005
American helicopters and warplanes bombed 2 villages near Ramadi, Iraq on Sunday. The U.S. military said nearly 70 suspected insurgents were killed, while local witnesses said that at least 39 civilians, including 18 children, were also lost to the attack.
A Ramadi resident, Ahmed Fouad, said that just after 7 p.m. Sunday, U.S. warplanes killed 18 children, including Fouad’s son and 8-year-old daughter. “She was killed with her brother. Her mother had a stroke out of shock.” Fouad said.
Family members of victims gathered at a Ramadi General Hospital where refrigeration space for the dead bodies had been exhausted. In the garden the bodies of a woman and three children lay as relatives sifted through remains.
“[They] were not terrorists…they were only a bunch of civilians whose curiosity prompted them to gather around a destroyed Humvee,” said Dr. Dhiya Fahdawi in reference to the dead and wounded.
The U.S. military neither confirmed nor denied that civilians were killed and issued a statement saying; “All the attacks were timed and executed in a manner to reduce the possibility of collateral damage.”
Monday, May 7, 2007
The 88th annual Brita Kongreso (British Congress) in Letchworth, England drew to an official close, Sunday, after a weekend of presentations, courses, lectures, and activities in Esperanto. With the final excursion to Cambridge (town of the Third Universal Esperanto Congress in 1907) taking place on Monday, the event will draw to a final close at the end of today.
The Brita Kongreso is an opportunity for Esperantists the world over to convene and spend the weekend being entertained, lectured, and socialising with other Esperantists in a relaxed atmosphere. This year, it was also host to a Guinness World Record attempt by French musician Jean-Marc Leclercq, a.k.a. jOmO, who successfully sang 25 songs in 25 different languages in an open air concert on Saturday, before providing evening entertainment within the main venue, Plinston Hall.
? June 3, 2010
June 5, 2010 ?
June 4
Pages in category “June 4, 2010”
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Sun Microsystems has released StarOffice 8 today. StarOffice 8 is a commercial office suite that includes word-processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing and database applications.
According to Sun, StarOffice 8 “provides excellent compatibility with Microsoft Office”. This new version improves Word, Excel and PowerPoint import and export filters, improving support for password-protected Word and Excel files and presentations with complex animations, autoshapes and slide transitions. StarOffice 8 also includes a Microsoft Office macro converter allowing many Microsoft Office macros to work in StarOffice.
StarOffice 8 is also the first commercial office suite to support the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument). OpenDocument is an XML based file format created by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards. Massachusetts has recently announced the plan to switch to OpenDocument format. Microsoft has said it will not support the OpenDocument format.
StarOffice 8 is based on the open source OpenOffice.org project. OpenOffice.org was founded July 2000, by Sun with the release of StarOffice code under two open source licenses.
StarOffice 8 is available as a download from Sun’s Web site for $69.95, or packaged product can be ordered for $99.95. Enterprise customers can purchase StarOffice 8 for $35 (£20) per user. OpenOffice.org is available for free from openoffice.org.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
At least eight construction workers have died and thirteen more are injured after a building collapsed during construction in Qiuzhigou Village, a suburb of China’s Wuhan City. It is unclear how many more if any are trapped as the project’s coordinator fled and is being sought by police.
The collapse occurred at 5 p.m. local time yesterday and reduced the four-story structure to a five-metre pile of rubble. The building was a private residence and was illegal as authorities had not been informed of it. Its location in an area accessible only via narrow alleys is hampering search and rescue efforts as heavy equipment such as cranes is having difficulty reaching the scene.
Around 100 rescuers continue to pick through the rubble in the rain. An investigation has been launched.
Sunday, May 31, 2020
SpaceX successfully launched its first crewed mission at 1922 UTC yesterday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, US with NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley in a Crew Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket. This was the first launch of a crewed spacecraft from the United States since NASA’s final Space Shuttle mission in July 2011 — a mission Hurley piloted.
SpaceX, backed by entrepreneur Elon Musk, is the first private company to send astronauts into space. The company has engineered and operated reusable rockets, potentially reducing the overall cost of future space missions. Shortly after the launch, the Falcon 9 rocket’s first stage disengaged and returned to an autonomous spaceport drone ship off the coast, to be refurbished and reused on a future mission. Behnken and Hurley are slated to catch up to the International Space Station (ISS) for a stay of one to four months, docking today at 1429 UTC.
The originally planned launch on Wednesday afternoon, local time, was scrubbed due to inclement weather conditions less than 20 minutes before scheduled launch time, with the schedule pushed back to yesterday. Unlike Wednesday’s scrub, however, yesterday’s launch proceeded without issue. Hurley, on radio following the minutes-long ride to low Earth orbit, said, “It was incredible”.
SpaceX’s launch is the latest development in a program initiated in earnest by NASA’s 2014 selection of SpaceX, along with Boeing, to be an initial commercial contractor providing transportation for NASA astronauts to the ISS. Boeing’s first crewed mission is reportedly expected to launch next year. Since the retirement of the Space Shuttles in 2011, NASA has relied on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to transport its astronauts to the orbiting space station.
Hurley, along with his fellow crew members aboard the final Shuttle mission, had left a small U.S. flag aboard the ISS, to be retrieved when the U.S. space program was once again able to launch astronauts to the outpost. Hurley and Behnken, when they depart, plan to return this flag to Earth after a nearly nine-year hiatus to commemorate the milestone. The exact timing of their return is not set, however, as it depends on the continued performance of the Crew Dragon spacecraft, and on when the next Crew Dragon mission occurs, which NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has said may be ready to launch by late August.
Bridenstine remarked of the remainder of the test flight, “I’m breathing a sigh of relief, but I will also tell you I’m not gonna celebrate until Bob and Doug are home safely.” Hurley, for his part, paraphrased the first U.S. citizen in space, Alan Shepard, commenting before launch on the occasion of the United States’ return to human spaceflight capability: “SpaceX we’re go for launch. Let’s light this candle.”