- only if we're lucky.

Govt 'violence manual' raises China net users' ire

Posted 2 hours 3 minutes ago

Extracts from what appears to be a government manual telling law enforcers how to use violence have caused outrage among internet users in China.

Details from the guide were published online and in a state newspaper.

One passage advises: "Take care to avoid leaving blood on the subject's face or visible wounds on the body."

The official who circulated the extracts said he thought much of the guide was useful but some parts were inappropriate.

The guide is aimed at local government enforcers who are employed to deal with low-level crime such as checking permits and removing unlicensed street vendors.

They have often been accused of using excessive force.

The gospel of high-tech genetically modified (GM) crops is not sounding quite so sweet in the land of the converted. A new pest, the evil pigweed, is hitting headlines and chomping its way across Sun Belt states, threatening to transform cotton and soybean plots into weed battlefields.
In late 2004, “superweeds” that resisted Monsanto’s iconic “Roundup” herbicide, popped up in GM crops in the county of Macon, Georgia. Monsanto, the US multinational biotech corporation, is the world’s leading producer of Roundup, as well as genetically engineered seeds. Company figures show that nine out of 10 US farmers produce Roundup Ready seeds for their soybean crops.

So far, there have been no deaths from swine flu in the United States, and only one of the people who tested positive for the disease has been hospitalized, officials said. Even though most of the cases have been mild, officials said they expect reports of more severe infections, and said the government had declared a public health emergency over swine flu.

Despite an annual budget of more than $5 billion, Mexico's health secretary said Monday that his agency hasn't had the resources to visit the families of the dead. That means doctors haven't begun treatment for the population most exposed to swine flu, and most apt to spread it. It also means medical sleuths don't know how the victims were infected — key to understanding how the epidemic began and how it can be contained.

It remained unclear where and how the epidemic began, how it has spread, who it has killed or how fast it is growing. And the government has yet to take some basic steps critical to containing any outbreak, such as quick treatment of people who had contact with the victims. In the town of Xonacatlan, just west of Mexico City, Antonia Cortes Borbolla told The Associated Press that nobody has given her medicine in the week since her husband succumbed to raging fever and weakened lungs that a lab has confirmed as swine flu. No health workers have inspected her home, asked how her husband might have contracted the illness or tested the neighbors' pigs, she said.

WASHINGTON – Two million dead. Hospitals overwhelmed. Schools closed. Swaths of empty seats at baseball stadiums and houses of worship. An economic recovery snuffed out. We're nowhere close to what government planners say would be a worst-case scenario: a global flu pandemic. But government leaders at all levels, and major employers, have spent nearly four years planning for one in series of exercises.Their reports, reviewed by The Associated Press, and interviews with participants paint a grim picture of what could happen if the swine flu gets severely out of control. A full-scale pandemic — if it ever comes — could be expected to claim the lives of about 2 percent of those infected, about 2 million Americans.

Some advocates of tighter immigration rules are jumping on the swine flu public health emergency to call for the closing of the border with Mexico, including a ban on all air and ground traffic and importation of products.

"The Obama administration's failure to secure our borders against a possible pandemic is putting American lives at risk at a time when days and hours matter," said William Gheen, head of the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, accusing the Obama administration of "treating Mexico like a 51st state, instead of separate nation."