Evan Solomon of the CBC interviews Kofi Annan
EVAN SOLOMON: Ok. Let’s talk about relevance of the US [sic] itself. Famously, the president of the US said the UN risks irrelevance if it did not back the war in Iraq. It didnt. There have been, as you know, tensions between the US and the UN. Tell us, tell Canadians why Canada ought to spend the scarce dollars that we as a country have on UN operations? Why the UN is actually relevant?
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“Get yer ya-ya’s out”. |
From China, this cautionary tale…
A computer game addict in western China collapsed and died at his screen after playing the popular online game Saga non-stop for 20 hours, a news report said today.
The 31-year-old began playing the game regularly at an internet cafe in Chengdu, Sichuan province, three months before his death, according to the South China Morning Post.
An employee at the cafe said he would play for more than 10 hours a day and was found dead on Saturday morning after a marathon 20-hour session, the newspaper said.
Pre-meditated “payback” for a legal hit on Vancouver Canuck captain Markus Naslund during a game Feb. 16.
Bertuzzi came up behind Moore, grabbed the back of Avalanche player’s sweater and delivered a round-house swing with his gloved right hand that struck Moore’s head. Moore fell head first to the ice under the weight of Bertuzzi, who came down on top of him at the 8:41 mark.
A pool of blood formed around Moore’s head as he lay motionless on the ice. A stretcher was wheeled out and after a delay of nearly 10 minutes the 25-year-old native of Windsor, Ont., was taken off for medical attention.
Toronto Star
Moore had regained consciousness by the time he was off the ice, but some news agencies are reporting that he may have a broken neck. Bertuzzi has been suspended indefinitely by the NHL.
He should be in jail.
Update Moore’s neck fracture and concussion confirmed, and Bertuzzi is under police investigation for assault.
Fertility hope for cancer patients
Doctors have grown the world’s first embryo from frozen human ovary tissue, raising the strongest hopes yet that the technique could be used to restore fertility in cancer patients whose treatment would otherwise damage the ovaries irreparably.
The patient was aged 30 and newly diagnosed with breast cancer when the tissue from the ovary was frozen, and 36 when it was replaced into her abdomen. Within three months the transplanted tissue began producing eggs again. An egg was harvested after stimulation with IVF drugs and mixed with her partner’s sperm to create the embryo, said Kutluk Oktay in the medical journal The Lancet.
Although the embryo did not result in pregnancy, its creation represents a big step in the quest to refine the technique, which has previously been successful only in animals.
This is certain to be welcome news to young women who are cancer patients. I’m not so sure it’s a good thing.
Dennis Scott’s saga began in February of 2003 when his family doctor found antigens consistant with prostate cancer. He didn’t receive a biopsy until the next September.
CBC
A Saskatchewan family says waiting for health care has been devastating. Tracy Grube was at the legislature Monday morning to talk about her father’s battle with cancer.
She says her dad had to wait seven months for a biopsy to diagnose his prostate cancer. Once the test results came back, Grube says the cancer was found to have spread and was considered incurable.
That wasn’t the end of Dennis Scott’s ordeal. He requires surgery to ease his discomfort. Last week he was on a hospital gurney, prepared for the surgery, when he was told to get up and put his clothes on. There were no recovery beds. It was the third time the surgery has been cancelled.
Apparently, we have an council established to monitor these incidents.
“We don’t know if this is an isolated incident, or something that’s happening repeatedly,” Quality Council chair Dr. Ben Chan said upon hearing about the incident. The Health Quality Council was set up and began monitoring the performance of Saskatchewan’s health system last summer. Chan doesn’t know how common it is to wait seven months for a biopsy, but finding out is definitely a priority. “If we’re going to manage the system better, we really need to have good quality information about just how many people are in that type of a situation,” he said.
This is the so-called Health Quality Council chairman, and he doesn’t know “how common” this is? He’s lacking good quality information? What exactly does this man do for his paycheck?
Without that information Chan said that it is hard to tell where the system may be breaking down and how to fix it. “If somebody has an urgent problem, are they going to the doctor that has the shortest waiting list, or do we know which doctor has the shortest waiting list?” Chan won’t speculate on when the council may have answers, but says if it’s any consolation, Saskatchewan is probably further ahead in this work than many other parts of the country.
Well, no Dr. Chan, it isn’t any consolation. Where the hell were his doctors? Didn’t they read his medical records? The hospital JANITOR could tell you that 7 months for a cancer biopsy is too long to wait. Why do we need an entire beaurocracy on the tax payroll to tell us what we already know and more to the point –why the fuck haven’t the whole lot of you been fired?
More – A good post at Trudeaupia about the effect of socialized health care on doctors.
This year’s Kinsmen Telemiracle is over, with over 3.5 million raised by the province’s residents.
Since its inception 27 years ago, the 20 hour province-wide telethon continues to hold a Guiness World Record, for raising more money per capita than any other fund raising event of its type. The funds are used to help residents with special needs.
Murray Wood hosts an afternoon phone in show on Saskatoon’s talk radio station, 650 CKOM (980 CJME in Regina). Today, he had a few choice words for some of our least favorite Liberals. I had been planning to dedicate a few words to Sheila Copps… saved me a lot of typing, Murray Wood did…
I emailed him to see if the piece was available online (it isn’t), but he sent me the raw text.
Heh. Nothing like a good rant to finish off a lazy Monday afternoon.
The Way I See It
If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, then self-righteous outrage is surely the final sanctuary for Liberal hacks and flacks facing their oh-so-deserved comeuppance.
I love the headline “Copps Cries Foul!!!” After losing the Liberal nomination in her Hamilton riding, the queen of the undeclared expense account suddenly wants a full accounting of the vote… and demands to know why some of her supporters were challenged.
Hey Sheila – here’s how the math breaks down; two plus two equals zero when it comes to you. That’s the number of positives you bring to any political party.
From the days of painfully shrill screeching on the opposition benches to her less than stellar time in cabinet, (remember free flags for all?) and unanswered questions about expense accounts, Sheila Copps has been a noisy, empty suit. No substance and not much style. Just sharp political claws and elbows.
Too bad for she doesn’t have better political instincts. Like a paunchy fighter who doesn’t know when to retire, Copps should have grabbed the patronage plum offered to her and ran. Of course, she could always run for the NDP.and aren’t the other parties all hoping she does?
And he was just getting started…
Build your own chicken using four simple ingredients.
Chicken genome assembled
BETHESDA, Md., Mon., March 1, 2004 – The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), today announced that the first draft of the chicken genome sequence has been deposited into free public databases for use by biomedical and agricultural researchers around the globe.
Coming Soon: Steven Den Beste– How to build a Cocker Spaniel for the kids, altering only 27 base pairs!
Inspired by Drudge.
I swear to God, I did not “photoshop” this.
If you head out for a weekend getaway, and the traffic looks something like this
You might be in Saskatchewan.
….
If longing to see something green means driving two hours north
You might be in Saskatchewan.
…
If you pull up to your motel room, and half the vehicles in the parking spaces have tracks
You might be in Saskatchewan.
Is it just me, or is Howard Stern turning into a whiny tit?
Howard came back after the break and said he has some bad news. He said that the future of radio is coming to what he thought it would. He said he’s wanted to be on radio since he was 5 and knew that he would change the way people talk on radio. He said it was his stupid destiny. He said he finally got on the radio and got on in Philadelphia and Los Angeles and he’s even changed the way people talk on TV. He said that his tim has passed though and he’s become too much of a symbol in this country that is out of control to the religious right. He said they’ve been organizing for the past 15 years or so trying to get him off the air. He said that they’ve been targeting his advertisers and trying to censor him. He said he has made the big mistake of getting political.
He’s made a career for himself as a risk taker, and now he wants a risk free environment.
I actually like Stern well enough to listen to him when travelling in the US. But give it a rest, Howard. When you push the envelope, sometimes, the envelope pushes back.
If you were broadcasting in a country in which there were no rules or regulations, in which there were no possibility of enforcing decency norms, you’d be busting your ass in a real job. Without the envelope, there can be no “Howard Stern”.
Stern could always move here to Canada , where both he and the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers are banned by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council and where watching Fox News is a criminal code offense.
update – Added to the Beltway Traffic Jam.
more – at Instapundit
Dog show weekend, so activity here will be light. Go check out some of the folks on my blogroll.
Via Drudge Report, the first post-nomination poll is out showing Kerry and Bush in a virtual dead heat.
The speculation is that Nader is the spoiler, bleeding off Democrat supporters.
Bush and the four-term Massachusetts senator, who emerged as the nominee Tuesday after a string of primary race wins over several rivals, have been running close or Kerry has been ahead in most recent polls that did not include Nader.
Since Nader entered the race Feb. 22, campaign strategists and political analysts have been trying to assess the impact of another presidential bid by the consumer activist whom Democrats blame for Al Gore’s loss in 2000.
Well, maybe. But if this proves to be a genuine signal that the enthusiasm for Kerry is already waning, it suspect it’s due to Edwards supporters moving to Bush. No doubt Nader may have skimmed off a few from Kerry’s left, but more likely he’d motivate the type who would refuse to commit to either Bush or a Kerry, the previously “undecided” who needs a third option to even want to vote.
Admittedly, I haven’t seen much of either on TV, and none of the debates. But it’s been my impression that hawkish Democrats were more comfortable with Edwards than with Kerry, and with Edwards out of the race, they can’t bring themselves to wobble over in his direction.
disclaimer: I reserve the right to be full of shit.
The country is in shock, I tell you. Our own Poster Family for Multiculturalism has admitted
“we are an al-Qaeda family”.
Ahmed Said Khadr and his family first came to national attention in 1996, when then Prime Minister Jean Chretien intervened on his behalf to gain his release from Pakistan, where he was being held on suspicion of financing the bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad.
He and a son were killed, and a second paralyzed, in a raid on an Al Queda camp on the Afghan-Pakistan border last year. Another son is in US custody at Gitmo. The admission came by way of a fifth, Abdullah Khadr, who was recently released and made his way back to Canada. Of course.
CBC news interviewed the remaining family members for a documentary.
Now, could someone please shoot the mother, before she gets another chance to reproduce?
Today, the Saskatoon Health Region announced that they will be closing up shop the last few days of March. March is the end of their fiscal year, and they’re $7 million in debt. Cancelling the surgeries is expected to save an estimated $200,000. Well, not save, of course… defer.
Saskatoon Star Phoenix:
After waiting for four years for knee surgery, a Saskatoon woman has been told she’ll have to wait even longer because the Saskatoon Health Region (SHR) can’t afford to do the procedure this month.
“I’ve waited for four years without too much complaining. I’ve been really patient because I realize there were people who needed it worse than me. But it’s got to the point where I need it as bad as anybody right now,” said Joyce Ratke, who learned this week she won’t have both knees replaced as scheduled on March 30.
One of 60 people being affected by the cancellations, her case is considered “elective”.
The annual budget of SHR is over a half billion dollars. $200,000 is a drop in their annual budget. The surgery moratorium has nothing to do about cost overruns, and everything to do with putting pressure on the politicians, and making a splash in the media. This time, though, the local media seems to be “on to them” and the decision is backfiring on the SHR.
I have a friend who works in the higher echelons of Sask Health, and she sometimes phones to vent her frustrations at the bloated unionized wages and threats to pull services whenever they need leverage for contract demands.
I told her the provincial government’s solution to reset the mindset of these “essential employees” could be summed up in 4 words.
Reagan. Air Traffic Controllers.
I had to explain what that meant.
Elena is a 25 year old who lives in Ukraine. She offers this motorcycle travelogue of the Chernobyl “Dead Zone” today.
The word CHERNOBYL scares holly bijesus out of people here. If I tell someone that I am heading in “dead zone”… you know, what I hear.. In best case- “are you nuts?” My dad used to say that people afraid of a things which they don’t know. Dad is nuclear physicist and he also says that of all dangerous things he can only think about one, which is riding on fifth or sixth gear on my bike.
Her site is on Angelfire – I suspect it’s going to get too much attention for her bandwidth allowance, but bookmark it for later, if you can’t get through.
hat tip = Politburo Diktat
Wizbang has a new photoshop contest. It promises to be fun.
update: My entry
James Joyner remarks on another good reason to use linux the creativity of the recent email virus making the rounds. Hard to believe they’re written by these little pottie mouths
Inside Bagle.j, the eighth variant to debut since Friday, and which first showed Tuesday, is text taunting Netsky that reads “Hey,NetSky, f*** off you b****, don’t ruine our bussiness, wanna start a war?” (Not exactly Shakespeare, and the hacker’s spell-checker must not be working.)
Or maybe this is payback for the “whole-word learning” movement.
Within Bagle.k, a new variant that appeared Wednesday, is similar text, said Sophos: “Hey, NetSky, f*** off you b****!”
Netsky.f, another worm discovered Wednesday, sports a retort, according to analysis by F-Secure. Tucked inside its code is the line “Skynet AntiVirus –Bagle — you are a looser!!!”
Takes me back to the good old days in alt.hackers.malicious
Well, now I know what to get the men on my Christmas list.
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Mr Benestad, a doctor and a well known transvestite, says the book will feature 80 to 100 photographs of penises. He hopes that most men will be able to find a penis similar to their own in the book. “Heterosexual men have no one to compare their penises with,” he said. |
Odd. Most of the heterosexual men I know seem more interested in comparing boobies.
