West Nile virus outbreak in Texas kills 17, Dallas mayor declares “state of emergency”

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Photo credit: dr_relling

West Nile virus kills 17 in Texas, sickens hundreds

By AFP.  The US state of Texas is battling an outbreak of the West Nile virus, with 17 deaths being blamed on the mosquito-borne disease, authorities said Wednesday.

Throughout the state, 381 people have been sickened since the start of the year, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.

“Texas is on track to have the most cases of West Nile illness since the disease first emerged in the state in 2002,” it said in a statement.

The county incorporating Dallas, the ninth-largest city in the United States, has been the hardest hit, prompting the mayor to declare a local state of disaster.

“The City of Dallas is experiencing a widespread outbreak of mosquito-borne West Nile virus and has caused and appears likely to continue to cause widespread and severe illness and loss of life,” Mayor Michael Rawlings said in the proclamation of emergency that takes effect Wednesday.  Read more from this story HERE.

Dallas Mayor declares state of emergency, orders aerial spraying for first time in almost 50 years

By Sarah Kutah.  Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings on Wednesday declared the city’s recent West Nile virus outbreak to be a state of emergency and authorized the first aerial spraying of insecticide in the city in more than 45 years.

Dallas and other North Texas cities have agreed to the rare use of aerial spraying from planes to combat the nation’s worst outbreak of West Nile virus so far this year. Dallas last had aerial spraying in 1966, when more than a dozen deaths were blamed on encephalitis.

More than 200 cases of West Nile and 10 deaths linked to the virus have been reported across Dallas County, where officials authorized aerial spraying last week. State health department statistics show 381 cases and 16 deaths related to West Nile statewide.

“The number of cases, the number of deaths are remarkable, and we need to sit up and take notice,” Rawlings said during a city council briefing. “We do have a serious problem right now.”

Aerial spraying for mosquitoes could begin Thursday evening, depending on weather conditions. The state health department, which will pay for the $500,000 aerial spraying with emergency funds, has a contract with national spraying company Clarke. Clarke officials have said two to five planes will be used in Dallas County.  Read more from this story HERE.

Normalizing the unthinkable: RFID implants begin in Washington (+video)

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Photo credit: Forbes.com

Amal Graafstra snaps on a pair of black rubber gloves. “Do you want to talk about pain management techniques?” he asks. The bearded systems administrator across the table, who requested I call him “Andrew,” has paid Grafstra $30 to have a radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip injected into the space between his thumb and pointer finger, and as Graafstra describes Lamaze-type breathing methods, Andrew looks remarkably untroubled, in spite of the intimidatingly high-gauge syringe sitting on the table between them.

Graafstra finishes his pain talk, fishes a tiny cylindrical two-millimeter diameter EM4012 RFID chip out of a tin of isopropyl alcohol, and drops it into the syringe’s end, replacing the RFID tag intended for pets that came with the injection kit. He swabs Andrew’s hand with iodine, carefully pinches and pulls up a fold of skin on the top of his hand to create a tent of flesh, and with the other hand slides the syringe into the subcutaneous layer known as the fascia, just below the surface.

Then he plunges the plastic handle and withdraws the needle. A small crowd of onlookers applauds. The first subject of the day has been successfully chipped.

Over the course of the weekend, Andrew would be one of eight people to undergo the RFID implantation among the 500 or so attendees of Toorcamp, a hacker conference and retreat near the northwest corner of Washington State. Graafstra’s “implantation station” was set up in the open air: Any camper willing to spend $30 and sign a liability waiver could have the implantation performed, and after the excitement of Andrew’s injection, a small line formed to be next.

And why volunteer to be injected with a chip that responds to radio signals with a unique identifier, a procedure typically reserved for tracking pets and livestock? “I thought it would be cool,” says Andrew, when we speak at a picnic table a few minutes after his injection. (The pain, he tells me, was only a short pinch, followed by a “weird feeling of a foreign body sliding into my hand.”)

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Romney taunts China over moon landing, Olympic medals

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In this humorous speech at a campaign stop this week, Romney taunted China over the US’s medal count and moon landing.

Probing Obama: Russian sub moves undetected in Gulf of Mexico for a month

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Photo credit: DVIDSHUB

A Russian nuclear-powered attack submarine armed with long-range cruise missiles operated undetected in the Gulf of Mexico for several weeks and its travel in strategic U.S. waters was only confirmed after it left the region, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

It is only the second time since 2009 that a Russian attack submarine has patrolled so close to U.S. shores.

The stealth underwater incursion in the Gulf took place at the same time Russian strategic bombers made incursions into restricted U.S. airspace near Alaska and California in June and July, and highlights a growing military assertiveness by Moscow.

The submarine patrol also exposed what U.S. officials said were deficiencies in U.S. anti-submarine warfare capabilities—forces that are facing cuts under the Obama administration’s plan to reduce defense spending by $487 billion over the next 10 years.

The Navy is in charge of detecting submarines, especially those that sail near U.S. nuclear missile submarines, and uses undersea sensors and satellites to locate and track them.

Read more from this story HERE.

Romney calls Obama ‘angry and desperate,’ but still won’t ask for college records

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Photo credit: DonkeyHotey

Mitt Romney lashed out at President Obama with some of the harshest rhetoric of his campaign at a Tuesday night rally here, accusing Obama of leveling “wild and reckless accusations that disgrace the office of the presidency.”

The already divisive presidential contest took on an even uglier tone after Romney seized on the latest campaign-trail skirmish — a comment at a Virginia rally by Vice President Biden that Romney’s plans to loosen Wall Street regulations would “put y’all back in chains” — to go after his opponents.

“This is what an angry and desperate presidency looks like. President Obama knows better, promised better, and America deserves better,” Romney told a roaring crowd of about 5,000 supporters in Chillicothe. “His campaign strategy is to smash America apart and then try to cobble together 51 percent of the pieces. If an American president wins that way, we all lose.”

Romney added, “Mr. President, take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago and let us get about rebuilding and reuniting America.”

Throughout the summer, Romney has taken umbrage at the tone of the Democratic advertising barrage, but this week he ratcheted up his criticism. He and his advisers wrote much of the speech Tuesday on his campaign bus riding between stops in Ohio.

Read more from this story HERE.

Videos: Biden’s recent comments lead Giuliani to ask if he’s too dumb to be president

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Biden is on a roll.  Today, he apparently forgot that he was in Virginia rather than North Carolina:

Then, he asserts that Republicans will put people “back in chains”:

That leads Giuliani to say that Biden might be too dumb to be president:

Of course, Biden can’t compare to Ryan. The GOP candidate for VP doesn’t even need a teleprompter:

Federal Appellate Court: No warrant needed to track you in real time by your cell phone

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Photo credit: from_ko

A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that police do not need a warrant to track the location of a suspect’s phone.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that the Drug Enforcement Administration did not violate the constitutional rights of Melvin Skinner when they collected his phone’s GPS data.

DEA agents tracked Skinner’s pay-as-you-go phone as he transported drugs between Arizona and Tennessee. They arrested him at a rest stop in Texas with a motorhome filled with more than 1,100 pounds of marijuana.

Skinner’s lawyers argued that the police violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches by collecting his phone’s GPS data without first obtaining a warrant.

But the appeals court ruled that Skinner has no reasonable expectation of privacy for his cellphone’s location data.

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Newt drills CNN Host-“You’re An Extension of the Obama Campaign”

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Gingrich hands Piers Morgan’s hat to him in this interview.  Not only does Gingrich accuse Morgan of, essentially, working for Obama, he eviscerates the Obama record, noting that the US is in the worst recovery in 75 years and that Obama’s approach is “crippling” the poor.

Obama costs Iowa fair patron $25,000, apparently doesn’t care (+video)

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Photo credit: An Honorable German

By Kyle Munson. President Barack Obama’s impact on what is arguably the Iowa State Fair’s most storied watering hole has become a morning-after mini-debate over the breakfast bacon ­ thanks to a tweet from Sen. Chuck Grassley, as well as fairgrounds chatter.

Obama’s fair stop Monday evening required shutdown of the popular Bud Tent, the heart of fairgrounds nightlife at the intersection of E. 33rd Street and Grand Avenue. Fairgoers eager to greet the president were ushered inside, screened and scanned by the Secret Service and penned in by yellow caution tape. The entire production required at least two hours, and the president’s sleek black coach bus pulled away from the Bud Tent by 8:30 p.m.

On one hand, [the Bud Tent owner Mike] Cunningham, 39, appreciated the historical significance of Obama’s visit: His great-grandfather, Lloyd Cunningham, was secretary of the fair board from 1942 to 1962 and was on hand to greet then-President Dwight Eisenhower when Ike visited the centennial fair in 1954 with Iowa’s own President Herbert Hoover in tow. (That was the first of four visits by sitting presidents, followed by Gerald Ford in 1975, George W. Bush in 2002 and Obama on Monday.)

On the other hand, the small business owner side of Cunningham fumes that the president “put a damper on what I’m trying to do here.” His Bud Tent was shut down at the most lucrative time of day, with a popular rock cover band, Hairball, about to perform at the Susan B. Knapp Amphitheater next door ­ with legions of thirsty fans.

“I was in a position to make a campaign donation against my will,” said Cunningham, a Republican.  Read more from this story HERE.

And here’s the video of Obama splurging on ten beers to pass around to the dozens of folk (except the Romney supporter) surrounding him at the fair:

Video: Sununu to CNN’s Soledad-`Put An Obama Bumper Sticker On Your Forehead’

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Governor Sununu and CNN’s Soledad O’Brien get into it in this clip from a live CNN interview today. The fireworks start at 2:10 with Sununu telling Soledad that she might as well “put an Obama bumper sticker on [her] forehead.”