Unprecedented demand for the flu vaccine has caused its price to skyrocket across the United States, from $40 a vial two months ago to as high as $215 today, leading to charges that companies are price-gouging health agencies amid fears of an unusually harsh flu season. Each vial contains 10 doses.

Meanwhile, private U.S. companies have been offering for sale several hundred thousand vaccine doses at a steep markup to health agencies across the country. The companies say they are doing nothing wrong. It is a simple case of supply and demand, they say.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services paid $74 a vial for the vaccine it bought from England, about twice what it typically pays.
The increased cost of acquiring the vaccine is not expected to be passed along to the public, health officials said. The health agencies will likely absorb the added expense, they said.
FluMist, a nasal spray vaccine, is being offered for the first time this year, with about 4 million doses available.

WashTImes
The capture promises to restore Mr. Rumsfeld's status as the ultimate wartime leader, after months of being pummeled by the Washington press corps.
In addition to eyewitness identification, the piece of evidence that finally convinced Mr. Rumsfeld was the money: Why would a Saddam double be hiding with nearly $1 million in cash?
mred - how bout the dna?

Osama bin Laden proposed attacking a Turkish military base used by the United States, but militants stymied by tight security bombed civilian targets instead, killing Muslims and upsetting al-Qaida leaders, Turkish officials told The Associated Press.

"The government can’t spend taxpayer money promoting one side of the drug policy debate while prohibiting taxpayers from using their own money to promote the other side," said Bill Piper, Associate Director of National Affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance. "This is censorship and not the democratic way.

Richard Britt, 51, the executive director of the Amherst Boys and Girls Club, was arrested and arraigned Monday on a charge of possessing child pornography, police said.
Britt revealed that he had sexually explicit materials last week during a meeting with board members in his apartment.

In 1988, the same year the Iran-Iraq war ended, a new U.S. president was elected. George Herbert Walker Bush came into office determined to pursue a policy of engagement with Saddam. In fact, his first year in office, President Bush signed a secret executive order, National Security Directive Number 26. It called for even closer ties between the United States and Iraq.

If U.S. officials insist on retaining control over Hussein’s case, what are they going to charge him with — “misleading President Bush into mistakenly believing that he still possessed the weapons of mass destruction that the president’s father gave him”?

there’s a good possibility that Hussein will be charged with employing chemical weapons both against Iran and his own people. But how do they explain the failure to indict the U.S. officials who furnished him with those weapons in the first place?
Indeed, the real question is: Will President Bush permit Saddam Hussein to be put on trial for anything? As U.S. officials begin to reflect upon the legal quandary that Hussein’s capture has put them in, they will undoubtedly come to rue the day that U.S. soldiers treated his capture differently than the way they treated the capture of his two sons.

The Tavistock Institute did some interesting research after WW2,
showing that conditions of stress were conducive to operations attempting to change belief-structures or world-view of society.

"According to a Congressional report on the 9/11 attacks, an estimated 70,000 to 120,000 jihadists passed through those training camps. So even if a few thousand are sent to Iraq, Osama bin Laden will retain a healthy reserve capable of sustaining his global jihad." (Bruce Hoffman is a terrorism expert with the RAND Corporation.)

This is superficially curious. The US did not similarly trust the Serbs to try Slobodan Milosevic, although they had voted him from power themselves, enjoyed a democratic government and already had him under house arrest. Milosevic's crimes were against his own people. Yet his own people were not allowed to try him. Americans kidnapped him and spirited him away to The Hague.
Iraqis may speak of a thirst for justice but they understandably mean revenge. The Governing Council's Mowaffak al-Rubaie said on Monday: "We will get sovereignty on June 30 and I can tell you he could be executed on July 1."

It's just a suggestion but maybe if you're that convinced of Republican stupidity you ought to write about something else between now and, say, the start of Condi Rice's second term in 2013. The fact (if you'll forgive the word) is that things are going pretty well, and there's really no losing scenario in Iraq.
Bush may not succeed in bringing democracy to Mesopotamia, but so what? If he has to settle for a Musharraf and a big American base on the Syrian border, it's no skin off his back. But it's still better to have tried.
mred - the australian has started borrowing a lot of puremurdoch. hard. right.



the photo is from Jeff Rense's site - November 1993 - Hustler Magazine - satire ad.
mred - larry flint also played an odd role in the jessica lynch story. odd.

In NSW, a surveillance law reform proposal is drafted so sweepingly it would declare spectacles and contact lenses as illegal devices intended to enhance surveillance.

In Victoria, there are discussions about privacy laws preventing the use, without their permission, of photographs of people taken in public places.



Just as the U.S. launched its PR blitz on the capture of Saddam, a bomb on a bridge just outside Rawalpindi, Pakistan, came close to killing Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president. Over the preceding few days Musharraf had come down hard on jihadi groups and had made peace overtures to India, which really enrages the jihadists. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the No. 2 man in Al Qaeda, in a taped message broadcast on Al Jazeera, called for Musharraf's assassination.

But they added that doctors and parents should closely monitor children for signs of restlessness, agitation, recklessness, unusual behavior or thoughts of suicide, especially during the first weeks of drug treatment and after any increase in dosage. Some anecdotal evidence suggests that suicidal or aggressive behavior, if it is tied to the drugs, occurs within the first weeks after the drug treatment is started.