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US Department of Health proposes priorities for flu vaccine distribution

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Thursday, December 20, 2007

Draft guidelines issued by the United States Department of Health and Human Services in November have established a series of tiers and categories for distribution of scarce vaccine in the event of pandemic flu. These guidelines give strong preference for emergency responders, military and national security personnel, and socially important occupations, such as top politicians, energy sector and communications personnel, bankers, and newborn infants. Distribution of vaccine to the elderly occupies a low priority, especially in the event of a severe pandemic with a case-fatality rate of 2% or more causing more than 1.8 million deaths. The scheme differs significantly from that proposed in Britain in 2005, which gave high priority to the elderly, noting that most of the deaths in recent years – ranging from 12,000 to 29,000 annually – were in elderly patients.

U.S. 2007 Britain 2005
Tier 1. Deployed/mission critical national security, health care providers, police, fire, vaccine manufacturers, top politicians Priority 1. Health care workers, nursing home staff
Tier 1*. Pregnant women, infants (*Sub-tier plan places at lower priority than other Tier 1) Priority 2. Fire, police, security, communications, utilities, undertakers, armed forces
Tier 2. Intelligence, border, national guard, other domestic national security, community support, electricity, natural gas, communications, water, critical government personnel, children, household contacts of infants Priority 3. High medical risk (e.g. diabetes, immunosuppressed)
Priority 4. All over 65 years of age
Tier 3. Other active duty military, important health care, transport, food, banking, pharmaceutical, chemical, oil sector personnel, postal and other government, children Priority 5. Selected industries, e.g. pharmaceuticals
Tier 4. High risk conditions, all over 65 years of age Priority 6. Children
Tier 5. General public Priority 7. General public

The plan is open to public comment under U.S. Federal Register guidelines until December 31.

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Wikinews interviews You-peng Wang of Taipei Electrical Commercial Association

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Sunday, November 11, 2007

Besides becoming a political stomping ground for the Pan-Green and Pan-Blue coalitions, there are other changes from past years of Taipei Audio Video Fair (TAVF). With those changes in mind, Wikinews reporter Rico Shen interviewed You-peng Wang, chairman of the Taipei Electrical Commercial Association (TECA), the main organizer of TAVF, about the 60th year anniversary of TECA and the changes to the show.

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Marketing

How To Use Relevance In Your Web Content

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Submitted by: Peter Nisbet

If you really want to know how to use relevance in your web content for any page on your website, and write content for your website that cannot be misconstrued, you have to open your eyes and look at what you are writing. I have read so much hysterical tripe online, even on the first page of Google from reasonably respected websites, that I despair for the intelligence of many people.

Given that their sites are not at #1 – #5 due to a lack of ability or intelligence, then I also despair for their honesty. Who really cares about complex mathematical equations? This big term Latent Semantic Indexing , or LSI for short, is a meaningless term for webmasters and they should not even be bothering with it, let alone contemplating teaching you about it.

I have a page on my website telling you what it is not! Perhaps more people should read that. In fact, the Google algorithm contains an element of Latent Semantic Analysis, there is no such a term as LSI, and you certainly can t make your website LSI compliant, since that term indicates a total ignorance in what it actually is. Any statistical mathematician can tell you that! It s pretty basic.

Here s a heads up on how to keep relevance to your topic and keywords, or to phrase it another way, maintain contextually relevant content on your web pages. Phrasing it another way is a good way, in fact, to maintain that relevance without repetition. This is what Google likely mean by LSI (a misnomer in any case), since it works perfectly for me.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hH2F_XKhGxE[/youtube]

The first thing you have to do when writing content for your website is to determine your keyword or phrase. To me Relevance in your Web content is a keyword. OK? That s normal accepted terminology. Your keyword can be a single word or a long phrase what is called a long-tailed keyword . Decide on the keyword you are using, then use THAT as the title of your web page. Use the Title html tags for it, and put it in H1 tags at the top of your web page.

Now study that keyword very carefully, and break it down into its components. Is their any way that an alien using a dictionary for every word could come down to earth and misinterpret the meaning of your keyword? If so be aware of the fact, and immediately put the alien right in the very first sentence of your article or page content. Here are two examples. Once is very commonly used on the web and the other is not. Have you spotted the second already? It is in this article! Now the first:

Take the keyword How to Train German Shepherds . Great good keyword, lots of demand and it makes a good title. However, let s break it down. In the Concise Oxford Dictionary, german can mean having both parents the same, and shepherd is somebody who tends sheep. So your alien could believe that your article is about a shepherd tending his flock with two parents the same. Illogical? Perhaps. Semantically correct: certainly. So now, for the alien read the Google algorithm.

Your job is telling the alien exactly what you mean by your use of words. First, you might mention the German canine so the alien does his thing and comes up with one of the front teeth of a person from Germany. Get the drift? So-called LSI has nothing to do with it. You have to write using vocabulary that explains exactly, and incontrovertibly, what the subject of your page is.

In your first sentence use dogs , Germany perhaps, Alsatian, dog training, puppy, and so on so that when put together the meaning is obvious. Leave that till the last paragraph and the spider will be off wondering why you are trying to train a shepherd with two similar parents that have front teeth – and wear dog collars! Perhaps they are German vicars!

Write using as much text as is reasonable and normal in your article that describes the true meaning of your page, and the message it is conveying. Don t overuse your keyword: in the title, first 100 characters and last paragraph is enough, plus once each 400 words. Certainly not 3% – 15 times in a 500 word page? That s spamming and you will not be listed. The algorithm is looking for no more times that you would use in speech or normal writing: the rest should be of similar meaning. Use a thesaurus: thesaurus.com is a good reference.

OK? Get the idea. Now for another twist to this. Check out my title again. How to Use Relevance in Your Web Content . You know what I mean and I know what I mean, but we don t determine the listing position of this article on a search engine. What does? A spider!

What does a spider think of when it sees the juxtaposition of the words Web and Content ?

You don t have to be Fly for white guy to work that one out. Use the first paragraph to begin your explanation, so that the spider isn t salivating thinking that your article is relevant to its dinner!

About the Author: For more information on how to write your articles and optimize your web pages so as not to get your spiders hungry, but to satisfy them, visit

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Immigration Detainees on Hunger Strike in Oxford UK

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Thursday, June 15, 2006

One hundred and twenty detainees at an immigration removal centre in Oxford, UK, are on hunger strike. The protest started when some detainees refused breakfast on Wednesday 14th June 2006. A letter from the hunger strikers explaining why they are seeking to draw attention to their plight in this way has been reproduced in full below.

Those detained at the centre are mostly men who have sought asylum in the UK and whose asylum applications have been rejected. These people are then held without knowing how long they will be detained for – some end up being held for many years while awaiting deportation.

The removal centre, known as Campsfield, or Campsfield House is approximately 5 miles north of Oxford and has been in operation since 1993. It was managed on behalf of the UK Government by Global Solutions Limited, until may 2006 when it was taken on by GEO UK, the centre has a capacity of 198. Only males are detained at Campsfield.

According to the campaign group Barbed Wire Britain Over 2,600 individuals, mostly asylum seekers, are detained indefinitely in the UK without trial and with no automatic right to bail.

There have been reports in the UK press of the state taking people to detention centres without notice, in the early hours of the morning using excessively heavy handed tactics, taking children out of schools and separating families.

Many UK people and politicians express their disgust at the way detainees are treated, yet it continues. Perhaps this action by the detainees themselves will further highlight their plight and result in more UK electors writing to their MPs and demanding improvements to the way in which rejected asylum seekers are treated.

“We are detainees at Campsfield removal centre in Oxford. Most of us have been here for a long while now. There are people who have been detained for up to two years and down to three months. We are cramped in here like animals. We are treated like animals and moved around different detention centres like animals. The immigration service have taken husbands from their families and taken people who ran away from persecution in their various countries, and dumped everyone in here.

Once you are put in here the immigration service forget you. There are detainees who have applied to go back to their own countries that are still being held here for months without any news about their cases, just so that the private security companies get more money.

Detainees are asked to seek asylum and then refused. The immigration service also ask detainees to apply for bail. When you get a bail hearing date all of a sudden they serve you with removal papers that are not valid. There are many of these situations. In most cases the immigration service don’t take you to your court hearings. And then they tell the judges you refused to turn up, just so the hearing goes ahead in your absence. Many detainees have been served with removal papers and travel documents but nothing happens on the removal day.

Campsfield has become a slave house. We detainees are treated like slaves, to do odd jobs for officers. Detainees are handcuffed to see doctors or dentists in hospitals or clinic appointments. We have some racist security officers who make racist comments to detainees and go out of their way to make you feel like committing suicide. Detainees have to be at the point of death before they get to see the doctors.

The food is not worth eating. Even dogs would refuse to eat what we eat. But we don’t have a choice; every single day we eat the same food (the food we eat is rice, chicken, sandwiches, and left-over eggs)”.

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School Academy

How Do I Become An Orthopedic Surgeon?

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By Elizabeth L Perkins

Becoming an orthopedist, or an orthopedic surgeon, is a rigorous procedure that takes in all around 14 years of hard study. This includes beginning with four years of undergraduate study that should include two years of chemistry, a year of biology, and a year of physics – courses typically offered as part of a B.S. (Bachelor of Science) program at practically any accredited college or university.

Having completed this, a future orthopedist must then take an admission test for a Medical College, which takes about one day. Passing this test requires sufficient knowledge in the areas of biology and physics, and includes both written and verbal sections. Following that, the student must apply for admission to a Medical College. Because of their highly competitive nature – many schools only admit 5 to 10 percent of applicants – the admissions process generally has a preliminary round and a secondary round, followed by an interview of the candidate.

Medical School itself requires four years of study – the first two of these in the classroom, and the last two in-hospital training. During this time, he or she takes National Board Examinations – one upon completing the second year, and one upon completion of the third year; each examination involves an entire day of rigorous testing of medical knowledge. Upon graduation, the student receives his or her MD degree, or better still, a D.O. degree specifically in Osteopathic medicine. Then the following fall, the would-be orthopedist submits his or her application for Orthopedics Residency.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYx7YG0RsFY[/youtube]

Successful applications result in an interview of the candidate being scheduled that winter. All medical students learn the results of their applications for residency on the same big day, called Match Day. Residency begins with a preliminary year of internship, starting on July 1, at a determined hospital, focusing on general surgery. After this year, a further four years of residency are required, during which time the doctor will throughly learn all the basics of orthopedic procedures in an apprentice role. He or she will benefit from spending a bit of time in several of the various subspecialties of the field, eg hip, knee, shoulder, etc., rather than concentrating exclusively in one targeted area. Finally, an optional year of fellowship in a particular subspecialty allows the orthopedist to focus on his desired area of treatment, eg., sports injuries, pediatric orthopedics, etc.

Only around ten percent of orthopedic residents are women, and about twenty percent of the total are members of minority groups. About 700 doctors per year in the United States complete the required five years of orthopedic residency training; they are reckoned to number around only 3 to 4 percent of all practicing physicians. Once residency is completed, the surgeon is enabled to seek Board certification, which requires another written and oral test and attention to the candidates performance record while in residency; in the United States, certification is provided by the American Board of Orthopedic Surgery. The total number of orthopedic surgeons in the US at present is thought to be around 20,400 – not many for a population of over 300 million!

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Canadian jail inmates used nail clippers to escape, report finds

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Friday, March 13, 2009

According to a government report released on Tuesday, six inmates of a Regina, Saskatchewan jail managed to escape last summer after spending four months using nail clippers and other makeshift instruments to break out.

We didn’t think we would get away with it

The report stated that no fewer than 87 prison guards had supervised the inmates’ unit, but did not discover the prisoners’ escape plans.

The inmates, four of whom had faced murder charges, used the instruments to remove a steel plate and grill, and finally break through with a shower rod, reaching an exterior brick wall. The inmates used sheets and blankets to climb up the exterior walls of the compound.

Some of the prisoners played cards at a table in the corridor to block the guards’ view.

The prisoners were later caught and sent back to prison. “We didn’t think we would get away with it. We started working on it. It was something to do and we just kept at it. When we didn’t get caught, we picked our night and just went,” said one of the escapees to the team investigating the incident.

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Congressman Cunningham admits taking bribes

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Monday, November 28, 2005

U.S. Representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R–CA) pled guilty today to conspiring to take bribes in exchange for using his influence as a member of the House Appropriations Committee to help a defense contractor get business. In total he pled guilty to one count of income tax evasion and four counts of conspiracy, namely mail fraud, wire fraud, bribery of public official and accepting bribes. U.S. District judge Larry A. Burns scheduled Cunnigham to be sentenced on February 27. He is facing up to 10 years in prison and nearly $500,000 in fines, as well as forfeiture of unspecified amounts of cash and property.

In the court hearing, Cunningham admitted to accepting “bribes in exchange for performance of official duties” between “the year 2000 and June of 2005”, taking “both cash payments and payments in kind” and following up by “trying to influence the Defense Department”.

The federal investigation against Cunningham was triggered by his sale of his California residence to defense contractor Mitchell Wade in late 2003. However, Wade never moved in and sold the house at a $700,000 loss three quarters of a year later. At the same time Wade’s company MZM won tens of millions of dollars in defense contracts. Subsequent investigations discovered more questionable business transactions, including interactions with the defense contractor ADCS. In his plea agreement he testified that, among other charges, he “demanded, sought and received at least $2.4 million in illicit payments and benefits from his co-conspirators in various forms, including cash, checks, meals, travel, lodging, furnishings, antiques, rugs, yacht club fees, boat repairs and improvements, moving expenses, cars and boats.”

Cunningham announced his resignation after the hearing. In a written statement released by his law firm O’Melveny & Myers LLP he declared “The truth is — I broke the law, concealed my conduct, and disgraced my high office. I know that I will forfeit my freedom, my reputation, my worldly possessions, and most importantly, the trust of my friends and family.”

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Bum Marketing If You Happen To Want Extra Internet Site Visitors On Their Sites Or Perhaps Personal Blogs}

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Bum Marketing If You Happen To Want Extra Internet Site Visitors On Their Sites Or Perhaps Personal Blogs

by

Bartholomew Higginthorpe

For quite a while now there’s been plenty of excitement in the online world with regards to marketing with articles, nevertheless I’m nonetheless, regularly asked just what it is and also precisely how it performs. Listed here is a brief explanation.

Like any big medium, the Internet is certainly hungry with regard to subject matter. Even so, unlike other media outlets like Television, radio stations as well as newspapers, which normally only use content material through professional writers, on the Internet, virtually anyone can present articles and other content. Article promotion is actually a way of benefiting from that liberty and using this medium as a way to bring in guests towards your site or maybe your blog page. And so, precisely how does it work?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFk2sIZPYrc[/youtube]

First you need to generate a piece of writing. A normal article for Internet use will be somewhere between 350 and 700 words in length. These articles should be thoroughly centered all around a specific area of expertise. The article will work with keywords relevant to the actual author’s expected target audience and sometimes it will contain a numbered as well as bulleted list intended for clearness as well as easy reading through.

Then you need to distribute your article on the web. These day there are many hundreds of article directories, in which just about any author can distribute virtually any piece of writing. The majority are free for you to utilize, although several, more distinct article directories ask for a small fee. Together with the particular reality that there are 100s maybe even tens of thousands of article directories on the web, choosing article directories to publish your content pieces to is often a fairly simple chore.

The actual article directory sites are usually sorted into numerous categories not to mention the particular content writer will need to choose which group they should publish under. You can be additionally asked to incorporate several applicable keywords for your personal content article and you also need to incorporate your personalized or your Internet business information and a backlink to your Internet site, as part of your authors bio box, this is just a compact sentence or two with regards to you and your work, which will appear at the end of each content article. The directories utilize some sort of team of staff to review and approve every single article before the article appears on the Internet.

So how can doing all this attract potential customers? To start with, the particular article directory sites, which are incredibly content rich, have higher rankings within the major search engines and sometimes your content article could possibly be noticed in the search engine results and an intrigued reader might check out your link and come through to your Internet site.

However, the real function of the particular article directory sites is usually to furnish a location for e-zine owners and also site owners to seek out totally free and also relevant content. Everyday, publishers of a huge range of topic precise e-zines, go to the article directory sites and even acquire fresh articles which are highly relevant to their particular viewers. Using these articles saves these people the time associated with creating the article on their own. The only stipulation made is that they must post the article entirely, while not modifying and always include the author’s bio box and also maintain the links.

Lastly you may also contact website as well as blog masters to see if you can upload your content pieces on their own sites. Working with this approach gives the site or blog owners content for his or her websites and it also gives you links for your own website. Which means that over a period, just one content article may easily, end up being found in many different sites online, each time including a treasured link pointing to your site, which in turn not merely directs extremely targeted visitors to your website, but additionally it enables you to improve your search rankings.

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Bankruptcy for U.S. automaker GM becomes almost certain after bondholder offers fail

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Thursday, May 28, 2009

The United States automobile manufacturing firm General Motors announced on Wednesday that most of its bondholders did not exchange GM’s US$27 billion debt for a ten percent share in the company’s stock.

The automaker, in financial straits, has a June 1 deadline to finish a government restructuring plan that includes plant closures and other debt reduction measures. U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration said it would not give more financial aid to the firm unless 90% of GM’s bondholders would agree on compromises that would significantly reduce the firm’s costs.

“The principal amount of notes tendered was substantially less than the amount required by GM to satisfy the debt reduction requirement,” GM said in a statement.

“They said no. That’s it. They tried. That’s why they’re going to have to file for bankruptcy,” said a university professor from the University of Michigan who specializes in bankruptcy.

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