CDC: New virus strain caused cruise outbreak

John Makely

The Explorer of the Seas cruise ship returns to port after hundreds of passengers became ill on Jan. 29, 2014, in Bayonne, N.J.

The gut bug that cut short a Royal Caribbean cruise last week and sickened nearly 700 passengers and crew is a new strain of norovirus that has become something of a scourge of the seas — and everywhere else.

Federal health officials on Thursday confirmed that the norovirus that infected passengers and crew on the Explorer of the Seas is the GII.4 Sydney strain, a notorious germ first detected less than two years ago.

“This particular strain emerged in late 2012 and quickly became the predominant strain causing outbreaks not only on cruise ships but also in land-based outbreaks,” said Bernadette Burden, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That may help explain the illness that swept rapidly through the 1,000-foot cruise ship that left New Jersey for a tour of the eastern Caribbean on Jan. 21 — and had to return two days early. When it was over, 634 of the 3,071 passengers and 55 of the ship’s 1,116 crew reported being ill, typically with classic norovirus symptoms of vomiting and diarrhea, according to a CDC report.

The new strain was first discovered in Australia in March 2012 and has quickly circled the globe, said Dr. Jan Vinje, the head of the CDC lab that tests for norovirus. It emerged because, like the virus that causes the flu, norovirus mutates quickly, resulting in new strains every few years. When that happens, people who’ve already had previous versions of the bug can get sick again.

“Three years before that, we had a strain we dubbed New Orleans because that’s where it started,” he said.

The GII.4 Sydney strain was blamed for an outbreak last year on the Queen Mary 2. During a voyage that ended in early January 2013, 220 passengers and crew were sickened by the germ.

The bug doesn’t just affect cruise ships, of course. Last year, CDC officials said that the GII.4 Sydney bug had quickly become the leading cause of all norovirus cases in the U.S., including outbreaks in other close quarters such as nursing homes.

Norovirus is the leading cause of gastroenteritis in the U.S., causing about 21 million infections each year and 800 deaths.

The virus spreads very easily, often carried in the air after vomiting, or lingering on surfaces to infect the next victim. The best defense is frequent handwashing and thorough sanitation after people have been ill, CDC officals say.

First published February 6 2014, 11:10 AM

CDC: New virus strain caused cruise outbreak

Leaked Memo Reveals Who Caused The Global Financial Collapse (It"s Not Good) - MOC #261 via @LeeCamp

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Leaked Memo Reveals Who Caused The Global Financial Collapse (It"s Not Good) - MOC #261 via @LeeCamp

Attorney: "Insecurities" Caused Ex-EPA Climate Scientist To Be A Phony CIA Operative

An attorney for former Environmental Protection Agency climate scientist John Beale said In sentencing memos detailed by NBC News on Monday that his client lied about working with the CIA because of his “insecurities.”

However, federal prosecutors said Beale’s lies were designed to help him bilk about $ 900,000 in salary and other benefits from the EPA in what they described as a “crime of massive proportion” that was “offensive” to people who work for the CIA.

“With the help of his therapist,” Beale’s attorney, John Kern, wrote in his sentencing memo, “Mr. Beale has come to recognize that, beyond the motive of greed, his theft and deception were animated by a highly self-destructive and dysfunctional need to engage in excessively reckless, risky behavior.”

NBC also reported on documents it said provided new details about Beale’s crimes, for which he pleaded guilty in September.

Beale was the EPA’s highest paid employee in his role as a “senior policy advisor” in the agency’s Office of Air and Radiation. Court documents showed he did not work for six months in 2008 and told supervisors he was working with the CIA on an election-year project involving “candidate security. In late 2010, Beale justified another absence from work by claiming to be in Pakistan.

In his sentencing memo, Kern admitted Beale did “absolutely no work” for an 18 month period that started in June 2011. In addition to his salary, Beale charged more than $ 200,000 in flights and hotel expenses to the EPA, including some that Kern said were made for “personal reasons.”

The EPA began investigating Beale in early 2012 after an administrator noticed he was still on the payroll months after holding a retirement party in September 2011. Beale officially retired in April. 

Shutterstock / Ritu Manoj Jethani

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Attorney: "Insecurities" Caused Ex-EPA Climate Scientist To Be A Phony CIA Operative

6 presidential siblings and the headaches they caused

6 presidential siblings and the headaches they caused
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Every aspect of the American presidency comes under intense scrutiny, but few parts of a president’s life contain as many amusing, slightly sordid anecdotes as their siblings’ behavior

Every aspect of the American presidency comes under intense scrutiny, but few parts of a president’s life contain as many amusing, slightly sordid anecdotes as their siblings’ behavior. When a new president takes office, his ne’er-do-well siblings receive a whole slew of opportunities for corrupt behavior, legal scrapes, and generally humiliating mayhem. Here are a few of our favorites:

1. Neil Bush: Opening doors when opportunity knocks

George W. Bush’s younger brother Neil certainly hasn’t done much to make his brother’s rocky political life any easier. Neil’s been making the wrong kind of news since as far back as the 1980s, when as the son of Vice President George H.W. Bush he served as a director of Silverado Savings and Loan, which cost taxpayers an estimated $ 1 billion when it collapsed. He drew accusations of insider trading chicanery in 1999 when he made nearly $ 800,000 in three trades of Kopin Corporation stock in a single day; Bush had been a consultant for Kopin and sold on the day the stock’s price soared as the result of good news from a client. Bush also had a somewhat dubious-sounding arrangement with Grace Semiconductor, a Chinese company with ties to former Chinese president Jiang Zemin. Despite admittedly not knowing anything about semiconductors, Bush had a deal to receive $ 2 million in stock and $ 10,000 for every board meeting he attended to discuss business strategies, a deal that led to claims of influence peddling.

These little business episodes were just appetizers for Bush’s truly bizarre 2003 divorce proceedings. His wife Sharon Smith accused Bush of enjoying the company of high-priced escorts on business trips to Thailand and Hong Kong. (Bush’s defense: Yes, he had sex with these strange women, but they might not have been prostitutes. They just showed up at his door, and he slept with them. No money changed hands.) Not content to let things die with that simple embarrassment of infidelity, Neil’s friend John Spalding accused Sharon of pulling out Neil’s hair for use in a voodoo curse. Sharon countered that she simply wanted the hair tested for evidence of cocaine use. In either event, the President couldn’t have been too pleased as this saga played out in front of the media.

2. Roger Clinton: Codename “Headache”

Some presidential siblings wait until their brother takes up residence in the White House to start making trouble. Not Bill Clinton’s half-brother Roger, though. By the time Bill had jumped from the Arkansas governor’s mansion to Washington, Roger had already spent a year behind bars for a 1984 cocaine distribution arrest. He then spent much of Bill’s two terms trying to realize his dream of becoming an Elvis-like rock star with his band, Politics, and appearing in a string of abysmal movies that must have been almost as embarrassing for Bill as the cocaine arrest. (It’s one thing to get in trouble for drug trafficking, but it’s quite another to have the poor judgment to appear opposite Pauly Shore in Bio-Dome.)

Despite his busy schedule, he still found time to get into an altercation with a stockbroker at a Knicks game in 1993 and later unsuccessfully lobbied for pardons for his drug-dealing chums. Bill actually included Roger’s cocaine arrest in his flurry of pardons in 2001; Roger showed his gratitude by promptly getting arrested for drunk driving a month later. It’s easy to see why his Secret Service codename was “Headache.”

3 & 4. Hugh and Tony Rodham: Brothers in harm

Despite the nickname, Roger might not even have been the biggest familial headache Bill Clinton had to deal with during his term. Instead, the Clintons introduced a new species of White House blight: bad presidential brothers-in-law. While Roger was pretty much a run-of-the-mill troublemaker, Hillary’s brothers Hugh and Tony were bumbling power grabbers who kept making almost comical attempts to capitalize on their sister’s high station. In 1999, Hugh, a former Florida public defender, and Tony, whose resume included work as both a private eye and a repo man, joined in on a $ 118 million business plan to process and import hazelnuts from the Republic of Georgia. There was a slight hitch though: The brothers’ key connection in Georgia was a major political rival of Georgia’s president (a key American ally). Bill and Hillary had to work in tandem with National Security Advisor Sandy Berger to talk the brothers out of their hazelnut empire. (We can only hope Roger Clinton would later defend his own antics with, “…yeah, but I never attempted to politically destabilize former Soviet republics, did I?”)

After this episode, Hugh seemed to start behaving. That image only lasted for a couple of years, though. When Bill Clinton issued the slew of pardons before leaving office in 2001, drug dealer Carlos Vignali and Glenn Braswell, who had peddled a fake baldness cure by mail, received a sentence commutation and a pardon, respectively. Somehow, Hugh Rodham pocketed $ 400,000 for offering legal help in acquiring the pardons. Although the transaction may have been perfectly legal, it certainly didn’t appear all that kosher, and the Clintons suffered further embarrassment when the story broke.

5. Billy Carter: The mother of all brothers

Truly the standard by which all other presidential sibling’s antics are judged, Billy burst onto the national scene as the boisterous, hard-drinking counterpoint to his pious, reserved brother Jimmy. Billy’s early antics were amusing and fairly innocuous: He endorsed the legendarily terrible Billy Beer in an effort to make a little cash off of his hard-living image, and he made quips like, “My mother went into the Peace Corps when she was sixty-eight. My one sister is a motorcycle freak, my other sister is a Holy Roller evangelist and my brother is running for president. I’m the only sane one in the family.” While he worked hard to convey a roughneck bumpkin image to the press, Billy’s confidantes claimed that he was in fact well-read and an able businessman who used his Southern bona fides to help his older brother’s political cause. On the other hand, Billy’s drinking turned from amusing to tragic as his fame grew.

In 1979, he had to go into rehab to curb his drinking. Around the same time he nearly lost his Georgia home to the IRS for failing to pay a six-figure federal income tax bill for 1978. The real capper, though, came when Billy began consorting with Libya at a time when relations between the North African nation and the U.S. were starting to strain. In 1978, he made a trip to Libya with a group of Georgia businessmen who were interested in expanding trade with the country; Billy then hosted a Libyan delegation in Atlanta. When questioned about his dealings, Billy responded, “The only thing I can say is there is a hell of a lot more Arabians than there is Jews,” a public-relations nightmare for which he later apologized. The damage got worse in 1980 when Billy registered as an agent of the Libyan government and received a $ 220,000 loan from the Libyans for helping facilitate oil sales. This transaction led to accusations of influence peddling and a Congressional investigation. In short, it was enough to make Jimmy Carter long for the days when his brother’s antics only included such little quirks as urinating in public in front of a group of reporters and dignitaries.

6. Donald Nixon: Big loans for small potatoes

Prior to 1960, nobody had even heard of Donald Nixon, even though his brother Richard had been VP under Eisenhower. When Richard launched his own presidential campaign against JFK, though, Donald found himself flung into the spotlight. Don was a restaurateur, and not a very good one. In 1954, he was running a chain of Nixon’s drive-ins in Whittier, California and fell upon some tough financial times. In an effort to keep the business afloat, he accepted a $ 205,000 loan from Howard Hughes. “Big Don,” as he called himself, never got around to paying Hughes back, and voters had to wonder why a defense contractor like Hughes was suddenly so interested in a chain of burger joints that just happened to be run by the Vice President’s rotund brother. Whatever the reasoning, the loan wasn’t enough, and the chain went under the following year.
Don caused a second stir in 1969 by once again joining his pal Hughes for a shadowy trip to the Dominican Republic. Nothing came of this episode, but it certainly didn’t look good to have Big Don once again flitting about with Hughes. All of this might explain why the press later learned in 1973 that during Nixon had the Secret Service tap Big Don’s phone calls lest he do something illegal, or even more problematic, embarrassing to his brother.

HONORABLE MENTION: Sam Houston Johnson

Lyndon Johnson’s brother loved to have him some drinks. Once hammered, he’d get chatty with the press, a habit that LBJ eventually curbed by placing him under Secret Service surveillance. According to several sources, he’d occasionally pass a bad check, too. Sam Houston Johnson later wrote a book My Brother Lyndon in which he slammed LBJ as a bully who was a difficult boss. As Time put it, “A rivalry with the leader of the free world played hell with Sam’s self-image.”

More from Mental Floss…

• What’s a Ponzi scheme? (And who is this Ponzi character?)


• 11 notable presidential pardons


• How ex-presidents and prime ministers make their money

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Read more about 6 presidential siblings and the headaches they caused and other interesting subjects concerning Surveillance State at TheDailyNewsReport.com

NSA Chief: Snowden Has Caused Irreversible Damage To US

David Kurtz June 23, 2013, 12:45 PM

Spencer Ackerman in Washington and Dominic Rushe in New York | The Guardian

Keith Alexander defends agency’s broad surveillance as being in line with Americans’ expectations for preventing another 9/11

National Security Agency director Keith Alexander said on Sunday that whistleblower Edward Snowden betrayed the trust of Americans and defended the broad surveillance programs as necessary to prevent another terrorist attack.

As Snowden evaded an attempt on Sunday by Washington to have him arrested in Hong Kong, General Alexander told ABC’s This Week: “This is an individual who is not acting, in my opinion, with noble intent … What Snowden has revealed has caused irreversible and significant damage to our country and to our allies.”

Alexander said the NSA surveillance programs Snowden had disclosed to the Guardian were tightly overseen and disputed statements from members of the Senate intelligence committee that they had not played a unique role in preventing terrorist attacks.

He read from a 2012 intelligence committee report about a law that broadened the NSA’s authority to perform surveillance even when US communications are involved that said after “four years of oversight, the committee has not identified a single case in which a government official engaged in wilful effort to circumvent or violate the law”.

Yet last year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence conceded publicly that the surveillance had violated the fourth amendment on at least one occasion. The circumstances behind that violation remain classified.

Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have disputed that the NSA’s collection of phone records on millions of Americans was key to preventing any terrorist attack. Alexander said that in “a little over 10” cases, the phone records databases helped the US government find individuals inside the US connected to terrorists.

Snowden left Hong Kong and flew to Moscow on Sunday after the US charged him with espionage on Friday, effectively slipping away from arrest. Hong Kong authorities released a statement saying Washington had requested an arrest warrant for Snowden, but Hong Kong requested more information since the US had “not fully comply with legal requirements under Hong Kong law”.

WikiLeaks issued a statement saying that Snowden had requested its legal advisers broker his departure from Hong Kong. “He is bound for a democratic nation via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks,” the radical transparency organisation said. Speculation has centered on Snowden ending up in Venezuela, Cuba – two countries with adversarial stances toward the United States – Ecuador and Iceland.

The Obama administration indicated on Sunday morning it would not cease in attempts at capturing Snowden.

“As we stated yesterday, the United States had contacted authorities in Hong Kong to seek the extradition of Mr. Snowden, based on the criminal complaint filed in the eastern district of Virginia, and in accordance with the US-Hong Kong Agreement for the Surrender of Fugitive Offenders,” said Nanda Chitre, spokeswoman for the Department of Justice.

“We have been informed by the Hong Kong authorities Mr. Snowden has departed Hong Kong for a third country,” Chintre said. “We will continue to discuss this matter with Hong Kong and pursue relevant law enforcement co-operation with other countries where Mr. Snowden may be attempting to travel.”

Douglas McNabb, founder of McNabb Associates, a law firm that specialises in extradition cases, said the US has extradition treaties with both Venezuela and Cuba but not Russia, although he said any move involving Snowden was likely to be dictated by politics as much as the law.

Cuba’s treaties date back to 1904 and 1905 and Venezuela’s to 1922 and 1923. “There are old but valid treaties with both Venezuela and Cuba. But the US doesn’t exactly have great international relations with either of those countries. In any of these countries, Russia included, politics is going to play a large part. This case is going to be 10% legal and 90% politics,” he said.

“If I was representing him, I’d be concerned about what Russia would want from him. He’s potentially a gold mine for them,” he said. McNabb said Snowden could become a political pawn amid the increasingly fraught politics between Moscow and Washington.

Alexander also indicated on This Week that the NSA has procedures in place to distinguish foreign from domestic communications in its phone-records databases. Citing statistics on when NSA could query that database in 2012, Alexander said, “Two-thirds of those are foreign. One-third were in the US.”

Yet the NSA has said in the past that it lacked the analytic tools to even make an assessment on how many Americans have had their communications swooped up in its databases, and that doing so would itself violate Americans’ privacy. That stated inability contributed to a March exchange between Wyden and US director of national intelligence James Clapper that Clapper has conceded was the “least untruthful” thing he could have said about surveillance on Americans.

But the Guardian has published leaked NSA documents describing an analytic tool called Boundless Informant that collates stored communications by country of origin.

Alexander said that broad surveillance efforts on Americans’ phone records and on foreign internet usage, disclosed by Snowden, was in line with Americans’ expectations for preventing another 9/11.

“These two capabilities helped us form the dots,” Alexander said. ”I think that’s what the American people want us to do.”

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