Newberry public schools will close Friday in the wake of an outbreak of swine flu at a private school nearby.
Officials in the school system, which includes Newberry High School and Mid-Carolina High School, decided to suspend classes as South Carolina health officials got confirmation today from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of least 13 cases of swine flu in the state. The number of suspected cases is expected to grow.
The cases afflicted students and parents connected with the private Newberry Academy. Many of the students returned from Mexico earlier this month.
After several high-profile fiascoes two years ago, airlines promised to do more to avoid stranding passengers on planes for hours. But Delta Flight 510 is a stunning reminder that the problem persists.
On Good Friday, April 10, what should have been a three-hour flight became a 13-hour ordeal for passengers heading home from a Caribbean vacation. When thunderstorms prevented Delta Air Lines Inc. Flight 510’s scheduled landing in Atlanta, the MD88 diverted to Columbia, S.C., for nine hours. Passengers spent five of those hours on the tarmac without food or water.
Airport officials say bathrooms turned foul, children got antsy and some passengers became extremely agitated. One woman called 911 because she needed food. Parents with small children ran short on essentials like diapers. Eventually the passengers were allowed off and held in part of the terminal, cordoned off with yellow police tape.
The Pew study founded that 79% of the currently unaffiliated –also known as “nones” in the survey–started off life connected with a religion. But get this: only 30% of “nones” who used to be Catholic and only 18% of former Protestants said they’d had strong faith as a child. This is true even for those who attended church regularly.
In other words, perhaps it’s not that the devout have lost their way, it’s that the nominally religious have stopped pretending to be religious. Perhaps what we’re seeing is not an increase in the number of “nones” but an increase in the numbers willing to admit it.
Another bit of evidence for this theory is that the rates of church attendance during this same period from 1990 to 2009 have remained stable. The pious are just as pious; it’s the more tenuously connected that seem to be fleeing.
This is the culmination of a long, patient slow-motion insurgency by the Taliban-al-Qaeda alliance suddenly propelled into a fast-moving and aggressive push on many fronts and forms. The jury is still out on the level of commitment of the Pakistani military push to take back Buner and, presumably, the Swat district from Taliban-al-Qaeda control.
The manner in which the Pakistanis pursue that push is critical. Will they continue to rely heavily on area weapons, such as artillery and helicopter gunships which cause much collateral damage and limited precision? Or will it shift to a boots-on-the-ground fight between men for Pakistan’s survival? And will those boots continue to be the less capable Frontier Corps paramilitary forces and local constabularies, or will the more professional and capable Pakistani Army assume the tip of the spear? These are important questions that we will learn the answers to over the coming days.
27 April, 2009
The Standing Committee of the Diocese of South Carolina is unable to consent to the election of the Rev. Kevin Thew Forrester as Bishop of Northern Michigan for the following reasons:
1. Writings and sermons of Fr. Thew Forrester and liturgies composed by him call into serious question his understanding of and commitment to Nicene orthodoxy regarding the nature of the Trinity , the unique revelation of God in Christ , the nature and necessity of the Atonement, and the Virgin Birth.
Internet users face regular “brownouts†that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace, according to research to be published later this year.
Experts predict that consumer demand, already growing at 60 per cent a year, will start to exceed supply from as early as next year because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry websites such as YouTube and services such as the BBC’s iPlayer.
It will initially lead to computers being disrupted and going offline for several minutes at a time. From 2012, however, PCs and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the internet an “unreliable toyâ€Â.
Many of you have probably seen this. While each of us here could write volumes on the subject, it just seems simpler to point you to the master of curmudegeonly thought.
What is it about New York courts? They do not seem to like to hold trials—you know, those hearings in front of a judge and jury where two sides actually put on evidence with witnesses and documents, and out of the opposing versions some sort of truth emerges? But in New York, at least in cases involving its home-grown, common-law behemoth, the “Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America”, the courts decide the matter without the bother of a trial, and even without burdening the record with any evidence. All they seem to need are allegations—and based on those (as long as they are made under oath), they make up their minds and issue judgments.For the latest example of such a judicial shortcut, see this decision by Judge Ferris Lebous in the lawsuit brought by the Diocese of Central New York against the Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton. Earlier, Judge Lebous granted summary adjudication to the Diocese on its claim to own by forfeit the parish’s real and personal property after the parish voted to leave the Diocese. (Never mind that there were not enough parishioners remaining to allow the building to stay open; it’s the principle of the thing, don’t you understand? “People may leave, but buildings stay put, even if they are empty. We can always sell them—but not to those who left, you understand—and put the cash to good use in suing other parishes for their property.”)
By granting summary adjudication, Judge Lebous necessarily found that there were no facts in dispute that needed a trial to sort them out. No, all was clear from the respective affidavits submitted on either side. The Dennis Canon, after all, was not only part of the diocesan canons (Canon XXIII “reaffirms” its principles, even if the Diocese itself never bothered to accede to the ECUSA canons), but had even been enacted as a statute by that most considerate group of Christians, the New York Legislature, who of course wanted only to help their local parishioners in their desire to give everything they had to the national church, instead of to (God forbid!) their own parish. Given this state of affairs, it was not difficult for Judge Lebous to conclude as a matter of law that the parish did not really own its own property, but held it in trust for the Diocese and the national church.
When a young Jew named Ilan Halimi was found dying on a railway siding three years ago, duct tape over his eyes and his body burned and slashed, the French police were reluctant at first to call it a hate crime.
Within a week, their caution gave way to a different and uglier conclusion, one that sent shock waves through a country that has wrestled with the demons of anti-Semitism for years.
The victim was targeted, investigators said, because he was Jewish.