Duck soup

For those of you biting your nails out there over the pending global disaster known as Avian Flu, good news! It appears that the deadly strain just waiting to be unleashed will have a much easier time getting from Asia to the rest of the world! Yay!

The flu has spread to migratory flocks of birds rather than captive chickens and other fowl, and 5,000 dead ducks (and geese) have been found at Lake Qinghaihu in western China — and being that this is western China, that means they’re closer to Europe, and you, and me!

So far, avian flu hasn’t made the leap to human communicability, but the World Health Organization believes that if (when?) it mutates, millions will be dead before it’s over. All it needs is to be passed to a human already carrying a human flu virus — but that’ll never happen.

Death race 2005

The party that spent countless news minutes to position itself as the banner holder for a “culture of life” is speeding up the death penalty so the government has less impediments to kill its citizens on death row.

Dubbed the “Streamlined Procedures Act of 2005,” congressional Republicans are just oh so tired of those damned criminals getting away with murder, literally, so they’d like to be able to kill them with less messy litigation.

Looking at the numbers, Texans absolutely love killing, while 9 other states perform at least one execution per year and the rest of these United States that allow executions only manage to kill someone rarely. Twelve states have no death penalty.

The U.S. is among 76 countries that retain the death penality for any crime at all, and is joined by such human rights luminaries as Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Rwanda, Syria, Sierra Leone, Libya and North Korea on that list. Currently, 85 countries have abolished the death penality altogether, 24 are abolitionist in practice (no killings in 10 years), and another 11 won’t kill its citizens for ordinary crimes.