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About 1,300 people are being held in cramped conditions in towns across Puning county, in Guangdong Province, as officials try to put pressure on couples who have illegal children to come forward for sterilisation.

The 20-day campaign, which was launched on April 7, aims to complete 9,559 sterilisations in Puning, which, with a population of 2.24 million, is the most populous county in the province.

A doctor in Daba village said that his team was working flat out, beginning sterilisations every day at 8am and working straight through until 4am the following day.

…

The Health Minister, Kim Hames, says 45 children have been taken to hospital suffering high temperatures and febrile convulsions after receiving the vaccination.

Dr Hames says the program will be suspended until the department finishes its investigation.

He says parents who have had their children vaccinated should take precautions.

“If it’s longer than 12 hours ago then there is no risk,” he said.

In one case, a soldier found himself fighting against deployment to Iraq after re-enlistment papers with his signature on it appeared — even though he never signed any such papers, reports Chris Ingalls at KING channel 5 news in Seattle.

And in another case, a sergeant who had signed up for a one-year tour of duty was shocked to discover his enlistment papers stated he had signed up for two years.

Former soldier Michael Patrick sounded the alarm when he discovered forged re-enlistment papers with his name on them.

“Sounds crazy,” Michael Patrick told KING 5. “Sounds like something from a movie.”

The Washington National Guard soon determined that Sgt. Wendy Schaefer, a recruiter, had paid soldiers and civilians out of her own pocket to sign up recruits. She also promised the Guard would pay $1,000 for each enlistment.

According to Guard documents, Schaefer “created an environment that may have caused some of these ‘paid assistants’ to fabricate documents in order to get money.”

“The documents we received in the Patrick case do not explain how anyone would possibly think they could get away with signing over a soldier’s life,” Ingalls reported.

In another instance, Sgt. Keith Jackson says he was confronted by his superiors with enlistment papers showing he signed up for a two-year tour of duty, when he says he signed up for a one-year tour.

“I didn’t sign it,” he told KING 5. “That isn’t my signature.”

“While the Guard denies the forgery it granted Jackson an honorable discharge soon after KING 5 first told his story,” the channel reports.

The beleaguered Wall Street bank hired Craig — now in private practice at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom — in recent weeks to help in navigate the halls of power in Washington, a source familiar with the firm told POLITICO.

“He is clearly an attorney of eminence and has a deep understanding of the legal process and the world of Washington,” the source said. “And those are important worlds for everybody in finance right now.”

They’re particularly important for Goldman.

Europe, on the other hand, has almost no reserves of its own, and it depends on imports to satisfy 90 percent of its demand. Phosphorus is a “geostrategic ticking time bomb,” warns David Vaccari, a professor of environmental engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. “We may eventually be driven to implement a high degree of recycling as resources become depleted,” he says. “The sooner we implement recycling technologies, the longer the current resources will last to ease the transition to the period when intense recycling may become imperative.”

Even the French writer Victor Hugo recognized the problem, interrupting his successful novel “Les Misérables” to devote several pages to a fiery plea in favor of using human fecal matter as fertilizer. “There is no guano comparable in fertility to the detritus of a capital,” he raved.

So says a report by a multinational research project that calls for the building of global backup routes for the submarine network that carries almost all international communications, including financial transactions and Internet traffic.

The report’s main author, Karl Rauscher of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), an international professional body, told Reuters changes should be made “before we have to learn the hard way.”

“This report is trying to have a September 10 mindset, where you actually do something about what you know on September 10 to avoid a September 11 situation,” Rauscher, who was an adviser to the U.S. government on cyber security after the September 11 attacks, said.

An executive summary of the report made available to Reuters says that the current probability of a global or regional failure of the network is very low, but is “not zero.”

“The impact of such a failure on international security and economic stability could be devastating…There is no sufficient alternative back-up in the case of catastrophic loss of regional or global connectivity.”

WITHOUT CABLES, MARKETS WOULD “FREEZE”

“Satellites cannot handle the volume of traffic — the available capacity is not even close,” the report says.

“It is unclear if civilization can recover from the failure of a technology that has been so rapidly adopted without a backup plan … Without (the network), the world’s economic financial market would immediately freeze.”

The project, managed by the IEEE and the EastWest Institute think tank, cites the “cable-dense” Luzon Strait south of Taiwan, the Strait of Malacca and the Red Sea among several “chokepoints” that funnel important cable paths together.

“A single disaster in such an area could cause catastrophic loss of regional and global connectivity,” the report says.

“Insatiable thirst for bandwidth is accompanied by an ever-growing dependence on inter-continental communications, which are nearly entirely supported by undersea cables.”

The study said it taken account of numerous trends including skyrocketing bandwidth demand, increased piracy on the high seas and “growing concerns of terrorist activity worldwide.”

“Increased hostile activity around the world requires the undersea communications cable industry to enhance its preparedness for attacks on its specialized cable ships and critical infrastructure,” it said.

Recent failures include breaks in three submarine cables linking Europe and the Middle East, which disrupted Internet and international telephone services in parts of the Middle East and South Asia in December 2008.

DEPENDENCE HAS GROWN

In January 2008, a breakdown in an undersea cable network disrupted Internet links to Egypt, India and Gulf Arab countries and a December 2006 earthquake off southern Taiwan hit cables and slowed Internet and telephone traffic across parts of Asia.

The study’s concern is not so much that the reliability of the system is declining, but that the world’s dependence has grown so great — and on a network lacking global backup.

“What would you do without connectivity for a day, a week, or a month?” said Rauscher, also executive director of Bell Labs Network Reliability and Security Office of Alcatel-Lucent.

Rauscher presented the report, entitled the Reliability of Global Undersea Communications Cable Infrastructure, to 40 ambassadors in Washington on Monday and it will be studied again at an EastWest cyber security conference in Dallas in May.

Ethan McCord: Right. We were engaged in our own conflict roughly about three or four blocks away. We heard the gunships open up. [Then] we were just told … to move to this [other] location. It was pretty much a shock when we got there to see what had happened, the carnage and everything else.

Wired.com: But you had been in combat before. It shouldn’t have surprised you what you saw.

We have been speaking to whoever will listen, telling them that what was shown in the Wikileaks video only begins to depict the suffering we have created. From our own experiences, and the experiences of other veterans we have talked to, we know that the acts depicted in this video are everyday occurrences of this war: this is the nature of how U.S.-led wars are carried out in this region.

“We’re bringing up a generation in this country in which you either sit down, shut up and do what you’re told, or you get diagnosed and drugged,” he points out.

Breggin considers the situation to be “a national tragedy.” “To inflict these drugs on the growing brains of infants and children is wrong and abusive,” he contends.

The kids who get drugged are often our best, brightest, most exciting and energetic children, he points out. “In the long run, we are giving children a very bad lesson that drugs are the answer to emotional problems.”

Dr Nathaniel Lehrman, author of the book, “Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs,” believes that giving infants and toddlers “powerful, brain-effecting psychiatric medication is close to criminal activity.”

“Giving them these drugs,” he says, “has no rationale, and ignores the basic fact that youngsters are very sensitive to their environments, both social and chemical, with the juvenile brain easily damaged by the latter.”