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U.S. officials had offered Chrysler’s secured lenders $2.25 billion in cash if they would agree to writedown the $6.9 in secured debt that the company owed. But a small group of hedge funds refused the 11th-hour deal, forcing an imminent bankruptcy.

An administration official this morning expressed disappointment, saying the holdouts had failed to “do the right thing,” but that “their failure to act in either their own economic interest or the national interest does not diminish the accomplishments made by Chrysler, Fiat and its stakeholders, nor will it impede the new opportunity Chrysler now has to restructure and emerge stronger going forward.”

At the time it became policy that all soldiers would be vaccinated for swine flu. As a medical officer I refused and almost faced a court martial, but the military didn’t want the bad publicity. Despite the assurance by all the experts in virology, including Dr. Sabin, the epidemic never materialized.

What did materialize were 500 cases of Gullian-Barre paralysis, including 25 deaths—not due to the swine flu itself, but as a direct result of the vaccine. At the time President Gerald Ford, on advice from the CDC, called for vaccination of the entire population of the United States.

Today, some 33 years later, we are hearing the same cries of alarm from a similar lineup of virology experts.

The pharmaceutical companies are busy designing a vaccine for the swine flu in hope that this administration will make the vaccine mandatory before another vaccine-related disaster can ruin their party.

And as before, a number of equally qualified experts are calling for calm, based on a number of carefully conducted studies. To no one’s surprise, they too are being ignored by the media and government planners.

According to science reports, this current strain of flu is H1N1. It can be forcibly inoculated into pigs, but it has been shown not to spread among the pig population. This means that the danger of a swine-based epidemic is small.

There are several strains of this flu virus however, including H1N1, H1N2, H3N1, H3N2 and H2N3. What the science has shown is that when the virus passes through the pig, it becomes less virulent—that is, it is less likely to cause serious disease in people. With each passage, it becomes even weaker.

Since this is not the answer that the pseudo-scientists wanted, they next announced that it is “possible” that the pigs could be infected with both the bird flu (strain H5N1) and the swine flu (strain H1N1), resulting in a mutant, highly virulent strain that could lead to a pandemic.

Note this is pure speculation and that no scientist has ever performed this trick. It is purely hypothetical—like global warming. CDC virologists claim that in the past they performed a similar virological trick, but they never published their results and thus have kept the data close to the vest.

In science, especially medical science, speculation is taboo. But, politicized scientists perform this bit of smoke and mirrors all the time.

So, you may ask, “What about all the people dying in Mexico?”

Overcrowding, poor nutrition and overall poor immunity, all of which are indigenous to Mexico, are a certain prescription for death from almost any infection. [Note that despite 46 cases of this very same flu in the United States there have been no deaths. This is because Americans, comparatively, have better nutrition and medical care.]

Like SARS and bird flu before it, this swine flu scare is a lot of nonsense.

Here’s one you might not have thought of yet: The Pentagon may be taking over more and more of our civil society in this crisis.

Back in 2002, President Bush created NorthCom, the Pentagon’s Northern Command, which has jurisdiction over the United States.

And NorthCom has been running preparedness drills in the event of a flu pandemic for at least the past three years.

Making things more alarming, NorthCom got assigned its own fighting unit six months ago—the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, which had spent much of the last five years battling things out in Iraq.

The assignment of that fighting unit alarmed the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “This is a radical departure from separation of civilian law enforcement and military authority and could, quite possibly, represent a violation of law,” said Mike German, ACLU national security policy counsel.

Testifying in March, General Victor Renuart, head of NorthCom, said it would provide “assistance in support of civil authorities” during an epidemic. And, he added, “when requested and approved by the Secretary of Defense or directed by the President, federal military forces will contribute to federal support.” But he boasted: “USNorthCom does not wait for that call to action.”

He noted that NorthCom has prepared for a flu outbreak from Mexico. “Because Mexico is our neighbor and disasters do not respect national boundaries, we are focused on developing and improving procedures to respond to potentially catastrophic events such as pandemic influenza outbreak, mass exposure to dangerous chemicals and materials, and natural disasters,” he testified.

NorthCom also has a “private sector cell,” Renuart said in a talk to the Heritage Foundation on August 20, 2008. “We have great participation from industry and from other organizations around the country.”

One private sector group that has worked with the FBI and Homeland Security on pandemics is InfraGard. This is group of more than 30,000 businesspeople who have special access to confidential FBI information and may be assigned special—and lethal—duties in times of an emergency (See “The FBI Deputizes Business”).

An InfraGard chapter held a meeting at NYU Medical Center on February 21, 2007 on “Pandemic Preparedness Planning: the Case for Public-Private Collaboration”.

InfraGard also participated in a conference entitled “Surviving the Pandemic,” held in Madison, Wisconsin, October 12, 2006. That conference was co-sponsored by the Southeast Wisconsin Homeland Security Partnership, two centers at the University of Wisconsin, the Madison Area Technical College, Alliant Energy, and American Family Insurance.

InfraGard wants to be a player in pandemic response. “Utilization of their expertise will help local communities prepare for a possible pandemic event to ensure minimal disruption and quick recovery,” one InfraGard press release stated.

The bill, proposed by conservative President Felipe Calderon, would make it legal to carry up to 5 grams (0.18 ounces) of marijuana, 500 milligrams (0.018 ounces) of cocaine and tiny quantities of other drugs such as heroin and methamphetamines.

Mexico’s Congress passed a similar proposal in 2006 but the bill was vetoed by Calderon’s predecessor Vicente Fox, under pressure from the United States, which said it would increase drug abuse, but now is worried by the drug-related violence along its border.

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It is more than 100 days since Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. The “Obama brand” has been named “Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008”, easily beating Apple computers. David Fenton of MoveOn.org describes Obama’s election campaign as “an institutionalised mass-level automated technological community organising that has never existed before and is a very, very powerful force”. Deploying the internet and a slogan plagiarised from the Latino union organiser César Chávez – “Sí, se puede!” or “Yes, we can” – the mass-level automated technological community marketed its brand to victory in a country desperate to be rid of George W Bush.

No one knew what the new brand actually stood for. So accomplished was the advertising (a record $75m was spent on television commercials alone) that many Americans actually believed Obama shared their opposition to Bush’s wars. In fact, he had repeatedly backed Bush’s warmongering and its congressional funding. Many Americans also believed he was the heir to Martin Luther King’s legacy of anti-colonialism. Yet if Obama had a theme at all, apart from the vacuous “Change you can believe in”, it was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully. “We will be the most powerful,” he often declared.

Perhaps the Obama brand’s most effective advertising was supplied free of charge by those journalists who, as courtiers of a rapacious system, promote shining knights. They depoliticised him, spinning his platitudinous speeches as “adroit literary creations, rich, like those Doric columns, with allusion…” (Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian). The San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote: “Many spiritually advanced people I know… identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who… can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.”

In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus and demanded more secret government. He has kept Bush’s gulag intact and at least 17,000 prisoners beyond the reach of justice. On 24 April, his lawyers won an appeal that ruled Guantanamo Bay prisoners were not “persons”, and therefore had no right not to be tortured. His national intelligence director, Admiral Dennis Blair, says he believes torture works. One of his senior US intelligence officials in Latin America is accused of covering up the torture of an American nun in Guatemala in 1989; another is a Pinochet apologist. As Daniel Ellsberg has pointed out, the US experienced a military coup under Bush, whose secretary of “defence”, Robert Gates, along with the same warmaking officials, has been retained by Obama.

All over the world, America’s violent assault on innocent people, directly or by agents, has been stepped up. During the recent massacre in Gaza, reports Seymour Hersh, “the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of ‘smart bombs’ and other hi-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel” and being used to slaughter mostly women and children. In Pakistan, the number of civilians killed by US missiles called drones has more than doubled since Obama took office.

In Afghanistan, the US “strategy” of killing Pashtun tribespeople (the “Taliban”) has been extended by Obama to give the Pentagon time to build a series of permanent bases right across the devastated country where, says Secretary Gates, the US military will remain indefinitely. Obama’s policy, one unchanged since the Cold War, is to intimidate Russia and China, now an imperial rival. He is proceeding with Bush’s provocation of placing missiles on Russia’s western border, justifying it as a counter to Iran, which he accuses, absurdly, of posing “a real threat” to Europe and the US. On 5 April in Prague, he made a speech reported as “anti-nuclear”. It was nothing of the kind. Under the Pentagon’s Reliable Replacement Warhead programme, the US is building new “tactical” nuclear weapons designed to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war.

Perhaps the biggest lie – the equivalent of smoking is good for you – is Obama’s announcement that the US is leaving Iraq, the country it has reduced to a river of blood. According to unabashed US army planners, as many as 70,000 troops will remain “for the next 15 to 20 years”. On 25 April, his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, alluded to this. It is not surprising that the polls are showing that a growing number of Americans believe they have been suckered – especially as the nation’s economy has been entrusted to the same fraudsters who destroyed it. Lawrence Summers, Obama’s principal economic adviser, is throwing $3trn at the same banks that paid him more than $8m last year, including $135,000 for one speech. Change you can believe in.

Hywel Jones, 55, survived the shot to the back of his head but remains in a coma at the hospital on New Providence Island where police have put him under round-the-clock protection.

Police say a man was waiting for him when he arrived at work at the Britannia Investment Group near Gambier Village at 9.30am on Wednesday and shot him as he got out of his car.

The man described as “slim and dark” was spotted loitering outside a disused building nearby before the shooting and made his escape on a motorbike, shedding his clothes as he went.

Detectives investigating the case say Mr Jones, from North Wales, was “not a random target” and there were reports that he had been beaten up during a break-in at his home a few weeks earlier.

The financial adviser had worked for NatWest in Britain before establishing Britannia in 1996 and is a former director of the Bankers Association of The Bahamas and The Bahamas Institute of Bankers.

Assistant Superintendent Leon Bethel, of the island’s central detective unit, said Mr Jones was currently “unresponsive.”

“I visited him but have not been able to interview him. We have officers there and we are going to allow them to remain for some time,” he added.

“We are following some lines of inquiries and we believe that it is going to lead us somewhere, but we are still asking members of the public to assist us in our investigations.”

Mr Bethel said the bullet had passed through the victim’s head.

“This man who did the shooting was hanging out in the area of West Bay Street and Gambier Village,” Mr Bethel added. “He was here for a while and when [Jones] pulled up, he approached him and fired shots.”

Vivienne Allan, from WHO’s patient safety program, said the body had confirmed that worldwide there had been just seven deaths – all in Mexico – and 79 confirmed cases of the disease.

“Unfortunately that [150-plus deaths] is incorrect information and it does happen, but that’s not information that’s come from the World Health Organisation,” Ms Allan told ABC Radio today.

“That figure is not a figure that’s come from the World Health Organisation and, I repeat, the death toll is seven and they are all from Mexico.”

Ms Allan said WHO had confirmed 40 cases of swine flu in the Americas, 26 in Mexico, six in Canada, two in Spain, two in Britain and three in New Zealand.

Ms Allan said it was difficult to measure how fast the virus was spreading.

She said a real concern would be if the flu virus manifested in a country where a person had had no contact with Mexico, and authorities were watching all countries for signs of that.

“There is no pattern that has emerged at this stage to be able to say that it is spreading in a particular way or it is spreading into a particular country … the situation is continuing to evolve,” she said.

She said the WHO was not recommending against overseas travel, but urged those who felt sick to stay home and others to ensure they kept their hands clean.

No decision had yet been made about vaccinations.