Health Warning

The FDA is advising people not to eat bagged raw spinach. They have traced an outbreak of E. coli infections to the product but are unable to determine what brands it was sold under or exactly where it was distributed. One person has died so far, but the number of cases reported continues to grow.

The death occurred in Wisconsin, where 20 people were reported ill, 11 of them in Milwaukee. The outbreak has sickened others — eight of them seriously — in Connecticut, Idaho, Indiana, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon and Utah. In California, state health officials said they were investigating a possible case there.

The outbreak has affected a mix of ages, but most of the cases have involved women, Acheson said. Further information on the person who died wasn't available.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Wisconsin health officials alerted the FDA about the outbreak at midweek. Preliminary analysis suggested the same bug is responsible for the outbreak in all eight states.

The warning applied to consumers nationwide because of uncertainty over the origin of the tainted spinach and how widely it was distributed. Health officials did not know of any link to a specific growing region, grower, brand or supplier, Acheson said.

Amy Philpott, a spokeswoman for the United Fresh Produce Association, said that it's possible the cause of the outbreak won't be known for some time, even after its source is determined.

"Our industry is very concerned," she said. "We're taking this very seriously."

Reports of infections have been growing by the day, Acheson said. "We may be at the peak, we may not be," he said."

E. coli causes diarrhea, often with bloody stools. Most healthy adults can recover completely within a week, although some people — including the very young and old — can develop a form of kidney failure that often leads to death.

Anyone who has gotten sick after eating raw packaged spinach should contact a doctor, officials said.

If you have any of this product, you should not eat it.

Godwin’s Law Violation Already

An official of the ruling Turkish Islamic-rooted party has compared Pope Benedict XVI with Hitler and Mussolini. We have a real-time violation of Godwin's law in record time.

On Friday, Salih Kapusuz, a deputy leader of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's party, said Benedict's remarks were either "the result of pitiful ignorance" about Islam and its prophet, or worse, a deliberate distortion of the truths.

"He has a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the Middle Ages. He is a poor thing that has not benefited from the spirit of reform in the Christian world," Kapusuz blurted out in comments made to the state-owned Anatolia news agency. "It looks like an effort to revive the mentality of the Crusades."

"Benedict, the author of such unfortunate and insolent remarks is going down in history for his words. However … he is going down in history in the same category as leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini," he said.

In Beirut, Lebanon's most senior Shiite Muslim cleric denounced the remarks and demanded the pope personally apologize for insulting Islam.

"We do not accept the apology through Vatican channels … and ask him (Benedict) to offer a personal apology — not through his officials — to Muslims for this false reading (of Islam)," Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah told worshippers in his Friday prayers sermon.

The rioting will commence as soon as enough of the proper flags, effigies, fuel and ignition sources can be obtained, one suspects. It takes time to organize a "spontaneous outpouring of rage", after all.

UPDATE: The Anchoress is well worth reading on this subject.

Dire Situation

The Washington Post has an article today that describes the intense pressure one small native American tribe is under because of illegal immigration and drug smuggling across its reservation. These are people caught in the middle between those breaking the law and those trying to enforce it.

As the United States ramps up its law enforcement presence on the border with Mexico, places like Alir Jegk, a village of 50 families in south-central Arizona, are enduring heightened danger, as they are squeezed between increasingly aggressive bands of immigrant and drug smugglers and increasingly numerous federal agents who, critics say, often ignore regulations as they seek to enforce the law.

Alir Jegk's experience is complicated by the fact that it is on the second-biggest Indian reservation in the United States, belonging to the Tohono O'odham, or Desert People, who hunted deer and boar and harvested wild spinach and prickly pear in this region before an international border was etched through their land in 1853. Now, the Tohono O'odham Nation occupies the front line of the fight against drug and immigrant smuggling — costing the poverty-stricken tribe millions of dollars a year and threatening what remains of its traditions.

"We have the undocumented and drug smugglers heading north and law enforcement heading south. We're smack in the middle," Vivian Juan-Saunders, chairwoman of the tribe, said in an interview at the tribal headquarters in Sells, Ariz. "We are being squeezed."

In testimony to the U.S. Senate, the tribe's vice chairman, Ned Norris Jr., described a "border security crisis that has caused shocking devastation of our land and resources."

There is only a rickety 4-foot high fence along the reservation's 75 mile border with Mexico. There are numerous holes in that fence with well established trails running through them. These are some of the poorest people living in America today and they are being crushed by this wave of criminal activity. This is a dire situation for them, they need relief.

Tell me again why we don't need a fence?

Oldest Writing In Americas Discovered

Scientists are excitedly discussing a stone block found in an ancient Olmec mound that has what is believed to be the oldest writing ever discovered in the New World.

The arrangement and pattern of the symbols suggest the ancient Olmec civilization was using written language roughly three centuries earlier than previously proposed.

"We are dealing with the first, clear evidence of writing in the New World," said Stephen Houston, a Brown University anthropologist. Houston and his U.S. and Mexican colleagues detail the tablet's discovery and analysis in a study appearing this week in the journal Science.

The patterns covering the face of the rectangular block also represent a previously unknown ancient writing system — a rare find in archaeology.

The text covers the block's face, which is almost exactly the dimensions of a standard legal pad. However, at 5 inches thick and tipping the scales at 26 pounds, the tablet is decidedly more hefty.

The face is smooth and slightly concave, which suggests it may have been worn down in antiquity as it was inscribed and erased multiple times, Houston said.

Villagers in the Mexican state of Veracruz discovered the tablet sometime before 1999, while quarrying an ancient Olmec mound for road-building material. News of the discovery slowly trickled out, and the study's authors traveled to the site earlier this year to examine and photograph the block.

Based on other materials, including pottery sherds, believed found with the slab, team concluded it is roughly 2,900 years old. Isolated signs similar to those inscribed on the block also appear on even older figurines found elsewhere in Mexico.

The writing appears to be unrelated to any other known language and will therefore be difficult or impossible to decipher, scientists fear. Fortunately, we here at Blue Crab Boulevard have enlisted the services of the Magic 8-Ball Archaeological Institute and Fish Market and are able to provide a partial translation for our less-educated brethren in the sciences.

The text reads: "(something), (something), (something), vast right wing conspiracy, (something), (something)". This, of course, proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Olmecs were, in fact, bloggers. You heard it here first.

So Quick To Take Offense

Astonishingly quickly, Muslim leaders from all over are pouncing on a speech given by Pope Benedict XVI, demanding apologies or "clarifications". The Vatican has actually already done so, but the drumbeat appears to be gathering steam with the media fanning the situation.

ROME, Sept. 14 — As Pope Benedict XVI arrived back home from Germany, Muslim leaders strongly criticized a speech he gave on his trip that used unflattering language about Islam.

Some of the strongest words came from Turkey, possibly putting in jeopardy Benedict’s scheduled visit there in November.

“I do not think any good will come from the visit to the Muslim world of a person who has such ideas about Islam’s prophet,” Ali Bardakoglu, a cleric who is head of the Turkish government’s directorate of religious affairs, said in a television interview there. “He should first of all replace the grudge in his heart with moral values and respect for the other.”

Muslim leaders in Pakistan, Morocco and Kuwait, in addition to some in Germany and France, also criticized the pope’s remarks, with many demanding an apology or clarification. The extent of any anger about the speech may become clearer on Friday, the Muslim day of prayer in which grievances are often vented publicly.

As the criticisms gathered force, the Vatican worked quickly to quell a potentially damaging confrontation with Muslims. It issued a statement saying that the church seeks to “cultivate an attitude of respect and dialogue toward other religions and cultures and obviously also toward Islam.”

The statement, from the pope’s chief spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said: “It should be said that what is important to the pope is a clear and radical rejection of the religious motivation of violence.”

“It was certainly not the intention of the Holy Father to do an in-depth study of jihad and Muslim thinking in this field and still less so to hurt the feelings of Muslim believers,” he added.

It is amazing how quickly certain people take offense. At pretty much anything it seems. The Pope's exact words from the speech were:

In the seventh conversation (*4V8,>4H - controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably (F×< 8`(T) is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death…".

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry.

It is pretty clearly his intent to examine - and denounce - forced conversion and religious motivation for violence. Is that something to take offense at? The words of one of the later Byzantine emperors written down not long before Constantinople fell.