The world's still funny!

Two stories from last week that tickled me pink. It's nice to know that the world's not turned into a frightfully boring place, notwithstanding pompous and pretentious Barack Hussein Obama, the utterly banal general election campaign in India where nobody is talking issues that matter, the onward march of the Taliban which believes that the world should be a joyless place where women are flogged for the pleasure of men in beards, and the swine flu that is fast replacing the bird flu scare.


WHO to stop using term 'swine flu' to protect pigs

By FRANK JORDANS
GENEVA (AP)

The World Health Organization announced Thursday it will would stop using the term "swine flu" to avoid confusion over the danger posed by pigs. The policy shift came a day after Egypt began slaughtering thousands of pigs in a misguided effort to prevent
swine flu.
WHO spokesman Dick Thompson said the agriculture industry and the U.N. food agency had expressed concerns that the term "swine flu" was misleading consumers and needlessly causing countries to ban pork products and order the slaughter of pigs. "Rather than calling this swine flu ... we're going to stick with the technical scientific name H1N1 influenza A," Thompson said.
Egypt began slaughtering its roughly 300,000 pigs Wednesday even though experts said swine flu is not linked to pigs and not spread by eating pork. Angry farmers had protected the Government decree.



Kenya leader's wife says she supports sex strike

By TOM ODULA
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP)

The wife of Kenya's prime minister says she will join thousands of women in a weeklong sex strike to protest divisions between her husband and the country's president. Members of the Women's Development Organization say Prime Minister Raila Odinga and President Mwai Kibaki are squabbling with protocol and precedence instead of ending corruption and poverty.
The women have vowed to abstain as a demonstration against the rifts.
Ida Odinga told journalists Thursday that she supported the boycott, which began Wednesday, and would "definitely" participate.
Odinga and Kibaki are locked into an uneasy coalition by an agreement that ended weeks of postelection violence last year. It was not clear whether the president's wife was participating in the boycott.