No, says the U.S. federal government, but officials finally have enough data to give a good picture of the pandemic and it isn’t pretty. The CDC estimates that 22 million Americans caught swine flu in the first six months of the pandemic and 3,900 people died.

This includes 540 children.

So why the big jump in numbers? In a country of 300 million people, it takes some time to do a count. The US doesn’t have an organized public health system and states and cities lack enough staff to crunch the numbers in real-time. So the CDC takes a representative, detailed sampling from 10 states and then extrapolates this to the total US population. The latest figures are the first to give a good estimate of how extensive the pandemic is so far.

The CDC is pushing vaccines but at the same time, supply is spotty and people are often suspicious of them. Americans are not alone in this mistrust, by the way - check here for an unpdate on what is happening in Europe.  And here is one creative way to help prevent the spread…

Swine flu is turning out to be a sales bonanza for drug companies - just don't call it a windfall, says GlaxoSmithKline.

As one of the world's top suppliers of both vaccines and antiviral medicine, CEO Andrew Witty resents the implication that billions of dollars of business simply fell into his company's lap when the World Health Organisation declared H1N1 a pandemic in June.

"For me the word windfall means you're walking down the street and something fell out of the sky," he told the Reuters Health Summit. "We've spent the best part of 15 years investing for this situation and our ability to manufacture and supply potentially 500 million or so doses (of vaccine) is all because of these investments."

- Phelim Kine is an Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch. The opinions expressed are her own. -

When 15-year-old Wang Xiaomei made the long trip from Gansu province to Beijing last year, she hoped to find justice for her family. Instead, she met with abuse.

First, Wang was abducted by plainclothes Gansu officials, who imprisoned her incommunicado for two months in a “black jail”—an illegal detention facility.

Two days before her September 13, 2008 release, Wang’s captors beat her so badly they knocked out one of her teeth. Wang’s victimizers have never been brought to justice.

Worse still, Wang’s experience—which stands in stark contrast to the Chinese government’s claims of fealty to the rule of law—is not unique. A new Human Rights Watch report released today, “An Alleyway in Hell: China’s Abusive ‘Black Jails',” exposes the routine and severe human rights abuses perpetrated against detainees in these secret facilities.

Our research shows that Wang is just one of estimated thousands of people abducted off the streets of Chinese cities and held incommunicado for weeks or months. Inside these unlawful, secret detention facilities detainees are beaten, sexually abused, deprived of food, sleep and medical care, and subject to theft, extortion and intimidation at the hands of their guards.

And, as Wang’s case shows, children aren’t spared the dangers and indignities of black jail detention. These facilities exist outside of China’s official prison system, and are often located in state-owned hotels, nursing homes and psychiatric hospitals.

The former black jail detainees we interviewed were petitioners--people from mainly rural areas who come to Beijing and other cities in search of legal redress for violations including illegal land seizures and police torture. The petitioning system, which exists in parallel to formal judicial structures, is entirely legal, and explicitly permits people to take their grievances to the highest levels of government.

So why are petitioners being treated this way? Black jails emerged in 2003 after the Chinese government abolished laws permitting the arbitrary detention of any “undesirables.” But that progress was undercut by the introduction at the local level of guidelines that limit local officials’ prospects for promotions or raises if petitioners from their areas carried on their efforts to find justice in larger cities.

What might have been intended as an incentive to make local officials deal with local grievances became an incentive for those officials to keep petitioners off the streets and invest considerable resources in achieving that goal. Plainclothes thugs commonly known as retrievers, or jiefang renyuan, locate and abduct petitioners in Beijing and other cities for bounties as high as $250 per person. Operators of black jail facilities reap daily cash payments from local governments of up to $29 per detainee, helping to perpetuate black jail abuses.

Rather than crack down on these facilities, the central Chinese government denies that they even exist. In an April 2009 Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs press conference, a MOFA official responded to a foreign correspondent’s query about black jails by insisting, “Things like this do not exist in China.”

In June 2009, the Chinese government asserted in the Outcome Report of the United Nations’ Human Rights Commission’s Universal Periodic Review of China’s human rights record that, “There are no black jails in the country.”

Such denials make a mockery of the commitment in the first-ever National Human Rights Action Plan that, “The Chinese government unswervingly pushes forward the cause of human rights in China.” The Chinese government’s credibility would be considerably enhanced by acknowledging that black jails do indeed exist, shutting them down, liberating detainees, and bringing the perpetrators to justice.

External actors also have a role to play. Many governments and international organizations fund Chinese legal reform projects, and they too should demand that the Chinese government put an end to these abuses and that their victims be fairly compensated.

No less a civil rights and legal aid luminary than U.S. President Barack Obama, who will make his first trip as President to China on November 16-18, has a golden opportunity to raise the cases of black jail detainees and explain that an independent judicial system in China is of significant consequence to U.S.-China relations.

He should also repeat to his Chinese hosts–and the Chinese people—his September 2009 message to the United Nations General Assembly: “True leadership will not be measured by the ability to muzzle dissent, or to intimidate and harass political opponents at home.”

A mouse that can speak? A monkey with Down's Syndrome? Dogs with human hands or feet? British scientists want to know if such experiments are acceptable, or if they go too far in the name of medical research.

The Academy of Medical Sciences has launched a study to look at the use of animals containing human material in scientific research.

Using human material in animals is not new. Scientists have already created rhesus macaque monkeys that have a human form of the Huntingdon's gene so they can investigate how the disease develops; and mice with livers made from human cells are being used to study the effects of new drugs.

But scientists say the technology to put ever greater amounts of human genetic material into animals is spreading quickly around the world -- raising the possibility that some scientists in some places may want to push boundaries.

Religious groups are among those that are uneasy about the trend. One Catholic cardinal, Keith O'Brien of Edinburgh, has branded such work "Frankenstein science."

Martin Bobrow, a professor of medical genetics at Cambridge University is chairman of a 14-member group looking into the issue.

He says: "Do most of us care if we make a mouse whose blood cells or liver are human? Probably not. But if it can speak? If it can think? Or if it is conscious in a human way? Then we're in a completely different ballpark."

What do you say?

While some people enjoy collecting model trains and building tiny stations along scaled down tracks, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il appears to have taken this passion to a new level. According to a report in South Korea’s largest daily newspaper, the Chosun Ilbo, Kim has six private trains and 20 stations around the country built just for him.

Kim’s train is armored and also contains conference rooms, an audience chamber and bedrooms. Satellite phone connections and flat screen TVs have been installed so that the North Korean leader can be briefed and issue orders, the paper said quoting intelligence sources.

Security obsessed Kim has 90 carriages in his collection and uses three trains when he travels, according to the paper. The advance train carries security personnel who check the tracks and look for bombs along the way. The train in the middle carries Kim and his entourage, while the trailing train is also for security.

Lee Yong-guk, who served in the closest circle of bodyguards for Kim in the 1980s before defecting to the South, told Reuters that North Korean security had mastered the art of camouflage to such a level that a train going north may in fact mean a ship carrying Kim is heading south.

Kim also travels the rails with a few young women who share food, drinks and perhaps a few other things with the man known at home as the “Dear Leader”, Lee said.

The reclusive Kim is thought to be afraid of flying and typically uses his private rail cars for his few trips abroad. He also likes to ride the rails for his internal inspection visits to military bases, factories and farms called “field guidance” by the North’s state media.

U.S. and South Korean aerial reconnaissance of North Korea have been keeping track of Kim’s trains for years, causing him to send out decoys.

There was speculation that Kim may have been the target of an assassination attempt in 2004 when there was a massive explosion in the area where his train was thought to have been travelling.

Kim could soon be taking one of his rare trips aboard. His state media reported in late October that Chinese President Hu Jintao had invited Kim for a visit. If Kim does take the journey to China, which would be his first since a trip there in January 2006, the North will probably be true to its form and not announce the visit until it is over and Kim is safely back in Pyongyang.

(PHOTO: North Korean leader Kim Jong-il visits the newly built Kumjinggang Guchang Juvenile power plant in North Korea during one of his field guidance visits in an undated photo provided by the North’s KCNA news agency on Nov. 8, 2009)

The fall of the Berlin Wall, on November 9, 1989, was one of history’s truly epochal moments. During what became a revolutionary wave sweeping across the former Eastern Bloc countries, the announcement by the then-East German Government that its citizens could visit West Germany set in train a series of events that led, ultimately, to the demise of the Soviet Union itself.

Twenty years on, what is most striking to me are the massive, enduring ramifications of the events of November 1989. Only several decades ago, the Cold War meant that the borders of the Eastern Bloc were largely inviolate; extremist religious groups and ethnic tensions were suppressed, there was no internet (at least as we know it today) and travel between East and West was difficult. The two great Glaciers of the Cold War produced a frozen hinterland characterised by immobility.

Today’s world is a vastly different place. When one of the great Glaciers - the former Soviet Union – melted it helped unleash a potential torrent of security problems. We now live in an era characterised by huge mobility and instability, in which issues such as mass migration, international crime and international terrorism have a much higher prominence.

The end of the Cold War, together with subsequent conflicts across Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East, for instance, has led to many millions of people migrating the globe in hope or fear. In the West, this has given rise to pressure on jobs, healthcare, education, housing and cultural identity, causing local populations to feel threatened.

While international migration has generally been culturally enriching and beneficial, it has nonetheless also increased the range of threats to our societies. For instance, the 48 radical Islamicists implicated in terror plots in the United States between 1993 and 2001, including the 9/11 hijackers, all used legitimate immigration devices (e.g. "green cards", student/tourism/business visas, and amnesty and asylum) to get into the country.

Getting to grips with this specific threat is a major challenge and the reason why, as UK Home Secretary, I placed so much emphasis on the need to overhaul our immigration system. Key elements of the changes I championed include a new points-based system -- which represents the biggest reform of UK immigration procedures for more than half a century; electronic border controls (all UK entry visas, for instance, are now based on finger prints); and the National Identity Scheme which features compulsory fingerprint biometric identity cards for foreign nationals.

It is globalisation that lies at the heart of our transformational post-Cold War World. This inexorable process has extended the opportunities of world-wide interchange. Driven by technological advances in transport, communications, and electronic networks, globalisation has delivered massive opportunities in terms of mobility, movement and exchange of people, ideas, values, resources, commodities and finance.

But this same globalisation process and associated technology has also brought major new threats, or intensified existing ones, rendering everyone increasingly inter-dependent and vulnerable. The threat we face is seamless, running across the boundaries of defence, foreign affairs, domestic and social life. For instance, it has left nations and peoples ever more vulnerable to phenomena ranging from international crime and terrorism through to cyber-attack, health pandemics, energy-politics, resource shortage and financial crises.

The net result is that there are far more sources of insecurity than during the Cold War. The uncertainty this generates means that crises (defined as crucial turning points in events rather than as catastrophes) are more recurrent. Moreover, this bias towards instability is exacerbated by the fact that the nature of the potential crises we face is constantly evolving. In the context of international migration, for instance, terrorists and other international criminals are constantly trying to find new ways to evade our security safeguards.

Given the complexity of the threats we face, it is essential as a nation that we continually upgrade our capacity to deal with them by identifying, exposing and remedying our deficiencies. If we are to be able to keep up, and potentially be one step ahead of our adversaries, we will increasingly need to pool our ingenuity to innovate and deliver solutions.

This is a relatively uncontroversial ambition, shared by many. But I believe it requires nothing less than new thinking, new urgency and a new approach to studying tomorrow’s security problems today.

That’s partly why we are establishing the Institute for Security and Resilience Studies at University College, London. The new Centre will address projects of vital importance to national and international security arising from globalisation in the post-Cold War World. The goal is to assess and embed resilience as well as analysing threats; and to extend this analysis into action in outlining policy options to shape our preparation, response and recovery to crises.

This insistence on “embedding” resilience throughout organisational structures and culture is essential given the nature of contemporary society. Where there is, for instance, now a global availability of information through the internet, satellite and mobile communications, resilience to threats must be embedded in a decentralised way (rather than top-down). To the degree that resilience can ever be said to have depended on an elite management at the top of organisations, this is no longer the case -- hence the need to bring together practitioners from the public, private and third sectors with academics in order to combine theory and practice in targeted projects.

The goal must be nothing less that ensuring that government, business and society can not only cope with, but flourish, in the increasingly uncertain times in which we live. The fall of that wall symbolised the emergence of a world offering both unparalleled opportunities and unprecedented insecurities. The challenge of maximising the first and countering the latter is a legacy demanding an ingenuity and endurance from the next and subsequent generations to match that of their predecessors.

Once a year, North Korea’s often vitriolic rhetoric machine fires up with special intensity to attack those who attack its human rights record. The exchanges usually come toward the end of the year when the U.N. General Assembly approves what has become an annual measure criticising North Korea for having one of the worst rights records in the world.

Reclusive North Korea is a member of only a few international organisations so the annual rebuke at the United Nations stings particularly hard for the state that bills itself as a workers’ paradise, or as it said in a state media report on Tuesday: “the best socialist state in the world as it is centred on the popular masses”.

North Korea comes under special scrutiny this year because it will be subject to official international questioning of its human rights record at the United Nations in December, which could provide even more embarrassment for the North’s thinned-skinned leaders as the prickly state is put on the defensive.
North Korea has prepared for this event by changing its Constitution earlier this year and adding clauses about human rights protections.

But many of the rights of North Korean citizens spelled out in the document are not carried out. For example, it guarantees freedom of assembly, but Pyongyang can send to political prison anyone who gathers without permission of authorities. The regime guarantees freedom of religion, but jails those who try to exercise the right. Privacy is a right, but the government’s large internal spy network keeps tabs on almost all citizens.

According to human rights groups, the United States and other leading democracies, North Korea maintains a vast political prison system to stamp out dissent. It intimidates the masses through public executions and by guilt by association where it can jail family members of those it accuses of crimes.

North Korea’s official media usually unleashes some of its harshest rhetoric during this human rights season, saying this is all part of a plot by a hostile United States to topple its leaders. Already this week, the North slammed “the ceaseless mean ‘human rights rackets’ kicked up by the U.S. and its followers.”

“This is nothing but a despicable plot to attain their sinister purposes by putting political pressure upon the DPRK (North Korea),” its KCNA news agency said.

The points to watch this year when North Korea is raked over the coals for its record are whether Pyongyang will use the criticism as a means to back away from international nuclear disarmament talks – as it has done previously – or if it will finally grant the request of Vitit Muntarbhorn, the U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in North Korea, to see for himself what is going on in one of the world’s most isolated states.

For years Mohamed ElBaradei, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and outgoing head of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, has warned the United States and other Western powers against jumping to conclusions about Iran’s nuclear program. While Washington, Israel and their allies see increasing indications that Tehran’s secretive nuclear program is aimed at developing weapons, ElBaradei told an audience of academics, politicians and diplomats at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City that his agency has “no concrete evidence” that Tehran is pursuing an atom bomb.

So is Iran’s nuclear program intended solely for lighting light bulbs in the world’s fourth biggest oil producer as Tehran insists? According to ElBaradei, its purpose is something completely different.

“Iran’s nuclear program is a means to an end, it wants to be recognized as a regional power,” the outspoken Egyptian lawyer and diplomat said. “They believe that the nuclear know-how brings prestige, brings power, and they would like to see the U.S. engaging them. Unfortunately that holds some truth. Iran has been taken seriously since they have developed their program.”

In other words: Don’t mess with us. We can enrich uranium.

U.N. officials who know ElBaradei have told Reuters for years that the IAEA director-general is convinced that Iran is pursuing what is often called the “break-out option” — the capability to produce nuclear weapons should it ever decide it needed them. He is not convinced, they say, that Iran has taken a decision to follow North Korea’s example and build an actual weapon.

But Western diplomats who follow the Iranian issue say that it is doubtful Iran would choose to hover on the threshold of the nuclear club without entering the door. A more likely scenario, they argue, is that the Islamic Republic would secure its place at the table of world powers by developing and possibly even testing a nuclear device. They also say the impact on the Middle East would be the same whether Iran has the “break-out option” in the drawer or a live bomb in its basement. In either case the result would be a nuclear weapons race across the already unstable Middle East.

ElBaradei has spent six of his 12 years at the helm of the IAEA neogotiating with Iran to get access to Iran’s nuclear facilities, many of which were hidden from U.N. inspectors for decades before their existence was revealed by Iranian exiles or Western intelligence agencies.

The IAEA chief chastised the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush and the European Union’s three biggest powers — Britain, France and Germany — for failing to seize what he said was an opportunity they had years ago to persuade the Iranians to suspend their uranium enrichment program.

“They were ready to stop at an R&D (research and development) level … that could have not have created any concern for the international community,” he said.

Making matters worse, the European and U.S. demands that Iran cease all enrichment activity before negotiations on a package of economic and political incentives could begin was among the conditions imposed on Tehran that ElBaradei described as “impossible to accept.”

Western diplomats, however, have said that it would be naive to think that the Iranians were ever truly prepared to suspend their enrichment program after the EU trio launched negotiations with Tehran in the fall of 2003. They have defied three rounds of U.N. sanctions for refusing to stop enriching.  Bush’s successor Barack Obama has reversed the U.S. position by offering to engage Iran’s leaders, but they have reacted coolly so far.

ElBaradei, who opposed the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in March 2003, said Bush’s refusal to negotiate directly with North Korea and Iran was a colossal policy failure that had created “a total mess.” (North Korea tested nuclear devices in 2006 and 2009.)

ElBaradei added that if Israel, which neither confirms nor denies having a sizable nuclear arsenal of its own, follows through on threats to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities it would backfire. He said Tehran would simply launch a “crash course” to get an atom bomb and “would turn the Middle East into a ball of fire.”

One of the most amazing aspects about the Berlin Wall’s sudden collapse 20 years ago was that no one lost their nerve. Not a single shot was fired. The Cold War ended with the biggest street party Berlin, or any city anywhere, has ever seen. 

Who would have thought that’s how the Berlin Wall would go out? Berlin’s long division was the result of World War Two. The Wall was the focal point of the Cold War — Soviet and American tanks faced off almost barrel-to-barrel at Checkpoint Charlie. Not surprisingly, many people thought that the stalemate would only be changed by another war. But instead on Nov. 9, 1989 there was no bang, no blood. Just a lot of celebrating. And a lot of tears.

That’s for me probably the most fascinating thing about the sudden implosion of the Communist East German regime — it went out so peacefully. And that’s one of the themes that has been touched upon in the myriad of German media accounts in recent weeks ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Wall’s fall on Nov. 9.

It’s also an issue that’s been explored by Reuters correspondents in Berlin past and present — in a series of  stories that you can read on this special page . 

The collapse of the Wall was for Reuters a special occasion — not only because it was both the first to report the news to the world that the Wall had fallen but also because it was the first to report it was being built 28 years earlier, as my German language service colleague Volker Warkentin notes in his illumating story (click here) about the famous press conference on Nov. 9, 1989 that led to the Wall bursting open in the hours that followed.

Guenter Schabowski, a Politburo member, had inadverently announced at the very end of that otherwise dull hour-long news conference that East Germans would be allowed to travel directly to the West from now on.  Schabowski was asked when the new rules took effect and stammered: “That comes into effect…according to my information…. immediately, without delay,” he said, shuffling through the papers spread in front of him as he sought in vain for more information. It later emerged the announcement was not supposed to be released until 4 a.m. the next morning and it was supposed to include instructions for an orderly process of applying for visas first — not the mad dash to the border that he caused.

Tom Heneghan, the bureau chief for Germany at the time, was in East Berlin writing many of the stories on that famous evening when the Wall burst open. But as the American journalist notes in his intriguing story  (click here) there was so much going on that many of the details of the action only came to be known later.  “What we only found out much later was that Schabowski silently asked himself: ‘I wonder if this has been cleared with the Soviets.’ He didn’t know!”, Heneghan writes. “Later that evening, as the world’s eyes zeroed in on the partying at the Wall, East Germany’s communist leader Egon Krenz was pacing the long corridors of the Central Committee headquarters alone mumbling ‘What should I do now?’  What a gem that would have been in our story that night.”

Douglas Hamilton, who came to Berlin from Paris to reinforce the bureau, was out on the streets on that night and describes the scene here. Paul Taylor, who later came to Berlin from Jerusalem, steps back here to look at Germany’s relations neighbours then and now. Ralph Boulton, who worked for many years in East Berlin for Reuters, recalls some of his experiences here in this post.

Fabrizio Bensch, who was in his last year of high school in West Berlin, grabbed his camera and went to Checkpoint Charlie when he heard on the news the Wall was opening. But it took another hour or so before the first East Germans came through. ”It changed my life,” said Bensch, who decided on that night he wanted to be a photojournalist. Here’s his story.

Perhaps the most moving story is Peter Jebautzke’s. He grew up in East Germany and always dreamed of climbing in the Alps. But the Berlin Wall (3.5 metres high) kept him away from the 4,000 metre high peaks — until Nov. 9. Here’s what Jebautzke did when the Wall finally opened. 

There are many theories about what led to the Wall’s opening in 1989 — my personal favourite story is that Bruce Springsteen may have helped let the genie out of the bottle a year earlier when he held a concert in front of 160,000 people in East Berlin and said: “I came here to play rock ‘n’ roll for you East Berliners in the hope that one day all the barriers will be torn down.”

But colleagues currently working in Berlin have also weighed in with interesting examinations of what’s going on now, 20 years later.  Paul Carrel writes that the economy in formerly Communist East Germany has recovered in the last two decades in this story even if it’s not quite the “flourishing landscapes” everywhere that then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl had promised.

And Madeline Chambers shows that thousands of former workers at the loathed Stasi security police still have no remorse for the repressive regime they so ruthlessly kept in power. Here’s her story.

The German media have also had a lot of great stories. The ARD network had a fascinating documentary “Schabowskis Zettel” (Schabowski’s note) that ends with the head of the border guards at the first crossing point to open the Wall, Harald Jaeger, getting home early in the morning of Nov. 10 and telling his wife: “Honey, I just opened the Wall last night.” And then she said: “Erzaehl nicht so dummes Zeug” (Don’t come in here with rubbish like that).