"We think very few of the cases we have confirmed are in people over 50," the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Dr Anne Schuchat told reporters in a telephone briefing. "Whether this will pan out over the weeks ahead we don’t know."

The CDC reported 226 cases of the new H1N1 swine flu virus and one death in 30 states. The CDC previously had confirmed 160 cases in 21 states.

Mexican officials say they believe the outbreak there is starting to ease, although they are still trying to get a full picture of just how far the disease has spread.

Schuchat said the virus is fairly widespread in the United States, meaning that most states have reported cases. New York has the most cases with 63, many linked to a school in the New York City borough of Queens. Texas has 40 cases.

U.S. health officials said they were encouraged by signs in Mexico that the number of cases are leveling off and that there was only one death in the United States — a toddler visiting from Mexico.

Most cases in the United States have been reported to be mild. But 30 people, mostly older children and young adults, have been hospitalized with the disease, U.S. officials said.

Schuchat said that with seasonal flu, the elderly and very young are most likely to be sick enough to be hospitalized — 200,000 a year on average.

"I don’t think we are out of the woods yet," Schuchat said. "From what I know of influenza, I do know there will be more cases, more severe cases and more deaths."

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said on Sunday that flu vaccines for both the new strain of the H1N1 virus and the seasonal flu should be ready by autumn.

She told NBC’s "Meet the Press" that the government is accelerating production of a vaccine against the seasonal flu, which is expected to infect millions of Americans, and is beginning laboratory work on the new H1N1 virus.

Companies already are making the vaccine for the autumn months with a mixture of three influenza viruses that was chosen this year before the new strain broke out.

They have a number of choices — leaving the new strain out of the mix altogether, replacing the current H1N1 component with the new H1N1 strain, or making it a so-called quadrivalent vaccine that includes the new swine H1N1, the circulating seasonal H1N1, the H3N2 component and the influenza B strain.

It takes months to formulate influenza vaccines and they must be made fresh every ear, with new strains of the constantly mutating virus.

CDC says few people in U.S. over 50 hit by new flu

“The child suffered fairly extensive injuries and the paramedics spent some time trying to resuscitate the child,” said ambulance spokesman Paul Bentley.

The girl’s 35-year-old father was arrested just an hour later outside Melbourne’s Federal Court, which hears family case matters, with two other children in his car, police said.

The father was charged with murder.

Australian girl, 4, thrown from bridge | International | Reuters

From his bed in Perth’s Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, the former mechanic found out Ford had dropped its appeal against the $840,000 payout he won in February.

The father of three had made legal history when the Supreme Court ruled he developed the asbestosis that now cripples him while he worked for Ford, and awarded him damages.

Mr Lo Presti, 59, who requires bottled oxygen 24 hours a day, inhaled asbestos while working for Ford between 1970 and 1987, servicing brakes that contained asbestos in the lining.

It was the first successful asbestos claim by a mechanic against a car company, opening the way for other similar victims.

But Ford appealed the Supreme Court’s decision, forcing a continuation of the litigation, which began in 2002.

Mr Lo Presti was rushed to hospital on Tuesday with a build-up of fluid on his lungs.

His wife, Connie, was critical of Ford’s timing in announcing it was abandoning the appeal on Christmas Eve.

She said they could have saved her husband and family a lot of stress by announcing it earlier.

“I thought they were pretty disgusting,” she said. “They could have done it better to relieve any heartache on the family and on him.

“I hope they come to the party on this and don’t let us stress any more than they already have.”

Mr Lo Presti began suffering the effects of the usually fatal lung disease in the late 1990s.

In his Supreme Court ruling, judge Andrew Beech said Ford should have known that, without protective measures, asbestos fibres released from the brake linings could have caused the disease.

Australian Asbestos Diseases Society president Robert Vojakovic, who has worked with Mr Lo Presti through the litigation process, said it had taken too long.

“Ford kept delaying, they kept frustrating. That should never happen again,” he said.

The Australian

The unnamed official had been in Suva on a visitor visa awaiting a decision by the interim Government on his long-term visa status.

Australian Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon told The Australian newspaper: “The interim (Fiji) Government has indicated that no visa will be granted.

“This is an important position, not only in relation to Fiji but also to the four other Pacific island countries, Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Kiribati and Nauru, all close neighbours of Fiji, to which the defence adviser position is credited,” he said.

“This is unhelpful and destructive behaviour by the Fiji interim Government, which should instead be focusing all of its efforts on returning Fiji to democracy – as it had promised to do.”

In a sign of worsening relations with Australia, the Fiji interim Government rejected the defence adviser’s application and ordered the Australian out of the country.

The move followed the recent expulsion and denial of consular access to New Zealand journalist Barbara Dreaver and the expulsion of two Australian journalists earlier this year.

Relations between New Zealand and Fiji sank to a new low last week with announcements by both countries of tit-for-tat expulsions of each other’s ambassadors.

Fiji’s action against New Zealand’s Caroline McDonald followed an outburst on Monday by the interim Government’s attorney-general, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, who alleged that New Zealand and Australian authorities were tapping phone lines and using locally hired Fijians as spies.

New Zealand Foreign Minister Murray McCully said he had no knowledge of any such activity, and the reference to locally hired Fijians was “one of the less pleasant aspects” of recent statements.

McDonald is the second Kiwi high commissioner to be given marching orders by Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama.

In June last year, Michael Green was declared persona non grata after being accused of meddling in Fiji’s affairs.
The diplomatic breakdown comes as Pacific Island Forum leaders prepare to make another attempt to persuade Fiji to hold democratic elections next year.

Regional leaders, including New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key, are due to meet in Papua New Guinea at the end of next month to discuss a way forward.

The latest sparring started when New Zealand refused to grant a student visa to the son of the private secretary to Fiji’s President Ratu Josefa Iloilo under sanctions Wellington imposed on key members of Fiji’s Government and their relatives following the December 2006 coup.

Fijilive

White pointers caused terror on opposite sides of Australia yesterday, with snorkeller Brian Guest killed as he swam with his son at a beach near Perth.

Sydney paddlers Justin Stanger and Steve Kulscar were lucky to survive, with Mr Kulscar falling from his craft as the four-metre white pointer circled them about a kilometre off Long Reef.

Fisherman Glenn Morgan was in a runabout nearby when he saw a large fin break the water near the kayakers about 11am.

“All of a sudden I saw one bloke topple off his kayak, so we cut our anchor rope and went straight over to him and got him in the boat,” Mr Morgan told The Sun-Herald last night.

The shark came perilously close as the two kayakers fastened their craft to the tinnie.

It circled for at least another 10minutes before leaving.

“The adrenalin was just pumping,” Mr Morgan said. “I reckon they would have died if we weren’t out there – the shark was pretty hungry.”

“I might get him a case of beer – that’s the least I can do,” one of the men told the Seven Network.

Mr Guest, 51, and his son, Daniel, 24, were diving for crabs off their local beach near Rockingham, 30 kilometres south of Perth, when the former suddenly disappeared about 7am.

Daniel had heard his father cry out and had seen the shark and a “heap of blood” in the water.

“Something very traumatic and pretty violent has happened there and we are treating it as a probable shark attack,” acting police inspector Mark Valentine said.

Police, marine rescue patrols and three helicopters searched unsuccessfully for Mr Guest.

“[Daniel] was on the beach shaking and looked really white, and he was just really shocked,” resident Luke Tubbs said.

Family spokesman and policeman Steve Kent said Mr Guest, a banker, was a devoted husband and father who knew the dangers of the ocean.

“[He was] an avid fisherman, an avid diver and a loving husband and father,” Sergeant Kent said.

Mr Guest had campaigned to protect sharks from hunting.

“Our place on earth is not so sacred that we remove every threat that exists,” he said in a forum about sharks on the Western Angler website.

“Every surfer, fisherman and diver has far more chance of being killed by bees, drunk drivers, teenage car thieves and lightning.”

Shark horror: snorkeller dead, kayakers menaced – National – smh.com.au

The fatal police shooting of a teenager has sparked Greece’s worst rioting in years, with gangs of youths rampaging through Athens and the northern city of Thessaloniki at the weekend.

Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) has not changed its overall level of travel advice for Greece, but it advises Australians to avoid central Athens and the tourist areas of Monastiraki and Plaka.

The Australian Embassy in Athens is unaware of any Australians affected by the riots.

A DFAT spokeswoman said 175 people had registered their travel to Greece with the department but noted the number of Australians actually in the country was likely to be much higher.

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Mr Utzon, an award-winning architect, put “Denmark on the world map with his great talent,” said Danish Culture Minister Carina Christensen.

Having won a competition in 1957 to design the building, he left the project before it opened in 1973.

Mr Utzon never visited the completed landmark, after disputes about costs.

He had quarrelled with the Australian client and the costs overran by 1,000%.

Even decades later he declined invitations to return to Australia, but did design, with his son, a new wing which opened in 2006.

In 1998 he told Associated Press news agency: “It’s part of education – I can’t be bitter about anything in life.”

Most of the interior of the opera house was not completed according to his plans after government-appointed architects took over the job.

The Sydney Opera House planned to dim the lights on the sail-shaped roof on Sunday to mark Mr Utzon’s death.

The chairman of Sydney Opera House Trust, Kim Williams, said: “Jorn Utzon was an architectural and creative genius who gave Australia and the world a great gift.

“Sydney Opera House is core to our national cultural identity and a source of great pride to all Australians. It has become the most globally recognised symbol of our country.”

Mr Utzon also designed the National Assembly of Kuwait and several prominent buildings in Denmark.

Danish Minister of Culture Carina Christensen paid tribute to him, saying: “Jorn Utzon will be remembered as one of the Danes who in the 20th century put Denmark on the world map with his great talent.”

Mr Utzon won several international awards, including the Alvar Aalto Medal for architecture and France’s Legion of Honour.

In 2003 he won the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize for his design of the opera house.

arkitecto

Malouf was presented with the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Award in Perth last night.

The $110,000 award, which was created by the former Labor government in Western Australia, is worth $10,000 more than the next richest, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, and is given for fiction by writers resident in, or outside Australia, writing primarily about Australia or Asia.

Malouf, whose new short novel Ransom will be published in April, was “very pleased to be the first recipient”. He welcomed the award, and praised it as unique among state literary prizes.

“It’s unlike most of the other major Australia prizes because it’s given by a state government, but it’s not limited to Australia,” he said.

“There is certainly no other literary prize where Australia is the initiator which takes in Asia like this does, so it’s a very good thing that we’re looking outwards rather than inwards as we tend to do” he said.

The Complete Stories won from a very strong shortlist, including The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize), The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser (longlisted for the Booker), Blood Kin by Ceridwen Dovey, and Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital.

The longlist, culled from 111 entries, also had plenty of dazzle, including the Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee (Diary Of A Bad Year), Haruki Murakami (After Dark) and the Miles Franklin- shortlisted Rodney Hall (Love Without Hope) and Alex Miller (Landscape Of Farewell).

“It’s a wonderful piece of writing, a combination of decades of work, and it captures the human condition in such a deep and intense way,” said Nury Vittachi, a member of the judging panel, along with the Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie, and the Australian critic Peter Craven.

“His characters are very ordinary people and he captures the intense joys and sadness of ordinary life.”

The Complete Stories spans Malouf’s career, containing all the stories in his collections Dream Stuff (2000) and Every Move You Make plus 1985’s Antipodes and the two shorter pieces from Child’s Play (1982).

Vittachi agreed the decision to award the prize to a book of short stories was unusual.

“It might usually go to a novel. But there’s an ancient story form called a bracelet, where you have a sequence of stand-alone stories which when read together have as much power as a single, united novel. We thought this book worked as just such a bracelet.”

Vittachi sees the award as a means to divine the region’s literary future.

“This award is special as it has a focus on a particular region, a region where there are 4 billion people,” Vittachi said.

“The future of our cultural entertainment will be here. We’re looking for a new Asia-Pacific flavour, as that is a good pointer to what the new literature will be. There’s a huge change coming very fast and this prize is giving a glimpse of that future.”

Malouf said he hoped “booksellers, publishers and the media get behind the prize in the way they do for the Miles Franklin Award”.

Entertainment

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has told the APEC summit in Peru, Jakarta will boost growth with infrastructure projects like power plants, and fight poverty with greater spending on education and health care.

He says with global markets weakening and prices soft for Indonesia’s exported commodities “sources of growth will come more from our large domestic market,”.

The Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, says his idea for an Asia Pacific Community would be an important move to ensure economic growth in the region.

“We need to think now about the next 20 years and beyond,” Mr Rudd said.

“The rapid changes taking place in our region are certain to throw up a myriad of economic, political and security and environmental challenges that require common action and we need to position the region to respond effectivey to all of these challenges through a single forum that brings together regional countries such as the Untied States, China, India, Indonesia and Japan and others.”

Mr Rudd wants the Community to be set up by 2020.

Indonesia looks inward for economic help

US President George W Bush used his final summit before leaving office to encourage continuity on the part of his successor Barack Obama on issues ranging from North Korean nuclear talks to free trade.

“We refuse to accept protectionism in the 21st century,” Bush said emphatically on Saturday.

His was one of a series of anti-protectionist statements made as the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum got under way in the Peruvian capital Lima on Saturday.

The 21-member grouping which accounts for half the world’s trade activity issued a statement that also urged reform of global financial institutions, echoing the Group of 20 summit held in Washington the previous weekend.

“We reiterate our firm belief that free market principles and open trade and investment regimes will continue to drive global growth, employment and poverty reduction,” said the one-page communique.

The statement was light on details, however, and there was no indication strong measures would be announced in a final statement on Sunday to address a financial crisis that has shown no sign of improving.

Attention was likely to turn somewhat on Sunday to the lighthearted annual photograph of regional leaders clad in attire unique to the host country, the signature feature of the gathering.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the 20 other APEC leaders are expected to don ponchos and, perhaps, the traditional Peruvian beanie, the chullo, when they gather for the traditional photograph at lunchtime (0400 AEDT Monday).

Rudd will join his counterparts at the Ministry of Defence to put the finishing touches to the final communique, known as the Lima Declaration, which will add impetus to efforts by the G20 nations – which met in Washington DC last weekend – to wrap up the long-running Doha round of global trade negotiations.

Before Sunday’s closing session gets under way, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Chinese leader Hu Jintao were to meet, Russian officials said, for talks expected to further spotlight the two powers’ increasingly close relationship and its potential as a check on US power.

Russia and the United States have had a tense relationship recently due to disputes including US plans to erect a missile defence system in Eastern Europe.

The United States says the plan is aimed at a potential Iranian missile threat, but Russia has hotly opposed it as a provocation.

However, Bush and Medvedev made soothing noises during a Saturday bilateral meeting, calling for a “practical” approach to their relationship, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.

The leaders agreed “not to get hung up on such problems that always exist between big powers”, Lavrov told reporters.

In an another high-profile meeting on Saturday, Bush, Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso and South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak gathered to jointly press North Korea over a stalled six-nation pact on ending its nuclear program.

The three leaders called on North Korea to draft a document showing how it will carry out the landmark disarmament-for-aid deal.

Aso said afterward that Bush promised to impress upon Obama – who takes office in January facing a host of major problems – the importance of continuing the drive for a negotiated disarmament of North Korea.

Summit leaders were to issue the final declaration on Sunday amid broad consensus that change is needed in the global financial system but little clear indication yet of how to get there.

President Hu of China on Saturday repeated his country’s stance that efforts to address the current crisis should include giving developing countries such as China a greater voice in bodies like the International Monetary Fund.

Any world financial reforms “should seek a balance among the interests of all parties and reflect, in particular, the interests of emerging markets and developing countries”, Hu said.

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