Yesenia Rojas, vibrant in her purple shawl, sang with a voice so powerful it rose above the rest of the procession as they shuffled down the damp Anaheim sidewalk.
"Era mexicana. Era mexicana," they sang with a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe hoisted high, candlelight and street lamps illuminating their way. "Madrecita de los mexicanos."
The singsong serenade lauds the patroness, the mother of all Mexicans.
On this drizzly evening, Rojas led the group down Anna Drive, where she and her family have made their home.
In a city often defined by Disneyland and elegant sports venues, this street of working-class Latino immigrants has become an avatar of a lesser-known, voiceless Anaheim, one riddled with poverty and gangs.
When police shot and killed a 25-year-old alleged gang member who lived on Anna Drive, it stoked what had been a growing fire in the city. It was the latest in a spate of police shootings last year, which inflamed anger with law enforcement into a larger sense of resentment over ethnic and class fissures that divide Orange County's largest city.
Unrest — amplified by Occupy-connected protesters from outside the city — gripped Anaheim for days after the July shooting, followed by weeks of heated City Council meetings.
The wave of protesters demanding change has washed away, but Rojas has emerged in its wake. The 35-year-old mother of six, with short, wavy dark hair and a small frame that belies her force of will, has taken it upon herself to become the voice of Anna Drive.
Her family lives in a one-bedroom apartment just yards from where Manuel Diaz was shot that summer day. Rojas' 14-year-old daughter saw Diaz's body and has been traumatized since. Her mother can't let that go.
"I thought about leaving, and so did my husband, because of the children," she said. "But I said no. Because, first of all, we don't need to fear anyone, not even the police. The biggest thing right now is to stay on our feet and make things happen as a community. If we all leave, things won't change. They'll keep trampling us and humiliating us."
Rojas has a vision for her community that would seem bold if her wishes weren't so simple: She imagines playgrounds and community centers and political representation. But most of all, she sees respect for Anna Drive.
She balances two jobs, but she makes time for her community. She bends the ears of politicians. She organizes rallies encouraging her neighbors to register to vote and head to the polls. She plans events that she hopes will draw together a community that has grown accustomed to seeing itself as the backdrop of news cameras trying to highlight the city's ills.
And on this night, dozens gathered to pray a rosario in the tight courtyard outside her apartment, where the statue of the Virgin rested on an altar of roses and carnations.
As sirens echoed in the distance, the crowd stayed late into the night. They sang, they danced, they sipped cinnamon-spiced coffee.
And they prayed, petitioning the Virgin Mother for peace and for guidance.
"This is the community," Rojas said. "These are the people of Anna Drive."
::
Anna Drive, a collection of squat, modest apartment buildings, horseshoes off of a busy thoroughfare. On any given day, it pulses with life: children whipping down the sidewalk on scooters and skateboards, older boys tussling with one another and nanas and tatas watching it all unfold from chairs in their frontyards.
The street is clogged with cars and the vending truck that always seems to be parked along the same slice of curb, hawking snacks, produce and spices to the families who live on this stretch of tidy apartments and small, fenced-in lawns.
Rojas came to Anna Drive about a year ago, moving her family into the tight but comfortable apartment, its walls lined with family photographs. She was born in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, but she has lived much of her life in the flatlands of Anaheim. Her mother has lived in the same apartment, just a few blocks away, for decades.
A Dutch design agency has come up with a concept for a rubbish bag that lets you dispose of items that you don’t want, but which someone else might.
The “Goedzak,” which translates to “good bag” or “do-gooder,” is a transparent bag with an eye-catching yellow stripe down one side, which you can put things out on the street in. If any of the contents catch the eye of a passer-by, they can feel free to just take them.
Designers Simon Akkaya and Maarten Heijltjes told the Pop Up City: “Whether it’s that purple vase your sister-in-law got you, or that particular coffee-pad-loving coffee machine (you know the one) that’s been lying in the basement for ages; everybody owns items that are no longer of value to them.”
They added: “Every now and then we throw out these items, while they still might be of value and/or useful to others. These items disappear in grey garbage bags and end up on trash piles. Goedzak offers these items a second chance.”
Akkaya and Heijltjes are looking for a Dutch municipality to run a pilot scheme of the bag to see if it works. But there’s a slight issue — under Dutch law, taking items off the street is considered theft.
Still, if that problem can be surmounted, this could be an idea worth watching.
LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – The Academy has dramatically expanded the potential pool of voters in three categories, looking to increase voter participation just as its first-ever adoption of online voting has apparently led to unexpectedly high turnout.
On Saturday, AMPAS president Hawk Koch sent an email to voters announcing that all 5,856 voting members would be sent screeners of all the nominees in the Best Documentary Feature, Best Live-Action Short Film and Best Animated Short Film categories.
The change had actually been adopted by the Board of Governors more than a year ago, at a December 2011 meeting.
Academy rules still require voters in the three categories to see all five nominees before voting, but the rules no longer insist that members to view the films theatrically at special AMPAS screenings.
The third short-film category, Best Documentary Short Subject, is not affected by the new policy, even though the push to expand the pool of voters via screeners began in the Documentary Branch when it changed the doc-feature rules a year ago.
Branch governor Michael Moore told TheWrap he plans to push for changes in the doc-shorts category this year.
The new procedures have the potential to increase the number of voters in those categories from the low hundreds into the thousands. The Academy does not release the numbers of members who vote, but those who’ve participated in the process have long surmised that categories requiring members to attend special voting screenings may only attract a couple hundred voters.
This year’s nomination vote was beset by snags in the transition to online voting, with the Academy first pushing back the deadline for members to request paper ballots, then opting to automatically send ballots to every member who didn’t sign up for the online option regardless of whether they’d requested paper.
The week that ballots were due, AMPAS also pushed back the final deadline for nomination voting by one day, amid rampant speculation and anecdotal evidence that voters were confused by the new procedures.
Many people insisted that the earlier deadline and the different voting procedures would cause members to give up, and thus substantially depress the number of voters who cast ballots.
But according to three Academy sources, voter turnout was in fact the highest number in years in every category.
As public health officials struggle to contain a series of viral outbreaks this winter, many people are reaching for bottles of hand sanitizer.
Studies show that alcohol-based sanitizers, particularly those with 60 percent ethanol or more, can reduce microbial counts on contaminated hands and reduce the spread of some strains of the flu. But against norovirus, the severe gastrointestinal illness gripping many parts of the country, they may be useless.
Some viruses, like influenza, are coated in lipids, “envelopes” that alcohol can rupture. But non-enveloped viruses, like norovirus, are generally not affected.
Bleach is effective against norovirus, and can be used to decontaminate countertops and surfaces. And for people, the best strategy may be washing hands with plain old soap and water.
In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studied 91 long-term care facilities. During the winter of 2006-07, they identified 73 outbreaks, 29 of which were confirmed to be norovirus.
The facilities where staff members used alcohol-based sanitizers, were six times more likely to have an outbreak of norovirus than the facilities where the staff preferred using soap and water.
The C.D.C. says that as a means of preventing norovirus infection, alcohol-based sanitizers can be used “in addition” to hand washing, never as a substitute.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Hand sanitizers can reduce the spread of some viruses, like the flu. But against norovirus they are largely ineffective; better to use soap and water.
Shares of Dell rose more than 12 percent early Monday afternoon after Bloomberg News reported that the personal computer maker was in talks with at least two private equity firms about going private.
A buyout of Dell would be worth more than $17 billion, based on its total enterprise value. The company has some $9 billion in debt, but $11 billion in cash at hand. A deal would make it the largest technology buyout since the $17.6 billion acquisition of Freescale Semiconductor by a group of buyers led by the Blackstone Group in 2006.
The Bloomberg report, citing two people with knowledge of the matter, said the talks were preliminary. It cautioned that the firms might not be able to line up financing.
The report of the talks comes a week after a top Dell executive, David Johnson, who was in charge of the company’s corporate strategy, including deals, left to join the Blackstone Group.
Any buyout would involve Michael Dell, who started the company out of his University of Texas dormitory room in 1984. The chief executive owns nearly 16 percent of the company.
At a Sanford C. Bernstein conference in June 2010, Mr. Dell was asked whether he had considered taking the private. “Yes,” was all he would say on the matter.
Since Michael Dell returned as chief executive six years ago, Dell has tried to move from its core business of personal computers and computer servers into the more stable and growing business of equipping corporate data centers with hardware and software. Its personal computer and associated laptop businesses, however, still accounts for about half of Dell’s revenue.
That PC business is shrinking fast. On Monday, Gartner, a market analysis firm, stated that for all of 2012 Dell sold 37.6. million PCs worldwide, a 12.3 percent drop from its 2011 shipments. It was the worst performance, in a weak market, of any major manufacturer. Dell’s drop was particularly severe in both the United States and in the fourth quarter, indicating that its erosion is accelerating. Hewlett Packard, the world’s top PC maker, shipped 6.7 percent fewer PCs in 2012, but was only modestly lower in the fourth quarter, and increased its share in the United States, Gartner said.
PCs, until recently the primary way people worked with computers and got on the Internet, are facing increasing competition from tablets and smartphones. The launch of Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system in October, which PC makers hoped would revitalize their business, may have made things worse . Customers seem not to like Microsoft’s design and touch screen innovations.
Dell has been trying to cut its reliance on the PC business, but the company faces challenges.
Last July, Dell purchased Quest Software, a maker of software for data centers, for $2.4 billion. John Swainson, the head of Dell’s corporate software business, has said it will take five years to build a business big enough to significantly affect Dell’s performance.
In October Dell announced advanced products in servers, data storage, and computer networking. It faces tough competition in these areas, however, from H.P., I.B.M., and Oracle.
In the meantime, Dell’s stock has suffered. Before Monday, the stock price was down some 30 percent over the last 12 months.
The math for a leveraged buyout seems daunting, at least initially. Dell’s market value as of Friday was about $18.9 billion. Assuming a 30 percent takeover premium — slightly below the average for high technology L.B.O.’s last year, according to Thomson Reuters — that would value the company at about $24.6 billion.
Mr. Dell would presumable roll over his stake, which would still leave about $24.3 billion to cover. That means would-be buyers still have to stump anywhere from $6 billion to almost $8.5 billion in equity. That’s an enormous amount for even two private equity firms to cover, even assuming that these shops brought in co-investors to help out with the equity check.
And that leaves an investor consortium needing to raise $15.8 billion to more than $18 billion in debt. To say that’s a hefty sum is an understatement. But bankers have long argued that the debt markets can support an enormous amount of borrowing, as investors have shown a willingness to pay cheaply for high-yield debt in a world of near-zero interest rates.
One could also subtract Dell’s bulging cash horde, making the debt figure seem less onerous. However, given the company’s already significant debt load, the company is likely to remain highly levered even after an L.B.O.
For now, it appears that the company has some breathing room with ratings agencies, because with an A2 rating, Dell has a solidly investment grade assessment from Moody’s Investors Service.
The bigger question, then, is whether would-be buyers can assemble a bid in the first place. Shareholders and analysts alike were already skeptical that Best Buy could be taken private by a group of investors when the proposal was first announced last summer. And at that time, a potential buyout bid for the electronics retailer was valued at a relatively paltry $8.8 billion.
An Egyptian court granted an appeal by former President Hosni Mubarak and ordered a new trial into the killings of hundreds of protesters during the 2011 uprising, a move certain to inflame the political unrest that has upset the country’s democratic transition.
The ruling was a victory for the ailing Mubarak and his Interior minister, Habib Adli, who also won his appeal. Both men, who had been sentenced to life in prison, face other criminal charges and are likely to remain in detention until a new trial in the deaths by security forces of more than 800 protesters.
“The previous ruling was unfair and illegal,” said Yousry Abdelrazeg, one of Mubarak’s lawyers, who accused the judge in the first trial of political bias. “The case was just a mess and there was no evidence against Mubarak.”
No date has been set for the new trial.
The court’s decision comes amid turmoil over an Islamist-backed constitution and outrage over the expanded powers of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. It means a bloody chapter in Egypt’s 2011 revolt will be revisited with the prospect that Mubarak, whose police state ruled for 30 years, may be absolved in a case that deepened the nation’s political differences and impassioned the Arab world.
Mubarak was convicted in June of not preventing the deaths of hundreds of protesters attacked by police and snipers during the uprising, which began on Jan. 25, 2011, and ended 18 days later when he stepped aside and the military seized power.
Mubarak argued that he had not ordered the crackdown and was unaware of the extent of the violence. A recently completed government-ordered investigation into the killings, however, reportedly found that Mubarak had monitored the deadly response by security forces in Tahrir Square via a live television feed.
The appeals court ruling came a day after prosecutors announced an investigation into allegations that Mubarak, 84, received about $1 million in illicit gifts from Al Ahram, the country’s leading state-owned newspaper. The former president has reportedly been in a military hospital since December after he fell in a prison bathroom and injured himself.
Last year’s trial riveted the nation with images of the aging Mubarak wheeled into the defendant’s cage on a stretcher, his arms crossed and his eyes hidden behind sunglasses.
jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com
(Special correspondent Reem Abdellatif contributed to this report)
Spoiler warning: Firefly ended over 10 years ago and it’s been 7 years since its subsequent film, Serenity, came out, so the spoiler statute of limitations is officially up. Proceed at your own risk.
Like many fans of the Joss Whedon space western Firefly, Kyle Hill was shocked by the end of the Serenity movie, when fan-favorite character Wash (Alan Tudyk) was unceremoniously impaled by a Reaver harpoon. Unlike most fans, Hill — a research assistant with a degree in Environmental Engineering and a contributor at Scientific American — decided to try and rewrite (fictional) history by proving that Wash’s death was scientifically impossible, using the power of math, physics and fandom. His article originally appeared online at Scientific American, and Wired publishes this updated version with permission.
I was late to Firefly. Nearly 10 years after the show first aired and then was subsequently cancelled, I holed up in my room, coffee and external hard drive in hand, aiming to blaze through one of the most beloved sci-fi series.
A mix of science fiction and “spaghetti-western” genres, Firefly was wonderful. It certainly awakened the fanboy in me, and I quickly understood why my girlfriend envied me for being able to watch the series for the first time.
It all ended abruptly, due to early cancellation, with the last episodes of Firefly barely answering any central questions or exploring the rich universe that had been so lovingly crafted by creator Joss Whedon. It was to my delight to learn that in 2005 there was a full-length movie in response to public (and private) outcries for more of Serenity and her crew.
Watching Serenity let me spend a bit more time in the ‘verse, and the film thankfully resolved a number of outstanding loops justwaiting to be closed. But the forced end of Firefly also forced Joss Whedon’s hand. He put in scenes that would only have appeared in a last hurrah like Serenity. One scene in particular shook me, like the unexpected sight of a Reaver ship. It’s a scene that drove me to NASA forums and technical reports, glass manufacturers, my calculator, and eventually to this post.
Late in Serenity, after crash-landing at the mysterious base of “Mr. Universe,” pilot Hoban “Wash” Washburne meets his end at the tip of a Reaver spear. The immediacy of the violence, and his wife Zoe’s touching reaction, kept my mouth agape well into the next few minutes of the film. One of my favorite characters just died, as Firefly died. I couldn’t stand it. I had to be sure.
What if the Reaver spear couldn’t plausibly make it through the forward windows of Serenity? The movie may have been set in the future, but we too have built spacecraft with windows, and they are made to withstand impacts. If I could prove that a modern shuttle window (assuming that a future window would be even better) could withstand the impact that killed Wash, I could have the ultimate in fanboy closure: the movie is “wrong,” and my version of the story lives on.
Objects in Space
In terrestrial situations, a speck of paint is less than harmless. In space, it’s deadly. Travelling at a blistering 10,000 meters per second in orbit, the equations deem it lethal. It becomes a “hypervelocity” bullet.
Our spacecraft obviously must account for this deadly debris. Tens of thousands of pieces of extraterrestrial trash litter the orbit of Earth [PDF], meaning that a shuttle’s final impact could come from an errant hex nut. Shuttles today are outfitted with shielding to prevent such disasters, and feature two-and-a-half inch thick windows—the thickest pieces of glass ever produced in the optical quality for see-through viewing.
The largest impact to a shuttle window occurred when a fleck of paint struck STS-92—a flight to the International Space Station. A shuttle window has never been penetrated by a hypervelocity impact, but it doesn’t have to be. A deformation large enough could eventually cause window failure upon repeated take-offs and re-entries.
After engineers examined the crater in the window of STS-92, the shape that best explained the damage was a sort of miniaturized plate. But to begin making comparisons, I’ll consider the fleck of paint to be a similarly sized metal sphere. This will bring the numbers in line with the hypervelocity testing that NASA has already conductBased on the size and the speed of the fleck that hit STS-92, I calculated that the window weathered an impact with around 20 Joules of kinetic energy—equivalent to four milligrams of TNT or a decently thrown baseball. It created more than enough damage to warrant a window replacement. And such replacements from serious impacts are commonplace. Robert Lee Hotz notes in the Wall Street Journalthat “NASA shuttle engineers have replaced the spacecraft’s debris-pitted windows after almost every flight since since 1981, at a cost of about $40,000 per window.”
Such little flecks can be catastrophes. An orbiter unlucky enough to be hit by anything much larger than the paint chip that hit STS-92 is in for some trouble. Debris measuring five centimeters in diameter packs the punch of a bus collision. Any larger than that and we begin making comparisons to sticks of dynamite.
The shuttle windows are tough, to be sure, surviving nearly 1,400 impacts intact over 43 sampled missions, but are they strong enough to save Wash? Tiny particles are elevated to terrifying status because of their ridiculous speeds, not their mass. Conversely, the Reaver spear that killed Wash was larger, but moving much more slowly. A few assumptions and some physics equations would determine if I could save him.
I Am A Leaf on the Wind…
To get the general dimensions of the spear that killed Wash, I had to (unfortunately) go back to the scene in question, excruciatingly slowing down an emotional moment to be replayed over and over.
Diving back into Serenity, I used an earlier Reaver chase scene to guesstimate the spear size and speed. If Reavers shoot spears slow enough to be dodged (which they do), the spear that kills Wash can’t be moving much faster than a Major League fast-ball, putting the upper limit on speed around 100 miles per hour (45 m/s). This is orders of magnitude slower than the hypervelocity impacts that a shuttle deals with, but the spear is thousands of times more massive than a fleck of paint. Assuming it’s fashioned out of an “average” metal, and given its size, I’d guess it’s around 100-200 pounds (45-90 kg).
Kinetic energy is easy enough to calculate. The kinetic energy of a moving object is one-half of its mass multiplied by the square of its velocity.
This equation gives the Reaver spear a frightening 45,500 Joules at the low end. This is over 3,700 times the energy of the largest recorded impact to a space shuttle window — equivalent to a detonation of a pencil made of TNT or a medium sized anvil dropped on it.
What are the risks? via Aerospace.org
Based on hypervelocity testing undertaken by NASA, the Reaver spear would be like an aluminum sphere with a one-centimeter diameter hitting the window at 10 kilometers per second (assuming that the tip of the spear is comparable to a 1cm diameter point). Seeing that the damage threshold for a shuttle window based on this testing is 0.004 centimeters, my hopes quickly vanished. With this kind of energy, the Reaver spear could pierce a shuttle’s wing, its thermal protection tiles, or even its crew cabin.
The math doesn’t lie—Wash didn’t stand a chance.
Watch How I Soar…
I thought I had found the perfect fanboy out. The windows in Serenity looked flimsy and thin, surely not something a space-faring craft would be outfitted with. If the windows were anything like what we use to traverse the ‘verse today, perhaps all that would have happened is a jolt of fright from a deflected Reaver spear, or so I hoped.
But even delving through a hundred page NASA technical report [PDF] on impact shielding couldn’t ease my psyche.
Now, this is at its core a fanboy rant. No matter what I found, Wash dies in the movie. It’s part of the larger story and serves as a plot point, not a meaningless killing-off. But I selfishly wanted closure; I needed to resolve the dissonance between a character’s death and the fact that we know he wouldn’t have died if the networks saw better numbers from Firefly.
Maybe this is a testament to the enduring qualities of the show. To create characters important enough, and in only fifteen short stories, to warrant hours of research and calculation that ultimately proves useless in the larger story is an outcome of a great narrative. It’s typical of a fan base that will still pack a Comic-Con panel ten years after the airing of the show.
In the end, I like the story better this way. It takes a great narrative to make someone care so much about a character that he takes real world steps to resolve his own dissonance. If I could have ‘proved’ that Wash wouldn’t have been killed, a whole can of worms would open. What about the fact that Serenity was an old ship with sub-optimal gear? What about space-age technologies like super-strong window polymers? The scene obviously resonated with people (especially me), and the fact that I failed is a better story than a discussion of faulty film physics.
DALLAS (Reuters) – Grammy-winning country music singer Randy Travis had a blood alcohol level nearly twice the state’s legal limit when he was arrested last summer after a Texas state trooper found him lying naked on a road after crashing his car, authorities said.
Travis, 53, was charged on Wednesday with driving while intoxicated for the August 7 incident near his hometown of Tioga, about 60 miles north of Dallas, in which he also threatened to shoot and kill state troopers while he was being transported to jail, Grayson County prosecutors said.
Travis had a blood alcohol level of more than 0.15 percent, or nearly twice the legal limit of 0.08 in Texas, authorities said in the statement issued on Thursday.
The misdemeanor charge carries up to two years in jail and a $ 4,000 fine if he is convicted.
Travis has not been charged for the threats to troopers, which remain under investigation and could be considered retaliation, a third-degree felony, the statement said.
Prosecutors and lawyers representing Travis have been actively negotiating a resolution, Grayson County District Attorney Joe Brown said in the statement, apparently hinting at a possible plea deal.
“The filing of this charge allows us to get the case into court, in order to finalize the case as soon as we can,” Brown said, noting that it took some time to complete blood alcohol tests needed by the state and defense attorneys.
In addition to winning multiple Grammy awards, Travis also has appeared in movies and television shows.
The August crash and drunken driving charge is the latest in a series of law enforcement incidents involving Travis, who is known for “Forever and Ever, Amen” and other songs.
Travis pleaded not guilty in December to assaulting a man in a church parking lot in the Dallas suburb of Plano last August. Police said Travis intervened in a dispute between a woman he was with and her estranged husband. The misdemeanor charge carries a maximum $ 500 fine. Trial is set for March 11.
He was also arrested last February on suspicion of drunken driving while sitting in his car in the parking lot of another North Texas church.
(Editing by David Bailey and Will Dunham)
Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News
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With the nation in the grip of a severe influenza outbreak that has seen deaths reach epidemic levels, New York State declared a public health emergency on Saturday, making access to vaccines more easily available.
There have been nearly 20,000 cases of flu reported across the state so far this season, officials said. Last season, 4,400 positive laboratory tests were reported.
“We are experiencing the worst flu season since at least 2009, and influenza activity in New York State is widespread, with cases reported in all 57 counties and all five boroughs of New York City,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said in a statement.
Under the order, pharmacists will be allowed to administer flu vaccinations to patients between 6 months and 18 years old, temporarily suspending a state law that prohibits pharmacists from administering immunizations to children.
While children and older people tend to be the most likely to become seriously ill from the flu, Mr. Cuomo urged all New Yorkers to get vaccinated.
On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said that deaths from the flu had reached epidemic levels, with at least 20 children having died nationwide. Officials cautioned that deaths from pneumonia and the flu typically reach epidemic levels for a week or two every year. The severity of the outbreak will be determined by how long the death toll remains high or if it climbs higher.
There was some evidence that caseloads may be peaking, federal officials said on Friday.
In New York City, public health officials announced on Thursday that flu-related illnesses had reached epidemic levels, and they joined the chorus of authorities urging people to get vaccinated.
“It’s a bad year,” the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, told reporters on Thursday. “We’ve got lots of flu, it’s mainly type AH3N2, which tends to be a little more severe. So we’re seeing plenty of cases of flu and plenty of people sick with flu. Our message for any people who are listening to this is it’s still not too late to get your flu shot.”
There has been a spike in the number of people going to emergency rooms over the past two weeks with flulike symptoms – including fever, fatigue and coughing – Dr. Farley said.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Mr. Cuomo made a public display of getting shots this past week.
In a briefing with reporters on Friday, officials from the C.D.C. said that this year’s vaccine was effective in 62 percent of cases.
As officials have stepped up their efforts encouraging vaccinations, there have been scattered reports of shortages. But officials said plenty of the vaccine was available.
According to the C.D.C., makers of the flu vaccine produced about 135 million doses for this year. As of early this month, 128 million doses had been distributed. While that would not be enough for every American, only 37 percent of the population get a flu shot each year.
Federal health officials said they would be happy if that number rose to 50 percent, which would mean that there would be more than enough vaccine for anyone who wanted to be immunized.
Two other diseases – norovirus and whooping cough – are also widespread this winter and are contributing to the number of people getting sick.
The flu can resemble a cold, though the symptoms come on more rapidly and are more severe.
A version of this article appeared in print on 01/13/2013, on page A21 of the NewYork edition with the headline: New York Declares Health Emergency.
WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department said Saturday that it will not mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin to head off an imminent battle with Congress over raising the government’s borrowing limit.
“Neither the Treasury Department nor the Federal Reserve believes that the law can or should be used to facilitate the production of platinum coins for the purpose of avoiding an increase in the debt limit,” Anthony Coley, a Treasury spokesman, said in a written statement.
The Obama administration has indicated that the only way for the country to avoid a cash-management crisis as soon as next month is for Congress to raise the “debt ceiling,” which is the statutory limit on government borrowing. The cap is $16.4 trillion.
“There are only two options to deal with the debt limit: Congress can pay its bills, or it can fail to act and put the nation into default,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “Congress needs to do its job.”
In recent weeks, some Republicans have indicated that they would not agree to raise the debt limit unless Democrats agreed to make cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security.
The White House has said it would not negotiate spending cuts in exchange for Congressional authority to borrow more, and it has insisted that Congress raise the ceiling as a matter of course, to cover expenses already authorized by Congress. In broader fiscal negotiations, it has said it would not agree to spending cuts without commensurate tax increases.
The idea of minting a trillion-dollar coin drew wide if puzzling attention recently after some bloggers and economic commentators had suggested it as an alternative to involving Congress.
By virtue of an obscure law meant to apply to commemorative coins, the Treasury secretary could order the production of a high-denomination platinum coin and deposit it at the Federal Reserve, where it would count as a government asset and give the country more breathing room under its debt ceiling. Once Congress raised the debt ceiling, the Treasury secretary could then order the coin destroyed.
Mr. Carney, the press secretary, fielded questions about the theoretical tactic at a news conference last week. But the idea is now formally off the table.
The White House has also rejected the idea that it could mount a challenge to the debt ceiling itself, on the strength of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which holds that the “validity of the public debt” of the United States “shall not be questioned.”
The Washington Post earlier published a report that the Obama administration had rejected the platinum-coin idea.
