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KANO, Nigeria (AFP) — Nigerian health workers Saturday began house-to-house immunization of 4.6 million children under the age of five in the northern state of Kano in a new drive to eradicate the disease.

“Health personnel from all over the country are in Kano for the four-day polio immunization campaign during which we intend to immunise 4.6 million children against polio virus,” Abdurrahman Yakubu, Kano state coordinator of the National Programme of Immunization (NPI), told AFP.

For four days 26,000 health workers will go door-to-door in the 484 wards of the state administering oral polio drops to those under five years old, he said.

“We have decided to employ a staggering strategy of pulling personnel and logistics in one polio-endemic area at a time as a means of effectively fighting the polio virus,” senior health official Ado Abdullahi told AFP.

Kano …

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Dear Jim: I want the best quality air at home for my family. I am trying to decide which type of central air cleaner is best. Will installing a central air cleaner make my heating and cooling more efficient? - Steve D.

Dear Steve: Installing a high-quality central air cleaner in the furnace/air conditioner duct system doesn’t technically improve the efficiency of your heating and cooling system. What it will do is keep the heating and cooling units running at their highest original efficiency levels.

With a lower-quality air cleaner, such as the standard 1-inch- thick fiberglass filter, dust and dirt can build up on the heat exchanger and cooling coil surfaces. This dust creates a layer of insulation so heat isn’t exchanged as effectively as it should. This reduces their efficiency.

Within the past year or two, several air cleaner manufacturers and heating equipment manufacturers have come out with new super- efficient central air cleaners. They use a combination of electronic charging of the air and filter media to trap even the tiniest particles in the air. They can even catch flu viruses and bacteria as they pass through duct system.

Until this technology was developed, electronic air cleaners used wires of one charge and a collection cell of the opposite charge to catch the air particles. When the collection cell was dirty, it was washed off in the dishwasher, bathtub or outdoors and slipped back into the unit. The new super-efficient ones use collection media that is replaced, not washed.

For many people, the older technology electronic air cleaner is adequate. I use one in my own home. For people with allergies to some of the smallest particles in the indoor air, the new electronic air cleaners are more effective. The electricity cost to operate either type isn’t significant.

Another option is a pleated media air cleaner. This type of unit is less expensive and relies on many square feet of folded filter material to catch the particles as the air passes through it. There are various levels of media quality and price. The cleaning effectiveness of various models can be compared by their MERV (minimum efficiency reporting value) rating.

If you don’t want to have the ducts modified to install a new air cleaner, consider a self-charging electrostatic model. This slips into the existing furnace filter slot and is many times more effective than a fiberglass filter. Another option is a bypass HEPA air cleaner, which has its own air circulation motor.

With any central air cleaner, it cleans only when a furnace/air conditioner blower is running. To get around this, Aprilaire offers a new controller that mounts next to the wall thermostat. It allows you to automatically run the blower for any length of time when no heating or cooling is needed.

Dear Jim: We are moving to a home in the Rocky Mountains at an elevation of about 8,000 feet. I have heard that water boils at a lower temperature in the mountains. Will this reduce the amount of energy we need for cooking? - Steve K.

Dear Steve: You are correct that water does boil at a temperature lower than 212 degrees as the elevation increases. This is because it requires less vapor pressure from the water to change its state into water vapor.

You may actually use a little more energy for cooking in the mountains. Since the water boils at a lower temperature, it will take longer to cook potatoes. Don’t worry - the difference shouldn’t be significant.

Send inquiries to James Dulley, Topeka Capital-Journal, 6906 Royalgreen Drive, Cincinnati, OH 45244 or visit www.dulley.com.

Copyright 2008
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.

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Errors & Omissions

In a fable attributed to Aesop, a fox desires a bunch of grapes he sees hanging high up in a vine. He jumps and jumps but cannot reach them. Finally the fox gives up, remarking that he did not want the grapes anyway because they were sour.

Hence the expression “sour grapes”. It means unfairly disparaging something or someone you have failed to win, claiming that you never wanted it in the first place. (”That slag? I wouldn’t be seen dead with her!”) Note that the fox could not possibly have known that the grapes were sour, since he never tasted them.

Hardly anyone seems to remember any of that. People seem to think that sour grapes means any bitterness or unfair criticism motivated by envy or disappointment. A precise expression has become vague. An article on Thursday about the imminent birth of twins to the film stars Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt recalled that a previous baby got the christening present of a gold dummy worth 7,000.

“As the humanitarian organisation Care noted at the time, that money could allow 61,000 people to eat for a day … That may, in fairness gave been a case of sour grapes. Pitt and Jolie have always made generous donations to charities.” Nobody is suggesting that Pitt and Jolie’s money was not desirable, so that is nothing to do with sour grapes.

Wheels or tracks: It was reported on Thursday, by this newspaper and other media, that a man went on a rampage in Jerusalem, killing three people by driving a bulldozer down a busy street. In fact it wasn’t a bulldozer but a wheel-loader, a wheeled vehicle with a bucket for moving loose material.

Just as any military armoured vehicle is liable to be reported as a tank, so any large vehicle used in quarrying or construction tends to become a bulldozer. A true bulldozer has caterpillar tracks and a blade at the front for breaking ground. It moves very slowly.

House price gloom: Even before global warming started threatening to destroy our civilisation, I was always annoyed by the chirpy assumption among television and radio weather presenters that everybody likes hot, dry “fine” weather. Sunshine is “good news”, but there may be a “risk” of rain, and so on. I like rain.

As with the weather, so with house prices. Wednesday’s news story on the collapse referred to the “destruction of property values”, the “worst annual rate of decline since December 1992″, “worse to come” and so on.

All that is clearly directed at people who view their homes as a financial asset. Fair enough, but there are also those of us who see a home as a place to live. Higher house prices mean that we cannot afford such a good house. How is this supposed to be a good thing?

How about just describing the facts, and acknowledging that different readers will take different views of them?

Weird substances: Funny how “drugs” only means drugs that are now illegal. This is the opening of a news story published on Thursday: “Sherlock Holmes, the pipe-smoking Victorian super-sleuth with a penchant for drugs…” So Holmes’s use of cocaine, a dangerous drug, is “drugs”, but his use of tobacco, another dangerous drug , is not “drugs”.

Daft headline of the week: “Woman, 28, is latest victim of surge in knife crime.” It is so easy to slip into talking as if a statistical phenomenon were causing the events it describes. But it is actually the other way round. This woman was not the victim of a surge. She was the victim of a crime. The surge is the result of the crimes, not their cause.

Journalese: people are so desperate to avoid saying “caused”. This is from a business report on Wednesday: “London’s FTSE 100 index dropped … to its lowest in three months, initially sparked by a … manufacturing survey described as ‘truly dreadful’.” How do you spark a drop? And on Monday the front page story began: “The nationwide smoking ban has triggered the biggest fall in smoking ever seen in England.” How do you trigger a fall?

Initial difficulty: A story on Monday about models who died young told us that Gia Carangi “contracted the HIV virus”. Coming soon: the BBC corporation, the RAF force and the CID department.

Copyright c 2008 Independent Newspapers UK Limited. All rights
owned or operated by The Independent.
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.

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HITLER’S EMPIRE by Mark Mazower Allen Lane, £30, pp.725, ISBN 9780713996814 £24 (plus 2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655

As we now know, the unimaginably awful Third Reich did not spring fully formed from Hitler’s mind.

Its antecedents can be traced to the predominantly upper-class and reactionary parties of the late 19th century, to Bismarck’s Slavic preoccupation, to a long history of racial and mythical obsessions with Deutschtum or German-ness, and on into Weimar with its manifold resentments.

We also know that the myth of efficiency and single-mindedness was an illusion: the Third Reich was a shambles, both organisationally and ideologically. Much of the policy was made on the hoof, with the SS, the Gauleiters, the Army and the Civil Service in competition for power, and for Hitler’s attention.

What Mazower demonstrates in this exhaustive and brilliant book, is that the unexpected speed of the conquest of Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Norway and France led to utter confusion about how to govern, how to impose German dominance and how to lend some form to the racial paranoia which inhabited the minds of Hitler, Heydrich and Himmler, and the minds of many other lesser lights and opportunists like Rosenberg, Sauckel and Koch. What Mazower is interested in is something which, as far as I know, has never before been attempted, to explain coherently how confused policies of race and German-ness actually related to notions of empire — Hitler wanted an empire on the British model, but located in Europe — in the newly conquered territories.

Mazower shows that there were no agreed policies, because of the very subjective nature of racial judgments and because, by setting his Gauleiters and the SS in opposition, both to each other and to the army and the civil service, Hitler was courting chaos. With the recklessness engendered by the early successes in Western Europe, he imagined that Germany’s manifest destiny as the world’s greatest empire was about to be realised: Russia would fall and the East would provide raw materials, labour and Lebensraum for a new, racially pure state without minorities. Almost alone, he never doubted this vision until the very end. On the very day in 1944 — 20 July — that Stauffenberg brought his bomb from Berlin to the Führer’s eastern headquarters, the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler was in conversation with his generals about the defeat of the Red Army. By this stage the inevitability of defeat was more or less taken for granted by much of the army, the navy, the Foreign Office and the Secret Service. Yet this was the moment when the madness of racial obsessions and the mythical concepts of Teutonic destiny prevailed over pragmatism, at the cost of many more millions of lives, including more than two million Germans. Uppermost in the minds of the bomb plotters when they tried to kill him on 20 July 1944, was the certainty that Hitler was leading Germany to catastrophic ruin and shame.

From the beginning, the one thing the fantasists around Hitler were agreed on was that Jews were poisoning the bloodstream of German-ness. Because of their irredeemably alien qualities, Jews were also the bearers of the Bolshevik virus. Initially the plan was to create space for ethnic Germans to replace the Poles, Jews and various Slavs sent eastward, but the task proved beyond the capabilities of the SS: when the military advance stalled, where were the displaced to be sent?

When it turned out there were not enough ethnic Germans willing to be colonisers, who was going to keep the economies of the devastated lands going? And, crucially, how were Jews to be transported to the proposed homelands in the East, when the Russians stopped the German advance? The seeds of the policy of destruction — Vernichtung — were sown. Mazower suggests that it was the product of the irreconcilable military and racial objectives swirling in Hitler’s brain. It led to Wannsee and the final solution.

In detail, in country by occupied country, Mazower demonstrates effectively that Hitler subjected practical considerations such as the shortage of labour, the impossibility of fighting on two and more fronts, the alienation by the SS (but not only the SS) of the local populations particularly in the East, and the inability of the various arms of the state to co-operate, to his obsession with race, and the place of race in Greater Germany’s triumphant recreation of itself. In the West the conquered, non-Jewish people were treated with relative kindness. They were not Untermenschen, and at various times experts declared the Dutch, the Norwegians and the Flemings to be Aryan. Forms of self-government were allowed. Mazower examines the cases of Austria, France, Denmark Norway, Holland and Belgium meticulously. Scotland was to be given full independence. The 2,800 strong list of the SS special wanted list in Britain, included Nancy Cunard, Noël Coward and Sigmund Freud who had died some months earlier.

There was no consistency at all: in the end racial antipathy was the deciding factor.

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The good-time capital of the US has hit a losing streak. Guy Adams reports on an epidemic of bankruptcies, foreclosures and masslay-offs

Casino city caught in the credit crunch

Since the day Las Vegas was created in the shimmering Nevada desert, visitors have been drawn by one simple promise: “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”. The motto adorns the city’s road signs, and has inspired everything from its souvenir T-shirts to the local tourist board’s seductive advertising campaigns.

These days, that motto is imbued with a worrying sense of irony. Because America’s most outrageous city is facing a growing multitude of problems, and they all boil down to a single, unavoidable point: right now, far too little happens in Vegas, because not enough people are actually staying there.

The onset of global slowdown, high petrol prices, and a nation- wide housing slump is spelling disaster for a town that owes every aspect of its wealth - from that gaudy replica of the Eiffel Tower to those scale models of Venetian canals and the Pyramids of Egypt - to its ability to inspire free-spending hedonism.

With Americans cutting back on luxuries, and the price of transport rocketing, the so-called “Vegas vacation” is facing the axe. This week, as the nation celebrated Independence Day, major hotels were taking stock of a fall in all-important room occupancy rates from their usually impressive 95 per cent levels to nearer 80 per cent.

More worryingly, new figures showed gambling revenue has also dropped - a further 3 per cent this month - starting a price war between worried firms anxious to lure punters back. Hotel rooms, which last year averaged $130 each, now go for less than $100 (50).

At the vast Planet Hollywood resort, the clatter of fruit machines and poker chips was this week replaced by an uneasy - and, for Vegas, very unusual - calm. A large if slightly tatty double room could be found for less than $80.

No tourist resort can afford to lose its buzz. Yet the slump now runs so deep it’s starting to hurt even the town’s Elvis impersonators, wedding chapels, and sex industry. When money’s tight, the prospect of stuffing another $20 bill into a lap- dancer’s gyrating stocking-top somehow doesn’t seem quite so enticing.

“This year already we’ve seen the Minx closing, the Mensa club closing, and the Crazy Horse closing,” says Dolores Eliades, owner of the OG, the second biggest “adult cabaret” venue in the world. “By another 12 months from now, I expect another two or three major venues will have gone. We’ve seen a drop in custom here too: maybe 180 people coming in when before we got 200.”

To quantify the Vegas slump, look to the stock market. Shares in casino operators, the engine room of an economy reliant on its liberal attitude to public morality, have been haemorrhaging value like a down-on-his-luck gambler.

Las Vegas Sands, which controls the Venetian and Palazzo resorts on the famous neon-lit Strip that runs through a “miracle mile,” has dropped below $50 a share, a third of its value last September. MGM is at $28, from over $100 a year ago. Wynn resorts, owned by the ebullient billionaire Steve Wynn - a Texan version of Donald Trump - neared $70, from almost $180 last year.

This week, in an attempt to prevent financial meltdown, Nevada’s Tourism Alliance convened an “Air Crisis Briefing” in an effort to prevent airline plans to halve the number of flights to the resort. The city’s gut-busting “eat all you can” buffets are also being scaled back to account for the US’s 4 per cent food inflation. Where a long queue of obesity once trailed across The Bellagio hotel restaurant’s ornate carpets, demand for its famous (but now pricey) lunch buffet had on Thursday slowed to a trickle. In what sounds suspiciously like a panic measure, the Golden Gate Hotel this month even said it was doubling the price of its signature 99 cent shrimp cocktail.

For the inhabitants of the desert resort, which was founded in 1905 and became prosperous after gambling was legalised in 1931, it’s no joking matter. The growing unemployment crisis (MGM just axed another 400 middle-managers), plus a downturn in the tips that form a significant portion of the Vegas economy, has a human cost, too.

Local bankruptcies have quadrupled. The property market, which rode the wave of a boom for most of the past decade is now below its peak by anything from a quarter to a third (depending on whose figures you believe), while Nevada now boasts, if that is the right word, the nation’s highest foreclosure rate.

The number of empty homes has caused a health scare after it emerged that mosquitoes - possibly carrying the killer West Nile virus - are breeding in abandoned swimming pools. “We’ve had crews pumping out pools every day this week,” Devin Smith, who manages the city’s Neighbourhood Response Division, told the Las Vegas Review Journal. “Two years ago, we may have pumped six pools in a season. Now we’re probably pumping that a week.”

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