- Bjork’s job just got a little tougher. The singer has founded a venture capital fund looking to revitalize the economy of her native Iceland, but the country’s faltering economy took another step backward yesterday when its ruling coalition resigned, three months after the collapse of the country's currency, stock market and several major banks. The resignation came after months of public protests, with President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson officially accepting Prime Minister Geir Haarde's resignation but asking him and other Cabinet members to continue in an interim capacity until a new government can be formed. There is no firm deadline for that to happen, but at least the hard-working protestors who were pushing for a change will have a chance to take a break. They’ve been at it for weeks, marching in the streets, holding up signs and making their voices heard. An estimated 6,000 to 7,000 people were out demonstrating Saturday, renewing their calls for the government to step down and this time, it happened. Ironically, Saturday's demonstration was peaceful even though it was also the last one before the movement’s goal was achieved, given the fact that protestors squared off with riot police during protests earlier in the week, facing pepper spray and multiple arrests, two causes any good movement of social dissidence is likely to incur. And what better to protest than a government that has presided over the total collapse of your country’s financial system and currency? Whatever government emerges from meetings between the two parties that make up Iceland's coalition government -- the Independence Party and the Social Democrats -- will find it hard to do any worse of a job than the previous regime. Sometimes I wish we had the type of government here in the U.S. that would allow for the removal of one regime when it abysmally fails and has the president meeting with the leaders of the main political parties to find out what type of government they think should be formed. After those meetings, President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson will give the job of forming a new government to whichever party he feels best suited make it happen and that party will try to form a new coalition government. A big undertaking to be sure, but one that is necessary after a financial crisis so severe that the International Monetary Fund felt compelled to intervene. That came after Iceland’s government was forced to nationalize three banks to keep its faltering economy from totally tanking. Trading on the country's stock market was suspended for nearly a week, inflation jumped to more than 12 percent and the IMF stepped up in November with a $827 million boost to the Icelandic economy immediately, followed by another $1.3 billion in eight installments. Even Iceland's Nordic neighbors -- the governments of Finland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden -- have stepped in to lend a hand, offering Iceland loans amounting to $2.5 billion. But no worries, Bjork is on the job so this should all work out just fine……
- This should really help assuage the belief that Terrell Owens is an attention-starved, egotistical jerk who is more about himself, his stats and his contract than winning and being a good teammate. Rather than locking himself in the gym and training like a maniac to better his game and help him team rebound from a disastrous season in which it failed to even make the playoffs despite one of the best collections of talent in the NFL, Owens will instead star in his own show on VH1 this summer. Ostensibly the angle of the show is to give fans a look into Owens’ life off the field, but history would seem to indicate that feeding Owens’ sizeable ego is also a big part of doing the show. The series is set in the offseason, so this won't be a foray into the locker room or onto the field. Sadly, Owens’ former publicist Kim Ethridge, she of the “Terrell has 25 million reasons to be alive” comment after his “accidental overdose/alleged suicide attempt” a couple of years ago, won't be involved as she no longer works for him. Instead, Owens’ best friends and publicists -- Monique Jackson and Kita Williams -- will “help him re-examine his personal life,” working as "matchmakers and therapists" for him. Reality TV is nothing new for the Cowboys, who were featured on HBO's "Hard Knocks" during their training camp last year. However, make no mistake about it: this show is all about T.O., his persona and ego, not about football or his team. Not exactly what you’d hope for from a guy who is supposed to be one of the top players on a team in turmoil and needing to rebound from a huge end-of-the-year choke job that cost them a playoff spot they seemed to have wrapped up in November. Still looking out for No. 1, eh T.O…………….
- Nothing like accusations that a megachurch paid a 20-year-old man to keep silent about a sexual relationship he had with a former pastor to boost morale among the faithful. Such is life at New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where disgraced evangelical pastor Ted Haggard, used to work. He was fired back in 2006 for allegedly doing some decidedly un-pastorly things such as using drugs and being a customer for a male prostitute. Now, Rev. Brady Boyd, a senior pastor at the church, is saying that the male hooker wasn’t Haggard only homosexual relationship. Boyd admitted this week that Haggard had a sexual relationship with a second man -- a 20-year-old volunteer at his megachurch, and that the church agreed to pay the man hush money in exchange for his promises not to talk publicly about the relationship. Boyd was referring to a settlement reached by the man's lawyer and the church's insurance company, a deal which dictated that the church provide the man money for college tuition, moving expenses and counseling. "This was compassionate assistance. It was to help him move forward, not a settlement to keep him quiet," said Boyd, senior pastor. Riiiiiight. Because you had nothing to gain by keeping him quiet and keeping your church’s name from being dragged through the mud one more time. Because a big, messy lawsuit wouldn’t have bothered you one bit, right? Ironic that Haggard could bring both immense suffering and immense benefit to the same place. He founded New Life in his basement in 1984 helped grow it into an influential megachurch with 15,000 members, yet he’s helped to tear down much of what he built with his actions the past 2-3 years. He’s done so by having a three-year relationship with Mike Jones, a male escort, involving drugs and sex for money, among other things. That led to him being fired by the very church he founded, but with their trouble former leader gone, New Life members probably figured Haggard and his hazards were behind them - until Friday, when New Life Church announced Haggard's relationship with the volunteer in a letter to the congregation. The church didn’t come forward on this voluntarily; they did so because the young man told church leaders that he was considering going public with his story in order to combat Haggard’s attempts to paint himself as a victim of the system in the upcoming HBO documentary called "The Trial of Ted Haggard." Quite a pair of stones Haggard must have, playing the victim card after soliciting a male prostitute multiple times over the course of three years, using methamphetamine in the presence of said male hooker and having an affair with a male volunteer at his church. Then again, Haggard does have a good excuse, claiming that he received a massage from Jones, but never had sex with him. Yeah, because lots of guys solicit prostitutes for a massage and nothing more. There are people for that specific purpose, and they’re called licensed masseurs. Even better is Haggard’s claim that he bought methamphetamine, but threw it away instead of using it. Again, who buys drugs and doesn’t use them? Meth isn’t cheap (see my post from Monday for more on meth’s stunning comeback in the U.S.) and if you buy it, you’re using it. None of this done anything for Christianity, that’s for sure. When a so-called religious leader who denounced homosexual sex in a documentary called "Friends of God" turns around and engages in the very behavior he condemned in such public fashion, that’s the height of hypocrisy. In the midst of all of this, New Life Church is doing pretty well, with Boyd claiming that the church has added 1,500 people in the last 18 months. Here’s hoping that it’s headed in a vastly different direction than the one it was in prior to 2006…….
- I’ll warn you before I get going that this next tale is more than a little revolting. Firefighters, paramedics and other first responders deal with tragic, gruesome scenes on a regular basis and you need special people with strong stomach and tough mindsets to do that day in, day out. You’d like to think that people who sign up for that sort of job do so because they like helping people and making the world a better place and not because they do things like taking a man's amputated foot home with them following a car crash. You’d like to think that, but people like former St. Lucie County (Fla.) firefighter Cindy Economou unfortunately prove otherwise. Economou (sounds like some cut-rate motor inn) has been arrested on charges that she took home the amputated foot of a man who t was traveling south on Interstate 95 in Port St. Lucie when his Chevrolet pickup collided with another vehicle, flipped and struck a tree. When a rescue crew arrived on the scene and began working to free the man from his truck, they realized that the foot would need to be amputated in order to get him out. They made the tough call and cut off the foot, but I’m guessing they didn’t expect anyone to come along and pick up the foot, take it home and put it in their freezer. But maybe they would have expected it if they knew what a piece of crap Economou is. She picks up amputated feet from crash scenes and stashes them in her freezer so she can use them later on in cadaver-dog training that she did outside of her gig with the fire department. No word on how authorities were tipped off about her possession of the foot, but however it happened, an arrest warrant was issued late last week and Economou was picked up Monday. She is charged with petit theft, a second-degree misdemeanor, but sadly being a soul-less human being isn’t something you can be charged with a crime for…….
- Add cultivating a great environment for the spread of the bird flu to the ever-growing list of things that new global superpower China excels at. We already know they can make lead-paint-covered toys like no one’s business, put out toxic food products and toothpaste containing chemicals more commonly used for anti-freeze and repress human rights like no other nation, but facilitating a bird flu epidemic might be their best skill year. In the past month, the country has had six confirmed cases of the virus, with the latest being a man in southwest China who is in critical condition after testing positive for bird flu. The man fell ill on January 15 in Guizhou province and tested positive for the H5N1 virus on Sunday, but so far no one he came into contact with has shown any symptoms of being infected. As you might expect, China's health ministry has been busy lying and trying to cover up, er, allaying fears over a bird flu outbreak. Actually, they appear to know something the rest of us don’t or possess some mythical power over the bird flu, because while they admitted that further human bird flu cases were possible throughout China, there wouldn't be a large-scale outbreak. Awesome, good to hear. No one else has found a way to completely control and manage this disease, but you’ve managed to lock it up. I’d like to believe you, but the facts don’t bear out your claims. This thing is getting worse, not better. The train is coming off the tracks, not getting back on them. After all, a woman from Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in the far northwest died from the virus over the weekend, 16-year-old boy in the city of Huaihua in central Hunan province died during the same time frame and just one week ago, a woman from eastern China died of bird flu. The World Health Organization isn’t helping your case either by reporting that a two-year-old girl in northern Shanxi province had tested positive for bird flu. Leave it to China to portray itself as the defeater of a virus that has infected numerous species of birds in more than 60 countries in Asia, Europe and Africa and doesn’t appear to be slowing down any time soon. Thankfully the H5N1 virus hasn’t been found in birds in North or South America or the Caribbean, even though this disease has been making the rounds among humans ever since China reported its first human-to-human infection case in 2005. No worries, though, only 23 of the 34 cases confirmed to date in China 23 have been fatal, a mere 67.64 percent……..
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