Earthquake too Damn Mexico!

A 5.6 magnitude earthquake shook Mexico City early Monday afternoon, sending frightened residents into the streets and saturating phone lines, but causing no apparent significant damage.

The quake rattled nerves of Mexicans already coping with an outbreak of the swine flu that has killed an estimated 149 people.

The combination of the higher death toll from the flu and the quake weakened the peso, which had lost nearly 5% from Friday's close to MXN13.975 per U.S. dollar.

The quake briefly interrupted a press conference in which Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova was giving an update on the flu emergency situation.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the epicenter was in the Pacific coast state of Guerrero, home to the resort of Acapulco, which lies roughly 360 kilometers from Mexico City.

The earthquake's depth made serious damage less likely, said Jim Dewey, a research geophysicist with USGS.

"Certainly strong shaking could be perceived, but it wouldn't likely cause extensive damage," Dewey said. "It was 25 miles deep, so that puts some distance between it and the surface of the ground."

Telephone service in parts of Mexico City was lost briefly. A spokesman for phone company Telefonos de Mexico (TMX) said lines were temporarily saturated with call volume, as usually happens after earthquakes, and that there was no reported damage to exchanges.

Mexicans, accustomed to earthquakes, largely shrugged off the tremor, worried more about the killer flu. "Ah, we're accustomed to earthquakes around here," said Leopoldo Garcia, a 70-year-old retiree walking around the city.

Black in America Is the best thing to Air Since American Idol

California Ordered to Release thousands of prisoners due to over Budgets! WTF

According to CNN, A federal judicial panel heard closing arguments Tuesday in a long-running legal battle over crowding in California prisons, a case that will have far-reaching consequences for the state's corrections system, its budget and public safety.
At issue are cases stretching back more than two decades that claim overcrowding is the cause of poor medical and mental health treatment. Courts already have found the care so poor that it violates inmates' constitutional rights. Inmates' attorneys argued Tuesday that releasing tens of thousands of prisoners is the answer. "The entire system is collapsing because of the overcrowding," Don Specter, director of the nonprofit Prison Law Office, told the three-judge panel in U.S. District Court.
If the panel agrees, it could order the population cut by one-third in California's 33 adult prisons.

That would lead to the early release of some 52,000 inmates.
Closing arguments are expected to last through Wednesday. Afterward, the judicial panel must decide whether overcrowding is indeed the cause of the poor medical and mental health care. If that is the finding, the judges then must determine whether to release inmates early and how such a release order would be implemented. Public safety also will factor into their decision.