my news: 五月 2011

2011年5月17日星期二

Gingrich Calls G.O.P.’s Medicare Plan Too Radical

在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。

Mr. Gingrich, the former speaker of the House who led a conservative resurgence in the 1990s, said the Republican Medicare plan was “too big a jump” for Americans and compared it to the health care overhaul championed by President Obama.

“I’m against Obamacare, which is imposing radical change, and I would be against a conservative imposing radical change,” Mr. Gingrich said on the NBC program “Meet the Press.”

“I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering,” he said. “I don’t think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate.”

The Republican plan calls for the most extensive overhaul of the Medicare program since it was created. It would end direct payment for medical care and would instead subsidize health coverage for older Americans.

While House Republicans have portrayed the plan as a way to address the nation’s long-term financial problems, Democrats and their allies have sought to seize on public concerns over it, arguing that the changes would hurt the elderly, an influential voting group.

After facing waves of protests in public meetings after introducing the Medicare proposal in early April, House Republicans have begun signaling that they are prepared to shelve it, at least for now.

In leveling criticism at the Republican Medicare proposal, Mr. Gingrich appeared to be acknowledging the political difficulties and risk of abruptly changing a highly popular entitlement program.

“I think we need a national conversation to get to a better Medicare solution for seniors,” Mr. Gingrich said, suggesting that any Medicare overhaul would have to include a system in which beneficiaries voluntarily opt out of the program.

Also on Sunday, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and the author of the Medicare proposal, defended the plan during an appearance on the CNN program “State of the Union.”

“We have got to reform this program for the next generation if we’re going to save it for the next generation, and that’s what we’re proposing to do,” Mr. Ryan said.

Mr. Ryan also addressed his own future in the interview, saying he was considering running for the seat now held by Senator Herb Kohl, a four-term Democrat from Wisconsin who announced on Friday that he would not seek re-election next year.

View the original article here

A Sports Executive Leaves the Safety of His Shadow Life

In many work environments, this would qualify as a so-what moment. But until now, Mr. Welts, 58, who has spent 40 years in sports, rising from ball boy to N.B.A. executive to team president, had not felt comfortable enough in his chosen field to be open about his sexuality. His eyes welling at times, he also said that he planned to go public.

By this point, Mr. Welts had already traveled to Seattle to share his news with another friend, Bill Russell, one of the greatest basketball players ever and the recent recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He had also met with Val Ackerman, the founding president of the Women’s National Basketball Association, in New York, and would soon be lunching in Phoenix with Steve Nash, the point guard and leader of the Suns and twice the N.B.A.’s most valuable player.

In these meetings and in interviews with The New York Times, Mr. Welts explained that he wants to pierce the silence that envelops the subject of homosexuality in men’s team sports. He wants to be a mentor to gay people who harbor doubts about a sports career, whether on the court or in the front office. Most of all, he wants to feel whole, authentic.

“This is one of the last industries where the subject is off limits,” said Mr. Welts, who stands now as a true rarity, a man prominently employed in professional men’s team sports, willing to declare his homosexuality. “Nobody’s comfortable in engaging in a conversation.”

Dr. Richard Lapchick, the founder and director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, and the son of the basketball legend Joe Lapchick, agreed. “The fact that there’s no other man who has done this before speaks directly to how hard it must be for Rick to do this now,” he said.

Mr. Stern did not find the discussion with Mr. Welts awkward or even surprising; he had long known that his friend was gay, but never felt that he had license to broach the subject. Whatever I can do to help, the affably gruff commissioner said. He sensed the decades of anguish that had led the very private Mr. Welts to go public.

After what needed to be said had been said, the two men headed for the door. And for the first time in their 30-year friendship, they hugged.

The very next day, the gifted Los Angeles Lakers forward Kobe Bryant, one of the faces of the N.B.A., responded to a technical foul by calling the referee a “faggot.”

A Feeling of Isolation

Rick Welts always knew.

Growing up in Seattle, he was the industrious kid who landed a coveted job with the SuperSonics basketball team, first as a ball boy, then as an assistant trainer. By the time he went to the University of Washington, he had enough good-will clout to have Lenny Wilkens, then the coach of the Sonics, visit his fraternity for a chat.

But for all the fraternal respect this earned him, Mr. Welts felt isolated. What little he knew of gay culture was stereotypical, and unappealing, he recalled. “In my mind, it was effeminate: a way that I would not define as masculine.”

His growing responsibilities with the Sonics allowed him to miss class dances and other awkward obligations, but even alone, he felt out of place. Late one night, he walked two miles to slip a long confessional letter under the door of a young minister at his family’s church, but the well-intentioned minister could not help him. So he resigned himself to adapt, in private.

After college, Mr. Welts returned to the Sonics as assistant director of public relations, a position that came with a desk but not an office. His diligent omnipresence, from early morning to late evening, impressed the team’s coach at the time, the intimidating Bill Russell.

“Hey!” Mr. Russell would call. “White boy down the hall!”

And Mr. Welts would hustle up to do whatever was asked. The mutual respect that developed between the demanding basketball legend and the earnest employee gradually grew into a friendship close enough for Mr. Russell to judge him “a good teammate.”

View the original article here

Gold Mania in the Yukon

Finlay MacKay for The New York TimesShawn Ryan outside Whitehorse, Yukon Territory.

When I first met Shawn Ryan and Cathy Wood, in 2005, they were living with their two young children in a small cabin outside Dawson City, at the northernmost end of the paved road system in Canada’s Yukon Territory. It was a beautiful site in the summertime, with clear water lapping the banks of the Klondike River and the sky still bright at midnight. But the sun hit their roof for the last time each year in early December and didn’t show up again for six weeks. Temperatures in the dead of winter could reach 50 below zero. Wood sometimes feared that their children would freeze. Back then Ryan and Wood already knew they had found gold, but they didn’t have proof.

A rock sample from one of Shawn Ryan's first gold discoveries in the Yukon.

Recently, I went to see them again in their new home in Whitehorse, the territorial capital, and I sat with Ryan one night as he talked business over the phone. His right arm was stretched around the back of his head, holding his BlackBerry to his left ear. “Those guys were at 6 cents a share last year, now they are over a buck, and they got nothing,” he said. “When you look at it, it’s like a hundred claims.” The shares Ryan was talking about belonged to a mineral-exploration company, one of his many competitors. The claims are mining claims, a government license to extract minerals from a 50-acre patch of wilderness. To Ryan, a hundred claims is pathetic. He and Wood own more than 35,000 claims. “We just passed Luxembourg, and over the summer we’ll be the size of Samoa,” he continued, describing just one of his projects. Credible estimates of the amount of gold still buried in his properties run to the billions of dollars.

Ryan is the king of a new Yukon gold rush, the biggest since the legendary Klondike stampede a century ago. Behind this stampede is the rising price of gold, and behind this price is fear. As the Federal Reserve keeps interest rates very low to stimulate the economy, gold bugs make nightmarish predictions that loose money and a huge federal deficit will crush the value of the dollar and bring ruinous inflation. Gold holds its value when national currencies collapse and is easily imported and universally traded. It feels like the perfect investment for the apocalypse. A few weeks ago, gold passed $1,500 an ounce, an astonishing level. George Soros warned of a bubble back when gold was barely over $1,000. Glenn Beck cried that the run was just beginning: just wait until the United States is bankrupt and the real trouble starts. Gold bulls talk of $2,000 gold, $5,000 gold, even $10,000 gold. But 10 years ago, when Ryan made his first discoveries, nobody cared at all.

Ryan has been in the woods his whole life. At age 15, he was snaring foxes, martens and mink near Timmins, Ontario, where his father worked in a mine. Trapping in Canada is regulated through licenses called trap lines, and Ryan didn’t have a trap line of his own, he just went where he pleased. This is called poaching, and eventually he was caught. Instead of turning him in, the trapper he was poaching from put him to work. Ryan would skin animals until midnight, then go to school without bathing. Looking back, he understands why he was socially isolated. In his 20s, Ryan came west to work a trap line of his own in the sparsely populated expanse of the Yukon, but his plan changed when he learned about mushrooms.

Twenty years ago there was a kind of gold rush in mushrooms that enticed itinerant pickers to make a long circuit through British Columbia, Alaska and the Yukon, collecting chanterelles, matsutakes and morels. The market was driven by demand in Paris and Tokyo, and brokers built a network of little buying stations wherever mushrooms were fruiting. It was cash on the ground, and the pickers taunted one another with stories of thousand-dollar days. Ryan eventually settled near Dawson, once the roaring center of the Klondike gold fields, now a community of about 2,000 people surrounded by wilderness and close to good morel-picking territory.

Ryan met Wood in 1992 at the height of the mushroom season. He was down in Whitehorse shopping for supplies when he noticed a young woman standing outdoors in spangled tights selling bundles of sage. Wood, who was from New Brunswick, had been working for a Toronto bank, but she didn’t like it. After she quit, she took her savings and rode across the continent on a motorcycle. By the time she got to Whitehorse, her cash was gone. When Ryan walked up, she was reorganizing the last of the sage into smaller packets so she wouldn’t run out of stock before something else turned up. He was a striking person, compact and strong, with hair braided nearly to his waist. And he had a good thing going: the banks of the White River should be thick with morels. Did she want to come pick with him?

Gary Wolf (gw@aether.com) is a contributing editor for Wired. His last article for the magazine was about self-measurement. Editor: Vera Titunik (v.titunik-maggroup@nytimes.com).

View the original article here

Chicago News Cooperative: A Mayor Moves on, and a Myth Moves In

Opening the 57th branch library of his tenure last week, Mayor Richard M. Daley turned to me and, like a 68-year-old kid at Baskin-Robbins, exclaimed, “Isn’t this great?”

“Look at this! Look at all the light,” he said, admiring the building in the Far Northwest Side’s Dunning neighborhood. “That’s the one thing we never had growing up. All this light.”

Will Rahm Emanuel exhibit such delight over something so small yet so lasting? And, if not, should we care?

On the eve of Mr. Emanuel’s inaugural, it is folly to predict his fate. That’s especially so given a national economy that a big-city mayor is impotent to fix and, just as relevant, given how environments shape personalities and personalities shape environments.

He has been high profile as a solid North Side congressman, a cannily pragmatic head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and a hyperkinetic White House chief of staff. But Mr. Emanuel’s image is largely that of a spectral presence — somebody off in the closed room, in the back, who shaped events for others.

Mere mention of his name could alter the dynamic of a situation. People dealing with him get anxious without knowing what he’s really up to. He’s not a poet, philosopher or rabbi. He’s an astute student of government and a practitioner of power.

Mr. Daley entered the job in 1989 trying to remake a myth, namely that of his iron-fisted father, an American icon who erected a concrete-and-steel metropolis and resisted a changing world. Mr. Emanuel arrives as a myth, the oft-caricatured “Rahmbo,” the apparatchik with a razor-sharp intellect, cosmopolitan air and Somali warlord’s heart.

Many underestimated Mr. Daley because of his Son-of-Boss status and combat with the English language. But he was served well by what Mr. Emanuel does not possess.?As the church-going child brought up in a Bridgeport bungalow, he had an organic tie to the city’s neighborhoods and their ways of life.

Mr. Emanuel has fewer instinctual links to the city. He was raised largely in the suburbs, worked in the White House at a young age and amassed great wealth. And while good friends confirm his impressive smarts, sharp and self-deprecating humor and deep-as-a-mine devotion to family, curiously few call him “warm.” That might be a liability if we secretly want a new civic daddy, rather than a proven problem-solver.

He will enter City Hall with some advantages over Mr. Daley. These include a more granular take on what he inherits, in part having labored mightily during a far longer transition period and having picked many big brains.

Yet Rahm the Myth can no longer lead from the misty backroom and must prove that he can build something solid and enduring. And while his campaign was brilliantly executed — replete with media “messaging” honed in tactics-obsessed Washington — he must move from strategist to implementer in a universe demanding results.

It’s a tall order, no matter his resolute assertion that Chicagoans are craving change. Perhaps I’ve frequented different L platforms. The reality strikes me as more ambiguous; namely, that change scares us to death, especially amid a ravaging recession.

Can he succeed while lacking Mr. Daley’s visceral feel for the neighborhoods, Bill Clinton’s communications skills or Harold Washington’s pure affability? Probably. His arguable shortcomings are outweighed by a much-needed empirical bent and air of power and steely resolve, with people perhaps desiring stability and great competence more than inspiration.

Visiting the Rod Blagojevich retrial last week, I was reminded that we’re lucky not to have an engaging poseur, or a personable but undisciplined successor like Carol Moseley Braun. The problems are stark, even if some are shorted in Mr. Emanuel’s long but cautiously political transition report, like rampant segregation and dispiriting economic, social, health, education and incarceration disparities between blacks and whites.

Those persistent failings are why big-city mayor is America’s toughest job.

That’s why I was struck by Mr. Daley’s passion at the library opening. Imagine such glee after 22 years and amid an emotionally complex period exacerbated by his wife’s poor health. Even a journalist can wish him well, though one need not appear in a furniture commercial to do so, as did local TV anchors.

As for Mr. Emanuel, he takes on daunting responsibilities, including ones that even his workaholic groundwork won’t have prepared him for.

They’ll include the awful call in the middle of the night about two cops down on the West Side. It’s one of the reasons to wish him well, too.

View the original article here

Gay CNN Anchor Sees Risk in Book

By the time the news network was confirming the reports of the death of Osama bin Laden, however, Mr. Lemon had been replaced by CNN’s chief anchor, Wolf Blitzer.

“I kind of got big-footed,” Mr. Lemon said, with a knowing laugh.

Now 45, though he looks much younger, Mr. Lemon understands the television news business from long experience, gathered through jobs at such local stations as WCAU in Philadelphia, WMAQ in Chicago and WNYW in New York.

So he has no illusions about what he is getting himself into with the book he has written about his career — and life. In “Transparent,” Mr. Lemon has a lot to say about reporting for television and about journalism in general. But he knows enough about news to recognize what will get this book noticed.

“People are going to say: ‘Oh, he was molested as a kid and now he is coming out.’ I get it,” he said.

Few national television news anchors or hosts have publicly acknowledged being gay. Rachel Maddow is perhaps the best known. Her MSNBC colleague, Thomas Roberts, has also come out as gay.

Mr. Lemon has not made a secret of his sexual orientation in his work life; many of his CNN co-workers and managers have long been aware that he is gay. But he still acknowledged that going public in his book carries certain risks.

“I’m scared,” he said in a telephone interview. “I’m talking about something that people might shun me for, ostracize me for.”

Even beyond whatever effect his revelation might have on his television career, Mr. Lemon said he recognized this step carried special risk for him as a black man.

“It’s quite different for an African-American male,” he said. “It’s about the worst thing you can be in black culture. You’re taught you have to be a man; you have to be masculine. In the black community they think you can pray the gay away.” He said he believed the negative reaction to male homosexuality had to do with the history of discrimination that still affects many black Americans, as well as the attitudes of some black women.

“You’re afraid that black women will say the same things they do about how black men should be dating black women.” He added, “I guess this makes me a double minority now.”

So why do it? It really came down to the act of writing the book. Mr. Lemon said he had been on a panel a couple of years ago called “The Black Man in the Age of Obama,” and was approached afterward by a publisher’s representative about writing an inspirational book.

“It was supposed to be a little pamphlet,” he said. “You know: say your prayers; have a good, hearty handshake; say good morning to your boss.”

But as he began to write, he came to realize that he could not hold back the truth of who he was. He started to pour out the details of his personal life. How he had grown up not knowing his father, how he had suffered abuse by someone close to him.

When he informed the publisher of his new tack, the initial reaction was caution. But when the editors saw the material, they embraced it. It was left to Mr. Lemon to experience a bout of nerves and suggest at one point that the most personal material be taken out.

“But as I started to read it back, I said, no, leave it,” Mr. Lemon said. “I abhor hypocrisy. I think if you’re going to be in the business of news, and telling people the truth, of trying to shed light in dark places, then you’ve got to be honest. You’ve got to have the same rules for yourself as you do for everyone else.”

He has been assured of support by CNN, which has booked him as a guest Monday on its daytime show “CNN Newsroom.” He will also be on Joy Behar’s show on the network’s sister channel, HLN. A few other possibilities remain “up in the air,” he said.

Mr. Lemon said he knew that coming out this way would stir up a degree of comment about other television news personalities, and whether any would acknowledge being gay.

“I think it would be great if everybody could be out,” he said. “But it’s such a personal choice. People have to do it at their own speed. I respect that. I do have to say that the more people who come out, the better it is for everyone, certainly for the Tyler Clementis of the world.”

Mr. Clementi was the Rutgers student who committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge after his sexual encounter with a man in his dorm room was shown on the Internet.

“I think if I had seen more people like me who are out and proud, it wouldn’t have taken me 45 years to say it,” Mr. Lemon said, “to walk in the truth.”

View the original article here

In This Sky, the Planes Fly Alone

So one weekend in 2007, Mr. Anderson brought home a model radio-controlled airplane and a Lego Mindstorms robotics kit. Soon he and the children put the two toys together, making the Lego robot fly the plane. The result was a clunky Lego drone.

His children moved on to other playthings. But Mr. Anderson was captivated. And that led him to found an online network for amateur drone enthusiasts, DIY Drones, and to co-found a new business, 3D Robotics, which features an online store for those hobbyists.

“This is the future of aviation,” Mr. Anderson, 49, said. “Our children will not believe that people used to drive cars and drive airplanes. We are the weak link in the chain.”

Unlike traditional radio-controlled planes, unmanned aerial vehicles, or U.A.V.’s, have the capacity for autonomous flight and navigation. A radio-controlled plane becomes an autonomous drone when it is given an autopilot, which Mr. Anderson calls “giving the plane a brain.”

Mr. Anderson was among the enthusiasts here recently attending the third annual Autonomous Vehicle Competition, where teams of software programmers and robot tinkerers from across the country faced off in robot races.

Though many of the racers focused on antics like dressing their robots as dinosaurs, Mr. Anderson believes that unmanned aircraft are not just for fun-loving hobbyists. He argues that small drones outfitted with sensors could be used to assess emergency situations like that at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, to find survivors of natural disasters, to assist law enforcement and to monitor pipelines, agricultural crops and wildlife populations.

He is not alone in his thinking; many companies and research institutions are working to design drones for commercial and other uses. The Federal Aviation Administration estimates that around 50 companies, universities and government organizations are at work on at least 155 drone designs in the United States alone. Some companies already manufacture sophisticated drones. AeroVironment, based in Monrovia, Calif., designed the 4.2-pound, hand-launched Raven aircraft currently used by United States military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Still, there are privacy and safety concerns, which the F.A.A. mitigates by limiting commercial opportunities for U.A.V.’s and by requiring special permits for unmanned vehicles to fly in the National Airspace System — a complex web of more than 19,000 airports that involves about 100,000 flights a day and thousands of air traffic controllers.

So far, the agency has issued 240 such permits — the Department of Homeland Security received permission to patrol the border with drones, and NASA was allowed to fly unmanned aircraft to spot wildfires across the West.

The F.A.A. has an additional 164 permit applications pending, and early this fall expects to release new rules, which Mr. Anderson hopes will be more lenient toward unmanned aircraft.

Mr. Anderson said DIY Drones had 15,000 members and had about one million page views a month, tapping into a world of do-it-yourself hobbyists who build their own small drones and fly them around parks and neighborhoods. Many of the site’s members, he said, work day jobs at major technology companies like Apple and work in their off hours to develop open-source software that can fly seagull-size drones.

Mr. Anderson founded 3D Robotics with Jordi Mu?oz, 24. The two met soon after Mr. Anderson trolled the Web for fellow homegrown drone makers and saw a video of Mr. Mu?oz flying a helicopter using a repurposed Wii controller. The company now sells the autopilot hardware, cords and sensors needed to build unmanned planes and quadcopters, small helicopters with four rotors.

“We are growing really fast,” said Mr. Mu?oz, the company’s chief executive, who assembled early prototypes at his home. “When we first started I was working 24 hours a day, seven days a week for almost a year.”

View the original article here

The Bay Citizen: Big Deal. I Just Said It. I Didn’t Say It Was True.

In an expansive, nuanced and thoughtful conversation, Ross Mirkarimi, a San Francisco supervisor and candidate for sheriff, told us recently that the city’s tenants might now have too much power. A constituent’s demand for $70,000 to vacate a rent-controlled apartment, he said, amounted to “extortion.”

But those comments, Mr. Mirkarimi said in The San Francisco Bay Guardian the following week in response to tenant blowback, “do not reflect my views or my record.”

In short, Mr. Mirkarimi reassured voters that his actions and policies will in no way be affected by his actual beliefs, even after he has observed with alarm the real-world effect of laws he has personally championed.

As it enters the election season, San Francisco finds itself with a clutch of political figures who, like Mr. Mirkarimi, seem determined to turn prevarication into a comical art form.

Perhaps they should take some tips from Stephen Colbert and footnote their remarks with “Not intended to be a factual statement.” Mr. Colbert minted that disclaimer last month and has had a lot of fun with it on Twitter, after Jon Kyl of Arizona declared on the Senate floor that more than 90 percent of Planned Parenthood’s budget was spent on abortions — and then had an aide explain, when confronted with the real number (3 percent), that his boss had never intended his statement to be understood as being actually true.

Mr. Mirkarimi and other candidates here are hard at work perfecting their own routines. Consider these developments from just the past week or so:

? Dennis Herrera, the city attorney and a leading mayoral candidate, hired a registered lobbyist, Alex Tourk, as his campaign manager. A 2004 law — passed when Mr. Tourk was Mayor Gavin Newsom’s deputy chief of staff and Mr. Herrera was already city attorney — made it illegal for campaign consultants to lobby their clients.

Nonetheless, Mr. Tourk reports lobbying Mr. Herrera on behalf of a hospital seeking city approval to expand.

(The same day that the lobbying reportedly took place, the hospital’s chairman made a donation to Mr. Herrera’s campaign.)

“Dennis does not believe those meetings” with his registered lobbyist/campaign manager “were lobbying,” said Mr. Herrera’s campaign spokeswoman, Jill Nelson. Are there any records of what was said, considering that Mr. Tourk certainly regarded those meetings as lobbying when he submitted his report to the city ethics commission?

There are “no records,” Ms. Nelson said, “because they are not meetings. If Dennis doesn’t have those meetings on his calendar, they didn’t happen.”

Last week Mr. Tourk left Mr. Herrera’s campaign.

? In February, Edwin Lee, the interim mayor, affirmed to a roomful of Bay Citizen reporters and editors that $300 million to $400 million had to be cut from what the city spends annually on pensions and benefits. If not, he said, the city could be bankrupt in five to 10 years. Recording devices rolling, he also vowed that under no circumstances would he run for mayor. Is that unequivocal, he was asked? Yes, he responded.

Three months later, Mr. Lee is about to declare victory with a plan to trim roughly $100 million in pension costs. He steadfastly refuses to entertain questions about how a $300 million bankruptcy-inducing emergency has been transformed into a $100 million victory. Oh, and that mayoral run? Stay tuned.

? State Senator Leland Yee, also a mayoral candidate, is a lover of shark-fin soup, and he loudly opposed a proposed ban on the dish as an insult to Chinese-Americans.

But this week at least, Mr. Yee is a lover of sharks.

“We totally share concerns about what is happening to the sharks,” Jim Stearns, Mr. Yee’s campaign strategist, said Monday. What changed? A coterie of Chinese and Chinese-American shark-loving celebrities appeared together in San Francisco last week, and a poll found that 70 percent of the state’s Chinese-Americans are perfectly content to renounce shark-fin soup to protect the world’s shark population.

So Mr. Yee is “95 percent” in favor of the ban, said Mr. Stearns. And he is floating this compromise: shark-fin soup is fine, as long as it comes from a legally caught shark whose entire corpse is eaten. “If you are selling shark-fin soup, you’d better have a receipt showing” that the rest of the animal was consumed, Mr. Stearns said.

Mr. Yee’s proposal is comically unenforceable, akin to passing a law decreeing that filet mignon cannot be served unless the pulverized hooves of the cow in question are eaten for dessert.

Really. In all truthiness.

View the original article here

Nursing Homes Seek Exemptions From Health Law

The numbers are stark. Among workers who provide hands-on care to nursing home residents, one in four has no health insurance. Among those who provide care to people living at home, one in three is uninsured.

The new health care law is supposed to fix the problem by guaranteeing access to affordable coverage for all. But many nursing homes and home care agencies, alarmed at the cost of providing health insurance to hundreds of thousands of health care workers, have started a lobbying effort seeking some kind of exemption or special treatment.

Mark Parkinson, president of the American Health Care Association, the largest trade group for nursing homes, says the problem is that reimbursement rates for Medicaid and Medicare, set by government agencies, do not pay them enough to offer their employees medical coverage. “We do not have much ability to increase prices because we are so dependent on Medicaid and Medicare” for revenue, he said.

Mr. Parkinson acknowledged that when nursing homes do offer health insurance to employees, the benefits are often limited. The coverage “is probably not up to what will be required” by the federal law, he said.

Medicaid covers about two-thirds of nursing home residents. States set Medicaid rates, and many states, facing severe budget problems, have reduced payments for nursing homes.

Starting in 2014, the law will require employers with 50 or more full-time employees to offer affordable coverage or risk paying a penalty. For a midsize nursing home, that penalty could easily exceed $200,000 a year. Nursing home executives are urging Congress and the Obama administration to spare them from the penalties.

Vanessa Valerio, 25, a certified nursing assistant who earns $10 an hour at Lakeview Christian Home in Carlsbad, N.M., said she was uninsured because she could not afford the coverage offered by her employer.

The chief executive of the Lakeview nursing home, Joanna D. Knox, said the company used to pay the entire premium for employees. It now requires workers to pay $25 of the $585 monthly premium for individual coverage.

“When we started charging $25 a month,” Ms. Knox said, “many employees dropped coverage.” Of the home’s 200 employees, only 87 have elected it, she said, adding, “I don’t know how we could possibly absorb the additional cost of providing coverage for the other employees.”

Charlene A. Harrington, a professor at the School of Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco, said it would be a mistake for Congress or the administration to relieve nursing homes of the obligation to provide coverage to employees.

“It’s scandalous to have nursing home employees taking care of people when they themselves lack coverage and go without care,” Ms. Harrington said. “If employees have health insurance, they are more likely to be treated for illnesses, less likely to pass on infections to nursing home residents and more likely to get early treatment for occupational injuries.”

The rate of injuries in nursing homes is about twice the rate for all occupations, according to the Labor Department. Back injuries are common among those who lift patients and help them get in and out of bed.

Since the law was signed 14 months ago, the focus of lobbying has shifted. A tumultuous battle over the future of the health care system has given way to more concentrated efforts to undo or rewrite particular provisions.

Mr. Parkinson, a former Democratic governor of Kansas who is now the top Washington lobbyist for nursing homes, is pushing several ideas.

One option would give nursing homes more time to comply with the requirement to offer coverage. Another proposal, according to a list of options prepared by lobbyists for the industry, would waive or reduce the penalties for nursing homes “placed in financial distress as a result of the new mandates and fines.” Alternatively, Mr. Parkinson said, Congress could allow nursing homes to take tax deductions for the penalties, which under the 2010 law are nondeductible.

View the original article here

United Arab Emirates Confirms Hiring Blackwater Founder’s Firm

The United Arab Emirates confirmed on Sunday that it had hired a company run by Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of Blackwater Worldwide, to provide “operational, planning and training support” to its military. But it gave no details of the company’s project to build a foreign mercenary battalion for the Emirati government.

A written statement from a top Emirati general, issued through the U.A.E.’s official news agency, said that the country had relied extensively on outside contractors to bolster its military, and that all work with contractors was “compliant with international law and relevant conventions.”

The statement, by Gen. Juma Ali Khalaf al-Hamiri, said that the U.A.E. had signed a contract with Reflex Responses, Mr. Prince’s company, but made no mention of the hundreds of Colombian, South African and other foreign troops now training at an Emirati military base. The statement did not mention Mr. Prince by name.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that the company last year signed a $529 million contract with the Emirati government to recruit and train a foreign battalion for counterterrorism and internal security missions, according to former Reflex Responses employees, American officials and corporate documents.

Former employees said that the company had a separate lucrative contract to help protect a string of nuclear reactors planned in the U.A.E. and to provide cybersecurity for the nuclear sites.

The U.A.E is a close American ally, and officials in Washington indicated that there was some support in the Obama administration for the foreign mercenary battalion. But the State Department is looking into the project to ensure it does not violate American laws regulating the export of defense technology and expertise.

General Hamiri’s statement said his country’s military had gone through an “extensive process of development and Emiratisation,” which has allowed Emirati forces to make “meaningful contributions” in recent conflicts in places like Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

Kateri Carmola, a professor at Middlebury College in Vermont who researches the use of private security companies, said that it was common for countries to hire contractors for military training, but that it appeared that Reflex Responses had more ambitious goals both in the U.A.E. and elsewhere.

“There is no real legal precedent for a company like this, where the U.A.E. would be used as a launch pad for a wide range of missions, and potentially for a wide range of clients,” she said.

View the original article here

The Choice: Undecided After 36 Sleepless Hours

student photo

Michael Campbell is one of six seniors at Cherry Creek High, a public school in Denver, who are blogging about their college searches.

“I think I know where I’m going,” I say as I walk into the living room, checking my phone for anticlimactic effect.

The new e-mail chime pierces the silence. It is late March, and I have one message.

“Well?” asks my nervous mother.

“Good things.”

“Meaning?”

“Just the subject line of the e-mail.”

“I see. From whom?”

Mom seems a bit annoyed.

“The College of William & Mary.”

Full stop.

Silence.

It sinks in.

I grin.

“People say good things come in small packages, but in college admissions, good things come in thick envelopes. Consider this the small package, but something bigger is on its way.”

Could it be?

I reread the letter. Does it mean what I think it means? I check the calendar, and April Fool’s Day it is not. This is real.

“On second thought, I’m going to need some time to think.”

Mom understands.

By the end of March, my rejection list totaled three: the University of Virginia, Tufts and Georgetown were all “sorry to inform” me that I was one of the “many well-qualified candidates” whom they couldn’t admit.

I was happily surprised to land on the waiting list at highly selective Washington & Lee University, where barely 17 percent of applicants were admitted.

Boston University, which accepted 47 percent of its applicants this year, also put me in decision purgatory. I withdrew from both lists.

I sympathized with the plight of college admissions officers in this decision-making process, but through the opposite end of the looking glass: I was accepted to many more schools than I have the ability to attend, and after careful consideration of each individual college I, too, must make a tough choice.

Luckily, the wide range of schools to which I was accepted gave me many great options. I ultimately narrowed the list to the two most viable possibilities: American University and the College of William & Mary.

Trade-offs were abundant. Would I better enjoy Washington and the plentiful opportunities the city provides for internships and exploration, or Williamsburg, Va., for its quieter, academically focused atmosphere?

Would I prefer the honors program at American or the top-notch academics at public William & Mary? After scholarships, American would be significantly less expensive than W&M; could we afford the difference?

To my parents’ surprise and delight, I decided the most prudent course of action would be to buy last-minute cross-country plane tickets and visit both schools in two days. After all, seeing is believing, right?

Two red-eyes, two cities, thirty-six consecutive waking hours, and an almost-missed Amtrak train later, and I quickly reached a simple decision: I will never, ever, under any circumstances, subject my kind mother to that torture again.

My college decision, on the other hand, became even more complicated.

Sleep-deprivation aside, the admitted student days at both American and William & Mary were dazzling. The opportunities, academics and people at both were exciting and inspiring.

On the flight home, with a shirt from each university stowed safely beneath the seat in front of me, I couldn’t help but love both schools even more.

When I got home, I decided to sleep on it. Fourteen blissful hours later, I opened my eyes, but there was still no college pennant on the wall.

This was a decision I was going to have to make on my own, and soon, with May 1 looming.

It didn’t strike me; no blows were exchanged. There was no lightbulb-over-my-head moment; just the constant drip-drip percolation of facts and feelings through the semipermeable membrane of my mind.

So here goes: In the fall of 2011, I will be studying International Relations at the College of William & Mary.

I could never fit my decision into a linear pro-con list. Just as important as the excellent academics are the less quantifiable factors: the people, the atmosphere and the overwhelming sense of unity in diversity.

One college official said that “those who come here, belong here.” I like that.

My deposit is paid and my hoodie has arrived. I’m college-bound, and in two weeks I’ll be graduated from high school and cleared for liftoff. I like that, too.

I’m also done. I like that best.

Mr. Campbell is one of six seniors at Cherry Creek High School in Denver blogging about his college search for The Choice between now and May. To comment on what he has written here, please use the box below.

View the original article here

The Chicago Way: Figure in 2006 City Hall Patronage Case Has a New Career Lobbying City Hall

His new opportunity turns out to involve lobbying the mayor’s office, according to city records. Mr. Kozicki’s employer installs steel covers over the windows of abandoned city properties like police stations and firehouses.

“If, in fact, Kozicki is working for city funds and lobbying people in the mayor’s office, the current administration has no interest in punishing people for illegal hiring,” Noelle Brennan, the city’s court-appointed hiring monitor, said last week. “It suggests instead that such people are rewarded.”

The state’s last two governors have faced corruption charges in cases based largely on the testimony of former top aides. Yet, despite federal prosecutors’ threats to aim for bigger targets at City Hall, their investigation of illegal patronage hiring never reached into the highest echelons of the mayor’s office.

Whenever the smaller fish caught in the federal net would refuse to incriminate their superiors, members of the city’s political class shrugged and suggested that the “stand-up guys” would eventually be taken care of.

But Mr. Kozicki said Friday that his story was not a case of a political loyalist being rewarded for taking the fall for Team Daley.

“It’s a great product,” he said of his company’s method for securing vacant properties. “You can pick on me all you want, but the technology is second to none.”

Mr. Kozicki agreed to testify under a grant of immunity in the 2006 federal corruption trial of Mr. Daley’s patronage chief, Robert Sorich. But Mr. Kozicki surprised prosecutors when he testified that his old boss in the buildings department — rather than the mayor’s aide who was on trial — had pushed to rig the hiring of the young building inspector.

The prosecutors treated Mr. Kozicki as a hostile witness, saying his words on the witness stand deviated from an earlier sworn statement to the authorities. Those authorities suggested he had changed his story because of his deep ties to Mr. Daley’s 11th Ward Democratic power base, of which Mr. Sorich also was a member. Mr. Kozicki was an operative for the ward organization, and he drove the mayor’s brother, Cook County Commissioner John Daley, to and from their Bridgeport neighborhood.

Soon after the trial, the mayor’s office rejected the inspector general’s recommendation that Mr. Kozicki be fired for his role in the hiring of the 19-year-old son of a union official. Still, Mr. Kozicki stepped down in March 2008.

He then registered as the City Hall lobbyist for Vacant Property Security, city records show. The firm covers up abandoned buildings for the city’s property management contractors.

Mr. Kozicki said his work for the city since leaving the Daley administration has owed nothing to clout and everything to the value of the company’s product, as well as his experience as a “good public servant” before the scandal.

“I was not charged with any wrongdoing,” Mr. Kozicki said. “I worked hard. I was the mayor’s top deputy for vacant buildings for 10 years. I’m not some hack who didn’t know anything.”

View the original article here

The Texas Tribune: Cardiologists Accuse Hospital of Discrimination

Caleb Bryant Miller for The Texas TribuneDrs. Harish Chandna, from left, Ajay Gaalla, Dakshesh Kumar Parikh, cardiologists, in the waiting room of their office in Victoria.

VICTORIA — The e-mails and memos written by administrators and doctors at Citizens Medical Center here about three of their colleagues of Indian descent are, at best, derogatory. An operating room chief wrote of trying to force “the Indians off the reservation.” Others wrote about their “Indian troubles,” or labeled the hospital’s two rival cardiology practices as “the Cowboys” and “the Indians.”

Expanded coverage of Texas is produced by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit news organization. To join the conversation about this article, go to texastribune.org.

At worst, they could be considered racist: “I feel a sense of disgust but am more concerned with what this means to the future of the hospital as more of our Middle-Eastern-born physicians demand leadership roles and demand influence,” David P. Brown, chief executive of Citizens Medical, wrote in a 2007 memo to himself. He continued, “It will change the entire complexion of the hospital and create a level of fear among our employees.”

But whether racial animus led Citizens Medical, a 344-bed county-owned hospital, to close its cardiology unit to non-staff doctors — effectively revoking the privileges of Drs. Harish Chandna, Ajay Gaalla and Dakshesh Kumar Parikh to practice there — is the subject of fierce debate and a discrimination lawsuit filed by the three doctors in Federal District Court in the Southern District of Texas. The dispute has divided Victoria’s close-knit medical community, where many doctors and hospital officials say it is not about race — the city has long been home to doctors of all ethnicities and nationalities — but a struggle over egos and influence gone awry.

The Citizens Medical battle appears to have begun over operational disagreements between Drs. Chandna, Gaalla and Parikh and hospital administrators, and a lack of trust between the three Indian-American doctors and other cardiologists at C.M.C. Drs. Chandna, Gaalla and Parikh have their own cardiology practice and have practiced at C.M.C. and the neighboring DeTar Hospital for many years.

In e-mails, memos and court testimony, Citizens Medical administrators and doctors, who declined to be interviewed for this article, describe fractious relationships between themselves and the three cardiologists as they debated on-call schedules, compensation and leadership roles. The arguments sometimes devolved into shouting matches and name-calling — often, C.M.C. officials suggest in the documents, incited by the three cardiologists.

“From my review of the evidence, the common denominator in the rough aspects of the operation of the hospital were the three plaintiffs,” said Rex L. Easley Jr., one of the defense lawyers in the suit.

In e-mails referenced in a complaint the plaintiffs filed in August, Citizens Medical doctors also accuse the three cardiologists of starting a smear campaign against the hospital’s staff heart surgeon, Dr. Yusuke Yahagi, who is of Japanese descent and who complained of harassment and threatened to leave the hospital.

“This seditious speech and subversive actions toward [Dr. Yahagi] and C.M.C. is deliberate and calculated,” Dr. William T. Campbell Jr., a staff cardiologist and one of the defendants in the suit, wrote in a March 2010 e-mail included in the court file connected with the case. He continued, “These rabble-rousing behaviors are very disruptive to general medical care and are a poor reflection on Victoria medical community as a whole.”

But Drs. Chandna, Gaalla and Parikh, board-certified cardiologists who have been licensed in Texas for 13 to 18 years, say they were raising concerns about inappropriate procedures and poor patient outcomes, not being “disruptive.” In court filings, the doctors — one who was born in the United States and two who were born in India and are naturalized citizens — say they were consistently treated like second-class citizens, removed from committees and pushed out of laboratory posts arbitrarily, or overlooked in favor of “less-qualified” cardiologists C.M.C. hired.

View the original article here

The Radiation Boom

View the original article here

The Texas Tribune: Lawmakers and Others Discuss Changes to Education Programs for Prisoners

Lawmakers will most likely cut that number significantly in the 2012-13 budget, and that could be just the beginning of big changes to come.

“The structure itself screams out for change, screams out for renovation and innovation,” said State Senator Florence Shapiro, Republican of Plano and chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee.

The Windham School District is financed by the Texas Education Agency and overseen by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. In the 2009-10 school year, about 77,500 offenders participated in some type of Windham program. The school district operates much like a regular public school system, with a superintendent, principals and teachers at campuses across the state. It provides basic adult education, vocational training, life-skills programs and college-level courses.

Despite its sizable budget, a staff of more than 1,200 and a large number of students, Windham awarded just 5,287 G.E.D.’s in the last school year. “It’s really outrageous,” said Senator John Whitmire, Democrat of Houston and chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee.

Texas could save money, and prisoners could get better educations, some lawmakers say, if programs were provided online. Such programs allow students to learn at their own pace, Ms. Shapiro said, and would be better for prisoners. “Putting them in desks and chairs and making them feel like they’re in a school surrounding makes them feel stupid,” she said.

Lawmakers also complain that the school system seems top-heavy, with some 60 principals. “It’s the structure that needs to change,” Ms. Shapiro said. She and Mr. Whitmire are calling for a review of the program.

But correctional-education experts say lawmakers’ ideas, particularly about online programs, show a lack of understanding about prison life. “I don’t know of a program anywhere in the country where they’re able to use the Internet for instructional purposes,” said Chris Tracy, a former Windham superintendent. “Security personnel,” he said, are “absolutely paranoid about Internet systems.”

Mr. Tracy said that using more technology would not replace teaching staff for a population in which learning disabilities are endemic and educational achievement is low. “You don’t just say: ‘Here’s a computer. Help yourself learn how to read and write,’ ” he said.

Eddy Turner, a Windham teacher, said the school district could use more technology and could probably do with fewer administrators. But he said lawmakers should not judge the success of Windham solely on outcomes like G.E.D. attainment. Mr. Turner teaches courses that help inmates develop skills like maintaining relationships, balancing a checkbook and keeping a job.

“If you take education out of the prison,” Mr. Turner said, “they will no longer be confronted about changing.”

View the original article here

The Choice: Is College Worth It? Answers From Presidents and the Public

The Pew Research Center has just released a report incorporating two surveys — one of 2,142 adults 18 or older; the other of 1,055 college presidents — each centered on the question, “Is college worth it?”

Pew Research Center

Among the answers:

Fifty-seven percent of those questioned in the survey of members of the public said “the higher education system in the United States fails to provide students with good value for the money they and their families spend,” according to the report. Moreover, three-quarters say “college is too expensive for most Americans to afford.”

One factor behind such opinions is clearly student loan debt: among those questioned by Pew who said they had left college “with a substantial debt burden,” nearly half said such loans made it more difficult to pay other bills and a quarter said their college debts made it harder to buy a home.

And what of the presidents?

Pew Research Center

A majority of those surveyed — 58 percent — “say public high school students arrive at college less well prepared than their counterparts of a decade ago,” according to the report. Meanwhile, nearly four of every 10 presidents — who represent two- and four-year-colleges, and were questioned by Pew in partnership with The Chronicle of Higher Education — said they thought higher education was “headed in the wrong direction.”

The full report can be viewed here. The Chronicle’s coverage can be found here.

I’m curious what readers of The Choice make of these statistics, which seek to take the measure of a dynamic you’re experiencing first-hand. To register a comment, please use the box below.

View the original article here

Afghanistan May Be Open to New Path, Kerry Says

That message, which has been bandied about in Congress and on television talk shows in the wake of Bin Laden’s killing in Pakistan two weeks ago, appears to be more of an inevitability as policy makers look closely at the amount being spent in Afghanistan and ask where security threats are most severe.

As his two-day visit in Afghanistan came to a close, a central point made by Senator Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was that events in Pakistan and its relationship with the United States will have the biggest impact on security here.

“I have consistently said every year that Pakistan may do more to determine the outcome of what happens in Afghanistan” than anything else, he said.

He spoke at a news conference in Kabul before heading to Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, where he is expected to have blunt conversations with military and civilian leaders.

Mr. Kerry indicated that during briefings in Khost Province, where the United States keeps watch on Pakistani tribal areas, he had been told that Pakistan remained involved in helping to send insurgents into Afghanistan.

“Yes, there are insurgents coming across the border. Yes, they are operating out of North Waziristan and other areas of the sanctuaries. Yes, there is some evidence of Pakistan government knowledge of some of these activities in ways that are very disturbing,” he said. “That will be, without any question, one of the subjects of conversation. It will not be the first time this has been raised.”

As far as Afghanistan goes, he said, “We’re at a critical moment where we may be able to transition at a greater speed.”

Mr. Kerry did not specifically mention civilian casualties. But when he spoke about “reducing the footprint,” he seemed to indirectly allude to civilian casualties and the house searches and night raids that Afghans hate.

After years of Western military and civilian leaders arguing that the deaths and raids, while regrettable, were a byproduct of NATO’s fight against terrorism, Mr. Kerry said that President Hamid Karzai’s complaints about them were “correct.” One benefit of reducing the number of troops, he implied, would be to also reduce such searches and civilian casualties.

What is being talked about, he said, is a “a smart, thoughtful way to rapidly, as rapidly as possible, while maintaining progress, shift responsibilities to Afghans,” he said.

Underpinning that judgment, he said, were conversations with President Karzai; Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior commander in Afghanistan; Karl W. Eikenberry, the American ambassador in Kabul; and other Afghan political figures, who all said that security had improved, which opens the way for a reduction in the NATO presence.

Senator Kerry acknowledged that improvements were needed in governance and in fighting corruption, but he sounded willing to be satisfied with the situation as it stands. “To the credit of the Afghans, they have made a series of choices and decisions and progress that is beginning to provide a road, even notwithstanding the level of cooperation of Pakistan,” he said.

Some lawmakers in Congress are demanding that aid to Pakistan be cut off or sharply reduced, but Mr. Kerry said such actions could have a profound effect on the extent to which Pakistan encouraged the largely Pashtun Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.

“It’s important to try to not allow the passions of the moment to cloud over the larger goal that is in both of our interests,” Mr. Kerry said.

View the original article here

Political Memo: Idea Rebounds: Automatic Cuts to Curb Deficits

Yet Democrats and Republicans are taking a second look at the idea behind the law: the threat of automatic steps to address the problem if elected officials cannot rein in deficits.

The goal of the continuing bipartisan negotiations is to combine some action-forcing budget process with specific, deep spending cuts, allowing a deal to raise the government’s $14.3 trillion debt limit and avert a potential financial crisis. But the parties are far apart on the details.

Nearly all Congressional Republicans want caps only on government spending, backed by the threat of across-the-board cuts if agreed-upon targets are exceeded. Mr. Obama, most Democrats and several bipartisan budget groups want annual caps on deficits, with both spending cuts and tax increases triggered if the caps are breached.

The history of previous efforts suggests that targets and triggers can be a mechanism for bipartisan compromise, but are no substitute for sustained political will.

The most prominent example, Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, was an act of desperation at a time of mounting deficits, partisan paralysis over solutions and a desire for political cover to raise the debt limit — a time much like today, except debt projections are much larger and political divisions arguably wider. The act set declining annual deficit targets to reach a balanced budget in five years; if these targets were missed, across-the-board cuts loomed.

“With no disrespect to those three senators, it was a strange idea,” Steve Bell, the Senate Republicans’ top budget adviser when the act was passed, recalled for a 2006 history of the Senate Budget Committee.

“Fortunately,” he said, “Gramm-Rudman-Hollings was so contrary to the culture and the Constitution and whole flow of legislative history, the first thing we did was to ignore it.”

Actually, the politicians evaded it. Deficits exceeded targets every year, yet Congress and the administrations of President Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush avoided meat-ax cuts by fudging the numbers and moving the deficit goal posts. By 1990, faced with an economic downturn and a deficit too big to finesse, Mr. Bush and Congressional leaders replaced the law with less radical but ultimately more effective budget limitations — and nearly $500 billion in spending cuts and tax increases.

It raises the question: Why should that 1985 law be a guide now?

The answer, say advocates of the approach in both parties, is that for all its flaws, the act created a fiscal climate that forced compromises like the 1990 agreement. Its new budget limits — caps on annual discretionary spending and pay-as-you-go rules requiring offsetting savings for new tax cuts or spending on entitlement programs like Medicare — contributed, along with a surging economy, to balancing the budget by the late 1990s.

Members of both parties also say there is no realistic chance that President Obama and Republicans can agree by August — when the Treasury says it will run out of ways to avoid defaulting on the government’s debt obligations — on specific cuts of trillions of dollars, as Republicans are demanding. So the fallback is to combine what cuts they can agree to with budget procedures to enforce additional future savings.

“You can’t just do budget process reforms because that’s just kicking the can to the next Congress and saying, ‘Well, we promise to fix this later,’?” said Representative Paul D. Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican and House Budget Committee chairman. “That’s why we say you have to have real, material spending changes, which then are backed up by substantive process reforms.”

Even former opponents of Gramm-Rudman-Hollings are now open to an updated version. One is Mr. Obama’s budget director, Jacob J. Lew. “I’ll be candid,” Mr. Lew said. “My own thinking on this area has evolved over the last 25 years.”

In 1985, as a senior adviser to Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill, Mr. Lew helped negotiate changes to make Gramm-Rudman-Hollings acceptable to Democrats — for example, by exempting antipoverty programs from automatic cuts. In the 1990s, he was deputy director and then director of President Bill Clinton’s White House budget office.

View the original article here

Record Water for a Mississippi River City

He was staring at a calm puddle of water in which his house sat. A man standing beside Mr. Buck’s mailbox was casting a fishing line into a neighbor’s yard.

“It never came this far,” said Mr. Buck, a 21-year-old college student. “The farthest it ever came was the backyard of that house back there.”

The city of Vicksburg sits safely on lofty bluffs, except where it does not. The Kings neighborhood, where Mr. Buck lives in the north part of town, is one of the places where it does not.

Sunday in Kings was, for the most part, as it is in any other neighborhood, full of lawnmowers, barbecues and men standing around talking about nothing in particular. The difference was the muddy lake that was slowly consuming the neighborhood from the back.

Variances in elevation that would have gone unnoticed a few weeks ago now separate those who are nervous but dry from those whose houses are submerged nearly to the eaves. The water was not rising, residents said, so much as it was spreading, quietly. And the river that had pushed the water here was churning ferociously.

Around 10 a.m. on Sunday, according to officials from the Army Corps of Engineers, the river broke the record elevation set here during the flood of 1927, rising to 56.3 feet, 13 feet above flood stage and 1.2 feet below the predicted crest on Thursday. It was flowing by at a rate of nearly 17 million gallons a second, which is the highest rate it is likely to reach in its entire race down to the Gulf of Mexico.

Those numbers may be nerve-racking for those along its banks, but the weekend also brought some relatively good news: the failure of a predicted rain storm to appear has resulted in a lower estimated crest downriver at Natchez.

Furthermore, the Yazoo River, engorged with Mississippi backwater, had been projected to overtop its levees at some point this weekend, flooding 285,000 acres of delta farmland and threatening some anxious country towns. But the overtopping, designed into the system as a sort of relief valve, has not happened yet.

If the Mississippi comes in a few inches lower than predicted as it passes Vicksburg, the overtopping may not happen at all.

“It’s going to be really close,” said Robert Simrall, the chief of water control for the Vicksburg district of the corps.

These yardsticks are more or less irrelevant for the residents of Kings. While the river has been indifferent to income, folding over multimillion-dollar homes and valuable farmland in the delta along with single-wide trailers in Kings, the consequences for rich and poor vary considerably.

“Out of the whole community, I would say it’s probably three families with flood insurance,” Mr. Buck said.

The worries here are as much about the water as what it will bring in the weeks it sits here. Snakes, of course. Just about everyone in the neighborhood knows someone who has recently seen an alligator, or killed one, or lost a dog to one. More acute is the worry about who might come to their homes if they have to evacuate, and what those people might do or take.

The traffic was slow along Washington Street here, as gawkers pulled off on the increasingly narrow shoulder, emerging in Sunday clothes to take pictures of an old brick church that itself was undergoing something of a full-immersion baptism.

“This is ridiculous,” said Tawanna Bush, a 36-year-old waitress at a Cracker Barrel restaurant, looking at the top third of her uncle’s house. “Is it a sign?”

“Yeah, it’s a sign,” said Jackson Floyd, 49, offering the practical fatalism of those who have known hard luck. “It’s a sign that it’s time to move and get another house.”

Catrin Einhorn contributed reporting.

View the original article here

At War: Clues About Qaddafi’s Forces

C.J. Chivers/The New York Times

MISURATA, Libya — As the forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi fled Misurata’s airport and its environs on Wednesday, they left behind signs of both how they survived and how they fought during their weeks working against the city that expelled them.

One set of clues was evident just outside the airport’s gates. The runway is surrounded by stands of olive and almond trees, and many farms. Near one traffic circle, the Qaddafi soldiers had taken shelter inside an opaque green plastic greenhouse.

From a fast-moving car on the nearby road, and likely from the air, the greenhouse looked innocuous enough. But the trash heaps nearby gave it away — someone had been drinking hundreds of liters of bottled water, and had thrown away many ammunition cans, and then, had ditched uniforms and even military boots.

A stop revealed more. Inside the tent, shielded from view, were a few grubby mattresses and cardboard sheets, where soldiers had been sleeping. Many of their blankets had been left behind, too.

C. J. Chivers/The New York Times

And at one end of the greenhouse was a large pile of crates telling more of the war and of how Colonel Qaddafi armed his forces for it. The crates had contained 125-millimeter high-explosive fragmentation rounds for the main guns of T-72 tanks.

Rebels and medical officials in Misurata have said the T-72 tanks at the city’s edge had been firing randomly into the city. Sometimes at night, when the wind died down and noise carried, it seemed they could be heard. A distant boom would sound — the report of an outgoing round. And then an explosion would be heard in the city, often very fast — within four or five seconds.

This was faster than artillery and mortar rounds, which fly in a high, looping arc that consumes time. Tank rounds fly in a much flatter trajectory, and can cover many kilometers in four seconds, though not exactly precisely.

And here were scores of a round that were not designed to fire at other tanks, but at bunkers, structures and people.

The official designation of this round is 3VOF36. It contains a projectile with a high-explosive charge surrounded by a steel case. When it detonates, the projectile breaks into hundreds of what its seller calls “anti-personnel fragments”; in other words, flying bits of jagged steel designed to kill.

The stenciling on the crates, and the paperwork within, told of their provenance. They had been exported from Oktyabrsk, Russia, in late 2002 under a 1999 contract between Rosoboronexport, the Russian state arms-trading agency, and the Libyan government. Under this contract, the Qaddafi military has bought 8,126 cases — a quantity corroborated by both the paperwork and the stenciling on the crates.

null

Who they were intended to be used against no one can say from the evidence available in the tent. But the empty canisters told the rest. They had been used in Misurata, and perhaps for the shelling of the city, by a force that put a greenhouse to a novel new use.

C.J. Chivers/The New York Times

Follow C.J. Chivers on Facebook, on Twitter at @cjchivers or on his personal blog, cjchivers.com, where many posts from At War are supplemented with more photographs and further information.

View the original article here

Before It Can Rebuild, Japanese Town Must Survive

She was swept away by the tsunami that flattened much of this fishing town and killed his wife, mother and two other young daughters. Once he finds the missing child, Mr. Watanabe said, he will leave this town and its painful memories for good.

“No one wants to build here again,” said Mr. Watanabe, 42, who spoke in short sentences punctuated by long sighs. “This place is just too scary.”

Two months after a huge earthquake and tsunami, devastated coastal communities like this one remain far from recovery and, with many working-age people moving away, they face the prospect that they could simply wither away and, ultimately, perhaps even disappear.

With neither homes nor jobs to lose, and fearing another tsunami from the continuing aftershocks, many residents have already left. Town officials now fear losing the bulk of working-age families, leaving this already graying town with an overwhelmingly elderly population that might lack the energy or the incentive to undertake a lengthy reconstruction.

And that poses another hurdle. Experts have said that it will be years before the rebuilding is complete and the number of jobs returns to anything like its former level — another reason, many experts and townspeople worry, for working-age residents to flee.

“Otsuchi must move quickly in order to survive,” said Seiichi Mori, a biologist at Gifu Keizai University who is helping draw up recovery plans.

As a stopgap measure, Otsuchi announced in late April that it planned to hire 270 townspeople to remove debris. But with a lengthy reconstruction ahead, many experts and townspeople fear an exodus of younger residents, who cannot wait years for a job.

Town officials say they are trying to draw up plans that will entice younger residents to stay. Most of the ideas are coming from Tokyo and call for grand schemes to move coastal towns to higher ground by constructing huge platforms or shearing off nearby mountaintops — the sorts of megaprojects that Japan may no longer be able to afford.

But town officials say they are overwhelmed by more immediate demands, like relocating the 2,247 residents who still sleep on the floors of school gymnasiums and other cramped refugee centers to longer-term temporary housing, or finding the 1,044 who remain missing in this town, which had 15,239 residents before the tsunami. So far, the bodies of 680 people have been found.

Just cleaning up the mounds of debris left by the waves, which towered as high as 50 feet and destroyed more than half of Otsuchi’s homes and buildings, will very likely take a year. The town’s administrative functions were also crippled by the waves, which gutted the town hall and killed the mayor and some 30 town employees.

“We are far from reconstruction,” said Masaaki Tobai, 66, the vice mayor, who stepped in to lead the town and who survived by scrambling to the town hall’s roof. “Medical services, administration, education, police, fire, retail stores, hotels, fishing cooperative, farming cooperative, industry, jobs — all are gone, all washed away.”

In other hard-hit areas, particularly around the region’s main city, Sendai, there are already signs of recovery, with the cleanup well under way and full bullet train service having resumed. But more remote communities like Otsuchi, on the rugged coast further north, are falling behind.

While the shortages of food and drinking water of the first desperate weeks are over, the town remains a flattened landscape of shattered homes and crumpled vehicles, where soldiers still pull a dozen bodies or so from the wreckage every day.

Restarting the local economy appears a distant prospect. This coastal area of rural Iwate Prefecture has long lagged behind the rest of Japan. The average annual income in Otsuchi is 1.7 million yen, around $21,000, about 60 percent of the national average. In this fishing port, most of the work was either on fishing boats that worked local oyster, scallop and seaweed farms or in canneries and seafood-processing plants along the wharfs. All were destroyed by the tsunami.

Last month, the town’s chamber of commerce surveyed local business owners. Only half said they definitely planned to rebuild their businesses in Otsuchi.

The chamber, however, was able to survey only 114 business owners, just a quarter of its membership before the tsunami. It is now based in a prefabricated hut on the sports field of a burned-out elementary school and is still trying to locate about 300 other members.

“We know we need to create jobs,” said Chieko Uchihama, an official at the chamber, “but how do you do that when you don’t even know who survived?”

Another immediate task is the grim search for the remains of the people still classified as missing in Otsuchi. On a recent afternoon, survivors combed through the wreckage in search of lost loved ones.

One of them was Mr. Watanabe.

He and his family were home when the wave suddenly swept into the living room, knocking him against the ceiling before he could claw his way up to the second floor of the house, which had begun to float away from its foundation. He managed to jump onto the passing roof of a concrete building, but other family members were not as lucky or strong.

He quit his job at the town’s still functioning garbage incinerator so he could come every day to look for his youngest daughter, Mikoto. He also wanted to find personal belongings, like the red backpack he had bought his oldest daughter, Hinata, 6, who had been excited about entering the first grade soon.

He said he would eventually move inland to find new work, and somehow start again.

“It’s too hard to stay here,” said Mr. Watanabe, who stared stoically at the wreckage of his house. “If I see where we used to shop on weekends, I will remember.”

Makiko Inoue contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 16, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the occupation of Seiichi Mori, of Gifu Keizai University. He is a biologist, not an economist.

View the original article here

Henry Kissinger on China

John Dominis/Time & Life Pictures — Getty ImagesThe easy part: Kissinger, Nixon, Secretary of State William P. Rogers and Prime Minister Zhou Enlai in 1972.

Henry Kissinger was not only the first official American emissary to Communist China, he persisted in his brokerage with more than 50 trips over four decades, spanning the careers of seven leaders on each side. Diplomatically speaking, he owns the franchise; and with “On China,” as he approaches 88, he reflects on his remarkable run.

To the degree that Washington and Beijing now understand each other, it is in good measure because Kissinger has been assiduously translating for both sides, discerning meaning in everything from elliptical jokes to temper tantrums. At every juncture, he has been striving to find “strategic concepts” that could be made to prevail over a history of conflict, mutual grievance and fear. As President Nixon’s national security adviser, then secretary of state for Nixon and Gerald Ford, and since 1977 as a private interlocutor extraordinaire, Kissinger has been unwaveringly committed to surmounting what he considers the legitimate Chinese resentment of American interference in their internal affairs and Americans’ distaste for China’s brutal suppression of ethnic, religious and political dissent.

The surprise buried in his lumbering review of Sino-American relations is that the much ballyhooed Nixon-Kissinger journeys to China in 1971-72 turned out to have been the easy part. “That China and the United States would find a way to come together was inevitable given the necessities of the time,” he writes. “It would have happened sooner or later whatever the leadership in either country.” Both nations were exhausted from war (Vietnam, clashes on the Soviet border) and domestic strife (antiwar protests in Nixon’s case, the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s). Both were determined to resist Soviet advances and so could quickly agree to make common cause. The menace of Moscow took the leaders’ minds off confrontations in Vietnam and Taiwan and quelled their ritual denunciations, whether of international imperialism or Communism. They decided that the adversary of my adversary was my pal, and for more than a decade that was fruitfully that.

But that was a different time. China finally escaped from Mao Zedong’s mad doctrine of perpetual revolution and from the enfeebling nostrums of central planning; it became an industrial powerhouse. The Soviet Union and its empire collapsed. And the United States, feeling supreme, began promoting democracy with missionary zeal even as it grew dangerously addicted to foreign oil, goods and credit. The radical shift in the balance of power turned China and the United States into mutually dependent economic giants, but it left them without an overarching strategic design of partnership.

It is to demonstrate the need for such a design that Kissinger reviews the ups and downs of Sino-American relations, reaching even into ancient Chinese history to define national characteristics. (He finds it apt that the Chinese like to play “wei qi,” or “go,” a protracted game of encirclement while we play chess, looking for control of the center and total victory.) Kissinger draws heavily on much recent scholarship and on notes of his trips to Beijing to celebrate the pragmatism of Mao’s successors. He says they are content to remain within their restored historic frontiers, willing to await a peaceful reunion with Taiwan, and most determined to continue their remarkable economic growth and to eradicate China’s still widespread poverty. He is less confident about America’s capacity to sustain a steady foreign policy, noting that “the perpetual psychodrama of democratic transitions” is a constant invitation to other nations to “hedge their bets” on us.

As students of Kissinger well know, he has long considered democracy to be a burden on statecraft — both the clamor of democracy within the United States and our agitations for democracy in other lands.

He recalls yet again his agonies in office in the 1970s, when he thought that American demonstrations during the Vietnam War could have misled Mao into believing that a “genuine world revolution” was at hand. He argues that the “destruction” of Nixon in the Watergate crisis, the withdrawal of Congressional support for Vietnam, new curbs on presidential war powers and the “hemorrhaging” of intelligence secrets all combined to undermine the quasi alliance with China, making America appear ineffectual against the Soviets. He is glad that Jimmy Carter did not let his human rights concerns upset relations with China and that Ronald Reagan’s cheerful personality overcame the “almost incomprehensible contradictions” of his dealings with Beijing even as he promoted the idea of an independent Taiwan.

Max Frankel, a former executive editor of The Times, covered the Nixon-Kissinger journey to China in 1972.

View the original article here

Baku Journal: Eurovision Joy Deflects Cares for a While

His analysis of previous Eurovision Song Contests left him convinced that victory hinges on geopolitics — a subject all too familiar in Azerbaijan, a small, oil-rich nation wedged between Iran and Russia.

So Mr. Rahbarli brightened at the mention of Moldova, saying its votes might be swayed by its extensive network of Azerbaijani filling stations. He was circumspect about Georgia, whose alliance with Azerbaijan, he said, has always been tainted by envy. He racked his brain for shared ethnic roots that might sway Albania. It was not until after 3 a.m., when the vote tally showed that Azerbaijan’s singing duet had actually won, that Mr. Rahbarli’s analytical skills failed him.

“I can’t speak; I can’t speak,” he cried, gripping his head with his hands. “I am in no condition.”

Outside was a scene of mad joy. Drivers barreled through the city, leaning on their horns and flying huge flags. Those not satisfied with leaning out car windows climbed onto the roofs — or, in some cases, into the trunks — and hung on for dear life. Hummers and Land Rovers and boxy Soviet-era Ladas got so snarled on Oilmen’s Avenue, a palm-lined boulevard skirting the Caspian Sea, that everyone just got out and danced.

“We have come a very long way for this,” said Rauf Aliyev, 43, a pilot. “Europe will know us now.”

It is hard to imagine a country better prepared for the frothy burden conferred by Eurovision, a Continental battle of the bands that will now be held in Baku next spring.

Awash in wealth, Azerbaijan has developed a specialty in over-the-topness. Last Tuesday, for the birthday of the former president Heydar Aliyev, the authorities had upward of a million flowers flown in from various countries. They were fashioned into huge and elaborate sculptures, including a mosaic of the face of Mr. Aliyev, who died in 2003, made of purple, white and gold chrysanthemums. (By Saturday night, dump trucks had backed up to the park to cart away the rotting blossoms.)

Once a showcase for the whims of pre-revolutionary oil barons, Baku now boasts its own Bentley showroom and curvaceous glass towers that would look at home in Dubai. The authorities have announced plans to import a fleet of London taxicabs — in purple — at a cost of $27 million, according to the Trend news service, based in Azerbaijan. This may trump the unveiling, last year, of the world’s tallest unsupported flagpole, which measures a shade over 531 feet and cost $32 million.

For officials, these extravaganzas are a welcome distraction from social tensions that emerged this spring. Thanks to rising oil revenues, Azerbaijan’s official poverty rate dropped to 11 percent in 2010 from 45 percent in 2003, according to the International Monetary Fund. Meanwhile, much of the population lives off government allowances.

This means President Ilham H. Aliyev, who succeeded his father, “feels less incentive to pretend that Azerbaijan is a progressing democracy,” the International Crisis Group wrote last year in a report. Small antigovernment demonstrations inspired by the Arab revolutions were met with a harsh response, and many young people say they are now too afraid to participate in public dissent. But ordinary citizens do not hide their complaints about corruption and disparities in wealth.

“I don’t need Eurovision; I need money,” said Arif, 23, who did not give his last name for fear of government retribution. He said he earned about $190 a month working at a grocery.

“What will I do with Eurovision?” he said. “Our country is an oil country, but we live in poverty.”

Before dawn on Sunday, however, it felt as though all the hardships and the humiliations of the post-Soviet era had been redeemed in one swoop. As blue floodlights raked the Buta Palace nightclub, Mr. Rahbarli cheerfully recalled the competitions that Azerbaijan had traditionally dominated. It has a strong women’s volleyball team, he noted, and a legendary chess academy, and a good record on a Russian quiz show called “What? Where? When?” That was the end of his list — until now.

“For a European country, this would be a small victory,” he said. “For us, it is a supervictory!”

Within a few hours of the pop-music triumph, some Azerbaijanis were back on geopolitics — specifically, the standoff with Armenia over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, an area in Azerbaijan’s southwest.

Azerbaijan has tried for years, through international mediation, to reclaim the territory from Armenian control and allow refugees to return. Ganira Pashayeva, a member of Parliament, told the Trend news service on Sunday that she hoped Nagorno-Karabakh would be the subject of the next celebration.

“I believe that this day is near,” she said.

Armenia, meanwhile, has not said whether it will attend next year’s music competition in Baku.

Amanda Erickson contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 16, 2011

In an earlier version of this article, a map misidentified Nakhchivan as Nagorno Karabakh.

View the original article here

2011年5月16日星期一

Bin Laden as Patriarch

WASHINGTON — When a man stalks the world as a mass killer, it distracts from the ordinary interest we might otherwise take in the mundane details of his life. And so it was with Osama bin Laden.

But after he was cornered and killed on May 2 in an upstairs bedroom of his house in Pakistan, Bin Laden the terrorist and Bin Laden the family man came together. At home with him were three of his wives, the youngest of whom was shot in the leg; a son, who was killed; a daughter, who witnessed her father’s death; and other children, some of whom may be Bin Laden’s.

Now there is official interest in the wives as intelligence sources. They were questioned at length by the Pakistanis and subsequently by the Americans, though Bin Laden is not believed to have shared much of his business with the women in his life.

But apart from anything Bin Laden’s wives may have to say that might be useful to intelligence officers about his associates and their whereabouts, there is also a powerful natural curiosity about the women and their children: What was it like to live with the founder of Al Qaeda, to call him husband or father? As with Hitler or Pol Pot, you want to understand whether his bizarre combination of grandiosity and viciousness carried over to domestic life — in Bin Laden’s case, whether he perhaps was an eerily ordinary parent, complaining about what was for dinner, nagging the kids about their homework.

That was why the video of Bin Laden watching himself on TV was so riveting. He was anything but intimidating, sitting with remote control in hand to fast-forward, rather than to set off an explosion, with a shawl draped around him and his beard undyed. He was cut down to size, which was exactly why American officials rushed to make the home movies public.

But that was just a glimpse. The most vivid look the American public has had at Bin Laden’s family life is from a 2009 memoir by his son Omar bin Laden and Omar’s mother, Najwa bin Laden. They wrote “Growing Up bin Laden” with the assistance of Jean Sasson, an American writer. The book includes what may be the most complete account available of the terrorist’s immediate family. Ms. Sasson counts five wives, plus a sixth whose marriage to Osama bin Laden was mysteriously annulled within a day; at least 11 sons, two now dead; at least nine daughters. There may be more children, born after Najwa bin Laden left her husband. That was shortly before he engineered the Sept. 11 attacks and changed the world.

Here, based on the book, is the family tree of a terrorist.

View the original article here

Cathay Pacific Airliner Makes Emergency Landing in Singapore

HONG KONG — A Cathay Pacific airliner was forced to make an emergency landing after engine trouble on Monday, prompting the airline and the engine maker Rolls-Royce to start an investigation into the incident.

No one was hurt in the incident, which involved an Airbus A330 aircraft carrying 136 passengers and 13 crew members that left Singapore shortly after 1 a.m. local time, bound for Jakarta. The flight, CX 715, returned to Singapore’s Changi International Airport shortly after takeoff when one of the aircraft’s engines emitted a stall warning, Cathay Pacific said in a statement.

Cathay Pacific, which is based in Hong Kong and is one of the biggest airlines in the Asia-Pacific region, said fire crews met the aircraft on landing and used extinguishers to douse what it described as “sparks” from the affected engine. A separate statement from Changi Airport indicated the engine was on fire.

The passengers disembarked “without incident,” and most were transferred to other flights on Monday morning, according to Cathay.

“Cathay Pacific and Rolls Royce are investigating the incident which has been reported to the Hong Kong Civil Aviation Department,” the airline said in its statement.

The aircraft was purchased new by Cathay in February 2001. It has logged approximately 11,250 takeoffs and landings and 37,000 flight hours, according to Ascend, an aviation industry consultancy in London. The plane is powered by two Rolls-Royce Trent engines.

The engine involved was a Trent 700, built by Rolls-Royce of Britain. A Rolls-Royce spokesman said Monday that currently 900 engines of the same model are in service worldwide. The Trent 700 fleet, which first entered service in 1995, has logged a total of 16 million flight hours.

Nicola Clark contributed reporting from Paris.

View the original article here

订阅：博文 (Atom)