theurbanhermit (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} theurbanhermit) wrote,@ 2008-12-04 09:17:00 |
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4331
as always:
It is best to read this journal from the beginning. . .
<http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/2006/02/08/>
it makes more sense then. ....
or just explore the journal at: <http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/>
may i recommend: <http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/2008/01/04/>
and a follow up to that: <http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/2008/10/12/>
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and yesterday's news and comments:
yahoo.com.news:
FBI agents stage sting to snare corrupt Ill. cops
By MIKE ROBINSON, Associated Press Writer Mike Robinson, Associated Press Writer
Wed Dec 3, 4:18 am ET
CHICAGO – Duffel bags stuffed with cocaine were delivered by plane to an out-of-the-way suburban airport while two sheriff's officers provided security. A police officer stood by to guard the cash and keep out the riffraff at a poker game where $100,000 changed hands. And a drug dealer was told squad cars marked "sheriff" and "sheriff's police" might be available on a "freelance" basis to provide protection for his deliveries.
Such tales of law enforcement gone awry emerged in court papers Tuesday as federal prosecutors unveiled a series of elaborate sting operations aimed at officers who hired out to ride shotgun for drug deals and other criminal activities.
Fifteen officers and two other men who had pretended to be law enforcement officers were charged with conspiracy to possess and distribute cocaine or heroin or both.
But the most spectacular pretending was done by the federal agents themselves.
The pilots of the airplane were not drug runners but undercover agents. So were the gamblers who busily played hand after hand of high-stakes poker — all for show.
The drug broker who squired the officers to the airport to pick up the duffel bags was an agent. So was the drug dealer who stuffed the bags into his Mercedes-Benz.
U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald said he was dismayed to find that so many law enforcement officers had "sold out their badge."
"When drug dealers deal drugs, they ought to be afraid of the police — not turn to them for help," Fitzgerald said at a news conference.
Officials paid homage to an unnamed FBI agent who moved into a business in Harvey more than a year ago and set up shop as a drug broker. He soon attracted the attention of police and the corruption grew, authorities said.
They said the agent was sent in undercover because there had been reports of police corruption over the last several years in southern Cook County, including the Harvey police department. An investigation into allegations of robbery, extortion, narcotics offenses and weapons distribution is ongoing, officials said.
Those charged include 10 Cook County sheriff's correctional officers, four Harvey police officers and one Chicago police officer.
Of the 17 defendants, 14 were arrested or surrendered Tuesday and were being immediately brought before U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael Mason. Two sheriff's officers are on active duty with Army National Guard units in Afghanistan, and warrants were issued for their arrest.
If convicted of conspiracy to possess and distribute more than five kilograms of cocaine or one kilogram of heroin, the defendants would face a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years and a maximum of life. The maximum fine would be $4 million.
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart called the alleged behavior "absolutely reprehensible."
"The responsibility of watching over jail inmates is an important one and it's a shame these men didn't take that responsibility more seriously," he said in a statement.
Each of those charged has been suspended with pay pending a hearing next week, Dart said. "That step will then lead to a request for termination," he said.
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mike robinson? see rpevious entries harvard and 6/8. . .
thecrimson.com:
Harvard Endowment Fell 22 Percent in Four Months
Decline dwarfs University's previous worst single-year loss
Published On 12/2/2008 11:41:56 PM
By JUNE Q. WU and CLIFFORD M MARKS
Crimson Staff Writers
Harvard’s endowment—the largest in higher education—fell 22 percent in four months from its June 30 value of $36.9 billion, marking the endowment’s largest decline in modern history, University officials announced yesterday.
The precipitous drop will require Harvard’s faculties to take a “hard look at hiring, staffing levels, and compensation,” wrote University President Drew G. Faust and Executive Vice President Edward C. Forst ’82 in a letter informing the deans of Harvard’s losses.
The decline, which amounts to more than $8 billion, is larger than the endowments of all but four other universities—Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT.
In the same period, the S&P 500 fell 24.6 percent. The index has fallen an additional 12.4 percent since then.
The estimate of 22 percent may not fully capture the actual losses from this period, Forst said in an interview yesterday, as some of Harvard’s money is invested with external managers that have yet to report their latest figures. Faust and Forst wrote in yesterday’s letter that the University should plan for a 30 percent drop-off in endowment value for the year ending June 30, 2009.
The news comes during the worst economic turmoil in decades. University endowments across the country have begun announcing unprecedented losses and instituting hiring or construction freezes in an effort to save funds.
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences placed a freeze on staff hiring last week, following a cautionary letter from Faust a month earlier that warned of cutbacks ahead.
Yesterday’s figure dwarfs Harvard’s worst single-year endowment loss of 12.2 percent in 1974. The endowment has clocked only three years of negative returns, all under three percent, in the subsequent three decades.
Forst said University leaders have delayed setting the endowment payout rate for the next fiscal year—a figure generally announced the December before—until Harvard’s schools can reevaluate their budgets.
“Given the extreme volatility in the markets, I don’t expect [the payout rate] will be set until we have a much more concrete sense about financial plans and endowment performance,” Forst said.
Yesterday’s letter did state that University leaders expect to spend a higher percentage of the endowment next year in an effort to buffer the immediate impact of the losses.
The letter also stressed the possibility of slowing construction projects or reevaluating “staffing levels,” and Forst confirmed that the University will reevaluate the scope and pace of every major capital program—including Allston expansion plans and House renovations at the College.
“We expect that every part of the University is going to have to find ways to reduce its operating expenses,” Forst said.
The need for budget reductions could have particular impact on employee salaries and benefits, which make up half of the University’s costs, according to yesterday’s letter.
Forst would not say whether more hiring freezes would follow last week’s freeze in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, but said individual schools will need to “take a hard look at compensation generally.”
The central administration will work closely with leaders at the schools to tailor solutions to their individual circumstances, Forst said, adding that Faust convened a two-hour meeting yesterday morning to discuss the latest financial update with the deans.
“Obviously, no one is happy with the endowment being down,” FAS Dean Michael D. Smith wrote in an e-mail to The Crimson yesterday, “but it does help out planning efforts to understand where the portion of the endowment that we can measure stands.”
While the schools struggle to budget for this new development, Harvard’s money managers plan to increase the University’s financial flexibility by upping cash holdings and reducing the amount of risk in the endowment portfolio.
Leveraging its strong credit ratings—the highest granted by rating agencies Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s—Harvard will issue new taxable fixed-rate debt. Unlike tax-free debt, these bonds can be used for any University expenditure and thus increase Harvard’s cash flexibility, Forst said.
The University will also convert existing short-term tax-exempt debt into bonds with longer maturities, allowing the University to postpone short-term payments to debt holders and retain a larger financial cushion to the volatility in the credit markets.
Multiple media outlets recently reported that Harvard was also seeking to shore up endowment holdings by selling $1.5 billion of its private equity portfolio at a drastically reduced price, but Forst declined to address those reports yesterday.
—Staff writer Clifford M. Marks can be reached at cmarks@fas.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer June Q. Wu can be reached at junewu@fas.harvard.edu.
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they lost the black funded money they gained from he bigoilwhitehouse. . ..
and harvardf and dhs again from thecrimson.com:
Security Chief Talks Terror
Cooperation among govt. agencies is hailed as key for new administration
Published On 12/3/2008 1:48:00 AM
By EMILY J. HOGAN
Contributing Writer
At the dawn of a new political administration, the United States faces evolving security threats that must be addressed through dynamic intelligence practices, the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, said in a speech at the Harvard Kennedy School yesterday.
“With weapons of mass destruction that could result in the death of many, many people—chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons—we assess the likelihood of each,” said McConnell, who became the second director of national intelligence in 2007. “The likelihood of nuclear attack is less but is not eliminated.”
Cyberterrorism is yet another rising danger, McConnell said.
“The cyber threat is the soft underbelly of the United States,” McConnell said. “The United States depends on the cyber infrastructure more than any other on Earth.”
He said that the American financial system is especially vulnerable to a type of cyber-terrorism he referred to as “data destruction.”
Part of the government’s plan to meet growing security challenges must include increased cooperation between different agencies that collect intelligence, McConnell said.
“It is large: we are 100,000 people. It is global: we spend in the neighborhood of $48 billion a year,” McConnell said of the intelligence community, which includes entities like the intelligence-gathering agencies of the military, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “That’s a very complex enterprise to operate—my job is to make sure it’s integrated.
McConnell said that the lack of communication among these separate agencies has been a major weakness in American intelligence since well before 2001, adding that “we designed our own system to make the attacks of 9/11 successful.” Still, he added that in recent years, the intelligence community has taken steps to make itself more effective.
“The idea is always being willing to make yourself more agile, because you have to be ready to make decisions, and today’s decisions happen at the speed of light,” McConnell said.
McConnell also noted that the intelligence agencies have shifted their focus so that terrorism is now considered a legitimate threat. He noted that the FBI—which is considered both an investigative and domestic intelligence agency—has made the prevention of terrorist attacks its “primary focus.”
As director of the nation’s intelligence-gathering agencies, McConnell, a former Navy admiral, is charged with presenting the president with his daily intelligence briefing. He was also involved in the publication of “Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World,” a projection of the threats that the United States is likely to face over the next 17 years, which was released over the summer.
This most recent version of the report, which is produced every four years to aid the incoming presidential administration, warns of rising food prices, increased competition for energy sources, scarce water resources, and biological weapons as emerging national security threats.
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so freaking sdad. . .
boaston.com:
Victim's kin petition judge, back maximum sentence for Connolly
By Shelley Murphy, Globe Staff | December 3, 2008
The widow and two children of slain Boston business consultant John B. Callahan will urge a Florida judge tomorrow to consider their years of suffering and loss when he sentences former FBI agent John J. Connolly Jr. for his role in the 1982 murder.
"After 26 years, I still cry over my father's murder and my family's loss," wrote Callahan's daughter, Kathleen, 43,in a victim impact statement to be read in court at Connolly's sentencing tomorrow, which was shared with the Globe by her mother. "Since his murder, I learned that my dad was a brilliant, funny, and faithful man, yet I only knew him from the perspective of a child. One of my life's greatest regrets is not having a relationship with him as an adult."
Patrick Callahan, who was 14 when his father was killed, wrote in his victim impact statement, "Without my father's inspiration, guidance, discipline, and what he was able to provide for the family, life as I knew it was out the window."
Callahan's widow, Mary, said that she and her children had decided it was too difficult, emotionally and financially, to attend Connolly's eight-week trial in Miami, which ended last month with his conviction for second degree murder. But all three of them will be in court for the former agent's sentencing, she said.
"It's important that we, as victims, get our voices heard," said Mary Callahan, who was battling multiple sclerosis when her 45-year-old husband was shot to death in Florida, leaving her the sole supporter of their teenage children. "You never get over it."
Connolly, 68, was found guilty on Nov. 6 of second-degree murder for leaking information to longtime informants James "Whitey" Bulger and Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi that prompted them to hire a hitman to kill Callahan, the former president of World Jai Alai who fraternized with gangsters.
During the trial, Flemmi, who is serving a life sentence for 10 murders, testified that Connolly warned him and Bulger that the FBI planned to question Callahan. Connolly told them Callahan "wouldn't hold up" and would probably implicate the gangsters in the 1981 killing of World Jai Alai owner Roger Wheeler, Flemmi testified.
John Martorano, a hitman turned government witness, testified that he lured Callahan to Florida and killed him at the urging of Bulger and Flemmi. Callahan's bullet-riddled body was found in the trunk of his car at Miami International Airport on Aug. 2, 1982.
Prosecutors said Connolly faces a sentence of 30 years to life in prison for his conviction of second-degree murder with a firearm. But defense lawyers said they will argue that the judge has the authority to sentence Connolly to less time.
"We can in good faith say he shouldn't get more than John Martorano got," said Manuel L. Casabielle, a lawyer in Miami who represents Connolly, referring to a deal that allowed Martorano to walk free after serving 12 years for killing 20 people.
The defense has submitted a number of letters supporters of Connolly wrote to the judge.
Connolly, who retired from the FBI in 1990, is serving a 10-year prison term for his 2002 federal racketeering conviction for helping Bulger, one of the FBI's 10 Most Wanted, evade capture and for protecting him and Flemmi from prosecution.
Though Connolly was charged only with Callahan's murder in Florida, prosecutors were allowed to present additional evidence to try to prove that the former agent was corrupt.
Flemmi testified that he and Bulger killed two others - nightclub owner Richard Castucci in 1976 and gang associate Edward "Brian" Halloran in 1982 - because Connolly warned them that they were FBI informants who had cooperated against them or their friends.
Miami-Dade Assistant State Attorney Michael Von Zamft said he will seek a stiff sentence, adding, "The position of the state attorney is that a corrupt law enforcement official deserves to serve as maximum punishment as allowed because they take advantage of the public trust and they violate it."
Mary Callahan said her family supports the prosecution's call for the maximum penalty, which would mean Connolly would spend his life in prison.
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this with the back to spherion and connollys all over the hu temp agencies . . . see previous entris. . . read the journal form the beginning . . .
thecrimson.com:
My comments: curious this - PO, CO's wife, and the Bell Foundation (EAR RINGING!) and the Johnsons in the shelters from maine . . . oy . . .
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Chinese Company Rips Harvard Name
Published On 12/3/2008 1:47:51 AM
By WEIQI ZHANG
Contributing Writer
Harvard has had a lot of Presidents, but none of them were named “Bell Johnson.”
In China, “Bell Johnson,” who sports a mustache and furrowed brow in a black-and-white portrait, has been placed on flyers for Megee, a water heater company based out of the Guangdong Province.
Earlier this year, retailers who sell Megee products began hailing “Johnson” as the president of Harvard University. The logo carries the University’s name in both English and Chinese. The “v” in Harvard is set against a triangular background reminiscent of the American flag.
Here in Cambridge, Harvard administrators have taken notice.
Director of Harvard Trademark Program Rick Calixto said that an individual living in China brought the flyer to the University’s attention three or four weeks ago.
“We routinely get these sorts of tips from people around the world,” Calixto wrote in an e-mail, and “then proceed to take whatever action the University deems is warranted.”
Calixto declined to comment further on the case since it is presently under investigation.
A Megee representative, who requested that his name not be printed, said he acknowledged that the title of Harvard president has been misused but maintained that his company was not responsible.
“It’s true that some sales assistants advertised inappropriately,” the representative said during a phone interview. “But they are not from our company.”
He added that while Megee created the image of “Bell Johnson,” the retailers who carry his company’s products are responsible for giving him the title of the University’s highest office.
While the representative said that his company was not responsible for giving him the title of the University’s highest office.
While the representative said that his company was not responsible for naming Johnson Harvard’s president, he said that Megee registered the use of the Harvard name as early as 2001.
And the company states that “Harvard” is a legal brand name issued by the Chinese government’s trademark office for its use.
The company’s Web site highlights sections such as “Harvard in Beijing,” “Harvard’s History and Future,” and “Harvard’s Brand in China,” which all lead to pages with information about Megee, not Harvard.
James G. Ashe, who works for the Harvard Trademark Program, said that Harvard “does not necessarily have to have the trademark registered in all goods and services in order to protect the mark from unauthorized use.”
Last month, Harvard won a lawsuit against a Philippines-based jeans company that printed “Harvard Jeans USA, Cambridge, MA, Established 1936” on apparel without license from Harvard, even though the University has not registered trademarks there.
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the SAC. BO, and ogletree thing - atop the fake arrest byy hupd - just so those that hide could pass around mug shots of me so they could protect themselves and each other . . .
so freaking sad . . .
especially after hls and gonzales. . .
nytimes.com:
December 3, 2008
Editorial
The Next Attorney General
If he is confirmed by the Senate as attorney general, Eric Holder, President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for the job, will inherit a Justice Department that has been mired in scandal and that has seriously lost its way in critical areas. Under President Bush, the department has been used to defend the indefensible, like indefinite detention and torture of prisoners, and to undermine rather than protect Americans’ cherished rights. Mr. Holder could be an exemplary choice to face this daunting agenda, but he must answer serious questions before the Senate votes on his confirmation.
Mr. Holder, who would be the first African-American attorney general, has a particularly good record of public service for this job. He has been a United States attorney for the District of Columbia, a prosecutor in the Justice Department’s public integrity section and a deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton.
He has been outspoken on the most critical issue facing the department: restoring the rule of law. In a speech in June, he described the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism policies as “excessive and unlawful.” And he has called for closing the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
But senators should ask Mr. Holder to square those views with comments he made after the Sept. 11 attacks when he defended the Bush administration’s prisoner policies by declaring that “you can think of these people as combatants and we are in the middle of a war.”
Americans need to know that Mr. Holder does not believe that detainees can be held indefinitely without being brought before a judge — and that he would stand up for the Constitution when times are tough.
There are other aspects of Mr. Holder’s record that are of concern, starting with his role in Mr. Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, a billionaire financier who had fled the country rather than face federal tax-evasion charges whose ex-wife, Denise Rich, had contributed heavily to the Clinton presidential library and the Democratic Party.
The Senate needs to probe that serious lapse in judgment closely to seek assurances that Mr. Holder will be unyielding about keeping political influence out of the Justice Department, which was shamefully politicized under Alberto Gonzales.
In addition to signing off on torture memos and depriving detainees of basic rights, the Bush Justice Department adopted legal positions that greatly expanded executive power. These policies must be quickly undone. The next attorney general also will have to get to the bottom of the department’s disgraceful record of politicized hiring and firing. The attorney general will need to ensure that the investigation of the firings of United States attorneys for what appear to be partisan reasons is thorough and credible, and that witnesses who have been defying subpoenas, including Karl Rove and Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel, testify under oath.
There already are people — mainly Republicans — who say investigating these matters would be divisive. But the department’s integrity cannot be restored until the truth comes out and any wrongdoers are punished.
Many parts of the Justice Department must be pointed in a new direction. In the Bush years, the voting rights section worked against voting rights. The civil rights division too often sat idly by, or supported the wrong side, when rights were infringed. The antitrust division all but abandoned its responsibility to protect the public from the harm of monopoly power.
The attorney general is the nation’s top law enforcement official. The Senate must make sure that Mr. Holder is committed to the right kind of change in that job.
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nytimes.com:
December 3, 2008
College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S.
By TAMAR LEWIN
The rising cost of college — even before the recession — threatens to put higher education out of reach for most Americans, according to the biennial report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.
Over all, the report found, published college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007 while median family income rose 147 percent. Student borrowing has more than doubled in the last decade, and students from lower-income families, on average, get smaller grants from the colleges they attend than students from more affluent families.
“If we go on this way for another 25 years, we won’t have an affordable system of higher education,” said Patrick M. Callan, president of the center, a nonpartisan organization that promotes access to higher education.
“When we come out of the recession,” Mr. Callan added, “we’re really going to be in jeopardy, because the educational gap between our work force and the rest of the world will make it very hard to be competitive. Already, we’re one of the few countries where 25- to 34-year-olds are less educated than older workers.”
Although college enrollment has continued to rise in recent years, Mr. Callan said, it is not clear how long that can continue.
“The middle class has been financing it through debt,” he said. “The scenario has been that families that have a history of sending kids to college will do whatever if takes, even if that means a huge amount of debt.”
But low-income students, he said, will be less able to afford college. Already, he said, the strains are clear.
The report, “Measuring Up 2008,” is one of the few to compare net college costs — that is, a year’s tuition, fees, room and board, minus financial aid — against median family income. Those findings are stark. Last year, the net cost at a four-year public university amounted to 28 percent of the median family income, while a four-year private university cost 76 percent of the median family income.
The share of income required to pay for college, even with financial aid, has been growing especially fast for lower-income families, the report found.
Among the poorest families — those with incomes in the lowest 20 percent — the net cost of a year at a public university was 55 percent of median income, up from 39 percent in 1999-2000. At community colleges, long seen as a safety net, that cost was 49 percent of the poorest families’ median income last year, up from 40 percent in 1999-2000.
The likelihood of large tuition increases next year is especially worrying, Mr. Callan said. “Most governors’ budgets don’t come out until January, but what we’re seeing so far is Florida talking about a 15 percent increase, Washington State talking about a 20 percent increase, and California with a mixture of budget cuts and enrollment cuts,” he said.
In a separate report released this week by the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, the public universities acknowledged the looming crisis, but painted a different picture.
That report emphasized that families have many higher-education choices, from community colleges, where tuition and fees averaged about $3,200, to private research universities, where they cost more than $33,000.
“We think public higher education is affordable right now, but we’re concerned that it won’t be, if the changes we’re seeing continue, and family income doesn’t go up,” said David Shulenburger, the group’s vice president for academic affairs and co-author of the report. “The public conversation is very often in terms of a $35,000 price tag, but what you get at major public research university is, for the most part, still affordable at 6,000 bucks a year.”
While tuition has risen at public universities, his report said, that has largely been to make up for declining state appropriations. The report offered its own cost projections, not including room and board.
“Projecting out to 2036, tuition would go from 11 percent of the family budget to 24 percent of the family budget, and that’s pretty huge,” Mr. Shulenburger said. “We only looked at tuition and fees because those are the only things we can control.”
Looking at total costs, as families must, he said, his group shared Mr. Callan’s concerns.
Mr. Shulenburger’s report suggested that public universities explore a variety of approaches to lower costs — distance learning, better use of senior year in high school, perhaps even shortening college from four years.
“There’s an awful lot of experimentation going on right now, and that needs to go on,” he said. “If you teach a course by distance with 1,000 students, does that affect learning? Till we know the answer, it’s difficult to control costs in ways that don’t affect quality.”
Mr. Callan, for his part, urged a reversal in states’ approach to higher-education financing.
“When the economy is good, and state universities are somewhat better funded, we raise tuition as little as possible,” he said. “When the economy is bad, we raise tuition and sock it to families, when people can least afford it. That’s exactly the opposite of what we need.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 4, 2008
Because of an editing error, an article on Wednesday about the increasing cost of higher education gave an incorrect context for two figures: the 439 percent increase in college tuition and fees and the 147 percent increase in median family income since 1982. Those figures were not adjusted for inflation. The error was repeated for the data in an accompanying chart. A corrected chart appears at nytimes.com/national.
The article also described incorrectly the report for the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education that cited the figures. It is produced every other year, not annually.
====================
funny - there was an error cotrrected on the lucy caldwekk article in the crimson.com just as folks at the foundation were talking about it yesterday - so freking sad . . .recall the undercover HUPD detectiv there when the crimson editor got hit by a car. . .
see previous entries. . .
and on the bad doctors at HU - and their use against me?
nytimes.com:
December 2, 2008
Arrogant, Abusive and Disruptive — and a Doctor
By LAURIE TARKAN
It was the middle of the night, and Laura Silverthorn, a nurse at a hospital in Washington, knew her patient was in danger.
The boy had a shunt in his brain to drain fluid, but he was vomiting and had an extreme headache, two signs that the shunt was blocked and fluid was building up. When she paged the on-call resident, who was asleep in the hospital, he told her not to worry.
After a second page, Ms. Silverthorn said, “he became arrogant and said, ‘You don’t know what to look for — you’re not a doctor.’ ”
He ignored her third page, and after another harrowing hour she called the attending physician at home. The child was rushed into surgery.
“He could have died or had serious brain injury,” Ms. Silverthorn said, “but I was treated like a pest for calling in the middle of the night.”
Her experience is borne out by surveys of hospital staff members, who blame badly behaved doctors for low morale, stress and high turnover. (Ms. Silverthorn said she had been brought to tears so many times that she was trying to start her own business and leave nursing.)
Recent studies suggest that such behavior contributes to medical mistakes, preventable complications and even death.
“It is the health care equivalent of road rage,” said Dr. Peter B. Angood, chief patient safety officer at the Joint Commission, the nation’s leading independent hospital accreditation agency.
A survey of health care workers at 102 nonprofit hospitals from 2004 to 2007 found that 67 percent of respondents said they thought there was a link between disruptive behavior and medical mistakes, and 18 percent said they knew of a mistake that occurred because of an obnoxious doctor. (The author was Dr. Alan Rosenstein, medical director for the West Coast region of VHA Inc., an alliance of nonprofit hospitals.)
Another survey by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a nonprofit organization, found that 40 percent of hospital staff members reported having been so intimidated by a doctor that they did not share their concerns about orders for medication that appeared to be incorrect. As a result, 7 percent said they contributed to a medication error.
There are signs, however, that such abusive behavior is less likely to be tolerated. Physicians and nurses say they have seen less of it in the past 5 or 10 years, though it is still a major problem, and the Joint Commission is requiring hospitals to have a written code of conduct and a process for enforcing it.
Still, every nurse has a story about obnoxious doctors. A few say they have ducked scalpels thrown across the operating room by angry surgeons. More frequently, though, they are belittled, insulted or yelled at — often in front of patients and other staff members — and made to feel like the bottom of the food chain. A third of the nurses in Dr. Rosenstein’s study were aware of a nurse who had left a hospital because of a disruptive physician.
“The job is tough enough without having to prepare yourself psychologically for a call that you know could very well become abusive,” said Diana J. Mason, editor in chief of The American Journal of Nursing.
Laura Sweet, deputy chief of enforcement at the Medical Board of California, described the case of a resident at a University of California hospital who noticed a problem with a fetal monitoring strip on a woman in labor, but didn’t call anyone.
“He was afraid to contact the attending physician, who was notorious for yelling and ridiculing the residents,” Ms. Sweet said. The baby died.
Of course, most doctors do not spew insults or intimidate nurses. “Most people are trying to do the best job they can under a high-pressure situation,” said Dr. Joseph M. Heyman, chairman of the trustees of the American Medical Association.
Dr. William A. Norcross, director of a program at the University of California, San Diego, that offers anger management for physicians, agreed. But he added, “About 3 to 4 percent of doctors are disruptive, but that’s a big number, and they really gum up the works.” Experts say the leading offenders are specialists in high-pressure fields like neurosurgery, orthopedics and cardiology.
In one instance witnessed by Dr. Angood of the Joint Commission, a nurse called a surgeon to come and verify his next surgical patient and to mark the spot where the operation would be done. The harried surgeon yelled at the nurse to get the patient ready herself. When he showed up late to the operating room, he did not realize the surgery site was mismarked and operated on the wrong part.
“The surgeon then berated the entire team for their error and continued to denigrate them to others, when the error was the surgeon’s because he failed to cooperate in the process,” Dr. Angood said.
A hostile environment erodes cooperation and a sense of commitment to high-quality care, Dr. Angood said, and that increases the risk of medical errors.
“When the wrong surgery is done on patients,” he said, “often there is somebody in that operating room who knew the event was going to occur who did not feel empowered enough to speak up about it.”
Dr. Norcross blamed “the brutal training surgeons get, the long hours, being belittled and ‘pimped’ ” — a term for being bombarded with questions to the point of looking stupid. “That whole structure teaches a disruptive behavior,” he said.
Dr. Norcross and other experts said staff members’ understandable reluctance to challenge a physician, especially a popular surgeon who attracts patients to the hospital, created an atmosphere of tolerance for the bad behavior and indifference. So did a tendency among doctors to form “old boy” networks and protect one another from criticism.
But things have begun to change. Today, good communication and leadership are two of the six core skills taught in medical schools and residency programs. More nurses are challenging doctors on their inappropriate behavior, and fewer hospitals are tolerating disruptive doctors. “Today they’re getting rid of that doctor or sending them to anger management,” said Dr. Thomas R. Russell, executive director of the American College of Surgeons.
Hospitals have also developed more formal and consistent ways of addressing disruptive behavior, Dr. Rosenstein said. They are also trying to improve relations and mutual respect between doctors and nurses.
At John Muir Health, a nonprofit group of two hospitals in Walnut Creek and Concord, Calif., a committee of physicians, nurses and other staff members was formed to focus on collaboration and communication between disciplines.
“When complaints are submitted, we try to be proactive early to let them know there is not going to be any tolerance for that,” said Dr. Roy Kaplan, John Muir’s medical director for quality.
Some physicians worry that hospital administrators will abuse the stricter codes of conduct by using them to get rid of doctors who speak out against hospital policies. And the Joint Commission rulings have spawned a cottage industry of anger management centers and law firms defending hospitals or physicians.
Professionals like Ms. Silverthorn, the nurse in Washington, said the change was overdue.
“We go to school, we have a very important job, but there’s no respect,” she said.
She recalled a particularly humiliating moment on Dec. 25, 2006. Working in the pediatric emergency room, she called a drug by its generic name rather than its brand name.
“I was quickly shouted out of the trauma room and humiliated in front of everyone,” she said. But while “everyone knew the doctor was actually the one who didn’t know what he was doing,” she continued, no one said a word.
========
see previous entries for how many times i've written that folks at harvard: no one said a word. . .
washingtonpost.com:
FBI Agent Faces Charges in Pellicano Case
By Del Quentin Wilber
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 4, 2008; C08
A longtime FBI agent has been accused of accessing bureau computers to help high-profile Los Angeles private investigator Anthony Pellicano in his recent federal trial on wiretapping and racketeering charges, according to charging documents and law enforcement officials familiar with the case.
Mark T. Rossini, 47, who lives in New York, was charged Monday in U.S. District Court here with five misdemeanor counts of illegally accessing computers at the bureau's headquarters between January and July 2007. Officials say he was searching for reports dealing with Pellicano.
The charges come in what's known as a "criminal information," which can be filed only with a defendant's consent and generally signals a plea deal is near. Rossini is scheduled to appear at a hearing on Monday. Rossini's status at the bureau could not be determined. His lawyer did not return a phone call seeking comment.
Rossini's girlfriend, the actress Linda Fiorentino, known for her role in "The Last Seduction," has personal ties to Pellicano, according to law enforcement officials.
In May, Pellicano was convicted by a federal jury in Los Angeles of conspiring to run a criminal enterprise that employed illegal wiretaps to dig up dirt on the rich and famous on behalf of his elite Hollywood clients. Pellicano is awaiting sentencing for convictions on those 76 counts, as well as for convictions in August in a separate trial for wiretapping and conspiracy to commit wiretapping.
In court filings in March 2007, Pellicano's lawyers reference obtaining an FBI report that they said prosecutors should have turned over to them during pretrial discovery. The report raised questions about an FBI agent's credibility, the lawyers wrote. A law enforcement official said Rossini was the source of that document.
The charges were first reported Tuesday by TickletheWire.com, a Web site that reports on federal law enforcement news.
==========
try substituting principal investigator (as in sponsored research at harvard) for private investigator. . .
washigntonpost.com:
Retired officers want detainee policies overturned
By PAMELA HESS
The Associated Press
Tuesday, December 2, 2008; 10:32 PM
WASHINGTON -- A dozen retired generals and admirals are meeting with President-elect Barack Obama's transition team Wednesday to plead for a clean, unequivocal break with the Bush administration's interrogation, detention and rendition policies.
They are going into the meeting armed with a list of "things that need to be done and undone," retired Marine Gen. Joseph Hoar, chief of the U.S. Central Command from 1991 to 1994, said Tuesday in an interview with The Associated Press.
"It is fairly extensive," Hoar said.
Top on the list is the CIA's authority, granted by the White House, to use harsh interrogation methods that go beyond those approved for use by the military. They are said to include prolonged sleep deprivation, painful stress positions and waterboarding, though the agency says the last method has not been used since 2003.
Exactly what the CIA is allowed to do in interrogations remains secret. However, the White House maintains the CIA program adheres to the U.S. ban on cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of prisoners.
President George W. Bush vetoed legislation championed by the retired officers that would have held the CIA to the military's interrogation methods in March.
They argue that having two U.S. detainee treatment standards endangers American military personnel who may one day be captured, because it denies the U.S. government the moral authority to demand they are treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.
The group, which represents more than three dozen retired military officers with nearly 80 stars between them, is also pushing for an end to extraordinary renditions_ the secret transfer of prisoners to other governments that have a history of torture_ and the closing of the U.S. jail at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, something Obama has already announced he plans to do.
They believe Obama's election, and a stark contrast between his policies and Bush's, can reverse the decline in world opinion about the United States. They tie much of that decline to Guantanamo and detainee abuse, they said.
"Gradualism won't do. It's time for an abrupt change," said Vice Adm. Lee Gunn, a former Navy inspector general. "That abrupt change will send a signal to the world that America is back."
==================
one in the sam,e. . .
nytimes.com:
December 4, 2008
Panel Seeks Changes in E.P.A. Reviews
By CORNELIA DEAN
The Environmental Protection Agency must revise its approach to assessing environmental health hazards and other risks, because current practices hinder useful and timely regulation, an expert panel of The National Research Council says.
The council, the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, said the agency should scrap some of the assumptions on which its decisions have been based and reduce its focus on individual chemicals and other hazards to consider how they act in combination. It should also accept that uncertainty was always an issue and seek to provide practical information to policy makers as quickly as possible.
The report, which the panel produced at the behest of the E.P.A., was made public Wednesday and is online at www.nas.edu.
Determining whether something is a hazard and, if so, how great and to whom is a crucial step in devising appropriate environmental regulations, the panel said, and the field is advancing as testing systems and other technology advance.
But assessing environmental risks is highly complex and full of uncertainty, it continued, and at the E.P.A., “the regulatory risk-assessment process is bogged down,” with some assessments taking a decade or more. For example, the report cited an assessment of trichloroethylene, a commonly used solvent, that has been under way since the 1980s and is not expected before 2010.
The environmental agency’s conclusions about risk are usually crucial in establishing regulatory goals. As a result, they are often subject to intense political or economic pressure. When the Bush administration proposed changes that it said would streamline risk-assessment procedures, critics called the proposal an effort to weaken environmental regulation. In a 2007 report, the academy dismissed the proposal as “fundamentally flawed,” and it was withdrawn.
Thomas A. Burke, an epidemiologist at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, said the new report focused on the use of “defaults,” assumptions that are made about one factor or another in the face of uncertainty.
“Many of them are founded on good science,” he said, “but there are some hidden assumptions. Right now, when we don’t have information on a pollutant, we treat it as if there’s no risk. That’s a so-called hidden default.”
Dr. Burke added, “We really need to address these gaps.”
Another issue the report cited was the effect of cumulative exposures to a variety of environmental hazards. Usually these hazards are studied one by one. But Dr. Burke said, “You have to consider not just the one compound but you have to ask broadly, because people are exposed to many, many thousands of substances.”
A spokesman for the American Chemical Society said it would have no comment on the report until members had had time to read it.
Joel Tickner, a professor of environmental health at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell who studies chemicals in the environment, said that while he had not seen the report, its focus on speeding environmental review and consideration of cumulative effects was overdue.
“We put a lot of effort into finding more complex ways to characterize the problems while we don’t put nearly as much resources into studying solutions,” Professor Tickner said.
He, too, cited trichloroethylene, saying, “Given that we know trichloroethylene is a neurotoxin and a carcinogen and that there are very good alternatives, it makes no sense to put so much resources into studying it.”
Professor Tickner said that by focusing on safer alternatives for processes like degreasing, industries in Massachusetts had reduced their use of the compound by 90 percent.
“But as long as we are uncertain, we assume there is no problem,” he said. “That provides almost an incentive to having scientific uncertainty.”
==============
yahoo.com.news:
92 nations sign cluster-bomb ban; US, Russia don't
By DOUG MELLGREN, Associated Press Writer Doug Mellgren, Associated Press Writer
Wed Dec 3, 4:27 pm ET
OSLO, Norway – An Afghan teenager who lost both legs in a cluster bomb explosion helped persuade his country to change its stance and join nearly 100 nations in signing a treaty Wednesday banning the disputed weapons.
Afghanistan was initially reluctant to join the pact — which the United States and Russia have refused to support — but agreed to after lobbying by victims maimed by cluster munitions, including 17-year-old Soraj Ghulan Habib. The teen, who uses a wheelchair, met with his country's ambassador to Norway, Jawed Ludin, at a two-day signing conference in Oslo.
"I explained to the ambassador my situation, and that the people of Afghanistan wanted a ban," Habib, who said he was crippled by a cluster bomb seven years ago, told The Associated Press.
Speaking through an interpreter, Habib said the ambassador called Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who agreed to change his stance on the treaty.
"Today is a historic day," Habib declared.
Afghanistan's reversal even surprised the activists who are urging countries to join the pact against cluster munitions, which have been widely criticized for maiming and killing civilians.
"It is just so huge, to get this turnaround. Afghanistan was under a lot of pressure from the United States," said Thomas Nash, coordinator of The Cluster Bomb Coalition. "If Afghanistan can withstand the pressure, so can others."
Australian activist Daniel Barty said the Afghan ambassador appeared to start changing his mind after meeting Habib at a reception Tuesday.
The U.S., Russia and other countries refusing to sign the treaty say cluster bombs have legitimate military uses, such as repelling advancing troop columns.
Cluster bomblets are packed by the hundreds into artillery shells, bombs or missiles, which scatter them over vast areas. Some fail to explode immediately. The unexploded bomblets can then lie dormant for years until they are disturbed, often by children attracted by their small size and bright colors.
The group Handicap International says 98 percent of cluster-bomb victims are civilians, and 27 percent are children.
Organizers hoped that more than 100 of the 125 countries represented will have signed by the end of the conference on Thursday. Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere said 92 countries did so on Wednesday.
The treaty must be ratified by 30 countries before it takes effect.
His country, which began the drive to ban cluster bombs 18 months ago, was the first to sign, followed by Laos and Lebanon, both hard-hit by the weapons.
Britain, formerly a major stockpiler of cluster munitions, also signed the treaty, which Foreign Secretary David Miliband said showed that a NATO country can defend itself without cluster weapons.
Miliband said he would urge President-elect Barack Obama's administration to reconsider the U.S. stance.
The Bush administration says a comprehensive ban would hurt world security.
"Although we share the humanitarian concerns of states signing the (accord), we will not be joining them," the U.S. State Department said in a statement. "Such a general ban on cluster munitions will put the lives of our military men and women, and those of our coalition partners, at risk."
In Jerusalem, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said his government had decided not to join the treaty, and instead believes the issue of cluster bomb use should be addressed through the U.N. Convention on Conventional Weapons.
The anti-cluster bomb campaign gathered momentum after Israel's monthlong war against Hezbollah in 2006, when it scattered up to 4 million bomblets across Lebanon, according to U.N. figures.
"In southern Lebanon, for more than two years, children and the elderly have been victimized (by cluster munitions)," Lebanese Foreign Minister Fawzi Saloukh said.
Activists hoped the treaty would pressure non-signers into shelving the weapons, as many did with land mines after a 1997 treaty banning them.
"The cluster bomb treaty will save countless lives by stigmatizing a weapon that kills civilians even after the fighting ends," said Steve Goose, arms director of Human Rights Watch.
____
Associated Press writer Shawna Ohm in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
___
On the Net:
http://www.stopclustermunitions.org
as always:
It is best to read this journal from the beginning. . .
<http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/2006/02/08/>
it makes more sense then. ....
or just explore the journal at: <http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/>
may i recommend: <http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/2008/01/04/>
and a follow up to that: <http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/2008/10/12/>
----------------------------------------
as always:
It is best to read this journal from the beginning. . .
<http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/2006/02/08/>
it makes more sense then. ....
or just explore the journal at: <http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/>
may i recommend: <http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/2008/01/04/>
and a follow up to that: <http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/2008/10/12/>
----------------------------------------
and yesterday's news and comments:
yahoo.com.news:
FBI agents stage sting to snare corrupt Ill. cops
By MIKE ROBINSON, Associated Press Writer Mike Robinson, Associated Press Writer
Wed Dec 3, 4:18 am ET
CHICAGO – Duffel bags stuffed with cocaine were delivered by plane to an out-of-the-way suburban airport while two sheriff's officers provided security. A police officer stood by to guard the cash and keep out the riffraff at a poker game where $100,000 changed hands. And a drug dealer was told squad cars marked "sheriff" and "sheriff's police" might be available on a "freelance" basis to provide protection for his deliveries.
Such tales of law enforcement gone awry emerged in court papers Tuesday as federal prosecutors unveiled a series of elaborate sting operations aimed at officers who hired out to ride shotgun for drug deals and other criminal activities.
Fifteen officers and two other men who had pretended to be law enforcement officers were charged with conspiracy to possess and distribute cocaine or heroin or both.
But the most spectacular pretending was done by the federal agents themselves.
The pilots of the airplane were not drug runners but undercover agents. So were the gamblers who busily played hand after hand of high-stakes poker — all for show.
The drug broker who squired the officers to the airport to pick up the duffel bags was an agent. So was the drug dealer who stuffed the bags into his Mercedes-Benz.
U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald said he was dismayed to find that so many law enforcement officers had "sold out their badge."
"When drug dealers deal drugs, they ought to be afraid of the police — not turn to them for help," Fitzgerald said at a news conference.
Officials paid homage to an unnamed FBI agent who moved into a business in Harvey more than a year ago and set up shop as a drug broker. He soon attracted the attention of police and the corruption grew, authorities said.
They said the agent was sent in undercover because there had been reports of police corruption over the last several years in southern Cook County, including the Harvey police department. An investigation into allegations of robbery, extortion, narcotics offenses and weapons distribution is ongoing, officials said.
Those charged include 10 Cook County sheriff's correctional officers, four Harvey police officers and one Chicago police officer.
Of the 17 defendants, 14 were arrested or surrendered Tuesday and were being immediately brought before U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael Mason. Two sheriff's officers are on active duty with Army National Guard units in Afghanistan, and warrants were issued for their arrest.
If convicted of conspiracy to possess and distribute more than five kilograms of cocaine or one kilogram of heroin, the defendants would face a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years and a maximum of life. The maximum fine would be $4 million.
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart called the alleged behavior "absolutely reprehensible."
"The responsibility of watching over jail inmates is an important one and it's a shame these men didn't take that responsibility more seriously," he said in a statement.
Each of those charged has been suspended with pay pending a hearing next week, Dart said. "That step will then lead to a request for termination," he said.
----------
mike robinson? see rpevious entries harvard and 6/8. . .
thecrimson.com:
Harvard Endowment Fell 22 Percent in Four Months
Decline dwarfs University's previous worst single-year loss
Published On 12/2/2008 11:41:56 PM
By JUNE Q. WU and CLIFFORD M MARKS
Crimson Staff Writers
Harvard’s endowment—the largest in higher education—fell 22 percent in four months from its June 30 value of $36.9 billion, marking the endowment’s largest decline in modern history, University officials announced yesterday.
The precipitous drop will require Harvard’s faculties to take a “hard look at hiring, staffing levels, and compensation,” wrote University President Drew G. Faust and Executive Vice President Edward C. Forst ’82 in a letter informing the deans of Harvard’s losses.
The decline, which amounts to more than $8 billion, is larger than the endowments of all but four other universities—Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT.
In the same period, the S&P 500 fell 24.6 percent. The index has fallen an additional 12.4 percent since then.
The estimate of 22 percent may not fully capture the actual losses from this period, Forst said in an interview yesterday, as some of Harvard’s money is invested with external managers that have yet to report their latest figures. Faust and Forst wrote in yesterday’s letter that the University should plan for a 30 percent drop-off in endowment value for the year ending June 30, 2009.
The news comes during the worst economic turmoil in decades. University endowments across the country have begun announcing unprecedented losses and instituting hiring or construction freezes in an effort to save funds.
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences placed a freeze on staff hiring last week, following a cautionary letter from Faust a month earlier that warned of cutbacks ahead.
Yesterday’s figure dwarfs Harvard’s worst single-year endowment loss of 12.2 percent in 1974. The endowment has clocked only three years of negative returns, all under three percent, in the subsequent three decades.
Forst said University leaders have delayed setting the endowment payout rate for the next fiscal year—a figure generally announced the December before—until Harvard’s schools can reevaluate their budgets.
“Given the extreme volatility in the markets, I don’t expect [the payout rate] will be set until we have a much more concrete sense about financial plans and endowment performance,” Forst said.
Yesterday’s letter did state that University leaders expect to spend a higher percentage of the endowment next year in an effort to buffer the immediate impact of the losses.
The letter also stressed the possibility of slowing construction projects or reevaluating “staffing levels,” and Forst confirmed that the University will reevaluate the scope and pace of every major capital program—including Allston expansion plans and House renovations at the College.
“We expect that every part of the University is going to have to find ways to reduce its operating expenses,” Forst said.
The need for budget reductions could have particular impact on employee salaries and benefits, which make up half of the University’s costs, according to yesterday’s letter.
Forst would not say whether more hiring freezes would follow last week’s freeze in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, but said individual schools will need to “take a hard look at compensation generally.”
The central administration will work closely with leaders at the schools to tailor solutions to their individual circumstances, Forst said, adding that Faust convened a two-hour meeting yesterday morning to discuss the latest financial update with the deans.
“Obviously, no one is happy with the endowment being down,” FAS Dean Michael D. Smith wrote in an e-mail to The Crimson yesterday, “but it does help out planning efforts to understand where the portion of the endowment that we can measure stands.”
While the schools struggle to budget for this new development, Harvard’s money managers plan to increase the University’s financial flexibility by upping cash holdings and reducing the amount of risk in the endowment portfolio.
Leveraging its strong credit ratings—the highest granted by rating agencies Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s—Harvard will issue new taxable fixed-rate debt. Unlike tax-free debt, these bonds can be used for any University expenditure and thus increase Harvard’s cash flexibility, Forst said.
The University will also convert existing short-term tax-exempt debt into bonds with longer maturities, allowing the University to postpone short-term payments to debt holders and retain a larger financial cushion to the volatility in the credit markets.
Multiple media outlets recently reported that Harvard was also seeking to shore up endowment holdings by selling $1.5 billion of its private equity portfolio at a drastically reduced price, but Forst declined to address those reports yesterday.
—Staff writer Clifford M. Marks can be reached at cmarks@fas.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer June Q. Wu can be reached at junewu@fas.harvard.edu.
---------
they lost the black funded money they gained from he bigoilwhitehouse. . ..
and harvardf and dhs again from thecrimson.com:
Security Chief Talks Terror
Cooperation among govt. agencies is hailed as key for new administration
Published On 12/3/2008 1:48:00 AM
By EMILY J. HOGAN
Contributing Writer
At the dawn of a new political administration, the United States faces evolving security threats that must be addressed through dynamic intelligence practices, the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, said in a speech at the Harvard Kennedy School yesterday.
“With weapons of mass destruction that could result in the death of many, many people—chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons—we assess the likelihood of each,” said McConnell, who became the second director of national intelligence in 2007. “The likelihood of nuclear attack is less but is not eliminated.”
Cyberterrorism is yet another rising danger, McConnell said.
“The cyber threat is the soft underbelly of the United States,” McConnell said. “The United States depends on the cyber infrastructure more than any other on Earth.”
He said that the American financial system is especially vulnerable to a type of cyber-terrorism he referred to as “data destruction.”
Part of the government’s plan to meet growing security challenges must include increased cooperation between different agencies that collect intelligence, McConnell said.
“It is large: we are 100,000 people. It is global: we spend in the neighborhood of $48 billion a year,” McConnell said of the intelligence community, which includes entities like the intelligence-gathering agencies of the military, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “That’s a very complex enterprise to operate—my job is to make sure it’s integrated.
McConnell said that the lack of communication among these separate agencies has been a major weakness in American intelligence since well before 2001, adding that “we designed our own system to make the attacks of 9/11 successful.” Still, he added that in recent years, the intelligence community has taken steps to make itself more effective.
“The idea is always being willing to make yourself more agile, because you have to be ready to make decisions, and today’s decisions happen at the speed of light,” McConnell said.
McConnell also noted that the intelligence agencies have shifted their focus so that terrorism is now considered a legitimate threat. He noted that the FBI—which is considered both an investigative and domestic intelligence agency—has made the prevention of terrorist attacks its “primary focus.”
As director of the nation’s intelligence-gathering agencies, McConnell, a former Navy admiral, is charged with presenting the president with his daily intelligence briefing. He was also involved in the publication of “Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World,” a projection of the threats that the United States is likely to face over the next 17 years, which was released over the summer.
This most recent version of the report, which is produced every four years to aid the incoming presidential administration, warns of rising food prices, increased competition for energy sources, scarce water resources, and biological weapons as emerging national security threats.
-----------
so freaking sdad. . .
boaston.com:
Victim's kin petition judge, back maximum sentence for Connolly
By Shelley Murphy, Globe Staff | December 3, 2008
The widow and two children of slain Boston business consultant John B. Callahan will urge a Florida judge tomorrow to consider their years of suffering and loss when he sentences former FBI agent John J. Connolly Jr. for his role in the 1982 murder.
"After 26 years, I still cry over my father's murder and my family's loss," wrote Callahan's daughter, Kathleen, 43,in a victim impact statement to be read in court at Connolly's sentencing tomorrow, which was shared with the Globe by her mother. "Since his murder, I learned that my dad was a brilliant, funny, and faithful man, yet I only knew him from the perspective of a child. One of my life's greatest regrets is not having a relationship with him as an adult."
Patrick Callahan, who was 14 when his father was killed, wrote in his victim impact statement, "Without my father's inspiration, guidance, discipline, and what he was able to provide for the family, life as I knew it was out the window."
Callahan's widow, Mary, said that she and her children had decided it was too difficult, emotionally and financially, to attend Connolly's eight-week trial in Miami, which ended last month with his conviction for second degree murder. But all three of them will be in court for the former agent's sentencing, she said.
"It's important that we, as victims, get our voices heard," said Mary Callahan, who was battling multiple sclerosis when her 45-year-old husband was shot to death in Florida, leaving her the sole supporter of their teenage children. "You never get over it."
Connolly, 68, was found guilty on Nov. 6 of second-degree murder for leaking information to longtime informants James "Whitey" Bulger and Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi that prompted them to hire a hitman to kill Callahan, the former president of World Jai Alai who fraternized with gangsters.
During the trial, Flemmi, who is serving a life sentence for 10 murders, testified that Connolly warned him and Bulger that the FBI planned to question Callahan. Connolly told them Callahan "wouldn't hold up" and would probably implicate the gangsters in the 1981 killing of World Jai Alai owner Roger Wheeler, Flemmi testified.
John Martorano, a hitman turned government witness, testified that he lured Callahan to Florida and killed him at the urging of Bulger and Flemmi. Callahan's bullet-riddled body was found in the trunk of his car at Miami International Airport on Aug. 2, 1982.
Prosecutors said Connolly faces a sentence of 30 years to life in prison for his conviction of second-degree murder with a firearm. But defense lawyers said they will argue that the judge has the authority to sentence Connolly to less time.
"We can in good faith say he shouldn't get more than John Martorano got," said Manuel L. Casabielle, a lawyer in Miami who represents Connolly, referring to a deal that allowed Martorano to walk free after serving 12 years for killing 20 people.
The defense has submitted a number of letters supporters of Connolly wrote to the judge.
Connolly, who retired from the FBI in 1990, is serving a 10-year prison term for his 2002 federal racketeering conviction for helping Bulger, one of the FBI's 10 Most Wanted, evade capture and for protecting him and Flemmi from prosecution.
Though Connolly was charged only with Callahan's murder in Florida, prosecutors were allowed to present additional evidence to try to prove that the former agent was corrupt.
Flemmi testified that he and Bulger killed two others - nightclub owner Richard Castucci in 1976 and gang associate Edward "Brian" Halloran in 1982 - because Connolly warned them that they were FBI informants who had cooperated against them or their friends.
Miami-Dade Assistant State Attorney Michael Von Zamft said he will seek a stiff sentence, adding, "The position of the state attorney is that a corrupt law enforcement official deserves to serve as maximum punishment as allowed because they take advantage of the public trust and they violate it."
Mary Callahan said her family supports the prosecution's call for the maximum penalty, which would mean Connolly would spend his life in prison.
--------
this with the back to spherion and connollys all over the hu temp agencies . . . see previous entris. . . read the journal form the beginning . . .
thecrimson.com:
My comments: curious this - PO, CO's wife, and the Bell Foundation (EAR RINGING!) and the Johnsons in the shelters from maine . . . oy . . .
----------------------------------------
Chinese Company Rips Harvard Name
Published On 12/3/2008 1:47:51 AM
By WEIQI ZHANG
Contributing Writer
Harvard has had a lot of Presidents, but none of them were named “Bell Johnson.”
In China, “Bell Johnson,” who sports a mustache and furrowed brow in a black-and-white portrait, has been placed on flyers for Megee, a water heater company based out of the Guangdong Province.
Earlier this year, retailers who sell Megee products began hailing “Johnson” as the president of Harvard University. The logo carries the University’s name in both English and Chinese. The “v” in Harvard is set against a triangular background reminiscent of the American flag.
Here in Cambridge, Harvard administrators have taken notice.
Director of Harvard Trademark Program Rick Calixto said that an individual living in China brought the flyer to the University’s attention three or four weeks ago.
“We routinely get these sorts of tips from people around the world,” Calixto wrote in an e-mail, and “then proceed to take whatever action the University deems is warranted.”
Calixto declined to comment further on the case since it is presently under investigation.
A Megee representative, who requested that his name not be printed, said he acknowledged that the title of Harvard president has been misused but maintained that his company was not responsible.
“It’s true that some sales assistants advertised inappropriately,” the representative said during a phone interview. “But they are not from our company.”
He added that while Megee created the image of “Bell Johnson,” the retailers who carry his company’s products are responsible for giving him the title of the University’s highest office.
While the representative said that his company was not responsible for giving him the title of the University’s highest office.
While the representative said that his company was not responsible for naming Johnson Harvard’s president, he said that Megee registered the use of the Harvard name as early as 2001.
And the company states that “Harvard” is a legal brand name issued by the Chinese government’s trademark office for its use.
The company’s Web site highlights sections such as “Harvard in Beijing,” “Harvard’s History and Future,” and “Harvard’s Brand in China,” which all lead to pages with information about Megee, not Harvard.
James G. Ashe, who works for the Harvard Trademark Program, said that Harvard “does not necessarily have to have the trademark registered in all goods and services in order to protect the mark from unauthorized use.”
Last month, Harvard won a lawsuit against a Philippines-based jeans company that printed “Harvard Jeans USA, Cambridge, MA, Established 1936” on apparel without license from Harvard, even though the University has not registered trademarks there.
------------
the SAC. BO, and ogletree thing - atop the fake arrest byy hupd - just so those that hide could pass around mug shots of me so they could protect themselves and each other . . .
so freaking sad . . .
especially after hls and gonzales. . .
nytimes.com:
December 3, 2008
Editorial
The Next Attorney General
If he is confirmed by the Senate as attorney general, Eric Holder, President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for the job, will inherit a Justice Department that has been mired in scandal and that has seriously lost its way in critical areas. Under President Bush, the department has been used to defend the indefensible, like indefinite detention and torture of prisoners, and to undermine rather than protect Americans’ cherished rights. Mr. Holder could be an exemplary choice to face this daunting agenda, but he must answer serious questions before the Senate votes on his confirmation.
Mr. Holder, who would be the first African-American attorney general, has a particularly good record of public service for this job. He has been a United States attorney for the District of Columbia, a prosecutor in the Justice Department’s public integrity section and a deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton.
He has been outspoken on the most critical issue facing the department: restoring the rule of law. In a speech in June, he described the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism policies as “excessive and unlawful.” And he has called for closing the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
But senators should ask Mr. Holder to square those views with comments he made after the Sept. 11 attacks when he defended the Bush administration’s prisoner policies by declaring that “you can think of these people as combatants and we are in the middle of a war.”
Americans need to know that Mr. Holder does not believe that detainees can be held indefinitely without being brought before a judge — and that he would stand up for the Constitution when times are tough.
There are other aspects of Mr. Holder’s record that are of concern, starting with his role in Mr. Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, a billionaire financier who had fled the country rather than face federal tax-evasion charges whose ex-wife, Denise Rich, had contributed heavily to the Clinton presidential library and the Democratic Party.
The Senate needs to probe that serious lapse in judgment closely to seek assurances that Mr. Holder will be unyielding about keeping political influence out of the Justice Department, which was shamefully politicized under Alberto Gonzales.
In addition to signing off on torture memos and depriving detainees of basic rights, the Bush Justice Department adopted legal positions that greatly expanded executive power. These policies must be quickly undone. The next attorney general also will have to get to the bottom of the department’s disgraceful record of politicized hiring and firing. The attorney general will need to ensure that the investigation of the firings of United States attorneys for what appear to be partisan reasons is thorough and credible, and that witnesses who have been defying subpoenas, including Karl Rove and Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel, testify under oath.
There already are people — mainly Republicans — who say investigating these matters would be divisive. But the department’s integrity cannot be restored until the truth comes out and any wrongdoers are punished.
Many parts of the Justice Department must be pointed in a new direction. In the Bush years, the voting rights section worked against voting rights. The civil rights division too often sat idly by, or supported the wrong side, when rights were infringed. The antitrust division all but abandoned its responsibility to protect the public from the harm of monopoly power.
The attorney general is the nation’s top law enforcement official. The Senate must make sure that Mr. Holder is committed to the right kind of change in that job.
=============
nytimes.com:
December 3, 2008
College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S.
By TAMAR LEWIN
The rising cost of college — even before the recession — threatens to put higher education out of reach for most Americans, according to the biennial report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.
Over all, the report found, published college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007 while median family income rose 147 percent. Student borrowing has more than doubled in the last decade, and students from lower-income families, on average, get smaller grants from the colleges they attend than students from more affluent families.
“If we go on this way for another 25 years, we won’t have an affordable system of higher education,” said Patrick M. Callan, president of the center, a nonpartisan organization that promotes access to higher education.
“When we come out of the recession,” Mr. Callan added, “we’re really going to be in jeopardy, because the educational gap between our work force and the rest of the world will make it very hard to be competitive. Already, we’re one of the few countries where 25- to 34-year-olds are less educated than older workers.”
Although college enrollment has continued to rise in recent years, Mr. Callan said, it is not clear how long that can continue.
“The middle class has been financing it through debt,” he said. “The scenario has been that families that have a history of sending kids to college will do whatever if takes, even if that means a huge amount of debt.”
But low-income students, he said, will be less able to afford college. Already, he said, the strains are clear.
The report, “Measuring Up 2008,” is one of the few to compare net college costs — that is, a year’s tuition, fees, room and board, minus financial aid — against median family income. Those findings are stark. Last year, the net cost at a four-year public university amounted to 28 percent of the median family income, while a four-year private university cost 76 percent of the median family income.
The share of income required to pay for college, even with financial aid, has been growing especially fast for lower-income families, the report found.
Among the poorest families — those with incomes in the lowest 20 percent — the net cost of a year at a public university was 55 percent of median income, up from 39 percent in 1999-2000. At community colleges, long seen as a safety net, that cost was 49 percent of the poorest families’ median income last year, up from 40 percent in 1999-2000.
The likelihood of large tuition increases next year is especially worrying, Mr. Callan said. “Most governors’ budgets don’t come out until January, but what we’re seeing so far is Florida talking about a 15 percent increase, Washington State talking about a 20 percent increase, and California with a mixture of budget cuts and enrollment cuts,” he said.
In a separate report released this week by the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, the public universities acknowledged the looming crisis, but painted a different picture.
That report emphasized that families have many higher-education choices, from community colleges, where tuition and fees averaged about $3,200, to private research universities, where they cost more than $33,000.
“We think public higher education is affordable right now, but we’re concerned that it won’t be, if the changes we’re seeing continue, and family income doesn’t go up,” said David Shulenburger, the group’s vice president for academic affairs and co-author of the report. “The public conversation is very often in terms of a $35,000 price tag, but what you get at major public research university is, for the most part, still affordable at 6,000 bucks a year.”
While tuition has risen at public universities, his report said, that has largely been to make up for declining state appropriations. The report offered its own cost projections, not including room and board.
“Projecting out to 2036, tuition would go from 11 percent of the family budget to 24 percent of the family budget, and that’s pretty huge,” Mr. Shulenburger said. “We only looked at tuition and fees because those are the only things we can control.”
Looking at total costs, as families must, he said, his group shared Mr. Callan’s concerns.
Mr. Shulenburger’s report suggested that public universities explore a variety of approaches to lower costs — distance learning, better use of senior year in high school, perhaps even shortening college from four years.
“There’s an awful lot of experimentation going on right now, and that needs to go on,” he said. “If you teach a course by distance with 1,000 students, does that affect learning? Till we know the answer, it’s difficult to control costs in ways that don’t affect quality.”
Mr. Callan, for his part, urged a reversal in states’ approach to higher-education financing.
“When the economy is good, and state universities are somewhat better funded, we raise tuition as little as possible,” he said. “When the economy is bad, we raise tuition and sock it to families, when people can least afford it. That’s exactly the opposite of what we need.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 4, 2008
Because of an editing error, an article on Wednesday about the increasing cost of higher education gave an incorrect context for two figures: the 439 percent increase in college tuition and fees and the 147 percent increase in median family income since 1982. Those figures were not adjusted for inflation. The error was repeated for the data in an accompanying chart. A corrected chart appears at nytimes.com/national.
The article also described incorrectly the report for the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education that cited the figures. It is produced every other year, not annually.
====================
funny - there was an error cotrrected on the lucy caldwekk article in the crimson.com just as folks at the foundation were talking about it yesterday - so freking sad . . .recall the undercover HUPD detectiv there when the crimson editor got hit by a car. . .
see previous entries. . .
and on the bad doctors at HU - and their use against me?
nytimes.com:
December 2, 2008
Arrogant, Abusive and Disruptive — and a Doctor
By LAURIE TARKAN
It was the middle of the night, and Laura Silverthorn, a nurse at a hospital in Washington, knew her patient was in danger.
The boy had a shunt in his brain to drain fluid, but he was vomiting and had an extreme headache, two signs that the shunt was blocked and fluid was building up. When she paged the on-call resident, who was asleep in the hospital, he told her not to worry.
After a second page, Ms. Silverthorn said, “he became arrogant and said, ‘You don’t know what to look for — you’re not a doctor.’ ”
He ignored her third page, and after another harrowing hour she called the attending physician at home. The child was rushed into surgery.
“He could have died or had serious brain injury,” Ms. Silverthorn said, “but I was treated like a pest for calling in the middle of the night.”
Her experience is borne out by surveys of hospital staff members, who blame badly behaved doctors for low morale, stress and high turnover. (Ms. Silverthorn said she had been brought to tears so many times that she was trying to start her own business and leave nursing.)
Recent studies suggest that such behavior contributes to medical mistakes, preventable complications and even death.
“It is the health care equivalent of road rage,” said Dr. Peter B. Angood, chief patient safety officer at the Joint Commission, the nation’s leading independent hospital accreditation agency.
A survey of health care workers at 102 nonprofit hospitals from 2004 to 2007 found that 67 percent of respondents said they thought there was a link between disruptive behavior and medical mistakes, and 18 percent said they knew of a mistake that occurred because of an obnoxious doctor. (The author was Dr. Alan Rosenstein, medical director for the West Coast region of VHA Inc., an alliance of nonprofit hospitals.)
Another survey by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a nonprofit organization, found that 40 percent of hospital staff members reported having been so intimidated by a doctor that they did not share their concerns about orders for medication that appeared to be incorrect. As a result, 7 percent said they contributed to a medication error.
There are signs, however, that such abusive behavior is less likely to be tolerated. Physicians and nurses say they have seen less of it in the past 5 or 10 years, though it is still a major problem, and the Joint Commission is requiring hospitals to have a written code of conduct and a process for enforcing it.
Still, every nurse has a story about obnoxious doctors. A few say they have ducked scalpels thrown across the operating room by angry surgeons. More frequently, though, they are belittled, insulted or yelled at — often in front of patients and other staff members — and made to feel like the bottom of the food chain. A third of the nurses in Dr. Rosenstein’s study were aware of a nurse who had left a hospital because of a disruptive physician.
“The job is tough enough without having to prepare yourself psychologically for a call that you know could very well become abusive,” said Diana J. Mason, editor in chief of The American Journal of Nursing.
Laura Sweet, deputy chief of enforcement at the Medical Board of California, described the case of a resident at a University of California hospital who noticed a problem with a fetal monitoring strip on a woman in labor, but didn’t call anyone.
“He was afraid to contact the attending physician, who was notorious for yelling and ridiculing the residents,” Ms. Sweet said. The baby died.
Of course, most doctors do not spew insults or intimidate nurses. “Most people are trying to do the best job they can under a high-pressure situation,” said Dr. Joseph M. Heyman, chairman of the trustees of the American Medical Association.
Dr. William A. Norcross, director of a program at the University of California, San Diego, that offers anger management for physicians, agreed. But he added, “About 3 to 4 percent of doctors are disruptive, but that’s a big number, and they really gum up the works.” Experts say the leading offenders are specialists in high-pressure fields like neurosurgery, orthopedics and cardiology.
In one instance witnessed by Dr. Angood of the Joint Commission, a nurse called a surgeon to come and verify his next surgical patient and to mark the spot where the operation would be done. The harried surgeon yelled at the nurse to get the patient ready herself. When he showed up late to the operating room, he did not realize the surgery site was mismarked and operated on the wrong part.
“The surgeon then berated the entire team for their error and continued to denigrate them to others, when the error was the surgeon’s because he failed to cooperate in the process,” Dr. Angood said.
A hostile environment erodes cooperation and a sense of commitment to high-quality care, Dr. Angood said, and that increases the risk of medical errors.
“When the wrong surgery is done on patients,” he said, “often there is somebody in that operating room who knew the event was going to occur who did not feel empowered enough to speak up about it.”
Dr. Norcross blamed “the brutal training surgeons get, the long hours, being belittled and ‘pimped’ ” — a term for being bombarded with questions to the point of looking stupid. “That whole structure teaches a disruptive behavior,” he said.
Dr. Norcross and other experts said staff members’ understandable reluctance to challenge a physician, especially a popular surgeon who attracts patients to the hospital, created an atmosphere of tolerance for the bad behavior and indifference. So did a tendency among doctors to form “old boy” networks and protect one another from criticism.
But things have begun to change. Today, good communication and leadership are two of the six core skills taught in medical schools and residency programs. More nurses are challenging doctors on their inappropriate behavior, and fewer hospitals are tolerating disruptive doctors. “Today they’re getting rid of that doctor or sending them to anger management,” said Dr. Thomas R. Russell, executive director of the American College of Surgeons.
Hospitals have also developed more formal and consistent ways of addressing disruptive behavior, Dr. Rosenstein said. They are also trying to improve relations and mutual respect between doctors and nurses.
At John Muir Health, a nonprofit group of two hospitals in Walnut Creek and Concord, Calif., a committee of physicians, nurses and other staff members was formed to focus on collaboration and communication between disciplines.
“When complaints are submitted, we try to be proactive early to let them know there is not going to be any tolerance for that,” said Dr. Roy Kaplan, John Muir’s medical director for quality.
Some physicians worry that hospital administrators will abuse the stricter codes of conduct by using them to get rid of doctors who speak out against hospital policies. And the Joint Commission rulings have spawned a cottage industry of anger management centers and law firms defending hospitals or physicians.
Professionals like Ms. Silverthorn, the nurse in Washington, said the change was overdue.
“We go to school, we have a very important job, but there’s no respect,” she said.
She recalled a particularly humiliating moment on Dec. 25, 2006. Working in the pediatric emergency room, she called a drug by its generic name rather than its brand name.
“I was quickly shouted out of the trauma room and humiliated in front of everyone,” she said. But while “everyone knew the doctor was actually the one who didn’t know what he was doing,” she continued, no one said a word.
========
see previous entries for how many times i've written that folks at harvard: no one said a word. . .
washingtonpost.com:
FBI Agent Faces Charges in Pellicano Case
By Del Quentin Wilber
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 4, 2008; C08
A longtime FBI agent has been accused of accessing bureau computers to help high-profile Los Angeles private investigator Anthony Pellicano in his recent federal trial on wiretapping and racketeering charges, according to charging documents and law enforcement officials familiar with the case.
Mark T. Rossini, 47, who lives in New York, was charged Monday in U.S. District Court here with five misdemeanor counts of illegally accessing computers at the bureau's headquarters between January and July 2007. Officials say he was searching for reports dealing with Pellicano.
The charges come in what's known as a "criminal information," which can be filed only with a defendant's consent and generally signals a plea deal is near. Rossini is scheduled to appear at a hearing on Monday. Rossini's status at the bureau could not be determined. His lawyer did not return a phone call seeking comment.
Rossini's girlfriend, the actress Linda Fiorentino, known for her role in "The Last Seduction," has personal ties to Pellicano, according to law enforcement officials.
In May, Pellicano was convicted by a federal jury in Los Angeles of conspiring to run a criminal enterprise that employed illegal wiretaps to dig up dirt on the rich and famous on behalf of his elite Hollywood clients. Pellicano is awaiting sentencing for convictions on those 76 counts, as well as for convictions in August in a separate trial for wiretapping and conspiracy to commit wiretapping.
In court filings in March 2007, Pellicano's lawyers reference obtaining an FBI report that they said prosecutors should have turned over to them during pretrial discovery. The report raised questions about an FBI agent's credibility, the lawyers wrote. A law enforcement official said Rossini was the source of that document.
The charges were first reported Tuesday by TickletheWire.com, a Web site that reports on federal law enforcement news.
==========
try substituting principal investigator (as in sponsored research at harvard) for private investigator. . .
washigntonpost.com:
Retired officers want detainee policies overturned
By PAMELA HESS
The Associated Press
Tuesday, December 2, 2008; 10:32 PM
WASHINGTON -- A dozen retired generals and admirals are meeting with President-elect Barack Obama's transition team Wednesday to plead for a clean, unequivocal break with the Bush administration's interrogation, detention and rendition policies.
They are going into the meeting armed with a list of "things that need to be done and undone," retired Marine Gen. Joseph Hoar, chief of the U.S. Central Command from 1991 to 1994, said Tuesday in an interview with The Associated Press.
"It is fairly extensive," Hoar said.
Top on the list is the CIA's authority, granted by the White House, to use harsh interrogation methods that go beyond those approved for use by the military. They are said to include prolonged sleep deprivation, painful stress positions and waterboarding, though the agency says the last method has not been used since 2003.
Exactly what the CIA is allowed to do in interrogations remains secret. However, the White House maintains the CIA program adheres to the U.S. ban on cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of prisoners.
President George W. Bush vetoed legislation championed by the retired officers that would have held the CIA to the military's interrogation methods in March.
They argue that having two U.S. detainee treatment standards endangers American military personnel who may one day be captured, because it denies the U.S. government the moral authority to demand they are treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.
The group, which represents more than three dozen retired military officers with nearly 80 stars between them, is also pushing for an end to extraordinary renditions_ the secret transfer of prisoners to other governments that have a history of torture_ and the closing of the U.S. jail at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, something Obama has already announced he plans to do.
They believe Obama's election, and a stark contrast between his policies and Bush's, can reverse the decline in world opinion about the United States. They tie much of that decline to Guantanamo and detainee abuse, they said.
"Gradualism won't do. It's time for an abrupt change," said Vice Adm. Lee Gunn, a former Navy inspector general. "That abrupt change will send a signal to the world that America is back."
==================
one in the sam,e. . .
nytimes.com:
December 4, 2008
Panel Seeks Changes in E.P.A. Reviews
By CORNELIA DEAN
The Environmental Protection Agency must revise its approach to assessing environmental health hazards and other risks, because current practices hinder useful and timely regulation, an expert panel of The National Research Council says.
The council, the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, said the agency should scrap some of the assumptions on which its decisions have been based and reduce its focus on individual chemicals and other hazards to consider how they act in combination. It should also accept that uncertainty was always an issue and seek to provide practical information to policy makers as quickly as possible.
The report, which the panel produced at the behest of the E.P.A., was made public Wednesday and is online at www.nas.edu.
Determining whether something is a hazard and, if so, how great and to whom is a crucial step in devising appropriate environmental regulations, the panel said, and the field is advancing as testing systems and other technology advance.
But assessing environmental risks is highly complex and full of uncertainty, it continued, and at the E.P.A., “the regulatory risk-assessment process is bogged down,” with some assessments taking a decade or more. For example, the report cited an assessment of trichloroethylene, a commonly used solvent, that has been under way since the 1980s and is not expected before 2010.
The environmental agency’s conclusions about risk are usually crucial in establishing regulatory goals. As a result, they are often subject to intense political or economic pressure. When the Bush administration proposed changes that it said would streamline risk-assessment procedures, critics called the proposal an effort to weaken environmental regulation. In a 2007 report, the academy dismissed the proposal as “fundamentally flawed,” and it was withdrawn.
Thomas A. Burke, an epidemiologist at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, said the new report focused on the use of “defaults,” assumptions that are made about one factor or another in the face of uncertainty.
“Many of them are founded on good science,” he said, “but there are some hidden assumptions. Right now, when we don’t have information on a pollutant, we treat it as if there’s no risk. That’s a so-called hidden default.”
Dr. Burke added, “We really need to address these gaps.”
Another issue the report cited was the effect of cumulative exposures to a variety of environmental hazards. Usually these hazards are studied one by one. But Dr. Burke said, “You have to consider not just the one compound but you have to ask broadly, because people are exposed to many, many thousands of substances.”
A spokesman for the American Chemical Society said it would have no comment on the report until members had had time to read it.
Joel Tickner, a professor of environmental health at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell who studies chemicals in the environment, said that while he had not seen the report, its focus on speeding environmental review and consideration of cumulative effects was overdue.
“We put a lot of effort into finding more complex ways to characterize the problems while we don’t put nearly as much resources into studying solutions,” Professor Tickner said.
He, too, cited trichloroethylene, saying, “Given that we know trichloroethylene is a neurotoxin and a carcinogen and that there are very good alternatives, it makes no sense to put so much resources into studying it.”
Professor Tickner said that by focusing on safer alternatives for processes like degreasing, industries in Massachusetts had reduced their use of the compound by 90 percent.
“But as long as we are uncertain, we assume there is no problem,” he said. “That provides almost an incentive to having scientific uncertainty.”
==============
yahoo.com.news:
92 nations sign cluster-bomb ban; US, Russia don't
By DOUG MELLGREN, Associated Press Writer Doug Mellgren, Associated Press Writer
Wed Dec 3, 4:27 pm ET
OSLO, Norway – An Afghan teenager who lost both legs in a cluster bomb explosion helped persuade his country to change its stance and join nearly 100 nations in signing a treaty Wednesday banning the disputed weapons.
Afghanistan was initially reluctant to join the pact — which the United States and Russia have refused to support — but agreed to after lobbying by victims maimed by cluster munitions, including 17-year-old Soraj Ghulan Habib. The teen, who uses a wheelchair, met with his country's ambassador to Norway, Jawed Ludin, at a two-day signing conference in Oslo.
"I explained to the ambassador my situation, and that the people of Afghanistan wanted a ban," Habib, who said he was crippled by a cluster bomb seven years ago, told The Associated Press.
Speaking through an interpreter, Habib said the ambassador called Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who agreed to change his stance on the treaty.
"Today is a historic day," Habib declared.
Afghanistan's reversal even surprised the activists who are urging countries to join the pact against cluster munitions, which have been widely criticized for maiming and killing civilians.
"It is just so huge, to get this turnaround. Afghanistan was under a lot of pressure from the United States," said Thomas Nash, coordinator of The Cluster Bomb Coalition. "If Afghanistan can withstand the pressure, so can others."
Australian activist Daniel Barty said the Afghan ambassador appeared to start changing his mind after meeting Habib at a reception Tuesday.
The U.S., Russia and other countries refusing to sign the treaty say cluster bombs have legitimate military uses, such as repelling advancing troop columns.
Cluster bomblets are packed by the hundreds into artillery shells, bombs or missiles, which scatter them over vast areas. Some fail to explode immediately. The unexploded bomblets can then lie dormant for years until they are disturbed, often by children attracted by their small size and bright colors.
The group Handicap International says 98 percent of cluster-bomb victims are civilians, and 27 percent are children.
Organizers hoped that more than 100 of the 125 countries represented will have signed by the end of the conference on Thursday. Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere said 92 countries did so on Wednesday.
The treaty must be ratified by 30 countries before it takes effect.
His country, which began the drive to ban cluster bombs 18 months ago, was the first to sign, followed by Laos and Lebanon, both hard-hit by the weapons.
Britain, formerly a major stockpiler of cluster munitions, also signed the treaty, which Foreign Secretary David Miliband said showed that a NATO country can defend itself without cluster weapons.
Miliband said he would urge President-elect Barack Obama's administration to reconsider the U.S. stance.
The Bush administration says a comprehensive ban would hurt world security.
"Although we share the humanitarian concerns of states signing the (accord), we will not be joining them," the U.S. State Department said in a statement. "Such a general ban on cluster munitions will put the lives of our military men and women, and those of our coalition partners, at risk."
In Jerusalem, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said his government had decided not to join the treaty, and instead believes the issue of cluster bomb use should be addressed through the U.N. Convention on Conventional Weapons.
The anti-cluster bomb campaign gathered momentum after Israel's monthlong war against Hezbollah in 2006, when it scattered up to 4 million bomblets across Lebanon, according to U.N. figures.
"In southern Lebanon, for more than two years, children and the elderly have been victimized (by cluster munitions)," Lebanese Foreign Minister Fawzi Saloukh said.
Activists hoped the treaty would pressure non-signers into shelving the weapons, as many did with land mines after a 1997 treaty banning them.
"The cluster bomb treaty will save countless lives by stigmatizing a weapon that kills civilians even after the fighting ends," said Steve Goose, arms director of Human Rights Watch.
____
Associated Press writer Shawna Ohm in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
___
On the Net:
http://www.stopclustermunitions.org
as always:
It is best to read this journal from the beginning. . .
<http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/2006/02/08/>
it makes more sense then. ....
or just explore the journal at: <http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/>
may i recommend: <http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/2008/01/04/>
and a follow up to that: <http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/2008/10/12/>
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