2759
morning . . .

last in yesterday from HU HR:

31419 P-T 032 Grill Cook
Dining Services Belvea's Cafe (Divinity School) 09/06/2007
31418 F-T 032 Floor Supervisor
Dining Services Belvea's Cafe (Divinity School) 09/06/2007
31416 F-T 058 Associate Director of Accounting and Financial Systems
School of Engineering & Applied Sciences SEAS 09/05/2007
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new humf spam tactic is to send nothing . . . just send a blank page . . . I did get in one of htem a box (like that surrounding the HLS X-boxes - see previous entries) . . . and the volume, again, is up. . .

oy . . .

bostonherald.com:

Ex-Constitution chief in hot water
Tossed at sea

By Marie Szaniszlo | Thursday, September 6, 2007 |

The decorated ex-commander of the historic USS Constitution may be forced to walk the plank after a naval hearing today on charges he assaulted a sailor and forced him to lie in a report, in a scandal that could sink his career for good.

Four months after he was fired, Thomas C. Graves, 43, of Marblehead will stand before the military equivalent of a grand jury, accused of assaulting a petty officer who, Graves’ lawyer said, failed to note in the ship’s morning report that a shipmate had been late.

Graves faces charges of assault, cruelty and maltreatment, forcing someone to falsify a record and making a false statement. He is accused of having the petty officer “correct” the report and of denying that he hit the officer.

“The Navy lost confidence in his ability, so his career could be over,” Navy spokesman Mike Giannetti said.

Graves’ lawyer, Charles Gittins, said, “The petty officer was incompetent and, in frustration, the captain handed the papers back to him,” allegedly hitting him in the chest with them. “In his mind, he didn’t hit the sailor.”

But Giannetti said, “It’s my understanding there were witnesses.”

If convicted of all charges at a general court-martial, he faces up to 11 years and six months in prison.

In 2005, Graves assumed command of the 210-year-old national landmark, a job considered a plum position, given the ship’s role in the War of 1812, when it became known as “Old Ironsides” because British cannonballs were unable to penetrate its wooden hull.

He was fired in May, two months before his two-year term was to expire, for what the Navy described at the time as an “administrative matter.”

Commanders may be fired for many reasons, including failing to enforce safety rules and fostering a poor command climate.

“Because of the significance of the Constitution, typically (a commander’s) record and performance would be heavily scrutinized before they were appointed,” Giannetti said.

A 1987 U.S. Naval Academy graduate, Graves served as the engineering officer on the USS Underwood and the USS Philippine Sea and was promoted to commander in 2003. He has received several awards, including two Navy Achievement Medals and the Navy Meritorious Service Medal.

In addition to the military lawyer the Navy has provided him, Graves hired Gittins, who has represented high-profile defendants in military courts-martial, including Lt. Ilario Pantano, a Marine accused of shooting unarmed Iraqi captives; Spc. Charles Graner, who was involved in the Abu Ghraib scandal; and Maj. Harry “Psycho” Schmidt, who bombarded a platoon of Canadians in Afghanistan after being told to hold his fire.

Pantano was acquitted, and the charges against Schmidt were dropped.

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metaphorics are something here . . . underwood? see previous entries. . . forcing to lie?

boston.com:

Customs raids spur training on rights
Advocacy groups teach immigrants to protect selves
By Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff | September 6, 2007

In living rooms, laundromats, and community centers across Massachusetts, immigrant-rights groups are running an underground campaign to teach illegal immigrants to protect themselves from federal agents. Their instructions to the immigrants: Keep their lips sealed and doors shut unless authorities have a warrant.

The grass-roots training sessions, coming in response to recent federal raids through immigrant enclaves from Nantucket to Boston to Springfield, have ignited controversy on all sides.

Federal customs officials criticize the nonprofit groups for aiding anyone in this country illegally and say that agents generally target criminals. But the advocacy groups, worried that the raids are more widespread, say that even illegal immigrants have rights under the Constitution.

"We understand trying to remove violent people," said Maria Elena Letona, executive director of Centro Presente, a Cambridge-based nonprofit that aids immigrants. "But in doing so, you end up terrorizing entire communities."

One steamy night last week in Springfield, a handful of immigrants here illegally from Mexico and Honduras gathered in the sparse kitchen of a tiny apartment. They sat on nylon folding chairs facing a laptop computer that Joel Rodriguez, a trainer for the Alliance to Develop Power, had placed at the edge of the sink.

Their faces tense, they watched a DVD in Spanish that simulated encounters between immigrants and federal officials and police. In one scene, two men wearing jackets emblazoned with "police" and "ICE" pounded on the door, shattering a couple's morning coffee.

The couple froze. Through the closed door, the father asked to see the warrant, which the agent slipped underneath the door. After reading the warrant, the father returned it, saying it did not list his name. Rebuffed, the agents left.

After the video, Rodriguez told the immigrants that they should not lie or carry false documents, or run away.

"The best thing you can do is stay silent," or ask for a lawyer, he said.

Federal immigration officials and others say such training undermines federal immigration law, and worry that the advice could leak to criminals, as well. Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, which favors stricter controls on immigration, called the training "immoral."

"It troubles us tremendously," said Kelly Nantel, press secretary for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Washington, maintaining that the agency does not conduct random sweeps for illegal immigrants. "We would encourage organizations that are engaging in that kind of information distribution to stop."

Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, said the training sessions are a form of constitutionally protected free speech designed to help families who are unaware of their legal options. Many unauthorized immigrants have applied for legal residency or asylum and are awaiting hearings, she said.

"Having those people know their rights isn't in any way going to give them any safety or comfort," said Rose, whose group has been doing the training for years.

National grass-roots immigrant groups called for increased training for immigrants at a conference in July, but many groups cannot afford it, said Lee Siu Hin, national coordinator of the National Immigrant Solidarity Network.

In Massachusetts, many nonprofits redoubled their efforts to train immigrants after last week's antigang raids in several Greater Boston cities led to conflicting reports about the detainees. Immigrant advocates said authorities picked up some immigrants without criminal records. Federal officials said they arrested 36 gang members and associates.

Ali Noorani, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, or MIRA, said the groups support crackdowns on crime, but he was concerned that federal agents were using the raids to question anyone in sight. MIRA has been doing the training for years, but recently saw requests increase dramatically.

"What's happening right now is federal agents are banging on doors and barging into homes and saying I have a warrant for this person but I'm going to ask everybody everything," Noorani said. "So we're telling people, 'listen, you've not committed a criminal offense, so unless there is a warrant for you, the government has no reason to enter your home.' "

In coming weeks, groups including Centro Presente, the Chelsea Collaborative, Agencia Alpha, and MIRA are increasing training in Chelsea, Boston, Somerville, and other cities. Last week, dozens of advocates and immigrants flooded a church in East Boston and a gymnasium in Chelsea for PowerPoint presentations on immigrants' rights. On Saturday, Chelsea Collaborative handed packets to people as they lunched in restaurants and washed clothes in East Boston's Maverick Square.

The Alliance to Develop Power, a wide-ranging nonprofit in Springfield involved in affordable housing, union organization, and services for US citizens and immigrants, began training in June after a raid jarred the community.

According to the alliance, federal agents arrived to deport one illegal immigrant but also detained four others, including a couple from Mexico who were driving to pick up their son, who was with baby sitter.

In Springfield, the training sessions are intimate, invitation-only affairs held in immigrants' apartments, because people are afraid to gather in larger groups outside, said alliance director Caroline Murray.

At the end of each session, each trainee receives a packet of fliers outlining their rights and business-size cards to give to federal agents that explain why they decline to speak. The packets include an "emergency plan" that immigrants can use to arrange child care in case they are arrested.

Edith, a 26-year-old single mother from Mexico, invited the alliance to her Springfield apartment last week because she feared for her 3-month old daughter. The only person she trusts to care for her is 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles, which would be difficult to arrange if she is detained.

"Really, you think it's not going to happen to you," said Edith, who works for a laundry service and who did not want her full name used.

Jorge, 26, a construction worker from Honduras, said he would like to help police, but doubted that he would open the door for them today because he has too much to lose.

Eight years ago, he clung to the sides of trains to get to the Mexican border, paid $1,500 for a boat ride across the Rio Grande, and then walked four nights to Houston. Eventually he made his way to Massachusetts and later paid $6,000 to smuggle his mother here.

Now he has a wife, two children, and one on the way. He earns $2,000 a month, 10 times what he made in Honduras.

"It's not that I don't trust [the police]," said Jorge. "If we didn't have the police here, this country would be like our countries. But sometimes the fear of what could happen to me takes over."
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boston.com:

NIH funds local teams for daring research
Organ shortage, new drugs at issue
By Liz Kowalczyk, Globe Staff | September 6, 2007

Boston researchers are about to begin a bold experiment that, if it works, could help solve the organ shortage and provide other replacement parts for worn-out humans: They will try to grow heart valves, and parts of a pancreas and a tooth, from scratch in the lab.

A second local group hopes to transform the drug discovery process, taking advantage of a flood of genes being linked to human diseases to rapidly identify potential treatments for those ailments.

The National Institutes of Health plans to announce today that it will fund both of these projects as part of a $483 million initiative to support daring, difficult research that has the potential to solve intractable medical problems and transform patient care. Nine teams nationwide will each get $21 million to $25 million in this round of funding.

"This is knock-your-socks off science," said Dr. Alan Krensky, director of the NIH office of portfolio analysis and strategic initiatives, which is funding the projects.

The agency, the major funder of biomedical research in the United States, wants to bring together scientists from different fields to solve problems that have been resistant to traditional approaches, Krensky said. The organ project, for example, includes a cardiac surgeon and two mathematicians, computer specialists, and tissue engineers.

The NIH traditionally awards most research grants - typically about $250,000 each - to individual doctors and scientists whose work has a high likelihood of success. But hoping to turn a new page on how research is done, the agency has set aside 1.7 percent of its budget in a sort of venture capital fund for large, multidisciplinary projects that are riskier but have a huge potential payoff. Among the other projects, researchers in Chicago will try to develop novel ways to preserve the fertility of women undergoing cancer treatment, and scientists at Yale University will study the connection between stress, self-control, and addiction.

The initiative is occurring, however, at a time when scientists are concerned about funding for research. The NIH budget, about $29 billion this year, doubled between 1998 and 2003 but has not kept pace with inflation since then, said David Moore, senior associate vice president for governmental relations for the American Association of Medical Colleges.

"A lot of people are worried about this. Our institutions are worried about it," said Moore, referring to the overall NIH budget.

Money hasn't been the only barrier to collaboration. Medical schools such as Harvard tend to evaluate young researchers for promotions and tenure based on the quality and quantity of articles for which they are a lead author and how much individual grant money they pull in. To address this obstacle, heads of the schools involved in the organ engineering project pledged to look favorably upon participation in the team project when young researchers come up for tenure, said Dr. Richard Maas, a geneticist at Brigham and Women's Hospital who will head the project.

The team hopes to devise instructions for growing specific body parts by turning on and off certain genes and to use these genetic blueprints to direct embryonic stem cells to grow fully-formed cardiac valves, the insulin-producing "islet cells" of the pancreas, and "tooth germs," which could grow into complete teeth once implanted in the mouth. Researchers will begin by trying to grow these new parts for mice, and then eventually proceed to humans.

"In medicine, a major cause of morbidity is organ damage. Diabetes, heart attacks, stroke, renal failure - they all cause organ damage," said Maas, whose collaborators include 24 scientists from Brigham, Children's Hospital Boston, Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT, and Harvard, Boston and Vanderbilt universities. "The traditional approach has been transplantation and devices. We think nature has figured out a way to do it better."

Tissue engineering already is having a major impact on medicine. Scientists around the world have been working for years to grow functioning tissue in the lab, with some success, so the groundwork for this type of project already has been laid.

Researchers at Children's, for example, have reconstructed the defective bladders of seven young patients using the patients' own cells - the first time that tissue engineering has rebuilt a complex internal organ in humans. At a Texas military base, doctors are treating soldiers who lost parts of their fingers in Iraq with "extracellular matrix" harvested from pig bladders, a sort-of scaffolding that cells latch onto as they form tissue. And, five years ago, scientists at the Forsyth Institute in the Fenway grew tooth crowns from the stem cells in a pig that eventually form enamel.

Dr. Joseph Vacanti, chief of surgery at MassGeneral Hospital for Children who recently coauthored a textbook on tissue engineering, said heart valves, pancreatic islet cells, and teeth have been grown in the lab, either from a person's own cells or from animal cells. "It's been proven in sheep that you can make heart valves from the sheep's own cells and you can implant them and they work as heart valves," he said.

What's new about the experiment Maas and his colleagues will try, Vacanti said, is their plan to develop a blueprint for the use of human embryonic stem cells, which have the ability to develop into any of the multiple types of tissue and body parts. One advantage of using stem cells is that the cell colony can live indefinitely, he said.

Maas said researchers plan to use federally registered embryonic stem cell lines; scientists are allowed to use federal funds when working with these stem cells, created before August 2001, but they are not allowed to use NIH money to work with batches of embryonic stem cells created since then.

The Brigham-led group "has a big bold vision here to take [tissue engineering] to the next step and the expertise to try it," Krensky said. But "this is high-risk, not a slam dunk application."

More than 2 million Americans suffer from Type 1 diabetes, which develops when islet cells stop producing adequate amounts of insulin, and 90,000 Americans a year undergo surgery to repair or replace faulty heart valves. And, by the age of 50, the average American has lost eight teeth.

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the second Boston group, will work to develop technologies to discover drugs, rather than on finding new drugs for a particular disease.

Dr. Todd Golub, director of the Broad's cancer program and a researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, said compounds now generally are screened as potential drugs by testing their ability to interfere with isolated proteins in a test tube. This can be done only after the underlying biology of a disease is largely understood. The Broad team wants to short-circuit this process and make it more efficient, by testing potential drugs directly on living cells and looking for chemicals that modify the activity of genes in a diseased cell so that they act more like the genes in a normal cell.

"We think there are powerful ways to tap into the effects of chemical compounds on cells and measure them in ways previously not possible," he said.

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boston.com:

Judge's remarks irk BU biolab opponents
By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff | September 6, 2007

The state's top judge yesterday characterized the campaign to stop construction of a high-security research laboratory in Boston's South End as a not-in-my-backyard squabble, a potentially telling assessment in a high-stakes legal case.

Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall of the Supreme Judicial Court made the remarks during arguments in a case filed by 10 Boston residents suing to block the Biosafety Level-4 laboratory from being built on Boston University's medical school campus. The lab, a cornerstone in the Bush administration's effort to combat bioterrorism, will give scientists the ability to work with the world's deadliest germs, including Ebola, plague, and anthrax.

A group of residents living near the lab has spent more than four years battling the facility, which is rising along Albany Street and expected to open in the fall 2008. The neighbors have argued that the lab's work will put their lives at risk and that BU and the National Institutes of Health, which is underwriting the facility's construction, unfairly located it in a densely populated area with many minority and low-income residents.

"It sounds in the context of this case rather like a NIMBY case," Marshall said, using the acronym for "not in my backyard." She said that it seemed inevitable that such a laboratory would have to be built near a medical research center, so that it would be accessible to infectious-disease scientists, technicians, and other health workers.

"Your honor, I strongly disagree," said Douglas Wilkins, the Anderson & Kreiger lawyer who is representing the residents. "My clients just want to be safe. . . . I don't accept the assumption that this has to be near a large medical area."

The case landed before the Supreme Judicial Court after the residents won a partial victory in August 2006 before a lower court judge. Suffolk Superior Court Judge Ralph D. Gants ordered further environmental review of the lab, declaring that a decision by the state Executive Office of Environmental Affairs to approve the lab "was arbitrary and capricious." Gants, however, did not block construction of the $178 million building, which will house the Level-4 lab as well as other research facilities.

BU appealed Gants's ruling, and the Supreme Judicial Court decided to hear the case, bypassing an appeals court.

Klare Allen, a stalwart opponent of the lab, said after the hearing that she found Marshall's depiction of the case as a NIMBY dispute "very insulting. We've been very careful in saying we don't think this project should be built anywhere, period."

The lawyer for BU, John M. Stevens, told the judges there was no evidence from the operations of other Biosafety Level-4 labs in the United States that the BU facility will pose a danger to neighbors.

Only two of the court's six members, Marshall and Justice Robert J. Cordy, posed multiple questions to the lawyers during the oral arguments, which lasted 37 minutes. Their queries suggested they were mostly interested in technical aspects of the state's environmental review.

The Supreme Judicial Court did not indicate when it will rule.

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nytimes.com:

Despite DNA Test, Prosecutor Is Retrying Case
By SHAILA DEWAN
Prosecutors in Mississippi have sought a new capital murder trial after DNA evidence overturned a conviction.
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Hmmm . . .

nytimes.com:

September 6, 2007
Age of Riches
Big Gifts, Tax Breaks and a Debate on Charity
By STEPHANIE STROM

Eli Broad, a billionaire businessman, has given away more than $650 million over the last five years, to Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to establish a medical research institute, to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and to programs to improve the administration of urban schools and public education.

The rich are giving more to charity than ever, but people like Mr. Broad are not the only ones footing the bill for such generosity. For every three dollars they give away, the federal government typically gives up a dollar or more in tax revenue, because of the charitable tax deduction and by not collecting estate taxes.

Mr. Broad (rhymes with road) says his gifts provide a greater public benefit than if the money goes to taxes for the government to spend. “I believe the public benefit is significantly greater than the tax benefit an individual receives,” Mr. Broad said. “I think there’s a multiplier effect. What smart, entrepreneurial philanthropists and their foundations do is get greater value for how they invest their money than if the government were doing it.”

It is an argument made by many of the nation’s richest people. But not all of them. Take the investor William H. Gross, also a billionaire. Mr. Gross vigorously dismisses the notion that the wealthy are helping society more effectively and efficiently than government.

“When millions of people are dying of AIDS and malaria in Africa, it is hard to justify the umpteenth society gala held for the benefit of a performing arts center or an art museum,” he wrote in his investment commentary this month. “A $30 million gift to a concert hall is not philanthropy, it is a Napoleonic coronation.”

Elaborating in an interview, Mr. Gross said he did not think the public benefits from philanthropy were commensurate with the tax breaks that givers receive. “I don’t think we’re getting the bang for the buck for gifts to build football stadiums and concert halls, with all due respect to Carnegie Hall and other institutions,” he said. “I don’t think the public would vote for spending tax dollars on those things.”

The billionaires’ differing views epitomize a growing debate over what philanthropy is achieving at a time when the wealthiest Americans control a rising share of the national income and, because of sharp cuts in personal taxes, give up less to government.

Familiar Recipients

A common perception of philanthropy is that one of its central purposes is to alleviate the suffering of society’s least fortunate and therefore promote greater equality, taking some of the burden off government. In exchange, the United States is one of a handful of countries to allow givers a tax deduction. In essence, the public is letting private individuals decide how to allocate money on their behalf.

What qualifies for that tax deduction has broadened over the 90 years since its creation to include everything from university golf teams to puppet theaters — even an organization established after Hurricane Katrina to help practitioners of sadomasochism obtain gear they had lost in the storm.

Roughly three-quarters of charitable gifts of $50 million and more from 2002 through March 31 went to universities, private foundations, hospitals and art museums, according to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.

Of the rest, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation accounted for half on the center’s list. That money went primarily to improve the lives of the poor in developing countries. Valuable as that may be, it also meant that the American public effectively underwrote several billion dollars worth of foreign aid by private individuals, even though poll after poll shows Americans are at best ambivalent about using tax dollars in such assistance.

In contrast, few gifts of that size are made to organizations like the Salvation Army, Habitat for Humanity and America’s Second Harvest, whose main goals are to help the poor in this country. Research shows that less than 10 percent of the money Americans give to charity addresses basic human needs, like sheltering the homeless, feeding the hungry and caring for the indigent sick, and that the wealthiest typically devote an even smaller portion of their giving to such causes than everyone else.

“Donors give to organizations they are close to,” said H. Art Taylor, president and chief executive of the BBB Wise Giving Alliance. “So they give to their college or university, or maybe someone close to them died of a particular disease so they make a big gift to medical research aimed at that disease. How many of the superrich have that kind of a relationship with a soup kitchen? Or a homeless shelter?”

Philanthropists like Mr. Broad say that looking at philanthropy solely as a means of ameliorating need is too narrow. “If you look historically at what Carnegie did with creating a library system and the Rockefellers in creating Rockefeller University, I think it does a lot more for society than simply supporting those in need,” Mr. Broad said.

About 2 percent of the money Mr. Broad has given away through his two foundations over the last five years, or $15 million, went to support organizations like the United Way and the United Jewish Fund, which serve needy people as well as the middle class. The foundations also have given money to groups that help homeless children, and the International Rescue Committee.

Still, Mr. Broad dedicates his biggest gifts to areas he thinks lack government support, like the $25 million he gave to the University of Southern California last year to found an institute for integrative biology and stem cell research, or the tens of millions he dedicated to complete the new Disney concert hall in Los Angeles.

Like many major philanthropists, Mr. Broad said he considered such gifts an illustration of the Chinese proverb: “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” The argument is that simply taking care of the poor does nothing to eliminate poverty and that they will ultimately benefit more from efforts to, say, find cures for the diseases that afflict them or improve public education.

As for Mr. Gross, despite his uncharacteristically fiery criticism of what he calls “philanthropic ego gratification,” some of the large gifts he and his wife, Sue, have made are not so different from those made by other billionaires. He has given millions to a local hospital, for example, and for stem cell research.

And in 2005 the couple gave roughly $25 million to Duke, Mr. Gross’s alma mater.

But the Duke gift illustrates Mr. Gross’s priorities. The money is almost exclusively for scholarships.

“Universities have their own thing going — they want to build infrastructure and endowments and perpetuate their system, which isn’t necessarily in the social interest,” Mr. Gross said. “Scholarships get a little more down to the ground level.”

Taking Aim at the Tax Code

The investor Warren E. Buffett also voices strong feelings about how donations are used.

When Mr. Buffett pledged $30 billion to the Gates Foundation, he included a little-noted requirement that the foundation spend each increment of the gift he hands over, in addition to its own annual legally mandated spending. If Mr. Buffett transfers $1.3 billion of stock to it, it must spend every nickel within a year.

“I wanted to make sure,” he said, “that to the extent I was providing extra money to them, it didn’t just go to build up the foundation size further but that it was put to use.”

The Gates Foundation’s work is largely international, although a portion of its spending supports efforts to improve urban education and access to college, so Mr. Buffett’s money is unlikely to be used to address basic needs in this country.

“I think the government ought to make sure that all the people here who drew short straws have a decent minimum,” Mr. Buffett said. “We moved toward that with Social Security, but we could go a lot further now.”

He does not regard his gift as charitable and expects no tax benefit from it, in part because he has credit for past donations that he has not used.

Rather, he calls his sister, Doris Buffett, the “real philanthropist” in the family. Ms. Buffett runs an organization, the Sunshine Lady Foundation, that helps the needy pay for college, medical expenses, mortgages, glasses and cars.

Mr. Buffett recently has brought attention to himself as a critic of inequities in the nation’s tax system, which offers the wealthy better tax breaks for charitable giving than it does the average taxpayer. Deductions for charitable giving can be claimed only by the fewer than half of all taxpayers who itemize, and those falling in higher tax brackets get bigger deductions for cash gifts.

The charitable deduction cost the government $40 billion in lost tax revenue last year, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, more than the government spends altogether on managing public lands, protecting the environment and developing new energy sources.

Rob Reich, an assistant professor of political science and ethics in society at Stanford, goes so far as to say that the tax code promotes inequities through the breaks it provides for charitable giving.

Take schools. The Woodside Elementary School in Woodside, Calif., where the median family income is $196,505, raised $7,065 a pupil in 1998 from charitable contributions to a foundation it created, according to Professor Reich’s research. Across the San Francisco Bay, a similar foundation to support the Oakland Unified School District, where the median family income is $44,384, raised $138 a pupil that year.

In effect, the government is subsidizing a system that enhances inequities between poor and wealthy public schools, Professor Reich said.

Raising Questions

Legislators, regulators and others are asking more questions about exactly what charities do with the money they are given.

“When foundations, corporations and individuals give money to the opera,” said Xavier Becerra, a California Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee who represents a district in Los Angeles populated largely by young working-class immigrant families, “my folks are very unlikely to benefit from those forgone tax dollars that could have been used for health care, for after-school programs for kids, for help in getting access to college education.”

Yet Mr. Becerra himself is a beneficiary of one of the country’s wealthiest charities, Stanford, which has a $15.2 billion endowment and gave him a scholarship. “There is no way my parents could have afforded for me to go there without the generous financial aid the university gave me,” he said.

At the other end of the political spectrum, Grover G. Norquist, whose Americans for Tax Reform lobbies for lower taxes, suggests taxing nonprofit hospitals that cannot demonstrate that they provide significant care for the poor.

“I’m not aware of anything they do that a for-profit hospital doesn’t do in terms of providing free care,” Mr. Norquist said.

Like other billionaire philanthropists, Thomas M. Siebel, founder of Siebel Systems, has given his largest gifts to his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 1999, he donated $32 million for a computer science center bearing his name, and he pledged $100 million this year to support basic research that he hopes will reduce dependency on carbon-based fuels.

But when the university suggested using some of that gift to put up another new building named for him and hire new professors, he said no.

“I told them to use the basement of an existing building and some of the really smart people they already have,” Mr. Siebel said.

Attracting philanthropic support to fight substance abuse is one of the biggest challenges in fund-raising, but Mr. Siebel has donated more than $15 million to the Meth Project, an organization he created. “I think we’ll save a lot of lives in the end,” Mr. Siebel said. “Isn’t that what philanthropy is supposed to be about?”

He has also given the Salvation Army more than $18 million over the last six years, mostly to support services for the homeless. He said he gives to the organization because of its low administrative costs and lack of frills.

“When I first started doing this, I made a contribution to some organization, Harvest something or other, I think, that was working on homelessness,” Mr. Siebel said. “The next thing I knew, I got a plaque in the mail and an invitation to an awards ceremony.”

He added: “I never gave them another nickel. What were they spending money on plaques for?”
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nytimes.com:

September 6, 2007
Editorial
A Chance to Make Votes Count
The United States Congress has a chance to take a big step toward reassuring Americans that the votes they cast on Election Day will not be lost or stolen. The House is considering a bill sponsored by Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, that could come to a vote as soon as today that would make electronic voting both more reliable and less prone to fraud. The bill lacks one important thing: a ban on touch-screen voting machines. But even in its current form, it goes a long way toward fixing a voting system that has been clearly broken for many years. The House should pass it, and the Senate should pass its own bill without delay.

Electronic voting has been an abysmal failure. Computer experts have done study after study showing that electronic voting machines, which are often shoddily made, can easily be hacked. With little effort, vote totals can be changed and elections stolen. In many recent elections, voters have complained of “vote flipping,” in which touch-screen machines took votes cast for one candidate and gave them to an opponent.

When these machines do not produce a paper record of each vote that can be independently counted, voters have to accept the totals they report on faith. That is unacceptable. Testing laboratories, which are supposed to independently verify the integrity of voting machines, are rife with conflicts, since they accept money from the manufacturers.

Mr. Holt’s bill would solve many of these problems. It would require machines used in federal elections to produce “voter-verifiable paper records,” a paper record of every ballot cast that voters could check to ensure that their choices were properly recorded. Those records would then be audited to confirm the accuracy of the machine totals. The bill would also crack down on testing laboratories’ conflicts of interest.

It is unfortunate that the bill does not contain a provision banning the use of touch-screen voting machines. A touch-screen ban would encourage states to use optical scan machines, which rely on paper ballots read by a computer, like a standardized test form. Optical scans are less expensive and less vulnerable to vote theft.

There is still time before the bill becomes law to add a ban on touch-screen voting. If the House fails to do so, the Senate should, and it should fight for it to be in the final bill.

There has been a spirited debate about how quickly to require reforms to be implemented. There have been calls for putting a solution off until 2012. That is too long to wait. Congress should push states to act quickly, while allowing exceptions for states that truly need more time to put a reliable system in place. Many Americans lost faith in their election system after the 2000 election. They have waited long enough for it to be fixed.

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nytimes.com:

Some Food Additives Raise Hyperactivity, Study Finds

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: September 6, 2007
Common food additives and colorings can increase hyperactive behavior in a broad range of children, a study being released today found.

It was the first time researchers conclusively and scientifically confirmed a link that had long been suspected by many parents. Numerous support groups for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder have for years recommended removing such ingredients from diets, although experts have continued to debate the evidence.

But the new, carefully controlled study shows that some artificial additives increase hyperactivity and decrease attention span in a wide range of children, not just those for whom overactivity has been diagnosed as a learning problem.

The new research, which was financed by Britain’s Food Standards Agency and published online by the British medical journal The Lancet, presents regulators with a number of issues: Should foods containing preservatives and artificial colors carry warning labels? Should some additives be prohibited entirely? Should school cafeterias remove foods with additives?

After all, the researchers note that overactivity makes learning more difficult for children.

“A mix of additives commonly found in children’s foods increases the mean level of hyperactivity,” wrote the researchers, led by Jim Stevenson, a professor of psychology at the University of Southampton. “The finding lends strong support for the case that food additives exacerbate hyperactive behaviors (inattention, impulsivity and overactivity) at least into middle childhood.”

In response to the study, the Food Standards Agency advised parents to monitor their children’s activity and, if they noted a marked change with food containing additives, to adjust their diets accordingly, eliminating artificial colors and preservatives.

But Professor Stevenson said it was premature to go further. “We’ve set up an issue that needs more exploration,” he said in a telephone interview.

In response to the study, some pediatricians cautioned that a diet without artificial colors and preservatives might cause other problems for children.

“Even if it shows some increase in hyperactivity, is it clinically significant and does it impact the child’s life?” said Dr. Thomas Spencer, a specialist in Pediatric Psychopharmacology at Massachusetts General Hospital.

“Is it powerful enough that you want to ostracize your kid? It is very socially impacting if children can’t eat the things that their friends do.”

Still, Dr. Spencer called the advice of the British food agency “sensible,” noting that some children may be “supersensitive to additives” just as some people are more sensitive to caffeine.

The Lancet study focused on a variety of food colorings and on sodium benzoate, a common preservative. The researchers note that removing this preservative from food could cause problems in itself by increasing spoilage. In the six-week trial, researchers gave a randomly selected group of several hundred 3-year-olds and of 8- and 9-year-olds drinks with additives — colors and sodium benzoate — that mimicked the mix in children’s drinks that are commercially available. The dose of additives consumed was equivalent to that in one or two servings of candy a day, the researchers said. Their diet was otherwise controlled to avoid other sources of the additives.

A control group was given an additive-free placebo drink that looked and tasted the same.

All of the children were evaluated for inattention and hyperactivity by parents, teachers (for school-age children) and through a computer test. Neither the researchers nor the subject knew which drink any of the children had consumed.

The researchers discovered that children in both age groups were significantly more hyperactive and that they had shorter attention spans if they had consumed the drink containing the additives. The study did not try to link specific consumption with specific behaviors. The study’s authors noted that other research suggested that the hyperactivity could increase in as little as an hour after artificial additives were consumed.

The Lancet study could not determine which of the additives caused the poor performances because all the children received a mix. “This was a very complicated study, and it will take an even more complicated study to figure out which components caused the effect,” Professor Stevenson said.
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washingtonpost.com:

Experts Doubt Drop In Violence in Iraq
Military Statistics Called Into Question

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 6, 2007; A16



The U.S. military's claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends.

Reductions in violence form the centerpiece of the Bush administration's claim that its war strategy is working. In congressional testimony Monday, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is expected to cite a 75 percent decrease in sectarian attacks. According to senior U.S. military officials in Baghdad, overall attacks in Iraq were down to 960 a week in August, compared with 1,700 a week in June, and civilian casualties had fallen 17 percent between December 2006 and last month. Unofficial Iraqi figures show a similar decrease.

Others who have looked at the full range of U.S. government statistics on violence, however, accuse the military of cherry-picking positive indicators and caution that the numbers -- most of which are classified -- are often confusing and contradictory. "Let's just say that there are several different sources within the administration on violence, and those sources do not agree," Comptroller General David Walker told Congress on Tuesday in releasing a new Government Accountability Office report on Iraq.

Senior U.S. officers in Baghdad disputed the accuracy and conclusions of the largely negative GAO report, which they said had adopted a flawed counting methodology used by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Many of those conclusions were also reflected in last month's pessimistic National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq.

The intelligence community has its own problems with military calculations. Intelligence analysts computing aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the NIE puzzled over how the military designated attacks as combat, sectarian or criminal, according to one senior intelligence official in Washington. "If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian," the official said. "If it went through the front, it's criminal."

"Depending on which numbers you pick," he said, "you get a different outcome." Analysts found "trend lines . . . going in different directions" compared with previous years, when numbers in different categories varied widely but trended in the same direction. "It began to look like spaghetti."

Among the most worrisome trends cited by the NIE was escalating warfare between rival Shiite militias in southern Iraq that has consumed the port city of Basra and resulted last month in the assassination of two southern provincial governors. According to a spokesman for the Baghdad headquarters of the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I), those attacks are not included in the military's statistics. "Given a lack of capability to accurately track Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence, except in certain instances," the spokesman said, "we do not track this data to any significant degree."

Attacks by U.S.-allied Sunni tribesmen -- recruited to battle Iraqis allied with al-Qaeda -- are also excluded from the U.S. military's calculation of violence levels.

The administration has not given up trying to demonstrate that Iraq is moving toward political reconciliation. Testifying with Petraeus next week, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker is expected to report that top Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish leaders agreed last month to work together on key legislation demanded by Congress. If all goes as U.S. officials hope, Crocker will also be able to point to a visit today to the Sunni stronghold of Anbar province by ministers in the Shiite-dominated government -- perhaps including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, according to a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq policy. The ministers plan to hand Anbar's governor $70 million in new development funds, the official said.

But most of the administration's case will rest on security data, according to military, intelligence and diplomatic officials who would not speak on the record before the Petraeus-Crocker testimony. Several Republican and Democratic lawmakers who were offered military statistics during Baghdad visits in August said they had been convinced that Bush's new strategy, and the 162,000 troops carrying it out, has produced enough results to merit more time.

Challenges to how military and intelligence statistics are tallied and used have been a staple of the Iraq war. In its December 2006 report, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group identified "significant underreporting of violence," noting that "a murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the sources of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the data base." The report concluded that "good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals."

Recent estimates by the media, outside groups and some government agencies have called the military's findings into question. The Associated Press last week counted 1,809 civilian deaths in August, making it the highest monthly total this year, with 27,564 civilians killed overall since the AP began collecting data in April 2005.

The GAO report found that "average number of daily attacks against civilians have remained unchanged from February to July 2007," a conclusion that the military said was skewed because it did not include dramatic, up-to-date information from August.

Juan R.I. Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan who is critical of U.S. policy, said that most independent counts "do not agree with Pentagon estimates about drops in civilian deaths."

In a letter last week to the leadership of both parties, a group of influential academics and former Clinton administration officials called on Congress to examine "the exact nature and methodology that is being used to track the security situation in Iraq and specifically the assertions that sectarian violence is down."

The controversy centers as much on what is counted -- attacks on civilians vs. attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops, numbers of attacks vs. numbers of casualties, sectarian vs. intra-sect battles, daily numbers vs. monthly averages -- as on the numbers themselves.

The military stopped releasing statistics on civilian deaths in late 2005, saying the news media were taking them out of context. In an e-mailed response to questions last weekend, an MNF-I spokesman said that while trends were favorable, "exact monthly figures cannot be provided" for attacks against civilians or other categories of violence in 2006 or 2007, either in Baghdad or for the country overall. "MNF-I makes every attempt to ensure it captures the most comprehensive, accurate, and valid data on civilian and sectarian deaths," the spokesman wrote. "However, there is not one central place for data or information. . . . This means there can be variations when different organizations examine this information."

In a follow-up message yesterday, the spokesman said that the non-release policy had been changed this week but that the numbers were still being put "in the right context."

Attacks labeled "sectarian" are among the few statistics the military has consistently published in recent years, although the totals are regularly recalculated. The number of monthly "sectarian murders and incidents" in the last six months of 2006, listed in the Pentagon's quarterly Iraq report published in June, was substantially higher each month than in the Pentagon's March report. MNF-I said that "reports from un-reported/not-yet-reported past incidences as well as clarification/corrections on reports already received" are "likely to contribute to changes."

When Petraeus told an Australian newspaper last week that sectarian attacks had decreased 75 percent "since last year," the statistic was quickly e-mailed to U.S. journalists in a White House fact sheet. Asked for detail, MNF-I said that "last year" referred to December 2006, when attacks spiked to more than 1,600.

By March, however -- before U.S. troop strength was increased under Bush's strategy -- the number had dropped to 600, only slightly less than in the same month last year. That is about where it has remained in 2007, with what MNF-I said was a slight increase in April and May "but trending back down in June-July."

Petraeus's spokesman, Col. Steven A. Boylan, said he was certain that Petraeus had made a comparison with December in the interview with the Australian paper, which did not publish a direct Petraeus quote. No qualifier appeared in the White House fact sheet.

When a member of the National Intelligence Council visited Baghdad this summer to review a draft of the intelligence estimate on Iraq, Petraeus argued that its negative judgments did not reflect recent improvements. At least one new sentence was added to the final version, noting that "overall attack levels across Iraq have fallen during seven of the last nine weeks."

A senior military intelligence official in Baghdad deemed it "odd" that "marginal" security improvements were reflected in an estimate assessing the previous seven months and projecting the next six to 12 months. He attributed the change to a desire to provide Petraeus with ammunition for his congressional testimony.

The intelligence official in Washington, however, described the Baghdad consultation as standard in the NIE drafting process and said that the "new information" did not change the estimate's conclusions. The overall assessment was that the security situation in Iraq since January "was still getting worse," he said, "but not as fast."
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Like violence in America . . . ?

washingtonpost.com:

Suicides Rose as Prescription Use Declined
Study: Child Antidepressant Warnings Coincided With Increase

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 6, 2007; A01



Warnings from federal regulators four years ago that antidepressants were increasing the risk of suicidal behavior among young people led to a precipitous drop in the use of the drugs. Now a new study has found that the drop coincides with an unprecedented increase in the number of suicides among children.

From 2003 to 2004, the suicide rate among Americans younger than 19 rose 14 percent, the most dramatic one-year change since the government started collecting suicide statistics in 1979, the study found. The rise followed a sharp decrease in the prescribing of antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil after parents and physicians were confronted by a barrage of warnings from the Food and Drug Administration and international agencies.

The data suggest that for every 20 percent decline in antidepressant use among patients of all ages in the United States, an additional 3,040 suicides per year would occur, said Robert Gibbons, a professor of biostatistics and psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who did the study. About 32,000 Americans commit suicide each year.

Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said, "We may have inadvertently created a problem by putting a 'black box' warning on medications that were useful." He added, "If the drugs were doing more harm than good, then the reduction in prescription rates should mean the risk of suicide should go way down, and it hasn't gone down at all -- it has gone up."

The new finding, published in the September issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, is the latest development in a controversy marked by complex science and passionate advocates. In 2003 and 2004, the FDA issued a series of warnings that clinical trials had detected an increase in suicidal thinking among children and adolescents taking a class of antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), compared with children and adolescents given sugar pills. In late 2004, the agency called for a "black box" warning on the drugs to call attention to the potential risk, and expanded it last December to include young adults.

The warnings led to a broad decline in SSRI prescriptions for all patients younger than 60, Gibbons said. Prescription rates continued to rise among those older than 60, and this was the only group in which suicides dropped between 2003 and 2004, his study found.

The study included the Netherlands, which had a 22 percent decrease in antidepressant use among children between 2003 and 2005. The suicide rate among youngsters there increased by 49 percent in that period.

The trend lines do not prove that suicides rose because of the drop in prescriptions, but Gibbons, Insel and other experts said the international evidence leaves few other plausible explanations. Previous studies have shown that U.S. suicide rates are lower in counties where antidepressant use is higher, and a recent study of 200,000 depressed veterans found that those taking an antidepressant had one-third the risk of suicide of those who were not.

David Healy, a British psychiatrist who has been critical of the drugs, disagrees. He said that the increase in suicides was more likely caused by the growing use of antipsychotic drugs among children rather than a decline in antidepressant use. "I would be absolutely certain that the increase is not because kids are not being treated," he said. "They may not be getting SSRIs, but they are getting psychotropics."

The new study was largely funded by the federal government. Pfizer, which makes Zoloft, provided some money for data collection, Gibbons said, but was not involved in the study and did not review the results before they were published.

The FDA required the warnings on the drugs' labels to prompt doctors to closely monitor patients they put on antidepressants, because of some evidence that the risk of suicide is highest shortly after treatment begins. Gibbons said that the decision was misguided and that the situation called for better education of physicians, not warnings.

Thomas Laughren, director of the agency's division of psychiatry products, said, "FDA is obviously concerned about possible negative impacts of labeling changes but also feels a strong obligation to alert prescribers and patients to possible risks associated with the use of antidepressants." He added, "We will continue to monitor antidepressant use and suicide rates, and will take appropriate regulatory actions as new data become available."

NIMH's Insel said it is possible that antidepressants are lowering the risk of suicide overall, even as they increase the risk among a subset of patients. New research to be published soon examines genetic factors that may put some patients at particular risk, he added.

If regulators base their decisions on risks alone, he said, "you focus on that very tiny number of kids who may be at greater risk when they are treated and you ignore the very large benefit that might accrue to the other 99.9 percent."

Insel acknowledged that it may be a while before physicians have tests that can reliably predict which patients are likely to become suicidal as a result of the drugs. In the interim, he said, "if I had a child with depression, I would go after the best treatment but also provide the closest monitoring."
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Damned if we do, damned. . .