Su'prise, su'prise, su'prise

Rico says he never thought this would be the outcome, but Elisabetta Povoledo has an article in The New York Times about the Amanda Knox case:

A court in Perugia, Italy overturned the homicide convictions of Americans Amanda Knox and a co-defendant and ordered them freed, ending a sensationally lurid trial of murder and rough sex that made Knox notorious on both sides of the Atlantic.
An appellate court jury of eight Italians, which included two judges, delivered their verdict after more than eleven hours of deliberations. Knox and her supporters packing the court let out whoops of joy and relief as the verdict was read on live television, prompting court officials to shout for silence. Knox broke down in tears.
The decision overturns the December of 2009 ruling that convicted Knox and got her sentenced to 26 years in prison and her co-defendant, Raffaele Sollecito, a former boyfriend, to 25 for the 2007 stabbing murder of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher, a Briton who shared an apartment with Knox. The case was built largely on DNA evidence that legal experts called flimsy and suspect.
Knox, 24, from Seattle, was returned to prison to collect her possessions, but was expected to be on her way home later in the day.
All three figures in the trial were young, promising students in Perugia, a fact that largely ignited the media hype that surrounded the case from the start. Unprecedented international attention in a murder trial in Italy was fueled by looming question marks over means and motive that made the case a classic whodunit.
“We’re thankful Amanda’s nightmare is over,” Knox’s sister, Deanna, read in a statement after the verdict was read. “We’re grateful for the support we have received from all over the world.”
Giulia Bongiorno, a lawyer for Sollecito, said “we’ve been waiting for this for four years.”Earlier in the day, Knox read a tearful statement in fluent Italian beseeching the court to overturn the verdict, claiming her innocence. The joyful reaction of the defendants contrasted sharply with the looks of ashen disappointment by relatives of Kercher.
The British media had openly sympathized with the tragic figure of Kercher and her family, which backed the prosecution in seeking to uphold the original trial’s outcome. “The lower court found the defendants guilty,” said a lawyer for the family, Francesco Maresca, at a press conference as deliberations were underway. He said the Kercher family wanted to “have the verdict confirmed”.
The trial and retrial of Knox attracted widespread attention, partly because of its sensational details and the differing portraits of the main defendant, who was alternately described as a hard-working college student caught up in an arcane foreign justice system and a marijuana-smoking criminal.
Kercher was found stabbed and bloody in her room on 2 November 2007 in what prosecutors described as a game of rough sex involving Knox and her boyfriend that went horribly wrong. Knox and Sollecito were arrested a few days later.
The appeal, which began last November, was dominated by the re-examination of the DNA evidence. Court-appointed independent experts said that the DNA had been collected in a way that could have allowed for contamination and that the genetic information on two main pieces of evidence could not be matched to the defendants with certainty. Bongiorno argued that evidence collected 46 days after the police first went through the scene should have been thrown out.
In their closing arguments, prosecutors dismissed the findings of the independent experts, calling them inept and inexperienced. They also reiterated other evidence from the first trial, including eyewitness evidence placing Knox and Sollecito at the scene.
The appeals court upheld Knox’s conviction on a charge of slander for accusing a bar owner, Diya "Patrick" Lumumba, of committing the murder. The court set the sentence for that conviction at three years and a fine of 22,000 euros, or about $29,000.

Rico says this Lumumba is not this Lumumba...

Nice words

Anonymous, again:

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Rico says he has every intention of continuing to write this blog, for years to come...

A little thought would've been nice

Rico says the ladyfriend has owned this GE stove for a couple of years now, and he is irritated constantly by the stupidity of the industrial designers who did not put the time buttons under the time controls:

There, wasn't that simple?

Droning on

Scott Shane and Thom Shanker have an article in The New York Times about the use of drones:

The CIA drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born propagandist for al-Qaeda’s rising franchise in Yemen, was one more demonstration of what American officials describe as a cheap, safe and precise tool to eliminate enemies. It was also a sign that the decade-old American campaign against terrorism has reached a turning point. Disillusioned by huge costs and uncertain outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama administration has decisively embraced the drone, along with small-scale lightning raids like the one that killed Osama bin Laden in May, as the future of the fight against terrorist networks.
“The lessons of the big wars are obvious,” said Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who has studied the trade-offs. “The cost in blood and treasure is immense, and the outcome is unforeseeable. Public support at home is declining toward rock bottom. And the people you’ve come to liberate come to resent your presence.” The shift is also a result of shrinking budgets, which will no longer accommodate the deployment of large forces overseas at a rough annual cost of $1 million per soldier. And there have been improvements in the technical capabilities of remotely piloted aircraft. One of them tracked Awlaki with live video on Yemeni tribal turf, where it is too dangerous for American troops to go.
Even military officials who advocate for the drone campaign acknowledge that these technologies are not applicable to every security threat. Still, the move to drones and precise strikes is a remarkable change in favored strategy, underscored by the leadership changes at the Pentagon and CIA. Just a few years ago, counterinsurgency was the rage, as General David H. Petraeus used the strategy to turn around what appeared to be a hopeless situation in Iraq. He then applied those lessons in Afghanistan. The outcome— as measured in political stability, rule of law, and economic development— remains uncertain in both.
Now Petraeus (who now goes by his civilian title of director, rather than general) is in charge of the CIA, which pioneered the drone campaign in Pakistan. He no longer commands the troops whose numbers were the core of counterinsurgency. And the Defense Secretary is Leon E. Panetta, who oversaw the escalation of drone strikes in Pakistan’s lawless tribal area as the CIA director. Panetta, the budget director under President Bill Clinton, must find a way to safeguard security as the Pentagon purse strings draw tight.
Today, there is little political appetite for the risk, cost, and especially the long timelines required by counterinsurgency doctrine, which involves building societies and governments to gradually take over the battle against insurgents and terrorists within their borders. The apparent simplicity of a drone aloft, with its pilot operating from the United States, can be misleading. Behind each aircraft is a team of 150 or more personnel, repairing and maintaining the plane and the heap of ground technology that keeps it in the air, poring over the hours of videos and radio signals it collects, and gathering the voluminous intelligence necessary to prompt a single strike. Air Force officials calculate that it costs $5 billion to operate the service’s global airborne surveillance network, and that sum is growing. The Pentagon has asked for another $5 billion next year alone for remotely piloted drone systems.
Yet even those costs are tiny compared with the price of the big wars. A Brown University study, published in June, estimates that the United States will have spent $3.7 trillion in Afghanistan and Iraq by the time the wars are over.
The drones may also alienate fewer people. They have angered many Pakistanis, who resent the violation of their country’s sovereignty, and the inevitable civilian casualties when missiles go awry or are directed by imperfect intelligence. But while experts argue over the extent of the deaths of innocents when missiles fall on suspected terrorist compounds, there is broad agreement that the drones cause far fewer unintended deaths and produce far fewer refugees than either ground combat or traditional airstrikes.
Still, there are questions of legality. The Obama administration legal team wrestled with whether it would be lawful to make Awlaki a target for death, a proposition that raised complex issues involving Awlaki’s constitutional rights as an American citizen, domestic statutes, and international law. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel eventually issued a lengthy, classified memorandum that apparently concluded it would be legal to strike at someone like Awlaki in circumstances in which he was believed to be plotting attacks against the United States, and if there was no way to arrest him. The existence of that memorandum was first reported by The Washington Post.
The role of drones in the changing American way of war also illustrates the increasing militarization of the intelligence community, as Air Force drone technologies for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance— and now armed with Hellfire missiles for strikes on ground targets— play a central role in CIA operations. The blurring of military-intelligence boundaries includes former uniformed officers assuming top jobs in the intelligence apparatus and military commando units carrying out raids under CIA command.
As useful as the drones have proved for counterterrorism, their value in other kinds of conflicts may be more limited. Against some of the most significant potential threats— a China in ascendancy, for example, or a North Korea or Iran with nuclear weapons— drones are likely to be of marginal value. Should military force be required as a deterrent or for an attack, traditional forces, including warships and combat aircraft, would carry the heaviest load. Of course, new kinds of air power have often appeared seductive, offering a cleaner, higher-tech brand of war. Military officials say they are aware that drones are no panacea. “It’s one of many capabilities that we have at our disposal to go after terrorists and others,” one senior Pentagon official said. “But this is a tool that is not a weapon for weapon’s sake. It’s tied to policy. In many cases, these weapons are deployed in areas where it’s very tough to go after the enemy by conventional means, because these terror leaders are located in some of the most remote places.”
In some ways, the debate over drones versus troops recalls the early months of George W. Bush’s administration, when the new president and his defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, envisioned how a revolution in military technology would allow the Defense Department to reduce its ground forces and focus money instead on intelligence platforms and long-range, precision-strike weapons.
Then came the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the wars, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, in which ground forces carried out the lion’s share of the missions.
Zenko, of the Council on Foreign Relations, worries about the growing perception that drones are the answer to terrorism, just a few years after many officials believed that invading and remaking countries would prove the cure. The recent string of successful strikes has prompted senior Obama administration officials to suggest that the demise of al-Qaeda may be within sight. But the history of terrorist movements shows that they are almost never ended by military force, he said.
“What gets lost are all the other instruments of national power,” including diplomacy, trade policy and development aid, Zenko said. “But these days those tools never get adequate consideration, because drones get all the attention.”

Rico says it doesn't really matter what the military uses, as long as it kills them...

Tooting their own horn

Laura Kasinof has an article in The New York Times about Yemen:

Yemeni officials recently provided more details about their role in the tracking and killing of an American-born cleric, while a government spokesman said that the United States should show more appreciation to Yemen’s embattled president for his assistance in the case.
A high-ranking Yemeni official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Yemen had provided the United States with intelligence on the location of the cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by an American drone strike on Friday. The information came from “a recently captured al-Qaeda operative,” the official said. He said that Yemeni security officials located Awlaki on Friday morning in a house in the village of al-Khasaf in al-Jawf Province. The remote village lies in a desert where the Yemeni state has no control and tribes with varying loyalties rule.
The United States said that Awlaki, a propagandist for the Yemeni branch of al-Qaeda, had taken on an operational role in the organization, and last year the Obama administration placed him on a list of targets to kill or capture. The Yemeni group, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, is considered al-Qaeda’s “most active operational affiliate,” President Obama said recently, and the United States was a major target. The State Department issued a travel alert, warning that the attack “could provide motivation” for retaliatory attacks worldwide against American citizens and interests.
The killing came a week after the return to Yemen of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had been recovering in Saudi Arabia from wounds sustained in an assassination attempt and whose resignation after thirty-plus years of autocratic rule has been demanded by a large protest movement in Yemen, the political opposition, regional powers and the United States.
The timing of the airstrikes fueled speculation that Saleh, who has frequently portrayed himself as an essential bulwark against al-Qaeda, had handed over Awlaki to the Americans in order to reduce American pressure on him to leave, but American officials said that there was no connection between Saleh’s return and the airstrikes. They said that American and Yemeni security forces had been hunting Awlaki for nearly two years, and that new information about his location surfaced about three weeks ago. That information allowed the CIA to track his movements, the officials said, and wait for an opportunity to strike when there was little risk to civilians.
A senior American official made it clear that Saleh’s immediate resignation remained a goal of American policy, and said that Yemen’s government was under no “significant illusion” that the United States had changed its position. “Sustaining military-to-military cooperation is in our best interest,” the official added, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “We don’t want to undermine that cooperation.”
A Yemeni government spokesman, however, said that Saleh deserved credit for helping the Americans. “After this big victory in catching Awlaki, the White House calls on the president to leave power immediately?” a deputy information minister, Abdu al-Janadi, told Reuters. “The Americans don’t even respect those who cooperate with them.”
The spokesman for Yemen’s opposition coalition, Mohammed Qahtan, rejected the idea that Awlaki’s killing was a feather in the government’s cap. Instead, it showed “the regime’s failure and weakness to perform its duty to arrest and try Awlaki in accordance with the Constitution,” Qahtan said. “And it’s that that forced America to go after him using their own means.”
Although Yemen did not carry out the strike, which was launched from a secret American base, Yemeni officials were quick to trumpet the results. A high-ranking Yemeni security official called The New York Times at 10:15 a.m. local time on Friday, about twenty minutes after the attack.
The Defense Ministry broadcast the announcement an hour later, long before American officials made any public statement.

Rico says that, what with living in a neighborhood with a lot of Orthodox synagogues, doesn't al-Awlaki look like such a nice Jewish boy? (Just kidding.)

If they don't care, why should we?

Anthony Shadid and David Kirkpatrick have an article in The New York Times about the aftermath of the death of Anwa al-Awlaki:

Until about two years ago, few in Yemen or the Arab world had even heard of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born propagandist for Islamic radicalism whose death President Obama celebrated as a major blow against al-Qaeda. “A dime-a-dozen cleric” was one response, by Gregory Johnsen, a Princeton professor who studies Yemen. Another: “I don’t think your average Middle Easterner knows who Anwar al-Awlaki is,” said Emad Shahin, a scholar of political Islam at Notre Dame University.
While Western officials and commentators saw the end of Awlaki as another serious loss for al-Qaeda, a very different reception in the Middle East was the latest reminder of the disconnect between American aims and Arab perceptions. In a region transfixed by the drama of its revolts, Awlaki’s voice has had almost no resonance.
“I don’t think this will really get people’s interest, I can’t imagine why it would,” said Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center. “It seems totally irrelevant to how Arabs view the world right now. They don’t care about Awlaki.”
It is a remarkable feature in the Arab world these days how little al-Qaeda actually comes up in conversations. Even before the eruption of revolts and revolutions, a group that bore some responsibility for two wars and deepening American involvement from North Africa to Iraq was losing its significance. When Osama bin Laden died, his killing seemed more an epitaph for another era. As is often remarked, the events of 11 September seem a historical note to much of an Arab population where three in five are younger than thirty.
In that atmosphere, many saw Awlaki’s death as an essentially American story: here was a man that American attention helped create, and its Hellfire missiles killed, in a campaign born out of American fears of homegrown militancy. What distinguished Awlaki was not his ideas or influence but his American upbringing, passport and perfectly idiomatic English.
“When the Obama administration and the U.S. media started focusing on him, that is when al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula pushed him to the fore,” Johnsen said, referring to the group’s Yemeni branch. “They were taking advantage of the free publicity, if you will. And any stature he has now in the Arab world is because of that.”
Another analyst, Michael Wahid Hanna, a fellow at the Century Foundation, echoed the idea that Awlaki’s fluency in English generated more interest about him. “The US focus on Awlaki was a function of his language abilities and their understanding of his role as a recruiter and propagandist. If recent events can be said to further marginalize violent rejectionists such as Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri, then there is very little room for a virtual unknown such as Awlaki to command any serious attention.”
Hanna said that was even more the case with the Arab world having plunged into what he described as “this transformational juncture”.
Given the enormity of political turmoil that has toppled or threatened leaders across the region, many in the Arab world appeared to see Awlaki’s death not as a turn in the battle between the United States and al-Qaeda, but rather as a twist in the dramas of popular uprisings in Yemen and five other states. Commentators evaluated his killing mainly as a potential factor in the Obama administration’s relations with Yemen, where pressure on President Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down has intensified. “To the White House: This will not change our call for the departure of the Yemeni president,” was the headline in the Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq Alawsat.
Some feared Saleh would use the killing to try to convince the United States that he remained an essential ally in the battle against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Others hoped that the American perception of a defeat for al-Qaeda might encourage the Obama administration to turn its back on Saleh.
“For Yemenis, they are much more likely to see this in terms of the domestic drama,” said Sheila Carapico, an expert on Yemen and professor at the University of Richmond. “ al-Qaeda does have some role to play. But the standard narrative in Yemen is that Ali Abdullah Saleh cultivated al-Qaeda for a long time.”
Analysts are debating how much of an operational role Awlaki might have played in the group. One view is that Awlaki was more important as a source of inspiration than as a vital facilitator for attacks: Awlaki’s words appear to have touched a chord with a series of independent freelancers like the American Army officer of Palestinian descent who opened fire at Fort Hood in 2009, or the Pakistani-American who last year attempted to set off a bomb in Times Square. Those cases helped stoke national anxieties about a new wave of homegrown militants, evidence of which still seems incidental.
Whether the interest in his words was a cause or a symptom of their motivation to violence is, of course, impossible to answer, like the related question of whether they would have acted without him. But he is not unique in his role as the American voice of al-Qaeda recruiting. United States counterterrorism officials say there are as many as one hundred English-language sites offering militant Islamic views.
Samir Khan, a Saudi-born American who moved to Yemen two years ago and was killed along with Awlaki, produced Inspire magazine, an al-Qaeda publication aimed at English-speaking Muslims. Its issue celebrating the tenth anniversary of the 11 September attacks included an interview with Adam Yahiye Gadahn, an American convert and al-Qaeda supporter, also based in Yemen.
Johnsen argued that al-Qaeda would continue to try to court potential “lone wolves” inside the United States, as Awlaki did, because they cost little in training or organization, for a big potential payoff in attacks. But others in the Middle East suggested a turn toward audiences in Europe and the United States seemed symptomatic of their flagging audience here.
Assassinations of top leaders have done little to diminish the pull of militant organizations like Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon, organizations with mass constituencies, extensive charitable outreach, and pervasive grassroots networks. But then al-Qaeda shares almost none of those attributes; so amorphous it sometimes seems more a state of mind.
“It doesn’t really matter who leads Hamas,” said Hamid. “The organization is much stronger than the sum of its individuals. It probably does have more of an impact with a group like al-Qaeda, which is losing support, hemorrhaging support. It needs all the leaders it can get. It needs all the members it can get to stay viable.”

Rico says we'll just have to start killing the members, as well...

Email scam for the day

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Rico says who falls for this shut?
>

Diluting the title

Gardiner Harris has an article in The New York Times about changes in the health industry:

With pain in her right ear, Sue Cassidy went to a clinic. The doctor, wearing a white lab coat with a stethoscope in one pocket, introduced herself: “Hi. I’m Dr. Patti McCarver, and I’m your nurse.” And, with that, Dr. McCarver (photo) stuck a scope in Cassidy’s ear, noticed a buildup of fluid and prescribed an allergy medicine. It was something that will become increasingly routine for patients: a someone who is not a physician using the title of doctor.
Dr. McCarver calls herself a doctor because she returned to school to earn a doctorate last year, one of thousands of nurses doing the same recently. Doctorates are popping up all over the health professions, and the result is a quiet battle over not only the title “doctor”, but also the money, power, and prestige that often comes with it.
As more nurses, pharmacists, and physical therapists claim this honorific, physicians are fighting back. For nurses, getting doctorates can help them land a top administrative job at a hospital, improve their standing at a university, and win them more respect from colleagues and patients. But, so far, the new degrees have not brought higher fees from insurers for seeing patients nor greater authority from states to prescribe medicines.
Nursing leaders say that their push to have more nurses earn doctorates has nothing to do with their fight of several decades in state legislatures to give nurses more autonomy, money, and prescriptive power. But many physicians are suspicious, and say that once tens of thousands of nurses have doctorates, they will invariably seek more prescribing authority and more money. Otherwise, they ask, what is the point?
Dr. Roland Goertz, the board chairman of the American Academy of Family Physicians, says that physicians are worried that losing control over “doctor”, a word that has defined their profession for centuries, will be followed by the loss of control over the profession itself. He said that patients could be confused about the roles of various health professionals who all call themselves doctors.
“There is real concern that the use of the word ‘doctor’ will not be clear to patients,” he said.
So physicians and their allies are pushing legislative efforts to restrict who gets to use the title of doctor. A bill proposed in the New York State Senate would bar nurses from advertising themselves as doctors, no matter their degree. A law proposed in Congress would bar people from misrepresenting their education or license to practice. And laws already in effect in Arizona, Delaware ,and other states forbid nurses, pharmacists, and others to use the title “doctor” unless they immediately identify their profession.
The deeper battle is over who gets to treat patients first. Pharmacists, physical therapists, and nurses largely play secondary roles to physicians, since patients tend to go to them only after a prescription, a referral, or instructions from a physician. By requiring doctorates of new entrants, leaders of the pharmacy and physical therapy professions hope their members will be able to treat patients directly and thereby get a larger share of money spent on patient care.
As demand for health care services has grown, physicians have stopped serving as the sole gatekeepers for their patients’ entry into the system. So physicians must increasingly share their patients, not only with one another but also with other professions. Teamwork is the new mantra of medicine, and nurse practitioners and physician assistants (sometimes known as midlevels or physician extenders) have become increasingly important care providers, particularly in rural areas.
But, while all physician organizations support the idea of teamwork, not all physicians are willing to surrender the traditional understanding that they should be the ones to lead the team. Their training is so extensive, physicians argue, that they alone should diagnose illnesses. Nurses respond that they are perfectly capable of recognizing a vast majority of patient problems, and they have the studies to prove it. The battle over the title “doctor” is in many ways a proxy for this larger struggle.
For patients, the struggle has brought an increasing array of professionals trained to deal with their day-to-day health woes, but also at times confusion over who is responsible for their care and what sort of training they have.
Six to eight years of collegiate and graduate education generally earn pharmacists, physical therapists, and nurses the right to call themselves “doctors” compared with nearly twice that many years of training for most physicians. For decades, a bachelor’s degree was all that was required to become a pharmacist. That changed in 2004, when a doctorate replaced the bachelor’s degree as the minimum needed to practice. Physical therapists once needed only bachelor’s degrees, too, but the profession will require doctorates of all students by 2015— the same year that nursing leaders intend to require doctorates of all those becoming nurse practitioners.
Dr. Kathleen Potempa, dean of the University of Michigan School of Nursing and the president of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, said that the profession’s new doctoral degree, called the doctor of nursing practice, was simply about remaining current. “Knowledge is exploding, and the doctor of nursing practice degree evolved out of a grass-roots recognition that we need to continuously improve our curriculum,” she said.
Last year, 153 nursing schools gave doctor of nursing practice degrees to 7,037 nurses, compared with four schools that gave the degrees to 170 nurses in 2004, when the association of nursing schools voted to embrace the new degree. In 2008, there were 375,794 nurses with master’s degrees and 28,369 with doctorates, according to a recent government survey.
Dr. Potempa said that nurses with master’s degrees were every bit as capable of treating patients as those with doctorates.
Nursing is filled with multiple specialties requiring varying levels of education, from a high school equivalency degree for nursing assistants to a master’s degree for nurse practitioners. Those wishing to become nurse anesthetists will soon be required to earn doctorates, but otherwise there are presently no practical or clinical differences between nurses who earn master’s degrees and those who get doctorates.
Nurse practitioners must generally graduate from college and take an additional twelve to sixteen months of classes, which include months of treating patients for both mild and serious illnesses in clinics and hospitals under the watchful eyes of instructors. Those earning doctorates must generally take a further four semesters or twelve to sixteen months of additional classes.
While instruction at each school varies, Dr. McCarver took classes in statistics, epidemiology, and health care economics to earn her doctor of nursing practice degree. These additional classes, at Vanderbilt University, did not delve into how to treat specific illnesses, but taught Dr. McCarver the scientific and economic underpinnings of the care she was already providing, and how they fit into the nation’s health care system. Studies have shown that nurses with master’s level training offer care in many primary care settings that is as good as and sometimes better than care given by physicians, who generally have far more extensive training. And patients often express higher satisfaction with care delivered by nurses, studies show. Physicians say they are better at recognizing rare problems, something studies have trouble measuring.
The benefits to patients of nurses receiving doctorates is unclear, since there is no evidence that nurses with doctoral degrees provide better care than those with master’s degrees do.
Given the proven effectiveness of nurses with master’s degrees, even some nursing leaders have asked why nurses should be required to get doctorates. “If it ain’t broke, why fix it?” asked Dr. Afaf I. Meleis, dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.
Some health care economists say the push for clinical doctorates across health professions could be misguided. They argue that anything requiring students to spend more time and money getting trained will invariably result in longer waits and increased costs for patients, because fewer students will meet the increased requirements and those who do will eventually demand higher compensation.
“Everyone’s talking about improving patients’ access to care, bending the cost curve and creating team-based care,” said Erin Fraher, an assistant professor of surgery and family medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. “Where’s the evidence that moving to doctorates in pharmacy, physical therapy, and nursing achieves any of these?”
Depending on their area of specialty, nurse practitioners earn a median salary of $86,000 to $90,000 annually, according to the Medical Group Management Association— a bit less than half of what primary care physicians earn. Nurses with doctorates generally earn the same salaries as those with master’s degrees since insurers pay the same rates to both. Physician groups fear that the real reason behind the creation of the doctor of nursing practice degree is to persuade more state legislatures to grant nurses the right to treat patients without supervision from doctors. Twenty-three states allow nurses to practice without a physician’s supervision or collaboration, and most are in the mountain West and northern New England, areas that have trouble attracting enough physicians. Nursing groups have lobbied for years to increase that number. “This degree is just another step toward independent practice,” said Louis J. Goodman, chief executive of the Texas Medical Association.
Not true, Dr. Potempa said; the new degree simply ensures that nurses stay competent. “It’s not like a group of us woke up one day to create a degree as a way to compete with another profession,” she said. “Nurses are very proud of the fact that they’re nurses, and if nurses had wanted to be doctors, they would have gone to medical school.”

Rico says they're all whiners; they don't want the 'doctor' accomplishment diluted...

Ancient history for the day

Lizette Alvarez has an article about a quaint piece of presidential history in The New York Times:

A nuclear bomb shelter was a must-have in the 1950s and ’60s. Magazines displayed backyard do-it-yourself versions. Castro Convertibles pitched its foldaway “jet beds” as bunker-ready. And a pair of publicity-savvy newlyweds actually spent their honeymoon inside one for fourteen days.
President John F. Kennedy, who was facing a series of nail-biting face-offs with the Soviets, even recommended a fallout shelter for all Americans “as rapidly as possible” in a speech in October of 1961. Two months later, Kennedy was presented with his own top-secret tropical bomb shelter off Palm Beach, Florida, on an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean. Few even know it is here, but some area residents believe that the bunker is a must-see attraction that could put Peanut Island, a manmade islet, on the map.
Termed the Detachment Hotel in documents, the fallout shelter here was built by Navy Seabees in less than two weeks at the end of December in 1961, and sits a short stroll from a rambling colonial-style house that doubled as a United States Coast Guard station. Deftly camouflaged by trees, it was hard to spot. If people asked, they would be told it was a munitions depot, nothing more. Kennedy visited the bunker twice during a drill.
“The government never admitted it existed until 1974,” said Anthony Miller, a member of the executive board of the Palm Beach Maritime Museum, a nonprofit organization that leases part of the land on Peanut Island and runs a charter school and gives tours of the bunker and the former Coast Guard station. “But it was the worst-kept secret in Palm Beach.”
With the Soviets intent on shipping nuclear warheads to nearby Cuba, Kennedy was assured a radiation-proof haven a mere five-minute helicopter hop from his oceanfront winter home on millionaire’s row in Palm Beach. Peanut Island sits just between Palm Beach and its ritzy companion, Singer Island. It was intended to be used as a terminal for shipping peanut oil; that never happened, but the name stuck.
To ensure the president’s safety during the summer, when he visited the Kennedy compound on Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, a sister shelter was built on Nantucket Island in 1961; it has never been open to the public.
The Florida bunker, which fell into disrepair in the 1990s, was cleaned up and has been open for tours since 1999, shortly after the museum leased the land. Buried under layers of concrete and built with quarter-inch-thick walls of steel and lead, the bunker looks like something out of the television show Lost.
Inside, to the left of a long corrugated tunnel, lies the decontamination shower, the first hint that the possibility of a nuclear showdown was not believed to be so far-fetched. Eleven months after the shelter was built, the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted.
The shelter is decorated as it was then, more or less, with replica pieces and a presidential seal. The décor is fittingly rustic, a far cry from Jacqueline Kennedy’s sensibilities. There is room enough to hold thirty people on fifteen metal bunk beds for thirty days, if not very comfortably. A Taylor Transmitter ham radio sits on a desk in a corner. “His mobile phone, back in the day,” Miller said.
Shelves are stocked with giant tins of waterless hand cleaner (today’s Purell), cans lined with lead that contained drinking water (no longer advisable), deodorant to clean clothes, petroleum jelly, castor oil and ample Army K-rations. Gas masks sat at the ready. An escape hatch lies at one end, just in case the Russians were coming. In one corner, there is a rocking chair, a nod to Kennedy’s bad back.
But just how long the museum can keep operating the bunker is another matter. The museum has been running at a loss for years now, Miller said, and the curators are embroiled in a decade-long tussle with a few Palm Beach County commissioners to open a full-service restaurant, as many museums do, to help them foot the bill. A proposal will be put forward again soon to the commission, although some of its members are leery about whether the restaurant plans to serve liquor. They are concerned for security on an island with no police force at the ready. There are signs of détente, however, and Miller is hopeful.
Priscilla Taylor, a county commissioner who said she was open to a restaurant if concerns were addressed, said the issue might be reconsidered. “It’s a beautiful facility,” Taylor said. “The bunker has a story to tell, and they should be included in anything we do to promote tourism for the island.”

Rico says it may have been the worst-kept secret in Palm Beach, but both he and his mother lived on Nantucket, and he never heard of the shelter from the close-mouthed New Englanders...

Bitter lessons

The New York Times has an editorial about anti-terrorism:

One of the bitter lessons of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, was the need for better coordination and sharing of intelligence among the nation’s security agencies, to flag dangerous people entering the country. But there were also well-founded concerns about how well that system was working, and whether it was being abused.
Ten years later, files released by the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act show that the government’s bloated terrorist watch list remains a flawed security tool in need of greater transparency and accountability. There are longstanding concerns about implementation and accuracy, including the omission of names from the list that properly belong there. There also has been a persistent problem of flagging the wrong people, including an eight-year-old and at least one senator, who then have serious trouble getting their names removed.
The ninety pages of newly disclosed files, described by The Times’ Charlie Savage last week, included a December 2010 memorandum to FBI field offices revealing that even a not-guilty verdict may not always be enough to get someone off the list, if agents retain “reasonable suspicion” that the person might have ties to terrorism.
The database now has over four hundred thousand names, including about eight thousand Americans. About sixteen thousand individuals are barred from flying. Timothy Healy, the director of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, which reviews requests to add or remove names from the watch list, says the multilayered process for vetting nominees for the list balances civil liberties and security well.
But the unwieldy size of the database raises doubts. So does the disturbing absence of procedures to notify people who are on the watch list, or to give them a chance to see and challenge allegations against them. Inclusion on the watch list can keep people off planes, subject them to delays and extra invasive scrutiny at airports, traffic stops and border crossings, and prevent noncitizens from entering the country. The security agencies have stepped up efforts to avoid mistaken identifications, but there remains a need for Congress to make sure the system’s flaws are fixed.

Rico says it's one list he's happy not to be on...

Ron Paul disagrees

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiuqBJvSkLA&sns=em

Too fat for the job?

Frank Bruni has an op-ed piece in The New York Times about the size of Chris Christie:

There are a great many things that Chris Christie is indeed too fat for.
Spelunking, for one. Wriggling through subterranean caverns is safest for those of a lesser circumference.
A middle seat in coach. That would be cruel to the people on the window and aisle, and some carriers might forbid it, as the movie director Kevin Smith, ejected not long ago from a Southwest Airlines flight, can roundly attest.
But the presidency? That’s ludicrous. Downgrade Christie for his truculent style. Reject him for his limited experience. But don’t dwell on his heft, at least not to the extent that many Americans have been whispering (and some are now outright saying) you should. Girth doesn’t equal character. And mettle has better measurements than the number of scoops in your post-dinner sundae or miles in your pre-breakfast run.
First off, a reality check: the New Jersey governor is not yet in the hunt for the Republican nomination, and may never be. But last week, as Christie speculation reached a fever pitch, attention to his corpulence hit critical mass, with the question changing from whether he was too overweight to win to whether he was so overweight that he didn’t deserve to.
The tone was sneering. Eugene Robinson noted, in a column about Christie’s size in The Washington Post, that the governor “speaks often about the need for officials to display leadership. Well, Governor Christie, lead thyself,” Robinson wrote, later adding: “Eat a salad and take a walk.”
In a Bloomberg View column, Michael Kinsley was blunter and meaner, asserting that Christie “cannot be president: He is just too fat.” That evaluation pertained not to Christie’s ability to seduce voters, but to his character, writ in love handles and chins. They symbolized insufficient discipline, in Kinsley’s estimation, and Christie shouldn’t be granted access to the Oval Office “unless he goes on a diet and shows he can stick to it.”
Let’s talk about discipline. It’s not an attribute that carries through in a consistent, coherent fashion to all facets of a person’s life; disciplined or undisciplined behavior on one front doesn’t augur identical behavior on others. Someone can be a flawless steward of his or her physique and a wanton lunatic in all else. Ever been to Hollywood?
Discipline can also be overrated. A vegan-come-lately, President Clinton fought and often lost his struggles with diverse appetites, succumbing to a burger here and a Lewinsky there, and President Obama was reportedly still sneaking cigarettes well into his 2008 campaign. He can be seen chomping on Nicorette gum to this day.
Did that or does that make either leader less suited to office than the second President Bush, who seemingly kept his midlife resolve never to touch booze again, worked out religiously, maintained an early bedtime, and vacationed like clockwork at his ranch? Bush was arguably more disciplined in those arenas than his predecessor and successor combined, but discipline was entwined, as it often is, with an absolute certainty and even inflexibility. And those qualities arguably had consequences far greater than Christie’s evident gluttony might.
Let’s talk as well about that gluttony. It may say much more about his genetic allotment or early rearing than his resolve. Over recent years, there has been more and more scientific consideration of obesity as an expression largely of hereditary and environmental factors beyond a person’s ready control, and there has been evidence that one person’s fatness versus another’s thinness may to a significant extent be foreordained. It’s the eyes, not the thighs, that are windows to the soul.
No two stomachs are precisely alike, and I know whereof I speak. I was born with such a fierce, unappeasable hunger that, as a toddler, I threw screaming fits if I didn’t get, say, a third hamburger. And I grew up in a family where food was everywhere and food was love and you ate in celebratory moments and in sad ones and to stave off boredom and just because Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom or Monday Night Football was on.
The thinness that I managed in college didn’t reflect laudable self-control. It reflected bulimia and laxatives. My borderline obesity in my mid-thirties wasn’t a sign of indolence and drift. Professionally, I was working harder and more reliably than ever. And my sustained anguish over my waistline and tortured efforts to regulate it bespoke a kind of shallowness and vanity that I’m not looking for in politicians. It seems too prevalent among them already. I’d prefer a big fat president, governor, or senator to one who’s constantly darting behind closed doors for a makeup touch-up or posing at a predetermined flattering angle for the C-Span camera. Ever been to the Capitol?
In their columns, Robinson and Kinsley raise at least one worthy concern: the excess weight on Christie, 49, endangers his health and potentially exacerbates other ailments, like his asthma, and puts him in greater jeopardy of an array of diseases. It would be right and responsible for voters to think at least somewhat about whether a Christie presidency or, for that matter, governorship, would be sidelined or shortened by illness.
But should that thinking be any more pivotal than questions about Ronald Reagan’s energy and acuity when he ran for re-election in 1984? He was 73 at the time, and John McCain was 72 when he squared off against Obama in 2008. Both men were thus more likely than their rivals to die or become incapacitated in office. But that didn’t prevent Reagan’s victory and wasn’t a principal cause of McCain’s defeat. Christie’s weight— a risk factor, not a crystal ball— shouldn’t be accorded more importance than the advanced ages of those two candidates were.
Still, it’s discussed with an entirely different kind of emotionalism and censure. That’s partly because it’s seen as changeable, as his fault, and partly because the growing prevalence of obesity throughout America has ratcheted up the country’s revulsion at, and demonizing of, obese people themselves. When I listen to the talk around me, I detect more sympathy for smokers or alcoholics than for overeaters, though the latter are in the grip of a similarly compulsive and perhaps addictive behavior, one with a twist that can make it even harder to control. It can’t be quit entirely. Cold turkey isn’t an option. Or, rather, it is, but just two slices, not four, with no mayo, on a multigrain roll. And moderation is often the trickiest adjustment of all.
Christie’s weight presents optical challenges, no doubt about it. Many voters aren’t going to want to look at him as often as they must look at a president, and they aren’t accustomed to prominent politicians of his dimensions. The last truly fat president, William Howard Taft, who weighed more than 330 pounds at his apogee, served near the start of the twentieth century. There was no Bill O’Reilly, Rachel Maddow, or David Letterman— who all make ceaseless, merciless sport of Christie’s contours— during those blinder, gentler times.
Christie may figure out some way to drop scores of pounds, as Mike Huckabee got lavish praise for doing before his presidential bid. But did you see Huckabee when he provided television commentary at the Iowa straw poll in August? What’s lost can often be regained; the physical is less permanent than the spiritual. That’s why we should focus less on it.
Would I advise Christie to eat a salad? Sure. I’m trying to eat more of them myself. But it’s Robinson, Kinsley, and the rest of the fat police whom I’d like to see take a walk.

Rico says far be if from him to criticize another big guy (though Christie is way bigger, at almost Taft's weight, than Rico at his worst), but the guy's definitely gotta drop some pounds if he's gonna run, or he won't make a second term... (But 'roundly attest'? Good one.)

Cooperating with evil

Maureen Dowd weighs in on the Supreme Court in The New York Times:

Maybe it’s the Mario Lanza in him. But Nino Scalia relishes being operatically imprudent. The Supreme Court justice’s latest supreme lapse of judgment involves poking his nose in a local legal wrangle about the place where I slept for four years: the Catholic University dorms.
In a speech last weekend at Duquesne University Law School, a Catholic institution in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Justice Scalia defended religion in public life: “Our educational establishment these days, while so tolerant of and even insistent on diversity in all other aspects of life, seems bent on eliminating the diversity of moral judgment, particularly moral judgment based on religious views,” the devout Catholic said.
As an example, he cited the lawsuit filed by the “notoriously litigious” George Washington University law professor John Banzhaf against Catholic University’s new ban on coed dorms.
In June, the president of Catholic U, John Garvey, wrote an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal explaining why, as a father of five, he felt the need to resort to a “countercultural” and “slightly old-fashioned remedy”, ending 25 years of coed dorms. He said he believed single-sex dorms would “improve the practice of virtue”, reducing binge drinking and “the culture of hooking up”.
Using a formula that’s the inverse of Sex and the City, Garvey wrote: “Rates of depression reach twenty percent for young women who have had two or more sexual partners in the last year, almost double the rate for women who have had none. Sexually active young men do more poorly than abstainers in their academic work.” He made note of the sad slide from proud feminism to proud sluttiness. “I would have thought that young women would have a civilizing influence on young men,” he wrote. “Yet the causal arrow seems to run the other way.”
Banzhaf, who calls Garvey’s arguments “totally secular”, pronounced himself “astonished that a justice of the nation’s highest court would single out and prejudge a legal proceeding which could set an important precedent, and could one day even come before the Court”.
As the Supreme Court gets ready to go into session on Monday, its six Catholic justices were set to merge church and state by attending the traditional first-Sunday-in-October Red Mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral. (It’s hard to believe there’s no Protestant on the Supreme Court.) Through the years, the presiding clergy have aimed their homilies against abortion, gay marriage and “humanism”. Justices of other faiths have attended; but as Dahlia Lithwick wrote in Slate: “Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg stopped attending the Red Mass altogether after hearing her very first homily, which she has described as ‘outrageously anti-abortion’.”
In 2007, there was a kerfuffle about Catholic dominance on the court, because the five justices who pushed to uphold the ban on “partial-birth abortion” were all Catholic men appointed by conservative presidents. The church has aggressively meddled in politics on abortion, trying to defeat candidates who support abortion rights and prevent some liberal politicians from receiving Communion. But American bishops have been inconsistent in preaching their values.
They do not try to bring down politicians who supported the Iraq war, even though Pope John Paul II spoke out against it, and sent a Vatican cardinal to warn George W. Bush that the war would be a “disaster” that would “destroy human life”. They do not express outrage at Republican audiences that cheer for executions, or target pols who brag on the death penalty, even though the Pope issued an encyclical against “the culture of death”, saying modern states have so many ways to protect citizens that the necessity for executions is “very rare, if not practically nonexistent”.
Scalia, confident in his own infallibility, dissented. As he wrote in a religious journal in 2002, he does not find the death penalty immoral, and he believes that as the “minister of God,” government has powers to get “revenge” and “execute wrath.” He’s clearly more an Old Testament guy than New, or he would know that some prisoners get falsely accused and nailed to the cross (Matthew 26:59-66).
Now Scalia has dissented from the opinion of a second pope on the issue. Pope Benedict sent Georgia state officials a letter last month asking for clemency for Troy Davis, but the very Catholic Supreme Court denied a last-minute stay of execution. In his Duquesne speech, Scalia said: “If I thought that Catholic doctrine held the death penalty to be immoral, I would resign. I could not be a part of a system that imposes it.”
My family priest, Father Kevin O’Neil, teaches about “cooperation in evil” in Catholic moral theology. If you facilitate something that has been deemed wrong, like taking a human life, are you cooperating in evil? Maybe the Supreme Court should ask itself that question. Are you “cooperating in evil,” Justice Scalia?

Rico says that “notoriously litigious” is pretty funny, coming from a Supreme Court justice; that's all they do all day...

Downward spiral

Anthony Shadid wrote an article for The New York Times about the situation in Syria:

The semblance of a civil war has erupted in Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, where armed protesters now call themselves revolutionaries, gun battles erupt as often as every few hours, security forces and opponents carry out assassinations, and rifles, costing as much as $2,000 apiece, flood the city from abroad, residents say.
Since the start of the uprising in March, Homs has stood as one of Syria’s most contested cities, its youth among the best organized and most tenacious. But across the political spectrum, residents speak of a decisive shift in past weeks, as a largely peaceful uprising gives way to a grinding struggle that has made Homs violent, fearful, and determined.
Analysts caution that the strife in Homs is still specific to the city itself, and many in the opposition reject violence, because they fear it will serve as a pretext for the government’s brutal crackdown.
But in the targeted killings, the rival security checkpoints, and the hardening of sectarian sentiments, the city offers a dark vision that could foretell the future of Syria’s uprising as both the government and the opposition ready themselves for a protracted struggle over the endurance of a four-decade dictatorship.
“We are done with the protesting phase,” said a 21-year-old engineering student here who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “We’ve now entered a more important phase.”
Homs is a microcosm of Syria, with a Sunni Muslim majority and minorities of Christians and Alawis, a heterodox Muslim sect from which President Bashar al-Assad draws much of his leadership.
Six months of protests and crackdown here have frayed ties among those communities, forging the conditions for urban strife. An armed opposition is battling security forces in the most restive neighborhoods. Insurgents have tried to protect the same peaceful protesters the government has relentlessly sought to arrest. Tension has grown so dire that members of one sect are reluctant to travel to neighborhoods populated by other sects. Men in some parts of the city openly carry weapons.
Perhaps the most dramatic facet of the struggle is a series of assassinations this past week that have left nearly a dozen professors, doctors, and informers dead in a paroxysm of violence that echoes the sectarian vendettas still besetting Iraq. Unlike the uprising’s early days, when the government exercised a near monopoly on violence, fear is beginning to spread in the other direction, as insurgents kill government supporters and informers, residents say.
One of those killed was Dr. Hassan Eid, the chief of thoracic surgery at the National Hospital and an Alawi from Al Zuhra, one of a handful of neighborhoods where his sect makes up a majority and where buildings and streets are still plastered with the portraits of Assad. He was shot to death in front of his house as he headed off to work, residents said.
al-Ouruba, a government-aligned newspaper, called him a “symbol of dedication” and said he treated victims of the violence “without discriminating between any of them.” But in Sunni Muslim locales, residents called him a government informer who helped security forces detain the wounded who were treated at his facility. By nightfall, a hint of triumphalism echoed in parts of the city, as some people celebrated his death. “He was responsible for the death of many young men,” said a 65-year-old resident of Homs, who gave his name as Rajab. “He was killed because he deserved it.”
Soon after dawn the next day, gunfire erupted as children went to school. “They shot Abu Ali,” an old man who collects garbage and cleans the streets in the neighborhood said a short time later. Abu Ali, the name most knew him by, was another informant, the residents said.
“The guys were aware of him a long time ago,” said an activist in his late 40s who gave his name as Abu Ghali. “But now it’s different. He kept reporting, so they had to kill him. I don’t think he died right away though.” Abu Ghali added that it was not difficult to get information on informers. “You can do anything with money,” he said. “You just bribe an officer, be generous with him, and you can get all you want.”
The killings took place during two bloody days in Homs, a city along the Orontes River and not too far from the historic medieval castle Krak des Chevaliers. Residents said that, after Abu Ali died, three Alawi teachers were killed at a school in the neighborhood of Baba Amr. (Government newspapers did not confirm those deaths.) In the afternoon, Mohammed Ali Akil, an assistant dean at al-Baath University in Homs, was found dead in his car on a highway. Students said he had shown support for the uprising and criticized Assad’s leadership in his lectures. “It is true that we were scared during your lectures, but you were a wonderful professor,” a student posted on Facebook. “May you rest in peace. We won’t forget you.”
Near the Lebanese border— where residents say weapons flow across a porous border from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and even Qatar— Homs strikes an odd posture. Many of its Sunni residents are at once fearful and proud, empowered by their opposition to dictatorship. Many Alawis are terrified; they are often the victims of the most vulgar stereotypes and, in popular conversation, uniformly associated with the leadership.
In Alawi villages, only government television is watched. To do so in Sunni neighborhoods amounts to treason. There, al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya are the stations of choice. Suspicions give currency to the wildest of rumors; in one, a female butcher in Homs named Um Khaled asked the armed gangs to bring her the bodies of Alawis they capture so that she could cut them up and market the meat to her customers.
Centuries-old connections between sects still knit together the city, even as the suggestion of civil war threatens to sever them forever. The countryside, residents say, is roiled by far more sectarian hatred. Government checkpoints separate Sunni from Alawi. “One side kills an Alawi, the other kills a Sunni,” a 46-year-old activist said.
The uprising’s overall toll has been grim: By the United Nations’ count, more than 2,700 people have died. The revolt still draws much of its strength from the countryside, and the two largest cities, Aleppo and Damascus, remain relatively quiescent. Though protests have flagged lately, Homs has stayed defiant.
Armed men often protect the perimeter of protests in places like Bab al-Sba'a, Khaldiya, and Baba Amr, where some stores are shut and buildings are scarred by broken windows and bullet holes. Some of them have carried out the assassinations of informers, or awayniyeh, as they call them. Others scout government checkpoints and occasionally set up their own, temporary versions.
“They have rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikovs,” said a driver in his late fifties who lives in the neighborhood of Khaldiya. “They should be armed,” he added. “They protect us.”
A woman who gave her name as Suleima lives on al-Joura Street in Baba Amr. She earns a living by preparing kibbe, a dish of minced meat with cracked wheat, for wealthier clients in other neighborhoods of Homs. For three days, gunfire kept her inside her house and telephones were down. “You never know when they will start shooting again,” she said. Angry and exhausted, she professed neutrality in a conflict that makes such a notion ever more difficult. “Neighbors accuse me of being with the regime, so I laugh,” she said at her house, which she shares with her daughter. “What on earth did this regime give me? Absolutely nothing. But neither did the revolutionaries. I work, I eat. If I don’t work, I starve. At least I worked before. Now I’m at home, hardly leaving it, and hardly making a living.”

Rico says this all sounds very unpleasant; he's happy we don't have a revolution here... (But kibbe is too close to kibble to sound appetizing.)

History for the day

On 2 October 1967, Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, the first black person to serve on the high court.

Scary moments in Syria

Nada Bakri has an article in The New York Times about Syria:

Dozens of pro-government Syrians attempted to assault an American diplomatic delegation that included the ambassador, striking its motorcade as it traveled to a meeting with an opposition figure in Damascus, and then trying to break into an office where the meeting was held, essentially trapping the participants inside for ninety minutes.
The United States protested the episode and suggested that the attackers had been deliberately allowed to harass the diplomatic delegation by Syrian security forces, who arrived belatedly to provide safe passage for the Americans to leave. The ambassador, Robert S. Ford, an outspoken critic of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, was reported safe, but some vehicles in his motorcade were damaged.
“We condemn this unwarranted attack in the strongest possible terms,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a statement. “Ambassador Ford and his aides were conducting normal embassy business, and this attempt to intimidate our diplomats through violence is wholly unjustified.”
It was the second attack on American diplomats in Syria since the antigovernment uprising started in mid-March. In July, after Ford’s visit to Hama, a restive city in central Syria, supporters of the government attacked the embassy’s compound.
Hassan Abdel-Azim, who leads the National Democratic Gathering, was the host for the meeting with Ford’s delegation at Abdel-Azim’s office building. He said that about one hundred protesters were shouting outside the building “from the moment he arrived”. He said the protesters tried to break into the office, but he and others were able to stop them by locking all the gates.
Abdel-Azim is a moderate politician who has called for an end to the six-month crackdown on pro-democracy protesters as a prerequisite for a dialogue with Assad and his government.
Ford and his staff returned safely to the embassy.
In Washington, the State Department deputy spokesman, Mark Toner, said the harassment began as Ford’s group traveled to Abdel-Azim’s office building. He said “a crowd of demonstrators tried to assault Ambassador Ford and embassy colleagues” as they were preparing to meet Abdel-Azim. “The mob was violent,” Toner said in a statement. “It tried, unsuccessfully, to attack embassy personnel while they were inside several embassy vehicles, seriously damaging the vehicles in the process.” He suggested that Syrian security forces had been tardy in assisting Ford.
At least 2,700 people have been killed since the uprising started, according to the United Nations, and thousands have been arrested. The government disputes those numbers and says it is facing armed groups who have killed at least seven hundred police officers and soldiers.
The state news agency reported that seven soldiers and police officers had been killed in a military operation in Rastan, according to Reuters. The statement also said the military had “inflicted big losses on the armed terrorist groups” the government says it has been fighting there since earlier in the week.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry accused Washington of providing verbal support to those who attack Syria’s military.

Rico says we ought to be providing more than verbal support; Assad's another one of those asshole rulers who'd gotta go...

Scam email for the day

Rico says he wishes there was some way to punish these assholes, but there's not:

Hello,
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davi@un.org

Rico says you'll note that the money is never in their account...

Not a nice bunch of guys

J. David Goodman has an article in The New York Times about Bahrain:

A court in Bahrain recently sentenced a protester to death for killing a police officer in March, and it issued harsh prison terms to medical workers who treated protesters wounded during the months of unrest there this spring, according to the official Bahrain News Agency. The punishments drew strong criticism from rights groups.
The agency reported that eight people it identified as doctors who worked at a central hospital in the capital, Manama, received fifteen-year sentences. Other medical personnel at the hospital, the Salmaniya Medical Complex, Bahrain’s largest public hospital, were given terms of between five and fifteen years.
The sentences were the latest sign that the country’s Sunni monarchy would continue to deal severely with those involved in widespread protests this year, mostly held by members of its repressed Shi'ite majority. Much of that effort has been focused on the doctors and nurses who treated demonstrators.
At the height of the protests, security forces commandeered the Salmaniya hospital and arrested dozens of doctors and nurses. Rights activists have since accused the government of having made systematic efforts to deny medical services to wounded protesters. The international relief organization Doctors Without Borders stopped working in Bahrain last month after its offices were raided.
Reacting to the verdicts and punishments, Physicians for Human Rights, an advocacy group in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called on the government of Bahrain to set them aside. “These are medical professionals who were treating patients during a period of civil unrest, as their ethical duty requires them to do,” the group’s chief policy officer, Hans Hogrefe, said in a statement on the group’s website. “To imprison them as part of a political struggle is unconscionable.”
The Bahrain News Agency, in describing the sentences handed down by a security court, said the medical workers had taken over the hospital and used it as a base for antigovernment activity. They were convicted of possessing fuel bombs and light weapons, confiscating medical equipment, and “fabricating stories and lies”.
The medical professionals have said it was their duty to treat anyone who arrived at the hospital and have rejected accusations that treating protesters was akin to supporting their cause.
In the case of the officer’s death, the court said the convicted man, identified as Ali Yusuf Abdulwahab al-Taweel, had run down the officer with his car during anti-government protests in Sitra, an oil hub just south of the capital, and was guilty of an act of terror. Another man, driving a second car, was sentenced to life in prison for his involvement. Sitra, known for its activist Shi'ite population, was a stronghold of antigovernment activists at the height of the demonstrations.
The government of Bahrain, with help from Saudi Arabia, violently quashed the country’s peaceful protest movement in March. Despite the crackdown, demonstrations still occur regularly, especially in places like Sitra, where youths battle security forces after sundown. Graffiti clutters almost every wall there. “We will only kneel before God,” one slogan reads.
“The government has turned to using the law for repression,” said Mohammed al-Maskati, the head of the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights.
The security court upheld life sentences for eight prominent political leaders, The Associated Press reported. Earlier in the week, the court sentenced 32 people, including at least two members of the Bahrain national handball team, to fifteen years in prison for protesting illegally.
“They are sending a very negative message to the international community that Bahrain is not moving in the right direction in terms of respecting human rights,” Maskati said.
Human rights groups say that, since the unrest began in the Persian Gulf kingdom of only about 525,000 citizens, 34 people have been killed, more than 1,400 have been arrested and as many as 3,600 people have been fired from their jobs. Four people also died in custody after torture, the rights groups say.

Rico says 'fabricating stories and lies'? Ooohh, like no one in the Middle East has ever done that before, but it looks like the Bahrainis stepped in the Shi'ite again. (Rico says he's trying to make "Bah. Rain." work, but hasn't come up with the right place yet... )

Drunk would've been illegal enough

Abby Goodnough has an article in The New York Times about an unlucky young man:

A fatal accident that the police say involved an illegal immigrant driving drunk has stirred outrage in Massachusetts and put Governor Deval Patrick on the defensive for his resistance to a federal program intended to deport criminals.

According to the police, the immigrant, Nicolas Guaman (photo), who is from Ecuador, struck and killed a young motorcyclist in Milford last month while intoxicated, dragging him for a quarter of a mile. Guaman has a previous criminal record, the police said, and many here have pointed to his case as an example of why the federal program, known as Secure Communities, is necessary. Under Secure Communities, the fingerprints of anyone booked into jail by the state and local police are sent through the FBI to the Department of Homeland Security, which tracks immigration violations. Immigration agents then decide whether to deport immigrants flagged by such checks.
Patrick, a Democrat, announced that Massachusetts would not participate in Secure Communities, citing concerns that it casts too wide a net and led to the deportation of immigrants with no criminal histories. Two other Democratic governors, Pat Quinn of Illinois and Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, have also rejected the program, though the Obama administration has announced plans to expand it nationwide, with or without states’ support, by the end of 2013.
The Guaman case and several others, including that of Onyango Obama, a Kenyan uncle of President Obama, who was arrested last month outside Boston on drunken-driving charges and found to be in violation of a 1992 deportation order, have become part of a growing debate over whether Massachusetts is too easy on illegal immigrants.
Critics, including some Democrats, are also asking why Patrick, a close ally of Obama’s, would reject a program central to Obama’s immigration enforcement plan. The Obama administration has taken steps recently to focus its deportation strategy on illegal immigrants who have been convicted of violent and drug-related crimes.
“Unfortunately, the governor doesn’t think it’s a serious enough problem to deal with,” said State Senator Richard T. Moore, a Democrat whose district includes Milford. “We’re hearing from the public constantly: what are we going to do about this problem?” Moore is co-sponsoring new bipartisan legislation meant to crack down on illegal immigration, in part by imposing tougher penalties, including possible jail time, for driving without a license and not registering cars properly. Guaman was not carrying a license at the time of his arrest.
Onyango Obama, the half brother of the president’s father, who did have a driver’s license, was taken into custody on an immigration detainer after his arrest in Framingham on 24 August. Immigration and Customs Enforcement released him on 8 September but has refused to say why, citing federal privacy laws.
In another recent case, a Mexican immigrant was arrested on a charge of drunken driving last weekend in Boxborough, and the police said he had five previous drunken-driving convictions. The man, Eduardo A. Torres, had been deported three times previously, according to immigration officials.
Moore joined three county sheriffs at a State House news conference calling for Patrick to embrace the Secure Communities program immediately, while Senator Scott Brown, a Republican facing re-election next year, urged Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, to “proceed with the full activation” of the program in Massachusetts. He also suggested that Patrick’s resistance would delay the program’s activation in Massachusetts; it currently operates only in Boston. But a spokesman for the immigration agency, which runs the program, said that would not be a factor.
The sheriffs of Bristol, Plymouth, and Worcester Counties, all Republicans, said they were working with federal officials to adopt elements of the program in their counties immediately. Patrick said that the state already sends fingerprints of arrestees to the FBI, which is free to share them with immigration agents. The state also sends fingerprints of convicted criminals directly to the immigration agency once they arrive in state prisons, he said.
“This is about grandstanding and headlines,” Patrick said of his critics on the issue. “Meanwhile, the public should know that every fingerprint is sent to the federal government; they should know that every felony is referred to the federal government.”
It is far from certain that Moore’s bill will pass both houses of the legislature; similar crackdowns in recent years have passed the Senate but not the more liberal House of Representatives. But Eva Millona, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, said she was worried: “We seem to continue to lose supporters/” Millona added that it was unfair to connect drunken driving with illegal immigration. “Drunk driving is another issue, and people should be punished for it,” she said. “But immigration status has nothing to do with it.”

Rico says that "Eduardo A. Torres had been deported three times previously". Yeah, that worked real well... Maybe it's time to start removing body parts (hey, just a fingertip or an earlobe or something) before we send them back; when they get tired of having missing parts, maybe they'll stay home...

Whup-ass

Scam for the day

From: george.shipman1@gmail.com

Dear Friend,

Greetings to you and your family, Firstly, I want say I am deeply sorry for bumping into your privacy. I am presently with the USA Marine Corps of 29 Commando Regiment Royal Artillery at Camp Leatherneck which is based in Helmand Province Afghanistan; I may have failed in my loyalty as a service man but firstly please I ask for forgiveness. I am seeking your assistances to evacuate the sum of 2,400,000.00 (two million four hundred thousand dollars) to you, as far as I can be assured that it will be safe in your care until I complete my service here.

I want you to be aware that this money was discovered in a concealed barrels with piles of weapons and ammunition at a location during a rescue operation,and it was agreed by all party present that the money be shared amongst us, this was quite an illegal thing to do that is why I have asked to be forgiven, but I tell you what no compensation can make up for the risks we have taken with our lives here in Afghan. I was given my own part of this money, but to keep this lump sum of money became a problem for me, but so far so good I have been able to secure it with a Dutch contact working here at Camp Holland, which is a Dutch military base, and his office enjoys some immunity,and this gladden my heart because i was able to get the packages out to a safe location entirely out of trouble spot. My Dutch contact does not know the true contents in those package, but I was able to convince him that it belongs to an American who died in an air raid by enemy small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenade attacks and he is by name Marine James Robert Wright, from Juliet Company, 42 Commando Royal Marines, serving as part of Combined Force Nad 'Ali (North), and was killed in Helmand province and before giving up, trusted me to hand over the package to his family.

I have checked and balanced all measures to get this package out to a safer country for you to pick up and i have come up with a very high tech procedure which I will discuss with you when I am sure that you are willing to get alone and assist me. One passionate appeal I will make to you is, please do not discuss this matter with a third party, should you have reasons to reject this offer, please kindly destroy this mail as any leakage of this information will spell doom for us. I will be here until the first quarter of next year by his grace, I must confess it is not as easy for us here because our people don't really understand what we are passing through, but this is a choice to serve the nation and has always been the choice of every service men. God bless you.

Respectfully,

Captain George Shipman

Rico says that this has SO much wrong with it. If you email him back, a) you're an idiot and deserve the screwing you'll get and b) don't come crying to Rico when it happens...