Dumb criminals for the day

Mike Newall has an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about a witness no longer:

A witness who later recanted in the slaying of a mother of four killed by a stray bullet was beaten to death Saturday night in West Philadelphia, police said Sunday. Investigators were not sure whether the killing was related to the woman's death and were exploring other possible motives. Akeel Prout, 26, was punched and stomped by six men about 10 p.m. on the 500 block of North 55th Street, police said. One of the assailants reached into the victim's pocket and took something before fleeing.
Prout was taken, unconscious and bleeding, to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where he died at 10:26 p.m., police said.
Prout, who lived in the 5200 block of Berks Street in the city's Wynnefield section, had six prior arrests, including for drug offenses, and was on probation for a weapons conviction. No one answered the door at the home Sunday afternoon although people could be heard talking inside.
Prout had been a witness in the killing of Hafeezah Nurid-Din (photo), an Overbrook mother and schoolteacher killed by a stray bullet through the heart in October of 2011.
According to police, Prout identified the gunman as Daniel Shelley, now nineteen. Police said Shelley, seeking revenge for a shooting that wounded his brother months earlier, rode up on his bicycle and opened fire on a group of young men. The intended targets fled unscathed, but a bullet hit Nurid-Din outside her Malvern Avenue home as she returned from a grocery store.
At Shelley's preliminary hearing in February of 2012, Prout recanted, testifying she did not know Shelley and had never seen him.
He acknowledged being at the scene, but testified he only helped put the dying woman, whom he knew in passing, into a car so a relative could take her to a hospital.
Despite the recantation, prosecutors planned to use at trial Prout's statement to investigators, which was read into the record at the preliminary hearing.
According to court records, a status hearing is set for March 1 in Shelley's case with an anticipated trial date of 15 April. The records also show that while in jail, Shelley was charged with possessing a weapon for possible use in an escape. A trial is set for 22 February on that charge.

Rico says any shooter who rides a bicycle to a shooting should get extra years for that...

History for the day

On 7 January 1979, Vietnamese forces captured the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, overthrowing the Khmer Rouge government.

Paper is the problem

Rico says the solution to the big-city newspaper problem (like with the New Orleans Times-Picayune, as 60 Minutes explained this last Sunday) is not with the newspaper itself, but the delivery system.
Imagine, however, a public display like this one that, instead of a stack of papers inside, had a card reader so you you use your credit or debit card to 'read' as much of the paper (which we'll now have to call something else, since it'll be electronic) via a touch-screen as you want, and are charged accordingly. (Still have to have those ads, too, to help offset the cost.)
Bummer for the paper makers (good for the trees, though) and the printers' unions, but good for reporters and photographers and the local advertisers...
There'd be the Home Edition, too, of course, which you'd download on your computer, but this would solve the distribution problem for people without a Mac (what, you think they should have a Windows POS? Nah.) at home.

History for the day

On 6 January 1919, the 26th president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, died in Oyster Bay, New York at the age of sixty.

Rico says that Teddy had more style than most Presidents (and used more gubs than many of them put together), and had an entire class of toys named after him, but why is it that Rico can only hear Sean Connery's voice (from The Wind and the Lion) saying his name?

Anonymity

Krista Mahr has a Time article about the recent rape in India:

As the ashes of the young New Delhi rape victim were scattered in the Ganges this week, a new debate started to take shape about the chilling attack that has sent India into a period of deep introspection. For weeks, protesters and newspapers have used a series of symbolic names to refer to the 23-year-old physiotherapy student who died on 29 December from the injuries inflicted on her during a brutal gang rape earlier in the month. One network calls her “the Braveheart”; another calls her Amanat, or treasure. That’s because Indian law prohibits making public the names of victims of rape. The Indian press, which has reported extensively on the victim’s family, friends, and hometown, has taken great care to obscure any details that may identify her.
Now some are questioning why. This week, Minister of Human Resource Development Shashi Tharoor wondered aloud on his popular Twitter feed what, exactly, the purpose was of keeping the victim’s name shrouded in secrecy. “Why not name and honour her as a real person with her own identity?” he wrote on 1 January. “Unless her parents object, she should be honoured and the revised anti-rape law named after her. She was a human being with a name, not just a symbol.”
Protecting the anonymity of rape victims in court and the media is a widely practiced way to give them the space to recover, and to protect them from further harm. It is part of the Indian penal code, and has been supported in amendments to the country’s anti-rape legislation. In 1983, that law went through several changes after another egregious sexual assault mobilized women’s groups to fight for improvements to the law. In recent weeks, the government has again promised several revisions that would toughen it further, one of several measures the government has taken to improve the safety of women in India since the 16 December attack. “Confidentiality is a human right when it comes to the victim,” says Anne Stenhammer, the regional program director for UN Women South Asia. “If the family of the victim wants to reveal the name, that is a different case.”
Evidently, at least some of the family does. Support for Tharoor’s idea has come from protesters, activists, and, more recently ,the victim’s father. He said naming the revised anti-rape law after his daughter would be “a step in the right direction” in a recent interview with news network CNN-IBN. “A law named after an individual, for whom the entire country came together, will obviously be much more effective,” he said. “This will also ensure that she will be immortalized forever.”
But not everyone has clambered aboard. The ruling Congress party, to which Tharoor belongs, was irked that the high-profile Minister floated the idea without consulting the government first. While not prohibited, naming laws after individuals in order to memorialize them and help the public identify with a cause, like Jessica’s Law and Megan’s Law in the US, has not been practiced in India. That in itself is not much of a reason not to reconsider. But there is a graver case to be made for not changing India’s culture of confidentiality for rape victims, even with the family’s permission. More than in other societies, “there is a huge stigma to the survivor and victim of rape in India,” says Vrinda Grover, a human-rights lawyer in New Delhi. “It is the survivor and victim who is blamed for the sexual assault, and her life is made completely hellish… Confidentiality allows her to move on.”
Grover feels that the anonymity of the victim may have helped people in India wake up to the fact that they, too, are not safe, making their demands for change louder. The gang-rape victim had just left a movie at a mall with a companion and was lured onto a private bus when she was attacked for over an hour. The banality of her circumstances has helped bring her case home in a powerful way and has helped sustain the weeks-long protests around the country. “My sense is what drew the protesters to this was the anonymity of the victim,” says Grover. “Each one of us could identify with her suffering.” Others say the debate, which has gotten a lot of ink and airtime in recent days, has simply become a sideshow. A spokesman for the opposition BJP party called Tharoor’s suggestion a “needless diversion” from the real task at hand: getting changes made to the existing law that will make it a more effective tool in protecting women in a nation where rape is unsettlingly common.
But the fact that it is a debate at all is yet another encouraging indicator— like the unprecedented tide of outrage that has swept the country— that people are rethinking everything at the moment. The victim has become an unexpectedly vital symbol of just how dangerous the institutional and social complacency over treating women as second-class citizens has become in India. With so many young people out on the streets, a sense of real hope is forming that this case could stir lasting change. “There has been an earthquake,” says Stenhammer. “The most important thing is not to lose focus: fast-track the courts, change the law where we have found gaps, and focus on what we can do together. There has to be a basic systemic change, a mind-set change. There is a lot to do.”

Rico says the article asks if, after the New Delhi gang rape, should the culprits be executed? As if one needed to ask the question... (Of course, unless Indian law provides for something worse.)

Cannibal cops? Really?

Larry Neumeister has an Associated Press article about police cannibalism, of all things:

A lawyer claims that the arrest of a man accused of trying to pay a police officer to kidnap a Manhattan woman was done to prevent him from testifying about Internet sexual fantasies at the officer's cannibalism-tinged trial.
Authorities say the man, Michael Vanhise, agreed to pay Officer Gilberto Valle five thousand dollars to kidnap the woman in New York City and deliver her bound to Vanhise's home in New Jersey, where she would be raped and killed.
Attorney Julia Gatto spoke after Vanhise, 22, of Trenton, appeared briefly in US District Court in Manhattan, where he was ordered held pending a bail hearing on a conspiracy to commit kidnapping charge. "Vanhise is being used as a pawn by the government to bolster a very weak case," Gatto said outside court. She represents Valle, a 28-year-old New York City police officer from Queens. He is scheduled to go to trial later this month after being charged in October with one count of kidnapping conspiracy and one count of accessing a computer without authorization. Gatto said Vanhise "would have exonerated our client" with testimony about his own participation in a world of Internet sexual fantasies where people could speak of unspeakable acts they would never commit. She said the arrest appeared to be a tactical move by authorities to prevent testimony by Vanhise or others about Internet fantasies. "He definitely could have been a defense witness, yes. We believe he would certainly support the defense," Gatto said.
The lawyer said the government appeared to be pressuring potential defense witnesses not to take the witness stand by saying in court documents filed against Vanhise that there were other co-conspirators who had not been charged in the case. Authorities say Vanhise also participated in planning the kidnapping of a girl. Vanhise's lawyer, Alice Fontier, said her client, an auto mechanic who seemed to wipe tears from his eyes during his court hearing, was "very upset", especially because he wanted to be home after his wife gave birth to a daughter last month, one of several young children the couple has.
She said he had been in contact with the FBI since late October, and there had "certainly been ongoing meetings." "He has not stopped cooperating," she said, though she added: "Obviously, the relationship has changed since he was arrested."
Besides being accused of agreeing to pay Valle for the abduction last year when Valle was an active police officer, Vanhise also admitted emailing others about kidnapping, raping, and killing women and children, the FBI said in court papers.
The FBI quoted Valle in court papers as saying in an email to Vanhise that it would be hard to restrain himself when he knocks the woman out, "but I am aspiring to be a professional kidnapper and that's business." It quoted him as also saying he would tie her hands and bare feet and gag her. "Then she will be stuffed into a large piece of luggage and wheeled out to my van," it said he told Vanhise. "Just make sure she doesn't die before I get her," Vanhise was quoted in court papers as telling Valle in response. "No need to worry. She will be alive. It's a short drive to you," the officer was quoted as responding.
Valle was charged last year with using a law-enforcement database as he allegedly made plans to kidnap, rape, kill and eat women. Gatto said at that time that he was engaging in sexual fantasies and intended no violence.
In court papers, defense lawyers wrote that Valle was accused from January of 2012 to 24 October 2102 of conspiring with others he met on a website devoted to the exploration of deviant sexual fantasies.
"Valle and the individuals with whom he communicated discussed, among other things, their violent sexual fantasies of abducting, raping, murdering, and cannibalizing women," they wrote. They said Valle sometimes distributed the photographs of women he knew through his social network "to enhance the fantasy," though he never intended for any acts to be committed in the "real world".
US Attorney Preet Bharara said Vanhise engaged in conduct "that reads like a script for a bad horror film". He said the arrest was the second "in this bone-chilling case, but we are not finished."
George Venizelos, head of the New York City FBI office, said the charges "convey the depravity of the offense."
The court papers said Vanhise also emailed photographs of a girl whom Vanhise knew well. They said this occurred after other unidentified co-conspirators expressed interest in kidnapping the child. If convicted, Vanhise could face life in prison.

Rico says this is a bad horror movie; the death penalty would be more appropriate, but maybe life in prison would be worse...

Pirates hang for their crimes

Dawn C. Chmielewski has an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about Google and Yahoo:

Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., two Internet companies that have long cultivated relationships in Hollywood, are nevertheless placing ads on sites that feature pirated movies, television shows, and music, a new report says.
University of Southern California's Annenberg Innovation Lab ranked Google and Yahoo among the top ten advertising networks that support major piracy sites around the world, based on the lab's analysis of online ads that receive the most copyright-infringement notices.
Google took issue with the findings, calling the researchers' conclusion "mistaken". Yahoo did not respond to requests seeking comment.
The report is the first installment of a monthly update that Innovation Lab director Jonathan Taplin hopes major brands will use in deciding where to advertise online.
"Whenever we talk to a brand about the fact that their ads are all over the pirate sites, they're like, 'Oh, how did that happen?'" Taplin said. "We thought it would be easier if they knew what ad networks were putting ads on pirate sites so they could avoid them."
The Innovation Lab used as its starting point Google's Transparency Report, which lists Internet sites that receive the most notices from studios, trade associations, and software and game publishers telling them to remove copyrighted works. Whenever an ad appears on one of these leading pirate sites, the lab uses software to obtain the name of the ad network.
The list of ad networks includes Openx, a Pasadena, California company that was backed by AOL Ventures and that describes itself as a leader in digital and mobile ad technology; Google and its advertising platform, DoubleClick; Yahoo and its ad exchange, Right Media; and Quantcast, a San Francisco firm that also places ads on sites owned by such major media companies as NBCUniversal and Viacom.
"To the extent [the study] suggests that Google ads are a major source of funds for major pirate sites, we believe it is mistaken," a Google spokesman said.

Rico says it's funny, but Google refused to post ads on his Rant because they said it had too much pirated (even though fully credited and attributed) stuff...

Wait''ll they have to live in Russia

The Associated Press has an article about animal rights:

Sex symbol-turned-animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot is threatening to join actor Gerard Depardieu in Russian exile unless France halts the scheduled euthanasia of two sick circus elephants.
The 1960s screen diva says authorities have ignored her "numerous proposals" to save Baby and Nepal, a pair of 42-year-old elephants dying of tuberculosis at a Lyon zoo.
In a statement on her foundation's website, Bardot says that, if the elephants are killed, she will request Russian citizenship "to flee this country that is now just a graveyard for animals".
This week France was shocked to learn Depardieu, an Academy Award-winner and pillar of French cinema, had received Russian citizenship after he was called "pathetic" by France's prime minister in a bust-up over the country's proposed 75 percent income tax for the superrich.

Tarantino unchained

Tirdad Derakhshani has an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about Tarantino:

Quentin Tarantino is disturbed by the torrent of criticism poured on his über-violent new pic, Django Unchained, for being, like his other pics, too violent. "Yeah, I am. I'm really annoyed," he told NPR's Terry Gross, with people who censure him in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre for promoting movie violence.
Connecting movies and a real-life tragedy, Tarantino says, is foolish. "I think it's disrespectful to the victims' memory, actually, to talk about movies," he said. "Obviously, the issue is gun control and mental health." Continued Tarantino: "I've been asked this question for twenty years, about the effects of violence in movies related to violence in real life. My answer is the same as twenty years ago. It hasn't changed one iota. Obviously, I don't think one has anything to do with the other."

Learning from the best

Dan Gross has an article at Philly.com about how Leonardo DiCaprio learned to saw open a human skull (photo) with 1850's medical equipment for a scene in Django Unchained:

By watching a video by Mutter Museum (at 19 South 22nd in Philadelphia) curator Anna Dhody. The museum says Dhody received a request from the propmaster on the Quentin Tarantino film for instructions on how to properly saw a skull and decided it best to show, rather than tell.

Scam for the day

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History for the day

On 5 January 1914, Henry Ford, head of the Ford Motor Company, introduced a minimum wage scale of five dollars per day.

Movie review for the day (Expendables)

Rico says he wonders how you take many millions of dollars, add stars of the experience and caliber of Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Eric Roberts, Steve Austin, Mickey Rourke, Arnold Schwartzenegger, and Bruce Willis, then let Sylvester Stallone direct, and end up with a horrendous POS like The Expendables (let alone The Expendables 2, which Rico has coming from Netflix once he sends this DVD back, and The Expendables 3, which was released in August)...

Over the edge

Wired Magazine has an article in the January 2013 issue about the fall of John McAfee:

On 12 November 2012, Belizean police announced that they were seeking John McAfee for questioning in connection with the murder of his neighbor. Six months earlier, I began an in-depth investigation into McAfee’s life. This is the chronicle of that investigation.
Twelve weeks before the murder, John McAfee flicks open the cylinder of his Smith & Wesson revolver and empties the bullets, letting them clatter onto the table between us. A few tumble to the floor. McAfee is 66, lean and fit, with veins bulging out of his forearms. His hair is bleached blond in patches, like a cheetah, and tattoos wrap around his arms and shoulders.
More than 25 years ago, he formed McAfee Associates, a maker of antivirus software that went on to become immensely popular and was acquired by Intel in 2010 for $7.68 billion. Now he’s holed up in a bungalow on his island estate, about fifteen miles off the coast of mainland Belize. The shades are drawn so I can see only a sliver of the white sand beach and turquoise water outside. The table is piled with boxes of ammunition, fake IDs bearing his photo, Frontiersman bear deterrent, and a single blue baby pacifier.
McAfee picks a bullet off the floor and fixes me with a wide-eyed, manic intensity. “This is a bullet, right?” he says in the congenial Southern accent that has stuck with him since his boyhood in Virginia.
“Let’s put the gun back,” I tell him. I’d come here to try to understand why the government of Belize was accusing him of assembling a private army and entering the drug trade. It seemed implausible that a wildly successful tech entrepreneur would disappear into the Central American jungle and become a narco-trafficker. Now I’m not so sure.
But he explains that the accusations are a fabrication. “Maybe what happened didn’t actually happen,” he says, staring hard at me. “Can I do a demonstration?” He loads the bullet into the gleaming silver revolver, spins the cylinder. “This scares you, right?” he says. Then he puts the gun to his head.
My heart rate kicks up; it takes me a second to respond. “Yeah, I’m scared,” I admit. “We don’t have to do this.”
“I know we don’t,” he says, the muzzle pressed against his temple. And then he pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. He pulls it three more times in rapid succession. There are only five chambers.
“Reholster the gun,” I demand.
He keeps his eyes fixed on me and pulls the trigger a fifth time. Still nothing. With the gun still to his head, he starts pulling the trigger incessantly. “I can do this all day long,” he says to the sound of the hammer clicking. “I can do this a thousand times. Ten thousand times. Nothing will ever happen. Why? Because you have missed something. You are operating on an assumption about reality that is wrong.”
It’s the same thing, he argues, with the government’s accusations. They were a smoke screen— an attempt to distort reality— but there’s one thing everybody agrees on: The trouble really got rolling in the humid predawn murk of 30 April 2012.
It was a Monday, about 4:50 am. A television flickered in the guard station of McAfee’s newly built, 2.5-acre jungle outpost on the Belizean mainland. At the far end of the property, a muddy river flowed slowly past. Crocodiles lurked on the opposite bank, and howler monkeys screeched. In the guard station, a drunk night watchman gaped at Blond Ambition, a Madonna concert DVD.
The guard heard the trucks first. Then boots hitting the ground and the gate rattling as the lock was snapped with bolt cutters. He stood up and looked outside. Dozens of men in green camouflage were streaming into the compound. Many were members of Belize’s Gang Suppression Unit, an elite force trained in part by the FBI and armed with Taurus MT-9 submachine guns. Formed in 2010, their mission was to dismantle criminal organizations. The guard observed the scene silently for a moment and then sat back down. After all, the Madonna concert wasn’t over yet. Outside, flashlight beams streaked across the property. “This is the police,” a voice blared over a bullhorn. “Everyone out!”
Deep in the compound, McAfee burst out of a thatched-roof bungalow that stood on stilts twenty feet off the ground. He was naked and held a revolver. Things had changed since his days as a high-flying software tycoon. By 2009 he had sold almost everything he owned— estates in Hawaii, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas as well as his ten-passenger plane— and moved into the jungle. He announced that he was searching for natural antibiotics in the rain forest and constructed a mysterious laboratory on his property. Now his jungle stronghold was under attack. The commandos were converging on him. There were thirty of them; he was outgunned and outmanned.
McAfee walked back inside to the seventeen-year-old in his bed. She was sitting up, naked, her long frizzy hair falling around her shoulders and framing the stars tattooed on her chest. She was terrified.
As the GSU stormed up the stairs, he put on some shorts, laid down his gun, and walked out with his hands up. The commandos collided with McAfee at the top of the stairs, slammed him against the wall, and handcuffed him. “You’re being detained on suspicion of producing methamphetamine,” one of the cops said.
McAfee twisted to look at his accuser. “That’s a startling hypothesis, sir,” he responded. “Because I haven’t sold drugs since 1983.”

Rico says you can buy the issue or read the rest on-line, but it's a sad tale of someone who went off the rails... (But it does have the great line about one of his young lovers: "She can pretend sanity better than any woman I have ever known."

Stiffing the gummint

Charles Duhigg and David Kocieniewski have an article in The New York Times about Silicon Valley accounting practices:

Congressional investigators are wrapping up an inquiry into the accounting practices of Apple and other technology companies that allocate revenue and intellectual property offshore to lower the taxes they pay in the United States.
The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations inquiry now drawing to a close began more than a year ago, and involves at least a half dozen technology companies, according to people with firsthand knowledge of it, who declined to be identified.
Those people said the subcommittee had subpoenaed or otherwise asked the companies to explain methods they used to avoid domestic taxes. They said Apple had become a focus of the inquiry, and was cooperating with the subcommittee, which is expected to issue wide-ranging recommendations that are likely to play a significant role in Congressional tax code negotiations.
Apple’s domestic tax bill has drawn the interest of corporate tax experts and policy makers because although the majority of Apple’s executives, product designers, marketers, employees, research and development operations, and retail stores are in the United States, in the past Apple’s accountants have found legal ways to allocate about seventy percent of the company’s profits overseas, where tax rates are often much lower, according to corporate filings.
Apple, in a recent statement, said the company was “one of the top corporate income taxpayers in the country, if not the largest.” The statement said the company “conducted all of its business with the highest of ethical standards, complying with applicable laws and accounting rules”.
It is unclear how broadly Senate investigators are looking into the technology industry, if any laws are thought to have been broken, and how many companies are involved. The subcommittee is also known to be looking at Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and firms in such fields as biotechnology.
The subcommittee, which is overseen by Senator Carl Levin, a Democrat from Michigan, has been interested in the impact on the budget deficit of offshore tax strategies. Representatives from Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard testified at a subcommittee hearing on the subject in September. Both companies were criticized sharply by Senator Levin for using accounting rules to allocate revenue to other nations to avoid paying taxes in the United States. “This subcommittee has demonstrated in hearings and comprehensive reports how various schemes have helped shift income to offshore tax havens and avoid US taxes,” Senator Levin said at that hearing. “The resulting loss of revenue is one significant cause of the budget deficit, and adds to the tax burden that ordinary Americans bear.”Apple has long been a pioneer in developing innovative tax strategies that lessen its domestic taxes. At the September hearing, Senator Levin said the investigation indicated that Apple had deferred taxes on over $35.4 billion in offshore income between 2009 and 2011.
Tech companies are able to easily shift “intellectual property, and the profit that goes along with it, to tax havens,” said a former Treasury Department economist, Martin A. Sullivan. “Apple went out of its way to try and ensure that its tax savings didn’t attract too much public attention, because tax avoidance of that magnitude— even though it’s legal and permissible— isn’t in keeping with the image of a socially progressive company.”
In its statement, Apple said it paid “an enormous amount of taxes” to local, state, and federal governments. “In fiscal 2012 we paid six billion dollars in federal corporate incomes taxes, which is one out of every forty dollars in corporate income taxes collected by the government,” it said. In the 1980s, Apple was a pioneer of an accounting technique known as Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich, which reduces taxes by routing profits through Irish subsidiaries and the Netherlands and then to the Caribbean. Today, that tactic is used by hundreds of other corporations— some of which directly imitated Apple’s methods, say accountants at those companies. More recently, Apple has moved revenue to states like Nevada and overseas nations where the company pays less, or in some cases no, taxes.
Almost every major corporation tries to minimize its taxes. However, technology companies are particularly well positioned to take advantage of tax codes written for an industrial age and ill-suited to today’s digital economy.
Some profits at companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft emerge from royalties on intellectual property, like the patents on software. At other times, products are digital, such as downloaded songs or movies. It is much easier for businesses with royalties and digital products to move profits to low-tax countries than it is, say, for grocery stores or automakers.
Although technology is now one of the nation’s largest and most highly valued industries, many tech companies are among the least taxed, according to government and corporate data. Over the last two years, the 71 technology companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index— including Apple, Google, Yahoo, and Dell— reported paying worldwide cash taxes at a rate that, on average, was a third less than other S&P companies’, according to a New York Times analysis.
Companies report their cash outlays for income taxes in their annual Form 10-K, but it is impossible from those numbers to determine precisely how much, in total, corporations pay to governments.

Rico says if anyone is surprised that companies work hard at paying as little as possible, they should remember that rich people do the same thing...

Another one gone

Salman Masood and Ismail Khan have an article in The New York Times about justice done, if brutally:

An American drone strike killed a top Pakistani militant commander in a northwestern tribal region, security officials said recently. The death of the commander, Maulvi Nazir (photo), was seen as a serious blow to Taliban fighters who attack United States and allied forces in neighboring Afghanistan.
The drone strike targeted Nazir’s vehicle in the Angoor Adda area in South Waziristan. Five other people were also killed, including one of his aides, officials said. “He has been killed; it is confirmed,” said a senior Pakistani intelligence officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The vehicle he was traveling in was hit.” Nazir was heading from Bermal to Wana, the main town in South Waziristan, when the drone hit the vehicle he was in. In a separate drone strike, at least four people were killed in North Waziristan when a vehicle was targeted. Their identities were not immediately known.
Nazir, believed to be in his thirties, was based in the western part of the South Waziristan tribal region. He led the Ahmadzai Wazir tribe, and his loyalists regularly joined attacks on American forces across the porous border with Afghanistan. Unlike other Taliban factions, Nazir’s fighters did not attack Pakistani military or government sites, instead focusing on the war in Afghanistan. He was believed to have signed a peace pact with the Pakistani military.
Nazir was allied with Hafiz Gul Bahadur, a leading warlord in North Waziristan. The two commanders’ nonconfrontational posture toward the Pakistani military often led to their being labeled here as “good Taliban”.
In Washington, American officials said Nazir’s apparent death could hurt al-Qaeda’s sanctuary in the Pakistani tribal areas. “Nazir and his men were directly involved in planning and executing cross-border attacks against US and coalition forces in Afghanistan and in providing protection for al-Qaeda fighters in South Waziristan,” said one American official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the intelligence matter. “While it is too soon to tell, the death of Nazir, along with some of his deputies, could push his network into disarray, degrading al-Qaeda’s access to South Waziristan as a result.”
Asad Munir, a former Pakistani Army brigadier and the intelligence chief in Peshawar, said Nazir’s killing could lead to a spurt in violence. “A dangerous scenario for the Pakistani military would be the joining of hands of Hafiz Gul Bahadur and Maulvi Nazir supporters with Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan,” he said. Munir said that the area controlled by Nazir’s forces had been “relatively peaceful”, but that his death increased the chances of attacks on military targets.
Nazir had survived two earlier drone strikes. In November, he survived a suicide attack attributed to Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, the Pakistani Taliban, who conduct attacks inside Pakistan. After the suicide attack, he expelled rival Mehsud tribesmen from territory controlled by his fighters.
Nazir also opposed the presence of Uzbek fighters in Pakistan and, with the help of the Pakistani military, pushed Uzbeks out of his region several years ago.
Mohammad Din, a resident of Wana, said people were widely mourning Nazir’s killing there. “The main bazaar in Wana was closed for all routine activities,” Din said in a telephone interview. He said Nazir opposed polio vaccination in the region, but otherwise did not disrupt government projects and cooperated with the local administration.
Some analysts said that militants like Nazir could be troublesome for the Pakistani military with the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan in 2014.
Arif Rafiq, an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute, said: “Maulvi Nazir would probably have posed a problem for the Pakistani army if and when a political settlement is reached in Afghanistan in 2014. But in the interim, the killing of Nazir and his deputies likely hurts the Pakistani army’s efforts against the TTP in South Waziristan.” Rafiq, based in Washington, continued: “Nazir would probably have wanted to hold on to his local jihadist fief, making him a long-term threat for the Pakistani state.”
The suspicion that the Pakistani military gave a nod to Nazir’s killing could result in attacks on Pakistani troops in some areas in South Waziristan, analysts said.
Pakistani officials publicly denounce American drone strikes, but have privately acknowledged the effectiveness of the campaign.

Rico says he wonders (not really) why is it that these guys never look like a lot of fun, you know? (And it's funny that the Pakis decry our strikes in public, but cheer us on in private...)

Wise council

Napkins used at a recent party thrown by his ladyfriend, Rico says they're good advice:

Ah, the French

Bruce Crumley, Paris bureau chief for Time, has an article about a French holiday tradition:

Burn out the old year; torch in the new. France celebrated the onset of 2013 in its uniquely pyromaniac fashion, with officials reporting that 1,193 cars were torched overnight from 31 December to 1 January, with 209 of them in the Paris area alone. Those figures marked a four percent increase over the 1,147 autos set ablaze on the same night in 2009, the last year for which French officials released figures on the nation’s peculiar New Year rite.
The mere fact the government of Socialist President François Hollande resumed publication of the burnt-car toll also caused sparks to fly. Conservative opponents claimed that revealing the information only poured gas on the New Year’s fires by inspiring copycat arsonists, while leftists countered that they were simply informing the public about a reality hidden by the previous government of the right. But as the debate raged over whether to publicize the nation’s flaming-auto fetish, some French observers sought explanations for the singularly antisocial custom of car toasting.
Why are cars burned on 31 December? asked French web news site Mediapart.
Burning Cars: A ‘Tradition’ That Remains Strong, lamented a 2 January headline in the daily Le Figaro.
More amazing, still, is the fact that the New Year’s Eve auto roast is only part of the story. In announcing the New Year’s Eve tally on 2 January, Interior Minister Manuel Valls also revealed that figures provided by fire, police, and insurance officials indicate that somewhere between 42,000 and 60,000 automobiles are intentionally torched in France every year. The majority of those go up in smoke in or near the disadvantaged suburban housing projects located outside most French cities. Indeed, the rest of the world first took notice of France’s distinctive car-burning penchant during the three weeks of nationwide rioting in French housing projects in 2005, when 8,810 automobiles were incinerated by enraged youths. Yet, despite that riot-driven surge of car arson, year-end figures of around 43,000 for 2005 came in at around normal levels. Normal, that is, for flame-happy France.
When the conservative government of former President Nicolas Sarkozy began withholding New Year’s car-arson figures in 2010, officials said the move was designed to suppress copycat attacks, noting that youths in rival housing projects across France had begun competing over which town could produced the most charred autos. Conservatives accused Valls of egging on the vandals through his return to transparency. “It's not the sharpest of our fellow citizens who burn cars, nor the local little Einstein,” former Sarkozy Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux told Europe 1 radio on 3 January, mocking Valls’ decision to reverse the blackout policy. “Did it work? Yes it worked, because the annual numbers of burned cars decreased.”
Both Hortefeux’ claim and the reasoning behind it are contested by leftists and many independent researchers alike. Some have dismissed his charge against Valls as specious, while others have repeated previously aired suspicions that Sarkozy governments used creative accounting to artificially reduce crime rates on their watch. Hortefeux’ explanation also appears to considerably oversimplify a longstanding and steadily escalating French tradition of automotive pyromania— a trend that has increased no matter how governments have communicated on it.
According to sociologists and delinquency experts, car burning as a ritualistic expression of protest began in disadvantaged areas of northeastern France in the 1980s, before gradually spreading to project communities elsewhere. Initially, scholars say, torching autos was seen as a spectacular form of destruction that pulled the attention of news media and authorities to the dismal economic and social conditions in the perpetrators’ neighborhoods. Others offer more subjective and artistic explanations for the phenomenon, seeing it as a perverse form of protest over the isolation of project areas with little or no link via public transportation to more affluent city centers or expressing a contradiction between individualism and social solidarity.
Then there’s the pecuniary motivation. French insurance experts and justice officials estimate that around twenty percent of all annual car arson is financially motivated fraud conducted by, or with the accord of, owners themselves. The perpetrators of random auto burning often, in fact, dismiss ethical questions about scorching a neighborhood car with rationalizations that insured victims will be compensated for their loss. The average payout on an automobile protected by fire insurance is around $6,500— no mean sum in areas where unemployment exceeds twenty-five percent and youth joblessness is closer to fifty percent.
Whatever the motives, increasingly demoralized advocates for improving conditions in the projects warn that one day delinquent arsonists will question the protest strategy of torching what few objects of value exist in their disadvantaged midst, and instead start targeting autos in middle-class and affluent neighborhoods where such destruction will really gain attention. It’s only when that happens, some activists fear, that the sparks in France will really start to fly.

Rico says that, with a headline like In France, Nothing Says ‘Happy New Year’ Like a Burning Car, how could he not post it? (But Hitler's question, Brennt Paris?, was just seventy years early...)

No Nookie, it seems

Leslie Kaufman has an article in The New York Times about the success, or lack thereof, of an iPad imitator:

For Barnes & Noble, the digital future is not what it used to be. After a year spent signaling its commitment to build its business through its Nook division, Barnes & Noble has announced disappointing holiday sales figures, with steep declines that underscored the challenge it faces in transforming from its traditional retail format.
Retail sales from the company’s bookstores and its website, BN.com, decreased eleven percent from the comparable nine-week holiday period a year earlier, to $1.2 billion, the company reported. More worrisome for the long-term future of the company, sales in the Nook unit, that includes ereaders, tablets, digital content and accessories, decreased thirteen percent over the same period, to $311 million.
“They are not selling the devices, they are not selling books, and traffic is down,” said Mike Shatzkin, the founder and chief executive of Idea Logical, a consultant to publishers. “I’m looking for an optimistic sign and not seeing one. It is concerning.”
The results, covering a period that ended on 29 December, are a sobering development for the nation’s largest bookstore chain. The declines occurred during what is supposed to be peak buying season. And the Nook unit’s sagging fortunes came despite a thirteen percent increase in sales of digital content, suggesting that it is the tepid demand for Nook devices that is dragging down the unit’s performance. Over all, the numbers underscore the difficult challenge the company faces in an increasingly competitive e-reading market.
Barnes & Noble has invested heavily in developing a tablet that can compete with offerings from media giants like Google, Apple, and Amazon. Last April, in announcing a three hundred million dollar investment in Nook by Microsoft, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble s chief executive, William J. Lynch, said the company wanted “to solidify our position as a leader in the exploding market for digital content in the consumer and education segments”.
A few months after that, the bookseller began breaking out the financial results of the Nook division, In October it completed its strategic partnership with Microsoft by creating Nook Media, a subsidiary and a signal that it was ready to ride its digital business into the future.
But, while Barnes & Noble s most recent Nooks have won critical praise, they have failed to gain significant traction with consumers.
Other companies do not break out sales of their digital tablets, but Amazon has been saying sales of its Kindle Fire were strong. Analysts say Apple’s iPads also appear to be doing well.
“The problem is not whether or not the Nook is good,” said James L. McQuivey, a media analyst for Forrester Research. “What matters is whether you are locked into a Kindle library or an iTunes library or a Nook library. In the end, who holds the content that you value?” For an increasing number of consumers, he said, the answer is not Barnes & Noble.
Though the company’s stock was down only slightly— falling two percent to $14.22— the reaction in the financial world was unsparing. Analysts stopped short of saying that this was a do-or-die moment for the Nook Media division, but they acknowledged that options for a strong digital future were narrowing.
In a note to clients, S&P Capital IQ said: “We think this portends greater market share losses for the Nook over the medium term” and downgraded its recommendation on Barnes & Noble stock from hold to sell. Barclays said in a note that the Nook’s precipitous decline was “quite concerning” and “below even our modest expectations”.
The declining retail numbers were also troubling when viewed in the context of a rise in sales among independent booksellers. The American Booksellers Association, which has not yet released official holiday sales, estimated that its members’ sales would be up about eight percent over last year.
Barnes & Noble executives were not available to discuss the sales numbers. But a statement from Lynch indicated that the company was searching for a solution. “Nook device sales got off to a good start over the Black Friday period, but then fell short of expectations for the balance of the holiday,” Lynch said. “We are examining the root cause of the December shortfall in sales, and will adjust our strategies accordingly going forward.”
The most intriguing, and troublesome, question is whether the company can stay in the digital device business at all over the long run. Nook has been expensive to develop and market, and the company does not have the hefty financial resources of its competitors.
Other options are strategic partnerships. Microsoft’s investment last spring was seen at the time as a way to promote Nook through a powerful partner. But sales of the Windows 8 operating system have been disappointing, and the Nook has been featured as little more than an app among hundreds on the Windows 8 platform. “It is going to prove to be a missed opportunity,” said McQuivey of Forrester.
Last month, Barnes & Noble announced that Pearson, the British education and publishing conglomerate, was taking a five percent stake in Nook for $89.5 million. Analysts said that cash investment was welcome and the partnership with Pearson, a major publisher of educational textbooks, might herald a strategy to move toward dominating an education niche market. Still, that would be a significantly smaller business.

Rico says it's hard to resist gloating over their failure, so he won't. (And if having Microsoft invest in your product isn't the kiss of death...)

Movie review for the day (Argo)

Mekado Murphy has an article in The New York Times about Argo:

The production designer Sharon Seymour has collaborated with Ben Affleck on all three films he has directed, creating gritty contemporary Boston sets for Gone Baby Gone and The Town. But Argo, Affleck’s  thriller set amid the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, presented a new challenge for the team. She and Affleck wanted to recreate the looks of the period, without drawing attention to them and making the film feel like an episode of That ’70s Show.
“There was a lot of anxiety in America at the time, both political and economic,” Seymour said during a recent interview in New York City, “and we didn’t want this movie to feel glossy and fantasy-like. It needed to have a reality base, but also needed to touch on the color and the world of the ’70s, which is really different than how we live now.”
To start, Affleck sent Seymour some documentaries and a box of books about the hostage crisis. Then she researched the locations  in the script; like what the Warner Brothers studio lot looked like at the time, and the differences between government buildings in Washington. She and her team also found former Iranian students who shared photographs from their school years in the ’70s. With every set, the team looked for one element that grounded it in the period, whether a specific kind of carpet or a particular color of wall. Seymour discusses some of her design ideas for Argo:

“In the Washington scenes, we were looking for more monotones and more repetition, in set decorating and color and props,” Seymour said. “The CIA wasn’t moving completely up to date to 1979 at the time. Government functions fifteen years behind in terms of what you can get allocated.” This was reflected in the more simple, streamlined sets for these scenes.

Some of the CIA footage was shot in Washington, but the CIA offices were created in a basement room at The Los Angeles Times. Seymour and her team spent nearly two weeks dressing the space, repainting the walls and adding period-appropriate desks. “The one thing I left was the carpet,” she said.

The Tehran exteriors were shot in Istanbul. The crew scheduled the shoot around a Turkish holiday, which meant access to the grand bazaar used in a sequence.

But many of the Tehran interiors, including the Canadian ambassador’s residence where the Americans were  hiding, was shot in Los Angeles. “We wanted that space to feel really claustrophobic,” Seymour said. “So we dressed it as if Ken and Pat (the ambassador and his wife) had a lot of things they brought with them from their various postings. They had layers of curtains because the houseguests couldn’t open the curtains.” The room was filled with paintings and furniture to contribute to the closed-in feel.

For the scenes in Hollywood, many of which were shot on the Warner Brothers lot, Seymour was aiming for a lighter mood. “The color palette was more of what we were classically thinking of as ’70s colors,” she said. Seymour was able to have a little more fun in these scenes, including a sequence in which the makeup artist John Chambers (played by John Goodman) is working on a low-budget science fiction film set. Seymour’s team created the set-within-a-set, using the bright colors of movies from the era.

The production office, however, was more traditional. “It was a very standard production office that you can still rent on the Warner Brothers lot to this day,” she said.

Rico says that Ms. Seymour is one of those unsung 'below the line' people who make movies look like the real thing...

Henry II had it right...

...when he said: "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?"

But Susan Snyder and John P. Martin have an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about a current one:

A Widener University dean who is also a Franciscan priest resigned in July of 2012 after school officials learned he had been accused of sexually abusing a teenage boy in the 1980s. Michael Ledoux, 55, had worked at Widener for nine years, and in recent years supervised student teachers at the Widener Partnership Charter School, which has students from kindergarten through the seventh grade.
The accusation was reported in 2003 to church officials in New Hampshire, where Ledoux served more than two decades ago. Widener officials learned about it this past summer through a tip.
Widener University president James T. Harris III told Ledoux he was placing him on administrative leave pending an investigation, but Ledoux chose to resign, Widener spokesman Dan Hanson said. The university has found no evidence of complaints or improper behavior during Ledoux' tenure there, Hanson said.
The accuser never pressed charges or pursued a lawsuit, but there was a settlement. Reached by email, Ledoux, who now lives at a Franciscan facility in New York, declined to discuss the matter but maintained his innocence. His case illustrates a thorny issue for schools, communities, and religious orders around Philadelphia and the country in the decade since the clergy sex-abuse scandal exploded. Credible allegations emerged against hundreds of priests or former priests, but, more often than not, the accusations were too old to be prosecuted or litigated.
Many accused clerics had spent years or decades in or around schools, and were competent educators. Like other religious orders, the Franciscans run dozens of schools nationwide.
For universities, the issue is especially problematic in the aftermath of the Pennsylvania State University scandal involving Jerry Sandusky. Penn State faces multiple civil claims after the former assistant football coach was convicted of abusing ten boys on and off campus.
Ledoux was hired by Widener in September of 2003, less than a year after a lawyer representing his accuser told church officials and police in New Hampshire that the Franciscan abused the teen between 1986 and 1989, when he was associate pastor at St. Thomas Aquinas in Derry.
The Franciscans found his claim credible, and assured the victim and his lawyer that the priest would be stripped of his public ministries, according to Jim Geoly, a Chicago attorney for the Franciscan Province of the Immaculate Conception. Geoly also said the Franciscans intended to restrict his access to minors.
That year, Ledoux ended up working at Widener with educators who knew nothing about his past. Geoly said the Franciscans concede they should have made Widener aware of the accusation against Ledoux. He also noted that Widener did not seek information from the Franciscans before hiring him. "They're sorry," Geoly said of his clients. "They acknowledged this was not done well. They understand now it would have been better if they had reached out to the university."
Widener had no knowledge of the accusation against Ledoux until it received a tip last summer, Hanson said. Widener conducted a criminal-background check before Ledoux was hired and a child-abuse check when he became involved in the charter school, Hanson said. Both showed no problems, he said.
The allegation against Ledoux is cited in records compiled by the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire. Those records were made public in 2009, and have since been posted on BishopAccountability.org, a website that catalogs records and allegations related to clergy sex abuse.
According to the site, a man in January of 2003 reported that Ledoux performed oral sex on him once in the late 1980s, and tried to other times in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Geoly said the boy was in the latter part of high school at the time of the alleged abuse.
Ledoux, who, after leaving New Hampshire, served as a high school and college administrator in Western Pennsylvania, denied the claim to The Inquirer. But the Franciscans found his accuser "credible," their lawyer said. "We believed him. We took him at his word," Geoly said. The man agreed to settle the case without legal action. His lawyer, Carmen L. Durso, declined to discuss details of the settlement, but said the Franciscans assured his client that Ledoux would be assigned to a facility that serves aging members of the religious order and would have no access to minors. "The only condition under which he was to leave that facility is if he was accompanied by someone else from the order," Durso said last week. Instead, Ledoux landed at Widener as an assistant professor of education.
Geoly said Ledoux pursued the position on his own. "I'm disappointed to hear this was handled this way. I thought the Franciscans were doing a better job than anybody else I had dealt with," Durso said. "If they had done what they said they were going to do, it would have been ideal."
Widener is not a religious institution, and Ledoux' job was not a Franciscan appointment. He did not wear a friar's robe or priest's collar on the job. He later became director of Widener's center for education and associate dean of the School of Human Service Professions. He most recently was acting dean of the relatively new School of Education, Innovation and Continuing Studies.
Since leaving Widener, Ledoux has been confined to a Franciscan monastery in Catskill, New York, and will have no access to minors, Geoly said. Were he to leave, he could be dismissed from the order, Geoly said. "While there, if people from the public come on the property, he is not to have anything to do with them," Geoly said. "He literally cannot function as a priest in public."
In an email to The Inquirer, Ledoux proclaimed his innocence. "Although I would love to speak with you about my innocence in regard to the initial accusation, my clear child abuse and criminal records required for PA educators, and my vigilance in the safety and protection of children, my legal counsel has advised me against it," Ledoux wrote.
Rocco P. Imperatrice III, the lawyer who reviewed the matter for Widener over the summer, emphasized that Ledoux' responsibilities in connection with the charter were only administrative. "He was never allowed unsupervised contact with any minor student," Imperatrice said. "His contact at the charter with any students would have been almost none." Imperatrice said he interviewed all administrators and supervisors who had contact with Ledoux. He also talked with Derry police and the New Hampshire Attorney General's Office. The university did not make charter school parents aware of the allegation because there had been no evidence of a complaint or problem, he said. "If there had been an allegation or a suspicion or a complaint, that would have most certainly been done," Imperatrice said.
Widener officials declined to comment on what action they would have taken if Ledoux had not resigned. Imperatrice said the situation in general is difficult. "Obviously for all colleges and universities, any institution of higher education, given today's social and political climate, there has to be a zero tolerance for individuals who have allegedly committed these types of offenses," he said.
Ledoux, Imperatrice said, should have disclosed the allegation to Widener during the hiring process. Ledoux apparently moved to the area in 2000 when he took a job at Neumann University in Aston. He served as an associate professor and director of the Neumann Institute for Franciscan Studies from August of 2000 to May of 2002, said Steve Bell, Neumann's spokesman. Neumann gave very positive references for Ledoux, according to Widener officials. Bell, the Neumann spokesman, said Neumann had not been aware of the allegation against Ledoux.
The case illustrates that relying on criminal background checks when looking at the record of a priest or former priest may not be enough. "Ninety percent, maybe even a higher percentage, of people who are perpetrators in the cases I'm involved in don't have a criminal record," Durso said.

Rico says this is yet another sad story of misdirected lust (and a case for public castration)... But a lawyer named Rocco P. Imperatrice III? Now there's a name to conjure with...

Let 'em die, then

Jeffrey Kluger , a senior Time editor, oversees their science and technology reporting, and has an article about idiots:

There’s no one place a virus goes to die, but that doesn’t make its demise any less a public health victory. Throughout human history, viral diseases have had their way with us and, for just as long, we have hunted them down and done our best to wipe them out. In the developed world, vaccines have made once-common scourges such as measles, rubella, mumps, and whooping cough rare to the point of near-extinction. Only once, however, has any virus been flushed from its last redoubts in both the body and the wild and effectively vaccinated out of existence. That virus was smallpox, which ceased to exist outside high-security labs in 1977. Since that day, humanity has been free to put the vaccines against the disease— and the terror its periodic outbreaks would cause— on the shelf forever.
Now we are tantalizingly close to another such epic moment. This time the disease in the medical cross hairs is polio, and there’s no minimizing the progress made against it. Just twenty-five years ago, polio was endemic to 125 countries and would paralyze or kill up to 350,000 people— the overwhelming majority of them children—  each year. Now the disease has been run to ground in just three countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria, and in 2012, it struck only 215 people worldwide. Thanks to aggressive global vaccination programs led by Rotary International, UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the US Centers for Disease Control, and, most recently, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the year just beginning could be the disease’s last.
But polio still has strong-armed friends. On 1 January 2013, as the rest of the world celebrated the New Year, gunmen in Pakistan shot and killed seven medical aid workers— six of them women or girls— who had been part of the anti-polio drive. Those killings followed nine others in December of 2012, as well as the shooting of a Ghanaian doctor, also conducting polio-vaccination work in Pakistan, in July. The month before that, the Pakistani Taliban blocked the planned vaccination of 161,000 children until US drone strikes in the country were halted.
Polio is a notoriously slippery disease, one that relies on— indeed its very survival depends on— just the kind of holes such sabotage efforts open in the vaccine safety net. In 2003, polio was similarly near its end when clerics in Northern Nigeria halted inoculations, claiming that the vaccine contained HIV and was designed to sterilize children. Within two years, cases of polio linked to the Nigerian strain were raging across sixteen countries. And, since once case of paralysis can result for every two hundred cases of polio infection, that means there may be 199 other carriers silently and unknowingly spreading the virus.
Using children as viral suicide bombers this way is a new— and grotesque— form of bioterrorism, and the world, for now at least, is not standing idly by. After the December killings, Pakistani officials pledged to continue with the country’s plans to deploy a quarter million health care workers to vaccinate 35 million children this year. The governments of Nigeria and Afghanistan have similarly vowed to see the eradication drive through to its end, as have the UN and the other institutions involved in the battle. The Islamic Development Bank has put fresh money behind the  push, donating $227 million to the vaccine program in Pakistan in particular. This is on top of the billions already provided by Rotary and the Gates Foundation.
All of that money could turn out to be very very well spent. One billion dollars per year over the next few years could save $50 billion  over the next twenty years in the costs of continuing to chase the disease around the globe and treat the children who are felled by it. And there is no way, of course, of putting a price tag on the suffering of those stricken children— or the importance of sparing other victims the same fate. The war with the poliovirus and its human defenders has been joined, and 2013 could be the year in which the climactic battles are fought.

Rico says the 'climactic battles' should include a resumption of drone strikes against any group of religious fanatics impeding this work...

History for the day

On 4 January 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson outlined the goals of his 'Great Society' in his State of the Union address.

Slamming the ladies

Rico says that, with a title like Daniel Craig slams the Kardashians, how could he not post it?

More Apple for the day

Brian Chen has an article in The New York Times about the iPhone:

When the first iPhone was released on AT&T’s network, it was widely criticized for being a lousy phone despite its powerful capabilities as a tiny touch-screen computer. Now it might gain a reputation for being a subpar clock.
On the morning of New Year’s Day, a bug affected the Do Not Disturb feature for many iPhone users. Apple designed the feature to block incoming phone calls and alerts for a set duration; from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., when the user is asleep, for example. But many iPhone users found that it did not turn off after the designated end time.
On Twitter, many were still complaining about the Do Not Disturb bug on Wednesday, except for those who were happy for the extra sleep. Awkwardly, Apple highlighted the Do Not Disturb feature in a new commercial broadcast this week (above). It stars Serena and Venus Williams in a table tennis match that would be a shame to disturb. This isn’t the first time the iPhone has had problems telling time. In 2010, many European iPhone owners complained that a bug in the iPhone alarm clock caused it to go off an hour late because the software did not automatically adjust to daylight saving time. Some iPhones had a similar problem on 1 January 2011.
Trudy Muller, an Apple spokeswoman, pointed to a troubleshooting bulletin that says the Do Not Disturb feature will work properly again after next Monday. Until then, users will have to manually turn the feature on or off themselves.

Rico says if you're too fucking lazy to turn off the ringer, then put up with the problem...

Wackos for the day

Charles McGrath has an article in The New York Times about Scientology:

The writer Lawrence Wright (photo) doesn’t seem at all the sort of person you’d find in public wearing a black cowboy shirt emblazoned with big white buffalos. He’s shy, soft-spoken, a little professorial. But as if he didn’t have enough to do, besides working on three plays simultaneously and getting ready to publish a new book in two weeks, Wright has been taking piano lessons with Floyd Domino, the two-time Grammy winner, and on a recent Saturday, in his buffalo shirt, he played in a concert at the Victory Grill in Austin, Texas with the band WhoDo. Wright was at the keyboard, and sang solo on Sixty-Minute Man and the Count Basie tune She’s Funny That Way. Not bad for a bookworm.
“I decided a while ago that I would only do things that are really important or really fun,” Wright said. “This is really fun.”
More fun, probably, than dealing with lawyers. His new book, Going Clear: Scientology, Celebrity, and the Prison of Belief, published by Knopf, is about the famously litigious Church of Scientology, and he said he has received innumerable threatening letters from lawyers representing the church or some of the celebrities who belong to it. (Transworld, Wright’s British publisher, recently canceled its plans to publish Going Clear, though a spokeswoman insisted that the decision was not made in response to threats from the church.)
The book, which recounts the history of Scientology through the interwoven stories of key figures like L. Ron Hubbard, the religion’s founder, and celebrity Scientologists like John Travolta and Tom Cruise, claims, among other things, that the Church has virtually imprisoned some of its members, threatening blackmail if they try to leave, and that its current leader, David Miscavige, has physically abused some of his underlings. The book won’t do anything to enhance the image of Scientology, already diminished by Janet Reitman’s 2011 book, Inside Scientology: The History of the World’s Most Secretive Religion.
In a statement, Karin Pouw, a Scientology spokeswoman, said Wright and his publisher refused to provide a copy of the book in advance and “showed little interest in receiving input” from the church. “The portions you cite from the book are preposterous lies,” she said, adding that “the allegation about Miscavige is false and defamatory.”
But Wright insists that he did not set out to write an exposé. “Why would I bother to do that?” he said. “Scientology is probably the most stigmatized religion in America already. But I’m fascinated by it, and by what drives people to Scientology, especially given its image.”
He added: “There are many countries where you can only believe more or you can believe less. But, in the United States, we have this incredible smorgasbord, and it really interests me why people are drawn to one faith rather than another, especially to a system of belief that to an outsider seems absurd or dangerous.”
Wright, whose previous book, The Looming Tower: al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, is no stranger to writing about secretive organizations. In the case of Scientology, he said, he had been looking for what he calls a “donkey”; a character strong and sympathetic enough to carry a complicated story. “I don’t mean it in a disparaging way,” he explained. “A donkey is a very useful beast of burden.” In 2010 he finally found one in Paul Haggis, the winner of back-to-back Oscars for Million Dollar Baby, which he wrote, and Crash, which he wrote and directed, who defected from Scientology in 2009 after 34 years in the church, during which he rose to one of its highest ranks.
In 2011, Wright published a profile of Haggis in The New Yorker and, in the course of the fact-checking process, Tommy Davis, the international spokesman for Scientology, did Wright an unwitting favor. He showed up in The New Yorker offices with four lawyers and 47 white binders full of material about the church.
“I suppose the idea was to drown me in information,” Wright recalled, “but it was like trying to pour water on a fish. I looked on those binders with a feeling of absolute joy.”
Among his peers, Wright is known for his thoroughness, and for his legal pads and his filing-card system, which in the computer age is as complicated and as antique as the historian Robert Caro’s. Lauren Wolf, a recent graduate of the journalism school at the University of Texas, who worked for Wright as a fact checker and researcher on Going Clear, said: “I think the reason Larry hired me was that in the interview I said: ‘I think one of my faults is that I don’t know when to stop researching.’ He looked at me and said, ‘I don’t think that’s a fault.’” She added: “He’s incredibly thorough. He does an immense amount of reading and researching and talking to sources.”
In all, Wright spoke to some two hundred current and former Scientologists, only a few of whom insisted on anonymity. He started with Haggis, he said, and one name led to another. It helped that, starting in 2009, a number of high-ranking officials had broken from the church and began talking to The St. Petersburg Times. (The spiritual headquarters of Scientology is in nearby Clearwater, Florida.)
“The church for decades has been mopping up as much information as they can,” Wright said. “That’s why there are so few photographs in the book. They’ve also silenced people through nondisclosure agreements and through intimidation. But this has not been a perfect job on the part of the church. There are a lot of people out there who were very high up in the church and know a lot about it who have become outspoken. I’m very lucky to come along at a time when a lot of these people are ready to talk.”
One of his sources, Amy Scobee, said of meeting Wright: “I had already taken the plunge and decided to speak out. But I’ve been approached by a lot of people who just want a quick sound bite. He wasn’t a Johnny-come-lately. I felt he had real integrity.”
Another ex-Scientologist, Tom De Vocht, a construction manager for the church who left after 28 years, said: “I could tell that Larry wasn’t just out to get the Church, though that would have been fine with me, actually. He really had dug into this, which made it easier to talk to him.” He added: “I couldn’t not say anything. I feel I’ve got to make the truth known.”
A color-coded outline for Going Clear is still on a wall-size whiteboard in Wright’s office in his house here. Next to it is an equally large whiteboard outlining a play Wright has written about the Camp David accords, which is expected to have its premiere at Arena Stage in Washington next season. In February he is going to London for a reading of a play he has written about the making of the movie Cleopatra. In March, a play he has written about the journalist Oriana Fallaci will open at Berkeley Rep in California.
Fallaci, he explained, was someone he admired and in some ways loathed. “She was a very formative figure for me,” Wright said, “though I’m not sure what I think about some of her techniques now. She went a little crazy at the end and, after 9/11, her anti-Muslim rhetoric was so provocative and inflammatory. But I’m still very interested in the tension between Islam and the West, and so Oriana Fallaci became for me a great vehicle, another donkey.”
Wright, who, despite his shyness has also appeared in two one-man shows based on his own journalism, said that he didn’t see much disconnection between his books and his theatrical writing. “They’re all kin,” he said. “I did interviews and have note cards for Oriana.” He also interviewed people who had worked on Cleopatra. “I like the serendipitous surprises of reality,” he said. “I get more pleasure from discovering it than from inventing it.” Excusing himself because he had to go practice the piano, he added: “I get very antsy when I’m not occupied.”

Rico says he knows it's dangerous to talk smack about Scientology, but what the fuck, if this guy can do it and live..

Revisionist history for the day

The New York Times has an editorial about the Japanese:

Few relationships are as important to stability in Asia as the one between Japan and South Korea. Yet Japan’s new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, seems inclined to start his tenure with a serious mistake that would inflame tensions with South Korea and make cooperation harder. He has signaled that he might seek to revise Japan’s apologies for its World War Two aggression, including one for using Koreans and other women as sex slaves.
In 1993, Japan finally acknowledged that the Japanese military had raped and enslaved thousands of Asian and European women in army brothels, and offered its first full apology for those atrocities. A broader apology by Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama in 1995 conceded that “through its colonial rule and invasion”, Japan had caused “tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations”.
In an interview with the Sankei Shimbun newspaper, Abe, a right-wing nationalist, was quoted by Reuters as saying he wants to replace the 1995 apology with an unspecified “forward looking statement”. He said that his previous administration, in 2006-7, had found no evidence that the women who served as sex slaves to Japan’s wartime military had, in fact, been coerced. However, at a news conference last week, the chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, said that Abe would uphold the 1995 apology, but hinted he may revise the 1993 statement.
It is not clear how Abe, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, might modify the apologies, but he has previously made no secret of his desire to rewrite his country’s wartime history. Any attempt to deny the crimes and dilute the apologies will outrage South Korea, as well as China and the Philippines, which suffered under Japan’s brutal wartime rule.
Abe’s shameful impulses could threaten critical cooperation in the region on issues like North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. Such revisionism is an embarrassment to a country that should be focused on improving its long-stagnant economy, not whitewashing the past.

Rico says okay, but it's Tokyo next time...

Bud eating spaghetti