Rico's rants

29 June 2011

Them, not Rico

Rico says he apologizes, but Blogger seems to be having problems uploading photos again, thus Rico's posts (for the moment) have none. As soon as they fix whatever the problem is, he'll put them in. (Now that they have, you'll see the pictures.)

Good business for bad medicine

Barry Meier and Duff Wilson have an article in The New York Times about Medtronic and its problems:

In an extraordinary move, a group of spine specialists are publicly repudiating the research of other experts that has backed the widespread use of a Medtronic bone growth product. The repudiation, appearing in a full issue of The Spine Journal devoted to the topic, represents a watershed in the long-running debate over conflicts of interest for the sponsorship of scientific studies by makers of drugs and medical devices. It is extremely rare for researchers to publicly chastise colleagues, and editors of leading medical journals said they could not recall an instance in which a publication had dedicated an entire issue for such a singular purpose.
Medtronic, the nation’s biggest maker of medical devices, has been facing intensifying scrutiny over its promotion of Infuse, the bone growth product at the center of the controversy. The bioengineered material is used primarily in spinal fusions, a procedure in which spinal vertebrae are joined to reduce back pain. Infuse is used in about a quarter of the estimated 432,000 spinal fusions performed in this country each year. The articles charge that researchers with financial ties to Medtronic overstated Infuse’s benefits and vastly understated its risks by claiming there were none. “It harms patients to have biased and corrupted research published,” five doctors wrote in a joint editorial that accompanied the reports. “It harms patients to have unaccountable special interests permeate medical research."
"The spine care field is currently at a precarious intersection of professionalism, morality, and public safety,” Dr. Christopher M. Bono, editor of the special edition, said in a statement. “As physicians and journal editors, we felt an obligation to present a thorough examination of this controversial issue.”
It is too early to predict how the articles will affect the financial fortunes of Medtronic, which earned an estimated $900 million from Infuse in its most recent fiscal year. But the potential consequences seem significant, and the company’s new chief executive, Omar Ishrak, decided to issue a statement in response. Mr. Ishrak noted that the articles did not challenge the data Medtronic had submitted to the Food and Drug Administration that led to Infuse’s approval in 2002 for use in one type of spinal fusion. Separately, other company officials said Medtronic planned to retain independent experts to examine the issues raised by the publication. “Integrity and patient safety are my highest priorities,” Mr. Ishrak said.
Medtronic officials acknowledged in interviews that it was common for them to review studies of its products before publication. However, they sought to distance themselves from the content of the published reports, and said outside researchers, not the company, had determined the significance of data and how it should be presented. At the heart of the issue are potential side effects related to Infuse’s use that emerged during patient studies conducted about a decade ago by outside researchers with significant financial ties to Medtronic.
Medtronic, as required, reported that data to the FDA, and the agency considered the rate of those complications significant enough in some cases to require the company to list them on Infuse’s label. But, in reporting on such studies in thirteen medical journal articles published during the last decade, researchers whose studies were paid for by Medtronic maintained that Infuse’s use was not tied to any complications.
In one article, experts said those reports played down Infuse’s risks and slanted them to favor Infuse’s performance over a bone graft, the material traditionally used in a fusion. Those experts estimated that the incidence of adverse events in connection with Infuse’s use ranged from ten to fifty percent, depending on how it was used.
Those side effects, they said, include male sterility, infection, bone loss, and unwanted bone growth. A stronger version of Infuse, called Amplify, was recently rejected for approval by the FDA because of concerns about possible cancer risks. In 2008, the agency warned the public that it had received reports of life-threatening injuries associated with the use of Infuse in the cervical portion of the spine, a use that was not approved by the agency.
Dr. Eugene J. Carragee, editor of The Spine Journal, said he believed that Infuse was a valuable product for patients who were not candidates for a bone graft. But he added that the publication had undertaken the review because he and other experts hoped to cleanse the scientific record. While Dr. Carragee said some researchers involved in the earlier reports were not influenced by links to Medtronic, he found it difficult to give those with major financial ties to the company such a pass. The median amount of Medtronic money received over time by researchers involved in some studies ranged from $12 million to $16 million, with most of that going to a few individuals, The Spine Journal estimated. “A consistent number of people involved with these studies got extraordinary sums,” he said.
Both Dr. Howard C. Bauchner, editor in chief of The Journal of the American Medical Association, and Dr. Gregory D. Curfman, executive editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, said they could not think of a time when a journal had devoted an entire issue to questioning an approved product. In recent years, medical journals and professional medical associations have adopted stronger standards requiring researchers to disclose financial conflicts of interest.
Along with Infuse’s approved use in one specific type of spinal fusion, doctors also use it in other types of spinal fusion procedures, something that they are free to do. Since 2008, however, the Justice Department has been conducting a criminal investigation to determine whether Medtronic illegally promoted Infuse for such so-called off-label uses; the company says it did not do so.
The articles added to an expanding number of studies pointing to serious side effects suffered by patients given Infuse. The journal also published an editorial by Dr. Charles L. Branch Jr., a Medtronic consultant, who said that the growing controversy over Infuse reflected a need to develop better ways to monitor and examine the off-label uses of medical products. Infuse “appears to have been assigned the role of the poster child for all that is wrong with ‘off-label’ or physician-directed use of a novel beneficial technology,” wrote Dr. Branch, a neurosurgeon at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Several researchers who were involved in the Medtronic-sponsored studies have defended their reports as scientifically sound and free of company influence, either directly or indirectly. For example, one of them, Dr. Thomas A. Zdeblick of the University of Wisconsin, said that he did not have a “direct financial interest in the success of Infuse or Medtronic.” Over the years, Dr. Zdeblick has received over $20 million in royalty payments from Medtronic in connection with patents on devices, including one that is used with Infuse. Dr. Carragee and his colleagues have called Dr. Zdeblick’s position “hardly credible” and “a fascinating denial of what, in our opinion, is an obvious and enormous conflict of interest.” Asked to respond, Dr. Zdeblick reiterated his position in an email, adding, “I will wait for science, not opinion, to dictate what’s really going on here.”
Dr. John K. Burkus, a surgeon in Columbus, Georgia, and the lead author of four of the questioned studies, did not respond this week to emails and calls seeking comment. However, he has previously defended his studies and took exception last month with a report by Dr. Carragee that asserted a link between Infuse and male sterility.
Last week, two members of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, and Charles E. Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, sent a letter to Medtronic requesting records involving payments and communications with researchers on the Infuse studies.

Doubtless somebody cares, but not Rico

Claire Cain Miller has an article in The New York Times about the Google vs Facebook war:

Google has tried several times, without much success, to take on Facebook and master social networking. Now it is making its biggest effort yet. Google has introduced a social networking service called the Google+ project, which happens to look a lot like Facebook. The service, which is initially available to a select group of Google users who will soon be able to invite others, will let people share and discuss status updates, photos, and links, much as they do on Facebook.
But the Google+ project will be different in one significant way, which Google hopes will be enough to convince people to use yet another social network. It is meant for sharing with groups— like colleagues, roommates or hiking friends— not with all of one’s friends or the entire web. It also offers group text messaging and video chat.
“In real life, we have walls and windows and I can speak to you knowing who’s in the room, but in the online world, you get to a ‘Share’ box and you share with the whole world,” said Bradley Horowitz, a vice president for product management at Google, who is leading the company’s social efforts with Vic Gundotra, a senior vice president for engineering. “We have a different model.”
When it comes to social networking, Google finds itself in an unusual position, one that its competitors in web search know all too well: playing catch-up with a service that dominates the market.
The debut of Google+ will test whether Google can overcome its past stumbles in this area and deal with one of the most pressing challenges facing the company. At stake is Google’s status as the most popular entry point to the web. When people post on Facebook, which is mostly off-limits to search engines, Google loses valuable information that could benefit its web search, advertising, and other products.
But Google+ may already be too late. In May, nearly two hundred million people visited Google sites, including YouTube, compared with 157.2 million on Facebook, according to comScore. But Facebook users looked at 103 billion pages and spent an average of 375 minutes on the site, while Google users viewed 46.3 billion pages and spent 231 minutes. Advertisers pay close attention to those numbers, and to the fact that people increasingly turn to Facebook and other social sites like Twitter to ask questions they used to ask Google, like a recommendation for a restaurant or a doctor.
Analysts say that Facebook users are unlikely to duplicate their network of friends on Google+ and post to both sites, but that they could use them for different types of communication. Google+ could also attract Facebook holdouts who have been uncomfortable sharing too publicly.
“Can someone eclipse Facebook in terms of its hold? It is a fantastic broadcast mechanism,” said Charlene Li, a social media analyst and founder of Altimeter Group, a technology research firm. “But if Google becomes the owner of your private groups, it’s going to be a splintering of our social lives.”
Mr. Gundotra and Mr. Horowitz said that knowing more about individual Google users would improve all Google products, including ads, search, YouTube, and maps, because Google will learn what people like and eventually personalize those products. “To think we could achieve Google’s stated mission of organizing the world’s information absent people would be ludicrous,” Mr. Horowitz said.
But Google has been criticized for failing to understand the importance of social information on the web until competitors like Facebook and Twitter had already leapt ahead. Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, regrets Google’s failure to lead in this market and has spent time working with the team since he became chief executive in April, people at the company say. He promoted Mr. Gundotra to senior vice president this year, placing him on an equal level with the heads of Google’s core products like search and ads.
Part of the blame, analysts say, falls on Google’s engineering-heavy culture, which values quantitative data and algorithms over more abstract pursuits like socializing. Exhibit A is Buzz, a sharing tool for Gmail users. It automatically included users’ email contacts in their Buzz network, setting off widespread criticism that Google had invaded the privacy of users and failed to understand that people’s email contacts are not necessarily their friends. Google quickly changed the service so it did not automatically connect people. In March, Google settled with the Federal Trade Commission over charges of deceptive privacy practices related to Buzz and agreed to twenty years of audits.
Mr. Gundotra and Mr. Horowitz, both of whom worked on Buzz, say they were chastened by the experience. Google+ grew out of those mistakes, they said, because they realized how much people care about controlling the information they share. And unlike its approach with Buzz, which was tested only by Google employees before its broad introduction to the public, Google is calling Google+ a project as a way to emphasize that it is not a final product. The company says it will undergo many changes to fix problems and introduce features. Still, its new web site, plus.google.com, is Google’s most fully formed social networking tool yet.
Mr. Gundotra and Mr. Horowitz said they took pains to mimic people’s relationships in real life and eliminate the social awkwardness that things like friend requests and oversharing can generate on other sites. Google+ users will start by selecting people they know from their Gmail contacts (and from other services, once Google strikes deals with them). They can drag and drop friends’ names into different groups, or circles, and give the circles titles, like “sisters” or “book club.” Then they can share with these groups or with all of their friends. Unlike on Facebook, people do not have to agree to be friends with one another. They can receive someone’s updates without sharing their own.
Facebook has also recognized people’s desire to share with smaller groups, and last year introduced Groups to make that possible. It has been one of Facebook’s fastest-growing products, with users creating fifty million groups in the first six months, according to Facebook. “We’re in the early days of making the web more social, and there are opportunities for innovation everywhere,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in response to Google+.
When users visit their Google+ home page, they see three columns and a stream of status updates in the middle that looks remarkably like Facebook. But Google said that, besides an easier way to share with select groups, Google+ has several other features that distinguish it from competitors. It offers group video chats, called Hangouts, that other members of a group can join as it is happening. Users can search a section called Sparks to see articles and videos from across the web on certain topics, like recipes or ailments, and share them with relevant groups of friends.
On the Google+ mobile app for Android phones and iPhones, people can chat with groups using a feature called Huddle. Photos and videos shot with cellphones are automatically uploaded to a private album, so Google+ users can quickly view and post them from their phones or later on a computer.
With these services, Google will compete with a host of start-ups, like Path for sharing with small groups, SocialEyes for video chat, Flipboard for articles on certain topics, and GroupMe for group texting. “The notion that online sharing is broken is not an insight that is unique to us,” Mr. Horowitz said. “We have a way to bring in millions of users in a way that is challenging for a start-up.”

Rico says that he doesn't do any of this stuff, so it's all meaningless to him, but others will doubtless welcome it...

Fundamentally human, yes, as in stupid

Seth Schiesel has an article in The New York Times about a recent Supreme Court ruling on videogames:

It is now the law of the United States that video games are art. It is now the law of the United States that video games are a creative, intellectual, emotional form of expression and engagement, as fundamentally human as any other. “Like the protected books, plays, and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas— and even social messages— through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot, and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world),” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the Supreme Court in a case that arose from a California effort to ban the sale of violent video games to minors. “That suffices to confer First Amendment protection.”
Well, I’m glad we’ve gotten that taken care of.
It isn’t every decade that a new form of media officially joins the spoken and written word as a member of the special class of protected endeavor we consider vital to the functioning of pluralistic, democratic society. The last big one was film, about sixty years ago.
As Justice Scalia pointed out, the Supreme Court originally found motion pictures unworthy of First Amendment protection. (You know, that freedom of speech thing). In 1915 the court ruled that states could broadly censor films because movies could be “used for evil”. It took until 1952 for the court to grant film constitutional recognition. (It bears noting that television historically has not been entitled to full First Amendment protections from the state because television uses the public airwaves.)
And now video games— as vulgar, crude, disgusting, and thoroughly unredeeming as they often may be— have finally been fully recognized as a worthy element of our culture.
Of course, those of us who actually play games figured this out a long time ago. We knew that the most important video games were not merely matters of technology or neuromuscular coordination, but of finding new ways to explore and think about both human relationships and the wider world around us.
Not all games allow this. Not even most of them. Most video games— like the vast majority of any medium— are insipid junk. But of course one person’s insipid junk— whether books, movies, TV shows, or games— is another’s masterpiece. The point is that as a basic principle, those decisions about value and worth and importance must be left to the individual and protected from politicians. That is what the First Amendment is all about.
This decision invalidated a California law intended to regulate the sale of violent video games to children. As someone who plays hundreds of hours of violent video games every year, I certainly recognize that many are extremely inappropriate for children. It would be unconscionable to allow a young child to sit through, much less control, the gory scenes in some games, just as it would be to let them watch an R-rated “torture porn” film.
With a game like Grand Theft Auto IV, set in a satiric rendition of New York City, there are certainly sixteen-year-olds who will do nothing but embark on wild virtual crime sprees. And there are also emotionally and intellectually precocious fourteen-year-olds who will appreciate the game’s sharp skewering of contemporary American vacuity as seen through the eyes of a Balkan immigrant named Niko Bellic.
That doesn’t mean that game retailers should sell anything to anyone. The game industry has adopted an internal ratings and enforcement system that is at least as effective as the similarly private and voluntary system for Hollywood films. It is only responsible that any media industry give parents thorough information about the violence and sexual content of its products. But, as the court ruled on Monday, deciding just what ideas children may be exposed to is not the proper role of government.
Of course, I was flattered that an article of mine was cited by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. in his concurring opinion (joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.). I agree with their (and my) point that people are coming to interact with video games in increasingly interactive and natural ways. But while they focused on the idea that increased interactivity may make violent games more dangerous, I believe that such involvement may make the player more aware of the potential consequences of his or her actions. A player who might mimic the motion of swinging a bat to smash a skull, a possibility raised by Justice Alito (though I’m not aware of such a game), may only be made more conscious of the brutality of such an act.
As a practical matter, parents ought to have a lot more control over what their children play than what movies they see, anyway. First, the sixty-dollar cost of top games requires parents to be more involved in those purchases than in the purchase of movie tickets. And with the death of the arcade, almost all major games are played at home now. So parents should know what their children are playing.
Yet the real importance of the decision does not rest in practicalities. Laws both reflect and shape the societies that create them. This decision reflects society in that video games have already become the most vibrant new form of media entertainment in decades.
The real question is how this decision now shapes society. The video game industry has long reveled in its adolescent gripe that “they just don’t understand us”. That has led game makers, like sulky teenagers, to act out in some ways, promoting, for instance, some antisocial games with zero redeeming value.
Now that the industry has finally gotten what it’s asked for, it can no longer play the aggrieved, misunderstood victim. It is time to grow up and show the world what you can do with your newfound respectability. Will you use it as cover to pump out schlock or will you rise to the opportunity and respectability that has been afforded you?
The court has ruled that games are art. Now it is up to designers, programmers, artists, writers, and executives to show us what art they can produce.

Stupid is as stupid does

Anahad O'Connor has an article in The New York Times about stupid people, one of whom is dead now, in the Bronx:

A star high school football player was stabbed to death in the Bronx just hours after his graduation, police said. The stabbing took place during an argument in a parking lot over property missing from his family’s car. The victim, Isayah Muller, 19, was a noted running back at Truman High School in the Bronx, where he earned widespread coverage for his success on the field.
According to the police, Mr. Muller and his family had left the commencement ceremonies when an argument erupted between his father, Andre Muller, and some parking attendants at a lot where the family parked their car near Jerome Avenue and 198th street.
The family was on their way to a celebration dinner when the senior Muller noticed something missing from his car, then accused the attendants of stealing it, said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman. Mr. Browne said the argument turned into a fight, which resulted in Isayah Muller being stabbed.
“After the stabbing, the father and son ran to the family car, parked just outside the lot,” he said. “With Isayah, his mother and his girlfriend in the car, the father drove Isayah to a clinic about ten blocks away.” Employees at the clinic called an ambulance, which took Isayah to St. Barnabas Hospital, where he was pronounced dead just before 6 p.m., Mr. Browne said.
The parking lot attendants involved in the fight were taken to the 52nd Precinct station house, where they were being interviewed along with Isayah’s father, Mr. Browne said. No charges have yet been filed.

Rico says if they'd just called the cops first, the kid would be alive now...

History for the day

On 29 June 1995, the shuttle Atlantis and the Russian space station Mir docked, forming the largest man-made satellite ever to orbit the Earth.

28 June 2011

Pershing had the right idea

General John Pershing was a hard man, but he got the job done; Rico says his friend Tex sends along this proof:

Hell for stout

Rico says his friend Tex sends along these photos, both taken in Nagasaki, Japan; the top one in 1945, following the atomic bomb, and the bottom one in 2011, following the earthquake and tsunami. His question (and a good one) is: what the fuck is that torii gate made from?

Dangerous

Anthony Shadid has an article in The New York Times about the opposition in Syria:

Scores of opposition figures met publicly in Damascus for the first time since Syria’s antigovernment uprising began. The officially sanctioned gathering underlined the changes the rebellion has wrought in Syria, as well as the challenges ahead in breaking a cycle of protests and crackdowns that have left hundreds dead. The gathering was remarkable foremost for its rarity; a public show of dissent in a country that has long conflated opposition with treason. But it also cut across some of the most pressing questions in Syria today: whether a venerable but weak opposition can bridge its longstanding divides, whether the government is willing to engage it in real dialogue and whether it can eventually pose an alternative to President Bashar al-Assad’s leadership.
The meeting offered no answers but, in speech after speech, participants insisted the three-month-old revolt could end only with Mr. Assad’s surrender of absolute power. One of the organizers, Louay Hussein, said the meeting of nearly two hundred opposition leaders, unprecedented in its size, would explore a vision for “ending tyranny and ensuring a peaceful and safe transition to a desired state, one of freedom, democracy and equality”.
The meeting was in the works for weeks and, though government officials had signaled that they would not oppose it, the leaders themselves spent days trying to find a locale in the capital that would set aside fears of government retaliation and host them. In the end, Syrian state television, long a tool of propaganda, covered the meeting.
Some activists abroad have criticized the gathering as suggesting that the government was willing to engage in dialogue and tolerate dissent, even as its army and security forces press on with a relentless crackdown from one end of Syria to the other. The Local Coordination Committees, which has sought to speak on behalf of youthful protesters, was not in attendance, and has yet to make a public statement on the meeting itself, though it has refused dialogue as the violence continues. “They contacted me but I refused the invitation as long as the atmosphere is not right,” said Hassan Abdel-Azim, a veteran party leader and opposition figure in Syria. “What kind of dialogue can you have in the midst of a security crackdown?”
Even some organizers— among them, Aref Dalila, an economist, and Hajj Yassin Hajj Saleh, a longtime activist— decided at the last minute not to participate in the gathering. “Unfortunately what I have seen on television is a silly scene,” Mr. Saleh said by phone. “That’s my impression, so I guess I made the right decision.”
But the meeting still drew some of the most prominent opposition figures in Damascus, men like Mr. Hussein, Anwar al-Bunni, and Michel Kilo, who have served time in prison for their outspokenness against one of the region’s most authoritarian governments. Mr. Hussein said that no government representatives would be invited, though dozens of security men were seen circulating outside the hall. In the meeting, convened at the Semiramis hotel, dissidents went to lengths not to claim to speak for the protesters, whose demands have grown in intensity in past weeks. “We are meeting here today to put a plan forward to solve the current crisis,” said Fayez Sara, an opposition activist who attended. “We are not saying we are representing protesters. We are not angry at those who criticized us for holding this meeting.”
So far, Mr. Hussein and others have said they will not enter into dialogue with the government as long as its forces persist on firing on peaceful protesters. But even they acknowledge that the crisis seems to be taking a dangerous turn, as the government grows more isolated, elements of an armed insurgency emerge, and the economy staggers.
“There are two ways forward; the first is a clear and non-negotiable move toward a peaceful transition to democracy, which would rescue our country and our people," Munzer Khaddam, another opposition activist, told the meeting. “The alternative is a road that leads into the unknown and which will destroy everyone.”
In a speech last week, just his third to the country since the uprising began in mid-March, Mr. Assad offered what he described as a national dialogue. The Syrian news agency said that dialogue would begin on 10 July and that “all factions, intellectual personalities, and politicians” would be invited, even though many dissidents have vowed to stay away as long as the crackdown persists. It reiterated a point Mr. Assad made in his 20 June speech: the agenda would include possible amendments to the Constitution, which enshrines the ruling Baath Party’s monopoly on power.
In the past week or so, the government has sought to improve its image as it endures some of the deepest isolation in its four decades in power. The Syrian media have acknowledged the protests, and allowed some foreign journalists into the country. But in the street, where demands have escalated into the rebellion, Mr. Assad’s moves have been met with skepticism and anger. No dialogue, some have chanted, with “tanks of the regime”.
But the government’s opponents have struggled to find their voice, as well. An opposition abroad, without set leaders or programs, has sought to unify its ranks in meetings in Turkey and Europe, with mixed success. Many activists who claim to speak on behalf of the street remain in hiding, fearful of arrest and torture. And deep fears persist inside Syria over the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, which fought a bloody battle with the government that culminated with the events in Hama in 1982, when government forces massacred at least ten thousand people, perhaps more, in that city.
Some diplomats have looked to Monday’s meeting as offering at least the potential for a more unified opposition that could deal with the government. “Every step that helps bring together an opposition is a positive step,” said Burhan Ghalioun, a Syrian scholar and director of the Center for Contemporary Oriental Studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. “We need a unified opposition that can be engaged in a political battle with the regime to force it to transfer the country into a democratic civil state.”

As well they should

Ray Rivera has an article in The New York Times about problems in the Afghan security forces:

For someone who had once joined an insurgent group, and whose family was tied to a top Taliban commander, Akmal had a strikingly easy path into the Afghan National Army. The district governor who approved his paperwork had never met him. A village elder who was supposed to vouch for him, as required by recruiting mandates, did little more than verify his identity. No red flags went up, even when, after just six weeks in the army, he deserted. He returned more than three months later with the skimpiest of explanations and was allowed to rejoin. “I told them I got sick,” Akmal recalled. Now Akmal, 18, who like many Afghans goes by one name, could face the death penalty for his admitted part in a suicide bombing on 22 May that killed six people on the grounds of the Afghan national military hospital. He also helped in another suicide attack in February on a shopping mall in the capital, while he was absent without leave from the army, he said in an interview with The New York Times after his capture last month.
President Obama’s announcement last week of troop withdrawals from Afghanistan made clear that, more than ever, the onus is on Afghans to take responsibility for their own security. But the story of how Akmal went from jihadist to Afghan soldier and back again demonstrates the many problems that still plague the Afghan army and police force. These include the danger of Taliban infiltration, the divided loyalties of many recruits, and even officers, and the sometimes explosive tensions between them and the foreign forces who are supposed to train them.
Interviews with intelligence officers, family members, and other conspirators supported Akmal’s account. The Taliban never asked Akmal to join the Afghan National Army, he said. But once inside, he proved a useful tool. So have many others, NATO data shows. In the past two and a half years, 47 NATO soldiers have been killed by Afghan soldiers or police officers. Many of those deaths were the result of arguments that turned violent. But infiltrators are suspected in some of the cases, including one in which an Afghan soldier detonated a vest at an Afghan military base, and another when a police officer killed the police chief at the Kandahar police headquarters.
As NATO hurries to build an Afghan security force of nearly 400,000 members by the end of 2014, Afghan military and intelligence officials concede that the task of screening the more than eight thousand army and police recruits who enlist each month is monumental. “The army cannot do investigations for each individual person who joins,” said General Zahir Azimi, a spokesman for the Defense Ministry. This month, intelligence officials arrested a dozen people within the Defense and Interior Ministries, including an army colonel and a major, accusing them of aiding in an attack on the Defense Ministry headquarters in Kabul in April that left two soldiers dead. Officials with the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan say there is no evidence to suggest that infiltration is widespread. Still, they began bringing eight counterintelligence officers and specialists to Afghanistan this month to enhance the recruit screening process. “There’s a major effort to turn Afghans once they’re already inside the security forces, as well as a push to infiltrate existing militants into the ranks,” said a senior United States military officer who is helping to oversee the influx.
The Taliban use a range of tactics, including paying relatives who are sympathetic to the insurgents, to lure Afghan security forces into cooperating with them. “They’re even trying cold-calling on their cellphones to see who might be interested,” said the American officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Akmal enlisted in the military for the same reason many people do: to escape poverty. But his heart remained with the insurgency. Though he was offered money, about three hundred dollars, to help in the hospital attack, he considered it supplemental income and not a motivating factor, he said. His background offered hints of trouble. He grew up in Shakar Dara, a small farming district north of Kabul that at one time had been a hotbed of Taliban activity. His father had served under Anwar Dangar, a top Taliban commander, Akmal said. His uncle was Mr. Dangar’s brother-in-law, though the uncle said in an interview that he had cut ties to the Dangar family. That uncle raised Akmal and his older brother from the time they were young, after their mother died and their father disappeared. But, last year, he kicked them out. With nowhere to go, his brother joined the police. Akmal went the opposite direction, following a friend named Waris, Mr. Dangar’s nephew, to eastern Afghanistan, where they joined Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, an insurgent group. Frustrated that the group was not doing much fighting, Akmal returned to Kabul a month later and, desperate for work, joined the army.
Under guidelines established in September of 2009, all army and police recruits must undergo criminal background checks, drug screening, and biometric scans as part of an eight-step vetting process. But, in a country where computers are rare and many criminal matters are handled through the informal justice system, background checks are difficult. So a key step requires that two village elders or guarantors sign letters testifying to the recruit’s “identity and motivation to serve.”
But both those who signed Akmal’s letters said they knew little about him. “All I write is something like, ‘I confirm that this guy lives in this place and he is the son of this man,’” said Malik Mohammad Din, the head elder in Akmal’s village. “And then I stamp it and sign it.” He added that he did not know Akmal had ever joined the insurgency, or he would not have signed. The district governor, Mehrabudin, said: “I signed the letters because the elder knows that person well and so I give my approval.”
Akmal was assigned to the 53rd Health Battalion and began training as a combat medic at the national military hospital in Kabul. He shared his insurgent sympathies with no one. But, told his unit would be sent to the front lines after its training, he quickly deserted. “I didn’t want to fight the Taliban and kill them,” he said. By then his friend Waris, with the help of Afghan associates in Pakistan, was plotting a suicide bombing of Kabul City Center, a shopping mall. Akmal agreed to help stake out the target, instructing the bomber where to go to kill the most foreigners. The plan called for the bomber to blow himself up deep inside the crowded mall, but security guards stopped him at the entrance and he set the vest off, killing himself and two guards.
Afterward, Akmal fled briefly to Pakistan, but returned to Kabul a month later. Finding himself homeless again, he rejoined the army, saying he had been hospitalized with an infectious disease to explain his absence. That he was allowed back was troubling but not unusual, Afghan and NATO officials said. Afghan soldiers often leave without permission to help their families. In fact, there is no penalty for desertion, according to the Defense Ministry. “There is not yet a culture in the military that says you can’t go away and do harvests and come back,” said Major General D. Michael Day, deputy commander of the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan.
A few weeks after Akmal rejoined, Waris called with a new target: the national military hospital. Akmal’s job would be to supply an army uniform and arrange for the bomber to get past the guards at the heavily fortified complex. Akmal called his brother, the police officer, who is also now in custody, for help. Two days before the attack, Akmal went to the home of another of the conspirators in Shakar Dara and met the suicide bomber, a burly Pakistani, for the first time. That night Akmal taught him how to walk like a soldier and gave him his army uniform and boots. As a final preparation, they rigged a grenade fuse to the suicide vest. The next morning, Waris and Akmal escorted the bomber by taxi into Kabul. Inside a restroom at the Pul-e-Khesthi mosque downtown, the bomber changed into the uniform, the vest hidden underneath. Outside the hospital, where Akmal’s brother had arranged for the bomber to pass through, Akmal gave the bomber a cellphone and they left him. A few minutes later, Akmal called. The bomber told him he was seated under a tree outside a hospital dining tent, where dozens of medical trainees were just sitting down to lunch. As Akmal and Waris’s taxi wove through downtown traffic, a report of a suicide blast at the hospital blared over the radio. Akmal dialed the phone again. This time, no one answered.

Separated at birth?

Rico says it's not a perfect resemblance, but it'll do; one of them is his father, and the other one isn't:

More guys on the lam

Abby Goodnough has an article in The New York Times about Whitey Bulger:

James 'Whitey' Bulger may have been on the lam, as they say, but he did not let it cramp his style. During his sixteen years in hiding, federal prosecutors say, Mr. Bulger, the legendary Boston crime boss, traveled to Las Vegas often to play the slots. And wearing a disguise, he even returned to Boston, “armed to the teeth” to “take care of some unfinished business”.
The disclosure came in a court filing, amid an escalating fight over whether Mr. Bulger should get free legal counsel in the two looming cases against him. Prosecutors restated their belief that he has hidden assets that could pay for his defense. But Mr. Bulger’s temporary lawyer, Peter B. Krupp, said that Mr. Bulger, 81, had no assets beyond the more than $800,000 that the government seized from the Santa Monica, California apartment where they captured him last week. Nor will Mr. Bulger ask relatives like his brother William, a former president of the Massachusetts State Senate, to pay his legal bills, Mr. Krupp said in a memorandum to Judge Mark L. Wolf of Federal District Court. “His family has not come forward to hire counsel,” Mr. Krupp wrote, “and there is no evidence to support the government’s surmise that extended family members might be willing and able to hire counsel.”
Brian Kelly, an assistant United States attorney, wrote in the government’s court filing that Mr. Bulger’s disclosures of trips to Boston and Las Vegas (where he “claimed he won more than he lost”) suggested that Mr. Bulger “may have additional assets and/or allies willing to assist him in his current predicament.” Much of the $822,198 seized from Mr. Bulger was found hidden inside a wall of his apartment, Mr. Kelly wrote. A judge has placed a lien on the money at the request of two of Mr. Bulger’s alleged victims.
A hearing on the issue is scheduled for Tuesday. In the meantime, Mr. Krupp asked Judge Wolf to bar the FBI and other law enforcement agencies from leaking details of the case to the news media, saying it would already be “more challenging than in any case in modern memory” to get Mr. Bulger a fair trial. He is facing charges in connection with nineteen murders and other crimes. “The jury pool has surely been tainted by the flood of publicity about this case over the last 25 years,” Mr. Krupp wrote. “If it is now possible, and Mr. Bulger seriously questions whether it will be possible, for Mr. Bulger to receive a fair trial, law enforcement leaks of non-public information must end.”
Mr. Bulger’s girlfriend, Catherine Greig, had also initially sought a court-appointed lawyer to defend her against the charge of harboring a fugitive. But she hired Kevin Reddington, a well-known criminal defense lawyer in private practice. Ms. Greig, a former dental hygienist who went on the run with Mr. Bulger in 1995, was arrested with him in California after a tipster led the FBI to their apartment. Mr. Reddington’s clients have included Mo Vaughn, a former player for the Boston Red Sox, who was acquitted of drunken-driving charges in 1998. Mr. Reddington did not respond to a phone call and e-mail; it was unclear if he was charging Ms. Greig or taking her case pro bono. She is due in court for a detention hearing.
Mr. Kelly said in the government’s court filing that Mr. Bulger had told the authorities after his arrest that William Bulger might be willing to help post bail for Ms. Greig. Mr. Kelly asked Judge Wolf to require affidavits from William and another brother, John, before deciding whether Mr. Bulger was entitled to public counsel.

A woman running the Teamsters? What is the world coming to?

Steven Greenhouse has an article in The New York Times about the Teamsters:

Sandy Pope acknowledges straightaway that she faces an uphill battle; she is the first woman to run for the presidency of the Teamsters union, and she is running against a three-term incumbent, James P. Hoffa, who has the most famous last name in American labor. But Ms. Pope, president of the Teamsters Local 805 in Queens since 2005, insists that she can pull off an upset. She argues that the rank and file are tired of Mr. Hoffa and fed up with contracts packed with concessions. “The anger among the membership is at an all-time high,” said Ms. Pope, who ran unsuccessfully for the union’s number two spot, secretary-treasurer, in 2006 as part of a dissident slate that lost by a ratio of nearly two to one. “The members are much more willing to look for change than five years ago.”
Although the mob influence that once pervaded the Teamsters has been largely rooted out, thanks to two decades of federal supervision and scores of indictments and expulsions, the union and its 1.4 million members face other problems. Membership has steadily declined, as nonunion trucking companies have taken over much of the market, and the economic downturn has made it hard to negotiate sizable wage increases or in some cases, to avoid contract concessions.
Ms. Pope’s campaign will move into a higher gear when she expects to be officially nominated as a candidate for the presidency at the Teamsters convention in Las Vegas. A third candidate, Fred Gegare, a former supporter of Mr. Hoffa and leader of a Teamsters local in Wisconsin, is also expected to be nominated. The members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters are scheduled to vote this fall.
Like many political candidates, Ms. Pope hopes to capitalize on an anti-incumbent fever that has been fueled by the weak economy, and she says she thinks the three-person race will give her an edge as the person least identified with the old guard and a problem-plagued status quo.
But David L. Gregory, a professor of labor law at St. John’s University, questioned Ms. Pope’s chances. “I would suspect Hoffa has a lock on the presidency,” he said. “He seems to have solidified his base.”
Ms. Pope, who is affiliated with Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a powerful faction that has long opposed Mr. Hoffa, said she wanted to make the Teamsters a more dynamic, more combative union that energizes its rank and file far more. But even if she loses, she said, she is confident that her campaign will improve the union by propagating her vision and prodding Mr. Hoffa to adopt some of it. She said she would have the locals do far more organizing, and would move money from headquarters to the locals to pay for it. She also intends to push locals to cooperate more to increase their clout when negotiating with regional employers. Ms. Pope said that Mr. Hoffa had not been nearly aggressive or tough enough in bargaining or organizing. She criticized several contracts negotiated in recent years, especially the one with YRC Worldwide, the biggest unionized long-haul trucking company, which included a fifteen percent pay cut, and exempted the company from making pension contributions for nearly two years. Union leaders justified that as an effort to keep the company out of bankruptcy and save more than 25,000 jobs, and the union received some equity in YRC in exchange.
Ms. Pope, 54, is far from the traditional image of a burly male Teamsters president. She is five-foot-six, weighs 135 pounds, and has blond-streaked sandy brown hair that falls past her shoulders. A member of the union since 1978, she drove trucks in the Midwest for years, hauling steel and delivering auto parts, and obtained a black belt in tae kwan do to help protect herself.
Supporters say she is a smart, savvy operator and a charismatic speaker. And she is plenty tough, having faced sexual harassment as a driver and a lot of boos when she ran for secretary-treasurer. “I’ve had to take a lot of guff,” Ms. Pope said. “Driving a truck is a hard job. It’s hard to drive in snow and ice in Cleveland and Buffalo, going to places you don’t know and making deliveries in the middle of the night.” She recalled arriving, covered in grease, to truck stops that had only men’s showers, often asking a waitress to stand guard while she washed up.
Still, Mr. Hoffa’s forces say that they are hardly worried about Ms. Pope. “She can wish upon a prayer of a rainbow,” said John Murphy, a Teamsters vice president for the Eastern Region who is a member of Mr. Hoffa’s slate. “She’s very critical, but she doesn’t offer any solutions. She doesn’t have a rationale to justify her campaign. She’s a vanity candidate.” Mr. Murphy said Mr. Hoffa, who has led the union since 1999, after Ron Carey was forced out from the presidency in a campaign-finance scandal, had done an excellent job. “By any measure, what Jim Hoffa has achieved over the past dozen years has been quite remarkable,” said Mr. Murphy, whom the Hoffa campaign put forward as its spokesman. “He’s unified the organization. He’s restructured the finances. He’s built up a solid strike fund, and he’s stepped up our organizing efforts.”
Under Mr. Hoffa, the union has organized 30,000 private school bus drivers, monitors, and mechanics, and 7,500 ramp workers at Continental Airlines.
Mr. Murphy said Mr. Hoffa was negotiating the best contracts he could in tough times and pointed to the flexibility shown in the rescue of YRC and the jobs there. “It’s in times like these that the value of your union shows through,” Mr. Hoffa and Ken Hall, his running mate and a candidate for secretary-treasurer, say in their campaign literature. “Your Teamsters union leadership is working tirelessly, at every level possible, to protect Teamster jobs and benefits and to balance the scales that have tipped so far toward Wall Street and away from Main Street.”
The Hoffa campaign, in a Web site called truthaboutsandypope.com, accuses Ms. Pope of running down the assets from her local to less than half of the $1.75 million it had in 2005, saying she has spent extravagantly going to Teamster meetings around the country.
Ms. Pope calls the Hoffa criticisms hypocritical, saying she goes to the same meetings that most Teamster local presidents do. She said the main reason that her local’s assets have dropped is that she has spent so much trying to organize nonunion workers, especially 900 at FreshDirect, the grocery delivery company. In an unusual strategy, Ms. Pope is not fielding a full slate of two dozen candidates for national and regional positions, but is instead running alone. She said many union officials backed her or wanted to work with her, but they were reluctant to join a slate because they worried that Mr. Hoffa and his allies would retaliate, a fear that Mr. Hoffa’s supporters say is unjustified. Ms. Pope said she hoped to again see the Teamsters become the nation’s most powerful union, as it was in the 1950s under Mr. Hoffa’s father, Jimmy Hoffa. He was hugely popular among drivers, but was convicted of jury tampering and fraud, serving time in federal prison before disappearing in 1975.
Michael H. Belzer, an associate professor of industrial relations at Wayne State University, said it would not be easy for Ms. Pope or anyone else to reverse the union’s decline. He noted that the Teamsters once represented eighty percent of the nation’s long-haul truck drivers, but it now represents around only eight percent, as many unionized firms have been pushed out of business by industry deregulation and lower-wage nonunion competitors. “It was an enormous challenge to turn things around twenty years ago,” Professor Belzer said. “It’s going to be much more enormous now.”
Mr. Gegare, a union member since 1972, often echoes Ms. Pope, also criticizing Mr. Hoffa for his “top down approach”, and for relying on many unelected consultants and lawyers as his top advisers. Mr. Gegare asserts that Mr. Hoffa runs the Teamsters “like a family fiefdom. It’s time for members to be the first priority and for local unions to get back their autonomy,” he said.
Ms. Pope acknowledges that the Hoffa campaign will have a much larger war chest than she or Mr. Gegare. As before, many well-paid officials in the union’s hierarchy are expected to contribute generously to Mr. Hoffa’s campaign. “I’m counting on grass-roots organizing and the Internet, Facebook, texting, and free conference calls to counter that,” she said. “I have regular conference calls with dozens of drivers during the middle of the night. They ask me questions and I respond. I think of winning the way the Obama campaign won: with ground action.”

Rico says that whirring noise is Jimmy Hoffa, spinning in his grave, wherever that is...

Desperation is now a Microsoft term

Steve Lohr has an article in The New York Times about Microsoft:

People like Tom Conophy are stirring anxiety and action in Microsoft’s executive offices these days. Mr. Conophy, the chief information officer of the InterContinental Hotels Group, decided earlier this year to begin moving nearly all the company’s 25,000 office workers off Microsoft’s email and Office productivity applications and onto Google’s web-based alternatives.
About 6,000 employees in the hotel management company have converted so far, Mr. Conophy says, and things are going well. The savings, he estimates, will add up to millions of dollars a year. And Google’s online offerings, he said, have improved steadily since it entered the business market four years ago. “We could do this now because the Google cloud apps are ready for prime time,” Mr. Conophy said.
Halting such defections is a top priority at Microsoft. The company will begin selling Office 365, a cloud-based version of Microsoft’s email, whiteboard collaboration software, and word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation programs. The marketing campaign will begin with a presentation in New York by Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer.
Like Google Apps, the new service is run in the cloud— remotely in data centers— and users tap in from an internet-connected browser on a personal computer, tablet, or smartphone.
Microsoft’s long-awaited move, analysts say, is a studiously crafted bet, including various offerings at different prices. They are not sure whether it represents wishful thinking or a workable strategy. Microsoft’s plan is to embrace the demand for cloud-based tools for office workers, which promise to be less costly for companies than conventional software, and yet avoid cannibalizing a business that is its biggest single money-maker.
“If Microsoft stumbles, it really opens the door to Google,” said Matt Cain, an analyst for Gartner. “It’s a tremendous long-term threat to Microsoft and its Office franchise.” The Microsoft unit that includes the Office family of products is a twenty-billion-dollars-a-year business, with pretax profit margins of sixty percent. The business is even larger than the company’s other big profit engine, the Windows PC operating system.
Google portrays the arrival of Office 365 as an endorsement, if not a capitulation. “This is a recognition that our business is for real,” said David Girouard, president of Google’s enterprise division. “We’ve really helped move the needle in the marketplace.” The company now claims more than 30 million active users of Google Apps, its collection of online office productivity and communications programs. But about twelve million of those users are university staff and students, who typically get free access to the apps. The standard charge for business and government customers is fifty dollars per user a year. Google will not disclose how many customers pay that fee. It does say it is gaining momentum. Just this month, Google announced a series of large converts. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that conducts climate and ocean studies, with 25,000 employees, is adopting Google Apps. Others include the State of Wyoming, with ten thousand workers, and the McClatchy Group, a publishing chain, with nearly nine thousand workers. The subscription renewal rates to Google Apps, Mr. Girouard said, are higher than ninety percent and, for larger companies, the rate is nearly one hundred percent.
There are other cloud-based business e-mail, productivity and collaboration tools including entries from Zoho, Zimbra from VMware, Lotus Live from IBM, and Chatter from Salesforce.com.
Yet Google, analysts say, is the main rival that Microsoft has in mind with Office 365. “There’s no doubt that the increasing popularity of Google Apps has forced Microsoft’s hand,” said Melissa Webster, an analyst at IDC. “But Microsoft is really embracing the cloud now. This is the other shoe dropping.”
At fifty dollars a year, Google’s pricing seems far more appealing than the standard price for the Office PC software, from $200 to about $400, depending on features. Office 365 prices are from $2 per user a month to $27 per user a month. The $2-a-month service is just email and is intended for companies that want to extend communications to employees currently not served, like factory workers. The $27-a-month offering is for all the online features, including web conferencing and digital whiteboards for team projects, and a license to the most powerful version of the Office personal computer software.
A $6-a-month offering is aimed at extending Microsoft’s email server services and collaboration tools, like SharePoint, to small businesses. These small businesses typically have the Office PC software, but not the related software, analysts say.
With cloud-based versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, plus several new communications and collaboration tools, that offering could be quite appealing, analysts say. The price, at $72 a year, is somewhat above Google’s, but it carries the Microsoft name and familiarity. “It could be a lot of net new business, and stable recurring revenue, if Microsoft can pull it off,” Ms. Webster said.

Rico says all this is quite moot, as far as he's concerned; as an Apple user, he'll soon be in the iCloud for free, and using Apple applications...

Rico had been wondering about that

John Schwartz has an article in The New York Times about the same-sex marriage squabble:

New York’s new law allowing same-sex marriage could bring renewed focus to an embattled federal law that says other states do not have to recognize such unions. The Defense of Marriage Act, known as DOMA, forbids federal recognition of same-sex marriage. But a less prominent part of the law says that no state can be forced to acknowledge a same-sex couple’s marriage from another state.
With New York’s law applying to nineteen million residents, and those from outside the state as well, a surge in same-sex marriages could ensue, with many of the couples migrating to places where those marriages are not recognized. Twenty-nine states have constitutional amendments that define marriage as being between a man and a woman, and twelve have laws that ban recognition of same-sex marriage. Douglas NeJaime, an associate professor at Loyola Law School, said the increased number of married couples moving around the country would force more states to “deal with interstate recognition” and would also have the effect of “putting more pressure on the everyday treatment of same-sex couples by the federal government”.
Opponents of same-sex marriage argue that the Defense of Marriage Act is, therefore, essential to prevent activists from using the judicial system to undercut the law in those states. “If DOMA is not there, the courts will begin the process of redefining marriage” in the states that have already stood against it, said Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council in Washington, a Christian organization that opposes same-sex marriage.
Kelly Shackelford, president of Liberty Institute, a conservative Christian legal advocacy group in Plano, Texas, said the New York law was “a reconfirmation of the very reason why DOMA was passed.”
But many constitutional law experts argue that the Defense of Marriage Act gave states no more powers than they already had. Tobias Barrington Wolff, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania law school, said: “There’s never been a mandatory obligation on the part of one state to recognize a marriage from another state that would violate local public policy.” Even if the act is overturned or repealed, the effect is not likely to force same-sex marriage upon other states, he said.
The Defense of Marriage Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton, has been under fierce attack in the courts. Last year, a federal judge in Massachusetts declared the law unconstitutional as it applied to same-sex couples for issues like inheritance taxes and federal health and pension benefits. President Obama has expressed his opposition to DOMA, and in February the Justice Department announced that it would not defend it in court, though it would enforce the law until a final court decision was made on its constitutionality.
The power of states to say no is tempered by the requirement of the Constitution that they need to work together, even when laws conflict, said Jennifer Pizer, the legal director of the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The Constitution says in a general way that we’re one country; states need to play nicely with each other and honor each others’ rules,” she said.
But Professor Wolff and others point to a large body of decisions that shows how the states have the power to reject other states’ rules based on public policy principles. Conflicts in state laws over marriage have emerged in the country for two hundred years, he said, and include issues like the minimum age to marry without parental consent, the right to marry first cousins, and mixed-race marriage. The general principle has been that the state where the couple lives gets to decide whether their marriages are valid on a case-by-case basis. Even Southern states that outlawed mixed-race marriages have recognized many of them when the couple resided elsewhere, for example when the case involved the probate of an estate, said Andrew Koppelman, a constitutional law expert at Northwestern University Law School. A couple passing through a state that does not recognize their marriage will often get recognition if one partner ends up in the hospital so that the other can direct treatment, he said: “It should be safe to travel without having to carry a power of attorney with you wherever you go.” Some states are so hostile to same-sex marriage that it is not certain that they will follow those principles, he said. Mr. Koppelman said courts were unlikely to recognize a marriage where the couple traveled to another state to marry— on a weekend vacation, say— in order to evade their home state’s prohibition of same-sex marriage. The principle that each state governs its own residents is “unattractive to supporters of same-sex marriage, including me”, but it has been the prevailing view, he said.
If the Defense of Marriage Act is overturned, it is unlikely to change the states’ ability to say no to gay and lesbian marriage, but a more sweeping decision by the United States Supreme Court declaring a constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry would. That is the legal theory behind the challenge in California to that state’s same-sex marriage ban. But the first lawsuits regarding same-sex marriage that are likely to reach the Supreme Court challenge the Defense of Marriage Act and its effect on benefits in a more surgically focused way. And Professor NeJaime of Loyola said that even with the court fight over California’s law, the Supreme Court tends to decide cases as narrowly as possible, so “I don’t think we’re headed down that road.”

Rico says he'd always thought that a legal marriage in one state was recognized in all states, so he's confused, as usual...

Bigger (and harder) legal issues

Marlise Simons has an article in The New York Times about indicting Qaddafi:

The International Criminal Court in The Hague issued arrest warrants for Libya’s leader, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, one of his sons, and his intelligence chief, accusing them of crimes against humanity during the first two weeks of the uprising in Libya that led to a NATO bombing campaign.
In addition to Colonel Qaddafi, warrants were issued for Seif al-Islam Qaddafi and the chief of military intelligence, Abdullah Senussi, the Libyan leader’s brother-in-law. Reading out the decision, the presiding judge, Sanji Monogeng of Botswana, said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that the three were criminally responsible for the murder and persecution of hundreds of civilians during peaceful protests in February.
The decision, by a three-judge panel, said it was impossible to know the number of people killed or imprisoned, because the crimes were covered up.
The order, another step in the isolation of the Qaddafi regime, raised the questions of how and whether the court could gain custody of the men, since it has no police powers.
Colonel Qaddafi’s government, which is not among the 115 countries that recognize the court, denounced the ruling. Libya’s justice minister, Mohammed al-Qamoodi, was quoted as saying the court “is a tool of the Western world to prosecute leaders in the Third World.”
One possible solution, lawyers said, would be for Libyan rebels to capture the men and send them to The Hague. But even as rebel fighters have loosened Colonel Qaddafi’s grip on the mountain towns southwest of Tripoli in recent weeks, they have been unable to reach the heavily defended capital. Rebels based in the mountains have pushed north and east to the town of Bir al-Ghanam, roughly one hundred miles from Tripoli, in heavy fighting with Qaddafi forces.
Failing a rebel capture of Colonel Qaddafi, NATO, now past the hundredth day of its air campaign against his forces, could expand its mandate to include the arrest of the three Libyans. But any overt or covert operations to track down the suspects would require that NATO leaders revise their policy of limiting alliance actions to aerial attacks.
Prosecutors in The Hague hope that the United Nations Security Council, which has requested the investigation of possible crimes in Libya, will find ways to encourage the arrest of the suspects and allow the court to go beyond statements and orders that may not be enforced. But diplomats may oppose such a move, on the grounds that they want to keep the road to a political solution open, as they have previously said. Even so, Colonel Qaddafi and his inner circle have consistently resisted offers of safe passage to exile abroad. “Qaddafi has made clear his determination to hang on,” said Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch. “It defies belief that his arrest warrant is an obstacle to a negotiated settlement of the Libya crisis.”
The court accusations were limited to events from 18 February to “at least” 28 February, before a full-scale conflict erupted between the Qaddafi regime and rebel forces and well before the start of the NATO air campaign on 19 March. Nonetheless, the prosecutor has said he will investigate possible violations by the rebel side, but has not mentioned civilians deaths the Libyan government has blamed on NATO.
The judges’ statement said that Colonel Qaddafi would have to answer charges of crimes because he had “absolute, ultimate, and unquestioned” control over the state. His son Seif al-Islam was described as “the most influential person” in Colonel Qaddafi’s inner circle, with control over finances and logistics and “the powers of a de facto prime minister.” The judges said that Senussi had directly ordered the February attacks on civilians in Benghazi as the head of military intelligence, “one of the most powerful and efficient instruments of repression.”
The three men are not expected in The Hague anytime soon. Nevertheless, some politicians and diplomats say they see arrest warrants as useful tools against political leaders once they are identified as potential war criminals. Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the Sudanese president, wanted by the court on genocide charges, retains strong support at home, but has been forced to skip several international meetings for fear of arrest.
Even leaders from countries friendly to Bashir have kept him at bay by saying that envoys from other countries would refuse to attend gatherings with him. Bashir, who was traveling to China on Monday, had to postpone his meetings with Chinese officials when he was forced to change his flight plans after a request not to go through Turkmenistan’s airspace.
For the court, which has jurisdiction over cases starting when it opened in 2002, the arrest warrant for Colonel Qaddafi was the second for a sitting president, after that of Bashir. Other international courts have indicted two sitting presidents for war crimes, Charles G. Taylor of Liberia and Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia. Both were eventually arrested and brought to trial.

More legal stuff

Adam Liptak has an article in The New York Times about the latest Supreme Court ruling:

The Supreme Court on Monday struck down, on First Amendment grounds, a California law that banned the sale of violent video games to children. The seven-to-two decision was the latest in a series of rulings protecting free speech, joining ones on funeral protests, videos showing cruelty to animals and political speech by corporations.
Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for five justices in the majority in the decision, Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, No. 08-1448, said video games were subject to full First Amendment protection: “Like the protected books, plays and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas, and even social messages, through many familiar literary devices, such as characters, dialogue, plot, and music, and through features distinctive to the medium, such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world,” Justice Scalia wrote. “That suffices to confer First Amendment protection.”
Depictions of violence, Justice Scalia added, have never been subject to government regulation. “Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed,” he wrote, recounting the gory plots of Snow White, Cinderella, and Hansel and Gretel. High school reading lists and Saturday morning cartoons, too, he said, are riddled with violence.
The California law would have imposed thousand-dollar fines on stores that sold violent video games to anyone under eighteen. It defined violent games as those “in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being” in a way that was “patently offensive”, appealed to minors’ “deviant or morbid interests”, and lacked “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value”.
The definitions tracked language from decisions upholding laws regulating sexual content. In 1968, in Ginsberg v. New York, the court allowed limits on the distribution to minors of sexual materials like what it called “girlie magazines” that fell well short of obscenity, which is unprotected by the First Amendment.
Justice Scalia rejected the suggestion that depictions of violence are as subject to regulation as obscenity. “Because speech about violence is not obscene,” he wrote, “it is of no consequence that California’s statute mimics the New York statute regulating obscenity-for-minors that we upheld" in the Ginsberg decision.
The video game industry, with annual domestic sales of more than $10 billion, welcomed Monday’s ruling. “Everybody wins on this decision,” John Riccitiello, chief executive of Electronic Arts, one of the largest public video game companies, said in a statement. “The court has affirmed the constitutional rights of game developers, adults keep the right to decide what’s appropriate in their houses, and store owners can sell games without fear of criminal prosecution.”
Leland Yee, a California state senator who wrote the law, said in a statement that “the Supreme Court once again put the interests of corporate America before the interests of our children,” adding: “It is simply wrong that the video game industry can be allowed to put their profit margins over the rights of parents and the well-being of children.”
The industry had viewed the court’s decision to hear the case as worrisome, given that the lower courts had been in agreement that laws regulating violent expression were unconstitutional. The justices had, moreover, agreed to hear the case just after issuing their eight-to-one decision last year in United States v. Stevens, striking down a federal law making it a crime to buy and sell depictions of animal cruelty like dog-fighting videos. That also suggested that at least some of the justices had viewed California’s law as problematic.
But, on Monday, the majority said the Stevens decision required the court to strike down the California law. Only a few kinds of speech, like incitement, obscenity, and fighting words, are beyond the protection of the First Amendment, Justice Scalia said, adding that the court would not lightly create new excluded categories. Stevens did not involve speech directed to minors, but the majority said the California law’s goal of protecting children from seeing violence did not alter the constitutional analysis. “No doubt a state possesses legitimate power to protect children from harm,” Justice Scalia wrote, “but that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed.”
Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan joined the majority opinion in the case.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in a concurrence joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., voted with the majority, but did not adopt its reasoning. Justice Alito said the California law was too vague. A more carefully worded law, he wrote, might survive constitutional scrutiny.Justice Alito said the majority opinion was too quick to dismiss differences between current video games and other media. “The objective of one game is to rape a mother and her daughters,” he wrote. In another, “players attempt to fire a rifle shot into the head of President Kennedy as his motorcade passes by the Texas School Book Depository.” Soon, he added, children may play three-dimensional high-definition games wearing equipment that will allow them to “actually feel the splatting blood from the blown-off head” of a victim.
Justice Scalia acknowledged that Justice Alito had identified some disturbing images. “But disgust,” Justice Scalia wrote, “is not a valid basis for restricting expression.”
Justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen G. Breyer filed separate dissents. Justice Thomas said the drafters of the First Amendment did not understand it to protect minors’ free speech rights. “‘The freedom of speech,’ as originally understood, does not include a right to speak to minors (or a right of minors to access speech) without going through the minors’ parents or guardians,” Justice Thomas wrote.
Justice Scalia, who shares with Justice Thomas a commitment to interpreting the Constitution in accord with its original meaning, parted ways with his usual ally on this point. “He cites no case, state or federal, supporting this view, and to our knowledge there is none,” Justice Scalia wrote of Justice Thomas.
Justice Breyer also dissented, saying the statute survived First Amendment scrutiny. He relied on studies that he said showed violent video games were positively associated with aggressive behavior. “Unlike the majority,” Justice Breyer wrote, “I would find sufficient grounds in these studies and expert opinions for this court to defer to an elected legislature’s conclusion that the video games in question are particularly likely to harm children.”

Rico says one must always remember the definition of Absolute Truth: a five-to-four decision by the Supreme Court. The simple solution, as ever, is for parents to not give their kids the money to buy this crap, or to throw it out if they do, but that's too fucking easy...

Speaking of stupid politicians

Monica Davey and Emma Fitzsimmons have an article in The New York Times about Rod Blagojevich, another idiot politician:

A jury on Monday convicted the former governor of Illinois, Rod R. Blagojevich, of a broad pattern of corruption, including charges that he tried to personally benefit from his role in selecting a replacement for President Obama in the United States Senate. Mr. Blagojevich, a Democrat who former aides say once envisioned himself as a future presidential contender, was found guilty of most of the twenty federal counts against him: seventeen counts of wire fraud, attempted extortion, soliciting bribes, conspiracy to commit extortion, and conspiracy to solicit and accept bribes.
As the verdicts were read aloud in court, one 'guilty' following another, Mr. Blagojevich, who has always proclaimed his innocence, turned, his jaw clenched grimly, to look at his wife, Patti, in the front row. By then, she was already slumped back in the arms of a relative, eyes closed, wiping away tears.
The verdict appeared to be the conclusion, at last, to the spectacle of Mr. Blagojevich’s political career, which began its spiraling descent shortly after Mr. Obama was elected president in November of 2008. A month after Election Day, Mr. Blagojevich, who was in his second term as governor and under state law was required to name a senator to replace Mr. Obama, was arrested, and federal agents revealed that they had secretly recorded hundreds of hours of damaging phone calls by him and his advisers.
Mr. Blagojevich, a lawyer and former state and federal lawmaker, was accused of trying to secure campaign contributions, a cabinet post, or a high-paying job in exchange for his official acts as governor, whether that was picking a senator, supporting particular legislation, or deciding how to spend state money. Mr. Blagojevich was acquitted on one charge of bribery, and the jury deadlocked on two counts of attempted extortion, but convictions came on the bulk of the counts and on those related to the Senate seat, the claims that had drawn international headlines.
The outcome came as a victory for federal prosecutors, whose earlier trial resulted in a deadlocked jury on most counts and led people to wonder whether Mr. Blagojevich’s behavior would ultimately be deemed crass political deal-making, or a lot of wishful and blustery talk, but not rise to the level of crimes.
Issuing their verdicts on the 10th day of deliberations, jurors said the accusations related to selling the Senate seat had been the clearest and easiest to resolve, in part because of the audio recordings of Mr. Blagojevich’s telephone calls. In the end, the jurors— eleven women and one man, all of whom declined to provide their names to reporters— said they believed they had sent a loud signal to corrupt Illinois politicians, past and future. “There’s a lot of bargaining that goes on behind the scenes; we do that in our everyday lives, in business and everything,” said the jury forewoman, a retired church employee from the Chicago suburbs. “But I think in the instances when it is someone representing the people, it crosses the line. And I think we sent a pretty clear message on that.” And she had her own conclusion about the unseemly political world she had seen close-up through about six weeks of testimony: “I told my husband that, if he was running for politics, he would probably have to find a new wife.”
For Democrats here, in a state government they almost entirely control, the final chapter could not come soon enough. By turns, Illinois residents had been mortified by the saga, amused by its circuslike antics, and, most recently, weary of the whole thing.
Mr. Blagojevich’s impeachment, removal from office, and evolution into a punch line on late-night television threatened the Democratic Party’s political hold on the state, created an outcry to overhaul lax state campaign finance and public records laws, and led to added scrutiny of some of this city’s best-known politicians, including Mr. Obama, Rahm Emanuel (the president’s former chief of staff and now Chicago’s mayor) and Representative Jesse L. Jackson Jr.
The scandal also reaffirmed an image that Illinois has long wished to shed: Mr. Blagojevich appears likely to be the fourth governor in recent memory to be imprisoned (one for acts committed after leaving office).
Mr. Blagojevich, 54, the father of two girls, was released until sentencing. His lawyers have until next month to pursue a new trial. The most serious of the counts carry penalties of up to twenty years in prison. After Mr. Blagojevich’s first trial last year, jurors said the case had been too tangled and confusing, and it was clear that prosecutors took that message to heart. In the retrial, which began in April, prosecutors offered fewer, simpler charges, a notably boiled-down message, and an emphasis on the thought that Mr. Blagojevich did not need to actually complete any deals to be found guilty of crimes for proposing them.
Prosecutors laid out five “schemes” in which they said Mr. Blagojevich tried to get campaign contributions, in exchange for supporting a Senate appointee or legislation to help racetracks, a pediatric hospital, or road projects. They also accused him of pushing for a campaign fund-raiser (from Mr. Emanuel’s brother in Hollywood, Ari Emanuel) in exchange for supporting a school. The jury ultimately did not convict Mr. Blagojevich in connection to the school or the road projects.
The stakes of the retrial were apparent. Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Illinois (who may be better known nationally as having pursued the CIA leak case against I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney) personally listened to parts of the trial and sat in the back row as the verdicts were read, later describing the outcome as vindication for the people of Illinois.
For his part at the trial, Mr. Blagojevich did what Mr. Blagojevich likes to do: talk. After offering no defense testimony at all in his first trial, he testified before jurors for seven days, proclaiming his innocence, and portraying his taped conversations about matters like who he might appoint to the Senate as merely brainstorming, not some sinister plot. Mr. Blagojevich defended himself against recorded calls and testimony that seemed to suggest he was pressing for a cabinet post in the Obama administration in exchange for appointing Valerie Jarrett, an ally of Mr. Obama, to the Senate. And he defended himself against calls and testimony that seemed to suggest he was considering a $1.5 million campaign contribution from supporters of Mr. Jackson if he were appointed to the Senate. He had not committed to any particular result, Mr. Blagojevich testified.
In a defense that some non-Chicagoans might have understandably viewed as closer to a confession, Mr. Blagojevich insisted that his favorite idea was not a financial trade at all, but a raw political exchange. He said he really wanted to appoint Lisa Madigan, the state’s attorney general, to the Senate seat in exchange for help getting his legislative agenda passed by her powerful father, Michael Madigan, the speaker of the Illinois House.
While residents here seem to have grown inured by the Blagojevich story over more than two years, a curious city did watch as its new mayor, Mr. Emanuel, and Mr. Jackson were called to the witness stand by the defense team. As it turned out, neither man’s testimony was particularly shocking. Mr. Jackson said he knew nothing of a financial offer by supporters to Mr. Blagojevich for the Senate seat, and Mr. Emanuel said Mr. Blagojevich had not solicited favors from him when he recommended Ms. Jarrett as a candidate for the Senate appointment. But Mr. Emanuel’s having appeared at all— he had been sworn in as mayor only days before— seemed one more fitting moment in a story that has never lacked big names or drama.
As Mr. Blagojevich departed the courthouse on Monday, he spoke only briefly. Gone was the news conference fanfare: “Among the many lessons that I’ve learned from this whole experience is to try to speak a little bit less,” Mr. Blagojevich said, soon adding, “I, frankly, am stunned. There is not much left to say other than we want to get home to our little girls and explain things to them.”