Saturday, December 7, 2013
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com


News Clips For The Day


'Murky' drug trade: How did North Korea become a meth hub? – NBC

By Geoffrey Cain, GlobalPost Contributor

SEOUL, South Korea – Extradited from Thailand, the five suspects appeared before a New York court last month to face charges of a sensational plot: smuggling crystal meth from enemy number one, North Korea.

The five suspects – from China, the U.K., the Philippines and possibly Slovakia – stand accused by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) of conspiring to sell 40 pounds of 99 percent pure crystal meth to an undercover agent. They pleaded not guilty, and will appear in court again in early December.

You wouldn’t guess it, but North Korea – run by the world’s most infamous authoritarian regime – happens to be a colossal supplier of a highly potent but moderately priced form of crystal meth, experts say.

It comes in the form of “Ice,” the powerful, smoke-able type that delivers a near-immediate jolt to the brain.
The drug is primarily made for export, ferried through China and, from there, distributed around the world.
But some North Koreans – despite the watchful eyes of their government – are avid consumers of crystal meth too.

Two North Korean refugees in Seoul told GlobalPost that, in a country suffering from poverty and food shortages, the drug is a much-needed appetite suppressant, offering a means of self-medication to cope with the hardship.

Near the Chinese border, they said, Ice was widely available on the black market. It was popular among private traders and their families, who had no problem inhaling or selling it in outdoor markets with a bribe to authorities.

“Life was hard, people were hungry, and we needed the drug,” said one female North Korean defector in Seoul, who fled to the Chinese border region in the mid-2000s.

Five men appear in a New York City courtroom on Nov. 21, 2013, in this courtroom sketch. They are accused of plotting to smuggle 100 kilograms of highly potent methamphetamine produced in North Korea into the United States.

She admitted to smoking Ice multiple times, and once gave smaller doses to her two boys, aged 11 and 13.
“My family was a little wealthier, so we could afford it, but even poor people did it too,” she said. “It was a popular drug.” She asked not to be named, fearing reprisals against family members still in the country.

Of course, various types of amphetamines enjoy some popularity in developing countries in Asia and Africa, where laborers, for instance, need energy to work long hours on scant meals. Even South Korea, which leaped from poverty to riches in about 30 years, was once a big-time producer of crystal meth.

This booming trade, now in private hands, was once a fundraising arm for the cash-strapped government, experts say. North Korean embassies trafficked in hashish as far back as the 1970s.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the economy collapsed, resulting in a devastating famine. By the mid-2000s, a nascent class of merchants flourished, peddling just about any illegal product you could imagine, including drugs and pirated DVDs.
“These days, more and more freelancers and professional drug dealers are taking over this murky operation of delivering the drugs produced in North Korea, packed in Northeast China, and smuggled via South East Asia to Australia, America and Europe,” said Leonid Petrov, a North Korea watcher at the Australian National University in Canberra.

“Many North Korean scientists began to moonshine in private laboratories producing the similar high-quality product for domestic consumption and illicit export,” he said. Since crystal meth laboratories are smelly, they would have to be away from populated towns.

From a business standpoint, moving the contraband from North Korea to China would be realistic and highly profitable.

Chinese Mafiosos probably hand over supplies, while North Koreans, in the safety of their country, synthesize the drugs in factories near the southern banks of the Tumen River that marks part of the boundary between North Korea, China and Russia, writes Andrei Lankov, a North Korea specialist at Kookmin University in Seoul.
That’s a swift change from a lucrative narcotics trade that, a decade ago, was mostly state-run.

Still, it’s not clear whether the group of five suspected dealers had the resources and connections to move meth from North Korea all the way to North America. Prosecutors accuse the group of trafficking and selling North Korean drugs in Southeast Asia, a more reachable market.

One suspect even boasted that his organization was the only one that could get the job done.

“Because before, there were eight [other organizations]. But now only us, we have the NK product,” Chinese suspect Ye Tiong Tan Lim was quoted as saying on the recordings.
The suspect said that his group stockpiled one ton of North Korean meth in the Philippines, anticipating an unconfirmed decision by North Korea to destroy meth labs under pressure from the U.S. The drugs would be shipped through Thailand, according to prosecutors.

The two North Korean defectors told GlobalPost they were unsure whether laboratories have been destroyed. One study in the North Korea Review suggested that the trade was indeed moving from an array of factories to the underground.
But, explains Petrov, “As with everything that comes out of North Korea, the veracity of this story is 50-50.”


This story is an eye-opener to me. I have never thought of a government leading a black market trade in anything, especially drugs, since the use of drugs is so deleterious to the health of the users. In the case of the North Koreans, they were using it as an appetite suppressant, though, and the inability to provide enough food for their citizens has been one of their main problems for a long time now. I notice the article said that the US has been putting pressure on the North Korean government to destroy meth labs, so this was not unknown to us before the five agents were arrested. It does seem that corruption is endemic to power, so police officials can only try to catch those who are selling contraband while the trade continues unabated in other places. These five people will be in prison for a while, at least.




Obama: NSA reforms will give Americans 'more confidence' in surveillance programs
By Andrew Rafferty, NBC News

President Barack Obama said he will propose new reforms to the National Security Agency aimed at giving Americans "more confidence" in the organization after various leaks revealed numerous wide-ranging government surveillance programs.

"The NSA actually does a very good job about not engaging in domestic surveillance, not reading people's emails, not listening to the contents of their phone calls," the president said Thursday during an interview with MSNBC's Chris Matthews.
"Outside of our borders, the NSA's more aggressive. It's not constrained by laws.  And part of what we're trying to do over the next month or so is having done an independent review and brought a whole bunch of folks, civil libertarians and lawyers and others to examine what's being done."

"I'll be proposing some self-restraint on the NSA and initiating some reforms that can give people some more confidence."
The president did not specify what the reforms may be. But some U.S. allies were angered by reports accusing the agency of monitoring the phone conversations of 35 world leaders.

Obama's remarks came in the immediate wake of a Washington Post report which charged the NSA with gathering 5 billion records a day as a way to track cellphone locations worldwide.

Obama did not comment on this report, but did say that these leaks, largely perpetrated by former government contractor Edward Snowden, have identified some areas of legitimate legal concern. 

The White House, under fire from closest allies, is taking a closer look at the National Security Agency's vast data collection. NBC's Andrea Mitchell reports.
But, he added, "some it has also been highly sensationalized." 
While the president said he is looking to reform how the NSA operates overseas, he also defended the importance of the agency's overall mission.

"We do have people that are trying to hurt us, and they communicate through these same systems we've got to be in there in some way to help protect people even as we're also making sure that government doesn't abuse it," he said.
"I want everybody to be clear.  The people at the NSA, generally, are looking out for the safety of the American people.  They are not interested in reading your emails.  They're not interested in reading your text messages," he added later. "And we've got a big system of checks and balances, including the courts and Congress, who have the capacity to prevent that from happening."


I hope to hear soon about the reforms that are proposed. Obama said the NSA didn't read emails and listen to telephone calls, but Snowdon said otherwise. I know 9/11 caught them totally off guard because they were not “connecting all the dots,” but for us to become anything other than a democracy in response to it is not acceptable to me. I think 9/11 was a one-time event, for the most part, and for us to overreact will tend to make us paranoid. We don't need large numbers of political prisoners, held without trials here or at Guantanamo Bay. One North Korea is enough for the world to hold. We need to have reasonable caution, but keep our policing aimed clearly at real criminal activities, and be sure to have proof of guilt of the subversive parties.



­

How Mandela Expanded The Art Of The Possible – NPR
by Frank James
­
When I was coming of age in the late 1970s, as an African-American high-schooler and college student, I had two certainties: Nelson Mandela would die in prison in apartheid South Africa and no black person would become U.S. president in my lifetime.
So much for my youthful powers of prediction.

Little could I have known then that I would become a journalist who would one day get to cover events I once thought would never happen, at least not during my time on Earth.

In 1994, I was in South Africa for the Chicago Tribune covering the campaign and election that led to Mandela's becoming that nation's first black president. Years later, I participated in that paper's coverage of hometown politician Barack Obama's journey to the White House. How much luckier could one kid from the South Bronx get?
I was fortunate because I was getting paid to witness history writ large. But also because I was observing history of particular significance to African-Americans.

The political triumphs, first of Mandela, then of Obama, were pinch-me milestones on the long march to freedom for many members of two long-oppressed groups — black South Africans and African-Americans — each of which saw something of its own story in the other's.

Even blacks who didn't belong to Mandela's or Obama's political parties, or black journalists who strove to maintain a professional skepticism, couldn't help but reflect on the extraordinary history that was taking place.

Blacks weren't alone in that, of course. But our histories as being treated at best as second-class citizens arguably made the gap between our experience, and our sense of the possible, wider than it was for many whites.

These were moments many generations of black South Africans and Americans had barely dared to imagine and hadn't lived to see. We, the living, saw them.
While we know how Mandela's story turned out, in 1994 when I headed to South Africa with other journalists from across the globe, it was by no means a sure thing.
There was the very real fear of a civil war during the run-up to South Africa's elections. And not just interracial conflict but also between different segments of black South Africans, namely Mandela's African National Congress and the mostly Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party. Daily incidents of political violence were occurring across the country. Journalists were warned to prepare for the worst.

On my way to South Africa, for instance, I stopped in London to obtain body armor theoretically capable of stopping AK-47 rounds.
That the flights were far from full going into Johannesburg (and packed leaving it) just added to the foreboding. As did a U.S. Embassy briefing for journalists where a briefer outlined contingency plans for evacuating Americans by convoy if all hell broke loose.

But as Abraham Lincoln knew, there are the "better angels of our nature." And if one man ever personified such angels and knew how to summon them from others, it was Mandela. His powers as a politician, as a negotiator, as a moral authority, kept South Africa from violently shaking itself to pieces.

Like Lincoln, Mandela is one of those world figures I wish I could have interviewed. But at least I did get to shake his hand.
It was at a pre-election church service outside Cape Town to celebrate the merging of two churches — one black, the other "colored" — a symbol of the end of the bizarre apartheid color line.

After the service Mandela stopped at each of the front pews to shake hands, including the pew filled with us journalists. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time to shake hands with a world historical figure whom I had never expected to survive prison, let alone to be standing in front of me with that broad smile. It was surreal.

I recall that after I returned to the U.S., when people asked me for my takeaways from my South Africa experience, my first response usually was: "Nothing is impossible."

Alas, it was a lesson I would later forget.
When Obama announced that he was running for U.S. Senate, I had serious doubts that someone with so exotic a name could win a statewide race in Illinois.

Then, when he announced he was running for president, like many other African-Americans I was dubious. Sure, the U.S. had progressed much since the civil rights era, but not that much.

Obama, however, clearly saw something many others didn't. He imagined a future that looked nothing like the past or even the present, then made it happen.
On the day Mandela died, Obama recalled that his first real political activity was in 1979 when he took part in an Occidental College campus protest against apartheid. Obama noted the older man's influence on him: "The day that he was released from prison gave me a sense of what human beings can do when they're guided by their hopes and not by their fears," the president said.

Eighteen years after Mandela was freed, there I sat on Invesco Field in Denver experiencing a sense of the surreal similar to what I had in that church outside Cape Town. The Obama family had taken the stage on the last night of the 2008 Democratic National Convention after Obama's acceptance speech.

I sensed it again when he was inaugurated as the 44th president.
It's said that politics is the art of the possible. Both Mandela and Obama expanded the definition of what's possible in politics and racial progress so much that they've made it harder for a doubter like me to rule anything out.

Change may come with difficulty, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. It was one of Mandela's lessons to the world I intend not to forget again.


My age is about the same as this reporter's. I reached my twenties in the early 1970's. I, too, grew up in a South that was filled with our own version of Apartheid. We called it Segregation. Black people couldn't sit down in restaurants that served whites, and they had numerous segregated facilities – schools, libraries, bathrooms and water fountains. I only knew one black person by name when I was in High School – that is the result of such a system. I began to meet black people when I went to college at Chapel Hill, NC. There were a minority of black students there. Then I met a black woman at a library where I worked. It was clear to me that they were more similar to us than different as I had conversations with them.

By the mid-70's there were a few politicians who were black and a few Hollywood personalities who were not portraying the old “conservative” image of blacks – “Guess Who's Coming To Dinner” made a splash and Sammy Davis, Jr. was a big star. After the death of Martin Luther King the changes came faster, of course, because the fear of a true uprising among blacks was being felt. Conservative politicians knew that the Black Panthers and neighborhood riots were to be the next step if they didn't give in.

Now, while there are still racists they are less vocal and violent, and many individual white citizens have realized that they don't hate the black people like they did before. People had to get to know each other and work together. Now if the churches would open up to people of other races to a greater extent, I would be almost satisfied with the progress. I go to a Unitarian Universalist Church which welcomes everybody unconditionally, but not many black people go there because most black people are strongly Christians instead of Humanists. We do have a few, though. I'm not saying that we don't need to make any more progress, but I am grateful for the changes I have seen. It makes me more proud to be a citizen of the USA and the South.



­

Social Security Fight Exposes Democratic Divide On Populism – NPR
by Mara Liasson
­
American politics is having a populist moment, with voters angry and frustrated with all big institutions in American life.
The backlash against big government found its expression on the right with the Tea Party. The tensions between that movement and the Republican establishment have been on full display.

This week saw similar tensions arise among Democrats, starting with an op-ed on Monday in The Wall Street Journal by the leaders of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way. The headline calls economic populism a "dead end for Democrats."
"We wrote this because there needs to be a serious discussion — and this seems to be the right time to have it — about what we're going to be doing with entitlements and investments in this country," says co-author Jim Kessler. "There's a belief, I think, on one end of the party — not with everybody but with some — that we can have it all, we can expand entitlements and we can have investments. And our view is that's just not realistic."

Kessler's op-ed also took aim at populism as a political strategy, warning Democrats not to follow Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts over the populist cliff. Warren is a hero to those in the liberal wing of the party who see her as the scourge of Wall Street.

The op-ed got a furious response from Warren and her supporters, including Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.
"Third Way is a corporate-funded think tank," Green says. "In contrast, the Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party speaks to the overwhelming majority of Americans that really want an economy that looks out for the Little Guy. And for them to take on both Social Security and Elizabeth Warren in their piece was pretty outrageous."

A Battle Leading To 2016
Like all intraparty feuds, this one can seem a little exaggerated. After all, both Third Way and the progressive groups support the Dodd-Frank Wall Street-regulation bill, and they both support raising taxes on the wealthy.

On Social Security, both want to increase the amount of income subject to payroll taxes, although Warren and her allies would raise it more. But the center and the left do part ways on the new push by progressives to expand Social Security benefits.
"Seniors have worked their entire lives and have paid into the system, but right now, more people than ever are on the edge of financial disaster once they retire — and the numbers continue to get worse," Warren said on the Senate floor in November. "That is why we should be talking about expanding Social Security benefits — not cutting them."

This new populist energy in the Democratic Party is fueled by growing frustration over income inequality, a shrinking middle class and the sense that Wall Street escaped responsibility for the financial crisis.

Future 'Key Questions' For Democrats
Democratic strategist and Fox News contributor Joe Trippi says what's happening now is the beginning of an intraparty battle that will go on for the next three years, as Democrats prepare for the 2016 election. Trippi, who ran the 2004 populist campaign of Howard Dean for president, says the battle will be fought along the ideological fault line that divides centrist Democrats from progressives.

"Obama's masked that," Trippi says. "His success at winning two elections in a row has kind of masked that division in the Democratic Party, pushed it under a little bit, particularly now as 2016 nears. There isn't somebody to bridge that gap ... and you're going to start seeing that division come out in the open a little bit."

Any successful Democratic presidential candidate will have to rise on the support of both wings, just as Barack Obama did, and Bill Clinton before him. But Green says that any candidate will be vetted by the progressive grass roots.

"At the end of the day, whoever the Democratic nominee is will have to answer key questions, like are you going to cut Social Security benefits or are you going to embrace this new consensus position that's growing for Social Security benefit expansion?" Green says. "Will you hold Wall Street more accountable and reform it more, or will you be in their pocket?

"Every Democrat will have to answer those questions, including Hillary Clinton. And if she answers wrong on those questions, there will be a lot of political space left for some insurgent Democrat to run and potentially pull another Obama."
Warren says she won't be that insurgent: She says she plans to serve out her full term in the Senate — just as Obama promised, before he changed his mind.


So, is Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts the candidate for Hillary Clinton to beat in 2016? Warren, according to yesterday's news, is in favor of eliminating the “cap” on income subject to Social Security taxes. That seems to me to be the best thing to do, because we will definitely need to replenish the fund when we the Baby Boomers all go through; and for wealthy people to have an exemption from taxation set at such a low level as $113,700 is profoundly unfair when they are often making $500,000, and so many citizens work full time and only earn $25,000 or less, while they still have to pay the full Social Security taxes on that. The tax structure used to be more equitable when it was set up, but the gap between the rich and the poor has become more extreme since then, and therefore it's now more unfair.




­

Meat And Booze With A Side Of Still Life: American Painters On Food – NPR
by April Fulton
­
In the age of celebrity chef fetishism and competitive ingredient sourcing, it can be hard to remember that there was a time when restaurants didn't exist in America.
Before the Civil War, most people ate at home, consuming mostly what they could forage, barter, butcher or grow in the backyard. But just because food choices were simpler back then doesn't mean our relationship to what we ate was any less complicated.

Food as a symbol of politics, diet, gender roles, technology, isolation, gluttony and blatant commercialism has, in fact, been with us for ages and in many forms.
A massive exhibit that opened last month at the Art Institute of Chicago gathers iconic (Norman Rockwell's Freedom From Want) and not-so-well-known (Francis W. Edmonds' The Epicure) American paintings of food from the Pilgrims right on through to Andy Warhol. And it throws in some elegant (Art Deco martini set) and creepy (cabbage-shaped teapot) tableware, menus and memorabilia for good measure.

The curators of the show, called Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture and Cuisine, "offer a new approach to still-life and food-related genre paintings, revealing their importance in American culture, the history of American cuisine, and the ways that these have shaped and reflected our national identity," says Douglas Druick, president of the Art Institute of Chicago, in the preface to the 125-page exhibit guidebook.

For example, The Epicure, painted in 1838, is one of the earliest-known depictions of a tavern meal in America, according to Judith A. Barter, curator of American Art at the institute.

At first glance, it may just look like a portrait of a well-fed rich guy inspecting the humble daily supper offerings. But Barter points out that the well-marbled side of beef on the table was standard Northern fare, while the pig being offered by the innkeeper was a Southern dish.

"The work may be illustrating as well the political divide that separated North and South," she writes. "During the presidency of Andrew Jackson, the debate over the future of the nation — the Jeffersonian dream of a nation of small farmers and limited national government versus the Hamiltonian vision of centralization and an economy built on international trade, banking, and speculation — came to a head."
All that from just one piece.


I grew up in a small southern town with only a few places that could be called restaurants, and to be honest, I would call most of those “cafes.” I went to very few restaurants until I was in high school when I started to date and eat my lunches in the town near the school. When I had transportation, we went to High Point, the slightly larger city to the north of us and I found what well-prepared steak tastes like and tried a good Italian dish called Shrimp Fra Diavolo. It didn't take long for me to realize that I had epicurean tastes. One of my favorite forms of entertainment to this day is to eat out at a good restaurant. I will sacrifice new clothing to have that.

Food as art, though, struck me as funny when I first saw it (Andy Warhol's cans of tomato soup in my freshman year art appreciation class), though picturing our bounty is probably a good idea as it causes us to give thanks for our good fortune. When I first started looking at art, though, I thought there were appropriate and inappropriate subjects for art. Of course, that was Warhol's point – that all subjects are “appropriate.” Also, it makes a particularly good subject for a still life, especially the many paintings that exist of well-filled fruit bowls.

Food often has beauty, as any good chef knows. This article above gave a series of photographs of food art which I can't display in this blog. You may want to go to the net and look up the NPR site for today and see the pictures, or if you live in Chicago go to see them live.




­
Reuters December 7, 2013, 3: 21 PM
21-foot high gingerbread house in Texas sets world record – CBS

BRYAN, Texas - Holiday cheer in Texas has become even sweeter thanks to a giant gingerbread house that has broken a world record for confectionary construction.
Coming in at 35.8 million calories and covering an area of 2,520 square feet, or nearly the size of a tennis court, the 21-foot high gingerbread house in Bryan, Texas, 90 miles northwest of Houston, has been declared the biggest ever by Guinness World Records.

The house, with an edible exterior mounted over a wooden frame, was built by the Traditions Club near Texas A&M University to help raise money for a trauma center at the regional St. Joseph's Hospital.

"We think big around here and we are competitive," said Bill Horton, general manager of the club.

The Texas creation topped the previous record holder for gingerbread houses, a 36,600-cubic-foot model constructed in Bloomington, Minnesota's Mall of America in 2012.
The recipe is simple. Mix 1,800 pounds of butter, 2,925 pounds of brown sugar, 7,200 eggs, 7,200 pounds all-purpose flour, 1,080 ounces ground ginger and a few other ingredients, bake and form into panels for mounting.

The bakers tried to cut back on the butter and baking soda as much as possible to help the gingerbread better stand up to the weather.
The edible and aromatic panels, icing and candy were mounted over the wooden frame and have so far stood up to the Texas sun as well as a few storms.

"One problem we did not anticipate was bees on warm days," Horton said. "They have been coming over, getting so much sugar and stumbling around like they are drunk. But no one has gotten stung."


The sugar must have fermented in the hot sun for the bees to be drunk. I used to watch drunken wasps stagger around under our pear tree in North Carolina. The pears would sometimes fall off before they could be picked and start to rot. Butterflies are also attracted to them.

I hope these people who built the house got a monetary prize for that. Maybe the only reward is mention in the Guinness publication. The article says they are raising money for a charity, so maybe they charge admission to visit the house. Anyway, it was a good project. It shows lots of imagination.