Sunday, April 6, 2014


News Clips For The Day



U.S. to Send Two Warships to Japan to Counter North Korea – NBC
The Associated Press
First published April 6 2014


TOKYO - Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel delivered a two-pronged warning to Asia Pacific nations Sunday, announcing that the U.S. will send two additional ballistic missile destroyers to Japan to counter the North Korean threat, and saying China must better respect its neighbors.

In unusually forceful remarks about China, Hagel drew a direct line between Russia's takeover of Ukraine's Crimea region and the ongoing territorial disputes between China, Japan and others over remote islands in the East China Sea.

"I think we're seeing some clear evidence of a lack of respect and intimidation and coercion in Europe today with what the Russians have done with Ukraine," Hagel told reporters after a meeting with Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera. "We must be very careful and we must be very clear, all nations of the world, that in the 21st century this will not stand, you cannot go around the world and redefine boundaries and violate territorial integrity and sovereignty of nations by force, coercion and intimidation whether it's in small islands in the Pacific or large nations in Europe."
Hagel, who will travel to China later this week, called the Asian nation a "great power," and added, "with this power comes new and wider responsibilities as to how you use that power, how you employ that military power."

He said he will talk to the Chinese about having respect for their neighbors, and said, "coercion, intimidation is a very deadly thing that leads only to conflict. All nations, all people deserve respect no matter how large or how small."

The announcement of the deployments of additional destroyers to Japan came as tensions with North Korea spiked again, with Pyongyang continuing to threaten additional missile and nuclear tests.

In recent weeks the North has conducted a series of rocket and ballistic missile launches that are considered acts of protest against annual ongoing springtime military exercises by Seoul and Washington. North Korea says the exercises are rehearsals for invasion.




Recent ballistic missile launches by North Korea are not threats, but “acts of protest” to the annual US military games with South Korea, according to this article. The military exercises are of course more like a street protest – a “demonstration” of how many voters are enraged and of what would happen if the crowd became violent, a threat. That's why conservative people don't like street protests and don't consider them “peaceful.”

Still, the display of military technology is better than an actual act of war, which would occur if North Korea did attack the disputed Japanese islands, Korea, or any other nearby nation. Hagel delivered a verbal warning to “all nations of the world” that the use of force will be strongly opposed. If we don't continue to push back against Russia, however, the threat will be empty and possibly do more harm than good if it furthers a lack of respect for the US. While I don't want the US to be considered an international bully, I don't want our nation to be “a paper tiger,” either. We need to continue the flexing of military muscles at least occasionally, and in the case of Russia's moves into Ukraine maybe more than that. I haven't seen any more about the peace talks between Kerry and Lavrov this week. I wonder what is happening.




6-Year-Old Uses Smarts to Foil Kidnapping Attempt from Outside Home – NBC
By Mel Bailey
First published April 5 2014

A 6-year-old Washington state girl is safe thanks to her street smarts — and her mother's sound advice — when two men tried to kidnap her in broad daylight from her own neighborhood.

Savanna Norman of Parkland, south of Tacoma, used the skills her mother taught her when a pair of men tried to grab her Wednesday afternoon as she crossed the street in front of her home.

"I looked both ways, and there was no one coming but … then I went halfway across the street, two guys came out of nowhere," Savanna told KOMO-TV, which first reported the attempted abduction. “They grabbed me.”

Savanna said she screamed, ran, kicked and punched — just as her mother instructed for such a scary situation.

Mom Amy Norman said she saw the attempted kidnapping from her front window, and dashed out the door to help her daughter.

Norman was shaken up by the incident but remains proud of her girl. “I’m bearing with it as normal, but it was very scary for all of us,” she told KOMO-TV.

Police ended up catching the suspect, local resident Jakeel Rashon Mason. He was booked into the Pierce County Jail for investigation of unlawful imprisonment, and is being held on $150,000 bail.

His first hearing is scheduled for May 8.




I wanted to highlight the savvy and gumption of this six year old girl. The article is very skimpy, though, and when I looked for more about it I only found the same facts. It is frustrating that the girl said there were two men, but the report only names one who is being held on $150,000 bail. That much is good news. I would like to know how the mother helped her and how and when they caught Mason. Are they still looking for the other one? Give me more!!




Ebola breaks out on a scale never seen before
By Kelly Cobiella CBS News April 5, 2014

Nearly 40 years after first striking fear with a painful, grotesque set of symptoms, the Ebola virus has now killed at least 88 people in the West African countries of Guinea and Liberia.

And the worry is: It could get a lot worse.
It is a terrifying virus, highly infectious, quick to kill, with no vaccine and no cure. Doctors in Guinea are dealing with the most aggressive strain. Only one out of ten victims survives. To stop Ebola everyone who has come into contact with the virus must be isolated.

Michel Van Herp, an epidemiologist for the aid group, Doctors Without Borders, said that they were facing an epidemic on an unprecedented scale -- not in numbers of victims, but because the cases are so spread out in Guinea and across its borders. The only way to stop Ebola is to find and isolate everyone who has come into contact with it.

The virus, which causes vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding and eventually organ failure, spreads through contact with body fluids. Doctors Without Borders is setting up quarantine clinics, but they're battling against a suspicious and scared public.

People are so afraid, one man said, they've stopped shaking hands. An Air France flight from Guinea to Paris was quarantined on Friday after a passenger was sick in the bathroom. No one was infected with Ebola.

The 1995 movie Outbreak showed an Ebola-like virus spreading through a fictional California town, while the real virus killed off nearly an entire village in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

"You have a lot of people who have recovered from civil war and are living in war-ravaged areas with very poor infrastructures," said Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow for global health with the Council on Foreign Relations. "Well as soon as word goes out of quarantine, you have people start trying to escape and get away from the clutches of authorities."

Guinea is trying to cope with the threat by banning bushmeat from bats, monkeys and apes, a possible source of Ebola, and educating the public on how to stay alive.




This report says “at least 88 people in the West African countries of Guinea and Liberia” have been killed so far, and the cases are spreading. It's the “most aggressive strain” and only one out of ten patients survive. One of the big problems of this situation is the eating of “bushmeat,” especially apes and monkeys which are so close to humans genetically that the disease spreads between species easily. Ebola is spread by “bodily fluids” and that means blood in these cases.

I wish people in isolated places would be more open to advancement and change. It's hard to get them to drop their old cultural traits. They have always eaten “bushmeat,” and can't be convinced not to. Part of the problem is you can't explain bacteria and viruses to people who have never looked through a microscope. Years ago when the disease erupted in Kikwit the funerary habits of the people were blamed along with their diet. They always washed the body of their dead ceremonially and during that process the disease was spread.

The 1995 move “Outbreak” was full of exciting helicopter chases, etc., but it was fictionalized, which limited its effect to me. To see the true picture of what happened in that outbreak you should read “The Hot Zone,” a factual story by Richard Preston. It is even more exciting than the movie because the disease alone is horrific enough to cause panic, and it did indeed break out in a small city in Northern Virginia among a set of laboratory monkeys, causing the nation's healthcare forces to step in with “space suits” and military vehicles to contain the situation. It turned out to be a new strain which didn't make people sick, but it did spread by the air rather than requiring contact with bodily fluids, which makes it a very dangerous strain. Future generations of the virus could enable it infect humans.

Every time I hear a report on Ebola, therefore, I am unnerved. It's a very mysterious disease because scientists know there is probably another species in which the virus maintains itself during human and monkey outbreaks, but they have never found out what that is. At the time the book was written they suspected bats, as the first case occurred at the mouth of a cave. Whenever it occurs it is a real life health emergency, especially when it is spreading across borders as it is now. Maybe there will be more news about it soon.




Ben Stein to John Kerry: "Time to wake up"
CBS News April 6, 2014

Should a name from three decades past be an issue in today's Middle East diplomacy? Here's our contributor Ben Stein:
I see that the media are filled with gossip that the U.S. government might allow convicted spy Jonathan Pollard to go free as a way to get Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians in the "peace" drive that John Kerry is trying to ram down Israel's throat.

Amid talk of his release, convicted spy Jonathan Pollard waives parole hearing
A few humble thoughts:
First, Jonathan Pollard should never have been sent to prison for life for giving secrets to our best friend in the Middle East, Israel. That sentence is off the charts, compared with similar situations.

Pollard's misconduct was obviously a disgrace, but he has paid for it insanely. He's been in prison longer than many people get for murder. Reports are that he's extremely unwell. This poor devil has been punished enough.

More important, the Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank do not recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. How can Israel possibly make peace with people who do not accept its right to exist?

The Palestinians insist that Israel allow anyone of Palestinian descent to return to Israel -- that would automatically make Israel into a majority non-Jewish state within a short time. Obviously, this is also not a possibility for Israel.

Yet Mr. Obama and Mr. Kerry try to paint Israel as the villain here, and say Israel built apartments in East Jerusalem or nearby and that's what's killed the fantasy "peace process."

Maybe Israel should not keep building those apartments. But it seems to me it's a pretty small stumbling block, compared with the Palestinians' refusal to even acknowledge Israel's right to exist.

I hate to break this to Secretary Kerry, but no state can make peace with neighbors who allow terrorists to come over to their country to kill civilians, and who refuse to even agree that the state in question should exist as it was constituted.
The bottom-line truth: Israel wants peace. They will cheerfully acknowledge a Palestinian state if they get recognition. They won't agree to make peace with people who want to destroy them.

Would we? Would France? Would England?
Why should a perennially victorious Israel sign its own death warrant to satisfy some anti-Israel, anti-Semite campaigners in Europe?
Mr. Kerry is living in a wicked dream world. Time to wake up.
And for heaven's sake, stop torturing Jonathan Pollard.





Clearly a fan of Israel's actions in the ongoing struggle with Palestine, Stein says of Kerry's efforts, “the "peace" drive that John Kerry is trying to ram down Israel's throat.” Stein states that if Palestine would recognize Israel they would “cheerfully acknowledge a Palestinian state.” I don't know about that. I think there is plenty of hate on both sides. I have always had a certain amount of sympathy with Israel after the near demise of the Jewish people in World War II, however; and it is equally true that Palestinians have not bargained in good faith with Israel either.

I agree with Stein in much of what he says here. Still, the US needs to continue to try to seek peace between the two nations because their ongoing conflict is the root of much of the hatred among Arabs and Westerners in many of the Middle Eastern countries, and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the Middle East is “a tinderbox,” which could set off World War III. I do think that if both parties would drop some of their demands and give in on the important points – recognizing Israel and stopping the settlements on Palestinian territory – there could be peace.




Feds Hope $5 Billion Settlement A Lesson For Polluters – NPR
by Elizabeth Shogren
April 05, 2014

This week, the federal government announced a record-breaking $5 billion settlement in a remarkable environmental case. The toxic legacy of the company involved, Kerr-McGee, stretches back 85 years and includes scores of sites across the country.

Kerr-McGee ran uranium mines in the Navajo Nation, wood-treating businesses across the Midwest and East Coast, and a perchlorate plant on a tributary of Lake Mead, the nation's largest reservoir — and it was messy.

"Kerr-McGee's business all over this country left significant, lasting environmental damage," said Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole, who announced the settlement during a news conference in Washington.

The company contaminated Lake Mead with toxic perchlorate, a component of rocket fuel, and exposed people to radioactive wastes on both rural Indian reservations and in Chicago.

Kerr-McGee also left communities and the federal government to pay for cleanups. For decades the government tried to get the company to pay to clean up, but Cole says the company dodged its responsibility.

The company split off its profitable oil and gas business and sold it for $18 billion to Anadarko Petroleum Corporation. The rest of the company filed for bankruptcy.
"This plan was intended to isolate and shed these liabilities through a complicated, multi-step corporate reorganization," Cole says. "Had Kerr-McGee gotten away with its scheme it would have skirted its responsibility for cleaning up contaminated sites around the country."

Instead, a bankruptcy court found that the reorganization was fraudulent, and now Kerr-McGee's buyer, Anadarko, will pay the $5 billion tab to clean up Kerr-McGee's pollution and compensate people who were harmed by it.

Among those people were residents of Manville,N.J. U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara says their homes were built on the company's creosote waste.

"Those families didn't know that their homes were built on top of pools of toxic waste until 1996, when sludge literally began to bubble up into one resident's basement," Bharara says.

And in the Navajo Nation in Arizona, Kerr-McGee's uranium mines contaminated the water people drink, give their cattle and play in. The tribe even made a comic book to warn children about the danger of swimming in radioactive water.

The government says the $5 billion settlement should more than cover the costs of cleaning up the company's toxic legacy. Bharara says the size of the settlement should also send a strong message.

"If you are responsible for 85 years of poisoning the earth, then you are responsible for cleaning it up," he says.

The government says the benefit of settling instead of taking the company to court is that the money will be available as soon as the court OKs the settlement, instead of years in the future.

Anadarko declined to record an interview with NPR, but in a press release, the company said by settling it was eliminating the uncertainty the dispute created. The company's stock jumped up significantly after the news.
Business analysts say Anadarko is in good enough financial shape to pay $5 billion without crippling itself.

Mark Latham, a professor at Vermont Law School, says the settlement shows just how far-reaching the country's toxic waste laws are.
"You might put off the day of reckoning for years, as we've done here, but sooner or later those efforts are likely to be unsuccessful and you'll be on the hook for hundreds of millions, if not more," Latham says.
Latham also says there's a lesson here for big corporations like Anadarko, to heed the old adage: buyer beware.




Except for the shocking amount of damage Anadarko did before it was stopped, this is a very upbeat story. I read a murder mystery about a uranium mine on an Indian reservation and its toxic effects on the countryside. An Indian is murdered because he came upon the site and saw some men there well enough to identify them. The company, in turn, found him and killed him. This makes it look like the author was writing at least a partially true story.

I think big businesses too often do things as amoral as this, all in the name of making money. They first have to be caught and then punished, either by class action law suits or as in this case, by government action. Conservative people hate class action law suits, but that is the only way people who aren't wealthy can get justice. R J Reynolds and some other cigarette companies were punished and reigned in by a class action suit in 1995. They fought to the very last, arguing to the end that cigarette smoking is not harmful to a smoker's health.




With Modern Election, Voters Make A Break From Old Afghanistan – NPR
SCOTT SIMON, HOST
April 05, 2014

Afghans voted for a new president Saturday, with only scattered violence. NPR'S Renee Montagne tells NPR's Scott Simon that the vote reflects the country's tug between tradition and modernity.
­
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon. Afghanistan held its presidential election today. Hamid Karzai, who's been president for more than a decade, is stepping down. His departure offers a historic opportunity - the chance to transfer power of peacefully. But the days leading up to the election have not been peaceful. NPR's Renee Montagne has been reporting from Afghanistan throughout the past week. She joins us now. Renee, thanks so much for being with us.

RENEE MONTAGNE, BYLINE: Good morning, Scott.
SIMON: Help us appreciate how important this election is to Afghans.
MONTAGNE: People talk about it here as if it's a make or break moment for them. There's a high awareness here of how much rests on this election going well having to do with the international community staying here. The Taliban clearly thought this was a make or break moment, too, for them even because they went into this campaign season vowing to disrupt the election. But I'll tell you, when the polling stations opened this morning, at least here in Kabul and I gather in many other places around the country, there were long lines. One of the things that helped was the security was really high. I mean, there were thousands of police, special forces. The situation was good for people to come out to the polls. Facebook helped pump up enthusiasm.

SIMON: I've seen some of the messages - people holding up their fingers.
MONTAGNE: Yes, yes. People holding up their fingers with the blue ink. And those pictures have been all over this morning. Also, people posting photographs of long lines in their areas of people voting, which is - you know, which is pretty inspiring. There were even pictures of lines in more volatile provinces.
SIMON: Renee, how visible have Afghan women been?

MONTAGNE: They have been visible throughout the election, actually. One of the lead candidates has, as a vice presidential running mate, a woman. She was the governor, for many years, of Bamiyan province. And there have been women helping with the campaigns and going to the rallies. The voting places we went, the women were also in long lines responding, also, to the fact that lead candidates this time have been very much aware of the women's vote. And every stump speech contains promises designed to appeal to women. But this morning, we saw women standing in the rain, some of them mothers with their babies and their toddlers in tow. I met this one 18-year-old. She had just voted. She was giddy, really. And I asked her, you know, weren't you a little bit afraid? And here's what she said.

(SOUNDBITE OF INTERVIEW)
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I was concerned, but it couldn't make me stay home. And I really wanted to vote for Dr. Abdullah. I must say I really love him, and I voted for him.

SIMON: She's voting for Dr. Abdullah.
MONTAGNE: Right. Her man is Dr. Abdullah. He is Abdullah Abdullah, one of the three front runners. He's a former Foreign Minister, impeccably dressed, handsome in an Omar Sharif kind of way. People here actually say he appeals to the ladies. But, you know, one thing you don't see wives on the campaign trail. One thing that has been interesting is that another front runner, Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank official, should he win, his wife, who is Lebanese-American and Christian, would be the first lady of Afghanistan.

SIMON: Of course, we half to talk about the violence that's been leading up to this day. We've talked so much about what's modern in Afghanistan, but clearly there's some forces that have been trying to pull the country back.

MONTAGNE: There have been a number of spectacular attacks. There was much talk about how this could make a difference in how many people came out. There were tragic deaths. And, Scott, we'll surely hear the days to come. There will be voting fraud. Voters, some of them out in the countryside will be reported to not have been able to get out to vote. But, in fact, we're hearing this morning, in some places, there aren't enough ballots because so many people came out. I have to say, though, that today, there were no spectacular attacks, very little violence. And, really, people defied the Taliban. They came out in large numbers to vote, and all in all, it has been a great day for Afghanistan.

SIMON: Renee Montagne of Morning Edition in Kabul. Thanks so much for being with us.
MONTAGNE: Thanks, Scott.




“Facebook helped pump up enthusiasm.” Some places ran out of ballots. There were long lines as soon as the polls opened. The role of women in the election was good to hear, even including a woman as a vice presidential running mate. The leading candidates have been “very much aware of the women's vote,” and stump speeches have including many promises to women. One woman voter said enthusiastically of the candidate Abdullah Abdullah “I really love him, and I voted or him.”

The other piece of very good news is that though the Taliban threatened to disrupt the proceedings, “there were no spectacular attacks, very little violence. And, really, people defied the Taliban. They came out in large numbers to vote, and all in all, it has been a great day for Afghanistan.”

As a citizen of the US who really loves peace, but will stand up and fight if necessary, I am so relieved to see that these people have stood up to the big bullies on the block in this election. It really does look as though the Afghan people want to (1) work toward women's role as a full citizen and a respected, beloved household member, and (2) protect their culture from being run over by the almost overwhelming forces of the Taliban. I think if that trend continues, our peace keeping forces won't have to be forever employed there and we will be able to meet them as a modern international friend. This gives me joy.