Saturday, July 19, 2014


News Clips For The Day


Stench of tragedy, uncertainty hangs over Malaysia Airlines crash site
By Ralph Ellis, Phil Black and Mick Krever, CNN
Fri July 18, 2014

(CNN) -- The sense that a deadly tragedy could get worse hangs over the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

Scattered bodies, ripped-apart suitcases and charred books testify that 298 people died Thursday when the airplane fell from 30,000 feet to the grassy fields of an almost-lawless section of eastern Ukraine.

More than 24 hours after the crash, the bodies lay there untouched, with nobody able to say who's in charge and whether the dead would ever be treated with dignity.

"It basically looks like the biggest crime scene in the world right now, guarded by a bunch of guys in uniform with heavy firepower who are quite inhospitable," Michael Bociurkiw, spokesman for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe team, told CNN's Christiane Amanpour.

The bodies are starting to decompose in the Ukraine summer heat, the stink mixing with the charred odor coming from the wreckage.

Surrealistic signs of death carpet the countryside.

Some on the Malaysia-bound plane were dressed in sandals, shorts and other clothes people wear on a tropical vacation, said Noah Sneider, a freelance journalist who visited the crash site.

At one spot he noticed a printout of the top 10 tourist tips for people visiting Bali.
Some passengers, he said, died strapped into their seats wearing headphones, as if listening to music or watching an onboard movie.

Emergency workers say they've found more than 170 bodies across a wide area, some caught up in large pieces of the aircraft, others simply lying where they fell. Some bodies are mangled so much it's impossible to say if they're man or woman, others show no marks or injury.

In the darkness, it's not hard to stumble across a body.

The region is controlled by pro-Russian militants, who gave a rude reception Friday to monitors on the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe team. They were in the region to observe the war and aren't air crash investigators.

"We asked for the commander, the leader," Bociurkiw told Amanpour. "No one showed up.

"There was one gentleman there in a uniform, heavily armed, and apparently somewhat intoxicated who wasn't very hospitable or helpful at all. In fact in the end he kind of rushed all of them away, including the journalists."

Bociurkiw said the team spent only 75 minutes at the crash site and examined only a 200-meter strip before being chased away. In the distance, he heard explosions, a familiar sound in this region ripped apart by war.

"The perimeter is not secure whatsoever," Bociurkiw said. "They seemed to have put some tape up where we were standing, but otherwise it's very easy for anyone, really, to walk in there and tamper with evidence or debris. So a lot of work needs to be done. A lot of professional work, very very quickly."

In the United States or other Western nations, law enforcement would have put the crash site off limits to the morbidly curious right away. In east Ukraine, reporters walked right up to pieces of wreckage to do stand-up reports.

A small crew of emergency workers from the Ukraine government arrived and began working on the scene, but they need more people and resources to properly handle a crash that killed 298 people. They're obviously working with the permission of the militants. At night the groups mingled, seemingly without hostility, and even shared tents.

Meanwhile, the world is watching. The clock is ticking.

"It is cool right now," Bociurkiw said, "but if it's a warm day tomorrow, it will continue to turn into quite a messy situation."




"We asked for the commander, the leader," Bociurkiw told Amanpour. "No one showed up. "There was one gentleman there in a uniform, heavily armed, and apparently somewhat intoxicated who wasn't very hospitable or helpful at all. In fact in the end he kind of rushed all of them away, including the journalists.... "The perimeter is not secure whatsoever," Bociurkiw said. "They seemed to have put some tape up where we were standing, but otherwise it's very easy for anyone, really, to walk in there and tamper with evidence or debris. So a lot of work needs to be done. A lot of professional work, very very quickly."

This article sheds no new light on who shot down the plane, but it is a beautifully written piece of prose and a great “slice of life,” that is if you are living in hell. Why is nobody examining the situation and taking care of the dead? One report yesterday said that a rebel claimed he found the black box and gave it to the Russians. They haven't stepped forward to talk about the evidence it shows. I wonder if both the Russians and their rebels are in shock – not really prepared for this at all.







http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/07/17/obama-ukraine-malaysian-jetliner/12788905/

Crash changes equation for Obama Ukraine policy
USA Today
By Gregory Korte
July 17, 2014

WASHINGTON — Having just ratcheted up the pressure on Russia with a new round of sanctions not 24 hours before, the Obama administration Thursday faced a potentially volatile new development in Ukraine with the downing of a Malaysian jetliner.

As President Obama called the president of Ukraine and the prime minister of Malaysia, U.S. officials were slow to speculate about what happened until Vice President Biden later said it appeared to have been shot down.

"Not an accident, blown out of the sky," he told a conference in Detroit. While he said more investigation needs to be done, the vice president went further than any other U.S. official in attributing the crash to an intentional act.

But beyond sending investigators, the administration's options aren't clear.

"The first question is whether or not U.S. interests have changed at all in the last 24 hours," said Joshua Rovner, a professor at Southern Methodist University. "It's been a terrible day, but it's not clear to me that the U.S. interests are any different than they were the day before."

The sanctions imposed Wednesday, targeting Russian banking and energy concerns and people tied closely with Russian President Vladimir Putin, "are not meaningless sanctions at all," Rovner said. And there's still room for more economic pressure with broader, industry-wide sanctions.

To a person, U.S. officials were careful to say they didn't want to jump to conclusions. But they also acknowledged that a missile attack from Russian separatists was not unlikely.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said the jetliner incident follows months of escalating tensions, with Russian-based separatists shooting down more than a dozen planes and helicopters in Ukraine.

"If evidence emerges that Russia was involved that would obviously be extremely concerning," she said.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the United States continues to be concerned by "the escalatory actions that we continue to see from Russia.

"However, we don't have enough info about this specific incident," she said. "And I don't want to speculate about who's to blame or the root causes, when we don't have that information yet."

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was more willing to speculate, telling MSNBC that it had the "earmarks of a mistaken identification" incident.

If that turns out to be the case, there will be "incredible repercussions," he said. "Exactly what those will be will have to be determined by how we find out who was responsible."

Those repercussions could be diplomatic, economic and military, said Stephen Black, a Russia fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council.

"I think we could bring this to the U.N. and start the ball rolling," he said. "Not just the Security Council, but the General Assembly, where Russia can't veto it. There are more economic tools. We did not simply block them from doing dollar-denominated transactions."

If nothing else, the incident demonstrates that the situation in Ukraine has impacts felt across the globe, said Damon Wilson, who served as a Russia and Ukraine expert in the administrations of former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Wilson, now with the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, said the U.S. and its allies should ratchet up "sanctions that bite, along with military assistance, including lethal military assistance to Ukraine."

News reports of the downed airliner emerged even as Obama was on the phone with Putin Thursday morning. The call was arranged at Moscow's urging to discuss the sanctions Obama announced late Wednesday.

Obama told Putin the United States and its allies are willing to take additional measures if Russia doesn't work to deescalate the conflict, said White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest. "They could shut down the border and prevent the transfer of heavy weapons and materiel to separatists. They have not done that. President Putin himself could intervene with pro-Russian separatists and encourage them to abide by the ceasefire. He has not done that," he said.

During that call, Putin mentioned the early news reports of the downed jet.

Contributing: Susan Davis and Oren Dorell. Follow @gregorykorte on Twitter.




“Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said the jetliner incident follows months of escalating tensions, with Russian-based separatists shooting down more than a dozen planes and helicopters in Ukraine.... Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was more willing to speculate, telling MSNBC that it had the "earmarks of a mistaken identification" incident.”

Stephen Black, a Russia fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council said 'I think we could bring this to the U.N. and start the ball rolling. 'Not just the Security Council, but the General Assembly, where Russia can't veto it.'.... Damon Wilson, who served as a Russia and Ukraine expert, “said the U.S. and its allies should ratchet up 'sanctions that bite, along with military assistance, including lethal military assistance to Ukraine.'... According to White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest. "They could shut down the border and prevent the transfer of heavy weapons and materiel to separatists. They have not done that. President Putin himself could intervene with pro-Russian separatists and encourage them to abide by the ceasefire. He has not done that," he said.

World concern is growing, with this incident affecting innocent air passengers from a number of nations, and especially since the rebels apparently didn't try to identify what kind of plane it was before they shot it down. They also seem to be without organization, as a group of OSCE observers asked the rebels at the crash site to speak to their leader and they either wouldn't or couldn't produce him. The man in uniform who seemed to be an officer was intoxicated. They also are not cooperating with international efforts to investigate the crash, saying that they have removed the “black box” and are holding it at their headquarters. I hope this event is taken to the UN because this local war is proving to be treacherous for Europe as a whole, and if Russia returns fully to their Cold War behavior they will be a threat to the US again.





Why apes can't speak like humans – CBS
By MIRIAM KRAMER LIVESCIENCE.COM July 19, 2014

In the new film "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes," a brilliant, mutant chimp named Caesar forcefully yells "Go!" at a group of humans who wandered into the ape population's forest. His deep, guttural voice startles the people, but his vocalizations are even more surprising.

The ape speaks English.

While bands of apes do have ways of communicating with one another, is it possible for nonhuman primates to speak the way humans do?

"One school [of thought] believes that chimpanzees simply don't have the vocal apparatus, and others believe they do, but language as we know it just hasn't emerged or evolved," said Marc Bekoff, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder. [8 Humanlike Behaviors of Primates]

Humans have vocal tracts that move freely and can be well coordinated, but the larynx muscles and vocal cords of apes don't have that same movement or coordination, according to the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

It's also possible that apes haven't evolved to speak like humans because they haven't needed to.

"As a biologist, I would always say, 'If they needed to be able to speak like we do in a language like we have, they would,'" Bekoff told Live Science. "That doesn't mean they don't have their own language. All the great apes -- of course, including chimpanzees -- have very complex communication systems. They communicate using vocalizations, facial expressions, gestures, postures, gait ... They can send very subtle signals with a lot of nuances by varying any one of [those] components."

Some primates have learned how to communicate in specific ways with their human handlers. One famous case is Kanzi, a 33-year-old bonobo. Scientists who worked with Kanzi think bonobos can understand English.

"Kanzi, for example, could figure out human sentences -- even nonsense sentences," Bekoff said. Someone once asked Kanzi to take a microwave outside, and he followed that request, even though it wasn't a common kind of command, Bekoff added.

Yet, even though Kanzi could understand and carry out directions from humans, the bonobo's responses "were not anything close to being verbal," Bekoff said.

Some scientists think that although chimps and other great apes can learn vocabulary well enough to express their wants and needs, they still don't necessarily understand syntax, a key component of human language.

Herbert Terrace, a primate cognition scientist at Columbia University, has found that chimps cannot combine words in different orders to create new meaning -- a skill that humans understand from a young age.

"I know of no example of a conversation by nonhuman animals," Terrace told Live Science via email in 2011.

Apes may not be able to speak like humans, but this probably doesn't have anything to do with the animals' intelligence, Bekoff said.

"A lot of animals that we don't think are particularly bright -- because we have such a perverted sense of what it means to be bright -- communicate in sophisticated ways," Bekoff said. For example, prairie dogs have a very complex way of communicating, using different vocalizations to signal a threat from various predators, Bekoff added.

In "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes," Caesar is the most fluent English speaker of the apes in the film, but other chimps, gorillas and orangutans seem to pick up on some of the leader's novel vocalizations. Learned behavior has been observed in real-life chimp communities, where some apes have picked up American Sign Language, Bekoff said.

"A lot of [chimps] learned sign language not by being explicitly taught, but by observing the other chimpanzees," Bekoff said. "They were acquiring American Sign Language by just observation, and somehow -- to me, it's remarkable -- they could then put meaning to the different signs."

The movie "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" is out in theaters now. Bekoff is the author of the book " Why Dogs Hump and Bees Get Depressed: The Fascinating Science of Animal Intelligence, Emotions, Friendship, and Conservation."




They communicate using vocalizations, facial expressions, gestures, postures, gait ... They can send very subtle signals with a lot of nuances by varying any one of [those] components.... 'One school [of thought] believes that chimpanzees simply don't have the vocal apparatus, and others believe they do, but language as we know it just hasn't emerged or evolved,' said Marc Bekoff, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Beckoff speculates that they just haven't needed to talk as we do. There is no doubt in my mind that a number of animals including dogs understand spoken language to a greater extent than we expect.

That is something I have thought about several times in the case of tribal hunter-gatherer groups that exist today, especially in jungle areas where there are numerous fruit and nut bearing trees, herbal food sources, insects, fish, and small animals such as monkeys. Some people make the judgmental decision that they must not be as intelligent as we are, or they would have built cities and taken up agriculture; but its highly likely that the naturally conservative thinking of so many people who have had little exposure to outsiders – such as “mountain folk” in the Southern US – simply stick to their old ways rather than learning new things. It's a form of social cohesion, which may be more helpful to them than 50 new pieces of electronic equipment would be. Besides, they are generally poor and need to spend their few dollars on food, clothing and medicine. I, personally, am consciously resisting the pull of each new piece of technology that comes out because I have a Tracfone that makes telephone calls, and I just don't think I need to have a “smart phone” very often. I have a road map in my car so I don't need GPS and I don't want to be constantly taking pictures, even the humorous “selfies” that are so popular right now.





Report: N.Y. man put in police choke hold dies during arrest
By CRIMESIDER STAFF CBS/AP July 18, 2014

NEW YORK - Police say a man had a heart attack and died as officers attempted to arrest him for illegally selling cigarettes on Staten Island, but a video of the incident obtained by the New York Daily News appears to show police placing the man in a choke hold as he pleads "I can't breathe."

Eric Garner, 43, was pronounced dead at a hospital after officers tried to apprehend him around 4:45 p.m., Thursday.

Police say the officers observed Garner selling untaxed cigarettes on Bay Street, just blocks away from the 120th precinct. They say he'd been arrested before for the same offense.

Authorities didn't say whether Garner was handcuffed or if there was a struggle during the arrest, however the video obtained by the paper shows several officers attempting to take Garner into custody by putting him in a choke hold and pressing him towards the ground.

"I can't breathe, I can't breathe," Garner is heard saying in the video as he is pushed to the ground and handcuffed.

Within moments, the 43-year-old stops struggling and appears to go unconscious.

"We have a responsibility to keep every New Yorker safe, and that includes when individuals are in custody of the NYPD," Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement expressing his condolences to Garner's family.

Ramsey Orta, 22, who shot the video posted by the newspaper, told the Associated Press on Friday that he was sitting with Garner and discussing weekend plans before the confrontation with police. Garner had just broken up a fight between two other men when the police approached him, claiming they'd observed him selling loose cigarettes, Orta said.

"Before they even grabbed him, he told them he wasn't feeling good and that's why I pulled the camera out and started recording," said Orta, adding that Garner was asthmatic. "They could've just hopped out on the guys who were fighting, but they didn't bother to ask. They just jumped straight on him."

Garner has been arrested 31 times since 1988 on charges such as drug possession, selling untaxed cigarettes and assault, police said. Police say Garner weighed 350 pounds at his last illegal-cigarette arrest in May.

Internal affairs investigators and prosecutors have opened inquires into Garner's death. An autopsy for the 43-year-old was scheduled for Friday.

On Thursday night, a group of people placed candles on the sidewalk where Garner was taken into custody. A sign was also mounted in the spot accusing police of "brutality" in connection with his death, reports CBS New York.




This is the second case I've heard of in which a police officer accidentally killed a man with a choke hold. If you think about it, just a little too much pressure could crush the bones in the throat or simply close off the airways. That's like depending too heavily on tasers – sometimes they are fatal, too. In this case, the petty criminal – selling cigarettes on the street – begged to be turned loose, saying he couldn't breathe. Police should always heed such statements and loosen their hold a little. “'We have a responsibility to keep every New Yorker safe, and that includes when individuals are in custody of the NYPD,' Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement expressing his condolences to Garner's family.

Garner's friend Ramsay Orta took a video of the whole event, saying that Garner had just broken up a fight between two other men when the police “'just jumped straight on him.'" “Internal affairs investigators and prosecutors have opened inquires into Garner's death. An autopsy for the 43-year-old was scheduled for Friday. On Thursday night, a group of people placed candles on the sidewalk where Garner was taken into custody. A sign was also mounted in the spot accusing police of "brutality" in connection with his death, reports CBS New York.”

Even though the police said he had been arrested numerous times, Garner was apparently well known and liked in his neighborhood. There is no mention in this article of Garner's race, so there is no evidence of racial overtones. Sometimes the police are simply too rough, seemingly unaware that they can be causing serious injury.





Iraqi Christians Flee Mosul as ISIS Orders Them to Convert or Be Killed – NBC
By Ammar Karim
7/19/14

Christians in Mosul began fleeing Iraq’s second-largest city Friday ahead of a Saturday afternoon deadline issued by Sunni insurgents for them to convert to Islam. If they choose not to convert, they can either pay a tax, leave or be killed, NBC News has learned.

The deadline set by the insurgents, known as ISIS, was noon local time. Many of the Christians who have left are fleeing north, trying to reach either the Arbil or Duhok provinces in the autonomous Kurdistan region, according to sources. The Christians are reportedly being ordered to leave with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. The ultimatum is an apparent change from previous reports that said ISIS would not threaten Christians in Mosul, which was seized last month by rebel fighters as they moved toward the capital.

Meanwhile, more violence erupted in Baghdad on Saturday as 26 people in mostly Shiite Muslim neighborhoods were killed, police and medics said. The first explosion, a suicide car bombing, killed seven people at a police checkpoint in the Abu Dsheer district in the south of the capital, the sources said. The army and allied Shiite militia are trying to push back Sunni insurgents who swept through northern Iraq last month to within 45 miles of Baghdad.




“If they choose not to convert, they can either pay a tax, leave or be killed, NBC News has learned.... The deadline set by the insurgents, known as ISIS, was noon local time. Many of the Christians who have left are fleeing north, trying to reach either the Arbil or Duhok provinces in the autonomous Kurdistan region.... The ultimatum is an apparent change from previous reports that said ISIS would not threaten Christians in Mosul.”

Both Christians and Jews have been the subjects of persecution down through history. They have kept to their own strictly held religious beliefs against the pressure of their neighbors. I strongly feel that the US constitutional ban on a state religion is the only thing that keeps us from having these kinds of incidents. Most of our citizens are Protestant Christians, but Catholics, Jews, Muslims and any number of other groups coexist successfully with very few radical incidents, like desecration of synagogues, etc. That is because our laws guaranteeing religious freedom are kept firmly in place from the Supreme Court on down.