August 22, 2016


News and Views


http://www.cbsnews.com/news/zika-virus-in-school-miami-officials-make-tough-decisions/

Zika virus in school: Miami officials make tough decisions
By DAVID BEGNAUD CBS NEWS
August 21, 2016, 6:22 PM

MIAMI - Monday is the first day of school across Miami - where there are growing concerns about the Zika virus.

Health officials are monitoring two so-called Zika zones.

In Miami Beach, at least five people have apparently been infected by local mosquitoes.

The original Zika zone is just across Biscayne Bay. So far, at least 36 people in the area have been infected. The virus can cause severe birth defects.

The Florida Department of Health handed out free bug repellent at Miami Beach Senior High. Students from here and one other school in the newest Zika zone were encouraged to spray themselves before class.

Melanie Fishman, principal at South Pointe Elementary in Miami, said they don’t want students to spray themselves at school because “some kids might have asthma.”

The Miami-Dade school district handed out protective clothing - long sleeves and pants for students that needed it.

The proactive efforts taken by the school district have impressed Carol Karp, whose son Adam is entering high school.

“I commend their efforts, fantastic,” Karp said. “It’s what we should do to protect children and community.”

Nearly 3,300 will now be attending school in the 1.5-mile area where local Zika transmission has been confirmed on Miami Beach.

Ashley Beauegard, a yoga teacher who is 6 months pregnant, canceled her baby shower in Miami Beach, and worries, her home, 15 minutes north of the Zika zone, may also be a vulnerable area.

“I mean I just feel like it spread from Wynwood to Miami Beach, cases that we know of,” Beauegard said. “So how many cases that we don’t know of could’ve spread further already?”

Starting Monday, 7,600 kids in Miami-Dade County will be attending school inside of one of the Zika zones - there are now two in the county. The superintendent of schools originally considered relocating the students, but decided not to.



This is beginning to look like one of those 1960s horror movies, and I don’t want to become totally paranoid, but if relocating the kids seems necessary, I think it should be done. As long as authorities haven’t located the mosquito source, there is no protection for the public. If these Zika zones cover such small territories as a square mile, perhaps some extra-heavy spraying could kill the bugs there, and an aerial surveillance campaign would be able to find all the wetlands there for special treatment? I feel as though we need to be able to do more than is being done so far. There was a report yesterday about fines being issued to landowners where there is standing water in such things as old tires, birdbaths, etc. That’s a good thing, and should be done everywhere. All the early news reports featured the high likelihood of mosquitoes breeding in things like tin cans and even bottle caps that are lying on the ground.

Gov. Scott stated that the Federal government is not giving FL as much money to kill mosquitoes as they should. I do hope the tide turns in our favor very soon, vs that of the hateful insects. And then there’s the fact that similar problems have popped up in Texas last week also. I can’t help feeling distinctly disturbed. I and no one in my family are in the childbearing age range, but scientists may not yet know all they need to about the various things a new virus like Zika can cause. How about brain damage in full adults?



http://www.cbsnews.com/news/judge-orders-expedited-release-of-15000-hillary-clinton-documents-found-by-fbi/

Judge orders expedited release of 15,000 Hillary Clinton documents found by FBI
By PAULA REID CBS NEWS
August 22, 2016, 12:05 PM

Related: Fact check: How do Hillary Clinton’s email claims hold up?
Colin Powell: Hillary Clinton’s people have been trying to pin email scandal on me


At a heated hearing Monday, a federal judge pressed the State Department on when it would release the 15,000 documents uncovered by the FBI during its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

Initially, the State Department attorney would not answer Judge James Boasberg’s repeated questions about the number of emails recovered by the FBI. The judge urged the State Department to expedite its review of what is called “Disc 1,” which is one of two discs handed over from FBI to the State Department in late July.

The soonest these emails will be released to the public is early October, a few weeks before the November elections.

These are all emails that Clinton sent or received during her tenure as secretary of state, and they were not among the 55,000 documents turned over by her lawyers last year. The conservative judicial watchdog Judicial Watch has filed several Freedom of Information Act lawsuits against the State Department for material from Clinton’s time as secretary of state. The group is keenly interested in Disc 1 because the information on it relates directly to Clinton.

FBI Director James Comey had said at the conclusion of the FBI’s probe into the use of her server that the agency had found thousands of emails on her server that were work-related and that had not been submitted to the State Department. Comey, while referring to Clinton and those she corresponded with as “extremely careless” in their handling of classified information, also said that there was no evidence that emails were “intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them.” Rather, he said she “periodically deleted e-mails or e-mails were purged from the system when devices were changed.”

The State Department is vetting the emails to see whether they deem any of them are private and personal before releasing the rest.

On Friday Clinton scored a minor victory against Judicial Watch when a judge said she could answer questions from Judicial Watch lawyers in writing and did not have to be deposed. Her answers are not due until after the election.



While I do wish Clinton had not used her private server in this way, because it was foolish in my view; I still doubt that she purposely misused her position in such a way as calling for a “stand down” of the Marine guards who tried to go in and help the diplomatic corps. That seems to be the most shocking of the rumors about her misdeeds, but who knows what subjects may also be involved. See the following Fortune article on some specifics about the controversy.



http://fortune.com/2016/05/27/clinton-emails-inspector-general/

The Origin of Key Clinton Emails From the Inspector General Report Is a Mystery
by The Associated Press
MAY 27, 2016, 6:17 AM EDT

And it’s raising concerns about whether she was 100% forthcoming in turning over her email trove.

Photograph -- Messages from aide Huma Abedin (r) were in the IG report, but not in the emails previously released by Hillary Clinton (center). Photograph by The Washington Post/Getty Images



Since her use of a private email server was made public last year, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has insisted she turned over all work-related emails to the State Department to be released to the public.

But after 14 months of public scrutiny and the release of tens of thousands of emails, an agency watchdog’s discovery of at least three previously undisclosed emails has renewed concerns that Clinton was not completely forthcoming when she turned over a trove of 55,000 pages of emails. And the revelation has spawned fresh criticism from presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

The three messages—which appear to have been found among electronic files of four former top Clinton State Department aides—included Clinton’s own explanation of why she wanted her emails kept private. In a November 2010, email, Clinton worried that her personal messages could become accessible to outsiders.

Two other messages a year later divulged possible security weaknesses in the home email system she used while secretary of state. The Clinton campaign has previously denied that her home server was compromised.

On Thursday, Clinton, who has called her use of a private email server “a mistake,” said she had been forthcoming with her personal emails and said she believed her use of a private email account was allowed.

“I have provided all of my work-related emails, and I’ve asked that they be made public, and I think that demonstrates that I wanted to make sure that this information was part of the official records,” Clinton said, according to an interview transcript provided by ABC News.

Most of Clinton’s emails have been made public by the State Department over the past year due to both a court order and Clinton’s willingness to turn them over. But hundreds were censored for national security reasons and 22 emails were completely withheld because the agency said they contained top secret material—a matter now under investigation by the FBI.

Clinton said in March 2015 that she would turn over all work-related emails to the State Department after removing private messages that contained personal and family material. “No one wants their personal emails made public and I think most people understand that and respect their privacy,” she said after her exclusive use of private emails to conduct State Department business was confirmed by media reports.

Senate investigators have asked for numerous emails about Clinton’s server as part of their own inquiry into Clinton’s email practices in recent months, but they didn’t get copies of key messages made public by the State Department’s own watchdog this week, a senior Republican senator said Thursday.

“It is disturbing that the State Department knew it had emails like this and turned them over to the inspector general, but not to Congress,” said Iowa Senator Charles Grassley, the chair of the Senate judiciary committee that’s been probing Clinton’s use of a private server.

The emails appear to contain work-related passages, raising questions about why they were not turned over to the State Department last year. The inspector general noted that Clinton’s production of work-related emails was “incomplete,” missing not only the three emails but numerous others covering Clinton’s first four months in office.

The inspector general also found Clinton’s email set up violated agency policies and could have left sensitive government information vulnerable. It also complicated federal archiving of her emails, in turn making it more difficult to obtain them under the Freedom of Information Act.

On Thursday, Clinton told ABC News her use of the personal email was “allowed,” saying that “the rules have been clarified since I left.” In a later interview Thursday with CNN, Clinton said she “believed it was allowed.”

A spokesman for the Clinton campaign did not respond to emailed questions Thursday. An inspector general’s spokesman declined to discuss the report.

The report said the inspector general was able to reconstruct some of Clinton’s missing emails by searching the email files of four former Clinton aides who had turned over thousands of pages of communications in 2015 at the request of the State Department, which is defending itself in multiple public records lawsuits, including one filed by The Associated Press. The four aides who turned over those files, according to the report, were Clinton’s former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, and top aides Huma Abedin, Jake Sullivan and Philippe Reines.

Abedin was the aide who authored the key email in November 2010 that provoked Clinton’s concerns about outsiders obtaining her personal emails. After the State Department’s computer spam filters apparently prevented Clinton from sending a message to all department employees from her private server, Abedin suggested that she either open an official agency email or make her private address available to the agency.

Clinton told Abedin she was open to getting a separate email address but didn’t want “any risk of the personal being accessible.” Clinton never used an official State Department address, only using several private addresses to communicate. Abedin, Mills, Sullivan and Reines all also used private email addresses to conduct business, along with their government accounts.

Two other emails sent to Abedin were cited in the inspector general’s report, but also did not turn up among the emails released by Clinton. Those messages to Abedin contained warnings in January 2011 from an unidentified aide to former President Bill Clinton who said he had to shut down Hillary Clinton’s New York-based server because of suspected hacking attacks.

In response, Abedin warned Mills and Sullivan not to email Clinton “anything sensitive” and said she would “explain more in person.”



I wonder if the public will ever know what was really in these emails, since they are so “sensitive.” It’s interesting that the original suggestion that Clinton use her personal server came from Abedin, and all because Hillary was annoyed at being unable to send a message to the whole staff from her personal server. If that report is true, I am sure that Clinton wasn’t trying to set up an unethical or illegal operation. I do wish she had asked permission up the ladder and discussed it all in detail with the lawyers, whom they undoubtedly keep on staff for that purpose!



http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cruise-ship-living-retiring-to-a-life-at-sea/

Cruise ship living: Retiring to a life at sea
CBS NEWS
August 22, 2016, 6:47 AM

Photograph -- cruise-ship-retiree-lee-wachstetter-620.jpg
Video -- Retiree Lee Wachstetter lives aboard the Crystal Serenity. CBS NEWS
Photograph -- crystal-serenity-crystal-cruises-620.jpg, The Crystal Serenity. CRYSTAL CRUISES


An estimated 24 million people are expected to take cruises this year. One report showed more than a quarter of them are age 60 or older, and more than one-fifth are retired.

Part of the reason cruises are so popular for retirees is because so much is taken care of for them -- cooking, cleaning, entertainment and activities. Of course, when the cruise is over, most of them return home to their regular lives. But Lee Wachtstetter found a way to travel the world without ever leaving home.

You could say the 88-year-old Wachtstetter has earned her sea legs.

Aboard the Crystal Serenity, she’s known simply as Mama Lee. She’s been living there for the past eight years.

“I don’t have to clean house. I don’t have to shop, I don’t have to cook, I don’t have to do anything. I do what I want, when I want, if I want,” she told CBS News travel editor Peter Greenberg.

And how often does she talk to her family back home? “Oh, I talk to them every day. I’ll talk to them twice a day if it means I don’t have to be there!”

Wachtstetter and her late husband, Mason, took nearly 100 cruises together before he died in 1997. “The last thing he ever said to me was -- this was the day before he died – ‘Don’t you quit cruising.’

“I started frequent cruising. But I got very, very tired of packing and unpacking. So I said, there’s got to be a better way to do this.”

Mama Lee sold her house in Florida, along with her car and most of her belongings, and never looked back.

“Everybody knows her, she’s knows everybody,” said Birger Vorland, captain of the Crystal Serenity. “She’s a little bit of a diva, in a good way. She gets along with her day, she makes herself busy, and she has her things and her opinions, and she’s a wonderful person.”

Greenberg asked Wachtstetter, “At your age, there are a lot of people who would say, ‘Well, I’m going to go to a retirement place.’”

“Oh, no, not me. Why do that?” she replied. “I’m now a great-grandmother. My grandchildren are having children. But I don’t want to be there every minute for that.

“I love babies, but they grow up!” she laughed.

Mama Lee has now done more than 240 cruises around the world, and visited hundreds of ports. But where the ship is going? Irrelevant. For Mama Lee, these days, the ship is the destination.

“Everything is ‘Been there, done that.’ If I’ve been there and done that, I don’t go off the ship. And I love it when everybody goes touring. I got the whole ship to myself with all the help.”

“You’ve got this figured out!”

“Oh, absolutely.”

“And you don’t really get off the ship anymore?” Greenberg asked.

“What for?”

How much does it cost her? About $175,000 a year.

Cruise director Rick Spath considers himself part of her extended family at sea.

“That’s Lee: She doesn’t care where the ship goes,” Spath said. “And she loves to dance her way around the world.”

“I dance every single day at 5:15, 7 days a week,” she said.

“Do you ever sit back and think about what your life would be like if you weren’t on the ship?” Greenberg asked.

“Very boring,” was her response. “I think I live a fairy tale existence. It’s not a real life, I realize that. Not everybody does this. But a lot of people could.”



This is not an important story, but it is interesting. I personally would hate to be unable to set my feet down on good solid earth and walk among flowers, watching little forest animals and birds. But then, she gets to dance every night.