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CORRUPTION UPDATES 65 June 2007: Draft Posting: Stay Tuned for More! The CORRUPTION UPDATES posts corruption news stories from California, the Nation and the World, and gives you the straight story. |
CORRUPTION UPDATES 65
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1) THE ABSTRACT PRINTED BELOW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE:
Honey, I'm Gone
Abandoned Beehives Are a Scientific Mystery and a Metaphor for Our Tenuous Times
By Joel Garreau
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 1, 2007; C01
Now, around the world, honeybees are vanishing en masse, leaving their humans engaged in a furious attempt to figure out the meaning of their exodus.
They're flying off and not returning. Commercial beekeepers open their hives and find them empty except for a queen, a few immature bees and abundant honey and pollen. The rest of the bees are simply gone, leaving behind not even dead bodies.
A third of our food supply -- including much of the boredom-relieving stuff, from cranberries to cucumbers -- is dependent on animal pollinators like the honeybee. As a result, this mystery is rapidly joining the all-star ranks of millennial end-time run-for-your-lives threats, right up there with Y2K, mad cow disease, West Nile virus, SARS and avian flu.
Of equal note is the way the bees are setting a new standard in human emotional resonance. Absolutely no one yet knows why the bees are checking out, though not for lack of abundant effort on the part of the world's scientists. This dearth of data allows us to project our greatest anxieties onto the bees.
Jeff Pettis...co-leader of the huge national research group working on "colony collapse disorder," as the phenomenon is known. An estimated quarter of the country's 2.4 million colonies of Apis mellifera have been lost since winter. Similar reports are pouring in from Spain to Germany to Brazil to Taiwan.
Pettis is a man in the right place at the right time. He heads the Bee Research Laboratory of the Agricultural Research Service at the Department of Agriculture in Beltsville. His group includes scientists from Columbia, Penn State, the University of Illinois, North Carolina State, the Florida Department of Agriculture and a host of other entities.
Colonies caught in the act of collapsing seem to display a raft of diseases. Is this the AIDS of bees?
"I don't like that particular analogy," Pettis says. "We actually don't have any evidence that the immune system is compromised. It's one of the ideas that we have, but the immune response genes are not turned on or off."
(Demonstrating its importance to commercial agriculture, even before the current crisis the honeybee was one of the first insects to have its entire genome sequenced.)
What do you think of the French referring to it as "mad bee disease"?
"They were using that because they thought some of their losses over the past 10 years were connected to low-level pesticides. It's one myth. But we can't make the connection to disorientation."
Where did the cellphone idea come from?
"The authors of that story were from Germany. It wasn't even a cellphone. It was an old cordless phone. They tested it in small hives and saw some very minor effects. We work with bees in a lot of areas where you can't even get a cellphone signal. The amount of energy is very, very remote. Even the authors themselves now say that was a big stretch."
. But it is by no means clear that colony collapse disorder affects any of the 17,000 other species of bees known to exist, or the 13,000 additional species of bees estimated to exist, not to mention the 200,000 other species of animal pollinators such as beetles, butterflies, moths, hummingbirds and even bats. This also leaves aside the two-thirds of the world's food that is pollinated not by critters, but by wind and rain, such as the grasslike crops that include corn.
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We lost our Ethics and Responsibility Long Before we Lost the Bees and Cooked the World:
Expect more repercussions from our Bad Behavior
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2) THE ABSTRACT PRINTED BELOW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE :
Global Warming Models Underpredict Increase in Rainfall, Study Says
Anne Minard
for National Geographic News
May 31, 2007 The world will be getting hotter, according to many climate models. But it might also be getting unexpectedly wetter.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/pf/17541402.html
That's the finding of a new study by Frank Wentz and colleagues at the research company Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) in Santa Rosa, California.
Wentz's team analyzed satellite data from the past 20 years to show that as global temperatures have risen, precipitation has kept pace.
The results fly in the face of many of the world's most sophisticated climate models, which predict that worldwide rainfall will increase at a much slower rate than temperatures.
(See a map of predicted effects of global warming.)
The findings also cast doubt on the ability of climate models to accurately predict precipitation on regional scales.
The study appears in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science.
Most computer models say that as the globe heats up, "the wetter areas on the planet are going to get wetter and the drier areas are going to get drier, which is a gloomy prediction," Wentz said.
The satellite data showed slight support for that prediction, but not enough to convince the authors that it will continue to hold true.
If the models are wrong about regional effects, that could be good news for places like the U.S. Southwest, which has withered under varying degrees of drought since the turn of the century.
But for other regions already prone to heavy rains, more precipitation could spell disaster.
"If you lived in Bangladesh"—where large areas flood annually—"you might not want to be reading this paper," Wentz said.
(Related news: "India Monsoons Intensifying, Hazard Risks Increasing, Study Says" [December 1, 2006].)
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Models Continue to Fail as we Continue to Massively Expand Population and Consumption
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3) THE ABSTRACT PRINTED BELOW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE :
Ancient "Megadroughts" Struck U.S. West, Could Happen Again, Study Suggests
Richard A. Lovett
for National Geographic News
May 24, 2007 Much of the western U.S. may be headed into a prolonged dry spell—a "perfect drought," scientists say, that could persist for
generations.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/pf/65564395.html
The West already has been dry for six years and is looking to be dry again in 2007, said Glen Macdonald, an ecology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
(Related: "U.S. Southwest Drought Could Be Start of New Dust Bowl" [April 5, 2007].)
The tree-ring data indicate that the West has experienced droughts that lasted ten times longer than anything the modern U.S. has ever seen.
Today millions of people living in Southern California are dependent on water from the Colorado as well as from local rainfall and snowmelt in the Sierra Nevada.
The latest study focused only on water levels in the Colorado River.
Bye-Bye El Niño?
The most likely causes of the megadroughts, Macdonald said, are changes in the temperature of the eastern Pacific Ocean that, in essence, "inoculate" it against wet El Niño years and lock in dry La Niña years.
El Niño and La Niña are the extreme ends of a regular ocean temperature shift called the Southern Oscillation. The events affect global weather in almost opposite ways, with La Niña creating warmer, drier conditions in the U.S. West.
Overall warmer waters "doesn't mean you won't get [El Niño] from time to time," Macdonald said, "but it will make it harder to achieve."
A thousand years ago such a change was likely caused by natural alterations in volcanism and solar radiation.
Today global warming may be producing similar results, Macdonald said this week during a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Acapulco, Mexico.
And if this is the first stage of a superdrought, it isn't likely to be limited to California and the Southwest.
The tree ring data suggest that the ancient droughts extended all the way from Canada's Yukon Territory to southern Mexico, said Edward Cook of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York.
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4) THE ABSTRACT PRINTED BELOW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE :
U.S. Data Show Rapid Minority Growth in School Rolls
By SAM DILLON
June 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/01/education/01educ.html?pagewanted=print
Driven mainly by an extraordinary influx of Hispanics, the nation’s population of minority students has surged to 42 percent of public school enrollment, up from 22 percent three decades ago, according to an annual report issued yesterday by the government.
The report, a statistical survey of the nation’s educational system, portrays sweeping ethnic shifts that have transformed the schools. The changes, with important implications for educators and policy makers, have been most striking in the West, where, the survey says, Hispanic, black and Asian students together have outnumbered whites since 2003. But all regions have seen growth in minority student enrollment, particularly by Hispanics, who accounted for one of five public school students in 2005, the last year for which data were available.
“The rapid increase in the Hispanic population in America’s schools is quite striking,” said Mark S. Schneider, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the data-gathering arm of the Department of Education.
Those data suggest significant challenges ahead for American education, partly because of the persistent math and reading test-score gaps that separate white students from blacks and Hispanics.
The most pronounced development in school demographics has been in Hispanic growth. Hispanic students accounted for just 6 percent of public school enrollment in 1972, but by 2005 their numbers had grown to 20 percent, the survey found. During the same period, white enrollment declined to 58 percent of school population, from 78 percent. African-American enrollment changed little: blacks were 14.8 percent of all students in 1972 and 15.6 percent in 2005.
The distribution of groups differs considerably by region. The Midwest remained the whitest region in 2005: 74 percent of students there were white, and 26 percent members of minorities. In the South, 24 percent of students were black, more than anywhere else. In the West, 46 percent of students were white, 37 percent were Hispanic, 7 percent were Asian, 5 percent were black, and the rest were Pacific Islanders, American Indians or students of more than one race.
THE COMMITTEE SAYS:
Flood of Crimigrant Cheap Labor Drowned Our Schools:
Cheap Labor and Profits More Important than Educating OUR Children
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5) THE ABSTRACT PRINTED BELOW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE :
Justice official is said to have favored GOP loyalists
Bradley Schlozman is slated to testify Tuesday in the U.S. attorneys investigation.
By Richard B. Schmitt
Times Staff Writer
June 4, 2007
Schlozman, a Bush administration political appointee, was also in the process of dismantling the ranks of career attorneys in the division, former employees contend.
Some of the division's most experienced lawyers resigned or were involuntarily transferred, often in favor of Republican loyalists who had a much different view of the laws they were sworn to uphold, the former employees allege.
"He viewed me as the enemy. He viewed most career attorneys as the enemy," said Joseph D. Rich, a former chief of the department's voting-rights section. Rich estimates that more than half of the 38 attorneys in the section eventually left.
Two months before Schlozman's speech, Rich resigned from the department, citing run-ins with Schlozman and other Bush appointees. Rich had served for 36 years.
On Tuesday, Schlozman is scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill in connection with the congressional investigation into the firings of U.S. attorneys last year.
Democrats are investigating whether the prosecutors were fired for improper reasons. One line of inquiry is whether the administration targeted those who were not aggressively pursuing voting-rights cases that could have benefited Republicans in so-called battleground states.
Schlozman was an architect of administration voting-rights policy at the Justice Department as well as an interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo., where he filed a number of controversial voting-rights suits.
Critics say his tenure is emblematic of how the administration turned civil rights enforcement on its head.
Less than a week before the November election, Schlozman obtained indictments of four members of the liberal activist group Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, for allegedly submitting fraudulent voter registrations. The Justice Department election manual says prosecutors should refrain generally from bringing cases just before elections, out of concern that the charges could affect voting.
ACORN itself had brought the case to the attention of authorities after discovering that some of its employees were making up names of registrants as part of a voter-registration drive. (in Missouri)
Missouri Republicans seized on the charges in the final days of the campaign. Nevertheless, Missouri voters narrowly elected Democrat Claire McCaskill over Republican incumbent Jim Talent, a victory that sank GOP hopes of maintaining control of Congress.
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Bush Justice Department Suppressing Democrat Voters
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6) THE ABSTRACT PRINTED BELOW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE :
Illegal Students Await Immigration Plan
By NANCY ZUCKERBROD
AP Education Writer
10:53 PM PDT, June 3, 2007
...an estimated 50,000 undocumented students in U.S. colleges today. These students would be among the people who would benefit from a part of an immigration bill that the Senate plans to resume work on this week.
Children born in the United States to undocumented parents are granted citizenship automatically. A section of the new legislation deals with illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children. They would gain temporary legal status when they graduate from high school as long as they agreed to enroll in college or enlist in the military.
They would be put on a fast, three-year path toward getting their permanent resident status and their green cards. While waiting for that, the students would be eligible for federal student loans and could work legally -- options not available to them now.
The overall bill would help roughly 12 million illegal immigrants. For most, it would take a minimum of eight years to get a green card. The larger group also would have to pay fines that would not be imposed on the high-school graduates who came to the U.S. as kids.
In all, about 1 million people now in the country illegally could potentially benefit from the provision aimed at children. Those include students currently in elementary and secondary schools. Current law allows children in the U.S. illegally to get a free K-12 education. They can go to most colleges if they can pay their way.
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Who is Going to Pay to Educate the Illegals?
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7) THE ABSTRACT PRINTED BELOW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE :
China puts economy before climate
BBC June 4, 07
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/world/asia-pacific/6717671.stm
China says its first and overriding priority in tackling climate change is to maintain economic development.
The plan has been released as China's President Hu Jintao prepares to attend a G8 meeting in Germany, where climate change will be high on the agenda.
"The first and overriding priorities of developing countries are sustainable development and poverty eradication," says the Chinese plan.
It is estimated that some 200 million Chinese are either unemployed or under-employed.
In explaining the plan, the chairman of China's National Development and Reform Commission, Ma Kai, said rich counties who have already industrialised would instead have to do more to tackle climate change.
Mr Ma said they were responsible for most of the greenhouse gases produced over the past century and had the money to tack the problem.
Mandatory emission caps "would hinder the development of developing countries and hamper their industrialisation", he added.
already the world's second largest emitter of carbon dioxide and is expected to overtake the US later this year.
US President George W Bush has proposed uniting a group of big emitters who would set non-binding targets by the end of next year.
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Gingrich Takes Bush White House to Task
Sunday, June 3, 2007
(06-03) 19:38 PDT WASHINGTON, (AP) –
Newt Gingrich described the Bush administration as dysfunctional and its unpopularity as hazardous to those in the Republican Party.
"The government is not functioning. It's not getting the job done," said the former House speaker, who is considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination. "Republicans need to confront this reality."
"All you have to do is look at the examples I've given you today where the government simply fails," said Gingrich, citing the administration's handling of the war in Iraq, its immigration policies and response to Hurricane Katrina.
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9) THE ABSTRACT PRINTED BELOW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE :
Prison solution became problem
A $26-million proposal to ease medical crisis led to a fight that highlights what critics say are flaws in contracting practices.
By Tim Reiterman
Times Staff Writer
June 4, 2007
...John Hagar, chief of staff for receiver Robert Sillen, said, "This is a classic example of the department looking at a problem and jumping to a solution that, in fact, does not work and increases costs unnecessarily….
"It appears there were outside influences," he said. "It was not being done at the urging of the contract staff who usually negotiate the contract. They were saying 'No.' "
After finding out about the deal, Hagar swiftly froze the contract process before Christmas and later halted payments.
The appointees who arranged the contract soon resigned. The state inspector general launched a conflict-of-interest investigation of one who held stock in a company listed as a subcontractor.
The contract uproar centered on Medical Development International, a $100 million-a-year business...founded in 1992 by a father and son, Richard and Ted Willich.
About two years ago, MDI officials hired Mark Nobili, a Sacramento lobbyist whose clients included a private prison operator. To date, records show that MDI has paid Nobili at least $170,000.
MDI representatives learned that the point people for new prison contracts were Peter Farber-Szekrenyi and Darc Keller — both longtime medical administrators appointed by Schwarzenegger in late 2005 to help reform healthcare.
(MDI used Mobil Medical, in which Keller had a significant financial interest)
About two years ago, MDI officials hired Mark Nobili, a Sacramento lobbyist whose clients included a private prison operator. To date, records show that MDI has paid Nobili at least $170,000.
Although MDI ultimately did not use Mobile Medical, Keller's participation in the contracting process may have violated the state Political Reform Act, said Robert Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies in Los Angeles.
On Aug. 31, Farber-Szekrenyi requested issuance of a $26-million contract to MDI, then the company began work.
...interviews and corrections department e-mails reviewed by the receiver's office show that contracting staff raised objections, such as whether the contract should have been competitively bid, whether MDI needed a medical license and whether the rates were too high.
When MDI complained about the delays, Hagar said, Farber-Szekrenyi and Keller repeatedly urged the employees to move the contract ahead.
Meanwhile, employees who process medical contracts were placed under the receiver. A short time later, Hagar learned from one of them that Farber-Szekrenyi and Keller were implementing a pilot program without competitive bidding — and that contracting staff thought the price was exorbitant and that the work required a medical license.
Hagar stopped the contract and later asked the inspector general to investigate.
Farber-Szekrenyi and Keller said that earlier this year they were forced to resign by the governor's office, which declined to comment.
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More Crooked Arnie Appointees: This Crew was Bilking Sick Prisons
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10) THE ABSTRACT PRINTED BELOW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE :
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