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As U.S. election nears efforts intensify to misinform pressure voters

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October 24, 2012

As U.S. election nears efforts intensify to misinform pressure voters – In Ohio and Wisconsin, billboards in mostly low-income and minority neighborhoods showed prisoners behind bars and warned of criminal penalties for voter fraud – an effort that voting rights groups say was designed to intimidate minority voters.

And across the nation, some employers – notably David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who help fund the conservative group Americans for Prosperity – are pushing their workers to vote for Republican Mitt Romney for president.

Two weeks before what could be one of the closest presidential elections in U.S. history, efforts to mislead, intimidate or pressure voters are an increasingly prominent part of the political landscape. Analysts say tactics typically seen in the last few days before an election are already in play.

“We’ve seen an uptick in deceptive and intimidating tactics designed to prevent eligible Americans from voting,” said Eric Marshall of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who manages a coalition that has a telephone hot line (1-866-OUR-VOTE) that collects tips on alleged voter intimidation.

Democrats have been more vocal in complaining about such antics. They also cite groups linked to the conservative Tea Party movement that are training tens of thousands of people to monitor polling places on November 6 for voter fraud. The controversial plan has been criticized as an attempt to delay or discourage voting.

But Republicans also have been behind some of the complaints, which have been focused largely on the eight or so politically divided swing states that are likely to decide the race between Romney and Democratic President Barack Obama.

Kurtis Killian, a Republican from St. Augustine, Florida, was among those in three states who have reported receiving calls that encouraged them to vote by phone so they would not have to go to the polls.

Killian said he received a call from a man who identified himself as an employee of the Florida Division of Elections. Killian said he refused the caller’s offer to cast his vote by phone then reported the call to local elections officials.

“I know there is no such thing as phone voting,” Killian said. But “for someone who can’t get out easily,” such as elderly or disabled voters, “they might go for that – it would be convenient for them. Once you think you voted … you won’t go to the polls. My vote would be canceled out.”

Virginia’s State Board of Elections received similar complaints from at least 10 people – most of them elderly – who said they had been urged to vote by phone.

Voters in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, reported similar phone calls in September, sparking an investigation by the Secretary of State’s office, which oversees Indiana elections.

The probe has focused on a firm called Vote USA. It is unclear who was behind the group; its phone number is no longer active. The Secretary of State urged voters who receive a call from Vote USA to ignore it.

Democratic lawmakers and activists in Wisconsin and Ohio – the most coveted of all the swing states in the presidential race because the winner there is likely to win the White House – are angry about several dozen billboard signs that have popped up in recent weeks, warning of stiff penalties for voter fraud.

The billboards were put up in mostly black and low-income communities. Most had a large picture of a judge’s gavel and said “Voter Fraud is a Felony!” punishable by up to 3-1/2 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. They were paid for by an anonymous group described only as “private family foundation.”

Other billboards showed prisoners in jumpsuits peering through prison bars. Community leaders said the signs were aimed at blacks and Hispanics and the poor as well as ex-convicts – all groups that tend to vote Democratic.

City Councilwoman Phyllis Cleveland, whose district in Cleveland includes several of the billboards, said the billboards were designed to intimidate.

“I’m worried they will actually scare some of the ex-offenders, people with felony records who can vote,” said Cleveland, who added that there is confusion about felons voting because it is illegal in some states. In Ohio, 12 other states and Washington, D.C., felons who are not behind bars may vote.

In response to the complaints, the billboard company, Clear Channel Outdoor, said last weekend that it would take down about 140 billboards in Ohio and Wisconsin that had been scheduled to stay up until November 6 – Election Day. The company said it has a policy against putting anonymous political messages on billboards and that it erred in agreeing to the contract.

Some Ohio residents who decided to vote early to avoid long lines on Election Day said they were angry about the billboards.

A few compared them with efforts in more than 30 states to impose new voting restrictions, such as requiring voters to produce a photo ID. Several photo ID laws have been tossed aside or delayed by courts.

“There is a concerted effort to keep specific groups from the polls,” said Camilo Villa, 24, who lives in the Cleveland area and voted early for Obama. “It’s very concerning.”

Meanwhile, some employers have pressured workers to support certain candidates in the presidential race and other elections.

Such employers seem to be taking advantage of a 2010 Supreme Court ruling that overturned laws that banned employers from directly expressing their political opinions to their employees.

Critics of the so-called Citizens United ruling – which also led to the creation of big-money “Super PACs,” or political action committees that can raise and spend unlimited amounts and have been a force in this presidential campaign – say it could make workers feel coerced into voting for certain candidates.

Several companies have sent out letters urging their employees to vote for Romney. The Koch brothers, who have given millions of dollars to back Romney and other Republicans, have come under fire for sending a “voter information packet” to 45,000 employees of Koch Industries’ Georgia Pacific.

The packet, obtained by the political magazine In These Times, includes a list of candidates the company supports, with Romney at the top of the list. It also includes a letter from Koch Industries President David Robertson saying that “many of our more than 50,000 U.S. employees and contractors may suffer the consequences” if voters elect candidates who increase regulations and hinder free trade – a presumed jab at Obama.

Some Democrats accused Georgia Pacific of trying to force workers into voting for Romney.

Lynn Rhinehart, general counsel for the AFL-CIO, the largest group of labor unions in the United States, said that employers may communicate with their workers about candidate choices, but should not link a vote with keeping their jobs.

“There could be legal issues with how it is that they are communicating with employees,” Rhinehart said in a media call to discuss the election and intimidation tactics.

Georgia Pacific spokesman Greg Guest said the company’s mailing was not an attempt to “intimidate” employees and that many companies and unions give members similar information.

“Unions and newspapers go further than this and actually endorse candidates to their members and readers,” Guest said in a statement.

Voting rights groups have raised concerns about volunteer “poll challengers” who will be out on Election Day to try to prevent what they see as possible voter fraud.

One group, called True the Vote, hopes to train up to one million people before November 6. Rights groups say the large numbers of monitors could be intimidating and discourage some people – particularly minorities – from voting.

“We expect organizations like True the Vote to try to intimidate people … (by) indicating to voters, possibly Latinos, ‘You know you’ve got to be a documented citizen to vote,'” said Arlene Holt Baker, vice president of the AFL-CIO.

True the Vote’s founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, disputed the notion that her group’s election monitors might keep legitimately registered voters from casting ballots.

“We have seen no evidence about voter intimidation by TTV volunteers at the polls,” she told Reuters in an e-mail.

In New Mexico, meanwhile, the state attorney general is investigating possible voter suppression after a video – secretly recorded by a group called ProgressNowNM – was circulated showing a Republican Party leader giving false information to volunteer poll monitors.

The Republican official can be heard saying that challengers could demand that voters show IDs and could prevent voters from requesting interpreters – neither of which are true. New Mexico does not require an ID to vote and interpreters are allowed. Ballots also are available in Spanish.

State Attorney General Gary King, a Democrat, said his office had received several complaints that appeared to show a “concerted effort afoot to discourage some New Mexicans from exercising their right to vote this November.”

Source: Reuters

Feds step up investor fraud education efforts

Business

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October 24, 2012

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Feds step up investor fraud education efforts – After a career in retail, he has chosen to help fight fraud as his retirement pastime. In the past 17 months alone, he has done 61 presentations as a volunteer with AARP Consumer Protection Speakers Bureau in New Hampshire.

Moldoff says he hears every few weeks from seniors at presentations who admit to him that they’ve been swindled – but, typically, with a pledge that he tells no one about it. “Very few people are gutsy enough to raise their hands and say they are a victim,” he says.

At a recent summit on investor fraud run by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Connecticut, however, the stories were out in the open. And the government was on hand to try to offer help proselytizers like Moldoff, who are trying to raise awareness of fraud in one of the most heavily victimized demographics.

At the event he attended in Stamford, Connecticut on October 1, speakers discussed an increase in scams involving reverse mortgages, the failure of victims to have done any due diligence on those they trust their money to, and a lack of skepticism when an “investment counselor” asks for funds to be paid directly to them.

Since last year, the U.S. Department of Justice says, it has charged, brought to trial, taken pleas or received sentences for more than 800 defendants in investor fraud cases. The amount taken from victims exceeds $20 billion.

To help spread the word about fraud, the Justice Department convened six regional summits earlier this month intended to mobilize a wide range of troops – from the SEC to the FBI, local police, AARP and The Better Business Bureau. The Stamford summit was followed by similar events in Nashville, San Francisco, Denver, Cleveland and Miami.

The government also set up the site stopfraud.gov to help educate consumers about risks and warning signs.

“We have seen a sharp rise in the number of investor fraud schemes,” says David B. Fein, U.S. Attorney in Connecticut, who hosted the first of the six summits. He says between 2008 and 2011, FBI statistics show at 136 percent increase in investor fraud schemes. “Many of the schemes we are prosecuting have been in process for five, 10, even 20 years.”

The economy has played a part in that, Fein says. Those operating a Ponzi scheme, for instance, can sustain it for a long time – collecting money from new victims to ensure there’s money on hand when needed. But when fewer people are attracted to the scheme, it can unravel. “As the waves recede you see what’s on the beach.”

In many instances, the fraud is so sophisticated it becomes easy to skip over the precautions, says U.S. Attorney Jerry Martin of the Middle District of Tennessee, who hosted one of the summits. So-called affinity fraud has been a big problem in that part of the country.

“It shouldn’t matter who you are investing with, you need to do your homework,” Martin says.

Gerri Walsh, president of the FINRA Investor Education Foundation, who attended the summit in Connecticut, says a big takeaway is that those who are being victimized come from all demographics. “It’s no longer exclusively older people. You realize that victims are intelligent people who are not vulnerable or isolated. There are signs that they miss when they are in the moment.”

Another attendee at the Stamford summit, Jackie Hotton MacKnight of the Better Business Bureau in Connecticut, says the summits helped bring together those with similar goals who would not normally connect, such as law enforcement and advocacy groups. They got to hear each others’ presentations – allowing a chance to refocus their own. A result, she was trained by Walsh’s group to go out and teach others to do presentations about fraud prevention.

She is scheduled do a presentation in November for up to 600 attendees. “Our goal is to reach as many communities within Connecticut as possible,” she says.

Source: Reuters

Ex-Goldman director Gupta awaits sentence in insider case

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October 24, 2012

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Ex-Goldman director Gupta awaits sentence in insider case – The sentencing on Wednesday of fallen Wall Street titan Rajat Gupta for insider trading could come down to whether a judge agrees that his lifetime of charity counts against sending him to prison.

The former Goldman Sachs Group Inc board member was convicted in June of leaking boardroom secrets to hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam, his friend and former business associate, at the height of the financial crisis.

Gupta, 63, is to be sentenced by Manhattan U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, who oversaw the four-week trial. The former Goldman director, who also once ran the McKinsey & Co consulting firm and sat on the boards of Procter & Gamble Co and American Airlines, is the most influential corporate figure to be convicted in the recent crackdown on insider trading.

Indian-born Gupta had moved in elite business and philanthropic circles for decades until he became ensnared in the Rajaratnam case.

Gupta’s lawyers have requested that he be spared prison, citing his work with groups such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on fighting disease in developing countries. Bill Gates, Microsoft Corp’s co-founder, and former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan are among the luminaries who have urged Rakoff to be lenient.

As one alternative to prison, the defense proposed “a less orthodox” plan in which Gupta would live and work with Rwandan government officials to help fight HIV/AIDS and malaria in rural districts, court papers said.

Federal prosecutors, however, argue that Gupta should serve eight to 10 years in prison. Gupta repeatedly flouted the law and abused his position as a corporate board member, they said.

Legal experts say Rakoff is unlikely to grant Gupta’s request to avoid prison. The leaks of sensitive information at the heart of his case involved serious breaches of trust, said JaneAnne Murray, a white-collar defense attorney and professor at the University of Minnesota Law School.

“Balanced against that will be the breadth of his philanthropy,” she said. “These extremes give this sentencing Shakespearean overtones.”

Rakoff is considered by many defense attorneys to be less harsh in sentencing than some of his peers, but he has imposed significant prison terms in other insider-trading cases.

In 2011, for example, Rakoff sentenced technology consultant Winifred Jiau to four years in prison on similar insider-trading charges. Another judge sentenced Rajaratnam, who was convicted of securities fraud and conspiracy in May 2011, to 11 years.

Gupta was found guilty of three counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy. The maximum sentence is 20 years for securities fraud and five years for conspiracy.

He was cleared of divulging P&G’s quarterly earnings in January 2009. He was also found not guilty of illegally telling Rajaratnam about Goldman’s quarterly earnings after a March 12, 2007, board meeting.

Part of the prosecution’s evidence was that within a minute of disconnecting from a September 2008 board call approving a $5 billion investment in Goldman by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc, Gupta called Rajaratnam. Rajaratnam then hurriedly ordered his traders to buy as much as $40 million in Goldman stock, prosecutors said.

The case is USA v Gupta, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 11-cr-907.

Source: Yahoo News

UN envoy: Syrian government agrees to cease-fire

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October 24, 2012

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UN envoy: Syrian government agrees to cease-fire – After 19 months of incessant violence, the Syrian government has agreed to a cease-fire during the four-day Eid al-Adha holiday, which begins Friday, special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said.

He added that some rebels also “agreed to the principle” of a cease-fire. But whether the words lead to any kind of peace remains uncertain. The U.N.-Arab League special envoy to Syria spoke from Cairo after a recent trip to Damascus.But Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi said that from his perspective, nothing was set in stone.

“The issue of halt(ing) the military operations during the Eid al-Adha holiday is still under study by the general command of the military and the armed forces,” Makdissi told CNN Wednesday. “A final decision will be issued tomorrow in this regard.”

The Syrian government has previously promised to withdraw its forces, but violence continued unraveling.

Earlier this year, President Bashar al-Assad’s government agreed to a six-point peace plan laid out by Brahimi’s predecessor, Kofi Annan. But reports of violence by both troops and rebels raged on.

Reports of fresh carnage on the ground did little to support the notion of an imminent cease-fire. Both dissidents and government forces blamed each other for a “massacre” in the city of Douma. The opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 16 bodies, including some of children, were found. Activists blamed the attacks on government forces, the observatory said.

“Terrorist armed groups committed a heinous massacre in the city of Douma, resulting in the killing of nine men, three children and one woman — all slaughtered by knives,” state TV reported.

The hundreds of thousands of Syrians who have fled across borders can sleep without fear of further attack. But they’re also causing serious strains on their host countries, such as Jordan.

Providing healthcare to “the Syrian brothers” has drained resources and put enormous pressure on Jordanian hospitals and clinics, Minister of Health Abdullatif Wreikat said, according to Jordan’s official Petra news agency.

He said Jordan, Syria’s southern neighbor, now has more than 200,000 refugees and needs more aid.

Wreikat said the kingdom has made significant strides in fighting contagious diseases, but fears a decline “as some diseases had spread among the Syrian refugees,” Petra reported.

The Health Ministry has provided 50,000 doses of vaccines against diseases to Syrian children at the Zaatari refugee camp, in addition other health services, a ministry official said, according to Petra.

Source: CNN

Good Thing, Small Package

life and style

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October 24, 2012

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Good Thing, Small Package – IF by chance you are a lover of dumplings (and really, Anthony Bourdain might have to mount a search party to find someone who isn’t), then consider this a very good time to be a New Yorker.

Yes, food trends beg to be quibbled over. We grow weary of cupcakes, of meatballs, of the overwhelming ubiquity of bacon. And yet it’s hard to find fault with the recent ascendancy of Asian dumplings on a lot of city menus, in part because it’s hard to snicker at the simple, plump lovability of this globe-spanning culinary trope: the very form of a dumpling, with a hidden knob of flavor all wrapped up in a bow of dough, calls to mind a tiny present that our species has decided to pass along to itself.

New York has been a dumpling town for a long time. Up and down the streets of Flushing (and at countless stuffed-pouch shrines like Vanessa’s Dumpling House, Joe’s Shanghai, Nom Wah Tea Parlor, Grand Sichuan,Prosperity Dumpling and M Shanghai Bistro & Garden), diners can feast on platters of two-bite delights while sometimes spending less than you’d pay for a morning cup of coffee.

But lately, in Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens, at spots like Talde, RedFarm, Hakkasan, Danji, the Good Fork, the Hurricane Club, the Rickshaw food truck, Biang and (at unpredictable intervals) Mission Chinese Food, classic dumpling forms are being executed with meticulous care — and stuffed, pinched and twisted into fresh manifestations.

In Park Slope, Dale Talde has engineered one of the most hunted-down bar snacks of 2012, a beer-friendly, street-cart collision known as the “pretzel dumpling.”

Inside, there’s some slightly cured pork. Outside, a process of boiling, brushing, pan-searing and baking creates a skin with the crust and chew of a hot pretzel. The dipping sauce echoes what you might get at a deli, or in a bag full of Chinese takeout: strong mustard.

For Mr. Talde, who grew up in Chicago and comes from a Filipino background, the goal was to summon a dish that represented a spirited take on what’s Asian and what’s American. “For us, it was a perfect way of blending the two,” he said.

If any place embodies the city’s neo-dumpling ethos, though, it’s RedFarm, whose West Village location has already spawned a forthcoming Upper West Side spinoff. At RedFarm, there are dumplings fashioned to look like Pac-Man characters and horseshoe crabs. There’s also an egg roll stuffed with pastrami.

“I call them whimsical,” said Ed Schoenfeld, the veteran restaurateur behind RedFarm. Spend an afternoon touring the kitchen, and Mr. Schoenfeld will rhapsodize about the artistry of the chef, Joe Ng. Those batter-crusted crabs might look like a cute gag, but there’s culinary precision (and greenmarket produce) inside them.

One day Mr. Schoenfeld pointed to a bowl of stuffing that Xiao Yan Mei, a prep cook, was smearing into sections of dough with a paddle that looked like a tongue depressor. That bowl held tiny cubes of roasted duck and vegetables — cut into what the French would call a brunoise, Mr. Schoenfeld said — all of which were meant to give the dumpling texture, “rather than having meatloaf inside.”

“This has a mouth feel that’s really special,” he said. “Here you can get individual bits of mushroom or sweet carrot or corn,” as opposed to the meat-and-spice mush often found inside a dumpling. “You might be getting yummy duck mush, but you’re not getting this, and there’s an appreciable difference.”

The current New York dumpling spectrum ranges from hyper-traditionalism to outlandish rule-flouting. Lawrence Knapp, the chef at the Hurricane Club, on Park Avenue South, cranks out unorthodox dumplings that riff on chicken parmigiana, pad Thai, cheesesteak and barbecued pork. “We don’t really strictly follow the guidelines of what makes sense or what a typical quote-unquote Asian dumpling is,” he said. “You can cheat more with the dumplings. You can have more fun with them, and people aren’t really going to criticize it.”

Or you can go the opposite route, as is done at Hakkasan in Midtown, where a sort of special-forces squadron of dim sum creates traditional dumplings with a level of precision that might be expected at an imperial Chinese banquet (with prices to match).

For Hooni Kim, the chef at Danji in Hell’s Kitchen, and Sohui Kim, the chef at the Good Fork in Red Hook, Brooklyn, the goal is to take a humble example of Korean street food and unpretentiously elevate it.

“Just wanting to perfect something that is really simple” is how Ms. Kim, from the Good Fork, put it. “What can I do to this already amazing food? How can I one-up this a little bit?”

While Mr. Talde has memories of making dumplings with his mother at Christmas, Jason Wang, the 24-year-old entrepreneur behind Biang! and the Xi’an Famous Foods restaurants, remembers doing the same thing with his family around the onset of the Lunar New Year.

“For Asian families, dumplings are something that we all grew up with,” Mr. Wang said. And the notion of inventively “playing around with the dumpling” is overdue, he added.

“For our generation,” he said, “it’s a way of communicating these things to everyone.”

The dumplings at Biang! (either floating in broth or strafed with generous rivulets of spicy red oil) are stuffed with lamb, as are the juicy ones that can sometimes be found (usually as a special) at a famous Chinese style restaurant, Mission Chinese Food, on the Lower East Side. There, the chef, Danny Bowien, plays up “the funkiness of the lamb, and the lamb fat,” he said, by cramming the restaurant’s dumplings with cheek meat.

Mr. Bowien has a love/hate relationship with dumplings. The problem, he said (echoing a sentiment that you can hear from chefs all over town) is that they’re way too popular. Popular enough to throw the whole kitchen out of whack.

Back in the spring, when the lamb-cheek dumplings were a fixture on the Mission Chinese Food menu, “we would get, like, 16 orders per table,” Mr. Bowien said. “I was like, ‘Really?’ It just got too crazy. After dumpling No. 1,000 goes out the door, I’m like, ‘Uh, let’s make something else.’ ”

At the Good Fork, Ms. Kim didn’t even want to include dumplings on the original menu, even though she had an excellent recipe from her mother. She sees the place as a globe-trotting bistro. But once her pork-and-chive packages made an appearance, with an interior texture expertly softened by lacings of silken tofu, it seemed there was no turning back, especially after she won a dumpling cook-off on “Throwdown With Bobby Flay.”

“After ‘Throwdown’ aired, all week I was like, ‘I hate dumplings,’ ” she said. “People came in just to get the dumplings. People would say, ‘Can I get 20 dozen in a box?’

“But I kept them on the menu. I just couldn’t disappoint people.”

Source: The New York Times

Centenary Tour de France: this could be the hardest finish ever

Sports

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October 24, 2012

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Centenary Tour de France: this could be the hardest finish ever – The centenary Tour de France will have a brutal final phase with a twin climb of l’Alpe d’Huez on the final Thursday and a gruesome summit finish at Mont Semnoz, high above Annecy, on the closing Saturday.

The combination of a viciously hard time trial on the last Wednesday, followed by three Alpine stages back to back, make this a strong candidate for the hardest finish to any Tour de France. The 2009 race climbed Mont Ventoux on the final Saturday, but did not have such a tough run-in.

The objective in devising the 100th Tour, according to the organiser, Christian Prudhomme, has been to show off France’s most beautiful areas while maintaining suspense until the last weekend. The race starts with a three-day visit to the island of Corsica, includes a team time trial in Nice, and has a first flat time trial from Avranches to the Mont Saint-Michel, where the riders will race along the causeway to the island before performing a U-turn with roughly 300m to go so the television cameras can capture them at the finish with the famous view of the monastery behind them. The Tour ends at dusk on the Champs Elysees.

“This is the first 100% French Tour in 10 years, and what we want is for everyone who sees the race to say: ‘I know that part of France and I understand why the Tour has gone there,’ or ‘I don’t know that place, but I can see why the Tour is visiting,'” said Prudhomme in advance of the route announcement.

The decisive phase is likely to come in the final week, however. The peloton will approach the Alps from the south after a stage finish on Mont Ventoux on the penultimate Sunday, with a rest day on the Monday and a flat run northwards on the Tuesday. The 32km time trial on Wednesday July 17 runs on a hilly course from Embrun to Chorges, and has barely a metre of flat road in the first 30km, which include two severe climbs of over 6km each, with the corresponding descents.

That is followed on the Thursday by a mountain stage of moderate length (168km) including an unprecedented challenge: two ascents of the Tour’s most celebrated summit finish, l’Alpe d’Huez, in the same afternoon. This is the first time the Tour has included such a stage – twice up the same vast mountain in one day – and it has been made possible by the upgrading of an alternative route off the Alpe over the Col de Sarenne.

After a classic long Alpine stage over several cols on the Friday, the Saturday stage is the sting in the tail: very short at 125km, but culminating in two climbs, Mont Revard and a new finish on top of Mont Semnoz, high above the town of Annecy. The Semnoz is some seven miles long and extremely steep, with lengthy passages at over one-in-eight. It is a mountain that will suit either Chris Froome, or the Spaniard Joaquim Rodríguez, although the recent Vuelta a España winner, Alberto Contador, will start favourite to take the third Tour win of his career.

It is unclear whether Bradley Wiggins will defend his title; the Londoner was in Paris for the presentation of the Tour on Wednesday morning but there is increasing speculation that he will have the Giro d’Italia as his main objective for the early season, and will then either not start the Tour, or will adopt a support role for the 2012 runner-up, Froome.

Wiggins said recently that he views the Tour as being “like the Olympics” – a once in several years objective – and that he is also interested in making a wholehearted bid to win either or both of the world road championships – road race and time trial – over a hilly course in Florence.

However, there is one particularly vital element of British interest on the first day of the race, a flat road stage from Porto Vecchio to Bastia on the island of Corsica. Mark Cavendish will have the opportunity to become the first sprinter in half a century to take the yellow jersey on the very first stage of the Tour, which has begun in recent years with a prologue time trial or a road race stage with a hilly finish.

“What I love in Cavendish and Wiggins is the knowledge they have ofcycling’s tradition,” said Prudhomme. “They come from a country where cycling is far from being the No1 sport, but they have that respect. Normally it’s the old guys who make you understand cycling, but these two really shine a light on cycling’s stars of the past.”

Rumours persist that there will be a British start to the race in 2014, either in Edinburgh or Yorkshire, on the back of Wiggins’s triumph in the 2012 race. The Grand Départ for 2014 is due to be confirmed in January next year.

Source: The Guardian

Passengers On Delayed Flights Should Get Compensation EU Cour Confirms

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October 24, 2012

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Passengers On Delayed Flights Should Get Compensation EU Cour Confirms

Passengers on delayed flights should get compensation, EU court confirms – Airlines face payouts of millions of pounds to passengers after a European court upheld a ruling that compensation should be paid for flight delays as well as cancellations.

The EU’s court of justice ruled that passengers whose flights arrive more than three hours late are entitled to compensation of up to €600 (£488) each unless the delay is due to extraordinary circumstances outside the airline’s control, such as strikes or bad weather.

In confirming its interpretation of EU law, the court reiterated that passengers delayed could suffer similar inconvenience to those on cancelled flights and therefore should be similarly recompensed.

The judgment resolves a grey area in regulation and potentially opens up airlines to millions of pounds in claims, including many put on hold pending the European ruling.

The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said the verdict provided “much needed clarity”.

Iain Osborne, CAA director of regulatory policy, said: “Every year around 200 million passengers travel on 2m flights to and from the UK, with the vast majority experiencing no problems. However, when something does go wrong, there are regulations in place to protect travellers, and the CAA is ready to ensure companies abide by them.”

The CAA can help passengers bringing complaints against airlines or airports, although it stressed that passengers should first contact airlines to give them an opportunity to consider their claim before getting the authority involved.

The EU is separately reviewing its regulations on what assistance and compensation should be provided.

According to flight-delayed.co.uk, a website that specialises in helping passengers seek compensation, the hassleof making claims “probably will not change even after the verdict”.

A spokeswoman for easyJet, which has challenged the CAA’s interpretation of due compensation, said the airline was disappointed by the outcome but also welcomed the clarity.

Airline sources said that while the cumulative bill would be sizeable, the majority of delays – such as those due to fog which disrupted dozens of flights at Heathrow and elsewhere on Monday and Tuesday this week – would not lead to airlines being liable for compensation. Constraints on crew working hours and the nature of short-haul scheduled services mean many flights are in any case cancelled when delays loom.

However, long-haul and charter flight customers on holiday packages, whose economics dictate that planes would fly even with long delays, are most likely to benefit from the additional rights. Passengers will still have to pursue claims individually.

Source: The guardian

Finding Zen in a Patch of Nature

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October 24, 2012

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Finding Zen in a Patch of Nature- It is afternoon in a hardwood forest on the edge of the Cumberland Plateau, and the cicadas are singing.

David Haskell, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of the South, is taking me through part of the 13,000 acres owned by the university, to a small circle of forest floor a bit over a yard in diameter. He visited this randomly chosen forest “mandala,” as he calls it, many times over the course of a year and recorded his observations in “The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature.”

He is pointing out flowers, salamanders, insects, trees, as we follow a well-worn hiking path, and stops for a moment to listen. These are swamp cicadas, he says, not the kind that hatch all at once after years underground and hammer the ear mercilessly.

“Was it last year or the year before we had the 13-year cicadas?” he says. “I took my sound pressure meter down to a place where they were really loud, and it came to over 90 decibels. At 85 OSHA says you need hearing protection in your workplace.

“Everybody else hates them.”

But to him, the noise is biological alchemy, sunlight into sound. “These guys have been feeding on roots for 13 years. And so it’s 13 years of combined Tennessee forest productivity being blasted out.”

It is this kind of perception, halfway between metaphor and field note, that makes his voice a welcome entry in the world of nature writers. He thinks like a biologist, writes like a poet, and gives the natural world the kind of open-minded attention one expects from a Zen monk rather than a hypothesis-driven scientist. He avoids terms like “nature deficit disorder” and refuses to scold the bug-fearing masses. His pitch is more old-fashioned, grounded in aesthetics as much as science.

“You can live a perfectly happy life never having heard of Shakespeare,” he says, “but your life is in some ways a little diminished, because there’s such beauty there.

“And I think the same is true of nature. Much of it is useless to us, and that’s O.K. It’s not true that every species that goes extinct is like another rivet off the plane and the plane’s going to crash. We lost the passenger pigeon and the U.S. economy did not tank. But we lost the passenger pigeon and we lost some of this remarkable music made out of atoms and DNA.”

Dr. Haskell wanted to tell the story of forest ecology and also to refresh himself with a kind of natural history meditation, as opposed to goal-directed scientific research. He has a daily practice of sitting and concentrating on his breathing (he doesn’t use the word “meditation”) of no specific religious bent. He does, however, set himself apart from crusading atheists, like Richard Dawkins, saying he harbors a “deep suspicion that the world is more than atoms rearranging themselves.”

He did no experiments and no research at his forest circle. He sat, and watched, and listened.

“I had my hand lens and binoculars and a notebook,” he said. “And that was it. And of course my senses.”

He is not, however, averse to technology when it comes to reaching an audience. He blogs(davidhaskell.wordpress.com) and tweets (@dghaskell).

As we walk in the forest, he points out shagbark hickory, baneberry (“very poisonous”) and blue cohosh (“you wouldn’t want to eat it”). The forest is rich in animal and plant diversity partly because it never suffered the onslaught of glaciers that scoured more northern forests in the last ice age. His small circle lies in an area that has been untouched for hundreds of years.

But this forest is no pristine wilderness, as is obvious from the occasional golf ball resting under the ground cover. The path we are on is well down the side of a rough hill, beyond the crest of which lies the golf course. “They remind me of eggs,” Dr. Haskell says. “You hatch one of these things and you get a golfer.”

Dr. Haskell was born in England, raised in Paris and educated at Oxford and Cornell before he came to Tennessee, 16 years ago, with his wife, Sarah Vance. One result of his background is that his accent is so hard to pin down, he says, that wherever he goes, people say, “You’re not from around here.”

At Oxford he met two people who had great influence on his approach: the evolutionary biologist William Hamilton, with whom he studied, and Ms. Vance, a biologist, artist, goat keeper and soap maker. They live on less than an acre in Sewanee with a garden and dairy goats for Ms. Vance’s Cudzoo Farm, along with ducks, rabbits, bees, a dog and several cats.

His wife, Dr. Haskell says, “really taught me what it would be like to look at nature with a more empathetic eye. And a careful eye.”

Dr. Hamilton, whose work on the genetic basis for altruism inspired both Dr. Dawkins’s book “The Selfish Gene” and E. O. Wilson’s “Sociobiology,” taught him that “the big ideas were not in conflict with the particularities of natural history.” In the field, he said, Dr. Hamilton would “be noticing little tiny wildflowers and telling me not to put my bike on them.”

We reach the circle where Dr. Haskell made his observations, a spot he picked, he writes, “by walking haphazardly through the forest and stopping when I found a suitable rock on which to sit.” The name “mandala” was inspired by the sand paintings made by Buddhist monks. In describing their making, he writes, “The whole universe is seen through this small circle of sand.”

In the book, he asks, “Can the whole forest be seen through a small contemplative window of leaves, rocks and water?”

But unlike a mandala, which calls the eye to it with its intricacy, this bit of nature has nothing that would catch the eye of a passer-by. He looks it over and says, “The first thing I see is this big old stick that’s fallen across here and that has fallen since I wrote the book. And there’s a downy woodpecker that’s been at it since it fell and has taken out one of the wood-boring beetles.”

“Usually, if you stay here for a while, something is going to happen,” he says. As if on cue, a bird’s cry pierces the cicadas’ hum. “There’s a blue jay. There are the cicadas. There are the harvestmen crawling around.”

He spent as much time doing research for the book as he did at the mandala, and some of the beauty he captures is intellectual, not sensual, found in the balance of conflict and cooperation in the forest. Of the toxins in plants and the detoxifying biochemistry of some herbivores, he writes, “The mandala is not a banquet waiting for guests to arrive but a devil’s buffet of poisoned plates from which herbivores snatch the least deadly morsels.”

When he sees ichneumon wasps in a fleck of sunlight running about, searching, he harnesses language and his acuity of vision to describe the moment: “Every minute or two the wasps flip onto their sides and shudder their legs together, cleaning away the silk that spiders have strewn over the mandala.”

Then he harnesses history and biology to note that the reproductive habits of the wasps — they lay their eggs in caterpillars, which the larvae, when hatched, eat from the inside out — posed the “problem of evil” for Darwin and led him to agnosticism.

Science did not, however, give him his most enduring insight, which came while he was watching squirrels on a sunny December day. They were not frantic as usual, he writes.

“I watch them for an hour,” he writes, “and mostly they loll in the sun, limbs sprawled.” It is a scene that seems a warning against too narrow a reading of nature.

“Science,” he writes, “deepens our intimacy with the world. But there is a danger in an exclusively scientific way of thinking. The forest is turned into a diagram; animals become mere mechanisms; nature’s workings become clever graphs.”

These loafing squirrels were something else. “They are alive; they are our cousins,” he writes. “And they appear to enjoy the sun, a phenomenon that occurs nowhere in the curriculum of modern biology.” Science is one story, he writes, true but not complete, and the world cannot be encompassed in one story.

Still, his inner scientist — noting, recording, cataloging — is never far from the surface. As we sit at the mandala, Dr. Haskell keeps on noticing one small thing after another, even as we are nearing time to head out of the forest.

“Look,” he says, “here’s a big old cricket. Looks to me like one of the cave crickets with the huge long antennae. That’s a species I have not seen in this circle before.”

Concern Raised About Finance Scheme For Malaria Drugs

Healthcare

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October 24, 2012

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Concern Raised About Finance Scheme For Malaria Drugs

The UK government has contributed £70m to the Affordable Medicines Facility for malaria (AMFm).Oxfam says there is no evidence the programme has saved the lives of the most vulnerable people.The body behind the AMFm says an independent study shows it has improved access and reduced drug prices.

The scheme was introduced three years ago by the Global Fund to Fight Aids, TB and Malaria.It acts as a global subsidy to provide greater access to combination therapy for malaria, particularly through private-sector drug retailers in developing countries.

The idea is to reduce the use of older treatments that carry a higher risk of resistance, and to untap the potential of the private sector in reaching remote communities. More than 200 million people contract malaria every year and 655,000 die from the disease – most of them are young children.The scheme is being piloted in seven countries including Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria. Its future will be considered at a meeting of the Global Fund’s board next month. Oxfam has criticised it as “risky and dangerous”.

The charity’s senior health policy advisor, Dr Mohga Kamal Yanni, said: “It is dangerous to put the lives of sick children in the hands of a shopkeeper with no medical training, and to pursue a scheme that doesn’t help those people who need it the most. “There is no cheap option or short cut to combat malaria.

“The AMFm is a dangerous distraction from genuine solutions like investing in community health workers, who have slashed the number of malarial deaths in countries such as Zambia and Ethiopia. “The Global Fund board must act on the evidence and put a stop to the AMFm now.”The Global Fund said Oxfam’s claims were “simply untrue”.

n a statement, it said: “Some Western aid groups oppose a pragmatic approach that includes any involvement of the private sector.

“But the reality of this programme is that it is getting life-saving medicine to people who need it most from the private sector outlets where they already seek treatment.

“Before the launch of AMFm, life-saving malaria treatments cost up to 20 times as much.

“An extensive study has shown that AMFm has increased availability and reduced prices for high quality anti-malarial drugs.”

The UK’s Department for International Development (DfID) allocated £40m to the scheme in its first two years, and boosted it by £31.6m this year. AMFm is also supported by the Canadian government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

A DfID spokesman said: “DfID is helping to halve the number of malaria deaths in the most badly affected countries by 2015 in a number of ways, including improving access and availability of life-saving drugs.

“Studies have shown that quality drugs have got through to remote areas – and that more vulnerable groups, including children under five in rural areas and from the poorest backgrounds, are now being reached.”

Soruce: BBC

Sterility Found Lacking at Drug Site in Outbreak

Desk of Editor

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October 24, 2012

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Sterility Found Lacking at Drug Site in Outbreak. The compounding pharmacy blamed for a deadly national meningitis outbreak repeatedly failed to follow standard procedures to keep its facility clean and its products sterile, Massachusetts officials said Tuesday, painting a harrowing picture of a company that flouted crucial rules as it hurried to ship drugs around the country.

One finding in particular stands out: the pharmacy, the New England Compounding Center, shipped some orders of the drug implicated in the outbreak without waiting for the final results of sterility testing. And while company records indicate the tests found no contamination, regulators said they were skeptical of the company’s methods.

Records suggest that the company failed to sterilize products for “even the minimum amount of time necessary to ensure sterility,” said Dr. Madeleine Biondolillo, director of the Bureau of Health Care Safety and Quality at the Massachusetts Public Health Department.

The findings raise questions about whether the meningitis outbreak could have been averted, or reduced in magnitude, had proper procedures been followed.

“This was preventable,” said Eric S. Kastango, president of Clinical IQ, a consulting firm that counsels compounding pharmacies. “They failed to properly sterilize this medicine that had to be sterilized. That’s huge.”

Mats used to trap dust and dirt just outside the company’s clean rooms were “visibly soiled with assorted debris,” according to a report released Tuesday by the state’s Board of Registration in Pharmacy, and hoods in the sterile compounding area were not properly cleaned. A leaking boiler next to a clean room “created an environment susceptible to contaminant growth,” Dr. Biondolillo said during a news conference at the State House here.

Investigators are also looking into “the environmental conditions surrounding the business,” she said, including a recycling center on the same property in Framingham, Mass., and owned by the same family. At the same time, the state and the Food and Drug Administration are investigating two related drug companies, Ameridose of Westborough and Alaunus Pharmaceutical of Framingham, which have many of the same owners.

All three companies list Barry Cadden, the chief pharmacist, and his brother-in-law, Gregory Conigliaro, as managers, according to company filings with the state. Mr. Conigliaro’s brother, Douglas, is also involved in the business and, through his wife, Carla, appears to be a major shareholder in the companies, according to state records.

New England Compounding has suspended operations and laid off most of its employees.

The meningitis outbreak has been tied to three lots of a steroid, methylprednisolone acetate, produced at New England Compounding that were contaminated with a fungus. In all, New England Compounding shipped more than 17,000 vials of the suspect drug, which was used mainly for spinal injections aimed at easing back and neck pain.

So far, 304 people in 17 states have contracted meningitis, and 23 have died.

Dr. Biondolillo stressed that the root cause of the outbreak has yet to be determined

Gov. Deval Patrick, speaking at the news conference here, said he had directed the state pharmacy board to “immediately start periodic, unannounced inspections of compounding pharmacies that prepare sterile and injectable medication.” There are 25 such pharmacies in Massachusetts, he said, adding that state rules governing them “have not kept pace with an industry that’s changing rapidly.” Although the F.D.A. can inspect compounding pharmacies and issue warnings, the agency says states have ultimate jurisdiction.

Mr. Patrick said that from now on, compounding pharmacies in the state would be required to submit annual reports on “production, volume and distribution of medication.” That way, he said, the state could better identify compounders that were acting more like manufacturers.

Mr. Patrick added that the state was moving to permanently revoke the licenses of New England Compounding and its three principal pharmacists, including Mr. Cadden. In a statement released after the news conference, Paul Cirel, a lawyer for New England Compounding, said the state pharmacy board had “numerous opportunities, including as recently as last summer, to make firsthand observations” of the company’s facilities and operations.

“Based on that history,” Mr. Cirel said in the statement, “it is hard to imagine that the board has not been fully apprised of both the manner and scale of the company’s operations. N.E.C.C.’s transparency in dealing with the board since inception in 1998 demonstrates its good-faith intention to operate in compliance with the requirements of its license.”

Dr. Biondolillo said there was no indication “at this moment in our investigatory process” that the pharmacy board had done anything wrong.

New England Compounding has a troubled history. It began receiving complaints less than a year after it was established in 1998. Many of the violations involved selling medicine in bulk without a prescription for an individual patient. But there were also more serious violations. For example, state health officials threatened action against the pharmacy in 2004, after the company “failed to comply with accepted standards” when mixing methylprednisolone acetate, the same steroid that has been the source of the company’s current trouble.

In 2006, the pharmacy agreed to inspections and improvement measures to avoid harsher regulatory action, and an outside investigator was brought in to ensure its practices were in compliance. A more recent complaint, made this March, about the potency of a solution used in eye surgery, remains under investigation. But none of the company’s infractions led to its having to suspend operations until now.

Mr. Kastango took issue with an inspection of New England Compounding conducted by the state last year, which found virtually no problems, according to state records released Monday. He said that inspection “seemed to be sort of a drive-by cursory thing.” The inspection report, he said, did not mention that sterility test reports had been reviewed. And it did not involve a new inventory of narcotics.