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E X PA N D E D U S O C E A N PRESERVE TO BE WORLD’S LARGEST
Rose Island, seen here from outside the atoll rim, is one of two small islands within the lagoon of Rose Atoll in America Samoa in this photo, date unknown. President Barack Obama is carving out a wide swath the Pacific Ocean for an expanded marine preserve, putting the waters off-limits to drilling and most fishing in a bid to protect fragile underwater life. The revamped expanded Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, will broaden the George W. Bush-era preserve, and will cover 490,000 square miles — an area roughly three times the size of California — and will become the largest marine preserve in the world.
NEW YORK (AP) -- Thousands of miles off America’s shores, an ocean preserve flush with rare seabirds, turtles and marine mammals will grow to roughly three times the size of California under a memorandum that President Barack Obama signed Thursday.
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OBAMA AT UN: DISMANTLE THE I S ‘ N E T W O R K O F D E AT H ’ journalists and a British aid worker, sparking outrage in the West and contributing to an increase in public support for military action.
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Confronted by the growing threat of Middle East militants, President Barack Obama implored world leaders at the United Nations Wednesday to rally behind his expanding military campaign to stamp out the violent Islamic State group and its “network of death.” “There can be no reasoning, no negotiation, with this brand of evil,” Obama told the General Assembly. In a striking shift for a president who has been reluctant to take military action in the past, Obama declared that force is the only language the militants understand. He warned those who have joined their cause to “leave the battlefield while they can.”
Shortly after Obama’s remarks, France confirmed that Algerian extremists allied with the Islamic State group had beheaded one of its citizens after the French ignored demands to stop airstrikes in Iraq. French President Francois Hollande, who was in New York for the U.N. meetings, said the killing underscored why “the fight the international community needs to wage versus terrorism knows no borders.” Secretary of State John Kerry, right, speaks with House Foreign Affairs Committee ranking member Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 18, 2014, after a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing. At the hearing, Kerry sought to push back on an argument by some in Congress that Syria’s rebels lack moderates, or at least any with the capacity to make a difference in the war.
The expanded Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument will cover 490,000 square miles, making it the largest marine preserve in the world, the White House said. The move puts the remote waters surrounding a collection of islands off-limits to drilling and most fishing in a bid to protect fragile underwater life.
The widening war against the Islamic State was just one in a cascade of crises that confronted the presidents, prime ministers and monarchs at the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly. Also vying for attention was Russia’s continued provocations in Ukraine, a deadly Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and the plight of civilians caught in conflicts around the world.
“This really is a matter of stewardship. It’s also a matter of generational responsibility,” Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday. “We have a responsibility to make sure our kids and their families and the future has the same ocean to serve it in the same way as we have - not to be abused, but to preserve and utilize.”
“Not since the end of the Second World War have there been so many refugees, displaced people and asylum seekers,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said as he opened Wednesday’s session.
Millions of marine animals live in the bio-rich expanse included by the new monument, which will also add new protections for more than 130 “seamounts” - underwater mountains where rare or undiscovered species are frequently found. Commercial fishing, deep-sea mining and other extraction of underwater resources will be banned, but recreational fishing will still be allowed, in an attempt to preserve the public’s access to federal areas. continued on page 5
GOVERNMENT HACKERS TRY TO CRACK HEALTHCARE.GOV
Sept 22 thru Sept 29, 2014
In a rare move, Obama also chaired a meeting of the U.N. Security Council where members unanimously adopted a resolution requiring all countries to prevent the recruitment and transport of would-be foreign fighters preparing to join terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State group. The American-led military campaign in the Middle East was at the center of much of the day’s discussions. After weeks of airstrikes in Iraq, U.S. planes began hitting targets in Syria this week, joined by an unexpected coalition of five Arab nations: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. There were more U.S. strikes Wednesday on both sides of the Syrian-Iraqi border.
U.S. officials say they are concerned that foreigners with Western passports could return to their home countries to carry out attacks. And even as Obama welcomed support for the resolution to deter foreign fighters, he said more must be done. “The words spoken here today must be matched and translated into action,” he said. The threat from the Islamic State group has already drawn Obama back into conflicts in the Middle East that he has long sought to avoid, particularly in Syria, which is mired in a bloody three-year civil war. Just months ago, the president appeared to be on track to fulfill his pledge to end the U.S.-led wars he inherited in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama sought to distinguish this current military campaign from those lengthy wars, declaring that he has no intention of sending U.S. troops to occupy foreign lands. He also pressed Middle Eastern nations to look beyond military action and take steps to reject the ideology that has spawned groups like the Islamic State and to cut off funding that has allowed that terror group and others to thrive. “No external power can bring about a transformation of hearts and minds,” Obama said in his nearly 40-minute address.
France has also taken part in strikes in Iraq, and British Prime Minister David Cameron’s office announced that Parliament was being recalled to London to debate whether to join the campaign, too.
Apart from the Middle East, the president was particularly blunt in his condemnation of Russia’s actions in Ukraine. He accused Moscow of sending arms to pro-Russian separatists, refusing to allow access to the site of a downed civilian airliner and then moving its own troops across the border with Ukraine.
The Islamic State has made lightning gains in Iraq this year and now moves freely across the increasingly blurred border with Syria. The group has claimed responsibility for the beheading of two American
Still, Obama held open the prospect of a resolution to the conflict. While continued on page 7
R E D C R O S S T E A M AT TA C K E D WHILE BURYING EBOLA DEAD
of the outbreak have led governments to impose severe measures to control it, like a recent nationwide lockdown in Sierra Leone to look for the sick and spread information. On Wednesday, Sierra Leone said 30 more cases uncovered during the shutdown tested positive for Ebola, raising the total number discovered over the three days to 160.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government’s own watchdogs tried to hack into HealthCare.gov earlier this year and found what they termed a critical vulnerability - but also came away with respect for some of the health insurance site’s security features.
Resistance to efforts to control the disease - from outright denials that Ebola exists to fears that the very people sent to combat it are in fact carriers - has frustrated efforts to end or slow the disease’s spread in all three of the most affected countries, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, say officials.
Those are among the conclusions of a report released Tuesday by the Health and Human Services Department inspector general, who focuses on health care fraud. The report amounts to a mixed review for the federal website that serves as the portal to taxpayer-subsidized health plans for millions of Americans. Open enrollment season starts Nov. 15.
In April, Doctors Without Borders briefly pulled out its team from the Guinean town of Macenta after their clinic was stoned. In Liberia, the homes of some of the infected have been attacked. Last week, Red Cross workers were threatened in Sierra Leone, Carpentier, the Red Cross spokesman, said.
So-called “white hat” or ethical hackers from the inspector general’s office found a weakness, but when they attempted to exploit it like a malicious hacker would, they were blocked by the system’s defenses. HealthCare.gov had some advance warning of the hacking attempt - a date range, but not specific times. HHS spokesman Kevin Griffis said the agency did not take additional precautions during that period. The report came on the heels of the massive breach at Home Depot stores, which affected 56 million credit and debit cards. The inspector general’s office released a public version that summarizes detailed findings delivered to the Obama administration. It concludes that more work needs to be done to bolster security. Last week, the congressional Government Accountability Office released similar conclusions after its own review.
A health worker sprays disinfectant on a college after he assisted in the loading of a man suspected of suffering from the Ebola virus into an ambulance, in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2014. U.S. health officials Tuesday laid out worst-case and best-case scenarios for the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, warning that the number of infected people could explode to at least 1.4 million by mid-January — or peak well below that, if efforts to control the outbreak are ramped up.
CONAKRY, Guinea (AP) -- A Red Cross team was attacked while collecting bodies believed to be infected with Ebola in southeastern Guinea, the latest in a string of assaults that are hindering efforts to control West Africa’s current outbreak.
The inspector general found that the administration “has taken actions to lower the security risks associated with HealthCare.gov systems” and consumers’ personal information.
One Red Cross worker is recovering after being wounded in in the neck in Tuesday’s attack in Forecariah, according to Benoit Carpentier, a spokesman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
But the auditors said they “remain concerned” about the use of encryption technology that is not certified to meet certain government standards. Encryption refers to the encoding of data traveling back and forth between consumers and HealthCare.gov to make it more secure.
Family members of the dead initially set upon the six volunteers and vandalized their cars, said Mariam Barry, a resident. Eventually a crowd went to the regional health office, where they threw rocks at the building.
In its formal response, the administration said it has taken other actions to resolve the encryption issue.
The attack is the most recent in a series that have plagued teams working to bury bodies safely, provide information about Ebola and disinfect public places. The most shocking was the abduction and killing last week in Guinea of eight people, health workers educating people about Ebola and the journalists accompanying them.
The inspector general’s office tried to break into HealthCare.gov in April and May. Experts used a technique called “vulnerability scanning” and also conducted simulated attacks.
continued on page 2
Ebola is believed to have infected more than 5,800 people in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nigeria and Senegal. The unprecedented size and sweep
The disease is so new to this part of the world and so terrifyingly lethal that many people fear all outsiders associated with Ebola, even if they are coming to help, said Meredith Stakem, a health and nutrition adviser for Catholic Relief Services. In addition, many people in these communities may not be familiar with even basic biological concepts of disease transmission, and Ebola is contradicting what they do know. “There’s not a lot of diseases that can be transmitted by corpses,” she said. “It’s hard for people to comprehend that the dead body is actually a threat.” Ebola is spread by bodily fluids including sweat and corpses are particularly infectious. The handling of dead bodies is deeply personal and rooted in tradition, especially in many parts of West Africa where the washing of bodies is common. It is often the teams trying to prevent those practices that have been targeted, said Carpentier. Much of the resistance is in remote, insular areas. “It has gotten better,” he said. “The problem is it has to be 100 percent” or the virus will persist. The conventional methods used to control Ebola - isolating sick people and tracing all their contacts - are buckling under the sheer size of the outbreak. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization offered hope that
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R E N E WA B L E E N E R G Y P L A N HINGES ON HUGE UTAH CAVERNS capacity expands and West Coast utilities look to Rocky Mountain states to supply more electricity. It also could help rebut renewable energy skeptics who point to the variability of wind power as reason enough to stick with fossil fuels.
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In this case, the electricity would originate with a 2,100-megawatt wind farm near Chugwater, a southeast Wyoming town of about 200 people 140 miles north of Denver. High-voltage lines would send the electricity to the compressed-air site 10 miles north of Delta, Utah.
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From there, the electricity would go to California, a state that requires one-third of its power to come from renewable sources, such as wind and solar. Turbines blow in the wind south of Cheyenne, Wyo. An alliance of four companies proposed an $8 billion project Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2014 that within a decade could send wind power generated near Chugwater, Wyo., sleepy ranching town of 216 residents north of Cheyenne, to households in Southern California.
CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) -- A proposal to export twice as much Wyoming wind power to Los Angeles as the amount of electricity generated by the Hoover Dam includes an engineering feat even more massive than that famous structure: Four chambers, each approaching the size of the Empire State Building, would be carved from an underground salt deposit to hold huge volumes of compressed air. The caverns in central Utah would serve as a kind of massive battery on a scale never before seen, helping to overcome the fact that - even in Wyoming - wind doesn’t blow all the time. Air would be pumped into the caverns when power demand is low and wind is high, typically at night. During times of increased demand, the compressed air would be released to drive turbines and feed power to markets in far-away Southern California. It’s a relatively simple concept proven decades ago on a much smaller scale by utilities in Alabama and Germany. Yet, experts said Wednesday there’s a reason similar projects don’t exist elsewhere: The technology known as “compressed air energy storage” is expensive, particularly when stacked against other power sources such as cheap, natural gas. “Stored energy technically is wonderful stuff. But it’s primarily the capital costs that get you,” said Brendan Kirby, a private consultant and former senior researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “If it made a lot of economic sense, you’d be seeing these projects duplicated.” Still, Kirby and other experts added that the concept holds great promise for broader application as expenses drop, wind power
GOVERNMENT HACKERS continued from page 1
Children Incorporated 4205 Dover Road Richmond, VA 23221-3267
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“Scanners simulate an outside malicious attack on the system and may identify ... vulnerabilities that could put a system’s security at risk,” the report explained. “Scanners use the same techniques as hackers, so the scanners test the security from an outside perspective.” HHS itself also runs similar scans regularly, part of its own security program. The hackers from the inspector general’s office found one “critical” vulnerability, described as a flaw that would let an attacker take over the system and execute commands, or download and modify information. But the office said that when its “white-hat” experts attempted to mimic what a malicious hacker might try next, they were blocked by the system’s defenses. Separately, the review also found two critical vulnerabilities in databases that support the website. Specific descriptions of the flaws were not released, but apparently none has been exploited by hackers. HealthCare.gov serves 36 states, while the remaining states run their own enrollment websites.
POTECTING SPEICIES worldwildlife.org
The federal site had numerous technical problems when it was launched last fall and for weeks it was unworkable for most consumers. At the time, technical experts within HHS were concerned that full security testing could not be completed because the system was undergoing so many last-minute changes. Nonetheless, Medicare administrator Marilyn Tavenner issued a six-month security authorization for the site, keyed to an action plan for reducing risks. HealthCare.gov was hacked this summer, but the administration said no consumer information was stolen. Instead, hackers installed malicious software that could have been used to launch an attack on other websites. “We have not had any malicious attacks on the site that have resulted in personal identification being stolen,” Tavenner told Congress last week.
www.redcross.org
California also is a big driver of energy storage. Last year, the state required three major utilities to acquire 1,325 megawatts of energy storage by 2020. A megawatt is enough electricity to provide power to roughly 600 to 1,000 homes. Batteries big enough to serve the grid can meet the requirement, but compressed air storage is a much better option, said Loyd Drain, executive director of the Wyoming Infrastructure Authority, an agency that promotes power line development to export electricity generated in the state. “Battery storage is very expensive, very inefficient. The second you put a charge into a battery it starts to discharge. You lose a lot of power,” Drain said. “But energy storage, like compressed air storage, you can store that and not lose any energy.” The air would be pumped into four caverns, each 1,300-feet high and 290-feet wide and capable of holding enough air to generate 60,000 megawatt-hours of electricity through turbines at the surface. “It’s probably one of the only salt formations in the West that lends itself to compressed air energy storage of any scale bigger than a very small facility. It’s a very large salt formation, very deep,” Chris Jones, managing director of business development for Duke-American Transmission, one of four partners in the project, said Wednesday. To excavate the caverns, the companies will pump fresh water into the salt deposit, which geologists call a “salt dome,” to gradually dissolve out the caverns. Magnum Energy, another partner in the project, already has used that process at the site to create two large caverns that can each store up to 2 million barrels of propane or butane. As the caverns get bigger, salt water is pumped to the surface to dry, leaving behind salt that can be sold for a variety of purposes, including road salt, said Magnum Energy spokesman Rob Webster. “From the surface, it would look not different from an oil or gas well, with a big wellhead sitting on top of it and not really much else to see,” Webster said. While huge salt domes are rare onshore in the West, they’re common in the Gulf of Mexico. Oil and gas companies excavate them to store natural gas using the same method. Magnum Energy expects to begin the two-year process of excavating the caverns in 2016. Once completed with all equipment in place, the facility will cost an estimated $1.5 billion. Paul Denholm, an analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, who has analyzed the economics of wind energy storage, said even though high costs have tripped up other projects, that won’t necessarily be the case in Utah. “The thing that makes this one different is that wind keeps getting cheaper and cheaper in price,” he said. “Every year that we move along the economics look more favorable.” The inspector general’s office also probed security for two state-run health care websites, the Kentucky exchange and New Mexico’s small-business portal. It found that Kentucky, seen as a national model, sufficiently protected consumers’ personal information. But there were some weaknesses in who had access to the system. “White-hat” hacking of New Mexico’s site revealed 64 vulnerabilities. The office said it will keep monitoring security on HealthCare.gov and state sites.
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________________________________________________________________________________________________________________The Weekly News Digest, Sept 22 thru Sept 29, 2014
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ordinated with the flights Syrian military planes, which would disappear from the skies shortly before the U.S.-led coalition aircraft show up.
BEIRUT (AP) -- U.S.-led airstrikes targeted Syrian oil installations held by the extremist Islamic State group overnight and early Thursday, killing at least 19 people as the militants released dozens of detainees in one of their strongholds, fearing further raids, activists said.
“It’s like they coordinate with each other,” Ramy told The Associated Press over Skype. “The American planes come and they go.”
The latest strikes came on the third day of a U.S.-led air campaign aimed at rolling back the Islamic State group in Syria, and appeared to be aimed at one of the militants’ main revenue streams. The U.S. has been conducting air raids against the group in neighboring Iraq for more than a month.
The Observatory reported less Syrian airstrikes in the past three days likely because of the presence of the coalition aircraft. Still, bombing continued in a rebel-held area near Damascus, killing at least 8 people, including children, reported the Observatory and activist Hassan Taqulden.
On the ground, Syria’s civil war continued unabated, with government forces taking back an important industrial area near Damascus from the rebels, said Syrian activists while also accusing President Bashar Assad’s troops of using an unspecified deadly chemical substance. The Islamic State group is believed to control 11 oil fields in Iraq and Syria, earning more than $3 million a day from oil smuggling, theft and extortion. Those funds have supported its rapid advance across much of Syria and Iraq, where it has carved out a self-declared state straddling the border, imposed a harsh version of Islamic law and massacred opponents. At least four oil installations and three oil fields were hit around the town of Mayadeen in eastern Syria, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and two local activist groups. It wasn’t immediately clear how important the refineries and fields were. At least 14 militants were killed, said the Observatory, which gathers information from a network of activists on the ground. Another five people who lived near one of the refineries were also killed, likely the wives and children of the militants, the Observatory and activists said. Other strikes hit checkpoints, compounds, training grounds and vehicles of the Islamic State in northern and eastern Syria. The raids also targeted two Syrian military bases that had been seized by the Islamic State group. In the town of Mayadeen, a building used by the militants as an Islamic court was also hit. Apparently fearing more strikes, the militants reduced the number of fighters on their checkpoints and freed at least 150 people from a prison in the city of Raqqa, their self-styled capital in northeastern Syria, activists said. More families of Islamic State militants left the city, heading
Syrian Kurdish fighters also reported three airstrikes near a northern Kurdish area, which Islamic State militants have been attacking for nearly a week, prompting over 150,000 people to flee to neighboring Turkey. Syrian refugees enter Turkey during a sand storm at Yumurtalik crossing gate near Suruc, Turkey, Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2014. More than 200,000 people fleeing the Islamic State militantsí advance on Kobani, Syria, arrived in Turkey over the last five days to find safety.
eastward, they added. For some Syrians, the airstrikes were bitter justice. “God has imposed on you just a part of what you have done, but you are even more criminal,” wrote Mahmoud Abdul-Razak on an anti-Islamic State group Facebook page, saying that the airstrikes were divine punishment. But other Syrians see coalition strikes as serving Assad’s interests because they do not target government forces and because some have hit the Nusra Front, Syria’s al-Qaida affiliate that has battled both the Islamic State and Assad’s forces. The strikes against the Nusra Front suggest a wider operation targeting other Syrian militants seen as a potential threat to the United States. “All of this is to serve Bashar (Assad), and yet people believe the Americans are protecting the Syrians,” said Saad Saad, writing on the same Facebook page. A rebel fighter in the northern Aleppo province who only identified himself by his nom de guerre, Ramy, said the U.S. airstrikes appear co-
SUBURBAN DENVER STUDENT EDUCATION PROTEST GROWS
Most of the young protesters gathered at a busy intersection, chanting “Education without limitation!” and waving signs and American flags. The afternoon demonstration against a plan to focus class material on topics that promote patriotism and respect for authority while discouraging civil disorder lasted about three hours, authorities said. Later, about 75 students from another area school walked out after meeting with Jefferson County school Superintendent Dan McMinimee about the proposal. McMinimee has offered to meet with any students about the standards proposed by Julie Williams, one of three members of the school board’s recently elected conservative majority. The proposal in the state’s second-largest school district comes in response to a new national framework for teaching Advanced Placement history. Supporters say the new outline from the College Board, which oversees the program, would focus on critical thinking and classroom discussion rather than memorization. Critics fear it would place too much emphasis on the nation’s problems. For its part, the College Board says the new system provides a balanced view. The Jefferson County school board plan would establish a committee to review texts and coursework, starting with Advanced Placement history, to make sure materials “promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights” and don’t “encourage
Elsewhere in Syria, Assad’s forces wrested back a rebel-held industrial area near Damascus after months of clashes, the Observatory and pro-Assad media in Lebanon said. The government forces seized the Adra industrial zone after rebels accused them of using chemical explosives there on Wednesday. Footage of the wounded from the incident, in which six people were killed, showed men jerking uncontrollably and struggling to breathe before their bodies went limp. The footage, posted on social networks, appeared genuine and consistent with The Associated Press reporting of the event depicted. But the footage did not suggest what chemical - if any - was used on the men.
DRONES FOR MOVIEMAKING FACE LIKELY F A A A P P R O VA L
District administrators have been sent to watch over the demonstrations to make sure students stay safe, she said. At the large afternoon protest, students mainly from Chatfield and Dakota Ridge high schools peacefully gathered along the roads near Littleton as deputies and school officials looked on.
However, the permits are expected to come with limitations, including that the unmanned aircraft be used only on closed sets and that they be operated by a three-person team, including a trained drone operator.
“There are kids here” just skipping class, student organizer Scott Romano told the Denver Post (http://dpo.st/1mSu4MN ). “But the majority of us are out here for the right reasons.”
Until now, the only permit for commercial drone operations the FAA has granted has been to the Conoco Phillips oil company, which has flown two kinds of unmanned aircraft in unpopulated areas of Alaska and over the Arctic Ocean with significant limitations on their use.
The district hasn’t tried to stop the students’ own form of civil disobedience and the young participants haven’t been punished. “We’re going to allow students to make their concerns heard,” district spokeswoman Lynn Setzer said.
DENVER (AP) -- Around 1,000 young people across several high schools in suburban Denver participated Wednesday in the largest of a series of student demonstrations opposing a new set of high school history standards proposed by a conservative-led school board.
“We are willing to cooperate with the U.S. and its alliance” by providing positions and information about the militants’ movements, Khalil said.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Federal Aviation Administration is expected to announce Thursday that it is granting permits to seven movie and television production companies to fly drones, an important step toward greater use of the technology by commercial operators, said attorneys and a company official familiar with the decision.
or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.”
Pamona High School students engage with passing motorists in a busy intersection near their school, during a multi-school protest against a Jefferson County School Board proposal to emphasize patriotism and downplay civil unrest in the teaching of U.S. history, in Arvada, Colo., Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2014. Students from several high schools walked out of class Tuesday in the second straight day of protests in Jefferson County.
The Kurdish fighters said the U.S.-led coalition was likely behind the strikes in the area known as Kobani, or Ayn Arab. A spokesman for the fighters, Reydour Khalil, pleaded again that the coalition coordinate with them, claiming that the overnight strikes were not effective and struck abandoned bases.
The proposal was introduced last week, but a vote hasn’t been scheduled. The next school board meeting is scheduled for Oct. 2. The protests began Friday with a sick out that shut down two schools by teachers upset over the plan and other issues. Students began walking out of classes in waves on Monday, organizing largely by social media. Hundreds of students from at least six area schools have participated. The dozens of students who left Alameda International High School in Lakewood asked McMinimee about the school board plan and teacher concerns including pay, KMGH-TV (http://bit.ly/1B8x2Of ) reported. He said he was worried that students haven’t fully informed themselves. “I think sometimes, as a student,” he told the station, “sometimes you hear what is going on, you don’t necessarily have the whole picture.”
RED CROSS TEAM continued from page 1
there may soon be another way to control the disease, saying there may be sufficient quantities of a vaccine by the end of the year to have some impact on the outbreak. That would make this the first Ebola outbreak to be tackled with vaccines or medicines in the nearly 40 years since the disease was discovered. Because Ebola only pops up sporadically, there has been little incentive to develop any drug or vaccine; most of the promising candidates have been largely funded by governments. “It may be that without a vaccine, we may not be able to stop this epidemic,” Dr. Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a co-discoverer of Ebola, told a news conference this week. “In this outbreak, we are reaching the limit of what classic containment measures can achieve.”
The FAA is under intense pressure from Congress and a plethora of industries that want to use the technology or sell it to others to relax its ban on commercial drone use. Companies want to use drones to monitor pipelines, inspect the undersides of oil platforms and bridges, and spray crops. Amazon and Google want to use them to deliver packages. Wedding videographers, real estate agents, journalists and other many others are clamoring to use them as well. The seven movie and television companies are regarded by agencies as trailblazers, the first of what are likely to be dozens of industries that could be approved in coming months for drone operations under limited circumstances. “The floodgates will open and we’ll see all kinds of other entities looking to use these things,” said Lisa Ellman, an attorney with McKenna, Long & Aldridge who formerly headed the Justice Department’s working group on drone policy But Brendan Schulman, a New York attorney who presents several drone operators and interest groups that have challenged the FAA’s drone restrictions, said he is concerned that limitations attached to the drone permits may be so onerous that the benefits of using the drones will be outweighed by the cost and the headache of complying with regulations. “I’m worried that it’s too small a step forward and it’s too narrowly limited,” he said. The seven companies - Aerial MOB LLC, Astraeus Aerial, Flying-Cam Inc., HeliVideo Productions LLC, Pictorvision Inc., Vortex Aerial and Snaproll Media LLC - have been working with the Motion Picture Association of America for two years to win FAA approval. Tony Carmean, a partner in Aerial MOB of San Diego, predicted drones will fundamentally change moviemaking, providing directors with the ability to get shots they could never get before and making films more dynamic. Small drones with video cameras will be able to fly through a building and in and out of windows, for example, he said. Major movie studios “want their hands on this right away,” but have held off using the technology until the FAA gives the go-ahead, he said.
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The Weekly News Digest, Sept 22 thru Sept 29, 2014
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FORT LAUDERDALE | FLORIDA | there is the body of a white female in the middle of 595 lanes looks like she has her head split open either she committed suicide or she got ejected from her vehicle[..
M a n c r a s h e s i n t o p i c k u p , b a c k s i n t o B u rg e r K i n g i n F o r t L a u d e r d a l e FORT LAUDERDALE | FLORIDA The pickup’s driver, Paul Edwards, 28, was on his way to the gym around 7 p.m. when the crash happened, he said. Edwards, who was uninjured, said officers told him that the car’s driver might have had an epileptic seizure that caused the crash.[...]
O ff i c e r t a k e n t o h o s p i t a l a f t e r p o l i c e c r u i s e r c o l l i d e s w i t h v e h i c l e i n F o r t . . . FORT LAUDERDALE | FLORIDA A Fort Lauderdale police officer was taken to a hospital Friday afternoon after a police cruiser collided with another vehicle. The crash happened around 3:15 p.m. at Northwest Seventh Avenue and Northwest
M a n c h a rg e d i n h i t - a n d - r u n d e a t h o f b i c y c l i s t i n F o r t FORT LAUDERDALE | FLORIDA Ellis is charged with leaving the scene of an accident involving death and is being held in the Broward Main Jail without bond. Brobeck was at his mother’s house near Southwest Seventh Street and Seventh Avenue that Sunday, and after having fallen ..
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FORT LAUDERDALE | FLORIDA A driver lost control of his SUV Monday evening and plowed through the side of plant store in Fort Lauderdale, shattering the glass, cracking the concrete and leaving the building structurally unsafe. The accident happened about 6 p.m. at The Plant .[...]
FHP expected to release more info about 6-vehicle I-95 crash Florida Highway Patrol is expected to release more information Thursday about an Interstate 95 crash that sent three people to the hospital and shut down northbound lanes for four and a half hours Wednesday. [...]
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________________________________________________________________________________________________________________The Weekly News Digest, Sept 22 thru Sept 29, 2014
U S I N
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H I T S I S L A M I C S TAT E G R O U P B O T H S Y R I A A N D I R A Q
BEIRUT (AP) -- U.S. fighter jets and bombers expanded their aerial campaign against Islamic State targets Wednesday, striking the militants in both Syria and Iraq even as the extremists pressed their offensive in Kurdish areas within sight of the Turkish border, where fleeing refugees told of civilians beheaded and towns torched.
bodies hanging headless in the village of Boras when he passed it on his three-day walk from a village on the outskirts of Kobani. The fighting near Kobani could be seen from hilltops in Turkey. Kurds from Turkey and Syria cheered on the Kurdish fighters from one hilltop, while the fighters signaled back with mortar fire.
President Barack Obama, speaking at the United Nations, vowed an extended assault and called on the world to join in.
Halil Aslan, a 48 year-old local villager in Turkey, recounted seeing Islamic State tanks roll into a village on the Syrian side.
“The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force, so the United States of America will work with a broad coalition to dismantle this network of death,” he told the U.N. General Assembly in a 38-minute speech. “Today, I ask the world to join in this effort.” In Syria, hard-line rebels aligned with a faction fighting to oust President Bashar Assad, but considered too radical by the U.S., packed up their heavy weapons and evacuated their bases over fears the Obama administration would target all fighters deemed a potential threat to the United States. Wednesday’s strikes marked the second day of a broadened U.S. military operation against the Islamic State group, after a barrage of more than 200 strikes on some two dozen targets in Syria a day earlier. That campaign, which the White House has warned could last years, builds upon the air raids the U.S. has already been conducting for more than a month against the extremists in Iraq. The ultimate aim of the Obama administration and its Arab partners is to destroy the Islamic State group, which through brute force has carved out a proto-state in the heart of the Middle East, effectively erasing the border between Iraq and Syria. Along the way, the extremist faction has massacred captured soldiers, terrorized religious minorities and beheaded two American journalists and a British aid worker. On Wednesday, Algerian extremists aligned with the Islamic State group declared in a video that they had beheaded a fourth hostage - a Frenchman seized in Algeria on Sunday - in retaliation for France joining the aerial assault against the militants in Iraq. French President Francois Hollande said France would not be deterred by the act of “barbarity.” “This particular group ... they don’t strike only those who don’t think like they do. They also strike Muslims. ... They rape, they kill,” a visibly upset Hollande told the U.N. General Assembly. “It is for this reason that the fight the international community needs to wage versus terrorism knows no borders.” Meanwhile, U.S. allies lined up in support of the aerial campaign. The Dutch government announced it would send six F-16 fighter jets along with 250 pilots and support staff to strike at Islamic State targets in Iraq, while British Prime Minister David Cameron’s office said Parliament had been recalled to debate Britain’s response to a request
OCEAN PRESERVE continued from page 1
The move to broaden the George W. Bush-era preserve comes as Obama seeks to show concrete presidential action to protect the environment, despite firm opposition in Congress to new environmental legislation. At the United Nations this week, Obama announced new U.S. commitments to help other nations deal with the effects of climate change, as world leaders seek to galvanize support for a major global climate treaty to be finalized next year in Paris. Yet the expansion falls far short of what Obama could have done in the Pacific had he used the full extent of his powers. Maritime law gives the U.S. control up to 200 nautical miles from the coast. Under Bush, the U.S. set aside waters extending about 50 miles from the shore of the remote, U.S.-administered islands in the south-central Pacific, thousands of miles from the American mainland. The islands sit between Hawaii and American Samoa and are divided into five regions. Obama is extending the preserve to the full 200 miles - but only for three of the five regions. Had Obama expanded the preserve in all five regions, he could have protected more than 780,000 square miles, according to a geographic analysis by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Still, environmental groups cheered the announcement and said they hoped it would spur other nations to take similar steps to preserve the world’s oceans. “The president acted expeditiously, while the area is still largely pristine and undisturbed,” said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Obama signed the memorandum on Thursday, the White House said, shortly before the president returns to Washington after three days of meetings with world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly. Obama first signaled his intent to expand the monument in June and asked for input on the final boundaries from fishermen, lawmakers and scientists. Officials said they received more than 170,000 electronic comments on the proposal. While a major symbolic victory for environmentalists, who long urged Obama to take this step, the designation will have limited practical implications. That’s because little fishing or drilling are taking place in the region even without the new protections.
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“They shelled the place with tanks and mortars,” he said. “We could hear them falling on those hills.”
In this image provided by the U.S. Navy a F/A-18F Super Hornet attached to the Fighting Black Lions of Strike Fighter Squadron lands aboard the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush in the Persian Gulf on Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2014, after conducting strike missions against Islamic State group targets in Syria.
to support the airstrikes. U.S. and coalition forces hit a dozen targets in Syria that included small-scale oil refineries that have been providing millions of dollars a day in income to the Islamic State, the U.S. Central Command said. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates took part, along with U.S. aircraft. Earlier, U.S. strikes damaged Islamic State vehicles in Syria near the Iraqi border town of Qaim, the U.S. Central Command said. It also reported hitting two Islamic State armed vehicles west of Baghdad, as well as two militant fighting positions in northern Iraq. In a separate statement, Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby said the strikes in eastern Syria hit a staging area used by the militants to move equipment across the border into Iraq. Despite the start of the coalition campaign, Islamic State fighters continued their advance against Syrian Kurdish militiamen around the town of Ayn Arab, known to Kurds as Kobani, near the Turkish border, where refugees fleeing into Turkey reported the beheading of captives and the torching of homes. A Kurdish militiaman fighting to protect the city said Islamic State militants were less than half a mile (one kilometer) from the outskirts Wednesday. Weary refugees arriving in Turkey described atrocities at the hands of the Islamic State militants. Osman Nawaf, 59, said he saw about 50
A video posted online showed what appeared to be Islamic State fighters toting assault rifles and fanning out across a dusty field in the Kobani area. A later clip showed a field cannon firing a shell toward a town located across a rolling expanse of brown fields, followed by a puff of smoke in the distance. The video appeared genuine and corresponded to other AP reporting of the events. In the opening salvo of the air campaign inside Syria on Tuesday, the U.S. also hit al-Qaida’s Syria branch, known as the Nusra Front. American officials said the strikes targeted the so-called Khorasan Group, a cell within the Nusra Front made up of hardened jihadis they said pose a direct and imminent threat to the United States. On Wednesday, the Nusra Front said it was evacuating its compounds near civilian areas in Idlib and Aleppo provinces in northern Syria, according to the Aleppo Media Center activist group. The decision followed a U.S. airstrike on a Nusra Front base in the village of Kfar Derian that killed around a dozen fighters and 10 civilians, activists said. Another Syrian rebel group, Ahrar al-Sham, was also clearing out of its bases, according to the Observatory. It said the group issued a statement calling for fighters to limit the use of wireless communication devices to emergencies, to move heavy weapons and conceal them, and to warn civilians to stay away from the group’s camps. Ahrar al-Sham has been among the most effective forces fighting to oust Assad in Syria’s civil war, and has also been on the front lines of a 9-month battle against the Islamic State group. But the U.S. has long looked askance at Ahrar al-Sham, considering it too radical and too cozy with the Nusra Front. An activist in Idlib who goes by the name of Mohammed confirmed the Ahrar al-Sham evacuations. He did not know of any strikes against the group, but said the fighters thought they would be targeted by the U.S.-led coalition because of their ultraconservative Islamic beliefs.
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The Weekly News Digest, Sept 22 thru Sept 29, 2014
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F A C T C H E C K : O B A M A ’ S U N S P E E C H S P I N S S T A T I S T I C S UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- President Barack Obama glossed over some inconvenient truths Tuesday in his climate-change speech to the United Nations. For one, as the U.S. cleans up emissions at home, it’s sending dirty fuel abroad to pollute the same sky.
OBAMA: “Today I’m directing our federal agencies to begin factoring climate resilience into our international development programs and investments.” THE FACTS: Not an entirely new effort. The U.S. Agency for International Development already factors climate-change impact in its assistance programs, says Oxfam America. Raymond C. Offenheiser, Oxfam America’s president, welcomed news that more U.S. agencies will do the same while saying that amounts to “a drop in the bucket” without additional financial commitments.
As well, the U.S. is not cleaning up quite as aggressively as Obama implied in his remarks. Obama was among scores of world leaders at the gathering, which followed by days a mass demonstration in New York City in support of action to combat global warming. Among those who marched: Al Gore, whose 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” shed light on the problem. A look at some of Obama’s claims and how they compare with the facts: --OBAMA: “Over the past eight years, the United States has reduced our total carbon pollution by more than any other nation on Earth.” THE FACTS: Europe as a whole has cut a bigger proportion of its emissions. From 2005 to 2013, the period cited by Obama, the European Union reduced carbon dioxide by 13.9 percent, compared with a 10 percent reduction in the U.S. Because the United States pollutes more, it has reduced more raw emissions than the EU - cutting raw tonnage by 649 million tons since 2005, compared with Europe’s reduction of 614 million tons. But Europe has cut a bigger proportion of its emissions. From 1990 levels, the benchmark year from which the EU measures progress, emissions were down about 18 percent in Europe. Meanwhile, compared with 1990, U.S. emissions are up about 10 percent, based on data from the Global Carbon Project. --OBAMA: “So, all told, these advances have helped create jobs, grow our economy, and drive our carbon pollution to its lowest levels in nearly two decades - proving that there does not have to be a conflict between a sound environment and strong economic growth.”
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United States President Barack Obama addresses the Climate Summit, at United Nations headquarters, Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2014
THE FACTS: About half of the 10 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions the U.S. has achieved in recent years can be attributed to the economic recession, not any specific actions from the Obama administration. Obama’s comments also left out that U.S. carbon emissions rose 2.9 percent from 2012 to 2013, the first increase since 2007, because higher natural gas prices spurred more coal use. ---
THE FACTS: That plan has nothing to do with reductions in emissions in 2012 because it was not announced until June 2013. Moreover, two of its cornerstone regulations - controls on new and existing coal-fired power plants - are at this point just proposals. The administration isn’t expected to complete those rules until next year and some states may not submit plans until after Obama leaves office. The statement also leaves out the fact that in 2013, emissions in the U.S. rose for the first time since 2007.
OBAMA: “We’re helping more nations skip past the dirty phase of development, using current technologies, not duplicating the same mistakes and environmental degradation that took place previously.”
Obama did invest in renewable energy and boost fuel economy before announcing the climate plan. But the plan can’t be credited with improving anything before it came into existence.
THE FACTS: The U.S. is actually sending more dirty fuel abroad even as it takes steps to help other nations transition to cleaner energy. The U.S. has cuts its own coal consumption by 195 million tons in six years. But according to an AP analysis of Energy Department data, about 20 percent of that coal was shipped to power plants and other customers overseas. Emissions from that coal were not eliminated but rather moved to other countries. As well, the U.S. exported more products refined from oil - another dirty fuel - than it imported, starting in 2011.
US MAN’S N. KOREAN PRISON LIFE: DIGGING, ISOLATION
On the other side of the pollution ledger, the Obama administration has placed restrictions on U.S. financing of coal plants overseas that don’t control for carbon dioxide and wants to lower tariffs on trade in clean energy technology.
‘ J E R S E Y S H O R E ’ S TA R S O R R E N T I N O H I T W I T H T A X C O U N T S defraud the United States, which is punishable by a maximum prison sentence of five years upon conviction.
Marc Sorrentino faces three counts of filing false returns from 2010 to 2012 and Mike Sorrentino is charged with two counts, in addition to one count of failing to file taxes for 2011. The conspiracy is alleged to have run from early 2010 to late 2013 in Monmouth and Ocean counties in New Jersey. The false filing counts carry maximum potential prison sentences of three years; failure to file carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison. Reporters gather around Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino as he leaves the MLK Jr. Federal Courthouse in Newark, N.J., after a court appearance, Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2014. The former “Jersey Shore” reality series star and his brother underpaid taxes on nearly $9 million in income over the last several years, the U.S. attorney’s office charged in a seven-count indictment released Wednesday.
NEWARK, N.J. (AP) -- A former star of the MTV reality show “Jersey Shore” and his brother filed bogus tax returns on nearly $9 million and claimed millions in business expenses - including luxury vehicles and clothing - that were actually for personal use, according to an indictment released Wednesday. Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino and his brother Marc pleaded not guilty through their attorneys during a brief initial appearance in U.S. District Court. Neither made any statements during or after the proceeding, though when Mike Sorrentino was asked outside the courthouse if he was innocent he smiled and replied, “Of course.” Each brother was released on $250,000 bail and scheduled for arraignment on Oct. 6. According to the seven-count indictment, the Sorrentinos earned about $8.9 million between 2010 and 2012, mostly through two companies they controlled, MPS Entertainment and Situation Nation. They allegedly filed false documents that understated the income from the businesses as well as their personal income. Mike Sorrentino also is charged with failing to file taxes for 2011, a year in which he earned nearly $2 million. The brothers also allegedly spent millions of dollars on personal expenses they claimed were for business In 2012, for example, the brothers filed documents with an unnamed accounting firm in Staten Island that claimed $3.9 million in business expenses, according to the indictment released by U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman. Both brothers are charged with one count of conspiracy to
OBAMA ADMINISTRATION: From a White House background document: “The Climate Action Plan is working. In 2012, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions fell to the lowest level in nearly two decades.”
“Rather than living in reality and reporting their true income, Michael Sorrentino and his brother Marc created the illusion that they earned less income by filing false and fraudulent tax returns,” said Jonathan D. Larsen, head of IRS-Criminal Investigation, Newark. Christopher Adams, an attorney for Marc Sorrentino, blasted the government’s case. “He has spent the better part of a year trying to show them flaws in their theory, and it is unfortunate that the government has chosen to rely on the word of a disgraced accountant who is a proven liar,” Adams told The Associated Press in an email. Richard Sapinski, an attorney representing Mike Sorrentino, didn’t comment after the hearing and didn’t return a message seeking comment. The cast of the MTV reality show were known for their rowdy lifestyle that occasionally led to legal scrapes. In July, Mike Sorrentino agreed to take anger management classes to resolve assault charges stemming from a July 15 fight with his brother at their family’s tanning salon.
PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) -- An American man recently sentenced by North Korea to six years of hard labor says he is digging in fields eight hours a day and being kept in isolation, but that so far his health isn’t deteriorating. Under close guard and with only enough time to respond to one question, 24-year-old Matthew Miller spoke briefly to an Associated Press Television News journalist at a Pyongyang hotel, where he had been brought to make a phone call to his family. It was his first appearance since he was convicted Sept. 14 of entering the country illegally to commit espionage. “Prison life is eight hours of work per day. Mostly it’s been agriculture, like in the dirt, digging around,” Miller said when asked what conditions were like in prison. “Other than that, it’s isolation, no contact with anyone. But I have been in good health, and no sickness or no hurts,” he said, showing little emotion. This is the fourth time North Korea’s government, normally one of the most secretive in the world, has produced an American detainee before The Associated Press. It has given no reason for its actions. One possibility is that it is trying to pressure the U.S. government to send a prominent high-level representative to negotiate Miller’s release, as has happened with some previous detainees. In North Korea’s view, that would bolster its standing among North Koreans and possibly lead to political concessions or much-needed aid. Miller is one of three Americans detained in North Korea. Jeffrey Fowle, who was arrested in May for leaving a Bible at a sailor’s club, is expected to be tried in court soon. Kenneth Bae was sentenced in 2013 to 15 years of hard labor. Wearing a prison-style gray uniform and cap, Miller was filmed sitting down at a phone booth at the hotel and pressing the buttons on a phone while a North Korean guard stood behind him. Officials said Miller spoke to his father, but the APTN journalist was not allowed to hear the conversation. Miller does not have routine access to phone calls home. The Bakersfield, California, native showed several letters he had written pleading for help from influential Americans, including first lady Michelle Obama, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Miller then enclosed them in a letter he mailed to his family from the hotel. At Miller’s 90-minute trial, North Korea’s Supreme Court said he tore up his tourist visa at Pyongyang’s airport upon arrival on April 10 and admitted to having the “wild ambition” of experiencing prison life so that he could secretly investigate North Korea’s human rights situation. Last week, Robert King, the U.S. special envoy for North Korean human rights issues, said Pyongyang has not accepted American offers to send a high-level envoy to seek release of the three U.S. men. King said that freeing the detainees could provide a diplomatic opening in ties between the two countries, but that Washington would not give into attempts to “extort” political gain from the detentions. King would not specify whom the Obama administration was willing to send. But Scott Snyder, senior fellow for Korea Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, said he was told by the administration that it has offered in recent weeks to send Glyn Davies, who leads U.S. diplomacy on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, and that Pyongyang had not responded favorably.
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In 2009, North Korea detained two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who were later freed after former U.S. President Bill Clinton visited Pyongyang. In 2011, former President Jimmy Carter visited North Korea to win the release of imprisoned American Aijalon Gomes, who had been sentenced to eight years of hard labor for crossing illegally into North Korea from China.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________The Weekly News Digest, Sept 22 thru Sept 29, 2014
A L G E R I A N I S L A M I C B E H E A D F R E N C H
ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) -- An Algerian splinter group from al-Qaida has beheaded a French hostage over France’s airstrikes on the Islamic State group, in a sign of the possible widening of the crisis in Iraq and Syria to the rest of the region.
M I L I TA N T S H O S T A G E
The killing of Herve Gourdel, a mountaineer who was kidnapped while hiking in Algeria, was a “cowardly assassination,” a visibly upset French President Francois Hollande said Wednesday, but he vowed to continue the military operation.
Gourdel, a 55-year-old mountaineering guide from Nice, was seized Sunday night while hiking in the Djura Djura mountains of northern Algeria. His Algerian companions were released. A group calling itself Jund al-Khilafah, or “Soldiers of the Caliphate,” split from al-Qaida and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group two weeks ago. It seized Gourdel in response to the call to kill the “spiteful and filthy French.” It gave France 24 hours to end its air campaign. A video posted online showed masked gunmen standing over a kneeling Gourdel. They pledged their allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and said they were fighting his enemies. The video showed the captive pushed to the ground and blindfolded before he was beheaded. The videos from the group were similar to those from the Islamic State group, which killed two American journalists and a British aid worker in recent weeks. “It is not the first time France has been affected by terrorist acts,” Hollande told an unusual session of the U.N. Security Council chaired by President Barack Obama. “And we have never given in. Every time, we come out of these things more robust, with greater solidarity.” Obama, speaking at the same meeting, said people around the
“That was the Islamic State’s intention, for there to be more events like this,” said analyst Geoff Porter of North Africa Risk Consulting. “If there were to be any similar copycat instances, I don’t think they would transpire in Algeria, they are more likely to occur either in Tunisia or Morocco - it’s certainly a more target-rich environment.”
Thousands of Tunisians and Moroccans have joined the Islamic State to fight in Syria and Iraq, and there are fears they will carry out attacks in their home countries upon their return.
“Herve Gourdel is dead because he is the representative of a people - ours - that defends human dignity against barbarity,” Hollande said on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York. “France will never cede to terrorism because it is our duty, and, more than that, because it is our honor.” On Friday, France joined the U.S. in conducting airstrikes on the Islamic State group in Iraq. Two days later, the Islamic State group called on Muslims to attack foreign targets, and the response in Algeria raised the specter of attacks on Westerners elsewhere.
The killing of a hostage actually represents a departure for radical Islamic groups in Algeria, which in the past decade have made millions from ransoms. France is also known for paying ransoms, although some hostages have been killed by their captors.
French President Francois Hollande speaks at the UN Security Council summit on foreign terrorist, Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2014, at the United Nations headquarters
world had been “horrified by another brutal murder.” “These terrorists believe our countries will be unable to stop them. The safety of our citizens demands that we do,” Obama said at the meeting, which was aimed at combating the threat posed by foreign fighters joining extremist groups. The Algerian government called the killing of Gourdel “an odious and abject act committed by a group of criminals.” Gourdel, an avid photographer, had expressed excitement on his Facebook page about his planned camping trip in the remote mountainous region. The area, which is riddled with steep valleys and deep caves, is also one of the last strongholds of the Islamist extremists in northern Algeria that have been fighting the government since the 1990s. The Algerian government statement said that since the kidnapping, authorities had been working to try to free him. It said it was determined “to pursue its fight against terrorism in all its forms, while guaranteeing the protection and security of all foreign nationals on its territory.” The Islamic State group claims leadership of all Muslims and has been hoping to incite additional attacks against foreigners around the world.
Islamic extremists have long singled out France as a special target for multiple reasons: the French military campaign against al-Qaida-linked militants in Mali, the French involvement in the NATO force in Afghanistan, and French laws banning the Muslim face veil and headscarves in public. Hours after French warplanes struck targets Friday in Iraq, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told the U.N. Security Council: “We are facing throat-cutters. They rape, crucify and decapitate. They use cruelty as a means of propaganda. Their aim is to erase borders and to eradicate the rule of law and civil society.” Nearly 1,000 French radicals have joined or are trying to join the Islamic State group in Syria and in Iraq - more than the number of fighters from any other Western country. French authorities are particularly concerned they will return home and stage attacks. Security has been boosted around the country. The Algerian military has never been able to eliminate the vestiges of the once-powerful al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb hiding out in the same terrain where Algerians fought French colonizers in the 1950s. The extremists usually left civilians alone and clashed only occasionally with army patrols. Gourdel’s killing may push the military to take care of these groups once and for all. It has sent thousands of troops and helicopters into the mountains. Hollande praised Gourdel as a man devoted to mountain climbing who “thought he would be able to pursue his passion.” According to a presidential aide, Hollande has spoken with Gourdel’s family, and his hometown in southern France planned a vigil Thursday at the mountaineering office where he worked.
R A P E J O K E O N F O X C A R T O O N S D R AW S A T T E N T I O N O B A M A Farlane and Fox in August, asking that the joke be removed when the episode is shown on television. He said he received no reply. Fox’s entertainment division, through a spokeswoman, said it would not comment on the criticism or whether there are any second thoughts about the joke. Katherine Hull Fliflet, spokeswoman for the Washington-based Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, said she did not find the line offensive.
In this image provided by Fox, Stewie Griffin, left, learns to skateboard from his new friend, Bart Simpson in a scene from “The Simpsons Guy,” the one-hour season premiere episode of “Family Guy,” airing Sunday, Sept. 28, 2014. The Fox network isn’t responding to suggestions that it edit the upcoming crossover episode of “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy” to remove a joke where the punch line is “your sister’s being raped.”
NEW YORK (AP) -- The Fox network isn’t responding to suggestions that it edit its upcoming crossover episode of “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy” to remove a joke where the punch line is “your sister’s being raped.” The line appears in Sunday’s much-awaited special where Bart Simpson and his family hang around with Stewie and the rest of the “Family Guy” crew, and has already circulated in a trailer for the episode that Fox released online over the summer. It punctuates a scene in which the incorrigible Bart is instructing Stewie Griffin in the art of the prank phone call. Bart dials the owner of Moe’s Tavern and asks whether there is anyone there with the last name Keybum, first name Lee. When Moe calls out to his patrons, asking for a “leaky bum,” everyone gets a laugh. Stewie thinks that’s cool, and asks to make his own prank call.
“I think the show is making it clear that rape is not funny by how they are positioning the joke,” Fliflet said. “It’s my hope that would be the viewers’ take-away.” RAINN, which says it is the nation’s largest anti-sexual assault organization and operates a rape hotline, works with creators in Hollywood to help them depict sexual assault realistically. The group lists actress Christina Ricci as a national spokesperson. The National Organization for Women didn’t respond to requests for comment on the Fox comedies. MacFarlane brought up the line during a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, predicting he will get attacked for it in the media. “But in context,” he said, “it’s pretty funny.” Winter said he didn’t think the subject was worth joking about, and said he was particularly concerned about its exposure to younger viewers who may be fans of “The Simpsons,” but are not familiar with the “Family Guy” style of comedy. “We don’t mock certain groups because we realize that it is highly insensitive and morally wrong,” he said. “Why wouldn’t we do the same thing about sexual assault?”
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he has previously expressed skepticism about a cease-fire signed this month, he said Wednesday that the agreement “offers an opening” for peace. If Russia follows through, Obama said, the U.S. will lift economic sanctions that have damaged Russia’s economy but so far failed to shift President Vladimir Putin’s approach. The chaotic global landscape Obama described Wednesday stood in contrast to his remarks at the U.N. one year ago, when he touted diplomatic openings on multiple fronts. At the time, the U.S. was embarking on a fresh attempt to forge an elusive peace between Israelis and Palestinians and there were signs of a thaw in the decades-old tensions between the U.S. and Iran. The Mideast talks have since collapsed, though the president said that “as bleak as the landscape appears, America will never give up the pursuit of peace.” And while the U.S., Iran and world powers are now in the midst of nuclear negotiations, those talks are deadlocked and there is skepticism about whether a deal can be reached by a Nov. 24 deadline. “My message to Iran’s leaders and people is simple: Do not let this opportunity pass,” Obama said. Even as the president cast the U.S. as the main driver of peace and security around the world, he acknowledged that his country has not always lived up to its own ideals. He singled out the recent clashes between police and protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, that followed the shooting death of a black teenager. “Yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions,” Obama said. “But we welcome the scrutiny of the world. Because what you see in America is a country that has steadily worked to address our problems and make our union more perfect.”
“Hello, Moe?” he says. “Your sister’s being raped.” Tim Winter, president of the advocacy group Parents Television Council, said he’s a longtime fan of Matt Groening, creator of “The Simpsons,” and sought out the trailer when it was released. “I was blown out of my shoes when I saw the scene with the rape joke in it,” Winter said. “It really troubled me.” He said he found it particularly offensive in the context of stories about sexual assaults on college campuses and, most recently, talk about abusive treatment of women by some players in the National Football League. He said when rape is accepted as a punch line for a joke in entertainment, “it becomes less outrageous in real life.” Winter said he wrote to Groening, “Family Guy” creator Seth Mac-
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The Weekly News Digest, Sept 22 thru Sept 29, 2014
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C O P S : S AW A M B U S H F O U N D H I S D I R T Y
A suspect in the fatal ambush of a trooper has occasionally made himself visible to officers before melting back into the forest, and police found empty packs of Serbian-branded cigarettes and soiled diapers believed to have been left by him, Pennsylvania State Police said Wednesday.
indefinite roadblocks and a “shelter in place” directive that prevented residents from leaving their houses for more than 24 hours at one point. Those who weren’t already home could not return. Residents say they support police in the search for Frein, but patience is wearing thin.
Officers saw a man they believe to be Eric Frein as recently as Tuesday, Lt. Col. George Bivens said Wednesday afternoon. But it was at a distance, and the extremely rugged terrain separating the officers from Frein gave him “the ability to disappear,” Bivens told reporters. It was the first time authorities have reported possibly laying eyes on the 31-year-old suspect charged with opening fire at the Blooming Grove state police barracks on Sept. 12, killing Cpl. Bryon Dickson and seriously wounding a second trooper who remains hospitalized. Bivens said the discovery of the empty packs of cigarettes and dirty diapers is helping to cement authorities’ belief they were closing in as the manhunt stretched into its 12th full day. They believe Frein is using diapers so he can remain stationary for long periods of time. They are testing the diapers to confirm he wore them. Frein appears to be probing the loose perimeter that’s been set up around him in a heavily wooded area around Canadensis, where he grew up and his parents still live, Bivens said. He appears to have purposely made himself visible a times, staying just far enough away to make it unlikely he’d be caught, he said. “I almost think that some of this is a game to him,” Bivens
M A R S F O R
M I S S I O N S P A C E
Screens show Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi greeting Indian Space Research Organisation scientists and other officials after the success of Mars Orbiter Mission at their Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network complex in Bangalore, India, Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2014. India triumphed in its first interplanetary mission, placing a satellite into orbit around Mars on Wednesday morning and catapulting the country into an elite club of deep-space explorers.
NEW DELHI (AP) -- India celebrated putting a spacecraft into orbit around Mars on Wednesday, hoping the rare feat will show the world it is open for business in space exploration and inspire a new generation of homegrown scientists to help drive growth. Those motivations help explain why India, a poor country of 1.2 billion, even invests in a space program when so many of its people lack access to proper toilets, electricity and health care. For one, boosting its space business has always been a key selling point of the country’s program. More than half of the world’s missions to Mars so far have failed. In proving it can pull off a complex space mission, India becomes one of the world’s few reliable ferrymen to the stars. That can attract investors, commercial launch orders and customers to hire Indian rockets and satellites for their scientific research. But the program also is a source of pride and motivation for the country’s burgeoning ranks of young professionals. India’s robust scientific and technical education system has already produced millions of software programmers, engineers and doctors who have helped grow the country’s growing middle class.
“Families are getting separated,” said Adam Christmann, who has been kept from his home at least twice in the past few days.
This undated photo provided by the Pennsylvania State Police shows a Jeep that ambush suspect Eric Frein is believed to have driven into a swampy area and abandoned after the Sept. 12 shooting in Blooming Grove, Pa. Frein, a suspect in the fatal ambush of a trooper has occasionally made himself visible to officers before melting back into the forest, and police found empty packs of Serbian-branded cigarettes and soiled diapers believed to have been left by him, Pennsylvania State Police said Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2014.
said. Upwards of 1,000 law enforcement officials have been involved in the search for Frein, named last week to the FBI’s 10 most wanted list. He is considered armed and dangerous, and police have authority to kill him if he doesn’t surrender. In an indication of just how wild the landscape is, tactical teams have “kicked out quite a few bears” as they search for Frein in caves, Bivens said. The lengthy manhunt has upended life in this usually tranquil corner of the Pocono Mountains, with unannounced and
O P E N S I N D I A B U S I N E S S
“We spent the night over on the bridge sleeping in the car waiting, and hoping, that we could get home,” Lewczak said. Authorities insist residents have been able to get escorts to their homes in emergencies, such as to retrieve medication. But some residents said elderly relatives have been left unattended and pets unfed. One attorney accused police of violating residents’ rights, and urged anyone who felt aggrieved to contact him. “Just because one of their brethren was murdered does not give them a right to violate YOUR Rights,” Joshua Prince of Bechtelsville wrote on his firm’s website. The provocative post, coming less than two weeks after Dickson’s death, drew hundreds of comments, split between those calling Prince a shameless opportunist and people critical of police tactics. Prince told The Associated Press on Wednesday that one resident told him he was kept away from his house for days, and returned home Tuesday night to find his dogs had eliminated all over the property. “There is no general blanket allowance for setting the Constitution aside because the Pennsylvania State Police and the FBI are doing an investigation or manhunt,” he said.
“Our scientists have achieved this in the first attempt,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said from the command center. “We have dared to reach out into the unknown and have achieved near impossible.”
Bivens said Wednesday that troopers are “doing their best to balance safety concerns with the needs for residents to be able to travel freely to and from their homes.”
India was particularly proud that MOM was developed with homegrown technology and for a bargain price of about $75 million - a cost that Modi quipped was lower than many Hollywood movie budgets. NASA’s much larger Maven mission, whose satellite went into orbit around Mars on Sunday, cost nearly 10 times as much, at $671 million.
And Ralph Megliola, chairman of the Barrett Township Board of Supervisors, said most residents he’s spoken with believe police are “doing the best job they can” under difficult circumstances.
The country’s business sector applauded the mission, with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry saying “it will encourage Indian industry to invest in the research and innovation.” India’s success shows the world that “they are now a force of capability ... that can be taken very seriously,” said space expert Roger Franzen, the technical program manager at the Australian National University’s Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. “India has an extremely well-developed space industry that manufactures everything from the components to the spacecraft to the instrumentation to the launch vessels,” he said. In the realm of scientific space research, India also could soon join in collaborative missions with NASA or ESA, he suggested. India has already conducted dozens of successful satellite launches, including sending up the Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, which discovered key evidence of water on the moon in 2008. And it plans new scientific missions, including putting a rover on the moon. But the focus for the space agency, which operates on an annual budget of $1.1 billion, will remain on developing technologies for commercial and navigational satellite applications, the agency’s chief K. Radhakrishnan said Tuesday. Those services could bring in significant revenues from companies or governments seeking to place their own satellites or research equipment in space. “If we’re going to earn money, we’re going to do it on that,” said D. Raghunandan of the Delhi Science Forum, a group that promotes the study of science. “India’s portfolio is likely to be somewhat limited because we can’t afford to spend that much money in pure science exploration and in an exercise of the imagination.”
Every time India launches another rocket, he said he is bombarded by students asking how they can get into the school’s aerospace engineering program.
Still, India hopes to gather scientific data to deepen our understanding of Mars and the wider universe.
India’s credibility also gets a huge boost, he said. “These kinds of successes put India in a better bargaining position, reassuring investors that we can perform.”
MOM will circle the planet for at least six months, with solar-powered instruments gathering scientific data that may shed light on Martian weather systems as well as what happened to the water that is believed to have existed once on Mars.
In scenes broadcast live on TV, scientists at the Indian Space and Research Organisation’s command center in Bangalore erupted into
High school student Kendall Lewczak left home at 7 a.m. Friday to go to work with her mom, since classes had been canceled because of the manhunt. They came back in the late afternoon to find access to their street blocked off.
cheers as orbiter’s engines completed 24 minutes of burn time to maneuver the spacecraft into place. MOM had traveled some 666 million kilometers (414 million miles) and more than 300 days since breaking from Earth’s gravitational pull.
“Mars, of course, captures the imagination of the world. What better goal is there to reach for, to prove we can accomplish our goals?” said B.N. Raghunandan, the engineering dean at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India’s tech hub.
India joined an elite club when it successfully guided its Mars Orbiter Mission, affectionately called MOM, into orbit around the red planet Wednesday morning. Only the U.S., former Soviet Union and European Space Agency have been able to do that before.
S U S P E C T , D I A P E R S
It also will search Mars for methane, a key chemical in life processes on Earth that could also come from geological processes. Experts hope data gathered will help them better understand how planets form and what conditions might make life possible. “Mars is gradually unveiling its secrets to science and humanity and
“Most of them understand,” he said. “They’d rather not be in their houses if there’s a murderer in their backyard.” the Indian mission is yet another means of unveiling this enigma that Mars presents,” said Franzen. Even though India wrestles with many problems from poverty to hunger, that shouldn’t stop the country from forging ahead in science and space, said B.N. Raghunandan, of the Indian Institute of Science. “I don’t think we can afford to lag behind. We can’t sacrifice frontier research for the sake of solving old-world problems,” he said. “These technological advances have their own spinoffs and benefits.” For 12-year-old Mansha Khanna, who was visiting the Nehru Planetarium in New Delhi for Mars-themed learning activities and games, the mission’s success gave her something to dream about - becoming “a scientist or an astronaut.” For another student, Kashish, also 12, who uses only one name, the sky was the limit. “I am proud to be born in a country that can do anything and succeed,” he said.
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_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________The Weekly News Digest, Sept 22 thru Sept 29, 2014
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A R A B S T A T E S R I S K B A C K L A S H B Y J O I N I N G S Y R I A S T R I K E S DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) -- The Arab nations that joined the United States in striking the Islamic State group in Syria were unusually open about it, throwing aside their usual secrecy and wariness about appearing too close to Washington. Saudi Arabia even released heroic-looking photos of its pilots who flew the warplanes.
countries - particularly Saudi Arabia and the Emirates - about the rise of Islamist groups in the wake of the Arab Spring, such as the Muslim Brotherhood movement and various al-Qaida affiliates. “The Islamic State represents a direct threat to the national security of these countries,” said Hossam Mohamed, a political analyst at the Regional Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo.
Their boasting reflects the depth of Gulf nations’ concern over the threat of the extremist group sweeping over Iraq and Syria. It also shows their desire to flex some military muscle toward regional rival Iran, a key supporter of the Syrian and Iraqi governments. But the Sunni monarchies run the risk of a backlash by hardline Islamists angered by the attacks against the Sunni fighters, whom many see as battling a Shiite-led government in Baghdad. Militant websites sympathetic to the Islamic State group lit up on Wednesday with the photos of the Saudi pilots, alongside calls for them to be killed. Even beyond the ranks of hard-liners, many around the region are suspicious of U.S. motives in yet again launching military action in an Arab nation. Many among the Syrian rebels grumble that the United States and Arab nations ignored their pleas for action against Syrian President Bashar Assad for years and are intervening now against the radicals only because it is in their interest. Moreover, the U.S. expanded the strikes beyond the Islamic State, hitting al-Qaida’s branch in Syria, the Nusra Front, in a bid to take out a cell called the Khorasan Group that is believed to be plotting attacks against the United States. That has other Syrian rebel factions with Islamic ideologies - and there are many of them - worried they, too, could be hit by the Americans. “For four years, we called on the West to help us topple the regime, but it’s clear the target is the Islamic factions,” said a Damascus-based opposition activist, Abu Akram al-Shami, speaking via Skype. The countries whose air forces carried out strikes were all Sunni-led states run by hereditary monarchs with longstanding ties to the American military: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Bahrain. Another Gulf monarchy, Qatar, played a supporting role, according to the Pentagon. President Barack Obama - who had been eager for Arab backing in the campaign - praised them for their willingness to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with the U.S. Perhaps most vulnerable to a backlash is Jordan, which borders Syria and has a strong community of Islamists and ultraconservative Salafis who have sympathies with the Islamic State group. Jordan was the homeland of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the militant who founded al-Qaida’s branch in Iraq, which eventually evolved into the Islamic State group. He was killed eight
Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, the two richest of the group, boast some of the region’s best-equipped militaries, including Western-made fighter jets and Apache attack helicopters.
n this image released Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2014 by the official Saudi Press Agency, a Saudi pilot sits in the cockpit of a fighter jet as part of U.S.-led coalition airstrikes on Islamic State militants and other targets in Syria that began early Tuesday. Arab countries’ prominent role in initial airstrikes against the Islamic State group in Syria shatters the notion of what a typical American-led military operation looks like and won the Mideast allies’ praise from U.S. President Barack Obama for their willingness to stand “shoulder-to-shoulder” with the United States. It is a reflection of their growing concern about the threat posed by Islamic extremists, and a chance to flex some military muscle toward regional rival Iran _ a key supporter of governments in both Syria and Iraq. The strategy is not without risks.
years ago in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq. Mohammed al-Shalabi, a prominent figure in the jihadi-Salafi movement in Jordan, told The Associated Press that while the Islamic State group has “made mistakes” - killing journalists, for example - it is still part of the Muslim nation and U.S. strikes against it will only build support for it. “The U.S. is hated in the region because of its support for Israel. People will now feel sympathy with (the Islamic State group) against the U.S.,” he said. “This war is not in Jordan’s interests,” the deputy head of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, Zaki Bani Rsheid, told the Al-Ghad newspaper. He warned that the war would only boost the power of Iran across the region and that Jordan’s participation could bring “responses targeting its internal security and stability.” In a move some saw as an attempt to soothe Salafi anger, a Jordanian court on Wednesday acquitted and freed a radical Muslim preacher known for his pro-al-Qaida sermons, Abu Qatada. Analysts said the preacher could help give legitimacy to the campaign against the Islamic State group - or at least help keep Salafis quiet over it. The action in Syria makes for the largest grouping of Arab military forces against a common target since the broad-based coalition formed to evict Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991, according to analysts at the Austin, Texas-based geopolitical intelligence company Stratfor. Their participation reflects the growing concern among Gulf
H O W I M M I N E N T I S A N ‘ I M M I N E N T ’ A T T A C K T H R E A T ? In government-speak, “imminent attack plotting” doesn’t necessarily mean an attack is imminent. Careful parsing of the language reveals a distinction between imminent plotting and an imminent attack. Likewise, an imminent threat doesn’t necessarily mean an imminent attack. And, in the view of the government, there’s more than one meaning for imminent, it turns out.
Army Lt. Gen. William Mayville, Jr., Director of Operations J3, speaks about the operations in Syria, Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2014, during a news conference at the Pentagon. In a separate action from the air strikes against the Islamic State group, the U.S. bombed a cell of al Qaida militants in northwestern Syria after concluding they were close to attacking the U.S. or Europe, Pentagon officials say. Mayville, the Pentagon’s operations chief, said that the Khorasan Group was nearing “the execution phase of an attack either in Europe or the homeland.”
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Smart people in the administration have spent the last two days telling the American people that U.S. strikes against the Khorasan Group were necessary to disrupt “imminent attack plotting” against U.S. and Western interests. They warned that members of the shadowy Khorasan Group, an al-Qaida offshoot, were “nearing the execution phase” of an attack in the U.S. or Europe. They spoke of “active plotting that posed an imminent threat.” People may have come away with the impression that the terror group was on the brink of pulling off something awful. Perhaps not.
Dictionary.com defines imminent as “likely to occur at any moment.” But a Justice Department white paper released in February 2013 gives a more nuanced view. “An `imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,” the memo reads.
The Emirates in particular has been playing a more active military role. It has deployed troops as part of the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan and, along with Qatar, contributed warplanes to the alliance’s aerial campaign over Libya in 2011 that helped lead to the ouster of Moammar Gadhafi. American officials have also said the Emirates carried out airstrikes against Islamist rebels in Libya last month, but the country has not confirmed that. American and French sorties targeting the extremists have flown from air bases in Qatar and the Emirates, and from the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush, which is assigned to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain. Saudi Arabia has agreed to host training facilities for Syrian rebels on its territory. It remains unclear how much of a military role the countries will play from here on. Their participation may turn out to be token, the Stratfor analysts said - or “these airstrikes could develop into a small but growing assertiveness among the region’s Arab monarchies.” However, Saudi Arabia and its allies are looking beyond just striking the extremists. They want to pressure Iran and eventually turn the campaign against Assad, whose ouster they seek, said Mustafa Alani, an expert on security and terrorism at the Geneva-based Gulf Research Center. “They are not hoping to topple the regime by military strikes. Military strikes are only a means to generate pressure on the regime to accept a diplomatic political solution,” Alani said. “The idea is to weaken the regime to send a clear message.”
The plans were far enough along that the Transportation Security Administration over the summer banned uncharged mobile phones and laptops from flights to the U.S. that originate in Europe and the Middle East. Despite persistent questioning after the airstrikes, U.S. officials have not explained whether something changed in recent weeks to compel them to launch cruise missiles. Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday on CNN that, although the U.S. had been tracking the group’s plots for some time, “the moment actually was ripe,” for military strikes. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, described the imminent threat of the al Qaida-linked Khorasan group this way Wednesday at a defense writer’s breakfast: “The briefings we had indicated that there was a growing ability, near ability to put together an explosive device which could get through the security at airports and that’s all I can tell you. And they were at a point, at a critical point in being able to develop that capability.” Two American officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal decision-making, told the AP that the government was concerned that the group could go underground after the AP reported that it was a top U.S. concern. A bulletin from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security issued Tuesday said U.S. officials had “no indicators of advanced al-Qaida or ISIL plotting in the homeland.” But that memo, which used ISIL as an acronym for the militant Islamic State group, doesn’t rule out terror plotting afoot elsewhere that could be focused on U.S. targets.
That’s because U.S. officials say they can’t wait until preparations for a terrorist act are completed before they take action to defend U.S. interests. So their idea of taking action against an “imminent threat” involves a more elastic time frame. In the case of the Khorasan Group, two U.S. officials told the AP that U.S. officials aren’t aware of the terrorists identifying any particular location or target for an attack in the near future. But intelligence officials have known for months that Khorasan group extremists were scheming with bomb-makers from al-Qaida’s Yemen affiliate to find new ways to get explosives onto planes, the officials said.
POTECTING SPEICIES
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10 The Weekly News Digest, Sept 22 thru Sept 29, 2014
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T U R K S L E A V E F O R - F R I E N D L Y ” I S
from Cumra, in central Turkey, who told AP that his son and his daughter-in-law are among the massive group. The villager spoke on condition of anonymity, saying he is terrified of reprisals.
ISTANBUL (AP) -- The Islamic State group is run by religious zealots and marked by war, mass killings, crucifixions and beheadings. But for a growing number of fundamentalist Muslim families, the group’s territory is home.
The movement of foreign fighters to the Islamic State group - largely consisting of alienated, angry or simply war-hungry young Muslims has been covered extensively. The arrival of entire families, many but not all of them Turkish, has received less attention.
“Who says children here are unhappy?” said Asiya Ummi Abdullah, a 24-year-old Muslim convert who traveled to the group’s realm with her infant son last month. She said that living under Shariah, the Islamic legal code, means the boy’s spiritual life is secure.
“It’s about fundamentalism,” said Han, a professor of international relations at Istanbul’s Kadir Has University. The Islamic State group’s uncompromising interpretation of Islam promises parents the opportunity to raise their children free from any secular influence.
“He will know God and live under his rules,” she said. Ummi Adullah’s story, told to The Associated Press in a series of messages exchanged via Facebook, illustrates how, despite the extreme violence which the radical group broadcasts to the world, the territory it controls has turned into a magnet for devout families, many of them Turkish, who have made their way there with children in tow. Ummi Abduallah said her move to the militant group’s realm was in part to shield her 3-year-old from the sex, crime, drugs and alcohol that she sees as rampant in largely secular Turkey. “The children of that country see all this and become either murderers or delinquents or homosexuals or thieves,” she wrote. The Islamic State group, the self-styled caliphate straddling Iraq and Syria, appears eager to attract families. One recent promotional video shows a montage of Muslim fighters from around the world cuddling their children in Raqqa against the backdrop of an amusement park where kids run and play. A man, identified in the footage as an American named Abu Abdurahman al-Trinidadi, holds an infant who has a toy machine gun strapped to his back. “Look at all the little children,” al-Trinidadi says. “They’re having fun.” It may promote itself as a family-friendly place, but the Islamic State group’s bloody campaign for control of Syria and Iraq has uprooted hundreds of thousands of people in a wave of destruction that involves
“It’s a confined and trustable environment for living out your religion,” Han said. “It kind of becomes a false heaven.” In this Friday, Sept. 19, 2014 photo, car salesman Sahin Aktan shows photos of his ex-wife Asiya Ummi Abdullah as he speaks during an interview at his lawyer’s office in Istanbul, Turkey. Aktan, 44, is the ex-husband of Asiya Ummi Abdullah, a 24-year-old Muslim convert who took their child to the territory controlled by Islamic State. Her experience illustrates the puritanical pull of the Islamic State group, the self-styled caliphate straddling Iraq and Syria that has sent shockwaves around the world with its bloodthirsty campaign. It also shows how, even in Turkey - one of the most modern and prosperous of the Muslim countries - entire families are dropping everything to find salvation in what one academic describes as a “false heaven.”
gruesome punishments and spectacular acts of cultural vandalism. None of that matters to Ummi Abdullah. “The blood and goods of infidels are halal,” she said, meaning she believes that Islam sanctions the killing of unbelievers. Ummi Abdullah’s story has already made waves in Turkey, where her disappearance became front-page news after her ex-husband, a 44-year-old car salesman named Sahin Aktan, went to the press in an effort to find their child. Many others in Turkey have carted away family to the Islamic State group under far less public scrutiny and in much greater numbers. In one incident earlier this month, more than 50 families from various parts of Turkey slipped across the border to live under the Islamic State group, according to opposition legislator Atilla Kart. Kart’s figure appears high, but his account is backed by a villager
T U R K I S H L E A D E R S A Y S W O R L D N O T D O I N G E N O U G H Erdogan said the threat of foreign terrorist fighters starts “the moment these individuals depart from the source countries” and that countries concerned have not cooperated in a timely fashion. Still, he said, recent information sharing by source countries helped Turkey in its effort to stem the flow. About 3,600 individuals have been included on the “no entry list” and nearly 1,000 foreigners have been deported by the Turkish government, Erdogan said. He said Turkey sacrificed greatly, taking in more than a million Syrian refugees in addition to more than 140,000 Syrian Kurdish refugees last week alone. President Recep Tayyib Erdogan of Turkey addresses a meeting of the United Nations Security Council regarding the threat of foreign terrorist fighters during the 69th session of the U.N. General Assembly at U.N. headquarters, Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2014.
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- The president of Turkey on Wednesday accused the international community of doing too little to stem the flow of foreign fighters to Syria and slammed the U.N. Security Council’s inaction on some of the world’s most pressing issues. In two separate speeches in New York, Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey was playing a leading role in fighting terrorism but was not being aided by the rest of the world. “We can stop this flow of foreign terrorist fighters only if our friends and partners awaiting our cooperation show, themselves, a sort of cooperation as well,” Erdogan said. “This is not a fight to be carried out solely by Turkey,” he added. But Turkey, a key backer of the rebels seeking to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad, is under scrutiny for allowing thousands of fighters to cross into Syria across its borders. Syria’s U.N. Ambassador Bashar Jaafari reiterated the criticism later Wednesday, noting pointedly that Turkey was the “main gate for terrorists crossing into Syria and Iraq.” He said Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have turned their airports into “reception halls” for extremists before sending them illegally to Syria. Erdogan spoke at a Security Council meeting where members unanimously approved a resolution requiring countries to prevent the recruitment and transport of foreign fighters preparing to join terrorist groups. It was an unusual Security Council meeting chaired by President Barack Obama and attended largely by heads of state for the 15 member states. U.S. intelligence officials estimate some 12,000 foreigners have traveled to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State group, which has many as 31,000 fighters.
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“Despite our sacrifices and our expectations of solidarity, we have not received the kind of support we’ve been looking for from the international community,” he said. Erdogan has said he would offer military help but has been vague about exactly how he intends to answer the American call to join Washington and a number of Arab states as they continue attacks on the Islamic State group that has taken over wide swaths of Syria and Iraq in a brutal assault and a bid to establish what the radical group calls a Islamic Caliphate. Earlier in the day, in his speech to the U.N. General Assembly, Erdogan said the U.N. has repeatedly failed to act, citing the Syrian civil war which has killed more than 200,000 people and this summer’s Gaza War in which more than 2,000 people died. He also criticized the U.N. for what he termed the legitimization of Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi who spoke from the same podium shortly before.
Ummi Abdullah’s journey to radical Islam was born of loneliness and resentment. Born Svetlana Hasanova, she converted to Islam after marrying Aktan six years ago. The pair met in Turkey when Hasanova, still a teenager, came to Istanbul with her mother to buy textiles. Aktan, speaking from his lawyer’s office in Istanbul, said the relationship worked at first. “Before we were married we were swimming in the sea, in the pool, and in the evening we would sit down and eat fish and drink wine. That’s how it was,” he said, holding a photograph of the two of them, both looking radiant in a well-manicured garden. “But after the kid was born, little by little she started interpreting Islam in her own way.” Aktan said his wife became increasingly devout, covering her hair and praying frequently, often needling him to join in. He refused. “Thank God, I’m a Muslim,” he said. “But I’m not the kind of person who can pray five times a day.” Asked why she became engrossed in religion, Aktan acknowledged that his wife was lonely. But in Facebook messages to the AP, many typed out on a smartphone, Ummi Abdullah accused her husband of treating her “like a slave.” She alleged that Aktan pressured her to abort their child and said she felt isolated in Istanbul. “I had no friends,” she said. “I was constantly belittled by him and his family. I was nobody in their eyes.” Aktan acknowledged initially asking his wife to terminate her pregnancy, saying it was too early in the marriage to have children. But when she insisted on carrying the pregnancy to term, Aktan said he accepted her decision and loved the boy. Meanwhile Aktan’s wife was finding the companionship she yearned for online, chatting with jihadists and filling her Facebook page with religious exhortations and attacks on gays. In June, she and Aktan divorced. The next month, a day before her ex-husband was due to pick up their son for vacation, she left with the boy for Gaziantep, a Turkish town near the Syrian border. Aktan, who had been eavesdropping on her social media activity, alerted the authorities, but the pair managed to slip across. It isn’t clear how many families have followed Ummi Abdullah’s path, although anecdotal evidence suggests a powerful flow from Turkey into Syria. In Dilovasi, a heavily industrial town of 42,000 about halfway between Istanbul and the port city of Izmit, at least four people including a pair of brothers - recently left for Syria, three local officials told AP. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to talk to the media, said that dozens of people from surrounding towns were believed to have left as well. Aktan says he is in touch with other families in similar circumstances. He cited one case in the Turkish capital, Ankara, where 15 members of the same extended family had left for Syria “as if they’re going on vacation.” Even with U.S. bombs now falling on Raqqa, Ummi Abdullah says she has no second thoughts. “I only fear God,” she wrote. For Aktan, who says he hasn’t seen his son since his ex-wife took the boy, her decision is a selfish form of fanaticism. “If you want to die, you can do so,” he said. “But you don’t have the right to bring the kid with you. “No one can give you this right.”
He said the democratically elected President of Egypt, Islamist president Mohammed Morsi, was overthrown by a coup, and the U.N. chose to legitimize the person who conducted this coup - a reference to el-Sissi.
Hours after the AP first published this story, Ummi Abdullah’s Facebook account disappeared. Her messages to the AP were also removed, replaced with a message from Facebook saying they were “identified as abusive or marked as spam.”
“We should respect the choice of the people in the ballot box. If we want to support coups...then why does the United Nations exist?” he said.
Facebook did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
Turkey had forged a close alliance with Morsi and strongly criticized the military coup in Egypt which ousted his government. He has described el-Sissi as a “tyrant,” prompting Egypt’s Foreign Ministry to summon the Turkish charge d’affaires. Erdogan said the U.N. as a world body should be more “brave” in addressing world problems. “The world is bigger than the five,” he said of the five permanent Security Council members, accusing them of rendering the U.N. ineffective.
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____________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________The Weekly News Digest, Sept 22 thru Sept 29, 2014
UN CHIEF URGES S E E M I N G T O
HOPE IN WORLD F A L L A P A R T
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- The United Nations chief called for world leaders Wednesday to join an international campaign to ease the plight of nearly unprecedented numbers of refugees, the displaced and victims of violence in a world wracked by wars and the swift-spreading and deadly Ebola epidemic.
the powerful U.N. Security Council to reflect the 21st century, not the post-World War II world. On a positive note, Mauritania’s President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, who currently heads the 54-nation African Union, touted the continent’s economic growth, now close to 6 percent on average, and its promotion of agriculture, which now employs close to 60 percent of the work force and represents one-third of the continent’s GDP.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said leaders must find and nurture “seeds of hope” in the turmoil and despair of a world that may seem like it’s falling apart with people crying out for protection from greed and inequality.
“Africa is working relentlessly to change from a consumption space to a production zone in order to guarantee employment opportunities for millions of its people,” he said.
“Not since the end of the Second World War have there been so many refugees, displace people and asylum seekers. Never before has the United Nations been asked to reach so many people with emergency food assistance and other life-saving supplies,” Ban said in his state of the world address at the opening of the U.N. General Assembly’s annual ministerial meeting.
Abdel Aziz called for “strong action to find efficient and rapid solutions” to the phenomenon of illegal immigration and address the unemployment that leads African youth to seek opportunities elsewhere.
Several leaders including Jordan’s King Abdullah and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addressed the challenges - financial and social - of hosting hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria.
“We cannot just count the bodies washed up onto the beaches or undertake rescue operations at sea for thousands of migrants crammed in unsafe boats,” he said.
Abdullah, whose country is sheltering nearly 1.4 million Syrians, said the refugee crisis “demands a global solution.” “To date, the response has not kept pace with the real needs,” he said. The global spotlight at the assembly is focused on the rise of radical Islamic extremists, who chose Wednesday to behead a French hiker in Algeria. French President Francois Hollande denounced the militants linked to the Islamic State group who assassinated Herve Gourdel and warned that they pose a global threat that must be stopped. U.S. President Barack Obama urged world leaders to join a global coalition to destroy the Islamic State terrorist group which “has terrorized all who they come across in Iraq and Syria.” He also urged the leaders to address the failure to confront forceful-
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses the 69th session of the United Nations General Assembly Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2014, at U.N. headquarters.
ly enough “the intolerance, sectarianism, and hopelessness that feeds violent extremism in too many parts of the globe.”
And Ban decried the “new depths of barbarity” and called for decisive action to stop “atrocity crimes.” But he also said “we must not let the smoke from today’s fires blind us to longer-term challenges and opportunities” and address “the danger posed by religiously motivated fanatics.” Speaker after speaker addressed a host of other issues from illegal immigration to promoting equality for women and reforming
M A R I J U A N A L E G A L I Z A T I O N EFFORT BEGINS IN CALIFORNIA kind. But along with opposition from law enforcement and elected officials, Proposition 19 faced unexpected resistance from medical marijuana users and outlaw growers in the state’s so-called Emerald Triangle who worried legalization would lead to plummeting marijuana prices. Marijuana Policy Project spokesman Mason Tvert predicted no such divisions would surface this time around. Citing his group’s experience in Colorado and the advantage of aiming for a presidential election year when voter turnout is higher, Tvert said legalization supporters would use the next two years to build a broad-based coalition and craft ballot language that addresses concerns of particular constituencies. Medical marijuana clone plants at a medical marijuana dispensary in Oakland, Calif. The Marijuana Policy Project on Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2014, will file paperwork with the California secretary of state’s office for a new committee that aims to put a pot legalization measure on the November 2016 state ballot, the group said.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- A national marijuana advocacy group took steps Wednesday to begin raising money for a campaign to legalize recreational pot use in California in 2016, a move with potential to add a dose of extra excitement to the presidential election year. The Marijuana Policy Project filed paperwork with the California secretary of state’s office registering a campaign committee to start accepting and spending contributions for a pot legalization initiative on the November 2016 state ballot, the group said. The measure would be similar to those passed in 2012 by voters in Colorado and Washington, the first U.S. states to legalize commercial sales of marijuana to all adults over 21. California, long the national leader in illegal marijuana production and home to a thriving, largely unregulated medical marijuana industry, is one of the 21 other states that currently allow marijuana use only for medical reasons. The drug remains illegal under federal law. “Marijuana prohibition has had an enormously detrimental impact on California communities. It’s been ineffective, wasteful and counterproductive. It’s time for a more responsible approach,” Marijuana Policy Project Executive Director Rob Kampia said. “Regulating and taxing marijuana similarly to alcohol just makes sense.” The Washington, D.C.-based group also has established campaign committees to back legalization measures in Arizona, Massachusetts and Nevada in 2016. Voters in Oregon, Alaska and the District of Columbia will weigh in on marijuana legalization in November. In 2010, California voters rejected a ballot initiative seeking to legalize recreational pot. The measure, just like the medical marijuana law the state approved in 1996, was the first of its
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“Obviously, it’s a whole different landscape in California, where it will cost probably as much or more to just get on the ballot as it did to run a winning campaign after getting on the ballot in Colorado,” he said. League of California Cities lobbyist Tim Cromartie, whose group opposed the state’s 2010 pot legalization initiative and until this year fought legislative efforts to give the state greater oversight of medical marijuana, said Wednesday that it was too soon to say what kind of opposition, if any, would greet a 2016 campaign. Lynne Lyman, California director of the Drug Policy Alliance, said her group expects to play a major role in the legalization effort and already has started raising money. Lyman said the goal is to have an initiative written by next summer. She estimated that a pro-legalization campaign would cost $8 million to $12 million. Even though California would be following in the steps of
N AVA J O T O G E T $554 MILLION IN SETTLEMENT WITH US FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) -- The Navajo Nation is poised receive $554 million from the federal government over mismanagement of tribal resources in the largest settlement of its kind for a single American Indian tribe. Much of the land on the 27,000-square-mile reservation has been leased for things like farming, grazing, oil and gas development, mining and housing. The leases once were largely overseen by the government, which mismanaged the revenue and failed to properly invest and account for it, according to the tribe. The tribe agreed to settle the case earlier this year but was awaiting signatures from federal agencies before the deal could be finalized. The Navajo Nation originally sought $900 million when the lawsuit was filed in 2006. “We had a strong claim,” said Navajo Nation Council Delegate Lorenzo Curley. Public meetings will be held to ask Navajos how they think the money should be spent, Curley said. The first meeting is scheduled for October. Already, tribal members have suggested that it be set aside for future generations or used for business development, he said. Andrew Sandler, one of the Navajo Nation’s attorneys on the case, said the tribe has taken on much of the responsibility for leasing on its land. If further disputes arise with the federal government, the settlement outlines a process to resolve them. “This was viewed as an appropriate and respectful settlement where the federal government acknowledged its responsibility and acted in an honorable way,” Sandler said. “It was a good result for all parties, and appropriate result for all parties, and it creates finality.” Tribes across the country have filed more than 100 breach-of-trust cases against the U.S. government. The Navajo Nation settlement is the largest, exceeding the next highest amount by $170 million, Sandler said. The Interior Department said it is working to resolve cases with other tribes without going to trial. Since April 2012, the federal government has resolved about 80 cases, totaling $2.5 billion. Sandler said the Navajo Nation should receive its money within 60 days.
other states if a 2016 initiative passes, legalizing recreational marijuana use there would have far-reaching implications, Lyman said. “When an issue is taken up in California, it becomes a national issue,” she said. “What we really hope is that with a state this large taking that step, the federal government will be forced to address the ongoing issue of marijuana prohibition.”
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The Weekly News Digest, Sept 22 thru Sept 29, 2014
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I N D O N E S I A E N L I S T S W A S P S I N W A R O N C R O P K I L L E R intervention. “As a traditional farmer, we didn’t know how to deal with it.”
BOGOR, Indonesia (AP) -- They are the size of a pinhead and don’t even pack a sting, but these tiny wasps are cold-blooded killers nonetheless. They work as nature’s SWAT team, neutralizing a pest that threatens to destroy one of the developing world’s most important staple foods: cassava.
Indonesia is one of the world’s top producers of cassava, planting around 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) a year, half of which is eaten as a staple food across the sprawling archipelago of 240 million people.
The wasps are being released in Indonesia, the latest country threatened by the mealybug. It’s a chalky white insect shaped like a pill that’s been making its way across Southeast Asia’s fields for the past six years. The pest first appeared in Indonesia in 2010. Bogor on the outskirts of Indonesia’s capital Jakarta was ground zero. But unlike in Thailand, where infestations reached some 250,000 hectares (618,000 acres) of crops grown mostly as part of a huge export business, cassava in Indonesia is a vital local food source second only to rice. That makes the mealybug a serious threat to food security in Indonesia, which already has one of the region’s highest child malnutrition rates. The parasitic wasps, or Anagyrus lopezi, need the mealybug to survive. Females lay their eggs inside the insect and as the larvae grow, they eat the bug from the inside out, slowly killing it until there’s nothing left but its mummified shell. On Wednesday, scientists put 3,000 wasps into a secure tent-like habitat in an affected field in Bogor. They will be monitored to see how well they handle local conditions as they multiply to an expected 450,000 within a month. Once a government permit is obtained, the wasps can be released into the wild to start their relentless killing spree. It’s unclear how much damage mealybugs have already caused to Indonesia’s crops, but infestations have been reported on the main cassava-growing island of Java and in parts of Sumatra, said Kris Wyckhuys, an entomologist at the Colombia-based International Center for Tropical Agriculture, which is helping to coordinate the release. He said the idea is to introduce the wasps early in a pre-emptive strike because the pests if left unchecked can destroy more than 80 percent of
The long roots of the shrub-like plant are a major source of carbohydrates and provide an array of nutrients. Like the potato, cassava is a versatile starch that’s an essential part of daily meals across much of the developing world. In Indonesia it is boiled, fried, made into noodles, crackers and even cakes.
Agricultural officers release parasitoid wasps (Anagyrus lopezi) inside a cage at a cassava field in Bogor, West Java, Indonesia, Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2014. They are the size of a pinhead and don’t even pack a sting, but these tiny wasps are cold-blooded killers nonetheless. They work as nature’s SWAT team, neutralizing a pest that threatens to destroy one of the developing world’s most important staple foods: cassava. The wasps are being released in Indonesia, the latest country threatened by the mealybug. It’s a white fuzzy-looking insect shaped like a pill that’s been making its way across Southeast Asia’s fields for the past six years. Scientists will put 2,000 wasps into a holding cage at an affected field in Bogor. They will be monitored to see how well they handle local conditions as they multiply to an expected 300,000 over the next month before being released into the wild to start their relentless killing spree.
a harvest by sucking the plant’s sap until it withers and dies. “It is entering into areas where it is expected to cause the biggest yield impact and the biggest impact on food security and on cassava-related livlihoods,” Wyckhuys said. Cassava farmer Wahyu Hidayat said the pests hit about three hectares of his five hectacre crop four years ago. The leaves started shriveling and falling off the plants that grow up to four meters tall, and no one had ever seen anything like it. It lowered production from five kilos of cassava from one tree down to two kilos. “It’s really difficult for us,” he said, welcoming the government’s wasp
U N I V E R S I T Y L A U N C H E S B E E R - M A K I N G P R O G R A M Behind the growth in demand for high-end beer is a long-running fascination with the brewing process, one of the oldest forms of human food processing. “There’s a lot of romantic attachment to beer,” said Scott Graham, executive director of the Michigan Brewers Guild. The Lansing-based group represents the state’s microbreweries, now numbering more than 160, and helped win passage this year of laws allowing them to expand. In-state microbrewers currently have 5 percent of Michigan’s beer market, a share that could easily double or triple, Graham said.
This photo released by Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant, Mich., shows James Holton, owner of Mountain Town Station Brewing Co. & Restaurant. The university announced Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2014, that it will begin offering a certificate program in “fermentation science” to train undergraduates in the science and practicalities of making beer. The school that Holton’s company will help provide students with hand-on experience in brewing. The program aims at training people to work in Michigan’s fast-growing microbrewing industry.
DETROIT (AP) -- Colleges and beer have a long shared history. A university in Michigan is taking that partnership to a new level with the creation of a program to train and certify experts in “fermentation science.”
Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant this week announced plans to launch the program in fall 2015, aimed particularly at supporting and boosting the state’s fast-growing craft brewing industry, now a $1 billion-plus annual business. “As of 2013, Michigan ranked fifth in the nation in number of breweries, behind only California, Colorado, Oregon and Washington,” said Ian Davison, dean of the College of Science and Technology at the Mount Pleasant school. Central Michigan bills its undergraduate program as the first in the state specifically aimed at providing a “hands-on education focused on craft beer.” Similar programs operate at the University of California’s Davis and San Diego campuses and at Oregon State and Central Washington universities. Michigan State University has operated an artisan distilling program for 15 years and last year started a beverage specialization program that also includes beer and wine-making. The Central Michigan program will include classroom and lab work in biochemistry, chemistry and microbiology, as well as a 200-hour internship in a “production-scale facility.” The university, which is about 150 miles northwest of Detroit, said it is collaborating with the Mountain Town Brewing Co. and Hunter’s Ale House in developing the program. Program director Cordell DeMattei said it “will fill a need in the state and across the region for students to learn the science and technology underlying brewing ... and provides the training needed by future leaders of the craft brewing industry.” Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in small-scale, local, high-quality beer-making. Rob Sirrine of the Michigan State University Extension said more than 400 acres of hops, beer’s key flavoring ingredient, are under cultivation in Michigan. Growers’ main market is small-sale in-state brewers, he said.
BUSINESSES AND I N V E S TOR S P R E S S I N G FOR GREEN POLICY NEW YORK (AP) -- Hundreds of corporations, insurance companies and pension funds are calling on world leaders gathering for a U.N. summit on climate change this week to attack the problem by making it more costly for businesses and ordinary people to pollute. The idea, long advocated by policymakers, economists and environmental activists, is that the world can’t hope to slow the heating of the planet until its cost is incorporated into the everyday activities that contribute to it, such as using gas- or coal-generated electricity, driving a car, shipping a package or flying around the globe. Business leaders representing trillions of dollars in revenue and retirement savings say they worry that global warming threatens the long-term value of their investments, and they want world leaders to adopt policies that would provide a financial incentive to people to clean up their act. That could include a tax on carbon emissions, a cap or some other mechanism. “There’s a market failure that needs to be fixed,” said Anne Simpson, senior portfolio manager and director of global governance at the $300 billion California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the largest public pension fund in the U.S. Despite a broad consensus that something needs to be done, it has been impossible so far for global leaders to agree on how to implement what amounts to a price on pollution, because energy is so important for economic growth. “It may be easier to get large businesses to agree that something should be done than to get them to coalesce around specific policy measures,” said Michael Levi, senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations. At Tuesday’s U.N. summit, 120 world leaders will try to summon some of the considerable political will required if a new climate treaty is to be reached at international negotiations next year in Paris. The one-day summit is part of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s push to help world leaders to reach a goal they set in 2009: prevent Earth’s temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) from where it is now. On Sunday, scientists announced that the world set another record last year for the amount of carbon pollution spewed into the atmosphere. Ahead of the summit, business leaders such as Apple’s Tim Cook renewed or expanded pledges to help the planet by running their businesses more efficiently, investing in renewable energy or pulling their investments from fossil fuel companies.
Known elsewhere as manioc, tapioca and yucca, it is also made into livestock feed and used as an ingredient in a variety of products worldwide, ranging from lipstick and artificial sweeteners to paint and glucose IV drips. Portuguese traders first brought the plant from South America centuries ago, and many of the world’s poorest people today depend on it for survival. It grows well in bad soil conditions and doesn’t need much water, making it ideal for hot areas hit by drought. It is especially important in Africa, which suffered a massive mealybug attack in the 1980s. Wasps were first imported there from Paraguay and released across the continent by airplane. The method was effective, wiping out up to 95 percent of the bugs in some areas, and has been credited with averting famine and saving $20 billion. Wyckhuys said the wasps have not created any unintended problems within ecosystems since the so called pink mealybugs only eat cassava and the tiny wasps only eat mealybugs. However, he said it’s impossible to erradicate all of the pests because the wasps must keep some hosts alive in order to keep from dying out themselves. Mealybugs, or Phenacoccus manihoti, are believed to have hitchhiked into Thailand in 2008, most likely aboard cassava cuttings transported from Africa. But without the wasps to keep them in check, they quickly spread to Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Small releases have been conducted within those countries, and the wasps imported in 2009 to Thailand have also slowly migrated into neighboring countries. The wasps have vastly improved the problem in Thailand, the worlds’s largest cassava exporter, but not eliminated it entirely. Several wasp releases are planned in different parts of Indonesia using insects brought from Thailand. Last week, CalPERS and other big asset-holders such as the insurance and financial firms Allianz, BlackRock and AXA Group called for a “meaningful” price on carbon emissions. The World Bank said Monday that 73 countries and more than 1,000 companies have expressed their support for a price on carbon. Also on Monday, a parade of business and political leaders tried to rally support in a series of speeches in New York. “It doesn’t cost more to deal with climate change; it costs more to ignore it,” said Secretary of State John Kerry. Cook said customers care about the planet and will “vote with their dollars” for sustainably produced products. He outlined the steps Apple is taking to reduce the carbon emissions of its products and its supply chain, and called for broader action. “The long-term consequences of not addressing climate change are huge,” he said. “I don’t think anyone can overstate that.” While many insist a transition to a cleaner economy can boost economic growth or at least not harm it, many worry it would slow the global economy and make it more difficult for people in developing nations to get access to even basic electricity and transportation. Even those who agree that the transition must take place can’t agree on how to do it. The International Energy Agency estimates that $1 trillion per year must be invested through 2050 in clean energy in order to keep global temperatures from rising past a level that scientists consider especially dangerous. Charging a price for carbon emissions could prod polluters to change their ways by making it in their financial self-interest to do so. It would make fossil fuel investments less profitable and therefore less attractive. And it would make clean energy more lucrative. A host of new investment vehicles are already making it easier for investors and others to sink their money into renewable projects. The market for so-called green bonds - tax-free bonds that fund clean energy, energy efficiency or other sustainable projects - is expected to at least double to $20 billion this year, for example. Last week the $188 billion California Teachers’ Retirement System announced its intention to boost its investment in clean energy and technology to $3.7 billion from $1.4 billion over the next five years and said that could rise to $9.5 billion with changes in policy. Warren Buffet has said he is looking to double his $15 billion in investments in wind and solar projects. On another front, a group of activists is calling on foundations and endowments to reduce or eliminate investments in fossil fuel-related companies and direct that money toward clean energy. The group, the Divest-Invest Coalition, said Monday that foundations representing $50 billion in assets have signed on, though the fossil-fuel investments in those portfolios are a very small percentage of the total. Despite these signs, annual global investment in clean energy is only a quarter of what the IEA estimates is required. “We’re moving tens or even hundreds of billions, but we’re looking at a $1 trillion every year, and if we’re looking at $1 trillion, we need policy,” said