A blog for all seasons; A blog for one; A blog for all. As the 11th most informative blog on the planet, I have a seared memory of throwing my Time 2006 Man of the Year Award over the railing at Time Warner Center.
Justice. Only Justice Shall Thou Pursue
Les Hinton has submitted his resignation on the same day as Rebekah Brooks. The Hinton resignation qualifies as a Friday night news dump considering the timing late on Friday. Try to get the big names out of the way before the weekend when no one pays attention.
Les Hinton, who headed News Corp.'s News International unit when the phone-hacking allegations roiling the media empire first arose, on Friday will resign his post as chief executive officer of Dow Jones & Co., according to a person familiar with the matter.
Mr. Hinton had come under increasing scrutiny recently as a cascade of allegations indicated the problems at the center of the scandal were more widespread than he had twice led a parliamentary committee to believe.
In 2007 and 2009, Mr. Hinton told the committee that the company had carried out a full investigation into the matter and was convinced just one of its journalists was involved.
Dow Jones & Co. is publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
Hinton is a key figure in the scandal, and his statements before Parliament are in question as to whether he purposefully misled the British government over the scandal, or whether his investigations didn't uncover more malfeasance in News Corp's outlets.
"I have watched with sorrow from New York as the News of the World story has unfolded," Hinton wrote in a section addressed to Murdoch. "I have seen hundreds of news reports of both actual and alleged misconduct during the time I was executive chairman of News International and responsible for the company. The pain caused to innocent people is unimaginable. That I was ignorant of what apparently happened is irrelevant and in the circumstances I feel it is proper for me to resign from News Corp, and apologize to those hurt by the actions of the News of the World."
Murdoch has issued an apology to his readers/viewers, but apologies aren't going to be sufficient, not when your company has broken multiple laws and possibly across multiple jurisdictions (UK and possibly the US). His company has broken what little trust the public had in his reporting and ethics.
Insufficient heads have rolled, and while I understand his need to contain the problem to the UK outfits, with all the people have have swapped jobs in his organization, it would appear that more head will have to roll to clean up the mess and more will have to be done to set things right.
Don Surber and others were quick to hit on the 80% claim:
From teh president’s press conference: “The American people are sold. The American people are sold, I just want to repeat that. You have 80% of the American people who support a balanced approach. 80% of the American people support an approach that includes revenues and includes cuts. So the notion that somehow the American people aren’t sold is not the problem. The problem is members of Congress are dug in ideologically.”
80% want their taxes raised?
That is not what the
From the above chart only 4% of Americans want to close the deficit with taxes only.
Only 11% want to close the deficit mostly with taxes.
And as far as I can tell, that Gallup did not find 80% want their taxes raised.
That's an outtake from the Gallup poll with the question and breakdown (click to expand). Only 20% of those polled said that they want the budget closed solely through spending cuts. That leaves 80% seeking deficit reduction through a combination of taxes and spending cuts, or purely through tax hikes. That's how Obama got to 80%, but is that truly reflective of the poll results?
Obama would have been on more solid ground had he said that 80% of Americans are looking for a combination of hikes and spending cuts to close the deficit. However, as the Gallup question was written, Obama's interpretation is technically accurate.
Sorry Don.
UPDATE:
Here's what a poll taken by MSNBC shows as people are willing to cut or tax (or increase taxes upon) to close the deficit. It shows that people are more willing to tax items than they are willing to cut spending - particularly when it comes to defense spending, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or national defense. That further lends credence to the President's statement that 80% support tax hikes.
UPDATE: Ace of Spades notes that the figures also show that 89% of Americans would want spending cuts, and that is also an acceptable way of reading the poll results. Fact is that most Americans want a combination of cuts and tax hikes to close the deficit, which puts the GOP position of refusing to accept any tax hikes against what most Americans want.
Syrian security forces killed at least 17 protesters Friday as hundreds of thousands flooded the streets nationwide in the largest anti-government demonstrations since the uprising began more than four months ago, witnesses and activists said.
In a significant show of the uprising's strength, thousands of protesters turned out in the capital, Damascus — the seat of the regime's power — which has been relatively quiet so far.
The crowds also took to the streets in areas where the government crackdown has been most intense, a sign that President Bashar Assad's forces cannot smother the increasingly defiant uprising.
"All hell broke loose, the firing was intense," an activist in Daraa told The Associated Press, asking that his name not be published for fear of government reprisals.
The protests stretched from the capital, Damascus, and its suburbs to Hasakeh province in the north and Daraa in the south, to Latakia on the coast. Thousands converged on the flashpoint cities of Homs and Hama in central Syria, among other areas across the nation of 22 million.
Hama has been besieged by Assad's military and basic food and health supplies are dwindling. Assad seems more than willing to let his countrymen starve in order to retain power.
Its troubles have prompted Iran's leadership to consider offering $5.8 billion in financial help, including a three-month loan worth $1.5 billion to be made available immediately, French business daily Les Echos said.
It added that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has backed the idea of the aid, which was outlined in a secret report by the Center for Strategic Research, a think tank linked to the Iranian leadership.
It was not possible to verify the report Friday.
Iran, Les Echos said, could also provide 290,000 barrels of oil to Syria each day over the next month while helping to boost border controls to stop Syrians from fleeing the country for Lebanon with cash.
Assad's been isolated diplomatically, and is increasingly reliant on Iran for maintaining his grip on power. However, Iran's own economic situation is precarious and bolstered only by the fact that the high cost of oil is maintaining revenues.
More than 30 nations, including the United States, on Friday declared that Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's regime is no longer legitimate and formally recognized Libya's main opposition group as the country's government.
In a final statement following a meeting of the so-called Contact Group on Libya, the nations said: The "Gadhafi regime no longer has any legitimate authority in Libya," and Gadhafi and certain members of his family must go.
The group said it would deal with Libya's main opposition group — the National Transitional Council, or TNC — as "the legitimate governing authority in Libya" until an interim authority is in place.
This action has repercussions far beyond Libya; it should be studied closely by opposition movements in Syria; both countries are in the midst of a massive crackdown by their respective autocratic despotic regimes but the world has essentially ignored the plight of the Syrian opposition while the Libyan opposition has coalesced into a coherent group that is now recognized as a legitimate government of the country.
Syrians need to take similar actions, and hope that its country's foreign diplomats defect and otherwise distance themselves from Assad's brutal regime so as to give the opposition a chance to stand up against the ongoing crackdown. Assad has been successful in cracking down against opposition groups so that they can't make the kind of gains that the TNC has seen in Libya, but hasn't successfully quashed the protests (the death toll keeps rising as protesters are killed on a daily basis with no sign of any letup).
The biggest rallies on Friday occurred in cities that have tested the government’s ability to impose its authority: Homs and Hama in central Syria and Deir al-Zour in the poor, drought-stricken northeast. Protesters also gathered in Dara’a, the southern town where the uprising began, suggesting that a fierce military crackdown in April has not broken the opposition movement there.
“Dara’a is still under siege,” said Anwar Farres, an activist in the town. “Nothing has changed. They’re still sending more and more security forces here.”
Omar Idlibi, a spokesman for the Local Coordination Committees, which has sought to document and organize the protests, said one person was killed in Dara’a on Friday and another in Homs. Three people were killed in the restive northwestern province of Idlib, where the military has carried out campaigns against what it calls Islamist insurgents.
The protesters in Hama, Syria’s fourth-largest city, numbered in the tens of thousands for a third straight week. Even larger crowds turned out in Deir al-Zour, knit by deep clan loyalties, and in Qaboun, which is emerging as a flash point on the outskirts of Damascus. Demonstrations in Homs have also proven resilient.
“Leave, Bashar,” the crowds in Homs chanted, according to an activist there. “No to dialogue!”
In a predominantly Kurdish area of the country, protesters unfurled a Syrian flag emblazoned with “Azadi,” the Kurdish word for freedom.
Four months into the uprising, some activists have spoken of a stalemate, as the government trumpets tentative and ambiguous steps toward reform while a fractious and immature opposition struggles to provide some kind of alternative. Meetings of opposition figures are scheduled to take place on Saturday inside Syria and in neighboring Turkey, but divisions have threatened to derail the meetings. Though the government allowed a rare opposition meeting last month, some fear that security forces may now seek to prevent one from convening in Damascus.
“I am pessimistic,” said Muntaha al-Atrash, a member of Sawasiyah, a human rights group in Damascus. “I feel like it’s going to be a long, long journey.”
“This regime won’t easily submit to people’s demands,” she added.
Assad is not going to give up his grip on power - power that has been in his family's hands since his father rose to power more than 40 years ago.
After Leiby Kletzky disappeared and the tight-knit Orthodox Jewish community mobilized to try and find him, one of those men looking for him found critical pieces of information that helped lead to his admitted killer. While many assumed that Kletzky had walked along a predetermined route, Yaakov German was able to get a hold of surveillance video from several local stores and realized that instead of walking down 13th Ave, he never made a critical turn, and continued walking in a different direction away from his home. That meant that searchers were looking in the wrong direction.
Additional persistence paid off as they eventually uncovered video showing Kletzky along with Levi Aron:
When 44th St. dead-ended at Dahill Road, the trail seemed to go cold again.
A video store had footage that showed only sidewalks on one side of the street. Benchers Unlimited had footage of both sidewalks but no sign of the boy.
Then German spotted newly installed cameras at a car-leasing company, Tristate Fleet. That's when they spotted Aron, the man who would be later identified as Leiby's killer.
"We found the kid," German said. "We saw somebody going with him and back forth. We watched it in slow motion.
"We saw the perp going across the avenue, going into a white house, up three steps, going in for three minutes and coming back out. We went by and saw it was a dentist's office."
All this time, German was feeding information to Mayer, the liaison to the NYPD, and he was sharing it with detectives.
At about 5:30 p.m., cops arrived at Tristate. "They came in here, screeching tires," said owner Yehuda Bernstein, 40.
Cracking the case
Cops, who confirmed German's account, tracked down the dentist at home. They learned that Aron was the only patient who had been in and out quickly - to pay a bill - and they got his address.
Soon after, they swarmed Aron's house on E. Second St., where they found Leiby's severed feet in the freezer, 2 miles from where the rest of his body would be found in a Dumpster.
German, who shopped at the hardware store where Aron was a clerk, was outside the house when cops made the arrest early Wednesday.
"I never saw a detective with tears before in my life," he said. "They said, 'They don't have the whole body.' We all started crying."
Alon has confessed to the killing, but not all aspects of his confession match up with the evidence released to date. He says that he killed Kletzky after panicking over how the community reacted to his disappearance, but it also appears that Kletzky put up a fight before being killed by suffocation with a towel.
His lawyer claims that Aron hears voices and he's currently undergoing psychiatric evaluation, and I suspect that his lawyers will lay the groundwork for either an insanity defense or a reduced manslaughter charge on extreme emotional disturbance rather than murder 2.
This case is going to be a challenge for Brooklyn prosecutors as the jury pool all but likely to be prejudiced against Aron. Heck, even hardened criminals were yelling at Aron outside his arraignment:
Even hardened criminals agreed with the commissioner, screaming, "You f--king killer!" in Brooklyn Criminal Court before Aron pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and kidnapping charges.
Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes said his office confiscated Aron's computers and will also investigate whether Aron had previous improper contact with kids here and in Tennessee, where he previously lived.
A disheveled Aron was held without bail and ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluation on Rikers Island after his lawyer told the judge his client "hears voices and suffers from hallucinations."
Investigators also confirmed that Alon did attend a wedding in Monsey, New York hours after Kletzky was abducted although quite a few people say that they didn't know or recognize him. Apparently, he was a distant cousin of the bride. The boy was never seen inside the wedding hall, and would have stood out because of his distinctive appearance (Kletzky had "payot" (long locks of hair in front of his ears), which is common in the Hasidic community, but not in the traditional Orthodox community.
The inquiry was prompted in part by a letter from Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, to Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, in which he asked that the bureau immediately open an investigation of News Corporation, citing media reports that journalists working for its subsidiary, The News of the World, tried to obtain the phone records of 9/11 victims through bribery and unauthorized wiretapping, the people said.
The decision to open a case in New York stemmed from the mushrooming hacking scandal that has wracked Britain for days, ever since The News of the World admitted that it had illegally intercepted the voice mail of Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old girl abducted and murdered in 2002. It also follows a decision by the News Corporation chairman, Rupert Murdoch, to withdraw from the biggest media takeover bid in British history.
The investigation was expected to be handled jointly by two F.B.I. squads in the bureau’s New York office, one that investigates cybercrimes and another that focuses on public corruption and white collar crimes, one of the people said. They all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case.
The British Daily Mail had alleged that the News of the World attempted to access the voice mails of victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks or other Americans but thus far the Guardian has been unable to verify that report. With the FBI entering into the fray, this matter is going to come to a head.
If the FBI finds that one of News Corporation's outfits engaged in this kind of action, the gig will be up for the company and puts everyone associated with those media outlets in jeopardy - particularly editors and reporters who used that information or knew or had reason to know how such information was obtained, or condoned those kinds of activities.
The construction around the site is quickening, particularly portions of Ground Zero dedicated to the Museum and Memorial in anticipation of the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks in September. Ventilation structures are being clad in steel and reflective surfaces, as is the Snohetta designed museum entrance.
Reservations are already being taken for access to the memorial beginning on September 12, but the first couple of days are already sold out. Gotham Gazette looks back at the contentious process of designing the memorial and how Michael Arad came to design and incorporate wildly divergent needs and suggestions and demands into a coherent plan. That mirrors much of my coverage from the past decade (covered under both the Battle for Ground Zero and Rebuilding of Ground Zero series).
The Arab League preparing to ask UN to recognize Palestinian state when it meets in September. The Arab League always seems capable of issuing derogatory statements about Israel on a moment's notice and agreeing about any action that harms Israel, but it never seems capable of denouncing its own members when they engage in war crimes, crimes against humanity, or democide.
Where is their outrage about the ongoing slaughter in Syria? For that matter, where is the Arab League's concern about recognizing Kurdish rights to statehood? That would affect Kurds living in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, which means they get ignored, but Palestinians who never had a state (and which lived under Jordanian and Egyptian control from 1948 to 1967) are paid lip service in a bid to harm Israel.
The only thing all these regimes can agree upon is that Israel is a wedge issue that keeps all concerned in business as a relief valve and MacGuffin. It's a shiny object that gets tossed out there when things go bad for Arab regimes (and it's always bad economically and socially, so it remains persistent throughout much of the Middle East).
I've been saying this for some time now, but the fact is that the housing sector, which has been a huge driver of the US economy for decades is about to head into a prolonged slump because it was seriously overbuilt in many areas as speculation and lax (or nonexistent) lending standards put people into homes they were incapable of paying for.
Simon has been traveling the country with a 28-page PowerPoint presentation for clients that illustrates the dire state of today’s housing market. Three of 10 homes, he notes, are now sold for a loss. American homeowners have equity (market value minus mortgage debt) equal to 38 percent of their homes’ worth, down a third since 2005 and half what it was in 1950. A lot of the decline is attributable to people who have negative equity — they owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.
Simon also points to the affordability index, which measures the ability of a family with the median national income to buy a median-price home at current mortgage rates. The index is near an all-time high and double its level in 2006 at the peak of the bubble — meaning buyers should find many more homes within their budgets. “I would never have believed this index could get so high,” he says. A rise in affordability should have spurred purchases, boosting prices and keeping a lid on the index. “What this instead means to me is that the credit is not available to most people,” he says. “Houses aren’t cheap if you can’t get the loan.” Simon worries that the problem will get worse in October, when Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration drop the maximum mortgage they will buy to $625,000 from $729,750 as a temporary increase expires.
The crux of Simon’s analysis is that the loose lending practices seen during the housing bubble allowed 5 million renters to become homeowners, and that the market is in the protracted process of evicting this group. He believes housing prices will decline 6 percent to 8 percent nationally, with 6 million to 7 million more foreclosures yet to come.
The markets are now in the process of filtering those millions of people out of their homeownership and back into renting status. This problem is worse in some parts of the country than others, particularly in Nevada, California, Arizona, and Florida, but there are local pockets throughout the country where speculation resulted in overbuilding and the housing crash means that there's far too much inventory and too few people who are willing or capable of buying those homes, especially as the price continues to slide.
That isn't to say that some parts of the country have been comparatively resilient to the crash; the New York metro area has been largely unscathed from the housing crash, and there remains a housing shortage in parts of the city because the area is so highly developed. There just isn't space to build new housing fast enough to accommodate additional growth and that's served to stabilize and moderate the pricing.
So much about the tragic end of 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky remains unanswered despite claims that admitted killer Levi Aron kidnapped and then killed Kletzky when he panicked over the reaction of the local community to the disappearance.
The boy was apparently lost and but for a wrong two, their paths may not have crossed. The two were together for several hours before Kletzky was killed.
According to the obtained statement, Aron told police he wanted a ride to a bookstore but then lost interest.
"So I asked if he wanted to go for the ride -- (a) wedding in Monsey -- since I didn't think I was going to stay for the whole thing since my back was hurting. He said OK," Aron told police.
They returned to Aron's home around 11:20 p.m. Monday night and watched television before going to sleep in separate rooms, Aron told police. Police said Aron, who is divorced, lives alone in an attic in a building shared with his father and uncle.
Aron told police he planned to return Kletzky to his home Tuesday.
Apparently unaware that a search was already in progress for the boy, Aron left his home Tuesday to find photos of the missing boy on fliers distributed in the neighborhood.
"When I saw the flyers I panicked and was afraid," he told police. "I was still in panic ... and afraid to bring him home. That is when I went for a towel to smother him in the side room. He fought back a little bit."
Now with the body of a dead boy in his home, he told police he panicked again "because I didn't know what to do with the body." He detailed to police how he dismembered the body.
A day-and-a-half search led police to Aron's home after midnight Wednesday morning after seeing him on a surveillance video with the child. They asked: Where is the boy?
The man nodded toward the kitchen, authorities said, where blood stained the freezer door. Inside was the stuff of horror films -- severed feet, wrapped in plastic. In the refrigerator, a cutting board and three bloody carving knives. A plastic garbage bag with bloody towels was nearby.
Aron's actions aren't one of a panicked individual who murdered someone in an act of desperation. Instead, it seems fully calculated and methodical. Parts of Kletzky were found in Aron's fridge, which was empty besides the remains and bloody instruments used in the dismemberment. The rest of the body was found in luggage discarded in a trash bin outside an auto parts store two miles from Aron's home.
It's little wonder then, that investigators are looking at whether Aron is a serial killer and are reexamining cold cases in New York and in Tennessee where Aron lived for several years. Aron's actions and behavior gave people the willies, but he had but one police citation for public urination.
The break in the Kletzky case came when video showed the boy getting into a car outside a dentist's office. Police tracked down the doctor to his New Jersey home, and that led to a tip on Aron.
Kletzky was buried yesterday as thousands of people from the tight-knit Jewish community came to pay their respects. He would have been nine next week.
Three blasts rocked Mumbai, police said on Wednesday. TV reports say at least 15 people have been injured. Two of the blasts were in south Mumbai, while one was in central Mumbai, police said. Blasts have been reported at the Dadar, Opera House and Zaveru Bazaar areas in Mumbai.
An NIA team has been sent for Mumbai. All states have been put on high alert.
Mumbai was the city where a 2008 gun raid by Pakistan-based militants killed at least 166 people.
Police are trying to determine what is going on and bomb squads have been rushed to the scenes and the area is on high alert following the attacks.
At least four people were killed, and 25 others have been taken to hospitals. Unfortunately, I think that those numbers are likely to rise as more reports come in.
Expect Indian authorities to point fingers at LeT and the Pakistanis considering the targets, the means and methods, and the timing.
The first explosion took place in south Mumbai's Zaveri Bazaar, near the famous Mumbadevi temple, in which some people were injured, said Mumbai Police spokesperson Nisar Tamboli. The bustling market also has a number of jewellery shops.
The second explosion was reported in a taxi in Dadar area in central Mumbai, he said.
The third blast was reported from south Mumbai's Opera House in Charni Road after 7pm.
News Corporation, which owns the likes of Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and British Papers such as the Sun and now-shuttered News of the World, and film and publishing companies is on the ropes following disturbing revelations about its improper conduct at several of its British papers over the past decade including hacking of voice mail accounts, bribing public officials, and a whole laundry list of other malfeasance.
A company statement quoted Chase Carey, News Corporation’s Deputy Chairman, President and Chief Operating Officer, as saying “We believed that the proposed acquisition of BSkyB by News Corporation would benefit both companies but it has become clear that it is too difficult to progress in this climate.”
“News Corporation remains a committed long-term shareholder in BSkyB. We are proud of the success it has achieved and our contribution to it,” the statement said.
The development also seemed to end what, for years, had been a close, cozy and influential relationship with the British establishment.
Only hours before the announcement, Prime Minister David Cameron had sought to distance himself from Mr. Murdoch and had urged him to drop the bid for BSkyB. The announcement came just before Parliament was set to approve a cross-party call for Mr. Murdoch to abandon his long-cherished desire to take full control of the lucrative satellite broadcaster.
The scandal has also convulsed the British politicians, press and police, forcing them to contemplate unheard-of scrutiny of their ties with each other.
On Wednesday, Mr. Cameron offered details for the first time of a broad inquiry into those relationships to be led by a senior judge, Lord Justice Leveson. Mr. Cameron told Parliament that it would have the power to summon witnesses to testify under oath. The announcement came as Mr. Cameron fought to recover the initiative in a scandal that has turned into potentially the most damaging crisis of his time in office.
That was after the British parliament united in its call for him to drop the takeover bid. News Corp's got to fight a rearguard action to keep the mess from spreading, but because so many within the organization have switched jobs within the company - going from one of the British papers to a US outlet, or vice versa (including those at the heart of the scandal in the UK), trying to contain this is like a wildfire that is splitting out in hundreds of different directions at once and can't be controlled.
If it turns out that Americans, including 9/11 victims, were among the victims of a hacking effort by News Corporation affiliates, the company and Murdoch would be finished. The FCPA (Foreign Corrupt Practices Act) is just the tip of the iceberg, and considering that there are inklings that they may have tapped phones, hacked accounts of 9/11 victims families, or otherwise engaged in illegal activities you're going to see prosecutors opening up cases in New York City and elsewhere.
NJ Transit has done an incredibly poor job in the past year following rate hikes and service cuts. That double whammy, combined with a series of ongoing problems along the Northeast Corridor (NEC) snarling traffic and ruining the commutes for hundreds of thousands of people daily has meant that the agency rightfully suffered in its latest customer survey.
The problems on the Northeast Corridor aren't always within the agency's control since the tracks and power systems are shared with Amtrak. However, NJ Transit has done a poor job in communicating about delays on those NEC trains.
The rail schedules also aren't conducive to getting people out of cars and onto mass transit; the schedules simply don't provide service into the evening, even though people would be willing to take mass transit into Manhattan to avoid the hassle of finding parking and dealing with the traffic in the city. The same people who commute regularly are likely to consider using mass transit at other times, but the rail schedule is lacking in many areas and service has been cut because the agency simply lacks the operating funds because they've blown so much money on projects that have not stayed within budget (see Secaucus junction aka the boondoggle, or the Ramsey Route 17 transit station that is sorely underutilized and two nearby stations remain open despite their close proximity).
The agency needs to orient itself better to customer needs and the top priority must be to reduce problems along the NEC and better communicate when problems do occur.
I've been relatively thankful that the conductors on my trains along the Bergen Line have been good at issuing updates on problems with the NEC, but that's an exception - and the statistics bear this out.
Clearly, riders see that fares and mechanical reliability are major problems - and they have been for years. The issues with mechanical reliability should have been resolved with the purchase of hundreds of new double-decker cars and refurbished Comet IV and V cars, along with dozens of new electric and diesel locomotives, but apparently the problems are much deeper than that. The problems are institutional. That goes to top management and all down the line.
UPDATE:
The agency is set to vote on a new budget, and it will be slightly higher than last year to account for higher fuel costs. No fare hikes are proposed in the budget, and while lip service is being paid to the survey, it remains to be seen whether NJ Transit can turn things around and improve on-time performance and performance during service disruptions.
For all the efforts by municipalities and politicians around the country to push alternative energy and solar and wind power incentives to reduce the need for conventionally generated electricity, only a handful have actually made the switch. The numbers, while increasing since fiscal year 2009, aren't exactly encouraging:
In the 2011 fiscal year, which ended in June, just 75 residential property owners received city approval to install solar-panel systems. That number was up sharply from 2009, just after the creation of a property tax abatement to encourage the use of solar power. That year, there were just five approvals, for both commercial and industrial projects; in 2010, the number of residential approvals jumped to 13.
“We’ve seen a tremendous amount of growth even though the numbers are small,” said Robert D. LiMandri, the commissioner of the Buildings Department. And he is bullish, he said, that the growth will continue. “At the end of the day, to me, this is just another permit,” he said, “and if enough people do it on the block or in the neighborhood, it really will change the way New York City lives.”
To that end, the department is about to roll out new educational materials to help the licensed architects and engineers who are required to file for permits. In addition, there is a new interactive map, developed by the City University of New York with the city and the federal Energy Department, that shows the estimated solar potential of each of the nearly one million buildings in the five boroughs.
But there are still challenges to creating your own sun-driven power generator, installers say. Not every building is suitable; the panels should be placed at a 30- to 40-degree angle facing south to maximize their power, said Mark Chandarpal of Go Solar Green NY in Hollis, Queens, who put in the Antonios’ panels. That is easier on a sloped roof like the Antonios’, but a flat roof would require a support structure, he said.
Some roofs are simply too small or shady to pay off. For example, a neighbor of the Antonios’ son wanted to install a system on his house in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, but could not because the city would not let him prune the tall trees shading his roof.
5, 13, 79. That's in a city with 8 million people, and hundreds of thousands of properties. Not all properties are amenable to solar power projects, and many of those owners aren't willing to plunk down tens of thousands of dollars for the possibility of recouping that investment over 20 years or more (though if electricity prices skyrocket, the return on investment could be cut).
I would contemplate solar power on my own home, but shade trees would block much of the sun, and I already derive a benefit from those trees in the form of lower power needs during the summer. Cutting them down to be able to generate more power isn't a winning argument.
I haven't seen Consolidated Edison push a solar power initiative along the lines of PSE&G's dispersed solar power generating plan, where solar panels were installed on tens of thousands of light poles and transmission poles throughout New Jersey to generate 40 up to megawatts of power. Con Ed is in a better position to do the kind of solar power installations than individuals or businesses, but there is a place for individual and business solar or wind power generation installations. Even state and local authorities like the MTA should be contemplating installations along their rights-of-way or structures to capture power that otherwise would go to waste. Co-locating power along those rights of way would improve reliability of power to mass transit that is a heavy user of electricity, reduce costs to the transit authorities, and provides locations that are often free of obstructions that would make power generation difficult.
Take a parking garage for example. Hackensack, New Jersey recently installed a major solar power array on the roof of one of its parking garages at the courthouse. The installation, done by Pfister of Paterson, will provide 10-15% of the Bergen county administrative building's power demands, and will hopefully save anywhere from $250,000 to $1 million over 15 years as comparing the PSE&G power rate to the reduced rate charged by Pfister. The County didn't have to pay for the project, which means that Pfister was able to acquire the space to build the solar array for no cost in return for the reduced costs to the county.
That's space that would have gone to waste but is a good site for solar power. The MTA has plenty of similar structures, including any number of bus and subway depots.
The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration awarded by the United States government. It's awarded only to those who show "...conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his or her life above and beyond the call of duty while engaged in an action against an enemy of the United States." More often than not, these are awarded posthumously as these soldiers, sailors, Marines, or airmen frequently give their lives so that their fellow comrades in arms can survive.
During the enemy action, he was already injured from bullet wounds to both legs when the grenade was thrown at his position.
An Army Ranger who lost his right hand while tossing an enemy grenade away from fellow soldiers in Afghanistan will be awarded the Medal of Honor on Tuesday.
Sgt. 1st Class Leroy Arthur Petry will be the second living recipient of the Medal of Honor from the Iraq and Afghan wars, according to the U.S. military. President Barack Obama will present the award to Petry.
"It's very humbling to know that the guys thought that much of me and my actions that day, to nominate me for that," Petry said, according to an Army News Service report.
Petry is being awarded the medal for actions on May 26, 2008, in Paktia, Afghanistan.
The CIA apparently ran a vaccination ruse to obtain DNA information. But perhaps more importantly, the fallout from the bin Laden raid continues to affect the security situation in Afghanistan and the frontier provinces in Pakistan. The drone program and military aid programs to Pakistan are in doubt as the Pakistanis continue to seethe over the raid:
The vaccination program was set up as the C.I.A. was struggling to learn whether Bin Laden was hiding in the compound, and adds a new twist to the months of spy games that preceded the nighttime raid in early May that killed the Qaeda chief.
It has also aggravated already strained tensions between the United States and Pakistan. The operation was run by a Pakistan doctor, Shakil Afridi, whom Pakistani spies have since arrested for his suspected collaboration with the Americans. Dr. Afridi remains in Pakistani custody, the American official said.
Getting DNA evidence from the people hiding in the Abbottabad compound would have been a significant coup, because it would have allowed the C.I.A. to match the samples with DNA from other members of the Bin Laden family that are on file at the C.I.A. — providing the first hard evidence in years of his whereabouts.
The American official said that the doctor managed to temporarily gain access to the compound, but that he never saw Bin Laden and was not successful in getting DNA samples from any Bin Laden family members. Obama administration officials have said publicly they were not sure whether Bin Laden was in Abbottabad when dozens of Navy Seals commandos stormed the house in May.
The existence of the vaccination program was first reported by a British newspaper, The Guardian. A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment.
It is unclear how the C.I.A. first recruited Dr. Afridi to work for the United States. The Guardian reported that he used a team of nurses and other health workers to administer Hepatitis B vaccinations throughout Abbottabad, even starting the program on poor fringes of the town to maintain a low profile.
Pakistani military and intelligence operatives were furious about the American raid that killed Bin Laden, and relations between the United States and Pakistan have only plummeted since. Pakistani officials have suggested that they might use troops to repel another incursion into Pakistan, and many American officials believe that Pakistan seems more concerned with hunting C.I.A. informants than with finding Qaeda operatives.
American officials said they planned to suspend as much as $800 million worth of military aid to Pakistan — a move partly designed to chasten Islamabad for expelling American military trainers — and several influential American lawmakers have suggested attaching more strings to the billions of dollars sent each year to Pakistan.
Also at stake is the C.I.A.’s armed drone program, which has carried out hundreds of strikes in Pakistan in recent years and has killed several senior operatives from Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban. Pakistan has threatened to expel C.I.A. operatives working on the drone program from a base in southern Pakistan, and the C.I.A. has set up contingency plans to run more flights from a base in eastern Afghanistan.
It is interesting that the Pakistanis seem to be more interested in catching those who may have provided intel to the CIA in the hunt for Osama bin Laden than they are in going after other terrorists hiding in their midst.
Drone airstrikes continue, including one that killed 38 people, and the Pakistanis continue to express their displeasure about those ongoing airstrikes. They threaten to stop US operations from airbases inside Pakistan, and the CIA and US military are contemplating carrying those operations from bases inside Afghanistan.
Pakistan is seeking to preserve ties with the Taliban and other militants that it has used for decades to gain political influence in Afghanistan, according to Imtiaz Gul, director of Islamabad’s Center for Research and Security Studies.
The reliance on guerrillas to project power across Pakistan’s borders is part of an effort to compensate for its smaller size compared with arch-foe India, against which it has fought three wars since the countries separated at independence from the U.K.
Any army offensive “is not going to give satisfaction to the Americans, because Pakistan wants to keep a relationship with some of the groups there,” including the one led by Afghan tribal leader Jalaluddin Haqqani, said Gul.
The U.S., which is withdrawing some troops and planning to end its combat role in Afghanistan by 2014, is pushing Pakistan to crush the Taliban in its territory while helping bring its leaders to peace talks. The U.S.-led coalition forces in Afghanistan describe Haqqani as a major enemy.
Things in South Asia are getting a whole lot more dangerous because Pakistan's ongoing limited actions to deal with the Islamists and Taliban who seek to destabilize the region results from the refusal to cut longstanding ties with those elements.
Both the U.S. and France strongly criticized Syria after pro-government mobs attacked the American and French embassies in Damascus on Monday, smashing windows and spray-painting obscenities and graffiti on the walls.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry condemned Clinton's statement as "a provocative reaction."
"Syria stresses that the legitimacy of its political leadership is based neither on the United States nor on others, it is exclusively from the will of the Syrian people," the statement said.
President Bashar Assad is facing a four-month-old uprising that has posed the gravest challenge to his family's 40-year dynasty in Syria, one of the most tightly controlled countries in the Middle East.
He has tried to crush the unrest using a mixture of deadly force and promises of reform, but the revolt has only grown more defiant. Enraged by a government crackdown that activists say has killed some 1,600 people, the protest movement is now calling for nothing less than the downfall of the regime.
Syria's deadly government crackdown has led to international condemnation and sanctions.
The US didn't provoke hundreds of thousands of Syrians to take to the streets to protest Assad's brutal regime. Assad's brutality brought that about on its own. Failed economic policies brought about the massive protests. The US had nothing to do with any of that.
What Assad did do was condone the rioters aimed at the US and French embassies where rioters vandalized and attempted to overrun the security posts and cause unspecified damage to the US ambassador's home. Those riots would not have occurred unless Assad bused them in and told security to be elsewhere when it happened.
This is far from the first time that Syrian security has looked the other way when rioters have attacked embassies. During the cartoon jihad, Danish and Norwegian embassies were torched by crowds in Damascus protesting the free speech rights to post cartoons depicting Mohammad. Those were well-planned riots with a death toll, but they were also acts of war against the countries whose embassies were damaged or destroyed.
Just as those were acts of war so too were the attacks against the embassies of the United States and France yesterday. International law provides protections for embassies and diplomatic property as though they were land of the foreign country. An attack on the US embassy is the same as an attack on the United States.
Now, Assad may claim that his regime didn't condone the rioting, but in a country where his regime is brutally cracking down against protests on a daily basis, that they've managed to overlook rioters hell-bent on attacking foreign embassies seems to be a stretch. He might have just enough plausible deniability to avoid direct and immediate consequences, but the war of words has been ratcheted up quite a bit since US Ambassador Ford went to Hama to witness the protests first-hand.
Since then, Assad has been waging an ever louder war of words with the US and sought to intimidate protesters in the US in addition to the actions within Syria. Some might argue that the Syrian ambassador to the US was put in that position by his masters in Damascus, but if he's as truly Westernized as claimed or believed, then he would have known that those actions would have resulted in serious repercussions. Syria Ambassador to the US Imad Moustapha, if those claims are to be believed, would appear to be the kind of individual that the US should be trying to turn against his masters in Damascus, just as other ministers and high ranking officials have fled and turned against the Libyian regime of Mumar Khadafi.
Let's not forget that Syria has been trying to influence the outcome in Lebanon for years, has been caught receiving arms shipments from Iran (and one such shipment that was intercepted and being stored in Cyprus pending a disposition exploded with deadly consequences earlier this week). They've been arming and sheltering terrorist groups throughout the region, including Hamas and Hizbullah.
This is not a regime interested in anything other than remaining in power and using whatever means at its disposal to do so. Assad's following the Hama rules, and it's the only playbook that his regime knows.
Rights activists and residents say Syrian troops backed by armored vehicles have stormed into the central city of Homs, killing at least one person and wounding 20 others.
The witnesses said the attacks Monday included troops firing machine guns.
The clashes come as Syria holds the second day of a national dialogue on political reform. Some opposition activists and intellectuals have joined the talks, but most prominent Syrian dissidents boycotted the conference to protest President Bashar al-Assad's deadly crackdown on the opposition uprising.
During the first day of talks Sunday, a number of speakers condemned the government's security forces and its violence against protesters. But others repeated Assad's contention that foreign agitators are attempting to destabilize Syria.
It's always about the foreign agitators - and finger pointing towards Israel or the US or other undisclosed Western influences.
It's never about the fact that Assad has ruled with an iron fist and his regime, like his fathers, has never been shy about using force to quell protests and opposition groups. The difference is that this time, the opposition has been televised and reports have been getting out of the country showing just how odious his regime is. The protests have not stopped, despite the carnage inflicted by the security forces.
Meanwhile, Syrian authorities continue the rabble rousing, and have brought about protests outside the US and French embassies. That follows the visit of US and French ambassadors to the embattled city of Hama to witness protests first-hand.
Assad's diplomatic corps has attempted to intimidate protesters in the US by photographing and videotaping them outside the Syrian embassy in Washington DC, but now the protests are outside the US and French embassies in Damascus and the French embassy in Aleppo.
UPDATE:
MSNBC is reporting that rabble rousers have now attacked the US Embassy in Damascus and Syrian security forces were no where to be found. Syrian goons were allowed to attack the US embassy in Damascus. They apparently entered the grounds and raised a Syrian flag and sprayed anti-US graffiti. That follows similar protests towards the French embassies that were dispersed by French forces firing into the air.
That comes a day after the Syrian ambassador was called to the US State Department in Washington DC to protest Syrian diplomats photographing and videotaping American protesters outside the Syrian embassy as a means to intimidate protesters.
It comes as no surprise that Iran is backing Syria's view on US Ambassador Robert Ford's visit to Hama to witness first hand the protests against the regime of Bashar Assad.
Note the key difference here - Syrian diplomats are attempting to intimidate legitimate protesters and the American and French diplomats were simply attempting to witness protesters in Hama demonstrate against the autocratic and brutal regime of Bashar al Assad.
Assad's regime simply cannot tolerate dissent and anything that even comes close to backing the protests is seen as a threat to be dealt with accordingly.
Meanwhile, I don't consider calls by the Syrian Vice President for a transition to democracy to be credible or trust-worthy. After all, Assad has gone on various media outlets claiming he was reforming or providing amnesty or otherwise giving in to various demands by the protesters, but then turns around to brutally suppress protests and continues murdering, torturing, and detaining thousands.
The Syrian regime has used a mix of brute force and tentative promises of reform to try to quell the uprising, which was inspired by the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. Some 1,600 civilians and 350 members of security forces have been killed since demonstrations began, activists say.
Al-Sharaa acknowledged that the promise of reforms would not have come without the uprising.
"It must be recognized, that without the blood sacrifices that was shed by civilians and soldiers ... that this national dialogue would not have been held, at this high level of supervision, under the lens of cameras," he said.
But at the same time, he condemned some protesters as tools of foreign agents seeking to enflame sectarian tensions and divide the country — echoing Assad's position.
The government accuses foreign conspirators and thugs for the unrest, not true reform-seekers.
The conference was a rare step in a country where people rarely criticize the regime publicly or directly, fearing retribution by the pervasive security forces. Though the main opposition boycotted the dialogue, some opposition figures, intellectuals and members of parliament were on the other side of the table.
On live Syrian television — which usually is a tightly controlled medium for the regime — a series of intellectuals slammed the government for using force against protesters.
Still, leading opposition figures and some of the coordinators of the anti-government uprising said they would not participate in the dialogue, saying it sought to whitewash the regime's brutal crackdown.
"They are blockading (restive) cities, and killing demonstrators, arresting people and torturing people to death," said Omar Idilbi, a spokesman for a loose network of anti-government activists. "That cannot create a good environment for dialogue."
