WORLD


Bomb suspect's buddies covered for him, feds say

By Matt Smith, CNN 

May 2, 2013 -- Updated 0933 GMT (1733 HKT)

From left, Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev went with Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to Times Square in this photo taken from the social media site VK.com. Tazhayakov and Kadyrbayev were <a href='http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/01/us/boston-attack/index.html'>arrested on Wednesday, May 1,</a> on charges they tried to throw investigators off Tsarnaev's trail. <a href='http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/us/boston-bombings-galleries/index.html'>See all photography related to the Boston bombings.</a>

(CNN) -- A laptop, some empty fireworks and a jar of Vaseline landed three friends of Boston Marathon bomb suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in jail Wednesday, charged with trying to throw investigators off their buddy's trail.
Those are the items federal prosecutors say Azamat Tazhayakov, Dias Kadyrbayev and Robel Phillipos took from Tsarnaev's dorm room at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth in the hours after the FBI released photos of Tsarnaev and his brother Tamerlan, the suspects in the marathon bombings. According to FBI affidavits, they quickly recognized their friend from the pictures.
When Kadyrbayev texted his friend to tell him "he looked like the suspect on television," Tsarnaev texted back "lol" and added, "come to my room and take whatever you want," the affidavit states. Phillipos, Tazhayakov and Kadyrbayev went to the room, where Kadyrbayev noticed a backpack containing fireworks that had been "opened and emptied of powder," according to the affidavit.
"Kadyrbayev knew when he saw the empty fireworks that Tsarnaev was involved in the marathon bombing," the affidavit states.


 
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All three are accused of removing items from Tsarnaev's dorm room after the April 15 bombings, which killed three people and wounded more than 260. According to the affidavit, they left with the backpack, the Vaseline -- which Tazhayakov believed could be used to make bombs -- and Tsarnaev's laptop.


By the time they got back to the apartment in New Bedford that Tazhayakov and Kadyrbayev shared, the Tsarnaev brothers had been named as bomb suspects, and the three friends "started to freak out," Phillipos recounted after what the affidavit stated had been four previous interviews.
"According to Kadyrbayev, they collectively decided to throw the backpack and fireworks into the trash because they did not want Tsarnaev to get into trouble," the affidavit states.
Investigators found the pack, fireworks and Vaseline in a landfill last week after a two-day search. The complaint doesn't state what happened to the laptop.
Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov, both from Kazakhstan, were already in federal custody on immigration charges. They're charged with obstruction of justice, while Phillipos, a U.S. citizen, is charged with lying to federal agents probing the bombing.

Probe stretches from Boston to Russia 

Wednesday's developments come after more than two weeks of intensive investigation that has stretched from Boston to the restive Russian republic of Dagestan, where the Tsarnaev brothers' parents now live.
Federal officials say investigators remain very interested in talking with Tamerlan Tsarnaev's widow, Katherine Russell, about what she may have known about her husband's travel and associations, as well as about any encounters she may have had with the two suspects in the aftermath of the attack.


Russell told investigators that she spoke to her husband after his picture appeared on national television as a suspect, two sources familiar with the investigation told CNN on Wednesday. The nature of the conversation remains under investigation, but the sources said there was some concern that Russell spoke with her husband but did not call authorities who were still seeking to identify the men in the photos.
Russell's lawyers had no immediate comment on that report. On Tuesday, attorney Amato DeLuca said Russell "will continue to meet with law enforcement, as she has done for many hours over the past week, and provide as much assistance to the investigation as she can."
Officials say Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has told investigators his brother was the mastermind of the attack. Investigators are looking into whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev was influenced toward radical Islam during a six-month visit in 2012 to Dagestan, a region where Russian forces are battling jihadist guerrillas.


 
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The elder Tsarnaev's body remained unclaimed in a state medical examiner's morgue Wednesday. His wife wants his family to claim the body, DeLuca said Tuesday.


Lawyers say Dzhokhar's friends cooperated

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's friends made their first appearance before a judge Wednesday afternoon, when they were read the charges against them and informed of their rights.
All three started at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth in 2011, along with Tsarnaev. Only Tazhayakov is still enrolled, and he's been suspended "pending the outcome of the case," university spokesman Rob Lamontagne said.
They waived bail requests until a later court date. At one point, Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler admonished Phillipos, "I suggest you pay attention to me, rather than looking down."
Tazhayakov and Kadyrbayev appear in a photograph with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev taken in New York's Times Square during an earlier visit. They were taken into custody last month on charges that they had violated the terms of their student visas, Kadyrbayev attorney Stahl said last week.
All three were questioned at length on April 19, when the manhunt for Tsarnaev was in full swing. Tsarnaev's brother Tamerlan had been killed in a gun battle with police early that morning, while Tsarnaev was captured alive but badly wounded that night. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is being treated for gunshot wounds at a federal Bureau of Prisons medical center in Devens, Massachusetts.
About a month before the marathon attack, Tsarnaev had told Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov "that he knew how to make a bomb," according to an FBI affidavit recounting the charges. Kadyrbayev told investigators that Tsarnaev "appeared to have given himself a short haircut" two days after the bombings.


Kadyrbayev's lawyer Robert Stahl said his client "did not have anything to do" with the bombing and disputed charges that he tried to obstruct the investigation. And Harlan Protass, who represents Tazhayakov, said his client "has cooperated fully with the authorities and looks forward to the truth coming out in this case."
On Wednesday, he said Kadyrbayev was accused of a "technical violation" of a student visa "for not regularly attending classes." Federal law enforcement sources said at the time that the Kazakh students were being detained "in an abundance of caution" because authorities wanted detailed information on the Tsarnaevs' movements in the weeks and days before the attack.
Phillipos faces up to eight years in prison if convicted, along with a $250,000 fine; the charges against Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov carry sentences of up to five years and $250,000 in fines.
Alan Dershowitz, a prominent defense attorney and Harvard law professor, called the obstruction charge "weak," suggesting it was meant to pressure the suspects into providing more information on Tsarnaev.
"If that's the best the feds have now, then they're just squeezing," Dershowitz told CNN. "It doesn't sound like they have very much new here."


One of the reasons Kadyrbayev drew investigators' attention was because of changes to his Facebook page, a source briefed on the Boston probe said. Kadyrbayev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev changed their profile photos within 15 minutes of each other in the pre-dawn hours of April 19, while the Tsarnaevs were on the run, the source said.
Tsarnaev, who appears to have had access to a wireless device at that time, changed his to a black-and-white photo, while Kadyrbayev changed his photo to one of him wearing an Iron Man mask, the source said.

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Global labor protests mark May Day



David Agren, Special for USA TODAY


CHILPANCINGO, Mexico — Protesters armed with pipes, spray paint and slingshots marched through this state capital south of Mexico City, vandalizing public buildings to express opposition to teacher competency exams and the revoking of the right to sell their jobs to the highest bidder.
The Mexico teachers protest was among many demonstrations worldwide for May Day, a day when labor unions traditionally head to the streets to demand more pay and benefits and job protections.
Unions in Greece, where government jobs have been cut because of overspending of taxpayer money, held a strike that brought ferry and train services to a halt.
"We are here to send a message to … those in power in Europe, that we will continue our struggle against unfair, open-ended policies that are destroying millions of jobs," said Kostas Tsikrikas, leader of Greek public sector labor union ADEDY.
More than 100,000 Spaniards angry at budget cuts and higher taxes imposed to solve a nationwide budget deficit took to the streets in 80 cities. Under banners reading "Fight for your rights," union leaders called on the government to reverse its austerity drive.
May Day events in Turkey turned violent when some demonstrators threw stones and gasoline bombs at police. Security forces used water cannon and tear gas to prevent crowds from accessing Taksim Square.
But it was Mexico, the protests were criticized by residents who accuse teachers of focusing more on leftist politics than helping change a school system that fails to educate children adequately.
"There's Marxism in all of the teaching, right from the start," teacher Arturo Castaño says of his alma mater, the Escuela Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos, which takes pride in having produced teachers that have gone on to participate in guerrilla movements.
President Enrique Peña Nieto introduced measures — now enacted — shortly after taking office Dec. 1, to improve teaching in a school system whose students receive some of the lowest scores on standardized exams.
Many residents in Chilpancingo expressed frustration with the teachers, saying they've had to make other arrangements for their children or enroll them in private schools.
"There are some good public school teachers, but a lot of bad ones that don't have the proper training," Esther Cruz, a stationary shop employee and mother of three, says.
Teachers in this state, which spreads south of Mexico City across marginalized mountainous regions, argue that the changes stealthily "privatize" education by imposing fees on poor parents. They insist the exam process is a trick to fire teachers and them hire them back on hourly salaries without full benefits.
"This has nothing to do with education. it's an administrative measure," 30-year veteran teacher Román López, says of the changes. "We have dilapidated school infrastructure (in Guerrero) and the education reform does nothing to fix that."
The former head of the 1.4 million member National Education Workers Union, Elba Esther Gordillo, has been accused of embezzling approximately $200 million in union money spent in part on a luxury home in Coronado, Calif., and shopping sprees at Neiman Marcus.
Teachers in Guerrero have forced the local governor, Ángel Aguierre, to back down and propose a different version of an education reform to be applied locally.
They've kept up the pressure with protests, which included burning the headquarters of four political parties, storming the state congress, surrounding stores such as Wal-Mart and blocking the busy Acapulco-Mexico City highway. Teachers encouraged their students to join in the acts.
Castaño says the leftist curriculum in some regions is a way of addressing the difficulties of rural Mexico, where poverty is pervasive and many work for low wages picking sugar cane and tomatoes in northern states. Students arrive at school hungry and the infrastructure is so lacking that kids bring buckets to school for fetching water from a nearby creek for cleaning and drinking.
Parents pitch in money, Castaño says, to pay the school's monthly electricity bill.
Elsewhere, in Indonesia, tens of thousands of workers rallied for higher pay and other demands. Some carried banners reading: "Sentence corruptors to death and seize their properties" to protest a proposal for the government to slash fuel subsidies that have kept the country's pump prices among the cheapest in the region.
In the Philippines, 8,000 workers marched in Manila to demand more pay and regular jobs instead of contractual work. Some rallied outside the U.S. Embassy, torching a wooden painting stamped with the words "low wages" and "union busting" that depicted Philippine President Benigno Aquino III as a lackey of President Obama.
More than 10,000 Taiwanese protested a government plan to cut pension payouts to solve worsening fiscal problems. In Cambodia, more than 5,000 garment workers marched in Phnom Penh, demanding better working conditions and a salary increase.
In Havana, tens of thousands of Cubans joined the communist nation's traditional May Day march in the Plaza of the Revolution. This year's event was dedicated to Cuba's ally, the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez.


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Oro police score against fake dollars



Wednesday, May 1, 2013
THE Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) in Cagayan de Oro scored in its campaign against the proliferation of fake bills following the arrest of a suspected counterfeiter in an entrapment operation Monday afternoon in Barangay Tablon.
Senior Inspector Pepito Reyes, chief of the city’s CIDG, identified the suspect as Rogelio Gaid, 57, married, a native of in Kitaotao, Bukidnon.
Reyes said it was a joint operation with representatives from Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) in Manila that resulted to the apprehension of the suspect.
“The BSP representatives certified the bills as fake, which then signaled the operatives to apprehend the suspect,” Reyes said.
He said Gaid was with two other companions while transacting with CIDG undercover agents posing as buyers.
Gaid told Sun.Star Cagayan de Oro in an interview that his associates eluded arrest.
The suspect identified his companions as alias Dodong and Roberto, both residents of Barangay Balubal, this city.
Gaid held a backpack containing 145 US currency bills in different denominations worth $41,548 placed inside a brown envelop.
Reyes said the bills’ market worth is P6.1 million and is intended to be sold to wealthy people, the prospective clients of the suspect.
“The suspect belongs to an organized crime group operating in Northern Mindanao. Bihasa ito. Kaya nilang magsalita para bilugin ang ulo ng mga tao lalo na nung hindi nakakikilala sa kanila and swindle them (victims) (...They are well-versed. They can speak well enough to confuse people specially those who do not recognize them and then swindle the victims.),” Reyes told SunStar Cagayan de Oro.
Reyes said Gaid and his group were under surveillance two weeks ago following an intelligence report from a CIDG-recognized community investigative support (CIS).
He said the CIDG undercover agents then held a “test-buy”.
They bought worth P1,000 dollar bills in different denominations from Gaid’s group.
The bills then were forwarded to the BSP-Manila for examination. When the BSP-Manila certified the bills as fake, the entrapment operation was conducted.
But Gaid denied the allegations saying he was there only for another transaction with two of his accomplices.
“Wala gyud ko kahibalo, sir,” he told Sun.Star Cagayan de Oro, adding that “naa lang ko didto aron mag-istorya mi parte sa falcata nga kahoy nga among komprahon didto sa Kitaotao aron dalhon dinhi sa Cagayan (I don’t know anything about this. I was only there to talk to those people about our deal to buy falcata logs in Kitaotao [Bukidnon] which we plan on bringing to Cagayan).”
“Wala gani ko kahibalo ngano nga naa sa sulod ang kanang mga kwarta diha sa akong bag. Sige baya ko simba, sir unya mosulod na hinoon ko sa ingon ani (I don’t even know why there was money inside my bag. I regularly go to church, sir, so why would I get into this kind of thing?)” he added.
“Pero sa mga ebidensiya na nakuha natin sigurado kulong siya for violation of Article 168 of Revised Penal Code otherwise known as counterfeiting money bills. Pero bailable naman ito (But with the evidence that we gathered from him, surely he will be convicted in violation of Article 168 of the Revised Penal code otherwise known as counterfeiting money bills. But this is bailable),” Reyes said.
The case was filed Tuesday morning at the City Prosecutor’s Office.
Gaid said he is willing to cooperate with the authorities for the capture of his two other accomplices.
“Motabang gyud ko aron makabalos ko sa ilaha kay giilad ko nila (I will fully cooperate with the police so I could get even with them for deceiving me),” Gaid said.
Well-done
The BSP-Manila congratulated the CIDG-Cagayan de Oro for a well done job.
Edmundo Leopoldo, one of BSP’s currency analysts, told Sun.Star Cagayan de Oro that BSP certified the confiscated bills as fake and that it will be brought to Manila for laboratory examination.
“Sandali lang ang pagkilala sa fake na dollar bills. But we still need to conduct laboratory examination to determine how they were manufactured—electronic or by a printing machine,” he added.
Reyes said the CIDG’s next objective would be to identify the places where these bills are manufactured and the machine that the suspects used for production.
“This is our next objective - to prevent the circulation of fake money in the market,” he added.

 



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Benedict comes home to new house, new pope



Thursday, May 2, 2013
VATICAN CITY -- Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI is coming home to a new house and a new pope as an unprecedented era begins of a retired pontiff living side-by-side with a reigning one inside the Vatican gardens.
All eyes will be on Benedict's physical state Thursday as he is welcomed by Pope Francis. The last time he was seen by the public — March 23 — he appeared remarkably more frail and thin than when he left the Vatican on his final day as pope three weeks earlier.
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, has acknowledged the 86-year-old's post-retirement decline but insists he isn't suffering from any ailment and is just old.
Benedict will live in a converted monastery inside the Vatican gardens that has been renovated specifically for his use. (AP)
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Let My People Awake! 


By Orlan R. Ravanera
Kim's Dream

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

IT was written seven decades ago but that one poem of a poet laureate from India, Rabindranath Tagore still reverberates until now . . .”Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, Where knowledge is free, Where the world is not broken down by narrow domestic walls, In that heaven of freedom my Father, LET MY PEOPLE AWAKE!”
Although the call to awaken the Indian people was one of liberation against the British Colonial Rule, it is still very relevant today. This time, the call is for us to be conscious of the contemporary issues believing that an awakened people can craft their own destiny based on the truism that the people united can never be defeated. Today, we strongly advocate:
Let my people awake to the painful reality that, according to scientists and environmentalists, the “current degradation of the environment and the massive loss of species are evidence that we are facing our own extinction and that “in the absence of a major change, the world system will collapse in less than a hundred years.”
Let my people awake that fundamental changes are now sweeping Africa, Latin America and now going to Asia and centuries-old beliefs and convictions are crashing down like the twin tower of the world trade center in New York. Among these are, the belief that nature is inexhaustible and this belief has lead to massive exploitation of our resources. The belief that the “Darwin’s Theory of natural selection to society is that by fittest means the strongest and the most aggressive. That is a gross mistake in principle. By fittest, it really means most cooperative, most adaptive and most caring.” That is why, we must advance cooperativism, the collective quest to make life better for the people rather than the individual quest for self aggrandizement and wealth.
Let my people awake on the unsustainability of the global economic system that is anchored on a dominant paradigm that pursues growth-at-all-cost development strategy. That unbridled consumerism and materialism where there is over-eating and obesity in the North while billions are hungry in the South; the gross inequities are very glaring as the combined wealth of the world’s billionaires equals the income of three billion people.
Let my people awake that social transformation has been so elusive all these years as the structures that breed poverty have remained as formidable as ever; that our country is not a capitalist country but one that follows block capitalism where only 300 families control the economy through cartels; that democratizing wealth and power cannot be had because those in control cannot moderate their greed.
Let my people awake that political exercises have proven to be exercises in futility in effecting social change because those running are voted not because they are for social re-structuring but because they are movie stars or good speakers or popular or because of their names, or because they have so much money as they are funded by vested interest groups or cartels to perpetuate their control over the economy.
Let my people awake that the Filipinos are poor not because they are lazy or lack resources (the truth is, our country is oozing with ecological resources) but because they are powerless to have access and control over their resources which are fast slipping through their fingers.
Let my people awake that poverty is the consequence of putting power where it does not belong, that is, to the politicians who are cornering gargantuan funds through massive corruptions (that is res ipsa loquitor), to the cartels that exploit our resources at the expense of the people and the environment, to institutions that are mouthing moral issues and social change but are only successful in enriching themselves and to TNCs that have made our country dumping grounds of finished products while extracting so much raw materials and natural resources at the expense of our ecosystems (this again, is res ipsa loquitor).
Let my people awake that we now must work for social change, for paradigm shifts. Debunk conventional agriculture because it is just successful in impoverishing the peasantry and in polluting our environment. Stop those who are exploiting our natural resources with utter disregard for nature and the welfare of the coming generations. Stop those cartels that all these years are depriving the people of their ownership of utilities.
Let my people awake to stop political dynasties (which is prohibited in the 1987 Constitution); to stop vote-buying and to elect only those who are subservient to the interest of the people and not to those who are advancing the interest of a few elite.
Only when the people have awakened that we can bring this country to “that heaven of Freedom” where the people are free from hunger and poverty!
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Flow of Tainted Water Is Latest Crisis at Japan Nuclear Plant




Kyodo News, via Associated Press
Gray and silver storage tanks filled with radioactive waste water are sprawling over the grounds of the Fukushima Daiichi plant. 

TOKYO — Two years after a triple meltdown that grew into the world’s second worst nuclear disaster, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is faced with a new crisis: a flood of highly radioactive wastewater that workers are struggling to contain.  


Groundwater is pouring into the plant’s ravaged reactor buildings at a rate of almost 75 gallons a minute. It becomes highly contaminated there, before being pumped out to keep from swamping a critical cooling system. A small army of workers has struggled to contain the continuous flow of radioactive wastewater, relying on hulking gray and silver storage tanks sprawling over 42 acres of parking lots and lawns. The tanks hold the equivalent of 112 Olympic-size pools.
But even they are not enough to handle the tons of strontium-laced water at the plant — a reflection of the scale of the 2011 disaster and, in critics’ view, ad hoc decision making by the company that runs the plant and the regulators who oversee it. In a sign of the sheer size of the problem, the operator of the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, plans to chop down a small forest on its southern edge to make room for hundreds more tanks, a task that became more urgent when underground pits built to handle the overflow sprang leaks in recent weeks.
“The water keeps increasing every minute, no matter whether we eat, sleep or work,” said Masayuki Ono, a general manager with Tepco who acts as a company spokesman. “It feels like we are constantly being chased, but we are doing our best to stay a step in front.”
While the company has managed to stay ahead, the constant threat of running out of storage space has turned into what Tepco itself called an emergency, with the sheer volume of water raising fears of future leaks at the seaside plant that could reach the Pacific Ocean.
That quandary along with an embarrassing string of mishaps — including a 29-hour power failure affecting another, less vital cooling system — have underscored an alarming reality: two years after the meltdowns, the plant remains vulnerable to the same sort of large earthquake and tsunami that set the original calamity in motion.
There is no question that the Fukushima plant is less dangerous than it was during the desperate first months after the accident, mostly through the determined efforts of workers who have stabilized the melted reactor cores, which are cooler and less dangerous than they once were.
But many experts warn that safety systems and fixes at the plant remain makeshift and prone to accidents.
The jury-rigged cooling loop that pours water over the damaged reactor cores is a mazelike collection of pumps, filters and pipes that snake two and a half miles along the ground through the plant. And a pool for storing used nuclear fuel remains perched on the fifth floor of a damaged reactor building as Tepco struggles to move the rods to a safer location.
The situation is worrisome enough that Shunichi Tanaka, a longtime nuclear power proponent who is the chairman of the newly created watchdog Nuclear Regulation Authority, told reporters after the announcement of the leaking pits that “there is concern that we cannot prevent another accident.”
A growing number of government officials and advisers now say that by entrusting the cleanup to the company that ran the plant before the meltdowns, Japanese leaders paved the way for a return to the insider-dominated status quo that prevailed before the disaster.
Even many scientists who acknowledge the complexity of cleaning up the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl fear that the water crisis is just the latest sign that Tepco is lurching from one problem to the next without a coherent strategy.
“Tepco is clearly just hanging on day by day, with no time to think about tomorrow, much less next year,” said Tadashi Inoue, an expert in nuclear power who served on a committee that drew up the road map for cleaning up the plant.
But the concerns extend well beyond Tepco. While doing a more rigorous job of policing Japan’s nuclear industry than regulators before the accident, the Nuclear Regulation Authority has a team of just nine inspectors to oversee the more than 3,000 workers at Fukushima.
And a separate committee created by the government to oversee the cleanup is loaded with industry insiders, including from the Ministry of Trade, in charge of promoting nuclear energy, and nuclear reactor manufacturers like Toshiba and Hitachi. The story of how the Fukushima plant ended up swamped with water, critics say, is a cautionary tale about the continued dangers of leaving decisions about nuclear safety to industry insiders. 

 When Tepco and the government devised the current plans for decommissioning the plant in late 2011, groundwater had already been identified as a problem — the plant lies in the path of water flowing from nearby mountains to the sea. But decision makers placed too low a priority on the problem, critics say, assuming the water could be stored until it could be cleaned and disposed of. 

According to some who helped the government plan the cleanup, outside experts might have predicted the water problem, but Tepco and the government swatted away entreaties to bring in such experts or companies with more cleanup expertise, preferring to keep control of the plant within the collusive nuclear industry.
Tepco also rejected a proposal to build a concrete wall running more than 60 feet into the ground to block water from reaching the reactors and turbine buildings, and the Trade Ministry did not force the issue, according to experts and regulators who helped draw up the decommissioning plan.
Instead, Tepco made interim adjustments, including hastily building the plastic- and clay-lined underground water storage pits that eventually developed leaks.
It was only after the discovery of those leaks that the regulation agency was added as a full-fledged member to the government’s cleanup oversight committee.
But the biggest problem, critics say, was that Tepco and other members of the oversight committee appeared to assume all along that they would eventually be able to dump the contaminated water into the ocean once a powerful new filtering system was put in place that could remove 62 types of radioactive particles, including strontium.
The dumping plans have now been thwarted by what some experts say was a predictable problem: a public outcry over tritium, a relatively weak radioactive isotope that cannot be removed from the water.
Tritium, which can be harmful only if ingested, is regularly released into the environment by normally functioning nuclear plants, but even Tepco acknowledges that the water at Fukushima contains about 100 times the amount of tritium released in an average year by a healthy plant.
“We were so focused on the fuel rods and melted reactor cores that we underestimated the water problem,” said Tatsujiro Suzuki, vice chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, a government body that helped draw up Tepco’s original cleanup plan. “Someone from outside the industry might have foreseen the water problem.”
Tepco rejects the criticism that it has mishandled the growing groundwater problem, saying that the only way to safely stop the inflow is by plugging the cracks in the damaged reactor buildings. It contends that no company in the world has the ability to do that because it would require entering the highly radioactive buildings and working in dangerously toxic water several feet deep.
“We operate the plant, so we know it better than anyone else,” said Mr. Ono, the Tepco spokesman. He then teared up, adding, “Fixing this mess that we made is the only way we can regain the faith of society.”
For the moment, that goal seems distant. The public outcry over the plans to dump tritium-tainted water into the sea — driven in part by the company’s failure to inform the public in 2011 when it dumped radioactive water into the Pacific — was so loud that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe personally intervened last month to say that there would be “no unsafe release.”
Meanwhile, the amount of water stored at the plant just keeps growing.
“How could Tepco not realize that it had to get public approval before dumping this into the sea?” said Muneo Morokuzu, an expert on public policy at the University of Tokyo who has called for creating a specialized new company just to run the cleanup. “This all just goes to show that Tepco is in way over its head.” 

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Colleges Adapt Online Courses to Ease Burden

Katie Kormanik preparing to record a statistics course at Udacity, an online classroom instruction provider in Mountain View, Calif.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Dazzled by the potential of free online college classes, educators are now turning to the gritty task of harnessing online materials to meet the toughest challenges in American higher education: giving more students access to college, and helping them graduate on time.

Nearly half of all undergraduates in the United States arrive on campus needing remedial work before they can begin regular credit-bearing classes. That early detour can be costly, leading many to drop out, often in heavy debt and with diminished prospects of finding a job.
Meanwhile, shrinking state budgets have taken a heavy toll at public institutions, reducing the number of seats available in classes students must take to graduate. In California alone, higher education cuts have left hundreds of thousands of college students without access to classes they need.
To address both problems and keep students on track to graduation, universities are beginning to experiment with adding the new “massive open online courses,” created to deliver elite college instruction to anyone with an Internet connection, to their offerings. 
While the courses, known as MOOCs, have enrolled millions of students around the world, most who enroll never start a single assignment, and very few complete the courses. So to reach students who are not ready for college-level work, or struggling with introductory courses, universities are beginning to add extra supports to the online materials, in hopes of improving success rates.
Here at San Jose State, for example, two pilot programs weave material from the online classes into the instructional mix and allow students to earn credit for them.
“We’re in Silicon Valley, we breathe that entrepreneurial air, so it makes sense that we are the first university to try this,” said Mohammad Qayoumi, the university’s president. “In academia, people are scared to fail, but we know that innovation always comes with the possibility of failure. And if it doesn’t work the first time, we’ll figure out what went wrong and do better.”
In one pilot program, the university is working with Udacity, a company co-founded by a Stanford professor, to see whether round-the-clock online mentors, hired and trained by the company, can help more students make their way through three fully online basic math courses.
The tiny for-credit pilot courses, open to both San Jose State students and local high school and community college students, began in January, so it is too early to draw any conclusions. But early signs are promising, so this summer, Udacity and San Jose State are expanding those classes to 1,000 students, and adding new courses in psychology and computer programming, with tuition of only $150 a course.
San Jose State has already achieved remarkable results with online materials from edX, a nonprofit online provider, in its circuits course, a longstanding hurdle for would-be engineers. Usually, two of every five students earn a grade below C and must retake the course or change career plans. So last spring, Ellen Junn, the provost, visited Anant Agarwal, an M.I.T. professor who taught a free online version of the circuits class, to ask whether San Jose State could become a living lab for his course, the first offering from edX, an online collaboration of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Ms. Junn hoped that blending M.I.T.’s online materials with live classroom sessions might help more students succeed. Dr. Agarwal, the president of edX, agreed enthusiastically, and without any formal agreement or exchange of money, he arranged for San Jose State to offer the blended class last fall.
The results were striking: 91 percent of those in the blended section passed, compared with 59 percent in the traditional class.
“We’re engineers, and we check our results, but if this semester is similar, we will not have the traditional version next year,” said Khosrow Ghadiri, who teaches the blended class. “It would be educational malpractice.”
It is hard to say, though, how much the improved results come from the edX online materials, and how much from the shift to classroom sessions focusing on small group projects, rather than lectures.
Finding better ways to move students through the start of college is crucial, said Josh Jarrett, a higher education officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which in the past year has given grants to develop massive open online courses for basic and remedial courses. 


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Fast, Cheap, Dead: Shopping and the Bangladesh Factory Collaps





                           MUNIR UZ ZAMAN/AFT/GETTY IMAGES
       Rescuers comb the shattered remnants of a textile factory near 
Dhaka, Bangladesh. Nearly 400 people havedied in the building's collapse
The collapse of a factory building near Dhaka, Bangladesh, which killed at least 362 people, is almost certainly the worst accident in the history of the garment industry. It’s worse than the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 that you learned 
about in American history class and which helped lead to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards. It’s worse than the 1993 Kader Toy Factory fire in Bangkok, which killed 188 people, nearly all of them women and teenage girls. It’s worse than the Ali Enterprises Factory fire in Karachi, which killed at least 262 people — and which I’m guessing nearly all of us had forgotten about, or never knew it occurred, even though the disaster happened only eight months ago.
Bangladeshi officials are still investigating the causes behind the factory’s collapse on April 24, although Sohel Rana, the building’s owner, was arrested over the weekend as he attempted to flee the country. There’s no shortage of possible reasons — building codes in Bangladesh are too rarely enforced and corruption in the country is rampant. Nor, sadly, are such disasters rare. A major fire in a textile factory in Dhaka killed over 100 people just last November. While thousands of Bangladeshi protesters have taken to the streets in the wake of the building collapse, and the political opposition has called for a national strike on May 2, there’s little hope that the catastrophe will be the last that the country’s garment workers suffer.
The clothes that the doomed workers in Dhaka were laboring over when their factory collapsed include some Western brands, like Primark and Joe Fresh. Is there anything we as clothing consumers can or should do about these deaths? In a post written last week as the dead were still being tallied in the building collapse, Slate’s economics blogger Matthew Yglesias suggests, not really:
Yglesias was raked over the coals by, as he put it in a later piece, just about the entire Internet. (This one was particularly good.) Yglesias was guilty of, at the very least, bad taste — the economic wonkery can wait until the dead have been counted. He makes the neoliberal point, just as the sweatshop defenders did during the Nike Wars of the 1990s, that Bangladesh’s low, low cost of doing business has helped the country take needed textile jobs — including from China — and build an $18 billion manufacturing industry. But there’s a difference between accepting that workers are being paid sweatshop wages to make our incredibly inexpensive clothes — the minimum wage is $36.50 a month — and accepting that they must labor in deathtraps. And they do: according to the International Labor Rights Forum, an advocacy group in Washington, more than 1,000 Bangladeshi garment workers have died in fires and other disasters.
Even Yglesias backtracked later, emphasizing that there are on-the-ground improvements that can be made to labor standards in Bangladesh that could mean the difference between life and death. (See this interview with Kimberly Ann Elliott of the Center for Global Development for a few ideas.) And those improvements shouldn’t drastically increase the cost of clothes made in Bangladesh — which is a good thing, given our addiction to cheap and fast-changing fashion:      
International retailers can do more to advocate safer standards at textile factories that manufacture their wares, in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Customers can do their part by putting a little pressure on their favorite brands, though that would require placing as much value on the cost of a life as you might on the cost of a T-shirt.

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Abdelaziz Bouteflika: Is Algeria’s Strongman on His Way Out?  



                                 FAROUK BATICHE/GETTY IMAGES
               Algeria's President Abdelaziz Bouteflika welcomes 
                          the Emir of Kuwait in Algiers on Jan.14,2013

Two days after Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika was airlifted to a military hospital in Paris to be treated for a supposed “mini-stroke,” his doctors raced to reassure the country that the autocratic ruler was not seriously ill and, indeed, would soon be home — a message that seemed designed to ward off any maneuvers by his rivals to oust him during his absence. “The President is in very good health,” his doctor Rachid Bougherbal was quoted as saying in the government-aligned Ennahar newspaper on Monday, adding that the President would return to Algiers “in not more than seven days.”
Still, the doctor’s message did little to tamp down furious speculation among Algerians. Bouteflika had barely left the country when politicians and analysts began debating whether his 14-year rule was finally over, or at least how much longer he was capable of governing the oil-rich North African country, which has by far the region’s biggest military, and which has faced a long-standing Islamist insurgency. Algerian newspapers were filled on Monday with heated discussion over the country’s future. With the government notoriously secret, Algerians have grown accustomed to picking apart official statements and looking for clues about the true state of affairs. “There is something new this time, in that the announcement of the President’s illness was made by the presidency,” political analyst Rashid Grim told the Algerian newspaper al-Watan; previous bouts of illness went unexplained to the public. “This means he is sick but that his life is not in danger.” Grim also said he believed the regime had already chosen someone to step into power in case Bouteflika were incapacitated.
Bouteflika came to power after Algeria’s devastating civil war against Islamist fighters, which is believed to have killed up to 200,000 people, on the promise of cracking down hard on militants, and keeping Algeria safe from insurgency — to a large extent, at the expense of open democracy. For Western leaders, Bouteflika’s departure, if it happened, could entail a tough adjustment, especially since the Arab Spring ousted longtime allies in Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.
After the 9/11 attacks, Bouteflika signed an intelligence-sharing relationship with the U.S. Bouteflika refused to join the NATO-led campaign against Muammar Gaddafi in next-door Libya in 2011, and refused to send Algerian troops to join the French-led offensive in northern Mali in January. Yet when Islamist militants seized the In Amenas gas plant in southeastern Algeria in January, killing dozens of foreign oil workers, Bouteflika allowed U.S. surveillance drones to hover overhead throughout the siege. “Algiers has been feted by Paris and Washington in the hopes of enlisting Algeria’s help in stabilizing northern Mali and performing a broader regional counterterrorism role,” says Geoff Porter, director of North Africa Risk Consulting Inc. in Washington. “If the presidency is prematurely up for grabs, Algeria would turn acutely inward. France and the U.S. would find themselves without reliable interlocutors.”
Algerians have good reason to question the statement from Bouteflika’s doctor about the President’s health. In 2005 and again in 2006, Bouteflika was flown to the same French military hospital in Paris, for what his doctors said was treatment for a hemorrhagic stomach ulcer. A year later, Bouteflika admitted that he had been “very, very ill.” But it took a few years more before Algerians learned that their President had in fact undergone treatment for cancer — and even then, they were not told by their own government. The truth emerged only in 2011, when WikiLeaks published a U.S. diplomatic cable in which then ambassador Robert Ford wrote in 2007 that a doctor close to Bouteflika had “told us in strictest confidence that the President suffered from cancer.” That was news to Algerians.
This time, Bouteflika, 76, has taken ill at an intensely awkward time. For months, top officials in the regime have squabbled bitterly over who might ultimately succeed Bouteflika — a subject that until recently seemed almost unmentionable. Under constitutional reforms that are currently under way, Algeria is set to appoint a Deputy President for the first time, a move aimed at paving the way for succession, after years in which Bouteflika has ruled the country with unchallenged authority.
Despite his frail health, Bouteflika has made it clear he intends to stand for a fourth term in office. That would all but ensure his victory, since the controlled process weeds out serious threats to his leadership. “The intelligence services are trying to make sure that the succession process goes their way,” says Riccardo Fabiani, North Africa analyst for the Eurasia Group in London. Given the fact that Bouteflika’s successor could rule for more than a decade, who comes next is crucial for Algeria. Despite its mammoth oil and gas reserves, the country faces declining production and high youth unemployment — both factors that could potentially spark an Arab Spring–style revolt. “There is no long-term perspective about when Algeria’s oil runs out,” Fabiani told TIME on Monday. That could happen, he says, “realistically between 10 and 20 years’ time.”
For most Algerians, the political crisis has arrived far sooner. With Bouteflika out of sight, the tone in the country’s media was impatient, and even irreverent, given the President’s fragile state. The Oran Daily, a newspaper in Algeria’s industrial city, said on Monday that it was unclear whether Bouteflika could last as President even until next year’s election, and warned that Algeria risked all-out revolt by keeping its ruler too long, as Libyans did with Gaddafi and Syrians with Bashar Assad. “We are dangerously infected with the syndrome of Gaddafi or Bashar,” the paper’s editorial said. In a more irreverent tone, a cartoonist in al-Watan showed Bouteflika’s medical team addressing a press conference, and announcing in unison: “The President will need to maintain total rest during his fourth term in office.”

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The Reign of Spain: Can Roca Ousts Noma as World’s Best Restaurant 




DAVID RAMOS/GETTY IMAGES
Cooks and prepare dishes at the restaurant
 El Celler de can Roca on May 19,2011, in Girona Spain
The king is dead; long live the king. Just when it seem that the food world had moved definitively beyond the high-wire pyrotechnics of modern Spanish cooking to embrace the less adorned lichen and sea buckthorn of new Nordic cuisine, along came the 2013 list of the San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants to say: not so fast. At its annual awards ceremony, held April 29 in London’s Guild Hall, the top honor went to El Celler de Can Roca, located in the northeastern Spanish city of Girona. There, avant-garde executive chef Joan Roca invents daring new dishes from things like distilled soil; one of his younger brothers, sommelier Josep, keeps a cellar where music and video images are matched to the flavors of his favorite wines; and the other, pastry chef Jordi, creates desserts that taste like the fragrance of well-known perfumes. Copenhagen’s Noma, which had held the top spot for the past three years, fell to second place.
Among Spaniards, Can Roca’s victory came as welcome reassurance that the country’s moment in the culinary sun was not over. Although Spanish restaurants have performed strongly for several years — two others, Mugaritz and Arzak, retained their positions in the top 10 of 2013’s list — it hasn’t taken first place since Copenhagen’s Noma displaced Ferran Adrià’s revolutionary elBulli in 2010. “It shows a consolidation of our position,” says Rafael Ansón, president of the Royal Spanish Academy of Gastronomy. “It’s the strongest confirmation that in the world of chef-artists, we are the best.”
But the results came as a surprise to some. Says Joanna Savill, director of the festival Crave Sydney: “You have to admire Can Roca, because what they do is so beautiful, so poetic, so evocative. But that’s not the global story at the moment. The global story, the new story, is about chefs reflecting who and where they are.”
That the restaurant industry now craves novelty almost as much as Hollywood does can be attributed in part to the 50 Best list itself. Founded 11 years ago, its audacious innovation was to rank restaurants, based on the votes of the hundreds of chefs and journalists who make up its jury. That simple mechanism has made it tremendously influential, catapulting chefs to prominence and changing the economic fortunes of their restaurants. The day after Noma first won the top slot, its reservationist received 100,000 booking requests.
This year, chefs from 49 of the 50 restaurants attended the award ceremony — proof of how highly regarded it is among them. “It’s an incredible honor,” says Alex Atala, chef of São Paulo’s DOM, which placed 6th this year. “To get this kind of recognition, especially when you come from a part of the world that hasn’t been known for its restaurant culture, is incredible.”
By insisting that jurors use at least three of their seven votes on restaurants outside their own regions, the organization helps ensure a certain geographic diversity. For countries or regions that have not traditionally been part of haute cuisine’s pantheon, the sense that the centers of gravity are expanding can be exhilarating. “We’re the first restaurant from Melbourne to ever make the list, and I’ve been getting messages from people at home — maybe 200 of them — all day,” says Ben Shewry, chef of Attica, which came in at No. 21. “But there’s also a sense of pride among Australiaas a whole; I feel like the whole country is behind us.”
Yet for all the enthusiasm that surrounds it, the list is not without controversy, and not just of the “How did that place get there?” kind. Britain’s Restaurant magazine, which oversees the rankings, has been criticized for a lack of transparency. The organization never releases the number of actual votes that each restaurant receives, nor does it require proof from its jury members that they have actually dined in the restaurants they vote for.
And of course the very premise that something as subjective as a restaurant can somehow be judged “best” in the world is itself questionable. Nevertheless, because the list tends to elevate not just chefs but the cuisines that give rise to them, it helps contribute to the sense of a hierarchy of nations — first Spanish cuisine was on top, then Nordic — and raise expectations that one cuisine will replace another (for premonitions of the next big thing, look to the unprecedented presence of six Latin American restaurants on this year’s list).
In London, a visibly moved Joan Roca was modest as he stepped on stage to accept the award for a restaurant that he and his brothers started over a decade ago. “We don’t know if we are the best, but you can be sure we will continue working with audacity, with generosity, and with creativity,” he told the audience. But as photographers crowded around to shoot photos of the world’s newest top chef, he couldn’t help reflecting on the win’s national importance. “Spanish gastronomy needed this,” he told TIME. “We needed a push like this to prove ourselves again in front of the world.”


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Obamacare Progress 

By Joe Klein 
April 29, 2013

A few weeks ago, I gave the President a tough time about the slow and messy implementation of his health care plan. But there’s been some progress in recent weeks — and I’m happy to pass it on.
One of the things that concerned me was the 21-page application form that was required for people to join a health care exchange — which, if you’re unfamiliar with the jargon, is an online health-insurance superstore (think Orbitz or Hotels.com) where individuals will have the collective market power of large corporations like, say, Time Warner.
Tomorrow morning the Administration will announce a spiffy, new three-page application for individuals (which we’ll attach here when it becomes public).* There will be a seven-page application for families (11 including the appendix), but even that one will be far better designed than the initial effort. “We did a lot of work testing words, to come up with simpler language,” an Administration official told me, “and we did time tests. Our average was seven minutes to fill out the paper version and even less if you do it online.”
This compares favorably with applications for private insurance plans, which average about 17 pages (and can go as high as 35). “We’re hoping to move as many people as possible to the e-mail application form,” a second Administration official told me. “We received a lot of [negative] feedback from insurers and individuals like you when we published the first application forms, and we’re trying to be responsive to those concerns.”
My primary concerns remain the implementation of the online superstores. I remain concerned that employees of small businesses won’t have a choice of health plans in the first year. I’m also concerned that the state exchanges run by the federal government — over the opposition of Republican governors — won’t offer as many choices as a true market should.
There are more than a few other concerns and ways the system might be improved that I’ve written about in the past. The good news about the streamlined application, though, is that it shows the Administration is alert and flexible and responsive — and, if we’re lucky, may turn out to be innovative in enacting a system that will bring health care to those who haven’t had it before, and lower costs to the self-employed masses who’ve had to go out and buy insurance on their own.
*The application form will be even simpler for higher-income individuals and families that aren’t eligible for a health-insurance subsidy but want to shop at the exchange in search of less expensive coverage.
 

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