Bomb suspect's buddies covered for him, feds say
By Matt Smith, CNN
May 2, 2013 -- Updated 0933 GMT (1733 HKT)
(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.
Detained students enjoyed attention
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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.
The case against Tsarnaev's friends
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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.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Global labor protests mark May Day
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.
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.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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)
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Let My People Awake!
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!
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Flow of Tainted Water Is Latest Crisis at Japan Nuclear Plant
By MARTIN FACKLER
Published: April 29, 2013
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.”
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Colleges Adapt Online Courses to Ease Burden
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: April 29, 2013
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
April 29, 2013
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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.
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?
April 29, 2013
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| 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
April 29, 2013
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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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