TGIF Edition 22 Oct 2010

22 NZ October 2010 TONIGHT

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ISSN 1172-4153 | Volume 3 | Issue 69 |

| 22 October 2010

Killer tried to murder Crewes twice on the INSIDE Jeannette’s Brakes Cut In 1969

By Ian Wishart

The killer of Pukekawa farmers Harvey and Jeannette Crewe tried to murder the couple twice, and only succeeded on the second occasion.

In a dramatic new twist to the 40 year old cold case tonight, two witnesses have come forward to reveal the brake lines on Jeannette’s car were cut “clean through” in early 1969, soon after the first fire at the house that had been ignited using baby Rochelle’s clothes.

It’s the first time this first attempt on the lives of the couple and baby Rochelle – believed to have been a passenger in the car – has ever been made public, and it comes from an elderly Auckland couple.

“My wife was in the [maternity] annex with Jeannette Crewe,” the new witness told TGIF Edition today,“they were in adjoining beds and became good friends.

“Somebody cut the brake lines on Jeannette’s car”he told us,“It was cut clean through, and had to have been done by a professional person.”

“Jeannette complained that the brake line was cut and she’d had to stop the car.”

“She was driving out the drive and the car wouldn’t stop,”remembers his wife.“It wasn’t long after we got home from the annex. She told me she hadn’t been able to get out of the house because the car had to be repaired and it took a couple of weeks.

She was definitely quite shaken, I can tell you that.”

The Crewe house driveway opened out onto State Highway 22. Brake failure could have been lethal.

Terminated It’s over for Arnie Page 5

“ The fires and that together,to me they had to have been done by the same people. I’m not sure whether she reported it to police or not,”adds the husband.

In the books, newspaper clippings and police documents released in the Crewe murder inquiry, there appears to be no reference to Jeannette’s brake failure. In fact, there’s no evidence Jeannette reported the brake sabotage to police either, and that in itself raises enormous questions.Was there

a reason for her not to involve police?

The couple’s problems appear to have begun with a burglary in 1967, which was attended by police officer Len Johnston – named in the new book The Inside Story as being responsible for a 1963 fire at the Otahuhu Police Station that he lit in a bid to incriminate a police colleague.

There’s some evidence the 1967 burglary was an

The new Mata Hari Russian spy hot in Moscow Page 9

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Hobbit threat a beat-up: Hollywood source

By Richard Verrier Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES – So much for peace breaking out in the Shire.

A day after the Screen Actors Guild announced it was ending its do-not-work order on the production of“The Hobbit,”Warner Bros. today denounced the unions that boycotted its production and said it was weighing locations outside of New Zealand for filming the two-picture project.

“The actions of these unions have caused us substantial damage and disruption and forced us to

consider other filming locations for the first time,” said Warner Bros., whose New Line Cinema unit is producing the films with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Warner Bros. noted that most of the seven international unions that participated in the boycott had not yet rescinded their do-not-work orders.The studio also balked at demands by New Zealand Actors Equity,which has been seeking to secure union wages and benefits for performers in New Zealand.

Warner maintains that the New Zealand performers are independent contractors, not union members, and that it would be illegal for the studio to participate in contract negotiations.

The studio’s statement follows claims made this week by Peter Jackson, the film’s director and producer, that plans were under way to move the production to another country, even if the SAG boycott were lifted, because the “damage inflicted on our film industry”was “long since done.”

Jackson told New Zealand media that representatives of Warner Bros. would be visiting New Zealand to “make arrangements to move the production offshore.”

A person familiar with the production, however, said Warner Bros. executives had not made a final decision and that the purpose of the trip was to seek

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assurances from the New Zealand government and Actors Equity that the studio’s $500 million investment in “The Hobbit”would not be jeopardized by future labour unrest.

Warner Bros. may be hoping that the threat of moving “The Hobbit” could prompt New Zealand officials to offer added financial incentives to keep the production in the country. Production on the first film is set to begin in February.

Concern that New Zealand might lose“The Hobbit”has divided actors there and sparked protests Wednesday among some 1,500 film industry workers who staged a rally in the country’s capital,Wellington.

NEW ZEALAND

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off BEAT LOOSE CROCODILE CAUSED PLANE CRASH KINSHASA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO, OCT. 22 (UPI) – A passenger plane crashed in the Democratic Republic of Congo in August when a crocodile escaped from a smuggler’s bag, causing a panic, the lone survivor says.

The Daily Telegraph reported the Czech-made Let L-410 Turbolet was on a flight from Kinshasa to Bandundu on Aug. 25 when the reptile got out of the sports bag where it had been secreted.

The terrified air hostess hurried towards the cockpit, followed by the passengers, the investigation report stated. The stampede caused the plane to be sent off-balance despite the desperate efforts of the pilot, the report said.

The aircraft plunged into a house near the Bandundu airport where it was heading. Twenty people on board died.

The British newspaper said the crocodile survived the impact but was killed by someone with a machete.

SEX NOT SO MAGIC AFTER ALL SYDNEY, OCT. 22 (UPI) – Three people are on trial in Australia for allegedly telling people they’d been cursed then luring them to prayer sessions that involved sex, officials say.

Tony Golossian, 62, Arthur Psichogios, 40, and his wife, Frances Psichogios, 39 have pleaded not guilty to charges, The (Sydney) Daily Telegraph reported.

Crown prosecutor Sarah Huggett said victims were told curses had been put on them and that to remove the curses they had to attend prayer sessions where they were blindfolded and sex took place.

The women also received phone calls from demonic voices, Huggett alleged.

The fiance of one of the victims also received similar calls telling him not to marry the woman, calls Hugget said were designed to isolate her.

The man testified he broke up with his fiancee after the phone calls told him she was sleeping around, the jury in the black magic sex trial heard.

THE PC GUIDE TO FEEDING DUCKS HAILSHAM, ENGLAND, OCT. 22 (UPI) – A British woman said she was lectured by a city official for feeding white bread to ducks instead of whole grain.

Lisa Taplin, 34, of Hailsham, England, said she and her sons, Luke, 4, and Dylan, 2, were feeding the ducks at a local pond when a council warden approached and told her the white bread she was using was unhealthy for the water fowl, The Sun reported.

Taplin said the warden told her giving the ducks white bread was like feeding kids chips every day.

“He said it would be better to bring whole meal, granary or bird seed. He walked off, leaving me feeling guilty,” Taplin said.

Nickey Caria, Hailsham’s deputy town clerk, said the council warden was right to lecture the woman.

UK MP’S WIFE SNATCHES MISTRESS’ KITTEN BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND, OCT. 22 (UPI) – A British politician’s wife is facing a burglary charge for allegedly stealing a kitten from her husband’s mistress, authorities said.

Christine Hemming, 52, the wife of John Hemming, who represents Birmingham in Parliament, was charged with burglary after she allegedly took the kitten Sept. 29 from the home of Emily Cox, The Birmingham Post reported.

At the time there was a four-year-old child and an adult present in the house. The kitten had sentimental value to the 4-year-old child, prosecutor David Devine said. Because of the deliberate targeting of Miss Cox and the history between the two women, it must be dealt with at the crown court.

Hemming was released on conditional bail and ordered to avoid all contact with Cox. In 2005, it emerged John Hemming had fathered a child with Cox. Christine Hemming said at the time she was standing by her husband and accepting the child as a member of the family.

22 October 2010

Daycare fees to rise

WELLINGTON, OCT 22 – Early childhood centres expect to have to raise fees by between $10 and $50 a week next year because of funding cuts, a new survey has shown.

Current funding covers 100 percent qualified teachers at the centres, and it is going to be reduced to cover 80 percent.

The Government says there has been a budget blowout and has acknowledged some parents could

be affected by fee increases.

The survey was carried out by the New Zealand Childcare Association (NZCA) and reported on 199 early childhood centres.

“The survey paints a troubling picture of confidence in the early childhood sector,” said NZCA chief executive Nancy Bell.

“Centres are expecting a large shortfall from the reduction of funding, with over 70 percent of

respondents forced to pass some of the shortfall on to parents.”

She said centres were looking at fee increases of between $10 and $50 a week which would be a significant amount for parents with children in full-time care.

“Most services expect to lose between $20,000 and $50,000, the equivalent of a teacher’s salary,” Ms Bell said.

“One of our concerns is the impact on quality with ratios, professional development and the amount of qualified teachers on the line.”

She said NZCA members were committed to 100 percent qualified teachers, but didn’t know how they would retain them under the new funding regime.

“The centres that have worked hard to achieve 100 percent are now disadvantaged,”she said.

“Qualified teachers are a key component of quality early childhood and every child should have access to them.”

The Government has announced a taskforce that will examine all aspects of early childhood education.

It is concerned that too many children, particularly in low income areas, are missing out.

Ms Bell said she hoped the taskforce would carefully consider the survey“and recommend a sustainable funding model which supports the delivery of high quality early childhood education”.

– NZPA

Swine flu mutates in NZ WELLINGTON, OCT 22 – Overseas medical researchers watching mutations in the H1N1 2009 swine flu virus in New Zealand say that so far minor genetic changes in the 2009 flu virus don’t seem to make existing vaccines less effective, but the altered strains bear watching.

“At this stage, these signature changes in the ... proteins have not resulted in significant antigenic changes which might make the current vaccine less effective,”Australian and Singaporean researchers said today in Eurosurveillance, an epidemiology magazine.

But they said the“adaptive mutations”should be carefully monitored as the northern hemisphere enters its winter flu season.

In New Zealand, the head of the World Health Organisation’s national influenza centre at state science company Environmental Science and Research, Dr Sue Huang, told NZPA that the genetic changes were happening all the time as part of the normal evolution of the virus.

But whether the virus was “fit”for survival was only one part of the issue.

More important was a process known as “antigenic drift”– changes in the way the virus interacted with the immune systems of humans, Dr Huang said.

The virus variations had not been found in any New Zealand cases where patients had died, or in cases where H1N1 had broken though the protection given by a vaccination.

Since January, 1810 cases of pandemic (H1N1) 09 virus have been recorded in New Zealand, including 1759 confirmed, 24 probable, and 27 still under investigation.

The original H1N1 swine flu virus has appeared relatively stable, but all such viruses are constantly evolving genetically.

The original H1N1 swine flu virus has appeared relatively stable, but all such viruses are constantly evolving genetically.

Two such genetic changes in the virus were first identified in Singapore during April, and by the middle of the year that genetic type of the virus had become dominant there. It was found in New Zealand in July and August.

Viruses with both the main variations have not yet been reported in any northern hemisphere countries.

The researchers speculated that in Australia and Singapore, the variants may have been associated with several cases where infections occurred in spite of vaccination, as well as in a number of fatal cases, but said this could not be proved.

“It remains to be seen whether this variant will

continue to predominate for the rest of the influenza season in Oceania and in other parts of the southern hemisphere and then spread to the northern hemisphere or merely die out,”the researchers wrote.

The variations might be an early signal of the start of a genetic “drift” to create a new human influenza virus that may require a vaccine update sooner than expected.

Dr Huang said the data used in the study was considered when WHO experts made their recommendations for the vaccine strains to be used for the Southern Hemisphere’s 2011 flu season.

Next year’s New Zealand seasonal flu vaccine will have the same strains as this year: A/California/7/2009 (H1N1)-like virus; A/Perth/16/2009 (H3N2)-like virus; B/Brisbane/60/2008-like virus.

Kiwi drifts down ahead of G20 WELLINGTON, OCT 22 – The New Zealand dollar drifted lower today ahead of a long holiday weekend and as investors awaited developments in the international economic story.

The NZ dollar was at US74.78c at 5pm, from US74.64c at 8am and US74.99c at 5pm yesterday.

The US dollar drifted higher as investors cut long positions ahead of the Group of 20 meeting in South Korea at the weekend.

The US dollar’s broad rebound from earlier losses came amid questions about the extent of expected

economic stimulus measures by the Federal Reserve to boost the US economy.

ANZ bank said the higher US dollar could be put down to nervousness ahead of the G20 meeting starting today. It doubted any meaningful agreement on co-ordinated exchange rate policies would emerge.

With a long weekend approaching in New Zealand, and an interest rate decision next week by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ), the market drifted.

“We expect the RBNZ to hold the OCR at 3 percent next Thursday. With Governor Alan Bollard

effectively giving current market pricing of rates on hold until early 2011 the thumbs up this week, it is hard to envisage any great surprises from the announcement,” Goldman Sachs & Partners New Zealand said in a preview.

The NZ dollar was down to 0.5368 euro at 5pm from 0.5390 euro at the same time yesterday and it edged down to 60.69 yen from 60.86. It was little changed at A76.29c from A76.31c yesterday.

The trade weighted index fell to 66.44 from 66.59.

– NZPA

NEW ZEALAND

22 October 2010

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Man gets 9 yrs for road-rage

Woman gets home-D for roadkill WHANGAREI, OCT 22 – A Northland mother has been sentenced to 12 months home detention for drunk and careless driving causing the death of a 29-year-old father of two.

Zoey Rawinia Wineera, 23, appeared in Whangarei District Court for sentence today after earlier pleading guilty to careless use of a motor vehicle causing death and drunk driving causing death.

Wineera was also found guilty on a charge of without reasonable excuse failed to ascertain injury after she ran over Sheridan Snowden near Mokau, 45km north of Whangarei, on October 11 last year.

The pair had been at the same barbecue earlier that evening.

Mr Snowden did not want to drink and drive so called his partner to pick him up. He sat, or lay on the road waiting for his lift when the car Wineera was driving ran over him, killing him almost instantly.

Judge Thomas Everitt sentenced Wineera to 12 months jail, then converted it to home detention, saying under the circumstances of the unusual case it was an appropriate sentence.

– NZPA

HAMILTON, OCT 22 – Enraged because another driver flashed his lights and honked his horn at him, Rotorua man Richard Marsters followed and confronted the man before shooting him in the jaw and arm with a pistol.

As the man lay on the ground, Marsters used the firearm to beat him about the head.

At Marsters’sentencing in the High Court at Hamilton today,a judge denounced his actions with a prison term of nine years,six months for the attempted murder of the man, whose name is suppressed.

Justice Denis Clifford imposed an additional three years’ jail for assaulting the man with a weapon. This is to be served concurrently with the longer sentence, however both sentences are cumulative on a four-year prison term Marsters is presently serving on methamphetamine and cannabis convictions.

He was ordered to serve a minimum non-parole period of six years.

A jury at a Hamilton trial in August found 50-year-old Marsters guilty of the attempted murder and assault with a weapon charges.

“The jury clearly inferred your use of the firearm demonstrated your intention to kill,” Justice Clifford said.

He described Marsters’ actions as “dangerous, sustained and violent offending in a public place”.

“They demonstrated outright thuggery ... an extreme form of road rage in response to a minor matter.”

He noted Marsters showed no remorse.

Outlining the offending, Justice Clifford said Marsters had stopped on Rotorua’s Te Ngae Rd where the victim had flashed his lights and honked at him. He followed the man to near-by Eruera St, demanding to know what he had been doing.

The victim’s nephew wrestled with Marsters who charged at the older man, abusing him and poking

him with the barrel of a pistol concealed in his vest pocket.

Marsters then hit him, pointed the pistol at his throat, struck him in the chest then shot him twice. Stunned and concussed, the man stagged to the ground where Marsters used the pistol to hit him about the head. As Marsters drove off, the victim’s nephew noted the car’s number plate.

Although the man’s physical injuries had not been on-going, his victim impact statement indicated he had suffered in many other ways.

His then-partner, who had recently given birth, had felt vulnerable and a loss of safety in public. His step-daughter required counselling.The couple had eventually separated.

In addition, there had been a negative impact on the man’s mental well-being which led to his business being severely affected.

Defence counsel Peter Kaye submitted that Marsters’ age and poor health should be taken into consideration.Marsters had had a triple heart bypass three years ago and was permanently on medication.

He acknowledge Marsters had a lengthy criminal history but his last violent offence had been almost 15 years ago.

Crown prosecutor Chris Macklin said the sentence imposed must denounce Marsters’ actions and act as a deterrent to others.

“Something needs to be done so the community is protected,”Mr Macklin said.

– NZPA

Gray gassed in AOS raid GISBORNE, OCT 22 – A man accused of an aggravated robbery in Waikato, who has been on the run since June, was arrested this morning by the Armed Offenders Squad using tear gas in Gisborne.

Police said they found Allan Taare Gray hiding under a house.

Gray was arrested on June 15 and charged with the aggravated robbery of a bank in Kihikihi, 4km south of Te Awamutu, but escaped from Gisborne District Court on June 21.

Earlier this month, police in the Waikato and Gisborne called for sightings of Gray, who they described as a man who should not be approached.

“This is an extremely dangerous criminal – I am

very glad he has been apprehended,”Gisborne area commander Inspector Sam Aberahama said today.

A woman who lives with her daughter nearby said she woke to the sight of police cars, policemen and dogs, and the AOS squad in the street opposite her house.

Around 7.50am, she heard what she thought were gunshots and ran to the room where her daughter was sleeping.

“It was really freaky. Something was going down but we could not see.

“The worst thing was not being allowed out of our houses here and nobody told us what was going on.”

She saw Gray escorted out of the house, limping, to a waiting ambulance.

Mr Aberahama said Gray was not injured during his capture and was taken to an ambulance because of the effects of the tear gas.

insurance fraud perpetrated by Harvey Crewe in a bid to raise cash to run the farm, and Johnston’s testimony in court indicates he did not believe the burglary was genuine.

The new book alleges Johnston tried to blackmail the wealthy and attractive Jeannette Crewe over the burglary fraud, and that the detective may have been responsible for two subsequent arson attacks – the first in December 1968 while Jeannette was still in the maternity annex, and the second six months later on June 17, 1969, exactly a year to the day before the couple were eventually murdered.

Until tonight, it has never been publicly revealed that the brakes on Jeannette’s car were cut, forcing her to make an emergency stop. This new revelation of an earlier attempt to kill Jeannette is further proof that Pat Booth’s ‘murder-suicide’theory doesn’t stack up against the evidence.

Equally significantly, the brake sabotage happened months before Jeannette’s mother later

changed her will, meaning the killer cannot have been driven by the will but by something else.

TGIF Edition is not making the names of new witnesses in the Crewe murders investigation public, in the expectation that their fresh testimony will be needed for an eventual full Commission of Inquiry.

The couple who’ve come forward should have been the last people to see the Crewes alive – they met up with Jeannette, Harvey and Rochelle at the stock sale the afternoon of the day they died, and Jeannette invited her friends to dinner – “Come and have fish and chips with us”.The witnesses now believe they dodged a bullet.

“We couldn’t do it,”remarks the wife,“and in hindsight we are kind of glad we didn’t.Who knows what might have happened if we had also been there that night.”

If you have new information on the Crewe case you’d like to pass on, email confidential@investigatemagazine.tv

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– NZPA

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OUT MONDAY

EDITORIAL

22 October 2010

Commentary

Family Matters

The stench of bad police investigations This week we’ve seen one attempt by police to kick for touch over the Crewe murders by launching a non-inquiry into the case. Next week you’ll see more controversy erupt over the Swedish tourists murder as a fresh story on that mystery breaks in Investigate magazine.

How gullible do the police top brass think the public are?

As I wrote two days ago, Police National Headquarters has broken a written promise it made 11 years ago, by refusing to re-open the investigation into the Crewe murders.

In 1999, police wrote to the Thomas family, pledging to re-open the murder case if new information on potential suspects came to light.

“Although the case is not currently being investigated,”wrote Inspector Lindsay Duncan from Police National Headquarters,“it is still considered unsolved.

“If information came to hand which indicated who the offender/s might have been it would certainly be investigated, that is, the investigation would be reopened.”Download Policeletter How do we move from a situation where any information that merely“might”indicate a possible offender would trigger a complete re-opening of the case, to this week’s deceptive move by Police Commissioner Howard Broad and his morally corrupt sidekick Rob Pope to merely“re-analyse”the Crewe murder file, and not investigate new suspects at all?

The Royal Commission of Inquiry in 1980 heard more evidence than any of the Thomas juries or Appeal judges ever heard. They tested police and other witnesses fully, and ruled there was clear evidence that Detective Inspector Bruce Hutton and his sidekick Len Johnston had fabricated evidence in order to convict Arthur Allan Thomas.

As I point out in The Inside Story, around $50 million in today’s money was wasted on needless court hearings and inquiries because Hutton and Johnston committed a crime in faking the evidence.

That’s a heck of a lot of taxpayer money spent as a result of the actions of the dynamic duo. Someone needs to be held accountable in our view, and that someone is Hutton.

Likewise, Rochelle Crewe deserves answers on who killed her parents and whether it was, in fact, Detective Len Johnston.

And don’t get me started on the Heidi Paakkonen scandal – that’s next week’s story.

Have a great Labour Weekend.

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Terminated: “I’ll not be back”

By Andy Goldberg

SACRAMENTO, CA – He rode into Sacramento seven long years ago like an action movie hero – vowing to send California’s inept politicians packing and restore the country’s most populous state to its place as the shining symbol of the American dream.

Shame, then, that nobody read his script.

After two terms in office,Arnold Schwarzenegger is heading back to Hollywood, his cupboard almost bare of accomplishments. His legacy: a political system as chaotic as the one he found, and a state financial system that remains mired in deep crisis.

Schwarzenegger’s failure has been so resounding in many ways that the governorship of the richest and most populous state in the US is now “the job that nobody wants,”according to Marc Ambinder, chief political correspondent of The Atlantic.

Still,whether you attribute it to the ruthless ambition or generous altruism of the political species,two unusual candidates are battling to succeed Arnold.

One, Democrat Jerry Brown, was once the youngest governor of California. He now wants to become the oldest, too, so he can bring his know-how to fixing the state.

The other, Republican Meg Whitman, is the former chief executive of eBay, a woman who has spent 150 million dollars of her own money in a bid to get to the governor’s mansion, where she promises, she will run California like a business.

But Whitman’s massive investment is unlikely to win her the race, political analysts and polls indicate.

California is staunchly Democratic, and its powerful Latino and African-American minorities are historically opposed to many Republican policies.

Adding to those handicaps is the fact that Californians have just experienced seven lean Schwarzenegger years. They’ve heard Whitman’s mantra of the rich mogul working only for the good of the people – and realize that it doesn’t actually work that way.

Brown has used this parallel to devastating effect in his latest campaign ad, which shows Whitman in

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split-screen with Schwarzenegger,repeating The Terminator’s hackneyed phrases almost word for word.

Since then, the San Francisco Chronicle has even started calling her the Meg-inator.

But not all California’s problems can be blamed on Schwarzenegger.

The ambitious movie star came to power in 2003 after organizing a special recall election against Democratic incumbent Gray Davis. The state had been thriving in the dot-com boom but found itself with a record 23.6-billion-dollar budget deficit following the crash in 2001.

Making matters worse was a disastrous energy deregulation crisis triggered by the policies of the previous Republican administration.

These rules allowed private energy companies to cut their supply of electricity to California, forcing rolling blackouts and exorbitant prices for power.

Schwarzenegger’s resounding victory made him a national political star.

But he found it hard to translate his popularity with

voters into influence over the entrenched political powers in Sacramento,where he encountered strong opposition from conservative Republicans,the Democratic majority and the state’s powerful labour unions. He found it hard to deliver on his two key promises – to reform the dysfunctional political and budgetary system, and to cut back the state pension agreements that were at the heart of California’s budget shortfall.

Eventually, Schwarzenegger decided to go over the head of the legislators in a 2005 special election, in which he put his proposals to the voters in four ballot initiatives.Yet all of them were defeated, signaling the end of his love affair with voters.

While the state is still mired in chaos, Schwarzenegger can claim credit for a few glimmers of progress.

On Saturday he managed to pass a pensionreform bill that he claims will save the state 100 billion dollars over the decades to come. He also championed a landmark climate-change bill that included strict emissions controls and alternative energy requirements.

The ongoing financial gridlock may also finally be cut. A ballot initiative is attempting to restore a simple majority vote to get the budget passed, rather than the two-thirds majority that is currently required.

But that is far from a glowing record for a candidate who made the sweeping promises that Schwarzenegger did.

“There was a sense in the fall of 2003 that California was headed off a cliff,”says veteran Sacramento correspondent Nannette Miranda.

“We still have problems – systemic budget problems, an electorate that feels like it’s going off the cliff. It feels like deja vu.”

– DPA

By Bob McCoskrie

-Smacking stats trivialise real impact on parents The latest police statistics on the anti-smacking law trivialize the real impact of the anti-smacking law and fail to reflect the widespread confusion over the effect of the law, the impact on parenting and parental authority, the continued opposition to the law, and the ongoing failure to target and tackle actual child abuse.

What these figures do show is that almost 350 families have gone through the trauma of an investigation, temporary removal of children, and potential court case for a smack or minor act of physical discipline, and 19 of these families have been taken to court. And this review does not even touch on the huge number of families investigated by CYF, children temporarily removed, and ex-partners using the law to their benefit in custody cases.

It is also incredible that the police refer to the Latta review undertaken at the end of the year, despite this review being exposed by Investigate Magazine as misleading, failing to meet its terms of reference, and missed out or ignoring key information.

The fact that over 95% of 20,000 respondents to a recent online poll continue to oppose the law shows that the police sales pitch isn’t working and the politicians’ denial of the reality of how this law is affecting parents isn’t fooling anyone. The politicians had the chance to decriminalise good parenting just last month – but they blew it. They continue to ignore the reality of parenting.

Family First is aware of a number of more recent cases where parents have been investigated, prosecuted and/or had children removed for removing children to Time Out, or using reasonable force to deal with defiant behaviour and tantrums.

The real tragedy in these figures is that the law has done absolutely nothing to tackle our child abuse death rate and rates of physical, sexual and emotional abuse in dysfunctional homes with rotten parents.

We all desperately want the real causes of child abuse tackled – but good parents deserve to be respected and left alone to continue raising great kiwi kids. At the moment, they’re being told how to parent – under the threat of potential criminalisation and intervention by CYF. And because they’re law abiding citizens, they’re trying to do their best.

Parents deserve better than a law which even John Key says is a complete and utter dog’s breakfast, badly drafted, and extremely vague.

-TVNZ remove liquor ads during family movies Family First is welcoming a commitment from TVNZ to remove alcohol advertising during family movies after a mother complained about an advertisement for Coruba Rum shown during a TV2 family movie Monsters Inc. This is another victory for families after an apology from TVNZ for a recent Close Up programme which offended many families with its promotion and display of the porn industry, and which received a record number of complaints.

It also follows on from recent decisions by the Broadcasting Standards Authority against TV3’s Home and Away and TVNZ’s Hung.

In a letter from the Advertising Standards Authority to the mother who complained, it said “TVNZ confirmed that they have taken the voluntary step of withdrawing liquor advertising during the Saturday night family movie” and they “...will exercise a greater degree of editorial control in relation to the content and nature of advertisements broadcast during the Saturday night family movie.”

This decision is more good news and will hopefully set a family-friendly precedent for advertisements shown during family viewing hours. It’s now time for the tv channels to exercise the same restraint with their promos of adult programmes.

Parents are sick and tired of lunging for the remote to protect children from offensive and inappropriate content during family viewing hours. The tv channels are having a race to the bottom regarding standards of decency, but these cases have shown the benefit of families actually complaining and getting pro-family decisions.

Family First has written to both the Prime Minister and the Minister of Broadcasting demanding a clean-up and stronger enforcement of broadcasting standards.

Sign Up Now to receive FREE regular updates about the issues affecting families in NZ http://www.familyfirst.org.nz/index.cfm/Sign_Up

ANALYSIS

6

22 October 2010

Outside View

A plague on both their houses

Pete Souza/The White House/PSG/NEWSCOM

By Harlan Ullman

WASHINGTON – The U.S. public is rightly outraged with and deeply cynical about Washington and its failure to govern.

The dire economic conditions that seem immune to solution are painful and depressing with unemployment running at least 9.5 percent for the past 15 months.While combat operations may have ended in Iraq, the Baghdad government is fragile at best and still forming.Afghanistan has become Obama’s war and is far from over.

But the overriding reason for public discontent isn’t well understood even though it is hidden in plain sight. Politics in America is no longer about providing good governance.

Over the past decades, politics have deteriorated into a process of continuous campaigning in which the objective is to win election and re-election, not

to govern and along the way to discredit and malign the opposition to the greatest extent possible.

The intense and mean spirited partisanship in both houses of Congress has become septic. In this environment, both parties have become dominated by extremes of left and right. Centrist and moderate are now politically pejorative terms.

The rapid ascent of the Tea Party, to anyone of sense seems straight out of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and the Mad Hatter’s tea party, will move Republicans further to the right possibly forcing Democrats to become even more ideologically driven leftward.

The long-term consequence has so intermingled campaigning and governance that the latter has been overwhelmed and is missing in action. Being skilled in campaigning and electioneering doesn’t automatically or usually carry over to governing.

Indeed, the short term, slogan driven tactics of

winning election are often in irreconcilable conflict with governing.

Even more damaging, aides and advisers for the campaigning and winning election sides of politics are routinely brought aboard for governing. Often no matter how successful these people are in winning election, many are under qualified or plainly unqualified for governing.And this poisonous combination allows and encourages campaign slogans and intuitive assertions useful in winning election to be translated into policy irrespective of the quality of those presumptions.

Barack Obama’s White House is a current manifestation of the triumph of electioneering over governing. Foreign policy is a sad example. The replacement of national security adviser retired U.S. Marines Gen. Jim Jones two weeks ago underscored the problem of making governing the highest priority.

Jones arrived with impeccable credentials. A former commandant of the Marine Corps with extensive experience in combat, military operations and the workings of Congress where he was a Pentagon liaison officer along with U.S. Navy Capt. John McCain, Jones headed NATO’s military command in Europe. One of his responsibilities was overseeing NATO’s military operations in Afghanistan.

Ironically, he was initially asked by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to take over Central Command after NATO until Bob Woodward’s previous book came out quoting Jones as telling U.S. Marines Gen. Pete Pace, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not to be a parrot sitting on the secretary’s shoulder.

The offer of CENTCOM was withdrawn. Jones was burned again as the White House, read president, was infuriated by statements attributed to the general in Woodward’s latest book Obama’s War. What happened?

As is well known, Obama brought to the White House much of his old campaign team that got him elected. Rahm Emmanuel as chief of staff and Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod as senior advisers have been closest to the president on virtually all issues.

And others very close to the president such as Mark Lippert were given senior positions on the National Security Council staff (it took Jones considerable time to remove Lippert because the president regarded him as a younger brother).

This youth and inexperience in foreign policy made this group known as“the kids”.And kids they were.

Worse, campaign promises to end the war in Iraq, emphasize Afghanistan and close Guantanamo became policy.There was no analysis or assessment of the consequences of each. The candidate made them ex cathedra and the administration implemented his pledges.

Jones had sounder views based on experience in Afghanistan, war and in NATO. However, he and the president never connected as prior successful national security advisers such as Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft did with their presidents. As a result, governance was left to veterans of the campaign who were novices in that regard.

Obama’s foreign policy is in tatters. As Jones wrote in early 2008 attracting Obama’s attention, Make no mistake: NATO is not winning in Afghanistan. Iraq is unsettled, the Middle East Peace process is stalemated, Iran is still pursuing a nuclear program and the one real accomplishment – the new START nuclear arms treaty with Russia – hasn’t been approved by the Senate.

The conclusion is self-evident. Success in campaigning isn’t synonymous with ability to govern.

But will we ever realize that and act accordingly?

with B-2s and B-52s. Osama bin Laden eluded similar strikes against the Tora Bora mountain range in December 2001. Minority dissenters say this would create a state of war with Pakistan.

• No less than 3 million weapons have vanished from official depots in Pakistan’s Punjab province – from AK-47s to grenade launchers, grenades, handguns. Seized from criminals over the years, they were presumably resold to criminals and terrorists by corrupt officials.

• Iraq, seven months after elections, has beaten all records for longest time a country is deadlocked

Hezbollah supporters, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad shouted with a bullhorn in southern Lebanon,2.5 miles from the Israeli border,Your Zionist enemies of humanity are on their way to annihilation, humiliated and weak.Iran is now officially on Israel’s northern border. Fearful Arab leaders in the Persian Gulf believe the time is fast approaching when Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons facilities will have to be taken out.

• Obama may agree when he realizes his once magical poll numbers in the Arab world nosedived from 77 percent after his June 2009 Cairo Declaration to 20 percent. Only 16 percent are still hopeful about U.S. policies.

•Almost no one believes Israel plans to facilitate the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank.

Jewish housing construction has resumed officially in East Jerusalem and below radar in many of the 141 West Bank settlements.

• NATO allies have cut defense spending to less than 2 percent of gross domestic product.With Europe’s strongest military, Britain is reducing its army by 20 percent, overall defense 12 percent. Member nations keep weakening the alliance to where it becomes meaningless.

• Al-Qaida’s new,slick online magazine Inspire spells out what NATO countries now have to face – homegrown terrorists.Trained in Pakistan’s tribal areas,they return to their homes in Europe where you keep fighting until you achieve martyrdom.You start your day in this world, and by the end of it, you are with Allah.

• Inspire suggests ideas for terrorist attacks and offers advice on how to wage Jihad without generating scrutiny from law enforcement or intelligence agencies.

One idea is to use a pickup truck as a mowing machine to plunge into a crowd of enemies of Allah. Just add steel blades to the front grill of the truck, then step on the gas.

– UPI

Commentary

New world disorder

By Arnaud de Borchgrave

WASHINGTON – U.S.President Barack Obama’s reset button for a new America as the shining beacon on the hill for the rest of the world to look up to is jammed.

And the prophets of doom and gloom are soaring.

Recent samples: • The world isn’t too much with us.We have left the planet.As we race toward the midterm elections, our political conversation has devolved beyond the silly to the absurd ... Farce has become the new reality, says columnist Kathleen Parker.

• With millions of viewers daily, the $30 million a year Fox News Channel doomster Glenn Beck,worries that the end, doomsday, is coming soon, and it won’t be pretty.(Which is why he opposes Obama spending on infrastructure projects, after all, why bother?) His worries about a violent national collapse have even attracted survivalist advertisers on his daily show.One of them touts a Survival Seed Bank in case the politicians and the bankers bring the whole thing crashing down,”writes Al Kamen.

• Wall Street’s 35 major financial companies, evidently oblivious to the plight of main street and 10 percent unemployment, will hand out $144 billion in executive bonuses this December – 5 percent increase over last year and a record for what billionaire philanthropist Pete Petersen calls carnivorous and animalistic capitalism.

• The subprime mortgage scandal that triggered a global collapse has spawned the foreclosure scandal, the work of robo-signers who authorized countless thousands of documents without proper review.

The latest foreclosure scandal is a multibillion-dollar boondoggle.

• Right out of central casting for a Wall Street buccaneer,Angelo Mozilo,the former head of Countrywide Financial Corp.,won’t have to pay the $67.5 million in

penalties for civil fraud and insider trading. Bank of America bought Countrywide and Mozilo’s old contract says the company pays all such penalties – even though he’s banned for life for serving as officer or director of a public company.

• An estimated 9,000 Iraq and Afghan vets are homeless on the streets of America. A quarter of a million out of 2 million Iraq and Afghan vets have asked for psychiatric help. Holly Petraeus, wife of Afghan commander U.S. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, directs BBB Military Line, a Better Business Bureau program that provides advocacy services for military families. Many military veterans are losing their security clearances due to heavy debt.

• The public might not love Sarah Palin. But by 2012, Americans might absolutely despise Obama.

Two more years of a bad economy and an unpopular Afghan war,and anything is possible.Yes,there’s a ceiling to Palin’s support. But in 2012, there also will be a ceiling to Obama’s.Whose will be higher? Matthew Continetti,Weekly Standard.

• Taliban insurgency leader Mullah Omar made clear no Afghan peace deal is possible without Pakistan and its Inter-Services Intelligence agency,which spells doom for U.S.peace overtures with Taliban dissidents.

• In a major effort to bomb Taliban to peace talks, drones have flown 21,000 sorties so far this year.

Unfriendly persuaders didn’t work for the Soviets in their decade-long Afghan war. Nor for the United States in its 10-yearVietnamWar.Bleeding the enemy isn’t a magic formula. It usually encourages him to fight harder.

• If Pakistan’s military continues its opposition to counterinsurgency operations in North Waziristan, where Afghan insurgent groups are sheltered, the National Security team has studied and OK’d for Obama’s approval plans for high-altitude bombing

THE PUBLIC MIGHT NOT LOVE SARAH PALIN. BUT BY 2012, AMERICANS MIGHT ABSOLUTELY DESPISE OBAMA. TWO MORE YEARS OF A BAD ECONOMY AND AN UNPOPULAR AFGHAN WAR, AND ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE without a government.The temporary caretaker Shiite government discouraged thousands of the former 94,000-strong Sunni Awakening insurgency, once on the U.S.payroll,who have now quietly rejoined a revival of al-Qaida in Mesopotamia.

• Economic and financial scribes are beginning to see the United States trapped in the dark vision of the Japan syndrome – low growth, a downward spiral of prices, known as deflation.The optimists say disruptive technology and creative destruction will still save the day.

• Another war may produce both. Surrounded by

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in 60 seconds WORLD WAR II BODIES FOUND TOKYO (DPA) – A government-appointed team found the remains of what appear to be 51 Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima, one of the bloodiest battlefields of World War II, news reports said Friday.

The remains were found buried in two locations on the island, officially known as Iwoto Island, in sites similar to those indicated on US documents as group burial sites, the Kyodo News agency reported, citing unnamed government sources.

The Japanese team excavated the two locations, which a US document described as an “enemy cemetery,” Kyodo reported. It was mainly in dugouts that about 8,700 bodies had been found during previous excavation work.

About 22,000 Japanese soldiers perished on Iwoto Island in the closing days of World War II. The team was appointed by the administration of Prime Minister Naoto Kan to recover the remains of the war dead.

AUSSIES ATTACKED, DUTCH LACKED COURAGE SYDNEY, OCT. 22 (UPI) – An Australian veteran of fighting in Afghanistan charges Dutch helicopter crews failed to come to the aid of his unit when it was pinned down in a firefight.

Rob Maylor, who served in the Special Air Service Regiment, has written SAS Sniper. The book is to be released next week, but his charge that Australian soldiers were abandoned by an ally is already making waves, The Daily Telegraph of Sydney reported.

Maylor said a patrol unit with U.S., Australian and Afghan soldiers was ambushed by about 150 insurgents in September 2008 near the village of Khaz Oruzgan.

One U.S. soldier was killed and nine Australians seriously wounded in the fight.

When the soldiers saw two Dutch Apache helicopters en route to a forward operating base on escort duty, they believed they were saved, Maylor said. An air traffic controller radioed the pilots asking them to provide air cover.

Maylor said the pilots apparently feared flying below 5,000 feet, where they would be at risk of ground fire.

U.S. helicopters eventually arrived.

“I honestly thought that we wouldn’t get out of there alive. If the bad guys had got any closer it would have been all over for us,” Maylor said.

Some Australian soldiers have argued their forces in Afghanistan need more equipment, including helicopters.

The government has said allies can provide what is needed.

MEGI SOAKS TAIWAN TAIPEI, TAIWAN, OCT. 22 (UPI) – Typhoon Megi drenched and buffeted Taiwan Friday, causing flooding and landslides despite being about 200 miles away, officials said.

The China Post reported 287 people from eight tourist groups were stranded along a roadway that had collapsed and 1,070 passengers were trapped in a train for 4 hours by flooding.

Taipei Times reported the storm had interrupted railway traffic and inundated much of Yilan County. Businesses and schools were shut down in Yilan, Pingtung and Penghu counties.

As of 8:30 p.m. Thursday, local time, Megi was 230 miles southwest of Oluanpi, the southernmost tip of Taiwan, and was producing sustained winds of 108 mph with gusts up to 131 mph as it headed north-northwest at 6 mph, meteorologists said.

Taiwan was forecast to receive 20-60 inches of rain in the next 48 hours, the Central Weather Bureau said.

The Chinese news agency Xinhua said Megi was responsible for at least 19 deaths in the Philippines early in the week.

22 October 2010

US having a ‘Paul Henry’ debate in Iowa and North Carolina. against the media organization. By Today evening, At the same time, a threat by a Florida pastor to more than 5,400 comments had been posted on burn copies of the Quran swelled into an interna- NPR.org, many of them angrily accusing the organWASHINGTON – NPR’s decision to fire news analyst tional issue, drawing condemnation from leaders, ization of political correctness. Conservative leaders Juan Williams for controversial remarks he made including President Obama. such as Newt Gingrich and former Arkansas Gov. about Muslims on airplanes was not only roundly The latest furor was kicked off last week when Mike Huckabee called for cuts to NPR’s funding. criticized by conservatives today but was viewed Fox News host Bill O’Reilly made an appearance NPR receives no direct federal money for its with alarm by some Muslim-American activists on ABC’s“The View”and declared“Muslims killed us operations, but between 1 percent and 3 percent and scholars. on 9/11.”That prompted co-hosts Whoopi Goldberg of its $160 million budget comes from competitive Public radio executives defended the move, saying and Joy Behar to walk off the stage. grants awarded by publicly funded entities such as that Williams’ comment on Fox News violated the That was the incident O’Reilly and Williams were the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the news organization’s ethics guidelines and under- discussing Monday night when the latter said,“I get National Endowment for the Arts mined his credibility.Williams said Monday on“The on a plane, I got to tell Dana Davis Rehm, O’Reilly Factor”that he worries when he sees Mus- you, if I see people who NPR’s senior vice THE FLAP OVER lims in traditional garb on airplanes. are in Muslim garb and I president for commuWILLIAMS’ REMARKS But some prominent Muslim thinkers expressed think, you know, they’re nications, said that Wilconcern Today that his firing would contribute to identifying themselves IS THE LATEST EXAMPLE OF liams had been warned what appears to be a widening gulf between Muslims first and foremost as times in the past HOW THE TOPIC OF ISLAM HAS several and non-Muslims in the United States.

Muslims, I get worried.” for comments that vio“The greater American public remains unsure about He also noted that it was BECOME A POLITICAL LIVE lated ethics guidelines Islam and very often hostile about Islam,”said Akbar not fair to cast all Mus- WIRE IN THIS ELECTION YEAR, that prohibits NPR Ahmed,chair of Islamic Studies at American Univer- lims as extremists. journalists from parsity,who examines the divide in his new film and book, “We as a country are PERHAPS EVEN MORE THAN ticipating in programs Journey into America:The Challenge of Islam. engaged in a very wild IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE “that encourage punAhmed said he was disappointed by Williams’ and woolly conversaditry and speculation comments. But he added that NPR’s abrupt firing tion about Islam and SEPT. 11 TERRORIST ATTACKS rather than fact-based of the news analyst“does not bring the temperature Muslim-Americans,”said analysis.” down against Muslims. ... Now the debate is, are we Suhail Kahn, a conservative activist who is Muslim“We felt we really didn’t have an alternative,”she being oversensitive to Muslims?”

American, noting that minorities such as Catholics, said.“And it was not without regret and it was not The flap over Williams’ remarks is the latest Jews and Japanese-Americans have faced similar a decision that was made lightly by any means.” example of how the topic of Islam has become a hostility throughout U.S. history.“Sometimes the In a piece for FoxNews.com Williams called his political live wire in this election year, perhaps even conversation is thoughtful and sometimes it’s ugly.” firing“an outrageous violation of journalistic standmore than in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist But Kahn said NPR overreacted in letting Wil- ards and ethics by management that has no use for attacks. liams go.“While Juan’s comments may have been a diversity of opinion, ideas or a diversity of staff.”

An emotional fight over the construction of an a little rough around the edges, he was voicing an He said his discussion with O’Reilly included “no Islamic community center blocks from the site honest opinion and trying to articulate his personal support for anti-Muslim sentiments of any kind.” of the destroyed World Trade Center in New York questions and struggles with perceptions in regards For its part, Fox News moved aggressively to turn exploded into a national controversy this summer to Muslims,”he said. the controversy to its advantage, signing Williams to and became fodder for campaign ads that have aired The decision drew an avalanche of complaints an expanded role at the cable news network.

By Matea Gold Tribune Washington Bureau

Moon has water

By Amina Khan Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES – The moon is much wetter and more chemically complicated than scientists had believed, according to data released Thursday by NASA. Last year, after the space agency dropped a rocket into a frozen crater near the moon’s south pole and measured the stuff kicked up by the collision, scientists calculated that the crater contained about 25 gallons of water. But further analysis over the past 11 months indicates that the amount of water vapor and ice was closer to 41 gallons.

“It’s twice as wet as the Sahara Desert,” said Anthony Colaprete, the lead scientist for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission at NASA Ames Research Center in Northern California.

The instruments aboard the satellite, including near-infrared and visible light spectrometers,scanned the debris cloud and identified the compounds it contained.They determined that about 5.6 percent of the plume was made of water, give or take 2.9 percent.

It also included a surprising variety of chemicals, including mercury, methane, silver, calcium, magnesium, pure hydrogen and carbon monoxide.

The findings were reported in six related papers published online Thursday by the journal Science.

“The lunar closet is really at the poles, and I think there’s a lot of stuff crammed into the closet that we really haven’t investigated yet,”said Peter Schultz, a planetary geologist at Brown University and one of the LCROSS team members.

The new measurements allowed Colaprete to estimate that the Cabeus crater could hold as much as 1 billion gallons of water.

That might be handy for space explorers who might use the moon as an interplanetary way station. The water could be used for drinking and be mined for breathable oxygen. It also could be used to make hydrogen fuel for long-distance spacecraft.

“You can’t take a lot of big things to the moon and you can’t take much water, so we’re learning to live off the land,”said Lawrence Taylor, a planetary geochemist at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, who was not involved in the studies.

The scientists picked the impact spot with care.

Since the moon has but a vanishingly thin atmosphere, any water on the surface would eventually evaporate in all but the coldest regions. But in the depths of the Cabeus crater, which is shrouded in permanent darkness, temperatures hover around 40 degrees above absolute zero. In such extreme cold, water gets stuck to the soil, unable to move.

“The atoms got stopped dead in their tracks,“ Schultz said.

If water is stuck on grains of moon dirt, it would be relatively easy to collect, the researchers said.

Even better, more water may be trapped outside the permanently shadowed regions, which are difficult places for machines to work, Schultz said.

For scientists studying the evolution of the moon, equally intriguing was the finding was the assortment of chemicals detected in the plume. Not all of the hydrogen was attributable to water.

How all those chemicals got to moon is a matter of much debate. Some scientists say it may have accumulated from bombardment by the solar wind, icy comets or by both. Others theorize that some of the water and chemicals were already part of the moon when it broke off from the primordial Earth.

WORLD

22 October 2010

9

Chilean miners turn to booze SANTIAGO – Some of the 33 miners rescued in Chile after weeks underground are having problems controlling their alcohol consumption, doctors said today.

“During all this time of abstinence they had, obviously one of the things they wanted to return to was (alcohol) consumption,”said doctor Jorge Diaz.

He noted that the problems were expected by the medical team, but he noted that if things get worse the affected workers will need to be hospitalized for rehabilitation.

He recalled that two miners have already missed psychotherapy sessions intended to help them deal with post-traumatic stress, because they could not get up on time after lengthy celebrations. However, Diaz insisted that the situation is still within the

realms of what is culturally acceptable in Chile.

“One of the problems we envisaged in advance was the return to social life, which from a cultural point of view in Chile takes place with alcohol consumption,”he said.

The miners, most of them men of humble origins who worked in the mines since they were teenagers, got plenty of offers after being rescued on October 13 after 70 days underground.

Four arrived Thursday in Spain for a TV interview.

One is headed to the United States for the New York marathon and to visit Graceland.All 33 were invited to watch Manchester United and Real Madrid home matches,and they got presents of free holidays in Greece and the Dominica Republic,among other freebies.

Daniel Herrera, regarded as one of the shy mem-

bers of the group, had a date with Italian TV personality Barbara Predotti, who has been linked to the famous parties hosted by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Miner Yonny Barrios, famous for his infidelity, has offers to be the face of a campaign for furtive love in the United States and of men’s sexual health programmes in Chile and Panama.

“They came out of the earth. It is as if they had been reborn, they are going to be happy,” the psychologist who accompanied the group in their ordeal,Alberto Iturra, said recently.

Iturra warned, however, in the face of the enthusiastic response to the miners, that the 33 men are“a model of survival, not of manners or of life.”

– DPA

Russian spy becomes a media sensation IF ANYTHING, CHAPMAN HAS BECOME AN EVEN BIGGER MEDIA SENSATION THAN IN THE TABLOID-TINGED DAYS AFTER HER JUNE ARREST IN NEW YORK FOR CONSPIRING TO ACT AS AN UNREGISTERED AGENT OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

By Sergei L. Loiko Los Angeles Times

MOSCOW – Two weeks ago, she turned up at the launch of a rocket that was carrying two cosmonauts and an American astronaut to the International Space Station.

On Monday, she appeared at the Kremlin, along with her nine fellow deported spies, to receive Russia’s highest honour from President Dmitry Medvedev.

And today,her image graced the glossy cover of the Russian edition of Maxim magazine,clad in nothing but her underwear, with a big gun in her hand.

Talk about exposure. , the red-haired, 28-year-old Mata Hari busted by the FBI and returned home with her fellow sleeper agents in July, is not exactly the spy who went back into the cold.

If anything, Chapman has become an even bigger media sensation than in the tabloid-tinged days after her June arrest in New York for conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of the Russian Federation.

Moreover, Russia’s top political leaders and striving business institutions appear locked in a head-long rush to capitalize on her celebrity, all but tripping over each other to cozy up to her.

Premier Vladimir Putin, who seems to be perpetually in campaign mode for a presidential election in April 2012, sang a patriotic song from his favourite World War II spy movie with Chapman and her secret agent comrades in July.

“They needed to master a foreign tongue as their own,” an admiring Putin said.“Think, speak in it, fulfil the goals of the mission in the interests of their motherland in the course of many years not counting on diplomatic protection.”

Putin went on to express confidence that Chap-

man, also known as Anna Kushchenko, and her fellow agents,“will find worthy employment and that their life will be bright and interesting.”

Among such presumably interesting times was the closed-door awards session hosted by Putin’s presumptive rival,Medvedev.“Top state awards were presented to SVR (foreign intelligence service) staff members in a ceremony in the Kremlin on Monday,including to the intelligence agents, who worked in the United States and returned to Russia in July,”announced Kremlin

pursue one of her projects on space research.”

Chapman enjoys a free schedule at the bank, Yershova added, since“she has her other job too.”

Make that, jobs.

Her sultry star turn in Maxim means that Chapman is the first returned spy ever to appear on the cover of a Russian men’s magazine.

“Anna will go down in history as the woman who boldly broke the old stereotypes connected with intelligence agents,”Ilya Bezugly, editorial director of the magazine said.“She is doing so much to incite a feeling of patriotism among the male population of Russia.”

“No one ever spoke of our spies as cool,”he added in a phone interview with the Times.“But as she so open-mindedly poses with a gun in her hand on spokeswoman Natalya Timakova.

Not everyone, however, is bowled over by the our cover, the time has come to abandon the Soviet ongoing publicity blitz for a spy who was, after all, perception of reality and enter a new age.”

In an interview which accompanied the pulchricaught in the act.

“The Kremlin now wants to present a huge fail- tude, Chapman posits:“The most negative feeling ure of our foreign undercover operations as a tre- towards a man I am capable of is pity.”

Former counterspy Kondaurov is not happy mendous success, they can’t tell all the truth about, singing praise to the spies and bestowing awards on about the public relations“circus.”

“When you have nothing positive to show to your them trying to make the public believe it was a great achievement,”Alexei Kondaurov, a retired KGB gen- people you start showing them your muscles, fly eral said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. planes and sing songs in the company of good-forWhile the Kremlin event produced no photos or nothing spies,”he said.

“I don’t know what feat of glory or bravery Anna television coverage, Chapman did appear in public earlier this month at the Kazakhstan launch of the Chapman committed on a mission abroad to be worspace-bound trio.She was dispatched to the Russian thy of a high state award but posing semi-naked on a Baikonur cosmodrome there by the formerly obscure glossy magazine cover is truly something unique in Fundservicebank,which has become one of the most the history of our intelligence service but very much mentioned credit organizations in Russia since it in line with the new ways of the Kremlin which hired her Oct.1 as an adviser to the bank’s president. turns everything into a circus,”Kondaurov added.

“She advises our bank’s president on innovations,” “I am deeply ashamed and hurt by what they have YuliaYershova, a bank spokeswoman said in a phone done to the image of the profession I devoted most interview to the Times.“She went to Baikonur to of my life to.”

Clinton for President in 2012

By Bogdan Kipling

WASHINGTON – The latest buzz flitting among the Georgetown salons is that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will switch jobs with Vice President Joe Biden and take his place on the Democratic ticket in 2012.

That’s one of the tidbits being peddled by Bob Woodward to promote his new book Obama’s Wars and it has Democratic loyalists desperate to salvage a rapidly failing Obama presidency atwitter with unbridled joy.

As a rumor, it’s intriguing. As common sense, it doesn’t pass Logic 101.

Why, after all, would the world’s top diplomat want to chug from John Nance Garner’s “warm bucket”when she could be sipping a Pimm’s Cup in the Oval Office on Jan. 20, 2013? With the economy unlikely to have recovered the Clinton-era glow of the 1990s, it’s far more likely that Hillary will challenge Obama at the start of 2012. If she does, that smart money in the Democratic Party will flow into

her coffers like water rushing over the Hoover Dam. Ah, but what about Woodward’s prediction that Hillary will be a good team player and wait until she is 69 to make a 2016 quest for the Oval Office?

Throughout the years since he chronicled the Watergate scandal with Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein, Woodward has been a font of delicious speculations – not all of them based in reality.

Be that as it may,there’s good reason to viewWoodward’s forecast of Hillary as veep as a mere throwaway line – designed to create a momentary sensation.

Anyone who knows the Clintons well knows they have no love lost for either Barack or Michelle Obama. Both believe they were outmaneuvered by the Illinois upstart in the Democratic prima-

ries because they received terrible advice from top campaign aides, including several they now believe were moles for Obama.

In truth, only Hillary’s belief in her “grand destiny” allowed her to accept the secretary of state offer from Obama – a stripped-down post considering the president had already named four special envoys to the Middle East, America’s key area of foreign policy concern. Her acceptance also relegated Bill Clinton to a quiet corner of the public stage – rendered all but mute in voicing any criticism of the Obama White House.

There is every reason to believe that the Clintons will deliver a comeuppance to the Obamas in 2012.

By that time, both will look like eminence grises after the amateurish performance of Obama and his buffoonish advisers during his first-term.

The dozens of Democratic senators and House members now fleeing any association with the administration’s disastrous health-care and stimulus bills are unlikely to return to the fold. Many, indeed, already are urging the Clintons to reclaim

their party before it is completely destroyed by Obama’s rigid ultra-left ideology.

A longtime Clinton insider says the couple is prepared to move their governing philosophy even more to the moderate center than they did after the sweeping Republican gains in the 1994 congressional mid-term elections.

“The Clintons may have started out as ideologues,” she said,“but they quickly realized that pragmatism is the true art of successful politics and they have been constantly fine-tuning their political philosophies.”The woman, a close friend of the Clinton for more than four decades, also pointed out another reason Hillary can’t wait until 2016.

“The constant travel and the never-ending demands of the secretary of state’s office are taking a devastating toll on her,”she said.“She turns 63 this month, but she’s starting to look more like 70 although she’s in excellent physical health.”

Here’s betting Hillary will look years younger and be all smiles when she delivers her inaugural address from the west steps of the capitol in early 2013.

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22 October 2010

11

Vettori visits Last Chance Saloon WELLINGTON, OCT 22 – Leadership of the Black Caps came under question when the New Zealand Cricket board met today with Black Caps captain Daniel Vettori, coach Mark Greatbatch and high performance director Roger Mortimer.

The trio had requested a meeting with the board following the Black Caps’ disastrous one-day 4-0 whitewash by Bangladesh.

As a result, NZC has signalled a“comprehensive review”of the Black Caps’ management, coaching and selection structures.

A cricket committee, comprising former international cricketers Stephen Boock and Rob Hart,High Court judge Sir John Hansen, and NZC chairman Chris Moller will also be formed. Up to three independent members will be co-opted to the committee.

The remit of the committee will run from the grass roots of the game to the elite level.

Moller described today’s meeting as“comprehensive and robust”.

He said the leadership of the Black Caps had come under question, after concerns from some quarters that Vettori had too much responsibility.

“We asked that question, we had a good debate on the subject. Dan commented that he feels the level of weight on his shoulders was far less than was the case 12 months ago.”

That was due to the structures currently in place, Moller said.

He would not comment on whether Vettori or

Greatbatch had offered their resignations.

“I’m not prepared to comment on individuals as to who may or may not have contemplated that situation. It’s not helpful to the debate.”

Moller said Mortimer, although he came from a non-cricketing background, had made a “a huge contribution”to the Black Caps and his role would continue for the upcoming tour of India.

“I’m not going to pre-empt the outcome of any review. But the feedback from everybody is that Roger is doing an absolutely outstanding job.”

Mortimer, who guided cyclist Sarah Ulmer and triathlete Hamish Carter to Olympic glory, was confirmed as NZC’s high performance director in late May. His brief is to oversee the players’ individual preparations, and ensure support staff were implementing the best possible training programmes.

Moller said that, by his own admission, Mortimer said there were some challenges for him to work with younger athletes than he has been used to in the past.

“But that’s not a fatal flaw -- that’s just part of the challenge Roger will rise to.”

The Black Caps team for the India tour is scheduled to be named on Sunday, leaving six days later.

They are scheduled to play three tests on the subcontinent, the first beginning on November 4, and five one-day internationals, the last on December 10.

– NZPA

Michael Mayhew/Sportsphoto/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar/NEWSCOM

The Black Caps team for the India tour is scheduled to be named on Sunday, leaving six days later.

Kiwis have big plans about working them (England’s forwards) over from the start of the game, to get that.”

WELLINGTON, OCT 22 – New Zealand will play a But to do that,the Kiwis must be sharper than they high-octane game as they attempt to run England’s were in last Saturday’s 50-6 warmup win over Samoa. big forward pack off their feet in the opening Four They were dazzling in the second half but there Nations rugby league match here tomorrow night. were too many handling errors, and if they want to England tired dramatically in the second half mount pressure,a high completion rate is paramount. of their drawn warmup match against New ZeaTheir forwards will also have to get the better land Maori last Saturday, and though coach Steve of a good English pack, highlighted by world-class McNamara has promised they will not suffer from second rowers Sam Burgess and Gareth Ellis. fatigue tomorrow, the Kiwis will play at pace in an “It’ll be good to try and step up to them and have attempt to ensure they do. a crack at them,”said Kiwis second rower Bronson The home team has effective dummy half runners Harrison. in wings ManuVatuvei and Jason Nightingale,hooker “We’ve got a Kiwi brotherhood, as we call it, so if Thomas Leuluai and halfback Nathan Fien,while the we work together that will be our real strength and dynamic Issac Luke will be unleashed from the bench. we should get it over them there.”

Kiwis coach Stephen Kearney has also selected England are missing battle-hardened props a versatile front row in Greg Eastwood and Adam Adrian Morley and Jamie Peacock, but in new capBlair, both natural second rowers, a strong pointer tain James Graham and veteran Stuart Fielden – to the style of game he wants to play. recalled after a four-year international hiatus – they “We’ll be definitely playing to our strengths and I have able replacements. think that is one of them, our dummy half runners,” It’s in the backline that New Zealand are Leuluai said today. expected to have a significant edge, with experi“We’re looking to get a bit of momentum. It’s all enced halves Benji Marshall and Fien in top form

By Fred Woodcock of NZPA

for their club sides, as were centre Shaun Kenny Dowall, Nightingale and Vatuvei.

England suffered a blow today with big Leeds wing Ryan Hall ruled out because of a hamstring pull.Wigan’s Darrell Goulding will make his debut and is charged with marking Vatuvei, a big test for even the most experienced player.

Expect Marshall and Fien to deliver plenty of kicks to Vatuvei’s wing.

The visitors will look for inspiration from their halfback, Sam Tomkins, a teammate of Leuluai’s at Wigan.

“He’s one of their strike players and we’ve talked about it,”Leuluai said.

“I don’t think you can cancel him right out of the game, but it’s just making sure that when he does have a say in the game, it’s not as effective.”

New Zealand are heavy favourites but they need only look back to last year’s 12-20 defeat to England at Huddersfield, a loss which saw them miss the Four Nations final, for a reminder of the challenge England offer.

Adding to the pressure is the almost do-or-die status of tomorrow’s match.

Steel to play at wheels venue WELLINGTON, OCT 22 – The Southern Steel will play four of their trans-Tasman league home games in Invercargill next season despite Stadium Southland’s roof collapse last month, with the cycling velodrome to be upgraded to host international netball games.

Transforming the 2700-seat velodrome into an indoor sports arena had proved a logistical nightmare, but team officials wanted to succeed for the 1200-strong Southland-based membership.

“Our Steel fans are not only the biggest in terms of numbers, they are the most loyal in this whole competition so it was our number one priority to show the same level of loyalty by ensuring the games were retained for them and all the local businesses which support us,”chief executive Julie Paterson said.

Stadium Southland’s roof collapsed under the weight of heavy snow during a storm on September 18, prompting questions over the construction of the building.

With the stadium rebuild expected to take about 17 months, the velodrome will be used for sporting events like the trans-Tasman league.

A $140,000 portable wooden floor has been bought for the velodrome.

“We’ve also found a solution to increasing the lux level of the lights which will not only meet the Steel’s needs in terms of live television but also benefit the likes of basketball,tennis and cycling at future events,” Stadium Southland general manager Nigel Skelt said.

The Steel will swap venues with the Wellingtonbased Central Pulse for their February 13 clash, and will now play their first game on home turf on March 14.

Other homes games are against the defending champion Adelaide Thunderbirds (March 28), Waikato-Bay of Plenty Magic (April 17) and Northern Mystics (May 1) in Invercargill and the Canterbury Tactix (April 9) and New South Wales Swifts (April 17) in Dunedin at the Edgar Centre.

– NZPA

THE HOME TEAM HAS EFFECTIVE DUMMY HALF RUNNERS IN WINGS MANU VATUVEI AND JASON NIGHTINGALE, HOOKER THOMAS LEULUAI AND HALFBACK NATHAN FIEN, WHILE THE DYNAMIC ISSAC LUKE WILL BE UNLEASHED FROM THE BENCH Whoever loses would have to beat Australia to have any chance of making the final.

Incidentally, the test marks 100 years since the first played on New Zealand soil, when Great Britain beat New Zealand 52-20 at Auckland.

The home fans will not only be hopeful, but expectant, of a reversal of that result tomorrow.

– NZPA

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WEEKEND

22 October 2010

13

TV & Film

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

0Cast: Michael Douglas, Shia La Beouf, Carey Mulligan, Susan Sarandon 0Dierctor: Oliver Stone 0Length: 133 minutes 0Rated: PG-13 (strong language)

Allen’s players would have drawn blood, sometimes quite literally given the filmmaker’s affection for killing off inconvenient characters (Crimes and Misdemeanors among them), here they pull their punches. The dialogue drifts into the petulance of bickering children rather than the biting brilliance that marks the best of his work.

In using a lighter touch, he’s made it harder to root for – or against – anyone in particular with the exception of Jones, a veteran British character actor probably best known in the U.S. as Bridget Jones’ flighty mum who blows into each of her scenes like a blithe spirit. Brolin, always better with a sharp edge, suffers, and Hopkins nearly fades away.

Thematically, Allen moves his unhappy troupe through life’s ups and downs in ways that will feel familiar to anyone who’s followed his work – perhaps the curse of such a long career. This kinder, gentler Allen is still clever, still amusing, and the film itself is a confection tempting enough to consider a taste.

Yet there is that empty-calorie letdown after it’s over.

Maybe it’s time to book another trip to Spain.

Watch the trailer

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– By Betsy Sharkey

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Human foibles, in major and minor keys, are the chords that Woody Allen has been pounding for roughly 45 years. So it should come as no surprise that in his new frothy and fitful romantic black comedy, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, everyone must take a spin around the dance floor with the disillusionments, deceptions and dissatisfactions of life.

Allen has put his latest morality and mortality tale in the hands of his usual complement of fine actors, who play interlocking couples each fraught in their own way. It starts with the dizzy delight of Gemma Jones as Helena, the matriarch in the meddling middle of it all. By the time we meet her, she’s attempted suicide after being divorced by her wayward husband, Alfie (Anthony Hopkins), who like his cinematic namesake hit midlife wondering “What’s it all about?”and it wasn’t about Helena.

Now Helena is settled into a needy depression helped by copious amounts of alcohol that’s put her daughter Sally (Naomi Watts) on edge and sent her son-in-law Roy (Josh Brolin) over it. But then they are barely treading their own troubled waters with Sally ready to trade career for a child and Roy desperate to resurrect his as a novelist with one long-ago success followed by a string of failures.

Another strain teasing out the tension is that most human of all foibles and one of the filmmaker’s favorites – a belief in true romance that he loves to systematically destroy.Thus the necessary complications for our couples come in fetching forms: Roy’s is Dia (Freida Pinto), a beautiful enigma he spies from his window; Alfie’s is a brassy blonde named Charmaine (a very funny Lucy Punch); Sally’s is her elegant art-gallery boss, Greg (Antonio Banderas).

And Helena’s is that stranger on the horizon.

Giving the film its name and its tone is a clever psychic con named Cristal, played with a calculating empathy by Pauline Collins, whom you may remember from her Oscar-nominated turn as a 40ish woman on the verge in 1989’s Shirley Valentine. Here her timing is as spot-on as Cristal’s

predictions for Helena, which is to say she keeps everything merry and moving.

The story is set in current-day London, Allen’s movie home away from home in recent years.Leaving the safety of Manhattan at first proved invigorating in 2005’s Match Point but less so for Scoop and Cassandra’s Dream, which followed.A brief sojourn through Spain for 2008’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona came with a fresh life.Whatever Works,back in Manhattan in 2009, didn’t. Tall Dark Stranger is somewhere in between.

The film is Allen’s third and best collaboration with director of photography Vilmos Zsigmond, a legend in his own right with such iconic classics as The Deer Hunter and an Oscar for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In Tall Dark Stranger, the slices of life cut between the tradition-bound Brit – housewife Helena in her dowdy flower-prints and dated hats – and the contemporary most pointedly in Alfie’s blindingly white penthouse styled for his new Viagra-infused life.Yet for the most part Zsigmond creates a faded wallpaper softness to the look that gives the film an almost ethereal charm.

That same softness extends to other parts of the production in ways not as satisfying. Where once

Chi

0Cast: Gemma Jones, Naomi Watts, Anthony Hopkins, Antonio Banderas 0Director: Woody Allen 0Length: 98 minutes 0Rating: R (for some language)

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You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger

The American Easy A Flipped Machete Nanny McPhee Resident Evil: Afterlife The Town The Virginity Hit © 2010 MCT

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, a sequel to Stone’s 1987 melodrama Wall Street, zeroes in on the turmoil of the late summer and early fall of 2008, when the highflying world economy suddenly went hurtling over a cliff.

Like the original Wall Street, the story here is little more than half-baked Greek tragedy, a tale of fathers and their surrogate sons and the boundless greed that unites them. Yet this movie displays an urgency and rage that makes it feel vibrantly alive. Stone discovers that, even after a cataclysmic financial meltdown, few of us seem capable of curing our addiction to excess.

The movie begins with Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) being sprung from prison, after an eight-year stint for assorted financial crimes. He’s written a memoir, and can still draw a crowd to his book signings, but most people seem to regard him as yesterday’s news.

The Gekko character, a much more straightforward bad guy in the original film, takes on an intriguing new arc here; he’s the beaten-down gambler desperate to back in on the action. Douglas, who won the Oscar for the first film (and who just keeps getting better with age), locates an unexpectedly touching weariness in Gekko, weariness that the actor perhaps knows all too well himself. (In Hollywood and on Wall Street, you can’t go on being a star forever).

But he never loses sight of Gekko’s core of slime: Here’s a guy forever on the hunt for a potential doubledeal; a guy who understands that the details of the game might have changed, but that the game is still rigged.

The original film pitted Gekko against Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), an ambitious, if easily manipulated, young stock broker. Sheen makes a cameo here, but the star is Shia La Beouf, playing Jake Moore, yet another ambitious and easily manipulated young trader who also happens to be dating Gekko’s long-estranged daughter (Carey Mulligan).

The family melodrama that unfolds is decidedly creaky: Eager to develop a relationship with the notorious Gekko, Jake plots to reunite father and daughter.

But poor Mulligan is left on the sidelines of the story, and for too long the movie seems to be marking time: When is Gekko going to drop the nice-guy act and reemerge as the devil we know him to be?

Where the movie does come alive is with its spot-on portrait of the chaos of American life on the brink of financial apocalypse. Everyone in the movie is overextended and desperately anxious, including Jake’s mother (Susan Sarandon), who earns money flipping houses in Long Island.

You could lodge any number of fair complaints against Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps: It goes on too long; Brolin’s villain is too one-dimensional; the neat-andhappy bow that Stone and screenwriters Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff tie around the proceedings is ridiculous.

That misses the larger, more provocative point, which is to take the pulse of a society that doesn’t seemed to have learned its lesson. Stone’s classic JFK famously ends with Kevin Costner literally pointing his finger at the audience, demanding that we ask questions of our leaders and pay more careful attention to history. The ending of this new film is no less caustic. The bubbles are still being blown much too big, still floating into the seemingly boundless sky.

And they’re still on the verge of bursting.

Watch the trailer – By Christopher Kelly

REVIEWS

14

22 October 2010

Music

Neil Young performs onstage at Sarah McLachlan’s inaugural Summer Sessions concert outdoors at Ambleside Park in West Vancouver, British Columbia. UPI/ Heinz Ruckemann

Neil Young and Daniel Lanois click on ‘Le Noise’

By Randy Lewis Los Angeles Times

WOODSIDE, CALIF. – It’s a pronounced climb up a winding road to the hilltop restaurant where Neil Young and Daniel Lanois have ensconced themselves for an afternoon to talk about their singular new collaboration,“Le Noise.”

Sitting on an enclosed deck 2,000 feet above the San Francisco Bay to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west, this pair of newfound musical kindred spirits can gaze out into a dense grove of towering coastal redwoods.The air is thick with the rich scent of natural mulch and moss; the remote quiet is broken only occasionally, if jarringly, by the roar of a passing motorcycle.

This location seems less the result of coincidence than design: It’s a geographical counterpart to the rarefied musical ground Young and Lanois have staked out together through the eight songs that make up“Le Noise.”

“Very early on,”Lanois said,“I realized that my favorite songs of this project all had a message.And I invented this idea that he had just come down from the mountaintop and he had the tablets with him. So I said,‘Neil, what’s the message?’”

There are many.In various songs,Young mourns the loss of close friends – this year alone, that’s included filmmaker Larry “L.A.” Johnson and steel guitarist Ben Keith – and offers up thanks for those who remain within the tightknit circle he’s kept for much of his life;questions the country and the world outside that circle;and yearns for inner understanding that he still finds elusive even with nearly 65 years behind him.

Indefinable revolution is the undercurrent in the album’s closing track,“Rumblin’,” one of several politically minded songs in which Young now seems more concerned with asking the right questions than attempting to shove answers down anyone’s throat.

“Something’s going on right now,” said Young, seated next to Lanois at one of the restaurant’s white-clothed tables.“We’re in the middle of a huge change or turnaround, but I don’t know really what

it is. But you can feel that something’s going on.

We’ve had enough of whatever it was. People have had enough of it.They’ve seen it over and over again.

It defies real description of what’s really going on.

We won’t know for a little while.”

Young speaks softly and evenly, his hazel eyes revealing a hint of curiosity about what may be coming next.

In Lanois’ company, he’s upbeat, even playful at times, but ever attentive to the task at hand.At one point, he breezes past a photographer who’s being introduced to him without turning his head or batting an eye.

“Le Noise” is technically a solo recording, just Young and one guitar – an electric instrument on six, an acoustic on the other two, recorded live with

“It’s one guy singing and playing,”Young said, “except it’s decomposing and falling apart and all the pieces are coming back upside-down and huge and small and blown up and coming back and being mixed back in with where they came from. It’s like you throw all the pieces up in the air and run through and they all stick to you. But the pieces he chose to do this with, that’s the magic.”

A lifelong believer in the nexus of film and rock music who has enlisted filmmakers Jim Jarmusch and Jonathan Demme to direct some of his concert movies,Young was drawn to team up with Lanois after viewing several atmospheric, black-and-white YouTube videos of Lanois’own band, Black Dub. He invited Lanois to record and film him working on a solo album. Although they began with an

are old:The instrument itself is old. I’m old,”he said with a laugh, then added,“Dan is young.”

Actually, Lanois is 59 – nearly six years Young’s junior – and has recovered from an incident that nearly cut his life short.

Three months ago, Lanois took a nasty spill on his motorcycle, just down the road from his home of seven years overlooking L.A.’s Silver Lake neighborhood, after swerving to avoid hitting a car that had turned in front of him. He missed the car but not a sidewalk electrical box that sent him flying about 150 feet and landed him a three-week stay in intensive care with broken ribs, collarbone and pelvis.

It was almost more than Young could take when he first got word of the accident, which came just six months after filmmaker Johnson, a close friend of Young’s for 40 years, died suddenly.

While Lanois was still recuperating,Young’s longHE’S FOUND A BAND’S WORTH OF ASSISTANCE FROM time musical collaborator Keith died of a heart attack.

LANOIS, WHO THICKENS, DEEPENS, AMPLIFIES, ECHOES, Young himself underwent brain surgery in 2005 to repair a potentially life-threatening aneurysm.

MAGNIFIES AND OTHERWISE ENHANCES THE BASICS OF WHAT “Here we are, we’re going along, we’re making YOUNG PICKED, STRUMMED AND SLASHED DURING RECORDING a great record,”Young said.“I finally found a new compadre that I can work with and I feel really SESSIONS AT THE PRODUCER’S HOME IN LOS ANGELES good about it.Then the first reports I hear are that no overdubs, no Crazy Horse, no Crosby, Stills, Nash acoustic guitar that Lanois had specially prepared for he’s just splat! That’s it.” or any of the other pals who’ve often accompanied Young with enhanced sonic capabilities,they quickly Both men appear to have found some measure of Young over the last four decades. But he’s found a switched the primary focus to the electric guitar. healing in collaborating on“Le Noise.” band’s worth of assistance from Lanois, who thick“Everybody associates‘acoustic’with‘solo,’”Young “My accident, the lost friends – I think all of ens, deepens, amplifies, echoes, magnifies and oth- said.“But once we heard solo electric,we started asso- that’s gone into the record,”Lanois said. erwise enhances the basics of what Young picked, ciating electric with solo....The reason why it seems so “Record making is not absent of life. I don’t want strummed and slashed during recording sessions original is because it has a perimeter.It’s enclosed.It’s to get all mystical about it, but whatever’s been hapat the producer’s home in Los Angeles. like a wild animal in a corral. No other animals can pening to Neil, it might be a more passionate record Young, outfitted rock-veteran comfortable in a get to it, and it can’t get out to the other animals. So consequently.” weathered straw fedora, a black T-shirt, a military you’re dealing with this one thing:the electric guitar.

It’s arguably Young’s most consistently potent green jacket, faded blue jeans and black Western Not 10 electric guitars and a bunch of overdubs;just work in the last decade and another stylistic deparboots, elucidated the ways that Lanois has sliced, one performance with one guitar.” ture for the ever-restless artist who in recent years has diced, julienned and reconfigured the live performThat’s a succinct summation of this collection zigzagged from the reassuring folk setting of 2005’s ances that Young laid down. The effect reaches of ferocious rockers and reflective ballads, which “Prairie Wind”album and its companion Demmewell beyond the sonic atmospherics the seven- will be released Sept. 28. (One edition will include directed concert film“Heart of Gold”to the bristling time Grammy-winning producer wove into highly a DVD with the films.) anger of 2006’s “Living With War”to the jumbled regarded albums he’s made with U2, Bob Dylan, “All this technology Dan brings is really old,” blue-collar charm of last year’s“Fork in the Road.”

Peter Gabriel and Emmylou Harris.

Young said.“And he’s capturing all these things that Love And War

REVIEWS

22 October 2010

NEW CD RELEASES

15

Books

A sheltered child

Richard Thompson 0Dream Attic 0Shout Factory

Room

0Emma Donoghue 0Little, Brown and Co. ($24.99)

Throughout his long career, Richard Thompson has been justly celebrated as both a songwriter and a guitarist, and “Dream Attic” provides ample new evidence of each talent. “The Money Shuffle” and“Here Comes Geordie”showcase his satiric wit in deft character studies.“If Love Whispers Your Name” and “A Brother Slips Away” are deeply felt ballads.“Among the Gorse, Among the Grey” and “Crimescene”grow from ancient roots in the British folk tradition.“Bad Again”and“Haul Me Up”cross jovial rock-and-roll with desperate pleas.

The 13 new songs were recorded in front of audiences with a quartet featuring Joel Zifkin on violin and mandolin. Much of “Dream Attic’s”appeal comes from the kinetic performances:Almost every track contains a Thompson electric-guitar solo that is its own compact narrative.The songs are typically solid; the solos rank with his best.

– Steve Klinge

JJ Grey And Mofro 0Georgia Warhorse 0Alligator

JJ Grey’s new album is named after a tough little grasshopper indigenous to the American Southeast. Grey himself is from northern Florida, and his music continues to have a distinctly Southern feel.

“Georgia Warhorse”builds on the warm, organic sound Grey and his band, Mofro, developed over their first four albums.The repertoire includes blasts of hard-edged rock (“All,”“The Hottest Spot in Hell”). Grey is best, however, when he veers toward Memphis-style soul (“The Sweetest Thing,” a duet with reggae great Toots Hibbert) and gutbucket blues (the title song); injects some gospel urgency (“Gotta Know”); and – setting seduction to a sort of swamp-jazz vibe – goes “Slow, Hot and Sweaty.”

– Nick Cristiano

Danilo Perez

0Providencia 0Mack Avenue Danilo Perez is an elite jazz pianist – but that doesn’t stop him from being highly enjoyable. This CD, devoted to his two daughters, feels like an ice-cold drink on a hot day.

The Panamanian-born Perez melds jazz, classical, and Latin American folk music into a potent mix.

There’s challenge here but also lurking melodicism and a rich tapestry of influences.

Perez, who heads the Berklee Global Jazz Institute in Boston, is aptly broad in his choice of collaborators: Indian American saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, Lebanese American percussionist Jamey Haddad, Colombian conga player Ernesto Diaz,and Portuguese vocalist Sara Serpa along with a Boston woodwind quintet and Perez’s longtime trio, with drummer Adam Cruz and bassist Ben Street.

The results weave in and out of accessible and phantasmagoric.“The Maze:The Beginning”fits in the latter category, though “The Maze: The End” makes things beautiful again, and the calls of the drums, as on the quirky “Cobilla,”is never far away.

Perez bewitches as he teaches.

– Karl Stark

I didn’t think I’d enjoy a book inspired by the crimes of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian rapist who locked his daughter in a basement for 24 years, where she bore and raised his children in captivity. I’m rarely drawn to voyeuristic narratives, fictional or nonfictional, about psychopaths and their crimes. And since I became a parent, I steer away from books where bad things happen to children.

But Room is not this sort of book at all. The breathtaking trick of Emma Donoghue’s novel, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, is similar to the one pulled off by her main character, known only as Ma, who raises her son, Jack, in an 11-by-11-foot space. The novel is the furthest thing from lurid, claustrophobic or sensational. Instead, it’s lovely and poignant, even whimsical. It’s full of insight about parenthood.And it’s hard to put down.

Since the details of the plot and back story are dealt out so judiciously and create so much suspense, I won’t reveal many of them here.The key to counteracting the seemingly inevitable prurience of the story is Donoghue’s decision to let Jack tell it. He begins like this:“Today I’m five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I’m changed to five, abracadabra.”

Jack understands the room he lives in to be all there is – Skylight, Rug, Mirror, Plant.The images he sees on TV he takes as transmissions from worlds that whirl inside the box itself.“On the other planets it’s mostly persons that hundreds can fit into the screen, except often one gets all big and near.”

Seeing Jack’s life through his eyes, you come to appreciate how the protectiveness, nurturing and creativity of his young mother have created a functional and impressively armored world, an alternate reality within the horrible truth. Ma protects Jack from their captor by having him sleep in Wardrobe, where he lies nervously but safely, enduring the man’s nocturnal visits by counting creaks from the bed.“Old Nick,”as the boy thinks of him, is also known for a regular Sunday treat – painkillers for Ma’s bad tooth, a pair of pants or a cheap toy. There are never any new books, so they read Dylan the Digger and The Runaway Bunny over and over.

The world of Room mirrors ordinary parental experience – repeating the same nursery rhyme a zillion times, finding ways to pass the day in an airport lounge, getting through the terrors and boredom of a blackout – and this makes Ma and Jack’s experience relatable.

In fact, Outside ends up seeming more bizarre than the world within. Donoghue’s description of the experience of release from captivity is well done (and based on research from the real cases), but it cannot measure up to the magic of the story before Ma and Jack leave Room.This dark and beautiful fairy tale about the parent-child relationship is what you’ll never forget.

– By Marion Winik

Day-to-day life in the Oval Office White House Diary

0Jimmy Carter 0Farrar, Straus & Giroux ($30) Presidents Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover might be bracketed together for a number of reasons.

Both were engineers by training, shared an almost theological faith in the chimera of governmental efficiency, believed effective management grew from close attention to detail and were powerfully influenced by their religious upbringings – in Carter’s case that meant the Baptist Church, in Hoo-

ver’s Quakerism. Most important, both left office as wretchedly unpopular, one-term chief executives, but then went on to become widely admired (and generally admirable) ex-presidents.

Both also turned out to be genuinely interesting writers: Hoover and his wife translated a Renaissance Latin tract on mining, and he penned the only study of one president written by another, “The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson.”Carter has written more than 20 books since leaving Washington; White House Diary stands out as a substantial contribution to the history of the presidency. This volume consists of his edited version of the diary he wrote and dictated during his tenure. (The unexpurgated manuscripts are in the Carter Library and open to scholarly examination.) At various points, Carter has interjected italicized afterthoughts in which he revisits his appraisals of events and the people involved. It all makes for a uniquely unfiltered look at what occupying the Oval Office day to day means, as well as a bit of second thinking and score-settling.

One of the things that jumps out with particular force is the way in which unforeseen events come to compete with a president’s own agenda for the finite amount of time and attention available to the chief executive and his team. Carter’s final years in office, for example, are dominated by the crises over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian Islamists’ seizure of American diplomats as hostages. (Carter’s account of his attitude toward the failed military rescue attempt and his implicit explanations for the reasons it occurred may surprise some.)

Politically speaking, Carter was a legendary grudge holder and his comments aren’t surprising regarding Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, whom he particularly loathed; Sen. Scoop Jackson, D-Wash.; and, of course, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., whom he regarded as a son of privilege with an overactive sense of entitlement.The same is true in his appraisals of those involved in what Carter rightly regards as his greatest foreign policy achievement, the Camp David Accords. Here, too, you also see the seeds of Carter’s recent shrill antipathy to Israel and its interests. He found Egyptian President Anwar Sadat a man of broad vision and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin narrow and deceitful.

Carter characterizes the Palestinians as people with “rights”and the Israelis as people with “demands.”

Over and over, he fails to evince any sympathy for the existential condition of Israeli leaders for whom every aspect of the peace process is a negotiation over their country’s survival. In several instances, he also implicitly taxes American Jews, particularly those in government, with the old dual-loyalty slander. It’s ugly, small-minded stuff.

At other moments, Carter is generously fairminded. He admired Republican Howard Baker’s bipartisanship, and he calls Warren Christopher, who served as his deputy secretary of state,“the best public servant I had ever known.”Few familiar with Christopher’s career would disagree.

Carter’s description of his press coverage is an

interesting example of the way those who opposed him, disappointed him or – in his view – let him down are handled in this volume. In his afterword, he cites among the failings that brought his presidency to grief“my inability to form a mutually respectful relationship with key news media. Because of the United States’defeat in Vietnam and Nixon’s Watergate debacle, I inherited a suspicious, almost cynical attitude among the press toward the presidency.”

That odd mixture of self-deprecation and historically inevitable circumstances-beyond-my-control is supposed to remove the sting of the criticism that follows: In the Carter schema, everybody is at fault, but the other guy is more at fault. Thus, in several diary entries, the president and his staff decry the savagery of their press coverage.

Look a bit closer, though, and the evidence of these pages suggests that what’s being denounced is the fact that all the administration’s coverage wasn’t positive. In an entry on who in the press could be trusted, for example, Carter notes his White House had good relations with Phil Geyelin and the people who ran the Washington Post’s editorial page, and terrible ones with Ben Bradlee and the paper’s news staff. NewYork Times columnist James Reston, then his paper’s eminence grise, wins the highest Carter rating for trustworthiness.

As far as a reflexively cynical, suspicious press corps goes, there’s this entry from Sept. 28, 1977: Press Secretary “Jody (Powell) and (chief of staff) Hamilton (Jordan) discovered a sweeping news media premise claiming that Vice President (Walter) Mondale had lost influence within the White House. It was ridiculous, so I called Jack Nelson with the Los Angeles Times and Hedrick Smith with the NewYork Times, and succeeded beyond my expectations.The following day superb articles came out telling how influential the vice president was.”

Maybe the press in Georgia, where Carter made his political bones, is more accommodating, but when you can call two of the toughest, most influential reporters of their generation and get that sort of result, it’s hard to imagine what a “respectful” relationship might have looked like.

Viewed through one prism, Carter’s presidential record involved remarkable achievements – creation of the departments of energy and education, the Camp David Accords, settlement of the Panama Canal issue, regulatory overhaul and a record of legislative success surpassed only by Lyndon Johnson in the post-war era. Still, his administration ended in failure. In the afterward, Carter explores some of what he believes are the reasons for that and offers President Barack Obama some cautionary advice on pushing too ambitious an agenda, asking Congress to take too many politically costly votes and getting too far out in front of the electorate.

There’s little in this diary about stagflation or the economy – and the fact that little else matters to the American people when they’re out of work and financially insecure. It’s that absence and its consequences that Obama ought to heed.

– By Tim Rutten

HEALTH

16

22 October 2010

Living their whole lives with HIV

By Brooke Minters The Philadelphia Inquirer

PHILADELPHIA – Last spring, Lafayette Sanders got a call from a friend who was concerned about his reputation.The word on the street, she said, was that he and his girlfriend had HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. It was true about Sanders, and he told her so because his friend was so supportive. But Sanders, then 23, also decided that he needed to tell all his friends that he had been HIV-positive – for his entire life.

Sanders, of Philadelphia, belongs to a rare group; he was born HIV-positive when he was perinatally infected via his mother either during pregnancy and delivery or breastfeeding.

At the time, HIV was a death sentence. Sanders and several thousand other infected babies weren’t expected to live very long.

But thanks to more than two dozen drugs, the oldest babies are now reaching 30, and living into uncharted territory.

Their challenges are daunting.Along with homework, puberty and just surviving the rough streets of Philadelphia, they’ve dealt with losing sick parents and friends, disclosing their status, engaging in sex with uninfected partners, and enduring medical side effects with unknown consequences.

Sanders, now 24, has experienced it all.“My main goal is to get people to talk about HIV,”said Sanders, a brand rep for a clothing line and peer educator for iChoose2live, a Philadelphia-based youth program that encourages HIV awareness and career building.

“I want to destigmatize it.”

More than a million people are living with HIV in the United States, mostly contracted from sex or drugs, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Just 1 percent got HIV perinatally or through the bleeding disease hemophilia and blood transfusions.

In 2007,an estimated 7,757 people were living in the 37 states reporting to the CDC who had been diagnosed with perinatally transmitted HIV before age 13.

In Philadelphia, where the overall HIV infection rate is five times the national average, at least 272 current residents were perinatally infected, though officials say the figure could be far higher.

Social worker Christine Ambrose has seen many changes over the last 20 years.“Back in the day, it was about preparing families to lose their kids,”said Ambrose, who directs the Adolescent Initiative at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Now the survivors are“living these incredible lives, but with a lot

During vaginal delivery, the mother’s blood can get on the mucus-laden areas of the baby, such as the eyes, nose, mouth, or rectal area, where the virus then attaches to white blood cells.

For those who get the disease, just learning about it is an early hurdle. It’s common for many young perinatally infected children not to know their status. They might tell their friends or teachers they are positive without understanding the isolation, stigma, and rejection that could follow.

But “it’s probably better to (disclose) it before the teenage years,”says John Krall, family services manager at Children’s Hospital’s Special Immunology Clinic.“With the younger kids, it feels a little less murky than a teenager who’s trying to deal with their identity and interest in sex.”

Sanders remembers his mother talking to him at age 13 before she died of kidney failure – a common AIDS complication – in 1999. “’Just make sure you take care of your sister and stay healthy,’” he recalls her saying.“I didn’t know what she meant at the time.”

He finally learned about his condition when his grandmother took him to Children’s Hospital later that year.

Deceased parents are another fact of life among his peers.“We don’t have any teens and young adults Chaneil Scott, left, and Lafayette Sanders, pictured August 18, 2010, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, were both infected born with HIV with both their parents alive,”says with HIV at birth from their mothers. / Laurence Kesterson/ physician Jill Foster, director of the Dorothy Mann Philadelphia Inquirer/MCT Center for Pediatric and Adolescent HIV at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. of barriers, given they weren’t expected to live long.”

Many young patients also have a hard time taking The first AIDS cases came to public attention in their drugs consistently, which is critical in keeping 1981, and doctors could do little to stop mother- the ever-changing HIV virus at bay. to-child transmission. It wasn’t until 1995 that a Children’s Hospital loses an average of one clinical trial found that the HIV drug zidovudine, or older teen a year who failed to take the drugs, said AZT, could reduce perinatal HIV transmission.The Richard Rutstein, Sanders’ doctor.“They make a drug was so effective that the researchers stopped semiconscious decision not to take their medicine,” the trial earlier than planned.The use of AZT during Rutstein said. So “there is not a conversation that pregnancy and a course of medicine for the new- doesn’t include something about adherence and born just after delivery dropped mother-to-infant social behavior.” transmission from 20 percent to 8 percent. Fifteen Sanders openly admits to periods of non-adheryears later, the rate is down to 1 percent, thanks to ence. newer drugs and better care.

“I sometimes do forget to take it,”he said.“Like Recent numbers show the problem has abated last year, I didn’t want to deal with it all. further but not disappeared. From 2005 to 2008, “But as I started to mature, I realize I need to there were 452 infants born to HIV-positive moth- take them to be healthy.” ers in Philadelphia. Of those, 14 babies tested posiThere are also questions about toxicity, with no tive for HIV. clear answers on what it means to be on these mediThe mother’s placenta naturally protects the cations for decades. Common side effects include baby from infection, says Kenneth Dominguez, a kidney and liver problems, plus the body-distorting CDC epidemiologist. But if the mother is sick, isn’t disorder Lipodystrophy, which causes fat to leave on medication, or is close to developing AIDS, she the face and arms and collect around the belly. is more likely to transmit through the placenta.

“Sometimes I do worry about how it’s affecting

Joint-pain supplements don’t work

By Shari Roan Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES – An analysis of 10 studies involving more than 3,800 people has found that glucosamine and chondroitin supplements for joint pain are ineffective either alone or in combination.

Glucosamine and chondroitin supplements have been popular for years among people with arthritic

knees or hips.According to the authors of the study, worldwide sales of the supplements reached almost $2 billion in 2008. Previous studies on whether the drugs work to relieve arthritis pain, however, have been conflicting.A study published earlier this year from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine found that people who took the supplements for two years had outcomes similar to people who took the prescription pain medication celecoxib or placebo pills.

The new analysis included 10 large, randomized, controlled studies. Researchers concluded that people taking the supplements did not differ from those taking a placebo on measures of pain or any changes in joint space.

The supplements don’t appear harmful, the authors note. But if people begin to feel better while taking them it could be due to the placebo effect or just the natural healing of joints over time.

“We see no harm in having patients continue these preparations as long as they perceive a benefit and cover the costs of treatment themselves,” the authors wrote.

my body,”said Sanders, though side effects have yet to appear.

All these burdens add up and create still more.

“They’re dealing with depression, mental illness, and obviously the physical challenges,” said Krall of Children’s Hospital.

Chaneil Scott, 19, of Philadelphia has come through it all intact. She knew from an early age she was HIV-positive. Every day she had to swallow a syringe’s worth of liquid AZT, the first approved HIV drug.

But she didn’t know what that meant until after her mother died and she moved in with her foster mother. She educated Scott by giving her children’s books on the disease and sending her routinely to see a pediatrician.

“At first, I was scared to tell people,” said Scott.

“But I never got a negative reaction so I felt like a regular person.” Now a sophomore at Millersville University, she just became a peer health educator and would like to go into public health.

Not everyone is so lucky. Doctors and social workers in the city speak of the trauma their patients have experienced, like losing friendships over disclosing their status and being bullied. One child had “AIDS BOY”scribbled on the front of his locker.

Pejoratives like“the ABC”and“Kittycat”are used to describe people who aren’t“clean,”another offensive term for those with HIV. “As disenfranchised as you are, you can always find someone else to pick on,”notedTheresa Parrino,assistant director at St. Christopher’s adolescent center.

“A lot of people think HIV and AIDS has a certain look,”added Sanders.“It was always weird to hear my friends talking about it because I’d think ‘I didn’t choose this to happen to me.’”

Sanders has a tattoo on each forearm; the left one bears lyrics from the late hip-hop artist 2Pac: “Hold on and be strong, God bless the child that can hold his own.”The right arm reads,“RIP Crystal”– his mother.

Finding a girlfriend has never been hard for him.

He lost his virginity at 13, he said, and has had several girlfriends before and after he began disclosing his illness. But he admits he has not been 100 percent responsible – even when his partner knew.

For the record, he says, the girlfriend, now his ex, who inspired him to be more open is HIV-negative.

So is his younger sister, whom he declined to name.

And while at least one close relative wishes he would be more private, he sees his mission as putting a face on HIV. “One person can change the world,”he said.“Look at Rosa Parks,Martin Luther King,or HarrietTubman.”

Healthy Living

How to grate a tomato

A quick, easy way to prepare tomatoes is to grate them; tomatoes are chock full of vitamins and cancer-fighting lycopene.

Tomatoes, Greek-style • Choose firm, ripe tomatoes • Cut them in half cross-wise, then remove the seeds • Grate the meat side of the tomato, using the coarse holes of a box grater, over a bowl or measuring cup • Use the grated tomatoes in any recipe that calls for tomato pulp; try mixing them – uncooked – with garlic, balsamic vinegar and olive oil for a quick pasta sauce • Grated tomatoes can also be frozen for later use Source: New York Times, About.com, health.learninginfo.org, MCT Photo Service Graphic: Pat Carr © 2010 MCT

SCIENCE/TECH 17

22 October 2010

E-readers mishandle some book formats

By Steve Alexander Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

Some new e-readers for electronic books create an interesting problem: It’s now possible to own a book you can’t read.

The problem occurs with free electronic books that have been digitized in the widely used PDF file format for PCs equipped with the free Adobe Reader program.These PDF files sometimes don’t display properly on tiny e-reader screens, even though they’re compatible.

I decided to see how the Amazon Kindle e-reader would display some PDF files of classic books, including the novel All Quiet on the Western Front and two collections of Sherlock Holmes short stories.The books are free to download to a PC because their copyrights have expired.

But, in a problem daunting enough for Holmes, the words in these PDF files shrank to nearly microscopic size when I transferred them to the smaller Kindle screen. The Kindle could make the type larger, but it failed to compensate by reducing the number of words per line.As a result, every page ran off the edge of the screen, making it necessary to scroll back and forth to read each line.This occurred

THE WORDS IN THESE PDF FILES SHRANK TO NEARLY MICROSCOPIC SIZE WHEN I TRANSFERRED THEM TO THE SMALLER KINDLE SCREEN. THE KINDLE COULD MAKE THE TYPE LARGER, BUT IT FAILED TO COMPENSATE

BY REDUCING THE NUMBER OF WORDS PER LINE

only with free PDF files; the for-pay books in Kindle format resized automatically to fit the screen.

Seeking a solution,I used my PC to adjust the type in the PDF files before transferring them to the Kindle.The Adobe Reader software did enlarge the type size and rearrange the lines so they didn’t run off the edge of the page, but it refused to save the changes.

For that I needed the $299 Adobe Acrobat program.

Rather than pay that much, I downloaded the literary works again, this time in HTML Web page format – which, unfortunately, the Kindle can’t read.

I copied and pasted the words from these files into Microsoft Word, and used Word to nearly double the type size (to 20 or 22 points.) Word automatically

rearranged the lines so none ran off the side the screen.Then I used Word’s“save as”feature to store the books as new PDF files.

When transferred to the Kindle’s small screen, the giant PDF type shrank dramatically but remained easily readable. No doubt Holmes would have solved the problem much sooner.

Science Matters

What addiction looks like

3-D nuclear scans are being used to help treat alcoholics and addicts by mapping the brain damage done by their substance abuse.

Single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT)

SPECT scanner

Shows blood flow and glucose use in brain; reveals underactive and overactive areas

Healthy brain NOTE: Colors are not significant

Bottom

Pick the perfect smart phone

By Bridget Carey McClatchy Newspapers

MIAMI – In the past few months we’ve seen more than a dozen new high-quality smart phones with powerful hardware – and tested them.

So which should you buy? First, decide which service provider you want to use. Not every phone is available from every carrier, and costs for monthly plans can vary significantly. Most phones cost about $200, after rebates and two-year contracts.

That said,software changes quickly,and the carriers are constantly coming out with software upgrades users can download to fix bugs and add features.

But for now, these are the winners in my book: Larger-than-average screen: HTC Evo 4G on Sprint. Compared to its larger brethren, it’s got the best interface and a second camera on the front for video chatting.

Slide-out keyboard: Top-of-the-line choices are AT&T BlackBerry Torch,Verizon Droid 2 and Sprint’s Samsung Epic 4G. My pick: Epic for its sharp graphics, spacious keyboard layout, quick and smooth response. It also has an extra camera on the front if you want to video-chat.

Photo-video sharing: The iPhone 4 and HTC’s Aria (both AT&T), Evo (Sprint) and Incredible (Verizon). Others new this season, such as the Samsung Galaxy S line of Androids (available on all major carriers), have great cameras, but cur-

rent software forces all vertical photos to be shared horizontally.

Video watching: It’s a toss-up between the iPhone 4 and the Samsung Galaxy S line of Android phones. The iPhone 4 offers Netflix (coming soon to Android), and Android has a Blockbuster app for instantly downloading movies. The Galaxy S is soon to feature a Media Hub – which is like an iTunes for Samsung.

Video chats: Three phones – AT&T’s iPhone 4, and Sprint’s HTC Evo 4G and Samsung Epic 4G – have front-facing cameras that allow video chatting. It’s easiest on the iPhone, but as of now, you can only chat with other iPhone 4 users using Wi-Fi.The video chat apps for the Evo and Epic can use improvement, but they have more flexibility on whom you can chat with and where you can chat.

Mostly business: Any of the latest smart phones can sync Outlook e-mail and calendar. Still, the new BlackBerry Torch is especially popular with businesspeople who are addicted to its messaging interface, keyboard with raised keys and blinking red alert light – though it offers limited multimedia functions and few apps.

Overall Champ: When you compare hardware, screen size and sharpness, battery life, an easy-touse interface and wide choice of apps, the iPhone 4 tops the list (as long as you solve the known antenna problem with a case).A close second: Samsung Galaxy S phones with Android.

Top

Side

Four drug-damaged brains Impaired areas appear as holes; some correlate with sensory, behavioral or social problems

1 Marijuana user, age 18,

2 Heavy

drinker,

17 years of weekend use

3 years of use

Prefrontal cortex

On top of brain

Short attention span, poor judgment

3 Heroin user,

Anterior cingulate

age 40; after 17 years of use*

Worries, obsessions, compulsions

Basal ganglia Anxiety, panic, conflict avoidance

Deep limbic, thalamus Sad moods, low motivation

Cerebellum

Temporal lobe Emotional instability, poor memory, panic

4 Cocaine user, age 24, after 2 years of use

Bottom view

Coordination problems, slowed speech Source: The Hanley Center, Amen Clinic, Siemens Graphic: Lindsay Conchar, Sun Sentinel © 2010 MCT

*With methadone

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TECHNOLOGY 19

22 October 2010

THE GROWTH OF STREAMING PIRATE SITES HAS BEEN NOTHING SHORT OF ARRESTING. ONE INDEPENDENT MEASUREMENT SERVICE DOCUMENTED A 42 PERCENT JUMP IN THE NUMBER OF INFRINGING SITES WITH STREAMING CAPABILITY FROM JULY TO AUGUST, SOUNDING ALARMS THROUGHOUT HOLLYWOOD

Claude Prigent/Photopqr/Le Telegramme/NEWSCOM

Hollywood sounds alarm on streaming piracy

By Dawn C. Chmielewski Los Angeles Times

University of Southern California student Elizabeth watched the season finale of HBO’s lusty vampire drama “True Blood” along with about 5.4 million television viewers.

But the 19-year-old junior didn’t see it in a way that would yield ratings points for Time Warner Inc.’s premium cable channel. She caught the final episode on her laptop using Megavideo, one of a growing number of websites in the vanguard of a new wave of Internet piracy. At least 1.25 million others did the same thing, according to estimates from one firm that monitors online traffic.

Megavideo and other sites like it offer a vast unauthorized selection of popular television shows and movies that can be watched with the click of a mouse, using the same streaming technology found on mainstream sites like CNN or Hulu. It demands none of the time or technical sophistication required to download a video file via BitTorrent or other file-sharing technology.

Streaming video is the most visible sign of how Internet piracy has evolved since the days of Napster and its imitators.The new digital black market combines “cyberlockers,”such as Megaupload and Hotfile, which piracy experts say hold stores of pilfered content, with linking sites such as TVDuck and TVShack.cc, that act like an underground version of TV Guide, helping people locate bootlegged TV shows and movies. Some of these linking sites even contain reviews and recommendations that lend a patina of legitimacy.

The growth of streaming pirate sites has been nothing short of arresting. One independent measurement service documented a 42 percent jump in the number of infringing sites with streaming

capability from July to August, sounding alarms throughout Hollywood.

“Accessing stolen content by streaming has become increasingly widespread,” said Rick Cotton, general counsel for NBC Universal.“So the challenge of reducing digital theft online now has a second major focal point.”

Technological leaps in the living room are heightening anxiety further, with manufacturers expected to ship 27.7 million televisions and 55.7 million media players with Internet connections this year alone, according to global projections from researcher iSuppli. Software including Google TV makes it possible for viewers to search for and find video on the Web – including unauthorized streams (a Google spokesman said the company provides tools for rights holders to remove links to infringing content).

“As we see more and more Internet-connected TVs, we’ll see more and more streaming piracy,” said Brian Baker, president and chief executive of Widevine, a company that makes the Internet streaming technology used by Netflix, Blockbuster, CinemaNow and Wal-Mart.

File-sharing remains the primary source for pirated digital copies of songs, movies,TV episodes and video games. But use has stagnated as media companies have enjoyed greater success in crippling or shutting down popular sites such as Mininova and Isohunt, said Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne, a media tracking firm. Streaming and downloading from so-called cyberlockers are on track to surpass peer-to-peer use by 2013, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, Hollywood’s lobbying arm.

“It’s not larger than peer-to-peer, but it’s growing faster,” said Lawrence Low, a vice president of strategy with BayTSP, a technology company that

works on behalf of entertainment industry clients in identifying unauthorized content online.“Live streaming, in particular, is doubling in the last two years.”

The financial damage to the industry is hard to quantify. The federal Government Accountability Office threw up its hands in April, writing that it couldn’t accurately estimate the losses because of all the assumptions required to make up for the lack of data – such as estimating how many consumers

Wider venue

Internet streaming technology is increasingly being used to watch bootlegged movies and TV shows.

Index of live online streams, in thousands (Q1 2009 = 100) 20

Projected Q3 ’10

16,036

15 10 5 0

’09 Source: BayTSP Graphic: Los Angeles Times

’10 © 2010 MCT

would have purchased something they pirated.

The fear is nonetheless palpable throughout the entertainment industry. Executives worry that improvements in Internet speeds and in the software that compresses movie files into easy-todistribute packages are making matters worse.

“It’s made streaming a lot less clunky than it was even three years ago,” said Darcy Antonellis, president of Warner Bros.Technical Operations.

Some of the sites that provide links to pilfered digital content lack any whiff of the illicit.

“It may be the case, in some instances, that people are viewing content from these sites believing they’re legitimate sites,” said Daniel Mandil, the MPAA’s general counsel.“That’s obviously part of the business model that these sites want to create the impression of legitimacy.”

Take, for example, Sidereel, which offers users the ability to watch “every show on the Web.”The site includes ads from Macy’s department store, the National Football League and even from the NBC broadcast network, which is using the site to promote Jimmy Smits’ new fall series “Outlaw.” It contains features common to entertainment sites, including Top 10 rankings, recommendations and a fall TV preview with descriptions of upcoming shows.

Anti-piracy experts describe Sidereel as a linking site that directs viewers looking to watch popular shows that aren’t available free online – such as HBO’s “True Blood” or Showtime’s “Dexter” – to cyberlockers such as Megavideo, which hosts streaming video files.

Chief Executive Roman Arzhintar said Sidereel was nothing more than a specialized search engine.

It points people to relevant content, including such legitimate sources as Amazon.com, iTunes and Hulu, and it immediately removes links whenever it receives notice that it is directing people to infringing content, he said.

“From my standpoint, Sidereel’s main goal is to help people find the content they’re looking for and to track the content so they can keep watching,” Arzhintar said.“I can’t stop the consumer from searching for stuff.”

Technology exists to solve the problem it enabled.

Richard Atkinson, an media piracy expert who created and ran Walt Disney Studio’s anti-piracy operations team, said Vobile makes identification technology that can quickly recognize a movie or TV show from its digital fingerprint, giving website operators the tools to block unauthorized uploads of copyrighted works. But some sites prefer instead the procedure spelled out in copyright law, which requires them to remove infringing content within a reasonable period of time after being notified by the rights holder.

Time is of the essence, however.

“If something is really in high demand, you’ve got the whole world connected via social media, blogging, Twitter,”Atkinson said.“Almost in real time, I can post something to a site and do a worldwide shout-out about my posting.”

A quick removal, Atkinson said,“can mean the difference between a hundred views, which is fairly good containment, and hundreds of thousands of views.” (