TGIF Edition 6 November 09

6 November 2009 NZTONIGHT

Thai tiler gets to stay page

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ANALYSIS

SPORT

MOVIES

CIA gets pinged

Lee still misfires

This is it

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EDITION

There’s been a major setback for global warming theorists tonight with a new study suggesting CO2 is responsible for less than half the warming it has been blamed for.

The study, published in the journal Science, says widely held assumptions about the heat absorbing properties of ‘greenhouse gases’have turned out to be wrong, because climate scientists had not properly taken account of other atmospheric conditions.

The new information effectively throws out 20 years worth of data from UN IPCC endorsed computer models which have been used to make future predictions about global warming. None of the predictions in the IPCC reports, which are relied on by the New Zealand government as it gets ready to introduce new climate charges, are valid any longer.

“What has caused climate scientists’assumptions to go awry?”poses climate writer Doug Hoffman in a brief analysis today.“Short lived aerosol particles in the atmosphere changing how greenhouse gases react in previously unsuspected ways.”

It seems that when UN scientists were telling Al Gore and other political leaders,“the science is settled”, that in fact it wasn’t and still isn’t.

Earlier this week, Gore himself admitted, after getting an early briefing on the study, that CO2 was no longer believed to be the main culprit in global warming, accounting for less than 40% according to new data.

Instead, the studies have found that interactions of greenhouse gases with genuine airborne pollution have a much bigger impact on warming or cooling than just CO2 emissions.

“The bottom line is that the chemistry of the atmosphere can get hideously complicated,”admits NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt.“Sorting out

Taxpayers may have to foot a $3 million bill to pay for carbon credits on clearing ‘weeds’in Southland.

The Fiordland Advocate newspaper reports that attempts to fell 250 hectares of wilding pines have run foul of new global warming laws, and could leave taxpayers bearing the burden.

Under the new laws, trees planted before 1990 cannot be cut down without incurring carbon taxes.

At the heart of the problem is a 250 hectare plan-

Sat: 16°/6° Sun: 16°/8°

www.tgifedition.com

ISSN 1172-4153 | Volume 2 | Issue 49 |

| 6 November 2009

what affects climate and what affects air quality isn’t simple, but we’re making progress.”

The admission, on the eve of Copenhagen talks designed to regulate CO2, that scientists still don’t really understand atmospheric physics, raises big questions about the justification for introducing

tough new restrictions estimated to cost each household up to $7,000 a year or more.

There’s bad news for New Zealand in the new study however – the scientists want tougher crackdowns on cattle emissions, blaming methane for a greater proportion of warming than the UN originally estimated.

Carnage in Texas

on the

INSIDE

PROTESTS MOUNT

Obamacare demo Page 8

By Christy Hoppe The Dallas Morning News

ON THE LINE All Blacks ready

FORT HOOD, TEXAS – The bloody scene might have

Page 11

been drawn from the scarred memories of Iraq war veterans assigned to this Army outpost in the hills of Central Texas: 12 dead and 31 wounded, gunned down in a sudden attack.

But today’s bloody assault at Fort Hood was committed by one of the Army’s own. As night fell across the nation’s largest military outpost on Thursday, investigators sought to explain why Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a 39-year-old Army psychiatrist, turned a pair of pistols on his comrades.

Late Friday, Lt. Gen. Robert Cone and Col. Ben Danner gave an account of the chaos and carnage that began about 8:30 a.m. (NZ time) inside two buildings that house psychiatric, medical and dental units: Hasan used two handguns, including a semi-automatic, to fire at fellow soldiers. Neither of the guns was military-issue.

As Hasan fired, an unidentified female civilian officer managed to shoot him at least once before being shot herself.

TECH TOYS Helping navigate Page 17 Joyce Marshall/Fort Worth Star-TelegramMCT

Continue reading

‘Weed’ clearance incurs $3m climate tax

By Ian Wishart

Dunedin

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We were wrong about CO2

By Ian Wishart

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tation of lodgepole pines planted between 1940 and the 1980s in an attempt to stabilize soil and prevent erosion.

Although successful, the pines quickly spread their seed far and wide, generating 16,000 hectares of wildings that reportedly threaten a further 100,000 hectares of high country grassland if they continue to spread.

The Mid Dome Wilding Tree Charitable Trust, which has the responsibility of eradicating tree ‘weeds’, has been told it’ll be pinged $3 million if

it cuts down the 250 hectare original plantation, for upsetting the government’s Kyoto obligations.

Trust chairwoman Ali Timms told TGIF she’s raised the issue with National’s Nick Smith, and has been told the matter is under consideration, but until it’s resolved the trust has had to down chainsaws.

The problem is likely to be widespread around New Zealand, and could add to an already hefty burden facing taxpayers as a result of following UN instructions on climate change.

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NEW ZEALAND

2

off BEAT TRIVIAL PURSUIT LAUNCHES GENDER CHALLENGE TORONTO, NOV. 6 (UPI) – The distributor of the Trivial Pursuit board game has launched a North American online battle of the sexes to determine the more knowledgeable gender.

In a news release from Toronto, Hasbro Inc announced the launch of the www.trivialpursuitexperiment.com site to determine who’s smartest when it comes to minutiae.

By Friday afternoon, men had a slight lead over women by about 100,000 points.

The release said knowing that coconuts kill more people than sharks each year, that the best matadors in Peru used to be women or that every second 200 stars are born are examples of the types of questions to expect.

Regardless of the eventual score, the company quoted former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on the gender issue.

“Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There’s too much fraternizing with the enemy,” he said.

POLICE EXHUME DOLL WELLINGTON (DPA) – New Zealand police found a doll when they exhumed a casket from a cemetery while investigating the reported death of a baby, a newspaper reported on Friday.

A 33-year-old woman later confessed to staging a funeral to avoid admitting to her partner, who wanted a baby, that she had not been pregnant, the Manukau Courier reported.

“We interviewed the alleged mum and she said there was no body in the grave,” detective Darrell Harpur told the paper.

He said the woman, who was not named, initially believed she was pregnant – as her partner wanted - but then discovered she was not.

“For some reason she couldn’t tell him, so she embarked on this subterfuge,” Harpur said.

The detective said police exhumed a casket from the Mangere Lawn Cemetery, South Auckland, after authorities became suspicious when they received a request for birth and death certificates for a baby with no doctor’s certificate.

He said police believed the woman had told only her partner the truth about the fake burial and most of her family members still believed there was a baby in the grave.

ESCAPED PONY DAMAGES POLICE CAR INDIANAPOLIS, NOV. 5 (UPI) – Indianapolis police said an escaped pony evaded injury when it slammed into a parked police cruiser at a fast speed.

The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police report of the incident said Officer Michael Agresta parked his car at a gas station to investigate reports of two escaped ponies darting in and out of traffic just after midnight Tuesday, the Indianapolis Star reported Wednesday.

Agresta wrote in his report that he and Officer Mikola Layton approached the ponies at the edge of a wooded area near the gas station and the horses became startled and ran toward the gas station at a fast speed.

One of the ponies headed straight for the squad car and attempted to stop, but slid on the surface of the parking lot while sparks were flying off its hooves and slammed into the car’s front bumper, Agresta wrote.

The report said the pony, which appeared uninjured, ran off with the other small horse.

ESCAPED ELEPHANT SIDE-SWIPES CAR ENID, OKLA., NOV. 6 (UPI) – Police in Oklahoma said an escaped circus elephant suffered a broken tusk and a hurt leg when it sideswiped a vehicle while running along a road.

Enid Police Department Sgt. Billy Varney said a couple riding inside of the vehicle Wednesday night were not injured in the collision with the elephant, which fled from the Family Fun Circus at the Garfield County Fairgrounds, The Enid News and Eagle reported Thursday.

The vehicle side-swiped the elephant as it ran along the road. The vehicle was able to drive away, Varney said. He said the elephant’s tusk poked a hole in the car’s sheet metal.

The elephant, which also suffered bumps, bruises and scratches, was loaded into a semi-trailer and returned to the circus at 11:19 p.m. Wednesday.

6 November 2009

Harawira’s political harikari attempt WELLINGTON, NOV 6 – The Maori Party says it is “on the verge” of disciplining MP Hone Harawira over his behaviour despite him apologising for any harm he has done to the party, and for his offensive language.

The party held a teleconference this afternoon after Mr Harawira lashed out at white people over criticism that he bunked off a work trip to visit Paris.

He has apologised for any harm to his party and his expletive filled language, but not for his actions or the sentiments he expressed.

In an email exchange, Mr Harawira accused “white mother*****s”of “puritanical bulls***”for expecting him to follow the rules.

Prime Minister John Key said the Maori Party MP had a history of intemperate remarks and said he hoped the Maori leadership would deal with this one.

“Hone Harawira has made a statement that is deeply offensive to a lot of New Zealanders,” Mr Key said Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia had already expressed concerns that his unscheduled side trip to Paris during a taxpayer-funded work trip last month would damage the party’s reputation.

After the party’s teleconference, president Whatarangi Winiata said in a statement it was very concerned about his behaviour in Europe and the expletive-ridden email that followed.

Prof Winiata said the actions were well short of the values and standards expected by the party.

“We are very disappointed that Hone’s behav-

iour, and his language, fall short of expressing our kaupapa,”he said.

“The party’s constitution sets out a process for handling inappropriate behaviour.”

The co-vice president of the party, retired Judge Heta Hingston, said if a complaint was received it would first be referred to Mr Harawira for an explanation and if this was not satisfactory the matter would be sent to his electorate.

If the response from this did not satisfy the complainant it would go to a party disciplinary committee made up of senior members.

Mr Hingston said he was not aware if any complaint had been laid.

The disciplinary committee could do everything from giving Mr Harawira“a slap on the hand with a wet rag through to expulsion”.

Mr Hingston did not believe that Mr Harawira had taken part in the teleconference, but he had sent an email to the party.

In that email he did not apologise for his actions, but for any harm he had done to his party.

“I apologise unreservedly for any harm to the Maori Party caused by my choice of words in the recent email,”Mr Harawira said to his party.

Mr Hingston said Mr Harawira was aware of the furore he had caused,“but who wouldn’t be the way the media has got involved”.

Mr Harawira skipped a meeting in Brussels so he and his wife, Hilda, could spend a day in Paris. He paid for the extra travel himself.

After this, former Waitangi Tribunal director Buddy Mikaere emailed Mr Harawira a two-sen-

tence message:“Gotta ask the question eh? Who’s paying for Hilda?”

Mr Harawira wrote back starting his email;“Gee Buddy, do you believe that white man bulls***, too, do you?

“White mother...ers have been raping our lands and ripping us off for centuries and all of a sudden you want me to play along with their puritanical bulls***.”

Mr Harawira then went on to say how much time and energy he put into fighting for Maori and what a big role his wife played in that.

“And, quite frankly, I don’t give a s*** what you or anyone else thinks about it. OK?” Mr Harawira was already in hot water, with Speaker Lockwood Smith saying he may have to pay back some of the trip’s overall cost and Mrs Turia revealing she had been led to believe the reason he skipped the meeting was illness.

Mr Harawira has been unrepentant about his actions, saying he missed nothing by skipping the meeting as he had already met those attending the meeting and discussed issues with them.

He did not think he should have to pay back any money and was glad he had undertaken the side trip, saying it would have been “dumb”not to visit such a wonderful city.

Mr Harawira told journalists that he apologised for his language in the emails but did not resile from the sentiments they expressed.

He refused to answer questions and is said to be meeting with his electorate over the weekend.

– NZPA

Project was all wind

By Amelia Romanos of NZPA

WELLINGTON, NOV 6 NZPA – Former All Black hooker Anton Oliver says the Environment Court’s decision to deny consent for a Central Otago windfarm shows the landscape has no pricetag.

Resource consent for Project Hayes, a $2 billion, 176-turbine windfarm, was granted to Meridian Energy in 2006 and 2007, but was subsequently appealed to the Environment Court.

Protesters, including Oliver, artist Grahame Sydney and poet laureate Brian Turner, as well as local residents,said the 160m-high turbines and 12m-wide access roads would destroy the natural landscape.

In a decision released today, the court rejected consent saying “despite the potentially large contribution of energy to the national grid, it would be inappropriate to put a huge windfarm in such a nationally important natural landscape”.

Oliver said he had been in touch with fellow protesters all day, celebrating the news.

“What this result is saying is that some things aren’t measured in monetary terms,”he said.

“It’s saying that some landscapes in New Zealand are so special that you can’t put any price on them.”

The group was not against renewable energy, rather the concern was over the massive size of the site, Oliver said.

“It was far too large, it was going to be the largest one in the southern hemisphere ...At this stage there is no need for that much wind.”

Despite his strong belief the windfarm would be damaging to New Zealand, Oliver said he had not been confident the court would decline consent.

“We live in crazy times at the moment, where things are being justified on crazy rationale, I wasn’t confident at all,”he said.

“I sat in on a few days of the hearing and was happy with the questions the commissioners were asking,so that buoyed me to think‘at least they’re alert and asking about things we were concerned about’.”

In a statement today, Meridian spokesman Alan

Seay said the company was disappointed by the decision and that it would be assessing the decision in detail to consider its potential responses.

TheWind EnergyAssociation said the court’s decision had failed to find a balance between what was good for the economy and concern for the environment.

Chief executive Fraser Clark said whether or not the decision was right, it would raise the bar for assessing renewable energy projects for other large scale infrastructure projects.

“This has the potential to create a far greater loss for all of New Zealand by hindering the development of other renewable energy schemes,”Mr Clark said.

“The significant contribution that Project Hayes would have made to security of electricity supply has not been attributed with any value in the decision.

“This is despite wide acknowledgement of the issues New Zealand faces in maintaining security of supply, and the court’s own recognition of the important role wind energy plays in reducing the risks of the electricity system failing during dry years.”

Taito’s Thai tiler awarded NZ digs WELLINGTON, NOV 6 – One of the key witnesses in the corruption case that put former Labour minister Taito Phillip Field behind bars has been allowed to stay in New Zealand.

Tiler Sunan Siriwan and his partner, Aumporn Phanngarm, have each been issued with two-year residency permits with a number of restrictions.

In a letter confirming the permits, Associate Immigration Minister Kate Wilkinson said the couple had not helped their case.

Mr Siriwan did not appear at an earlier refugee status hearing, and Ms Phanngarm’s refugee claims were“unfounded”and“abuse”of the refugee system, Ms Wilkinson said.

Despite this, Ms Wilkinson told their lawyer, Olinda Woodroffe, she would grant the permits on a number of conditions.

Permanent residence would be granted at the end of the two years, provided Mr Siriwan worked as a tiler for at least a year and worked to obtain New Zealand tiling qualifications.

The couple must also meet English language standards, health and character requirements.

A permanent residence application could not be guaranteed if the conditions were not met, she said.

Mr Siriwan worked for Field on his houses in New Zealand and Samoa in exchange for help with immigration matters.

He was a key witness against Field, who was found guilty on 11 of 12 bribery and corruption charges and 15 of 23 obstruction of justice charges.

Field is serving a six-year prison term and his family objected to Mr Siriwan getting permission to live in New Zealand as they said he had not told the truth during the trial.

Mr Siriwan and his family had been deported from Samoa to Thailand but he re-entered New Zealand at the request of the police on a limited visa to testify in the trial.

The couple have a seven-year-old son who was born in New Zealand.

– NZPA

NEW ZEALAND

6 November 2009

Kiwi stays above 0.72 WELLINGTON, NOV 6 – The New Zealand dollar traded in a narrow range today, dragged a little higher on the coat-tails of its Australian counterpart.

But BNZ Capital currency strategist Danica Hampton said it was a day of consolidation, ahead of the October payrolls report due out of the United States overnight.

“We’ve seen a bit of interest to sell kiwi out of Asia, so as a result we saw it fall from about US72.25c to just under US72c, but it recaptured its gains as the day wore on,”she told NZPA. The kiwi was at US72.25c at 5pm today, up from US71.89c at 5pm yesterday, but easier against the aussie at A79.12c from A79.34c.

The Australian dollar edged further above US91c

after the Reserve Bank of Australia today sharply upgraded growth forecasts and said more gradual increases in interest rates will be required. Ms Hampton said the market was expecting the RBA to revise up GDP and inflation forecasts, but there was surprise how strong the forecasts were when the numbers came out. The aussie was a “little perky” as a result and the kiwi was dragged a little higher against the US dollar.

“But it’s really a case of consolidation ahead of tonight’s payrolls release.”

At 5pm the kiwi was firmer against other major currencies compared with 24 hours earlier, moving to 0.4857 euro (from 0.4845) and 65.53 yen (64.98).

The trade-weighted index edged up to 64.78 (64.64).

– NZPA

ERMA goes soft on pesticide ditched in Europe WELLINGTON, NOV 6 – A broad-spectrum organophosphate insecticide pulled from the market in Europe, and being taken out of play in North America, has been given a reprieve in New Zealand.

Cotnion 200 will be allowed to be used on potatoes, stonefruit and strawberries for another five years, the Environmental Risk Management Authority (Erma) said today.

It has been pulled off the market in Europe, and is being phased out in North America, with a reassessment also under way in Australia.

Erma said the five-year phase-out of Cotnion 200 insecticide would allow alternatives to be developed to meet the needs of growers.

In the meantime, there would be a ban on domestic use or aerial application of the substance, and requirements to re-label, protect bystanders, and to require workers re-entering a sprayed area to wear protective equipment.

There would also be a limit on the number of times a crop could be sprayed.

“There are some uses of (the insecticide) for which there are no registered alternatives and in these cases the risks and benefits are finely balanced,” said Erma’s hazardous substances general manager Andrea Eng.“A five-year phase-out will allow time for alternatives to be trialed and registered.”

– NZPA

Labour’s worst poll since the 90s WELLINGTON, NOV 6 – The latest political poll shows National still holding high levels of support.

The New Zealand Roy Morgan poll found 55 percent of all voters backed National, up 2.5 percentage points from the last poll by the company.

Labour was down 1 point to 20 percent.

Of the minor parties supporting the Government,

the Maori Party was on 3.5 percent (up 0.5 points), ACT was down to 1.5 percent (down 1.5) and United Future was unchanged on 0.5. The Greens were unchanged on 7.5 percent.The poll of 951 voters was conducted between October 19 and November 1.

It had a margin of error of 3.2 percent.

– NZPA

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NEW ZEALAND

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6 November 2009

Rampage at Fort Hood Battalio

n Ave.

74th St .

Okla.

75th St .

As many as 12 people killed and 31 wounded at Fort Hood, Texas; gunman is wounded and in custody.

Scammers may have caught NZ universities

By Nick Wilson of NZPA

of whom did not bother to attend more than the first morning, sought refunds via the TGI website .

Two months ago Mr Bowering received an email from an Australian organisation which said it had checked its accounts and found a series of recent payments to an American company called Mother Road.

He contacted others who had been on the course and while none had heard of the company, their records also showed purchases.

Mr Bowering said he did some digging and found one of the people listed as a project manager for Mother Road was also a co-ordinator for TGI. He said representatives from about 15 Australian universities had attended the course and he had been trying to issue a warning for them to check their accounts.

“Some of the people have had seven transactions of between $A600 and $A1200 for each transaction.”

The New Zealand researcher said she noticed several transactions of $NZ1000 had gone out over the past two months and notified the financial manager .

Mr Bowering lodged a complaint with Australian police who, in turn, notified Interpol. However, he did not expect anyone would be reimbursed.

“Basically I was told there’s nothing you can do because (TGI) are operating internationally. The chance of pulling them in is nil.”

A New Zealand police spokesman could not confirm whether any complaints had been lodged locally.

TGI has also come under fire in the United States, the Better Business Bureau of Colton, California, reporting 63 complaints in the 36 months to July 2008.

This prompted the North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem to issue a warning about the company, saying he was“highly concerned”.

TGI last year advertised a follow-up to the Sydney seminar to be held at Otago University.

An Otago University spokeswoman said they were not aware of TGI but would investigate on Monday.

WELLINGTON, NOV 6 NZPA – A number of New Zealand universities may have been caught up in a Texas multi-million dollar international scam.

University researchers and staff from non-profit 25 km organisations attended a three-day seminar in SydFort Hood 25 miles ney in March last year, which promised to provide Solider expert speakers on how to apply for government Dallas Readiness Fort Worth grants and philanthropic funding.

Center It was run by the California Institute for Communication Improvement, trading as The Grants 400 ft. (125 m) Institute (TGI).

Site of Between 60 and 100 people signed on for the Base population About 50,000 soldiers and their shootings course, paying up to $A400 0 ($NZ5125) each. family members; 9,000 civilians work there Soldiers NZPA understands researchers from Otago UniReadiness versity,Otago Polytechnic,Lincoln University,and the Processing 35 University of Auckland, were amongst the attendees.

50 km Center A researcher from one of these universities, who Okla. 50 miles did not want to be named, paid $US996 ($NZ1400) Waco for her spot with a university credit card.

Texas Fort Fort “I and others in our research office had spoken Texas Worth Dallas Hood to organisers on the phone whom all sounded legit, Area of detail the website was full of glowing reports...so why Fort Hood Waco Killeen wouldn’t you go and learn from the“experts”about grant writing?”she said.

Houston Austin “It was clear from the first entry to the room that About Fort Hood we had been duped.”

San Antonio Largest Army base in the United States; The venue had been changed at a day’s notice to a covers 340 sq. mi. (880 sq. km) shabby classroom with no power outlets, insufficient Gulf of MEX. Home to 1st Cavalry Division; Mexico seats and no course material.The speaker had been 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment hired the night before.

Source: CNN, globalsecurity.com, KCEN-TV Shane Bowering, director of Queensland-based Graphic: Lee Hulteng, Judy Treible, Tim Goheen Melina Yingling, Pat Carr © 2009 MCT grant writing and lobbyist group Red Tape Busters, was one of the lecturers hired by TGI. “I delivered my own course. I refused to deliver The gunman was finally felled by four bullets and stuff,”said Shaffer.“At first I thought it was a wreck, their course because it was atrocious,”he told NZPA. Mr Bowering said none of the speakers were paid airlifted by medical helicopter to an undisclosed hospi- but I kept hearing more sirens. It kept going on.” tal,where he underwent surgery.Cone said Hasan was When she finished processing the soldier’s and there was no response when the attendees, many in critical condition but“his death is not imminent.” records, she checked her phone and saw her husband, The general said that many of the military per- who works on the base for the Army and Air Force sonnel used life-saving skills learned as part of their Exchange Service, had been trying to call her. Her training. He described a scene where people were husband phoned again and said urgently:“Where “ripping their uniforms and taking care of each other.” are you? Stay put.”

Still unexplained tonight was the motive for Her husband was close enough to the scene of the NEW FROM THE PUBLISHERS OF IAN WISHART’S BESTSELLER “AIR CON” Hasan’s attack. attack to hear the gunfire, said Shaffer.

Asked if it could be considered a terrorist attack, Spc. Joshua Branum, just recently back from his Cone replied,“I couldn’t rule that out”but said the second long tour in Iraq, was at the Killeen,Texas, evidence does not point to that. courthouse taking care of a minor traffic issue when Family members said Hasan, a native-born he heard of shootings and death at Fort Hood.

Virginian and 1997 biochemistry graduate of VirThree months back, and now it was his wife and ginia Tech University, had been distraught over an 1-year-daughter in harm’s way.“I went into combat impending overseas deployment. mode-autopilot,”he said.

Hasan had been posted to Fort Hood in July after He immediately called his wife and told her to serving for six years at Water Reed Army Medi- lock the doors and windows,“ ‘keep yourself and the cal Center in Washington, D.C. He was unmarried, baby down at all costs,’and then I started on my way.” authorities said.

For almost two hours, Branum paced outside the Nader Hasan, a cousin of the gunman, told Fox main gate at Fort Hood in his desert fatigues as News that Hasan had suffered harassment from he and more than dozen active military personcomrades over his Middle Eastern heritage. nel awaited the lifting of a lockdown so they could “He is a good American,” Hasan told the news see their loved ones. Phone lines were jammed, and channel.“We are shocked.” some had trouble getting through.

Other reports, however, suggested Hasan had He said he wanted to patrol the perimeter in his called on Muslim Americans to rise up in revolt, truck, to feel he could help in some way. and he had allegedly made supportive statements “In a situation like this, any soldier feels that ‘ about suicide bombing. should have been there.’Maybe there wouldn’t have While wounded were being transported to hospi- been so many dead; maybe there wouldn’t have been tals around the area, authorities ordered the mas- so many wounded,”Branum said. sive post closed. About 120,000 to 130,000 people He said he was angered to hear that it was a sollive or work on the post, one of the country’s largest dier who fired at colleagues. military installations.

The FBI and Texas Rangers joined with military “It’s a terrible tragedy. It’s stunning,”Cone told investigators in the search to determine how and reporters gathered outside the vast facility north- why the attack occurred. east of Austin,Texas.“Soldiers and family members Around the country, some bases stepped up secuand many of the great civilians who work here are rity precautions, but no others were locked down. absolutely devastated.”

After nightfall at Fort Hood, as the religious gathAt the Military Personnel Center, where arriving ered to pray, the patriotic gave blood, and doctors Two powerful books on global warming, easy to soldiers are processed and records updated, civilian and nurses worked to save the lives of the wounded, understand, great reading this Christmas employee Poi Shaffer was updating records for a the post returned to a semblance of normalcy. Sirens soldier when she heard sirens on Battalion Avenue- continued to sound, but traffic once again rumbled AVAILABLE NOW FROM WHITCOULLS, PAPERPLUS, TAKE NOTE, BORDERS, DYMOCKS about a mile away from the scene of the shooting. along Battalion Avenue and speakers blared,“The AND ALL GOOD BOOKSTORES “I heard sirens,ambulances,fire trucks,all kinds of emergency no longer exists.” Back to the front page

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EDITORIAL

6 November 2009

Editorial

Family Matters

The Rodney and Hone Show It would be hard to find a stranger week during the first year of this National/Act/Maori government coalition.

The news that perkbuster Rodney Hide had taken girlfriend Louise Crome to London for her brother’s wedding was swiftly followed by revelations that Te Tai Tokerau’s mouthy roustabout Hone Harawira had played hooky on a European parliamentary meeting for a side trip to Paris with his wife Hilda.

In Harawira’s case, one can almost sympathise.

Either another evening with the musty old Euro MPs in Brussels, or Paris.

If there was hope that Harawira had learned anything substantive in one of the West’s cultural homes, that disappeared out the window with his expletive hate-filled email rant to Maori party

supporter Buddy Mikaere.

If one of John Key’s MPs had been caught in an email talking about Maori scum raping and pillaging the country, they’d be out of a job by nightfall.

One might be able to understand the political arguments, but surely we’ve moved beyond this whole brown/white divide, haven’t we?

Media coverage has tended to focus on the expletives, rather than the substance of Hone’s email, yet it is the racist undercurrent in the message that is most concerning. It is the danger that goes hand

By Bob McCoskrie

-It’s Not OK – Mixed Message On Violence

in hand with encouraging race-based politics; the normal left-right divide, already bitter, is transposed on to a colour/culture framework.

For Hide, the need to keep a relationship together appears to have cost him hugely, in a political sense.

Whatever one’s talents, you can’t campaign on a platform of perk-busting whilst in opposition, and then lie back and take the blood money when you get into power.That’s a choice you should have agonized over right at the start of your perk-busting career.

Yes, he’s entitled to it, just like every other MP. Bill English was entitled to his housing allowance as well. But the public, in a recession, don’t see it that way.

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Comment

A plunge back into the angst of teen age

By Melissa Dribben The Philadelphia Inquirer

By your mid-50s, you really shouldn’t care what people you haven’t seen or heard from since you wore kneesocks think of you.

But high school trauma has the half-life of uranium. So it was crucial to prepare for my husband’s 40th reunion.

In some ways, the pressure was worse than if it were my own. We went to the same high school, although I’m younger by a whole year.Which, when you’re 17, is practically, like, a generation.

Older, then, was a good thing. The seniors had status, they always seemed cooler, the “Purple Haze”to our“Red Rubber Ball.”His girlfriend was demoralizingly pretty and popular. His buddies were dangerously confident and broke rules and my heart raced to pass them in the hall. And his class had Brad. I loved Brad. For a few weeks, he loved me, too. Or so he said.

At the reunion, there was a chance he’d show.

Here’s the unwritten rule: Anyone who has (1) royally screwed up, or (2) become famous enough to impress your children, does not attend. Serial divorces, a minimum five years out of rehab, 50 extra pounds, rigor mortis face-lift - you go. Attempted murder, involuntary celibacy, going from National Merit Scholar to living in a double-wide - you don’t.

Sane people don’t willingly present themselves to a jury of their fanged peers unless they can make a good case for themselves, or have such a good case that their time is too valuable.“You already know me from late night TV show.”

You’ll talk about them anyway.

My husband was blasé. In high school, he was a star. In life, he hasn’t done half bad either. He had nothing to prove; he just wanted to see old friends.

For me, it was more complicated. Despite four years as a varsity cheerleader, my social status had been shakier. At the reunion, if anyone was kind enough to speak to me, I figured I could hold my own with the career and kids.And hey, I did marry the senior class president.

We all know what really matters, though. So two weeks before, I tried on three outfits and let my daughters judge.

“The skirt’s good, but not the top.”

“Oh God, no.”

“I like the boots, but the sweater’s got to go.”

The morning of, I got dressed and went downstairs to the kitchen.

“Black? In NewYork? Really?”my 17-year-old said.

Ironic, coming from a girl who recently went to school in sheepskin ankle boots and a secondhand flowered mini skirt and (my) jean jacket. But she’s surviving adolescence much better than I did.And she was right.Wearing black in NewYork is trite, like quoting Kahlil Gibran in a mash note. It’s cliched, like planning to play Pachelbel’s Canon at your wedding. (A wedding, incidentally, that will never hap-

5

pen because your ex-boyfriend won’t ever forgive you for that time he told you to get naked and you laughed, thinking he was joking.) It’s ... never mind.

I changed.You can interpret that on several levels, but I also mean it literally.

We drove 2 hours, made pilgrimages to the high school, the rec center, and our houses, which have belonged to other families for so long their kids have grown up and moved away, too.Then we headed for the old Holiday Inn, parked, climbed the stairs and presto! There we were, back where we started.

Almost. Half the faces looked like they were drawn by a police artist projecting what the person would look like today if they’d been kidnapped in 1970 after a Derek and the Dominos concert.

The rest were instantly recognizable: My husband’s ex-girlfriend, still beautiful. An actor from L.A. I’d last seen in an episode of“Grey’s Anatomy.”A midwife from Oregon who helped deliver her grandchildren. A stunt man. An environmental lawyer who flew in from his lake house in Maine. A local politician. A pianist who went into insurance and now lives in a SoHo loft.A tenured college professor recently furloughed because California is bankrupt.

A Manhattan baker. And one single mother with 9-year-old twins.

This is what everyone said:“Oh My God!You look so great!”

When they dove in for a closer look at the little yearbook picture pinned to your shirt, you knew they were lying.

Five hours goes fast when you’re in a time warp. It is weirdly, profoundly comforting to be surrounded by people who remember your first dog’s bad breath, your mother’s stuffed cabbage, and the anti-Melvin Laird poster on your bedroom wall. Friends who knew, even liked, you when you were still raw material. Before you grew into yourself.“Back when we were pure,”someone said.Still,you have to be cautious.

Below the happy surface, there is cancer, addiction, children who have faltered.Who can you trust to sympathize, not judge?

“At the 20th,”one of my husband’s friends said, “everyone was comparing themselves to each other, trying to see who was more successful. Now we’re more mellow.”

Sure. Some of us. But did he really believe the judging was over? The jury had only softened with age, not died. Speaking of which, there was a death table with more than a dozen pictures of classmates who really could not make it to the reunion. Only a few of the causes were known: Lou Gehrig’s disease, multiple sclerosis, heart attack and suicide.And lest you think that once you’re gone, you’re safe from high school rumors, forget it. Even in memoriam, you can be misunderstood.

“I think he had AIDS,” someone said, pointing to the photo of someone I knew had died of a congenital heart defect.

Many of the memories were one-sided.“I felt so bad that time we went out and I was backing up the car and accidentally slapped you in the face,” said Steve, now a dentist in Florida.

I’d forgotten. Kind of wish he hadn’t brought it up.

“You ruined my life,” one woman informed my husband.“You told me I had a mustache.”

“I’m so sorry,”he said, mortified.

“It’s OK,”she said kindly.“It was 40 years ago.”

She still remembered, though.

Note to future reunion-goers: It’s OK, even recommended, to bring pictures of your beautiful, talented, successful children, but pulling out framed 8x10 glossy prints of them taken by Richard Avedon will get you talked about on the car ride home, and not in a good way.

Note to Brad: It’s OK. It was 40 years ago.

Note to my daughters:When it’s your turn, you’ll blow them away. Just don’t wear black.

A report by the US-based Parents Television Council which documents an alarming rise in violence against women and girls on prime-time television should sound warning bells in NZ. According to the report Women in Peril: A Look at TV’s Disturbing New Storyline Trend which studied trends from 2004 to 2009, it found a dramatic increase in storylines depicting violence against women and girls, and the violence being more graphic than ever before.

The study also found a shocking rise in the depiction of teenage girls as victims (400% increase over the 5 years); more scenes showing intimate partner violence (81% increase); and an increase in the use of violence against women as a punch line in comedy series.

Most of the programmes mentioned in the report are shown in NZ including Heroes, Prison Break, C.S.I. Medium, Family Guy, and American Dad, and this highlights the concern that our unacceptable levels of family violence are potentially being driven by a violent media culture.

The increasing use of violence against women as a punch line in comedies such as Family Guy and American Dad also shows a disturbing trivialisation of the seriousness of this issue.

The report correctly concludes that ‘By depicting violence against women with increasing frequency on television, or as a trivial, even humorous matter, the networks may be contributing to an atmosphere in which young people view aggression and violence against women as normative, even acceptable’.

There is ample evidence and research that shows that violence in our media is a significant risk factor for violence in the community and families.

A Family First investigation of 15 programmes on four freeto-air channels between 6pm and 8.30pm over a period covering November 4–13 in 2008 found a saturation of foul language, sexual innuendo, and promotion of Adult Only programmes, and called in to question the so-called family watershed time.

As NZ invests millions of dollars and resources into tackling the problem of family violence, sexual abuse and assaults, and the It’s Not OK campaign, it may be that the media is being left uncontrolled and unaccountable as they undermine these messages and normalize unacceptable behaviour which the community is trying to tackle.

-Price Increases Over 10% The price of budget shopping for a family has increased well above the food price index of 3.3% and could be closer to 12%.

A weekly shopping basket for a family with a budget of between $150 and $225 per week was recorded at two different supermarkets in Auckland in 2008 and then again 12 months later in 2009. While the prices increased only slightly at the higher priced Foodtown ($181-$187 cheaper option and $226-$237 more expensive option), the prices at the budget price Pak’n’Save increased by 10.4% for cheaper items ($152$168) and 12.3% for higher priced items ($173-$194).

While the wages and salaries of many families have been frozen over the past 12 months due to the recession, essential and basic groceries have potentially increased by up to 12%. It seems that the prices at ‘cost-cutting’ supermarkets are catching up to other supermarkets and families are paying much more for their groceries than this time last year.

The shopping basket only included basic items necessary for a family with very few ‘treat’ foods. It doesn’t include any restaurant eating or takeaways but is simply a ‘survival’ budget for a busy family.

According to Statistics NZ, food prices increased 3.3% from September 2008 to September 2009, but this fails to reflect the realities of what families are facing. This is not discretionary spending. It’s the basic spending that a family would need to do just to survive.

It comes as no surprise that families are struggling financially and that discretionary spending such as family trips, sports, and school expenses are being reduced. Desperate parents will be turning to food banks, looking to work longer hours, get extra jobs, and may even be turning to loan sharks. This will be increasing the stress of many families.

Low income families will simply not be able to survive if this trend continues and the government must address issues around tax cuts, income levels, accessibility to budgeting services, and increased support for families with children.

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

6 November 2009

Italian CIA verdict puts pressure on Obama

An Israeli Navy commando force seized control over a suspicious vessel in the early hours of Wednesday morning, which was found to be carrying weapons. The ship is believed to have come for Iran, destined for Hezbollah in Lebanon and meant to dock in Syria. The incident took place some 150 kilometers off the coast, near Cyprus

Israel arms seizure caps secret operation TEL AVIV, ISRAEL, NOV. 6 (UPI) – The Israeli navy’s seizure of a ship carrying 300 tons of Iranian arms supposedly bound for Hezbollah capped an intelligence operation that tracked the shipment for 2,500 miles from Iran’s Gulf port of Bandar Abbas.

That’s a key base of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which these days pretty much controls Hezbollah.

The timing of the seizure just before dawn Wednesday local time raised speculation that it was intended to deflect attention from a U.N. debate on alleged war crimes committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip in an offensive almost a year ago.

Those allegations were given immense international weight by a scathing U.N. report released Sept. 15.

With the intent to rebut the charges and justify its actions in Gaza, Israel has been waging a strident campaign claiming Iran arms Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas faction that controls Gaza with rockets capable of blasting Tel Aviv.

The seizure of the German-owned, Antiguanflagged freighter Francop in international waters off Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean by naval commandos of the elite Flotilla 13 unit was the biggest haul Israel has made in its drive to cut off arms supplies to its enemies.

Israel’s navy commander said the intercept occurred on a routine patrol,but all the signs are that it was the result of a complex intelligence operation.

According to various sources in Israel, Lebanon and Cyprus, the arms were shipped from Bandar Abbas Oct. 14 aboard the Iranian cargo ship Visea.

It is owned by the state-run Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines Group.

The arms shipment was under surveillance from the moment it left Bandar Abbas in a complex intelligence operation involving Israel, the United States and several NATO members.

The Visea sailed into the Arabian Sea and then north up the Red Sea to the Suez Canal and into the Mediterranean. It docked at the Egyptian port of Damietta on Oct. 26.

Thirty-six olive green containers holding, by Israeli count, 3,000 107mm and 122mm Katyusha rockets, along with large quantities of armour-piercing artillery shells, hand grenades and Kalashnikov ammunition, were offloaded.

The Israelis estimated that was enough to keep Hezbollah fighting for a month.

The containers remained at Damietta for a week

until they were loaded onto the 8,622-ton Francop.

From there, the Israelis say, the ship was due to go to Limassol, Cyprus, then to the Syrian port of Latakia from where the weapons would be delivered overland to Hezbollah.

The Israelis said cargo certificates proved the containers were bound for Syria, but they have not yet produced the documents.

Syria and Iran deny the Francop carried Iranian arms destined for Syria. Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem even claimed the vessel was sailing in the opposite direction carrying imported goods from Syria to Iran.

The Israelis say the Francop’s crew, along with the ship’s owners, Gerd Bartels of Hamburg, did not know the freighter was carrying weapons.

Most of the arms were hidden behind stacked bags of polyethylene labeled in English NPC National Petrochemical Company with a flame logo used by the company and Iran’s Oil Ministry. Some of the containers were marked IRISL. When the Israelis boarded the Francop Wednesday they found the arms very quickly, suggesting they knew exactly what they were looking for.

The Israelis clearly were alerted about the arms shipment even before it left Iran, indicating that they may have agents on the ground there or even inside Hezbollah.

Dozens of suspected Israeli agents have been rounded up in Lebanon over the last year, and it can be presumed that others may remain in place.

According to Ronen Bergman, an Israeli security expert and author of the 2008 book The Secret War with Iran, Israeli intelligence has been watching weapons deliveries to Hezbollah for some time now.

However, he says the Israelis have not moved to stop them, probably to protect their clandestine sources.

Reported attacks on Iranian arms shipments destined for Hamas that were destroyed in air and naval attacks in the Red Sea region earlier this year remain shrouded in mystery.

Israel has made no official comment, but the raids are widely considered to have been the work of Israel’s military.

This time the Israelis have gone public in a spectacular manner, possibly to counter the war crimes allegations by bolstering their claim that Iran supports terrorism and cannot be trusted to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

– UPI

MILAN, ITALY, NOV. 6 (UPI) – An Italian judge’s decision to convict 23 alleged CIA spies of kidnapping a Muslim cleric off the streets of Milan in 2003 spells trouble for Washington’s anti-terror plans.

At the end of a two-year trial in Milan,Judge Oscar Magi sentenced two Italian spies and 23 U.S. citizens, all but one CIA agents,in absentia to prison sentences of up to eight years for the kidnapping of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar.The radical Muslim cleric was snatched by a group of U.S. and Italian agents off a busy Milan street in broad daylight.

The verdict is the first against a dubious antiterror practice known as extraordinary rendition, in which a suspect is kidnapped and taken to a third country for interrogation.

It puts pressure on Washington to steer a clear course on the practice, which has been criticized by most European nations.

The Milan court sent a powerful message:The CIA can’t just abduct people off the streets, Joanne Mariner, terrorism program director at Human Rights Watch, told the Chicago Tribune. It’s illegal, unacceptable and unjustified.

Virtually all rendition victims claim they have been abused, some even say tortured.

Abu Omar, who was suspected of having recruited men for the insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, was flown via air bases in Italy and Germany to Egypt, where he says he was abused for months.

The Obama administration has so far not decided whether it wants to prosecute CIA agents who have committed crimes related to extraordinary renditions.

CIA officials have said renditions might continue, albeit under closer oversight, ensuring that no crimes are committed and that suspects are treaty humanely. (Washington doesn’t see rendition as a crime, and a major U.S. court has yet to render a verdict on the issue).

Armando Spataro, the lead prosecutor of the Milan trial, said the ruling is a warning to governments around the world.

The message of this important ruling – to nations, governments, institutions, secret services, etc. – is that we cannot use illegal instruments in our effort against terrorism. Our democracies, otherwise, would betray their principles, he was quoted as saying by the Chicago Tribune.

The CIA has not yet commented on the trial, nor has it ever admitted that its agents were involved in the kidnapping of Abu Omar.

Earlier this year Robert Seldon Lady, a senior CIA officer in Milan who was sentenced to eight years in prison, told Italy’s Il Giornale newspaper that he was not guilty.

“I’m only responsible for carrying out orders that I received from my superiors,”he told the paper.

The Americans are now warranted in Italy and may be extradited to the country by other EU nations if they travel to Europe.

– UPI

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WORLD

8

update

in 60 seconds RABBI: EUROPE NEEDS RELIGION LONDON, NOV. 6 (UPI) – Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, head of the Jewish community in Britain, said today that Europe needs a culture of tolerant religion to counter extremists.

Sacks, in a lecture to a religious think-tank, Theos, said European secularism makes fundamentalism stronger, The Times of London reported.

“A return to the Judeo-Christian tradition of religion willing to accommodate differences is the only strong enough defense with some of the religiosity that is coming our way with the force of a hurricane,” he said.

Sacks, 61, heads the United Synagogue, the largest Jewish congregation in Britain. He has been honored with the title Baron Sacks of Aldgate.

Comparing Europe to classical Greece during its decline, Sacks said secularism encourages a quest for gratification and discourages people from making the sacrifices needed to be parents. “Europe is both the most secular region in the world and the only one with a shrinking population,” he added.

“That is where Europe is today,” he said. “That is one of the un-sayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it.”

ARCHIVES: THATCHER OPPOSED UNIFIED GERMANY LONDON, NOV. 6 (UPI) – Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was strongly opposed to the reunification of East and West Germany, secret French files show.

The Times of London reported France revealed documents today that describe Thatcher was particularly concerned at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall about how reunification would impact then-West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

“Kohl is capable of anything, Luc de La Barre de Nanteuil, then France’s ambassador to Britain,” quoted Thatcher of saying in March 1990.

“He has become a different man, he does not know himself any more, he sees himself as the master and begins to act like that.”

The documents, unsealed by Elysee Palace in honour of the 20th anniversary of the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, also portray Thatcher, a staunch conservative nicknamed the Iron Lady, as a leader who possibly relied too much on her instincts.

“She wanted to be right and be right on all points, even when her worry did not suggest any solution. She was, as always, convinced that her instinct was right,” Nanteuil said in the documents.

PROSECUTOR CASE DIVIDES U.S. SUPREME COURT WASHINGTON, NOV. 5 (UPI) – U.S. Supreme Court justices are reportedly split regarding an ongoing case about whether prosecutors should enjoy absolute immunity for unscrupulous acts.

The Christian Science Monitor said based on comments made during oral arguments in the case of Pottawattamie County vs. McGhee, five Supreme Court justices appear divided into two rival camps and three justices remain centered on the prosecutor case.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Paul Stevens, and Sonia Sotomayor reportedly agree victims of prosecutorial misconduct should be allowed to file civil suits against prosecutors.

On the other side of the argument are Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, who appear to be concerned about the possibility fallout from such lawsuits.

The Monitor said Justices Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, and Antonin Scalia appear to have concerns on both sides of the matter.

The case stems from two men wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life in prison who are now seeking to sue the Iowa prosecutors who organized false testimony in their trials.

6 November 2009

Obamacare spurs massive protest

By Janet Hook and Noam N. Levey Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON – With the historic House vote on health care barely 48 hours away, battle lines hardened and rhetoric sharpened today when thousands of conservatives and anti-government protesters swarmed Capitol Hill to oppose Democrats’$1 trillion overhaul even as two powerful lobby groups for doctors and seniors endorsed the legislation.

“Kill the bill! Kill the bill!”chanted thousands of protestors outside the Capitol, some having traveled on short notice from as far as California and Texas to protest what they saw as tantamount to socialized medicine.“No Marx. No Mao,”one protest sign read. No socialized anything,”read another.

Meanwhile, officials of the AARP and the American Medical Association publicly endorsed the Democrats’ health care overhaul.

The endorsement by the AARP was prized because the seniors lobby is an electoral powerhouse and it has been skeptical of the Democrats’ proposals to reduce spending on Medicare.The AMA’s support was a marked turn-around for a group that played a leading role in stymieing past efforts to change health care.

The public pressure from left and right provided a dramatic background for Democratic leaders’lastminute efforts to nail down a solid majority for their overhaul plan, which is now scheduled to be laid before the House for debate Saturday – with a vote expected later that day.

The angry voices of opposition echoed the conservative protests that have been increasingly heard this year at anti-tax“Tea Party”rallies, including a major Washington demonstration Sept. 12, as well as at congressional town meetings on health care and in some of the campaigns leading up to Tuesday’s off-year elections.

While the rally assembled in front of the Capitol to hear from House Republicans was peaceful, Capitol Police arrested 21 anti-abortion activists and others inside House and Senate office buildings for disorderly conduct and related charges.

Some Republicans have tried to keep their distance from the Tea Party movement because of some activists’ divisive rhetoric – such as protest signs seen Thursday linking President Barack Obama and the health care bill to Nazi Germany.

Thousands hold carry signs and American Flags during a rally against the Democrats’ health care reform bill on Capitol Hill in Washington on November 5, 2009. UPI/Roger L. Wollenberg

Nonetheless, dozens of House Republicans including their top party leaders embraced the cause by appearing on the steps of the Capitol to address the crowd and denounce Obama and the health care bill.

“We are committed to making sure that not one Republican will vote for this bill,”House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R-Va., promised the crowd.

For their part, House Democrats pressed toward the expected Saturday vote, with President Obama slated to address the House Democratic Caucus Friday as part of the final push for votes.

The health bill protest was promoted by conservative broadcasters and by leaders of the Tea Party movement for less than a week. But even on that short notice, Christie Alkema and her 19-yearold daughter flew in from Corona, Calif.“Congress isn’t listening,”said Alkema, a homemaker who said she planned to sell some of her Los Angeles Lakers tickets to pay for the plane fare.

Out of a crowd of people streaming toward the Capitol under clear blue autumn sky, one woman exclaimed,“What a beautiful day for a revolution.”

Addressing the crowd was a parade of GOP lawmakers including House Republican Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, who denounced the health care bill as “the biggest threat to freedom I have seen in the 19 years I’ve been here in Washington.”

The crowd’s biggest cheers were for Rep. Michelle Bachman, R-Minn., a first-term icon of grassroots conservatives who had, on cable television last week, invited health bill opponents to come to rally and lobby lawmakers.

“You came to your House,”she said, standing at a podium beside a towering stack of paper that was the text of the health care bill.“You came for an emergency House call.’” No House Republican is expected to vote for the bill, so House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been laboring to nail down the 218 votes she needs from her own party’s ranks to pass the bill.

Democrats secured one new vote Thursday when she swore in Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., who won a special election Tuesday.Another special election winner, Democrat Bill Owens of New York, is to be sworn in this weekend.

‘Octopussy’ charged as insider-trading net widens

By Alistair Barr and Greg Morcroft MarketWatch

SAN FRANCISCO – A crackdown on alleged insider trading widened Thursday as five players in the US$1.5 trillion hedge-fund industry pleaded guilty to criminal charges and eight others were arrested.

Federal prosecutors filed new criminal charges against several Wall Street lawyers and traders for allegedly being part of an insider-trading network run by Zvi Goffer, a former proprietary trader at Schottenfeld Group LLC, a hedge-fund firm based in New York.

Goffer, who also worked at Galleon Group and started a trading firm called Incremental Capital last year,was known as“the Octopussy”within the insidertrading ring because of his reputation for having arms in so many sources of inside information,according to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The other defendants include Arthur Cutillo, an attorney at law firm Ropes & Gray LLP; New York attorney Jason Goldfarb; Craig Drimal, who worked in Galleon’s offices but wasn’t an employee; Emanuel Goffer, who worked at trading firm Spectrum Trading LLC and is associated with Incremental Capital; David Plate, a former Schottenfeld employee who’s associated with Incremental; and Michael Kimelman, another Incremental associate.

Ali Hariri, a vice president of Atheros Communications Inc. was also charged with giving inside information to an unidentified hedge-fund manager in California.

Goffer, Cutillo, Goldfarb, Drimal, Emanuel Goffer, Plate, Kimelman and Hariri were arrested. All except Hariri are expected to appear in Manhattan federal court on Thursday, according to a statement from the U.S.Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Deep Shah, a former employee at Moody’s Investors Service, was also charged with insider trading. He remains at large, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York added.

The developments follow last month’s federal criminal charges against Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire founder of Galleon Group. Rajaratnam, who has denied any wrongdoing, was one of six people charged last month. A spokesman for Galleon declined to comment Thursday.

Goffer operated an insider-trading network to gather private information about pending acquisitions of companies including 3Com Corp., Avaya Inc., Axcan Pharma, Hilton Hotels and Kronos Worldwide Inc., federal prosecutors allege.

He allegedly traded on the inside information, passing it along to others so they could trade. Prosecutors also claim Goffer likely paid sources for the

information and gave them prepaid cell phones to try to avoid getting caught.

At one point, Goffer destroyed one of the cell phones by first removing the SIM card and biting into it. He then broke the phone itself in two, throwing away one part and telling his source to get rid of the other piece, the SEC alleged.

A representative at Schottenfeld declined to comment, and a spokesman at Ropes & Gray didn’t respond to an email seeking comment Thursday.

Five hedge-fund industry figures who previously were charged with insider trading pleaded guilty to the crimes, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York also said Thursday.

The individuals are hedge-fund consultant Roomy Khan; Ali Far, founder of hedge-fund firm Spherix Capital; Richard Choo-Beng Lee, former president of Spherix; Gautham Shankar, a former proprietary trader at Schottenfeld Group; and Steven Fortuna, co-founder and principal of hedge-fund firm S2 Capital Management, which is based in Boston.

“If criminal activity is your business model, then criminal activity has to stop,” said Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York, during a press conference.

In addition, the SEC filed civil charges related to insider trading against Schottenfeld Group, S2 Capital and Far & Lee, LLC, a California trading entity.

WORLD

6 November 2009

9

Mouse drug saves Aussie baby WHAT THEN HAPPENED WAS REALLY AMAZING, BECAUSE THE BABY WAS WAKING UP, SHE WAS STARTING TO MOVE AROUND, STARTING TO LOOK AROUND, SHE WAS STARTING TO DRINK MILK FROM A BOTTLE, SHE JUST IMPROVED MASSIVELY

File

SYDNEY – An Australian doctor who used a German experimental drug that had been tested only on mice to save a baby’s life left Friday to brief US and European medical authorities about the amazing success.

In a race against time, doctors at the Monash Medical Centre argued before their hospital’s ethics committee and finally the law courts to allow them to use the experimental drug on the baby.

The baby, known only as Baby Z as the parents want to remain anonymous, suffered from a rare metabolic brain disease which had no known cure and her condition was worsening by the hour.

The disease stops the body expelling sulphite and causes babies to suffer increasingly severe seizures and brain damage until they die.

Baby Z was born on May 1, 2008, with the metabolic disorder which affects one in 500,000 babies and started having seizures 60 hours after her birth.

She was deteriorating fast as doctors desperately searched medical literature in the hope that somewhere in the world there was help.

They found a medical paper written by German plant biologist Professor Guenter Schwartz of Cologne University who had been working on an experimental drug called cPMP for 15 years,

but had tested it only on lab mice, the Australian Associated Press said.

It normally takes years for new drugs to get approval but Baby Z’s parents refused to let their baby die without a fight. They urged doctors to break normal medical procedures and let their baby be the human guinea pig for the unapproved drug.

The doctors contacted Schwartz who immediately sent all of his available compound to Australia.

The parents argued before the hospital’s ethics board that their baby was about to die an agonizing death so there was nothing to lose in giving the drug.

But the hospital insisted they also get approval from a court.A court hearing was hastily arranged and after a tense day of arguing, the judge allowed use of the unapproved drug.

The doctors led by neo-natal specialist Dr Alex Veldman raced back to the hospital as the baby was fast deteriorating.

“The hospital pharmacist sprinted up the stairs with the substance in his hand and we started to treat the baby on that afternoon, actually about 40 minutes after we got the court order,”Dr Veldman told reporters in Melbourne.

“What then happened was really amazing, because the baby was waking up, she was starting to move around, starting to look around, she was starting to drink milk from a bottle, she just improved massively.”

Dr Veldman said the girl is now 18 months old and is doing well although she has some problems and has to be injected with Schwartz’s compound every day.

“She is such a delightful little lady and the parents love her and she has a very happy life,”he said.

“The amazing thing is that I spoke to her mum and she said that she never believed that her baby would die, she always knew that she would fight for it until we find something.”

Baby Z’s mother told reporters through a telephone link-up that it was the most difficult thing anyone could go through.

“It was the most challenging and most traumatic time of our lives,”she said.

She never doubted her baby should be the human guinea pig for the untried German compound.

“There was courage and there was death – we opted for courage,”she said.“If she wasn’t treated, she would die a very painful death.”

Dr Veldman left Australia Friday to present his findings to the United States Food and Drug Administration and European regulators next week.

– DPA

Foreign students left in lurch SYDNEY – Thousands of foreign students studying in Australia were left shocked and angry on Friday after the collapse of four private colleges in Melbourne and Sydney.

Students, many of them just weeks from graduating, turned up for class, only to find the doors locked and signs saying the colleges had gone out of business.

The 2,700 students, mostly from India and SouthEast Asia, had paid up to 20,000 Australian dollars (18,300 US dollars) to the China-owned Global Campus Management/Meridean Group which suddenly went into voluntary bankruptcy administration on Thursday.

Thousands of shocked students gathered outside the locked colleges demanding answers as they feared losing their money without receiving any qualifications.

The colleges, located at 13 campuses in Melbourne and Sydney, provide tuition in hospitality, design, English language, fashion and secondary education.

State governments stepped in to offer places in government schools for students to sit their exams, but

students feared they had been cheated and abandoned.

Victorian Premier John Brumby said vocational students would be offered positions in other colleges.

He said it was purely a commercial matter as the colleges closed when one of the owners withdrew financial support.

It is the latest disaster in Australia’s troubled foreign education industry which has seen nine colleges suddenly close since May when the government started a crackdown on the privately run colleges.

Investigations had revealed some of the colleges were simply means for foreign students to get residency visas for Australia and offered little proper education.

Around 150,000 overseas students are enrolled in colleges, universities and schools in Australia making it an industry worth 16 billion Australian dollars anually.

Tougher regulations and auditing of the private colleges are due to be brought in next year.

Australia’s reputation was badly hurt earlier this year when Indian students protested, saying they had been victims of racist attacks.

– DPA

Asia poised to profit from crash SEOUL – The global financial crisis has triggered the rise of Asia as a regional financial hub with the Asian economy leading the world economy’s recovery, economists said Friday in Seoul.

“If concern still lingers in Europe, and Americans tend to be cautiously optimistic,Asian optimism is definitely obvious,”Dominic Barton, global managing director at McKinsey & Co, said at the Seoul International Finance Conference 2009, a gathering of more than 400 international economists.

Asia’s economy was proving more resilient than expected, economists said, the region’s optimism fuelled by rising numbers of consumers and massive government spending on infrastructure.

There are about 900 million middle-income consumers in China and India whose per-capita annual income averages 5,000 US dollars.

“These Asians will definitely buy more televisions,

cellphones and cars.The solid consumerism rise will supportAsia’s rise as a major financial hub,”Barton said.

Barton assumed that about 10 trillion US dollars would be spent worldwide on infrastructure in the decade ahead.“Asia represents 40 per cent of this forecast infrastructure spending,”Barton added.

The financial crisis has significantly changed the global financial-centre landscape.“As a result of the financial crisis, the overwhelming dominance of Western finance has come into question. One of the results is a shift towards Asia,”said Jeffrey E Garten, former dean of the Yale School of Management.

Asia is forecast to represent the world’s most lucrative financial services market sometime around 2012 and cities like Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul and Shanghai are competing to become new financial hubs, following in the footsteps of Tokyo and Hong Kong.

Shanghai is regarded a prime candidate, owing

to its links with Hong Kong and China’s growing economic power.

“China is Asia’s main assembly and production hub, boosting [Shanghai’s] rise as a regional financial hub,” said Cyn Young Park, economist at the Asian Development Bank.

“By 2020, when China is to become the second largest economy in the world and per capita gross domestic product reaches 10,000 US dollars, China could realize full currency convertibility and the yuan become one of the most important international currencies,” said Mingqi Xu, professor at Shanghai’s Academy of Social Sciences.

However,Asia still needs to do more to rebalance its sources of growth by promoting greater domestic demand and reducing reliance on external markets before assuming a more dominant role, Park said.

– DPA

ASIA IS FORECAST TO REPRESENT THE WORLD’S MOST LUCRATIVE FINANCIAL SERVICES MARKET SOMETIME AROUND 2012 AND CITIES LIKE SINGAPORE, KUALA LUMPUR, SEOUL AND SHANGHAI ARE COMPETING TO BECOME NEW FINANCIAL HUBS, FOLLOWING IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF TOKYO AND HONG KONG.

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SPORT

6 November 2009

11

We’re not handing up record, vow All Blacks A year ago here, Wales led 9-6 at halftime. The All Blacks soaked up the pressure then delivered CARDIFF, NOV 6 – Fresh from building an impos- 23 unanswered points via tries to Jerome Kaino ing record against the Wallabies, the All Blacks eye and Ma’a Nonu. their legendary test rugby winning streak here Under coach Warren Gatland, Wales have 12 determined not to be known as the side who let members of that starting side back while the All it slip.

Blacks have just seven returnees, with the missing As much as Sunday’s (6.15am NZT) test against brigade including Keven Mealamu,Ali Williams and Wales at Millennium Stadium is about the confi- Richard Kahui (all injured) and suspended duo dent hosts trying to end what local media dubs ‘56 Sitiveni Sivivatu and Tony Woodcock. years of hurt’, the All Blacks will fiercely guard their Wales are missing three key injured men: fullback 20-test streak.

Lee Byrne, halfback Mike Phillips and prop Adam While the Springboks have the All Blacks’ Jones. Their go-to men include Lions five-eighths number this year, and France will be confident of Stephen Jones and Jamie Roberts, captain and No a November victory in Marseille after their June 8 Ryan Jones, prop Gethin Jenkins and prolific tryboilover,Wales carry a heavy psychological burden. scoring winger Shane Williams.

The All Blacks saw evidence of the mental side of Said All Blacks captain Richie McCaw:“They continuous defeats this year with their oldest foes come out with a lot of passion and they hoe into the Wallabies, who they beat for a seventh consecu- things. I can’t see that being too different this time. tive time in Tokyo.

“They had us under a bit of pressure (last year) “I’m not sure if the history weighs too much, but but you always believe if you get hold of the ball and you definitely take confidence and your expecta- get at the right end of the field you can put pressure tions are that you can do it,”All Blacks No 8 Kieran back on them.”

Read said.

McCaw rated the atmosphere under the roof at “In their minds, if their group of players haven’t a jam-packed Millennium Stadium as one of his won against an All Blacks side, if it’s weighing on favourites in world rugby. their minds, then it’s a positive for us.”

For the All Blacks, most interest will surround the Read is among six changes to the All Blacks’ fringe men: exciting debut winger Zac Guildford, starting 15 from Tokyo and, aside from personal halfback Brendon Leonard, flanker Jerome Kaino, pride in maintaining a starting spot and rebuilding lock Jason Eaton and prop Wyatt Crockett. a shaky year for the team, the Welsh winning streak All get the chance to promote their claims for is a handy aside. the next two years under the tour rotation policy, “Definitely, we know the All Blacks haven’t lost or suspension in the case of Guildford and Crockett. for over 50 years and you don’t want to be part of With a whole new set of leapers, the lineout will that team that loses,”Read said. be under the microscope again after the excellent All Blacks assistant coach Steve Hansen has been work in Tokyo, while the Dan Carter-marshalled there before as Wales coach and insisted the hoodoo backline’s duel with their attack-minded opposites was no barrier if the tourists weren’t on their game. could make it a memorable contest.

“They’ve got a lot of experience.It’s no different to Carter only trained briefly today as he recovers a drought, there’s always one day closer to it raining. from a badly bruised calf muscle but was confident One day they will win,let’s hope it’s not this weekend.” of taking the field at No 10.

By Mark Geenty of NZPA

Daiju Kitamura/AFLO SPORT

Lee ‘paralysed’ with indecision – pampling

By Andrew Both for NZPA

SHANGHAI, CHINA, NOV 6 NZPA – Danny Lee has hit the skids only seven months after turning pro and one of his peers thinks he has some idea why.

Rod Pampling played with Lee in the opening round at the HSBC Champions tournament yesterday, and the Australian was struck by the way the 19-year-old seemed paralysed with indecision.

“He was stuck on a few clubs, wasn’t too sure what to hit,”Pampling said of Lee, who squandered a good start to shoot a mediocre two-over-par 74 in ideal conditions at Sheshan.

“Every time he was like that he made bogey or a double.They looked like pretty simple shots.

“At 19, you should be pretty much pulling the trigger on everything.You shouldn’t be thinking about a whole lot at that age, and that’s what he

seemed to be, over-analysing a lot of things.

“He’s got a lot of game and he hit the ball fine, (but) I don’t know if his head’s in the right spot right now. He’s getting a bit down on himself.”

Lee, who last year became the youngest US amateur champion at the age of 18, won the European Tour’s Johnnie Walker Classic in Perth in February, before turning professional after the Masters in April.

Great things were expected, and he began his pro career well, even taking the lead briefly during the third round at the US PGA Tour’s Quail Hollow Championship in just his second professional start.

But he has posted only one top-10 finish globally in the past four months and has slipped to 133rd in the world rankings.

On the other hand, fellow teenagers Rory McIlroy and Ryo Ishikawa, with whom Lee was favourably compared, have gone from strength to strength.

Northern Irishman McIlroy is currently third on the European Tour money list, while 18-yearold Ishikawa is second on the Japan Tour ranking.

It seems those two have adjusted to the pro ranks much better than Lee. “Going from an amateur, there’s a lot of pressures on him that he’s never had before,”Pampling said.

“That’s where Tiger’s unique. He came out young and kept it going.A lot of guys come out blazing and then have a little slow spot for a few years.

“They’re all trying to work out how to play the game as a pro and (how to handle) the pressures.

You can’t have an off week and still keep your spot.

A lot of young guys are still learning that.

“Danny’s got some game but as we all know, it’s not just having the game that gets you around.You have to be mentally switched on and I think he’s just a bit lost at the moment.”

Blackgrove regains yellow jersey WELLINGTON, NOV 6 – Waimate’s Heath Blackgrove regained the tour leader’s yellow jersey on cycling’s Tour of Southland but faces a battle to hang on to it in tomorrow’s final two stages.

Blackgrove’s Zookeepers-Cycle Surgery team pounced as rival teams including that of the previous leader Jack Bauer (Share The Road),Subway-Avanti and US-based Bissell Pro all missed an early break in today’s 165km seventh stage from Winton to Te Anau.

A group of 15 riders broke clear early and remained mostly intact for more than 150kms before the brilliant Taupo junior Patrick Bevin (Ascot Park Hotel) outsprinted a group of experienced riders to claim his second stage win of the tour.

Bevin clocked four hours, 15 minutes, 49 seconds, and Blackgrove finished fourth at the same time

to reclaim the lead that he relinquished when he missed the break on stage five from Tuatapere.

The battle for the yellow jersey tomorrow will likely be between Blackgrove and Timaru’s Olympic track medallist Marc Ryan (ColourPlus). Ryan trails Blackgrove by just 11 seconds.

Bauer is 1min 07sec behind in third and Bissell’s best, Peter Latham is 1min 32sec down in fourth.

“We knew it would be an important day, the second longest stage in a row, and our tactics were to outsmart Jack’s team,”Blackgrove said.

“The break came earlier than we expected but we had two riders in the break and with Marc Ryan also there, who was high up on GC, I could not have hoped for a better bunch.

“We all worked hard to keep clear. It was a sur-

prise that Bauer’s team, Bissell and Subway missed that break.”

Blackgrove, an Athens Olympian, said while he could have worked harder for the stage win, he was really focused on the yellow jersey.

“That was the most important thing. It was still tight over the last 5km and I concentrated on working hard to maximise the time difference.”

Blackgrove said he was disappointed to lose the yellow jersey on day three and expects a huge battle tomorrow. “ This tour has often been won or lost on the last stage so I expect it will go down to the wire. I have faith in my team to provide the cover and get me home.”

The leading pack opened an advantage of nearly four minutes with 50km remaining and while the

peloton worked exceptionally hard, contenders Bauer and Latham lost more than two minutes to the leaders.

American Floyd Landis showed up for the first time to ride prominently in the front pack, finishing ninth to move to 14th overall on general classification, nearly 12 minutes behind the leader.

Zookeepers-Cycle Surgery extended their advantage in the teams battle and now have a seemingly safe 10min 25sec advantage over Bici Vida, while Australian Ben King (Calder Stewart) has an iron grip on the king of the mountains title.

The final day will start with a 79km stage from Te Anau to Lumsden in the morning followed by a 65km stage from Winton to Invercargill in the afternoon.

– NZPA

WEEKEND

6 November 2009

13

TV & Film

The Men Who Stare At Goats

0Cast: George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey, Stephen Lang, Robert Patrick.

0Director: Grant Heslov.

0Length: 95 minutes.

0Rated: R (for language, brief violence, brief nudity, adult themes.

coy, nonchalant, controlling, a trouper, a sweetheart, a poseur – sometimes all at once.

We rarely see the performer in close-up, and the choice seems deliberate; that face was not his greatest piece of self-reinvention, only his most apparent. But in the film’s longest extended take, when Jackson duets on “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” with Judith Hill, we see how this performer used a vocal rehearsal to explore, and figure things out, and match his somewhat fraying voice to what he was thinking in terms of movement. He could dance brilliantly right up to the end, it’s clear.

This Is It may be a court documentary, but as a heavily lawyered portrait of an artist, it’s still pretty compelling.

Watch the trailer

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– By Michael Phillips

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How much of Michael Jackson’sThis Is It can we believe?

Was Jackson,50 at the time of his death on June 25, in rougher shape overall than the concert rehearsal footage assembled here suggests? Most certainly,yes.

Produced with the full, watchful cooperation of the Jackson estate,pulled from 100-plus hours of film and video shot between March and June 2009, This Is It has no interest in telling the full story of anything, or the crumbling state of anyone.

Rather, director Kenny Ortega – Jackson’s partner in staging the London concert that never came to fruition – is simply trying to suggest in some detail what sort of overstuffed career retrospective Jackson was attempting in this phantom arena affair. Naivete, calculation and all, it looks like it would’ve been a helluva show, complete with ecoconsciousness-raising, an onstage bulldozer and 3-D “Thriller”footage, newly created to dazzle audiences left high and dry by fate and Jackson’s demise.

This Is It is best taken as a bittersweet celebration of Jackson the dancer, the greatest popular dancer since Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly or at least James Brown. When he revisits “Billie Jean” and “Beat It,” we see someone who never really grew into any kind of visually recognizable adulthood, belonging to no easily recognizable notion of manhood. But the quicksilver limbs and perpetually busy hands (penguin flippers one second, rotating pinwheels the next, never at ease) were Jackson’s way of expressing what he expressed best.

He was a man both confined and liberated by movement, and This Is It constitutes a farewell to, and from, that man. He was the only entertainer who, within four bars, could do the mashed potato followed by the moonwalk followed by seven other

moves that never really had a name.

The self-made and then self-remade performer surrounded himself with a great group of backup dancers for this concert. Ortega’s film showcases their efforts.There’s a“Chorus Line”bit at the beginning where we see the cattle call, then the principals selected for the top slots,plus lots of testimonials from dancers addressing the camera on the subject of what Jacko means to them.You forgive the cliches because the dance footage makes this movie. (Though even Ortega might agree:A sharper-minded concert film might’ve weeded out the blather a little.)

The way Jackson interacts with Ortega (“yeah, I totally agree, Michael!” he says at one point in rehearsal, trying not to sound like a sycophant), or any of the army of collaborators, the audience can piece bits of Jackson’s personality together. He is

al c ritic

0Featuring: Michael Jackson 0Director: Kenny Ortega 0Length: 111 minutes 0Rated: PG (for some suggestive choreography and scary images)

Loc

This Is It

Amelia Astro Boy Cirque Du Freak Couples Retreat An Education Good Hair This Is It Where the Wild Things Are © 2009 MCT

“More of this is true than you would believe,” warns a title card at the start of The Men Who Stare at Goats, although the ever-reliable “I know this sounds crazy, but ...” would have worked just as well.

Based on the nonfiction book by Jon Ronson, whose Web site describes him as a journalist AND a humorist, the movie claims that the U.S. military developed a secret cadre in the 1980s code-named “Jedi warriors” (Ronald Reagan sure loved Star Wars). The soldiers were trained to hone their psychic and paranormal skills in order to read minds, walk through walls and turn invisible when caught in a tight squeeze.

“We will be the first superpower to develop superpowers!” exclaims Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), the lieutenant in charge of this “New Earth Army.” Django is a Vietnam veteran who was wounded in battle, returned home, disappeared for six years into the New Age demimonde– lots of nudist beaches, communal hot tubs and LSD parties– and emerged convinced that peace and love, not violence, were the key to winning wars.

Directed by Grant Heslov and written by Peter Straughan, The Men Who Stare at Goats uses flashbacks to chart the creation of Django’s super soldiers, whose idea of boot camp includes dancing to Billy Idol, walking on hot coals, driving through obstacle courses while blindfolded and lots and lots of yoga.

The film’s main story is set in 2003 Iraq, where Ann Arbor newspaper reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) has come to report on the war. Bob meets Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), who was once Django’s star pupil and who still believes he possesses Jedi powers, such as the ability to stop goats’ hearts with a gaze or the fearsome “sparkly eyes” technique, which, in one of the film’s most amusing moments, Lyn demonstrates to Bob. Much of The Men Who Stare at Goats is indeed amusing, although mostly in a mild, setting-the-stage kind of way, and your smiles eventually turn to yawns.

Once the movie has established its roster of loony characters (including Kevin Spacey as a dark Jedi who is jealous of everyone else’s powers), the script doesn’t give them anything to do. Pretty much nothing happens in Iraq: Everything’s just one gag after another, and a shot of Lyn and Bob wandering the desert reminds you of those old Bob Hope-Bing Crosby “Road” pictures (or perhaps a more sophisticated version of a Chris FarleyDavid Spade comedy). Except even they eventually got somewhere.

McGregor clearly relishes the opportunity to act in a real movie after a post-Star Wars string of duds, although his casting here feels primarily like a stunt to help all the Jedi jokes pay off more. Clooney is better– no one can say this superstar is not willing to make fun of himself– and Bridges deftly channels his shaggy Big Lebowski persona. But to what end?

The Men Who Stare at Goats is a premise in wait for a movie– the pilot episode for a TV series that got canceled before it got cooking.

Watch the trailer – By Rene Rodriguez

REVIEWS

14

6 November 2009

Music

At 81 is still going strong

By Drew Fortune PopMatters.com

The legendary Italian maestro Ennio Morricone is responsible for some of the most iconic film scores in history, and– at 81 years old– he’s still going strong.

Morricone first rose to worldwide acclaim through his teaming with friend and former classmate Sergio Leone for a trio of groundbreaking film scores (Morricone hates the term “Spaghetti Westerns”). Beginning in 1964 with A Fistful of Dollars and culminating with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Morricone’s scores revolutionized film scoring through his use of incorporated gunshots, whip cracks, wordless vocals and whistling, all serving to enunciate the violence and eerie desolation of Leone’s outlaws and antiheroes.

With over 500 film scores to his credit, Morricone has worked with everyone from cult director Mario Bava to John Carpenter to Rob Marshall for the upcoming musical Nine. His music was prominently featured in Quentin Tarantino’s World War II revenge fantasy Inglourious Basterds, and along the way Morricone has racked up heaps of awards, including five BAFTAs (Britain’s equivalent of the Oscar), France’s Legion of Honor Knighthood in 2009, and five Academy Award nominations for very diverse projects (those being for Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, Roland Joffe’s The Mission, De Palma’s The Untouchables, Barry Levinson’s Bugsy

and Giuseppe Tornatore’s Malena).

For each nomination, Morricone went away empty handed. Then, in 2007, he received an honorary Oscar, presented by Clint Eastwood, in recognition of Morricone’s lifetime of contribution to film scoring and for his part in changing the way we listen to the movies.

Morricone sat down briefly at his Italian villa to discuss (long distance, via translator) how he got into music, his reticence to pick a favorite score, and just how much that honorary Oscar meant to him.

Q. What has always drawn you to film scoring projects? Is it the director or the material?

A. Both, meaning that I have to know and like the director when I choose to do a film. But it’s also the story, because both things need to go well together for a project to work.The director is the most important thing though, because a good director can be trusted to make a good film.

Q. How do you feel about the current state of film scoring? Are people listening as much as they used to?

A. Well, I have to tell the truth. It seems like everything in Hollywood is a blockbuster, so that means people are still coming out and loving films, and that includes the scores.

Q. How does the composition process work? Do you watch dailies from the film and then put music to it?

A. I never watch the dailies.What I usually do is

have a look at the rough or final cut, and I just get something from the story. Sometimes I start composing even before the director has shot anything.

The dailies don’t help me at all.

Q. Growing up, was there a life changing moment when you knew that you wanted to become a composer?

A. Well, actually, when I was studying composition here at the Conservatory in Italy I was 16 years

important moment in my life. Whoever gets an Oscar has a really high recognition so that a very important thing to be recognized.

Q. While The Good, the Bad and the Ugly remains such a landmark, are there scores that you feel closer to personally? Or is that one of your favorites?

A. I usually never answer this question. The answer is that I always put something special into every score I’ve ever done, because I feel a huge

WHAT I USUALLY DO IS HAVE A LOOK AT THE ROUGH OR FINAL CUT, AND I JUST GET SOMETHING FROM THE STORY. SOMETIMES I START COMPOSING EVEN BEFORE THE DIRECTOR HAS SHOT ANYTHING old, and at that age, at that moment, I realized I wanted to do this for the rest of my life.

Q. How did your love of music first take shape?

A. I’ve had a passion for it since I can first remember, and nobody helped me with that. That came easy. But when I was 6 years old, my dad taught me how to read music and play some instruments.

Q.Receiving the 2007 honorary Academy Award, was there finally a feeling of validation from the Academy, considering that you had never won an Oscar? Have awards ever mattered to you?

A. It was really a very important validation for me, and I am really happy about it. It was a very

responsibility when composing music for a film. So I couldn’t really pick one score over another that I like better, or feel closer to personally.They’re all my children ... every score I’ve done.

Q. While you’ve always been staggeringly prolific, are you most happy working or do you prefer recreational time with your family?

A. Here’s the answer to that. I like composing music,but I love being with my family.Well,I also love playing chess,and I always play when I get a chance.

Q. It was a great pleasure speaking with you.

A. It was a pleasure speaking with you.Arrivederci!

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

REVIEWS

6 November 2009

NEW CD RELEASES Keith Jarrett

0Testament Paris/London 0ECM For decades, Jarrett has sought to reinvent the solo concert, leaving the old tunes behind and working completely off the moment without a playbook. In 2008, when his wife of 30 years left him, he committed to playing solo concerts in Paris and London, which now form these CDs, and the leaps he takes here are both emotional and musical. (In personal liner notes that are highly unusual for the austere ECM, he describes coming offstage in tears.)

The different moods, all described simply as“Part I,”“Part II,”“Part III”etc., are often extraordinary.

It is cool to go where Jarrett wants to. He can wax simple and melodic. He can be driven to heights by a repeating bass line.And he can follow a single line down a rabbit hole until it devolves into a polyphony of piano lines.

He also maintains a close rapport with the audience. The Paris audience on disc one gets some Debussy-like arpeggios and Parisian jazz ambience, while the Londoners on discs two and three get frenetic modernism and a surprising optimism.

There’s much more on both discs.

15

Books

Kingsolver’s sweeping new novel makes a case for a new world view The Lacuna

0Barbara Kingsolver 0HarperCollins (507 pages, $26.99)

Barbara Kingsolver is a prod to the nation’s conscience.

Her novel The Poisonwood Bible laid bare misguided missionary zeal.“Prodigal Summer”established our interconnectedness with the larger plant and animal world. As founder of the Bellwether Prize for Fiction, she’s encouraging a new crop of social novelists.

The Lacuna fits into this tradition. It explores the social and historical context of America’s reactionary fear of those who presume to question our system of government.The author stirs the real with the imagined to produce a breathtakingly ambitious book, bold and rich. If her dramatized history lesson feels at times forced, it also feels important.

Where the book sags under the weight of so many good intentions, two vital female characters prop it up: the saucy Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and the fictional archivist-stenographer Violet Brown.

– Karl Stark The Lacuna covers the years 1929 to 1951 in the life of blue-eyed Harrison Shepherd, born of a MexiPapa John Defrancesco can mother and an American father.A portmanteau 0Big Shot of two cultures, Shepherd is the novel’s shy, repressed 0Savant protagonist.Torn between the cultural heritage of parents who wouldn’t earn the Good Housekeeping seal of approval, Shepherd is that odd breed, an This CD constitutes a fine slice “orphan boy”with two living parents. of Philly barbecue. The region’s Harrison is taken to an island off the coast of Papa John DeFrancesco leads Mexico at age 12 by his mother, who has become this soulful exercise, but it’s attached to a Mexican attache. Ignored by a mother largely a family affair with sons who is foulmouthed, colloquial and colossally selfish, Joey DeFrancesco, the interna- he is mostly paid attention to by members of the tionally known organist, on keyboards and John hacienda’s staff. He finds comfort in words scribbled DeFrancesco on guitar. The DeFrancescos have in notebooks and in swimming through openings in been mixing it up so long with drummer Byron the coastal cliffside called lacunas.

Landham and bassist Mike Boone that they must The lacuna is the novel’s controlling metaphor. It qualify as family, too. is a gap or missing part, and the word keeps turnThe aim here is to get soulful in an understated ing up, a seaside penny, to suggest our incomplete way. Papa John rides herd on a Diversi DV-Duo Plus understanding of others’ stories.

Organ, made by a Woodlyn, Pa., company that seeks Before long, Harrison’s mother ships him to to revive the Hammond B-3 sound so integral to the America to his father, a government“bean counter.” jazz organ. (Joey is described as an investor.) Papa Enrolled in a military academy, the teenager witJohn carries off the patriarch role with aplomb, nesses the Bonus Army riots of homeless veterans pulling an earthy feel on“Down Home”and getting and experiences his own internal riot when he has funky on“What.” an affair with a scholarship student.

– Karl Stark This “irregular conduct” gets him booted from military school and sends him back to Mexico, Quincy Porter where he ends up a plaster-mixer for the mural0Complete Viola Works: Eliesha ist Diego Rivera. He graduates to household cook, Nelson, viola; Douglas Rioth, harp; John applying his kneading skills to dough rather than McLaughlin Williams, piano, harpsiplaster. chord, violin and conductor of the NorthRivera’s wife, artist Frida Kahlo, becomes Harwest Symphonia rison’s ally and confidante. She gives him the nick0Dorian name Insolito after she learns of his military school “conducta insolita,”or irregular conduct.

The Kahlo-Rivera household simmers, a rich and The academia-based composer colorful brew of talent, politics and infidelities. At was among the more retiring fig- night, Harrison records events in his journals, earnures of his generation, and musi- ing him a job as Rivera’s secretary. cally speaking, the most introWhen Trotsky is given shelter by Rivera, Harspective. While Aaron Copland rison Shepherd adds secretary to the famous revevoked emotional states through olutionary to his resume. And when the fatherly musical landscape painting, Porter had a deeper, Trotsky decamps, Harrison follows. more ambiguous sense of fantasy. Performances Trotsky’s assassination puts Harrison in personal are mostly first rate: Nelson has a flexibility and peril, and the police trash years of his journals and specificity of expression that eludes all but the best the beginnings of a novel, or so it seems. The fiery practitioners of her instrument. Her sympathy for Kahlo comes to his rescue. She sends him as a“shipthe music is complete. But recordings of repertoire ping shepherd”with eight of her paintings destined like this must be made with great economy if they’re for the Museum of Modern Art in his native America. going to be made at all, and this one is aided by Harrison Shepherd finds that his father has died the multi-tasking pianist/harpsichordist/violinist/ and left him only a Chevrolet. He drives to Asheville, conductor John McLaughlin Williams, who sounds N.C., where, in a delicious turn of events, he becomes stretched thin only in the“Duo for Violin and Viola.” a best-selling author of what Kingsolver called, in – David Patrick Stearns an interview,“the Pre-Columbian Potboiler.”

When the success of his books threatens to upend the reclusive scribbler, he hires Violet Brown as his stenographer/assistant. So the transcriber of the thoughts of Rivera and Trotsky now finds himself in need of secretarial services.

Violet Brown is totally winning: practical, determined, ethical, a vital punctuation mark to the central character’s repressed passivity. Descended from “Mountain Whites,” she speaks a backwoods Shakespearean dialect.

The quaint Violet Brown saves the last third of The Lacuna from Harrison Shepherd’s inability to act on his own behalf.

A pastiche of letters, notebook and diary entries, invented and real newspaper and magazine articles, The Lacuna dares to question America’s historical myopia and a national history full of gaps.

When Harrison’s employment by known Communists gets him in trouble as the 1950s witch-hunts begin, he is asked why he stayed in America by the Special Subcommittee of the Committee on UnAmerican Activities. His response:“ ... I decided to try my hand at making art for the hopeful. Because I wasn’t any good at the other thing, manufacturing hopes for the artful.America was the most hopeful place I’d ever imagined.”

Kingsolver’s seventh work of fiction is hopeful, political and artistic. The Lacuna fills a lacuna with powerfully imagined social history.

– By Jeffrey Ann Goudie

The shadows over childhood The Children’s Book

0A.S. Byatt 0Alfred A. Knopf (675 pages, $26.95) The Children’s Book, A.S. Byatt’s masterpiece of a novel, opens in 1895 in the basement of the Victoria and Albert Museum, where two boys– the sons of middle-class artists and collectors– discover a dirty working-class boy hiding in a sarcophagus to be close to the pottery. Hundreds of pages, scores of characters and several eras later, the novel closes in a London parlor, in the final days of the First World War. Reading the novel feels as if it takes all those years– it certainly takes you across a lifetime of emotions. I began the book in the bathtub. My heart was light. I finished the book on the train, five stops past my destination, lost in some blasted urban hell, with tears streaming down my face.

Olive Wellwood is a writer of children’s stories.

She lives with her husband in a warm, rambling Arts and Crafts house where they host the artists and thinkers of the era.They take lovers– some of whom they admit to, and some of whom they don’t.

They raise a huge brood of children, some made together, some separately.The children grow up free, ignorant of their complicated origins, surrounded by art and beauty. It is a mellow, richly tinted time that Byatt calls “The Age of Gold.”

Except that Olive Wellwood writes fairy stories for each of her children. For her eldest and favorite son, she writes a story about a boy who wanders forever in an underground world, searching for his shadow. For her most difficult daughter, she writes a story about a prickly little girl who is sometimes a hedgehog. Olive adds to these stories week by week,

and we see how Olive’s fantasies for her children control them, mapping magical destinies they may never escape.

Meanwhile, Benedict Fludd is a brilliant potter and a violent, isolating man. He lives in a miserable house far from anywhere, and his wife and two daughters wander the rooms, cold, entrapped and silent.As Fludd’s pots grow more and more ornate, their glazes more miraculously colored, his daughters grow colder and more disturbed, until we learn that he has literally been casting their genitals in porcelain.

As the chapters unfold, Olive’s children and Benedict’s children begin to feel the binding power of the art that seems to dictate their futures.As they enter their teens,they understand some of the lies that have structured their lives.The colors of their world fade.

The Edwardian era dawns, with its new, bright sense of fun and its motorcars:“The Age of Silver.”

Does a mother’s fantasy for her son, or a father’s vision of his daughter, shape their destiny? Is it ever possible to be out from under from such tender colonization? The younger generation of this novel comes of age as the new century is born, as new notions of freedom and responsibility take hold and new furnaces of untold destruction are quietly stoked. Whose story will drive them forward and through? Their parents’? Their own? Or something larger and more urgent?

Byatt’s novel– her best yet, I think– is a meditation on the ways the seductive power to create and to be created by someone else can entrap us.“The Children’s Book”lets us fully experience that lure, as beautiful sentences and elegant phrases lead us further and further in through a pleasurable series of portraits and scenes until the only way out is through.And in the end ... there is“The Age of Lead.”

– By Bethany Schneider

Find your photo mojo Photojojo!: Insanely Great Photo Projects and DIY Ideas 0Amit Gupta and Kelly Jensen 0Potter Craft ($21.99)

If your kids have started wearing dark glasses in the house and ducking for cover every time you pull out the Nikon, it might be time to find a new outlet for your camera love, Ms. Stalkerazzi.

Here’s a tip: Grab yourself a copy of Photojojo!: Insanely Great Photo Projects and DIY Ideas by Amit Gupta and Kelly Jensen, and you’ll never lack for photo ideas again.

Gupta is the creator of the Photojojo! e-newsletter and Web site (subscribe at photojojo.com), which offers cool DIY camera tricks and tips, ideas for photo projects and even photo craft ideas twice each week.

Now, the best of Photojojo! (and some new material) has been compiled into book form.

We love the ingenious solutions (turn any water bottle into a tripod), the photo-provoking assignments (take a picture a day for an entire year) and the sometimes wacky crafts. (Can you say photo cupcakes?!) If you want to take more creative photos and stop leaving your pics to languish on your laptop, this book could be the cure. Get it soon _ before Little Suzie’s perma-smile gets any more Joker-esque.

– By Cindy Dampier

HEALTH

16

6 November 2009

Learning to talk to your doctor

It doesn’t get easier as you age

By Judith Graham Chicago Tribune

Major concerns remain over lead bullets

By Dennis Anderson Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

MINNEAPOLIS – A little more than a year ago, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources officials were shooting dead sheep with high-caliber lead bullets, studying to see whether the bullets fragmented upon impact, and how widely any fragments might be found from wound channels. Sheep bear similarities to white-tailed deer, thus their choice as targets.

The study followed weeks, months and, in California, years of concerns that lead bullets pose hazards not only to people who eat venison, but to large aerial predators such as California condors and bald eagles. The birds often consume bullet fragments when they feast on wounded and unrecovered deer carcasses shot by hunters.

In California, lead bullets are prohibited in areas where condors fly.

The Minnesota DNR’s study was important because it showed that lead fragments, many too small to be easily seen, travel much farther– up to 18 inches– from wound channels than had been believed.

Long known as a toxin, lead has been banned from gasoline and many other substances. And waterfowl hunters can’t use it to shoot ducks and geese.

Still, the possibility that human health is threatened by lead bullet fragments has been met with great skepticism by hunters. Lead has been used in bullets for centuries, they say, and no one has been hurt.

The issue is highly charged and, as with all gunrelated controversies, laced with many political considerations.The ammunition industry, for example, can’t easily shift to producing bullets made of something other than lead.And other than copper, there aren’t a lot of“somethings”to choose from to make bullets. Simply put, bullets are made from lead because it is ideal to make bullets.

But if lead bullets were the source of so much hand-wringing a year ago, whither the hubbub this fall?

“I think the concern is still there (about lead bullets), but (state officials) are more comfortable (this

year) with the amount of information that came out last year,” DNR wildlife programs manager Steve Merchant said.“I think the feeling here is that we’ve gotten that information out and hunters can make their own choices.”

Maybe so. But the choice Minnesota’s Department of Agriculture has made this fall is to X-ray all donations made by hunters to the state’s venison donation program.Any meat found to have lead in it will be tossed out, said Nicole Neeser, the agency’s program manager for dairy and meat inspection.

The screening is necessary, Neeser said, because lead in meat is potentially harmful, particularly to pregnant women and kids younger than age 6.

Last year, 18,000 pounds of venison were distributed through the program.As many as 35 meat processors statewide will process venison this fall destined for food shelves.

Lead bullets (or slugs), or even copper-jacketed lead bullets aren’t a Minnesota deer hunter’s only alternative. Solid copper bullets are generally available at retailers in most calibers that hunters use for deer and other big game.

Copper isn’t toxic, and it doesn’t fragment upon impact.

Utah-based Barnes Bullets is a major innovator and manufacturer of copper bullets, which can be found in premium Federal and certain other namebrand ammunition. Increasing numbers of hunters began purchasing these cartridges last year as the lead-bullet scare widened. But Randy Brooks of Barnes Bullets didn’t develop copper bullets for their benign toxicity. He believed copper bullets offer better killing power without fouling rifle bores, thus contributing to greater accuracy and overall improved performance.

The problem, as yet unresolved, is that copper is more expensive than lead. Therefore copper bullets are more expensive than lead bullets.Whether they’re worth it might depend on how much venison you eat and whether you have a pregnant woman or kids in your family.

You might also consider this: Canadian scientists who have tested Arctic natives whose diets consist largely of bullet-killed game found high levels of lead in their blood, with attendant physical and mental health problems.

Changing physicians can be wrenching for older patients. My mother never got over it when her longtime doctor retired. The “new”doctor took care of Mom for more than 15 years, but she would still tell him what she thought he wanted to hear. Ironically, the frailer Mom grew, the less forthright she became.

Now, my 70-something aunt, who has diabetes and Parkinson’s disease, is going through a similar change. Her longtime physician is shifting to an endocrinology-only practice and has asked patients to find another primary care doctor.

As is widely recommended, she brought to her first appointment a list of all the medications she’s taking. But she also brought a sheet of paper on which she briefly described her youth, marriage, motherhood and other seminal life events, things essential to her personhood that she wanted her new physician to know.

Did my aunt talk about her fear that she’ll become progressively disabled because of her Parkinson’s? I suspect not.That’s a hard thing to share with a total stranger, even one who has a thick file containing your medical history on her desk.

For others going through something similar, the National Institute on Aging has a helpful publication,“Talking With Your Doctor:A Guide for Older People.” (For an online version: www.nia.nih.gov/ HealthInformation/Publications/TalkingWithYourDoctor.) The aging institute is part of the National Institutes of Health.

The guide’s fundamental message is clear:“When you’re older, it becomes even more important to talk often and comfortably with your doctor.”

Don’t be rushed: It’s up to you to intervene if you feel a physician is rushing through an appointment without really taking the time to address your concerns. The guide has a script that an older person can use:“I know you have many patients to see, but I’m really worried about this. I’d feel much better if we could talk about it a little more.”

Discuss medications: Too often older patients don’t talk about their medications, even when they feel the drugs aren’t working. A 2007 study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that 27 percent of seniors who decided to skip doses or stop taking a drug because of side effects hadn’t

discussed the matter with their physicians.

The report also found that 24 percent of seniors with three or more chronic medical conditions hadn’t talked about their complicated drug regimens with physicians. And older patients who discuss prescription drugs with doctors are more likely to be switched to low-cost generic versions, the research found.

Write it down: Come to an appointment with your top medical concerns written down, the National Institute on Aging guide suggests. Let the doctor know your priorities, and don’t hesitate to ask for clarification if you don’t understand the terms she’s using or tests she plans to order.

Bring your eyeglasses and hearing aid so you can see and hear what your doctor shows or tells you, the Georgia Institute of Technology advises in a publication on how seniors can communicate with doctors. Bring a notebook and ask your doctor to write down instructions if you’re unable to.

Acknowledge any problems: Finally, don’t chalk up troublesome symptoms to getting old and endure them stoically.That goes for problems such as incontinence, short-term memory loss, sexual dysfunction and depression. Many conditions that once were assumed part of “normal aging” can be treated and even prevented.

“It is important to talk about sensitive subjects ... even if you are embarrassed or uncomfortable,” the institute’s guide says.“A good doctor will take your concerns about these topics seriously and not brush them off as being ‘normal.’”

QUESTIONS TO ASK ABOUT MEDICATIONS What are the common side effects?

What should I pay attention to?

When will the medicine begin to work?

What should I do if I miss a dose?

Do I take it at meals or between meals?

Do I need to drink a glass of water with it?

Are there foods, drugs or activities I should avoid while taking this medicine?

Healthy Living

A spoonful of ginger Valued for centuries as an antidote to nausea, diarrhea and other intestinal ills, ginger can also be used to treat arthritis.

A golden anti-inflammatory • In a study of people with osteoarthritis of the knee, those who took ginger extract felt less pain and needed fewer painkillers than those who got a placebo • To relieve arthritis pain, take fresh ginger juice, extract or tea; you can also rub ginger oil into a painful joint • In general, do not take more than 4 grams of ginger daily, including that contained in foods, such as ginger ale • Do not take ginger if you have a bleeding disorder or are taking blood thinners, including aspirin; ask your doctor first if you have gallstones, are having surgery Source: University of Maryland Medical Center, MCT Photo Service Graphic: Pat Carr

© 2009 MCT

SCIENCE/TECH 17

6 November 2009

High-tech tools help you navigate vacation

By Etan Horowitz The Orlando Sentinel

Some people consider devices like iPhones and laptops to be a roadblock to an enjoyable vacation.

But for my recent trip to Europe, using gadgets enhanced my journey without breaking the bank.

For instance, I was able to get instant restaurant recommendations from friends on Twitter and Facebook, share photos from my iPhone to keep friends and family posted and get GPS walking directions from my hotel to Notre Dame Cathedral.

Here are some international technology travel tips based on a recent trip to Spain and Paris.

KEEPING TRACK OF YOUR PLANS Travel details: The best way to keep track of your flight details and other travel information is with a free account at TripIt.com. As you book flights and hotels, just send the confirmation e-mails to plans@ tripit.com and the service will automatically create an itinerary for you. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, TripIt offers a great free app that will let you access your travel plans when you are offline, as long as you sync it once when you have an Internet connection.

Itineraries: We used the free iPhone application Dropbox to store Microsoft Word documents with itineraries and restaurant recommendations that we could open from our phones without an Internet connection. BlackBerrys and other smartphones also have document storage options.

USING AN iPHONE We added a 50 MB international data plan ($60/ month, other plans also available) to my wife’s iPhone 3GS so we could access Google Maps walking directions. Since it’s hard to quantify how much data you will need, use the iPhone’s cellular network data tracker (found in “Settings) to keep track of usage and use your phone sparingly. Don’t use it like you do in the United States:Turn off automatic e-mail checking and active notifications, and put the phone in Airplane Mode whenever you are not using it.

While Google’s walking directions came in handy

many times, they weren’t always correct (they are still in beta), so it’s smart to keep an old fashioned paper map as well. When you get back, cancel the international data plan immediately and make sure that AT&T didn’t mistakenly charge you for data roaming like it did in our case.You’ll also want to carry an iPhone charger with you, or spare battery for when you run out of juice.

You can pay $6 to reduce the per-minute rates for voice calls from your phone, but amazingly, you’ll still be charged if your phone rings but you don’t pick it up, which is why you should keep it in airplane mode as much as possible to prevent calls from coming through.

CONNECT TO WI-FI Wi-Fi is plentiful in Europe, so it’s wise to carry a portable Wi-Fi enabled device with you such as an iPhone, iPod touch, BlackBerry or netbook so you can look up information, get directions, check your e-mail and even make low-cost international phone calls.

While much of the Wi-Fi costs money to use, many hotels offer free Wi-Fi in the lobby, and you can find it in some unexpected places. I was amazed to get free Wi-Fi at the world’s oldest restaurant in Madrid and at a small vegetarian fast-food restaurant in Paris.

MAKING PHONE CALLS If you need to make any phone calls, do it through an Internet phone provider such as Skype or Vonage, which lets you make low-cost calls through a computer or a smartphone. Set up accounts before you leave the U.S. and make sure you know how to use the service.

If you have an iPhone, iPod touch or BlackBerry, download the free Vonage app, which will let you make low-cost calls from your device.The app even comes with a $1 credit, which was enough for me to call my voicemail several times while in Europe.

AUDIO TOURS Many of Europe’s world-class museums such as the Louvre in Paris and the Prado in Madrid have portable audio tour guides, but the guides can cost as much as

New areas of brain structure identified NEW YORK – A U.S.-led team of scientists says it’s found four areas of the precuneus structure of monkey and human brains that had been thought to be a single structure.

Led by scientists at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, researchers said they used a new approach called resting state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging that produces a map of brain networks from only six minutes of data from a person at rest.

The authors said results of the brief fMRI sessions were consistent with well-established findings in monkeys examined microscopically.

The precuneus areas are located in the back of each brain hemisphere’s inner wall.

The scientists said recent studies have shown the precuneus has important roles in higher-level cognitive functions, including episodic memory, reasoning, and consciousness.

The findings confirm that higher order association areas in the brain have complex functional architectures which appear to be preserved and or expanded during the evolutionary process, said NYU Assistant Professor Michael Milham, one of

IF YOU NEED TO MAKE ANY PHONE CALLS, DO IT THROUGH AN INTERNET PHONE PROVIDER SUCH AS SKYPE OR VONAGE, WHICH LETS YOU MAKE LOW-COST CALLS THROUGH A COMPUTER OR A SMARTPHONE 6 euros each (about $9) in addition to your admission.

We did two things that added to our museum experiences.

In some cases, we skipped the museum guides and downloaded free high-quality podcast audio tours from well-known travel author and TV host Rick Steves.The free audio tours can be downloaded from ricksteves.com or iTunes, and they feature pictures

for each stop on the tour so you can make sure you are in the right place.

Where those weren’t available, we used rented one museum audio guide and used a “headphone splitter”I had brought so we could plug two pairs of headphones into it. (Remember to bring along an extra pair of headphones to supplement the museum-issued ones.)

USS New York

Partly built with steel from the World Trade Center, the Navy’s newest warship is the fifth U.S. ship to be named New York.

Brief history

Sept. 7, 2002 Name announced Sept. 10, 2004 Keel laid March 1, 2008 Christened Nov. 7, 2009 To be commissioned by President Barack Obama

Ship’s crest

1. Seven rays represent the seven seas and Statue of Liberty’s crown 2. Twin Towers and bow of ship 3. Phoenix breastplate represent colors of first responders

1 2 3

Bow stern 7.5 tons (6,8000 kg) recovered steel

Flight deck

105 ft.

(32 m)

685 ft. (208 m) the study’s authors.

He said modern technology, such as fMRI, gives researchers a powerful tool for translational science, making comparative studies of the brain’s functional neuroanatomy studies across species possible, The research is reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

– UPI

Speed More than 22 knots (24 mph) Troops Up to 800 Crew 360 sailors, 3 Marines Source: U.S. Navy, ussnewyork.com

Function Transport Marines; can carry helicopters, fighting vehicles, amphibious landing craft Armament Two 30 mm guns, two missile launchers

Graphic: Pat Carr, Melina Yingling

© 2009 MCT

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TECHNOLOGY 19

6 November 2009

Touting tech tools of the future

By Brier Dudley The Seattle Times

SEATTLE – While most people were turning their clocks backward over the weekend, Microsoft research chief Craig Mundie was moving his forward, five to 10 years into the future.

Mundie last year took over Bill Gates’job guiding long-term strategy at the world’s biggest software company.

He’s an erudite evangelist who travels the globe, talking up the big computing concepts Microsoft is pursuing, spreading the word to everyone from President Obama to students in China.

Last week in Redmond, Wash., Mundie put the finishing touches on a speech and set of technology demonstrations he’ll be sharing in the coming year.

This annual road show begins this week with a college tour, starting at Cornell University.

He also will visit Harvard and the University of Illinois before flying back for an appearance Thursday at the University of Washington’s Kane Hall.

It’s a chance to remind students that Microsoft works on more than PC software, Zunes and Xboxes.

The visits also help in recruiting talent and give Mundie a chance to hear what’s on the minds of students and faculty.

“Mostly the goal is to show them technology as it will be – or at least one man’s view of what it will be – and encourage them to think broadly about the role technology will play in their lives,”Mundie said

Friday after rehearsals and filming at Microsoft’s on-campus studio.

This year’s theme is solving global challenges such as climate change and the energy crisis, using the latest and coming technologies.

For instance, Mundie is demonstrating a global climate-modeling system developed by Microsoft researchers in England and at Princeton that shows how new methods of computational analysis can be combined into massive data collections such as forestry information.

He’ll use the model to show how deforestation in the Amazon can affect climate in the Midwest and new tools that climate scientists can use to connect data sets and build huge computing models without writing software code.

One message is that these “science-intelligence tools of the future”will make it easier for scientists from different disciplines to work together on big, complex problems.

“A guy who is a climate scientist or a tree biologist can make a direct contribution without having to understand everything else or becoming a computer wizard in the process,”Mundie said.“I tell people this is sort of doing for scientists and policymakers what Excel did for the average business guy 20 years ago.”

It’s not only about using dramatically more powerful computers. It’s about building tools that make it easier for scientists to use those computers to analyze and visualize overwhelming amounts of data.

“Just as spreadsheets made computing more

approachable for the masses in the business environment, getting to this level of abstraction and having very high-level tools and visual-programming models will similarly allow these new kinds of computing and modeling tools to become more approachable for everybody in the sciences,”Mundie said.

At the same time, building these tools is a huge challenge for programmers, he said.

“You could say these super-scale, data-driven models are almost a new branch of computer science because how you manipulate them, how you get data out of them, how you efficiently compute across them are all really interesting problems,”he said.

Also being demonstrated in the talks are new ways that everyone may control computers in five to 10 years.

Mundie is traveling with a mock-up of a futuristic workstation with a display made of curved, clear glass.

It uses several systems to take input from users, including a tablet for precise inputting with a stylus.

Also on the computer are cameras for motiontracking – based on the Natal control system being developed for the Xbox – and facial recognition.

To show how today’s students may use such computers tomorrow, Mundie works on the design of an electricity-generating wind turbine, moving his hands around to adjust its blade and make real-time adjustments to its airflow.

Mundie bristled a bit when asked if the presentations are intended to help Microsoft compete

against Google in recruiting students interested in massive-scale computing.

“Frankly, we don’t have any trouble competing for people,”he said.“I would tell you against all comers, for graduate-level people in these fields. Particularly if you actually want to do research instead of just write code – we are the preferred place compared to most every other company.”

IT’S NOT ONLY ABOUT USING DRAMATICALLY MORE POWERFUL COMPUTERS. IT’S ABOUT BUILDING TOOLS THAT MAKE IT EASIER FOR SCIENTISTS TO USE THOSE COMPUTERS TO ANALYZE AND VISUALIZE OVERWHELMING AMOUNTS OF DATA He said Microsoft has always tried to balance between pursuing advanced research and“competing for the best people we need to write the code every day.”

“This is part of making sure students are continuously aware of the breadth of the activities we’re doing and can distinguish between the long-cycle innovation parts and what you can go buy at Best Buy today.”

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