Update, 4/15: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta set new limits on F-22 flights, ordering that they stay within safe distance of a landing strips due to ongoing concerns about oxygen deficiency.

Last week, CBS’ 60 Minutes aired an interview with two of the pilots who are refusing to fly the jets. They will receive whistleblower protection, and not be reprimanded for speaking out.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7407680n

The pricey F-22 Raptor jet has just gotten back up in the air, but the safety problem that grounded it doesn’t seem to be resolved.

Last year, the F-22 was grounded for four months because pilots were experiencing dizziness and other symptoms of hypoxia, which is caused by a lack of oxygen. The Air Force looked into possible malfunctions in the plane’s oxygen-generation system, but in September, the planes were cleared for service after technicians were unable to pinpoint a source of the problem.

May 14, however, the Air Force’s Air Combat Command confirmed that some pilots — they would specify only “a very small” number — have requested not to fly the F-22.

General Mike Hostage, who heads the Air Combat Command, said in a news briefing yesterday that the Air Force is taking cautionary measures but would continue to fly the planes. “We don’t have a conclusive answer yet, and that’s why we continue to fly with the mitigating procedures, because I can’t learn about the problem if I don’t fly the airplane,” he said.

Since the planes started flying again in September, there have been more than 12,000 sorties and 11 reported instances of “hypoxia-like symptoms.” An Air Combat Command Center spokesman told ProPublica today that a team of two-dozen Air Force and outside specialists is monitoring the planes and pilots for both mechanical and medical problems regarding the hypoxia symptoms, but that no “root cause” has been determined.

Before the grounding, there had been at least 12 separate reports of hypoxia-like symptoms, and planes had been limited to flying at lower altitudes. In late 2010, an F-22 pilot died in a crash after he apparently lost control of the plane when the oxygen system malfunctioned. The Air Force’s official report on the incident acknowledged the oxygen system failure but blamed the pilot’s response for the crash.

As ProPublica has detailed, the roughly $70 billion F-22 program has long experienced structural deficiencies and cost overruns. The U.S. halted orders of the jets in 2009, as then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates argued the F-22′s specific capability was not widely applicable in the nation’s “spectrum of conflict.”

The planes have yet to be deployed in combat, though last week a number of them were reportedly sent to the United Arab Emirates.

by Cora Currier, ProPublica, May 15, 2012, 6:43 p.m.

Image Courtesy of By U.S. Air Force Photo/Tech. Sgt. Ben Bloker [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The article Air Force Pilots Balk at Flying the World’s Most Expensive Fighter Jet appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

A version of this story was co-published with The Washington Post.

Clarence Aaron seemed to be especially deserving of a federal commutation, an immediate release from prison granted by the president of the United States.

At 24, he was sentenced to three life terms for his role in a cocaine deal, even though it was his first criminal offense and he was not the buyer, seller or supplier of the drugs. Of all those convicted in the case, Aaron received the stiffest sentence.

For those reasons, his case for early release was championed by lawmakers and civil rights activists, and taken up by the media, from PBS to Fox News.

And, ultimately, the prosecutor’s office and the sentencing judge supported an immediate commutation for Aaron.

Yet the George W. Bush administration, in its final year in office, never knew the full extent of their views, which were compiled in a confidential Justice Department review, and Aaron’s application was denied, according to an examination of the case by ProPublica based on interviews with participants and internal records.

That Aaron joined the long line of rejected applicants illuminates the extraordinary, secretive powers wielded by the Office of the Pardon Attorney, the branch of the Justice Department that reviews commutation requests. Records show that Ronald Rodgers, the current pardon attorney, left out critical information in recommending that the White House deny Aaron’s application.

In a confidential note to a White House lawyer, Rodgers failed to accurately convey the views of the prosecutor and judge and did not disclose that they had advocated for Aaron’s immediate commutation.

Kenneth Lee, the lawyer who shepherded Aaron’s case on behalf of the White House, was aghast when ProPublica provided him with original statements from the judge and prosecutor to compare with Rodgers’s summary. Had he read the statements at the time, Lee said, he would have urged Bush to commute Aaron’s sentence.

“This case was such a close call,” Lee said. “We had been asking the pardons office to reconsider it all year. We made clear we were interested in this case.”

The work of the pardon office has come under heightened scrutiny since December, when ProPublica and The Washington Post published stories showing that, from 2001 to 2008, white applicants were nearly four times as likely to receive presidential pardons as minorities. The pardon office, which recommends applicants to the White House, is reviewing a new application from Aaron. Without a commutation, he will die in prison.

Through the Justice Department, Rodgers declined repeated requests for an interview, and the department itself declined to comment on any aspect of the Aaron case, citing “privacy and privilege concerns.”

“Every clemency request — whether it be for commutation of sentence or for pardon — is considered carefully and thoroughly by the Office of the Pardon Attorney,” spokeswoman Laura Sweeney said.

Last week, the American Constitution Society sponsored a panel discussion on Capitol Hill devoted to the pardon issue. President Obama’s former White House counsel Gregory B. Craig said the president could issue an executive order eliminating the pardon office.

“We cannot improve or strengthen the exercise of this power without taking it out of the Department of Justice,” Craig said.

He advocated for a bipartisan review panel that would report directly to the president.

The number of pardons awarded has declined sharply in the past 30 years, as have commutations. Obama has rejected nearly 3,800 commutation requests from prisoners. He has approved one. Bush commuted the sentences of 11 people, turning down nearly 7,500 applicants.

A former pardon office lawyer said some applicants have been turned down “en masse” with little, if any, review, a claim the Justice Department disputes.

Aaron, now 43 and in his 19th year behind bars, had not known how close to success his request had come, or what had barred his way, until he was contacted by ProPublica. Still, he said, it gave him hope.

“I didn’t know I had that type of support” from the judge and prosecutor, he said in a phone interview from the Alabama correctional facility where he is held. “When you do the right things each day, there really are people out there watching, and for those who still haven’t given me their support, I will keep working for them, too.”

A High Hurdle

Aaron stumbled into the “war on drugs” near its peak, in 1992. Then a linebacker at Southern University in Baton Rouge, he introduced a classmate whose brother was a drug supplier to a cocaine dealer he knew from high school in Mobile, Ala.

Aaron was present for the sale of nine kilograms of cocaine and the conversion of one kilogram to crack, according to court records. He was paid $1,500 by the dealer.

After federal authorities busted the ring and the case went to trial, Aaron claimed his role was so limited that he knew almost nothing about the deal. But he refused to testify against friends, and others fingered Aaron as a major player and testified against him in exchange for reduced sentences.

Though it was Aaron’s first criminal offense, he received the stiffest sentence of anyone involved in the conspiracy. Only Aaron and the drug supplier, who is scheduled to be released in 2014, remain behind bars.

Aaron’s case gained national attention in 1999 when he appeared in “Snitch,” a PBS “Frontline” documentary about prisoners serving long sentences after refusing to turn informant. The film helped him garner support in Congress and from civil rights organizations.

In January 2001, Aaron submitted an application for a commutation. He faced a high hurdle.

Between 1980 and 2010, requests for commutations rose sharply, reflecting lengthier sentences and the elimination of paroles for federal inmates, while the number of successful applicants plummeted.

“The reason that some people should have their sentences commuted is because they have been over-sentenced,” said Mark Osler, a former federal prosecutor who runs the country’s only law school clinic for commutations.

Under Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, both two-term presidents, one applicant in 100 was successful. Under Bush, approvals fell to barely better than one in 1,000. So far, Obama has commuted the sentences of fewer than one in 5,000. The only person freed by Obama had support from one of the president’s closest congressional allies, Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin.

Aaron’s high profile boosted his chances, as did his track records as a model inmate. He wrote in an amended petition that he was deeply ashamed of his actions and felt “terrible remorse. I also regret that I further compounded my mistake by not admitting to my participation at trial.”

But his petition had a critical weakness.

U.S. Attorney David York, the top prosecutor for the Southern District of Alabama, opposed reducing Aaron’s sentence.

In 2004, then-Pardon Attorney Roger Adams recommended the White House deny Aaron’s request. Adams said in a recent interview that he wrote the recommendation with some ambivalence.

“Anyone who looks at Clarence Aaron will see a really, really tough case of a young guy in prison for the rest of his life,” Adams said.

His report went to the White House, where it sat for three years among a growing stack of recommendations.

A Cursory Review

In 2008, Rodgers, a former military judge and federal prosecutor, took over the pardon office and changed the way it handled commutation applications.

Under Rodgers’s predecessors, staff lawyers reviewed each case, gathered pre-sentence and Bureau of Prisons progress reports and wrote recommendations based on their research.

“Some reports were shorter, just a paragraph or two,” said Margaret Love, who served as a pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997. “But there was always enough of a report that you could get an idea of what the basic facts and issues were.”

For the first 2 1/2 years under Rodgers, however, most petitions were handled by paralegals, not staff attorneys, and recommended for denial in batches, said Samuel Morison, a lawyer who spent more than a decade in the pardons office before leaving in 2010 to work for the Defense Department. He said Rodgers instituted the change when there was a significant backlog.

“The office types up a list of names, along with basic sentencing and offense information for each prisoner, and sends the list to the White House with a note that says the attached cases are meritless and should be denied,” Morison said.

At the end of 2010, Rodgers reverted to the old system. He now assigns a lawyer, along with paralegals, to review commutation requests, the Justice Department said.

Still, in the past four years, applications from more than 7,000 prisoners have been denied — 22 times as many as were rejected during Reagan’s eight-year presidency.

The Justice Department insists the accelerated process did not mean applicants got short shrift.

Rodgers “personally reviewed every application for commutation of sentence before recommending their disposition,” a Justice Department official said.

The dwindling numbers have caught the eye of Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who has complained publicly about the lack of commutations. “A people confident in its laws and institutions should not be ashamed of mercy,” Kennedy said in a 2003 speech to the American Bar Association. He urged members to tell president and governors, “this young man has not served his full sentence but he has served long enough. Give him what only you can give him. Give him another chance. Give him a priceless gift. Give him liberty.”

But applicants who most need the pardon office’s support have increasingly hit a wall, advocates say.

“We have never found a political opposition to the idea or concept of commutations,” said Mary Price, vice president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a group that pushes for judicial discretion in sentencing and, in certain cases, shortening of terms. “The chief impediment lies in the pardon attorney’s office.”

A Nine-Year Odissey

The White House sent Aaron’s application back to the pardon office for reconsideration in early 2008 as part of a larger push to find clemency candidates.

According to former White House counsel Fred Fielding, his staff had become frustrated by the lack of positive recommendations from the pardon office. In Bush’s final year in office, lawyers began searching through denial recommendations for promising cases and found Aaron.

This time, key elements shifted in Aaron’s favor. Unlike her predecessor, Deborah J. Rhodes, the new U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, supported the petition.

“I have reviewed various documents submitted by Clarence Aaron in support of his petition for commutation of sentence and agree that Aaron should receive a commutation of his life sentence,” her November 2008 memo to Rodgers began.

Rhodes suggested Aaron’s triple life sentence be commuted to the equivalent of a 25-year sentence, with credit for good behavior. Under this calculation, Aaron would be released in 2014.

U.S. District Court Judge Charles Butler Jr., who had sentenced Aaron, changed his earlier stance of no position, opting this time to support commutation.

“Looking through the prism of hindsight, and considering the many factors argued by the defendant that were not present at the time of his initial sentencing, one can argue that a less harsh sentence might have been more equitable,” he wrote in response to a motion filed by Aaron’s attorneys.

In a phone interview with the pardons office on Dec. 2, 2008, Butler told Morison, the lawyer in the office, that Aaron “should be granted relief” by the president immediately.

Morison sent an e-mail to Rodgers sharing his transcribed notes from the call with Butler. Morison asked Rodgers if he should update the draft recommendation on file for Aaron’s release in light of the views expressed by Rhodes and the judge. Rodgers responded minutes later: “Thanks Sam. I’ll take it from here.”

Instead, Rodgers offered no new recommendation to the White House and did not revise the old one. He did not pass on years of favorable prisoner reports describing Aaron’s successful rehabilitation. He also made no mention of an affidavit Aaron filed with the pardons office in 2007 in which he expressed further remorse and asked “for a second chance to be a productive citizen.”

Rodgers resubmitted the 2004 denial recommendation, unchanged, to the White House.

In an email the next day to Kenneth Lee, associate White House counsel, Rodgers did not disclose that Rhodes and the sentencing judge now agreed that Aaron should receive an immediate commutation. He told Lee that Rhodes suggested Aaron’s sentence should be commuted to a term of 25 years “at some point.” Rodgers also said that Rhodes believed “Aaron’s commutation request is about 10 years premature.”

No such language is in Rhodes’s memo.

All Rodgers told the White House about Butler’s views was that the judge had “no objection to commuting the sentence presently.”

Rhodes would not comment on Rodgers’s handling of the petition except to reiterate that she had recommended an immediate commutation for Aaron.

“I reviewed the case myself and thought it was a good one,” she said.

Butler declined to comment for this story.

The Justice Department would not answer questions about the way Rodgers characterized the views of Rhodes and Butler, or how Rodgers had arrived at his recommendation on Aaron.

Lee, the former associate White House counsel, said Rodgers had presented the views of Rhodes and Butler “in the least favorable light to the applicant.”

Referencing ProPublica’s findings on presidential pardons — that whites were nearly four times as likely to be pardoned than minorities — he also expressed concern that the office’s approach to the case could have been affected by race. Aaron is African American.

“Had we known before about a potential subconscious bias in the office,” Lee said, “we would have liked to look at the actual letters in the Aaron case rather than rely on the pardon attorney’s summary.”

In response to the ProPublica findings, the Justice Department said it took the concerns seriously and was reviewing the statistical analysis in the article.

Reed Prior

On Dec. 23, 2008, the day Bush denied Aaron’s petition, he commuted the term of another man, Reed Prior, who was serving a life sentence for his fourth drug offense.

Prior was a major dealer of methamphetamine at the time of his conviction in 1996, according to Justice Department records.

When he was busted, police found 869 grams of meth plus nearly $18,000 in cash. He was convicted for possession, with intend to distribute.

Prior refused to cooperate with prosecutors in the Southern District of Iowa. At 46, he received a mandatory life sentence.

Prosecutors in Des Moines vehemently opposed Prior’s commutation request.

According to a copy of the recommendation sent from the pardon attorney to the White House, U.S. Attorney Matthew G. Whitaker wrote that a commutation for Prior “would have a detrimental impact on law enforcement efforts in this community as (Prior) would essentially be rewarded despite his failure to provide full and truthful information about his criminal activity and his associates.”

Prior’s initial application for commutation was denied in December 2007. A year later, he reapplied.

This time, he had the support of influential family friends, senior judges and the wife of Iowa’s then-governor. In addition to petitioning through the pardon office, Prior’s lawyer met with Fred Fielding, the White House counsel.

A week later, Prior was ordered freed after 14 years of incarceration.

“Going through the pardons office didn’t work,” said Robert Holliday, the Des Moines lawyer who handled Prior’s case for free.

“Going directly to the White House did.”

Prior, who is writing a memoir, compared his fortune to that of winning a lottery. “When I see those megamillions ticket-buyers, I think about myself sometimes.” Of Aaron, Prior said he hoped President Obama would commute his sentence. “I watched ‘Snitch’ while in prison and remember his case.”

Lee said the White House was persuaded that Prior deserved to be released.

“There was evidence that he had been rehabilitated and adjusted well during his prison sentence,” Lee said. “He seemed to have shown remorse for his actions and was very active in his prison community, helping others out and had been a changed man.”

Talladega

Aaron remains in a federal penitentiary in Talladega, Ala.

He spent the first dozen years of his sentence at maximum security prisons in Florida and Georgia, where he completed a two-year religious-studies correspondence course through Emory University. He also took courses in microeconomics, Spanish, photography and behavioral development

In 2007, he was transferred to the medium-security facility in Talladega, where he helped bring a new textiles factory onlineand works as a clerk, assisting the factory accountant.

“A lot of people think I’m crazy, to do self-help programs and stay out of trouble with a sentence like mine,” Aaron said. But “from the first day I walked into the federal prison system, I just continued to better myself and educate myself.”

He’s acutely aware of all the milestones he has missed – family birthdays, his college graduation. In 2005, his younger sister Stephaine died suddenly during radiation treatment for skin cancer. Aaron said he calls her daughters every week.

Bush formally denied Aaron’s request on Dec. 23, 2008. Aaron learned of the decision three weeks later when Rodgers sent formal notification to his attorney.

In April 2010, Aaron submitted a new petition for commutation. It is pending.

“If I was to be granted that commutation,” Aaron said, “the president who backed me wouldn’t regret it, because I would work hard every day to prove my worthiness.”

by Dafna Linzer, ProPublica, May 13, 2012, 8 p.m.

Image Courtesy of   Walter G Arce / Shutterstock.com

The article Pardon Attorney Torpedoes Plea for Presidential Mercy appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

A version of this story was published in The Washington Post.

As the U.S. Senate Finance Committee launched an investigation Tuesday into makers of narcotic painkillers and groups that champion them, a leading pain advocacy organization said it was dissolving “due to irreparable economic circumstances.”

The American Pain Foundation, which described itself as the nation’s largest organization for pain patients, was the focus of a December investigation by ProPublica in The Washington Post that detailed its close ties to drugmakers.

The group received 90 percent of its $5 million in funding in 2010 from the drug and medical-device industry, ProPublica found, and its guides for patients, journalists and policymakers had played down the risks associated with opioid painkillers while exaggerating the benefits.

It is unclear whether the group’s announcement Tuesday evening — that it would “cease to exist, effective immediately” — was related to letters sent earlier in the day from Sens. Max Baucus, D-Mont., the finance panel chairman, and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, to the foundation, drug companies and others.

In the letters, the senators cited an “an epidemic of accidental deaths and addiction resulting from the increased sale and use of powerful narcotic painkillers,” including popular brand names like Oxycontin, Vicodin and Opana.

Growing evidence, they wrote, suggests that drug companies “may be responsible, at least in part, for this epidemic by promoting misleading information about the drugs’ safety and effectiveness.”

The American Pain Foundation’s website carried a statement Tuesday night saying its board had voted May 3 to dissolve the organization because it couldn’t stay “operational.” The foundation did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

The senators are targeting a who’s who of the pain industry, seeking extensive records and correspondence documenting the links, financial and otherwise, between them and the makers of the top-prescribed narcotic painkillers.

Letters went to three pharmaceutical companies, Purdue Pharma, Endo Pharmaceuticals and Johnson & Johnson, as well as five groups that support pain patients, physicians or research: the American Pain Foundation, American Academy of Pain Medicine, American Pain Society, Wisconsin Pain & Policy Studies Group, and the Center for Practical Bioethics.

The Federation of State Medical Boards, the trade group for agencies that license doctors, received a letter, as did The Joint Commission, an independent nonprofit that accredits hospitals nationwide and made pain management a national priority in 2001.

A report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office in 2003 noted that the commission partnered with Purdue Pharma, the maker of Oxycontin, to distribute pain educational materials nationwide. The committee’s letter to Purdue noted that the company pleaded guilty in 2007 to federal criminal charges that it misled regulators, physicians and consumers about Oxycontin’s risk of addiction.

The senators requested payment information since 1997 to 10 groups and eight people, including two doctors featured in ProPublica’s December report. They asked about any influence the companies had on a 2004 pain guide for physicians that was distributed by the Federation of State Medical Boards; on the American Pain Society’s guidelines; and on the American Pain Foundation’s Military/Veterans Pain Initiative.

In addition to citing ProPublica’s work, the letters also mention the reporting of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and MedPage Today.

Patients in serious pain need access to opioids, the senators wrote, but drugmakers and health-care groups “must distribute accurate information about these drugs in order to prevent improper use and diversion to drug abusers.”

“The problem of opioid abuse is bad and getting worse,” Sen. Grassley said in a statement. “Something has to change.”

“When it comes to these highly addictive painkillers, improper relationships between pharmaceutical companies and the organizations that promote their drugs can put lives at risk,” Baucus said in a prepared statement.

Dr. Andrew Kolodny, chairman of psychiatry at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., and president of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing, applauded the investigation.

“These groups, these pain organizations … helped usher in an epidemic that’s killed 100,000 people by promoting aggressive use of opioids,” Kolodny said. “What makes this especially disturbing is that despite overwhelming evidence that their effort created a public health crisis, they’re continuing to minimize the risk of addiction.”

Concerns about the overuse and abuse of painkillers have intensified in recent years. As sales of the powerful drugs have boomed — rising 300 percent since 1999 — so, too, have overdose deaths. Opioids were involved in 14,800 overdose deaths in 2008, more than cocaine and heroin combined, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In 2009, the use and misuse of the drugs were cited in more than 475,000 emergency department visits, nearly doubling the 2004 number, the CDC said.

Pain doctors and patient groups say that while drug overdoses are a legitimate concern, only a small percentage of deaths involves patients who receive them from their doctors. Most deaths involve illicitly obtained drugs, statistics show.

The groups also say that patients’ risk is low if they do not have addictive personalities, and that any restrictions should not punish patients who suffer from serious pain.

In recent weeks, two articles in medical journals have documented different aspects of abuse.

According to a paper published online this week by the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of every eight high school seniors surveyed said they had used prescription opioids for nonmedical reasons.

A paper released last month by The Journal of the American Medical Association found that the rate of newborns diagnosed with drug withdrawal jumped threefold from 2000 to 2009. And the rate of mothers using opioids at the time of delivery was five times higher in 2009. (Not all babies born to mothers using the drugs exhibit signs of withdrawal.)

Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary that makes the painkiller Nucynta, said in a statement that it “is committed to the responsible prescribing and appropriate use of opioid pain medications” and has supported educational websites about safe use.

The company is reviewing the senators’ letter and “will work with them to fulfill their request for information,” spokesman Mark Wolfe said via email.

Purdue Pharma acknowledged in a statement that it had received the letter, was reviewing it and looked forward to “cooperating with the committee on this matter.”

Endo did not return a request for comment. A spokeswoman for The Joint Commission said the group had just received the senators’ letter and had no comment yet. The Federation of State Medical Boards responded but did not offer immediate comment.

by Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber, ProPublica, May 8, 2012, 9:57 p.m.

The article American Pain Foundation Shuts Down as Senators Launch Investigation of Prescription Narcotics appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

The recent brouhaha over pink slime (and other lovely mass meat production processes) is only the beginning. Here’s our roundup of some standout reporting about the food on your plate.

This is a multifaceted, perennial topic. If you think Propublica missed any, we’re happy to hear suggestions. Please email a link to MuckReads@propublica.org or tweet it with the hashtag #muckreads.

Safety of Beef Processing Method Is Questioned, The New York Times, December 2009
A look at the development of Beef Product Inc.’s “novel” method of meat production that later became known as the infamous “pink slime.” Reporter Michael Moss won a Pulitzer Prize for his investigations into contaminated beef.

Our Dwindling Food Variety, National Geographic, July 2011
Our dwindling food variety, in a stride-stopping infographic.
Contributed by @kleinmatic

What the USDA Doesn’t Want You to Know About Antibiotics and Factory Farms, Mother Jones, July 2011
The U.S. Department of Agriculture appears to have repeatedly removed a report by a USDA-contracted researcher that summarized recent academic work, from “reputed, scientific, peer-reviewed, and scholarly journals,” on possible links between antibiotic-resistant infections and factory farm animals. Mother Jones got a permanent PDF of the researcher’s report, dubbing it the “document the USDA doesn’t want you to see.”
Contributed by @foodinteg

Asian Honey, Banned in Europe, Is Flooding U.S. Grocery Shelves, Food Safety News, August 2011

Some of the biggest U.S. honey packers knowingly bought honey of questionable quality so they could sell it on the cheap. Much of it was likely smuggled from China (honey the European Union has banned) and may have been laced with lead and illegal animal antibiotics — if it was really honey at all.

America’s Dangerous Food-Safety System, The Daily Beast/ Newsweek, September 2011
A shortage of inspectors in the U.S. food-safety system exposes Americans to the risk of illness and death.
Contributed by @StepShep

Nation’s Food Anti-terror Plans Costly, Unwieldy, Associated Press, September 2011 
An AP investigation into the United States’ $3.4 billion food counter-terrorism program found that progress had been slowed by a complex web of bureaucracy.
Contributed by @joannalin

On The Menu, But Not On Your Plate, Boston Globe, October 2011
A Globe-organized DNA test revealed scores of mislabeled fish in Massachusetts restaurants, grocery stores and seafood markets. Often, “local” fish was actually hauled from thousands of miles away, and while some chefs and store owners seemed to have no clue, others admitted to knowingly selling mislabeled food to boost profits. Experts said it reflects a nationwide trend that causes diners to unwittingly overpay, may make people sick and results in overfishing.

Contributed by @JoeYerardi

Dispute Over Drug in Feed Limiting U.S. Meat Exports, MSNBC, January 2012
The controversial drug ractopamine has sickened or killed more pigs than any other livestock drug on the market, leading the EU and China, which together produce and consume about 70 percent of the world’s pork, to refuse meat imports raised on the additive. The U.S. pork industry wants to change their minds.
Contributed by @NaomiStarkman

How Washington Went Soft on Child Obesity, Reuters, April 2012
The food and beverage industries have more than doubled their spending on lobbying in Washington in the last three years. And now Congress has declared pizza a vegetable.
Contributed by @mariancw

A History of FDA Inaction on Animal Antibiotics, ProPublica, April 2012
Everything you ever wanted to know about the Food and Drug Administration’s actions, or lack thereof, to keep antibiotics out of your food.

As Beef Cattle Become Behemoths, Who Are Animal Scientists Serving? The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 2012
A growing number of animal scientists employed by public universities are accepting payouts from pharmaceutical companies. They’re often hired to persuade farmers to use antibiotics that fatten up cattle but haven’t necessarily been proven safe. Some have been banned in the E.U. and China.
Contributed by @MelodyPetersen

Bonus points: In 1968, Nathan Kotz of the Des Moines Register and Minneapolis Tribune won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on unsanitary conditions in meat packing plants, which, according to the Pulitzer site, helped ensure passage of the Federal Wholesome Meat Act of 1967. Anybody have an online copy?

by Blair Hickman, ProPublica, May 7, 2012, 12:21 p.m.

The article The Best, Most Disgusting Reporting on Food Safety appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Each prescription drug you take has a unique code that the government can use to track problems. But artificial hips and pacemakers? They are implanted without identification, along with many other medical devices. In fact, the FDA doesn’t know how many devices are implanted into patients each year – it simply doesn’t track that data.

The past decade has seen numerous high profile cases of malfunctioning medical devices, which have led to injury or even death. Critics say the FDA’s minimal monitoring of devices contributes to these problems.

“If you’re lucky, you might find a sticker on the operating room note that was left over from the product,” said Richard Platt, who runs the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute. Otherwise, there is little way of knowing what device was used.

Right now, the FDA depends mostly on voluntary reports from doctors, patients, manufacturers and hospitals to notify them of problems with devices already on the market. The agency does have some power to require manufacturers to conduct further studies or track a particular device once it is sold. But many devices don’t get that level of surveillance.

“It’s much like a patchwork of streams of information getting to the FDA,” said cardiologist Frederic Resnic of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who has worked with the FDA on medical device safety monitoring. “The FDA is relying on anecdotal and very variable information about the safety of medical devices.”

If manufacturers get word from a doctor or hospital about a death or injury that occurred as a result of their product, they are legally obligated to investigate the event and report it to the FDA. But the process isn’t straightforward, as has become clear in the recent controversy over the malfunctioning St. Jude’s Riata defibrillator leads (wires that connect a defibrillator to the heart). The FDA said an individual doctor’s report helped alert them to the problem, but it was months before the device was recalled.

According to attorney William Vodra, a regulatory law expert and member of the Institute of Medicine panel that published a report on medical device safety last year, the number of doctors who actually contact manufacturers is small.

And after being notified of patient harm, manufacturers can minimize their own responsibility if they point the blame elsewhere, said health policy expert Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Research Center for Women & Families.

For example, if someone dies from complications in a surgery to remove an implant, the manufacturer may argue that it was the surgery – not the implant – that killed the patient.

“You have a system that is not rigorous, the standards are not always understood, and they are interpreted differently by different people,” Zuckerman said.

The FDA responds to the criticism by pointing out that while every medical device carries a potential risk, the vast majority of devices perform well and improve patient health. An FDA spokeswoman emphasized that the agency must evaluate thousands of medical devices each year, and is constantly looking for ways to better and more quickly identify problems.

While the FDA makes the adverse event reports publically available in a searchable database, it doesn’t have a standardized system for reviewing reports once they are sent in, said Vodra, the attorney. A disclaimer on the site specifically states that the data is “not intended to be used either to evaluate rates of adverse events or to compare adverse event occurrence rates across devices.”

“What you would normally consider the simplest kind of data analysis is not done,” said Zuckerman. Often, doctors catch a malfunctioning device before the FDA ever notices.

In one case, a group of Pennsylvania doctors noticed that several patients were showing severe complications a few years after getting an IVC filter – a device designed to capture blood clots. Bits of the filter were breaking off, causing chest pain and a dangerous build-up of fluid and pressure around the heart. In 2010 the doctors conducted their own studyand found that the filter broke in a quarter of all patients who used it.

On the day that study was published, the FDA issued a warning saying it had received over 900 reports of problems with IVC filters since 2006, and that the device was meant to be removed after a few months, not left in permanently.

There have been numerous attempts at reform. Five years ago Congress ordered the FDA to set up a post-market surveillance system to track the safety of all medical projects, but a system hasn’t yet been set up for medical devices.

A year later the FDA announced the Sentinel Initiative, which would combine existing data from electronic health records and medical claims to track drugs, vaccines, and devices. Some groups of hospitals or other organizations have voluntarily set up registries to collect information about the make and model of devices.

While the FDA has made significant progress on tracking drugs, it’s not yet in a position to do the same thing for devices, according to Harvard’s Platt, who is the principal investigator of Mini-Sentinel, the FDA’s pilot program for the national system. The data isn’t there.

The FDA has long acknowledged the need for a unique device identifier system, and got permission from Congress to set one up five years ago. No such system of ID-tags exists yet, but after several recent high profile medical device failures, the issue getting some attention from Congress. A proposed Senate bill, which cleared the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee last week, sets a timeframe for implementing a unique identification system, among other reforms.

“If UDI’s were used in a consistent way, we could use the same kinds of techniques we’ve developed for drugs for devices,” said Platt. “It would be a huge breakthrough.”

by Lena Groeger, ProPublica, May 3, 2012, 1:07 p.m.

The article How Does the FDA Monitor Your Medical Implants? It Doesn’t, Really appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

The pricey F-22 Raptor jet has just gotten back up in the air, but the safety problem that grounded it doesn’t seem to be resolved.

Last year, the F-22 was grounded for four months because pilots were experiencing dizziness and other symptoms of hypoxia, which is caused by a lack of oxygen. The Air Force looked into possible malfunctions in the plane’s oxygen-generation system, but in September, the planes were cleared for service after technicians were unable to pinpoint a source of the problem.

Monday, however, the Air Force’s Air Combat Command confirmed that some pilots — they would specify only “a very small” number — have requested not to fly the F-22.

General Mike Hostage, who heads the Air Combat Command, said in a news briefing yesterday that the Air Force is taking cautionary measures but would continue to fly the planes. “We don’t have a conclusive answer yet, and that’s why we continue to fly with the mitigating procedures, because I can’t learn about the problem if I don’t fly the airplane,” he said.

Since the planes started flying again in September, there have been more than 12,000 sorties and 11 reported instances of “hypoxia-like symptoms.” An Air Combat Command Center spokesman told ProPublica today that a team of two-dozen Air Force and outside specialists is monitoring the planes and pilots for both mechanical and medical problems regarding the hypoxia symptoms, but that no “root cause” has been determined.

Before the grounding, there had been at least 12 separate reports of hypoxia-like symptoms, and planes had been limited to flying at lower altitudes. In late 2010, an F-22 pilot died in a crash after he apparently lost control of the plane when the oxygen system malfunctioned. The Air Force’s official report on the incident acknowledged the oxygen system failure but blamed the pilot’s response for the crash.

As ProPublica has detailed, the roughly $70 billion F-22 program has long experiencedstructural deficiencies and cost overruns. The U.S. halted orders of the jets in 2009, as then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates argued the F-22′s specific capability was not widely applicable in the nation’s “spectrum of conflict.”

The planes have yet to be deployed in combat, though last week a number of them were reportedly sent to the United Arab Emirates.

 by Cora Currier, ProPublica, May 1, 2012, 4:31 p.m.

Image Courtesy of By U. S. Air Force Photo [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The article Air Force Pilots Balk at Flying the World’s Most Expensive Fighter Jet appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Last month Propublica told the unlikely story of how Eni Faleomavaega, the congressional delegate from American Samoa, had become one of Bahrain’s most reliable friends on Capitol Hill.

Faleomavaega had traveled to the Gulf Nation and made a series of statements in support of the government and criticizing popular protests that broke out there early last year. As we documented, he was turned on to the issue by the Bahrain American Council, a group created by a Washington lobby shop run by a close friend and campaign contributor of Faleomavaega’s.

But something unexpected happened after the publication of the story: Faleomavaega’s view of the situation in Bahrain shifted dramatically.

Since the protest movement began in February 2011, Faleomavaega had repeatedly criticized protesters as pawns or agents of Iran who were violently destabilizing an important U.S. ally. In comments submitted to the Congressional Record last March, for example, Faleomavaega argued that the monarchy that rules Bahrain had met all of the protesters’ demands, and added, “I have to ask why the demonstrators returned to protesting again, even after all their demands were agreed to.”

Human rights groups, meanwhile, have consistently criticized the government for suppressing protests with sometimes deadly force and for prosecuting activists and those that aided them.

Propublica’s story was published April 2, which happened to coincide with the start of a trip  Faleomavaega and two other Democratic members of Congress took to Bahrain (paid for by the government there).

On April 3, the group met with Bahrain’s human rights minister. During that meeting, Faleomavaega called on the government to implement reforms that were recommended by a commission of inquiry last year. He also raised the case of Jaffar Salman, a man detained for allegedly participating in an illegal assembly who had complained he was not getting medical treatment after being shot in the face with birdshot.

Salman was subsequently brought to the hospital, according to a letter Faleomavaega received thanking him from opposition party Al-Wefaq published on his congressional website last week.

In a statement accompanying the letter, Faleomavaega called for reconciliation, adding that “after the government crackdown on government protestors, the situation in Bahrain is alarming.”

This kind of rhetoric is an about face for the congressional delegate. On his last trip to Bahrain in October, Faleomavaega delivered a speech vigorously defending the government’s response to the protests. He worried about “the prospect of anarchy or the violent overthrow of a peaceful government by infiltrators from another country” — Iran.

Faleomavaega also met with Al-Wefaq officials on that October trip but they had expressed disappointment after the meeting, complaining that he did “not show enough understanding for the legitimate demands for reform.”

What caused Faleomavaega to change his view of the situation? He did not respond to requests for comment.

by Justin Elliott, ProPublica, May 2, 2012, 4:03 p.m.

The article Congressman Unfriends Bahrain appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

A new study has raised fresh concerns about the safety of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, concluding that fracking chemicals injected into the ground could migrate toward drinking water supplies far more quickly than experts have previously predicted.

More than 5,000 wells were drilled in the Marcellus between mid-2009 and mid-2010, according to the study, which was published in the journal Ground Water two weeks ago. Operators inject up to 4 million gallons of fluid, under more than 10,000 pounds of pressure, to drill and frack each well.

Scientists have theorized that impermeable layers of rock would keep the fluid, which contains benzene and other dangerous chemicals, safely locked nearly a mile below water supplies. This view of the earth’s underground geology is a cornerstone of the industry’s argument that fracking poses minimal threats to the environment.

But the study, using computer modeling, concluded that natural faults and fractures in the Marcellus, exacerbated by the effects of fracking itself, could allow chemicals to reach the surface in as little as “just a few years.”

“Simply put, [the rock layers] are not impermeable,” said the study’s author, Tom Myers, an independent hydrogeologist whose clients include the federal government and environmental groups.

“The Marcellus shale is being fracked into a very high permeability,” he said. “Fluids could move from most any injection process.”

The research for the study was paid for by Catskill Mountainkeeper and the Park Foundation, two upstate New York organizations that have opposed gas drilling and fracking in the Marcellus.

Much of the debate about the environmental risks of gas drilling has centered on the risk that spills could pollute surface water or that structural failures would cause wells to leak.

Though some scientists believed it was possible for fracking to contaminate underground water supplies, those risks have been considered secondary. The study in Ground Water is the first peer-reviewed research evaluating this possibility.

The study did not use sampling or case histories to assess contamination risks. Rather, it used software and computer modeling to predict how fracking fluids would move over time. The simulations sought to account for the natural fractures and faults in the underground rock formations and the effects of fracking.

The models predict that fracking will dramatically speed up the movement of chemicals injected into the ground. Fluids traveled distances within 100 years that would take tens of thousands of years under natural conditions. And when the models factored in the Marcellus’ natural faults and fractures, fluids could move 10 times as fast as that.

Where man-made fractures intersect with natural faults, or break out of the Marcellus layer into the stone layer above it, the study found, “contaminants could reach the surface areas in tens of years, or less.”

The study also concluded that the force that fracking exerts does not immediately let up when the process ends. It can take nearly a year to ease.

As a result, chemicals left underground are still being pushed away from the drill site long after drilling is finished. It can take five or six years before the natural balance of pressure in the underground system is fully restored, the study found.

Myers’ research focused exclusively on the Marcellus, but he said his findings may have broader relevance. Many regions where oil and gas is being drilled have more permeable underground environments than the one he analyzed, he said.

“One would have to say that the possible travel times for a similar thing in Arkansas or Northeast Texas is probably faster than what I’ve come up with,” Myers said.

Ground Water is the journal of the National Ground Water Association, a non-profit group that represents scientists, engineers and businesses in the groundwater industry.

Several scientists called Myers’ approach unsophisticated and said that the assumptions he used for his models didn’t reflect what they knew about the geology of the Marcellus Shale. If fluids could flow as quickly as Myers asserts, said Terry Engelder, a professor of geosciences at Penn State University who has been a proponent of shale development, fracking wouldn’t be necessary to open up the gas deposits.

“This would be a huge fracture porosity,” Engelder said. “So I read this and I say, ‘Golly, does this guy really understand anything about what these shales look like?’ The concern then arises from using a model rather than observations.”

Myers likened the shale to a cracked window, saying that samples showing it didn’t contain fractures were small in size and were akin to only examining an intact section of glass, while a broader, scaled out view would capture the faults and fractures that could leak.

Both scientists agreed that direct evidence of fluid migration is needed, but little sampling has been done to analyze where fracking fluids go after being injected underground.

Myers says monitoring systems could be installed around gas well sites to measure for changes in water quality, a measure required for some gold mines, for example. Until that happens, Myers said, theoretical modeling has to substitute for hard data.

“We were trying to use the basic concepts of groundwater and hydrology and geology and say can this happen?” he said. “And that had basically never been done.”

by Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica, May 1, 2012, 4:29 p.m.

Image Courtesy of    Adrian Kinloch

The article New Study Predicts Frack Fluids Can Migrate to Aquifers Within Years appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

With the Federal Communications Commission set to vote Friday on whether to require broadcasters to post political ad data online, the industry has been scrambling to water down the proposed rule.

The data is currently available only on paper at TV stations. We’ve been tracking the flurry of lobbying against the rule by big media companies, including the owners of many of the nation’s largest news outlets. In the latest development, Communications Daily reported earlier this week that the FCC has become more receptive to the industry’s attempts to soften the proposed rule.

The exact contents of the rule may be in flux until the vote on Friday, and we won’t get a look at the text of the rule itself until sometime after the vote. Those who follow the FCC closely say that while we will likely know the broad outlines of the rule on Friday, the exact text is sometimes not completed and released until days or even weeks after a vote.

But because the FCC might water down the rule, it’s a good time to take a look at exactly what the broadcasters’ counterproposal would mean for the public’s access to the political ad data.

The FCC is made up of two Democrats who have spoken broadly in favor of the proposed rule and one Republican who has criticized it. Citing unnamed “agency and industry officials,” Communications Daily reported Monday (subscription required) that the two Democrats appeared to be showing some give on the crucial issue of whether broadcasters would have to put all 2014 or just some 2014 political ad data online.

“[T]hey said the potential for changes appears higher now than it did earlier last week, when [FCC Chairman Julius] Genachowski seemed set against any modifications,” the publication reported.

In a speech at the annual tradeshow of the National Association of Broadcasters in Las Vegas last week, Genachowski appeared to stand firm against the industry’s lobbying. He answered the industry’s arguments one by one and decried its stance “against transparency and against journalism.”

But Mignon Clyburn, the other Democratic commissioner, reportedly struck a “conciliatory note” in her remarks on the political ad files at the NAB show. “I can affirm to you that in terms of this process, this office is still open for engagement,” she said, according to Communications Daily.

Republican Robert McDowell has echoed the industry’s opposition to the proposed rule.

Lobbying disclosures filed with the FCC this week outline a final proposal written by a Washington attorney for a group that includes the National Association of Broadcasters, Fox, CBS, NBC, ABC, Univision and other stations. (Here is the full list.)

The proposal represents a last-ditch bid by the industry to undermine the rule, which is expected to pass in some form. Just a couple of weeks ago, NAB chief Gordon Smith, a former senator, visited the FCC to express the industry’s flat opposition to any online disclosure rule.

Under the industry’s proposal, broadcasters would post to an FCC website the aggregate amount of each purchase of political ads instead of the full itemized information that is currently in the paper files.

Advocates of full online disclosure argue the broadcasters’ proposal is lacking in a few key respects.

The Public Interest Public Airwaves Coalition pointed out in a April 19 letter to the FCC chairman that the broadcasters’ proposal would conceal “more detailed information about how much stations charge for the purchase of political advertising time, as well as whether a station accepted or rejected a request to purchase time, the date and time a political advertising message aired, and the class of time purchased.”

Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center, told ProPublica that the full, itemized data are important in assessing whether broadcasters are abiding by rules requiring that they offer candidates the cheapest rates and equal opportunity to buy ad time.

“Only by looking at each ad request can you determine whether they are abiding by the statute,” said McGehee, whose organization is a member of the public interest coalition.

Jonathan Blake, the Covington & Burling attorney who authored the broadcasters’ proposal, declined to comment.

Corie Wright, senior policy counsel at Free Press, wrote the public interest coalition’s letter. She told ProPublica that information on the so-called disposition of political ad requests 2014 that is, whether a station rejected a candidate’s request to purchase time 2014 “is extremely important because it enables communities to assess whether broadcasters are using their government-granted monopoly of public spectrum to slant democratic outcomes in favor of one side of an issue over another.”

McGehee, of the Campaign Legal Center, said she won’t be surprised if the FCC bows to the broadcasters’ demands.

“I never underestimate the power of the broadcasters,” she said. “They have a pretty powerful combination. They are big political givers. They are right there in the communities of the members of Congress who are loathe to offend their broadcasters.”

by Justin Elliott ProPublica, April 26, 2012, 12:10 p.m.

Image Courtesy of   Gregory Johnston / Shutterstock.com

The article Broadcasters’ Last-Ditch Push to Hide Political Ad Data appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Update (4/26): An earlier version of this story said a proposed amendment by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., had helped gain support for CISPA. Schiff’s amendment, which among other things would further define what’s considered a “cyber threat,” is no longer scheduled for consideration.

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, up for debate in the House of Representatives today, has privacy activists, tech companies, security wonks and the Obama administration all jousting about what it means 2013 not only for security but Internet privacy and intellectual property. Backers expect CISPA to pass, unlike SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act that melted down amid controversy earlier this year.

Here’s a rundown on the debate and what CISPA could mean for Internet users.

What exactly is CISPA?

The act, sponsored Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., would make it easier for private corporations and U.S. agencies, including military and intelligence, to share information related to “cyber threats.”

In theory, this would enable the government and companies to keep up-to-date on security risks and protect themselves more efficiently. CISPA would amend the National Security Act of 1947, which currently contains no reference to cyber security.  Companies wouldn’t be required to share any data. They would just be allowed to do so.

Why should I care?

CISPA could enable companies like Facebook and Twitter, as well as Internet service providers, to share your personal information with the National Security Agency and the CIA, as long as that information is deemed to pertain to a cyber threat or to national security.

How does the bill define “cyber threat”?

The bill itself defines it as information “pertaining to a vulnerability of” a system or network 2014 a definition that opponents have criticized as too broad. The bill gained support after sponsors agreed to allow votes on several amendments they said would make concessions to privacy activists; one aims to narrow the definition of “cyber threat.”

When can data be shared?

Rogers said the amended version of the bill would only enable companies and intelligence agencies to share information related to 1) cyber security purposes; 2) investigation and prosecution of cyber security crimes; 3) protection of individuals from death and bodily harm; 4) child pornography; or 5) protection of the national security of the United States.

Why are privacy activists upset about CISPA?

Privacy activists like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation contend CISPA isn’t specific enough about just what constitutes a “cyber threat.” They say it enables Internet companies and service providers to hand over sensitive user information to intelligence agencies without enough oversight from the civilian side of government.

Finally, they say it does not explicitly require Internet companies to remove identifying information about users before sharing. Opponents contend, for instance, that Facebook or Twitter could share user messages with the NSA or FBI without redacting the user’s name or personal details.

CISPA also protects the private sector from liability even if they share private user information, as long as that information is deemed to have been shared for cybersecurity or national security purposes. Even though sharing is voluntary and not required under the law, privacy activists say the legal immunity CISPA provides would make it easy for the government to pressure Internet companies to give up user data.

What kind of information can be shared?

Private companies and government agencies can share any information that pertains to a “cyber threat” or that would endanger national security. That could include user information, emails, and direct messages. Companies would be allowed to share with each other as well as the government.

The government is not allowed to proactively search company-provided information for purposes unrelated to cyber security, but opponents say this would be tough to enforce. The bill does not place any explicit limit on how long that information can be kept. Several proposed amendments would limit the amount and kinds of information that can be shared, but it remains to be seen which 2014 if any 2014 will be adopted.

Is CISPA basically SOPA 2.0?

No, it’s very different.

SOPA was about intellectual property; CISPA is about cyber security, but opponents believe both bills have the potential to trample constitutional rights. The comparisons to SOPA stem from language in an earlier version of CISPA that referenced intellectual property. That wording was removed early on in response to mounting criticism. SOPA would have strengthened copyright laws, barring search engines and other websites from linking to sites that violated intellectual property regulations.

That prompted a First Amendment concern from critics that it would give government the power to block websites wholesale, trampling free speech. CISPA’s liability shield, on the other hand, has sparked a concern based on the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure. Opponents contend the law would make it too easy for private companies and the intelligence community to spy on users in the name of cyber security.

Why are some of the tech companies that protested SOPA, like Facebook and Microsoft, now supporting this bill?

CISPA gives Internet companies the ability to share threat information with intelligence agencies and receive information back from them, an ability they say would enable them to deal with cyber threats more effectively. It does not compel them to protect users’ privacy (though a variety of proposed amendments aim to add more stringent privacy protections). Companies could not be held liable for divulging a user’s identity or data to the government if the information relates to a “cyber threat.”

What’s the Obama administration’s take?

The White House is backing a Senate bill proposed by Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and has threatened to veto CISPA. Officials cite a lack of personal privacy protections. They say CISPA would enable military and intelligence agencies to take on a policing role on the internet, which the administration points out is a civilian sphere.

What is CISPA’s path forward in Congress?

A vote is set for Friday. CISPA has accumulated more than 100 cosponsors and will most likely pass the House. “This isn’t about scrambling to meet 218 votes, we are well past that,” co-sponsor Rogers said during a conference call with reporters. But the Senate is a different story 2014 there, it must compete with the Lieberman cyber security bill and one from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

Would CISPA really make us more secure?

It’s unclear.

Some cyber security specialists note that neither CISPA nor other cyber security bills in Congress would compel companies to update software, hire outside specialists or take other measures to preemptively secure themselves against hackers and other threats. CISPA’s backers respond that the bill would forestall a “digital Pearl Harbor,” allowing a freer flow of information for a quicker and more effective response to hackers by both the government and the private sector.

by Megha Rajagopalan ProPublica, April 26, 2012, 1:16 p.m.

The article Is CISPA SOPA 2.0? We Explain the Cybersecurity Bill appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

In front of a British government panel today, Rupert Murdoch denied that he tried to wield political influence or use his media holdings to further the business interests of News Corp.

“I take particular pride in the fact that we’ve never pushed our commercial interests in our newspapers,” Murdoch said at the media ethics inquiry brought on by the phone-hacking scandal at News of the World last year.

He was responding to questions about contacts between News Corp. and government officials in connection with the company’s attempted $12 billion takeover of BSkyB, Britain’s top satellite TV network.

But email messages released Tuesday indicate that News Corp. executives at least considered dispatching top editors of The Wall Street Journal Europe and The Times of London, both News Corp. holdings, to advocate the BSkyB deal.

The newly released emails, totaling 163 pages, were exchanged among News Corp. chief lobbyist Frédéric Michel, company officials and government aides. Several refer to Lord Matthew Oakeshott, a member of Parliament whom News Corp. perceived as key to influencing Vince Cable, the government minister who had the authority in the fall of 2010 to approve the BSkyB deal.

News Corp. execs were worried that Oakeshott wouldn’t be receptive to their overtures. In one email to James Murdoch’s aide, Matthew Anderson, and Rebekah Brooks, chief executive at News International, Michel described Oakeshott as “a difficult character [who] hates lobbying (and doesn’t like our empire either2026).”

So Michel, the lobbyist, suggested that they arrange a meeting between Oakeshott and James Harding, editor in chief of The Times. From the email, dated Oct. 12, 2010

On Oct. 18, Michel wrote that Oakeshott would also be “VERY receptive” to a message from Patience Wheatcroft, then the editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe.

That November, Wheatcroft left The Journal after she was named to the House of Lords as a member of the Conservative party, by Prime Minister David Cameron.

It is not clear whether Harding and Wheatcroft were actually asked to lobby Oakeshott.  A spokeswoman for Harding said that “there was never a meeting between James Harding and Lord Oakeshott,” but did not say whether News Corp. officials had asked Harding to have such a meeting. Wheatcroft did not respond to our requests for comment, nor did Oakeshott.

A News Corp. spokesman declined to comment on any of the emails.

Apart from raising questions about Rupert Murdoch’s claim that there was no use of his media holdings to further his company’s interests, the emails document a more general strategy to turn media coverage of the deal in favor of News Corp. in order to give political cover to the minister, Vince Cable, who could approve the deal.

Cable was removed from the bid approval process after he was recorded by journalists saying he had “declared war” on Murdoch. Cable was replaced by Jeremy Hunt, with whom News Corp. appears to have had more luck 2014 the emails point to close communication between Hunt’s aide and News Corp. about how best to push approval of the BSkyB buyout.

Hunt said Wednesday that he “didn’t know the volume of those communications or the tone” of the interactions between his aide and News Corp. The Guardian also reported Wednesday that in 2009 Hunt was at News Corp. headquarters in New York during the company’s meetings on whether to launch the bid.

News Corp. threw the support of its British newspapers behind Cameron’s Conservative party in the 2010 elections, shortly before the BSkyB bid was announced. Cameron has maintained that he had had no “inappropriate conversations” with Murdoch about the deal.

Competing news organizations and others had opposed the deal because they said it would further concentrate the media power of Murdoch, who controls 40 percent of Britain’s newspaper circulation. The bid was eventually put on hold when news of phone-hacking by Murdoch papers broke last summer and engulfed the company in scandal.

by Cora Currier ProPublica, April 25, 2012, 3:16 p.m.

Image Courtesy of   david_shankbone

The article News Corp. Exec Considered Enlisting Newspaper Editors in Lobbying Effort appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

This story was published as an op-ed in The New York Times.

Two years after a series of gambles and ill-advised decisions on a BP drilling project led to the largest accidental oil spill in United States history and the death of 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, no one has been held accountable.

Sure, there have been about $8 billion in payouts and, in early March, the outlines of a civil agreement that will cost BP, the company ultimately responsible, another $7.8 billion in restitution to businesses and residents along the Gulf of Mexico. It’s also true the company has paid at least $14 billion more in cleanup and other costs since the accident began on April 20, 2010, bringing the expense of this fiasco to about $30 billion for BP. These are huge numbers. But this is a huge and profitable corporation.

What is missing is the accountability that comes from real consequences: a criminal prosecution that holds responsible the individuals who gambled with the lives of BP’s contractors and the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico. Only such an outcome can rebuild trust in an oil industry that asks for the public’s faith so that it can drill more along the nation’s coastlines. And perhaps only such an outcome can keep BP in line and can keep an accident like the Deepwater Horizon disaster from happening again.

BP has already tested the effectiveness of lesser consequences, and its track record proves that the most severe punishments the courts and the United States government have been willing to mete out amount to a slap on the wrist.

Prior to the gulf blowout, which spilled 200 million gallons of oil, BP was convicted of two felony environmental crimes and a misdemeanor: after it failed to report that its contractors were dumping toxic waste in Alaska in 1995; after its refinery in Texas City, Texas, exploded, killing 15, in 2005; and after it spilled more than 200,000 gallons of crude oil from a corroded pipeline onto the Alaskan tundra in 2006. In all, more than 30 people employed directly or indirectly by BP have died in connection with these and other recent accidents.

In at least two of those cases, the company had been warned of human and environmental dangers, deliberated the consequences and then ignored them, according to my reporting.

None of the upper-tier executives who managed BP 2014 John Browne and Tony Hayward among them 2014 were malicious. Their decisions, however, were driven by money. Neither their own sympathies nor the stark risks in their operations 2014 corroding pipelines, dysfunctional safety valves, disarmed fire alarms and so on 2014 could compete with the financial necessities of profit making.

Before the accident in Texas City, BP had declined to spend $150,000 to fix a part of the system that allowed gasoline to spew into the air and blow up. Documents show that the company had calculated the cost of a human life to be $10 million. Shortly before that disaster, a senior plant manager warned BP’s London headquarters that the plant was unsafe and a disaster was imminent. A report from early 2005 predicted that BP’s refinery would kill someone “within the next 12 to 18 months” unless it changed its practices.

Such explicit flirtation with deadly risk was undertaken as part of Mr. Browne’s effort while chief executive to expand BP as quickly as possible. Mr. Browne relentlessly cut costs, including on maintenance and safety.

Then he hastily assembled a series of acquisitions and mergers between 1998 and 2001 that added tens of thousands of employees, blurred chains of command and wrought chaos on his operations. His methods 2014 and the demands of Wall Street 2014 became overly dependent on quantitative measures of success at the expense of environmental and human risk.

After each disaster, Mr. Browne pledged to refresh his focus on safety, investment in maintenance and commitment to the environment. His successor, Mr. Hayward, followed suit, saying that BP’s culture had to change. But the Deepwater Horizon tragedy 2014 which bears many of the same traits as the company’s past accidents 2014 shows how difficult it has been for the company’s leaders to shift BP’s corporate values and live up to their promises.

The question becomes: did they try hard enough, and did the mechanisms of oversight, regulation and law enforcement work sufficiently to provide a recidivist organization the deterrent that could guarantee its compliance?

After its previous convictions, BP paid unprecedented fines 2014 more than $70 million 2014 and committed to spend at least another $800 million on maintenance to improve safety. The point was to demonstrate that the cost of doing business wrong far outweighs the cost of doing business right.

But without personal accountability, the fines become just another cost of doing business, William Miller, a former investigator for the Environmental Protection Agency who was involved in the Texas City case, told me.

The problem then (and perhaps now) is that it is the slow pileup of factors that cause an industrial disaster. Poor decisions are usually made incrementally by a range of people with differing levels of responsibility, and almost always behind a shield of plausible deniability. It makes it almost impossible to pin one clear-cut bad call on a single manager, which is partly why no BP official has ever been held criminally accountable.

Instead, the corporation is held accountable. It isn’t clear that charging the company repeatedly with misdemeanors and felonies has accomplished anything.

At more than $30 billion and climbing, the amount BP has paid out so far for reparations, lawsuits and cleanup dwarfs the roughly $8 billion that Exxon had to pay after its 1989 spill in Prince William Sound in Alaska. And BP will likely still pay billions more before this is finished.

And yet it is not enough. Two years after analysts questioned whether the extraordinary cost and loss of confidence might drive BP out of business, it has come roaring back. It collected more than $375 billion in 2011, pocketing $26 billion in profits.

What the gulf spill has taught us is that no matter how bad the disaster (and the environmental impact), the potential consequences have never been large enough to dissuade BP from placing profits ahead of prudence. That might change if a real person was forced to take responsibility 2014 or if the government brought down one of the biggest hammers in its arsenal and banned the company from future federal oil leases and permits altogether. Fines just don’t matter.

by Abrahm Lustgarten ProPublica, April 19, 2012, 8 p.m.

Image Courtesy of   Albert H. Teich / Shutterstock.com

The article A Punishment BP Can’t Pay Off appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

The Environmental Protection Agency issued the first-ever national air pollution regulations for fracking on Wednesday. First proposed in July 2011, the final rules have been welcomed by environmental groups as a much-needed initial move in reducing pollution and protecting public health from the toxic chemicals involved in the oil and natural gas drilling process. But many cautioned it was just a first step.

“It sets a floor for what the industry needs to do,” said attorney Erik Schlenker-Goodrich of the Western Environmental Law Center. “The reality is we can do far better.”

Over the past few years, more information has come out about fracking’s potential harms to the environment and human health, particularly relating to the risk of groundwater contamination.

In addition to the many potentially toxic components of the highly pressurized fluid injected into the ground during the natural gas drilling process, fracking can also release cancer-causing chemicals like benzene and greenhouse gases like methane into the air. The federal government has made moves to tighten regulations, and we’ve chronicled the history of those regulations.

The EPA’s new rules don’t cover most of those issues. Instead, they address a single problem with natural gas: air pollution.

“These rules do not resolve chronic water, public health and other problems associated with fracking and natural gas,” Schlenker-Goodrich said.

The agency is actually barred from regulating the impact of fracking on groundwater because, in 2005, Congress exempted fracking from the Safe Water Drinking Act. Congressional proposals to give the EPA more oversight have so far failed.

With the new rules on air pollution, the EPA rejected an industry request to exempt some wells with low emissions of toxic compounds but did give drilling companies more time to comply. Notably, the final version provides a two-and-a-half-year transition period (rather than the 60 days in the original proposal) that gives drilling companies until 2015 to comply with the strictest regulations.

The industry lobbied hard for the delay, and its reaction to the rules have been mixed.

A spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, the largest oil industry trade group, said it is still reviewing the new rules but said it’s happy with changes from the original proposal that will allow companies to “continue reducing emissions while producing the oil and natural gas our country needs.” Another industry group told The New York Times that the rules are too strict and could “make exploring in new areas cost-prohibitive.”

A key rule targets one large source of air pollution 2014 the burst of gas released during the first few days after a well is first tapped but before production begins. The EPA requires that companies start using “green completions,” a technology that captures the released gas and fumes in tanks and transports them via pipelines to be sold as fuel. (The Natural Resources Defense Council has a good breakdown of the process).

Many drilling companies already use green-completion systems. One natural-gas company recently told Bloomberg that the system doesn’t cost the company “any more than just venting the gas into the atmosphere.” The EPA says that once companies buy the necessary equipment to separate and collect the released gas, they could actually make up to $19 million a year selling the captured gas.

“By ensuring the capture of gases that were previously released to pollute our air and threaten our climate, these updated standards will not only protect our health, but also lead to more product for fuel suppliers to bring to market,” EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson said in a statement.

For the next two and a half years, in addition to trapping the gas, companies are allowed to burn off, or “flare,” the excess gas, which reduces air toxins but is wasteful because the gas can’t be resold. Peter Zalzal of the Environmental Defense Fund said the EPA rules give companies an incentive to adopt the green-completion technology instead of flaring.

by Lena Groeger ProPublica, April 19, 2012, 11:09 a.m.

Image Courtesy of   Adrian Kinloch

The article The EPA’s First Fracking Rules 2014 Limited and Delayed appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

April 19: This story has been corrected.

This story was co-published with PBS Frontline.

This is how I — a journalism graduate student with no background in forensics — became certified as a “Forensic Consultant” by one of the field’s largest professional groups.

One afternoon early last year, I punched in my credit card information, paid $495 to the American College of Forensic Examiners International Inc. and registered for an online course.

After about 90 minutes of video instruction, I took an exam on the institute’s web site, answering 100 multiple choice questions, aided by several ACFEI study packets.

As soon as I finished the test, a screen popped up saying that I had passed, earning me an impressive-sounding credential that could help establish my qualifications to be an expert witness in criminal and civil trials.

For another $50, ACFEI mailed me a white lab coat after sending my certificate.

For the last two years, ProPublica and PBS “Frontline,” in concert with other news organizations, have looked in-depth at death investigation in America, finding a pervasive lack of national standards that begins in the autopsy room and ends in court.

Expert witnesses routinely sway trial verdicts with testimony about fingerprints, ballistics, hair and fiber analysis and more, but there are no national standards to measure their competency or ensure that what they say is valid. A landmark 2009 report by the National Academy of Sciences called this lack of standards one of the most pressing problems facing the criminal justice system.

Over the last two decades, ACFEI has emerged as one of the largest forensic credentialing organizations in the country.

Among its members are top names in science and law, from Henry Lee, the renowned criminalist, to John Douglas, the former FBI profiler and bestselling author. Dr. Cyril Wecht, a prominent forensic pathologist and frequent TV commentator on high-profile crimes, chairs the group’s executive advisory board.

But ACFEI also has given its stamp of approval to far less celebrated characters. It welcomed Seymour Schlager, whose credentials were mailed to the prison where he was incarcerated for attempted murder. Zoe D. Katz 2013 the name of a house cat enrolled by her owner in 2002 to show how easy it was to become certified by ACFEI — was issued credentials, too. More recently, Dr. Steven Hayne, a Mississippi pathologist whose testimony helped to convict two innocent men of murder, has used his ACFEI credential to bolster his status as an expert witness.

Several former ACFEI employees call the group a mill designed to churn out and sell as many certificates as possible. They say applicants receive cursory, if any, background checks and that virtually everyone passes the group’s certification exams as long as their payments clear.

Some forensic professionals say the organization’s willingness to hand out credentials diminishes the integrity of the field.

“I am insulted by it,” said Dr. Victor Weedn, a forensic pathologist for Maryland’s chief medical examiner office and the vice president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. “They seem like an organization that’s all about the money.”

Robert O’Block, ACFEI’s founder, vigilantly defends the group’s work, saying it has helped make forensics more accessible. He told ProPublica and PBS “Frontline” that the ACFEI credentials are not designed to qualify experts in court and emphasized only a judge can make that determination.

O’Block also said he’s been unfairly criticized by other professional groups that compete with ACFEI in certain regards, including the AAFS, Weedn’s group.

“I have been fighting for 20 years for an open educational certification and accreditation in forensic examination,” O’Block wrote in an email. “But they have painted me as the bad guy.”

* * *

The judges who must determine whether to qualify a witness as an expert face an alphabet’s soup of organizations with differing standards. Some, like the American Board of Criminalistics, vet members extensively, requiring them to pass intensive board exams to demonstrate their skills. Others, as noted in the NAS report, are far less stringent.

Experts in the field worry that inconsistent standards and training for forensic examiners can lead to miscarriages of justice 2014 to the guilty walking free and the innocent being locked up or worse.

“There are a lot of people practicing, but there’s no assurance that they have the requisite training and board certification to see if they do have the skills to do the practical [work],” said Dr. Marcella Fierro, one of the NAS report’s authors and the former chief medical examiner of Virginia.

Under state and federal rules of evidence, judges decide whether prospective expert witnesses can testify, but they sometimes rely heavily on the titles and letters around someone’s name.

“Credentials are often appealing shortcuts,” Michigan circuit court judge Donald Shelton said. Fancy titles can have a disproportionate effect on juries, he added. “Jurors have no way of knowing that this certifying body, whether it’s this one or any other one, exacts scientific standards or is just a diploma mill.”

O’Block, 60, founded the organization that grew into ACFEI in Branson, Mo., in 1992, after being rejected for membership by a credentialing organization for forensic handwriting experts.

As chronicled in “United for Truth,” ACFEI’s self-published history, his goal was to create an alternative group open to those with all levels of experience. “It didn’t matter that he, himself, was not then one of the anointed handwriting experts,” the book says, “because he already knew that he was an expert at making things happen.”

O’Block launched his first credentialing programs while teaching criminal justice at the College of the Ozarks. Initially, the fledgling operation offered correspondence certifications in forensic document examination and behavior profiling for $100 apiece.

Over time, the organization expanded its offerings, adding dozens of courses to certify applicants in various aspects of forensics, from counseling to nursing to accounting. Applicants must become members of ACFEI to become certified; on top of my course fee, I paid $165 in membership dues.

O’Block also founded related associations that offer credentials in other fields, including psychotherapy and integrative medicine. One, the American Board for Certification in Homeland Security, attracted a powerful new client: the Defense Department. Since 2008, the U.S. Navy has paid more than $8.5 million for sailors to obtain credentials in such specialties as “Disaster Preparedness” and “Sensitive Security Information” through a program separate from the one for forensics.

Today, there are two entities that go by the ACFEI acronym 2014 the original, which is a non-profit, and a related for-profit company called the American College of Forensic Examiners Institute of Forensic Science. O’Block is president of both and, according to tax filings, received total compensation of more than $430,000 in 2010.

ACFEI and its related entities have continued to expand under O’Block’s leadership, growing to about 20,000 members combined, despite periodic controversies.

In 1998, when ACFEI proposed offering an online doctorate in forensic science, dozens of forensics professionals and educators wrote to the Missouri Board of Higher Education to protest the plan. “The questions are suitable for a grade school child,” wrote one. ACFEI dropped its application.

Then, in 2002, the story broke about the cat. O’Block remains vexed by what he calls a “stunt” orchestrated by a member of a competing professional organization.

“First of all, ACFEI did not certify a cat2026[It] certified a human being who used fraudulent credentials and called himself Dr. Katz,” O’Block wrote in an email.

Since then, O’Block said, ACFEI has changed its verification process, requiring applicants to submit multiple professional references and be placed on provisional status while their application is pending.

Two days after I passed the Certified Forensic Consultant exam, I received an email from ACFEI asking me for additional materials. I emailed the group my references, a resume and a scanned copy of my college diploma. Less than an hour later, I received an email saying I could start using my forensic consultant designation.

None of my references was contacted by the group.

According to a statement provided by ACFEI’s attorney, that step was deemed unnecessary in my case.

“Professional references are requested in the event questions arise concerning an applicant’s eligibility for the credentialing program in which they are applying,” the statement said. “Since applicant clearly met the requirements for the Certified Forensic Consultant program, professional references were not contacted.”

* * *

Among forensic professionals, there continues to be fierce debate over the quality of ACFEI’s courses — and what being certified by the group actually signifies.

ACFEI advertises itself as an educational institution and markets its certificates as building up holders’ value as witnesses in court. Expert witnesses are typically paid for their testimony.

The page on its web site for the certification I obtained 2014 Certified Forensic Consultant 2014 says, “The CFC credential contributes to the weight of an individual’s testimony relating to qualifications, knowledge of the scope of the issues, the validity of the evidence presented, application of specialized knowledge to the facts in the case, and the relevance of the evidence to the issues in the case.”

But both O’Block and Wecht, the group’s official spokesman, stressed that ACFEI certificates alone don’t make you an expert.

“It’s designed to make somebody feel good, to make them feel they’ve accomplished something, and I would hope they have,” Wecht said in an interview. “Does it really qualify them to be the expert in a particular field? No.”

Wecht also dismissed the notion that the group’s use of “college” in its name could be misleading. “That’s a play on words,” he said. “Nobody believes for one moment that it is a real college.”

In an interview and an email, O’Block defended ACFEI’s credentialing programs by saying the group held seven outside “accreditations and approvals.”

But ACFEI is not recognized as an accredited institution of higher learning by Missouri, where it is incorporated, or by the U.S. Department of Education, which maintains a registry of accredited schools.

A number of organizations, such as the California Board of Registered Nursing and the American Psychological Association, recognize ACFEI as a provider of continuing education. But that’s not the same as institution-wide accreditation, said Leroy Wade, the Assistant Commissioner of the Missouri Board of Higher Education.

“There’s really no oversight that regulates the CE providers in general, at least not in this state,” Wade said. “You can’t put any stock in the fact that an organization states it’s a continuing education provider.”

Several former ACFEI staffers say they came to question how the group writes and administers its exams.

John Bridges was hired as ACFEI’s president and chief executive in 2010 after decades in government, most recently as an administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He left ACFEI after just nine months, frustrated, he says, by the group’s practices.

“Based on my perception of what went on related to standards and quality, it operated like a certification mill,” he said.

Though ACFEI offers both basic courses and more advanced, specialized certificates, Bridges said, its exams are designed so that anyone can pass. He put the failure rate at less than 1 percent.

“If you want to be validated by somebody,” Bridges said, “this organization will validate you.”

O’Block initially said that ACFEI did not keep pass/fail rates for its exams. Later, the group’s attorney said it did keep such statistics, but he did not provide them upon request.

Other former employees said it was routine for low-level staffers to write exams for ACFEI and its related organizations based on textbooks in subject areas in which they had no expertise.

Tania Miller worked for six months as chief association officer for the American Psychotherapy Association, an ACFEI sister group, beginning in fall 2010. A few weeks into her job, she said, she was asked to author an exam to certify forensic counselors. Miller’s background was in marketing and graphic design. She said she declined to write the exam. ACFEI did not respond to questions about Miller.

The Forensic Consultant test I took focused primarily on rules of evidence and courtroom procedure. Some questions required specialized knowledge (i.e., Which rule is known as the “Admissibility of Expert Testimony” rule in the Federal Rules of Evidence? Answer: 702), but ACFEI’s study packets helped me fill in the blanks, making it basically an open-book exam. The rest of the questions relied largely on common sense (i.e., When providing testimony, which of the following should you NOT do? Answer: Cross your arms and joke with the jury.)

ACFEI did not answer questions about what level of expertise it requires of those who write its exams. According to its catalog, some of the exams are authored by prominent specialists, including Wecht.

O’Block vehemently denies that ACFEI is a diploma mill, saying the group has thousands of satisfied members. He has filed five lawsuits in the last year against individuals 2014 mostly bloggers 2014 who have posted statements O’Block claims are defamatory about his organizations. One is pending. The others have been dismissed by courts or at the parties’ request after bloggers agreed to take down posts.

Wecht, whose signature appears on some ACFEI certificates (including mine), said he didn’t know how applicants did on the group’s tests, but emphasized that the group’s program is mostly about fostering enthusiasm for the field.

“The purpose of the organization is to encourage people who are interested in forensic science to learn more, to study more,” he said.

* * *

To critics, the greatest concern about ACFEI is the potential that the organization is giving legitimacy to expert witnesses who don’t warrant it.

Among the thousands of people that ACFEI has certified is one particularly controversial expert in forensic pathology: Dr. Steven Hayne.

Hayne, the longtime pathologist for the state of Mississippi, performed the autopsies in two shocking 1990s cases in which three-year-old girls were abducted, sexually assaulted and murdered.

In both cases, Hayne testified he had observed bite marks on the young girls. He said he had called in a forensic dentist who confirmed that the marks were human and matched them to dental impressions from the defendants in each case. These findings aided in the convictions of Levon Brooks for the first murder and of Kennedy Brewer for the second. Brooks was sentenced to life in prison. Brewer was sentenced to death.

After the men spent more than 30 years combined incarcerated, the Innocence Project recovered DNA evidence that led investigators to the real killer. He confessed to both crimes, but denied biting the victims.

Hayne no longer conducts autopsies for the state, but continues to give testimony as an expert witness. Testifying in March 2010 in Lamar County Circuit Court, Hayne was asked what board certifications he held. “I’m board certified in anatomic pathology, clinical pathology, forensic pathology and forensic medicine,” he replied.

Hayne has credentials in anatomic and clinical pathology from the American Board of Pathology, considered the gold standard, but not in forensic pathology, the branch of medicine focused on the mechanics of death. For that, he cites his Certified Forensic Physician credential from ACFEI and certification in forensic pathology from the American Academy of Neurological and Orthopaedic Surgeons.

When attorneys for the Innocence Project submitted a wide-ranging complaint about Hayne to the Mississippi board of licensure, they cited Hayne’s reliance on these organizations to allege he had misrepresented his credentials.

“Certification by these organizations is not at all what the medical community and public understand when a doctor claims to be ‘board certified,’” the complaint said, referring to ACFEI and the other group.

Citing ongoing litigation, Hayne declined to be interviewed by ProPublica and PBS “Frontline” beyond confirming that he is certified by ACFEI. He has sued the Innocence Project for defamation in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi.

Wecht acknowledged he knew of Hayne by reputation, but told ProPublica and PBS “Frontline” that he had not known Hayne was certified by ACFEI.

* * *

In its 2009 report, the National Academy of Sciences called for several measures to address systemic flaws involving forensic examiners and expert testimony.

Certification should be mandatory for forensics professionals and should be overseen by a centralized credentialing agency, the report said.

One of the report’s primary authors, Harry T. Edwards — a federal appeals court judge for the District of Columbia 2013 said these changes were critical to imposing rigorous standards on the field..

“There are certifiers, but it’s not what you and I are talking about — that is, real certification programs that train, give serious tests and will revoke your license and affect your job and ability to testify in the event that you do something wrong or fail,” Edwards said in an interview. “That doesn’t exist now.”

Despite the controversies that dog it, ACFEI may aspire to fill that role. In a promotional video filmed after the NAS report’s release, Wecht said its findings presented the group with a unique opportunity.

“We can play a role, the challenge has been issued,” he said. “The NAS report can be a blessing to our organization.”

I’ve never tested whether my $495 forensic consultant credential from ACFEI would carry any weight on the witness stand.

Asked about my certification, O’Block responded this way:

“Congratulate Leah for passing the CFC,” he wrote in an August 2011 email. “That course was designed as entry level to educate professionals about the justice system.”

Wecht said he doubted that having the certificate on my resume would be enough to persuade a court to allow me to give expert testimony. Any decent lawyer, he said, could easily cast doubt upon my qualifications.

“A kid right out of law school would say, 2018Ma’am, just exactly what is your training?’” Wecht said. “The point I’m making, you see, is that that piece of paper doesn’t mean that much.”

Leah Bartos graduated from UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism in May 2011. Since then, she’s been a reporter-in-residence at the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley.

Andrés Cediel, the producer of PBS Frontline’s “The Real CSI” and Lowell Bergman, the film’s correspondent, contributed to this report.

Update (4/19): ACFEI has posted a response to our collaboration with PBS “Frontline” on its website. It defends the value of the group’s programs and says the pass rate on ACFEI exams is 86 percent.

Correction: This story identified Henry Lee as a pathologist. Lee has a PhD in biochemistry, but is not a medical doctor.

by Leah Bartos, Special to ProPublica April 17, 2012, 11:30 a.m.

The article No Forensic Background? No Problem appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

News organizations cultivate a reputation for demanding transparency, whether by suing for access to government documents, dispatching camera crews to the doorsteps of recalcitrant politicians, or editorializing in favor of open government.

But now many of the country’s biggest media companies, which own dozens of newspapers and TV news operations, are flexing their muscle in Washington in a fight against a government initiative to increase transparency of political spending.

The corporate owners or sister companies of some of the biggest names in journalism 2014 NBC News, ABC News, Fox News, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Politico, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and dozens of local TV news outlets 2014 are lobbying against a Federal Communications Commission measure that would require broadcasters to post political ad data on the Internet.

As we have recently detailed, political ad data is public by law but not easy to get because it is kept only in paper files at each station. The FCC has proposed fixing that by requiring broadcasters to post online the details of political ad purchases, including the identity of the buyer and the price.

(ProPublica has been inviting readers and other journalists to send in the files to be posted as part of our Free the Files project.)

Over the past few months, several major media companies have dispatched top executives or outside lobbyists to the FCC to oppose the proposed rule or to push a watered-down version, disclosure filings show. (The FCC will vote on the issue April 27.)

Among them are:

• News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal and Fox News;
• Walt Disney, which owns ABC News and ESPN;
• NBCUniversal, which is owned by Comcast and includes NBC News;
• Allbritton, which owns several TV stations and Politico;
• Gannett Broadcasting, a division of Gannett, which owns USA Today:
• Post-Newsweek Stations, the broadcast division of The Washington Post Co.;
• Belo Cos., which owns 20 TV stations;
• Cox Media Group, which owns The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Austin American-Statesman and other newspapers and TV stations;
• Dispatch Broadcast Group, which owns Ohio and Indiana TV stations;
• Barrington Broadcasting Group, which owns several TV stations around the country;
• The E.W. Scripps Co., which owns TV stations and newspapers, including The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn.;
• Hearst Television Inc., which owns 29 stations;
• Raycom Media, which owns TV stations;
• Schurz Communications, which owns newspapers and TV stations nationwide.

(ProPublica has published stories in partnership with many of these news organizations, and has an agreement with NBC’s owned and operated TV stations for pre-publication access to our news apps and a contribution by NBC to ProPublica.)

In a speech this week at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski excoriated the broadcasters as working “against transparency and against journalism.”

The industry’s opposition to the transparency proposal has sometimes been heated. In filings submitted to the FCC in January and March, Allbritton Senior Vice President Jerald Fritz raised the specter of “‘Soviet-style standardization” of ad sales if political ad files are required to be put online in a single format.

In a February meeting with the FCC, Walt Disney executives complained about the “logistics and burden” of putting the political ad information online.

That month, executives from Disney, NBC and News Corp. argued in a meeting with FCC officials that posting the political ad data would allow “competitors in the market and commercial advertisers [to] anonymously glean highly sensitive pricing data.”

Television stations must by law offer political candidates the lowest rates on ads. Broadcasters have argued that making this information available online 2014 and not just at stations 2014 would hurt their ability to negotiate with other advertisers.

Advocates for the online disclosure rule have countered that the political ad information is already public by law and the measure would simply make the existing disclosure rules relevant for the Internet age. Advocates have also pointed out that keeping paper files in electronic form should actually be more efficient for stations.

Allbritton, NBC and Walt Disney did not respond to requests for comment on the FCC chairman’s charge that they have positioned themselves “against transparency and against journalism.” News Corp. declined to comment.

Some media companies have also pushed a watered-down proposal to post only some of the public political ad data, and to put it up on individual station websites instead of a central FCC website.

Washington lawyers representing the other companies fighting the rule 2014 Barrington Broadcasting, Belo, Cox, Dispatch, E.W. Scripps, Gannett, Hearst, Meredith Broadcasting, Post-Newsweek Stations, Raycom Media and Schurz Communications 2014 lobbied FCC officials in February, March and again this week.

The group suggested that instead of putting the full, itemized political ad data online, stations would post aggregate data once a week.

“What we were saying is, if you want the public to be informed about what’s being bought at what price, maybe there’s a simpler way to do it,” Mary Jo Manning, an attorney representing the group, told ProPublica. “Transparency is giving people information that is useful.”

But when the FCC pressed the group for details on its plan, the stations said they opposed posting even the aggregate data in a single format prescribed by the FCC. They also opposed posting the data on a central FCC website, saying they wanted to post the limited data only on the stations’ own websites. If enacted, both of those stances would make it more difficult to get and analyze the data.

Since there is a one-week sunshine period ahead of FCC votes, today is the last day that interested parties will be able to lobby the commission before its public meeting April 27.

by Justin Elliott ProPublica, April 20, 2012, 10:50 a.m.

Image Courtesy of    Walter G Arce / Shutterstock.com

The article Meet the Media Companies Lobbying Against Transparency appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

One of the most talked-about “dark money” groups of the election released its tax returns yesterday, showing it raised almost $77 million from fewer than 100 donors over 19 months. Most of the money spent in its first year went directly to political ads or grants to other groups.

The returns are the first glimpse showing how much money has been raised by Crossroads GPS, launched by GOP strategist Karl Rove in mid-2010.

(Here are the full returns, for both 2010 and 2011. We’ve marked interesting bits. If you spot something we haven’t, let us know.)

By choosing to include the number of donors and the amounts of some of its larger donations, including one of $10.1 million in the first year and another of $10.1 million in the last seven months of 2011, the group was somewhat more transparent than the IRS requires.

Still, Crossroads GPS, also known as Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, retained plenty of mystery 2014 namely, their donors’ identities.

There are no donor names, no clues as to whether they are individuals, companies or trade groups, and no hint as to whether there are repeated donors from year to year.

Nonprofits like Crossroads GPS, classified by the IRS as “social welfare” organizations, are not required to disclose their donors, even if those organizations spend money on political ads. That is why they are sometimes referred to as “dark money” groups.

Yesterday, two campaign-finance watchdog groups again called for the IRS to investigate the tax status of Crossroads GPS. Critics have complained that the group and others like it use the IRS social-welfare status as a fig leaf to be able to hide the names of donors. The IRS says a social-welfare nonprofit, or 501(c)4, must have social welfare as a “primary purpose” but has never defined what that means. Most groups interpret this to mean social-welfare nonprofits can spend up to 49 percent of their money on politics.

Crossroads GPS spokesman Jonathan Collegio responded to critics by sending an email message with the subject line “Snarky comments” that pointed out that some of the group’s critics are nonprofits that also don’t disclose their donors. In another email, he compared what the group does to how environmental and labor groups have operated for decades.

Although similar nonprofits engaged in politics in past elections, their use exploded in 2010, particularly in tandem with super PACs, taking advantage of federal court rulings that paved the way for a new role for outside-spending groups in elections.

The IRS doesn’t comment on individual groups but is expected to give more scrutiny to politicking social-welfare nonprofits this year, considering the major role the groups are expected to play in the election. Together with its affiliated super PAC, American Crossroads, Crossroads GPS hopes to raise $300 million, primarily to help defeat President Barack Obama and to elect Republicans to Congress.

Crossroads GPS reported 64 donors in its first year, between June 2010 and May 2011, including four who gave $10.1 million, $5 million, $4.5 million and $4 million. There were 32 donors in the last seven months of 2011, including two who gave $10 million and $4.3 million. It’s unknown whether any of them were repeat donors.

Between June 2010 and May 2011, Crossroads GPS spent about $42.3 million, including about $15.9 million directly for political ads and another $15.9 million on grants to 12 like-minded nonprofits and trade groups.

The $15.9 million that Crossroads GPS gave in grants coincided with the midterm 2010 elections. The money included $500,000 to the American Action Network, the conservative nonprofit that once shared an office with Crossroads GPS and American Crossroads, and $4 million to Americans for Tax Reform, formed by anti-tax activist and GOP heavy hitter Grover Norquist.

Federal Election Commission records show that these groups, as well as five other grant recipients of Crossroads GPS, spent money on political ads, directly or indirectly, in the 2010 election cycle. The grant money that groups received from Crossroads was earmarked for non-political activities.

In its 2011 filing, which covers the last seven months of the year, Crossroads GPS reported spending almost $22.4 million, including $1.7 million on political ads, including this anti-Obama ad. It gave only one grant, of $50,000, to a charity called the Ethics and Public Policy Center. The organization describes itself as “D.C.’s premier institute dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy.”

by Kim Barker ProPublica, April 18, 2012, 6 p.m.

Image Courtesy of   Sachyn

The article Read the Tax Returns From Karl Rove’s ‘Dark Money’ Group (Donors Still a Mystery) appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank have let foreclosed homes in black and Latino neighborhoods lapse into disrepair, while bank-owned homes in mainly white neighborhoods are better cared-for, according to housing advocates.

The National Fair Housing Alliance, a non-profit group, brought a formal complaint to the Department of Housing and Urban Development last week alleging that Wells Fargo violated the Fair Housing Act by failing to keep up homes in minority neighborhoods. Today, the group announced they are also filing a second complaint, against U.S. Bank.

Earlier this month, the group released a survey, which was funded in part by HUD, of more than 1,000 unoccupied, foreclosed homes across the country owned by unspecified banks. When a house is foreclosed upon, the bank that takes it over is responsible for maintaining it. The report cites evidence 2014 photos and interviews with neighbors 2014 showing houses becoming dilapidated under banks’ watch.

The complaint against Wells Fargo claims that among more than 200 homes surveyed, those in black and Latino neighborhoods were much more likely to have yards filled with trash, broken doors, damaged windows, and other signs of neglect. Fewer homes in those neighborhoods had “for sale” signs visible. For example, 68 out of 149 homes in black and Latino neighborhoods had damaged roofs, compared to only nine out of 69 properties in white neighborhoods.

The study looked at homes owned by Wells Fargo in Washington D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, Dallas, Miami, Atlanta, Oakland, Calif., and Dayton, Ohio.

A spokeswoman for Wells Fargo said in an emailed statement that the bank “conducts all lending-related activities in a fair and consistent manner without regard to race: this includes maintenance and marketing standards for all foreclosed properties for which we are responsible.” She also said that the bank has a dedicated department that maintains and markets foreclosed properties from loans that are within its portfolio. Since the complaint did not identify specific properties, she said, Wells Fargo has not been able to investigate its claims.

U.S. Bank did not immediately respond to our request for comment, and a spokesman for HUD declined to comment on the complaint.

The report also pointed out that there were simply fewer bank-owned foreclosed properties in white neighborhoods than in minority neighborhoods, an indication, it says, of the fact that African-American and Latino communities were disproportionately affected by the subprime mortgage crisis.

Numerous studies have shown that lenders targeted minorities for the riskiest loans, and often charged them more than similarly qualified white borrowers. A report from the Center for Responsible Lending found that black and Latino homeowners were twice as likely to lose their homes to foreclosure than white homeowners.

(The center was started with support from the Sandler Foundation, which is also the major funder of ProPublica.) In the biggest settlement to come out of the government post-bubble investigation of discriminatory lending practices, lender Countrywide (now owned by Bank of America) agreed to pay $335 million to settle a Department of Justice suit.

Nationally, banks or investors own roughly half a million foreclosed homes, and the Federal Reserve estimates this will increase to 1 million this year. Some banks and investors are looking to unload the properties en masse. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who own about half the properties, are piloting a program for bulk sales of their foreclosed properties that requires they be offered as rentals. Other lenders are turning into landlords themselves.

by Cora Currier ProPublica, April 16, 2012, 5:10 p.m.

The article Big Banks Slack on Maintaining Foreclosed Homes in Minority Areas, Complaint Charges appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

In November 2001, Bank of New York, a mid-tier U.S. bank, transferred nearly $8 billion of its own assets to a trust in the small, business-friendly state of Delaware through several layers of newly created companies.

A mixture of home mortgages, shares and other securities, the transferred assets made up almost 10 percent of the bank’s total assets at the time. Yet, the transaction was not discussed with BNY’s regulators; nor was it noted in the bank’s financial statements or annual report. It had little practical effect on the lender’s day-to-day operations 2014 the assets continued to be managed and serviced by the same employees in New York.

But it was a critical first step in setting up a complex structure known as STARS 2014 structured trust advantaged repackaged securities 2014 which U.S. tax authorities claim was used by several American banks as an abusive tax shelter that has cost the government more than $1 billion in tax revenue in the past decade.

This week, BNY will square off against the Internal Revenue Service in U.S. Tax Court in New York over STARS and the tax benefits tit triggered for the U.S. bank and U.K.-based Barclays, its counterpart in the deal. At issue is whether STARS was set up primarily to generate artificial foreign-tax credits, as the IRS contends; or was a legal way for BNY to obtain financing at rock-bottom rates.

The arguments heard this week will pose a crucial test of the U.S. government’s resolve to rein in sophisticated corporate tax planning that has sapped vast amounts of potential revenue. Tax authorities worldwide, notably in the U.S. and U.K., are under mounting pressure to show that large companies are shouldering their share of the tax burden as part of a broader political debate about fairness and corporate social responsibility.

“We are upping our game in the large business area, particularly as it relates to international tax issues,” Douglas Shulman, the U.S. internal revenue commissioner, said in a speech this month in Washington, D.C.

For the IRS, losing the STARS disputes would be a serious blow to its strategy in high-value cases, tax lawyers said. For the banks, the risk is both financial 2014 $900 million is at stake in the BNY case alone 2014 and to their reputations.

An investigation last year by the Financial Times and ProPublica first detailed how STARS produced tax benefits for U.S. banks beginning in 1999. In all, six banks 2014 BNY (now Bank of New York Mellon), BB&T, Sovereign (now a unit of Santander), Wachovia (now part of Wells Fargo), Washington Mutual and Wells Fargo 2014 participated in STARS deals with Barclays between 1999 and 2006.

Five of those banks are challenging IRS rulings that disallowed foreign tax credits generated in those transactions. WaMu has settled a STARS dispute in bankruptcy court by agreeing to forgo $160 million in claimed tax credits. In total, the IRS says, the STARS deals created $3.4 billion in foreign tax credits.

Now, documents filed in BNY’s case in the past few weeks 2014 the court proceedings begin Monday 2014 provide unprecedented detail about how STARS was crafted at a time when banks and accounting firms were offering deals for multinational corporations to take advantage of loopholes in rules governing foreign tax credits.

At the simplest level, foreign tax credits are designed to prevent U.S. companies from being taxed twice on overseas income by allowing them to claim credit for taxes paid in foreign jurisdictions.

In the BNY case, the IRS claims STARS allowed both Barclays and BNY to claim credits for the same “illusory” foreign tax charges, ultimately reducing the U.S. government’s tax revenue by $18.15 for every $100 of income funneled through the Delaware trust. “The record will establish that STARS was a pricey financing that no prudent banker would undertake but for the tax benefits generated by the meaningless circulation of cash flows,” according to a court filing by the IRS on March 27.

BNY has argued that the deal was a complex but entirely legal, allowing the bank access to low-cost financing from Barclays for its everyday business activities.

Brainchild of Barclays

Like hundreds of other foreign-tax-driven transactions sold to companies in the boom years before the financial crisis of 2008, STARS was developed by Barclays’ famed structured finance group, known as Structured Capital Markets. Roger Jenkins, one of Britain’s best-known dealmakers, and Iain Abrahams, the expert behind most of the bank’s tax arbitrage transactions, led SCM. The idea was for STARS to manufacture tax credits for Barclays and a U.S. corporate taxpayer by circulating U.S. income through an entity taxed in the U.K., the IRS said in its filing.

Because of the differences between U.S. and U.K. accounting rules, STARS would allow Barclays to reimburse a U.S. company for half the tax paid in the U.K. while not reducing the amount of foreign tax credits that could be claimed by either party, the IRS said. Barclays is not a party to the IRS dispute with BNY and has not been accused of wrongdoing by U.S. authorities.

According to the IRS, blue-chip U.S. companies including Microsoft and insurers AIG and Prudential Life passed on early versions of STARS for unspecified reasons. But the IRS said BNY, which bought the deal in 2001, had grown “addicted” to tax-driven transactions, which provided it with an important source of revenue.

Before buying STARS, the IRS says, BNY had entered into more than 100 “lease-back” transactions, known as Lilos and Silos, that produced tax advantages. Shortly after participating in STARS, BNY also purchased from Barclays another foreign-tax-credit structure, nicknamed Toga, that involved high-grade debt securities, the IRS said.

“Barclays understood that BNY was highly receptive to a wide range of tax-based ideas, and had targeted BNY for an SCM 2018tax product’ after discussions with BNY senior executives,” the IRS said in its court filing.

The IRS also described KPMG as a pivotal player. The accounting firm provided a U.S. tax opinion blessing the structure for Barclays and sold STARS to BNY for a fee of $6 million, according to the IRS filing.

David Brockway, then of KPMG, was engaged to provide the firm’s opinion on STARS, and is expected to testify at trial, according to the IRS. Brockway, a leading U.S. tax lawyer, left KPMG in April 2005 amid scrutiny of the firm’s previous sales of potentially abusive tax shelters.

The IRS also has named lawyer Raymond Ruble, formerly a partner at Sidley Austin in Washington, D.C., as a key adviser on the structure. Ruble was convicted of multiple counts of income-tax evasion in a separate tax-shelter case involving wealthy taxpayers in 2009. He is in a federal prison in Lewisburg, Pa.

The IRS, Barclays, BNY, KPMG and Sidley Austin declined to comment on the case. Jenkins, now a partner at the Brazilian investment bank BTG Pactual; Abrahams, still a senior executive at Barclays in London; and Brockway, now a Washington-based partner at the law firm Bingham McCutchen LLP, also declined to comment.

$900 Million Disputed

Both sides acknowledge that BNY’s STARS deal was executed through highly choreographed steps. First, BNY transferred about $7.9 billion of income-producing assets to the Delaware trust through layers of newly created subsidiaries. Barclays, as the counterpart, acquired shares in the trust, giving it a right to nearly all the income generated by the assets. In return, Barclays loaned $1.5 billion to BNY, also via the trust.

Barclays and BNY then executed a repurchase agreement, or “repo,” under which BNY agreed to buy back the shares in the Delaware trust five years later, in November 2006. BNY appointed a U.K. company as trustee of the Delaware trust, making the income it produced subject to U.K. tax.

At the outset of the deal, the trust’s pool of assets were expected to generate about $460 million of income a year 2014 of which, at a tax rate of 22 percent, $100 million would be paid to U.K. tax authorities. When the trust income failed to reach $460 million, as expected, BNY injected extra assets, essentially to boost the income stream.

At the heart of the structure are differences between how it is treated under U.S. and U.K. tax law. Under U.K. rules, Barclays was allowed to take a deduction against its other taxable income in the U.K. on the condition that it immediately reinvested the income produced by the assets in the trust. But it was able to simultaneously take a credit for the tax paid by the trust.

According to the IRS, those tax benefits were shared with BNY, generating gains for both banks. For every $100 of income circulated through the trust, the U.S. government lost $18.15, which funded BNY’s profit of $7.15, Barclays’ profit of $7.70 and U.K. tax receipts of $3.30, the IRS claims.

But under U.S. tax law, the deal was considered a secured lending arrangement. So, subject to U.S. tax rules, BNY, as owner of the U.K. trust, could also claim a foreign tax credit for the U.K. taxes paid. In 2001 and 2002, BNY claimed nearly $200 million in foreign tax credits from the STARS structure, which the IRS has disallowed. Including interest, the total amount in dispute is about $900 million, according to the bank’s most recent annual report.

“The foreign tax credits that Bank of New York claimed in the U.S. at a 22 percent rate were far more than the actual U.K. tax attributable to STARS,” the IRS said in its filing. “In other words, Bank of New York claimed credits for phantom U.K. tax expense.”

BNY is challenging the IRS’ refusal to allow the credits and says it entered the STARS deal to borrow low-cost funds. Because of the U.K. tax benefits the structure generated for Barclays, BNY claims the British bank was able to provide it with the five-year, $1.5 billion loan at more than three percentage points below the prevailing benchmark lending rate.

“The complication was required by Barclays’ U.K. tax objectives, not by BNY,” the bank said in a court filing March 27. “By lending to [BNY] through the structure that Barclays designed, Barclays could offer a very favorable borrowing rate.”

In the coming weeks, U.S. Tax Court will hear from the bankers, lawyers and accountants involved as well as a raft of experts. A final decision is not expected for at least several months.

With much at stake, BNY and the IRS appear to be digging in for a protracted battle. In its latest filing, BNY accuses the government of using “emotionally laden” arguments to try to deliver a “sweet sound bite.” The IRS says “no rational person” would have participated in STARS if not for the foreign tax credits.

Let the war of words begin.

Vanessa Houlder covers taxation and Megan Murphy investment banking for the Financial Times in London. Senior reporter Jeff Gerth is in Washington, D.C.

by Megan Murphy and Vanessa Houlder, Financial Times, and Jeff Gerth, ProPublica April 15, 2012, 3 p.m.

Image Courtesy of   wallyg

The article Bank of New York Case Tests IRS Power to Halt Foreign Tax Abuses appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Television stations are required by the Federal Communications Commission to keep a list of political ad buys and to make it available on request. Stations don’t post this data on the Internet, however, so the only way to get the records is to go in person.

We think this data is vitally important, and can reveal how big money influences elections. So to make it accessible to everyone, we started a project last month named “Free the Files” to recruit citizens and local journalists to visit TV stations and post these “Public File” documents online.

So far, more than 180 people in 37 states and the District of Columbia have volunteered to make copies of the files, then scan and e-mail them to us. We’ve heard from news organizations that are sending reporters (see files gathered by the Cincinnati Enquirer and by the Wisconsin State Journal), universities that are sending students (Northwestern University students checked the Chicago market), and from people with some spare time who want to help.

But with hundreds of TV stations and untold millions in political ad spending expected this year, we still need you! The process takes between 15-30 minutes at your TV station, plus however long it takes to scan and e-mail us the files.

Before you set out, please let us know you’re interested by signing up on this form. We’ll make sure you aren’t grabbing files that someone else has already checked, and we’ll help coordinate so this takes as little of your time as possible.

How to Gather and Submit the Files

What you’ll need: Some free time, access to a scanner, e-mail and good manners.

1) Go to the front desk of the television studio during business hours. Politely ask to see “the Public File.” They should know what you’re talking about, but if not, you can ask to speak to whoever handles political ads. It’s likely that a staff member will be summoned to escort you to the file.

2) The files are paper records, probably in manila file folders or binders. They should be organized by advertiser and client name. It would be great if you could copy everything, but ProPublica is primarily interested in spending by outside groups (super PACs and nonprofits), so if your time is limited please pull whatever files are there on these:

• Restore Our Future (pro-Romney)
• Winning Our Future (pro-Gingrich)
• Red White and Blue Fund (pro-Santorum)
• Endorse Liberty (pro-Paul)
• Priorities USA Action (pro-Obama)

3) There may not be any files on some of these groups if they have not been advertising in your market. For reference, our PAC Track news application lists the major super PACs that may have run ads in your state.

4) Ask for a photocopy of the selected files. Most stations will do this for free, but some will charge a small fee per page. Some may point you to the photocopy machine and ask you to do it.

5) Once you have all the copies, scan and e-mail them to tv.transparency@propublica.org (some stations may do this for you, but don’t count on it). We will post the files and credit you for your work. If you are from a news organization with a DocumentCloud account and want to submit the files that way, see the extra steps below.

A Few Things to Remember

Always treat the station’s staff with courtesy and respect 2014 they are likely to be more helpful. In the course of small talk, they may ask you why you are there. There is no need to be secretive. Your forms may look different from our sample forms. That’s OK. You should bring a small amount of cash in case you are charged for photocopies. It’s OK to say you’re helping ProPublica, but to avoid confusion, please do not identify yourself as a “ProPublica reporter.”

Thank you for helping. What you’re doing will make a real difference.

If you have questions before, during or after your visit to the station, please contact us for help. Here’s how:

Daniel Victor, ProPublica social media editor

E-mail: tv.transparency@propublica.org

Phone: 917-512-0219

Twitter: @bydanielvictor

If You’re Using DocumentCloud

DocumentCloud is a tool used by news organizations and others to post, annotate and embed the documents online. News organizations can request an account here. For those who already have a DocumentCloud account, here’s how to submit your Public Files:

1)    While logged in, upload your files by clicking the “New Documents” button on the left rail. Make sure they are set to “public” (as always, make sure there is no sensitive information like credit card numbers in the documents before publishing).

2)    Once the files are processed, highlight them under “Your Documents.” Click on “Edit”, then “Edit Document Data.”

3)    In the first field before the colon, type “contributedto” (case-sensitive). In the second field after the colon, type “freethefiles” (case-sensitive). This will allow all Free the Files contributors to easily find each other’s files.

by Daniel Victor ProPublica, April 6, 2012, 1:58 p.m.

Image Courtesy of   http://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/

The article Campaign Ads: How To Free the Files at Your TV Station appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Some homeowners are getting stuck with relatively high interest rates even after they participate in the government’s program to help them refinance their mortgages. The biggest banks are not lowering rates as much as they could be 2014 and homeowners have few options to go elsewhere.

Analysts say that the big banks are set to make major profits off of the Home Affordable Refinancing Program, also known as HARP, which allows homeowners with loans backed by government-owned Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to refinance if they owe more than their home is worth.

The program, launched in 2009, is designed to let struggling borrowers take advantage of lower market interest rates. So far, about 1.1 million people have refinanced under the program, which was expanded last fall to make it more attractive for banks and to let more homeowners participate.

Since then, the government says there has been “tremendous borrower interest” and estimates that another 1 million could qualify over the next two years. But while the expansion may let more people refinance, it may not be at the lowest rate possible because the incentives don’t favor competition, according to a new report by an investment group Amherst Securities.

The report says the big banks are able to make a considerable profit from refinancing their existing customers under HARP, and that there is little incentive for them to go outside their own customer base and seek out more HARP business on mortgages that originated with other lenders.

Few other companies have stepped in to offer HARP refinancing for people who’d like to leave their current lender, partly because it is still risky for them to take on the underwater loans, even with the HARP incentives.

The result is that homeowners in many cases are stuck with what they’ve got, Amherst says, and the big banks can charge them more.

Guy Cecala, who runs the publication Inside Mortgage Finance, said that there is “virtually no competition” for the big banks. “It’s normal business practice for mortgage lenders 2014 when you can, you charge a higher interest rate.”

Here’s how this situation came about.

For Banks, Built-In Incentives

Last fall’s expansion of HARP tries to make it more appealing to mortgage lenders, since the initial response to the program fell short of expectations.

New rules removed the cap on how much a borrower could be underwater and still qualify. It also eased appraisal requirements and 2014 critically for banks 2014 removed some of the liability for bad loans that banks had when selling their mortgages to Fannie and Freddie.

The Amherst report points out that the biggest lenders 2014 JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo 2014 are responsible for more than 60 percent of HARP refinancing applications. The report also says the cost of refinancing an existing customer under HARP is minimal.

The big banks already have plenty of demand in-house. As such, it’s easier and more profitable to stick with the loans they already service than to compete for new business, which could result in lower rates for homeowners.

The report says that the extra steps required under HARP to refinance a loan from another lender make the process onerous and risky. A spokeswoman for the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which is in charge of HARP, disputed the notion that it’s difficult to sign up new borrowers. “The additional information collected is minimal and appropriate, given that these lenders have no experience with or information on these (new) borrowers,” she said.

JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America all confirmed to ProPublica that they have seen an increase in the volume of applications for HARP refinancing since the new rules came into effect. Last month, American Banker reported that banks were scrambling to bolster their mortgage-servicing units to deal with the influx of applications from HARP.

The program is voluntary for banks, and they can place their own restrictions over and above those set by the government.

JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America say they are only doing HARP refinancing for existing customers 2014 not seeking out new business on loans originated by other lenders. Wells Fargo is accepting refinance applications from borrowers at other servicers, but it is putting a cap on the amount that the loan can be underwater.

In January, according to the FHFA, roughly 50,000 people refinanced under the new HARP rules, and HARP’s share of all refinancing increased. Some smaller lenders, especially in states with the worst housing markets, are hoping to jump in and offer lower rates to people looking to leave their current bank, even with the greater risk.

by Cora Currier ProPublica, April 5, 2012, 3:10 p.m.

The article Lack of Competition Stifles Refinance Program for Underwater Homeowners appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

It was with some fanfare that the Obama administration announced last fall that it was ramping up a program to help students with federal loans reduce their monthly payments. Under the program, payments are adjusted based on how much students earn 2014 what’s known as income-based repayment.

Yet, even while the administration has emphasized easing the burden for student borrowers, some contractors with the Department of Education appear to be exacerbating it.

Bloomberg reported this week that some federally contracted debt collection agencies have been playing hardball with borrowers who are behind, insisting on payments the borrowers can’t afford 2014 even when federal student-loan rules allow more leniency.

The debt collectors have an incentive to be tough. As Bloomberg explains:

Under Education Department contracts, collection companies “rehabilitate” a defaulted loan by getting a borrower to make nine payments in 10 months. If they succeed, they reap a jackpot: a commission equal to as much as 16 percent of the entire loan amount, or $3,200 on a $20,000 loan.

These companies receive that fee only if borrowers make a minimum payment of 0.75 percent to 1.25 percent of the loan each month, depending on its size. For example, a $20,000 loan would require payments of about $200 a month. If the payment falls below that figure, the collector receives an administrative fee of $150.

The Department of Education is trying to balance its interest in helping struggling borrowers and stewarding taxpayer dollars, department spokesman Justin Hamilton told Bloomberg.

Striking that balance, it seems, hasn’t been easy. Consumer advocates chafed when President Obama, as part of a deficit-reduction plan promoted last fall, recommended allowing debt collectors to robo-call the cell phones of borrowers who fell behind on federal student loans and other debts to the government.

That plan didn’t get far. But the measure resurfaced as a line item [PDF] in Obama’s proposed 2013 budget last month.

As Bloomberg noted, federal student-loan rules require that collectors work out “reasonable and affordable” payments with borrowers to get them back on track, but the rules don’t spell out how such a calculation should be made. The Department of Education is meeting with key student-loan stakeholders this week to discuss, among other things , whether to use the income-based repayment formula to help set that standard. (As it stands, only borrowers who are current on their federal loans are eligible for help via income-based repayment.)

One thing that isn’t on the table at these rule-making meetings? A measure hailed by some advocates as potentially the single most important rule change for student borrowers who’ve become severely disabled and are seeking a discharge of their federal student loans. As we reported last year, the department initially pledged to overhaul the program and consider whether to simply accept Social Security determinations of disability instead of its current complex and opaque process. The department subsequently backed off that fix. Now it isn’t even on the agenda [PDF].

by Marian Wang ProPublica, March 29, 2012, 12:24 p.m.

The article While White House Emphasizes Easing Student Debt Burden, Fed Contractors Play Hardball appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

For an example of the fluidity of campaign finance rules, as well as the tangled web of connections between candidates and super PACs, look no further than the digital consulting firm Targeted Victory.

So far, the firm’s hauled in $4.1 million working for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and American Crossroads, the super PAC launched by GOP strategist Karl Rove. Just down the hall, its neighbors in Arlington, Va., include an office housing four other companies working for Romney, American Crossroads or the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future.

With the rise of super PACs, the jet-fueled political action committees that can take unlimited contributions, many campaign finance watchdogs have focused on the hundreds of millions of dollars being raised this presidential election cycle. But after the most recent campaign filings came in last week, ProPublica decided to track the other side of the equation: Where the money goes.

Our analysis found that more than $306 million has been spent so far by major super PACs and the five leading presidential candidates. In some cases, payees serve both candidates and the super PACs aligned with them, raising the specter that groups may be working together in ways that violate the rules, campaign finance experts said. We also found instances in which overseers of some political action committees directed hefty fees to their own companies, a legal form of self-dealing.

Among the top 200 payees, there were dozens of firms about which little is known. With generic names like Financial Innovations, Election Connections, Postage for Direct Mail Fundraising or Strategic Media Services, it’s sometimes unclear who runs them or exactly what they do. Many have short histories: Four of the six top-paid consulting firms for Winning Our Future, the super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich, have been launched since July.

At the same time, familiar names cropped up regularly among the top earners. Democratic strategists David Axelrod, Ronald Rosenblith and Barack Obama’s team from 2008 are back in place. On the Republican side, there were companies connected to Karl Rove, Carl Forti, David Carney and Michael Dubke.

Targeted Victory’s initial manager was Tony Feather, a close friend of Rove’s who served as the political director of the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000. Feather also co-founded longtime GOP consulting firm DCI Direct and its sister firm, FLS Connect. Targeted Victory co-founder Michael Beach oversaw the national voter turnout program for the Republican National Committee in the 2008 election cycle.

Like some other outside spending groups, super PACs are allowed to raise and spend unlimited funds, but they are not allowed to coordinate with campaigns.

Yet the rules governing “coordination” have been narrowly interpreted and rarely enforced by regulators. As long as candidates and super PACs don’t discuss the granular ins and outs of their spending, such as the placement and length of election ads, they can discuss strategy. Candidates can even help raise money for super PACs, or even, say, ask their father or good friend to donate.

Campaign-finance experts say there’s plenty of room for activity that average people would consider “coordination” that legally doesn’t count. They also said when consultants work for both a super PAC and a candidate, regulators should question whether they are operating independently.

“Any time it’s the same individual who is providing advice and services to a campaign and a super PAC, there is the danger of coordination,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California-Irvine who runs the Election Law blog. “I’m sure most of the individuals playing these roles are getting legal advice on what they can and cannot do. The human brain being what it is, though, I think it is very difficult to separate those roles.”

Expenditure records show that a company called TargetPoint Consulting provides “survey research” to Mitt Romney’s campaign while also doing “direct mail consulting” for Restore Our Future, the pro-Romney super PAC. In February, the founder told The New York Times that while he understood it could look “ridiculous,” his company had gone to great lengths to prevent improprieties, setting up a firewall between employees working on the different campaigns.

Even when the ties between super PACs and candidates are less direct, spending records show how their spheres overlap. For example, partners of GOP polling company Public Opinion Strategies set up NMB Research, a polling company that works for Restore Our Future. One Public Opinion partner, Neil Newhouse, serves as the chief pollster for Mitt Romney’s campaign.

American Crossroads uses four of the same consultants as Restore Our Future and three of the same consultants as Romney’s campaign. (This is hardly a shock: Carl Forti, a former political director for Romney, is political director of American Crossroads and senior strategist for Restore Our Future.) TargetPoint Consulting works for all three groups, although it’s only done $1,700 worth of work for American Crossroads.

On the Democratic side, NGP VAN, a company that sells software that helps with fundraising and FEC compliance, has done work for both the Obama campaign and two super PACs backing Obama. The Obama campaign has paid NGP VAN $130,000; the two super PACs have paid it less than $17,000.

Beyond potential coordination, the analysis done by ProPublica also showed how some who have set up super PACs are directing donors’ cash into their own pockets.

GOP strategist Nick Ryan, a former aide to Rick Santorum, for instance, started his direct-mail and telemarketing firm, Global Intermediate LLC, shortly after launching the pro-Santorum super PAC, the Red White and Blue Fund. Global Intermediate is now the second-biggest vendor for Red White and Blue, earning almost $1.9 million so far.

While Ryan couldn’t be reached for comment, the super PAC’s spokesman, Stuart Roy, acknowledged in an email to the Los Angeles Times in February that Ryan’s participation with Global Intermediate was “no big mystery, they have done our phones and mail programs in multiple states (very effectively, I might add).”

Candidates are prohibited from using campaign funds for personal use and must pay “fair market value” if they hire companies run by relatives or other insiders, but super PACs, like regular PACs, have no such restrictions. For years, the FEC has asked Congress to expand the ban on candidates using campaign funds for personal use to PACs. So far, Congress has not acted.

“My standard sound-bite advice is 2018donor beware,’ when giving to any political action committee,” said Paul S. Ryan, of the non-partisan Campaign Legal Center.

Some insider transactions are on a smaller scale. A man named Gary Franchi Jr. runs both Revolution PAC, a super PAC known for its Ron Paul action figures, and Restore the Republic, a social networking site for Paul followers. Since last July, Revolution PAC has been paying Restore the Republic more than $1,700 a month for office rent. When asked if the office had telephones, desks and computers, Franchi replied: “Oh, yeah.”

But the office turned out to actually be a box in a Northbrook, Ill., UPS store. Franchi did not return follow-up calls for comment.

by Kim Barker and Al Shaw ProPublica, March 28, 2012, 1:02 p.m.

Image Courtesy of   http://www.flickr.com/photos/newshour/

The article Campaign Spending Shows Political Ties, Self-Dealing appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

A Kashmiri-American accused of funneling money from Pakistan’s main spy agency to American politicians in a scheme to influence U.S. policy on Kashmir was sentenced to two years in federal prison Friday.

Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai, 62, of Fairfax, Va., had pleaded guilty in December to conspiracy and tax violations in connection with moving at least $3.5 million from Pakistan’s government and the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, mostly through his charity, the Kashmiri American Council. For more than 20 years, the charity had been the highest profile Kashmiri nonprofit in the U.S. As its leader, Fai had taken his case to top U.S. officials, rubbing shoulders with people like Bill Clinton and Bob Dole.

Although Fai had publicly called for “self-determination” for the Indian side of Kashmir, the FBI insisted that he was privately working on behalf of Pakistan. Kashmir is the disputed Himalayan territory that has sparked two of the three wars between India and Pakistan and almost led to a fourth.

The sentencing capped a bizarre case, replete with twists and turns, including the death of Fai’s co-defendant in Pakistan. According to the FBI, dozens of emails between Fai and his handlers featured code words, such as “Brylcreem” for money, and “the library in Islamabad” for an ISI office.

Fai was initially charged with failing to register as a foreign agent in July, at the height of tensions between the U.S. and Pakistan. An FBI affidavit laid out how Fai had allegedly been a tool of the ISI and how he used Pakistan’s money to try to influence U.S. politicians, whether through campaign contributions or by hosting conferences.

It’s not clear where the ISI’s millions went. According to campaign finance records, Fai had given $28,165 to federal candidates and political parties since 1990, including $10,290 to Rep. Dan Burton, the Republican from Indiana. Others connected to Fai, his co-defendant and the Kashmiri American Council’s board donated at least $93,000. There’s no indication that either Fai’s board members or the politicians knew where Fai got his money.

In October, ProPublica documented Fai’s improbable rise from a poor villager in Indian Kashmir to Washington insider. Fai, who emigrated to the U.S. for graduate school in the 1980s, is one of the only people in recent history to be criminally charged with failing to register as a foreign agent.

The plea agreement reached in December did not mention that charge, and Fai never admitted to operating as an unregistered agent. Fai’s alleged accomplice, Zaheer Ahmad, a Pakistani-American doctor who ran one of the nicest hospitals in Pakistan, died in early October after apparently suffering a stroke in Islamabad.

The two men were accused of mounting an elaborate plot: Ahmad was accused of funneling money from the ISI to 13 straw donors, mostly Pakistani-American doctors and businessmen, who then gave the money to the Kashmiri American Council, claiming tax deductions. Ahmad then allegedly reimbursed the straw donors.

As part of his plea agreement, Fai admitted making false statements to U.S. officials about his ties to Pakistan’s government and that the Internal Revenue Service had lost as much as $400,000 in his scheme.

Fai had faced a maximum of eight years in prison. In filings with the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., Fai’s lawyer argued that the seriousness of his offenses was mitigated by “the unspeakable suffering of the Kashmiri people that motivated his crimes, as well as his demonstrated remorse.”

U.S. prosecutors had asked for Fai to be sentenced to four years in prison, saying that he showed no remorse. “The opposite is true,” argued Gordon Kromberg, the assistant U.S. attorney on the case, in filings with the court. He said Fai was only sorry for the damage he had caused to the Kashmiri movement by linking his group with the ISI.

Fai had sent a seven-page, single-spaced letter to the court, outlining the history of Kashmir but mentioning nothing about his dealings with the ISI.

“In fact, nowhere is the ISI even mentioned,” Kromberg wrote, outlining the U.S. position. “Nowhere is any mention of a single lie that Fai made to the American people and Government in the course of innumerable lies over a period of decades.”

by Kim Barker ProPublica, March 30, 2012, 6:09 p.m.

The article Two Year Sentence for Man Accused in Pakistan Spy Plot appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

This story was co-produced with NPR and PBS’ “Frontline.” Listen to NPR’s Morning Edition for more.

March 30: This post has been clarified.

A senior pathologist in the Los Angeles County coroner’s office has sharply questioned the forensic evidence used to convict a 51-year-old woman of shaking her 7-week-old grandson to death, identifying a host of flaws in the case.

The new report by the pathologist, Dr. James Ribe, details eight “diagnostic problems” with the coroner’s 1996 ruling that the child had died from violent shaking or a forceful blow to the head. Ribe wrote that he saw little evidence that the infant had been attacked, noting “the complete absence of bodily trauma, such as face trauma, grab marks, bruises, rib fractures, or neck trauma.”

Shirley Ree Smith was convicted of felony child endangerment 2014 a charge equivalent to second-degree murder 2014 in the case, and she’s garnered national attention over the course of a long legal campaign to clear her name. Smith insists that she never harmed the infant, Etzel Glass, who died in an apartment in Van Nuys, Calif.

After watching her legal appeals bounce from court to court for the past 15 years, Smith is currently out of custody, but is facing a possible return to state prison. She has petitioned California Gov. Jerry Brown for clemency, asking him to commute her sentence.

Ribe’s review, which reveals a deep divide within the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner, could influence the governor’s decision. Other doctors in the office reassessed the case and stood by the homicide ruling.

Los Angeles prosecutors constructed the case against Smith largely on the findings of medical experts working for the county coroner. During an autopsy, forensic pathologists discovered a small amount of bleeding on the infant’s brain and in his optic nerves. They concluded the death was a homicide.

Documents obtained by ProPublica, NPR and PBS “Frontline” show the coroner’s office in January asked several staff doctors to take a second look at Glass’s death. As part of that effort Ribe examined the autopsy report, tissue slides and other forensic evidence.

In Ribe’s view, the injuries to the child’s brain were relatively minor and could have been caused by the birth process. He also noted the baby’s lungs were speckled with tiny blood spots called petechiae, which are often linked to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and suffocation, and pointed out that Glass had been sleeping face-down on an “unsafe sleep surface” — a couch cushion — on the night of his death.

The “bottom line,” wrote Ribe, is “there was head trauma, but we don’t know when it happened or how it happened. We don’t know if it’s related to the cause of death. The conservative approach would be to acknowledge these unknowns. The cause of death should be diagnosed as undetermined.”

Reached by phone, Ribe declined to comment.

Smith’s advocates said Ribe’s review strikes at the foundation of the case against her.

“This case wouldn’t go to trial today,” said Michael Brennan, a law professor at the University of Southern California and one of Smith’s attorneys. “I am confident that the DA’s office would never try this case again.”

Dr. Eugene Carpenter, who supervised the original autopsy, remains certain that Glass’s death was a homicide. As part of the recent review, Carpenter went through autopsy case files again. He stood by his original assessment, stating that Glass died as a result of abuse.

“Death is not due to natural causes and certainly not due to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome,” Carpenter wrote in his report. “There is no reasonable doubt as to the cause of death.”

Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran, the chief medical examiner-coroner, largely concurred, writing that the baby was the victim of abuse that injured his brain and may also have been intentionally suffocated.

The coroner’s office would not address the conflicting views about the case.

“The cause and manner of death of any person is an opinion and those opinions are based on multiple criteria,” said Craig Harvey, the chief investigator and head of operations for the agency, in an email. “The Department of Coroner will not be making any further comment on this case.”

Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley recently sent a letter to the governor saying that medical evidence presented during Smith’s trial was valid. Granting her clemency due to concerns about the soundness of that evidence, Cooley wrote, would have a “chilling effect,” making it more difficult to prosecute child abusers.

Sandi Gibbons, Cooley’s spokeswoman, declined to comment on the case, as did the governor.

On the night of Glass’s death, Smith says she was sleeping on the floor as the baby and another grandchild slept on a nearby couch. Smith’s daughter, Tomeka, and other family members were in the next room.

In a recent interview, Smith vehemently and tearfully denied ever hurting her grandson. “I didn’t do it,” she said. “There’s no way I could possibly do that. Why would I do that? I mean why? Why would I shake him?”

A Unique Theory

In the decade and a half since Smith was convicted, much has changed in the world of forensics. The National Academy of Sciences in 2009 issued a lengthy report highlighting flaws in the country’s coroner and medical examiner system and criticizing the techniques used in law enforcement crime labs.

Among doctors there’s an increasing awareness of ailments and conditions that can mimic the typical symptoms of child abuse — bleeding and bruising. The leading textbook on pediatric head injuries now includes two chapters on these mimics; they range from sickle cell anemia to congenital brain malformations to unintentional damage caused by the use of forceps or vacuums during birth.

Ribe’s analysis notes that Glass’s death doesn’t fit the usual pattern for shaken baby syndrome cases, which are typically marked by a triad of symptoms: bleeding on the brain and in the retinas, and swelling of the brain.

Glass had only one of these symptoms, a tablespoon or two of blood, pooled on top of his brain.

During Smith’s trial, Carpenter testified the bleeding wasn’t severe enough to kill the baby.

But on the witness stand, Carpenter voiced a novel theory about the death, telling jurors that Glass was shaken or slammed so forcefully that his brainstem was fatally — but invisibly — damaged, shutting his whole body down instantly. “There is no evidence” of the brain stem injury,” Carpenter testified, “and there is no evidence expected to be found in a shaken infant that dies quickly because the body does not have time to react to the injury.”

The jury convicted Smith of child endangerment, and she spent the next decade of her life dwelling in a California women’s prison. “The hardest part of being locked up was knowing that I didn’t belong there,” Smith said. “And being away from my daughter and grandkids.”

While Carpenter’s testimony persuaded the jury, it didn’t sway the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which in 2006 overturned Smith’s conviction. The court found “there was simply no demonstrable support for shaking as the cause of death.” Smith’s incarceration, added the court, had “very likely been a miscarriage of justice.”

The ruling freed Smith from prison after 10 years. “I felt a sense of relief. I couldn’t believe it was happening,” she recalled.

But when the initial joy wore off, Smith had difficulty resuming her life in the free world. Her collision with the criminal justice system carried lingering psychological effects, leaving her feeling “lost” and fearful, she said. After a stint in a cheap hotel on Los Angeles’s skid row and a bout of homelessness, Smith eventually moved to the Midwest, where Tomeka and her surviving grandchildren were living.

Her legal struggle, however, continued. The California attorney general appealed the case, and late last year, a divided U.S. Supreme Court reversed the 9th Circuit. “The Court of Appeals in this case substituted its judgment for that of a California jury on the question whether the prosecution’s or the defense’s expert witnesses more persuasively explained the cause of a death,” wrote the court in an unsigned opinion.

At the high court’s direction, the 9th Circuit reinstated Smith’s conviction in February of this year.

That move prompted Brennan, and his co-counsel, Dennis Riordan, to petition Brown to commute Smith’s sentence to the 10 years she has served, rather than returning her to a prison cell.

In a letter to the governor, the attorneys note that prosecutors recently asked pediatrician Carol Berkowitz to review the evidence. The doctor’s report contradicts Carpenter’s theory that Glass died nearly instantly after someone abused him — and highlights the lack of scientific consensus among medical experts when it comes to sudden infant fatalities.

Though Berkowitz believes Glass suffered head injuries due to abuse, she is uncertain about when the trauma occurred. “I think that one cannot say with medical certainty the precise time when these injuries were inflicted (e.g., whether immediate or within a specified number of hours),” wrote Berkowitz, a UCLA pediatrics professor and executive vice chair of the pediatrics department at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.

Tomeka Smith is adamant that nobody abused her child. “Our family is so loving it’s ridiculous,” she said in an interview, adding that she has complete faith in her mother.

“My mother never spanked me, she never cursed me, she never yelled at me,” Tomeka Smith recalled. “There’s no possible way she could’ve done what they say. If I had any doubt about that, I would’ve wanted her prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Today, Tomeka and Shirley Smith are living together in Alexandria, Minn., a quaint town of approximately 11,000 people located about midway between Fargo and Minneapolis. They share a small, tidy apartment with Tomeka’s children, Marquis and Yondale, both teenagers. Tomeka’s daughter, Yolanda, is attending college in Nevada.

On a recent afternoon, Shirley Smith greeted Yondale as he came home from school carrying a battered skateboard. She cooks for the boys, helps them with their homework, and generally keeps an eye out for them while Tomeka works at Walmart.

She knows the family reunion could end at any moment.

“I’m not free. … I can’t go anywhere without permission,” Smith said. “They’re trying to send me back to prison.”

Clarification: This post has been clarified to reflect that Smith was charged and found guilty of felony child endangerment, which is equivalent to second-degree murder.

by A.C. Thompson, ProPublica, and Joseph Shapiro, NPR March 29, 2012, 5 a.m.

The article New Evidence in High Profile Shaken Baby Case appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Every local broadcast station has a repository of documents about political advertising that you have a legal right to see but can do so only by going to the station and asking to see “the public file.”

These paper files contain detailed data on all political ads that run on the channel, such as when they aired, who bought the time and how much they paid. It’s a transparency gold mine, allowing the public to see how campaigns and outside groups are influencing elections.

But TV executives have been fighting a Federal Communications Commission proposal to make the data accessible online. They say making the files digital would be too burdensome 2014 it “could well take hundreds of hours for a single station,” according to comments filed with the FCC by the National Association of Broadcasters.

Others have taken their case a step further. As reported by Bloomberg Government, Jerald Fritz, senior vice president of Allbritton Communications, said in an another FCC filing that online availability “would ultimately lead to a Soviet-style standardization of the way advertising should be sold as determined by the government.” (NPR’s On the Media did an excellent segment recently on broadcasters’ opposition to the proposal.)

We tend to like the idea of public data being online. Since TV stations won’t put it online themselves, we decided to do it ourselves 2014 and we want your help. Working with students at the Medill journalism school at Northwestern University, we looked at five local stations in the Chicago market.

You can explore the results yourself: Here are detailed breakdowns of when the ads aired, during which programs, and how much each spot cost: Read the documents from the local affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and CW.

Big thanks to Medill students David Tonyan, Julie O’Donoghue, Vesko Cholakov, Safiya Merchant and Gideon Resnick, who visited the stations Monday.

We intend to enlist more readers in checking their local stations as the election campaigns slog on. The general election is likely to usher in even greater spending, and such spot checks could keep an eye on how big spenders are influencing the election. If you’d like to join in, please fill out this form.

Campaigns and super PACs are required to report their spending on independent expenditures to the Federal Election Commission within a day or two, but they often just report how much they paid ad-buying firms, which can disguise how much actual ads cost and where they’re airing.

What’s more, the files could be a window into what may be otherwise undisclosed spending by “dark money” nonprofit groups that are playing an increasing role in the elections .

For our experiment, we asked our Chicago volunteers to check on spending by five super PACs that individually support Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama. There were no records of spending in Chicago by four of them, but Restore Our Future, a pro-Romney super PAC, advertised on all five stations. The super PAC paid the five stations about $800,000 in the past month.

As our PAC Track interactive chart shows, Restore Our Future has spent more than twice as much as any other PAC so far 2014 nearly $37 million. Medill student O’Donoghue said getting the files from the ABC station took her about half an hour, most of which was spent wrestling with the copy machine. Tonyan, another graduate student, said he spent 15 minutes at the CW affiliate, plus a 15-minute drive.

Both said the station employees who helped them were friendly and accommodating. We encountered the same when I visited five stations in New York, Missouri and Florida. Typically, a station employee will simply show you the room where the files are kept and let you dig in. Such visits don’t seem to happen often. A log at the New York CBS affiliate showed only six registered visitors since October 2011.

The Campaign Media Analysis Group, a unit of Kantar Media, tracks ads that have hit the airwaves and estimates what they would cost, but the company charges high rates to obtain the information. The Wesleyan Media Project publishes some CMAG data.

Rich Robinson, executive director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, found that $70 million in advertising had been unreported from 2000-10 in Michigan. He got that number by personally examining public files, at one point driving 14 hours for a 15-minute visit to a station.

He told the FCC: “I can testify to you, unequivocally, that the threshold of effort necessary to report this important public interest story is too high for every news organization in Michigan, except mine.” Which is why we’re asking for your help. You can help expose spending that might otherwise remain hidden in your television market. Sign up here.

by Daniel Victor ProPublica, March 20, 2012, 3:29 p.m.

Image Courtesy of  Frontpage / Shutterstock.com

The article If TV Stations Won’t Post Their Data on Political Ads, We Will appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

March 21: This post has been corrected.

When the Environmental Protection Agency announced last week that tests showed the water is safe to drink in Dimock, Penn., a national hot spot for concerns about fracking, it seemed to vindicate the energy industry’s insistence that drilling had not caused pollution in the area.

But what the agency didn’t say 2013 at least, not publicly 2013 is that the water samples contained dangerous quantities of methane gas, a finding that confirmed some of the agency’s initial concerns and the complaints raised by Dimock residents since 2009.

The test results also showed the group of wells contained dozens of other contaminants, including low levels of chemicals known to cause cancer and heavy metals that exceed the agency’s “trigger level” and could lead to illness if consumed over an extended period of time. The EPA’s assurances suggest that the substances detected do not violate specific drinking water standards, but no such standards exist for some of the contaminants and some experts said the agency should have acknowledged that they were detected at all.

“Any suggestion that water from these wells is safe for domestic use would be preliminary or inappropriate,” said Ron Bishop, a chemist at the State University of New York’s College at Oneonta, who has spoken out about environmental concerns from drilling.

Dimock residents are struggling to reconcile the EPA’s public account with the results they have been given in private.

“I’m sitting here looking at the values I have on my sheet 2013 I’m over the thresholds 2013 and yet they are telling me my water is drinkable,” said Scott Ely, a Dimock resident whose water contains methane at three times the state limit, as well as lithium, a substance that can cause kidney and thyroid disorders. “I’m confused about the whole thing2026 I’m flabbergasted.”

The water in Dimock first became the focus of international attention after residents there alleged in 2009 that natural gas drilling, and fracking, had led to widespread contamination. That April, ProPublica reported that a woman’s drinking water well blew up. Pennsylvania officials eventually determined that underground methane gas leaks had been caused by Cabot Oil and Gas, which was drilling wells nearby. Pennsylvania sanctioned Cabot, and for a short time the company provided drinking water to households in the Dimock area.

This January, the EPA announced it would take over the state’s investigation, testing the water in more than 60 homes and agreeing to provide drinking water to several of families 2013 including the Elys 2013 in the meantime.

Then, last Thursday, the EPA released a brief statement saying that the first 11 samples to come back from the lab “did not show levels of contamination that could present a health concern.” The agency noted that some metals, methane, salt and bacteria had been detected, but at low levels that did not exceed federal thresholds. It said that arsenic exceeding federal water standards was detected in two samples.

But Dimock residents say the agency’s description didn’t jibe with the material in test packets distributed to them, and they voiced concerns about why the EPA had passed judgment before seeing results from nearly 50 homes. Several shared raw data and materials they were given by the EPA with Josh Fox, the director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary “GasLand,” who shared them with ProPublica.

EPA press secretary Betsaida Alcantara said the agency was trying to be forthcoming by giving the tests results to Dimock residents and is now considering whether to release more information to the public about the water samples. “We made a commitment to the residents that we would give them the information as soon as we had it,” she said. “For the sake of transparency we felt it was the right thing to do.”

However preliminary, the data is significant because it is the first EPA research into drilling-related concerned on the east coast, and the agency’s first new information since it concluded that there was likely a link between fracking and water contamination in central Wyoming last December. The EPA is currently in the midst of a national investigation into the effects of fracking on groundwater, but that research is separate.

As the agency has elsewhere, the EPA began the testing in Dimock in search of methane and found it.

Methane is not considered poisonous to drink, and therefore is not a health threat in the same way as other pollutants. But the gas can collect in confined spaces and cause deadly explosions, or smother people if they breathe too much of it. Four of the five residential water results obtained by ProPublica show methane levels exceeding Pennsylvania standards; one as high as seven times the threshold and nearly twice the EPA’s less stringent standard.

The methane detections were accompanied by ethane, another type of natural gas that experts say often signifies the methane came from deeply buried gas deposits similar to those being drilled for energy and not from natural sources near the surface.

Among the other substances detected at low levels in Dimock’s water are a suite of chemicals known to come from some sort of hydrocarbon substance, such as diesel fuel or roofing tar. They include anthracene, fluoranthene, pyrene and benzo(a)pyrene2013 all substances described by a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as cancer-causing even in very small amounts. Chromium, aluminum, lead and other metals were also detected, as were chlorides, salts, bromide and strontium, minerals that can occur naturally but are often associated with natural gas drilling.

It is unclear whether these contaminants have any connection to drilling activities near Dimock. The agency says it plans further testing and research.

Many of the compounds detected have not been evaluated for exposure risk by federal scientists or do not have an exposure limit assigned to them, making it difficult to know whether they present a risk to human health.

Inconsistencies in the EPA’s sampling results also are raising concerns. EPA documents, for example, list two different thresholds for the detection of bromide, a naturally occurring substance sometimes used in drilling fluids, opening up the possibility that bromide may have been detected, but not reported, in some tests.

“The threshold that it is safe, that shouldn’t be changing,” said Susan Riha, director of the New York State Water Resources Institute and a professor of earth sciences at Cornell University. “For some reason 2026 one was twice as sensitive as the other one.”

The EPA did not respond to questions about the detection limits, or any other technical inquiries about the test data.

A spokesman for Cabot declined to comment on the water test results or their significance, saying that he had not yet seen the data.

Correction: This post said EPA tests had detected bromium in some Dimock water wells. It should have said bromide. Also, the post identified Susan Riha as the director of the New York State Water Resources Group. She is the director of the Water Resources Institute at Cornell University.

by Abrahm Lustgarten ProPublica, March 20, 2012, 2:42 p.m.

The article So, Is Dimock’s Water Really Safe to Drink? appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

This summer, health insurance companies may have to pay more than a billion dollars back to their own customers. The rebate requirements were introduced as part of the 2010 health-care reform law and are meant to benefit consumers. But now an insurer-supported Senate bill aims to roll back the rebate requirements.

Known as the medical loss ratio rule, it’s actually pretty simple. Under the health-care law provision, 80 to 85 cents of every dollar insurers collect in premiums must be spent on medical care or activities that improve the quality of that care. If not, they must send their customers a rebate for the difference. The goal, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, is to limit the money insurers spend on administrative costs and profit.

“It essentially ensures that consumers receive value for every dollar they spend on health care,” HHS spokesman Brian Chiglinsky told ProPublica.

Last month, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., introduced a bill that would change what costs companies can include in the 15 to 20 percent they are allotted for overhead, salaries and marketing. The bill, similar to a House bill introduced in March 2011 that has yet to come up for a vote, focuses on payments to insurance agents and brokers.

Traditionally, these commissions are bundled into the administrative costs when making the final calculation. But insurance regulators have argued that fees paid to insurance agents and brokers shouldn’t count. Such a change could mean big savings for insurance companies 2014 and much smaller rebates for consumers.

This is the first year that companies are required to send out rebates. According to a report by state insurance commissioners, if rebates had been handed out last year, insurers would have had to pay consumers almost $2 billion. If they had carved out the broker fees, as proposed in the two current bills, consumers would have gotten only about $800 million.

Landrieu’s office did not immediately respond to our call for comment.

“[The bills] would water down the standard to a point where it becomes ineffective,” said Sondra Roberto, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit advocacy group Consumers Union. The group, which also publishes Consumer Reports, recently urged members to oppose the bill. The rebates have gotten relatively modest attention. Only 38 percent of the public is even aware of the rule’s existence, according to a Kaiser poll.

Insurance companies have supported the two bills, claiming that the rebate rule, as it stands now, stifles jobs and actually drives up insurance premiums. A 2011 government report found that most insurance companies were, in fact, lowering their premiums to meet the requirements, as the administration had hoped.

While most insurance companies hit the 80 to 85 percent target, the few that didn’t may be required to send out rebates this year. “Some insurance companies pay an inordinate amount, as much as 40 percent, on administration and profit and not health care,” Roberto said.

The rules on rebates differ slightly depending on whether the insurance comes from a large-group plan (employers with more than 100 employees), or a small-group or individual plan. In each case, insurance companies will be required to make all their costs publicly available so consumers can see how their premium dollars are spent.

The government granted insurance companies in seven states extra time to meet the requirements. Insurers that serve states with more rural populations, for example, tend to have higher overhead costs and cannot meet the requirement as easily, according to Eric Fader, a New York health-care lawyer. But the government decided that for all other states, enforcing the requirement wouldn’t pose any risk to the market, and that the federal government didn’t “need to coddle an inefficient insurance company,” Fader said.

by Lena Groeger ProPublica, March 16, 2012, 1:01 p.m.

The article Senate Bill Could Roll Back Consumers’ Health Insurance Savings appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Instead of picketing outside company headquarters, an advocacy group is using Facebook ads to try to influence people whose profiles identify them as employees of Freddie Mac or JPMorgan Chase.

The anti-foreclosure ad campaign, which launches today, asks Freddie and Chase employees to talk to their CEOs about a veteran — a former Marine — who’s facing eviction in California.

“This is not any sort of attack on the employees there,” said Jim Pugh of Rebuild the Dream, which is running the ad campaign. “We’re trying to let them know what’s happening.”

The ad that targets Freddie Mac employees features a small picture of CEO Charles Haldeman’s face, and the message, “Freddie Mac did what???? Freddie Mac is evicting a former Marine who’s been trying to pay his mortgage. Tell CEO Haldeman to work out a fair deal with him!” according to a copy of the ad provided by Pugh.

The JPMorgan Chase ad is similar, but with a Chase logo instead of an executive’s face. We’ve contacted Freddie Mac and JP Morgan Chase spokespeople for comment, and also reached out to Freddie Mac and JPMorgan Chase employees on Facebook. If you’ve seen one of these ads, please let us know.

Targeted online advertising is nothing new. (As anyone who has changed their Facebook status to “engaged” can tell you, a simple update can bring a deluge of new ads.) But political campaigns and advocacy groups are increasingly adopting the same microtargeting tactics that companies use.

Rick Perry’s campaign, for instance, targeted faith-focused ads to people in Iowa who listed themselves as Christians on Facebook, and ads featuring his wife to the state’s female conservatives, Politico reported.

According to FEC data, Endorse Liberty, a super PAC that supports Ron Paul, has led the way on Facebook expenditures, spending a total of $241,508 through January 2012.

And it’s not just Facebook and Google where campaigns and activists are doing microtargeting. The music site Pandora announced last year that it would be selling political ad space targeted to the zip codes of particular listeners, the Wall Street Journal reported.

There’s nothing inherently problematic about targeted ads. Campaigns have been using direct mail to target particular voters for decades. Digital targeting can be a cost-effective way of spending advertising dollars, especially for smaller groups, like Rebuild the Dream, which sees the ads as a great way to get more bang for their buck in terms of reaching their intended audience. (The group also launched a special donation drive specifically for the Facebook ad buy.) ProPublica even used Facebook ads to try to find sources for our 2009 series, When Caregivers Harm.

But as the ability to use data to reach particular people grows more sophisticated, targeting risks crossing privacy lines, as demonstrated by a recent New York Times article on how Target knew a teenage customer was pregnant before her father did.

What’s clear is that if all this microtargeting translates into electoral gains, the scale and sophistication of these efforts will continue to grow, and the data science that gained traction in 2008 will become a regular part of campaigning. In the meantime, the Obama campaign’s already substantial data team continues to hire statistical modeling analysts and analytics engineers.

The increasing ease and flexibility of online targeting also raises new questions about how politicians are presenting themselves to different audiences, how much campaigns need to tell their supporters about the personal information they collect — and what will happen to the massive databases of voter information collected during the 2012 presidential campaign. Will they be sold? Passed on to other politicians?

Rebuild the Dream, which focuses on economic issues, was launched by MoveOn.org in 2011, but has been independent since January, Pugh said. The group’s president is former Obama green jobs adviser Van Jones.

Pugh worked on the Obama campaign’s digital analytics team in 2008 while also trying to finish a Ph.D. dissertation in robotics, and later did similar work for the Democratic National Committee. He said he was not sure what kind of reaction the ads would receive.

“I would imagine that people are fairly used to targeted ads at this point,” he said. But while people who work in politics and advocacy may be used to receiving Facebook ads targeting specific causes, “It’s hard to know in advance how unusual it will seem to the employees of Freddie Mac and JP Morgan Chase.”

by Lois Beckett ProPublica, March 13, 2012, 1:31 p.m.

The article How to Win Facebook Friends and Influence People appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

BP’s refining subsidiary was released on Monday from criminal probation related to a 2005 explosion in Texas City that killed 15 workers. The company has addressed the most serious safety deficiencies exposed by the accident and satisfied the terms of a felony plea agreement to settle charges that it failed to protect workers from known risks, a U.S. Justice Department spokesman said.

The move closes a controversial chapter for the company, but it leaves an array of worker-safety issues unresolved. BP is still negotiating over more than 400 additional violations brought against its Texas City refinery separately from the criminal case.

Following the explosion, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration and BP reached a settlement requiring the company to address safety issues at the refinery. Fixing those problems became one of the Justice Department’s conditions for settling felony charges relating to the explosion and for ending the three-year probation period.

In late 2009, however, after a series of inspections, OSHA determined that BP had not addressed many of its safety lapses and levied 270 additional violations and a $87.4 million fine. It also hit the company with another 439 additional “egregious and willful” safety violations at the refinery that were not a component of the criminal case.

At issue then was whether the company had violated some of the most important terms of its probation even after it was given a second chance. In 2010, BP settled with OSHA, paying the agency $50.6 million and committing to making substantive safety changes by the court-set sunset of its probation period Monday (March 12).

A Justice Department spokesman said BP has met its obligations for probation, including addressing the 270 violations. The remaining 400 or so OSHA violations, however, were not specific to the Texas City agreement.

“These violations were unrelated to the 2005 settlement agreement and did not in the Department’s view rise to criminal conduct,” said Wyn Hornbuckle, an agency spokesman, in a statement to ProPublica. “The Department did not seek any extension or revocation of BP’s criminal probation.” The resolution of those remaining violations will be dealt with administratively, by OSHA, Hornbuckle said, and not by the courts.

As the probation expired, confusion remained about exactly what improvements BP had made at its refineries. According to the 2010 agreement with OSHA, BP pledged to address the risk of catastrophic chemical releases and to install new protective equipment and instrument systems across the sprawling refinery’s 28 units.

It was not clear how much progress the company had made, however, and BP spokesman Daren Beaudo characterized the OSHA issues as Unresolved. “We continue to work with OSHA to resolve these issues,” Beaudo wrote in an email. BP declined to say whether it had made any of the specific improvements listed in its 2010 settlement agreement, or to say how much money it had invested at the Texas City plant to meet the terms of its agreement with OSHA.

A spokeswoman for OSHA said the agency remained in negotiations with the company. In an email exchange, OSHA told ProPublica that the agency could not provide copies of any of the quarterly progress reports that BP had agreed to submit, and that it was “unable” to specify how many of its outstanding violations BP had addressed.

On March 23, 2005, a facility used to distill gasoline and boost its octane content was overfilled by BP workers, spewing a geyser of flammable liquid into the air. The subsequent explosion destroyed an office trailer nearby, killed 15 workers, and sent nearly 200 more to area hospitals.

Like the investigations into BP’s Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, a series of reports analyzing the refinery disaster found that the company had failed to follow basic steps to avert a disaster, had not installed or maintained equipment that would have helped prevent the leak and the explosion, and generally had a poor safety approach.

A 2010 investigation by ProPublica found that in the years before the explosion, BP had been repeatedly warned that its facilities were in need of repair, and the company had declined to replace ailing equipment — including the unit that failed the day of the explosion — in order to cut costs.

Documents obtained by ProPublica showed that an internal BP report shortly before the disaster said that employees at the plant worked with “an exceptional degree of fear.” The report warned that the plant might “kills (sic) someone in the next 12-18 months.” The Texas refinery, which produces about 3 percent of the country’s gasoline, continued to have problems after the explosion. Several more workers died in accidents, and in 2010, the plant was found emitting a huge cloud of unpermitted toxic emissions.

After the toxic release, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), Texas’s chief environmental regulator, charged the company with emissions reporting violations and alleged it had violated the terms of its probation with the federal government. BP settled that case, as well as an another similar emissions violation, with Texas in late 2011. That left the criminal probation period and the outstanding OSHA violations as the final chapters in the Texas City saga.

BP has endeavored to keep the Texas City accident separate from claims and ongoing investigations into its 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. As recently as two weeks ago, the company’s lawyers argued in court that past accidents should have no bearing on a trial to decide liability for the Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed 11 workers.

BP sought to strike portions of testimony about Texas City and other past incidents from its former CEO, Tony Hayward, in depositions that would be admitted to the court. BP announced last year that it would sell its Texas City refinery along with another facility outside Los Angeles. The company said this week it has suitors and expects to complete a sale by year’s end.

by Abrahm Lustgarten ProPublica, March 12, 2012, 6:20 p.m.

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