Eeyore's News and View

Bush on border agents: 'I'm not talking pardons'
Laments failure of immigration reform, gives agency executive $60,000 bonus
Posted: January 12, 2009
By Chelsea Schilling
Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compe
President Bush has extensively discussed his immigration reform policy in exit interviews and given a $60,000 bonus to a Border Patrol chief who has been criticized for not supporting Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean – but he refuses to talk about whether pardons could be in store for the imprisoned agents.
In a Jan. 6 interview with John Gizzi, political editor of Human Events, Bush said he regrets that the comprehensive immigration bill he endorsed did not prevail.
"Well, I'm sorry it didn't pass, because I felt strongly that the comprehensive approach to immigration reform was necessary for border enforcement, as well as recognizing that there are people willing to do work Americans won't do," Bush said. "[W]ithout the law, by the way, we did put fence up, and the border is becoming more secure. People are now recognizing the truth that there are fewer crossings, and we've ended the catch and release and issues like that."
Bush expressed concern for illegal aliens who risk their lives to come to the United States.
"I don't like it when the law is so antiquated that people who are willing to do hard work become contraband, they get stuffed in the bottom of 18-wheelers in order to come and do a job that others aren't willing to do. I don't think that's right," he said.
Only two days later, the Washington Times reported Bush awarded a $61,200 bonus to Border Patrol Chief David V. Aguilar, who has been criticized by members of his own agency for refusing to support Ramos and Compean after they were sentenced to 11 and 12-year prison sentences, respectively, for shooting at an illegal alien drug dealer while he attempted to smuggle 750 pounds of marijuana across the border.
Aguilar made headlines in April 2007 when 100 top leaders of the National Border Patrol Council endorsed a no-confidence resolution against him, citing the cases of Ramos and Compean among other complaints.
The union, which represents 11,000 of the U.S. Border Patrol's nonsupervisory field agents, pointed to Aguilar's willingness to believe the "perjured allegations" of criminal aliens over his own agents.
"Front-line Border Patrol agents who risk their lives protecting our borders have every reason to expect that the leadership of their own agency will support them," NBPC President T.J. Bonner said in the statement. "When this does not occur, and instead they are undermined by their so-called leaders, no one should be surprised when they express a loss of confidence in those managers."
In yet another four-page letter acquired by the Washington Times last week, anonymous field agents blasted Aguilar for damaging the agency and jeopardizing agents with his "politically expedient decisions."
There has "never been a time when our chief has been so out of touch with the field, or a time when our chief has become a politician and lost sight of his most important responsibility: to be an advocate for the agency and its mission," the letter stated. "You clearly see yourself as an agent of change for political bosses rather than a person who has been entrusted to ensure that the Border Patrol remains a top-notch law enforcement agency, ready and able to carry out its critical function."
Nonetheless, Bush presented Aguilar with the presidential merit award for "sustained extraordinary accomplishment" amounting to almost twice the starting salary of a Border Patrol agent.
However, the president wasn't as willing to provide detailed answers when asked about the agents during the exit interview.
Gizzi asked Bush, "Are you going to pardon Ramos and Compean? Are you talking with them?"
He replied flatly, "I'm not talking pardons."
http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=85943

History's Most Terrifying Conventional Weapons
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
By Catherine Donaldson-Evans and Paul Wagenseil
Modern conventional weapons, deadly as they are, have no monopoly on terrorizing soldiers and civilians. Many military innovations of the past scared the enemy senseless — especially when only one side got to use them.
"When you defeat someone psychologically, that's really how you win battles," says Pentagon spokesman and artillery officer Lt. Col. Mark Wright. "If [enemy forces] think they've been beaten, they're going to turn and run."
Here, then, are five of the most terrifying conventional weapons of all time. Each was effective because it was a surprise introduction to a conflict, permitted essentially no defense, and only one side got to use it — though, as we'll see, that didn't always guarantee victory.
Some historians argue it was crucial to letting the continually dwindling empire — by the end, just the city of Constantinople — survive as long as it did.
The composition of Greek fire was a highly guarded state secret, one that was lost forever when the Ottoman Turks finally captured Constantinople in 1453. Modern historians speculate it contained some sort of petroleum, or possibly phosphorus.
It burned on water, could be shot in any direction and was packaged into grenades and cannonballs, helping the Byzantines fend off Arabs, Vikings, Crusaders, various Turks and all manner of Italians.
It could also be hurled by catapults over city walls or dumped on attackers trying to climb them.
But best of all were the specialized bowsprits built into Byzantine naval vessels, which made it appear as if the deadly flames were shooting out of the mouths of terrifying metal dragons, lions or other fierce animals.
It wasn't "so much the lethality as the fear of the flames," explains Wright. "It was very effective at sea — you could throw it on the enemy's ships and burn them down."
Napalm: This mixture of gasoline and a thickening agent is similar to Greek fire and is best known for use against Viet Cong supply lines by American forces during the Vietnam War. It was actually first used toward the end of World War II against German and Japanese positions.
American pilots noticed its effectiveness in terrifying the enemy during the Korean War, remarking that North Korean troops would surrender to aircraft following napalm attacks. The French used it against the Viet Minh, the Viet Cong's predecessors, later in the 1950s.
Napalm is so effective because it sticks to anything it hits and burns at about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit for up to 10 minutes. There's little soldiers or civilians hit by it can do except hope to survive.
The Gatling gun: Briefly used by Union forces during the American Civil War, the first mass-production machine gun came into wide use in the 1870s and 1880s by European armies spreading their power across Africa and Asia in the race for empire.
The British used it to mow down Zulu tribesmen; the Russians did the same to nomadic horsemen on the Central Asian steppe.
It was less effective against modern armies. Much too heavy to be carried by hand, the Gatling gun was mounted on wheels like a cannon and cranked by the operator to turn the six firing barrels around a central axis as a second man stood to hand-feed the bullets.
This exposed its crew to rifle fire, and the huge amount of gunsmoke it gave off meant the crew often couldn't see what it was shooting at.
By the turn of the 20th century, the Gatling gun was being replaced by the more efficient, fully automatic Maxim gun and its derivatives, all of which saw much use in World War I.
But the Gatling principle came back after World War II, when American weapons designers mounted rapid-fire revolving-barrel guns on aircraft; the AC-130 Spectre and Spooky gunships and A-10 "Warthog" ground-support aircraft both use modern Gatling guns.
The Paris gun: This long-barreled artillery piece deployed by the Germans during World War I killed relatively few people, but because its range was so long — 75 to 80 miles — it told the citizens of Paris, far from the front lines, that the war could get to them too.
By the standards of the time, the Paris gun was truly a superweapon. Its barrel was over 100 feet long, it was mounted on a railway carriage manned by naval gunners and its shells tore away so much of the rifling during firing that sequentially wider shells had to be used until the barrel was completely torn up and had to be replaced.
Once fired, each shell reached an altitude of 25 miles, the edge of the stratosphere, where frictional forces were minimal, enabling them to travel further than any previous artillery weapon — so far that German gunners had to adjust their aim to compensate for the rotation of the Earth.
The first shells began landing in Paris in mid-March 1918, and locals, having heard neither aircraft nor guns, initially assumed they'd been bombed by a high-altitude blimp. The biggest loss of life came on March 29 when a shell hit a church during Good Friday services; 88 were killed.
"For a city the size of Paris, it was just a terror weapon," says Wright. "It didn't paralyze the city and didn't shut anything down, but it was a terrifying weapon to be able to reach out that far."
Fortunately for the French, the Paris gun could fire only about 20 shells per day and constantly needed to be overhauled. By the time it had to be moved out of range in the face of advancing Allied forces in August 1918, it had fired about 350 shells in total, killing 250 people over five months.
Although the Paris gun was dismantled and destroyed by the Germans to prevent its capture by the Allies, enough was known about it so that it influenced later designs. One joint U.S.-Canadian descendent project during the 1960s was used for low-cost ballistics tests.
That project's main designer, Gerald Bull, later became a renegade weapons peddler, selling long-range howitzers to South Africa and Iraq among others.
He was assassinated in Brussels in 1990, possibly by Israel's Mossad intelligence agency or by its Iranian counterpart, as he was trying to develop a 500-foot-long gun for Saddam Hussein.
The V-2 rocket: Germany's famed "revenge weapon" was the first ballistic missile to be used in wartime; its predecessor, the V-1 or "buzz bomb," was the first effective cruise missile. The entire early U.S. space program, and most of the Soviet one as well, was based on the V-2.
Early research on what later became the V-2 began long before the war. The first successful launch was in late 1942, but that was a fluke because almost all the other launches blew up in mid-air.
Hitler was rightly less than impressed with early tests, dismissing the V-2 as too expensive and inaccurate, but the airburst problem was eventually solved and mass production began in early 1944 at a slave-labor factory deep in central Germany.
Nearly 2,000 had been built before the first V-2 was launched into Paris on Sept. 8, 1944, causing little damage. Later that same day, two landed on London, killing three people, and for the next few months, the rocket war was on.
The V-2 was technically astonishing. Its liquid-fuel engines cut off about a minute after launch, their timing precisely controlled by an analog computer.
From then on it was mostly physics as the 50-foot, 27,000-pound rocket soared to the edge of space 55 miles up, then came down so fast it broke the sound barrier.
"The old V-1 [missiles] could be shot down," explains Wright. "The V-2 traveled at supersonic speeds and couldn't be tracked, couldn't be shot down."
Some V-2 launch teams were even equipped with long-range radio transmitters that pointed straight at the target, allowing the missile's receivers to home in by adjusting its four tailfins.
Its range was about 200 miles, and specially designed trailers meant it could be launched by mobile teams from anywhere.
Popular culture has fixed the notion of the V-2 as a weapon directed mainly against London, but it was the strategically key Belgian port of Antwerp that took even more hits, especially after the Germans failed to retake the city during the Battle of the Bulge at the end of 1944.
Once a V-2 was launched, there was little that could be done in defense. Early attempts to bombard them with anti-aircraft fire as they came down proved unsuccessful; there is one account of an American bomber downing one it happened to catch upon launch.
Countermeasures focused on destroying the launch facilities, but many were operated by highly mobile teams hiding in forests. (Submarine launches, planned for use against American coastal cities, passed tests but never came to fruition.)
Allied ground advances ended the V-2 launches in March 1945, when the rockets were either captured or moved out of range.
More than 3,000 V-2s had been launched against Western targets, and more than 7,000 people had died as a result.
But the ratio of deaths to losses made the V-2 a failure in terms of costs and benefits, especially since it did nothing to turn the tide of the war.
Far less lucky than the residents of London and Antwerp were the estimated 20,000 Russian, Polish and French slave laborers who were starved, hanged or simply worked to death as they built V-1 and V-2 missiles at the Mittelbau-Dora slave-labor camp in the central German mountains.
The real beneficiary of the V-2 program was the U.S. military, which spirited dozens of its scientists and engineers , including project leader Wernher von Braun, across the Atlantic, where they became the foundation of the U.S. ballistic-missile program and then later of NASA.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,476045,00.html

Take a pay cut and keep your jobs, bosses tell Vauxhall workers By Ray Massey
12th January 2009
Bosses at parent company General Motors said last night that they had reached agreement with union leaders across Europe for a 'new deal' to protect jobs.
Hans Demant, managing director and vice president of engineering at GM Europe, said: 'We have an umbrella agreement. We are looking at less work and less pay.'
Vauxhall cars are parked outside the cars giant's Ellesmere Port factory as workers will not face redundancy as long as they take a pay cut
It comes as talks between Vauxhall bosses and Business Secretary Lord Mandelson for a potential bailout through loans continue.
General Motors employs around 4,000 at the Vauxhall factory in Ellesmere Port, which produces the Astra, and a vanmaking factory in Luton.
Unions and car bosses have agreed that the among the flexible options will be: workers taking pay cuts; sabbaticals on 30 per cent salary; four- day weeks, and cuts to shifts.
Mr Demant said: 'As long as these agreements are in place we will not go for forced redundancies.'
The deal allows Vauxhall to retain a trained workforce throughout the economic downturn, while giving workers a measure of job security.
Vauxhall's Ellesmere Port plant has been chosen to build the nextgeneration Astra, and needs to keep its workforce intact as production picks up when the economy begins to recover.
But already it has been forced to shutdown for more than 40 days in total, including an extended break over Christmas.
The car maker has also exhausted its flexible working hours and has been looking for alternatives to laying-off workers which until now it has described as a 'last resort'. Vauxhall last night confirmed that a 'menu' of potential cost-saving measures had been agreed.
Mr Demant also confirmed that he and his team had been talking to Lord Mandelson and other ministers and MPs over their request for credit and loans to see them through the crisis.
But he said: 'There are continuing contacts to Mandelson. We are looking for support in the UK. But we have probably not progressed as far in the UK as in other countries.'
The U.S. government will decide by March 31 whether to bail out General Motors if its restructuring plan is accepted.
Cutting jobs and other costs is now the 'top priority' as firms wake up to the full effects of recession, the CBI will warn today. A survey of financial services organisations found almost half were planning to axe staff in the next three months.
But the business lobby group warned staff are likely to stay with the same employer rather than looking to change jobs, which means fewer vacancies for those made redundant.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1112313/Take-pay-cut-jobs-bosses-tell-Vauxhall-workers.html

Central bankers expect global recovery in 2010
ReutersPublished: January 12, 2009
BASEL, Switzerland: The global economy will recover in 2010 from a sharp slowing this year as official steps to lift growth hit home, senior central bankers said on Monday.
The European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet, who chaired talks here on the world economy, said restoring confidence was crucial as emerging markets join the industrialized world in feeling the impact of the financial crisis.
"The global economy will slow down significantly in 2009 with the industrialized economies having negative figures," he said, summing up the talks at the Bank for International Settlements.
Trichet, who also chairs the Group of 10 central bankers from leading economies, said lower oil prices, extra government spending and central bank steps to boost economies would have a positive impact in the longer term. "That was one of the reasons why we globally have the sentiment that 2010 is the year of the pick-up, a significant pick-up," he said.
Major central banks have slashed interest rates in the last few months and boosted liquidity as the financial market crisis spread and dragged major developed economies, including Japan, the United States and the euro zone, into recession.
The International Monetary Fund predicts global growth this year of just 2.2 percent, down from an estimated 3.7 percent in 2008, and other major institutions have similarly low expectations.
Governments have also raised public spending to support growth, with Britain pledging extra money to help jobs and U.S. President-elect Barack Obama promising to restructure a financial rescue plan to save more families from home foreclosures.
Trichet said central bank and government action so far had helped to avoid a market "meltdown" but markets had not yet fully taken on board all the measures undertaken and confidence was still lacking.
"In the present situation more than ever confidence is of the essence," he said. A "'large part of the slowing down that is been observed comes from the confidence channel. It is important for all authorities to do whatever is appropriate to preserve, to reinforce confidence."
In general, central bankers were still keen to make sure inflation expectations remained solidly anchored, he said.
Trichet made no comment on ECB interest rates before a policy meeting on Thursday, when analysts expect the Governing Council to cut euro zone rates - currently the highest in the Group of 7 - by another 50 basis points to 2.0 percent.
The U.S. Federal Reserve, which has slashed its rates close to zero, is supplementing cuts with unconventional steps such as buying up assets. But Trichet said there was no talk of central banks taking coordinated steps in this regard.
Officials attending the talks, including the Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and the Bank of Japan governor Masaaki Shirakawa - had no discussion about currency rates, Trichet said.
The January BIS talks were also attended by commercial bank chiefs, as usual for the first meeting of the year, and policymakers from emerging market economies including Brazil, Mexico, India and China.
China's central bank head, Zhou Xiaochuan, said the economy was slowing moderately but the bank was still basing its economic policies on the assumption of 8 percent GDP growth this year.
"It's a moderate slowdown. Certainly we will keep a very good vigilance to prevent a sharp slowdown but up to now I think we can see in comparison with many other countries it is a moderate slowdown," he told reporters at the meetings.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/12/business/12bis.php

Preventing colds may be as easy as vitamin ZZZ
January 12, 2009 - 7:48pm
By CARLA K. JOHNSON
CHICAGO (AP) - Fluff up the pillows and pull up the covers. Preventing the common cold may be as easy as getting more sleep. Researchers paid healthy adults $800 to have cold viruses sprayed up their noses, then wait five days in a hotel to see if they got sick. Habitual eight-hour sleepers were much less likely to get sick than those who slept less than seven hours or slept fitfully.
"The longer you sleep, the better off you are, the less susceptible you are to colds," said lead author Sheldon Cohen, who studies the effects of stress on health at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University.
Prior research has suggested that sleep boosts the immune system at the cell level. This is the first study to show small sleep disturbances increasing the risk of getting sick, said Dr. Michael Irwin, who researches immune response at the University of California, Los Angeles, and was not involved in the study.
"The message is to maintain regular sleep habits because those are really critical for health," Irwin said.
During cold season, staying out of range of sneezing relatives and co-workers may be impossible. The study, appearing Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine, mimicked those conditions by exposing participants to a common cold virus _ rhinovirus _ and most became infected with it.
But not everyone suffered cold symptoms.
The people who slept less than seven hours a night in the weeks before they were exposed to the virus were three times more likely to catch a cold than those who slept eight hours or more.
To find willing cold victims, researchers placed ads and recruited 78 men and 75 women, all healthy and willing to go one-on-one against the virus. They ranged in age from 21 to 55.
First, their sleep habits were recorded for two weeks. Every evening, researchers interviewed them by phone about their sleep the night before. Subjects were asked what time they went to bed, what time they got up, how much time they spent awake during the night and if they felt rested in the morning.
Then they checked into a hotel where the virus was squirted up their noses. After five days, the virus had done its work, infecting 135 of the 153 volunteers. But only 54 people got sick.
Researchers measured their runny noses by weighing their used tissues. They tested for congestion by squirting dye in the subjects' noses to see how long it took to get to the back of their throats.
Sleeping fitfully also was tied to greater risk of catching a cold. Those who tossed and turned more than 8 percent of their time in bed were five times more likely to get sick than those who were sleepless only 2 percent of the time.
Surprisingly, feeling rested was not linked to staying well. Cohen said he's not sure why that is, other than feeling rested is more subjective than recalling bedtime and wake-up time.
The researchers took into account other factors that make people more susceptible such as stress, smoking and drinking, and lack of exercise, and they still saw a connection between sleep and resisting a cold.
Cold symptoms like congestion and sore throat are caused by the body's fight against a virus, rather than the virus itself, Cohen said. People whose bodies make the perfect amount of infection-fighting proteins called cytokines will not even know they are fighting a virus. But if their bodies make too many, they feel sick.
Sleep may fine-tune the body's immune response, Cohen said, helping regulate the perfect response.
Prior research has tied lack of sleep to greater risk of weight gain, heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke and diabetes.
Dr. Daniel Buysse, a sleep researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, said spending too much time in bed can lead to more interrupted sleep, which in this study "seems to be even worse than short sleep" for increasing the risk of catching a cold.
If it takes a long time to fall asleep or if you are restless during the night, "you would probably benefit from spending a little LESS time in bed," Buysse said in an e-mail. "If you fall asleep instantly, have no wakefulness during the night, and are sleepy during the day, you would probably benefit from spending a little MORE time in bed."
Buysse was not directly involved in the research, although he commented on an early draft of the study. The study was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the MacArthur Foundation.
Harvard sleep researcher Sat Bir Khalsa said people do not need to turn to prescription sleep aids to improve their sleep. Setting a regular bedtime, moving computers and televisions out of the bedroom and, when restless, getting out of bed for a while and doing something soothing can help. His research focuses on treating insomnia with yoga.
As preventive measures, vitamin C and herbal supplements have not lived up to their reputation in rigorous studies. Cohen said research has shown people who get more exercise, drink moderately and have lower stress also get fewer colds.
On the Net:
Archives: http://www.archinternmed.com
http://wtop.com/?nid=106&sid=1571289

Thai Cabinet approves $3.3 bln stimulus plan
January 13, 2009 - 9:57am
By AMBIKA AHUJA
Associated Press Writer
BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) - Thailand's Cabinet approved a 115 billion baht ($3.3 billion) economic stimulus package Tuesday that it hopes will shore up an economy battered by the global downturn and recent political turmoil.
Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said the money will be allocated to help the poor deal with the economic downturn and to rejuvenate a tourism industry battered by months of political unrest. Anti-government protests culminated with a weeklong seizure of Bangkok's airports in November, stranding more than 300,000 travelers.
"The measures are based on the idea of reviving the economy directly, that is, adding money in people's pockets," Abhisit told reporters after a weekly Cabinet meeting. "Giving money directly to people is the most effective way. It will lead to more spending that will help industrial, agricultural and business sectors."
The stimulus package was approved in principle and will be officially approved by the Cabinet next week, Abhisit said. The measures will then be submitted to Parliament on Jan. 28.
hThe funds will be used to support social security, free education programs, create jobs and provide low-interest loans to farmers.
The government will also extend a package of economic stimulus measures implemented by the previous government by another six months. These include lower water and electricity charges, free rides on some of Bangkok's public buses and free third-class train rides nationwide.
A portion of the funds will be doled out in a one-off allowance of 2,000 baht ($57) to several millions of low-income employees and government officials, said Labor Minister Phaithoon Kaeothong. Only those who earn less than 14,000 baht ($400) a month will qualify.
Abhisit had earlier said his government would retain populist policies _ including cheap credit and health care _ implemented under exiled former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who has loomed over Thai politics even after being ousted by a military coup in 2006.
Abhisit, 44, was voted to be the new prime minister last month after a court dissolved the party leading the previous government.
A Cabinet statement said the stimulus package will also be used to help promote the country's battered tourism industry.
The Bank of Thailand has estimated the country would lose 290 billion baht ($8.3 billion) as a result of the weeklong blockade of Bangkok's two main airports by protesters who called for the ouster of the previous government packed with Thaksin's allies. It said the shutdown of the airports would deter 3.4 million tourists from visiting the country.
Southeast Asia's second-largest economy is likely to grow between 0.5 percent and 2.5 percent in 2009 _ a sharp slowdown from last year _ because of declining exports and weak domestic demand, the central bank said earlier this month.
The central bank is expected to cut its benchmark interest rate on Wednesday.
http://wtop.com/?nid=111&sid=1572180