Saudis order 40 lashes for elderly woman for minglingCNN -- A Saudi Arabian court has sentenced a 75-year-old Syrian woman to 40 lashes, four months imprisonment and deportation from the kingdom for having two unrelated men in her house, according to local media reports.
According to the Saudi daily newspaper Al-Watan, troubles for the woman, Khamisa Mohammed Sawadi, began last year when a member of the religious police entered her house in the city of Al-Chamli and found her with two unrelated men, "Fahd" and "Hadian."
Fahd told the policeman that he had the right to be there, because Sawadi had breast-fed him as a baby and was therefore considered to be a son to her in Islam, according to Al-Watan. Fahd, 24, added that his friend Hadian was escorting him as he delivered bread for the elderly woman. The policeman then arrested both men.
Saudi Arabia follows a strict interpretation of Islam called Wahhabism and punishes unrelated men and women who are caught mingling.
The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, feared by many Saudis, is made up of several thousand religious policemen charged with duties such as enforcing dress codes, prayer times and segregation of the sexes. Under Saudi law, women face many restrictions, including a strict dress code and a ban on driving. Women also need to have a man's permission to travel.
Al Watan obtained the court's verdict and reported that it was partly based on the testimony of the religious police. In his ruling, the judge said it had been proved that Fahd is not the Sawadi's son through breastfeeding.
The court also doled out punishment to the two men. Fahd was sentenced to four months in prison and 40 lashes; Hadian was sentenced to six months in prison and 60 lashes. In a phone call with Al Watan, the judge declined to comment and suggested the newspaper review the case with the Ministry of Justice.
Sawadi told the newspaper that she will appeal, adding that Fahd is indeed her son through breastfeeding.
The case has sparked anger in Saudi Arabia.
"It's made everybody angry because this is like a grandmother," Saudi women's rights activist Wajeha Al-Huwaider told CNN. "Forty lashes -- how can she handle that pain? You cannot justify it."
This is not the first Saudi court case to cause controversy.
In 2007, a 19-year-old gang-rape victim in the Saudi city of Qatif was sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in prison for meeting with an unrelated male. The seven rapists, who had abducted the woman and man, received sentences ranging from 10 months to five years in prison. The case sparked international outrage and Saudi King Abdullah subsequently pardoned the "Qatif Girl" and the unrelated male.
Many Saudis are hopeful that the Ministry of Justice will be reformed. Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz announced in February a major Cabinet reshuffling in which many hard-line conservatives, including the head of the commission, were dismissed and replaced with younger, more moderate members.
The new appointments represented the largest shakeup since King Abdullah took power in 2005 and were welcomed in Saudi Arabia as progressive moves on the part of the king, whom many see as a reformer. Among ministers who've been replaced is the minister of justice.
The actions of the religious police have come under increased scrutiny in Saudi Arabia recently, as more and more Saudis urge that the commission's powers be limited. Last week, the religious police detained two male novelists for questioning after they tried to get the autograph of a female writer, Halima Muzfar, at a book fair in Riyadh, the capital of the kingdom.
"This is the problem with the religious police," added Al-Huwaider, "watching people and thinking they're bad all the time. It has nothing to do with religion. It's all about control. And the more you spread fear among people, the more you control them. It's giving a bad reputation to the country."
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/03/09/saudi.arabia.lashes/index.html?iref=mpstoryview
U.S. healthcare system pinched by nursing shortageWASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. healthcare system is pinched by a persistent nursing shortage that threatens the quality of patient care even as tens of thousands of people are turned away from nursing schools, according to experts.
The shortage has drawn the attention of President Barack Obama. During a White House meeting on Thursday to promote his promised healthcare system overhaul, Obama expressed alarm over the notion that the United States might have to import trained foreign nurses because so many U.S. nursing jobs are unfilled.
Democratic U.S. Representative Lois Capps, a former school nurse, said meaningful healthcare overhaul cannot occur without fixing the nursing shortage. "Nurses deliver healthcare," Capps said in a telephone interview.
An estimated 116,000 registered nurse positions are unfilled at U.S. hospitals and nearly 100,000 jobs go vacant in nursing homes, experts said.
The shortage is expected to worsen in coming years as the 78 million people in the post-World War Two baby boom generation begin to hit retirement age. An aging population requires more care for chronic illnesses and at nursing homes.
"The nursing shortage is not driven by a lack of interest in nursing careers. The bottleneck is at the schools of nursing because there's not a large enough pool of faculty," Robert Rosseter of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing said in a telephone interview.
Nursing colleges have been unable to expand enrollment levels to meet the rising demand, and some U.S. lawmakers blame years of weak federal financial help for the schools.
Almost 50,000 qualified applicants to professional nursing programs were turned away in 2008, including nearly 6,000 people seeking to earn master's and doctoral degrees, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing said.
PAY DIFFERENCES
One reason for the faculty squeeze is that a nurse with a graduate degree needed to teach can earn more as a practicing nurse, about $82,000, than teaching, about $68,000.
Obama called nurses "the front lines of the healthcare system," adding: "They don't get paid very well. Their working conditions aren't as good as they should be."
The economic stimulus bill Obama signed last month included $500 million to address shortages of health workers. About $100 million of this could go to tackling the nursing shortage. There are about 2.5 million working U.S. registered nurses.
Separately, Senator Dick Durbin and Representative Nita Lowey, both Democrats, have introduced a measure to increase federal grants to help nursing colleges.
Peter Buerhaus, a nursing work force expert at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, said the nursing shortage is a "quality and safety" issue. Hospital staffs may be stretched thin due to unfilled nursing jobs, raising the risk of medical errors, safety lapses and delays in care, he said.
A study by Buerhaus showed that 6,700 patient deaths and 4 million days of hospital care could be averted annually by increasing the number of nurses. "Nurses are the glue holding the system together," Buerhaus said.
Addressing the nursing shortage is important in the context of healthcare reform, Buerhaus added. Future shortages could drive up nurse wages, adding costs to the system, he said.
And if the health changes championed by Obama raise the number of Americans with access to medical care, more nurses will be needed to help accommodate them, Buerhaus said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE5270VC20090308
Scientists explain why they plagiarize South Korea's stem cell scientist Hwang Woo-Suk speaks to reporters at the Seoul National University on December 23, 2005 in Seoul, South Korea. Woo-Suk resigned from his position as a university professor after his school stated that he had damaged the scientific community by fabricating the results of at least nine of 11 stem-cell lines he claimed to have created.
Scientists don't often turn the microscope on themselves, and when they do, the results sometimes prove disappointing.
"It's just too easy to cut and paste these days," says Harold Garner of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, an expert of scientific plagiarism.
In a report in the current journal Science, his team lists excuses offered by "potential" plagiarists, authors of studies in which the text was, on average, 86.2% similar to previously-published work. Last year, the same team reported in Nature that a sample of the federal government's PubMed database of studies suggests about 1 in 200 papers is plagiarized.
"Over time, the responses just got crazier and crazier," says Tara Long, Garner's colleague at Texas Southwestern. "There's every excuse in the book, from 'my hard drive crashed' to 'the other guy did it.' "
The team used a computer program they wrote called "eTBLAST" (available online) to detect about 9,000 suspicious duplicates from PubMed. The team then sent out 163 questionnaires to potential plagiarists and authors of copied works on the list, and to editors of the journals that published the studies. They received 144 replies.
"The reactions by the respondents were intense and diverse," notes the study, with 93% of the plagiarism victims unaware and "appreciative." Potential plagiarists were "more varied" in their responses:
•28% denied plagiarism
•35% admitted wrongdoing and expressed remorse
•22% were from co-authors "claiming no involvement in the writing of the manuscript."
•Others claimed they didn't know their names were on the studies.
"It was a joke, a bad game, an unconscious bet between friends, 10 years ago that such things ... happened. I deeply regret," was one duplicate paper author's response.
"That's my favorite," Long says. The team found the regretful jokester had eight other duplicate papers and was the head of an ethics committee in his country.
"The truth is that it's an equal-opportunity offense," with researchers from all over the world implicated, including a case at Harvard, Long says. However, China and Japan had slightly elevated rates, and some responses complained of lax plagiarism standards overseas.
"The most alarming thing was papers that could affect doctors and patients," Long says. About 42% of the duplicates also contained botched data, calculations or images. Doctors make decisions about treatment, and researchers make decisions about experiments based on the scientific literature, adds Garner, making fudged data in plagiarized studies a concern. "(My) major concern is that false data will lead to changes in surgical practice regarding procedures," was one response from an original paper's author.
The biggest plagiarism concern is self-plagiarism, says Garner, researchers who copy their work again and again, republishing old data in varied journals. The team found those cases about eight times more common than authors ripping off other researchers. "Plainly, scientists are human and they get into desperate situations," he says, likely due to the "publish or perish" requirement for keeping a job at many schools.
A survey in Naturelast June led by Sandra Titus of the federal Office of Research Integrity, which polices federally-funded research, found about 3% of researchers observed scientific misconduct each year, largely faked data but also plagiarism. High-profile cases, such as stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-Suk's faked data or the Bell Lab's prodigy Jan Hendrik Schön's discredited results, have rocked science labs in the last decade.
"Although our numbers can sound like a lot, you have to remember there are 18 million papers in PubMed and more than 95% of studies are painstakingly high-quality efforts," Garner says. "We just need the culture of science to have the same high standards everywhere."
Some potential plagiarists' responses to the questionnaire (from Science):
•" I was not aware of the fact I am required to take such permission."
•"There are probably only 'x' amount of word combinations that could lead to 'y' amount of statements. ... I have no idea why the pieces are similar, except that I am sure I do not have a good enough memory —and it is certainly not photographic — to have allowed me to have 'copied' his piece .... I did in fact review (the earlier article) for whatever journal it was published in."
•"I know my careless mistake resulted in a severe ethical issue. I am really disappointed with myself as a researcher."
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/2009-03-07-plagiarize-scientists_N.htm
Mexican cartels infiltrate HoustonRecent arrests in a mistaken killing point to the perilous presence of gangs
The order was clear: Kill the guy in the Astros jersey.
But in a case of mistaken identity, Jose Perez ended up dead. The intended target — the Houston-based head of a Mexican drug cartel cell pumping millions of dollars of cocaine into the city — walked away.
Perez, 27, was just a working guy, out getting dinner late on a Friday with his wife and young children at Chilos, a seafood restaurant on the Gulf Freeway.
His murder and the assassination gone awry point to the perilous presence of Mexican organized crime and how cartel violence has seeped into the city.
Arrests came in December when police and federal agents got a break in the 2006 shooting as they charted the relationship and rivalries between at least five cartel cells operating in Houston. A rogue’s gallery of about 100 names and mug shots taken at Texas jails and morgues offers a blueprint for Mexican organized crime.
Houston has long been a major staging ground for importing illegal drugs from Mexico and shipping them to the rest of the United States, but a recent Department of Justice report notes it is one of 230 cities where cartels maintain distribution networks and supply lines.
At Chilos, the real crime boss was sitting at another table, as were two spotters. The hitman waited in the parking lot for Perez to leave the restaurant.
“I just remember that guy coming up to us and he started shooting and shooting and shooting and never stopped,” said Norma Gonzalez, Perez’s widow. He was hit twice.
“I know they will pay for what they have done, maybe in the next life,” she said of Perez’s killers. “I don’t know what is going to happen to them in this life.”
Problem ‘far-reaching’
The gangster — captured on surveillance video — blended in with other customers as they gawked at the aftermath. A few months later, he was dead too, gunned down two miles from the restaurant.
“It is here and it has been here, but people don’t want to listen,” Rick Moreno, a Houston police homicide investigator working with the Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI, said of the cartels’ presence in Houston. "It is so far-reaching"
Washington is taking notice, even if the toll on U.S. streets is nowhere near as pervasive as in Mexico, where cartels are locked in a war against one another and with the government.
“International drug trafficking organizations pose a sustained, serious threat to the safety and security of our communities,” U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said. “We can provide our communities the safety and the security that they deserve only by confronting these dangerous cartels head-on without reservation,” he said.
When it comes to tearing into the cartels in Houston, an investigation later code-named Operation Three Stars got quietly under way three years ago, as an undercover DEA agent stood in line at a McDonald’s in north Houston. He listened to a drug trafficker using a two-way radio to set up delivery of $750,000; the man was with his wife and kids, ordering Happy Meals while making the deal.
Shifting alliances
Since then, more than 70 people in Houston have been prosecuted as a result of the ongoing operation and more than $5 million has been seized, as well as about 3,000 pounds of cocaine, according to court documents and law enforcement officers.
How many people are involved in cartel business is unknown, authorities said. Alliances shift quickly, as can the need to shut down to evade the law. Federal agents concede that numbers garnered by the operation pale compared to the cash and drugs pumped through Houston, but contend they’ve headed off countless crimes.
“The public never gets the full picture, they don’t understand these murders, these kidnappings, these violent crimes are directly tied to these organizations,” said Violet Szeleczky, spokeswoman for the DEA regional office in Houston. “A lot of these guys are just real dirtbags.”
Hard to spot connections
In the murky underworld, it takes time and luck to connect dots.
The accused mastermind of the Chilos attack, Jaime Zamora, 38, is charged with capital murder. He lived modestly, worked for Houston’s Parks and Recreation Department and was a Little League volunteer. State prosecutor Colleen Barnett said in court that such a profile was how he avoided detection.
Paul Looney, Zamora’s lawyer, contends the government can’t prove his client has ever touched drugs or drug money, or that he is a crime boss. He added that Zamora had never before been arrested.
“I don’t think there is a chance in hell (the prosecutor) is right about her theory of the case,” Looney said.
Court documents indicate Steven Torres, 26, one of the men charged with helping Zamora with the 2006 killing, confessed “his part involving arranging the murder.” In 2002, he was sentenced to 10 years probation after being convicted of a murder he committed when he was 16.
His lawyer could not be reached.
Authorities, saying it’s tough to spot cartel connections because the gangsters work in several jurisdictions, point to at least seven homicides in the Houston area since 2006, as well as nine home invasions and five kidnappings tied to cartels. They believe there are many more.
Among the unsolved local killings is the death of Pedro Cardenas Guillen, 36, whose last name is considered trafficking royalty. He was shot in the head and left in a ditch off Madden Road, near Fort Bend County.
His uncle is Osiel Cardenas Guillen, reputed head of the powerful Gulf Cartel. He was extradited from Mexico and awaits trial in Houston on charges of drug trafficking, money laundering and threatening to kill federal agents.
Third attempt succeeded
Other victims of what authorities believe are cartel-related murders include a husband and wife who were tortured and shot in the head on Easingwold Drive, in northwest Houston. About 220 pounds of cocaine were later found in their attic.
Some victims were in the drug business and may have owed money; others could be relatives of criminals or innocent victims, authorities say. Santiago “Chago” Salinas, 28, the crime boss who escaped death at Chilos, was killed six months later.
High on cocaine as he answered the door of a room at the Baymont Inn on the Gulf Freeway, he was shot three times in the head.
It was the third and final attempt on the life of the man who’d once been shot in the neck and left for dead in Mexico. His killing may have been the latest payback between rivals slugging it out.
Chago’s brother-in-law was killed in Mexico, as was Zamora’s younger brother, who was known as “Danny Boy” and who was a lieutenant in a trafficking organization, according to authorities. Danny Boy’s boss, a major player in the Sinaloa cartel, also was murdered in Mexico.
Survivors remember
Those who survive the wrath of cartel gangsters don’t forget.
“I thought I was going to die for sure,” recalled David DeLeon, a used-car dealer who was kidnapped on Airline Drive and severely beaten while being held for ransom, also in 2006. He was rescued by Houston police, but not before he was punched, kicked and thrown across a room so much that his face was unrecognizable.
Authorities say the kidnappers were low-ranking thugs working for a cartel cell.
In another instance, men armed with assault rifles attacked a Houston home. The resident used a handgun to kill one and wound another before the survivors left.
Norma Gonzalez, whose husband was killed at Chilos, said she believes he used his body to shield his 4-year-old daughter and infant son. Leaning over her husband in the parking lot, she whispered, “Everything is going to be OK.”
He died minutes later.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6299436.html
I really try to stay out of the politics but i guess i can't do it. Here are two that struck me as interesting. The first one were the entries wrong?
Wikipedia scrubs Obama eligibilityMention of citizenship issues deleted in minutes, 'offending' users banned
Wikipedia, the online "free encyclopedia" mega-site written and edited entirely by its users, has been deleting within minutes any mention of eligibility issues surrounding Barack Obama's presidency, with administrators kicking off anyone who writes about the subject, WND has learned.
A perusal through Obama's current Wikipedia entry finds a heavily guarded, mostly glowing biography about the U.S. president. Some of Obama's most controversial past affiliations, including with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and former Weathermen terrorist Bill Ayers, are not once mentioned, even though those associations received much news media attention and served as dominant themes during the presidential elections last year.
Also completely lacking is any mention of the well-publicized concerns surrounding Obama's eligibility to serve as commander-in-chief.
Indeed, multiple times, Wikipedia users who wrote about the eligibility issues had their entries deleted almost immediately and were banned from re-posting any material on the website for three days.
In one example, Wikipedia user "Jerusalem21" added the following to Obama's page:
"There have been some doubts about whether Obama was born in the U.S. after the politician refused to release to the public a carbon copy of his birth certificate and amid claims from his relatives he may have been born in Kenya. Numerous lawsuits have been filed petitioning Obama to release his birth certificate, but most suits have been thrown out by the courts."
As is required on the online encyclopedia, that entry was backed up by third-party media articles, citing the Chicago Tribune and WorldNetDaily.com
The entry was posted on Feb. 24, at 6:16 p.m. EST. Just three minutes later, the entry was removed by a Wikipedia administrator, claiming the posting violated the websites rules against "fringe" material.
According to Wikipedia rules, however, a "fringe theory can be considered notable if it has been referenced extensively, and in a serious manner, in at least one major publication, or by a notable group or individual that is independent of the theory."
The Obama eligibility issue has indeed been reported extensively by multiple news media outlets. WorldNetDaily has led the coverage. Other news outlets, such as Britain's Daily Mail and the Chicago Tribune have released articles critical of claims Obama may not be eligible. The Los Angeles Times quoted statements by former presidential candidate Alan Keys doubting Obama is eligible to serve as president. Just last week, the Internet giant America Online featured a top news article about the eligibility subject, referencing WND's coverage.
When the user "Jerusalem21" tried to repost the entry about Obama's eligibility a second time, another administrator removed the material within two minutes and then banned the Wikipedia user from posting anything on the website for three days.
Wikipedia administrators have the ability to kick off users if the administrator believes the user violated the website's rules.
Over the last month, WND has monitored several other attempts to add eligibility issues to Obama's Wikipedia page. In every attempt monitored, the information was deleted within minutes and the user who posted the material was barred from the website for three days.
Angela Beesley Starling, a spokeswoman for Wikipedia, explained to WND that all the website's encyclopedia content is monitored by users. She said the administrators who deleted the entries are volunteers.
"Administrators," Starling said, "are simply people who are trusted by the other community members to have access to some extra tools that allow them to delete pages and perform other tasks that help the encyclopedia."
According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia is the seventh most trafficked website on the Internet. A Google search for the words "Barack Obama" brings up the president's Wikipedia page in the top four choices, following two links to Obama's official websites.
Ayers, Wright also missing in Obama's bio
The entire Wikipedia entry on Obama seems to be heavily promotional toward the U.S. president. It contains nearly no criticism or controversy, including appropriate mention of important issues where relevant.
For example, the current paragraph on Obama's religion contains no mention of Wright, even though Obama's association with the controversial pastor was one of the most talked about issues during the presidential campaign.
That paragraph states: "Obama explained how, through working with black churches as a community organizer while in his twenties, he came to understand 'the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change.' He was baptized at the Trinity United Church of Christ in 1988 and was an active member there for two decades."
Ayers is also not mentioned, even where relevant.
WND monitored as a Wikipedia user attempted to add Ayers' name to an appropriate paragraph. One of those additions, backed up with news articles, read as follows:
"He served alongside former Weathermen leader William Ayers from 1994 to 2002 on the board of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, which in 1985 had been the first foundation to fund the Developing Communities Project, and also from 1994 to 2002 on the board of directors of the Joyce Foundation. Obama served on the board of directors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge from 1995 to 2002, as founding president and chairman of the board of directors from 1995 to 1991. Ayers was the founder and director of the Challenge."
Within two minutes that Wikipedia entry was deleted and the user banned from posting on the website for three days, purportedly for adding "Point of View junk edits," even though the addition was well-established fact.
The Wikipedia entry about former President George W. Bush, by contrast, is highly critical. One typical entry reads, "Prior to his marriage, Bush had multiple accounts of alcohol abuse. ... After his re-election, Bush received increasingly heated criticism. In 2005, the Bush administration dealt with widespread criticism over its handling of Hurricane Katrina. In December 2007, the United States entered the second-longest post-World War II recession."
The entry on Bush also cites claims that he was "favorably treated due to his father's political standing" during his National Guard service." It says Bush served on the board of directors for Harken and that questions of possible insider trading involving Harken arose even though a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation concluded the information Bush had at the time of his stock sale was not sufficient to constitute insider trading.
http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=91114
I guess this following article means he does not agree with doing it or that he did not vote for it and won't continue the practice. Just because it does not happen on his watch does not mean anything. The Stem cell reasearch did not happen on his watch, but he is reversing that and Gitmo, did not happen on his watch but he plans on closing it? Does he think we are stupid?
Obama makes Oval Office call to reporters Joe Curl (View Blog)
POSTED March 08 2009 9:48 AM
President Obama was so concerned that he had appeared to dismiss a question from New York Times reporters about whether he was a socialist that he called the newspaper from the Oval Office to clarify his policies.
"It was hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question," he told reporters, who had interviewed the president aboard Air Force One on Friday.
Opening the unusual presidential call to reporters by saying that there was "just one thing I was thinking about as I was getting on the copter," he said it wasn't he who started the federal government's intervention into the nation's financial system.
"I did think it might be useful to point out that it wasn’t under me that we started buying a bunch of shares of banks. It wasn’t on my watch. And it wasn’t on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement -– the prescription drug plan -- without a source of funding. And so I think it’s important just to note when you start hearing folks throw these words around that we’ve actually been operating in a way that has been entirely consistent with free-market principles and that some of the same folks who are throwing the word 'socialist' around can’t say the same."
The New York Times asked, "So whose watch are we talking about here?" but Obama wouldn't name names.
"Well, I just think it’s clear by the time we got here, there already had been an enormous infusion of taxpayer money into the financial system. And the thing I constantly try to emphasize to people if that coming in, the market was doing fine, nobody would be happier than me to stay out of it. I have more than enough to do without having to worry the financial system. The fact that we’ve had to take these extraordinary measures and intervene is not an indication of my ideological preference, but an indication of the degree to which lax regulation and extravagant risk taking has precipitated a crisis."
He concluded the brief call by saying, "I think that covers it."
The phone call came after the president was asked aboard his plane: "Are you a socialist as some people have suggested?"
He was clear in his first answer: "You know, let’s take a look at the budget – the answer would be no."
"Is there anything wrong with saying, 'Yes'?" a Times reporter pressed.
"Let’s just take a look at what we’ve done," Obama said, ticking off efforts his administration has made to stabilize the economy. But he acknowledged that, as he told Joe the Plumber, he plans to try to spread the wealth around.
"If you look on the revenue side what we’re proposing, what we’re looking at is essentially to go back to the tax rates that existed during the 1990s when, as I recall, rich people were doing very well. In fact everybody was doing very well. . . . We said that we’d give a tax cut to 95 percent of working Americans. That’s exactly what we have done."
http://washingtontimes.com/weblogs/joe-curl/2009/Mar/08/obama-makes-oval-office-call-reporters/
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