Britain's dishonor: guilty by statistics

BBC NEWS | Health | Global experts slam cot death policy

...On Monday, the Court of Appeal cleared Angela Cannings of murdering her two sons.

The judges said the medical evidence that helped convict the 40-year-old woman was unreliable.

The medical evidence they referred to was 'Meadow's law', espoused by prosecution witness Sir Roy Meadow. He maintains that one cot death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder.

At one trial, he said the chances of two infants from one family dying from cot death was one in 73 million.

The UK government has now ordered a review of 258 cases where parents were convicted of killing their children in light of Monday's ruling.

Thousands of other parents who had a child taken away from them on the basis of similar evidence will also have their case re-examined.

However, experts in Europe and the United States believe Britain's approach to investigating sudden infant death is wrong.

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Your child dies of SIDS, so now you're on the firing line. A second child dies, so now you're guilty. Talk about grading on the curve! I suspect many of those parents were absolutely innocent - even if many or most were guilty. Those people, innocent of crime and cursed by tragedy, then lost their surviving children or went to prison. Those double victimes may say this is as bad as the American system of executing people without just process. Shame on Britain for tolerating this law; one wonders what other similar procedures have been followed. They're almost as low as we are -- ok, not that low.

Poverty in America - NYT Magazine

A Poor Cousin of the Middle Class

Poverty is a peculiar, insidious thing, not just one problem but a constellation of problems: not just inadequate wages but also inadequate education, not just dead-end jobs but also limited abilities, not just insufficient savings but also unwise spending, not just the lack of health insurance but also the lack of healthy households. The villains are not just exploitative employers but also incapable employees, not just overworked teachers but also defeated and unruly pupils, not just bureaucrats who cheat the poor but also the poor who cheat themselves.

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The difference between the Raptors (Republicans) and the Losers (liberals/democrats) is how we consider the "unfit", those who've lost out in a culture of aggressive natural selection. The religious Raptor might say that they have done something to displease God, the secular Raptor that the unfit do not deserve sympathy.

The Loser would say that we need another answer; that a reasonably comfortable life with a hope of happiness should be available to everyone; not luxury, but some happiness, comfort, and security.

U.S. School Segregation Now at '69 Level (washingtonpost.com)

U.S. School Segregation Now at '69 Level (washingtonpost.com)

Half a century after the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of American education, schools are almost as segregated as they were when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, according to a report released today by Harvard University researchers.

The study by the Harvard Civil Rights Project, shows that progress toward school desegregation peaked in the late 1980s as courts concluded that the goals of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education had largely been achieved. Over the past 15 years, the trend has been in the opposite direction, and most white students now have "little contact" with minority students in many areas of the country, according to the report.

"We are celebrating a victory over segregation at a time when schools across the nation are becoming increasingly segregated," noted the report, which was issued on the eve of the holiday celebrating King's birthday.

Triggered by a civil rights case in Topeka, Kan., the Brown decision marked the start of three decades of intensive efforts by the federal government to integrate public schools, first through court orders that opened white schools to minority students and later through busing. Its most dramatic impact was in southern states, where the percentage of blacks attending predominantly white schools increased from zero in 1954 to 43 percent in 1988.

By 2001, according to the Harvard data, the figure had fallen to 30 percent, or about the level in 1969, the year after King's assassination.

"We are losing many of the gains of desegregation," said Harvard professor Gary Orfield, the primary author of the report. "We are not back to where we were before Brown, but we are back to when King was assassinated."

The Harvard study suggests that Hispanic students are even more segregated than African American students, while Asian Americans are the most integrated ethnic group in the country. The increase in Latino segregation has been particularly marked in western states, where more than 80 percent of Latinos attend predominantly minority schools, compared with 42 percent in 1968.

Despite the national trend toward resegregation, there are significant differences among states and regions, Orfield said. Maryland is one of the most "rapidly resegregating states" in the country, he said, partly because of the phasing out of court-ordered busing in Prince George's and Baltimore counties and partly because of migration patterns.

The District of Columbia has long been one of the most segregated school districts in the nation, a trend accentuated in recent years by the exodus of white middle-class families.

The most segregated states for black students are New York and Illinois; the most integrated are Kentucky and Washington. For Latinos, the most segregated states are New York and California; the most integrated states are Wyoming and Ohio. Virginia ranks somewhere in the middle for both African Americans and Hispanics.

According to Orfield and other researchers, the resegregation trend picked up momentum as a result of a 1991 Supreme Court decision that authorized a return to neighborhood schools instead of busing, even if such a step would lead to segregation. The consequences were particularly dramatic in school districts such as Prince George's County's that were declared "unitary" by the courts, meaning that they had made a good-faith effort at integration.

According to the Harvard data, the average black student in Prince George's County attends schools with 12 percent fewer white students than a decade ago. In Charlotte, black exposure to white students has dropped by 16 percent, and in DeKalb County, Ga., it has declined by 72 percent.

"Most schools in this country are overwhelmingly black or overwhelmingly white," said Elise Boddie, head of the education department of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., which litigates civil rights cases. "We have still not committed ourselves as a country to the mandate of Brown versus Board of Education. If these trends are not reversed, we could easily find ourselves back to 1954."

The report said that a massive migration of black and Latino families toward the suburbs is producing "hundreds of new segregated and unequal schools and frustrating the dream of middle-class minority families for access to the most competitive schools." It predicted that the suburbs soon could be threatened with the problems of "ghettoization" that have already affected big urban areas.

Such a development, the report warned, would bring the nation closer to the "nightmare" of "two school systems" and "two housing markets" mentioned by King in one of his last public appearances.

"There have been considerable gains in some areas, such as the number of [minority] students attending college," said John Jackson, education director for the NAACP. "But you still find many school districts across the country that are segregated and unequal. The implications are the same as in the '50s: Minority students in high poverty areas are not getting a quality education.

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The law of unintended consequences. For integration to have worked we would have had to put vast amounts of money into the educational system; more than equalizing funding even as schools merged. We didn't do that.

Faced with a relative decrease in perceived quality of education and fears of increased risk to their children, middle class Euros (anglos, whites) left the cities and wealth Euros enrolled children in private schools. The urban public school system came to resemble the unequal and underfunded Black public schools of the the 1960s.

I don't think preserving busing would have changed things. And I don't think we're getting closer to the "nightmare" of two systems, I think we're already there.

In the meanwhile Euros will be a minority majority soon; we already are in California. So the equation will change again.

I don't know what would have worked for America. If I didn't distrust Republicans so intensely and deeply I'd try vouchers -- but the vouchers would never be adequately funded by this administration -- and special needs children would be abandoned to the wolves.

Give away the software, sell the hardware

New Economy: Can Hardware Rise Above Software?

... For Microsoft, the issue transcends online music. The foundation of Microsoft's power and leverage in the computing industry is based almost entirely on a set of software sockets known as application programmers' interfaces, or A.P.I.'s. It is those A.P.I.'s that other software publishers must adapt to in writing programs for use on Windows machines. By controlling the shape of the sockets, and what can fit into them, Microsoft has a powerful advantage against its competitors.

The Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit in the 1990's was about Silicon Valley's quarrel with Microsoft over control of the A.P.I.'s. During the trial in 1998, Apple's lead software designer, Avi Tevanian, described his company's efforts to persuade PC makers to bundle Apple's QuickTime media software with their machines and how Microsoft demanded that Apple 'knife the baby' - in other words, drop the QuickTime bundling effort.

Now, with the new Apple-Hewlett alliance, Mr. Jobs finally has a QuickTime bundling arrangement. The program, which allows for the playing of video clips on a PC, will be a standard feature of every Hewlett-Packard computer. So will another Apple software technology, Rendezvous, which is an A.P.I. designed to let the computer identify and create links to any printer, camera, music player or other digital device without complicated configuration procedures on the user's part.

Simply put, Mr. Jobs has managed to inject Apple's DNA into the PC world, meaning that it will be increasingly easy for his company to offer PC users any kind of iPod-style device - whether for music or other media - the company may create in the future.

Don't be surprised, in other words, if Mr. Jobs and Apple have many razors in the works.

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Markoff knows, though he didn't say so, that Apple has always made money off hardware. Apple has long given away software (bundled with machines) while controlling what hardware would work with the software. So the iPod is only the continuation of an old business model. What's more novel is Apple's move towards software leasing (.Mac) -- something Microsoft longs to do.

IBM is bundling Linux with its non-PC hardware, so it's been giving away the (free) software and selling hardware for a while.

He's partially right about Quicktime. Yes, HP is bundling. But just as important is that iTunes, freely downloaded by millions, is a trojan horse for QuickTime. That's the bigger bundling. The Rendezvous observation is very important.

Microsoft completely controls the software industry -- with the exception of Linux which has a much smaller revenue stream. The analogy is an organism that totally occupies and ecological niche. Eventually organisms that can't compete move into another niche. Given Microsoft's power the mutations required are considerable -- software costs plummet by a rock. Eventually Microsoft is competing against "free" (not free of course, just that the costs are concealed.)

Alsoft - DiskWarrior - when OS X goes really bad

Alsoft - DiskWarrior

Mad Cow: Casting light in dark places

PCRM >> News and Media Center >> Health News Release Archive

Farmers routinely feed animal remains, blood, and manure—particularly chicken feces—to cattle. Although the USDA prohibits the feeding of ruminant (e.g., cows, sheep, and goats) remains to ruminants, this rule is poorly enforced and does not preclude many other risky practices, including the feeding of blood, manure, and nonruminants (e.g., chickens, pigs, etc.) to cows. Cattle remains are also fed to chickens, whose wastes are then fed back to cows. PCRM recommends a ban on all these practices.

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Those rapid fire cracking sounds you hear are the sounds of "straws breaking backs" across the nation.

The Mad Cow incident is causing some light to be cast into some very dark places. These practices have been revealed in a few books and articles, but mostly we've chosen not to know. Now we know, and even the most fervent Republican doesn't trust this administration to keep our food safe.

Coincidentally, our closest Burger King just closed.

If organic coops were publicly traded, their share prices would be going mad. At the prices that middle class folk will soon be paying for meat we'll be eating a lot less of it. On the other hand, poor people will soon have be able to eat very inexpensive steak -- if they choose.

Globalization and the Export of American Labor: Outsourcing non-IT knowledge work -- now it's the lawyers

Neal St. Anthony, Star Tribune, On business: Outsourcing hits legal services

First it was the apparel workers -- the working class -- who saw their $10-an-hour jobs go overseas.

More recently, the United States has started to export to India the $35,000-a-year customer-service center jobs from the likes of American Express Financial Advisors and $50,000 technical-support positions from IBM and ADC Telecommunications to India and elsewhere where educated, English-speaking workers are hired for a tenth of the cost to communicate with U.S. customers by phone and over the Internet.

Now, six-figure lawyers and legal support staffs are starting to sweat.

At West, the Eagan-based legal-publishing unit of Canada's Thomson Corp., there's a buzz over a small test office in Bombay, India, where Indian lawyers may one day interpret and synthesize U.S. court decisions for subscribers of Westlaw, the online legal network relied upon by thousands of practicing U.S. attorneys.

To date, this work has been the growing province of a group of 150-plus editor-lawyers in Eagan and elsewhere who review court decisions, synopsize them and write "headnotes" for each point of law. This work is then keyed into Westlaw's league-leading database, enabling lawyers to quickly review and cite decisions and other relevant case law in West's venerable classification system.

So far, just a few months into the quiet Indian pilot-office experience, the half-dozen or so Indian lawyers have been doing online interpretation and legal-classification of "unpublished decisions" of U.S. state and lower courts that are not considered big deals -- or "precedential" in legal parlance.

West editor-lawyers, who make up to $100,000 per year, continue to do the "published opinion" work and are editing the work of the Indian lawyers.

The Indian lawyers are trained in British Common Law, different than U.S. law. But they've been brought into West for in-house training, and more through West trainers in Bombay.

Their work so far has been good, and has the West editors "terrified" that the pilot program will blow into a wholesale operation, which would displace lawyers in Eagan and elsewhere making five or more times the Indian lawyers.

Kyle Christensen, a spokesman for the 6,000-employee West unit in Eagan, said the Eagan workforce has been expanded in recent years to accommodate case analysis and headnoting for Westlaw.

And, as part of its expansion to start giving the same treatment to unpublished opinion, West opened the Bombay office to "assess potential improvement in the product and how we might better use outside resources," Christensen said.

"None of the work, to this point, that has been completed in India has made it into any of our publications. It's a test. It's possible that some of the low-end support could work out. The analysis, headnoting, detailed classification will remain in Eagan." he said.

Referring to the Indian office, Christensen said: "They're not actually providing analysis. They're doing some review of how to assign key numbers to administrative law decisions. And they're doing some training on writing headnotes for unpublished decisions."

The West spokesman is quick to add that dozens of West lawyers also work in Minnesota to interpret the legal decisions of British, Spanish, Greek and other courts for lawyers in those countries.

Still, West's Indian office is a toehold in what once was considered an all-American business, immune from the foreign competitors that took manufacturing, and now services jobs, overseas.

The American Lawyer reported recently that General Electric and other U.S. behemoths are starting to use low-cost Indian lawyers to supplant some of the work formerly done by outside U.S. law firms.

A vice president of the Chicago-based outsourcing firm Mindcrest, which has an Indian subsidiary that handles legal work, told the American Lawyer that business is booming for basic research and low-rung work usually done by paralegals and junior lawyers for U.S. corporations and law firms.

Moreover, Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass., the market research firm, predicts that by 2015, more than 489,000 U.S. lawyer jobs -- about 8 percent of the total, will shift to lower-cost countries.

Ironically, a Twin Cities personnel recruiter says the trend will grow because corporations and senior partners at law firms will have a financial incentive to farm out the less-costly boilerplate work now done by junior people.

Ron Kreps, the managing partner of the Minneapolis office of Fulbright & Jaworski, said: "West provides a great service, you bet they do. We can't just rely on a West editor and keynotes, but yes, they get you started. And it's very important that the keynotes are accurate.

"I don't care where the people sit who write them, but I do care that they know U.S. common law and the trends in the U.S. And that's different than British common law. The bigger question is: Can professional services be done offshore? That's the question a lot of professions are worried about."

Globalization, long the nightmare of displaced Minnesota taconite miners, electronics assemblers and North Carolina textile workers, takes on a different wrinkle when it starts to claim not just the job of Jane Lunchpail, but also threatens the jobs of those who were banking on country club memberships.

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Fascinating, an understated and very well written summary. Not surprising; I've been predicting this one for a couple of years. Nice to have confirmation though.

The synthesis and extension of existing "content" (industry term for this type of knowledge) has no regulatory barriers. It requires intellect and domain knowledge, it requires an ability to read but not speak or write English, it does not require physical presence. If the domain knowledge is costly in the US, but substantially less costly overseas, the work will move very quickly. In other words, the barrriers to migration of work in this instance are very low and the incentives are high.

I know of one corporation in the medical content domain who's essentially outsourcing some of their content management and development to a (relatively) "low wage" nation. (In this case English speaking and highly industrialized, but physician wages in many nations are a fraction of US physician wages. The same thing is true for lawyers.)

I think this globalization, which does put my own job at risk, is a great thing for the world. Insofar as we are a part of this world, it's a great thing for us. The challenge for a great leader is to find a way mitigate the great hurt it will do to many people in the US. Injuring the career prospects of lawyers is likely to lead to more change than unemploying blue collar workers and IT professionals. Lawyers are close to politicians, and politicians have the power. The danger is a stupid protectionist response, one that will harm us and the world. The other choice, however, is far too novel for our current administration to consider. One can only pray that a miracle occurs and Bush is displaced from power this year.

Gore on Bush: Orwellian language

NYT, Herbert: Masters of Deception

...Amid cheers, he [Gore] made it clear that the broad interests of the American public are consistently betrayed by the policies and practices of President Bush and his administration. 'They devise their policies with as much secrecy as possible,' he said, 'and in close cooperation with the most powerful special interests that have a monetary stake in what happens. In each case, the public interest is not only ignored, but actively undermined. In each case, they devote considerable attention to a clever strategy of deception that appears designed to prevent the American people from discerning what it is they are actually doing.

'Indeed, they often use Orwellian language to disguise their true purposes. For example, a policy that opens national forests to destructive logging of old-growth trees is labeled Healthy Forest Initiative. A policy that vastly increases the amount of pollution that can be dumped into the air is called the Clear Skies Initiative.

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Orwellian language has been a strong feature of the Republican party since Gingrich. Stalinists and Nazis were past masters of the art; it's important for any power structure where self deception is critical.

Krugman compares the Bush administration to Nixon. I think Bush is a curious blend of Nixon and Reagan; a fascinating combination of a sharp mind, extraordinary discipline, unbounded arrogance, and a total lack of curiousity about the world.

The extraordinarily rapid selection and evolution of the human brain

Evolution of Gene Related to Brain - Nicholas Wade -NYT

A gene that helps determine the size of the human brain has been under intense Darwinian pressure in the last few million years, changing its structure 15 times since humans and chimps separated from their common ancestor, biologists have found.

The gene came to light two years ago, when a disrupted form of it was identified as the cause of microcephaly, a disease in which people are born with an abnormally small cerebral cortex...

The gene, known as the ASPM gene, has been under steady selective pressure throughout the evolution of the great apes, a group that includes orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and humans, Dr. Lahn and colleagues say in an article being published today in the journal Human Molecular Genetics. By contrast, the versions of the gene possessed by monkeys, dogs, cats and cows show no particular sign of being under selective pressure.

The progressive change in the architecture of the ASPM protein over the last 18 million years is correlated with a steady increase in the size of the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain responsible for higher cognitive function, during the ape and human lineage. Evolution has been particularly intense in the five million years since humans split from chimpanzees.

"There has been a sweep every 300,000 to 400,000 years, with the last sweep occurring between 200,000 and 500,000 years ago," Dr. Lahn said, referring to a genetic change so advantageous that it sweeps through a population, endowing everyone with the same improved version of a gene.

But since the last sweep, the gene seems to have been kept stable by what geneticists call purifying selection, the removal of any change that makes a significant difference to the gene's protein product, according to an independent study by Dr. Jianzhi Zhang, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan. Dr. Zhang's report was published last month in the journal Genetics.

Early hominids like Australopithecus africanus, which lived some three million years ago, had a brain that weighed about 420 grams (15 ounces); modern human brains range from 1,350 to 1,450 grams, an increase that Dr. Zhang calls "one of the most rapid morphological changes in evolution." The brain of a typical patient with microcephaly is the same weight as that of an australopithecus, Dr. Zhang noted, as if disruption of the gene negated three million years of development.

Disruption of the ASPM gene was identified as a cause of microcephaly two years ago by Dr. Geoffrey Woods, a British pediatrician, and Dr. Christopher Walsh, a neurogeneticist at the Harvard Medical School. Their finding instantly caught the interest of evolutionary geneticists.

At least five other genes, yet to be identified, can cause microcephaly when disrupted by a mutation, so ASPM is not the only determinant of human brain size. But given what is now known about its evolutionary history, it does seem to be an important one. It acts during fetal development to prescribe the number of cells in the future cerebral cortex.

Most human genes exist as families of similar members, formed when one gene gets accidentally duplicated one or several times. The ASPM gene is "almost unique," Dr. Walsh wrote by e-mail, because in all known animal genomes, it has resisted the usual duplication events and been maintained as a single copy. Single-copy genes can cause serious disease if disrupted by mutation. But their advantage, in terms of evolution, is that "you only have to edit them once to create a lasting change," Dr. Walsh said.

Evidently, the ASPM gene has been heavily edited, but with an apparently fortunate result.

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This is breathtaking work, and it fits in well with a series of articles I've posted about over the past few months. Comparative DNA analysis shows very extensive changes in many genetic determinants of brain morphology and cognitive functions -- all of which appears to have slowed or stopped in the past 150,000 years. We are freshly made.

We don't know what those selection pressures were, but it's commonly assumed that they are due to human interactions, both competitive and cooperative. We've had no significant predators for some time. What was the first mutation that set us down the road that chimpanzees did NOT follow?! It is the fascinating difference, something that causes us to enter into a building pattern of cognitive development. (Science Fiction fans will recognize the "altered evolution" theme of a myriad of good and bad science fiction stories.)

Our "newness" also suggests that cognition may be frail and fragile, with many "new'" genes that may lack redundancy. This is a single copy gene! I suspect cognitive defects (schizophrenia, learning disorders, pervasive developmental delay/autism, etc) are FAR more common in humans than in any other animal. Our cognition is frail.

Can we estimate the capabilities of an Australopithecus from studying persons afflicted with microcephaly?

This research also points the way to the next shocking scandal -- enhanced chimpanzees. I am sure some research in the next 10 years will create a chimpanzee with an enhanced brain -- if they haven't already done so. Let me be among the first to insist on their civil rights.

O'Neill learns Cheney is the mole -- a great story of the Bush White House

Paul O'Neill, Unplugged, or What Would Alexander Hamilton Have Done? NYT OpEd

... Mr. O'Neill's is a woeful tale of what it feels like to sit in the office once occupied by Alexander Hamilton and be subservient to people like Karl Rove and Karen Hughes.

'We need to be better about keeping politics out of the policy process,' Mr. O'Neill told Dick Cheney, his old friend from the Ford administration who had recommended him for the job early on. In this tale, the Treasury secretary repeatedly implores the vice president to foster a more open and rigorous policy-making process in the White House, but to no avail. These scenes are reminiscent of a spy thriller in which the protagonist warns the head of counterintelligence that there is an enemy mole in their midst, only to discover that his confidant is actually the mole.

Long after the reader has figured it out, Mr. O'Neill finally realizes that Mr. Cheney is the leader of the inner circle ....

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O'Neill appears to have been genuinely shocked by how things turned out. How could he have been so naive? He should have known better. If we knew how he fooled himself we might understand how to awaken the other fools.

$1 Billion for Mars, $1.5 billion for marriage.

Bush Plans $1.5 Billion Drive for Promotion of Marriage

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Bush adds $1 billion to NASA's budget and calls it a Mars mission. He then puts 1.5 billion into marriage promotion.

The media goes nuts.

A few points.

1. $1 billion is not going to take us to Mars.
2. $1.5 billion to promote marriage is sheer flaming idiocy.
3. Bush is evidently printing money. No wonder the dollar is falling.

The Maher Arar Case: American Disgrace, take II

The Maher Arar Case: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

Christopher Pyle writes about the Maher Arar case:

Torture by proxy / How immigration threw a traveler to the wolves: On Sept. 26, 2002, U.S. immigration officials seized a Syrian-born Canadian at Kennedy International Airport, because his name had come up on an international watch list for possible terrorists. What happened next is chilling.

Maher Arar was about to change planes on his way home to Canada after visiting his wife's family in Tunisia when he was pulled aside for questioning. He was not a terrorist. He had no terrorist connections, but his name was on the list, so he was detained for questioning. Not ordinary, polite questioning, but abusive, insulting, degrading questioning by the immigration service, the FBI and the New York City Police Department.

He asked for a lawyer and was told he could not have one. He asked to call his family, but phone calls were not permitted. Instead, he was clapped into shackles and, for several days, made to "disappear." His family was frantic.

Finally, he was allowed to make a call. His government expected that Arar's right of safe passage under its passport would be respected. But it wasn't. Arar denied any connection to terrorists. He was not accused of any crimes, but U.S. agents wanted him questioned further by someone whose methods might be more persuasive than theirs.

So, they put Arar on a private plane and flew him to Washington, D.C. There, a new team, presumably from the CIA, took over and delivered him, by way of Jordan, to Syrian interrogators. This covert operation was legal, our Justice Department later claimed, because Arar is also a citizen of Syria by birth. The fact that he was a Canadian traveling on a Canadian passport, with a wife, two children and job in Canada, and had not lived in Syria for 16 years, was ignored. The Justice Department wanted him to be questioned by Syrian military intelligence, whose interrogation methods our government has repeatedly condemned.

The Syrians locked Arar in an underground cell the size of a grave: 3 feet wide, 6 feet long, 7 feet high. Then they questioned him, under torture, repeatedly, for 10 months. Finally, when it was obvious that their prisoner had no terrorist ties, they let him go, 40 pounds lighter, with a pronounced limp and chronic nightmares.

Why was Arar on our government's watch list? Because "multiple international intelligence agencies" had linked him to terrorist groups. How many agencies? Two. What had they reported? Not much.

The Syrians believed that Arar might be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Why? Because a cousin of his mother's had been, nine years earlier, long after Arar moved to Canada. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police reported that the lease on Arar's apartment had been witnessed by a Syrian- born Canadian who was believed to know an Egyptian Canadian whose brother was allegedly mentioned in an al Qaeda document.

That's it. That's all they had: guilt by the most remote of computer- generated associations. But, according to Attorney General John Ashcroft, that was more than enough to justify Arar's delivery to Syria's torturers.

Besides, Ashcroft added, the torturers had expressly promised that they would not torture him.

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I've written about this before. We need the Washington Post or the New York Times to get to the bottom of this. Reporting has been limited to a few blogs. Are the allegations correct?

60 years ago Americans imprisoned Americans with Japanese ancestors -- because of their ancestry. That was a national disgrace. We are again disgracing ourselves.

NYT: Insurance pays $2000 for smoking cessation advice

Focus on ’Prevention’ Divides Cancer Experts: "The 2,000 people, the worried well, who come each year to Memorial Sloan-Kettering's cancer prevention center will learn that many cancers can, in fact, be prevented, and that it is up to them to have the appropriate medical tests and to live right.

For their $2,000 fee, most of which is paid by health insurance, they may be steered to smoking cessation sessions, or watch a cooking demonstration and hear a talk by a nutritionist. They will learn the early signs and symptoms of cancer and they almost certainly will have a cancer screening test.

... Cancer prevention has become a buzzword these days, with some medical centers, like M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, planning entire buildings just for prevention. Its center will open in about a year, big as eight and a half football fields.

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We used to give away this advice for free, at the end of the much-derided annual "physical exam". Apparently at $2000 a pop, paid by health insurance (!?!) it's much more effective. It must come as a shock to patients to learn they can reduce their cancer risk by not smoking.

This fits perfectly with marketing and economics research on pricing theory. If the patients/students were paying out of pocket I'd say this was "medical infotainment" -- marginally useful information that has a high entertainment value. But their insurance companies are paying?! There's something wrong here.

As for Sloan-Kettering and MD Anderson -- this is a variant of what they've done for years; live off the worried well. To some extent this may be subsidizing other care and research they provide.

Space Plan Envisions Apollo As Model (washingtonpost.com)

Space Plan Envisions Apollo As Model (washingtonpost.com)

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I still won't vote for him. He's making it harder though.

BBC - US fears of 'dirty bomb' - homeless men with radium pellets

BBC NEWS | Americas | Fresh US fears of 'dirty bomb'

Scientists have been secretly testing radiation levels in major US cities as part of the latest security alert, the Washington Post has reported.

The newspaper says officials feared a radioactive "dirty bomb" could target New Year celebrations. It says the government sent out dozens of nuclear scientists with detection equipment hidden in briefcases and golf bags to check for radioactive material...

... The first and only alert came in Las Vegas on 29 December, when detection devices picked up a trace of radiation, the newspaper says.

The White House was notified, but the radiation was found to have come from a cigar-sized radium pellet, used to treat cancer, that a homeless man had found and hidden among his belongings.

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Ok ... so substantial hunks of radium pellets are just ... errrr .... lying around? This is supposed to be reassuring? How many cigar sized radium pellets does it take to build a dirty bomb anyway?