good morning. . . a nice deep sleep (that is a benefit of a sole solid bed for sleeping in). . .

yahoo.com.news:

Number of environmental cops decreasing By RITA BEAMISH, Associated Press Writer
2 hours, 1 minute ago



Fewer U.S. environmental cops are tracking criminal polluters these days, their numbers steadily dropping below levels ordered by Congress. They are pursuing fewer environmental crimes in a strategy by the Bush administration to target bigger polluters.

The number of the Environmental Protection Agency's criminal investigators has dropped this year to 174, below the 200-agent minimum required by Congress, even as the EPA's overall criminal enforcement budget rose nearly 25 percent over three years to $48 million, according to EPA records.

An internal memorandum from one of the agency's top lawyers, obtained by The Associated Press, said the EPA is violating the U.S. Pollution Prosecution Act of 1990, which requires the agency to employ at least 200 criminal investigators.

The agency's Criminal Investigation Division, made up of gun- and badge-carrying agents, investigates the most serious environmental violations.

In the legal memo, criminal office counsel Michael Fisher said Congress intended to increase criminal prosecutions under pollution laws by setting minimum staffing levels. Fisher wrote the memo to Assistant Administrator Granta Nakayama. Fisher did not return telephone calls and e-mails from The Associated Press over two days.

"If you have fewer cops on the beat, you end up with fewer cases," said Eric Schaeffer, who resigned as head of EPA's civil enforcement organization in 2002. He has accused the Bush administration of weakening environmental protection.

Schaeffer heads an advocacy group, Environmental Integrity Project, that compared five-year averages of the Bush and Clinton administrations and found a significant decrease in the numbers of criminal pollution investigations and civil lawsuits and the amounts of fines assessed under President Bush.

However, civil settlements requiring pollution control spending increased.

Nakayama acknowledged in an interview with The Associated Press that the number of the EPA's criminal investigators has dropped further, from 179 to 174, since Fisher wrote his memo in February. The reductions stem from transfers and retirements. The agency is accepting applications for four openings.

Nakayama said the EPA is reinvigorating criminal enforcement with an emphasis on pursuing high-impact cases, such as the recent felony air pollution convictions against CITGO Petroleum Corp. and convictions and fines worth millions of dollars against pipe and foundry divisions of McWane Inc. of Birmingham, Ala.

The EPA's overall criminal caseload — investigations that could lead to prosecutions later — is declining, according to the agency's figures. It has opened fewer investigations every year since 2002, when there were 484 new investigations and 216 agents. Last year, the number of new cases fell to 305.

The 1990s saw an overall increase in new criminal investigations and increases in the number of agents during seven of 10 years.

"It is difficult to believe that environmental crime suddenly declined precipitously after Bush took office. It is more likely that the administration's enthusiasm for criminal prosecution declined," said Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce committee, who spearheaded the 1990 law.

In a new investigation, Dingell's committee is looking at EPA's criminal enforcement operations and management, including duties of criminal investigators as well agents in the separate homeland security and protective service units. It also is demanding records from EPA's investigation of past drinking water contamination at Camp Lejeune, the Marine base in North Carolina, which ended with no prosecution.

The EPA acknowledged that criminal investigators sometimes are pulled off cases to check routes and guard EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson when he travels, although an eight-person team separate from the criminal division is dedicated to his protective detail. A 2003 inspector general's report criticized such diversions, first disclosed by the AP and the Sacramento Bee.

Those started after Sept. 11, 2001, when the administrator received bodyguards, and criminal agents for a time helped with other homeland security duties.

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yahoo.com.news:

Panel approves cigarette packs warnings By ANDREW BRIDGES, Associated Press Writer
Wed Jul 25, 6:40 PM ET



Cigarette packs would bear graphic warnings that illustrate the health risks of smoking under a provision added Wednesday to landmark tobacco legislation pending in a Senate committee.

The warnings would mimic those already used in Canada and elsewhere.

"These warnings convey the truth in no uncertain terms," said Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo. Enzi opposes the overall bill, however, saying that it doesn't do enough to support smoking cessation programs.

The amendment was accepted as part of overall legislation that would give the Food and Drug Administration authority for the first time to regulate cigarettes and other tobacco products. The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee began considering the bill Wednesday but delayed final action until Thursday after losing a quorum.

The bill has broad support in the Senate, where 52 Senators have signed on as co-sponsors.

"They recognize that giving FDA authority over tobacco products is essential to effectively addressing the tobacco health crisis," said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.

But some lawmakers opposed the legislation, saying it would overburden an already busy agency.

"FDA is having a very difficult time performing its current responsibilities. To add such an enormous responsibility such as regulating tobacco simply doesn't make sense," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.

An amendment offered by Hatch that would delay implementation of the legislation while its cost and impact on the FDA is studied was defeated 12-9.

The program would be funded by $450 million a year in fees collected from the tobacco industry. The fees work out to an estimated 2.5 cents per pack.

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best never to get started on smoking . . . i say this, now 41, and now a smoker over half my life. . .

bostonherald.com:

Danvers’ co. brain scanner heading to NFL
By Jay Fitzgerald
Boston Herald General Economics Reporter

Thursday, July 26, 2007 - Updated: 02:33 AM EST

The Oakland Raiders this season will test a Danvers company’s new portable CT scanner amid growing concerns that too many current and former National Football League players are suffering from the effects of devastating concussions and other head injuries.

NeuroLogica - whose founder’s brother died of brain injuries after a car accident - has loaned the Raiders one of its $300,000 “CereTom” scanners for use in training rooms if a player gets whacked too hard in the head. The Raiders will become the first NFL team to have a portable on-site CT scanner during games.

The 4-foot-high cordless “CereTom” - which is much smaller than conventional CT scanners and can be wheeled about at a stadium or training facility - was developed over the past three years and is already being sold to hospitals, said Eric Bailey, chief executive of NeuroLogica.

“Call it ‘Brothers Against Brain Injuries,’ sort of like ‘Mothers Against Drunk Drivers,’ ” said Bailey, whose brother died from bleeding in the brain less than an hour after being injured in a 1992 auto crash.

For the NFL, it’s also a matter of life and death for current and past players who have endured brutal hits to the head on the field.

Some of those injuries have caused premature deaths of former players.

Meanwhile, other players, such as the New England Patriots [team stats]’ former star linebacker Ted Johnson, have talked of suffering from massive depression and other ailments that have wreaked havoc on their post-NFL lives.

The NFL has been harshly criticized by some for not acting faster to address what some call a “crisis” in head injuries in football. But this past May, the NFL announced a new “concussion management plan” to deal with the health issue.

In a statement yesterday, the Raiders said that “player safety is of paramount importance to us” and that NeuroLogica’s technology will help players. Spokesmen with the NFL and New England Patriots [team stats] did not get back to the Herald with comments.

Bailey, a former chief engineer at Analogic, the Peabody maker of CT technology, said he’s in talks with two other NFL teams interested in using his company’s scanner.

NeuroLogica - whose chairman and a major investor is Bernie Gordon, founder and former CEO of Analogic - has sold its scanners to Massachusetts General Hospital, Children’s Hospital and other local medical institutions.
----------------------------------

herald's top story today a mother/two soms bust in Charleston. . .

boston.com:

Analyst counters Bush on Al Qaeda
Says biggest threat is in S. Asia, not Iraq
By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | July 26, 2007

WASHINGTON -- A day after President Bush sought to present evidence showing that Iraq is now the main battlefront against Al Qaeda, the chief US intelligence analyst for international terrorism told Congress that the network's growing ranks in Pakistan and Afghanistan pose a more immediate threat to the United States.

In rare testimony before two House committees, Edward Gistaro, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats, said that Al Qaeda terrorists operating in South Asia are better equipped to attack the United States than the network's followers in Iraq are.

Asked which arm of Al Qaeda concerned him the most, Gistaro told a joint session of the House armed services and intelligence panels that it was South Asia.

"The primary concern is in Al Qaeda in South Asia organizing its own plots against the United States," he said. Al Qaeda planned the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks from its bases in Afghanistan.

The top leaders of the terrorist network, Gistaro added, are "able to exploit the comfort zone in the tribal areas" of Pakistan and Afghanistan and are "bringing people in to train for Western operations."

"We see increased efforts on the part of Al Qaeda to try and find, train, and deploy people who could get into this country," he testified.

Meanwhile, a top US general in Afghanistan told Pentagon reporters in a video teleconference that the number of Al Qaeda foot soldiers traveling to South Asia has increased up to 60 percent over the past year.

"It's increased probably 50 to 60 percent over what it was last year . . . and they come from multiple areas in the Middle East," said Army Major General David Rodriguez, commander of the 82d Airborne Division.

The comments provided more fuel for Democratic leaders in Congress who believe the White House is exaggerating the Al Qaeda threat in Iraq to justify prolonging the US military presence indefinitely.

"I am deeply concerned that we have not paid sufficient attention to the places that [today's] threat is most real," remarked Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, chairman of the Armed Services Committee. "Chasing windmills has kept our eye off of the more important struggle, the one with roots in Afghanistan."

Senator John F. Kerry, who chaired a similar hearing yesterday of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called for a renewed focus on Al Qaeda by working more closely with the Pakistani government and allocating more resources to track down the central leadership of the terrorist network.

"Osama bin Laden and top Al Qaeda leaders are likely still hiding out somewhere in the region, and none of us here need to be reminded of the nightmare scenario of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal falling into the wrong hands," Kerry said.

The United States has about 160,000 troops in Iraq and about 20,000 in Afghanistan.

Gistaro, the intelligence analyst, was among the main authors of a National Intelligence Estimate released this month that concluded that the network headed by bin Laden presents a "heightened threat" of attack against the United States.

The assessment, a small portion of which was disclosed publicly, said that the organization has been able to retain many of its top lieutenants, recruit new operatives, and establish new training camps in Pakistan's lawless northwestern frontier.

But in recent days the White House has highlighted one particular line in the declassified version of the report that portrays the group known as Al Qaeda in Iraq as the "most visible and capable affiliate [of Al Qaeda] and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the [US] homeland."

On Tuesday, in a speech about Iraq to a military audience at Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina, Bush offered a detailed argument why Al Qaeda in Iraq is central to the battle against the terrorist network responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.

Bush named a number of Al Qaeda leaders from across the Middle East who are organizing attacks in Iraq to make the case that much of the violence there is a direct result of the bin Laden network.

"Here's the bottom line," Bush said in a speech that mentioned Al Qaeda 25 times. "Al Qaeda in Iraq is run by foreign leaders loyal to Osama bin Laden. Like bin Laden, they are cold-blooded killers who murder the innocent to achieve Al Qaeda's political objectives. Yet despite all the evidence, some will tell you that Al Qaeda in Iraq is really not Al Qaeda and not really a threat to America."

Bush warned that unless the United States sustains its current military strategy, Iraq could become a base to launch attacks against the United States -- as Afghanistan was before US forces toppled the Taliban in 2001.

"We've already seen how Al Qaeda used a failed state thousands of miles from our shores to bring death and destruction to the streets of our cities, and we must not allow them to do so again," Bush said.

The White House reiterated its stance yesterday that Iraq is "the central front" in the war on terrorism.

"Al Qaeda leaders describe it the same way, which is why they are trying to use murder and mayhem to provoke sectarian violence, foment chaos, and create a safe haven for terror," White House press secretary Tony Snow said.

But Gistaro testified that Al Qaeda followers in Iraq -- who number in the "several thousands" -- have little support among the local population.

Gistaro noted that the United States has begun arming Sunni Muslim tribes in western Iraq to fight Al Qaeda sympathizers who have entered the country to sow civil war and kill US troops.

Abraham Wagner, a senior researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies on Terrorism at Columbia University, called Bush's speech about the Al Qaeda threat in Iraq a "spin job."

"In the Cold War it was called 'threat lumping,' " Wagner said. "It is creating a threat to justify what you are doing. Al Qaeda in Iraq never existed prior to the US activity in Iraq and I think it is still a small operation."

"It is unfortunate," he added, that "the administration, in their last gasp to justify what they are doing, are inventing threats and misrepresenting what they are getting from the intelligence community."
------------

oston.com:
Hedge fund tried to sway gas prices, regulator says
By Bloomberg News | July 26, 2007

WASHINGTON -- The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has alleged that Amaranth Advisors LLC tried to manipulate US natural gas prices and is seeking to bar the hedge fund's former head of energy trading for life.

The regulator filed a civil enforcement action in federal court in New York yesterday, saying the fund and trader Brian Hunter tried to sway prices with large sell orders late in the trading session on Feb. 24 and April 26, days when monthly futures contracts expired. Hunter established his own fund in Calgary after he left Amaranth.

Greenwich, Conn.-based Amaranth, which lost $6.6 billion in the biggest-ever hedge fund failure, controlled more than half the US natural gas market at one point, according to a Senate report. While the firm's blowup didn't disrupt the market, it showed that large players can swing prices and hurt gas consumers, the Senate study found.

Hunter "actually bragged about flexing his muscles upon America's natural gas markets," said Gregory Mocek, enforcement director for the commission.

Michael Kim, an attorney for Hunter with the New York firm of Kobre & Kim LLP, said in a statement that Hunter had done nothing wrong: "Brian Hunter simply did not undertake any manipulative trading and we are going to prove it."

In a letter to investors, Nicholas Maounis, founder of Amaranth, denied the fund attempted to manipulate prices. "The allegations made by the CFTC today, while certain to attract extensive media attention, lack any basis in the evidence or law," Maounis wrote.

Amaranth on April 26 sold 99 percent of its May Nymex gas futures in the final four minutes of the session, according to the commission's complaint. Hunter "was concerned that Centaurus Advisors LLC, another hedge fund, was going to be a large buyer," which could boost prices and harm Amaranth's trades.

A futures contract is an agreement to buy or sell gas for a future delivery date. The so-called settlement price is determined by the weighted average of trades made between 2 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. on the final day of trading.

Amaranth "intentionally waited to sell their May 2006 Nymex natural gas futures contracts" to affect prices, the commission said.

The commission is seeking $130,000 for every "overt act" that violates trading laws, said Mocek.

The CFTC failed to show "that prices during the period of time discussed in the complaint were even affected by Mr. Hunter's trading," said the statement from Kim, Hunter's attorney.
-------------

boston.com:

Metco fears for its future
Ruling may put desegregation effort at risk
By Tracy Jan, Globe Staff | July 26, 2007

Leaders of a 41-year-old state program created to integrate suburban schools with urban minority students are facing the possibility that they may have to allow white participants in the aftermath of a Supreme Court ruling last month.

Program leaders and others fear that including white students from the cities in the voluntary desegregation program, known as Metco, could lead to the program's demise. Admit white students, suburban superintendents say, and their communities may pull out because the program's purpose was to diversify their predominantly white schools.

The Supreme Court decision, which prohibited Seattle and Louisville, Ky., from using race in school assignments, has flung Metco and other desegregation efforts across the nation into uncertainty over whether their admissions policies could withstand legal challenges. Metco parents, students, and other community members plan to gather in Boston today to discuss the potential effects of the court decision, which struck down race as a primary tool for integration but left it open as a last resort.

"If the issue gets down to, 'You cannot assign students by race,' Metco could end," said Jean McGuire, executive director of Metco. "We have to figure out what might happen. The superintendents are worried that somebody's going to tell them they have to put white kids in Metco and their towns won't buy it."

The Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity program will contin ue as is unless someone challenges it. The program buses 3,169 minority students from Boston and 120 from Springfield to suburban school systems. No lawsuits challenging the program have been filed, and officials said they would await word from lawyers before making any changes. Because of the Supreme Court ruling, a lawyer representing a group of parents trying to overturn Lynn's race-based school assignment policy is pushing Metco to use income instead of race.

Metco is one of at least half a dozen urban-suburban desegregation programs in the country, most of which were created in the 1960s and '70s to counter the racial isolation in the suburbs and give urban minority students access to a better education. At the time, black students faced overcrowded classrooms in segregated Boston schools.

Metco officials said they never intended the program, created in 1966 with 220 students, to last for four decades and remain the primary solution for racial integration in the suburbs. However, because housing patterns remain segregated -- more than half of the suburbs participating in Metco are more than 90 percent white -- Metco has endured.

Boston students are entered onto a waiting list of 12,000 students, including a small number of white students, for about 450 spots a year. Metco refers minority applicants to suburban school systems as seats open. Under state guidelines, for every 10 names Metco refers, six are black, three are Latino and one is Asian, reflecting Boston's minority demographics. A few white students, trying to exploit the system, slip through because they classify themselves as Latino, McGuire said.

Program officials and suburban superintendents worry that allowing white students to participate would jeopardize Metco's future because the Legislature may no longer consider the program worth funding. Representative Gloria Fox of Boston said that any changes to Metco would hurt its support among lawmakers. Already program leaders must lobby the Legislature, and the number of participants has held steady since 1980 because of limited funding.

The state spent $3,700 per Metco student last year, compared with the approximately $8,400 minimum it says school systems should spend on each student; school systems often spend more and pick up the rest of the costs for its Metco students -- something superintendents are skeptical their towns would be willing to do if white students were admitted.

"I wonder if the community would continue to support Metco in the same way if it wasn't a desegregation program," said Michael F. Brandmeyer, Lincoln superintendent and chairman of the Metco Advisory Council. "Why would we do it?"

About 14 percent of Lincoln's students participate in Metco, the highest proportion of the 35 Metco communities.

"We don't need more white children," said Christina Horner, Lincoln's Metco director and a former Metco student overseeing a summer program for the students. "Not that they're not deserving of a quality education, but it's not desegregation."

Chester Darling, an Andover lawyer representing Lynn parents challenging its voluntary desegregation effort, said Metco should admit students by income instead of race to allow poor white students the same opportunities as their urban peers of other races.

"Everyone should have equal access to those buses and the education that they represent," said Darling, who said he received one phone call after the Supreme Court ruling from a white Boston parent eager to challenge Metco's policy.

"I told him to wait and see what happens," Darling said. "It shouldn't go to court. They should get realistic and do the right thing. This just exacerbates racial tension and encourages hostility."

McGuire said she opposes using income as a substitute for race because it would only reinforce stereotypes that Metco is trying to combat. "I'm not going to send a bus of poor kids to the suburbs," McGuire said. "That's cruel. There are enough people who think that all black kids are poor as it is."

Most of the program's families are middle-class; approximately a quarter are low-income, according to Metco. If Metco were banned from using race, McGuire said she would consider selecting students by neighborhoods, since many Boston communities are racially segregated.

"If the law tells us we cannot use race, we have to figure out how to keep this program alive," said Kahris McLaughlin, president of the Metco board and cochairwoman of the state's Racial Imbalance Advisory Council.

Suburban superintendents predicted that Metco's desegregation efforts would be watered down if proxies for race such as income and neighborhoods were used.

"Metco helps the Newton schools look and feel more like the diverse society that our kids are going to have to function in as citizens and leaders," said Jeffrey Young, Newton superintendent. "It's about enriching our lives."

Jeannette Huezo, a Jamaica Plain parent whose children attend Needham schools, said Metco has exposed white Needham students to another culture. She said her children's schoolmates have learned about Hispanic food and culture during visits to her home, where she cooks them rice, beans, and chicken. Ten served on the court of honor for her daughter's quinceañera and learned salsa and meringue for the occasion.

"It was unbelievable to see all those white kids dancing with the swing of a Latino," said Huezo, who plans to speak at today's forum sponsored by United for a Fair Economy, a Boston-based nonprofit. "Even though it's not far away, those kids in Needham live in a bubble."

Education Commissioner David P. Driscoll said: "We need time. It may be in the final analysis frankly that Metco is fine the way it is, or we may see some changes that ought to be made."

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boston.com:

Backlog at crime lab is in dispute
Prosecutors say it's 2,000 cases
By John R. Ellement, Globe Staff | July 26, 2007

Top prosecutors accused the Patrick administration yesterday of overstating the backlog of untested crime scene samples at the State Police crime lab in a way that is undermining public confidence in the justice system.

In a joint interview with the Globe, Attorney General Martha Coakley and the Essex, Middlesex, Berkshire, and Cape and Islands district attorneys said the backlog is only 2,000 active cases, not 16,000 as the administration and a consultant have said.

"We are shocked in the sense that they said there is a 16,000-case backlog because we know it isn't there," said Coakley, who was Middlesex prosecutor for eight years before being elected attorney general in November.

"It is our obligation to say [the consultant] is not 100 percent correct, and on this particular point it gets a big headline -- and it is particularly misleading."

Earlier this month, the Executive Office of Public Safety unveiled a $267,000 study it commissioned on the crime lab after problems emerged with the processing of DNA test results. The study found major problems with management and also identified 16,000 biological samples dating to the 1980s that had gone untested.

Officials at the Office of Public Safety said that the cases included about 1,000 deaths and more than 6,600 sexual assaults and said that 10,000 of the samples were found in cold storage, though they stressed at the time that there was "only the remotest of possibilities" that slaying suspects or rapists were walking free.

Told of the prosecutors' criticisms yesterday, Public Safety Secretary Kevin M. Burke insisted that the study found 16,000 untested biological samples that must be processed. He said there is only a difference in semantics between his numbers and the lower estimate preferred by prosecutors.

"I think we are on the same book and page about it," Burke said by telephone. "Everyone is looking at these cases to determine their status, and there will be cases where no action needs to be taken."

Prosecutors said thousands of the untested samples are from suicides, drug overdoses, and criminal cases where other evidence or guilty pleas made the biological evidence unnecessary at trials. Or the material is biological evidence simply being stored at the lab.

They said Burke should have limited his public comments about the lab to the 2,000 active investigations awaiting DNA testing. To say otherwise wrongly creates the impression among the public that prosecutors are hiding exculpatory evidence in cold storage at the lab, the prosecutors said.

"We are all disturbed that there would be some implication that somehow we are covering up or hiding something, because that's just not true," said Essex District Attorney Jonathan W. Blodgett.

"You'd be talking about a global conspiracy and that's just not going to happen," he added.

"Eleven DAs trying to protect cases they'd already adjudicated because they knew there was a warehouse with exculpatory evidence -- that's nonsense."

Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O'Keefe said he has reviewed 50 deaths dating to the 1980s in which biological samples were sent to the crime lab. In only a handful of those criminal cases was DNA testing not completed, and the forensic evidence wasn't needed, he said.

"Just the fact that they could produce that information shows that this isn't some situation where there is a closet there with 16,000 or 10,000 or even 3,000 cases sitting around that nobody knows anything about or had paid any attention to," O'Keefe said.

The state's public defender agency, the Committee for Public Counsel Services, is seeking data on all 16,000 cases to see whether it can identify any wrongfully convicted prisoners.

Burke said the administration will dedicate the money to fix the management and staffing problems identified by the consultant. An estimated $6 million is needed to test the samples where the statute of limitations has not expired, officials have said.

"The governor is committed to fixing the lab and that will be done," Burke said.

While critical of some findings, the prosecutors emphasized that the Vance report found no problems with the science performed at the lab.

"We have never had any reason to have anything other than the utmost confidence in the results we get from the crime lab," said David F. Capeless, the Berkshire prosecutor. "The lab isn't in any way connected to a case involving a wrongful conviction. It's only been to prove that, in fact, the person was innocent."

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split the difference - say it's 9,000 cases. . . way too much