October 27, 2013

Patients found abandoned at Castro Valley, Calif nursing home

Fourteen sick and elderly patients were abandoned at a Castro Valley care facility when the staff apparently walked out Thursday after the state ordered the home closed, Alameda County sheriff's deputies said.

Paramedics called to Valley Manor Residential Care at 17926 Apricot Way Saturday afternoon found a notice on the door from the state Department of Social Services ordering the facility to be closed as of Thursday, Oct. 24.

Inside, they found the patients, many of them bedridden, attended by only a handful of staff members.

"Thursday came around and the majority of the staff left and the majority of the patients remained," said sheriff's Sgt. J.D. Nelson.

The staff members who stayed, including a cook, a janitor and what is believed to be a single caretaker, "stayed because they felt bad for the patients," Nelson said. "They weren't getting paid or anything."

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Patients-found-abandoned-at-Castro-Valley-nursing-4929583.php

October 25, 2013

I Spy, No Lie

http://science.dodlive.mil/2013/10/24/i-spy-no-lie/#more-16321

October 25, 2013

Tests prove Roma couple are mystery girl's parents

The mystery is solved — but the future of the young girl known only as Maria is still uncertain.

DNA tests have confirmed that a Bulgarian Roma couple living in an impoverished village with their nine other children are the biological parents of the girl found in Greece with another Roma couple, authorities said Friday.

Genetic profiles of Sasha Ruseva, 35, and her husband, Atanas, matched that of Maria, Interior Ministry official Svetlozar Lazarov said Friday.

Ruseva says she gave birth to a baby girl four years ago in Greece while working as an olive picker but gave the child away because she was too poor to care for her. She since has had two more children after Maria.

Maria has been in a charity's care since authorities raided a Roma settlement in Greece last week and found she was not related to the Greek Roma couple she was living with. Her discovery triggered a global search for her parents, fears of possible child trafficking and interest from authorities dealing with missing children cases in Poland, France, the United States and elsewhere.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/crime/article/Tests-prove-Roma-couple-are-mystery-girl-s-parents-4925051.php

October 25, 2013

Confessions of a Drone Warrior

From the darkness of a box in the Nevada desert, he watched as three men trudged down a dirt road in Afghanistan. The box was kept cold—precisely sixty-eight degrees—and the only light inside came from the glow of monitors. The air smelled spectrally of stale sweat and cigarette smoke. On his console, the image showed the midwinter landscape of eastern Afghanistan’s Kunar Province—a palette of browns and grays, fields cut to stubble, dark forests climbing the rocky foothills of the Hindu Kush. He zoomed the camera in on the suspected insurgents, each dressed in traditional shalwar kameez, long shirts and baggy pants. He knew nothing else about them: not their names, not their thoughts, not the thousand mundane and profound details of their lives.

He was told that they were carrying rifles on their shoulders, but for all he knew, they were shepherd’s staffs. Still, the directive from somewhere above, a mysterious chain of command that led straight to his headset, was clear: confirmed weapons. He switched from the visible spectrum—the muted grays and browns of “day-TV”—to the sharp contrast of infrared, and the insurgents’ heat signatures stood out ghostly white against the cool black earth. A safety observer loomed behind him to make sure the “weapon release” was by the book. A long verbal checklist, his targeting laser locked on the two men walking in front. A countdown—three…two…one…—then the flat delivery of the phrase “missile off the rail.” Seventy-five hundred miles away, a Hellfire flared to life, detached from its mount, and reached supersonic speed in seconds.

It was quiet in the dark, cold box in the desert, except for the low hum of machines.

He kept the targeting laser trained on the two lead men and stared so intently that each individual pixel stood out, a glowing pointillist dot abstracted from the image it was meant to form. Time became almost ductile, the seconds stretched and slowed in a strange electronic limbo. As he watched the men walk, the one who had fallen behind seemed to hear something and broke into a run to catch up with the other two. Then, bright and silent as a camera flash, the screen lit up with white flame.

Airman First Class Brandon Bryant stared at the scene, unblinking in the white-hot clarity of infrared. He recalls it even now, years later, burned into his memory like a photo negative: “The smoke clears, and there’s pieces of the two guys around the crater. And there’s this guy over here, and he’s missing his right leg above his knee. He’s holding it, and he’s rolling around, and the blood is squirting out of his leg, and it’s hitting the ground, and it’s hot. His blood is hot. But when it hits the ground, it starts to cool off; the pool cools fast. It took him a long time to die. I just watched him. I watched him become the same color as the ground he was lying on.”



Read More http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/201311/drone-uav-pilot-assassination

October 21, 2013

Truckers halt work at Port of Oakland

Source: SFGate

Truckers at the Port of Oakland were refusing to work Monday to protest unsafe working conditions and unfair labor practices, according to a group representing them.

The work stoppage began at 5 a.m. The group, the Port of Oakland Truckers Association, said port truckers are independent contractors and can't join a union but had organized themselves because of "deteriorating conditions." The group said truckers have not seen any increase in the payment per cargo load in 10 years, while the cost of diesel has quadrupled.

"We want to put an end to inhumane treatment," group member and port trucker Isaiah Thompson said in a statement. "We need safer conditions and better compensation."

The group is seeking a $50 monthly "green emissions fee" to offset the cost of upgrading trucks to new emissions standards, an extension for compliance with environmental standards set to take effect on Jan. 1, and a congestion fee compensating truckers for hours currently spent waiting unpaid for a load. The truckers also want more pay per cargo load.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Truckers-halt-work-at-Port-of-Oakland-4912965.php

October 21, 2013

Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/us/insurance-site-seen-needing-weeks-to-fix.html?hp&_r=0

October 21, 2013

Alex Odeh Assassination Probe Demanded by Civil Rights Groups, Rep. Loretta Sanchez

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Jewish Voice for Peace and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee are among the civil rights groups pressing the U.S. Justice Department to renew the investigation into Palestinian-American civil rights leader Alex Odeh's 1985 assassination by bomb blast in Santa Ana.

An online petition the groups launched seeking support for opening the probe has received 10,000 signatures.

"Whenever a leader for a civil rights organization is killed, it is the responsibility of our country as a whole--and a civil rights community as a whole--to stand up and demand that their killers be brought to justice and to ensure that the U.S. Department of Justice does everything in its power to close the case," NAACP President Ben Jealous told reporters in a conference call Monday (via the Associated Press).

Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) in June sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder calling for a renewed probe, and she has since urged her fellow lawmakers to sign on. One of them, Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan), said Monday he wants the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations to convene a hearing on the bombing.

http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2013/10/alex_odeh_loretta_sanchez_naac.php

October 20, 2013

Signs of rift between Israel and US over Iran

Just days after the first round of global nuclear talks with Iran, a rift appears to be emerging between Israel and its closest ally, the United States.

Israel's prime minister on Sunday called on the U.S. to step up the pressure on Iran, even as American officials hinted at the possibility of easing tough economic pressure. Meanwhile, a leading Israeli daily reported the outlines of what could be construed in the West as genuine Iranian compromises in the talks.

The differing approaches could bode poorly for Israel as the talks between six global powers and Iran gain steam in the coming months. Negotiators were upbeat following last week's talks, and the next round of negotiations is set to begin Nov. 7.

Convinced Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu believes the Iranians are trying to trick the West into easing economic sanctions while still pushing forward with their nuclear program. Iran insists its program is for peaceful purposes.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/world/article/Signs-of-rift-between-Israel-and-US-over-Iran-4910965.php

October 20, 2013

Work begins on Calif. bullet train, locals angry

Voters in 2008 approved $10 billion in bonds to start construction on an 800-mile rail line to ferry passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles in 2 hours and 40 minutes, compared with 6 hours by car now during good traffic. Since then, the housing market collapsed, multibillion-dollar budget deficits followed, and the price tag has fluctuated wildly — from $45 billion in 2008 to more than $100 billion in 2011 and, now, $68 billion.

Political and financial compromises led officials to scale back plans that now mean trains will be forced to slow down and share tracks in major cities, leading critics to question whether it will truly be the 220-mph "high-speed rail" voters were promised.

Construction has been postponed repeatedly, and a court victory this summer by opponents threatens further delays; a Sacramento County Superior Court judge said the state rail authority's plan goes against the promise made to voters to identify all the funding for the first segment before starting construction.

Even the former chairman of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, Quentin Kopp, has turned against the current project, saying in court papers that it "is no longer a genuine high speed rail system."

In the Central Valley, there is intense distrust of the authority, which has started buying up property, land and businesses, some of which have been in families for generations.

http://www.sfgate.com/business/technology/article/Work-begins-on-Calif-bullet-train-locals-angry-4911057.php

October 20, 2013

Cashing Out: U.S. Military Quits Critical Air Base After $100 Million in Payoffs

After years of tense negotiations and more than a hundreds million dollars in payoffs, the U.S. military is finally giving up on a massive air base that served as a critical logistical hub for the Afghanistan war.

The Pentagon announced late Friday that the U.S. would return the Manas Transit Center air base to Kyrgyzstan by next July, just as the U.S. attempts one of its most complex logistics challenges yet -- returning people and gear from Afghanistan as that war draws to a close at the end of next year.

The relationship between the U.S. and Kyrgyzstan has been bumpy for years as Bishkek demanded more and more money from the U.S. for using a base they knew to be critical to the logistics operations surrounding the Afghanistan war. In the end, the U.S. may have been essentially outbid, as the base -- built with American "global war on terrorism dollars" as one officer put it -- became a gold mine to Kyrgyzstan and other countries, like Russia and China, became interested in its use.

But Friday's announcement appeared to reflect that the U.S. was fed up with the demands for more cash, and wouldn't pay any more for use of the base.

"It became too complicated," a senior defense official told FP. "The juice wasn't worth the squeeze."

http://killerapps.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/10/18/cashing_out_us_military_quits_critical_air_base_after_100_million_in_payoffs