Gates Assails WikiLeaks Over Release of Reports
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: July 29, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/world/asia/30wiki.html?_r=1&hpw
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Thursday denounced the disclosure this week of 75,000 classified documents about the Afghanistan war by the Web site WikiLeaks, asserting that the security breach had endangered lives and damaged the ability of others to trust the United States government to protect their secrets.
Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon, Mr. Gates portrayed the documents as “a mountain of raw data and individual impressions, most several years old” that offered little insight into current policies and events. Still, he said, the disclosures — which include some identifying information about Afghans who have helped the United States — have “potentially dramatic and grievously harmful consequences.”
“The battlefield consequences of the release of these documents are potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and Afghan partners, and may well damage our relationships and reputation in that key part of the world,” he said. “Intelligence sources and methods, as well as military tactics, techniques and procedures, will become known to our adversaries.”
Mr. Gates said the documents’ disclosure had prompted a rethinking of a trend nearly two decades old, dating from the Persian Gulf war of 1991, of trying to make intelligence information more accessible to troops in combat situations so they can respond rapidly to developments.
“We endeavor to push access to sensitive battlefield information down to where it is most useful — on the front lines — where as a practical matter there are fewer restrictions and controls than at rear headquarters,” he said. “In the wake of this incident, it will be a real challenge to strike the right balance between security and providing our frontline troops the information they need.”
The military has charged an intelligence analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, with downloading large amounts of classified information from a computer at a base in Iraq and sending it to WikiLeaks, which operates from servers scattered across multiple countries and solicits “classified, censored or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic or ethical significance.”
Military officials have said that Army investigators also consider Private Manning a “person of interest” in the investigation into the Web site’s most recent disclosures. They said Thursday that he was being moved from Kuwait to Quantico, Va., where he would remain in military confinement as he awaits further judicial steps. WikiLeaks shared the documents with publications in Britain, Germany and the United States, including The New York Times, before posting them this week.
Julian Assange, an Australian computer specialist who founded WikiLeaks, has described the project as a form of journalism that seeks to protect whistle-blowers and enhance democracy by making public information that government officials would rather keep secret.
In a series of media appearances and interviews this week, he has defended the latest release as providing an unvarnished portrait of problems with the war in Afghanistan, while saying that his organization had held back about 15,000 documents for safety reasons.
But at Mr. Gates’s news conference on Thursday, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, portrayed WikiLeaks as recklessly endangering people in order to satisfy its “need to make a point.”
“Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family,” Admiral Mullen said.
Mr. Gates said the military was taking steps to protect some Afghans identified in the documents, but he declined to specify them. He also declined to comment about the investigation beyond noting that he had enlisted the Federal Bureau of Investigation to assist Army investigators, a move that is seen as a precursor to potentially charging people who are not uniformed service members.
A person familiar with the investigation has said that Justice Department lawyers are exploring whether Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks could be charged with inducing, or conspiring in, violations of the Espionage Act, a 1917 law that prohibits the unauthorized disclosure of national security information.
Friday, July 30, 2010
S.E.C. Charges Brothers With $550 Million Fraud
S.E.C. Charges Brothers With $550 Million Fraud
By EDWARD WYATT
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: July 29, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/business/30sec.html?th&emc=th
WASHINGTON — Samuel and Charles Wyly, the billionaire brothers from Dallas who are large donors to philanthropies and to conservative causes, were charged Thursday with conducting an extensive securities fraud that the Securities and Exchange Commission said reaped $550 million in undisclosed gains.
The brothers, who founded Sterling Software, a business software and services company that they sold for $4 billion in stock to the software company CA in 2000, were also charged with insider trading violations from which they profited by more than $31 million, the S.E.C. said
The civil charges, coming just two weeks after the S.E.C. reached a $550 million settlement with Goldman Sachs, are part of a concerted effort by the commission to focus more sharply on prominent enforcement cases.
The agency came under fierce attack after the financial crisis of 2007-8 for failing to uncover fraudulent activity in the mortgage securities markets and for missing chances to halt the Ponzi scheme operated by Bernard L. Madoff.
The Wyly brothers are in many ways a study in contrasts, paradigms of self-made billionaires who for years have fought investigations into suspected tax dodges by the offshore trusts that the S.E.C. claims they controlled.
Samuel E. Wyly, 75, and Charles J. Wyly Jr., 76, who through a lawyer called the charges “without merit,” have given millions of dollars to Republican candidates and organizations, but Sam Wyly this year was also named one of the world’s 10 “greenest” billionaires by Forbes magazine.
The S.E.C. case, which was filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, centers on charges of securities fraud and insider trading related to the shares of companies founded by the Wyly bothers or where they served as directors or executives. They include the retail craft chain Michaels Stores, Sterling Software, Sterling Commerce and Scottish Annuity and Life Holdings.
The ill-gotten gains, according to the S.E.C., were used to buy tens of millions of dollars of art, collectibles and jewelry; $100 million of real estate, including two ranches in Aspen, Colo., and a 100-acre horse farm near Dallas; and for charitable contributions, including $10 million to the business school at Samuel Wyly’s alma mater, the University of Michigan.
The charges are the result of a six-year investigation that began in 2004 when Bank of America reported to the S.E.C. that it had terminated numerous accounts held in the name of companies based in the Isle of Man because it could not determine who actually owned the companies.
The S.E.C. found that those companies, and similar entities registered in the Cayman Islands, were registered as trusts over which the Wylys said they had no formal control. But in fact, the S.E.C. charged, the brothers directed nearly all the investment activity in the trusts, selling hundreds of millions of dollars in shares without following S.E.C. disclosure rules governing stock ownership and trading by company insiders.
Through a lawyer, the Wylys said that they believed the charges were “a misapplication of the law” and that they had conducted all of their activities on the basis of accounting and legal advice that they received.
“They have never been given any reason to believe the financial transactions in question were anything other than legal and fully appropriate,” said William A. Brewer III, a partner at the Dallas law firm of Bickel & Brewer who is lead counsel for the Wylys. The brothers “expect to be fully vindicated,” he said.
Also charged in connection with the case were a lawyer for the Wylys, Michael C. French of Dallas, and a stockbroker, Louis J. Schaufele III, also of Dallas.
Lawyers representing Mr. French and Mr. Schaufele did not immediately respond to phone calls seeking comment.
The S.E.C. can bring only civil actions, but the brothers have previously been reported to be under criminal investigation for actions related to their investment activities. Lorin L. Reisner, the deputy director of the S.E.C.’s enforcement division, declined to comment on whether the commission had referred its current findings to the Justice Department or other law enforcement agencies.
The S.E.C. claimed that a scheme of undisclosed investments and securities sales took place over 13 years and involved three-quarters of a billion dollars in stock. As longtime executives and directors of public companies, the S.E.C. said that the Wylys knew or should have known their obligations as the owners of more than 5 percent of the stock of several companies.
S.E.C. regulations require that holders of more than 5 percent of a company’s stock disclose that fact, and that company directors and executives report any and all sales or purchases of shares. Though they claimed to own only small stakes in their companies, the S.E.C. charged that they owned from 16 percent to 36 percent of the four companies named in the complaint.
Many investors track stock sales by company insiders because they believe that can provide clues to a company’s prospects; if well-informed company insiders are selling, investors might conclude that a company’s financial position is weakening.
“By concealing that the entities making the sales were under the control of the Wylys, other investors paid inflated prices for the shares they sold,” Mr. Reisner said.
If the S.E.C. is successful in proving all of its allegations, it could result in one of the biggest judgments ever in a securities fraud case. The commission is seeking disgorgement of the $550 million in gains and prejudgment interest and financial penalties.
Unlike some billionaires who maintain a cloak of privacy around their private lives, the Wylys maintain their own Web site extolling their business history, philanthropic activities and other interests.
They have been, at times, similarly open about their political affiliations. In 2000, Sam Wyly was a principal contributor to Republicans for Clean Air, a group that bought ads extolling then-Gov. George W. Bush’s environmental record and criticizing the record of Senator John McCain.
Four years later, the Wyly brothers were substantial contributors to the Swift Boat campaign that raised questions about the war record of Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who was running for president against President Bush.
By EDWARD WYATT
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: July 29, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/business/30sec.html?th&emc=th
WASHINGTON — Samuel and Charles Wyly, the billionaire brothers from Dallas who are large donors to philanthropies and to conservative causes, were charged Thursday with conducting an extensive securities fraud that the Securities and Exchange Commission said reaped $550 million in undisclosed gains.
The brothers, who founded Sterling Software, a business software and services company that they sold for $4 billion in stock to the software company CA in 2000, were also charged with insider trading violations from which they profited by more than $31 million, the S.E.C. said
The civil charges, coming just two weeks after the S.E.C. reached a $550 million settlement with Goldman Sachs, are part of a concerted effort by the commission to focus more sharply on prominent enforcement cases.
The agency came under fierce attack after the financial crisis of 2007-8 for failing to uncover fraudulent activity in the mortgage securities markets and for missing chances to halt the Ponzi scheme operated by Bernard L. Madoff.
The Wyly brothers are in many ways a study in contrasts, paradigms of self-made billionaires who for years have fought investigations into suspected tax dodges by the offshore trusts that the S.E.C. claims they controlled.
Samuel E. Wyly, 75, and Charles J. Wyly Jr., 76, who through a lawyer called the charges “without merit,” have given millions of dollars to Republican candidates and organizations, but Sam Wyly this year was also named one of the world’s 10 “greenest” billionaires by Forbes magazine.
The S.E.C. case, which was filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, centers on charges of securities fraud and insider trading related to the shares of companies founded by the Wyly bothers or where they served as directors or executives. They include the retail craft chain Michaels Stores, Sterling Software, Sterling Commerce and Scottish Annuity and Life Holdings.
The ill-gotten gains, according to the S.E.C., were used to buy tens of millions of dollars of art, collectibles and jewelry; $100 million of real estate, including two ranches in Aspen, Colo., and a 100-acre horse farm near Dallas; and for charitable contributions, including $10 million to the business school at Samuel Wyly’s alma mater, the University of Michigan.
The charges are the result of a six-year investigation that began in 2004 when Bank of America reported to the S.E.C. that it had terminated numerous accounts held in the name of companies based in the Isle of Man because it could not determine who actually owned the companies.
The S.E.C. found that those companies, and similar entities registered in the Cayman Islands, were registered as trusts over which the Wylys said they had no formal control. But in fact, the S.E.C. charged, the brothers directed nearly all the investment activity in the trusts, selling hundreds of millions of dollars in shares without following S.E.C. disclosure rules governing stock ownership and trading by company insiders.
Through a lawyer, the Wylys said that they believed the charges were “a misapplication of the law” and that they had conducted all of their activities on the basis of accounting and legal advice that they received.
“They have never been given any reason to believe the financial transactions in question were anything other than legal and fully appropriate,” said William A. Brewer III, a partner at the Dallas law firm of Bickel & Brewer who is lead counsel for the Wylys. The brothers “expect to be fully vindicated,” he said.
Also charged in connection with the case were a lawyer for the Wylys, Michael C. French of Dallas, and a stockbroker, Louis J. Schaufele III, also of Dallas.
Lawyers representing Mr. French and Mr. Schaufele did not immediately respond to phone calls seeking comment.
The S.E.C. can bring only civil actions, but the brothers have previously been reported to be under criminal investigation for actions related to their investment activities. Lorin L. Reisner, the deputy director of the S.E.C.’s enforcement division, declined to comment on whether the commission had referred its current findings to the Justice Department or other law enforcement agencies.
The S.E.C. claimed that a scheme of undisclosed investments and securities sales took place over 13 years and involved three-quarters of a billion dollars in stock. As longtime executives and directors of public companies, the S.E.C. said that the Wylys knew or should have known their obligations as the owners of more than 5 percent of the stock of several companies.
S.E.C. regulations require that holders of more than 5 percent of a company’s stock disclose that fact, and that company directors and executives report any and all sales or purchases of shares. Though they claimed to own only small stakes in their companies, the S.E.C. charged that they owned from 16 percent to 36 percent of the four companies named in the complaint.
Many investors track stock sales by company insiders because they believe that can provide clues to a company’s prospects; if well-informed company insiders are selling, investors might conclude that a company’s financial position is weakening.
“By concealing that the entities making the sales were under the control of the Wylys, other investors paid inflated prices for the shares they sold,” Mr. Reisner said.
If the S.E.C. is successful in proving all of its allegations, it could result in one of the biggest judgments ever in a securities fraud case. The commission is seeking disgorgement of the $550 million in gains and prejudgment interest and financial penalties.
Unlike some billionaires who maintain a cloak of privacy around their private lives, the Wylys maintain their own Web site extolling their business history, philanthropic activities and other interests.
They have been, at times, similarly open about their political affiliations. In 2000, Sam Wyly was a principal contributor to Republicans for Clean Air, a group that bought ads extolling then-Gov. George W. Bush’s environmental record and criticizing the record of Senator John McCain.
Four years later, the Wyly brothers were substantial contributors to the Swift Boat campaign that raised questions about the war record of Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who was running for president against President Bush.
Republicans Block Bill to Aid Small Business
Republicans Block Bill to Aid Small Business
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Copyright by Bloomberg News
Published: July 29, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/us/politics/30cong.html?th&emc=th
WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans on Thursday rejected a bill to aid small businesses with expanded loan programs and tax breaks, in a procedural blockade that underscored how fiercely determined the party’s leaders are to deny Democrats any further legislative accomplishments ahead of November’s midterm elections.
The measure, championed by Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, had the backing of some of the Republican Party’s most reliable business allies, including the United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business. Several Republican lawmakers also helped write it.
But Republican leaders filibustered after fighting for days with Democrats over the number of amendments they would be able to offer. A last-ditch offer by Democrats to allow three was refused by the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
“The majority leader has graciously given us three amendments and what I’m saying is three amendments is not enough; he knows that,” Mr. McConnell said on the Senate floor. “We are not expecting to have an unlimited number of amendments, but three amendments will not suffice.”
The demise of the measure, at least for now, signaled that Democrats would fare no better on other legislation that they had hoped to finish before summer recess begins at the end of next week, including a scaled-back energy bill. The Senate is expected to confirm Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, but that may be its only substantive action.
With 60 votes needed to advance the legislation, the tally was 58 to 42, with Democrats unanimously in favor and Republicans all opposed. The majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, switched his vote to no at the last minute, a parliamentary step that allows him to call for a re-vote.
Some lawmakers said a deal was still possible. Meanwhile, the Senate turned to a bill that would provide $26.1 billion in aid to states to help cover Medicaid costs and prevent teacher layoffs.
The vote on the small-business bill followed several emotional exchanges on the floor.
“That is the tradition in the United States Senate: majority rules, but you accommodate the rights of the minority,” said Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, who is the senior Republican on the small-business committee. “We’re faced with a procedural impasse here because we’re being denied the opportunity to offer some amendments.”
She also chastised Democrats as dillydallying on the measure, repeatedly pulling it off the floor to deal with other matters. “We need to create jobs in America,” she said. “This bill has been on the floor for three weeks and three substitutes — 81 days.”
Ms. Landrieu harshly criticized Mr. McConnell for blocking the measure, and warned that some businesses might fail.
“Our businesses have picked up enough weight; they can’t handle that weight,” she said in a floor speech. “And if we don’t give them some help now, today, many of them aren’t going to be here — I want the senator from Kentucky to know — when we show up in September.”
The bill would create a $30 billion lending program within the Treasury Department, to be administered through local banks. It would also provide more than $12 billion in tax breaks, and would expand or enhance existing lending programs.
The three Republican amendments that Democrats seemed open to debating would eliminate a provision in the new health care law requiring businesses to file 1099 forms reporting when they buy more than $600 in goods from other businesses, extend a tax credit for biodiesel fuel and extend a credit for research and development.
Republicans had also wanted amendments on other topics, including the estate tax, nuclear loan guarantees, border security and the expiring Bush tax cuts.
Senator George LeMieux, Republican of Florida, who helped draft the bill, said Democrats had taken a bipartisan measure and created a partisan fight over it.
“This small-business bill should pass, and it should pass with relevant amendments,” Mr. LeMieux said. “Before I am a Republican, I am a Floridian and an American, and this bill is good for our country.”
With tensions running high, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, noted that “if just one” Republican had voted with the Democrats — a pointed reference to Mr. LeMieux — the bill would move forward.
Mr. LeMieux shot back, “Half the truth is no truth at all.”
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Copyright by Bloomberg News
Published: July 29, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/us/politics/30cong.html?th&emc=th
WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans on Thursday rejected a bill to aid small businesses with expanded loan programs and tax breaks, in a procedural blockade that underscored how fiercely determined the party’s leaders are to deny Democrats any further legislative accomplishments ahead of November’s midterm elections.
The measure, championed by Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, had the backing of some of the Republican Party’s most reliable business allies, including the United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business. Several Republican lawmakers also helped write it.
But Republican leaders filibustered after fighting for days with Democrats over the number of amendments they would be able to offer. A last-ditch offer by Democrats to allow three was refused by the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
“The majority leader has graciously given us three amendments and what I’m saying is three amendments is not enough; he knows that,” Mr. McConnell said on the Senate floor. “We are not expecting to have an unlimited number of amendments, but three amendments will not suffice.”
The demise of the measure, at least for now, signaled that Democrats would fare no better on other legislation that they had hoped to finish before summer recess begins at the end of next week, including a scaled-back energy bill. The Senate is expected to confirm Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, but that may be its only substantive action.
With 60 votes needed to advance the legislation, the tally was 58 to 42, with Democrats unanimously in favor and Republicans all opposed. The majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, switched his vote to no at the last minute, a parliamentary step that allows him to call for a re-vote.
Some lawmakers said a deal was still possible. Meanwhile, the Senate turned to a bill that would provide $26.1 billion in aid to states to help cover Medicaid costs and prevent teacher layoffs.
The vote on the small-business bill followed several emotional exchanges on the floor.
“That is the tradition in the United States Senate: majority rules, but you accommodate the rights of the minority,” said Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, who is the senior Republican on the small-business committee. “We’re faced with a procedural impasse here because we’re being denied the opportunity to offer some amendments.”
She also chastised Democrats as dillydallying on the measure, repeatedly pulling it off the floor to deal with other matters. “We need to create jobs in America,” she said. “This bill has been on the floor for three weeks and three substitutes — 81 days.”
Ms. Landrieu harshly criticized Mr. McConnell for blocking the measure, and warned that some businesses might fail.
“Our businesses have picked up enough weight; they can’t handle that weight,” she said in a floor speech. “And if we don’t give them some help now, today, many of them aren’t going to be here — I want the senator from Kentucky to know — when we show up in September.”
The bill would create a $30 billion lending program within the Treasury Department, to be administered through local banks. It would also provide more than $12 billion in tax breaks, and would expand or enhance existing lending programs.
The three Republican amendments that Democrats seemed open to debating would eliminate a provision in the new health care law requiring businesses to file 1099 forms reporting when they buy more than $600 in goods from other businesses, extend a tax credit for biodiesel fuel and extend a credit for research and development.
Republicans had also wanted amendments on other topics, including the estate tax, nuclear loan guarantees, border security and the expiring Bush tax cuts.
Senator George LeMieux, Republican of Florida, who helped draft the bill, said Democrats had taken a bipartisan measure and created a partisan fight over it.
“This small-business bill should pass, and it should pass with relevant amendments,” Mr. LeMieux said. “Before I am a Republican, I am a Floridian and an American, and this bill is good for our country.”
With tensions running high, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, noted that “if just one” Republican had voted with the Democrats — a pointed reference to Mr. LeMieux — the bill would move forward.
Mr. LeMieux shot back, “Half the truth is no truth at all.”
From Fires to Fish, Heat Wave Batters Russia
From Fires to Fish, Heat Wave Batters Russia
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: July 29, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/world/europe/30moscow.html?th&emc=th
RYBKHOZ, Russia — This is a country that knows how to handle the cold, swaggering about during the most brutal of winters. But the heat is another story. And there has never been heat like this.
Here is how extreme it has become: Oymyakon in Eastern Siberia is considered one of the coldest places on Earth, with winter temperatures dropping to as low as minus 90 degrees. On Thursday, the thermometer also read 90 degrees. Plus 90. In the evening.
Much of Russia has been reeling. Forest fires have erupted. Drought has ruined millions of acres of wheat. More than 2,000 people have died from drowning in rivers, reservoirs and elsewhere in July and June, often after seeking relief from the heat while intoxicated. In Moscow alone, the number of such deaths has tripled in comparison with last year, officials said.
All week long, temperatures have been soaring to records, and on Thursday, they reached a new high for Moscow, 100 degrees. July has been the hottest month since the city began taking such measurements under the czars, 130 years ago, officials said.
At the Biserovsky Fish Farm in this suburb of Moscow, Ivan Tyurkin trudged along a pier and surveyed the breeding ponds all around him. He did not need a thermometer to figure out that the water was treacherously tepid. Dead trout, drifting like buoys, were evidence enough.
Last month, they were flipping and flopping and leaping, and Mr. Tyurkin was readying for another bountiful harvest. Now, with the weather finding seemingly endless ways of wreaking havoc across the country, the farm was in crisis.
“This is all just very difficult to believe,” Mr. Tyurkin said.
“There has never been a summer like this,” he said. “Never. Not once.”
That is a widely held view in Russia. New York, Washington and many other cities in the United States have certainly suffered from their own heat waves. But most Russians do not have air-conditioners, reasoning that they are not worth the investment given the typical summers here.
As if the heat were not enough, Moscow has lately been coated with a patina of smoke from fires that have broken out in dried-up peat bogs in the suburbs. Throw open a window in a desperate bid to catch a breeze and the unpleasant smell of smoke bounds in. One of the country’s chief medical authorities estimated that walking around Moscow for a few hours was the equivalent of smoking a pack or two of cigarettes.
A little respite from the heat is expected on Friday, when the temperatures are predicted to drop to 88 degrees in Moscow, but next week they may jump to 100 again.
When the heat wave hit Russia, agriculture seemed the first to fall victim across much of the country, with officials predicting that grain production could decline by as much as 25 percent. Now, fish farms like Biserovsky are struggling to keep their stocks alive.
Here in the village of Rybkhoz, a name derived from the Russian words for “fish production,” the artificial ponds have been nurturing fish for local consumption since Nikita Khrushchev’s time.
Trout is a relatively new venture for the Biserovsky farm, underscoring Moscow’s prosperity. In Soviet times, trout — let alone fresh trout — was viewed as a delicacy, but these days, it is much more available. It often retails for $5 to $7 a pound.
Biserovsky also produces carp, which is heartier and able to endure warm water, so that harvest is not at risk — at least not yet.
The farm said it had been expecting to harvest 100 tons of trout this year. Some died. The rest were prematurely sold — often at deep discounts — before they could be killed by the rising temperatures. About 30 percent of the live fish were in such bad shape that they could be used only for fish meal and other low-grade products.
With the current harvest gone, Mr. Tyurkin, who oversees the trout ponds at Biserovsky, has been intent on rescuing next year’s stock. His workers have been crowding the juvenile fish into a single pond that they have tried to cool down, as if it were a refugee camp for survivors of a great meteorological cataclysm.
“We realize that this may not have a great chance of succeeding, but if we don’t do this, they won’t have any chance at all,” Mr. Tyurkin said.
He explained that trout thrive in water that is 55 to 62 degrees. In recent days, the water temperature has spiked to as high as 85 degrees near the surface. The trout swim deeper to seek cooler water, but the lower they go, the less oxygen is available. They either overheat or suffocate.
Yuri Baranov, Biserovsky’s marketing director, said the heat had even paralyzed the farm’s ability to receive shipments of live trout that are raised elsewhere and then trucked here to be fattened up to their sale weight, usually about two pounds.
“All around Russia, even in the north, they are having the same problems,” Mr. Baranov said.
For now, the Biserovsky workers are pumping air into the ponds for the remaining stock, as well as circulating cooler water sucked up from the depths.
Mr. Tyurkin, with his expansive belly and equally expansive manner of talking about fish, was clearly pained by it all.
“These are like my children,” he said. “We see them when they are little hatchlings, then we watch them grow. And normally, you see the result of our work. But now, just look at this. They start dying, they float, and that’s it.”
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: July 29, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/world/europe/30moscow.html?th&emc=th
RYBKHOZ, Russia — This is a country that knows how to handle the cold, swaggering about during the most brutal of winters. But the heat is another story. And there has never been heat like this.
Here is how extreme it has become: Oymyakon in Eastern Siberia is considered one of the coldest places on Earth, with winter temperatures dropping to as low as minus 90 degrees. On Thursday, the thermometer also read 90 degrees. Plus 90. In the evening.
Much of Russia has been reeling. Forest fires have erupted. Drought has ruined millions of acres of wheat. More than 2,000 people have died from drowning in rivers, reservoirs and elsewhere in July and June, often after seeking relief from the heat while intoxicated. In Moscow alone, the number of such deaths has tripled in comparison with last year, officials said.
All week long, temperatures have been soaring to records, and on Thursday, they reached a new high for Moscow, 100 degrees. July has been the hottest month since the city began taking such measurements under the czars, 130 years ago, officials said.
At the Biserovsky Fish Farm in this suburb of Moscow, Ivan Tyurkin trudged along a pier and surveyed the breeding ponds all around him. He did not need a thermometer to figure out that the water was treacherously tepid. Dead trout, drifting like buoys, were evidence enough.
Last month, they were flipping and flopping and leaping, and Mr. Tyurkin was readying for another bountiful harvest. Now, with the weather finding seemingly endless ways of wreaking havoc across the country, the farm was in crisis.
“This is all just very difficult to believe,” Mr. Tyurkin said.
“There has never been a summer like this,” he said. “Never. Not once.”
That is a widely held view in Russia. New York, Washington and many other cities in the United States have certainly suffered from their own heat waves. But most Russians do not have air-conditioners, reasoning that they are not worth the investment given the typical summers here.
As if the heat were not enough, Moscow has lately been coated with a patina of smoke from fires that have broken out in dried-up peat bogs in the suburbs. Throw open a window in a desperate bid to catch a breeze and the unpleasant smell of smoke bounds in. One of the country’s chief medical authorities estimated that walking around Moscow for a few hours was the equivalent of smoking a pack or two of cigarettes.
A little respite from the heat is expected on Friday, when the temperatures are predicted to drop to 88 degrees in Moscow, but next week they may jump to 100 again.
When the heat wave hit Russia, agriculture seemed the first to fall victim across much of the country, with officials predicting that grain production could decline by as much as 25 percent. Now, fish farms like Biserovsky are struggling to keep their stocks alive.
Here in the village of Rybkhoz, a name derived from the Russian words for “fish production,” the artificial ponds have been nurturing fish for local consumption since Nikita Khrushchev’s time.
Trout is a relatively new venture for the Biserovsky farm, underscoring Moscow’s prosperity. In Soviet times, trout — let alone fresh trout — was viewed as a delicacy, but these days, it is much more available. It often retails for $5 to $7 a pound.
Biserovsky also produces carp, which is heartier and able to endure warm water, so that harvest is not at risk — at least not yet.
The farm said it had been expecting to harvest 100 tons of trout this year. Some died. The rest were prematurely sold — often at deep discounts — before they could be killed by the rising temperatures. About 30 percent of the live fish were in such bad shape that they could be used only for fish meal and other low-grade products.
With the current harvest gone, Mr. Tyurkin, who oversees the trout ponds at Biserovsky, has been intent on rescuing next year’s stock. His workers have been crowding the juvenile fish into a single pond that they have tried to cool down, as if it were a refugee camp for survivors of a great meteorological cataclysm.
“We realize that this may not have a great chance of succeeding, but if we don’t do this, they won’t have any chance at all,” Mr. Tyurkin said.
He explained that trout thrive in water that is 55 to 62 degrees. In recent days, the water temperature has spiked to as high as 85 degrees near the surface. The trout swim deeper to seek cooler water, but the lower they go, the less oxygen is available. They either overheat or suffocate.
Yuri Baranov, Biserovsky’s marketing director, said the heat had even paralyzed the farm’s ability to receive shipments of live trout that are raised elsewhere and then trucked here to be fattened up to their sale weight, usually about two pounds.
“All around Russia, even in the north, they are having the same problems,” Mr. Baranov said.
For now, the Biserovsky workers are pumping air into the ponds for the remaining stock, as well as circulating cooler water sucked up from the depths.
Mr. Tyurkin, with his expansive belly and equally expansive manner of talking about fish, was clearly pained by it all.
“These are like my children,” he said. “We see them when they are little hatchlings, then we watch them grow. And normally, you see the result of our work. But now, just look at this. They start dying, they float, and that’s it.”
Gulf of Mexico Has Long Been a Dump Site for Industry
Gulf of Mexico Has Long Been a Dump Site for Industry
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Copyright by Bloomberg News
Published: July 29, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/us/30gulf.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
HOUMA, La. — Loulan Pitre Sr. was born on the Gulf Coast in 1921, the son of an oysterman. Nearly all his life, he worked on the water, abiding by the widely shared faith that the resources of the Gulf of Mexico were limitless.
As a young Marine staff sergeant, back home after fighting in the South Pacific, he stood on barges in the gulf and watched as surplus mines, bombs and ammunition were pushed over the side.
He helped build the gulf’s very first offshore oil drilling platforms in the late 1940s, installing bolts on perilously high perches over the water. He worked on a shrimp boat, and later as the captain of a service boat for drilling platforms.
The gulf has changed, Mr. Pitre said: “I think it’s too far gone to salvage.”
The BP oil spill has sent millions of barrels gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, focusing international attention on America’s third coast and prompting questions about whether it will ever fully recover from the spill.
Now that the oil on the surface appears to be dissipating, the notion of a recovery from the spill, repeated by politicians, strikes some here as short-sighted. The gulf had been suffering for decades before the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20.
“There’s a tremendous amount of outrage with the oil spill, and rightfully so,” said Felicia Coleman, director of Florida State University’s Coastal and Marine Laboratory. “But where’s the outrage at the thousands and millions of little cuts we’ve made on a daily basis?”
The gulf is one of the most diverse ecosystems in the hemisphere, a stopping point for migratory birds from South America to the Arctic, home to abundant wildlife and natural resources.
But like no other American body of water, the gulf bears the environmental consequences of the country’s economic pursuits and appetites, including oil and corn.
There are around 4,000 offshore oil and gas platforms and tens of thousands of miles of pipeline in the central and western Gulf of Mexico, where 90 percent of the country’s offshore drilling takes place.
At least half a million barrels of oil and drilling fluids had been spilled offshore before the gusher that began after the April 20 explosion, according to government records.
Much more than that has been spilled from pipelines, vessel traffic and wells in state waters — including hundreds of spills in Louisiana alone — records show, some of it since April 20.
Runoff and waste from cornfields, sewage plants, golf courses and oil-stained parking lots drain into the Mississippi River from vast swaths of the United States, and then flow down to the gulf, creating a zone of lifeless water the size of Lake Ontario just off the coast of Louisiana.
The gulf’s floor is littered with bombs, chemical weapons and other ordnance dumped in the middle of last century, even in areas busy with drilling, and miles outside of designated dumping zones, according to experts who work on deepwater hazard surveys.
The likelihood of an accident is low, experts said, but they added that federal hazard mitigation requirements are not strong enough to guarantee the safety of drillers working in the gulf.
Even the coast itself — overdeveloped, strip-mined and battered by storms — is falling apart. The wildlife-rich coastal wetlands of Louisiana, sliced up and drastically engineered for oil and gas exploration, shipping and flood control, have lost an area larger than Delaware since 1930.
“This has been the nation’s sacrifice zone, and has been for 50-plus years,” said Aaron Viles, campaign director for the Gulf Restoration Network, a nonprofit group. “What we’re seeing right now with BP’s crude is just a very photogenic representation of that.”
History of Neglect
All along the coast, people speak of a lack of regulatory commitment and investment in scientific research on the gulf by state and federal lawmakers.
They note, for example, that over the last decade, the Environmental Protection Agency’s financing for the Chesapeake Bay Program, a regional and federal partnership, was nearly five times the amount for a similar Gulf of Mexico program, and a Great Lakes program was given more than four times as much.
“The funding had never been equivalent to other great water bodies,” said Lisa Jackson, the administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency. “That’s absolutely true. But it’s also absolutely true that this administration changed that long before the spill.”
While the Gulf of Mexico program financing remains at roughly the same levels, Ms. Jackson pointed to other programs to address gulf health that have been created and received tens of millions of dollars in the last two years.
On July 19, the Obama administration announced the recommendations of the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force, a committee created in 2009 to coordinate governance over the country’s major bodies of water.
The White House also announced the creation of a gulf restoration road map before the spill to address the long-term problems on the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts.
The details of some of these federal plans remain vague, and the financing is viewed as just a start, but they have raised hopes of a more effective federal approach to the gulf’s problems — an approach that has long been missing, say scientists, lawyers and environmental advocates here.
Ms. Jackson added that it is not all about money. Some of the key coastal issues, like control of the Mississippi River, present thorny jurisdictional complications between the federal government and the states.
And while billions of dollars would be required to restore the coast — much more than has already been committed — the maintenance of a healthy gulf also demands rigorous enforcement of regulations.
Some of the strongest resistance to tough regulation, as well as the most permissive attitude toward industry and property development, has come from the Gulf States themselves.
While the states formed an alliance in 2004 to address the gulf’s overall health, the group includes some of the poorest states in the country, and they are concerned that tighter rules could chase away jobs.
In a federal ranking of states for annual toxic release, 3 of the top 10 are along the gulf.
This has led to a cycle of lax oversight. Members of several national environmental groups said they had found much of the gulf a hostile fund-raising and political atmosphere — a point echoed by Paul Templet, a former secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.
“They don’t have any support in state government,” Mr. Templet said of the groups. “They do a cost-benefit analysis, and they decide to spend their money elsewhere.”
A Regional Difference
But without the aggressive watchdog role played by well-financed environmental groups in places like California and the Mid-Atlantic, threats to the gulf have largely gone unmonitored.
Kieran Suckling, a founder of the Center for Biological Diversity, said he was shocked in the days after the Deepwater Horizon spill to discover the United States Minerals Management Service’s lax oversight of the offshore drilling industry.
“The blatant, extremely public actions of the M.M.S. would not survive for 10 minutes if they were doing this very same thing in the Northeast or the Pacific Northwest,” he said.
But his organization, like many others, did not have an office on the gulf.
“The environmental movement was either so far removed from it that it was unaware, or it was aware and afraid to challenge it because of local politics,” Mr. Suckling said. “Or it was unwilling to challenge because it has written off the gulf as America’s dumping ground.”
By the time the environmental movement gained steam, in the 1970s, the Gulf of Mexico had already established a reputation as a place where the country did its dirty work.
Oil and gas companies have been drilling offshore in the central and western gulf for more than 60 years, providing tens of thousands of jobs for states with ailing agrarian economies.
In that time, only the Ixtoc I spill off Mexico in 1979 has come close to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. But still, a report from the Ocean Studies Board and other federal scientific advisory groups found that the waters of the northwestern gulf take on more oil on average per year, from spills, natural seeps and land-based sources like coastal refineries and everyday transportation, than any other North American marine waters.
According to data from the Minerals Management Service compiled and analyzed by Toxics Targeting, a firm that documents pollution and contamination, at least 324 spills involving offshore drilling have occurred in the gulf since 1964, releasing more than 550,000 barrels of oil and drilling-related substances. Four of these spills even involved earlier equipment failures and accidents on the Deepwater Horizon rig. Thousands of tons of produced water — a drilling byproduct that includes oil, grease and heavy metals — are dumped into the gulf every year. The discharges are legal and regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency.
But in the early 1990s, Robert Wiygul, an environmental lawyer who works on the Gulf Coast, brought at least a half-dozen lawsuits against companies that were found to be dumping produced water in shallow areas along the coast without any permit at all, citing little to no enforcement by the E.P.A. and little concern from regional politicians.
The E.P.A. later tightened regulations, including an outright ban on dumping produced waters near shore. But Mr. Wiygul described the situation as typical.
“If you’d had high-level politicians saying, ‘Y’all need to do this, this needs to happen,’ you would have seen a different situation there,” he said.
A Double-Edged Sword
Some of the alternatives to oil and gas could present their own problems to the gulf. While many farm groups, along with the Obama administration, are pushing for an expansion of ethanol-based fuels, such an expansion could mean more corn grown in the Midwest. That in turn could mean more nitrogen-rich fertilizer pouring into the gulf from the Mississippi River.
The nitrogen discharged into the Mississippi — 1.5 million tons of it yearly, from fertilizer, as well as urban runoff and sewage plants — creates a feeding frenzy among the phytoplankton when it enters the gulf. When the phytoplankton decompose, oxygen in the water is reduced so significantly that little life can exist.
That man-made area of dead water, called a hypoxic zone, is second in size only to a similar zone in the Baltic Sea. And its source, for the most part, is in states hundreds of miles from the gulf.
“One of the problems with the gulf as an ecosystem is its insults come from so damn far away,” said Oliver Houck, a lawyer at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic in New Orleans.
The Clean Water Act has been effective at regulating “point source” pollution from specific factories and waste plants. But the act leaves much up to the states when it comes to regulating more diffuse sources of pollution, like runoff. And agricultural runoff is explicitly exempt from regulation under the act.
That does not mean that the states and the E.P.A. are powerless to curtail upstream pollution, said Nancy Rabalais, an expert on gulf hypoxia and executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. They just have been reluctant to do so in the past.
She said some positive steps had been made recently, including a new four-year, $320 million federal initiative dedicated to substantially reducing the nitrogen coming into the gulf by working with agricultural states upriver. But the plan is only a start, she said, and she has not seen the states along the Mississippi, including those in the gulf, push for the financing needed to make a measurable difference.
Mr. Pitre is skeptical that anything will change, given the economic realities. The BP spill aside, much of the damage to the gulf has been gradual and piecemeal. And people still believe that the gulf is big enough to absorb it.
“You can fool people,” Mr. Pitre said. “But you can’t fool the fish.”
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Copyright by Bloomberg News
Published: July 29, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/us/30gulf.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
HOUMA, La. — Loulan Pitre Sr. was born on the Gulf Coast in 1921, the son of an oysterman. Nearly all his life, he worked on the water, abiding by the widely shared faith that the resources of the Gulf of Mexico were limitless.
As a young Marine staff sergeant, back home after fighting in the South Pacific, he stood on barges in the gulf and watched as surplus mines, bombs and ammunition were pushed over the side.
He helped build the gulf’s very first offshore oil drilling platforms in the late 1940s, installing bolts on perilously high perches over the water. He worked on a shrimp boat, and later as the captain of a service boat for drilling platforms.
The gulf has changed, Mr. Pitre said: “I think it’s too far gone to salvage.”
The BP oil spill has sent millions of barrels gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, focusing international attention on America’s third coast and prompting questions about whether it will ever fully recover from the spill.
Now that the oil on the surface appears to be dissipating, the notion of a recovery from the spill, repeated by politicians, strikes some here as short-sighted. The gulf had been suffering for decades before the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20.
“There’s a tremendous amount of outrage with the oil spill, and rightfully so,” said Felicia Coleman, director of Florida State University’s Coastal and Marine Laboratory. “But where’s the outrage at the thousands and millions of little cuts we’ve made on a daily basis?”
The gulf is one of the most diverse ecosystems in the hemisphere, a stopping point for migratory birds from South America to the Arctic, home to abundant wildlife and natural resources.
But like no other American body of water, the gulf bears the environmental consequences of the country’s economic pursuits and appetites, including oil and corn.
There are around 4,000 offshore oil and gas platforms and tens of thousands of miles of pipeline in the central and western Gulf of Mexico, where 90 percent of the country’s offshore drilling takes place.
At least half a million barrels of oil and drilling fluids had been spilled offshore before the gusher that began after the April 20 explosion, according to government records.
Much more than that has been spilled from pipelines, vessel traffic and wells in state waters — including hundreds of spills in Louisiana alone — records show, some of it since April 20.
Runoff and waste from cornfields, sewage plants, golf courses and oil-stained parking lots drain into the Mississippi River from vast swaths of the United States, and then flow down to the gulf, creating a zone of lifeless water the size of Lake Ontario just off the coast of Louisiana.
The gulf’s floor is littered with bombs, chemical weapons and other ordnance dumped in the middle of last century, even in areas busy with drilling, and miles outside of designated dumping zones, according to experts who work on deepwater hazard surveys.
The likelihood of an accident is low, experts said, but they added that federal hazard mitigation requirements are not strong enough to guarantee the safety of drillers working in the gulf.
Even the coast itself — overdeveloped, strip-mined and battered by storms — is falling apart. The wildlife-rich coastal wetlands of Louisiana, sliced up and drastically engineered for oil and gas exploration, shipping and flood control, have lost an area larger than Delaware since 1930.
“This has been the nation’s sacrifice zone, and has been for 50-plus years,” said Aaron Viles, campaign director for the Gulf Restoration Network, a nonprofit group. “What we’re seeing right now with BP’s crude is just a very photogenic representation of that.”
History of Neglect
All along the coast, people speak of a lack of regulatory commitment and investment in scientific research on the gulf by state and federal lawmakers.
They note, for example, that over the last decade, the Environmental Protection Agency’s financing for the Chesapeake Bay Program, a regional and federal partnership, was nearly five times the amount for a similar Gulf of Mexico program, and a Great Lakes program was given more than four times as much.
“The funding had never been equivalent to other great water bodies,” said Lisa Jackson, the administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency. “That’s absolutely true. But it’s also absolutely true that this administration changed that long before the spill.”
While the Gulf of Mexico program financing remains at roughly the same levels, Ms. Jackson pointed to other programs to address gulf health that have been created and received tens of millions of dollars in the last two years.
On July 19, the Obama administration announced the recommendations of the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force, a committee created in 2009 to coordinate governance over the country’s major bodies of water.
The White House also announced the creation of a gulf restoration road map before the spill to address the long-term problems on the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts.
The details of some of these federal plans remain vague, and the financing is viewed as just a start, but they have raised hopes of a more effective federal approach to the gulf’s problems — an approach that has long been missing, say scientists, lawyers and environmental advocates here.
Ms. Jackson added that it is not all about money. Some of the key coastal issues, like control of the Mississippi River, present thorny jurisdictional complications between the federal government and the states.
And while billions of dollars would be required to restore the coast — much more than has already been committed — the maintenance of a healthy gulf also demands rigorous enforcement of regulations.
Some of the strongest resistance to tough regulation, as well as the most permissive attitude toward industry and property development, has come from the Gulf States themselves.
While the states formed an alliance in 2004 to address the gulf’s overall health, the group includes some of the poorest states in the country, and they are concerned that tighter rules could chase away jobs.
In a federal ranking of states for annual toxic release, 3 of the top 10 are along the gulf.
This has led to a cycle of lax oversight. Members of several national environmental groups said they had found much of the gulf a hostile fund-raising and political atmosphere — a point echoed by Paul Templet, a former secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.
“They don’t have any support in state government,” Mr. Templet said of the groups. “They do a cost-benefit analysis, and they decide to spend their money elsewhere.”
A Regional Difference
But without the aggressive watchdog role played by well-financed environmental groups in places like California and the Mid-Atlantic, threats to the gulf have largely gone unmonitored.
Kieran Suckling, a founder of the Center for Biological Diversity, said he was shocked in the days after the Deepwater Horizon spill to discover the United States Minerals Management Service’s lax oversight of the offshore drilling industry.
“The blatant, extremely public actions of the M.M.S. would not survive for 10 minutes if they were doing this very same thing in the Northeast or the Pacific Northwest,” he said.
But his organization, like many others, did not have an office on the gulf.
“The environmental movement was either so far removed from it that it was unaware, or it was aware and afraid to challenge it because of local politics,” Mr. Suckling said. “Or it was unwilling to challenge because it has written off the gulf as America’s dumping ground.”
By the time the environmental movement gained steam, in the 1970s, the Gulf of Mexico had already established a reputation as a place where the country did its dirty work.
Oil and gas companies have been drilling offshore in the central and western gulf for more than 60 years, providing tens of thousands of jobs for states with ailing agrarian economies.
In that time, only the Ixtoc I spill off Mexico in 1979 has come close to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. But still, a report from the Ocean Studies Board and other federal scientific advisory groups found that the waters of the northwestern gulf take on more oil on average per year, from spills, natural seeps and land-based sources like coastal refineries and everyday transportation, than any other North American marine waters.
According to data from the Minerals Management Service compiled and analyzed by Toxics Targeting, a firm that documents pollution and contamination, at least 324 spills involving offshore drilling have occurred in the gulf since 1964, releasing more than 550,000 barrels of oil and drilling-related substances. Four of these spills even involved earlier equipment failures and accidents on the Deepwater Horizon rig. Thousands of tons of produced water — a drilling byproduct that includes oil, grease and heavy metals — are dumped into the gulf every year. The discharges are legal and regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency.
But in the early 1990s, Robert Wiygul, an environmental lawyer who works on the Gulf Coast, brought at least a half-dozen lawsuits against companies that were found to be dumping produced water in shallow areas along the coast without any permit at all, citing little to no enforcement by the E.P.A. and little concern from regional politicians.
The E.P.A. later tightened regulations, including an outright ban on dumping produced waters near shore. But Mr. Wiygul described the situation as typical.
“If you’d had high-level politicians saying, ‘Y’all need to do this, this needs to happen,’ you would have seen a different situation there,” he said.
A Double-Edged Sword
Some of the alternatives to oil and gas could present their own problems to the gulf. While many farm groups, along with the Obama administration, are pushing for an expansion of ethanol-based fuels, such an expansion could mean more corn grown in the Midwest. That in turn could mean more nitrogen-rich fertilizer pouring into the gulf from the Mississippi River.
The nitrogen discharged into the Mississippi — 1.5 million tons of it yearly, from fertilizer, as well as urban runoff and sewage plants — creates a feeding frenzy among the phytoplankton when it enters the gulf. When the phytoplankton decompose, oxygen in the water is reduced so significantly that little life can exist.
That man-made area of dead water, called a hypoxic zone, is second in size only to a similar zone in the Baltic Sea. And its source, for the most part, is in states hundreds of miles from the gulf.
“One of the problems with the gulf as an ecosystem is its insults come from so damn far away,” said Oliver Houck, a lawyer at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic in New Orleans.
The Clean Water Act has been effective at regulating “point source” pollution from specific factories and waste plants. But the act leaves much up to the states when it comes to regulating more diffuse sources of pollution, like runoff. And agricultural runoff is explicitly exempt from regulation under the act.
That does not mean that the states and the E.P.A. are powerless to curtail upstream pollution, said Nancy Rabalais, an expert on gulf hypoxia and executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. They just have been reluctant to do so in the past.
She said some positive steps had been made recently, including a new four-year, $320 million federal initiative dedicated to substantially reducing the nitrogen coming into the gulf by working with agricultural states upriver. But the plan is only a start, she said, and she has not seen the states along the Mississippi, including those in the gulf, push for the financing needed to make a measurable difference.
Mr. Pitre is skeptical that anything will change, given the economic realities. The BP spill aside, much of the damage to the gulf has been gradual and piecemeal. And people still believe that the gulf is big enough to absorb it.
“You can fool people,” Mr. Pitre said. “But you can’t fool the fish.”
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Ethics panel charges Rangel with conduct discrediting the House
Ethics panel charges Rangel with conduct discrediting the House
Copyright By the CNN News
July 29, 2010 6:40 p.m. EDT
http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/07/29/rangel.ethics/index.html?hpt=T2
Washington (CNN) -- The House ethics committee on Thursday accused veteran Rep. Charles Rangel of 13 violations of House rules involving alleged financial wrongdoing and harming the credibility of Congress.
The charges accused the 20-term Democrat from New York of using his influence to solicit donations for a college policy center in his name from corporate heads and others with business before the powerful House Ways and Means Committee that Rangel chaired.
Other charges involved alleged income tax and financial disclosure violations, as well as improper use of government mail service and letterhead.
"Credibility is what's at stake here; the very credibility of the House itself before the American people," said Rep. Mike McCaul, the ranking Republican on a subcommittee that will hold a trial-like hearing on the charges against Rangel.
McCaul spoke at the subcommittee's first meeting, described as an organizational session. Rangel was not required to attend and did not show up to hear the first public disclosure of the formal charges against him.
Asked later about his response to the charges, Rangel only responded: "I'm very anxious to." In the days leading up to the hearing, Rangel had said he welcomed the completion of a two-year investigation by the ethics committee so that he could finally respond to specific accusations against him.
According to documents released by the committee, Rangel first learned of the charges being pursued by an investigating subcommitee on June 17. He filed a motion to have the charges dismissed, which the investigating panel denied, the documents showed.
Rangel said this week that his lawyers were in talks with committee lawyers on a possible deal to settle the case without a hearing. When Thursday's hearing was delayed for 55 minutes with no explanation, rumors of an imminent agreement quickly spread.
However, the panel gathered and held the hearing, and it remained unclear whether a settlement avoiding the spectacle of a trial hearing was possible.
According to the charges, Rangel allegedly failed to report more than $600,000 on financial disclosure reports and improperly used a rent-subsidized apartment as a campaign office for over a decade and failed to pay taxes on a home in the Dominican Republic.
Rangel "argues that errors on his personal taxes do not implicate discharge of his official responsibilities," committee investigators concluded in response to Rangel's request to have the charges dismissed. He "appears to be operating under the erroneous belief that the only conduct subject to discipline is conduct directly related to the discharge of his official responsibilities."
An investigative subcommittee report on Rangel's dealings, available on the committee's Web site, detailed a lengthy series of meetings the congressman held with business leaders to raise funds for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Policy at the City College. His repeated attempts to woo potential donors violated the House's solicitation and gift ban, the report said.
Among other things, the report stated that Rangel met with a lobbyist for insurance giant AIG in April 2008 with the objective to "close" a $10 million "gift for the Rangel Center."
At the meeting, "AIG raised concerns about a potential donation, including the potential headline risk," the report stated. But Rangel pushed ahead, asking "AIG, at least twice, what was necessary to get this done."
During the period of time that Rangel was seeking donations from AIG, according to committee investigators, the company was lobbying the House on several tax and trade issues -- matters over which Rangel exercised considerable influence.
It also noted that, in March 2007, he used congressional letterhead to send notes to business leaders such as Donald Trump, in which he requested meetings to discuss the Rangel Center.
The congressman's "acceptance of favors and benefits from donors to the Rangel Center ... might be construed by reasonable persons as influencing the performance of his governmental duties," the report concluded, adding that the "accumulation of (Rangel's) actions reflected poorly on the institution of the House and, thereby, brought discredit to the House."
McCaul said the allegations against Rangel, if proven, would violate "the most fundamental code of conduct" for House members.
Rep. Gene Green of Texas, a Democrat who led a two-year ethics subcommittee investigation of Rangel, said it was a difficult job.
"The task is even more difficult when the subject has befriended and mentored so many new members, and I'm one of them," Green said.
Another ethics committee member, Republican Rep. Jo Bonner of Alabama, said "this is truly a sad day where no one, regardless of their partisan stripes, should rejoice."
Rangel temporarily stepped down as Ways and Means Committee chairman earlier this year following the announcement of an ethics investigation of several allegations, including failure to pay taxes on the Dominican Republic residence.
The House ethics committee previously admonished Rangel for violating rules on receiving gifts. Specifically, the committee found that Rangel violated House gift rules by accepting reimbursement payments for travel to conferences in the Caribbean in 2007 and 2008.
Rangel, whose autobiography that discusses his Korean War experience is titled "And I Haven't Had a Bad Day Since," told reporters earlier Thursday that "I have to reassess that (statement)" in light of the pending hearing.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday -- in response to a question about Rangel -- that there must be "accountability" and "transparency" in cases of ethical transgressions.
"Holding a high ethical standard is a serious responsibility ... and a top priority" for the House Democratic leadership, she said. In terms of political fallout from cases such as Rangel's, "the chips will fall where they may," she said.
Congressional Democrats have reportedly expressed concern that an extended public airing of the charges against Rangel could damage the party's prospects in the November midterm elections.
Copyright By the CNN News
July 29, 2010 6:40 p.m. EDT
http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/07/29/rangel.ethics/index.html?hpt=T2
Washington (CNN) -- The House ethics committee on Thursday accused veteran Rep. Charles Rangel of 13 violations of House rules involving alleged financial wrongdoing and harming the credibility of Congress.
The charges accused the 20-term Democrat from New York of using his influence to solicit donations for a college policy center in his name from corporate heads and others with business before the powerful House Ways and Means Committee that Rangel chaired.
Other charges involved alleged income tax and financial disclosure violations, as well as improper use of government mail service and letterhead.
"Credibility is what's at stake here; the very credibility of the House itself before the American people," said Rep. Mike McCaul, the ranking Republican on a subcommittee that will hold a trial-like hearing on the charges against Rangel.
McCaul spoke at the subcommittee's first meeting, described as an organizational session. Rangel was not required to attend and did not show up to hear the first public disclosure of the formal charges against him.
Asked later about his response to the charges, Rangel only responded: "I'm very anxious to." In the days leading up to the hearing, Rangel had said he welcomed the completion of a two-year investigation by the ethics committee so that he could finally respond to specific accusations against him.
According to documents released by the committee, Rangel first learned of the charges being pursued by an investigating subcommitee on June 17. He filed a motion to have the charges dismissed, which the investigating panel denied, the documents showed.
Rangel said this week that his lawyers were in talks with committee lawyers on a possible deal to settle the case without a hearing. When Thursday's hearing was delayed for 55 minutes with no explanation, rumors of an imminent agreement quickly spread.
However, the panel gathered and held the hearing, and it remained unclear whether a settlement avoiding the spectacle of a trial hearing was possible.
According to the charges, Rangel allegedly failed to report more than $600,000 on financial disclosure reports and improperly used a rent-subsidized apartment as a campaign office for over a decade and failed to pay taxes on a home in the Dominican Republic.
Rangel "argues that errors on his personal taxes do not implicate discharge of his official responsibilities," committee investigators concluded in response to Rangel's request to have the charges dismissed. He "appears to be operating under the erroneous belief that the only conduct subject to discipline is conduct directly related to the discharge of his official responsibilities."
An investigative subcommittee report on Rangel's dealings, available on the committee's Web site, detailed a lengthy series of meetings the congressman held with business leaders to raise funds for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Policy at the City College. His repeated attempts to woo potential donors violated the House's solicitation and gift ban, the report said.
Among other things, the report stated that Rangel met with a lobbyist for insurance giant AIG in April 2008 with the objective to "close" a $10 million "gift for the Rangel Center."
At the meeting, "AIG raised concerns about a potential donation, including the potential headline risk," the report stated. But Rangel pushed ahead, asking "AIG, at least twice, what was necessary to get this done."
During the period of time that Rangel was seeking donations from AIG, according to committee investigators, the company was lobbying the House on several tax and trade issues -- matters over which Rangel exercised considerable influence.
It also noted that, in March 2007, he used congressional letterhead to send notes to business leaders such as Donald Trump, in which he requested meetings to discuss the Rangel Center.
The congressman's "acceptance of favors and benefits from donors to the Rangel Center ... might be construed by reasonable persons as influencing the performance of his governmental duties," the report concluded, adding that the "accumulation of (Rangel's) actions reflected poorly on the institution of the House and, thereby, brought discredit to the House."
McCaul said the allegations against Rangel, if proven, would violate "the most fundamental code of conduct" for House members.
Rep. Gene Green of Texas, a Democrat who led a two-year ethics subcommittee investigation of Rangel, said it was a difficult job.
"The task is even more difficult when the subject has befriended and mentored so many new members, and I'm one of them," Green said.
Another ethics committee member, Republican Rep. Jo Bonner of Alabama, said "this is truly a sad day where no one, regardless of their partisan stripes, should rejoice."
Rangel temporarily stepped down as Ways and Means Committee chairman earlier this year following the announcement of an ethics investigation of several allegations, including failure to pay taxes on the Dominican Republic residence.
The House ethics committee previously admonished Rangel for violating rules on receiving gifts. Specifically, the committee found that Rangel violated House gift rules by accepting reimbursement payments for travel to conferences in the Caribbean in 2007 and 2008.
Rangel, whose autobiography that discusses his Korean War experience is titled "And I Haven't Had a Bad Day Since," told reporters earlier Thursday that "I have to reassess that (statement)" in light of the pending hearing.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday -- in response to a question about Rangel -- that there must be "accountability" and "transparency" in cases of ethical transgressions.
"Holding a high ethical standard is a serious responsibility ... and a top priority" for the House Democratic leadership, she said. In terms of political fallout from cases such as Rangel's, "the chips will fall where they may," she said.
Congressional Democrats have reportedly expressed concern that an extended public airing of the charges against Rangel could damage the party's prospects in the November midterm elections.
EDITORIAL: Ending 'pay for delay' tactics on generic drugs could mean lower prices
Editorial: Ending 'pay for delay' tactics on generic drugs could mean lower prices
Copyright by The Washington Post
Thursday, July 29, 2010
vhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/28/AR2010072805158.html
FOR TOO LONG, pay-for-delay settlements have been an accepted part of the health-care landscape. In these deals, a brand-name drug manufacturer pays a generic competitor to delay its entry into the market. Sound illegal? It isn't -- but a provision to be considered by the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday would finally make it so, banning such settlements unless drug manufacturers could prove they were not anticompetitive. It's a good idea that could save consumers billions of dollars.
In the world of prescription drugs, patents are vital to profitability. Researching, developing and testing new drugs requires a heavy investment, and strong patents keep imitators off the market long enough to make brand-name manufacturers' investment pay off. But the law surrounding these patents was so strong that even where products demonstrated little innovation or novelty, their monopolies could go unchallenged by generic competition out of fear of costly lawsuits.
The 1984 Hatch-Waxman Act sought to change this. It encouraged generic drug manufacturers to enter the market sooner by offering a 180-day window of exclusivity for the first company that could produce a drug that was "bioequivalent" to that of a brand-name competitor without infringing on its patent. Such a deal benefited consumers -- they would be able to access affordable drugs sooner -- and offered an incentive to generic drug manufacturers to develop products to take advantage of the window.
The resulting competition vastly decreases drug prices but cuts into the brand names' profits. As the number of challenges to brand-name patents has increased, the number of settlements has also increased, in which brand-name manufacturers agreed to pay generic competitors to delay their entry into the market. Brand-name manufacturers can thus continue charging monopoly prices longer than their patents might merit, and generics can make more money than they would by entering the market. It's a winning scenario for everyone -- except consumers.
The Federal Trade Commission estimates that these blatantly anti-competitive settlements cost consumers more than $3 billion a year; even the Congressional Budget Office's more conservative estimate placed the cost at $2.5 billion annually. The measure banning the deals found its way into an appropriations bill now before the Senate Appropriations Committee as an offset because the federal government buys one-third of all prescription drugs. Ending this anti-competitive practice would save taxpayers money this year and offer benefits for years to come.
Copyright by The Washington Post
Thursday, July 29, 2010
vhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/28/AR2010072805158.html
FOR TOO LONG, pay-for-delay settlements have been an accepted part of the health-care landscape. In these deals, a brand-name drug manufacturer pays a generic competitor to delay its entry into the market. Sound illegal? It isn't -- but a provision to be considered by the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday would finally make it so, banning such settlements unless drug manufacturers could prove they were not anticompetitive. It's a good idea that could save consumers billions of dollars.
In the world of prescription drugs, patents are vital to profitability. Researching, developing and testing new drugs requires a heavy investment, and strong patents keep imitators off the market long enough to make brand-name manufacturers' investment pay off. But the law surrounding these patents was so strong that even where products demonstrated little innovation or novelty, their monopolies could go unchallenged by generic competition out of fear of costly lawsuits.
The 1984 Hatch-Waxman Act sought to change this. It encouraged generic drug manufacturers to enter the market sooner by offering a 180-day window of exclusivity for the first company that could produce a drug that was "bioequivalent" to that of a brand-name competitor without infringing on its patent. Such a deal benefited consumers -- they would be able to access affordable drugs sooner -- and offered an incentive to generic drug manufacturers to develop products to take advantage of the window.
The resulting competition vastly decreases drug prices but cuts into the brand names' profits. As the number of challenges to brand-name patents has increased, the number of settlements has also increased, in which brand-name manufacturers agreed to pay generic competitors to delay their entry into the market. Brand-name manufacturers can thus continue charging monopoly prices longer than their patents might merit, and generics can make more money than they would by entering the market. It's a winning scenario for everyone -- except consumers.
The Federal Trade Commission estimates that these blatantly anti-competitive settlements cost consumers more than $3 billion a year; even the Congressional Budget Office's more conservative estimate placed the cost at $2.5 billion annually. The measure banning the deals found its way into an appropriations bill now before the Senate Appropriations Committee as an offset because the federal government buys one-third of all prescription drugs. Ending this anti-competitive practice would save taxpayers money this year and offer benefits for years to come.
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