Columbus -- PJs or sweat pants? Whatever Attorney General Marc Dann's scheduler was wearing while visiting his Dublin condo one night late last summer, it was not work clothes or even jeans, according to an employee who was there.
Jessica Utovich's attire arises as an issue because of a sexual-harassment complaint filed by an employee in the attorney general's office, against her boss, Anthony Gutierrez.
The events that unfolded at the condo on the evening of Sept. 10, 2007, play a crucial role in the complaint. Gutierrez has been suspended with pay while the complaint, along with one by another female employee, are investigated both inside the attorney general's office and by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The state complaint, first detailed Sunday by the Columbus Dispatch, says that while the female employee was at the Dann condo, Utovich "walked in w. pj's and laptop" and lay on the floor in front of the television to work on her computer and eat pizza.
Dann acknowledged to reporters Tuesday that Utovich, who is no longer his scheduler, was "at my house a number of different times." He said she was delivering schedules and related information because Dann prefers them on paper, not via e-mail. . . . Oh, so that's what we're calling it these days: "delivering schedules and related information."
Posted by: Mike ||
04/11/2008 10:46 ||
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A 19-year-old Green Township mother is in the Hamilton County jail after Cincinnati police charged her with taking her newborn child along while she broke into a candy store. There's a mugshot at the link. She's . . . kinda chunky.
Christine Ruther and three others are accused of breaking into Peter Minges & Son candy store, 138 W. Court St., downtown, shortly before 1 a.m. and swiping about $500 in candy, police said. The group was arrested a few blocks away at Fourth and Race streets when police caught up with them by following a trail of candy and candy wrappers.
Leslie Betts, manager of the 103-year-old family candy distributing business, said the quartet stole every kind of candy imaginable: Reece cups, Skittles, Twizzlers, you name it.
She said she learned of the break-in when Cincinnati police called her at home about 1:30 a.m. Youve been broken into, she said they told her. Were guarding the Swedish fish. Hurry. Come down. We cant leave the store. Its wide open. . . .
Posted by: Mike ||
04/11/2008 10:38 ||
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The state Supreme Court says a jail inmate who was starving himself did not have a right to refuse force-feeding. But the court is split on whether the state only has the right to force-feed prisoners in certain circumstances.
Four of the justices say the state had a right to force-feed Charles McNabb because he was trying to commit suicide.
Four others argue that McNabb's privacy rights were not violated by the force-feeding because he was not terminally ill and has no right refuse life-sustaining treatment.
One dissenting justice argues that McNabb had a right to refuse force-feeding under privacy rights guaranteed by the state constitution. Interesting in light of Washington States pro-euthanasia stance.
#2
See, you confuse principle with POWER. POWER does not require principle. Thus two inconsistent principles can be supported by our new Princes, Dukes, Counts, who but wear robes and are thus above the rest of us. They say so.
A Navy supply officer and former Naval Academy instructor testified Thursday that she moonlighted as a prostitute for the D.C. Madam, a California woman accused of running an escort service that prosecutors say netted her several million dollars over a 13-year period.
Lt. Cmdr. Rebecca Dickinson told federal prosecutors at U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., that she had sex with nearly every client she met while working for Deborah Jeane Palfrey from October 2005 until April 2006.
Several other women who testified said they were paid between $250 and $300 for 90-minute appointments at Washington-area homes, hotel rooms and offices, and were required to forward as much as half of that by postal money orders to a Northern California post office box rented by Palfrey.
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#1
Endless hilarity. The USN high command has a well deserved reputation for being very prudish, and are probably having a "dog stroke" about this. They about lost their marbles over the Cher music video thing.
The other branches officers are undoubtedly snickering when naval officers enter the room, and there will be a big jump in USN sexual harassment complaints resulting from tacky attempts to be witty.
All other female Lt. Commanders and other officers are going to have a big chip on their shoulder, so will be in a very surly mood for quite a while.
The end result is going to be exceptionally funny for anyone not directly involved. Broad grins on one side and grinding teeth on the other.
I am very interested on the takes other prior service have on this.
#2
I'm old enough to remember the scandal caused by Playboy's Women in Uniform issue. The Air Force and Navy chaptered their cases out of the service. The Army, which had a service pub which featured scantily clad women in the inside back cover, dropped the pics from the pub and issued a new directive about off duty employment authorization requirements [someone in JAG figured that with the pic in the service pub that the Army couldn't win any legal proceedings]. The Marine Corps commandant was questioned if he was concern about their 'representative' featured in the issue and replied he wasn't worried about others doing it again but if there was a magazine title Ugly he would be concerned.
#4
Oh come on now I know most of us vets are snikering at the thought of calling for a date and having the sultry supply officer showing up. Too tasty to talk about.
Perverts must go through crucial therapy programmes where they talk about their sex crimes, as part of their sentence. But the Ministry of Justice could offer exemption to Muslim prisoners after they complained discussing crimes is against their religion. Don't wanna go to re-hab,
Rather eat Kosher kebab,
Koran sez beat the wife,
Abdullah gonna do that right,
By Allah we will fight,
'Til the kaffirs say, "good night."
Tory MPs have blasted the idea and Shadow Justice Minister Nick Herbert reckons all prisoners should be treated equally. If they refuse the sex crimes rehab they should be kept behind bars for longer. Mr Herbert said: It is one thing to make a dispensation for a prisoners faith when it comes to prayer and diet.
But if a prisoner is unwilling to take part in rehabilitation they should be treated no differently to others, which may mean spending longer in custody.
Automatic early release should be scrapped Shadow Justice Minister Nick Herbert. He said: There can be no religious discrimination when it comes to deciding the appropriate and safe time to release a prisoner. Mr Herbert added that automatic early release should be scrapped.
He said: In any case, all prisoners, regardless of religion, should have their release made conditional on their behaviour and progress in custody, not be given automatic release at the half-way mark.
A Muslim prisoner wrote a letter to the lags newspaper Inside Time, raising the issue. The prison services Muslim Adviser Ahtsham Ali, confirmed that there is a legitimate Islamic position for not talking about crimes.
The Ministry of Justice has agreed to look at the issue to be sensitive to Muslim needs.
Eight Florida teenagers -- six of them girls -- will be tried as adults and could be sentenced to life in prison for their alleged roles in the videotaped beating of another teen, the state attorney's office said Thursday. The suspects, who range in age from 14 to 18, all face charges of kidnapping, which is a first-degree felony, and battery, said Chip Thullbery, a spokesman for the Polk County state attorney. Three of them are also charged with tampering with a witness.
Everyone involved in the case was under a gag order imposed by a judge. The only attorney for the teens who has been publicly identified did not return calls from CNN, and his assistant cited the gag order as the reason. The teens are scheduled for their first appearance in court Friday.
The video shows a brutal scene: The 16-year-old victim is punched, kneed and slapped by other girls. She huddles in the fetal position, or stands and screams at her attackers, but the assault continues. Authorities say the eight teens said they were retaliating for insults posted on the Internet by the attack victim.
Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd called the March 30 attack "animalistic." "I've been involved in law enforcement for 35 years, and I've seen a lot of extremely violent events, but I've never seen children, 14 to 18 years of age, engage in this conduct for a 30-minute period of time and then make these video clips," he said. Police say the teens planned to post the video on YouTube.
The victim, a 16-year-old from Lakeland, Florida, was hospitalized, and still has blurred vision, hearing loss, and a swollen face, her mother told CNN on Wednesday.
The video shows only girls doing the beating; Judd said the boys acted as lookouts.
The idea of girls administering a vicious beating so they can post the video online may seem shocking, but it's becoming an increasingly common scenario, according to experts and news reports. Another example was also in the news this week: A high school art teacher in Baltimore told police a female student beat her up last week, and a video of the attack was posted on YouTube, according to CNN affiliate WBAL.
A search for "girl fight" on YouTube gets thousands of results, and a suggestion to also try "girl fight at school, boy girl fight" and other search terms. There's at least one Web site devoted exclusively to videos of girls fighting.
In 2003, 25 percent of high school girls said they had been in a physical fight in the past year, according to a survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (The figure for boys was 40.5 percent.). A Justice Department report released in 2006 showed that by age 17, 21 percent of girls said they had assaulted someone with the intent to cause serious harm.
Frank Green is executive director of Keys to Safer Schools, a group that studies and tries to prevent school violence. He said he's not sure whether girls have actually become more violent, or whether there's just more awareness of their fights. My guess: The internet and relaxed norms have allowed groups to bypass the realities of a larger society, which in turn has left them unleashed in much the way boys have traditionally been due to their more "dominant" role.
"In one respect, girls have always been more vicious than boys," Green said. "Their violence is of a personal nature." He said boys usually have some focus and a concrete goal when they fight. "But girls want to cause pain and make the other girl feel bad," he said. Native Americans knew how to take advantage of this, I understand. :-)
Judd, the Polk County sheriff, said an important part of the plan in the Lakeland attack was to post the video of the beating on YouTube to humiliate and embarrass the victim.
"It's the next stage of cyberbullying," psychologist Susan Lipkins said. "They want to show what they're doing."
"Our kids are being peer pressured, in another sense of a trend, to put these shock videos out there at other peoples' expense," said Talisa Lindsay, the victim's mother. "And I hope that it doesn't come to the point where there's more people's lives that are being affected by having to take a beating for entertainment, or possibly being killed."
The suspects didn't have a chance to post the video online before police moved in and seized it, Judd said. The Sheriff's Department made it public, and it wound up on YouTube anyway. Judd recognizes the irony. "In a perverted sense, we were feeding into exactly what the kids wanted," he said. "But according to Florida law, [the video] is public record, and it's going to be in the public domain whether we agree with that or not." Well, exactly what the kids thought they wanted. There's going to be an outcry now that demands harsher justice.
Judd said the suspects showed no remorse when they were arrested and booked. "They were laughing and joking about, 'I guess we won't get to go to the beach during spring break.' And one ... asked whether she could go to cheerleading practice," he said.
Lipkins, the psychologist, says there's a "disconnect between their actions and their thoughts.""They think the entire society is doing it, and they think it's funny. So they put it on YouTube. And I don't think they expect kids to get really hurt, and they also don't expect to get really caught."
#1
life in prison? Please. Give me a F**** break. Yeah, that's a GREAT idea. How about we punish them accordingly and move on. Who comes up with this crap?!
#2
I seriously doubt the 'children' (most of whom are 17-18) will face 'life' or any time at all. That's just the 'journalist' trying to sensationalize the story.
I expect they will get a slap on the wrist, a few hours of community service, and a 'Don't do that again!' lecture before they go to the beach for spring break.
I think they should do some time - and get a permanent 'Felony Conviction' stamped on their record. If the victim has to live with permanent hearing loss then at least they should have to live with having to tick off and explain that 'Have you ever been convicted of a Felony?' question on their job application.
#3
I think the girls' own attitudes have brought this backlash on. The sheriff commented that they were all in the holding cell laughing and cajoling and generally making it known that they knew the authorities wouldn't really do anything to them for the attack.
That kind of behavior causes a backlash, which is what they are getting. And they won't get life, they'll bargain it down, BUT I BET THEY AREN'T LAUGHING ANYMORE.
#4
They won't (and probably shouldn't) get life in prison. They have really screwed up their potential of ever getting most good jobs though. And they may put their parents into bancruptcy once the lawsuits play out.
#5
Obviously, these have feral. The system won't cure that, but I know some good Drill Sergeants who'd give it try as long as the limp wristed bleeding hearts don't interfere.
#6
MAYBE not life -- but at least 15 to 20 years. And they should SERVE IT ALL. These animals have no place in civilized society. Many people like to pretend that teenagers are incapable of rational thought... and maybe these teenagers are incapable -- but there are millions of responsible young people in this country, and they shouldn't have to share the streets with this kind of vicious scum.
#7
Cheerleaders and prison. There's a movie script in there somewhere.
Posted by: ed ||
04/11/2008 11:18 Comments ||
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#8
Woodrow, these young women committed aggrevated assault. That's a vicious, violent attack. They deserve a very careful scrutiny after conviction and, in the absence of some obvious mitigating factor, deserve the maximum or near-maximum sentence Florida law provides.
Violence crosses a line. I can have sympathy for some non-violent offenders depending on life situation and circumstance. But the instant a person commits a violent, criminal act my sympathy meters pegs at zero.
Posted by: Steve White ||
04/11/2008 12:59 Comments ||
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#9
5 years of hard labor. Hell, there's a fence to build down south. Fences need post holes. In 5 years, all the holes should be dug, heh heh.
#10
"Our kids are being peer pressured, in another sense of a trend, to put these shock videos out there at other peoples' expense, said Talisa Lindsay, the victim's mother."
Peer Pressure? Let me blunt Fuck that! Its pathetic when even the girls mother sees a victim hood in the narcissistic behavior from the feral youth that beat her daughter. Western culture must begin to eliminate the concept of adolescence. It had merits in an era that sought to move away from child labor. However, the age of adolescence now only serves as the postponement of adulthood.
#13
OS, common morals are soooo old fashioned. And besides, how are you going to choose which morals to teach? I mean, if you base them on the ten commandments, then you are favoring one (or 2 or more) religions, which violates the first amendment. And if you use ethics from anywhere else, well, they probably originally came from some dead white guy, so they can be ignored. I mean, the only real moral should be "if it feels good, do it. If somebody disses you, put them in their place."
/sarcasm
Posted by: Rambler in California ||
04/11/2008 20:08 Comments ||
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#14
I'm with Steve. Woodrow must not have children. I can't imagine what I'd be like if this were one of my kids. If these punks are going to be charged as adults, their names and mug shots should be released. Ironically, it may be the tampering with a witness that puts the judge over the edge.
What these kids should get is a webcam in their cells 24/7. They get the noteriety they wanted and all the other kids in America understand what happens when you do this to others.
#15
If I'd been involved in crap like this, I would hope they'd put me in jail.
It would be easier than what my mother would have done to me.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
04/11/2008 20:38 Comments ||
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#16
Amen, Barbara...and my mom is a red-head!
Suddenly, break rocks in the hot summer sun in stripes seems like vacation to what my mom would've done.
Posted by: BA ||
04/11/2008 20:55 Comments ||
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#17
Woodrow, if you think this sort of thing deserves some sort of slap on the wrist, best you stay outta Flo'dah. Youse gots to be from a nort' Miami crew to get away with this sort of stuff.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
04/11/2008 21:59 Comments ||
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#18
Like Barbara, my Father was allot worser to face than the PO0OoLice!
The beating of a high school art teacher by a student has prompted city and school officials to call for more resources to deal with classroom violence. Art teacher Jolita Berry was beaten in an attack that was recorded on a cellphone camera and posted to the Internet. Berry says the attack began when she told a female student to sit down and behave and she is afraid to return to the classroom.
Teacher's union president Marietta English said her office receives two or three complaints a day of assaults on teachers. Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon said the problem is getting out of hand and stern discipline is needed. State Schools Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick called for increased character education, community partnerships and parental responsibility.
City schools officials say the student involved in the attack on Berry has been suspended.
Posted by: Fred ||
04/11/2008 00:00 ||
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#1
City schools officials say the student involved in the attack on Berry has been suspended
I wonder if they got suspended for as long as that kid did who took a call on his cell phone from his mother in Iraq who was in the military.
#2
I watched every episode of the Baltimore based series, "The Wire." I would swear that the series is reality, captured by hidden cameras. It is certainly true that city truant officers haul street corner drug dealers to sign up for school, each September, for the sole purpose of increasing state funding. Once the punks sign up, they head back to the corner.
#3
Student on student assaults occurred in the Indianapolis in the early 80s till the local DA assembled a grand jury, indicted principles for obstructing justice for failure to report and act on criminal assaults, and got plea bargains which removed them from working in the state. This is no different. It is criminal assault and the perps need to be handled like any other criminal, not someone or something that needs to be understood. It's not suspension - its criminal justice that's needed. Listen jerk if you 'want to be treated like an adult' we certainly will for punishment.
#4
The school admin needs to have another class on how to look puzzled when discussing the increasing numbers of kids being homeschooled.
Posted by: Richard Aubrey ||
04/11/2008 11:29 Comments ||
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#5
In the spirit of the public schools, in order to better understand these "alienated" yoots, it looks like it's time for more teacher "sensitivity" training. And a buck a pack increase in the cigarette tax to pay for it.
Don't tell me I couldn't be a big city mayor...
The grainy cell-phone video of a student hitting Baltimore City art teacher Jolita Berry in her classroom, replayed on the national news and the Internet, has reinforced the wide concern among school safety experts that teachers often don't receive enough training in how to defuse potentially dangerous confrontations with students.
Berry's case has angered local officials, who said they would hold a meeting to try find ways to give teachers skills to deal with disruptive students. Baltimore City schools offer classes on how to deal with such situations, but they are voluntary, and are only available to a small number of teachers. Those who study school violence say that kind of instruction is crucial. "An essential part of new teacher training has to be about how to de-escalate conflict," said Jane Sundius at the Open Society Institute, a nonprofit that has studied school suspensions and funded programs to improve student behavior.
"Rather than confront the child, learn to move the child away from their peers," said April Lewis, director of safe and supportive schools in Baltimore. Students are often embarrassed in front of their peers and become more confrontational with a teacher because they don't want to be seen as backing down, Lewis said.
The attack occurred after Berry asked the student to take a seat. The girl refused and walked up to her. "She said she's gonna bang me," Berry said. "I said, 'Back up, you are in my space. If you hit me, I'm gonna defend myself.'" Berry said the principal told her that she had used "trigger words" that made the incident worse.
"Teachers need to sharpen their observation skills to notice when trouble is brewing," said Rick Phillips, executive director of Community Matters, a California nonprofit hired by schools to help reduce youth violence. "They need to know how to intervene effectively." When he was a teacher, Phillips said, his training didn't teach him to stand at the door of his classroom and check in with students daily on how their lives were going, but that is an essential part of keeping schools safe. "I don't think our teacher training has caught up with this problem."
Berry, the teacher who was attacked, joined the staff at Reginald Lewis last December. She maintains that she had good training and good mentoring from an experienced teacher, but it didn't help her."These students are so unpredictable and so nothing really prepares you for that" she said.
There were about 500 assaults on teachers and staff at Baltimore schools last year, although they represent a variety of incidents. For instance, students will be disciplined if a teacher is inadvertently touched while intervening to break up a fight.
Phillips said it isn't just the behavior of the teachers that can de-escalate a situation, but what students do as well. In this case, the rest of the class apparently watched the fight and did not intervene. One student reported the fight to the office, but others encouraged the girl to "hit her."
The Community Matters program tries to take leaders -- good and bad -- in a school and teach them how to maintain a safe environnment."We have understood that you can't legislate compassion or kindness. You can empower the influential leaders to speak up and other students will follow the modeling of those kids," he said.
In that environment, other students could have physically tried to stop the fight, or they could have told the girl to stop and reminded her what trouble she would get into if she hit the teacher.
Another view was that the community needs to get involved in helping support the children whose behavior is linked to family problems, said Anne-Marie Bond, assistant director for the social work community outreach service at the University of Maryland Baltimore.
"These issues are well beyond the school per se. They reflect other layers in the community and experiences students have," Bond said, adding, "It is hard for the school to address this without a more community-wide or city- wide aproach."
Much can be done to improve the counseling and mentoring in schools," she maintains. Reginald Lewis, for instance, doesn't have a mental health counseling, although it has dealt with many students from troubled families.
"The kids in the community experience a lot of trauma in their daily lives that are associated with poverty, addiction, street violence," Bond said.
The student who allegedly assaulted Berry was suspended, but the school system has not said what will happen to her. She could face an expulsion or transfer to another school or criminal charges from the teacher.
#9
Who, in their right mind, would want to send one of their children to the Baltimore schools? This punk should be tossed out of school permanently, do two years highly publicized jail time AS AN ADULT, and every student in Baltimore should be told that if they touch a teacher in a fight, they'll get at least the same punishment.
Failing that, let the teachers start packing heat. When the first little Johnny, Janie or Shanniqua gets a .45 slug in the gut while assaulting a teacher, most of the little darlings will get the message loud and clear.
#10
As a teacher I make the following comment: whenever a serious student incident occurs, the leftist types among the teachers (and they are legion) ask themselves what THEY have done wrong. Furthermore, public schools, following leftist ideology, have ruled out the concept of shame when such misdeeds are performed. The perpetrators are hidden behind layers and layers of student confidentiality, and are not identified as the miscreants they are to the student population as a whole. In other words, a students misbehaves and a cover-up immediately takes place.
#11
When I went to school, violence wasn't a problem. Of course, I went to a Catholic school, and the really bad actors, if they got in at all, could be easily expelled.
Of course, there was always Fr. Poux, assistant headmaster and golf coach, with his cricket bat to explain things to the guys who thought they were tough.
Posted by: Rambler in California ||
04/11/2008 20:13 Comments ||
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#2
Wow! Dick Cheney is a Rantburg Defender-Scimitar & Times-Picayune subscriber!
Posted by: Mike ||
04/11/2008 10:44 Comments ||
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#3
"Clearly the picture shows a hand casting a rod," grumbled spokeswoman Meagan Mitchell.
As journalists, however, the word of an official spokeswoman isn't good enough.
So McClatchy/Tribune Information Services photo editor George Bridges used the latest digital technology to enlarge the picture, took a close look at Cheney's sunglasses and concluded that Mitchell was telling the truth.
The image is of the vice president's hand on his fly rod.
A London department store has started selling coffee for $100 a shot. Proving once again that a fool and their money are soon parted.
If the price sounds unappealing, shoppers also have to overcome the unusual method of cultivation, which sees the coffee beans harvested from the feces of an Indonesian jungle cat. What's so strange? People have been buying politicians $hit for years and it's cost them a lot more than this.
Even so, the Peter Jones store says the luxury blend -- called Caffé Estupido Raro -- is one of the world's rarest and most premium coffees. Made by the Italian company De Longhi, Caffé Raro combines Jamaican Blue Mountain and Kupi Luwak, two extremely rare coffees. The beans of Kupi Luwak are harvested after being ingested by civet cats, and only about 260 kilos (about 573 pounds) of the coffee is produced each year. From a few extremely wired cats, no less!
"The cats select the best beans to chew. It's rather like a natural filtering process," said Carie Barkhuzen, a spokeswoman for the upmarket store in London's upmarket Sloane Square.
The coffee, which went on sale Thursday, is available at $100 for a shot at the Peter Jones Espresso Bar, or shoppers can buy 100g (3.5-ounce) packs of the coffee beans to take away for the same price. "It's not exactly flying off the shelves -- it's very expensive, after all -- but customers are buying it," Barkhuzen said. The fact that it's expensive is probably not the first reason it's not flying off the shelves.
The proceeds from the coffee sales will go to charity. If some RBer out there has any extra money then why not send Nancy one of those 3.5oz packs of coffee beans. She deserves would appreciate it for all her hard work.
#1
I'm sorry, but reading about coffee made from coffee beans picked out of civit dung - after cleaning out my cat's litter boxes - just makes my throat close up and my gag reflex kick in.
I bet that you can find some interesting, untractable parasits in civit dung. In case the Nancy you mention is Mrs Pelosy I am sure no rantburger would even think so evil thing as to send them this coffee. Nope. Never.
#8
It's gotta taste better than that Earl Grey crap.
Posted by: ed ||
04/11/2008 10:20 Comments ||
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#9
Bigjim, this coffee has been in the "in crowd" groupies here in the U.S. for a while too. I've seen it on Discovery channel a few years ago.
And, BTW, what's with the commentary on Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee being "extremely rare"? I can buy that at any grocery store for just a few bucks more than Folgers. I actually enjoy the Blue Mountain coffee.
Posted by: BA ||
04/11/2008 11:10 Comments ||
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#10
I've got some freshly harvested almond rocas from cat's box to sell too....
Posted by: Frank G ||
04/11/2008 12:15 Comments ||
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#11
Sorry I'm not sophisticated enough to wanna pay $100 a shot for Indonesian Cat Shit Coffee. The Cool Kid's can have mine...
#14
This stuff has been around for a while. We were talking about it at work a few months ago. Someone commented that our own low-bidder coffee service stuff tasted like it had been excreted by an alley cat.
Sensitive and stolen U.S. military items are being sold on eBay and Craigslist, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office. Government investigators posing as buyers were able to purchase a dozen prohibited military items on the popular online selling sites. The report notes that the items purchased could easily have been shipped overseas and "used directly against our troops and allies."
The items include:
Two F-14 fighter jet components. The United States has retired its fleet of F-14s. Only Iran is currently using them.
Night vision goggles specially made to military specifications that allow the user to identify U.S. troops at night.
Army combat uniforms. The military has prohibited the sale of uniforms to non-military personnel since January 2007, when Iraqi Insurgents used U.S. military uniforms to sneak into a base in Karbala and kill five U.S. service members.
Special "enhanced" body armor vests used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and not available to the general public.
EBay says that it has more than 113 million items listed for sale at any given time and that military goods account for well under one-tenth of 1 percent of those. Yet the bad guys seem to be able to find them, don't they?
A quick search of eBay revealed several Army combat uniforms for sale, despite the sale ban. "With 7 million listings being added every day, we do the best we can, but things slip through from time to time," said Kim Rubey, senior public relations manager for eBay.
Testifying before the House National Security and Foreign Affairs subcommittee Thursday, eBay Vice President Tod Cohen said the company vigorously works to keep prohibited items off the site. "We created prohibited and restricted items policies and built tools using state-of-the-art technology to enforce those policies" he said.
Craigslist says it uses similar measures and relies on users to police the site. The company has only 25 employees. I certainly hope that both eBay and Craigslist have special highly cooperative arrangements with the military, especially if the sales would endanger Coalition forces.
Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster told the subcommittee that the rules about what can and cannot be sold are confusing. Gee. Seems to me a one-line addition to the terms of use would fix the problem. It might also cut into commissions, eh?
Asked by Rep. John Tierney, D-Massachusetts, what Congress could do to make the situation better, Buckmaster answered, "It would simplify things greatly if a law were passed banning the sale of any U.S. military item less than 50 years old."
"Its sort of amazing to me that we haven't had a law to ban the sale of that." Tierney replied. It's more amazing that eBay would deal with terrorists.
Most of the items the government investigators bought were stolen from U.S. military facilities, the GAO said.
At the subcommittee hearings, Rep. Chris Shays, R-Connecticut, pressed a Defense Department official for answers on how military goods are making their way into the marketplace. "Do we have a serious theft problem, or do we not even know if we have the ability to know we have a serious theft problem?" Shays asked. Let me think . . . .
"I might say the latter might be more accurate," replied Charles Beardall, a deputy inspector general of the Department of Defense.
Posted by: bruce ||
04/11/2008 7:35 Comments ||
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#2
Ebay has put the neighborhood fence out of business. Why settle for 10 cents on the dollar when you can steal it and sell it on ebay for 50 cents on the dollar. I would guess that at least 5% of the goods on ebay are either stolen or counterfeit.
#1
Watch the clip on that site about a Republican state senator from Alabama punching a Democrat for calling him a S.O.B. The Republican said "where I come from, that's talking bad about a man's mother, and you just don't take that stuff." Maybe that Demo punk will think twice before he opens his mouth with such an insult next time.
If it will do dogs, pigs, and monkeys then perhaps the Western world doesn't have so much to fear from an Islamic nuke.
An experimental drug helped protect mice and monkeys from the damaging effects of radiation, researchers said on Thursday, in a finding that may lead to less toxic cancer treatments or an emergency treatment for radiation exposure. They said the drug protected animals' bone marrow and cells in the gut from being destroyed by radiation without interfering with radiation therapy's ability to fight cancer.
"These tissues fail because these cells choose to commit suicide. Our idea was to block these suicidal intentions," said Andrei Gudkov of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York, whose study was published in the journal Science.
Gudkov, who also is chief scientific officer at Cleveland BioLabs Inc which is developing the drug, said radiation triggers cells to undergo a type of programmed cell death known as apoptosis, which helps rid the body of defective cells. Tumors have figured out how to block this suicide mode. "Tumors simply throw it out by causing mutations," Gudkov said in a telephone interview.
He and colleagues decided to study this mechanism to find a way to protect cells from radiation damage. They developed a compound known as CBLB502 made from a salmonella protein that naturally makes cells resistant to cell suicide. A single dose of the drug given to the animals shortly before receiving radiation therapy significantly reduced damage to sensitive bone marrow and gastrointestinal cells and prolonged their survival. The drug also improved survival of mice when given an hour after the animals got a dose of radiation.
"We can temporarily and reversibly convert normal cells into something which is resistant to radiation -- but only for a couple of hours," Gudkov said.
That is key, he said, because otherwise the cells would develop into tumors. So far, Gudkov said the drug has proven to have few toxic side effects. "We are basically developing this thing for two applications. One is for general protection from emergency situations -- dirty bombs or Chernobyl-type disasters," he said. "For that we would want people to have a loaded syringe with this compound for intramuscular injection," he said.
The other is for use with radiation therapy in cancer patients to make the treatments more effective with fewer side effects.
Gudkov said the company is seeking U.S. regulatory approval to start testing the drug in healthy adults, which could begin as early as this summer. Last week, the company won a $9 million contract from the U.S. Department of Defense to develop the treatment for radiation exposure.
#5
Possible but I'm not convinced - IMO many of these kinds of SCI-TECH news have directly or indirectly more to do wid the SUN = SOLAR RADIATION/ACTIVITY than anything else.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Columbus -- PJs or sweat pants? Whatever Attorney General Marc Dann's scheduler was wearing while visiting his Dublin condo one night late last summer, it was not work clothes or even jeans, according to an employee who was there.
A Navy supply officer and former Naval Academy instructor testified Thursday that she moonlighted as a prostitute for the D.C. Madam, a California woman accused of running an escort service that prosecutors say netted her several million dollars over a 13-year period.
Perverts must go through crucial therapy programmes where they talk about their sex crimes, as part of their sentence. But the Ministry of Justice could offer exemption to Muslim prisoners after they complained discussing crimes is against their religion.
The beating of a high school art teacher by a student has prompted city and school officials to call for more resources to deal with classroom violence. Art teacher Jolita Berry was beaten in an attack that was recorded on a cellphone camera and posted to the Internet. Berry says the attack began when she told a female student to sit down and behave and she is afraid to return to the classroom.
A London department store has started selling coffee for $100 a shot. 
