Edited for brevity.
As [Aurora, CO police Lt. Troy] Edwards handed one man a ticket during a traffic stop this week, the two cameras mounted to the roof of his patrol car scanned the license plates whizzing by. When Edwards returned to his driver's seat, the laptop in his passenger seat sounded a siren and flashed a red bar next to a photo of a green Kia up ahead.
The lawman dutifully fastened his seat belt and floored it, 60 mph, until he caught up with the driver, who had a warrant out for his arrest. Two stops in 20 minutes.
Edwards arrested the man, whose wife then arrived to drive the Kia away. "Why was he pulled over?" she said.
"Because his license plate showed that he had a warrant," Edwards replied.
"Wow, that's modern," she deadpanned, eyeing the cameras.
Aurora Police bought two of the plate readers in March, for about $25,000 each. In the past six months, Denver Police and the Colorado State Patrol also have each equipped three cars with the devices. "We're confident they are going to pay big dividends in the future," Denver Police spokesman Sonny Jackson said.
Growing out of a partnership between gun manufacturer Remington and Italian information technology company Elsag, the Mobile Plate Hunter uses optical character-recognition technology developed for Italian postal workers to sort letters and parcels. The readers tell officers whether a driver's license has been canceled or revoked, if the car or plates are stolen or if there are any warrants out for the driver's arrest. Without the cameras, officers must radio in a suspicious looking vehicle's tag or enter it manually into a laptop computer. The cameras, by contrast, read 1,500 to 2,000 plates per day automatically, without requiring any attention from officers in the patrol car.
The cameras are so effective that Edwards had to ignore sirens alerting him to three drivers with canceled or revoked licenses because he was already busy writing someone else a ticket for the same violation.
In one recent 48-hour period, Aurora's two scanner-equipped cruisers produced seven warrant arrests and 25 tickets for driving with revoked or canceled licenses, and spotted someone driving a stolen car.
Posted by: Dar ||
05/03/2007 13:42 ||
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I'll file this under "Good news-Bad news" and "Shades of 1984"
Since it's currently being used in a 'good' way, hooray.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
05/03/2007 19:45 Comments ||
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The cameras are so effective that Edwards had to ignore sirens alerting him to three drivers with canceled or revoked licenses because he was already busy writing someone else a ticket for the same violation.
...and each had been flagged as an illegal whom the local government said not to bother anyway. Betcha. Heh.
Edited for brevity.
Thousands of Virginia residents poured into their state capitol this cool spring afternoon to try to catch a glimpse of Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, on their visit to mark the 400th anniversary of nearby Jamestown colony.
The queen, who was to arrive by a chartered jet CARBON ALERT! at Richmond Airport around 3 p.m., will head to the governor's mansion for a short reception, followed by a "walkabout" at the Capitol, where she is expected to greet onlookers before addressing Virginia's General Assembly, the oldest continuous law-making body in the New World, which traces its origins to the House of Burgesses at Jamestown in 1619.
She is also expected to meet with survivors of last month's Virginia Tech shootings.
Posted by: Dar ||
05/03/2007 13:48 ||
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Yeah - they closed all the streets and government buildings around the Capital. Talk about a traffic nightmare!
She's gone on to Williamsburg/Jamestown now, AFAIK (I'm still at work), but some of the other downtown streets are still blocked due to a 10-K (8-K?) race scheduled for today. Luckily, the garage where I park is just beyond the mess.
I saw a picture in the paper of the Queen and Prince Phillip at Jamestown 50 years ago; I'd forgotten all about that. Wonder what she thinks about the 50 years between the visits - if she ever thought she'd be back a second time.
At least we ordered up cool, damp weather for her. Bet she felt right at home. :-D
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
05/03/2007 17:44 Comments ||
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Wonder what she thinks about the 50 years between the visits...
She said that when she visited the settlement at Jamestown in 1957, the emphasis was wholly on the white European nature of the pioneering enterprise in the colony of Virginia.
"With the benefit of hindsight, we can see in that event the origins of a singular endeavor -- the building of a great nation, founded on the eternal values of democracy and equality based on the rule of law and the promotion of freedom," the queen said at the start of a six-day state visit.
"But 50 years on we are now in a position to reflect more candidly on the Jamestown legacy. Human progress rarely comes without cost," Queen Elizabeth added.
Boy, this kind of thing just renews my confidence that terrorists have no way of sneaking things past our ports or into our food supply.
A Chinese company accused of selling contaminated wheat gluten to pet food suppliers in the United States failed to disclose to China's export authorities that it was shipping food or feed to the United States, thereby avoiding having its goods inspected, according to U.S. regulators.
Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development, one of two Chinese companies at the center of the massive pet food recall after thousands of animals were killed and sickened, had shipped more than 700 tons of wheat gluten labeled as "nonfood" products earlier this year through a third party, a Chinese textile company.
The "nonfood" designation meant the company's shipments were not subject to mandatory inspection by the Chinese government.
The details of the case, some of which were disclosed Friday in a circular released by the Food and Drug Administration in the United States, are just the latest clues that Chinese feed suppliers may have been intentionally disguising the contents of their goods.
FDA officials are now visiting China, seeking more information about how and why an industrial chemical used in plastics and as fertilizer got mixed into pet food ingredients.
The pet food recall is threatening to turn into a major trade issue because of mounting worries in the U.S. Congress about the safety of China's agricultural exports to the United States, the ability of American regulators to protect the country's food supply and the slow pace of efforts by the Chinese government to aid the investigation.
#1
the latest clues that Chinese feed suppliers may have been intentionally disguising the contents of their goods.
I am shocked, shocked to find this sort of thing going on here! You mean that a Chinese supplier is substituting toxic ingredients for pure ones in order to save a paltry amount of money? This could never happen.
The Chinese will stubbornly stonewall any investigation, since they would lose face if their tactics were publically known. Don't look for any cooperation from anyone in China on this case.
#3
China's agricultural exports to the United States??? And you thought Mad Cow Disease was scary? OK. But just make sure it's labelled as such before it gets to the supermarket shelf. If it says "Produce of China" any consumer with any common sense at all will leave it on the shelf. Hang the executives of any company that fail to label the stuff.
#4
Boy, this kind of thing just renews my confidence that terrorists have no way of sneaking things past our ports or into our food supply.
I'd worry much more about money-grubbing Chinese communists selling us tainted and sub-par goods. Vast quantities of them are entering the United States and have a greater potential for lethal consequences.
The Illinois attorney general's office identified bibs sold between June 2004 to the end of March this year in Wal-Mart stores throughout the state. Tests there on three styles of the bibs tested positive for lead, at more than 600 parts per million, the state's standard for lead in children's products, said Robyn Ziegler, spokeswoman with the attorney general's office.
"It's a PVC product," Ziegler said. "The lead in that product makes the vinyl softer."
Wal-Mart's recall comes after a lawsuit over the bibs was filed by the Center for Environmental Health, based in Oakland, California. Alexa Engelman, a researcher there, said the center became aware of the bibs in September. Engelman said a report by an independent laboratory test contracted by the center showed that the bibs contained 16 times the amount of lead allowed in paint.
[emphasis added]
In other words, to save pennies on plasticizing agents, the Chinese manufacturer knowingly substituted a verified toxin and did so for years.
China's dismal track record merits a costly and intensive inspection protocol to put them on notice that lax internal enforcement is no longer an option. Pet deaths are just the beginning for us. Please try to remember that they caught Chinese fraudsters domestically marketing counterfeit baby formula which had no nutritional content. Chinese infants died because of this. Will it take the deaths of American citizens to finally drive stronger QC/QA barriers on Chinese goods?
Remember, the absence of costly government inspections and enforcement is what allows China to spend more on its military buildup. China cuts corners in innumerably similar ways and it all adds up to an unfair competitive edge. This is corruption on a massive scale and we are the ones who end up paying for it. Quite possibly with our very lives.
#6
Check the labels on your canned mushrooms, tea, dates, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, baby corn, pineapple, shelled nuts, frozen pot stickers, soy sauce, tofu, ramen, cup-o-noodles, sesame oil, curry seasoning and a host of other Chinese food exports. Recently, tea leaves were found to contain high levels of lead because the processor had used a truck to roll over and crush the leaves, exposing them to automotive exhaust. Tainted catfish and crayfish, filthy plums and dates, the list is endless.
Domestic wheat gluten the sort used in pet food costs all of TEN CENTS more per pound more than the tainted Chinese crap. We need to reassess just how useful it is to do business with China.
#7
Zenster is right my boss's in-laws are involved in Hong Kong textiles. They were reps for a Japanese chemical company's textile dyes. all of a sudden they got an order for 200kg of a certain brown dye. The japs flew to HK since the sales for this brown dye worldwide was only a couple of kilos a year, what new use had someone found? Turns out a firm was using it to color tea. Needless to say this stuff was not safe for food use but it sure made cheap tea the right shade.
Posted by: bruce ||
05/03/2007 20:52 Comments ||
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Some more success stories for the avatars of grobalization.
Greed refashioned as immutable dialectic, science, majick, idolatry.
Posted by: IT Insider ||
05/03/2007 23:06 Comments ||
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Needless to say this stuff was not safe for food use but it sure made cheap tea the right shade.
"Toyama Koichi, self proclaimed Mussolini Style Fascist, and leader of the Kyushu Fascist Party has run for Tokyo Governor.
When he is not absorbed in his path to overthrow and destroy the nation of Japan, he works as a musician playing songs for tips on the side of the street.
This is an officical campaign broadcast. Every candidate in Japan is given the right to have their speech aired under equal conditions, according to Japanese law. Broadcasting companies are not allowed to edit them, and thus not responsible for the content of speech.
I believe this also shows the freedom in Japan. In many nations, a man such as this who blatantly wants to overthrow the government and is a convicted felon would not be given the opportunity to speak." This guy should work for Howard Dean.
A volunteer sifts the earth outside Berlin for forgotten soldiers. So far, he's uncovered the remains of 20,000.
Hammer, Germany THE shallow hole widens and a man comes together like a puzzle: hips, fingers, ribs, vertebrae, teeth and crushed skull. A boot surfaces along with a rusted bullet clip. But no dog tags, no wedding ring, nothing to give him a name, so the bones go into a box where they are marked with a number written in white chalk: 1,968.
The one who filled the box is sweaty; his after-shave fades amid the dirt and the dust. His name is Erwin Kowalke. The villagers know him by his determined face and trim graying beard and the way he moves from shovel, spade to hoe. He collects the bones of the fallen from a world war that ended six decades ago, but one that, if you listen, still moans through the forests and across the marshes.
"I once dug a whole plane out of a swamp. The pilot was sitting in the cockpit. His leather jacket was pretty well preserved even after all those years, but he was burned," said Kowalke, a volunteer who has excavated the remains of 20,000 people, most of them German and Russian soldiers killed in fighting as Berlin collapsed toward defeat in the final days of April 1945.
The dead are hidden in this loamy earth, but they are his, and with quiet obsession he aims to find them, even if there are 20,000 more scattered beyond the windshield of his white station wagon, which bounces and swerves down forgotten country roads.
"People tell me to just let the bones sleep in the woods," said Kowalke, a member of the German War Graves Assn. who has been searching for skeletons for 43 years. "But I say to them that no matter what this generation did, without them you wouldn't be here.
"In these bones you see what war is like. I know war now. I'll tell you what it is. War is young men killing other young men they do not know on the orders of old men who know one another too well."
And so he digs, this compact 65-year-old man with a briefcase holding ledgers of the dead and an amber-tinted photograph of his father, a German soldier killed somewhere in France. What a boy didn't have he invents; the bones Kowalke collects honor his father and those days in 1944 when the man returned briefly from the front to visit his 3-year-old son. It was the last time they saw each other...
Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the aging hospital heavily criticized for inadequate care of wounded war veterans, should be closed as planned, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Wednesday. Gates' conclusion, following a review of Walter Reed by an independent advisory group, runs counter to the recommendation of some in Congress who have called recently for the Pentagon to reverse its 2005 decision to close the facility.
The review group, which presented a summary of its conclusions at a Pentagon news conference with Gates, recommended that Walter Reed remain on a list of military facilities to be closed. It also urged that a plan to move the hospital's capabilities to an expanded National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Md., be accelerated. The review group's central finding, released last month, was that money woes and Pentagon neglect were mainly to blame for shoddy outpatient conditions and bureaucratic delays at Walter Reed, the Army's premier medical center.
Citing lapses in leadership and oversight as main reasons for the problems, the nine-member independent group concluded that the Defense Department was, or should have been, aware of the widespread problems but neglected them because they knew Walter Reed was scheduled for eventual closure. Gates indicated to reporters that he saw little wisdom in pouring money into Walter Reed to keep it open indefinitely. ``Far better to make an investment in brand-new, 21st-century facilities,'' he said, referring to the plan announced in 2005 to expand the Bethesda medical center and to build a new medical center at Fort Belvoir, Va. ``And how can we accelerate getting those facilities in place? And how can you keep high-quality staff at Walter Reed, right up until the day that people transfer to one of the other hospitals?'' Gates added.
He said that based on currently available information it would make sense to go ahead with the plan to close Walter Reed in 2011. ``But we ought to have the flexibility to make sure that it stays open until Bethesda and Fort Belvoir are completely ready to take on the responsibilities of the patients and the staff that are at Walter Reed now. Walter Reed should not be closed unless those other facilities are ready to go, in my opinion,'' he added.
This article starring:
Defense Secretary Robert Gates
Posted by: Steve White ||
05/03/2007 00:00 ||
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Well not everybody has a couple of BILLION laying around.
SAN DIEGO (AP) - A Marine has been charged with negligent homicide and dereliction of duty in the accidental shooting death of a comrade during a training exercise at Camp Pendleton last fall, according to a report. Sgt. Caleb P. Hohman is accused of failing to remove live ammunition from his rifle and replace it with blanks for the Oct. 30 exercise. Authorities say Hohman shot Sgt. Seth M. Algrim twice.
The Marine Corps could also take administrative action against several other Marines for supervisory and safety failures, according to the report, released Tuesday. ``The death was the result of individual and small-unit negligence and a lack of supervision,'' Maj. Gen. John Paxton Jr. wrote in the report. ``The tragedy could have been prevented.''
Investigators found a ``declining respect'' at Pendleton for ammunition that is not accounted for. That mind-set likely formed in the Anbar province of Iraq, where members of the battalion did combat tours and where accountability of ammunition ``has dulled,'' the report said. Paxton recommended a review of live-fire safety and training procedures at Pendleton.
The report recounts events that led to Algrim's death, beginning 10 days before the shooting, when Hohman, 23, became ill during a training exercise with live ammunition. Hohman left his rifle in his platoon's tent and was treated in the emergency room at Camp Pendleton's hospital. His rifle was moved from the tent to the site of the next training exercise, an urban-combat simulation with blank bullets, but no one checked to see whether the gun was still loaded.
On the night of the Oct. 30 exercise, Algrim was playing the role of an insurgent. Hohman shot Algrim once in the arm and once in the head, killing him instantly, the report said.
Algrim, 22, of Garden City, Kan., was a highly respected sniper who served with the Marine's elite 1st Reconnaissance Battalion in Afghanistan, according to the report.
Posted by: Steve White ||
05/03/2007 00:00 ||
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Tragic. Personally, I still preferred to shout "Bang, you're dead" - sometimes, even a "Do I have to say it?" weird look will suffice.
#2
One of my favorite sayings is, "There's never time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over." Unfortunately, that's not the case with bullets, so folks have to make time to do it right.
Posted by: Bobby ||
05/03/2007 5:57 Comments ||
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I see the press is going to post a story about EVERY gunshot death as prominently as possible now. This seems to be their next big drive.
#4
Ok, this smells wrong. That he gets sick during an exercise and has to leave, ok. But, no one clears his weapon when he has to leave? It lays around the tent for a few days, even gets moved to another area and no one clears it? He doesn't check his weapon, not even to clean it, when it was out of his control for days before the next exercise? Bullshit.
Posted by: Steve ||
05/03/2007 8:03 Comments ||
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Steve,
I think you're right. Unaccounted for weapons cause major crisis on any base, expecially training areas. If the Marines have become this lax, which I doubt, then a crackdown is needed.
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.
