The government is dangerously behind on plans to build mobile field hospitals that could be needed to treat thousands of sick and dying victims of a terrorist attack or natural disaster, according to doctors in the government’s medical response program, former top disaster officials and some members of Congress. The Homeland Security Department, which runs the nation’s disaster-response system, ‘by and large has not been serious about the medical issues,’ said Jerome Hauer, former head of the federal Office of Public Health Preparedness. ‘They don’t get the notion that during a disaster one of the fundamental needs is taking care of the large number of patients.’ One example is Homeland Security’s failure to complete a prototype of a 250-bed field hospital. The Bush administration is preparing to unveil a flu pandemic plan, but 4½ years after 9/11 and anthrax attacks prompted warnings of bioterrorism and eight months after Hurricane Katrina wiped out New Orleans hospitals, the government still has not set standards for what mobile hospitals should stock or how they should operate. Jake Jacoby, head of a San Diego medical response team, said Homeland Security is too focused on ‘ice and duct tape.’ Although […]
WASHINGTON — American contractors swindled hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraqi funds, but so far there is no way for Iraq’s government to recoup the money, according to US investigators and civil attorneys tracking fraud claims against contractors. Courts in the United States are beginning to force contractors to repay reconstruction funds stolen from the American government. But legal roadblocks have prevented Iraq from recovering funds that were seized from the Iraqi government by the US-led coalition and then paid to contractors who failed to do the work. A US law that allows citizens to recover money from dishonest contractors protects only the US government, not foreign governments. In addition, an Iraqi law created by the Coalition Provisional Authority days before it ceded sovereignty to Iraq in June 2004 gives American contractors immunity from prosecution in Iraq. ”In effect, it makes Iraq into a ‘free-fraud zone,’ ‘ said Alan Grayson, a Virginia attorney who is suing the private security firm Custer Battles in a whistle-blower lawsuit filed by former employees. A federal jury last month found the Rhode Island-based company liable for $3 million in fraudulent billings in Iraq. Even the United Nations panel […]
Beijing — China’s trade surplus surged in March, sharply illustrating US concerns about its swelling bilateral deficit days before Hu Jintao, China’s president, travels to Washington for a summit meeting with President George W. Bush. The March surplus of US$11.2bn, more than double the amount for the same month last year, and the largest since October, is a sign that China is on track to match and perhaps surpass the 2005 record surplus of US$102bn. The release of the March trade figures coincided with a trenchant defence by Beijing of the country’s intellectual property rights protection regime, the other major issue expected to dominate the Hu-Bush summit. The surplus will highlight concerns in the US, especially in Congress, that China’s rapidly growing exports are bolstered by a tightly-managed currency kept artificially weak to aid local enterprises. Although most Chinese economists oppose a hasty move to a free floating currency, many also believe the renminbi should be allowed to appreciate to bring down the surplus and help re-balance the economy. Shi Jianhuai, of Peking University, said the surplus was the result of manufacturing overcapacity and weak consumer demand in China, with enterprises forced to rely on […]
The environmental movement is facing one of its biggest-ever reverses, over one of its most cherished causes: Save The Whale. In a remarkable diplomatic coup, Japan, the leading pro-whaling nation, is poised to seize control of whaling’s regulatory body, the International Whaling Commission (IWC), and so hasten the return of commercial whale hunting, which has been officially banned worldwide for the past 20 years. While the world has been looking the other way, the Japanese have spent nearly a decade and many millions of dollars building up a voting majority in the IWC, by buying the votes of small member states with substantial foreign aid packages. Their aim is to reverse the moratorium on commercial whaling brought in by the IWC in 1986 as a result of the long Save The Whale campaign by Greenpeace and other environmental pressure groups. This has always been seen as of one of the environment movement’s greatest success stories. But anyone who opposes killing the great whales, or who thought that the main battle against the harpooners had been won, is in for a nasty surprise when at the IWC meeting in the West Indies, two months from now, […]
Alexis de Tocqueville once remarked that in a democracy, the greatest pacifists are the generals. In America, this has often been true but rarely obvious. Our time-honored and intense tradition of civilian supremacy means that senior officers, active or retired, rarely express misgivings or dissenting opinions in public — certainly not while a war is going on. And yet, since mid-March, we have witnessed a veritable ‘Revolt of the Generals,’ a situation having nothing to do with men on horseback but, potentially, a great deal to do with offering some perspective and restoring some sanity to this increasingly war-weary republic. Retired generals are speaking out against this war and the civilian leadership that thought it up and messed it up. Retired, yes. But all senior generals are (or at least consider themselves) members of a rather exclusive club, and when they speak out, it’s not impossible that they express the opinions of their active peers. The list is impressive. In a New York Times op-ed column, retired Major Gen. Paul Eaton, who helped revive the Iraqi army, described Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as ‘incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically’ and called for his resignation. Retired Lt. Gen. […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
