WASHINGTON — The Bush administration violated federal law last year when it restricted states’ ability to provide health insurance to children of middle-income families, and its new policy is therefore unenforceable, lawyers from the Government Accountability Office said Friday. The ruling strengthens the hand of at least 22 states, including New York and New Jersey, that already provide such coverage or want to do so. And it significantly reduces the chance that the new policy can be put into effect before President Bush leaves office in nine months. At issue is the future of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, financed jointly by the federal government and the states. Congress last year twice passed bills to expand the popular program, and Mr. Bush vetoed both. State officials of both parties say the policy, set forth in a letter to state health officials on Aug. 17, has stymied their efforts to cover more children at a time when the number of uninsured is rising and more families are experiencing economic hardship. In a formal legal opinion Friday, the accountability office said the new policy ‘amounts to a marked departure’ from a longstanding, settled interpretation of federal law. […]
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Many military experts who appeared on TV newscasts to provide commentary on the Iraq war were fed information by the Pentagon, an investigation found. The New York Times reported Sunday that a Pentagon information arm used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the Bush administration’s wartime performance. ‘It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,” said Robert Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst. Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the information campaign was a sophisticated operation. The Pentagon has defended its relationship with military analysts, saying they had been given only factual information. ‘The intent and purpose of this is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people,’ said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman. The newspaper noted most of the war analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the war-time policies they are asked to assess objectively on air. Moreover, the report said those business relationships are rarely disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not […]
LONDON — The ranks of the world’s rich swelled to 8 million during 2007 as the wealthy proved immune to the strains across global economies in the latter half of the year. There was a 4.5 per cent increase last year in so-called ‘high net worth individuals’, those with investable assets of more than $1m excluding primary residence, according to the 2008 wealth report compiled by Citi Private Bank and Knight Frank, published on Monday. There was particularly strong growth of wealthy populations in the emerging economies of China and India, as well as those countries that have access to Ânatural resources such as Kazakhstan. Countries such as Brazil, Canada, Australia and ÂRussia also each added more than 8,500 wealthy residents in 2007 on the back of the commodity boom. The report says that the rate of growth of high net worth individuals has outpaced growth in both gross domestic product, and GDP per head, which it believes indicates that the rich are getting richer relative to their respective countries. ‘This is not a perfect measure of relative wealth growth across income levels,’ it says, ‘but there is an indication here that the Âplutonomy model […]
WASHINGTON — The White House on Friday dismissed as ‘cosmetic’ changes in Cuba under new President Raul Castro on issues like access to cellphones and the potential easing of travel restrictions. ‘They’re cosmetic,’ Dan Fisk, the US National Security Council’s senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs, told reporters days before a three-way US, Mexico, and Canada summit in New Orleans. ‘We would hope that the international community, and I say that in the large terms, recognize that this isn’t real change, this isn’t fundamental change in the nature of the system,’ Fisk said. ‘And if you look at what the regime is doing in terms of the continued repression against dissidents and civil society activists, the iron fist is still very, very visible, especially to the average Cuban,’ he said. Fisk said US President George W. Bush, Mexican President Felipe Calderon, and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper were expected to discuss changes in Cuba when they meet on Monday and Tuesday in New Orleans. But while ‘all three countries agree’ broadly on the need for ‘democratic evolution’ in Cuba, ‘there are a lot ot tactical disagreements and I’m not expecting that to change,’ said the […]
Edward N. Lorenz, 90, a meteorologist who laid the groundwork for chaos theory, memorably asking whether the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas, died of cancer April 16 at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was an emeritus professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At MIT, Dr. Lorenz accidentally discovered how small differences in the early stages of a dynamic system, such as the weather, can trigger such huge changes in later stages that the result is unpredictable and essentially random. At the time, Dr. Lorenz was studying why it’s so hard to accurately forecast the weather, but the implications of his work go far beyond meteorology. The new science of chaos fundamentally changed the way researchers address topics from the geometry of snowflakes to the predictability of which movies will become blockbusters. The butterfly effect became a popular way of describing unpredictability, most recently in ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ (2006), the Academy Award-winning documentary with former Vice President Al Gore. It also ‘brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind’s view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton,’ said the committee that awarded Dr. Lorenz the […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
