在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
Published: August 1, 2010 Among patients tested for strokes with a complex type of brain scan, radiation overdoses were more widespread than previously known, a New York Times examination has found.
2011年6月19日星期日
U.S. Pledges to Raise Deportation Threshold
Moving to repair an immigration enforcement program that has drawn rising opposition from governors and police chiefs, senior immigration officials on Friday announced steps they said would focus the program more closely on deporting immigrants convicted of serious crimes.
In unveiling the changes, John Morton, the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the deportation program would continue to expand as planned in order to be operating nationwide by 2013, despite criticism from many police chiefs and from the governors of Illinois, New York and Massachusetts, who sought to withdraw their states.
But in making course corrections to the program, known as Secure Communities, Mr. Morton acknowledged the groundswell of local resistance, including opposition from Latino and immigrant groups, to an effort that is central to President Obama’s approach to controlling illegal immigration. Critics said the program was casting too wide a net and had strayed from its goal of bolstering public safety by expelling illegal immigrants who committed the most dangerous crimes.
In a fix likely to have broad practical effect, Mr. Morton issued a memorandum that greatly expanded the factors immigration authorities can take into account in deciding to defer or cancel deportations. Agents are now formally urged to consider how long an illegal immigrant has been in the United States, or whether the immigrant was brought here illegally as a child and is studying in high school or college.
In practice, the memorandum gives immigration agents authority to postpone or cancel, on a case by case basis, deportations of illegal immigrant students who might have been eligible for legal status under a bill stalled in Congress that is known as the Dream Act.
The authorities are also instructed to give “particular care and consideration” to veterans and active duty members of the military, especially if they have been in combat, and to their close relatives.
Mr. Morton also expanded the authority of federal lawyers who handle cases in immigration courts to dismiss deportation proceedings against immigrants without serious criminal records.
Also on Friday, Mr. Obama extended the deployment of some 1,200 National Guard troops who are backing up immigration agents along the Southwest border.
Under Secure Communities, tens of thousands of immigrants who were here illegally but had not been convicted of any crime were detained by local law enforcement and swept into deportation proceedings. Until now, once immigration agents in the field had started a deportation, government lawyers had little authority to decide which cases were worth pursuing in immigration court. Many immigration violations are civil, not criminal, offenses.
In the Secure Communities program, fingerprints of everyone who is booked into jail are checked against F.B.I. criminal databases, as has long been routine, and also against Department of Homeland Security databases, which record immigration violations. Homeland Security officials report results of fingerprint checks back to the arresting police departments, and federal immigration agents determine whether to detain the immigrants for deportation.
“We believe in this program, we think it’s the right program, and we intend to continue it,” Mr. Morton said on Friday. “But obviously we are listening to the concerns raised by the governors, members of Congress and community groups.”
Mr. Morton also said he would form an advisory commission of police chiefs, sheriffs, state and local prosecutors, immigration agents, and immigrant advocates. The first task of the commission would be to assess, within 45 days, another fix Mr. Morton is considering.
Currently all immigrants who are flagged in a Secure Communities fingerprint check can be detained for deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from the time they are first booked into jail. Mr. Morton said that under his proposal, illegal immigrants who were arrested for minor traffic offenses, like driving without a license, and other minor misdemeanors, would not be detained for deportation until they were convicted of those crimes.
Mr. Morton also issued new guidelines he said would ensure that illegal immigrants detained by the police who were victims of domestic violence and witnesses to crimes would not be deported.
Immigration lawyers praised the new ground rules. “If these standards are applied consistently, it would allow ICE to focus government resources on dangerous criminals and national security risks to make America safer, a goal we all share,” said David Leopold, the outgoing president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
But several community groups rejected the changes as cosmetic tweaks that would do little to slow deportations that they said had separated immigrant families without reducing crime.
“This program is riddled with flaws and the announcement today acknowledges that,” said Chris Newman, general counsel of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. He said the program should be suspended until the Homeland Security inspector general completes a review later this year.
A Watchdog Professor, Now Defending Himself
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
Mr. Protess, who taught at the Medill journalism school at Northwestern University, was the founder and driving force behind the Medill Innocence Project, which was instrumental in exonerating at least 12 wrongly convicted defendants and freeing them from prison, including five who were on death row in Illinois, and in prompting then-governor George Ryan to clear the rest of death row in 2003.
But during an investigation into a questionable conviction, the Cook County state’s attorney turned her attention instead on Mr. Protess and his students. Since then, questions have been raised about deceptive tactics used by the Medill students, about allegations that Mr. Protess cooperated with the defense lawyers (which would negate a journalist’s legal privilege to resist subpoenas) and, most damning, whether he altered an e-mail to cover up that cooperation.
Medill, which enjoys an international reputation, in significant part because of his work, removed him from teaching in April, and this week he retired from Northwestern altogether, and now runs the Chicago Innocence Project. It has been a breathtaking reversal for Mr. Protess, who says he believes he is being pilloried for lapses in memory and a desire to defend his students.
“I have spent three decades exposing wrongful conviction only to find myself in the cross hairs of others who are wrongfully accusing me,” he said in an interview.
It is often said that academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low, but in the matter of Mr. Protess and the wrongly convicted men he helped to free, the stakes could not have been higher.
“He is in the hall of fame of investigative journalists in the 20th century,” said Mark Feldstein, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University. “Using cheap student labor, he has targeted a very specific issue, and that work has reopened cases, changed laws and saved lives.”
Dennis Culloton, a lawyer who served as press secretary for Governor Ryan, said that Medill’s work led in part to the decision to essentially shut down Illinois’s death row. “I think it would have been an academic discussion if not for David’s work,” he said.
Behind that public success, however, there were gnawing tensions within Medill. Mr. Protess’s tendency to clash with authority did not end with law enforcement. He came into conflict with at least two deans of the Medill school, including the current one, John Lavine, who started in 2006 after a long career in newspapers.
Mr. Lavine is a polarizing figure at Medill: he is widely credited with stabilizing an institution that was suffering financially but he also led a successful effort to rename the school the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, a change he said reflected the school’s broader agenda but one that was widely ridiculed by alumni and journalists.
Mr. Protess said the project initially received support from the dean, but now says that was a charade, “an attempt to seem as if he were fighting for the First Amendment when in fact he was undermining the Innocence Project at every turn.” Mr. Lavine counters that he had no choice but to remove Mr. Protess: “What I saw warranted the decision that I made.”
Mr. Protess (whose son Ben is a reporter for The New York Times) started the Innocence Project at Medill in 1999 after spending much of his career looking into questionable convictions for Chicago Lawyer magazine. Working with the Center on Wrongful Convictions, a sibling project at the Northwestern Law School, Mr. Protess methodically vetted cases, laid out lines of inquiry for his student journalists and guided them through their reporting assignments.
As the list of exonerations grew, the global reputation of Medill — and Mr. Protess — soared and students were drawn to the project to be trained in the real-life crucible of capital cases.
“His class was life-changing,” said Evan S. Benn, a former student of Mr. Protess who is now a reporter at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 18, 2011
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the conclusion of David Protess's employment at Northwestern University. He retired, he did not resign.
Arizona Town Cashes In on a Rock Song
So it should come as no surprise that the line from “Take It Easy,” the 1972 hit by the Eagles, has become the lifeblood of tiny Winslow’s tourism trade.
On the corner of Second Street and Kinsley Avenue, on Route 66, sits Standin’ on the Corner Park, a homage to the open-highway ballad that now draws hundreds of visitors every day and has revived this dusty railroad town between Flagstaff and the New Mexico border.
The park’s main attraction is a life-size bronze statue of a floppy-haired man with a guitar, the song’s protagonist. (Locals point out that the statue, by the sculptor Ron Adamson, is neither Jackson Browne, who wrote the song with Glenn Frey, nor Mr. Frey, the Eagles member who sang it.)
A cherry-red vintage flatbed Ford truck is parked nearby. And on a brick wall behind the statue and truck is a large mural, by John Pugh, featuring a grinning blonde in such a truck, who clearly — as the song says — is “slowin’ down to take a look” at the itinerant all-American musician who has caught her eye.
“I see them out there at 2 or 3 in morning,” said Bob Hall, chief executive of the Winslow Chamber of Commerce, of the stream of tourists who pass through town and stop to take pictures. “It’s amazing. It has done wonders for Winslow.”
The park did not open until 1999, long after “Take It Easy” had become a fixture of classic rock stations and karaoke bars.
As Mr. Hall recalled, people were always driving around town, stopping to photograph themselves standing on random corners. Seeing an opportunity, a group of locals, called the Standin’ on the Corner Foundation, came up with the idea for a park, and a local family donated the land.
These days, the park is a primary component of a renaissance project for Winslow, which has about 10,000 people and was left for dead after Interstate 40 was built in the 1970s and shot right by town.
The park brings an estimated half a million dollars in annual revenue to Winslow, according to Mr. Hall. An amphitheater and plaza will go up in the next two years. And an annual Standin’ on the Corner Festival draws thousands each fall (Sept. 23 and 24 this year).
On a recent day, the park buzzed with visitors and self-styled middle-aged desperadoes sporting leather chaps and paunches. A group of Italian bikers had just driven off, giving way to a few families from Arizona.
“I’ve always wanted to stay at the La Posada,” said Mary Keller, 32, of Phoenix, referring to the historic hotel down the street. “So we decided to stop by here, too.”
An elderly couple wandered over to the souvenir shop across the street that sells all manner of Standin’ on the Corner memorabilia and blares an endless loop of Eagles’ songs from a speaker outside.
“What else would you want to hear?” said the shop’s owner, Sandra Myers, chuckling.
“Here, take my picture,” said one visitor, thrusting a cellphone at a passer-by, draping his arm around the statue and uttering a line that could have drifted in from the radio of a passing car: “I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
AARP Is Open to Cuts for Social Security Benefits
The group’s stance, which generated quick reaction from all sides because of its powerful voice on the issue, could provide added ammunition to fiscal conservatives who have sought unsuccessfully to restructure Social Security and chip away at the benefits it promises older Americans.
“Our goal is to limit any changes in benefits,” John Rother, AARP’s policy chief, said in a telephone interview, “but we also want to see the system made solvent.”
Mr. Rother said the group’s stance on possible cuts, which was first reported in The Wall Street Journal in Friday’s editions, should be seen less as a major change in position than as a reflection of the political and financial realities facing the Social Security system and the country as a whole.
“You have to look at all the tradeoffs,” Mr. Rother said, “and what we’re trying to do is engage the American public in that debate.”
He made clear that the group’s willingness to discuss cuts comes with conditions: Reductions in benefits should be “minimal,” they should not affect current recipients and instead should be directed “far off in the future,” and they should be offset by increases in tax-generated revenue.
Nonetheless, the group’s openness to the possibility of unspecified cuts was seen as a significant development by people on all sides of the Social Security question because of AARP’s influence on federal policies affecting older Americans, including Medicare, prescription drugs and many more.
Third Way, a moderate Democratic group in Washington that has favored possible reductions in benefits, called AARP’s position “a watershed moment” in the debate over Social Security.
“Now that they have opened the door to reform, it is time for lawmakers to walk through it,” said Jonathan Cowan, president of Third Way.
But other advocacy groups that are pushing to preserve Social Security benefits accused AARP of effectively abandoning its core constituency.
Max Richtman, executive vice president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, an advocacy group in Washington, said the timing of AARP’s statements was particularly bad because it came in the midst of deliberations between the Obama administration and Congressional Republicans about the debt ceiling and overall deficit reduction.
AARP insisted that the Social Security trust funds should not be raided to reduce the deficit and that the two issues were separate. But Mr. Richtman said the group’s openness to considering future cuts would no doubt be used by deficit hawks to push for immediate cuts in Social Security benefits as part of the debate over deficit reduction.
“I think it’s tragic that AARP would, wittingly or unwittingly, play into the hands of people who have never really liked Social Security and want to decimate it,” Mr. Richtman said. “AARP is the 800-pound gorilla, but they do not speak for seniors.”
Republican leaders, who have led calls for revamping Social Security, had no immediate comments on AARP’s willingness to consider benefit reductions.
An aide to the Republican-led House Ways and Means Committee, who spoke on condition of anonymity under committee protocol, said AARP’s position was a welcome acknowledgment that Social Security would be unable to pay future benefits at the current rate and that it must be restructured.
“The longer we wait,” the aide said, “the more difficult it will be to protect current beneficiaries and those who rely on Social Security the most.”
The most recent projections from the Social Security Administration, issued last month, indicate that at the current rate, the program’s trust funds will be exhausted by 2036, and that $6.5 trillion in additional money will be needed over a 75-year period to pay all scheduled benefits.
Mr. Rother said AARP expected to hear criticism from some of its members over its position on possible cuts.
“We have such a broad membership, Mr. Rother said. “I’m sure there will be some who will not be happy, but others will be eager to see the program put on a stronger financial footing for the long term.”
While AARP has not issued specific recommendations or figures on how benefit reductions might be carried out, the group’s recent discussions with its members signal support for using increased revenue to fill two-thirds of the projected gap, and benefits reductions for one-third, Mr. Rother said.
As word of AARP’s position set off debate in Washington on Friday, the group’s chief executive, Barry Rand, issued a formal statement saying that the group’s position had not changed in any substantive way and refuting what he described as “misleading” media reports.
“Let me be clear — AARP is as committed as we’ve ever been to fighting to protect Social Security for today’s seniors and strengthening it for future generations,” Mr. Rand said.?
While he did not directly address the question of possible cuts in benefits in his statement, Mr. Rand said his group would be working to evaluate any proposed changes in Social Security “to determine how each might — individually or in different combinations — impact the lives of current and future retirees.”
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