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.”
Man Found With Suspicious Materials in Virginia
A Marine Corps reservist who was found in Arlington National Cemetery overnight after it had closed, and then ran from approaching federal parks police was arrested on Friday, the authorities said.
The man, identified as Yonathan Melaku, 22, of Alexandria, Va., had been carrying a backpack, which federal authorities said contained “suspicious materials,” though they later determined it was not an explosive substance, said Chris Allen, a spokesman with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“Initial contact with Melaku found he was carrying items which caused initial concerns about the public’s safety, prompting the F.B.I. and other agencies to respond to the scene and roads around the Pentagon to be shut down,” the F.B.I. said in a statement.
The authorities searched Mr. Melaku’s car, a red 2011 Nissan, which was parked in a wooded area near the Pentagon, and directly off of Route 27 and Route 110. They did not find anything suspicious, Mr. Allen said.
Mr. Melaku’ house in Alexandria was also searched by the F.B.I. and the Fairfax County Police Department, the F.BI said.
Mr. Melaku joined the Marine Corps Reserve in September 2007 and holds the rank of lance corporal, the authorities said, having been awarded the National Defense Service Medal and the Selected Marine Corps Reserve Medal.?
He has not been deployed overseas, the authorities said.
Frozen Dead Guy Festival for Sale (the Man Himself Stays on Ice)
But the concept and the rights to the name Frozen Dead Guy Days, the gleefully ghoulish late-winter bacchanal of ice and death and beer — that’s up for grabs. The Nederland Area Chamber of Commerce here in the mountains northwest of Denver owns the registered trademark to all things Dead Guy and has put those rights up for sale.
“It has grown out of our grasp,” said Blue Hessner, the chamber’s president. Mr. Hessner said that the board would consider all offers, with no pre-set price, and that depending on the buyer, “it could become a little more commercial.” He said discussions were under way with two potential buyers, but he declined to name any names.
Celebrating the mortal remains of an 89-year-old Norwegian named Bredo Morstoel, whose body became stranded here in 1993, is already a big local economic engine. Upward of 20,000 people came this year over a three-day weekend in early March to mark its 10th year and its packed agenda — the coffin races, the parade of hearses, the crowning of an Ice Queen and the not-to-be-missed frozen salmon toss.
Mr. Morstoel, or so local lore has it, died in 1989. His body, already frozen, was brought to Nederland by a family member who dreamed of opening a cryogenic-body-storage-in-the-mountains business. Local officials subsequently found two frozen bodies, including Mr. Morstoel’s, in the family’s possession and outlawed the practice of storing dead bodies. One of the bodies was relocated, but Mr. Morstoel’s was allowed to stay.
A caretaker was hired by the family, charged with keeping Mr. Morstoel in fine frozen fettle against the advent of a scientific breakthrough that would someday allow his revival. Tours to view the shed and the sarcophagus, about 10 minutes outside town, are offered separately by the caretaker during festival times.
The festival, meanwhile, moved on its own trajectory starting in 2001 as a way for the town to capitalize on the weird, unlikely tale. A spokeswoman for the chamber stressed that what is up for sale is the festival itself and the name, not Mr. Morstoel’s actual remains or responsibility for his upkeep.
Frozen Dead Guy Days falls right into the longstanding Western tradition of hyperbolic, manic absurdity in ways that Mark Twain, who chronicled the jumping frogs of Calaveras County, Calif., would probably have appreciated.
Fruita, Colo., holds an annual fete for a chicken named Mike who supposedly lived for 18 months after his decapitation on Sept. 10, 1945. Ainsworth, Neb., trying to make lemonade from lemons, holds a Middle of Nowhere festival in June. And Conway, Ark., has something called Toad Suck Daze.
Here in Nederland, at least one corporate sponsor has been on board for years. Tuff Shed, a maker of, well, sheds, spotted opportunity when the original outbuilding used for body storage started deteriorating — the company donated a new space for Mr. Morstoel and his ice (which gets replenished periodically). T-shirts with the company tagline: “Frozen Dead in a Shed, a Tuff Shed, That Is,” are sold on the chamber’s Web site, along with DVD copies of a documentary, “Grandpa’s Still in the Tuff Shed.”
In a place still tinctured by hippie-era tie-dye, where corporate franchises are widely unwelcome (people threatened to shoot out the Best Western motel sign when that company had the temerity to come to town some years back), the idea of Dead Guys going brand name has already set off a heated discussion.
“Anything corporate and people would be angry for sure, myself included,” said Jon Ridnell, 46, a musician. “That’s why we live here — to get away from that stuff.”
Other residents said they thought Frozen Dead Guy Days had already drifted beyond its original roots — for the worse, some said, in its emphasis on alcohol — and that it could perhaps use a little cleanup.
“By noon, everybody is three sheets to the wind and you want to get your kids out of there,” said Joe Cleveland, 35, a construction contractor who has 5-year-old twins with his wife, Stephanie Bowyer, 38.
Others say that in a town dependent for its livelihood on tourism, a new festival owner with deeper pockets could only be a good thing.
“It brings in revenue — we depend on it,” said Heather Taylor, 31, an artist. “Besides, I was Ice Queen once — I can’t complain.”
Program Offering Waivers for Health Law Is Ending
No more applications will be accepted after Sept. 22, federal health officials said.
Steven B. Larsen, director of the federal Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, said employers and labor unions had until that date to seek exemptions or request the extension of waivers already granted.
The new health care law generally requires employers to provide at least $750,000 in coverage to each person in their health insurance plans this year. Many restaurants, retailers and small businesses do not meet the standard. Some provide “mini-med” coverage with annual limits that may be as low as $10,000.
“Mini-med plans do not provide comprehensive health coverage, but unfortunately they are the only insurance options some consumers have today,” Mr. Larsen said.
The minimum amount of coverage will increase. Federal rules require health plans to provide at least $1.25 million in coverage next year and $2 million in 2013. In 2014, annual limits for new health plans will be banned. In that year, individuals and small businesses will be able to buy comprehensive coverage through state-supervised insurance exchanges.
Waivers granted or renewed in the next three months will run through 2013. To date, the administration has granted waivers to 1,433 health plans covering 3.2 million people.
On Friday, the administration disclosed that it had denied 100 applications and then approved nearly one-third of them after reconsidering the evidence.
To obtain waivers, employers and health plans must show that compliance with the federal requirements would cause a significant increase in premiums or a significant decrease in access to benefits. Without waivers, some employers said, they would have increased premiums or dropped coverage this year because they could not afford to provide higher health benefits.
Republicans have seized on the waivers as evidence that the law is fundamentally flawed.
“If the law is so good, why are more and more employers begging for a waiver to get relief from its burdensome mandates?” asked Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming. “Americans need waivers from the president’s law because it causes health premiums to go up.”
The policy announced Friday may eliminate the waivers as an issue in the 2012 election year. Under the policy, the administration said, employers and insurers with annual coverage limits below $2 million will have “a reasonable opportunity” to apply for waivers in the next three months.
Republicans have repeatedly asserted that the administration was giving preferential treatment to its political allies by granting waivers to health plans sponsored by labor unions that had supported the legislation. But in a study this week, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said health officials had used objective criteria in deciding whether to grant waivers.
E. Neil Trautwein, a vice president of the National Retail Federation, a trade group, said that ending the waivers was “a wise, appropriate step for the administration to take.”
“This step will avoid unnecessary politics and furor over the waivers,” Mr. Trautwein said.
U2 Guitarist’s House Plan Rejected by California Board
LOS ANGELES — Turning that Malibu dream house into reality is never easy, even when you are a world famous rock star.
The California Coastal Commission, which oversees development near the shoreline, this week rejected a plan from David Evans, better known as U2 guitarist the Edge, to build five mansions along a remote stretch of scenic Malibu coastline. The commission’s 8-to-4 vote capped four years of wrangling over the project, and the battle may now move to court.
“This is one of the most environmentally devastating projects that I’ve seen in the 38-year history of the Coastal Commission,” said Peter Douglas, the agency’s executive director.
While celebrity mansions are hardly new to Malibu, Mr. Evans’s building plans have been a source of particular controversy, which pitted environmental groups against each other.
The houses Mr. Evans envisioned boast state-of-the-art green building techniques: solar panels, rainwater catching systems and native plants.
But despite that, environmentalists particularly opposed the road that would have to be built just to access the homes, while some potential neighbors in this most exclusive of enclaves disliked the idea of five homes — each more than 7,000 square feet — marring their view of the cliffs.
Mr. Evans and the four other property owners mollified one conservancy group that had opposed the project with a donation of $1 million, an open space dedication and a trail easement that would allow hikers to pass through an area currently closed to the public.
“The property owners worked diligently to develop home designs that would meet some of the highest standards for sustainability,” Fiona Hutton, a spokeswoman for the property owners, said in a statement. She noted dozens of other homes of similar size in the area that the Coastal Commission had supported.
But Mr. Douglas said the lack of infrastructure greatly multiplied the environmental impact of any project at the site.
Ms. Hutton said the owners were now considering their options, including litigation. A judge would then rule on whether the commission’s decision amounted to an unconstitutional “taking” of the land, which legally can be developed.
Hospitals Performed Needless Double CT Scans, Records Show
Performing two scans in succession is rarely necessary, radiologists say, yet some hospitals were doing that more than 80 percent of the time for their Medicare chest patients, according to Medicare outpatient claims from 2008, the most recent year available. The rate is typically less than 1 percent, or in some cases zero, at major university teaching hospitals.
Next month, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services is expected to release figures for 2009, but according to people who have seen the numbers, the practice of double scanning chest patients has continued.
“When I saw the 2009 numbers, they were the same essentially, and I was disquieted by that,” said Dr. Michael J. Pentecost, a radiologist and Medicare consultant who also reviews claims for commercial clients.
The overuse of scans has been the subject of growing concern in recent years, but a review of the federal data, focusing on a common procedure performed millions of times a year, offers a rare and detailed snapshot of the problem state by state, hospital by hospital.
In 2008, about 75,000 patients received double scans, one using iodine contrast to check blood flow, and one that did not. “If you do both, you bill for both,” Dr. Pentecost said.
Radiologists say one scan or the other is needed depending on the patient’s condition, but rarely both. Double scanning is also common among privately insured patients who tend to be younger.
Double scans expose patients to extra radiation while heaping millions of dollars in extra costs on an already overburdened Medicare program. A single CT scan of the chest is equal to about 350 standard chest X-rays, so two scans are twice that amount.
“The primary concern relates to radiation exposure,” said Dr. James A. Brink, chief of diagnostic radiology at Yale-New Haven Hospital, where double scans accounted for only a fraction of 1 percent of cases. He added: “It is incumbent upon all of us to limit it to the amount needed to make a diagnosis.”
Officials at hospitals with high scan rates said radiologists ordered the extra chest scan figuring that more information is better. In rare instances, the two scans might help a doctor distinguish between tangled blood vessels and a tumor, Dr. Pentecost said.
The Medicare agency distributed the data to hospitals last year to show how they performed relative to each other and to encourage more efficient, safer practices. The review of that data found more than 200 hospitals that administered double scans on more than 30 percent of their Medicare outpatients — a percentage that the federal agency and radiology experts considers far too high. The national average is 5.4 percent.
The figures show wide variation among states as well, from 1 percent in Massachusetts to 13 percent in Oklahoma. Overall, Medicare paid hospitals roughly $25 million for double scans in 2008.
Double scanning is more likely to occur at smaller, community hospitals such as Memorial Medical Center of West Michigan in Ludington. It gave two scans to 89 percent of its Medicare chest patients..
“We aren’t radiologists, but as we understand the practice, it was strictly a matter of physicians, independent practitioners who were doing their best to get to the bottom of what was ailing their patients,” said Bill Kerans, a spokesman for that hospital.
Since 2008, Memorial Medical Center lowered its rate to 42.4 percent in 2010 and to 3 percent in the first part of 2011. “We have made some dramatic changes in protocols and practices,” Mr. Kerans said.
A few large hospitals have had problems as well. St. John Health System in Tulsa double-scanned 80 percent — or 800 of its Medicare outpatients in 2008. “We recognized in late 2008 and early 2009 those numbers were higher than we needed to be,” said Charles Anderson, the hospital’s president and chief executive.
By changing protocols, the percentage of double scans is now “hovering around 5 percent,” Mr. Anderson said. “What that means for us is when a physician orders a scan from a radiology department, the radiologist begins to engage in a conversation with those physicians, talking about what might be a more reasonable and acceptable approach.”
2 Big Banks Exit Reverse Mortgage Business
Wells Fargo, the largest provider, said on Thursday that it was leaving the business, following the departure in February of Bank of America, the second-largest lender. With the two biggest players gone — together, they accounted for 43 percent of the business, according to Reverse Market Insight — prospective borrowers may find it more difficult to access the mortgages.
Reverse mortgages allow people age 62 and older to tap what may be their biggest asset, their home equity, without having to make any payments. Instead, the bank pays the borrowers, though they continue to be responsible for paying property taxes and homeowner’s insurance.
But the loans have increasingly become a riskier proposition. Banks are not allowed to assess borrowers’ ability to keep up with all their payments, and more borrowers do not have the wherewithal to stay current on their homeowners’ insurance and property taxes, both of which have risen in many parts of the country. At the same time, borrowers have been taking the maximum amount of money available, often using it to pay off any remaining money owed on the home. Yet home prices continue to slide.
“We are on new ground here,” said Franklin Codel, head of national consumer lending at Wells Fargo. “With house prices falling, you reach a crossover point where they owe more than the house is worth and it creates risk for us as mortgage servicers and for HUD.” He was referring to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, whose Federal Housing Administration arm insures the vast majority of these loans through its Home Equity Conversion Mortgage program.
As a result, banks are seeing a rise in what are known as technical defaults, when homeowners fall behind on their taxes or homeowner’s insurance, both of which are required to avoid foreclosure. According to Reverse Market Insight, about 4 to 5 percent of active reverse mortgages, or 25,000 to 30,000 borrowers, are in default on at least one of those items.
Bank of America, meanwhile, said that declining home values made fewer people eligible for reverse mortgages. So it decided to redeploy at least half of those working on the mortgages to its loan modification division, which has been criticized for failing to help enough homeowners on the brink of foreclosure.
For Wells Fargo, however, the inability to assess borrowers’ financial health was the biggest factor for exiting the business. Anyone over the age of 62 with enough home equity can take out a reverse mortgage, regardless of their other income. The amount of money received is determined by the borrower’s age, the amount of equity in the home and prevailing interest rates.
“We are not allowed, as an originator, to decline anyone,” added Mr. Codel of Wells Fargo. We “worked closely with HUD to find an alternative solution and we were unable to find one with them, which led to this outcome.”
Reverse mortgage borrowers are required to pay premiums for mortgage insurance, which protects the lender if the homes are ultimately sold for less than the mortgage value, since the government is required to pay the difference to the lender. The premium rates were increased last October to account for declining home values (though one sizable upfront mortgage premium was eliminated to make the loans more attractive to certain borrowers).
But lenders are responsible for making tax and insurance payments on behalf of delinquent borrowers until they submit an insurance claim to HUD, at which point the agency would be responsible since it provided the insurance against default.
In January, HUD sent a letter to lenders and reverse mortgage counselors that provided guidance on how to report delinquent loans to the agency, and what steps the lenders could take to get borrowers back on track, like establishing a realistic repayment plan that could be completed in two years or less, or getting a HUD-approved mortgage counselor involved to help come up with a solution. If one cannot be reached, the lenders must begin foreclosure proceedings.
Both Wells Fargo and Bank of America have said they have not foreclosed on any borrowers to date.
The National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association, the industry group, said it has been working with HUD to come up with procedures that would allow lenders to assess a prospective borrower’s income and expenses, or at least require homeowners to set aside money to pay for taxes and insurance. A spokeswoman for HUD said the guidance is still being drafted.
As it stands now, borrowers are required to see a HUD-approved lender before they can apply for a reverse mortgage. As part of that process, consumers are educated on the nuts and bolts of how the loans work and what their responsibilities are, including that they need to be able to continue to pay taxes, insurance and keep the property in good repair.
“We don’t tell consumers what decision to make, but we do try to give them the tools to make a decision,” said Sue Hunt, director of reverse mortgage counseling at CredAbility, a nonprofit consumer credit counseling agency. She added that their sessions last about an hour and 15 minutes, on average. The counselors also look at the consumer’s budget to see if it is sustainable with the mortgage, as well as what circumstances might arise that could throw the borrower off track.
“Outside factors are affecting people who thought five or six years ago that they were in pretty good shape,” she added. “The world has changed a bit around them.”
In days past, the borrower would get the reverse mortgage, and equity would continue to build, experts said, which would provide borrowers with more options — like refinancing — should they fall on hard times. Declining home values have changed that calculus for both bankers and consumers. Borrowers have not been able to pull out as much money. At the same time, the government has also tightened its withdrawal limits.
There were a total of more than 50,000 reverse mortgages, totaling $12.66 billion, made industrywide since last October, according to HUD.
Both Wells Fargo and Bank of America will continue to service their existing reverse mortgages. And the reverse mortgage association has said it will work with its members to ensure that senior citizens who need the loans can get them, though some experts said that less competition could increase certain fees.
“There is a certain amount of the business done by Wells and Bank of America that happens because of their bank branches, brand names and large sales forces,” said John K. Lunde, president of Reverse Market Insight. “We would expect something more than half of their volume to be absorbed by the rest of the industry, with something less than half not happening.”
Wells Fargo, which said that reverse mortgages represented 2.2 percent of its retail mortgage business, employs about 1,000 reverse mortgage workers. They are being given a chance to find other positions at the bank. Bank of America said that about half of its 600 workers have been reassigned within the bank. MetLife, the third-largest provider of reverse mortgages, declined to comment on its business.
2011年6月18日星期六
On Religion: A Black Cultural Tradition and Its Unlikely Keepers
“Een muh time ob dyin’,” Mr. Dougherty began, “Uh don wan nobody fuh moan.” These were the words, in Gullah dialect, to a spiritual about the wish to die easily and to be taken into heaven by Jesus. Mr. Dougherty’s mother had first heard the song as a teenager in the 1930s, and she requested it for her own funeral six decades later.
Now, on this evening in June 2011, the financial adviser and social worker and music professor and Navy officer, and the other half-dozen people joining in harmony from their chairs, were engaging in a profound act of cultural conservation. In a city built on the slave trade, in the state where the Civil War started, these white men and women were the curators of an African-American religious and musical treasure.
They all belonged to a group called the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals, as had many of their parents and grandparents. Since its founding in 1922, the society’s members have collected, recorded, transcribed and performed black praise songs that almost certainly would have otherwise been lost — lost to the resort development of the barrier islands where Gullah culture thrived, lost to the amplified up-tempo sounds of urban gospel music that overwhelmed rural, a capella forms.
“It’s poetry and it’s faith,” Mr. Dougherty, 54, said of the Gullah spirituals. “And it’s poetry about faith.”
Back at the genesis of the society, though, no premise could have been more radical than for a white person to consider Gullah spirituals worthy of protection and emulation. These were the songs, after all, of the descendants of rice-plantation slaves, so isolated that their language maintained elements of Krio from West Africa.
Long before it was recognized as a unique hybrid, suitable for scholarly inquiry, Gullah folk life was routinely ridiculed, even by some big-city blacks, as merely primitive. Gullah songs reached the affluent white children of Charleston through the cries of street vendors, the lullabies of black nannies.
That kind of casual sharing of culture, amid the overarching climate of segregation, attested to a black aphorism: “In the North the white man will let you get high but not close, and in the South the white man will let you get close but not high.”
So several dozen well-born whites — members of Episcopal, Lutheran and Reform Jewish congregations, more than a few the descendants of slaveholders — set about visiting Gullah churches in Charleston and the nearby Sea Islands. In 1931, the society published a book with music and lyrics to 49 spirituals, and later in the decade began recording black congregations on aluminum discs. That trove of material came to the attention of the legendary folklorist John A. Lomax, who tried to have the discs donated to the Library of Congress.
“There was a thread of respect that runs through the origins of the society,” said John Horlbeck, 56, a former Navy officer whose father was also a society member. “There was no attempt to claim the high ground as whites. They were witnesses to something and were concerned it would be lost.”
Inevitably, though, even the best-intentioned efforts raised issues of what would later be termed cultural appropriation and white-skin privilege. While the Gullah Christians remained in poverty and obscurity, the society’s members performed those spirituals during the 1930s at the White House and Harvard. One society member, the author DuBose Heyward, introduced George Gershwin to Gullah music while the composer was adapting Heyward’s novel “Porgy” into the opera “Porgy and Bess.”
As decades passed, and civil rights legislation, Interstate highways and Hilton Head resorts altered the seclusion and segregation of Charleston, the younger members of the society clung to their unlikely birthright for two reasons. First, those songs had become part of their own heritage — so much so that Mr. Dougherty proposed to his future wife not with a ring but with a paper loop bearing the title of the spiritual “Come En Go Wid Me.” And second, these whites viewed themselves as custodians of something sacred and irreducibly black.
“The greatest success we can have is in some way to have saved the music and given it back to black people,” said Edward Hart, 45, a music professor at the College of Charleston and a second-generation member of the society. “It’s their music.”
That process accelerated in the early 1980s when an elderly member of the society revealed to Mr. Dougherty a box containing the aluminum discs recorded in the 1930s. Evidently, they had never been sent to the Library of Congress then. So Mr. Dougherty did so right away — only to find out that the metal had become so oxidized over the years that the recordings were almost inaudible.
But as word of the discs passed among the society’s 50 members, one of them gave Mr. Dougherty a set of reel-to-reel tapes, apparently made from the discs in the 1960s. Those recordings, in turn, were released in 2004 on separate CD’s of the original field recordings and the society’s performances. (They are available through Edisto Bookstore in South Carolina and the Preservation Society of Charleston.) Three years later, the society published an updated and expanded version of its 1931 volume of Gullah spirituals.
As the society’s current members sang in and around Charleston, they also caught the ear of black listeners like Alphonso Brown, the organist and choir master of the Mt. Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church. Now 66, he grew up with the Gullah spirituals as part of Sunday worship and prayer meetings.
“I was angry with myself for not doing it before they did,” Mr. Brown said this week. “And they did such a great job of it. They inspired me to start doing those songs again in my church.”
Meditating in Silence as the Fire Draws Near
PHOENIX — Those living in the path of a huge wildfire typically express all sorts of emotions, but in one remote community in southeastern Arizona, the reaction has been muted.
The 39 Buddhists living at the Diamond Mound Retreat Center near Bowie, Ariz., are about six months into a three-year solitary retreat that includes a vow of silence. Ranging in age from their mid-20s to their late 60s, participants spend their days in intense meditation, living in basic huts that are separated from one another, in a spiritual exercise aimed at promoting world peace one person at a time.
Those administering the program are in regular contact with firefighters on the front lines of the Horseshoe 2 Fire, which has burned in excess of 200,000 acres in the Chiricahua Mountains since May 8, and say they are awaiting word from the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department on whether an evacuation will be necessary.
“They can see the smoke coming over the hill,” said Scott Vacek, one of the caretakers on the property and also a practicing Buddhist. “It looks startlingly close. But we haven’t told them that we may be coming in to evacuate them. We didn’t see any upside to that, because their meditations will immediately be over. They wouldn’t be able to concentrate.”
The fire is now believed to be about four miles from the retreat, which sits on just over 1,000 acres and has been a learning center for Buddhist studies since 2003. “It’s scrub desert with some brush and juniper trees,” Mr. Vacek said. “It’s beautiful landscape with some tall peaks behind us.”
The people participating in the retreat live in 29 cabins, ranging from mud huts to basic wood-frame dwellings, powered by solar panels or propane. Mr. Vacek and a team of volunteers deliver supplies every Monday and make a conscious effort to steer clear of the participants. Mr. Vacek’s wife is the program’s nurse, and she treats participants using written notes and gestures.
Among those in the retreat are Christie McNally, who is the director and is one of the first women to be recognized as a lama in the Tibetan tradition; Lisette Garcia, a former college professor from New York who grew up in El Paso; Dvora and Ari Tzvieli, from Israel, who are seeking an end to the conflict in the Middle East; and Bill McMichael, a former American Airlines pilot.
The authorities say an evacuation is not yet necessary.
“We know they are there and how to get in touch with them, but there is no need for them to be evacuated at this time,” Alexis West, a spokeswoman for the interagency group fighting the fire, said Friday.
If an evacuation is eventually ordered, organizers say they will try to keep the retreat going by taking participants in silence in two vans to a nearby town and housing them in quiet surroundings until they can return. But if the fire ends up damaging the dwellings, there is a chance the exercise could end.
“It would be a terrible shame,” Mr. Vacek said. “These people have gone through an incredible amount of physical work and a huge amount of emotional work. It’s a life-changing experience, and it would be tragic if it ended.”
The Horseshoe 2 Fire is one of several huge fires burning across Arizona. The Wallow Fire, in the eastern part of the state, now covers more than 495,000 acres, making it the largest wildfire in the state’s history.
Another blaze, the Monument Fire, forced the evacuation of thousands of residents of Hereford, a community south of Sierra Vista, Ariz., on Thursday. First reported on June 12, it covers about 19,000 acres in the Coronado National Forest, spans the Mexican border and is growing quickly, officials said.
For Want of a Word, Arizona’s Jobless Lose Checks
That’s all that Frank Ballesteros, a 62-year-old desperate for work, needs to stay afloat. The word is not “hope” or “God” or “patience.” It is, improbably, “three.”
Arizona’s legislature has resisted making a small word change, from “two” to “three,” in its statutes. Only if it does will Mr. Ballesteros continue to receive jobless benefits through November, allowing him to pay his mortgage and medical bills.
Otherwise, his checks stop next week.
“It is almost 100 degrees out there, and I am walking door to door handing out résumés,” said Mr. Ballesteros, who worked for 21 years at a nonprofit group in Tucson before getting laid off when funding dried up. “Now Arizona decided to kill the benefits extension from the federal government because some legislator decided we’re just sitting around on our butts waiting for a check.”
That last extension of unemployment benefits — typically received in weeks 80 through 99 of unemployment — is paid for entirely with federal money and does not affect state budgets. But because of ideological opposition and other legislative priorities, Arizona and a handful of other states, like Wisconsin and Alaska, have not made the one-word change necessary to keep the program going.
Right now about 640,000 jobless Americans are receiving this last tier of benefits, according to the National Employment Law Project. The money, appropriated in the 2009 federal stimulus package, was initially intended for states with jobless rates higher than they were two years earlier. Since the recovery has been much slower than predicted, though, Congress decided last December to allow states to continue receiving the money if their unemployment rates were higher than they were three years earlier. States simply needed to change “two” to “three” in the relevant state law.
Some economists say that cutting off the long-term unemployed from extended federal assistance could backfire by putting further strain on state economies instead. Indeed, most states were quick to make the one-word change, counting on the federal money not only to support ailing families but also to serve as a strong stimulus (jobless benefits are normally spent more quickly than, say, tax refunds). Nearly every state — Arizona included — had opted into the extended benefits program when it was introduced.
But now Arizona is reluctant. When Gov. Jan Brewer called a special session to address the issue last week, legislators didn’t introduce a bill. Republican legislators said they would consider the change only if it were packaged with other provisions, including tax cuts and stricter rules for receiving unemployment benefits in the first place.
“We prefer to look for long-term solutions so when the Obama administration money runs out Arizonans will have jobs,” said Andy Tobin, the Republican speaker of the house.
Some Arizona lawmakers expressed discomfort with the prospect of accepting more federal money.
“This is not free money,” said Al Melvin, a Republican state senator representing Tucson. “This is America’s money. We have a $14 trillion debt that has to be paid, and we need to stop spending money we don’t have.”
The last tier of federal benefits injects about $2.3 million a week into Arizona, and Mr. Melvin says he believes “every dollar’s important.”
Arizona’s deadline for continuing the federal benefits passed on June 11, though they could be reinstated retroactively. In the meantime, 15,000 workers have stopped receiving checks, and 30,000 more will most likely lose out on these benefits later this year, said Matthew Benson, a spokesman for Governor Brewer.
Mr. Ballesteros, who is on his 78th week of unemployment, is one of those workers. He receives $240 a week in benefits, or about $5 an hour for a full-time worker.
“These politicians just don’t realize how important that one $240 check is,” he said.
When he worked at a nonprofit managing a microloan program, Mr. Ballesteros earned $73,000 annually; now, he says, he is getting rejected — or worse, ignored — by employers who pay minimum wage.
“A grocery store here announced it had 100 positions available, and then they had 1,500 applying for the job,” he said. “I got there about 4:30 that first day but by that time it was too late. They told me they’d call me. That was a month ago.”
Five states — Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana and Utah — never accepted these federally funded benefits. Of those that did, some fought for months over whether to extend the program before finally acting as the deadline approached, including Florida, Pennsylvania and Nevada just this week. In North Carolina, the governor issued an executive order forcing the change after a long standoff with legislators.
Besides Arizona, two other states have not yet made the one-word change required to continue receiving the money. In Wisconsin, for example, the advisory council that refers bills on unemployment insurance to the state legislature has not even taken up the issue. The council comprises representatives from business and labor; the labor side has been too busy fighting back attacks on public unions.
“The management side is not inclined to approve this anyway absent concessions on their part,” said James Buchen, the lead management representative on the council. “The real question is whether there is still a need for extended benefits. We are increasingly hearing from people that they are having trouble hiring workers who are on unemployment because they want to wait until their benefits are exhausted.”
In Alaska, the issue has fallen by the wayside as well, and the state’s legislature has already adjourned for the year. In separate moves, five states — Illinois, Michigan, Florida, Arkansas and Missouri, according to the National Employment Law Project — have cut the first 26 weeks of unemployment benefits, which are paid by the state rather than the federal government. Labor leaders have argued that cutting jobless benefits — particularly money provided by the federal government — may be self-defeating.
When the unemployed stop receiving federal money they will cut back on spending, which means less income for local businesses. Many of them may also start relying more heavily on state services like Medicaid and homeless shelters, which are already strained for cash.
“I hate the idea that I’d become indigent if I can’t even get unemployment anymore,” Mr. Ballesteros said, fighting back tears as he described his unpaid medical bills and his struggles to afford his cholesterol medication. “I’m already afraid to get sick. I don’t want to be standing in a stupid line waiting for food, too.”
“I’m physically fit, and there’s no reason I don’t have another five years in me where I’ll be able to work,” he said. “For now I just need that stopgap.”
U.S. Is Paying European Teams to Hunt Stray Munitions in Libya
WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States is paying British and Swiss mine-clearing groups nearly $1 million to search for loose antiaircraft missiles in Libya and dispose of them, so they do not fall into the hands of terrorist groups.
The State Department’s hiring of the teams was prompted by fears that terrorists could use scavenged man-portable air defense systems, known as Manpads, to attack civilian aircraft around the world.
The Libyan military had amassed nearly 20,000 of the weapons before the popular uprising began in March. Most of them are still held by the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, but some bases and ammunition dumps in contested or rebel-held areas have been looted, and an unknown number of the weapons have gone astray.
The search teams, who will also keep an eye out for mines and other deadly munitions, will be allowed to work in rebel-held areas away from active combat zones. American and allied authorities have told Libyan opposition figures that their cooperation would be a factor in decisions about future aid, according to American and United Nations officials who are familiar with the discussions.
“From the U.S. point of view, it was an issue of paramount importance,” said Justin Baker, officer-in-charge of the United Nations Mine Action Service, which is overseeing the weapons disposal effort in Libya. “The Libyans seemed to get the big picture of what was necessary to present a credible international face.”
The disposal effort will not affect areas or munitions still under the Qaddafi government’s control. “I can’t imagine the U.S. can do anything about Qaddafi’s inventory until they defeat him or negotiate his exit,” said Matthew Schroeder, an arms expert with the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. “But even without that, securing any Manpads loose in Libya is a good thing.”
The Obama administration mentioned the anti-Manpads effort in its report to Congress this week defending the legality of its intervention in Libya. The report included classified documents detailing a “threat assessment of Manpads, ballistic missiles and chemical weapons in Libya.”
Most American and NATO warplanes have electronic evasion systems and can fly above the range of the portable missiles, but most civilian aircraft do not, and are vulnerable to attack. Nearly a dozen cargo and passenger planes have been brought down in Africa and Asia in the past decade using the missiles.
Reports have surfaced in recent weeks from officials in Algeria and Chad, and recently in the Russian news media, saying that antiaircraft missiles and launchers looted from Libyan government caches were already in the hands of a North African terrorist group, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. American officials have yet to confirm any of those reports.
The two groups hired by the State Department are the Mines Advisory Group of Britain and the Swiss Foundation for Mine Action.
Officials with the groups said that almost all of the Libyan weapons depots they had surveyed in recent weeks showed clear signs of looting. Libyan opposition forces took anything they could use from the depots in the opening weeks of the conflict, they said, and there were few surviving inventory records, making it impossible to account for the depots’ contents or say what was missing.
“The ammo dumps we’ve seen are either partially destroyed or picked clean,” said Alexander Griffiths, director of operations for the Swiss group, which now has 35 disposal experts working in rebel territory under a $470,000 American grant. “We haven’t seen Manpads so far, and my guess is we won’t see many, because they’re such a high-value item. They would be the first items to go.”
The British mine disposal group located and destroyed two of the portable missile systems last week near Ajdabiya in rebel-held northeastern Libya, according to Kate Wiggans, a spokeswoman. Two other stray antiaircraft missiles were found in May and destroyed, she said. All four were SA-7s — Russian-made portable missiles that date from the 1970s. Experts say that many of the Libyan Manpads were probably of similar vintage, and that some may be too decayed to use.
The Mines Advisory Group has three workers in Libya but plans to expand to at least 20, operating with $486,000 from the State Department and $290,000 in British government aid, Ms. Wiggans said.
Computer Failure Delays United Flights Nationwide
Passengers were stranded at airports across the country Friday night after a failure in United Airlines’ computer system, the airline said.
The disruption set off widespread delays at airports in San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, with many passengers left sitting in terminals or stuck on planes that were grounded.
United said in a statement that the problems began at 8:15 p.m. New York time, when the computer failure knocked out its flight departures, airport processing and reservations systems. The statement did not address the nationwide delays, and a spokesman did not return a phone call seeking comment.
It was not clear what had set off the computer failure, but United said in its statement that it had a technology team in place that was struggling to restore the system.
“We apologize for the disruption being caused to travelers at affected airports, and we are seeking to resume operations as quickly as possible,” the airline said.
Just before 2:00 a.m. New York time, United updated its Twitter feed to say it had started to resolve the problem.
"Our systems are up. We are in the process of resuming ops for UA," the Twitter message said.
Passengers at San Francisco International Airport reported a chaotic scene at the United terminal, while others waiting for flights at various airports around the country took to Twitter as they sat in limbo.
“Sitting on the plane in Chicago wanting to go home so badly but the whole computer system at United Airlines has shut down,” wrote @RonRhoads. “Delayed!”
Another stranded passenger, @mettlinger, posted from Dulles International Airport, or IAD: “Latest announcement at IAD: ‘Every computer system United Airlines has is down ... Our computers are paperweights.’?”
In the Town of Phil Campbell, a Gathering of Phil Campbells
There are 18 Phil Campbells here this weekend. No Phyllis Campbells, though, a frustration to the organizers who have been planning for months to descend on Phil Campbell as it celebrates its centennial.
The whole idea started as a joke, really — a weekend romp to rural northern Alabama for people who share a name and, clearly, a sense of humor.
Then, on April 27, one of the strongest tornadoes on record tore through town. It killed 26 people. That’s a lot of death to absorb, but even more so when a community had only 1,100 people to begin with.
Overnight, the Phil Campbell convention became a relief effort. Word went out to the 190 Phil and Phyllis Campbells on the Facebook page Brooklyn Phil started, in an age when the marriage between narcissism and technology has become everyday. Twitter accounts were established. Money was raised. The “I’m with Phil” campaign was born.
On Friday, the Phil Campbells gathered among the bottled water and diapers stacked at the community center here, waiting for the rain to let up so they could go out and help the town that shares their name with what is still a slow and difficult recovery.
“It’s an odd privilege,” said Alaska Phil, a pastor from Juneau. “Just because of the happenstance of my name, I have a chance to do some good.”
The Phil Campbells do not have much in common besides a name, but they point out some similarities. Like the man for whom the town is named, a 19th-century railroad engineer, every one is white. They also have receding hairlines and not much money. (Part of that theory was dashed when Texas Phil, an accountant with a full head of hair and a nice car, drove into town.)
People who live in Phil Campbell are moved, if not just a little perplexed.
“At first we were like, what?” said Sharon Baker, 28. “But then we thought, that’s pretty cool.”
The Phil Campbells are not entirely unknown in Phil Campbell. In 1995, when Brooklyn Phil was in college, he organized the first Phil Campbell convention here. The town tried to keep it up for a couple of years, but the novelty wore off. The convention morphed into an annual hoedown and street fair.
That is how it stayed until this year, when Brooklyn Phil and city leaders decided to get the Phil Campbell band back together to coincide with the hoedown. Then the tornado came, and the town thought about canceling. But the Phil Campbells were determined.
“I didn’t think anyone would come, but everyone still did,” said Rita Barton, the parks and recreation official who plans the city celebration each year. “The attitude of them wanting to come to Phil Campbell to help us just warms your heart. It just does.”
The town needs its Phil Campbells, said Jerry Mays, the mayor. Even two months after the tornado, relief crews continued to hand out free meals and household supplies. Residents, almost a third of whom lost homes, are still in shock.
“You close your eyes and you can still hear it,” said Vanessa Wilson, 49, who barely survived by cramming into a utility room with her family.
Of course, it is not always easy having so many Phil Campbells around. For one thing, a small town this battered cannot really host them. You cannot buy a hamburger here, let alone get a hotel room. So most of the Phil Campbells piled into the Best Western in nearby Russellville. The staff had so many Phil Campbells on the reservation system that they had to include middle initials and hometowns.
Still, the Phil Campbells offer comic relief, if not some real help. They have raised nearly $35,000 through corporate donations and people who click onto imwithphil.com. It should be enough to build a Habitat for Humanity house. Brooklyn Phil, who wrote a book about an ill-fated political campaign that became the Hollywood movie “Grassroots,” got permission from the director Stephen Gyllenhaal to screen a rough cut here on Thursday as a fund-raiser.
Residents seemed to like the movie. And they liked the joke, too. People in stores and restaurants call out “Phil” just to see men turn their heads. They keep asking Phil from Nottingham, England, to speak so they can hear an accent far removed from their own.
Merrell Potter, the police chief and a Baptist preacher, is not too worried about keeping the Phil Campbells in line. For one thing, the town prohibits the sale of liquor.
“We’re ready for them, but we haven’t called out the National Guard,” Chief Potter said.
On Saturday, the Phil Campbells will march in the town parade. Glasgow Phil, from Scotland, will perform some music, along with a Phil from Birmingham.
And the town will celebrate its sons.
“We don’t know if there is any magic in the name,” Chief Potter said, “but we’re hoping there is.”
Bill Haast, a Man Charmed by Snakes, Dies at 100
An eastern diamondback rattlesnake left one hand looking like a claw. A Malayan pit viper mangled an index finger. A cottonmouth bit a finger, which instantly turned black, prompting his wife to snip off the fingertip with garden clippers.
Mr. Haast was bitten at least 173 times by poisonous snakes, about 20 times almost fatally. It was all in a day’s work for probably the best-known snake handler in the country, a scientist-cum-showman who made enough money from milking toxic goo from slithery serpents to buy a cherry-red Rolls-Royce convertible.
A secret of his success was the immunity he had built up by injecting himself every day for more than 60 years with a mix of venoms from 32 snake species. He suspected the inoculations might have explained his extraordinarily good health, but he was reluctant to make that claim, he said, until he reached 100.
Mr. Haast, who was director of the Miami Serpentarium Laboratories, a snake-venom producer near Punta Gorda, Fla., died of natural causes on Wednesday at his home in southwest Florida, his wife, Nancy, said. He was 100.
Mr. Haast’s story was good enough in its day to land him in Walter Winchell’s syndicated column, on “The Tonight Show” and, hardly surprising, in Ripley’s Believe It or Not attractions. His original Miami Serpentarium, south of Miami on South Dixie Highway, attracted 50,000 tourists a year for four decades.
Outside was a 35-foot-high concrete statue of a giant cobra, forked tongue flicking menacingly. Inside, Mr. Haast, the self-proclaimed “Snakeman,” entertained paying customers by using his hands to grab snakes below their heads and force their teeth into soft plastic. Venom would then drain into test tubes fastened to the plastic. He did this 100 or so times a day.
The serpentarium was more than just another roadside attraction. The price of a gram of freeze-dried venom from exotic snakes, requiring 100 or more extractions to accumulate, could exceed $5,000. The substance is an essential ingredient in making a serum to treat snakebite victims. It has also shown promise as a medicinal ingredient.
Mr. Haast and a Miami doctor treated more than 6,000 people with a snake-venom serum that they and their patients contended was effective against multiple sclerosis and arthritis. After the CBS News program “60 Minutes” did a report on the subject in December 1979, interest in the serum surged. But in 1980 the Food and Drug Administration banned the product as useless after saying that numerous deficiencies had been found in Mr. Haast’s manufacturing process. Nevertheless, researchers have continued to work on drugs made from venom in the hope of using it to treat cancer, Alzheimer’s and other diseases.
Mr. Haast himself indisputably saved lives. He flew around the world to donate his antibody-rich blood to 21 different snakebite victims. Venezuela made him an honorary citizen after he went deep into the jungle to give a boy a pint of blood.
The favor was returned in 1989 when, according to The Associated Press, the White House used secret connections to spirit a rare serum out of Iran to treat Mr. Haast as he fought to recover from a bite by a Pakistani pit viper. (Different venoms require different antidotes.)
William E. Haast was born on Dec. 30, 1910, in Paterson, N.J. He caught his first garter snake at 7 at a nearby canal. His first serious snake bite came at age 12, when he was bitten by a timber rattlesnake at Boy Scout camp. The same year, a copperhead’s bite put him in the hospital for a week. When young Bill brought his first poisonous snake home to the family apartment, his mother left home for three days, he said. She finally agreed to let him keep a snake or two in cages.
“The snake would bite the mouse,” he said in an interview with The Miami Herald in 1984. “The mouse would die. I found it intriguing.”
He bought his first exotic snake, a diamondback rattler, from a catalog. Noticing that it had come from Florida, he knew then, he said, that Florida was his destiny. After dropping out of school at 16, he joined a roadside snake show that made its way to Florida in the late 1920s.
The snake attraction soon failed during the Depression, so Mr. Haast went to work for a bootlegger in the Everglades, where he was pleased to find plenty of snakes. The bootlegger was arrested, and Mr. Haast found his way to an airline mechanics school.
Finding a job as a flight engineer with Pan American World Airways, he began traveling around the world. That gave him a chance to use his toolbox to smuggle snakes, including his first cobra.
Mr. Haast’s dream of a first-class snake farm came true when he opened his Miami serpentarium in 1947. His near-fatal snakebites became legend in the news media, particularly after the total passed 100 in the mid-1960s.
His first wife, Ann, divorced him over his snake obsession. His second, Clarita, and third, Nancy, pitched in enthusiastically.
Besides his wife, the former Nancy Harrell, he is survived by two daughters, three grandchildren, two great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.
Mr. Haast closed the serpentarium in 1984 after a 6-year-old boy fell into his crocodile pit and was fatally mauled. He moved his venom-gathering operation to Utah. Six years later, he returned to Florida and opened the facility in Punta Gorda, where he raised and milked snakes but did not resume his snake show.
For all the time he spent with snakes, Mr. Haast harbored no illusions that they liked him.
“You could have a snake for 30 years and the second you leave his cage door cracked, he’s gone,” he told Outside magazine in 1997. “And they’ll never come to you unless you’re holding a mouse in your teeth.”
Political Memo: After Snips to Budget, a Thicket Looms
With time growing short before an Aug. 2 deadline to raise the federal debt limit, Republican and Democratic lawmakers meeting with Mr. Biden behind closed doors are just beginning to weigh the big fiscal trade-offs necessary for a compromise that could clear the way for a Congressional vote.
An accelerated schedule of meetings for next week will test whether the six members of the House and Senate talking with the White House are willing to entertain the serious political concessions and to make the hard choices needed to cut a deal in time.
In the colorful phrasing of Mr. Biden, the moment has arrived to find out who is willing to trade their side’s bicycle for the other side’s golf clubs.
“The really tough stuff that is left are the big-ticket items,” Mr. Biden said Thursday at the conclusion of the week’s third bargaining session, meetings that took lawmakers and administration officials to every corner of the federal budget in a search for consensus on ways to save federal dollars.
Lawmakers and aides say the negotiators quickly gobbled up low-hanging fruit like trimming agriculture subsidies and selling more of the telecommunications spectrum to generate revenue. There is a general consensus that federal workers are going to have to contribute more to their pensions, though the details are still to be determined. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation will collect higher fees from stable companies, and some idle federal property could be up for sale.
But those actions are not going to produce anywhere near the $2 trillion or more in savings that both sides agree is the level required to win a debt limit increase while putting the government on course to save $4 trillion over the next decade — a goal set by Mr. Biden.
To get there, negotiators are going to have to make some excruciating choices about federal health care and safety-net programs, as well as the tax structure. At the same time, they need to reach a deal that not only can be sold to a bipartisan majority in the House and Senate, but also is credible enough to assure investors worldwide that Washington is getting serious about taking care of its financial health.
Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the Budget Committee and a participant in the talks, said one reason for setting three-hour meetings four times next week is to gauge whether he and his fellow budget bargainers can ever come to terms.
“We are picking up the pace in a big way, recognizing that we’ve got to determine whether we can reach agreement in principle or recognize that we are not able to bridge our differences,” he said.
Watching the clock, Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader, on Friday called on the negotiators to keep working through the Fourth of July recess if necessary.
To Democrats, a major impediment is the Republican position against relying on any significant new revenues as part of the deal, insisting that most of the $2 trillion or more come from cuts in federal spending — although not from Pentagon spending, a major potential source of savings.
Democrats say they will never be able to sell a compromise without some new revenue to their colleagues in the House and Senate. They say the most affluent Americans should contribute to the debt limit deal through new taxes on hedge fund operators or by phasing out tax deductions for those at the highest levels of earnings.
But Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the majority leader who is representing House Republicans in the talks, on Thursday reiterated the deep Republican opposition to higher taxes.
“Our side will not support any attempt to raise the debt ceiling that is not accompanied by the kinds of cuts necessary or reforms necessary,” he said. “Nor will we support an attempt to raise the debt limit that raises people’s taxes. That, we don’t want to do.”
Republicans want to see Democrats embrace more changes in Medicare and Medicaid, the federal health programs for older Americans and the poor.
Democrats have so far pushed for modest changes like allowing the government to negotiate prescription prices with drug companies and to require drug industry rebates for people eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid — a proposal that could potentially generate tens of billions of dollars. But Democrats will not support any major Medicare overhaul, saying they believe that they have the political high ground on the issue at the moment.
To get a deal, lawmakers on both sides are going to have to bend considerably and back unpopular positions. They are then going to have to sell the plan to their rank and file on the grounds that they need to avert the economic disarray that could result from a failure to raise the debt ceiling.
Both sides say that all those in the talks want to reach a compromise. “There is no principal in that room that doesn’t want to get agreement,” Mr. Biden said.
Yet that is no guarantee that the deal will be done.
“I’m confident,” said Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, another top Democrat in the talks. “But I’ve been confident before and come up short.”
White House Memo: Obama vs. Boehner: Tee-Off Time
Representatives for both men say that they will find plenty of time to talk deficit reductions and spending cuts when they tee off.
Oh, please. This game is not about debt ceiling negotiations. It is a chance for Mr. Boehner, an accomplished golfer, to take on the most powerful man in the world; for the competitive Mr. Obama, who has been working hard to improve his game, to measure himself against his political nemesis.
Mr. Obama is not taking any more chances than necessary. He is bringing along a partner: Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who, at least by the reckoning of Golf Digest, is a better golfer than his boss and Mr. Boehner.
Golf Digest estimates Mr. Obama’s handicap — perhaps generously, in the view of some golfers — at 17, meaning, theoretically, that the president would typically play 18 holes in the high 80s to low 90s. The magazine put Mr. Biden’s handicap at 6.3 and Mr. Boehner’s at 7.9.
Golf has long been considered a window into character, or at least personality. Both President Bushes would speed-golf through 18 holes as if they had to beat the clock, not the course, leaving little time for introspection. President Bill Clinton had a reputation for being somewhat loose with the rules.
Mr. Obama’s golf game is characterized by long, slow rounds, with a lot of time hunting for balls in the woods. The president, say people who have golfed with him, is meticulous, studied and determined to improve his game through practice, practice and more practice. He has lodged more than 70 rounds of golf since taking office, most of them at the golf course at Andrews Air Force Base.
“It’s a way for him to relax, where he can barely see the Secret Service agents who are around him all the time,” one administration official said.
The president is private about a lot of things he does during the day; he is fiercely private about his golf game, and rarely allows reporters anywhere near him when he’s on a course.
People who have played with Mr. Obama say that he is very good at getting out of sand traps. But of course, that might be construed as a very backhanded compliment; the only way you get good at getting out of sand traps is if you get into a lot of sand traps to begin with.
Mr. Boehner is a different story.
“He likes the game,” said Arthur Mason, a vice president of the lobbying firm Cassidy and Associates who has played with Mr. Boehner. “He’s competitive, but in a cordial way.”
Mr. Boehner typically shoots in the low to mid-80s (Mr. Obama is in the low to mid-90s), but recently posted a round of 75, one source familiar with his game said. He swings right-handed, but putts left-handed.
Mr. Boehner has not been sounding like someone who plans to cut the president much slack. “I was watching one of these cable programs — it must have been Saturday morning, when somebody said, ‘Well, you know, if the president wants strokes from Boehner, Boehner ought to say to the president: ‘Mr. President, you can have all the strokes you want. It’ll just cost you a trillion dollars per stroke,’?” Mr. Boehner told a Rotary Club audience last week in Middletown, Ohio. “I thought it was a brilliant idea.”
Mr. Boehner is friends with the golf legend Jack Nicklaus. He has also played with Tiger Woods in a pro-am tournament two years ago at the Congressional Country Club outside Washington.
Scared yet, Mr. President?
Don’t be. You’ve got Biden.
Mr. Biden, 68, did not take up golf until he was 49, recovering from two operations for an aneurism, and his doctor told him that one of the few things he could do for exercise would be to hit golf balls. A friend of his would drive him to a restaurant in Oxford, Pa., that sat on a golf course. It was there that Mr. Biden began developing his game.
Mr. Biden now has such a low handicap — his idea of stress release is to hit buckets of golf balls at a driving range — that he and his aides have been a little worried that it could put him at a disadvantage on Saturday.
So twice this week, Mr. Biden has made nighttime visits to the public course at Hains Point, on the Potomac River in southwest Washington, to practice.
And then, there is the last — and most mysterious — member of Saturday’s foursome: Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio, a Republican.
“Kasich is the wild card,” Mr. Mason said. A solid afternoon’s worth of efforts to elicit tidbits about his golf game elicited nothing.
The one thing that is known: Mr. Kasich did build his house, in Delaware County, Ohio, next to a golf course.
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