VLEMX "keep informed"

Michelle Rodriguez in ''Machete''

2013-05-22T22:02:00.001-04:00

Reporter who wrote Facebook post saying IRS hammered him after Obama interview now FIRED by KMOV

2013-05-22T21:21:00.000-04:00

Dana Loesh has the details:

My producer, Kevin, was just contacted by someone with Conners’s legal team. KMOV just terminated his [employment] on the basis of, according to them, his Facebook post…

And here’s the official statement from the station:

(KMOV) — We regret to announce that Larry Conners is no longer a KMOV news reporter. Larry was a valued member of KMOV for a long time, and we will miss him.
For KMOV, there is no higher cause than unbiased, objective news reporting. It is what our viewers expect and it is what we work very hard to deliver. We can accept no less. Larry is certainly entitled to his opinion, but taking a personal political position on one of the Station’s Facebook pages creates an appearance of bias that is inconsistent with important journalistic standards. Larry’s departure has nothing to do with the particular position he took, but it does have to do with our belief that his actions made it impossible for him to report for KMOV on certain political matters going forward without at least an appearance of bias. Bringing you accurate and unbiased reporting is the reason we exist.
Mark Pimentel
KMOV TV President & GM
markpimentel@kmov.com

Ugh. He told what he thought was the truth and his station couldn’t even stand behind him.
Perhaps Fox News needs another good reporter?
Also good reporting isn’t about bias, it’s about truth. And truth knows no bias.

Minn. teen whose farewell song became web hit dies

2013-05-22T21:17:00.000-04:00

LAKELAND, Minn. (AP) — When high school student Zach Sobiech learned he didn't have much longer to live, his mother suggested he write letters to tell his loved ones goodbye. Instead, the Minnesota teenager turned to writing music — and his farewell song, "Clouds," became a YouTube sensation that has attracted more than 4 million views.

Other musicians have covered the tune, and it inspired a celebrity video on YouTube. "Clouds" was even listed No. 1 on the iTunes Top 10 list on Wednesday — two days after Sobiech died after battling bone cancer.

His mother, Laura Sobiech, said on the CaringBridge website that her son was surrounded by family and his girlfriend when he died at his home in Lakeland, an eastern suburb of St. Paul. He had recently turned 18.

Sobiech was being remembered not only for his music, but also for the way he lived. John Hallberg, the chief executive of the Children's Cancer Research Fund, said Wednesday that Sobiech had a positive attitude and approached his diagnosis with strength and grace.

"You don't have to find out you're dying to start living," Sobiech said in a short video about him titled, "My Last Days: Meet Zach Sobiech," which also has been viewed more than 4 million times since it was posted to YouTube two weeks ago.
"I want to be remembered as a kid who went down fighting, and didn't really lose," he said.
Sobiech was diagnosed with osteosarcoma in November 2009. He went through surgeries and chemotherapy, and spent some time cancer-free. But last May, cancer was found in his pelvis and lungs — and he was told he had months, maybe a year, to live.

He wrote the song, "Clouds," as a farewell. Hallberg said proceeds from the sale of the song, and Sobiech's other music, are going to the Zach Sobiech Osteosarcoma Fund, which Zach wanted set up so that more research could be done to find better ways to treat this form of childhood cancer.

"That will be Zach's lasting legacy," Hallberg said.
Zach's family members were declining interviews but said in a statement that they felt blessed by Zach's "amazing presence" in their lives. They thanked those who "listened with their hearts and helped Zach bring his message and his music to the world."
___
Online:
Zach Sobiech's "Clouds" video: http://bit.ly/UIGq9r

Today's pics

2013-05-19T22:06:00.001-04:00

I'm a black man

2013-05-19T21:58:00.001-04:00

President Obama on Sunday summoned the graduates of historically black Morehouse College to “transform the way we think about manhood,” urging the young men to avoid the temptation to make excuses and to take responsibility for their families and their communities.

Delivering a commencement address at the all-male private liberal arts college in Atlanta, Obama spoke in deeply personal terms about the “special obligation” he feels as a black man to help those left behind.

“There but for the grace of God, I might be in their shoes,” Obama said. “I might have been in prison. I might have been unemployed. I might not have been able to support a family — and that motivates me.”

GALLERY

Obama addresses Morehouse College graduates: President Obama gets personal about race and manhood in a speech to graduates of historically black Morehouse College.

The president also reflected on the absence of his father growing up, noting that he was raised by a “heroic single mother” and urged the young graduates not to shrink from their family responsibilities.

“My whole life, I’ve tried to be for Michelle and my girls what my father wasn’t for my mother and me,” Obama said. “I want to break that cycle — where a father’s not at home, where a father’s not helping to raise that son and daughter. I want to be a better father, a better husband, a better man.”

In his 32-minute address, Obama was far more personal and reflective in his remarks than he traditionally has been, especially on matters of racial discrimination. Obama delivered a similar speech three years ago when he addressed the graduates of Hampton University in Virginia, another historically black college.

He paid tribute to Martin Luther King Jr., a Morehouse alumnus, noting that King’s education there “helped to forge the intellect, the discipline, the compassion, the soul force that would transform America.”

Obama added, “Laws and hearts and minds have been changed to the point where someone who looks just like you can somehow come to serve as president of these United States.”

Yet Obama acknowledged that “the bitter legacies of slavery and segregation” have not vanished, that discrimination still exists.

“As Morehouse men, many of you know what it’s like to be an outsider, to be marginalized, to feel the sting of discrimination. That’s an experience that a lot of Americans share,” Obama said.

Hispanic Americans, Obama lamented, are told to “go back” home while strangers pass judgment on the parenting skills of gay men and lesbians or stare at Muslim Americans with suspicion.

Obama said that too many young black men make “bad choices.”

“Growing up, I made quite a few myself,” Obama said. “Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. I had a tendency to make excuses for me not doing the right thing.”

But, the president implored, “we’ve got no time for excuses.”

“In today’s hyper-connected, hyper-competitive world, with millions of young people from China and India and Brazil, many of whom started with a whole lot less than all of you did, all of them entering the global workforce alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything you haven’t earned,” he said. “Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination.”

“Moreover,” Obama continued, “you have to remember that whatever you’ve gone through, it pales in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured — and if they overcame them, you can overcome them, too.”

Obama told the graduates they needed to be role models for others in their communities and not just chase after high-paying jobs and fancy cars. If they get a law degree, he told the graduates, they shouldn’t defend only the powerful, but also the powerless. If they get an MBA and start a business, Obama said, they shouldn’t merely try to make money, but also consider the broader purpose their business might serve.

“No one expects you to take a vow of poverty,” Obama said. “But I will say it betrays a poverty of ambition if all you think about is what goods you can buy instead of what good you can do.”

Discuss this topic and other political issues in the politics discussion forums.

Wanted

2013-05-19T19:28:00.001-04:00

Obama knew....

2013-05-18T20:56:00.001-04:00

The Internal Revenue Service's watchdog told top Treasury officials around June 2012 he was investigating allegations the tax agency had targeted conservative groups, for the first time indicating that Obama administration officials were aware of the explosive matter in the midst of the president's re-election campaign.

The disclosure to the Treasury general counsel and the deputy secretary was a cursory one, according to J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration. He said he didn't reveal conclusions of the probe, which was in its early stages, and his disclosure came as part of a routine update to Treasury leaders. At the time, Republican lawmakers were complaining publicly about alleged IRS targeting of tea-party groups.

The revelation nonetheless raised a fresh set of questions about who was aware of the problem within the Obama administration. It was one of several new details that emerged during a contentious four-hour House committee hearing Friday, held one week after an IRS official revealed at a legal conference that the agency had taken "absolutely inappropriate" actions in targeting conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status for often heavy-handed scrutiny.

Among other disclosures: The conference revelation was itself stage-managed. Ousted IRS acting Commissioner Steven Miller testified he planned it with the director of the division in question. Republican lawmakers expressed amazement that IRS officials didn't tell them first.

The hearing left numerous other fundamental questions unanswered, however, including who ordered the targeting and why it continued so long, pointing to a protracted investigation ahead. Mr. Miller conceded the agency likely disciplined the wrong employee in one effort to address the problem. Another was reassigned in the agency's Cincinnati office, but he couldn't provide the employee's name.

Following the hearing, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R., Mich.), who led the proceedings, expressed frustration and left open the possibility of issuing subpoenas to the IRS. "I think the most interesting revelation was the overall arrogance of the IRS and the lack of information from somebody who was in charge," Mr. Camp said.

The Treasury Department, in a statement, confirmed officials were notified in June 2012 that an audit had begun. It added an underlined sentence, "Treasury strongly supports the independent oversight of its three Inspectors General, and it does not interfere in ongoing IG audits."

Treasury also said Neal Wolin, the deputy secretary, didn't notify anyone outside of Treasury that the audit was under way and that Mr. Wolin and Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew "learned about [the inspector general's] findings when they were reported publicly last week." A White House aide said Friday that Treasury officials didn't share the information with White House officials.

White House officials say they learned about the targeting of conservative groups from the report, and not before. President Barack Obama on Thursday said, "I can assure you that I certainly did not know anything about the IG report before the IG report had been leaked through the press."

At the hearing, lawmakers of both parties expressed anger that IRS officials didn't reveal the problems to them in 2012. GOP lawmakers, after receiving complaints from tea-party groups about IRS scrutiny, asked then-commissioner Douglas Shulman about that in March 2012. He testified before the Ways and Means committee then that there was "absolutely no targeting," but he didn't correct his testimony after learning of the problems in May, according to congressional investigators. Mr. Shulman couldn't be reached for comment.

Several other IRS officials, including Mr. Miller, didn't disclose the problems to lawmakers in letters and testimony. Mr. Miller Friday cited the continuing inspector-general investigation, even though he obtained an internal IRS investigation in May 2012 that came to some of the same conclusions as the inspector general report.

"I was not going to go there because I did not have full possession of the facts, sir," Mr. Miller said at one point.

In sometimes combative testimony, Mr. Miller also took exception to the idea that the IRS had engaged in targeting conservative groups, pointing out that groups representing other ideologies also were caught up in the extra review.

The inspector general's report said that based on a statistical sample, "all cases with Tea Party, Patriots or 9/12 in their names were forwarded" for extra scrutiny. Many of the cases were delayed for years.

Lawmakers of both parties questioned his response.

"Throughout this time, the IRS leadership has demonstrated a total disregard for the oversight role of the Congress and this committee," said Rep. Sander Levin (D., Mich.), the committee's top Democrat. Mr. Shulman "had an obligation to return to this committee and set this record straight. So did Mr. Miller."

"How was that not misleading this committee?" said Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) to Mr. Miller. "How can we not conclude that you misled this committee?"

"I did not mislead the committee," Mr. Miller responded, adding later, "I answered the question truthfully."

Messrs. Miller and George, the inspector general, said so far they had discovered no evidence that the targeting was politically motivated, and Mr. Miller described it as a bungled way to try and screen applicants.

Later Friday, the woman who posed the question at a conference to IRS official Lois Lerner—the moment last week that first revealed the problems at the IRS—said Ms. Lerner planted the query. Washington lawyer Celia Roady said in a statement that Ms. Lerner provided her the question to ask. She added that Ms. Lerner "did not tell me, and I did not know, how she would answer the question."

The IRS didn't respond to requests for comment from Ms. Lerner, who runs the exempt-organizations unit at the agency.

Mr. Miller said the IRS, meanwhile, had "called to get on the calendar" to also brief the Ways and Means committee—a statement Republicans met with barely disguised disbelief.

Mr. Camp and other GOP lawmakers suggested a pattern of efforts to use the IRS to attack conservatives. Those include a White House official's discussion in mid-2010, during a briefing with reporters, of the purported tax-filing status of Koch Industries. Its owners are big donors to conservative causes. The tax-filing status of businesses is often confidential. The White House said in 2010 that the official's statement "was not based on any review of tax filings." It promised not to use the example in the future.

In an interview, Mr. Levin said the IG's report to Treasury officials constituted only "a brief reference," that he doubted was communicated up the chain.

-Peter Nicholas contributed to this article.

Write to John D. McKinnon atjohn.mckinnon@wsj.com, Siobhan Hughes atsiobhan.hughes@dowjones.com and Damian Paletta atdamian.paletta@wsj.com

Obama knew....

2013-05-17T19:57:00.001-04:00

WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department’s inspector general told senior Treasury officials in June 2012 he was auditing the Internal Revenue Service’s screening of politically active organizations seeking tax exemptions, disclosing for the first time on Friday that Obama administration officials were aware of the matter during the presidential campaign year.

At the first Congressional hearing into the I.R.S. scandal, J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, told members of the House Ways and Means Committee that he informed the Treasury’s general counsel of his audit on June 4, and Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin “shortly thereafter.”

It remained unclear how much the disclosure would affect the broader debate over the I.R.S.'s problems. Complaints from Tea Party groups that the I.R.S. was singling them out became public in 2012, through media accounts.

Mr. George told Treasury officials about the allegation as part of a routine briefing about ongoing audits he would be conducting in the coming year, and he did not tell the officials of his conclusions that the targeting had been improper, he said.

Still, the inspector general’s testimony will most likely fuel efforts by Congressional Republicans to show that Obama administration officials knew of efforts to single out conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status for additional scrutiny, but did not reveal that knowledge during President Obama’s re-election campaign.

Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, who joined the Republican ticket as the vice-presidential candidate later in the year, said, “That raises a big question.”

Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, the House Ways and Means chairman, said in opening the hearing, “This appears to be just the latest example of a culture of cover-ups — and political intimidation — in this administration. It seems like the truth is hidden from the American people just long enough to make it through an election.”

The hearing quickly turned into partisan jousting, with House Republicans pressing to expand the inquiry to other tax misdeeds closer to the White House, while Democrats tried to keep the focus narrow and under the purview of an I.R.S. chief appointed by President George W. Bush.

Steven T. Miller, the acting I.R.S. commissioner, who has resigned, called the agency’s actions “obnoxious,” but told the House Ways and Means Committee they were not motivated by partisanship. And in testy exchanges, he said he had not misled Congress, even though he did not divulge the targeting efforts of a Cincinnati unit examining 70,000 applications for tax exemption.

He called the group’s centralization of applications from groups with names that included the words “Tea Party” or “patriots” simply “foolish mistakes” that “were made by people trying to be more efficient in their workload selection.”

With two additional hearings already scheduled for next week, it is clear the focus of Congressional inquires will extend well beyond the selection of conservative groups for special scrutiny of their tax-exemption applications.

Mr. Camp pressed Mr. Miller and Mr. George on the releasing of tax information on Koch Industries, the giant family business of the conservative benefactors Charles and David Koch, by a former White House economist, Austan Goolsbee. He also hit on the publication of donor lists for the National Organization for Marriage, which opposes same-sex unions, and the release of confidential applications for tax-exempt status to the investigative reporting outfit ProPublica.

The incidents of releases of confidential tax information were referred to the inspector general for investigation, but were found to be inadvertent, the witnesses said.

When Republicans asked Mr. Miller whether the targeting of conservative groups was divulged to Obama administration officials outside the I.R.S., Mr. Miller said “that would be a violation of law.”

“I would be shocked” if that occurred, he said.

Mr. Miller did concede that the I.R.S.'s apology for targeting was prompted by a question planted by the agency last Friday at an American Bar Association meeting. At that meeting, Lois Lerner, the head of the I.R.S.'s division overseeing tax-exempt organizations, was asked about an inquiry of the targeting issue, eliciting an apology that quickly leaked out of the closed-door session. The I.R.S. then scrambled to issue a formal release on the issue.

Florida quietly shortened yellow light standards & lengths, resulting in more red light camera tickets for you

2013-05-14T22:47:00.001-04:00

TAMPA BAY, Florida -- A subtle, but significant tweak to Florida's rules regarding traffic signals has allowed local cities and counties to shorten yellow light intervals, resulting in millions of dollars in additional red light camera fines.

The 10 News Investigators discovered the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) quietly changed the state's policy on yellow intervals in 2011, reducing the minimum below federal recommendations. The rule change was followed by engineers, both from FDOT and local municipalities, collaborating to shorten the length of yellow lights at key intersections, specifically those with red light cameras (RLCs).

While yellow light times were reduced by mere fractions of a second, research indicates a half-second reduction in the interval can double the number of RLC citations -- and the revenue they create. The 10 News investigation stemmed from a December discovery of a dangerously short yellow light in Hernando County. After the story aired, the county promised to re-time all of its intersections, and the 10 News Investigators promised to dig into yellow light timing all across Tampa Bay.

Red light cameras generated more than $100 million in revenue last year in approximately 70 Florida communities, with 52.5 percent of the revenue going to the state. The rest is divided by cities, counties, and the camera companies. In 2013, the cameras are on pace to generate $120 million.

"Red light cameras are a for-profit business between cities and camera companies and the state," said James Walker, executive director of the nonprofit National Motorists Association. "The (FDOT rule-change) was done, I believe, deliberately in order that more tickets would be given with yellows set deliberately too short."

The National Motorists Association identifies itself as a grassroots group that's been advocating for drivers since 1982. It fought the national 55 mph speed limit and is now campaigning against red light camera technology, contending the technology primarily targets safe drivers who are victims of short yellow lights or safely roll through right turns.

Proponents of the technology hang their hats on a reduction of serious accidents at RLC intersections. They also point out that every electronically generated violation is reviewed by a local police officer or sheriff's deputy before a citation is validated and sent to a driver. But questions about the fairness and constitutionality of RLCs linger, with questionable motivations of the state's yellow light reductions likely to add fuel to the fire.

FDOT CHANGES THE RULES

Yellow light times are calculated by a complex formula that takes into account variables such as the size of an intersection, the incline/decline of the roadway, driver reaction time, and deceleration rate. But ultimately, the proper intervals come down to a driver's approach speed.

When the Florida legislature approved 2010's Mark Wandell Act, regulating red light cameras across the state, FDOT had a long-standing rule that mandated yellow light calculations factor in either the posted speed limit or 85th percentile of drivers' actual speed -- whichever was greater. The point of the law was to calculate safe stopping times for the majority of drivers on any given roadway.

But in 2011, FDOT struck the "whichever is greater" language from its Traffic Engineering Manual (TEM), reducing minimum yellow light lengths and allowing communities to re-time their signals at RLC intersections.

The 10 News Investigators found a number of communities shortened their already-safe intervals to the new minimums. In some cases, FDOT mandated longer yellow lights, but seemingly only at intersections that hadn't been in compliance for years. Around Greater Tampa Bay, the yellow interval reductions typically took place at RLC intersections and corridors filled with RLC cameras.

FDOT's change in language may have been subtle, but the effects were quite significant. The removal of three little words meant the reduction of yellow light intervals of up to a second, meaning drastically more citations for drivers. A 10 News analysis indicates the rule change is likely costing Florida drivers millions of dollars a year.

"I think it's immoral to do that," Walker said. "You're basically punishing safe drivers with deliberately improper engineering. That's not moral to me."

But FDOT claims it had no financial motive to shorten yellow lights; the agency doesn't receive any direct payments from RLC fines. The state's portion of each $158 citation is split between its General Revenue Fund ($70), the Department of Health Administrative Trust Fund ($10), and Spinal Cord Injury Trust Fund ($3).

FDOT Traffic Operations engineer Mark Wilson said the agency was merely cleaning up language in its TEM to match federal guidelines. But 10 News found Florida's rules were already in compliance with federal guidelines, and there are no federal suggestions discouraging the use of "whichever is greater." FDOT is also ignoring numerous other federal guidelines (see below) that encourage longer yellow intervals.

The 10 News Investigators showed Wilson the emails from FDOT engineers in Tampa Bay, obtained through public records requests, instructing Pasco County officials in February 2012 to reduce the yellow light intervals on U.S. 19 from the already-short 4.5 seconds to the bare minimum 4.3 seconds. Wilson said he was not aware of the instructions and the engineer, who has since retired, misunderstood the purpose of the rule change.

"Those are (only) minimums. So some of the engineers said, 'Well, it's got to be that exact number.' That's not true. It has to be at least that number," Wilson said.

Wilson added that original language of the Mark Wandell Act required communities to perform engineering studies before installing RLCs, in order to comply with federal recommendations and determine drivers' actual approach speeds. But the requirement never made it into the final bill, allowing communities to install RLCs without any consideration of drivers' actual speed or the time it would take them to stop safely.

FLORIDA IGNORING NATIONAL STANDARDS, OPTING FOR SHORTER YELLOWS

Numerous U.S. Dept. of Transportation (USDOT) documents provide guidance to municipalities on how to install and operate RLC intersections. But FDOT and Florida communities are by-and-large ignoring those recommendations when it comes to yellow light intervals.

A USDOT/Federal Highway Administration (FHA) report said cities should not use speed limit in the yellow interval equation because it results "in more red light violations and higher crash rates." And if drivers' average speeds cannot be calculated, it's recommended engineers use the "speed limit plus 10 mph" variable to producing more conservative, and safer, yellow intervals.

Another report stresses the importance of using 85th percentile speed to calculate yellow intervals, while slide 28 on this report indicates when yellow light times are lengthened, severe crashes drop.

USDOT also recommends an extra half-second of yellow time at intersections with lots of trucks or elderly drivers to allow them to react safely. And despite the fact that Greater Tampa Bay is home to five of the nation's 12 oldest counties (by median age), it's also home to some of the shortest yellow lights.

"I'm not a law-breaker," said Pasco County retiree Shirley Nagle, who got a red light violation on U.S. 19 after more than five decades without a traffic citation.

Nagle entered the RLC intersection about half a second too late in February, and was issued a $158 ticket, which soon became a $262 fine after she didn't pay it immediately. She told 10 News that she spent 32 years working in the New Jersey courts system and would never break the law. She was just proceeding through the intersection because she thought it was the safest option for her.

"It's terrible," she said of Port Richey's RLCs and short yellow lights. "I think they're cheating the people!"

Wilson told 10 News that FDOT would likely approve any city's request to add a half-second to yellow light times to allow older drivers more time to react and safely stop, but none have.

Wilson also says FDOT is in the process of increasing the "Perception Reaction Time" variable in its statewide yellow light formulas from 1.0 to 1.3 seconds. That would add the 1/3 of a second to yellow light intervals statewide, to better accommodate Florida drivers.

SHORTER YELLOWS: WHO'S DOING IT?

FDOT's revised TEM provides bare minimum yellow light intervals for RLC intersections, based on speed limit. While the formula can fluctuate if the approach grade isn't flat, no consideration is mandated for drivers' actual approach speed:

Approach Speed

Yellow Interval

25 mph

3.0 sec

30 mph

3.2 sec

35 mph

3.6 sec

40 mph

4.0 sec

45 mph

4.3 sec

50 mph

4.7 sec

55 mph

5.0 sec

60 mph

5.4 sec

65 mph

5.8 sec

But 10 News found numerous communities using , or skirting, the minimums:

Port Richey, New Port Richey, and FDOT collaborated to reduce yellow light times along U.S. 19 from 4.5 seconds to the bare minimum, 4.3 seconds.

An FDOT analyst instructed New Port Richey to reduce its yellow light interval for the Main St. RLC (at U.S. 19) from 4.0 seconds to the bare minimum, 3.0 seconds.

Hillsborough County shortened the yellow interval on Bell Shoals Road (at Bloomingdale) in Valrico from 4.0 seconds to the bare minimum, 3.6 seconds.

Tampa has yellow lights below the state's 4.0-second minimum for 45mph zones at Hillsborough/Nebraska and Adamo/50th. Those RLC intersections turn red after just 3.9 seconds; city engineers claim the complex yellow light formula allows them to go below the TEM minimums.

St. Petersburg had yellow intervals that were shorter than FDOT minimums, but alert resident Matt Florell pointed them out and the city fixed them. Florell said thousands of citations were issued inappropriately, while a city engineer said four intersections had slight "malfunctions," where the yellow lights were only off by 0.1 seconds. Either way, ticketed drivers were not notified of the issues and no refunds were offered.

Oldsmar had a similar issue, where its intersection at Tampa Rd. and SR-580 (State St.) was improperly timed. The yellow light was just 3.0 seconds instead of 4.3 seconds. When the problem was addressed last fall, citations plummeted by 90 percent. But no notices, or refunds, went out to ticketed drivers.

FDOT's new rules didn't shorten every RLC intersection's yellow lights; many cities and counties had lights that were so far out of compliance the new minimums actually increased the intervals. Tampa and Hillsborough County both increased some intersections in recent years, but most in their jurisdictions remain at the bare minimum.

St. Petersburg city councilman Charlie Gerdes has also been pushing his city to lengthen its yellow intervals, about half of which are at the state minimum, but Gerdes has had trouble getting the entire council to follow him on the issue.

RED LIGHT CAMERA SAFETY

Although RLC critics dispute it, 10 News found a bevy of data that suggests the technology changes drivers' behavior and reduces serious crash rates. And everywhere new RLC programs start generating revenue for cities, the elected leaders behind the program tout its safety benefits.

But there are few tangible safety benefits to short yellow lights. In fact, they appear to have the opposite effects; according to the USDOT and FHA, short yellow lights raise crash rates.

"A one second increase in yellow time results in 40 percent decrease in severe red light related crashes," the report said.

Jim Walker said shortening a driver's window for reacting to a yellow light creates more difficult split-second decisions, which can lead to more rear end collisions too. And he contends most serious accidents aren't coming from the "innocent driver" who gets caught by a short yellow. They're caused by blatant red light runners who will run a light regardless of yellow light length.

But Charles Territo, spokesperson for American Traffic Solutions (ATS), one of the country's largest red light camera operators, said there is no need to extend yellow light lengths since "innocent red light runners" don't exist.

"I think that's probably an oxymoron," Territo said. "There is (no) such thing as safely running a red light."

Territo said RLCs have made intersections safer for non-motorists too. Florida cities routinely top national lists for "worst cities" for pedestrian and bicycle safety.

Territo contends adding length to yellow lights may have a short-term benefit, but points to research that suggests, over time, some drivers will adjust to the longer yellows and continue to run red lights. However, there is just as much data to contradict Territo's theory.

"Rear-end crashes are not caused by red light cameras," Territo added. "They're caused by distracted driving."

RLC REFORM STRUGGLES IN TALLAHASSEE

After RLC reforms were shot down in legislative committees for a third straight year, State Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, snuck some late reforms onto a highway bill in the closing days of the 2013 session. The bill, HB 7125, awaits Governor Rick Scott's signature.

Among the changes: right turn violations will be harder to issue; violators may request a hearing within 60 days (previously 30 days, and no hearing was permitted); and more legal protections were put in place for drivers looking to challenge the citation.

READ: Pinellas Clerk Ken Burke's letter applauding RLC reforms

READ: RLC critic opposes Brandes bill

But reforms have been few and far between for RLC laws, largely because of the industry's massive lobbying presence. State disclosures indicate ATS has spent more than a million dollars lobbying in Florida alone, while its also donated more than half a million dollars to Florida politicians directly.

"They're almost everywhere," Brandes said of ATS lobbyists in Tallahassee.

This year, a bill by Sen. Joseph Abruzzo, D-Wellington, would have prevented municipalities from using posted speed limit in the yellow interval formula, but the legislation was gutted by Sen. Jeff Clemens, D-Lake Worth. Clemens is a long-time camera proponent who has accepted $1,000 in direct donations from ATS in recent years.

"I agree, (longer yellow intervals) may create a safer traffic situation in the short-term, when people are not used to having longer yellows," Clemens said. "(But) as soon as they get used to the fact that those yellows last longer, more people are going to be trying to run the red lights."

Clemens said he just wants the state to follow national standards. But he also admitted RLCs have allowed states to create new revenue streams without raising taxes.

Territo and ATS said they have no role in issuing the tickets in Florida; a local officer or deputy must review and confirm each individual violation. But RLCs are a $120 million/year business in Florida, and shorter yellow lights threaten the revenue stream.

In Georgia, a 2009 law that mandated longer yellow lights practically eradicated RLC programs across the state. Many municipalities saw violations drop by 80-90%. Similar drops were seen in Oldsmar, Florida and Milton, Florida.

WHAT SHOULD I DO IF I'M CAUGHT RUNNING A RED?

10 News cannot provide legal advice, but you may have grounds to appeal an automated citation for a variety of reasons. If you believe you were ticketed because of a short yellow light, you may want to:

Go online to review your ticket and record the video with a cell phone or other recording device.

Going frame-by-frame, detemine if the yellow light failed to last as long as mandated by the TEM chart posted above. Also note how long the light was red before you entered the intersection.

You may be able to appeal if you can prove the yellow light was too short and you would have normally made it through a normal yellow light.

Even if the length of the yellow light meets the minimum, you may still be able to appeal if the yellow intervals are too short for drivers' actual average approach speed. The national suggestions posted above indicate safe stopping speed should be considered when planning RLC placements and yellow light times.

But ultimately, the choice to appeal is yours and as the law stands, the mere act of contesting the violation could cause your fine to surge from $158 to $264 -- even if you did nothing wrong.

Canadian mobsters killed in 'old-fashioned' Sicilian mafia hit!

2013-05-13T01:37:00.001-04:00

Two senior members of the Canadian mafia have been murdered in Sicily and their bodies incinerated, victims of what police suspect is a vicious turf war in Canada which has spilled over into the Cosa Nostra's Italian heartland.

After an anonymous tip-off, the bodies of Juan Ramon Paz Fernandez and Fernando Pimentel were discovered near a rubbish dump in the countryside outside Palermo on Thursday. Police described the double killing as an "old-fashioned" gangland hit.

Spanish-born Fernandez, 57, a notoriously tough enforcer for Montreal's Rizzuto clan, was expelled from Canada last year for the third time after serving a 10-year sentence for conspiracy to murder a fellow mobster. He resurfaced in Palermo, where he was suspected of teaming up with the Cosa Nostra to build drug-trafficking links between Sicily and Canada.

Pimentel arrived in Palermo a few weeks ago to join Fernandez, who was allegedly working as a martial arts instructor as cover for his mob activities.

Nicknamed Joey Bravo in Canada, Fernandez was a feared right-hand man of Sicily-born Vito Rizzuto, who allied with New York's Bonanno family to build an unrivalled mafia empire in Canada in the 1980s, handling drugs, loan sharking, gambling and contract killing.

In the midst of a turf war allegedly pitting the clan with a breakaway faction, Rizzuto was jailed while rivals murdered his father and son, the latter buried in a gold coffin which was paraded through Montreal's Little Italy.

Fernandez stayed loyal to Rizzuto while he served his own time in jail in Canada, and was suspected by police of continuing to run operations through criminal associates. He was also suspected of being behind the murder of drug dealer Constantin "Big Gus" Alevizos in 2008.

Fernandez bolstered his tough reputation in 2011 when he was refused parole after threatening to kill a prison guard and boasting of his underworld connections.

Police suspicions that Fernandez's murder in Sicily was ordered by his enemies back in Canada were strengthened after they arrested Pietro and Salvatore Scadutoon suspicion of being part of the hit squad that fired 30 shots at Fernandez and Pimentel and incinerated their corpses.

The Scaduto brothers have strong ties with the Canadian underworld. Following the murder of their own father in a mafia turf war in Sicily, the brothers moved to Canada in 1989, where Pietro Scaduto allegedly worked for the Rizzuto clan before they both returned to Sicily.

The discovery of both victims followed a police round-up on Wednesday of 21 mobsters linked to the Bagheria clan, based on the outskirts of Palermo, that Fernandez was working with.

A warrant had also been issued for Fernandez, who had been believed to have fled the city before his corpse was found.

Assets worth €30m were seized in the raids, which police said showed that the Cosa Nostra was "returning in a significant way" to the South American drugs trade after losing ground to the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta mafia, which has overtaken Sicily's Cosa Nostra to become Italy's most feared mafia.

As part of their operation, police are also investigating the mayor of a small Sicilian town who had stood for election with the Italian Northern League party, which has long railed against the mafia influence in southern Italy, for alleged mob ties.

Raw: Ice Wave Comes Ashore in Minnesota

2013-05-12T22:28:00.002-04:00

New video of kidnap rescue in Cleveland

2013-05-12T22:23:00.002-04:00

Ed Markey's Bounced Checks

2013-05-12T22:21:00.001-04:00

How to spot a murderer's brain Do your genes, rather than upbringing, determine whether you will become a criminal? Adrian Raine believed so – and breaking that taboo put him on collision course with the world of science

2013-05-12T22:12:00.000-04:00

In 1987, Adrian Raine, who describes himself as a neurocriminologist, moved from Britain to the US. His emigration was prompted by two things. The first was a sense of banging his head against a wall. Raine, who grew up in Darlington and is now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was a researcher of the biological basis for criminal behaviour, which, with its echoes of Nazi eugenics, was perhaps the most taboo of all academic disciplines.
In Britain, the causes of crime were allowed to be exclusively social and environmental, the result of disturbed or impoverished nurture, rather than fated and genetic nature. To suggest otherwise, as Raine felt compelled to, having studied under Richard Dawkins and been persuaded of the "all-embracing influence of evolution on behaviour", was to doom yourself to an absence of funding. In America, there seemed more open-mindedness on the question and, as a result, more money to explore it. There was also another good reason why Raine headed initially to California: there were more murderers to study than there were at home.
When Raine started doing brain scans of murderers in American prisons, he was among the first researchers to apply the evolving science of brain imaging to violent criminality. His most comprehensive study, in 1994, was still, necessarily, a small sample. He conducted PET [positron emission tomography] scans of 41 convicted killers and paired them with a "normal" control group of 41 people of similar age and profile. However limited the control, the colour images, which showed metabolic activity in different parts of the brain, appeared striking in comparison. In particular, the murderers' brains showed what appeared to be a significant reduction in the development of the prefrontal cortex, "the executive function" of the brain, compared with the control group.
The advancing understanding of neuroscience suggested that such a deficiency would result in an increased likelihood of a number of behaviours: less control over the limbic system that generates primal emotions such as anger and rage; a greater addiction to risk; a reduction in self-control; and poor problem-solving skills, all traits that might predispose a person to violence.
Even two decades ago, these were difficult findings to publish, however. When Raine presented a far less controversial paper in 1994 to a peer group, one that showed a combination of birth complications and early maternal rejection in babies had significant correlation with individuals becoming violent offenders 18 years later, it was denounced as "racist and ideologically motivated" and, according to Nature magazine, was simply further strong evidence that "the uproar surrounding attempts to find biological causes for social problems will continue". Similarly, when, 15 years ago, at the urging of his friend Jonathan Kellerman, the child psychologist and crime writer, Raine put together a proposal for a book on some of his scientific findings, no publisher would touch it. That book, The Anatomy of Violence, a clear-headed, evidence-based and carefully provocative account of Raine's 35 years of study, has only now appeared.
The reason for this delay seems mired in ideological enmities. For all Raine's rigour, his discipline of "neurocriminology" still remains tarnished, for some, by association with 19th-century phrenology, the belief that criminal behaviour stemmed from defective brain organisation as evidenced in the shape of the skull. The idea was first proposed by the infamous Franz Joseph Gall, who claimed to have identified over- or underdeveloped brain "organs" that gave rise to specific character: the organ of destructiveness, of covetousness and so on, which were recognisable to the phrenologist by bumps on the head. Phrenology was widely influential in criminal law in both the United States and Europe in the middle of the 1800s, and often used to support crude racial and class-based stereotypes of criminal behaviour.
The divisive thinking was developed further in 1876 by Cesare Lombroso, an Italian surgeon, after he conducted a postmortem on a serial murderer and rapist. Lombroso discovered a hollow part of the killer's brain, where the cerebellum would be, from which he proposed that violent criminals were throwbacks to less evolved human types, again identifiable by ape-like physical characteristics. The political manipulation of such hypotheses in the eugenics movement eventually saw them wholly outlawed and discredited.
As one result, after the second world war, crime became attributable to economic and political factors, or psychological disturbances, but not to biology. Prompted by advances in genetics and neuroscience, however, that consensus is increasingly fragile, and the implications of those scientific advances for law – and for concepts such as culpability and responsibility – are only now being tested.
Raine is by no means alone in this argument, though his highly readable book serves as an invaluable primer to both the science and the ethical concerns. As the polymath David Eagleman, director of neuroscience and law at Baylor College in Texas, recently pointed out, knowledge in this area has advanced to the point where it is perverse to be in denial. What are we to do, for example, Eagleman asked, with the fact that "if you are a carrier of one particular set of genes, the probability that you will commit a violent crime is four times as high as it would be if you lacked those genes. You're three times as likely to commit a robbery, five times as likely to commit aggravated assault, eight times as likely to be arrested for murder and 13 times as likely to be arrested for a sexual offence. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes; 98.1% of death row inmates do… Can we honestly say that the carriers of those genes have exactly the same range of choices in their behaviour as those who do not possess them? And if they do not, should they be judged and punished by the same standard?"
Raine's work is full of this kind of statistic and this kind of question. (One of his more startling findings is the extraordinarily high level of psychopathic markers among employees of a temping agency he studied, which came as no surprise to him. "Psychopaths can't settle, they need to move around, look for new stimulation," he says.) He draws on a number of studies that show the links between brain development, in particular – and brain injury and impairment by extension – and criminal violence. Already legal defence teams, particularly in the US, are using brain scans and neuroscience as mitigating evidence in the trials of violent criminals and sex offenders. In this sense, Raine believes a proper public debate on the implications of his science is long overdue.
Raine was in part drawn to his discipline by his own background. In the course of scanning his murderers, Raine also examined his own PET profile and found, somewhat to his alarm, that the structure of his brain seemed to share more characteristics with the psychopathic murderers than with the control group.
He laughs quickly when I ask how that discovery felt. "When you have a brain scan that looks like a serial killer's it does give you pause," he says. And there were other factors: he has always had a markedly low heart rate (which his research has shown to be a truer indicator of a capacity for violence than, say, smoking is as a cause of lung cancer). He was plagued by cracked lips as a child, evidence of riboflavin deficiency (another marker); he was born at home; he was a blue baby, all factors in the kind of developmental difficulties that might set his own researcher's alarm bells ringing.
"So," he says, "I was on the spectrum. And in fact I did have some issues. I was taken to hospital aged five to have my stomach pumped because I had drunk a lot of alcohol. From age nine to 11 I was pretty antisocial, in a gang, smoking, letting car tyres down, setting fire to mailboxes, and fighting a lot, even though I was quite small. But at that age I burnt out of that somehow. At 11, I changed schools, got more interested in studying and really became a different sort of kid. Still, when I was graduating and thinking 'what shall I research?', I looked back on the essays I'd written and one of the best was on the biology of psychopaths; I was fascinated by that, partly, I think, because I had always wondered about that early behaviour in myself."
As Raine began to explore the subject more, he began to look at the reasons he became a researcher of violent criminality, rather than a violent criminal. (Recent studies suggest his biology might equally have propelled him towards other careers – bomb disposal expert, corporate executive or journalist – that tend to attract individuals with those "psychopathic" traits.) Despite his unusual brain structure, he didn't have the low IQ that is often apparent in killers, or any cognitive dysfunction. Still, as he worked for four years interviewing people in prison, a lot of the time he was thinking: what stopped me being on their side of the bars?
Raine's biography, then, was a good corrective to the seductive idea that our biology is our fate and that a brain scan can tell us who we are. Even as he piles up evidence to show that people are not the free-thinking, rational agents they like to imagine themselves to be – entirely liberated from the limitations set by our inherited genes and our particular neuroanatomy – he never forgets that lesson. The question remains, however, that if these "biomarkers" do exist and exert an influence – and you begin to see the evidence as incontrovertible – then what should we do about them?
Perhaps we should do nothing, simply ignore them, assume, when it comes to crime, that every individual has much the same brain, the same capacity to make moral choices, as we tend to do now. As Raine suggests: "The sociologist would say if we concentrate on these biological things, or even acknowledge them, we are immediately taking our eyes off other causes of criminal behaviour – poverty, bad neighbourhoods, poor nutrition, lack of education and so on. All things that need to change. And that concern is correct. It is why social scientists have fought this science for so long."
The implication of neurocriminology, though – where it differs from the crude labelling of phrenology, say – is that the choice it presents is not an either/or between nurture and nature, but a more complex understanding of how our biology reacts with its environment. Reading Raine's account of the most recent research into these reactions, it still seems to me quite new and surprising that environmental factors change the physical structure of the brain. We tend to talk about a child's development in terms of more esoteric ideas of mind rather than material brain structures, but the more you look at the data the clearer the evidence that abuse or neglect or poor nutrition or prenatal smoking and drinking have a real effect on whether or not those healthy neural connections – which lead to behaviour associated with maturity, self-control and empathy – are made. The science of this is called epigenetics, the way our environment regulates the expression of our innate genetic code.
One result of epigenetics might be, Raine suggests, that "social scientists can actually win from this. I mean, if a child experiences a murder in his or her neighbourhood, we have found that their test scores on a range of measures go down. There is something happening in the brain as a result of that experience of violence to affect cognition. So social scientists can have their cake and eat it. They can say look, we can prove that these environmental social factors are causing brain impairment, which leads to some real, measurable problems."
One difficulty of embracing this "epigenetical" idea of crime is the degree to which such factors should be taken into account in courts of law. There have been several landmark cases in recent years in which particular neurological disorders caused by blows to the skull or undetected tumours have resulted in arguable changes in character and behaviour – and the violent or sexual crime is blamed on the disorder, not the individual. In most of these cases, it has been argued by the prosecution that brain imaging is prejudicial, that the brightly coloured pictures are too compelling to a jury and more emotional than scientific. But if neural scanning becomes more routine, and neuroscience more precise, will there not come a point where most violent behaviour – that of the Boston bombers, say, or the Newtown killer – is argued away in court as an illness, rather than a crime?
Raine believes that there might well be. He even likens such a shift to our change in perception of cancer, until fairly recently often deemed the "fault" of the sufferer because of some repressive character trait. "If we buy into the argument that for some people factors beyond their control, factors in their biology, greatly raise the risk of them becoming offenders, can we justly turn a blind eye to that?" Raine asks. "Is it really the fault of the innocent baby whose mother smoked heavily in pregnancy that he went on to commit crimes? Or if he was battered from pillar to post, or even if he was born with a, abnormally low resting heart rate, how harshly should we punish him? How much should we say he is responsible? There is, and increasingly will be, an argument that he is not fully responsible and therefore, when we come to think of punishment, should we be thinking of more benign institutions than prison?"
But then there is a further thought, that if you start to see criminality as a biological illness, where does a sense of retributive justice stand?
Raine himself was forced to face this dilemma when he became a victim of violent crime. As he recounts in his book, while on holiday in Turkey several years ago, a burglar entered his bedroom and in the struggle that followed tried to cut Raine's throat with a knife. He fought the attacker off, but when the following morning he was presented with two possible suspects by police, he admits to not only choosing the one who looked most like a thug [the man later admitted the crime, under duress], but also to wanting to visit on him the terror he had felt himself.
"I wasn't proud to discover I was a bit Jekyll and Hyde – perhaps we all are in that situation," Raine says when I ask him about his response. "The rational Dr Jekyll knew that if I took this man's brain scan and found he had prefrontal dysfunction, low resting heart rate, a background of neglect, then of course I should cut him some slack. With understanding comes mercy. But the Mr Hyde, the emotional voice in my head, was saying nothing of the sort: he was saying, he cut my throat, I want to cut his. That event changed me from someone dead set against the death penalty to someone who wouldn't be ruled out of a jury on a capital case in America. I think now my mind will always go backwards and forwards on this, the scientific understanding of the causes of crime versus being a human in society with all these gut reactions to people who commit awful crimes."
If the neuroscience raises as many questions as it answers about culpability after a crime has been committed, what about its role in crime prevention? Here, the questions seem no less fraught.
One of them was posed a couple of years ago by the arch-inquisitor Jeremy Paxman of Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, on Newsnight. "If science could predict with 100% certainty who was going to commit a violent crime, would it be legitimate to act before they commit that crime?"
Chakrabarti was in no doubt: "I would have to say that in a liberal society of human beings, and not animals, my answer to your question would be 'no'."
But if such intervention could prevent Newtown, you wonder, or Dunblane, would any of us be quite so certain? The fact is that the reality will always be a much greyer area because even the most nuanced neuroscience will never produce a perfect prediction of human behaviour. But is there a point at which the science – in identifying the possibility of repeat offending, for example – will be accurate enough to warrant routine scanning of those on the sexual offenders' register?
"The fact is," Raine says, "parole boards are making exactly these kind of predictive decisions every day about which prisoner or young offender we are going to release early, often with crummy evidence. At the moment, the predictors are social and behavioural factors, marital status, your past record. What is not used are biological measures. But I believe that if we added those things even now into the equation, we could only improve the prediction."
Raine cites two very recent brain-imaging studies to back this up. One is a study in New Mexico in which prisoners are scanned on release. "What they are discovering is that if the functioning of the anterior cingulate, part of the limbic system, is lower than normal before release, they are twice as likely to be reconvicted in the next three years. And that marker is more accurate a guide than all other social factors," Raine says. A second study apparently shows if a released prisoner has a significantly smaller volume in the amygdala, the almond-shaped part of the brain crucial for processing memory and emotion, he or she is three times more likely to reoffend. "Now, this is only two studies, but what they are beginning to show is proof of concept, that if we added neurological factors into the equation we could do a better job at predicting future behaviour."
At the end of his book, Raine suggests various possible Orwellian futures of such science, an ethical "slippery slope" of interventions that ultimately imagines a society that assesses the biological risk of all individuals – a wide-scale version of We Need to Talk About Kevin – and pre-emptively locks up those at the extreme end of the curve (a sort of evidence-based Guantánamo). He by no means advocates any of it, though when I ask if he would have his own children, two boys of 11, scanned, he suggests he probably would.
"If there was the opportunity for screening at school or through a GP programme, would I do it? Well, if my kids had problems, as a parent I would want to know about them and I would want to know how I might deal with them. If you brought in such things as emotion regulation and impulse control, which we know are risk factors for behaviour, then to me, as a parent, I would sort of want to know what could be done to help with those."
It is perhaps not too wildly far-fetched to imagine that such scans will one day be as routine as immunisation programmes; the bigger question then will be how we begin to react to the results. Raine rather likes the idea of public health programmes as crime prevention: "The teenage brain is still very malleable. There is good evidence from randomised control testing that omega-3 [fish oil] has a positive effect on young offenders, and even mindfulness seems to improve behaviour and brain structures."
You can't help thinking: if only it were as simple as that.

Engineering the $325,000 Burger

2013-05-12T22:07:00.002-04:00

By HENRY FOUNTAIN

MAASTRICHT, the Netherlands — As a gastronomic delicacy, the five-ounce hamburger that Mark Post has painstakingly created here surely will not turn any heads. But Dr. Post is hoping that it will change some minds.

The hamburger, assembled from tiny bits of beef muscle tissue grown in a laboratory and to be cooked and eaten at an event in London, perhaps in a few weeks, is meant to show the world — including potential sources of research funds — that so-called in-Vitro meat, or cultured meat, is a reality.

“Let’s make a proof of concept, and change the discussion from ‘this is never going to work’ to, ‘well, we actually showed that it works, but now we need to get funding and work on it,’ “ Dr. Post said in an interview last fall in his office at Maastricht University.

Down the hall, in a lab with incubators filled with clear plastic containers holding a pinkish liquid, a technician was tending to the delicate task of growing the tens of billions of cells needed to make the burger, starting with a particular type of cell removed from cow necks obtained at a slaughterhouse.

The idea of creating meat in a laboratory — actual animal tissue, not a substitute made from soybeans or other protein sources — has been around for decades. The arguments in favor of it are many, covering both animal welfare and environmental issues.

A 2011 study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, for example, showed that full-scale production of cultured meat could greatly reduce water, land and energy use, and emissions of methane and other greenhouse gases, compared with conventional raising and slaughtering of cattle or other livestock. Those environmental arguments will only gain strength, advocates say, as worldwide demand for meat increases with the rise of middle-class populations in China and elsewhere.

Dr. Post, one of a handful of researchers in the field, has made strides in developing cultured meat through the use of stem cells — precursor cells that can turn into others that are specific to muscle — and techniques adapted from medical research for growing tissues and organs, a field known as tissue engineering. (Indeed, Dr. Post, a physician, considers himself first and foremost a tissue engineer, and about four-fifths of his time is dedicated to studying how to build blood vessels.)

Yet growing meat in the laboratory has proved difficult and devilishly expensive. Dr. Post, who knows as much about the subject as anybody, has repeatedly postponed the hamburger cook-off, which was originally expected to take place in November. His burger consists of about 20,000 thin strips of cultured muscle tissue. Dr. Post, who has conducted some informal taste tests, said that even without any fat, the tissue “tastes reasonably good.” For the London event he plans to add only salt and pepper.

But the meat is produced with materials — including fetal calf serum, used as a medium in which to grow the cells — that eventually would have to be replaced by similar materials of non-animal origin. And the burger was created at phenomenal cost — 250,000 euros, or about $325,000, provided by a donor who so far has remained anonymous. Large-scale manufacturing of cultured meat that could sit side-by-side with conventional meat in a supermarket and compete with it in price is at the very least a long way off.“This is still an early-stage technology,” said Neil Stephens, a social scientist at Cardiff University in Wales who has long studied the development of what is also sometimes referred to as “shmeat.” “There’s still a huge number of things they need to learn.”

There are also questions of safety — though Dr. Post and others say cultured meat should be as safe as, or safer than, conventional meat, and might even be made to be healthier — and of the consumer appeal of a product that may bear little resemblance to a thick, juicy steak.

“This is something very new,” Dr. Stephens said. “People need to wrestle with the idea of whether this is meat or not.”

Dr. Post is well aware of the obstacles. “I see the major hurdles, probably better than anybody else,” he said. “But you’ve got to have faith in technological advances, that they will be solved.”

And as with any technology, costs should eventually come down. “If it can be done more efficiently, there’s no reason why it can’t be cheaper,” he said. “It has to be done using the right materials, introducing recycling into the system, controlling labor through automation.”

Cultured meat would have some inherent cost advantages over conventional meat, said Hanna Tuomisto, whose research while at the University of Oxford in England was the basis for the Environmental Science and Technology study. “It’s really about the conversion of feed to meat,” she said. “In cultured meat production it’s much more efficient; only the meat is produced, and not all the other parts.”

Gabor Forgacs, a researcher at the University of Missouri and a founder of Modern Meadow, a start-up company that wants to develop and market cultured meat, is aware of the hurdles as well. “Getting cultured meat to the supermarket is going to be difficult, and controversial,” said Dr. Forgacs, whose approach to cultured meat has some similarities to Dr. Post’s, although he has also developed 3-D bioprinting technologies that might someday be used to create thicker tissues.

Given the difficulties, Modern Meadow is first focusing on creating cultured leather. Its process does not use stem cells but rather skin fibroblasts, specialized cells that produce collagen. “There are a lot of parallels to cultured meat, except that it is a lot less controversial because you’re not going to eat it,” Dr. Forgacs said. “But if we can convince the universe that we can build leather, it will be much easier to convince the universe that we can build meat.”

In his work on cultured meat, Dr. Post uses a type of stem cell called a myosatellite cell, which the body itself uses to repair injured muscle tissue. The cells, which are found in a certain part of muscle tissue, are removed from the cow neck and put in containers with the growth medium. Through much trial and error, the researchers have learned how best to get the cells to grow and divide, doubling repeatedly over about three weeks.

“But we need billions,” said Anon van Essen, the technician in Dr. Post’s lab.

The cells are then poured onto a small dab of gel in a plastic dish. The nutrients in the growth medium are greatly reduced, essentially starving the cells, which forces them to differentiate into muscle cells. “We use the cell’s natural tendency to differentiate,” Dr. Post said. “We don’t do any magic.”

Over time the differentiated cells merge to form primitive muscle fibers, called myotubes. “And then they just start to put on protein,” Dr. Post said, and organize themselves into contractile elements. The key to this self-organization, he said, is that the cells are anchored in place (using a technique that he declined to disclose; earlier in his work he used Velcro). “We add anchor points so they can attach to something and start to develop tension,” he said. “That is by far the biggest driver of protein synthesis, and they do that by themselves.”

The result is a tiny strip of tissue, about half an inch long and only 1/25th of an inch in diameter, that looks something like a short pink rice noodle, Dr. Post said.

The strips have to be thin because cells need to be close to a supply of nutrients to stay alive. One approach to making thicker tissues — to make a cultured steak rather than a hamburger, for instance — would require developing a network of channels, the equivalent of blood vessels, to bring nutrients to each cell. (A steak would also require culturing fat and incorporating it in the tissue, something Dr. Post has not had to do with his burger.)

Dr. Post said that one advantage of using myosatellite cells is that they differentiate easily. “The satellite cell is the ideal cell,” he said. “You don’t have to pull a lot of tricks to let it differentiate. I also think it’s a practical advantage of keeping a lot of the stem cell production and quality control in the animal itself.”

But others note that since there is a limit to how often myosatellite cells can reproduce, Dr. Post’s cultured meat will never be completely animal-free; he will always need a supply of muscle tissue from which to obtain new cells.

Other researchers are studying different kinds of stem cells that, unlike myosatellite cells, can reproduce indefinitely, ensuring a “livestock-autonomous” supply of cells to make cultured meat. Dutch researchers at Utrecht University are trying to isolate embryonic stem cells from pigs and cows. And Nicholas Genovese of the University of Missouri is trying to develop a type of stem cell that is “induced” from a regular adult cell. So a skin cell from a pig, perhaps, could be turned into a stem cell that could reproduce indefinitely and differentiate into muscle tissue to create cultured pork.

But Dr. Post said that efforts to use different kinds of stem cells introduced other problems. And even if his approach means the world will still need cattle, it will need far fewer of them. “If we can reduce the global herd a millionfold, then I’m happy,” he said. “I don’t need to reduce it a billionfold.”

Anyway, he said, “a lot of the technologies in the process we are currently using eventually have to be changed, if not all of them.

“That’s not the point of the proof of concept,” Dr. Post said. “The point is, we already have sufficient technology to make a product that we could call meat or cultured beef, and we can eat it and we survive.”

Happy Mother's day New Orleans

2013-05-12T21:59:00.001-04:00

Shots fired during an informal Mother's Day afternoon parade in New Orleans injured 19 people, two of them children, police said Sunday.
The wounded included 10 men and seven women as well as a boy and a girl, both 10.
Remi Braden, director of public affairs for the New Orleans Police Department, said there were no fatalities and "most of the wounds are not life-threatening.''
The shots were fired at 1:47 p.m. in the area of North Villere and Frenchmen streets during what is locally referred to as "a second-line parade,'' Braden said.
Both children were reported in good condition with graze wounds to the body, police said, and two of the adults were in surgery. Police said many of the victims suffered graze wounds, in some cases by ricocheted bullets.

"At this point, there are no fatalities, and most of the wounds are not life threatening,'' police spokesman Garry Flot said.
The Times-Picayune newspaper said there were about 200 people at the event when gunfire erupted.
Second-line parades are loose processions in which people dance down the street, often following behind a brass band. They can be impromptu or planned and are sometimes described as moving block parties.
The two-block long parade included police officers and was about two blocks long, police said.
"When the end of the parade reached North Villere and Frenchmen ... shots were fired from different guns,'' Flot said in a statement. "Immediately after the shooting our officers saw three suspects running from the scene.''
Shermaine Tyler, 32, who lives nearby, told The Times-Picayune that a man collapsed onto her after being shot.
"Me and mom were going to the second line. I told her I didn't want to go because there are always shots at a second line," Tyler said. "And the second I heard shots, I heard shots fired, we ran outside and one man fell in my lap who had been shot."
Braden said detectives were interviewing witnesses and seeking surveillance video in the area.
"This is an extremely unusual occurrence, and we're confident that we will make swift arrests,'' Braden said.
Officers were interspersed with the marchers, which is routine for such events. Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas said police saw three suspects running from the scene.
A social club called The Original Big 7 organized Sunday's event. The group was founded in 1996 at a housing project, according to its MySpace page.
The neighborhood where the shooting happened was a mix of low-income and middle-class row houses, some boarded up. As of last year, the neighborhood's population was about 60% of its level before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005.
"We'll get them. We have good resources in this neighborhood," Serpas said.

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2013-05-08T19:31:00.001-04:00

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2013-05-08T19:30:00.001-04:00

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2013-05-05T12:46:00.003-04:00

Issa: Clearly Benghazi talking points a political decision

2013-05-05T12:45:00.002-04:00

Syria Orthodox Easter marred by bishops in captivity

2013-05-05T12:43:00.000-04:00

Capital One Financial Corp. : Capital One Reaches $3.5 Million Settlement With SEC Over Auto-Loan Accounting

2013-05-05T12:41:00.000-04:00

--SEC says Capital One understated costs tied to auto-loan losses during two quarters in 2007
--Agency also fined two bank executives
--Bank says settlement will not affect current or future business activities
(Updated with details from order in paragraphs eight and 11 and analyst comment in paragraphs 17 and 18.)

 
   By Andrew R. Johnson

The Securities and Exchange Commission Wednesday fined Capital One Financial Corp. (COF) $3.5 million for alleged lapses in how the lender reserved for potential losses on auto loans prior to the financial crisis.
In an enforcement action, the regulator said Capital One failed to set aside an appropriate amount of money when auto-loan losses turned higher than the company originally estimated. It also said two Capital One executives agreed to settle charges against them.
"Capital One failed in this responsibility by underreporting expenses relating to its loan losses even as its own internal forecasting tool had signaled an increase in incurred losses due to the impending financial crisis," said George Canellos, co-director of the division of enforcement for the SEC.
A spokeswoman for the McLean, Va., company said Wednesday no consumers were affected by the actions and the settlement doesn't require it to restate its financial results.
"The settlement will not affect any current or future business activities by Capital One," the spokeswoman said.
According to the SEC, Capital One's auto-finance business experienced "significantly higher" loan charge-offs and delinquencies on its loans than it originally forecasted.
In its order, the agency said the bank had determined the elevated losses were due to external economic factors, which would have resulted in Capital One adding $72 million to its reserve for loan losses in the second quarter of 2007 by year end. Because it failed to do so, Capital One should have added $85 million to its allowance for third-quarter 2007 loan losses by year end.
As a result, the bank's consolidated provision for loan and lease losses was understated by about 18% in the second quarter and by about 9% in the third quarter, the order said.
Lenders set money aside in reserves to account for future losses on loans that could go bad. Since the financial crisis, banks have boosted their profits in part by releasing such funds from their reserves as loan losses have declined.
The Financial Accounting Standards Board last year proposed changes that would require U.S. banks to record expected losses more quickly and increase the size of their reserves.
Capital One's total loan-loss expense in the second quarter of 2007 would have been $473 million, or 18% higher than it reported for that period, had it factored in the external factors. The bank's total net income would have been 7% lower, at $699 million, than it reported for the period.
The SEC also said Peter Schnall, the former chief risk officer of Capital One, failed to communicate such issues to the senior management and David LaGassa, the former credit officer for the auto-finance business, failed to ensure the external factors were included in the loss forecast for the auto business.
Mr. Schnall agreed to pay an $85,000 fine and Mr. LaGassa agreed to pay a $50,000 fine to settle the allegations. The bank and the executives neither admitted nor denied the findings.
The Capital One spokeswoman said the bank "continues to have confidence in Mr. Schnall and Mr. LaGassa and we believe that they can perform in their current roles with the company," she said.
Mr. LaGassa is currently a managing vice president in Capital One's financial-services division.
In October, Capital One announced Mr. Schnall planned to step down as chief risk officer but would remain with the company in a senior advisory role through this year. "His change of position and planned departure are not related to the SEC action," the spokeswoman said.
Sanjay Sakhrani, an analyst with KBW, said the impact of the settlement on Capital One was minimal.
"While not a positive headline, we don't view the settlement as material," Mr. Sakhrani wrote in a research note on Wednesday.
Capital One's shares were up 1% at $56.88 in recent trading. The shares are down 1.8% this year.
The SEC settlement is the latest regulatory action against the bank, which generates the bulk of its money through credit-card lending.
Last July, Capital One agreed to pay $210 million to settle allegations by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency that it failed to monitor third-party sales of add-on products, such as payment protection and identity-theft monitoring, to credit-card customers.
That same month it agreed to pay about $12 million in a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department and OCC stemming from payment collection and other activities involving active-duty military borrowers.
Write to Andrew R. Johnson at andrew.r.johnson@dowjones.com