news20090821lat

[Today's Newspaper] from [Los Angeles Times]

[News > Nation]
Mortgage defaults soar to record 13%
In the second quarter, the number of homeowners behind on payments or in foreclosure rose along with the jobless rate, with California among states leading the way.
By E. Scott Reckard and Ronald D. White
August 21, 2009

Widespread joblessness is causing more Americans to fall behind on their house payments, triggering a new round of foreclosures that some analysts fear could delay the nation's economic recovery.

A mortgage trade group reported Thursday that more than 13% of the nation's mortgage holders were delinquent on their mortgages or in the process of having their homes repossessed during the second quarter of this year. That's the highest figure since tracking began in 1972. California's rate, 15.2%, was among the highest of all states.

The numbers underscore a worrisome trend. A spate of foreclosures -- which began with speculators who walked away from their souring investments, then spread to high-risk borrowers who couldn't make their payments when their low-interest mortgages reset -- is now hitting unemployed homeowners with good credit scores, clean financial histories and conventional home loans.

The U.S. has shed 6.7 million jobs since the recession began, employment losses that have left even high-quality borrowers struggling. One in three new foreclosures from April to June was from a prime, fixed-rate loan, up from 1 in 5 a year earlier.

The rising tide of foreclosures could swamp positive economic trends such as improving home sales and a surprise increase in U.S. regional manufacturing, also reported Thursday.

"The broadening of the foreclosure crisis to include prime loans due to high and rising unemployment will delay a bottom in the housing market and threatens the economic recovery," said Mark Zandi, co-founder and chief economist of Moody's Economy.com.

It's also a huge challenge to the Obama administration, which is pressuring banks to restructure troubled mortgages to keep borrowers in their homes. Such modifications are difficult to achieve when a family's income is slashed. The Washington-based Mortgage Bankers Assn. predicts that U.S. job losses will continue at least until the middle of 2010, meaning that mortgage delinquencies and repossessed homes will almost certainly continue rising.

"We would expect delinquencies and foreclosures to peak sometime after that, probably at the end of next year," said Jay Brinkmann, the trade group's chief economist.

The U.S. jobless rate in July was 9.4%, down slightly from 9.5% in June, a 26-year high. California's June unemployment rate was 11.6%. July figures will be released today.

The employment troubles are compounding a messy situation for banks. Faced with a burgeoning backlog of problem loans, loan-servicing giants such as Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co. have gotten off to a slow start on the Obama administration's Home Affordable Modification program, recently released government statistics show.

Anxious borrowers who have contacted The Times complain that lenders lose their documents, pass them from employee to employee and make them endure unexplained delays.

They include Janet and Stan Hurwitz, who said they enjoyed pristine credit and good salaries before this recession turned their financial world upside down. Both now unemployed, they're worried about exhausting their savings and losing their spacious Porter Ranch home.

Stan, 58, lost his job as an apparel sales representative in May and has pursued dozens of leads without success. Janet, a 53-year-old commercial pilot, has been unable to find work in the battered airline industry since returning from disability last summer.

The couple have pared expenses drastically and are trying to refinance their 6.25% mortgage to reduce their $2,789-a-month payment. But the Hurwitzes say that the mounds of paperwork they have sent out -- to Bank of America, two government-sponsored home retention plans, credit and debt consolidation agencies and several elected officials -- seem to have disappeared into a black hole.

"No matter what you send in, or where, it just disappears," Stan Hurwitz said.

After The Times contacted Bank of America on Thursday about the case, the bank issued a statement saying it "has reached out to the Hurwitzes to apologize for their experience and to ensure they have a single point of contact to help them through these challenging times."

"Despite our best efforts, there are limits to how far modification programs can go," the Bank of America statement said. With unemployment rates so high, "even the most ambitious modification plan will not help when the homeowner has no income or prospects."

The bank said unemployment benefits count as income under the Obama plan as long as they continue for nine months, adding that it is working with the government "to find solutions for at-risk homeowners who fall outside the eligibility requirements of the current program as well as the growing number of customers now unemployed."

The mortgage bankers group said efforts to aid distressed borrowers, such as the Obama administration's housing affordability program, are providing some relief but are not addressing all the problems.

"While the various loan modification programs continue to have an impact on holding foreclosure rates below where they otherwise would be, the issue is that many of the foreclosures involve homes that are vacant, borrowers who no longer have jobs, or loans where there was fraud involved," Brinkmann said.

Another problem plaguing California and other hard-hit areas is the unprecedented decline in home prices. Falling values have left homeowners who purchased at the peak of the housing boom "underwater," owing far more than their homes are worth. Even drastically reducing interest rates and paying borrowers bonuses to stay in their homes can have little lasting effect if it will be years before homeowner equity is restored, Economy.com's Zandi noted.

"The idea [of the Obama plan] is to give homeowners a break so they can get through the recession and the falling housing market and, hopefully somewhere down the road, make full payments again," Zandi said. "That's going to be helpful, but as long as foreclosures keep rising and home prices keep falling, a lot of houses will be so far underwater that it makes no sense to bother modifying them -- from the lender's perspective and from the borrower's."

He said the Obama administration might reach its goal of having lenders offer 3.5 million to 4 million loan modifications -- restructurings that lower rates, extend the time for borrowers to repay what they owe and, in some cases, suspend interest payments on part of the loan balance. But Economy .com is projecting that only half of those offers will result in actual modifications, "and they'll be lucky if they get 1 million successful modifications out of that," Zandi said.

If the problem worsens, the government and lenders may have to revisit some ideas that so far have proved untenable, such as finding a way to reduce the principal owed on large numbers of loans, he added.

The problems are especially thorny in California, Zandi noted, because unemployment is higher and home prices have fallen more than in most states.

Still, he said, the Golden State should recover sooner than other hard-hit states including Nevada, Florida and Michigan because its economy is more diversified. Already, he noted, there are signs of stabilizing prices in areas such as San Francisco and Orange County, as buyers step in on the belief that California's notoriously up-and-down housing market will eventually stage one of its famous recoveries.

news20090821nyt1

[Today's Newspaper] from [The New York Times]

[Asia Pacific]
Afghan Election Called a Success Despite Attacks
By CARLOTTA GALL and STEPHEN FARRELL
Published: August 21, 2009

KABUL, Afghanistan — Dozens of rocket attacks and menacing threats from the Taliban suppressed turnout in Afghanistan’s presidential election, but it seemed clear on Friday that enough voters had cast ballots that Afghan officials could declare they had thwarted efforts by the insurgents to derail the vote.

The election, conducted Thursday, is the second in the nearly eight years since an American-led invasion ousted the Taliban from power, but the security situation in the country has deteriorated so sharply, and the credibility of the Afghan leadership has sunk so low, that the ability of the government to hold the election at all had been in doubt.

It was still too soon to say how many Afghans had actually cast ballots, yet spokesmen for President Hamid Karzai and his principal challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, each insisted on Friday that their men were leading.

The Karzai spokesman, Homayoun Hamidzada, did not give details but said turnout had been as high as 50 percent in parts of southern Afghanistan where Mr. Karzai has his principal base of support.

“What Karzai’s office is claiming is not correct,” said Sayyid Agha Hussain Fazel Sancharaki, a spokesman for Mr. Abdullah who was quoted by The Associated Press. He claimed early results showed Mr. Abdullah with 62 percent of the votes, twice as many as Mr. Karzai.

Richard C. Holbrooke, President Barack Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, met with three of the leading presidential candidates on Friday—President Karzai, Mr. Abdullah, who is the former Foreign Minister, and Ashraf Ghani, the former Finance Minister. He urged all three to wait until official results came in from the election commission before declaring victory or fraud.

American officials expressed displeasure with a statement from Mr. Karzai’s campaign manager Deen Mohammad who insisted that Mr. Karzai won outright and that there would be no need for a run-off.

“I am certain the outcome will be disputed,” Mr. Holbrooke said. “We always knew it would be a disputed election. I would not be surprised if you see candidates claiming victory and fraud in the next few days. For the United States and the international community, we’re going to respect the process.”

The American embassy issued a statement that also urged patience, saying only the election commission could announce the official results. “We’ll be waiting to hear from them. Anything else is just speculation at this point,” the statement read.

Slowed by the insecurity across Afghanistan, declaring a winner could take two weeks or more, although Afghan officials said they would release preliminary results by Saturday. United Nations officials, who were assisting in the process, said official returns could take up to a month if complaints of fraud or irregularities needed to be adjudicated.

American officials were quick to declare the poll a success — worth the expanding commitment of troops and money to an increasingly unpopular and corruption-plagued government.

“The test is going to be in the counting,” Mr. Holbrooke said in an interview after he toured four polling stations in Kabul. “If the will of the electorate is going to be thwarted, it will happen in the counting.”

At the same time, he was clearly pleased that the vote had come off.

“On the basis of what we’ve seen so far, it seems clear that the Taliban utterly failed to disrupt these elections,” he said.

But questions remained about whether the low turnout might affect the legitimacy of the vote, skew the results, and resolve multiple claims of fraud. Early accounts put the total far below the 70 percent who cast votes in the 2004 election.

In some parts of the heavily embattled south, only a trickle of men — and almost no women — defied Taliban threats to bomb polling stations and cut off fingers stained with the indelible ink used by election monitors. But Taliban attacks killed at least 30 people, and those who did vote wavered between resolution and terror.

“I am happy to use my vote, and I hope things will change and peace will knock at our door,” said Zainab, a 40-year-old voter in the southern city of Kandahar.

“Yes, I am scared!” Akhtar Mohmmad, who voted in the southern town of Khan Neshin, said, fearing his purple-stained finger would make him a target.

It remained unclear how a low turnout would affect President Hamid Karzai’s chances of winning re-election in the first round.

But early reports showed more voters in the north than in the volatile south — a pattern that would favor Mr. Abdullah and raise the chances of a runoff if no candidate won more than 50 percent of the vote.

Especially in the south, the Taliban made good on their threats to try to disrupt the vote. And even in the places where insurgents failed to stop the voting, they did a good job of putting a scare into everyone who did vote.

In Garmser, a dusty town in the insurgency’s heartland in the southern province of Helmand, the signs of the Taliban’s strength were evident. The bazaar — which now, on the eve of Ramadan, would ordinarily be bustling — was mostly closed, just as the Taliban had demanded.

Inside the polling center, voters and election workers covered their faces whenever they were approached by someone with a camera. They said they were fearful of retribution.

At the only polling center in southern Helmand, set up in the forecourt of a mosque in Khan Neshin, election officials estimated that no more than 300 people voted all day — and not a single woman.

On Tuesday, the Taliban distributed a warning to surrounding villages.

“If we see anyone on the street or outside your house from today until Friday noon, you will be punished severely,” it said.

In Kandahar, witnesses said, the Taliban fired nine rockets near polling stations and hanged two people who had ink-stained fingers.

At a news conference on Thursday at the presidential palace, Mr. Karzai thanked those who braved the Taliban threats, saying there had been 73 attacks in 15 provinces. Nevertheless, 94 percent of the polling centers opened, election officials said.

“I am very grateful to our people, who tolerated the suicide attacks, rockets attacks, and bomb attacks,” Mr. Karzai told journalists.

“Let’s see what the turnout was.” he said. “They came out and voted. That’s good, that’s good.”

Mr. Abdullah said his supporters would lodge complaints of fraud, in particular from the southern province of Kandahar. He called the low turnout in Kabul “unsatisfactory,” but also said the early returns were “hopeful” and offered his own praise.

“Despite all the difficulties, despite all the security problems and other problems, people went to the polls, and they participated in this day,” he said at a news conference in the garden of his home. “And in fact they stood up to those who wanted to take away the people’s right to choose their destiny.”

Two polling stations visited for the count in Kabul showed that the contest might be close. Male voters in one polling station gave Mr. Karzai 45 percent and Mr. Abdullah 38 percent. A women’s polling station next door, where only 41 women voted all day, gave Mr. Karzai 56 percent and Mr. Abdullah 26 percent.

Other candidates made a very small showing, and only one woman in 41 voted for one of the female candidates. In Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home city, a selection of four polling stations showed Mr. Karzai with 48 percent and Mr. Abdullah with 18 percent.

The turnout in Kabul, which officials said was lower than in 2004 in the last election, stemmed as much from disillusionment with progress since 2001 as with fear of violence, residents said.

In one area of western Kabul, where four small bombs exploded in the early morning, few people ventured out early. But by midmorning, election officials said, voting was brisk.

“Why should we be scared?” said Nurzia, a mother of four who brought her daughter and nieces to vote. Like many Afghans she has only one name. “We came to have a say in our future and for our children.”

Across town, Muhammad Qasim, 55, a mason, voted after a day at work. “I think it was our duty,” he said. “A change is good.”

But he was accompanied by three young relatives, all in their 20s, none of whom were voting. One, Muhammad Wali, a tailor, said he was not interested. “Last time I voted but I did not see any result,” he said.

Azizullah Ludin, the head of the election commission, said that counting would take place at polling stations, with the results called in to the election headquarters in Kabul and collated in the coming days. But insecurity in some areas made it necessary to transfer some ballot boxes to district centers, officials said.

In the most insecure areas, not even Afghan election monitors could attend the voting, raising concerns of fraud. Even as officials from the Obama administration, who were also on hand to observe the elections, expressed reserved optimism that the voting was transparent, they fretted about whether the ballot counting would be equally so.

President Obama, in a radio interview, said that the election appeared to be successful “despite the Taliban’s effort to disrupt it,” and that “we’ve got to make sure that we are really focused on finishing the job in Afghanistan.”

CONTINUED ON newsnyt2

news20090821nyt2

[Today's Newspaper] from [The New York Times]

[Asia Pacific]
Afghan Election Called a Success Despite Attacks
By CARLOTTA GALL and STEPHEN FARRELL
Published: August 21, 2009

CONTINUED FROM newsnyt1

One candidate, Mr. Ghani, sent an e-mail message to American officials to say that he had reports that his opponents were stuffing ballot boxes. Other presidential candidates were making similar complaints, which competed with reports of sporadic violence throughout the day.

In Kabul, the capital, police fought a gun battle with people suspected of being Taliban infiltrators who took over a house overlooking a police headquarters, killing two of them and capturing a third, as bystanders applauded the officers.

In the southern province of Paktia, two would-be suicide bombers were shot to death before they could detonate their explosives, Zahir Azimi, a Defense Ministry spokesman, said.

In Wardak Province, an hour’s drive south of Kabul, a barrage of six rockets fell just before the polls opened, and three more soon afterward.

A mechanic, Qudratullah, 32, said he encountered Taliban representatives on the road from Narkh District, just over a mile from the provincial capital of Wardak.

“They were standing on the road telling people not to vote,” he said.

“Of course I am scared,” he said. But, like a good number of others, he voted anyway. “We want to see change and a younger generation in a better condition,” Qudratullah said.

news20090821wp1

[Today's Newspaper] fom [The Washington Post]

[Fatal Flights > The cost of helicopter competition]
The Deadly Cost of Swooping In to Save a Life
By Gilbert M. Gaul and Mary Pat Flaherty
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 21, 2009

SANTA ROSA BEACH, Fla. Shortly after midnight on a storm-swept October night in 2004, Tom Palcic, a medical helicopter pilot, started across Choctawatchee Bay to pick up a hospital patient and transport him to a facility 60 miles away.

Such flights are common in the highly competitive multibillion-dollar air-medical business. Although the public profile of medical helicopters has them swooping to crash scenes at the edge of highways, most flights, like Palcic's, involve shuttling patients between hospitals.

The director of the helicopter program for which Palcic flew called these lucrative patients "golden trout" and pushed pilots to reel in as many as possible. When pilots balked at flying in bad weather, he called them sissies and second-guessed them, records and interviews show.

Palcic, 63, was just two minutes into the flight of AIRHeart-1 when his crew radioed a dispatcher that he was turning back because of the thunder and lightning.

Moments later, Palcic's helicopter banked in clouds and plunged 700 feet into shallow waters, killing him, a flight nurse and a paramedic. A woman who lived nearby recalled that the vibration shook candlesticks out of their holders.

For the medical helicopter industry, it was the fourth fatal crash that year -- part of a legacy that has claimed the lives of 211 crew members and 27 patients since 1980 and injured many others, The Washington Post has found.

The number of fatal flights has risen sharply, closely tracking the rapid growth of what is now a $2.5 billion industry. Nearly half of all deaths have occurred in the past decade. In 2008, the deadliest year ever, 23 crew members and five patients were killed.

Some calamities were the result of pilot errors. But many were predictable, pilots and safety experts say, and could have been prevented with stronger oversight and better technology.

"We've been killing ourselves the same way for 20 years," said veteran pilot Ed MacDonald. "There's not a whole lot new about these crashes."

What began almost four decades ago as a way to save lives is now one of the most dangerous jobs in America -- deadlier than logging, mining or police work -- with 113 deaths for every 100,000 employees, The Post found. Only working on a fishing boat is riskier. The rate for airline pilots is 80.1.

In the 37 years helicopters have been used to transport patients, pilots and crews have died in an almost unfathomable array of crashes. In the past two years alone, medical helicopters have dropped into pitch-black oceans, plummeted to the ground after losing rotor blades, smacked into mountains and collided in clear blue desert skies.

Yet as crashes and deaths have mounted, top executives at the Federal Aviation Administration and its parent agency, the U.S. Transportation Department, have acted as partners with the industry, issuing reams of voluntary safety advisories with little follow-up. The FAA has sent poorly trained inspectors to monitor operators and used fines and penalties as only a last resort.

"I'd rather use a carrot than a hammer," said John M. Allen, the FAA's director of flight safety standards. "It's not like we do nothing and then smack them with a rule."

Allen said the agency has to balance business and safety. "Even one crash is too many," he said. "But there's a fine line on how far does government go to impact business."

Private, for-profit companies dominate the industry, with about 830 medical helicopters vying for patients. The number of aircraft has doubled every decade since 1980, leaving some firms with fleets as large as those of US Airways or JetBlue. Yet medical helicopters are permitted to operate without basic safety features that commercial flights must carry, such as black box recorders, collision-avoidance systems and radar altimeters.

Unlike an airliner, a medical helicopter does not fly a direct route from one airport to another, seamlessly tracked by radar. Most flights are at low altitude. There might or might not be an established landing zone.

Because of their low flight paths, helicopters are especially vulnerable to rapid changes in weather. Most flights are made under visual flight rules, with the pilot using his eyes to pick through clouds and around obstacles, and often are to out-of-the-way accident scenes. Unlike commercial airline trips, only a fraction of helicopter flights are conducted under instrument flight rules, which make it easier to travel in inclement weather.

More than half of fatal crashes occur at night, but only one-third of medical helicopter pilots are equipped with night-vision goggles to help them avoid power lines, towers and other obstructions.

Industry officials are well aware of the risks, noting in public statements that medical flights are inherently dangerous. They emphasize the thousands of patients they safely transport each year and the many lives that have been saved. They also say helicopters are critical in rural areas.

Although the industry has not advocated for a specific federal safety requirement, companies have made individual improvements and supported voluntary guidelines, said Christopher Eastlee, a spokesman for the Air Medical Operators Association.

The accidents last year "lend themselves to safety concern in the industry, but I don't think that translates into a safety problem," said Eastlee, whose group represents more than 90 percent of the industry, which is dominated by five private companies and dozens of smaller programs.

Industry officials have been slow to adopt safety technologies until recently and urged more studies, citing the expense and readiness of the equipment. Operators also have successfully sued state regulators who tried to restrict the number of helicopters in their areas based on a community's medical need.

In effect, the FAA and Transportation Department treat the companies the same as low-fare carriers to Disney World, contending that a deregulated, unfettered market will drive down costs through competition.

The model hasn't worked.

Costs keep increasing, with a one-way trip running as high as $20,000. Medicare alone spends $220 million yearly to ferry patients -- 20 times higher than a decade ago, adjusted for inflation. Air Methods, the largest firm, has revenues of $500 million.

The unchecked growth has saturated some regions.

In Kentucky, "all of a sudden, the skies were almost black with helicopters," recalled Brian K. Bishop, a former regulator.

With a population of 4.2 million, Kentucky has 26 medical helicopters -- more than many nations. Canada, which is about nine times as large with a population of 33 million, has 20. It has never suffered a fatal crash.
'Like Flying Billboards'

The idea that helicopters can be used to swiftly transport critically injured patients to trauma centers and other hospitals grew from the experience of surgeons and pilots during the Vietnam War.

"What we learned was if we got to them quickly enough and got them to the right people, we could save lives," said MacDonald, a Dustoff pilot in Vietnam who flies a medical helicopter in New Mexico. "When we came back, we took a look around and said, why aren't hospitals doing that here?"

It didn't take long for hospitals and private operators to catch on. In 1980, there were about 40 medical helicopters in the United States. In 1990, there were about 225. Today, there are more than 800. Texas alone has 67. Arizona has 54. Pennsylvania: 45.

Virginia has 24; Maryland, 17; and the District, 5.

Operators say the extraordinary rate of growth reflects "pent-up demand" for the services, especially in rural areas without trauma centers. But as with many expensive technologies, the increase appears to have as much to do with making money as with medicine. Complaints about overuse are common, with patients walking off helicopters with sprained ankles or being discharged within a few hours from emergency departments.

"A patient flown in by helicopter can mean thousands of dollars in downstream revenue" once the patient is admitted to a hospital, said Paul A. Taheri, a doctor who co-wrote a 2003 study on the subject. "That fact is not lost on hospital administrators."

A helicopter also helps to burnish the image of a hospital as a lifesaving facility.

"They're like flying billboards," says Thomas P. Judge, executive director of LifeFlight of Maine, a statewide program with two helicopters. "It's the equivalent of a medical centerfold. It's sexy advertising."

In the late 1990s, Congress prodded Medicare, the nation's largest insurer, to change its formula for paying for helicopter transports. In 2002, Medicare boosted its reimbursement rates and started paying a 50 percent premium for rural flights. The spigot of new money expanded the market for private operators, who responded by opening scores of free-standing bases miles from hospitals. Medicare payments soared, increasing 434 percent in seven years, to $220 million last year.

Today, programs charge thousands of dollars for a flight, billing records show, and compete ferociously in heavily populated cities and suburbs. To shore up support among local fire, emergency medical service and hospital workers -- who often control which helicopter team is requested for a patient -- marketing teams have offered NASCAR tickets and hosted riverboat cruises, company e-mails and interviews show.

CONTINUED ON newswp2

news20090821wp2

[Today's Newspaper] fom [The Washington Post]

[Fatal Flights > The cost of helicopter competition]
The Deadly Cost of Swooping In to Save a Life
By Gilbert M. Gaul and Mary Pat Flaherty
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 21, 2009

CONTINUED FROM newswp1

Some helicopter crews pass out T-shirts and bottle coolers at accident scenes. "I like to look out at a scene and see a Wings cap out there," said Steve Lewis, a base manager for Wings Air Rescue in Johnson City, Tenn.

To fend off competitors, companies add more helicopters than are needed.

"If I had no competition in the United States, I could probably reduce the number of bases by 30 or 40 . . . and still have adequate service," Air Methods chief Aaron Todd told investment analysts in November.

Medicare pays ground ambulances based on the level of care they provide; the more sophisticated the care, the higher the reimbursement. But when it comes to paying medical helicopters, the government insurer assumes all helicopters and crews are alike.

"It's crazy," LifeFlight's Judge said. "It doesn't matter if you are flying a refurbished helicopter with an inexperienced crew or a helicopter that costs millions of dollars and is equivalent to a flying ICU. They pay the same."

Private investors have also poured millions of dollars into the medical helicopter industry, helping to fuel its rapid growth. In 2004, Brockway Moran & Partners, a billion-dollar private equity firm in Boca Raton, Fla., added Air Evac Lifeteam to its portfolio. Two years later, it acquired Med-Trans, another large operator. It picked up a third last month. Several other firms also jumped in.

The influx of private money transformed the industry, said Christine M. Zalar, a consultant. "A lot of money was going into this thing, and it started to feed on itself," Zalar said. "I think a lot of business people were sitting in a room saying, 'Hey, look at all of the places we can put these things and make a lot of money.' " Companies operate under a simple formula: The more they lift off, the more they earn. "It's pretty easy math," Zalar said. "If you aren't flying, you aren't paying."

Fishing for 'Golden Trout'

Keeping up the numbers was on the minds of pilots and managers during the 2004 AIRHeart-1 crash. Investigative records obtained by The Post depict a program divided by pressures to lift off, even in bad weather.

AIRHeart-1 was part of the Sacred Heart Health System, a $600 million hospital network based in Pensacola, Fla. Sacred Heart provided the nurses, billed the patients and stationed Randy Layman as program coordinator in Santa Rosa Beach. Metro Aviation, a private company in Shreveport, La., received a fee to provide the helicopters and pilots.

After the crash, lead pilot Wayne Weir told investigators that pilots complained that Layman pressured them to fly. If pilots refused flights, Weir said, Layman "would check the weather. It would be obvious that he was looking over the pilots' shoulder."

Weir added: "He says every patient is a golden trout. We need to go get those trout."

James E. Light, another pilot, told investigators that Layman "joked about me being a sissy" for turning down flights in bad weather. "He shouldn't kid about that," Light said. "This could affect pilot decision making in an insidious way, on an unconscious level; I think pressure to fly describes it."

Still another pilot, Thomas Dunn, said: "There is a veiled hostility between the pilots and the program director. That was true prior to the accident. He overinvolves himself in stuff he's not supposed to maintenance- and flight-wise. He creates a very uncomfortable situation and working environment."

Layman said it was "disturbing and disappointing" that pilots accused him of interfering and name-calling. "I don't think there is any evidence that there was pressure placed on the pilot," he told a Post reporter.

He said he was terminated by Sacred Heart a few months after the crash. He declined to provide details, saying it was a "delicate question. By mutual agreement I received a very heavy severance from them [Sacred Heart], and we moved on." Sacred Heart officials declined to discuss his comments.

Layman said the term "golden trout" was his way of emphasizing to pilots the importance of being ready to take missions.

Asked whether he was expected to meet flight quotas, Layman said, "You don't have to be a math wizard to understand that missions equal revenue, and revenue equals survivability in the air business."

A Hands-Off Approach

In July 2008, Federal Aviation Administration officials hurriedly arranged a meeting with industry leaders to discuss a spike in fatal medical helicopter crashes. Only days before, two medical helicopters had collided in daylight over Flagstaff, Ariz., killing five crew members and two patients. A spate of earlier crashes had claimed 17 lives.

But instead of ordering changes, regulators asked companies to "refocus" on safety, according to a summary of the meeting. Stricter regulation was quickly ruled out.

That hands-off approach is typical of the FAA's history of deferring to the industry on safety matters, The Post found.

During the past five years, the agency has issued civil penalties totaling less than $90,000 to the medical helicopter companies that account for most of industry. There were no suspensions or license revocations. Fines arise only in "the more egregious cases," FAA spokeswoman Diane Spitaliere wrote in an e-mail response to Post questions. "Our goal is to achieve compliance, rather than hit the operator with a fine."

The FAA does not require companies to report their total flights and flight hours, which other federal agencies said is needed for effective monitoring.

The FAA also has been slow to push for new safety systems -- including night-vision goggles and terrain-awareness and -warning systems -- saying they need more study and could drive some operators out of business. "We have to be careful," Allen said. "We might be doing a disservice to the public."

Gary Sizemore, a medical helicopter pilot who was based in Perry, Fla., said goggles would improve safety. "I'm hoping we will get them before long. Because a lot of the areas we fly are dark, it would be a great help."

One reason for the lag is a shortage of FAA inspectors to certify the use of goggles for thousands of waiting pilots and crew members. The FAA has nine inspectors for that task. In June, an FAA official said the agency doesn't have enough goggles for its inspectors. Before a roomful of industry representatives, he suggested the agency could rent them from operators when its inspectors arrive for "check" rides that test pilot skills.

In an interview, Allen quickly ruled out that idea. "I don't want them renting from industry," he said. "That wouldn't be good."

Eastlee, the air operators spokesman, said his members hope to be equipped with night-vision goggles by the end of next year. "There's no way to really enforce that," he said. "But that's what the commitments are."

Pilots also complain that FAA inspectors lack experience in helicopters -- an accusation FAA managers do not dispute. An inspector checking pilots in Nebraska last year had flown in a medical helicopter only three times.

The FAA has about 280 inspectors "qualified" in helicopters, but they are generalists who also handle airplane and other duties. Recently, the agency started a program to hire former helicopter pilots to beef up its inspections. As of last month, it had hired six. Allen said it will take 18 months before they "got traction."

Inspection reports obtained by The Post depict inspectors bogged down in check lists and minutiae, including the color and neatness of files. In Maine, an FAA inspector cited an operator because its duct tape was too old. "We didn't know duct tape had a shelf life," LifeFlight's Judge said.

If FAA inspectors find a problem, "we empower them [the operators] to fix it themselves basically," said Jon Prater, an FAA regulator who explained the process at a National Transportation Safety Board hearing. "Predominantly everybody does want to follow the rules."

Allen said that regulators and the industry work closely to sort through safety questions but that the industry pushes back over cost and control. He cited flight recorders and attempts by the FAA to regulate pilot flight hours and scheduling.

When the FAA looked at pilot fatigue, it proved to be "very, very sensitive with industry, and we really didn't get anywhere to making substantive changes," Allen said. And when the agency "starts asking for data from the industry, they get very nervous."

"I'm not aware of those issues," Eastlee said, "but if that is his perception I'd like to work with him on addressing it."

Summits and More Summits

When crashes first spiked in the mid-1980s, industry officials and regulators held a summit to discuss what they could do to improve safety -- the first of many such meetings held over the past two decades.

Some victims' families say that is the standard government-industry response: to hold another safety summit whenever the glare of unfavorable publicity rains down.

Last year, amid a record number of fatal crashes, two summits were held: one in Washington and one in Dallas. They followed summits in 2000 and 2004, as well as a 2004 government task force.

CONTINUED ON newswp3

news20090821wp3

[Today's Newspaper] fom [The Washington Post]

[Fatal Flights > The cost of helicopter competition]
The Deadly Cost of Swooping In to Save a Life
By Gilbert M. Gaul and Mary Pat Flaherty
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 21, 2009

CONTINUED FROM newswp2

Allen said the FAA issued "numerous" voluntary safety advisories in 2005 as a result of the task force's work. "The first thing we do is awareness," he said. "The safety equation is not unilateral. It's industry and us."

In February, Allen told the NTSB that the FAA's safety advisories resulted in a "drastic reduction" in fatal crashes between 2004 and 2007. "The numbers prove it," Allen testified.

In fact, the numbers show that fatal crashes jumped sharply in 2004 and 2005. And after dipping in 2006-07, they spiked again last year, with seven.

Questioned about his testimony, Allen said in an interview: "I should probably not have not said drastic. Drastic was an overstatement."

The cycle of crashes followed by meetings and studies is not new, said Gerald L. Dillingham, a Government Accountability Office investigator and author of a 2007 report critical of medical helicopter safety reporting. "The pattern we are seeing is a pattern we have seen before," Dillingham said. "As time passed and attention waned," interest in the safety issue faded.

In 1987, after a cluster of fatal crashes, the FAA conducted a 60-day review of medical helicopter operations, followed by more voluntary advisories. A year later, the NTSB issued a 130-page report that found a "significant rise in the number of accidents."

Problems identified by the NTSB in 1988 continue to affect the industry: poor communications, competitive pressures to accept risky missions, pilot fatigue and a lack of equipment to help pilots flying in dark, unfamiliar settings.

FAA officials said they work closely with their NTSB counterparts. However, as a separate agency, the FAA is not obligated to accept the NTSB's findings -- and sometimes doesn't.

In 2006, the NTSB issued another long report on medical helicopter crashes. It recommended that the FAA require operators to add terrain- awareness and -warning systems, supply their crews with night-vision goggles and implement formal programs for pilots to evaluate risks before flying in bad weather. FAA officials balked, saying several recommendations were impractical or costly or required more study.

Last year, the NTSB upped the ante, adding four of the recommendations the FAA had not implemented to its Most Wanted List -- a public catalog of the NTSB's most pressing safety concerns.

There is a natural tension between the FAA and the NTSB, said James E. Hall, a former NTSB board member. "The NTSB is the investigator. The FAA is the regulator. The FAA isn't going to accept everything the NTSB says, nor should it."

At the same time, Hall said, "Many people in the bureaucracy of the FAA still feel their mission is as much to promote aviation as to provide for safety." As a result, the agency is slow to push new rules. "It's tombstone technology," Hall said. "You have to have enough deaths to justify a rule change."

Allen said: "The FAA never shies away from issuing rules. However, our main focus is on getting immediate results when there is a safety issue -- by whatever means is fastest."

Patricia Schroder of Pittsburgh, whose brother, flight nurse John Stumpff, died in a December 2007 crash in snow and mist near Whittier, Alaska, said the FAA should have had stricter rules in place requiring night-vision goggles and other equipment. "It's one thing to be completely oblivious to certain weaknesses within a system," she said. "But how tragic is it when you have recommendations from the NTSB several years earlier [2006] and no apparent action? It's extremely frustrating, and it makes me angry."

Allen said that before the FAA could write a regulation requiring helicopters to use night-vision goggles or terrain-warning systems, it would need industry buy-in. "We have to learn what would be acceptable," he said. "We're studying the heck out of these things."

'Helicopter Shopping'

Under federal law, the FAA and Transportation Department have responsibility for fares, routes and safety. That includes the type of helicopter, avionics equipment, pilot training, routes and acceptable weather conditions for flight. State health officials are responsible for licensing the nurses and paramedics and approving the medical equipment used on the helicopters.

Eastlee and his trade group contend that the two-pronged regulatory model works well and has resulted in numerous "safety enhancements."

But a growing number of state regulators and some hospital-based helicopter programs counter that the approach is confusing and that federal law prevents them from making medical helicopters even safer. They point to a practice known as "helicopter shopping" as an example.

Helicopter shopping refers to hospitals or EMS dispatchers calling companies until they find one willing to take the flight. The practice is considered dangerous when dispatchers don't tell the pilots that other operators have rejected the same flight or aborted because of weather.

A July 2004 incident spotlighted the practice, when a medical helicopter in South Carolina crashed into trees shortly after liftoff from an accident scene, killing the pilot, flight nurse, paramedic and patient. The pilot hadn't been told that three pilots had rejected the flight, including one who turned back because of fog.

But helicopter shopping continued, and investigators have singled it out as a contributing factor in fatal crashes in recent years in Utah and several other states.

Chris Waters's 27-year-old wife, Stephanie, was a paramedic on a helicopter operated by PHI Air Medical that crashed in a dark forest in June 2008 near Huntsville, Tex. Earlier, another helicopter had aborted a flight while trying to pick up the same patient.

PHI said its pilot became disoriented because of the dark terrain. The pilot was not wearing night-vision goggles, and company said it has since installed them throughout its air-medical fleet.

The night of the crash, Waters called his wife's cellphone and was surprised when she answered during her flight.

"It was strange," Waters said, "she usually didn't pick up when she was on a flight. I got one last chance to say I love you. In my case, it was 'Good night, see you tomorrow,' and she's gone forever."

FAA officials decry helicopter shopping, but they add that it is not their responsibility. "That's an economic issue. We cannot do anything specific," Allen said. "It's not something we can get into a regulation."

In April 2006, the agency wrote to state EMS directors, asking for their help in reducing helicopter shopping. The FAA suggested that state regulators send a memo and establish a "standard for EMS dispatch in your state which prohibits" the practice.

Some state EMS directors were taken aback. "If it's an economic issue, which is what they appear to be saying, we can't touch it," because of recent court decisions, said R. Shawn Rogers, the EMS director for Oklahoma, where the number of helicopters soared from four to 34 in eight years.

The legal battles have turned on the federal Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, which was meant to spur competition among major airlines. A provision of the act prohibits states from interfering with airline prices, routes or services. The provision has helped medical helicopter operators pry open markets and boost business even as Rogers and others decry its impact on safety.

State regulators contend that health planning and emergency care have traditionally been state responsibilities. They say they should be able to regulate medical helicopters the same way they do ground ambulances. They want to require operators to obtain Certificates of Need to justify why an expensive service should be added in a region. They also seek to require them to use specified safety equipment and be available round-the-clock.

But providers and federal regulators argue that the deregulation act gives the FAA exclusive power over commercial aviation, including medical helicopters. They reject calls for an increased state role, contending the division of powers between the states and federal officials works well.

"We are concerned that fifty separate State regimes addressing the economic regulation of air ambulances could unnecessarily complicate the industry and hinder interstate operations," Christa Fornarotto of Transportation, the parent department of the FAA and NTSB, testified to Congress in April.

That means Oklahoma "can't require air conditioning" on helicopters even though it reached 105 degrees this summer or "enforce radio frequency coordination," Rogers said. "Any rule the air ambulance industry objects to is subject to lawsuit."

Voluntary Compliance

The FAA's voluntary approach to oversight relies in large part on trust.

In 2005, the agency issued a series of "Best Practices" to operators, recommending training, risk assessment for pilots and equipment such as flight recorders and collision-avoidance systems.

Agency officials made clear that they were not issuing mandates. One FAA official told operators that they should continue to police themselves, auditing their safety programs.

Records show that the agency didn't track its 2005 recommendations to see whether operators were voluntarily complying until this year, and only then when it faced increased scrutiny over the dramatic increase in fatal crashes.

CONTINUED ON newswp4

news20090821wp4

[Today's Newspaper] fom [The Washington Post]

[Fatal Flights > The cost of helicopter competition]
The Deadly Cost of Swooping In to Save a Life
By Gilbert M. Gaul and Mary Pat Flaherty
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 21, 2009

CONTINUED FROM newswp3

In January, agency officials ordered their lead inspectors to go back and survey medical helicopter companies to gauge compliance. The memo was issued three weeks before FAA officials were scheduled to testify at an NTSB public hearing in Washington on the crashes. Inspectors were required to return their forms two days before that session.

In an interview, Allen acknowledged that the impending hearing prompted the survey, adding that the FAA had no system for tracking compliance in the interim. "Not formally," he said, "no."

The inspectors checked paperwork at their offices rather than visiting helicopter companies. Nevertheless, at the NTSB hearing, FAA officials enthusiastically pointed to the surveys as evidence that voluntary initiatives were working.

FAA officials at the hearing said voluntary measures were just as effective as rules, which take years to approve.

Shortly after the hearing, FAA officials abruptly reversed their position. Allen announced in April that the FAA was preparing to propose new rules requiring many of the same technologies singled out by the NTSB four years earlier.

"We recognize that relying on voluntary compliance alone is not enough to ensure safe flight operations," said Allen, adding that the rules could take several years to draft.

In the interview with Post reporters, Allen said the shift was not a policy reversal. "Nothing really changed," he said. "We were working up to it. Our voluntary initiatives were a precursor to rulemaking so we know what works well."

For Stacey Friedman of El Dorado Hills, Calif., the FAA's shift is bittersweet. Her sister, flight nurse Erin Reed, was killed in 2005 when her helicopter plunged into Puget Sound.

"The sad thing is, it took all of this time and all of these crew members who died for them to announce this change," she said. "It felt a little like a triumph, I guess, but it also felt like a stab in the heart in the sense that they were years too late."

news20090821slt

[Today's Paper: A summary of what's in the major U.S. newspapers] from [Slate Magazine]

Afghanistan Doesn't Bring Out the Vote
By Daniel Politi
Posted Friday, Aug. 21, 2009, at 7:11 AM ET
The New York Times (NYT) and the Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox lead with, and everyone else fronts, Afghanistan's presidential election, which was marred by low turnout and scattered violence. A steady campaign of intimidation by the Taliban over the past week kept many inside their homes. Officials were quick to declare that the vote had been a success, but the papers say it's far too early to tell "whether bombs or ballots would ultimately emerge the day's victor," as the WSJ puts it. Declaring a winner could take at least two weeks, and a runoff seems likely. The Washington Post (WP) goes across the top of Page One with an investigation into the medical-helicopter business, which is now a competitive $2.5 billion industry that is lightly regulated. It is also one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, with 113 deaths for every 100,000 employees, a rate surpassed only by working on a fishing boat. Since 1980, 211 crew members and 27 patients have been killed in crashes that many experts say were largely predictable and avoidable.

The Los Angeles Times (LAT) leads with a look at how the growing ranks of the unemployed are increasing foreclosure rates among those with good credit scores and conventional home loans. According to one trade group, more than 13 percent of mortgage holders in the country were behind on their mortgage or in the process of having their homes repossessed during the second quarter of the year. It's the highest figure since 1972. Experts worry that the increasing number of foreclosures could threaten the economic recovery. USA Today leads with a warning that all those hoping to take advantage of the Cash for Clunkers program only have until Monday evening to make a deal. The $3 billion program has been more successful than expected and many dealerships have run out of the fuel-efficient cars that qualify for the program. Dealers are also a little miffed because it has taken a while for them to get their money back from the government, but the program has certainly helped boost demand for vehicles.

There were no major episodes of violence in Afghanistan yesterday, as many had feared there would be, but the WSJ points out that the Taliban did manage to carry out 73 attacks across the country. According to official reports, election-day violence killed eight Afghan soldiers, nine police officers, nine civilians, a U.S. soldier, and a British soldier. The LAT specifies that early turnout estimates were below 50 percent, considerably lower than the 70 percent who voted in 2004. Many voters stayed away from the polls, particularly in southern and eastern provinces. The NYT highlights that in some areas of the South there were almost no women voters. But the low turnout was hardly limited to the extremely volatile areas. The WP notes that even in Kabul, where thousands of security officers were on duty, some polling places reported low turnout. It seems more voters showed up in the north, which should theoretically benefit President Hamid Karzai's main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, and increase the chances of a runoff. Early-morning wire stories report that both Karzai and Abdullah claimed victory today.


While it's easy and obvious to blame low turnout on the Taliban threats, the WP points out that some residents simply had no interest in voting. Some were simply disenchanted with politics, while others didn't think there was anyone worthwhile on a ballot that contained dozens of names or saw it as a pointless exercise, since they were certain that Karzai would win. Counting the votes "in a vast country where donkeys were used to deliver ballot boxes to many remote villages," as USAT puts it, will probably take a while. Although preliminary results were expected Saturday, the LAT says the first results won't be available until early next week.

The WP reports that even as crashes in the medical helicopter business have increased—2008 was the deadliest year—federal regulators "have acted as partners with the industry." Helicopters aren't required to have many of the very basic safety features of commercial airplanes. Meanwhile, the business, which is dominated by for-profit companies, has exploded. There are now around 830 medical helicopters competing for patients, and in some states the saturation is astounding. Kentucky, for example, has 26 medical helicopters for a population of 4.2 million, while all of Canada has only 20. This competition leads many pilots to take unnecessary risks to get a piece of the action. And while the government contends that leaving the industry lightly regulated increases competition and decreases prices, that has hardly been the case, as costs keep rising. Medicare spends $220 million a year to transport patients.

The NYT fronts word that Xe Services, the company formerly known as Blackwater, plays a pivotal role in the CIA program that uses unmanned drones to kill al-Qaida leaders. The private contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on the Predator, work that was previously done by agency employees. The Predators are launched from a remote base in Pakistan, and, the paper reveals, a second site in Afghanistan. On occasion, agency employees have accused contractors of doing their job poorly, particularly if the drone misses its target. In one case, a 500-pound bomb dropped too early, leading to a frantic search for the unexploded bomb that was ultimately found 100 yards from the original target. This is a reminder of how the CIA "now depends on outside contractors to perform some of the agency's most important assignments," says the paper.

The WP reports that the Justice Department is looking into allegations that military defense attorneys in Guantanamo unlawfully showed detainees photographs of CIA personnel. Apparently, the lawyers were trying to determine who the officers and contractors who carried out harsh interrogations in the so-called black sites outside the United States were. Researchers trying to shed light on the interrogation program took the photographs, sometimes outside the home of CIA officers. If true, this illustrates just how aggressively lawyers and human rights groups are pursuing this information. But defense attorneys say it's just an attempt to intimidate them and change the subject away from the CIA's interrogation tactics.

The WP reports on a new poll that shows public confidence in Obama is slipping. Less than 50 percent of Americans are confident that he will make the right decisions for the country, which is down from 60 percent when his presidency hit the first 100 days. His overall approval rating stands at 57 percent, 12 points lower than in April, while his disapproval hit an all-time high of 40 percent. A full 42 percent disapprove of how he's dealing with health care, and 52 percent back a government-run health insurance plan, also known as the "public option," which marks a decline from 62 percent in June. The decrease in support for the public option is particularly notable among independents and seniors. One bright spot for Obama is the economy, as more Americans are optimistic the recession will be over within the next year.

The NYT says that while many proclaimed the return of multimillion-dollar bonuses is just another example of how the rich always end up winning, "a significant change may in fact be under way. The rich, as a group, are no longer getting richer." They've become poorer over the last two years, and may not get back to their old levels of wealth anytime in the near future. Of course, it's difficult to feel sympathy for someone who still has $4 million, even if he did once have more than $100 million, but some economists think this trend could elicit some broad new trends. One of the more interesting ones is whether the fact that there will be fewer obscenely wealthy people will mean that the average middle-class worker will be a little better off. Or, as the NYT puts it, "the question is whether the better metaphor for the economy is a rising tide that can lift all boats—or a zero-sum game."

Meanwhile, the question of whether runner Caster Semenya is really a woman has raised interest across the world, but, in South Africa, many have taken up her cause and are outraged by the question, particularly the idea that Westerners are judging an African woman based on appearance alone, reports the LAT's Robyn Dixon. Semenya became an instant worldwide sensation Wedneday, when she beat her nearest rival in the 800-meter race by 2.45 seconds. But many immediately questioned whether she was really a woman and she was asked to undergo a variety of complex gender tests. For many in South Africa, it quickly became another example of how Westerners attempt to minimize the achievements of a black African woman. But the request should have hardly surprised the 18-year-old, who has been teased about looking like a man since she was a little girl. "They're jealous of my daughter," her mother said. "It's the first girl in the black people doing such things. That's why they say those things."

news20090821gc

[Environment] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Pollution]
1,300 Chinese children near smelter suffer lead poisoning
• Officials close 'unapproved' manganese plant in Hunan
• Second case in a month involving mass poisoning of pupils
Jonathan Watts, Asia environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 20 August 2009 13.06 BST Article history

More than 1,300 children have been poisoned by a manganese factory in central China, the state media reported today, amid growing fears about the prevalence of heavy metal pollution nationwide.

The exposure of mass lead contamination in Wenping township, Hunan province, is the second case in as many weeks, prompting accusations that the authorities have failed to adequately regulate toxins that build up over time.

A local government official told the Xinhua news agency that tests of children living near the smelter showed that 60-70% had unhealthy levels of lead in their blood. With tests continuing, more positive cases are expected.

The authorities closed the factory last week and detained two executives on suspicion of "causing severe environment pollution".

The plant reportedly opened in May 2008 without the approval of the local environmental protection bureau within 500m of a primary school, a middle school and a kindergarten.

Although the factory had only been operating for a year, the blood of 1,354 local children was found to have more than 100mg of lead per litre, the limit considered safe.

A gradual build up of lead in the bloodstream can lead to anaemia, muscle weakness and brain damage.

The plant is unlikely to have gone ahead without support from the local government. Many poor districts ignore environmental regulations to attract investment, and Hunan is notorious for its heavy metal industry. The Wugang city government said it had demanded an overhaul of more than 100 plants, including seven other smelters.

But the problem is likely to be nationwide because authorities are not obliged to conduct expensive tests for heavy metals, which tend to accumulate over time rather than be emitted in noticeable bursts.

In a separate case in Shaanxi, northern China, last week, 615 children tested positive for lead poisoning attributed to a nearby smelter, which is now due to cease operating this Saturday.


[News > Technology > Oracle]
Oracle's $7.4bn move for Sun forges ahead
Bobbie Johnson, San Francisco and agencies
guardian.co.uk, Friday 21 August 2009 08.56 BST Article history

Software giant Oracle has cleared the first hurdle in its attempt to buy Sun Microsystems for $7.4bn, after US regulators gave the deal their blessing.

The Department of Justice gave its approval to both companies to move forward with the purchase, after several months of investigation into whether the deal could damage competition.

Clearance had hit hiccups about the licensing of Java, the programming language owned by Sun that runs on more than 7 billion electronic devices around the world including mobile phones and PCs.

Despite Sun's struggles in recent years, the deal came as a surprise when it was announced in April – largely because Sun had been locked in mercurial talks with another rival, IBM. Although the legendary computer company had made a higher initial bid, discussions broke down after IBM reduced its valuation over competitive concerns.

The Oracle deal still has to get the approval of the European Commission, which has traditionally taken a more robust hand to regulating technology companies. Potential antitrust questions surrounding the deal include the future of Sun's MySQL database – an open-source product that it bought in 2008 for $1bn.

There had been concerns that bringing that together with Oracle's own database products would create a possible anti-competitive situation - fears that MySQL founder Martin Mickos, among others, attempted to quell.

European regulators have said they will make a decision by September 3.

news20090821sa1

[Environment] from [scientificamerican.com]

[Environment]
August 20, 2009
Rising Ocean Acidity Erodes Alaska's Fisheries
New research from the University of Alaska Fairbanks suggests Arctic oceans are already seeing the effects of acidification, with potentially dire consequences to Alaska's rich crab and salmon fisheries
By Douglas Fischer

The Arctic's increased vulnerability to climate change is not limited to higher temperatures and melting permafrost.

New research from the University of Alaska Fairbanks suggests Arctic oceans are particularly susceptible to acidification, with potentially dire consequences to Alaska's rich crab and salmon fisheries.

"Everything is acting in unison on the environment - it's not just the ice loss or the warming or the acidification," said UAF chemical oceanographer Jeremy Mathis. "The Arctic is taking a multilateral hit."

Mathis' newest data from the Gulf of Alaska shows acidity levels far higher than expected are already having an impact. In several sites the increasing acidity has changed ocean chemistry so significantly that organisms are unable to pull crucial minerals out of the water to build shells, he said.

Ocean acidification, often called the sister problem to climate change, refers to the rising acidity of the world's seas as seawater absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

By some accounts the oceans have absorbed 30 percent of the carbon dioxide humans have pumped into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial age, buffering the atmosphere from the harm posed by that greenhouse gas.

But that storage comes with a price. The ocean's pH has dropped nearly 30 percent over the past 250 years to levels not seen in the last 800,000 years; if emissions continue unchecked, the oceans could be more acidic than anything experienced in the past 12 million years. Scientists increasingly consider this change in ocean chemistry to be as consequential and potentially catastrophic for the globe as any temperature rise associated with climate disruption.

"When people talk about ocean acidification, it's a whole suite of changes in the chemical system," said Joanie Kleypas, an oceanographer with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. "There's all sorts of stuff going on, and it's hard to piece it all together."

But one of the most noticeable impacts is hampered shell formation: As ocean pH drops (and acidity rises), organisms such as corals, oysters, clams and crabs have trouble pulling minerals necessary for their shells out of the seawater.

It's too soon to say whether an acidifying Arctic means curtains for Alaska's lucrative king crab fishery, Mathis said.

The impact is already being felt by a tiny creature at the base of the food web supporting the state's legendary salmon runs - the pteropod, or swimming sea snail. Accounting for up to half the diet of pink salmon, pteropods have trouble building shells - and hence surviving - at the Gulf of Alaska's current acidity, Mathis has found.

Mathis, talking with commercial salmon fishermen in Alaska's Kenai Peninsula, said many have reported that fish this year weighed 20 percent less than those from past runs. The change could be significant for all Americans: Alaska in 2007 accounted 62 percent of the United States' commercial seafood catch, according to the Marine Conservation Alliance.

"The increasing acidification of Alaska waters could have a destructive effect on all of our commercial fisheries," Mathis said. "This is a problem that we have to think about in terms of the next decade instead of the next century."

But others are more cautious about stating that Arctic ecosystems are any more at risk by acidification than tropical ones.

Cold water holds more gas than warmer water - the reason why a refrigerated can of cola fizzes less aggressively when opened than a warm one. While this means frigid waters off Alaska's coasts can absorb more carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, it also means the waters were naturally more acidic and that species in those waters are adapted to lower pH levels.

"It won't necessarily have a more severe impact," said Oceana marine scientist Ellycia Harrould-Kolieb. "It's having an earlier impact."

"As more and more carbon dioxide is absorbed by the oceans, it's going to spread from the poles to the tropics."

There's also question whether Arctic organisms are more vulnerable than their tropical counterparts, Kleypas said.

Northern critters might be able to adapt more successfully to changing ocean chemistry than tropical coral reefs, which Kleypas compared to "spoiled brats" that have existed for eons in comfortably stable, higher pH waters.

Indeed, the situation in the Arctic could be akin to adding a few degrees to the summertime highs in Phoenix, she said: the typical resident, well-adapted to the heat, wouldn't have to do much to adjust.

But force that same increase upon someone living in Hawaii, where temperatures stay comfortably constant, and the change is unbearable.

"If they're already used to (stress), they've figured out a way to deal with it," she said.

"Not that people are wrong," she added. But "we're assuming things we shouldn't assume yet."

Still, both Kleypas and Harrould-Kolieb cautioned that acidification's consequences are profound and need to be taken seriously, whether in the tropics or at the poles.

Mathis, who agreed that the full range of acidification's effects remains uncertain, said it's clear at this point that the changing oceans pose a threat to Alaska's commercial fisheries and subsistence communities today.

"Ecosystems in Alaska are going to take a hit from ocean acidification," said Mathis.

"Right now, we don't know how they are going to respond."

The Arctic's increased vulnerability to climate change is not limited to higher temperatures and melting permafrost.

New research from the University of Alaska Fairbanks suggests Arctic oceans are particularly susceptible to acidification, with potentially dire consequences to Alaska's rich crab and salmon fisheries.

"Everything is acting in unison on the environment - it's not just the ice loss or the warming or the acidification," said UAF chemical oceanographer Jeremy Mathis. "The Arctic is taking a multilateral hit."

Mathis' newest data from the Gulf of Alaska shows acidity levels far higher than expected are already having an impact. In several sites the increasing acidity has changed ocean chemistry so significantly that organisms are unable to pull crucial minerals out of the water to build shells, he said.

Ocean acidification, often called the sister problem to climate change, refers to the rising acidity of the world's seas as seawater absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

By some accounts the oceans have absorbed 30 percent of the carbon dioxide humans have pumped into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial age, buffering the atmosphere from the harm posed by that greenhouse gas.

But that storage comes with a price. The ocean's pH has dropped nearly 30 percent over the past 250 years to levels not seen in the last 800,000 years; if emissions continue unchecked, the oceans could be more acidic than anything experienced in the past 12 million years. Scientists increasingly consider this change in ocean chemistry to be as consequential and potentially catastrophic for the globe as any temperature rise associated with climate disruption.

"When people talk about ocean acidification, it's a whole suite of changes in the chemical system," said Joanie Kleypas, an oceanographer with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. "There's all sorts of stuff going on, and it's hard to piece it all together."

But one of the most noticeable impacts is hampered shell formation: As ocean pH drops (and acidity rises), organisms such as corals, oysters, clams and crabs have trouble pulling minerals necessary for their shells out of the seawater.

It's too soon to say whether an acidifying Arctic means curtains for Alaska's lucrative king crab fishery, Mathis said.

The impact is already being felt by a tiny creature at the base of the food web supporting the state's legendary salmon runs - the pteropod, or swimming sea snail. Accounting for up to half the diet of pink salmon, pteropods have trouble building shells - and hence surviving - at the Gulf of Alaska's current acidity, Mathis has found.

Mathis, talking with commercial salmon fishermen in Alaska's Kenai Peninsula, said many have reported that fish this year weighed 20 percent less than those from past runs. The change could be significant for all Americans: Alaska in 2007 accounted 62 percent of the United States' commercial seafood catch, according to the Marine Conservation Alliance.

"The increasing acidification of Alaska waters could have a destructive effect on all of our commercial fisheries," Mathis said. "This is a problem that we have to think about in terms of the next decade instead of the next century."

But others are more cautious about stating that Arctic ecosystems are any more at risk by acidification than tropical ones.

Cold water holds more gas than warmer water - the reason why a refrigerated can of cola fizzes less aggressively when opened than a warm one. While this means frigid waters off Alaska's coasts can absorb more carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, it also means the waters were naturally more acidic and that species in those waters are adapted to lower pH levels.

CONTINUED ON newssa2

news20090821sa2

[Environment] from [scientificamerican.com]

[Environment]
August 20, 2009
Rising Ocean Acidity Erodes Alaska's Fisheries
New research from the University of Alaska Fairbanks suggests Arctic oceans are already seeing the effects of acidification, with potentially dire consequences to Alaska's rich crab and salmon fisheries
By Douglas Fischer

CONTINUED FROM newssa1

"It won't necessarily have a more severe impact," said Oceana marine scientist Ellycia Harrould-Kolieb. "It's having an earlier impact."

"As more and more carbon dioxide is absorbed by the oceans, it's going to spread from the poles to the tropics."

There's also question whether Arctic organisms are more vulnerable than their tropical counterparts, Kleypas said.

Northern critters might be able to adapt more successfully to changing ocean chemistry than tropical coral reefs, which Kleypas compared to "spoiled brats" that have existed for eons in comfortably stable, higher pH waters.

Indeed, the situation in the Arctic could be akin to adding a few degrees to the summertime highs in Phoenix, she said: the typical resident, well-adapted to the heat, wouldn't have to do much to adjust.

But force that same increase upon someone living in Hawaii, where temperatures stay comfortably constant, and the change is unbearable.

"If they're already used to (stress), they've figured out a way to deal with it," she said.

"Not that people are wrong," she added. But "we're assuming things we shouldn't assume yet."

Still, both Kleypas and Harrould-Kolieb cautioned that acidification's consequences are profound and need to be taken seriously, whether in the tropics or at the poles.

Mathis, who agreed that the full range of acidification's effects remains uncertain, said it's clear at this point that the changing oceans pose a threat to Alaska's commercial fisheries and subsistence communities today.

"Ecosystems in Alaska are going to take a hit from ocean acidification," said Mathis. "Right now, we don't know how they are going to respond."


[Environment]
August 20, 2009
Got Goat's Milk? The Quest to Save Dairy from Climate Change
Although the dairy industry wants a free pass for carbon emissions, some scientists are looking for ways to help it cope with a warming climate
By Brendan Borrell

In July 2006, a monthlong triple-digit heat wave scorched California, killing more than 25,000 cattle and reducing dairy production in the region. Land O'Lakes Creameries, which normally produces six million liters of milk daily, was short 1.5 million liters per day. All told, experts estimate that the high temperatures caused $1 billion worth of dairy shortfalls.

Extreme weather events and higher average temperatures are predicted to increase with global warming, and that's bad news for livestock producers in the U.S. and abroad. Warming will reduce grass, brush and other forage available in many areas, and it will also directly influence cows' physiology. Dairy production is optimal at cooler temperatures between 20 to 22 degrees Celsius, explains Terry Mader of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. "For every degree above that," he says, "we'll have a decline of approximately 2 percent productivity."

Mader is one of many scientists studying the potential impacts of climate change on livestock, and how producers can mitigate them. He says that although climate models are not conclusive about whether the U.S. Midwest's average temperature will go up 2 degrees C or 5 degrees C over the next century, the physics of cows is pretty straightforward. "You have heat generated from metabolism and digestion, and then they have to cope with the environmental component," he explains, "How do they offset increased heat? They eat less." The decline in feeding results in a decline in output, whether that's meat, milk or fur. They also tend to have lower rates of conception during warmer months. "That's just physiology," Mader says.

In an upcoming issue of the journal Climatic Change, Mader and his colleagues combined his cow model with climate models to estimate milk production along three north-south transects in the Midwest under scenarios doubling and tripling climate-warming carbon dioxide. The researchers concluded that summer milk production in the U. S. would decrease by 16 to 30 percent, about double the normal summer decline. A drop in the supply could lead to an increase in the price of milk, and suppliers in some areas would also need to use electric fans to keep facilities cool for animals.

Other researchers have been looking to tap into the genetic diversity of livestock in tropical countries to create heat-tolerant breeds that can also pump out lots of milk. The problem is that a Holstein in the U.S. can produce up to 8,000 liters of milk annually, compared with lowland Brazilian breeds that are tick-resistant and heat-tolerant but are only producing just over a thousand liters of milk per annum.

Curtis Tassell at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Bovine Functional Genomics Laboratory in Beltsville, Md., has been working with San Diego–based Illumina, Inc., to build gene chips that can help researchers quickly assemble cow pedigrees and analyze milk production in relation to environmental factors. In an article published this week in PLoS One, Tassell collaborated with Australian researchers studying 62,343 Holsteins in their country to identify genetic markers that indicate how sensitive the cow's dairy production is to temperature and to the amount of forage they receive. "In Australia," Tassell explains, "the sensitivity to climate change is higher than in the U.S., particularly because of the drought conditions they have seen in the last few years."

By picking a breeding bull with genes that exhibit low temperature sensitivity, Tassell and his co-authors estimate they can keep milk production nearly constant, about 18 kilograms per day, as the temperature effectively increases from about 60 degrees F to 90 degrees. By contrast, selecting a more temperature-sensitive bull would result in a 20 percent decrease in milk production over that same range.

Whereas the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) may benefit from all this research, they are not particularly keen about the government capping the industry's greenhouse gas emissions. In a statement regarding the House climate bill passed in June, the organization wrote, "NMPF supported the concept of cap and trade as long as agriculture was not a capped industry."

On the other hand, the industry has vowed to voluntarily reduce its carbon footprint by 25 percent by 2020. And in the dairy industry's quest for economic efficiency in the past 60 years, it has already reduced its carbon footprint by 41 percent. According to a study published in the June issue of the Journal of Animal Science, today's dairy producers use only 10 percent of the land, 23 percent of the feedstock and 35 percent of the water that was used to produce the same amount of milk in 1944.

But the big question is what sort of changes the industry will make in the next century. Mader says some researchers in Brazil are so concerned about climate change, they've suggested the country set its sights on goat milk. "That's a far-fetched concept!" he chuckles. "The industries will change, but we have animals in our cattle population that we can still select from."

news20090821nn

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 20 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.841
News
The resistant rice of the future
Cross-breeding could create rice varieties that can survive flooding and fungi.
Elie Dolgin

Japanese research teams have pinpointed the genes in hardy varieties of rice that help the plants to outgrow rising paddy-field waters and fend off fungal infections. Having these genes in more vulnerable rice varieties could save billions of dollars and feed millions more people.

The two papers are "very welcome at a time of increasingly difficult challenges to rice growing", says Michael Jackson, a plant physiologist at the University of Bristol, UK.

In the first study, published in Nature¹ on 19 August, Motoyuki Ashikari, at Nagoya University in Japan, and his colleagues found two genes that help plants to keep their leaves above water when partially submerged. In the second study, published in Science² on 20 August, a team led by Shuichi Fukuoka at the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences in Tsukuba, Japan, has found a gene that helps some types of rice fight off fungal infection — and successfully isolated it from a linked stretch of DNA responsible for the terrible flavour of the wild varieties.

Snorkel genes

The Nature study focused on the threat posed by deep flooding, which affects more than 25% of global rice-producing land. Most rice plants (Oryza sativa) die if completely submerged for more than a few days. But some rice varieties can survive the conditions by rapidly shooting up in height. These plants are typically far less productive, however, so researchers have sought the genes responsible for flood tolerance in the hope of introducing them into high-yielding rice varieties.

In 2006, a team led by David Mackill at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines discovered similar flood-tolerance genes — a genetic cluster called Submergence 1 that allowed plants to survive for more than two weeks by entering a dormant state when completely submerged³ (see 'Rice made to breathe underwater').

Ashikari's team examined three genomic regions that they had found helped rice to grow. In the region that added the greatest growth boost, they mapped a pair of genes — dubbed SNORKEL1 and SNORKEL2 — that together can trigger growth of up to 8 metres in the face of rising water levels.

Julia Bailey-Serres, a molecular geneticist at the University of California, Riverside, says that the Submergence and Snorkel genes can now be crossed into common rice varieties to protect crops exposed to different flooding scenarios. When flooding is deep and quick, Submergence genes might be best; but when floodwaters climb in a progressive and prolonged fashion, Snorkel genes will be more effective. "It provides two strategies and they both have their importance," she says.

Intriguingly, the same plant hormone, ethylene, stimulates both the escape strategies. "What has happened with natural selection apparently is that that pathway is where things are tweaked evolutionarily," says Bailey-Serres. The mutation in the Snorkel pathway probably came first, though, adds Ashikari. Some wild rice species possess Snorkel genes, whereas only domesticated breeds contain the Submergence genes, he says.

Fighting fungus

Flooding is not the only threat to the world's largest diet staple. Rice blast disease destroys around 10-30% of global rice crops — enough food to feed about 60 million people each year. Some rice plants are resistant to the pernicious fungus responsible the disease, but the rice from these plants often has undesirable qualities, such as lower stickiness and poor flavour, so they have not been introduced into widely consumed rice varieties. Some researchers have speculated that blast-immunity genes might directly confer terrible taste, but Fukuoka and his colleagues have shown that resistance and bad taste can be teased apart2.

The team cloned a gene called Pi21, and showed that plants with two rare deletions had around 10 times fewer blast lesions than wild-type rice, yet these same plants tasted awful. Fukuoka's group crossed the resistance gene into a tastier breed, and mapped the foul flavour to a point a few thousand nucleotides downstream of the Pi21 gene, indicating that Pi21 itself does not harm the rice's taste.

Both research teams are breeding more-durable rice varieties. No genetic engineering is required, says Ashikari, because all of these genes can be transferred by crossing. Once these new cultivars are made, however, they still need to be tested — both in the paddy and on the plate. "We need to see how these behave in field situations and how they can be used in a rice breeding programme," says Mackill.

References
1. Hattori, Y. et al. Nature advance online publication doi:10.1038/nature08258 (2009).
2. Fukuoka, S. et al. Science 325, 998-1001 (2009). | Article
3. Xu, K. et al. Nature 442, 705-708 (2006). | Article | PubMed | ChemPort |

news20090821bbc

[One-Minute World News] from [BBC NEWS]

[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 09:43 GMT, Friday, 21 August 2009 10:43 UK
N Korea envoys mourn Kim Dae-jung
Senior North Korean officials have paid respects to late former President Kim Dae-jung, who is lying in state in Seoul ahead of his funeral on Sunday.

The six envoys are the highest-level delegation to visit South Korea in nearly two years.

Mr Kim devoted his presidency to improving relations between the two Koreas, still technically at war.

After nuclear and missile tests in May, the North has made a series of what some see as conciliatory gestures.

The six officials from North Korea's ruling Workers' Party, wearing black suits and ties, placed a wreath of flowers on the steps of South Korea's National Assembly, where Kim Dae-jung is lying in state.

The flowers were marked as a gift from North Korea's ruler, Kim Jong-il.

Fears of snub

The delegation's visit is, first and foremost, a sign of the esteem in which the former South Korean president was held on both sides of the border, says the BBC's John Sudworth in Seoul.

Mr Kim died on Tuesday at the age of 85, after a bout of pneumonia. He was president from 1998 to 2003 and won the Nobel Peace Prize for his historic summit with Kim Jong-il in 2000.

It is the first time representatives from the North have come to Seoul since the conservative government of President Lee Myung-bak took office early last year.

Relations have soured since President Lee cut the flow of aid to the North, tying its resumption to nuclear disarmament.

The delegation's visit is being seen by some as a rare chance for inter-Korean dialogue after a recent series of positive gestures from the North.
A South Korean worker detained in the North since March was released, and the North has said it will ease restrictions on cross-border traffic to the joint industrial zone in the Northern town of Kaesong.

Pyongyang has also offered to re-introduce tourism visits to the North, and reunions of families split by the 1950-53 war.

But there are fears that the delegation's two-day visit could be used by Pyongyang to give Seoul the cold shoulder, says our correspondent.

Beyond paying tribute to Kim Dae-jung, no itinerary has been agreed. The visit was arranged through Mr Kim's family, not South Korean government officials, and they will leave on Saturday - before the funeral on Sunday.

It is not clear if the North Korean envoys will meet any South Korean officials.


[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 11:19 GMT, Friday, 21 August 2009 12:19 UK
NZ votes against child smack ban
New Zealanders have voted by a wide margin in favour of allowing parents to smack their children, two years after a law banned discipline by force.

The legislation was brought in two years ago to try to lower the country's high rate of child abuse.

The referendum asked: "Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?"

The referendum is non-binding, and Prime Minister John Key has said he will not change the existing law.

Based on preliminary results, 54% of the voting population took part in the referendum, with nearly 90% responding No, the election commission said.

The United Nations Children's Fund, Unicef, said in 2003 that New Zealand had the third-worst rate of child abuse and neglect of the OECD group of countries.

'Ambiguous question'

The vote was held following a campaign by opponents of the 2007 legislation, which removed a provision allowing parents "reasonable force" to discipline their children.

The legal change was to stop people using "parental discipline" as a defence against assault changes but allowed police wide latitude to not prosecute cases seen as trivial.

Opponents of the law said it would result in good parents being prosecuted.

WHERE SMACKING IS BANNED
Austria, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Latvia, Moldova, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, Uruguay, Venezuela
Source: Endcorporalpunishment.org
Referendum campaigner Larry Baldock said he was ecstatic at the vote's result and hoped it would send a strong message to the prime minister that the current law was not working.

"There are an incredible number of people all over the country tonight who will be feeling really great about what they helped bring about with their vote."

Many critics of the referendum, including the prime minister, said the question was loaded and ambiguous.

Mr Key, who did not cast a vote, said he would put some proposals on the issue to his cabinet on Monday.

"I think they will give New Zealand parents added comfort that the law is working," he said.

The issue has provoked heated debate in the country, but the postal vote - at a cost of $6.1m (£3.7m) - is considered by many to have been a waste of time and money.

New Zealand is one of six countries to have banned corporal punishment of children in 2007.

The first country to take the step was Sweden in 1979, followed by Finland in 1983 and Norway in 1987.


[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 08:20 GMT, Friday, 21 August 2009 09:20 UK
Japanese women 'still not equal'
A United Nations panel has urged Japan to take stronger measures to eliminate gender inequality.
By Roland Buerk
BBC News, Tokyo

The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women said the country's efforts were "insufficient".

It pointed to unequal laws on marriage, the treatment of women in the labour market and the low representation of women on elected bodies.

But the committee said Japan had made great progress reducing the already low maternal mortality rate.

It said the world's second-biggest economy ranked 54th in the world in terms of gender equality.

It was concerned over the low legal penalty for rape and the widespread availability in Japan of violent pornography, it added.

And the committee said Japan should set goals to increase the number of women in senior decision-making positions in the workplace and politics.

It said the age at which women can marry should be raised from 16 to 18 in line with men.

And a six-month waiting period before remarriage after divorce that applies only to women should be scrapped.

The committee called for immediate action, but did note that Japan had already put in place numerous laws to promote gender equality.



[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 05:52 GMT, Friday, 21 August 2009 06:52 UK
Police held in China gang probe
More than 30 police officers have been detained, say reports
At least six district police chiefs in the Chinese city of Chongqing have been detained as part of a crackdown on criminal gangs.

They were being investigated on suspicion of giving "protective umbrellas" to gangs, said state media.

Local media reported the gangs were involved in illegal casinos, loan sharking and extortion.

The two-month investigation has already caught the long-standing former deputy head of Chongqing's police.

Wen Qiang, the once high-profile director of the Chongqing Municipal Judicial Bureau, was detained earlier this month alongside the head of the judicial bureau.

Wang Lijun, a top policeman know for being tough on gangs, has been brought in to Chongqing to oversee the continuing cleanup.

So far, 1,544 suspects have been investigated, including prominent business people, the China Daily reported.

Earlier this month, a government spokesman said more than 100 suspected gangsters had been detained in Chongqing alone and 14 gangs broken up.

Climate of fear

China Daily cited a senior police officer as saying 30 to 40 police officers had been detained in the city so far for involvement in crimes or for protecting gangs.

Three of the six district police chiefs were detained a few minutes before the opening of a meeting last week that was to focus on the anti-gang operation.

The local government has vowed to "uproot every protective umbrella for gangs", a phrase used to refer to corrupt officials or members of the judicial system.

Hong Kong's South China Morning Post said there was a climate of fear among the city's police forces, with staff working double shifts seeing their colleagues disappear into jail on a daily basis.

The wife of the deputy director of Yubei district police bureau committed suicide after her husband was detained for alleged involvement in a local gang that had monopolised the local pork market, China Daily said.

The paper also quoted an unnamed policewoman as saying she had never thought the campaign could go so far.