Bill to spare U.S. economy from debt crisis also delivers favors

By Patricia Zengerle and David Lawder

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The last-minute bill to avert a potentially catastrophic U.S. default and reopen the government came in at a relatively skimpy 35 pages, but lawmakers still managed to pack in some special favors.

Such stop-gap funding measures often include so-called "anomalies" to address special needs that would otherwise be handled in normal spending bills.

This time, they range from flood relief to funds to speed claims for veterans benefits to money for a dam project.

The Senate and House of Representatives passed the legislation late on Wednesday, sending it to President Barack Obama for his signature.

Within its few pages, the measure contains $450 million for Colorado flood relief and more than $600 million for fire management and fire suppression, after devastating blazes in California and other states.

It also includes $2.455 billion to help the Veterans Administration deal with a huge claims backlog that has angered and frustrated former soldiers, many of whom have been waiting years for health coverage and other benefits.

Further, the plan includes a $1.2 billion authorization increase - to $2.918 billion - for a dam project that is partly in Kentucky. Some conservative groups blasted Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, who helped reach the deal, for supporting a project in his own state.

The project has been under construction for more than 20 years and is far over budget. It originally was supposed to cost $775 million. However, the funding was approved by the White House, not McConnell, and the project is in Illinois as well as Kentucky.

The legislation also includes a $174,000 payment to Bonnie Englebardt Lautenberg, the widow of New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg, who died in June.

Lautenberg was a respected New Jersey Democrat. He was a multi-millionaire, but Senate traditions honor late senators with a cash payment to their survivors.

And it extends an authority for the Department of Defense to continue to support African forces pursuing Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army.

Kony, indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, waged a brutal fight against the government in northern Uganda for nearly two decades before fleeing with his fighters into the jungles of central Africa around 2005.

The measure has several provisions to ensure that furloughed federal workers receive pay they missed during the 16-day shutdown. And it provides $9.248 billion for the operations of the Federal Aviation Administration to prevent budget cuts from disrupting the work of air traffic controllers and safety inspectors.

Also notable is what the 35 pages do not include.

Congress likely was wise to spell out that its members will not see any pay increase as a result of the deal. The bill states that members will not receive any cost of living adjustments during the fiscal year 2014 that began on October 1.

(Additional reporting by Andy Sullivan and Richard Cowan; Editing by Karey Van Hall and Eric Walsh)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/bill-spare-u-economy-debt-crisis-delivers-favors-021147869--business.html
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After Sept. 11, Special Ops Were 'Injected With Steroids'

Audio for this story from Morning Edition will be available at approximately 9:00 a.m. ET.

 

Two recent operations in Libya and Somalia offer a vivid example of how members of U.S. Special Operations are being deployed around the world to go after terrorists. Renee Montagne talks to author Jeremy Scahill about his newest book, Dirty Wars, which is about the rise of special forces.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2013/10/16/235220323/after-sept-11-special-ops-were-injected-with-steroids?ft=1&f=1032
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Obama picks attorney Jeh Johnson for Homeland Security chief

By Jeff Mason

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama will nominate former Pentagon attorney Jeh Johnson, a national security expert who had a role in ending the military's ban on gays in the military, to be Homeland Security chief, a White House official said on Thursday.

Johnson, who served as general counsel in the Department of Defense during Obama's first term, would succeed Janet Napolitano, who stepped down earlier this year. His nomination requires Senate confirmation.

Obama will announce the selection during a White House ceremony at 2 p.m. (1800 GMT) on Friday.

"The president is selecting Johnson because he is one (of) the most highly qualified and respected national security leaders, having served as the senior lawyer for the largest government agency in the world," the official said.

"By advising the president and two secretaries of defense, he was at the center of the development of some of the most sensitive and important national security policies and strategies during the first term."

Johnson is now a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, LLP.

Johnson was involved in the administration's policy over the legality of drone use.

He helped lead a review and authored a report that led to the 2010 repeal of the "Don't' Ask, Don't Tell" policy that prevented gays and lesbians from serving openly in the U.S. military.

The White House described Johnson as a key member of Obama's counterterrorism circle.

"As a senior member of my management team at the Pentagon, Jeh worked on every major issue affecting America's security, including border security, counterterrorism, and cyber security," said former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta in a statement. "I urge the Senate to act quickly to confirm him."

If confirmed, Johnson, an African-American, would bring further racial diversity to Obama's Cabinet. The first black U.S. president has been criticized for having a high number of white men in top Cabinet roles. Johnson graduated from Morehouse College in 1979 and Columbia Law School in 1982.

The nomination is the latest by Obama since he nominated Federal Reserve Vice Chair Janet Yellen last week as the new head of the U.S. central bank. It comes as the federal government gets back into gear after a 16-day shutdown.

DISASTER RESPONSE, IMMIGRATION

Johnson was involved in helping the Department of Defense provide resources to the Department of Homeland Security during disaster responses such as Hurricane Sandy and the Gulf oil spill, the White House official said.

Disaster response, border security and immigration reform - a top priority of Obama's second term - are all major DHS responsibilities.

"Jeh Johnson had a distinguished career at the Pentagon where he has grappled with the challenges of protecting national security while respecting human rights and upholding American ideals," said Elisa Massimino, head of Human Rights First, in a statement.

"The United States has a long history as a nation of immigrants, and part of that legacy includes our commitment to protecting refugees. We urge Jeh Johnson to make this vulnerable population a priority as his nomination moves forward."

A spokesman for Senator Tom Coburn, the top Republican on the Senate's Homeland Security committee, said the next department chief would be expected to bring about reform.

"Dr. Coburn looks forward to meeting with Mr. Johnson and considering his qualifications to lead and reform DHS," the spokesman said.

Coburn has raised concerns about wasteful spending at the department, including grants for domestic law enforcement agencies used to buy drones for surveillance.

Representative Michael McCaul, chairman of the House of Representatives Homeland Security committee, criticized Obama for leaving many positions at the agency unfilled.

"Even with this prospective nominee, over 40 percent of senior leadership positions at DHS are either vacant or have an ‘acting' placeholder," the Texas Republican said in a statement.

"The lack of leadership at the White House is reflected in the holes in leadership at the Department, and these important positions must be filled in order to fill the holes in our homeland security."

(Additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-picks-attorney-jeh-johnson-homeland-security-chief-201029539--business.html
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More Angst For College Applicants: A Glitchy Common App

Thousands of students apply to college each year using the online Common Application. But a flawed overhaul of the system has left many students and parents frustrated.

iStockphoto.com

Thousands of students apply to college each year using the online Common Application. But a flawed overhaul of the system has left many students and parents frustrated.

iStockphoto.com

For many high school students this year, the already stressful process of applying to college has been made far worse by major technical malfunctions with the Common Application, an online application portal used by hundreds of colleges and universities.

"It's been stressful, to be honest," says Freya James, a senior in Atlanta applying to five schools — all early admissions. The Common App has been a nightmare, the 17-year-old says.

"No one likes applying to college anyway, and this is supposed to help and it's made it worse," she says. "I have spent a good number of hours just sitting there refreshing the page, doing nothing terribly productive except for trying to get this thing to work. ... It's not useful; it's not doing what it's meant to do."

The Common Application has been around for more than 30 years and has long made the application process easier for students and schools. With one common form, students are able to apply to dozens of schools at once.

But the number of schools using the form has more than doubled over the past decade. What was once used mainly by small liberal arts schools is now accepted by more than 500 institutions.

The nonprofit that runs the form, also called Common Application, had touted a major upgrade of software and applications as a way to streamline the process even more. Instead, the digital makeover has been a bust and a big mess for many students and higher education officials.

"Application Armageddon"

"There have been issues with being able to import the application itself, with receiving the supplemental materials like the transcripts or letters of recommendations, those kinds of things," says Lisa Meyer, dean for enrollment at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore.

“ We did test the system. But what we couldn't test was tens of thousands of people hitting the system at the same time using multiple kinds of browsers.

- Scott Anderson, senior director for policy, Common Application

"Those are very big things. It's very hard to read an application when you don't have a transcript to look at. ... So I think the colleges have been scrambling a bit," she says.

Other serious technical problems include payments that take days to register or registering duplicate payments. Other students complain they simply couldn't log in, while others were repeatedly logged off for inactivity after waiting hours to submit their applications.

Then there's the personal essay, a key part of the admissions process. A formatting glitch left many students' essays looking like a giant stream-of-consciousness blur with no spaces, paragraphs or indentations.

Many high-schoolers are ranting against the Common App on Twitter. Some of the kinder comments: "I'm freaking out, the common app isn't working"; "The common app is kind of the worst thing ever"; "The common app is broken ... so we're all just not gonna go to college, ok."

Irena Smith, a college admissions consultant based in the San Francisco area, says the problems are adding more stress for her student clients. "It's starting to look like application Armageddon," she says. And an official with the National Association for College Admission Counseling says, "There is a bit of panic in the community."

Schools Look For Backup Plans

A growing number of colleges and universities are now rolling back early admissions deadlines or trying to reassure students that they won't be penalized for technical failures of the Common App. As Columbia University, which has extended its early admission deadline, put it on its website, "We hope this announcement helps to relieve some of the stress and anxiety you might be feeling as the application deadline approaches."

In a statement, Common Application says it's "committed to resolving these issues promptly." Scott Anderson, the company's senior director for policy, says some of the problems have been resolved, but he concedes that others persist.

"We did test the system. But what we couldn't test was tens of thousands of people hitting the system at the same time using multiple kinds of browsers," Anderson says.

Many parents and school administrators, however, are frustrated and angry. "I think this has been a debacle, and the Common App board and leadership should be ashamed," says Valerie Weber, chairwoman of the Department of Clinical Sciences at the Commonwealth Medical College in Pennsylvania — and mother of a high school senior currently applying to college.

"How they have handled the mess will be a case study in business schools for years to come about how not to handle a PR catastrophe — hunker down, ignore and refuse to answer questions," Weber says.

A Lesson For Procrastinators?

Some in higher education are cautiously hopeful that the technical problems will be resolved by Nov. 1, the early admissions deadline for many schools, but others are getting nervous. Some schools are starting to make backup plans that include email, snail mail — even dusting off the fax machine. "That is certainly one of the things we are considering doing," says Meyer of Lewis and Clark College.

Mary Beth Fry, director of college counseling at Savannah Country Day School in Georgia, cautions students and parents to take a deep breath. "Everyone at the Common App and the colleges is doing his best, and — as some colleges' extensions of early action or early decision deadlines will attest — colleges are going to do what's best for everyone."

Admissions consultant Smith sees a "teaching moment" in all this: Some teenagers prone to procrastination may now be prodded into getting their applications done — early.

"In some ways it's nice to learn, as we do as adults, that you can't always anticipate that everything will go smoothly," she says. "It's nice to plan for contingencies and to get things done a little bit ahead of time."

But when that lesson comes with potentially crippling anxiety, she adds, maybe it's not such a great way to teach it.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2013/10/16/235421758/more-angst-for-college-applicants-a-glitchy-common-app?ft=1&f=1049
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Escaped Fla. prisoners grilled: Who helped you?

PANAMA CITY BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Back in custody after using forged documents to escape their life sentences, two convicted killers were being grilled on Sunday by law enforcement authorities who said they expect to make more arrests in a case that has given both court and corrections officials in Florida a black eye.

Among the questions being posed to Joseph Jenkins and Charles Walker: Who forged the papers? Who helped you run from police? What other prisoners have gotten away with this? Who was coming from Atlanta to whisk you out of Florida?

"I can tell you, there will be more arrests," Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Gerald Bailey told a news conference Sunday, hours after Jenkins and Walker, both 34, were arrested without incident at a motel in Panama City.

"We will be backtracking to those who helped carry out this fraud and along the way we will be looking closely at anyone who may have helped harbor these fugitives," Bailey said.

Jenkins and Walker, both 34, were captured Saturday night at the Coconut Grove Motor Inn in Panama City Beach, a touristy area of putt-putt courses and go-kart tracks. Hours earlier, their families had held a news conference in Orlando — 350 miles away — urging them to surrender.

The men, who had fled the Orlando area after word of their ruse became public, did not know law enforcement was on the way to Panama City. They were waiting in the motel for someone to arrive from Atlanta to take them out of state, Bailey said, adding that authorities don't yet know who that person was or where the convicts planned to go. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is working with Georgia authorities to answer those questions, he said.

"They had to have had help — a lot of help — to get to where they were last night," Bailey said. He said the men were unarmed and didn't have much money on them.

Bailey's department is pursuing a tip that someone was offering to forge documents for prisoners for $8,000. He said there are at least two other recent cases where prisoners were thwarted trying to use fake documents to escape.

"The documents themselves looked good, they looked official," Bailey said, although they contained the signatures of people who normally don't deal with release documents, something that maybe should have raised questions, he said.

Meanwhile, Corrections Secretary Michael Crews scheduled a meeting with court clerks on Monday to find ways to prevent future escapes through bogus documents.

"It is embarrassing, but my concentration at this point is making sure that we come up with a process and a procedure that prohibits this from happening in the future," Crews told a news conference.

Crews has already ordered his department to begin verifying the legitimacy of early-release orders with a judge, not just court clerks. He said his department receives a few thousand such orders each year, although he acknowledged that reduced sentences in murder cases are rare.

He also expressed relief that the men were captured.

"I did a lot of praying for the last five or six days," he said. "To say we're thankful I think is probably an understatement. These were two hardened, convicted felons and the thought of them being out there in our state caused me great concern."

The two prisoners had not been traveling together, but hooked up once word of the forgeries became public and traveled from Orlando to Panama City, said Frank Chiumento (Sha MENTO), chief of the U.S. Marshals Service for Florida and the Caribbean.

Chiumento told The Associated Press on Sunday that Joseph Jenkins and Charles Walker knew their time on the run was limited once their ruse had been uncovered. They were under surveillance for about two and a half days, and the men were surprised when authorities finally knocked on their motel door.

A woman who answered the phone at the motel said she saw police coming and they went into room 227. After authorities left, the parking lot of the two-story motel next to Big Willy's Swimwear was mostly empty.

Jenkins and Walker were both serving life sentences at the Franklin Correctional Facility in the Panhandle before they walked free without anyone realizing the paperwork, complete with case numbers and a judge's forged signature, was bogus. The documents seemingly reduced their life sentences to 15 years.

Jenkins was released first on Sept. 27 and registered himself as a felon Sept. 30 in an Orlando jail. Walker was released Oct. 8 and also registered himself with authorities three days later.

Family members said they thought the releases were legitimate and that the convicts even spent time with their relatives before they disappeared.

Jenkins had been locked up since the 1998 killing and botched robbery of Roscoe Pugh, an Orlando man. It wasn't until Tuesday, when one of Pugh's relatives contacted the state attorney's office to let them know Jenkins had been let out, that authorities knew of the escape.

Prosecutors reviewed Jenkins' case file and quickly discovered the forged paperwork, including motions from prosecutors to correct "illegal" sentences, accompanied by orders allegedly filed by Judge Belvin Perry within the last couple of months. The orders granted a 15-year sentence.

___

Farrington reported from Tallahassee.

___

Follow Farrington at www.twitter.com/bsfarrington

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/escaped-fla-prisoners-grilled-helped-180700661.html
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All Is Well Between Miley And The Little People

By Travis October 18, 2013 @ 9:00 AM

Last week, one of the little people employed by Miley Cyrus as a backup dancer complained that she felt exploited for having accepted money from the twerking singer to dress up as a bear and dance on stage. Of course, this was stupid, because fuck you, you were paid to do a job, you did it and you’ll do it again any time someone hands you a signed check. But Miley still wants people to know she’s not a heartless monster with an elementary school sense of humor, so she Tweeted this picture last night of her and the dwarven dancers having a slumber party and braiding each other’s hair.

Sure, minutes later she probably threw one of them into a mud pit before firing a pistol into the air and shouting, “Midget huntin’, y’all!” but the bottom line is that Miley still loves her bitches.

Source: http://www.wwtdd.com/2013/10/all-is-well-between-miley-cyrus-and-the-little-people/
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Intel pushes back Broadwell release - what's it mean for Mac users?

In its most recent earnings call, Intel indicated that it has pushed back production of its new Broadwell microprocessor from later this year to the first quarter of 2014. Will the impact the release of new Mac systems? In all likelihood, no.

The Broadwell microprocessor builds on the foundation Intel laid with Haswell, the fourth-generation Core processors that Apple has used in 2013 revisions to its MacBook Air and iMac computers, and that Apple is widely expected to use in the next iteration of the MacBook Pro and Mac mini.

The hallmark of Haswell processors hasn't been their performance - while integrated graphics performance is better, the clock speed of the CPUs aren't remarkably different than the previous generation. Where Intel has focused is on efficiency. A Haswell-equipped MacBook Air can run all day on a single charge. And while their are some new instruction sets in Broadwell, they new processors are going to be up to 30 percent more efficient than their predecessors, meaning longer battery life for mobile computers still.

Since 2007, Intel has, like clockwork, followed a manufacturing process widely described as the "tick tock model." Intel releases a new microprocessor architecture, as it did in 2013 with the release of Haswell microprocessors, and follows that with an iterative design that shrinks the die size of the microprocessor, enabling Intel to improve efficiency and performance.

It's a system that's proven remarkably effective, but this fall Intel suffered a rare misstep. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich revealed during a conference call to discuss Intel's third-quarter earnings that Intel's Broadwell yields - that is, the number of usable chips - have been especially low, and it's taken a while for Intel to get the fixes it needs in place. The fixes have been made, though, so Intel plans to begin to roll the new processors into production a few months later than expected, but with the necessary changes to guarantee good production yields.

Where does this leave the Mac? Largely unaffected, thanks to Apple's own production schedule. Apple has only gradually moved the Mac to the Haswell architecture, and Intel isn't having any problems keeping up with demand for those chips.

The new Mac Pro, which was announced in June and which Apple says will be out before year's end, uses Intel's Xeon E5 processor, a workstation and server-class chip based on Intel's Ivy Bridge-EP architecture. So that, likewise, shouldn't be affected by Intel's Broadwell blip.

In other words, Intel's production problems come at a time when Apple isn't hinging its design plans around that shift. What's more, Broadwell is an iterative improvement to the foundation that Intel has already set with Haswell, so migrating to the new chips shouldn't be a huge hassle for Apple - when it and Intel are ready.

Are you planning to - or have you - bought a new Mac with a Haswell microprocessor? Does Intel's plans to shift Broadwell production into 2014 make you nervous about the Mac's roadmap? Sound off in the comments - I want to hear from you.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/0gLgux4iHac/story01.htm
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