Author Archives: Jon

Chairman of NRC Panel indifferent to whether Indian Point hearings audible to audience

Preliminary evidence supports these propositions:

  1. The NRC is interested in limiting the scope of the public hearings;
  2. the NRC doesn’t mind if no one can hear what’s being said

Attempts by persons or groups to conceal their actions may be interpreted as circumstantial evidence of consciousness of guilt (Wigmore On Evidence, 2nd edition, 1915, § 178). We could probably find more citations, but the point is – what’s the NRC got to be afraid of?

From Matthew Wald’s piece in The New York Times [emphasis supplied]:

Opponents of the Indian Point nuclear power plants, including New York State, got their day in court on Monday – sort of – to explain why they thought the two reactors should not be allowed to operate 20 more years. It signified the first time that a state had stepped forward to flatly oppose license renewals.

But like much about the tangled history of the plants in Westchester County, the hearing before a three-judge panel appointed by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission was not that simple.

The proceedings got off to a prickly start when a member of the audience seated in a courtroom at the Westchester County Courthouse here complained to the panel chairman, Lawrence G. McDade, that he could not hear what was being said. “The acoustics here are what the acoustics here are,” said Mr. McDade, a former military judge, who was himself using a microphone.

The difficulty was that about 20 lawyers seated at five tables and flanked by cartons of documents, as well as another 20 or so who spilled over into the jury box, did not have microphones.

When Michael B. Kaplowitz, vice chairman of the Westchester County Board of Legislators, rose and said he could not hear the lawyers representing him – and that he was not a member of the audience but a participant – Mr. McDade told Mr. Kaplowitz that he could read the transcript later.

After a lunch break, Mr. McDade relented and had more microphones brought in.

Acoustics were not the only setback for those opposed to relicensing the two plants in Buchanan, on the east bank of the Hudson River 35 miles north of Midtown Manhattan.

It was immediately clear that for the opponents – the state, Westchester County and several environmental groups – to win the day, they would have to persuade the panel and the regulatory agency itself to reconsider what arguments are admissible.

The commission has ruled that for an argument to be considered in license extension hearings, it must deal with problems that may arise because the license is extended. The state contends, however, that the region’s extraordinary population density, when considered together with the threat of terrorism or earthquake, makes the plants unsafe.

“The presence of the Indian Point nuclear power plant in our midst is untenable,” the state argued in a legal brief.

Joan Leary Matthews, a lawyer for the State Department of Environmental Conservation, said in an opening statement that “whatever the chances of a failure at Indian Point, the consequences could be catastrophic in ways that are almost too horrific to contemplate.”

Sherwin Turk, a lawyer for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said that questioning whether the site was a good idea in the first place was not within the scope of the proceeding.

Foes of Indian Point Begin Legal Battle, The New York Times, March 11, 2008.

 

Elisabeth Rosenthal/NYT: Europe, Cutting Biofuel Subsidies, Redirects Aid to Stress Greenest Options

Elisabeth Rosenthal, writing in The Times,reports that European policy makers are beginning to smell the coffee on biofuel subsidies:

Governments in Europe and elsewhere have begun rolling back generous, across-the-board subsidies for biofuels, acknowledging that the environmental benefits of these fuels have often been overstated.

But as they aim to be more selective, these governments are discovering how difficult it can be to figure out whether a particular fuel — much less a particular batch of corn ethanol or rapeseed biodiesel — has been produced in an environmentally friendly manner. Biofuels vary greatly in their environmental impact.“A lot of countries are interested in doing this, but it’s really hard to do right,” said Ronald Steenblik, research director of the Global Subsidies Initiative in Geneva. “You can’t look at a bottle of ethanol and tell how it’s produced, whether it’s sustainable. You have to know: Was the crop produced on farmland or on recently cleared forest? Did the manufacturer use energy from coal or nuclear?”

Several countries — including Australia, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, as well as parts of Canada — have removed or are revising incentives for farmers, biofuel refiners and distributors.

The manufacturers and sellers will have to quantify their fuel’s net effect on the environment before being eligible for subsidies, or even to count toward national biofuel quotas. Many European countries aim to have 5.75 percent of their transportation fuel made from renewable sources by the end of the year.

There is increasing evidence that the total emissions and environmental damage from producing many “clean” biofuels often outweigh their lower emissions when compared with fossil fuels. More governments are responding to these findings.

Under a proposed Swiss directive, for example, a liter of biofuel would have to produce 40 percent less in emissions than fossil fuel to qualify for special treatment. It will be hard to make corn ethanol or even rapeseed (used to make canola oil) meet the standard, said Lukas Gutzwiller of Switzerland’s Federal Energy Office.

With a fuller picture of “the pros and cons of various biofuels, it was very obvious to us that we should not just push forward blindly,” Mr. Gutzwiller said. “We had to base the political debate on environmental analysis to make sure that biofuels were having a positive effect.”

Similarly, Germany recently canceled tax exemptions for biodiesel at the pump and is about to pass a mandate that only biofuels meeting sustainability criteria would count toward the national quota.

The biofuels craze was founded on the theory that plant-based fuels are carbon-neutral: The carbon dioxide released from burning biofuels would be canceled out by the carbon dioxide absorbed by plants as they grow. But this equation does not include emissions from processing the crops. Nor does it cover the environmental cost of fertilizers. Such factors vary significantly from biofuel to biofuel.

Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Europe, Cutting Biofuel Subsidies, Redirects Aid to Stress Greenest Options,”NYT, January 22, 2008.

Solar powered lawn mower

While at first it may seem a trivial application, it’s a good sign. It’s another sign that – despite an administration which has been at best, apathetic about solar power, the market is stil, slowly, finding price-points and product applications which can use solar power. And, individual failed products aside, there is no question that fossil fuel energy will get more expensive over time – and solar energy – however it’s gathered – will get cheaper.

According to the Boulder-based Daily Camera, gasoline-driven lawn mowers produce 80 pounds of carbo dioxide per year. (Based on the context, we believe that’s a figure for family-owned lawnmowers, rather than a figure for a mower used all day by a commercial service; Daily Camera cites the EPA as source, but doesn’t provide a footnote or direct link).  Continue reading →

Michael Yon-Online – independent blogger in Iraq

Michael Yon Online: he’s a U.S. veteran who’s been blogging about the war from Iraq, apparently pleasing and irritating people on both

ideological sides of things. If  there’s a discernible ideology here, it’s the U.S. Special Forces notion that you win over cultures and communitites with a lot of engagement, community-building, and (physical) infrastructure construction.

I wouldn’t have learned about Michael Yon’s work if I hadn’t found a piece about it on BlogRunne

r, a site started by The New York Times, and which had a link to this profile of Michael Yon by Richard Perez-Pena.

The shrinking G.I. Bill

The Post World War II G.I. Bill paid 100% of tuition for veterans. Plus other benefits. Now it maxes out at $800 month. As U.S. Senators Jim Webb and Chuck argued in “A Post-Iraq G.I. Bill,”The New York Times, November 8, 2007: “[i]t is hardly enough to allow a veteran to attend man community colleges.

“In terms of providing true opportunity, the World War II G.I. Bill was one of the most important pieces of legislation in our history. It paid college tuition and fees, bought textbooks and provided a monthly stipend for eight million of the 16 million who served. Many of our colleagues in the Senate who before the war could never have dreamed of college found themselves at some of the nation’s finest educational institutions.

Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey went to Columbia on the G.I. bill; John Warner of Virginia to Washington and Lee and the University of Virginia Law School; Daniel Inouye of Hawaii to the University of Hawaii and the George Washington University Law School; and Ted Stevens of Alaska to the University of California, Los Angeles, and Harvard Law School.

College costs have skyrocketed, and a full G.I. Bill for those who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan would be expensive. But Congress has recently appropriated $19 billion next year for federal education grants purely on the basis of financial need. A G.I. Bill for those who have given so much to our country, often including repeated combat tours, should be viewed as an obligation.

We must put together the right formula that will demonstrate our respect for those who have stepped forward to serve in these difficult times. First-class service to country deserves first-class appreciation.

Senators Jim Webb and Chuck Hagel, A Post-Iraq G.I. Bill

, The New York Times, November 9, 2007.

Stove for the Developing World’s Health – Amanda Leigh Haag, The New York Times

There are two sets of problems associated with indoor cooking in less-affluent countries: toxicity from the burning process, and access to fuel. (The third set of problems would be fire risk, which we won’t address here). Amanda Leigh Haag’s piece, Stove for the Developing World’s Health, discusses some approaches to the problem.

When Kurt Hoffman visited Tanzania in the 1970s as a young product-development researcher, he could hardly bear to enter village huts to ask questions.

Some 30 years later, when Mr. Hoffman returned to the field in his position as director of the Shell Foundation, a charity in Britain established by the Shell Group, not much had changed.

“To find that it still exists,” he said, “I was appalled by it. I said to myself, ‘There has to be a better way.’”

And there may be. The foundation has partnered with Envirofit International at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, to introduce the first market-based model for clean-burning wood stove technology to the developing world.

This year, the team plans to begin distributing 10 million stoves, focusing first on India, Brazil, Kenya and Uganda at a variety of prices over five years. Mr. Hoffman played a leading role in the development of the Shell Foundation’s ‘Breathing Space’ program, founded in 2002, one of the first to focus on the problem of indoor air pollution.

Half of the world population and 80 percent of rural households in developing countries cook with solid fuels like wood, coal, crop residues and dung. In many instances, women cook around open fires, typically with a pot atop three large stones and a wood fire in the middle.

No comprehensive worldwide censuses exist to provide hard numbers.Indoor air pollution, including smoke and other products of incomplete combustion like carbon monoxide, is a major environmental risk factor, usually ranking behind lack of clean water, poor sanitation and malnutrition. The problem does not only afflict the poorest populations. Many affluent households cook on traditional biomass stoves or open fires by choice or because they live in rural areas without electricity or access to modern fuels.

The World Health Organization estimates that 1.6 million people a year die of health effects resulting from toxic indoor air. The problem disproportionately falls on women and children who spend hours each day around the hearth.

Of that 1.6 million, one million children die of pneumonia, and 600,000 women die prematurely of chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases like bronchitis and emphysema. In China, epidemiologic studies indicate that 420,000 people a year die because of indoor air pollution, 40 percent more than the premature deaths attributed to outdoor air hazards in the pollution-choked urban areas there.

Envirofit was formed in 2003 as a result of two senior undergraduate research projects at the Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory of Colorado State. It develops engineering and technology solutions.

The Shell Foundation estimates that it has invested $10 million in Envirofit’s effort to produce 300,000 stoves on a pilot scale and plans to invest $25 million more to sponsor the stove effort.

For decades, numerous small-scale efforts to introduce improved stoves in countries like China, India and Nepal have achieved modest gains.

“You can design something that looks great in the laboratory,” Kirk R. Smith, an environmental health scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, said. “But you get it out in the households, and five years later, you can’t even find it, let alone see that it’s actually achieving.”

Dr. Smith, who is not involved with the Shell-Envirofit partnership and who will be an independent reviewer of the program, has researched health effects of air pollution in the developing world since the early 1980s. He said one challenge had been the lack of randomized research trials that can show cause and effect, rather than just correlations.

“It’s been shown that children living in houses using open fires with solid fuels will have more pneumonia than children living in houses that are using cleaner fuels,” Dr. Smith said. “But those houses are different in other ways, too. They tend to be richer, have better education and may have better nutrition. So the effect may not be due to just the pollution.”

Dr. Smith and his colleagues have recently completed a five-year study of Guatemalans cooking on open fires versus improved stoves, the first such randomized trial, they say. The research, the team says, combined with studies in Asia, suggests additional health problems from indoor air pollution, including higher frequency of cataracts, partial blindness, tuberculosis, low birth weights and high blood pressure. The researchers found that cleaner stoves had larger effects than reducing salt in the diet on lowering blood pressure in women, results published last July in Environmental Health Perspectives.

Scientists measure air pollutants by the concentration of small particles considered safe to inhale. The W.H.O. target is an annual average of 10 to 35 micrograms of particles in a cubic meter of air per year. The Environmental Protection Agency calls for 15.

Yet houses that rely on traditional stoves or open fires typically register in the hundreds or, in some cases, thousands, Dr. Smith said.

At Envirofit headquarters in the old Fort Collins power plant, researchers and engineers are designing and testing clean-burning stoves that they say will significantly improve air quality and require less wood fuel. An important feature will be the ability to control carefully the air pulled in, said Bryan Willson, a mechanical engineer who founded the Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory and was a co-founder of Envirofit.

Too much intake cools the process, leading to incomplete combustion. In a modern gas stove, nearly 100 percent of the carbon is burned to carbon dioxide. With traditional stoves in the developing world, 90 percent is fully converted to CO2. The remainder forms a toxic cocktail of byproducts like benzene, carbon monoxide and formaldehyde that billow out in soot and smoke. Envirofit’s stoves will be designed with an insulated chamber that cuts down on energy loss and maintains heat inside the chamber walls.

Envirofit has plans not only to engineer the stoves, but also to market them. The hundreds of prior stove projects, Dr. Willson said, were not “guided by a real strategic vision of what it means to understand who the customer is, what they need and how to get it produced.”

Envirofit has been visiting rural areas to study factors like the ergonomics of cooking habits and preferred color schemes. In India, women tend to squat while cooking, making height an important consideration.

Envirofit will offer a variety of sleek ceramic stoves from single to multipot, with and without chimneys, and with colors like apple red, baby blue and gold. The cost is to start at $10 to $20 and run to $150 to $200.

“The women and the families that are buying them are no different from us,” the Envirofit program coordinator, Jaime Whitlock, said. “They want to buy something they’re proud of.”

Amanda Leigh Haag, Stove for the Developing World’s Health – New York Times.

NYT: “Blood Thinner Linked to China and 19 deaths Had a Contaminant, F.D.A. Says”

According to Gardiner Harris and Wald Bogdanich of the Times,

  • The FDA has received reports of 785 serious  injuries and forty-six (46) deaths associated with Heparin;
  • But the FDA has taken the position that only 19 of the 46 deaths are in fact, related to Heparin;
  • Baxter International says it’s only four deaths.

Harris and Bogdanich also make it clear how difficult it can be to investigate these typpes of cases after the fact:

Federal drug regulators said Wednesday that a critical blood thinner that had been linked to at least 19 deaths and whose raw components were produced in China contained a possibly counterfeit ingredient that mimicked the real drug. (emphasis added)

Routine tests failed to distinguish the contaminant from the drug, heparin. Only sophisticated magnetic resonance imaging tests uncovered that as much as 20 percent of the product’s active ingredient was a heparin mimic blended in with the real thing. Federal officials said they did not know what the contaminant was.

In their piece the following day, Harris and Bogdanich reported that:

Food and Drug Administration officials announced that they were asking all companies in the United States that produce heparin to test it with two new procedures.

The complex tests, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and capillary electrophoresis, are the only ones that can uncover whether the drug contains a possibly counterfeit ingredient.

“German Authorities Report Problems With Blood Thinner,” March 7, 2008.

The Times has been  on top of this story: a search for “blood thinner China” on the Times website yielded at least eight articles on the subject in the last five weeks.

Perhaps it’s time to think about making our drugs at home – rather than becoming dependent on  a country without real regulation to produce medication,  a commodity for which quality control is asolutely critical. One wonders what the those who are rosy-eyed about free-trade think about this. (We’ll keep an eye out to see if The Times’s Thomas Friedman weighs in on this).

James McKinley in the Times: memory sticks are Samizdat technology in Cuba

James C. McKinley, Jr.’s  report from Havana last Thursday describes Cuban government attempts to control information flow, including Internet access. Cubans have extremely limited web access, but they use memory stick and flash drives to store and distribute information:

A growing underground network of young people armed with computer memory sticks, digital cameras and clandestine Internet hookups has been mounting some challenges to the Cuban government in recent months, spreading news that the official state media try to suppress.Last month, students at a prestigious computer science university videotaped an ugly confrontation they had with Ricardo Alarcón, the president of the National Assembly.

Mr. Alarcón seemed flummoxed when students grilled him on why they could not travel abroad, stay at hotels, earn better wages or use search engines like Google. The video spread like wildfire through Havana, passed from person to person, and seriously damaged Mr. Alarcón’s reputation in some circles.

Something similar happened in late January when officials tried to impose a tax on the tips and wages of employees of foreign companies. Workers erupted in jeers and shouts when told about the new tax, a moment caught on a cellphone camera and passed along by memory sticks.

“It passes from flash drive to flash drive,” said Ariel, 33, a computer programmer, who, like almost everyone else interviewed for this article, asked that his last name not be used for fear of political persecution. “This is going to get out of the government’s hands because the technology is moving so rapidly.”

Cuban officials have long limited the public’s access to the Internet and digital videos, tearing down unauthorized satellite dishes and keeping down the number of Internet cafes open to Cubans. Only one Internet cafe remains open in Old Havana, down from three a few years ago.

Hidden in a small room in the depths of the Capitol building, the state-owned cafe charges a third of the average Cuban’s monthly salary – about $5 – to use a computer for an hour. The other two former Internet cafes in central Havana have been converted into “postal services” that let Cubans send e-mail messages over a closed network on the island with no links to the Internet.

 Because Ms. Sánchez, like most Cubans, can get online for only a few minutes at a time, she writes almost all her essays beforehand, then goes to the one Internet cafe, signs on, updates her Web site, copies some key pages that interest her and walks out with everything on a memory stick. Friends copy the information, and it passes from hand to hand. “It’s a solid underground,” she said. “The government cannot control the information.”

It is spread by readers like Ricardo, 28, a philosophy student at the University of Havana who sells memory sticks to other students. European friends buy blank flash drives, and others carry them into Cuba, where the drives available through normal channels are very expensive and scarce.

Like many young Cubans, Ricardo plays a game of cat and mouse with the authorities. He doubts that the government will ever let ordinary citizens have access to the Internet in their homes. “That’s far too dangerous,” he said. “Daddy State doesn’t want you to get informed, so it preventively keeps you from surfing.”

James McKinley, “Cyber-Rebels in Cuba Defy State’s Limits,” The New York Times, March 6, 2008.

Doesn’t this make a good case for relaxing

the United States trade embargo on Cuba? With the limited access to information, the government’s control of information flowing is weakening. An influx of visitors from the United States would probably leadto more phone and data lines – and the more connections there are, the harder they’ll be to control. The more visitors, and the more luggage the bring, the more flash drives will be left behind.

See also:

Jad Mouawad – NYT: Wary of Protests, Exxon Plans Natural Gas Terminal in the Atlantic – New York Times

Exxon is going to build a natural-gas processing facility in a large”boatlike structure” 20 miles off the Jersey coast. According to Times reporter Jad Mouawad, this is “a move meant to deflect safety and environmental concerns aboutproximity to populated areas. [photopress:2007_exxon_offshore_NJ_map.jpg,full,alignleft]

Perceptions aside, which is more likely (probability of occurrence) to occur, or a leak/accident/fire n on-shore facility? What’s to preclude a system failure which causes failure both in populated areas and in the Atlantic. From Mouawad’s piece about the pipeline, which will be connectedto the Buckeye NY/NJ pipes. Exxon wants to:

build a $1 billion floating terminal for liquefied natural gas about 20 miles off the coast of New Jersey, a move meant to deflect safety and environmental concerns about proximity to populated areas.

The company plans to anchor a boatlike structure in the Atlantic Ocean to process natural gas imported by cargo ships from faraway suppliers in the Middle East, Europe and Africa.

The terminal, if approved, would connect through an underwater pipeline to an existing network that feeds New York and New Jersey, two of the top consumer markets in North America.

Exxon’s project is the latest of several dozen gas terminals that have been proposed in recent years in the United States. Energy specialists say more natural gas supplies will be needed to meet the growth in consumption and to make up for an expected drop in imports from Canada.

In many cases, energy companies have faced stiff opposition in finding sites for large new terminals. This has become one of the thorniest energy issues, especially since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, raised security concerns about cargo ships carrying liquefied gas near big cities.

Still, companies are slowly moving forward with their plans. Since 2002, federal and state authorities have approved 18 new liquefied gas terminals around the country, including 4 offshore, though most analysts do not expect all of them to be built.

While most of the projects are planned along the Gulf Coast, the northeastern corner of the country is attracting attention because of its reliance on natural gas and its large populations. Two terminals to be built off Massachusetts gained approval last year. For Exxon, going so far offshore is an effort to duck the vociferous opposition that has dogged projects on both coasts. Its project, called BlueOcean Energy, would be able to supply 1.2 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day, about 2 percent of the nation’s gas consumption — and enough to meet the needs of five million residential customers.

Exxon’s project is the third offshore terminal proposed for the greater New York region in recent years.

One proposal, to build a gas terminal in the middle of Long Island Sound, has aroused concern since its announcement in 2004 because of the impact it might have on fishing and boating; it is strongly opposed by shore communities and politicians.

That opposition could intensify in coming months as the project, which is known as Broadwater and is a joint venture by Royal Dutch Shell and TransCanada, is expected to receive notice about federal and state permits.

Another company, the Atlantic Sea Island Group, plans to build a terminal for liquefied natural gas on an artificial island about 14 miles south of Long Island, a project called Safe Harbor Energy.

Opponents of natural gas terminals have cited the potential for leaks, fires, explosions or terrorist bombings. The industry has generally argued that the terminals are secure and accidents are rare, but it has also started looking for ways to build them as far as possible from population centers.

Jad Mouawad, “Wary of Protests, Exxon Plans Natural Gas Terminal in the Atlantic, The New York Times,December 12, 2007.

Archive of Mouawad’s pieces – he’s one of the Times’ in-house experts, I think.

McKinsey Report: U.S. could cut 40% of greenhouse gases with “negative” costs

McKinsey & Company released a report in November called “Reducing Greenhouse Gases: How Much at What Cost?“

From the executive summary, available here:

  • Almost 40 percent of abatement could be achieved at “negative” marginal costs, meaning that investing in these options would generate positive economic returns over their lifecycle. The cumulative savings created by these negative-cost options could substantially offset (on a societal basis) the additional spending required for the options with positive marginal costs.

McKinsey is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a bunch of sandal-wearing, left-wing treehuggers. In fact, this particular study was funded by a number of energy companies. Nonetheless, they’ve come to these conclusions, and a quick look at their prominently website features progressive energy policy. For example, “The Case For Investing in Energy Productivity.”

Perhaps this represents a shift of the political center of gravity among American corporations. If so, a welcome change.

Thanks to David Roberts of Grist.org; see his piece “It Can Be Done” for more details, as well as Mathew Wald’s “Study Details How U.S. Could Cut 28% of Greenhouse Gases.“

New York City receives larger DHS grant for subway security

Jen Chung at Gothamist and Al Baker of the Times have good coverage of the new, much-increased Department of Homeland Security grant to provide security for New York City subways, including the 16 underwater tunnels that link the boroughs to each other, and to the mainland (the Bronx, of course, is actually on the mainland). From Gothamist:

Continue reading →

The Lede on current ricin incident(s)

The New York Times’ blog about news coverage, The Lede, has a good piece by Patrick J. Lyons about the current Las Vegas ricin incident. “Scary Stuff That Won’t Stay in Vegas

” updates the story concisely, and provides some context:

After all, nobody is known to have been hurt so far, though seven people — the room’s occupant, three workers at the motel and three cops — have been sent to hospitals for observation, just in case they might have been exposed to the chemical in question, which was found in a package in the room. Update: The occupant of the room is in critical condition and has been hospitalized for several weeks; it now appears that it was a friend or relative who went to the room on Thursday to retrieve his belongings who found the package and reported it.. The authorities are saying they have no reason to think the episode has anything to do with terrorism.

But this wasn’t just any nasty industrial byproduct, it was ricin — the stuff of mystery novels and cloak-and-dagger schemes. And that makes everybody’s ears prick up.

Continue reading →

“I don’t like the word investigation”

Lakhdar Brahimi is Chair of the Independent Panel on Safety and Security of UN Personnel and Premises. That is “a new panel that will look into attacks on United Nations offices,” prompted by the bombing of a United Nations facility last December, which killed 17 staff members. Warren Hoge, in his Times account notes that

In a letter to Mr. Ban, the staff union complained that it had played no role in setting up the panel, despite concerns that it had repeatedly voiced about protecting personnel, dating from the bombing of United Nations headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003. That blast killed 22 staff members, including the chief of the mission, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

The union said it was concerned that the Brahimi panel would not examine the circumstances behind the Algiers bombing “but rather be a global examination of security threats.”

It said, “We believe that without accountability, there is impunity,” and urged Mr. Ban “not to be complicit in a cover-up of what happened.”

The United Nations’ transcript of Brahimi’s press conference

contains three references to Sherlock Holmes, in each case Brahimi stressing that he doesn’t intend to place blame, that he’s not a policeman. The Algerians, according to Hoge, protested when the Secretary General formed the panel.

Perhaps it would also have been useful for him to emphasize another difference: that Sherlock Holmes was fictional and that he, and the panel, are not fictional.

See also “UN Staff Council calls on secretary-general to withdraw all UN staff from Iraq ,” IHT, August 7, 2007.

It appears – from our brief research – that, but for the United Nations itself mentioning it publicly, the staff union’s (formally known as the United Nations Staff Council

) position and letter might not have been made public. There’s no mention of it on their website.

If it’s possible to mollify Algeria – perhaps “appease” is the better word for a country which objects to scrutiny when diplomats are killed on its own soil – and to make United Nations employees feel that their safety is a real concern – that would be ideal. But if there’s a choice between the two? Without its staff, the United Nations is just a nice idea with some really nice buildings. It’s only a fraction of the staff operating in hazardous areas, but those assignments and their outcomes are critical, and doubtless have an effect on the UN’s credibility.

Comcast admits paying attendees at FCC hearing | Philadelphia Inquirer | 02/28/2008

Probably not illegal; but it doesn’t quite seem right, either. According to Bob Fernandez of The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Comcast Corp. admitted yesterday that it paid people to attend a government hearing. Company critics say the freelance attendees were there to crowd them out; Comcast says they were merely saving seats for employees.

The five-hour hearing Monday at Harvard University was organized by the Federal Communications Commission to address the issue of net neutrality, a hot-button topic for those who think there should be minimal restrictions on Internet traffic.

The topic has drawn wide interest from college students, media-reform groups, and Internet companies.

An official at Free Press, a nonprofit advocacy group that has criticized Comcast for limiting the amount of data some of its customers send over its network, accused the cable company of “stacking the deck” at the hearing with the 30 to 40 “seat-warmers.” An official at Harvard said dozens of real participants were left standing outside the auditorium with placards.

“They were taking seats away from other citizens who had a right to be there,” said Catherine Bracy, administrative manager for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School. “It was a PR thing. [Comcast] wanted more people in the room who were sympathetic.”

Comcast feared a loud and critical crowd at the hearing where executive vice president David Cohen was scheduled to testify. Comcast, which offers high-speed Internet to 48 million homes, has said it needs to manage Internet use so that a small number of customers transmitting very large video files do not clog the network for everyone.

Comcast admits paying attendees at FCC hearing | Philadelphia Inquirer | 02/28/2008

Via Daring Fireball.