It's too bad the article didn't print the two phone numbers, I'd like to see if it was really a typo or if some ad designer at Kroger's was playing a game.
Either way, whoever is supposed to proofread ad copy should be fired.
Typo on Ochocinco cereal sends callers to sex line:
CINCINNATI -- Charity-minded callers are getting intercepted by a phone-sex line because of a typo on Chad Ochocinco's cereal boxes.
The phone number is supposed to connect callers to Feed the Children, which benefits from sales of the Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver's cereal. But the box has the wrong toll-free prefix, meaning callers get a seductive-sounding woman who makes risque suggestions and then asks for a credit card number.
Cincinnati-based Kroger Co. said Thursday it was pulling all Ochocinco cereal boxes from its grocery shelves because of the error. Some local stores had them on special display after the launch about a month ago.
Pittsburgh-based PLB Sports Inc., which specializes in limited-edition products featuring star athletes and their favorite charities, apologized for the error in a statement Thursday. The statement said the boxes will be re-issued with the correct toll-free number.
Ochocinco told WCPO-TV that the number was clearly a mistake and he's sure that the maker will fix the problem.
As of Thursday afternoon, he hadn't mentioned the error in any of his frequent messages on the Twitter social media site. On Wednesday, he had urged fans to go to his website to order the cereal and "Start your day with a lil suga!!!"
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Various travel stupidities...
I don't know if these count as stupidities or just cheapness, but they are annoying nevertheless.
I'm driving my elderly, deaf, mobilility-challenged mother to Wyoming via Texas, so she can visit her sister who lives there. So this is not a picnic.
I'm currently driving through the state of Tennessee, on W40.
My mom wanted to stop at some souvenir shop to pick up a cup or something. I didn't want to do this in Nashville, which is a large city. I'm using Yahoo driving directions and I don't want to get too far off the beaten track. Too many one way streets and strange dead ends and traffic in big cities. So, I figured I'd get her one in a small city.
So we're driving along, and I see a sign for a particular city. There's also a blue sign that says "Tourist Info." So I'm thinking, well, I'll go to this "Tourist Info" place, and maybe they'll have cups and t-shirts on sale.
So, I get off the interstate and follow the signs. There's exactly one. Just as the exit road comes to the city road, there's a sign pointing to the right. So I turn, and expact to see a Tourist Info building on my right, within a mile or so. Not so. I'm driving, and I'm driving, and I don't see anything. Finally I figure out that it must be in the middle of the city - and frankly I don't have time to spend 15 minutes driving into a city to find a Tourist Info place that may or may not have what I want. Also, it's taking me further from the highway, and since I have a bad sense of direction, this makes me nervous. What if, as I get further into the city, there's yet more arrows pointing to yet more roads, until I'm thoroughly confused?
So I turned around while I had a chance and got back on the highway.
What they should have, on these tourist info signs, is the mileage of how far away the attraction or tourist info place is.
Why do I say attraction?
Well, a similar thing happened an hour or so later. I see a sign that says, Tennessee's largest independent book store, next exit. So I take that exit. And then, nothing. No more signs. And I'm driving past an outlet mall, but then, nothing but grass on either side of the road. So, is this road going to take me deep into a city to find this bookstore? How deep into the city? I wanted to spend 30 minutes browsing in a book store, I don't have 30 minutes to waste looking for the place, first.
If the mileage had been on the sign, I could have made my decision then, did I have time to go to it.
So that's pretty annoying. And of course it can't be changed -- that would cost money the state probably doesn't have. But you'd think they'd have put the mileage on these signs when they first did them.
Bait and Switch
Then, as I was driving down this road that had the outlet mall, I see a sign that says "Tourist Info." Now, when you see a sign like that, you think you're going to get a big building with a clerk who can give you touirst info. Or, if its inside a mall like this was supposed to be, you'd still get a clerk.
No so. What I saw were two small racks, one empty, one full of brochures. The one that was empty said "This space for rent." So soon, this "Tourist info" place will only have one rack!
But in any event, it was underwhelming. When you have two state-put-up blue signs saying "Tourist Info" you're expecting more than a single 5 X 5 rack of brochures.
What I'm thinking is that there was a large tourist info office in there, but that it closed and the two racks were put there so the city wouldn't have to take down the blue signs. But, it was underwhelming. And, there was no brochure for the Sherlock bookstore, so that establishment struck out again.
I'm driving my elderly, deaf, mobilility-challenged mother to Wyoming via Texas, so she can visit her sister who lives there. So this is not a picnic.
I'm currently driving through the state of Tennessee, on W40.
My mom wanted to stop at some souvenir shop to pick up a cup or something. I didn't want to do this in Nashville, which is a large city. I'm using Yahoo driving directions and I don't want to get too far off the beaten track. Too many one way streets and strange dead ends and traffic in big cities. So, I figured I'd get her one in a small city.
So we're driving along, and I see a sign for a particular city. There's also a blue sign that says "Tourist Info." So I'm thinking, well, I'll go to this "Tourist Info" place, and maybe they'll have cups and t-shirts on sale.
So, I get off the interstate and follow the signs. There's exactly one. Just as the exit road comes to the city road, there's a sign pointing to the right. So I turn, and expact to see a Tourist Info building on my right, within a mile or so. Not so. I'm driving, and I'm driving, and I don't see anything. Finally I figure out that it must be in the middle of the city - and frankly I don't have time to spend 15 minutes driving into a city to find a Tourist Info place that may or may not have what I want. Also, it's taking me further from the highway, and since I have a bad sense of direction, this makes me nervous. What if, as I get further into the city, there's yet more arrows pointing to yet more roads, until I'm thoroughly confused?
So I turned around while I had a chance and got back on the highway.
What they should have, on these tourist info signs, is the mileage of how far away the attraction or tourist info place is.
Why do I say attraction?
Well, a similar thing happened an hour or so later. I see a sign that says, Tennessee's largest independent book store, next exit. So I take that exit. And then, nothing. No more signs. And I'm driving past an outlet mall, but then, nothing but grass on either side of the road. So, is this road going to take me deep into a city to find this bookstore? How deep into the city? I wanted to spend 30 minutes browsing in a book store, I don't have 30 minutes to waste looking for the place, first.
If the mileage had been on the sign, I could have made my decision then, did I have time to go to it.
So that's pretty annoying. And of course it can't be changed -- that would cost money the state probably doesn't have. But you'd think they'd have put the mileage on these signs when they first did them.
Bait and Switch
Then, as I was driving down this road that had the outlet mall, I see a sign that says "Tourist Info." Now, when you see a sign like that, you think you're going to get a big building with a clerk who can give you touirst info. Or, if its inside a mall like this was supposed to be, you'd still get a clerk.
No so. What I saw were two small racks, one empty, one full of brochures. The one that was empty said "This space for rent." So soon, this "Tourist info" place will only have one rack!
But in any event, it was underwhelming. When you have two state-put-up blue signs saying "Tourist Info" you're expecting more than a single 5 X 5 rack of brochures.
What I'm thinking is that there was a large tourist info office in there, but that it closed and the two racks were put there so the city wouldn't have to take down the blue signs. But, it was underwhelming. And, there was no brochure for the Sherlock bookstore, so that establishment struck out again.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Military (In)Justice - This Needs to Be Fixed
Not guilty, but stuck with big bills, damaged career
By Stan Godlewski for USA TODAY
Robert Morris, then a lieutenant colonel, was cleared on charges of conspiring to divert government medical gear for his non-profit. His mother, Lillian, 86, mortgaged her house to help him pay legal bills.
A judge had a warning for the Justice Department lawyers who accused Army Lt. Col. Robert Morris of conspiring to steal military supplies: The case could be "ill-advised." A nearly two-year Army probe had cleared him. And another U.S. attorney's office had declined to prosecute.
The cost of fighting federal charges could "take the guy's life savings away," the judge added.
Prosecutors went ahead, anyway. The judge's prediction was right — a jury needed only 45 minutes to find Morris not guilty. By then, though, his career had derailed. His parents had mortgaged their home to help with $250,000 in legal bills. He had drained his own savings.
The government he had served in uniform for decades could have compensated Morris for some of the losses. A 1997 law requires the Justice Department to repay the legal bills of defendants who win their cases and prove that federal prosecutors committed misconduct or other transgressions.
RARE VICTORY: Va. bankers beat government twice
VIDEO: One man's story of beating the government
EXPLORE CASES: Investigate the misconduct cases we ID'd
JUSTICE IN BALANCE: Prosecutors' conduct can tip the scales
FULL COVERAGE: Federal prosecutors series
But Morris didn't get anything from Washington. It took a gift from a Texas billionaire to help the Morris family pay off part of the debts.
The law, known as the Hyde Amendment, was intended to deter misconduct and compensate people who are harmed when federal prosecutors cross the line. A USA TODAY investigation found the law has left innocent people like Morris coping not only with ruined careers and reputations but with heavy legal costs. And it hasn't stopped federal prosecutors from committing misconduct or pursuing legally questionable cases.
USA TODAY documented 201 cases in the years since the law's passage in which federal judges found that Justice Department prosecutors violated laws or ethics rules. Although those represent a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of federal criminal cases filed each year, the problems were so grave that judges dismissed indictments, reversed convictions or rebuked prosecutors for misconduct. Yet USA TODAY found only 13 cases in which the government paid anything toward defendants' legal bills. Most people never seek compensation. Most who do end up emptyhanded.
The Hyde Amendment did nothing for Morris, whose claim was dismissed by a judge who nonetheless criticized prosecutors and said they had "lost sight of the objective — justice."
It did nothing for Daniel Chapman, a lawyer who lost his job and had to sell his house to pay $275,000 in legal bills fighting a securities fraud case a judge threw out for "flagrant" prosecutorial misconduct.
And it did nothing for Michael Zomber, an antiques dealer who spent two years in prison and paid more than $1 million in attorney fees before his fraud conviction was thrown out.
The Justice Department, which fought the Hyde Amendment from the day it was proposed, nearly always resists efforts to win compensation, no matter how egregious a prosecutor's conduct might have been. Defense lawyers contend that the scarcity of compensation wins, amid a rise in misconduct charges, shows the law's not working.
"The Hyde Amendment is practically a useless tool for dealing with prosecutorial misconduct," said Jon May, a Miami lawyer who co-chairs the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers' white-collar crime committee. For a defendant to win, "the standard is so high that a prosecutor practically has to know" in advance "that his case is so meritless that it is unlikely to get a conviction."
USA TODAY found the government is seldom forced to pay because:
• Many defendants don't apply. The wealthy and those so poor they had court-appointed lawyers don't qualify. Others hold back because they'd have to spend time and money in court and pursue a new civil action against the government after winning their criminal cases. The investigation identified just 92 Hyde Amendment compensation cases since the law's enactment.
• Some defendants are pressured by federal prosecutors to give up their right to seek repayment in exchange for lenient plea bargains or getting their cases thrown out.
• Even those who seek compensation face what an appeals court called the "daunting obstacle" of proving, sometimes in another trial, that prosecutors wronged them. Congress deliberately set a high legal standard to qualify for payment: To win, a defendant must prove a prosecution had been "vexatious, frivolous or in bad faith." But the House and the Senate never held committee hearings that could have defined that standard.
An anonymous tip
The case against Morris began in 1999 with an anonymous tip to a Department of Defense hot line. The caller said the infantry officer had diverted $7 million of surplus medical equipment from a Marine Corps base in Albany, Ga., just south of his own post at Fort Benning.
Morris, now 54, was a decorated combat veteran and logistics expert. Superiors often had praised his ability to work his way through complex military supply rules and get the job done. He played a role, for example, in ex-Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega's 1990 surrender to U.S. troops. When commanders decided to use deafening music to force Noriega out of the Vatican Embassy in Panama City, Morris quickly found and set up a sound system.
Morris' defense team said the medical supplies were intended to help a charity he had founded open health clinics in Rwanda. The non-profit, Partners International Foundation, had been approved by Army brass and had never paid Morris.
The Army's Criminal Investigation Division and the Defense Logistics Agency probed the charges and gave a report to Army Maj. Gen. John Le Moyne, the Fort Benning commander. Le Moyne issued a February 2001 decision that cleared Morris, finding that he didn't violate military law, hadn't lied and didn't misappropriate government property. "There was no theft," the decision stated.
Dissatisfied, the Defense Logistics Agency took its findings to the U.S. attorney's office in Columbus, Ga., which declined to prosecute. The agency then turned to the U.S. attorney's office in Dallas. In March 2001, a grand jury there indicted Morris on a theft conspiracy charge.
U.S. District Court Judge Joe Kendall in Dallas voiced doubts about the case. He said it looked as if investigators had shopped it to prosecutors in several jurisdictions. Getting a guilty verdict from a Texas jury could be hard, he warned, and prosecuting Morris could be a mistake. The prosecutors went forward, and Kendall granted a defense motion to transfer the case to Georgia for trial.
Le Moyne also tried to head off the August 2002 trial. He reminded prosecutors the Army had exhaustively investigated Morris. In a letter to an Army officer panel, Le Moyne said he had met with the prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Candina Heath, and told her "she would lose … and be embarrassed in the process." In a separate memo sent to prosecutors before trial, Le Moyne wrote that Morris had made an "error in judgment" that "did not rise to the level of a criminal offense." It concluded: "Bob Morris is not a crook!"
During a nearly two-week trial, the prosecution called 38 witnesses. The defense called none. The jury acquitted Morris in 45 minutes, a "lightning fast" verdict that U.S. District Court Judge Clay Land tied to the government's "woefully inadequate presentation."
The Dallas U.S. attorney's office and Heath declined to comment.
Legal bills from Morris' criminal case totaled $250,000.He said he faced at least $40,000 more in related expenses — and had exhausted his savings and life insurance benefits during the earlier Army investigation. So Morris' parents took two new mortgages on their Connecticut home, and also cashed life insurance policies, to help pay the lawyers.
Morris filed a Hyde Amendment application. Despite Judge Land's criticism of the prosecution, he dismissed the case in 2003. The decision to prosecute hadn't been totally baseless, he ruled, because Morris' logistics skill and signs that he'd skirted military rules provided "sufficient circumstantial evidence" to infer "criminal intent."
The judge did not rule that the prosecutors committed misconduct. For that reason, USA TODAY did not include the Morris case among 201 misconduct cases the newspaper found in an extensive search of federal court records since 1997.
The prosecutors, Land wrote, "will likely lick their wounds and fully recover. Because of the strict requirements for recovering fees and expenses, Lt. Col. Morris, an innocent (and now financially poorer) man, may not."
The case put a three-year hold on Morris' previously approved promotion to colonel. He got the promotion after the trial, but his military career plateaued and he ultimately retired Aug. 31. The case didn't leave him destitute, but there seemed little hope of repaying his parents anytime soon.
Then Texas billionaire and former presidential candidate H. Ross Perot and his charitable foundation stepped in. Grants totaling $210,000 to Morris and his father arrived in 2003 after the court denied Morris' compensation claim, the foundation's tax filings show. The organization, which often requires beneficiaries to sign confidentiality pacts, declined to comment.
Morris said the money helped his parents pay off their mortgages. It did not, though, cover thousands in other debts related to the investigations and trial. His widowed mother, Lillian, 86, is his dependent; he took over paying most of her bills.
Said Jack Zimmerman, a Houston lawyer who represented Morris: "If Congress really intended to compensate innocent people who were put upon by the government, they've got to revisit the Hyde Amendment standard. … Any court is loath to penalize the government … if it's a judgment call."
A compromise in Congress
Illinois Rep. Henry Hyde spoke bluntly when he rose on the House floor and introduced the law that bears his name. "This simply says to Uncle Sam, 'Look, if you are going to sue somebody … and the verdict is not guilty, then the prosecution pays something toward the attorney's fees of the victim,' " Hyde said on Sept. 24, 1997.
As proposed, the legislation would have required the Justice Department to pay legal fees to vindicated defendants unless the government proved the prosecution had been "substantially justified." That provoked a veto threat from the Clinton White House.
Then-deputy attorney general Eric Holder, the Justice Department's leader, said defendants such as John Gotti, the mobster who beat the rap at his first trials, might get "big taxpayer checks."
Asa Hutchinson, a former House member from Arkansas who led the opposition, said critics feared the law could have a "chilling effect," making prosecutors shy away from worthwhile but difficult cases.
Hyde compromised. He agreed to require defendants to prove they had been wrongly charged. And to win, they would have to show not just that they were innocent, but that prosecutors had acted vexatiously, frivolously or in bad faith.
Congress approved the measure, which Hyde had attached to an appropriations bill, without defining those terms. As a result, federal trial and appeals courts in different parts of the country have issued conflicting and often confusing rules about when the Justice Department must pay.
A U.S. district court in Virginia in 1999 ruled the standard for vexatiousness should be whether a "reasonable prosecutor should have concluded" that evidence was "insufficient to prove the defendants' guilt beyond a reasonable doubt."
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco explicitly rejected the standard used in Virginia. It adopted a two-step rule: To win, a defendant must prove that the case was "deficient or without merit" and the prosecutor "acted maliciously or with an intent to harass."
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta used different language. It said defendants must show a prosecutor's "state of mind (was) affirmatively operating with furtive design or ill will."
The U.S. Supreme Court, which often resolves conflicting lower-court rulings, has not yet accepted any Hyde Amendment cases.
The legal threshold is so high that Joseph McKay, a Montana lawyer who won nearly $17,000 in a 1999 Hyde Amendment repayment, says the legal standard has become "un-meetable" since his win.
Law not a deterrent
Hyde Amendment awards are so infrequent and so small that the law "hasn't been a major remedy for bad prosecutions," said Bennett Gershman, a Pace Law School professor who examined the misconduct cases USA TODAY identified. "It's a very minuscule deterrent" to prosecutors.
Even courts that have ruled that prosecutors violated defendants' constitutional rights find their hands tied. That's what happened when the government brought securities fraud charges against Las Vegas lawyer Daniel Chapman. The case collapsed in 2006 because prosecutors failed to turn over more than 650 pages of records his lawyers could have used to discredit prosecution witnesses.
A series of judges berated prosecutors for violating Chapman's rights. U.S. District Judge James Mahan, who presided over the trial, said it was "not some slight oversight, but it strikes at the very heart of the government's obligation." He said prosecutors had offered no proof that Chapman broke the law and then dismissed the case.
An appeals court was even tougher, ruling that prosecutors had committed "misconduct in its highest form" and "conduct in flagrant disregard of the United States Constitution."
Chapman, now 57, has spent four years seeking repayment of his legal bills. That effort has so far failed, because the Hyde Amendment only allows payment to a "prevailing party." Courts ruled the dismissal Chapman won didn't qualify because it didn't decide his innocence or guilt.
He's now pursuing another long-shot appeal. Chapman said his continued battle is about vindication and discouraging government misconduct as much as a desire for repayment. Without a strong deterrent, Chapman said, federal prosecutors will "do this over and over again."
Defendants who win Hyde cases also say they doubt that repayment awards have any impact on the Justice Department.
Ali Shaygan, a Miami doctor, was charged in 2008 with 141 counts of illegally administering prescription drugs. Acquitted in 2009, he sought Hyde Amendment payment because the government had engaged in what the trial judge called "win-at-all-costs" conduct. Shaygan won compensation of $601,795; the government is appealing.
Even if he wins again on appeal, Shaygan said the money would amount to "a drop in the bucket" that wouldn't change prosecutors' "habits."
Payments in all the winning Hyde Amendment cases ranged from $8,722 to nearly $1.5 million, USA TODAY found, less than some of the defendants' total legal costs. The 13-year payout total was just under $5.3 million.
A bargaining chip
Michael Zomber already had served his two-year sentence when prosecutors agreed to throw out his conviction stemming from a 2003 conspiracy indictment. There was just one catch: He had to give up give up his right to seek government repayment of his $1 million legal bills.
Before agreeing to a dismissal, federal prosecutors used Zomber's right to seek government repayment as a bargaining chip.
A federal jury in Pennsylvania had convicted Zomber of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud for the sale of four antique Colt pistols to businessman Joseph Murphy. Prosecutors said the weapons were worth half of what Murphy paid for them, and that Zomber lied to increase the price.
Zomber, now 60, spent almost two years in a federal prison camp before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit threw out his conviction. It found that the prosecutor, Robert Goldman, had failed to give Zomber's defense the letters Murphy wrote to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates offering to resell the pistols "at cost" — the same price Murphy paid.
Goldman said he did nothing wrong and warned USA TODAY that he would have any article about Zomber's case "reviewed by counsel for potential litigation." He said he regrets only that Zomber's conviction was overturned because of "an insignificant document." But the Appeals Court ruled the letters could have given jurors "reasonable doubt" about whether Zomber overcharged Murphy.
The court's decision meant Zomber faced the prospect of another costly trial. He was unlikely to go back to prison. But he could have been ordered to pay $1 million or more in restitution.
Instead, defense lawyer Gerald Lefcourt reached a deal in which prosecutors ended the case.
"They weren't going to consider dismissing" it "unless we agreed not to pursue a Hyde Amendment application," he said. Lefcourt, Hutchinson and other lawyers say prosecutors now automatically include such waivers in many plea agreements.
Zomber said he had little choice but to go along with the agreement, because prosecutors are "always going to make you sign a Hyde Amendment" waiver. Battling for repayment, he said, was "just not worth it."
By Stan Godlewski for USA TODAY
Robert Morris, then a lieutenant colonel, was cleared on charges of conspiring to divert government medical gear for his non-profit. His mother, Lillian, 86, mortgaged her house to help him pay legal bills.
A judge had a warning for the Justice Department lawyers who accused Army Lt. Col. Robert Morris of conspiring to steal military supplies: The case could be "ill-advised." A nearly two-year Army probe had cleared him. And another U.S. attorney's office had declined to prosecute.
The cost of fighting federal charges could "take the guy's life savings away," the judge added.
Prosecutors went ahead, anyway. The judge's prediction was right — a jury needed only 45 minutes to find Morris not guilty. By then, though, his career had derailed. His parents had mortgaged their home to help with $250,000 in legal bills. He had drained his own savings.
The government he had served in uniform for decades could have compensated Morris for some of the losses. A 1997 law requires the Justice Department to repay the legal bills of defendants who win their cases and prove that federal prosecutors committed misconduct or other transgressions.
RARE VICTORY: Va. bankers beat government twice
VIDEO: One man's story of beating the government
EXPLORE CASES: Investigate the misconduct cases we ID'd
JUSTICE IN BALANCE: Prosecutors' conduct can tip the scales
FULL COVERAGE: Federal prosecutors series
But Morris didn't get anything from Washington. It took a gift from a Texas billionaire to help the Morris family pay off part of the debts.
The law, known as the Hyde Amendment, was intended to deter misconduct and compensate people who are harmed when federal prosecutors cross the line. A USA TODAY investigation found the law has left innocent people like Morris coping not only with ruined careers and reputations but with heavy legal costs. And it hasn't stopped federal prosecutors from committing misconduct or pursuing legally questionable cases.
USA TODAY documented 201 cases in the years since the law's passage in which federal judges found that Justice Department prosecutors violated laws or ethics rules. Although those represent a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of federal criminal cases filed each year, the problems were so grave that judges dismissed indictments, reversed convictions or rebuked prosecutors for misconduct. Yet USA TODAY found only 13 cases in which the government paid anything toward defendants' legal bills. Most people never seek compensation. Most who do end up emptyhanded.
The Hyde Amendment did nothing for Morris, whose claim was dismissed by a judge who nonetheless criticized prosecutors and said they had "lost sight of the objective — justice."
It did nothing for Daniel Chapman, a lawyer who lost his job and had to sell his house to pay $275,000 in legal bills fighting a securities fraud case a judge threw out for "flagrant" prosecutorial misconduct.
And it did nothing for Michael Zomber, an antiques dealer who spent two years in prison and paid more than $1 million in attorney fees before his fraud conviction was thrown out.
The Justice Department, which fought the Hyde Amendment from the day it was proposed, nearly always resists efforts to win compensation, no matter how egregious a prosecutor's conduct might have been. Defense lawyers contend that the scarcity of compensation wins, amid a rise in misconduct charges, shows the law's not working.
"The Hyde Amendment is practically a useless tool for dealing with prosecutorial misconduct," said Jon May, a Miami lawyer who co-chairs the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers' white-collar crime committee. For a defendant to win, "the standard is so high that a prosecutor practically has to know" in advance "that his case is so meritless that it is unlikely to get a conviction."
USA TODAY found the government is seldom forced to pay because:
• Many defendants don't apply. The wealthy and those so poor they had court-appointed lawyers don't qualify. Others hold back because they'd have to spend time and money in court and pursue a new civil action against the government after winning their criminal cases. The investigation identified just 92 Hyde Amendment compensation cases since the law's enactment.
• Some defendants are pressured by federal prosecutors to give up their right to seek repayment in exchange for lenient plea bargains or getting their cases thrown out.
• Even those who seek compensation face what an appeals court called the "daunting obstacle" of proving, sometimes in another trial, that prosecutors wronged them. Congress deliberately set a high legal standard to qualify for payment: To win, a defendant must prove a prosecution had been "vexatious, frivolous or in bad faith." But the House and the Senate never held committee hearings that could have defined that standard.
An anonymous tip
The case against Morris began in 1999 with an anonymous tip to a Department of Defense hot line. The caller said the infantry officer had diverted $7 million of surplus medical equipment from a Marine Corps base in Albany, Ga., just south of his own post at Fort Benning.
Morris, now 54, was a decorated combat veteran and logistics expert. Superiors often had praised his ability to work his way through complex military supply rules and get the job done. He played a role, for example, in ex-Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega's 1990 surrender to U.S. troops. When commanders decided to use deafening music to force Noriega out of the Vatican Embassy in Panama City, Morris quickly found and set up a sound system.
Morris' defense team said the medical supplies were intended to help a charity he had founded open health clinics in Rwanda. The non-profit, Partners International Foundation, had been approved by Army brass and had never paid Morris.
The Army's Criminal Investigation Division and the Defense Logistics Agency probed the charges and gave a report to Army Maj. Gen. John Le Moyne, the Fort Benning commander. Le Moyne issued a February 2001 decision that cleared Morris, finding that he didn't violate military law, hadn't lied and didn't misappropriate government property. "There was no theft," the decision stated.
Dissatisfied, the Defense Logistics Agency took its findings to the U.S. attorney's office in Columbus, Ga., which declined to prosecute. The agency then turned to the U.S. attorney's office in Dallas. In March 2001, a grand jury there indicted Morris on a theft conspiracy charge.
U.S. District Court Judge Joe Kendall in Dallas voiced doubts about the case. He said it looked as if investigators had shopped it to prosecutors in several jurisdictions. Getting a guilty verdict from a Texas jury could be hard, he warned, and prosecuting Morris could be a mistake. The prosecutors went forward, and Kendall granted a defense motion to transfer the case to Georgia for trial.
Le Moyne also tried to head off the August 2002 trial. He reminded prosecutors the Army had exhaustively investigated Morris. In a letter to an Army officer panel, Le Moyne said he had met with the prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Candina Heath, and told her "she would lose … and be embarrassed in the process." In a separate memo sent to prosecutors before trial, Le Moyne wrote that Morris had made an "error in judgment" that "did not rise to the level of a criminal offense." It concluded: "Bob Morris is not a crook!"
During a nearly two-week trial, the prosecution called 38 witnesses. The defense called none. The jury acquitted Morris in 45 minutes, a "lightning fast" verdict that U.S. District Court Judge Clay Land tied to the government's "woefully inadequate presentation."
The Dallas U.S. attorney's office and Heath declined to comment.
Legal bills from Morris' criminal case totaled $250,000.He said he faced at least $40,000 more in related expenses — and had exhausted his savings and life insurance benefits during the earlier Army investigation. So Morris' parents took two new mortgages on their Connecticut home, and also cashed life insurance policies, to help pay the lawyers.
Morris filed a Hyde Amendment application. Despite Judge Land's criticism of the prosecution, he dismissed the case in 2003. The decision to prosecute hadn't been totally baseless, he ruled, because Morris' logistics skill and signs that he'd skirted military rules provided "sufficient circumstantial evidence" to infer "criminal intent."
The judge did not rule that the prosecutors committed misconduct. For that reason, USA TODAY did not include the Morris case among 201 misconduct cases the newspaper found in an extensive search of federal court records since 1997.
The prosecutors, Land wrote, "will likely lick their wounds and fully recover. Because of the strict requirements for recovering fees and expenses, Lt. Col. Morris, an innocent (and now financially poorer) man, may not."
The case put a three-year hold on Morris' previously approved promotion to colonel. He got the promotion after the trial, but his military career plateaued and he ultimately retired Aug. 31. The case didn't leave him destitute, but there seemed little hope of repaying his parents anytime soon.
Then Texas billionaire and former presidential candidate H. Ross Perot and his charitable foundation stepped in. Grants totaling $210,000 to Morris and his father arrived in 2003 after the court denied Morris' compensation claim, the foundation's tax filings show. The organization, which often requires beneficiaries to sign confidentiality pacts, declined to comment.
Morris said the money helped his parents pay off their mortgages. It did not, though, cover thousands in other debts related to the investigations and trial. His widowed mother, Lillian, 86, is his dependent; he took over paying most of her bills.
Said Jack Zimmerman, a Houston lawyer who represented Morris: "If Congress really intended to compensate innocent people who were put upon by the government, they've got to revisit the Hyde Amendment standard. … Any court is loath to penalize the government … if it's a judgment call."
A compromise in Congress
Illinois Rep. Henry Hyde spoke bluntly when he rose on the House floor and introduced the law that bears his name. "This simply says to Uncle Sam, 'Look, if you are going to sue somebody … and the verdict is not guilty, then the prosecution pays something toward the attorney's fees of the victim,' " Hyde said on Sept. 24, 1997.
As proposed, the legislation would have required the Justice Department to pay legal fees to vindicated defendants unless the government proved the prosecution had been "substantially justified." That provoked a veto threat from the Clinton White House.
Then-deputy attorney general Eric Holder, the Justice Department's leader, said defendants such as John Gotti, the mobster who beat the rap at his first trials, might get "big taxpayer checks."
Asa Hutchinson, a former House member from Arkansas who led the opposition, said critics feared the law could have a "chilling effect," making prosecutors shy away from worthwhile but difficult cases.
Hyde compromised. He agreed to require defendants to prove they had been wrongly charged. And to win, they would have to show not just that they were innocent, but that prosecutors had acted vexatiously, frivolously or in bad faith.
Congress approved the measure, which Hyde had attached to an appropriations bill, without defining those terms. As a result, federal trial and appeals courts in different parts of the country have issued conflicting and often confusing rules about when the Justice Department must pay.
A U.S. district court in Virginia in 1999 ruled the standard for vexatiousness should be whether a "reasonable prosecutor should have concluded" that evidence was "insufficient to prove the defendants' guilt beyond a reasonable doubt."
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco explicitly rejected the standard used in Virginia. It adopted a two-step rule: To win, a defendant must prove that the case was "deficient or without merit" and the prosecutor "acted maliciously or with an intent to harass."
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta used different language. It said defendants must show a prosecutor's "state of mind (was) affirmatively operating with furtive design or ill will."
The U.S. Supreme Court, which often resolves conflicting lower-court rulings, has not yet accepted any Hyde Amendment cases.
The legal threshold is so high that Joseph McKay, a Montana lawyer who won nearly $17,000 in a 1999 Hyde Amendment repayment, says the legal standard has become "un-meetable" since his win.
Law not a deterrent
Hyde Amendment awards are so infrequent and so small that the law "hasn't been a major remedy for bad prosecutions," said Bennett Gershman, a Pace Law School professor who examined the misconduct cases USA TODAY identified. "It's a very minuscule deterrent" to prosecutors.
Even courts that have ruled that prosecutors violated defendants' constitutional rights find their hands tied. That's what happened when the government brought securities fraud charges against Las Vegas lawyer Daniel Chapman. The case collapsed in 2006 because prosecutors failed to turn over more than 650 pages of records his lawyers could have used to discredit prosecution witnesses.
A series of judges berated prosecutors for violating Chapman's rights. U.S. District Judge James Mahan, who presided over the trial, said it was "not some slight oversight, but it strikes at the very heart of the government's obligation." He said prosecutors had offered no proof that Chapman broke the law and then dismissed the case.
An appeals court was even tougher, ruling that prosecutors had committed "misconduct in its highest form" and "conduct in flagrant disregard of the United States Constitution."
Chapman, now 57, has spent four years seeking repayment of his legal bills. That effort has so far failed, because the Hyde Amendment only allows payment to a "prevailing party." Courts ruled the dismissal Chapman won didn't qualify because it didn't decide his innocence or guilt.
He's now pursuing another long-shot appeal. Chapman said his continued battle is about vindication and discouraging government misconduct as much as a desire for repayment. Without a strong deterrent, Chapman said, federal prosecutors will "do this over and over again."
Defendants who win Hyde cases also say they doubt that repayment awards have any impact on the Justice Department.
Ali Shaygan, a Miami doctor, was charged in 2008 with 141 counts of illegally administering prescription drugs. Acquitted in 2009, he sought Hyde Amendment payment because the government had engaged in what the trial judge called "win-at-all-costs" conduct. Shaygan won compensation of $601,795; the government is appealing.
Even if he wins again on appeal, Shaygan said the money would amount to "a drop in the bucket" that wouldn't change prosecutors' "habits."
Payments in all the winning Hyde Amendment cases ranged from $8,722 to nearly $1.5 million, USA TODAY found, less than some of the defendants' total legal costs. The 13-year payout total was just under $5.3 million.
A bargaining chip
Michael Zomber already had served his two-year sentence when prosecutors agreed to throw out his conviction stemming from a 2003 conspiracy indictment. There was just one catch: He had to give up give up his right to seek government repayment of his $1 million legal bills.
Before agreeing to a dismissal, federal prosecutors used Zomber's right to seek government repayment as a bargaining chip.
A federal jury in Pennsylvania had convicted Zomber of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud for the sale of four antique Colt pistols to businessman Joseph Murphy. Prosecutors said the weapons were worth half of what Murphy paid for them, and that Zomber lied to increase the price.
Zomber, now 60, spent almost two years in a federal prison camp before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit threw out his conviction. It found that the prosecutor, Robert Goldman, had failed to give Zomber's defense the letters Murphy wrote to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates offering to resell the pistols "at cost" — the same price Murphy paid.
Goldman said he did nothing wrong and warned USA TODAY that he would have any article about Zomber's case "reviewed by counsel for potential litigation." He said he regrets only that Zomber's conviction was overturned because of "an insignificant document." But the Appeals Court ruled the letters could have given jurors "reasonable doubt" about whether Zomber overcharged Murphy.
The court's decision meant Zomber faced the prospect of another costly trial. He was unlikely to go back to prison. But he could have been ordered to pay $1 million or more in restitution.
Instead, defense lawyer Gerald Lefcourt reached a deal in which prosecutors ended the case.
"They weren't going to consider dismissing" it "unless we agreed not to pursue a Hyde Amendment application," he said. Lefcourt, Hutchinson and other lawyers say prosecutors now automatically include such waivers in many plea agreements.
Zomber said he had little choice but to go along with the agreement, because prosecutors are "always going to make you sign a Hyde Amendment" waiver. Battling for repayment, he said, was "just not worth it."
What Would You Do To Own an Emerald Worth $3 Million?
I don't know if the people involved in this lawsuit are all stupid, but I do know this. By the time the dust settles, none of them will have any money. It will all have been paid to their lawyers.
Los Angeles TImes, Sept 25: Trial begins in tussle over giant emerald
The 840-pound emerald became his, Anthony Thomas says, when he forked over $60,000 to a pair of Brazilian miners back in 2001.
He may never have physically received the behemoth, but the proof was on a piece of paper filled out at a hotel party, since destroyed in a house fire. He didn't bother notarizing documents or memorializing agreements, the San Jose businessman says — that's just the way the Brazilians did business.
Nine years later, Thomas stands among at least half a dozen men claiming ownership of the giant stone, known as the Bahia Emerald. Thomas took the stand Friday in the first day of a trial in the legal dispute over the gem, one of the largest of its kind, valued at one point at $372 million.
"Mr. Thomas is the only person who has ever paid a cent for the Bahia Emerald," his attorney, Jeffrey Baruh, told Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge John Kronstadt. The terms under which his client bought the stone were "very straightforward," he argued.
Attorneys for the others claiming ownership of the emerald contended that Thomas' story was ludicrous and inconsistent.
"His story is inherently unbelievable," attorney Steven Haney told the judge, saying that Thomas was simply trying to "throw his hat in the ring." Haney represents a man who footed the bill for the emerald to be shipped to the United States.
Attorney Browne Greene, who represents a group of investors who say the stone became theirs through business deals, said Thomas' credibility had been "significantly impeached" in deposition testimony. He questioned Thomas' contention that the bill of sale was "mysteriously lost in a mysterious fire."
Thomas' is the first claim Kronstadt will weigh. After deciding whether Thomas has rights to the emerald, he will hear evidence from other parties claiming ownership. In the meantime, the giant gem sits in an evidence locker of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, which took possession of it after it was reported stolen in late 2008.
Thomas, who made his money in the construction business, said in a deposition that he first heard of the emerald on a trip to Brazil, where he was buying a different emerald, one about 50 pounds. At the time, he thought that emerald was the largest in the world, he said.
But when he got there, the Brazilians told him they had something even bigger. They took him to see it at a carport somewhere in Sao Paolo, where he took photos with his arms around the stone. Thomas said he agreed to pay $60,000 for it.
"There was no bartering back and forth on what the price was," he said. "They said this is what they wanted for it, and I agreed to it and that was it."
After he returned to the United States, he wired the money to a bank in Florida, then went back to Brazil, where he signed a document labeled "bill of sale" with the Brazilians. The emerald was to be shipped to him in San Jose, but the people who were supposed to arrange it told him it was stolen, Thomas testified.
He also testified that he told the Santa Clara County district attorney's office about the emerald, but was told there was nothing it could do because the gem was outside its jurisdiction.
Attorneys seized on the years that passed between Thomas' alleged purchase and his involvement in the Los Angeles lawsuit.
"From 2001 to 2009, he essentially sits on his sofa and hopes the emerald appears," Haney said.
Outside court, one of the investors claiming ownership accused Thomas of "clouding up" the title to the stone.
"We needed to put it through laundry," Idaho-based businessman Kit Morrison said. "Unfortunately, this court is the laundry."
The trial is expected to resume next month.
Los Angeles TImes, Sept 25: Trial begins in tussle over giant emerald
The 840-pound emerald became his, Anthony Thomas says, when he forked over $60,000 to a pair of Brazilian miners back in 2001.
He may never have physically received the behemoth, but the proof was on a piece of paper filled out at a hotel party, since destroyed in a house fire. He didn't bother notarizing documents or memorializing agreements, the San Jose businessman says — that's just the way the Brazilians did business.
Nine years later, Thomas stands among at least half a dozen men claiming ownership of the giant stone, known as the Bahia Emerald. Thomas took the stand Friday in the first day of a trial in the legal dispute over the gem, one of the largest of its kind, valued at one point at $372 million.
"Mr. Thomas is the only person who has ever paid a cent for the Bahia Emerald," his attorney, Jeffrey Baruh, told Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge John Kronstadt. The terms under which his client bought the stone were "very straightforward," he argued.
Attorneys for the others claiming ownership of the emerald contended that Thomas' story was ludicrous and inconsistent.
"His story is inherently unbelievable," attorney Steven Haney told the judge, saying that Thomas was simply trying to "throw his hat in the ring." Haney represents a man who footed the bill for the emerald to be shipped to the United States.
Attorney Browne Greene, who represents a group of investors who say the stone became theirs through business deals, said Thomas' credibility had been "significantly impeached" in deposition testimony. He questioned Thomas' contention that the bill of sale was "mysteriously lost in a mysterious fire."
Thomas' is the first claim Kronstadt will weigh. After deciding whether Thomas has rights to the emerald, he will hear evidence from other parties claiming ownership. In the meantime, the giant gem sits in an evidence locker of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, which took possession of it after it was reported stolen in late 2008.
Thomas, who made his money in the construction business, said in a deposition that he first heard of the emerald on a trip to Brazil, where he was buying a different emerald, one about 50 pounds. At the time, he thought that emerald was the largest in the world, he said.
But when he got there, the Brazilians told him they had something even bigger. They took him to see it at a carport somewhere in Sao Paolo, where he took photos with his arms around the stone. Thomas said he agreed to pay $60,000 for it.
"There was no bartering back and forth on what the price was," he said. "They said this is what they wanted for it, and I agreed to it and that was it."
After he returned to the United States, he wired the money to a bank in Florida, then went back to Brazil, where he signed a document labeled "bill of sale" with the Brazilians. The emerald was to be shipped to him in San Jose, but the people who were supposed to arrange it told him it was stolen, Thomas testified.
He also testified that he told the Santa Clara County district attorney's office about the emerald, but was told there was nothing it could do because the gem was outside its jurisdiction.
Attorneys seized on the years that passed between Thomas' alleged purchase and his involvement in the Los Angeles lawsuit.
"From 2001 to 2009, he essentially sits on his sofa and hopes the emerald appears," Haney said.
Outside court, one of the investors claiming ownership accused Thomas of "clouding up" the title to the stone.
"We needed to put it through laundry," Idaho-based businessman Kit Morrison said. "Unfortunately, this court is the laundry."
The trial is expected to resume next month.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
China's the richest country in the world - it still gets foreign aid
And the people who give them that aid are stupid!
SFGate: China rises and rises, yet still gets foreign aid
China spent tens of billions of dollars on a dazzling 2008 Olympics. It has sent astronauts into space. It recently became the world's second largest economy. Yet it gets more than $2.5 billion a year in foreign government aid — and taxpayers and lawmakers in donor countries are increasingly asking why.
With the global economic slowdown crimping government budgets, many countries are finding such generosity politically and economically untenable. China says it's still a developing country in need of aid, while some critics argue that the money should go to poorer countries in Africa and elsewhere.
Germany and Britain have moved in recent months to reduce or phase out aid. Japan, long China's biggest donor, halted new low-interest loans in 2008.
"People in the U.K. or people in the West see the kind of flawless expenditure on the Olympics and the (Shanghai) Expo and it's really difficult to get them to think the U.K. should still be giving aid to China," said Adrian Davis, head of the British government aid agency in Beijing, which plans to wrap up its projects in China by March.
"I don't think you will have conventional aid to China from anybody, really, after about the next three to five years," he said.
Aid to China from individual donor countries averaged $2.6 billion a year in 2007-2008, according to the latest figures available from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Ethiopia, where average incomes are 10 times smaller, got $1.6 billion, although measured against a population of 1.3 billion, China's share of foreign aid is still smaller than most. Iraq got $9.462 billion and Afghanistan $3.475 billion.
The aid to China is a marker of how much has changed since 1979, when the communist country was breaking out in earnest from 30 years of isolation from the West. In that year, foreign aid was a paltry $4.31 million, according to the OECD.
Today's aid adds up to $1.2 billion a year from Japan, followed by Germany at about half that amount, then France and Britain.
The U.S. gave $65 million in 2008, mainly for targeted programs promoting safe nuclear energy, health, human rights and disaster relief. The reason Washington gives so little is because it still maintains the sanctions imposed following the 1989 military crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square, said Drew Thompson, a China expert at the Nixon Center in Washington, D.C.
China is also one of the biggest borrowers from the World Bank, taking out about $1.5 billion a year.
Asked why China still needed foreign aid after making so much economic progress, the Commerce Ministry ed back that China remains a developing country with 200 million poor and big environmental and energy challenges.
The current debate spotlights the challenges of addressing poverty in middle-income countries such as China, India and Brazil, where economic growth is strong but wealth is unequally spread. After the U.S., China has the world's most billionaires, yet incomes averaged just $3,600 last year.
Roughly three-quarters of the world's 1.3 billion poor people now live in middle-income countries, according to Andy Sumner, a fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex in the U.K.
That's a major shift since 1990, when 93 percent of the poor lived in low-income countries, Sumner said. It raises the question of who should help the poor in such places: their own governments or foreign donors?
Experts say it's hard to justify giving aid to China when it spent an estimated $100 billion last year equipping and training the world's largest army and also holds $2.5 trillion in foreign reserves.
"China's made a strategic choice to invest in building its military and acquiring these massive reserves, but at the same time it's underfunding social services, so I think it's going to be harder and harder for donor nations to continue to fund projects in China," said Thompson.
Japan's generosity has historically been driven at least in part by a desire to make amends for its invasion of China in the 1930s. But in recent years Japanese lawmakers and officials have repeatedly questioned whether the money flow should continue, pointing to China's emergence as a donor to African countries.
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China provided around $1.4 billion in aid to Africa last year, according to Professor Deborah Brautigam, an expert on China-Africa relations at the American University in Washington, D.C.
Japan has cut its aid down to grants and technical help for environmental and medical projects. Germany's current projects are due to be completed by 2014.
China is cautious about its new status. It is proud of having lifted half a billion people out of poverty and is beginning to flex the muscle that comes with being an economic power. Yet when, for instance, it is called on to agree to binding reductions in carbon emissions, it replies that it can't because it's still a developing country.
At this week's U.N. global summit on fighting poverty, Premier Wen Jiabao pledged to expand Chinese foreign aid and announced an additional $200 million in aid to flood-hit Pakistan.
But he also stressed that China still had to help its own tens of millions of poor. And when Europe's top diplomat, Catherine Ashton, visited China this month, her hosts made sure to take her to a poor village in the remote southern province of Guizhou.
Development aid is not always solely based on need either. Aid groups say China is an ideal place to try out projects, because the authoritarian government can expand successful ones rapidly on a large scale.
But China is effectively robbing the poor by competing for grants, said Dr. Jack C. Chow, who was the lead U.S. negotiator in talks that set up the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a major funder of health programs.
The $1 billion China has been awarded in grants from the fund could have paid for 67 million anti-malarial bed nets, 4.5 million tuberculosis treatments, or nearly 2 million courses of AIDS therapy in poorer countries, Chow said.
"I think the milestone that China is now the second largest economy, arguably, I would say that it's no longer a developing country with the likes of sub-Saharan Africa," Chow said in an interview. "Having money from the Global Fund going to China really detracts and depletes that mission of helping people in the poorest of countries."
Global Fund spokesman Jon Liden said China has not taken any money away from other countries so far, because the organization has had sufficient funds to approve all applications "of quality" that it has received. But China could help by contributing more to the fund, he said.
The World Bank defends its assistance to China, saying it enables the bank to work with Beijing on climate change and projects in sub-Saharan Africa.
"Sometimes there's a simplistic view that there should just be the developed countries and the very poorest countries," the bank's president, Robert Zoellick, said recently in Beijing. "But that would run exactly against ... the changes in the world economy, where the role of the emerging economies are to support demand, to take on responsibilities as stakeholders with the environment, to help support other poor countries."
SFGate: China rises and rises, yet still gets foreign aid
China spent tens of billions of dollars on a dazzling 2008 Olympics. It has sent astronauts into space. It recently became the world's second largest economy. Yet it gets more than $2.5 billion a year in foreign government aid — and taxpayers and lawmakers in donor countries are increasingly asking why.
With the global economic slowdown crimping government budgets, many countries are finding such generosity politically and economically untenable. China says it's still a developing country in need of aid, while some critics argue that the money should go to poorer countries in Africa and elsewhere.
Germany and Britain have moved in recent months to reduce or phase out aid. Japan, long China's biggest donor, halted new low-interest loans in 2008.
"People in the U.K. or people in the West see the kind of flawless expenditure on the Olympics and the (Shanghai) Expo and it's really difficult to get them to think the U.K. should still be giving aid to China," said Adrian Davis, head of the British government aid agency in Beijing, which plans to wrap up its projects in China by March.
"I don't think you will have conventional aid to China from anybody, really, after about the next three to five years," he said.
Aid to China from individual donor countries averaged $2.6 billion a year in 2007-2008, according to the latest figures available from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Ethiopia, where average incomes are 10 times smaller, got $1.6 billion, although measured against a population of 1.3 billion, China's share of foreign aid is still smaller than most. Iraq got $9.462 billion and Afghanistan $3.475 billion.
The aid to China is a marker of how much has changed since 1979, when the communist country was breaking out in earnest from 30 years of isolation from the West. In that year, foreign aid was a paltry $4.31 million, according to the OECD.
Today's aid adds up to $1.2 billion a year from Japan, followed by Germany at about half that amount, then France and Britain.
The U.S. gave $65 million in 2008, mainly for targeted programs promoting safe nuclear energy, health, human rights and disaster relief. The reason Washington gives so little is because it still maintains the sanctions imposed following the 1989 military crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square, said Drew Thompson, a China expert at the Nixon Center in Washington, D.C.
China is also one of the biggest borrowers from the World Bank, taking out about $1.5 billion a year.
Asked why China still needed foreign aid after making so much economic progress, the Commerce Ministry ed back that China remains a developing country with 200 million poor and big environmental and energy challenges.
The current debate spotlights the challenges of addressing poverty in middle-income countries such as China, India and Brazil, where economic growth is strong but wealth is unequally spread. After the U.S., China has the world's most billionaires, yet incomes averaged just $3,600 last year.
Roughly three-quarters of the world's 1.3 billion poor people now live in middle-income countries, according to Andy Sumner, a fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex in the U.K.
That's a major shift since 1990, when 93 percent of the poor lived in low-income countries, Sumner said. It raises the question of who should help the poor in such places: their own governments or foreign donors?
Experts say it's hard to justify giving aid to China when it spent an estimated $100 billion last year equipping and training the world's largest army and also holds $2.5 trillion in foreign reserves.
"China's made a strategic choice to invest in building its military and acquiring these massive reserves, but at the same time it's underfunding social services, so I think it's going to be harder and harder for donor nations to continue to fund projects in China," said Thompson.
Japan's generosity has historically been driven at least in part by a desire to make amends for its invasion of China in the 1930s. But in recent years Japanese lawmakers and officials have repeatedly questioned whether the money flow should continue, pointing to China's emergence as a donor to African countries.
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Calif. initiative to legalize pot picks up support 09.26.10
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
China provided around $1.4 billion in aid to Africa last year, according to Professor Deborah Brautigam, an expert on China-Africa relations at the American University in Washington, D.C.
Japan has cut its aid down to grants and technical help for environmental and medical projects. Germany's current projects are due to be completed by 2014.
China is cautious about its new status. It is proud of having lifted half a billion people out of poverty and is beginning to flex the muscle that comes with being an economic power. Yet when, for instance, it is called on to agree to binding reductions in carbon emissions, it replies that it can't because it's still a developing country.
At this week's U.N. global summit on fighting poverty, Premier Wen Jiabao pledged to expand Chinese foreign aid and announced an additional $200 million in aid to flood-hit Pakistan.
But he also stressed that China still had to help its own tens of millions of poor. And when Europe's top diplomat, Catherine Ashton, visited China this month, her hosts made sure to take her to a poor village in the remote southern province of Guizhou.
Development aid is not always solely based on need either. Aid groups say China is an ideal place to try out projects, because the authoritarian government can expand successful ones rapidly on a large scale.
But China is effectively robbing the poor by competing for grants, said Dr. Jack C. Chow, who was the lead U.S. negotiator in talks that set up the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a major funder of health programs.
The $1 billion China has been awarded in grants from the fund could have paid for 67 million anti-malarial bed nets, 4.5 million tuberculosis treatments, or nearly 2 million courses of AIDS therapy in poorer countries, Chow said.
"I think the milestone that China is now the second largest economy, arguably, I would say that it's no longer a developing country with the likes of sub-Saharan Africa," Chow said in an interview. "Having money from the Global Fund going to China really detracts and depletes that mission of helping people in the poorest of countries."
Global Fund spokesman Jon Liden said China has not taken any money away from other countries so far, because the organization has had sufficient funds to approve all applications "of quality" that it has received. But China could help by contributing more to the fund, he said.
The World Bank defends its assistance to China, saying it enables the bank to work with Beijing on climate change and projects in sub-Saharan Africa.
"Sometimes there's a simplistic view that there should just be the developed countries and the very poorest countries," the bank's president, Robert Zoellick, said recently in Beijing. "But that would run exactly against ... the changes in the world economy, where the role of the emerging economies are to support demand, to take on responsibilities as stakeholders with the environment, to help support other poor countries."
Felons hired to work as caregivers for elderly
This is not new. If you research the hiring practices of nursing homes around the country for the last several decades, you will see that their screening process is either non-existent or easily circumvented.
The people who hire these individuals are not stupid, they know what these people will do.
There's nothing they can do about it.
Our litigious society has ruled on behalf of felons. Who brought the lawsuit that felons of all kinds should be allowed to be home health care workers? Unions.
From the Los Angeles TImes, two days ago:
California has paid scores of criminals to care for residents
Reporting from Sacramento — Scores of people convicted of crimes such as rape, elder abuse and assault with a deadly weapon are permitted to care for some of California's most vulnerable residents as part of the government's home health aide program.
Data provided by state officials show that at least 210 workers and applicants flagged by investigators as unsuitable to work in the program are nonetheless scheduled to resume or begin employment.
State and county investigators have not reported many whose backgrounds include violent crimes because the rules of the program, as interpreted by a judge earlier this year, permit felons to work as home care aides. Thousands of current workers have had no background checks.
Only a history of specific types of child abuse, elder abuse or defrauding of public assistance programs can disqualify a person under the court ruling. But not all perpetrators of even those crimes can be blocked.
In addition, privacy laws prevent investigators from cautioning the program's elderly, infirm and disabled clients that they may end up in the care of someone who has committed violent or financial crimes.
"We are allowing these people into the homes of vulnerable individuals without supervision," said John Wagner, director of the state Department of Social Services. "It is dangerous…. These are serious convictions."
Alarmed administrators and law enforcement officials have warned lawmakers, who have the power to change the program's rules, that the system may be inviting predators to exploit program enrollees. But efforts to address the problem have stalled in the Legislature.
Lawmakers with ties to unions representing home care workers are wary of making more changes to a program they have cut deeply under pressure from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Relatively new restrictions on who can work in the program or receive its benefits, also implemented at the governor's urging, have already created unnecessary obstacles, lawmakers and activists say.
State and county investigators have identified 996 convicted felons working or seeking jobs in the program since background checks were launched last year; 786 of them were removed or declared ineligible, according to the state Department of Social Services.
The rest are expected to be employed in the program despite the investigators' concerns. Among them is a woman convicted of false imprisonment, assault with a deadly weapon, forging drug prescriptions and selling drugs who continues to work as a caregiver, according to state officials. Another person was convicted of welfare fraud, willfully threatening bodily harm, drug possession and two counts of burglary.
Advocates and unions note that nearly half of the 400,000 employees of the In Home Supportive Services program, which is intended to provide the state a cost-efficient alternative to nursing homes for low-income people who need certain kinds of help, are caring for their own relatives.
"We don't want to put anybody at risk of abuse or theft, but sometimes your options of who you can get to work for you are very narrow," said John Wilkins, a recipient of the services and co-chairman of a coalition of advocacy groups and unions.
Further, he said, "I've had two providers work for me who had criminal histories who were two of the best providers I have had. There is a lot of gray area. It is just not black and white."
A spokesman for the Service Employees International Union, which represents most of the state's home healthcare workers, referred questions to Wilkins. SEIU is consistently one of the biggest donors to the Democrats who dominate the Legislature, contributing millions of dollars to political committees that the state Democratic Party and its leaders use to win legislative seats, register voters and even fund lawmaker retreats.
Members' wages from the home aide program provide millions of dollars in dues revenue that the union can use to fund such operations.
At a recent meeting of an advisory panel made up of administrators, investigators, caregivers and others, one county official raised the case of a man working in the program who had been convicted of raping a 3-year old, said Laura West, a Sacramento County prosecutor who was at the meeting.
"Can you do this job if you burned down someone's house? Yes. Murdered someone? Yes. Raped a 3-year-old child? Yes," West said.
West said she is prosecuting three caregivers for fraud against the system. One has been convicted of armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon; another committed identity theft; the third was a drug dealer.
"These are all good indicators that the person steals," she said. "Yet they were able to work in the program and went on to steal from it."
In Los Angeles County, investigators are frustrated after coming across numerous cases of convicted welfare cheats working in the program who, under current rules, cannot be removed.
"It is so unfair that we can't even tell the [IHSS] consumer about this," said Philip Browning, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services. "We have our hands tied. We asked our lawyers if we could share this information. They said, 'Absolutely not,' " due to privacy restrictions.
The strict limits on who can be barred from the program stem from a lawsuit that advocates won in March in Alameda County Superior Court. They sued after the Schwarzenegger administration launched an effort to purge all convicted felons from employment in the program. Exactly who could be barred had been unclear until the court ruling; the restrictions had been lobbed into legislation drafted hastily as part of a late budget deal.
The court sided with the advocates, who represented mostly workers caring for relatives or friends. They argued that the legislation limited those who could be expelled to a narrow group of offenders, so people in need would not lose a trusted provider who had committed an offense such as theft or drunk driving.
Administration officials say they are pushing to root out only the most dangerous felons, and they complain that the effort has met a chilly reception in the Legislature. Union members have argued at legislative hearings that more restrictions would cause people like the plaintiffs in the Alameda County case to lose their jobs and force their family members into institutions.
The battle is part of a larger dispute over the recently implemented anti-fraud measures that Schwarzenegger championed. Advocates say the rules, which in addition to background checks for employees involve fingerprinting of care recipients and spot checks by investigators, are invasive and don't root out fraud because little is being committed.
Assemblywoman Noreen Evans (D-Santa Rosa) said lawmakers would consider a reasonable proposal to block potentially dangerous people from the program if that were all the administration was seeking. But she said the administration also wants to save money by slashing the aides' wages and cutting 200,000 recipients from the program and has even proposed eliminating the services altogether.
"The administration is interested in nothing less than destroying IHSS," said Evans, who has chaired oversight hearings on the program.
Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Denise Moreno Ducheny (D- San Diego) said the budget discussions in which the administration's proposed restrictions have been raised are not an appropriate venue.
"They need to draft a bill, get an author and bring it up in the public safety and human services committees," she said.
Administration officials cited many meetings they have had with lawmakers and their staffs in which they said they raised the issue of criminals working in the program.
Meanwhile, Eileen Carroll, deputy director of adult programs for the state Department of Social Services, says she fields calls from puzzled county investigators who are seeking to keep potential predators out of the program.
"We tell them they have to approve someone who has a murder conviction," she said. "We tell them they have to approve the rapist. They call the state and ask for our help, and all we can tell them is: If it is beyond the [court-approved] list, you cannot deny them. "
The people who hire these individuals are not stupid, they know what these people will do.
There's nothing they can do about it.
Our litigious society has ruled on behalf of felons. Who brought the lawsuit that felons of all kinds should be allowed to be home health care workers? Unions.
From the Los Angeles TImes, two days ago:
California has paid scores of criminals to care for residents
Reporting from Sacramento — Scores of people convicted of crimes such as rape, elder abuse and assault with a deadly weapon are permitted to care for some of California's most vulnerable residents as part of the government's home health aide program.
Data provided by state officials show that at least 210 workers and applicants flagged by investigators as unsuitable to work in the program are nonetheless scheduled to resume or begin employment.
State and county investigators have not reported many whose backgrounds include violent crimes because the rules of the program, as interpreted by a judge earlier this year, permit felons to work as home care aides. Thousands of current workers have had no background checks.
Only a history of specific types of child abuse, elder abuse or defrauding of public assistance programs can disqualify a person under the court ruling. But not all perpetrators of even those crimes can be blocked.
In addition, privacy laws prevent investigators from cautioning the program's elderly, infirm and disabled clients that they may end up in the care of someone who has committed violent or financial crimes.
"We are allowing these people into the homes of vulnerable individuals without supervision," said John Wagner, director of the state Department of Social Services. "It is dangerous…. These are serious convictions."
Alarmed administrators and law enforcement officials have warned lawmakers, who have the power to change the program's rules, that the system may be inviting predators to exploit program enrollees. But efforts to address the problem have stalled in the Legislature.
Lawmakers with ties to unions representing home care workers are wary of making more changes to a program they have cut deeply under pressure from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Relatively new restrictions on who can work in the program or receive its benefits, also implemented at the governor's urging, have already created unnecessary obstacles, lawmakers and activists say.
State and county investigators have identified 996 convicted felons working or seeking jobs in the program since background checks were launched last year; 786 of them were removed or declared ineligible, according to the state Department of Social Services.
The rest are expected to be employed in the program despite the investigators' concerns. Among them is a woman convicted of false imprisonment, assault with a deadly weapon, forging drug prescriptions and selling drugs who continues to work as a caregiver, according to state officials. Another person was convicted of welfare fraud, willfully threatening bodily harm, drug possession and two counts of burglary.
Advocates and unions note that nearly half of the 400,000 employees of the In Home Supportive Services program, which is intended to provide the state a cost-efficient alternative to nursing homes for low-income people who need certain kinds of help, are caring for their own relatives.
"We don't want to put anybody at risk of abuse or theft, but sometimes your options of who you can get to work for you are very narrow," said John Wilkins, a recipient of the services and co-chairman of a coalition of advocacy groups and unions.
Further, he said, "I've had two providers work for me who had criminal histories who were two of the best providers I have had. There is a lot of gray area. It is just not black and white."
A spokesman for the Service Employees International Union, which represents most of the state's home healthcare workers, referred questions to Wilkins. SEIU is consistently one of the biggest donors to the Democrats who dominate the Legislature, contributing millions of dollars to political committees that the state Democratic Party and its leaders use to win legislative seats, register voters and even fund lawmaker retreats.
Members' wages from the home aide program provide millions of dollars in dues revenue that the union can use to fund such operations.
At a recent meeting of an advisory panel made up of administrators, investigators, caregivers and others, one county official raised the case of a man working in the program who had been convicted of raping a 3-year old, said Laura West, a Sacramento County prosecutor who was at the meeting.
"Can you do this job if you burned down someone's house? Yes. Murdered someone? Yes. Raped a 3-year-old child? Yes," West said.
West said she is prosecuting three caregivers for fraud against the system. One has been convicted of armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon; another committed identity theft; the third was a drug dealer.
"These are all good indicators that the person steals," she said. "Yet they were able to work in the program and went on to steal from it."
In Los Angeles County, investigators are frustrated after coming across numerous cases of convicted welfare cheats working in the program who, under current rules, cannot be removed.
"It is so unfair that we can't even tell the [IHSS] consumer about this," said Philip Browning, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services. "We have our hands tied. We asked our lawyers if we could share this information. They said, 'Absolutely not,' " due to privacy restrictions.
The strict limits on who can be barred from the program stem from a lawsuit that advocates won in March in Alameda County Superior Court. They sued after the Schwarzenegger administration launched an effort to purge all convicted felons from employment in the program. Exactly who could be barred had been unclear until the court ruling; the restrictions had been lobbed into legislation drafted hastily as part of a late budget deal.
The court sided with the advocates, who represented mostly workers caring for relatives or friends. They argued that the legislation limited those who could be expelled to a narrow group of offenders, so people in need would not lose a trusted provider who had committed an offense such as theft or drunk driving.
Administration officials say they are pushing to root out only the most dangerous felons, and they complain that the effort has met a chilly reception in the Legislature. Union members have argued at legislative hearings that more restrictions would cause people like the plaintiffs in the Alameda County case to lose their jobs and force their family members into institutions.
The battle is part of a larger dispute over the recently implemented anti-fraud measures that Schwarzenegger championed. Advocates say the rules, which in addition to background checks for employees involve fingerprinting of care recipients and spot checks by investigators, are invasive and don't root out fraud because little is being committed.
Assemblywoman Noreen Evans (D-Santa Rosa) said lawmakers would consider a reasonable proposal to block potentially dangerous people from the program if that were all the administration was seeking. But she said the administration also wants to save money by slashing the aides' wages and cutting 200,000 recipients from the program and has even proposed eliminating the services altogether.
"The administration is interested in nothing less than destroying IHSS," said Evans, who has chaired oversight hearings on the program.
Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Denise Moreno Ducheny (D- San Diego) said the budget discussions in which the administration's proposed restrictions have been raised are not an appropriate venue.
"They need to draft a bill, get an author and bring it up in the public safety and human services committees," she said.
Administration officials cited many meetings they have had with lawmakers and their staffs in which they said they raised the issue of criminals working in the program.
Meanwhile, Eileen Carroll, deputy director of adult programs for the state Department of Social Services, says she fields calls from puzzled county investigators who are seeking to keep potential predators out of the program.
"We tell them they have to approve someone who has a murder conviction," she said. "We tell them they have to approve the rapist. They call the state and ask for our help, and all we can tell them is: If it is beyond the [court-approved] list, you cannot deny them. "
Saturday, September 25, 2010
US Spending Our Tax Money In Other Countries to Combat AIDS
We have an AIDS epidemic here in the US, with straight women now being those getting the disease the fastest... and our tax money is going overseas, via the National Institute of Health, to study why African men don't wash their genitalia after having sex, and now the whole lifestyle of migrant workers in Russia.
Other countries should not be our responsibility right now - at least when it comes to their AIDS health. We know how to keep from getting AIDS - don't have unprotected sex and don't share needles.
If the HIH wants to continue to study human stupidity - why people continue to get AIDS even though they must know by now how to prevent it - why not study that in the US and share the info with other countries. No need for our tax dollars to go out of country for this type of thing.
CNSNews: U.S. Has Spent $1.39 Million on Study Surveying Married Tajik Migrant Workers in Moscow, and Interviewing Some of Them, Their Wives, Girlfriends and Prostitutes
Here are a couple of key points:
Well, then, the opposite should be true. Do the studies in the US, where it's got to be cheaper, and share that info to benefit people in other countries.
And
Well, this raises a point. Is the Eunice Kennedy Institute of Child Health funded by the Kennedys, donations, or private tax payers?
Other countries should not be our responsibility right now - at least when it comes to their AIDS health. We know how to keep from getting AIDS - don't have unprotected sex and don't share needles.
If the HIH wants to continue to study human stupidity - why people continue to get AIDS even though they must know by now how to prevent it - why not study that in the US and share the info with other countries. No need for our tax dollars to go out of country for this type of thing.
CNSNews: U.S. Has Spent $1.39 Million on Study Surveying Married Tajik Migrant Workers in Moscow, and Interviewing Some of Them, Their Wives, Girlfriends and Prostitutes
(CNSNews.com) - The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has spent $1.39 million over the last 3 years on a study that involves surveying a group of married Tajik migrant workers in Moscow, and interviewing some of them, their wives, girlfriends and prostitutes.
According to the description of the study on the NIH Web site, the research was developed in order to address “the major global health problem of HIV prevention amongst married male labor migrants in Central Asia and the public health risk for an AIDS epidemic in Tajikistan.”
“The study focuses on married men from Tajikistan working in Moscow and their risks for acquiring HIV through having sex with female sex workers and then transmitting the infection to their wives or female sexual partners,” the description said.
"The specific aims of this study," the NIH abstract for the grant says, "are: 1) To characterize how labor migration of married men under extreme conditions shapes masculine norms and schemas and HIV risk and preventive behaviors; 2) To characterize how women (wives, regular partners, sex workers) and their perceptions of HIV, femininity, and masculinity impact male migrants' HIV risk and preventive behaviors; 3) To assess the current and potential roles of the organizations involved with married male migrants in responding to HIV and in mitigating masculine norms impacting men's sexual behavior; 4) To build an empirically based model for preventing HIV amongst married male migrants that will help to develop programs and policies focused on heterosexual men and masculine norms.
In order to do this, according to the abstract, researchers would interview, among others, Tajik migrant workers in Moscow, their wives and "female partners" back in Tajikistan and "sex workers in Moscow."
"These aims will be accomplished." the abstract says, "by a survey of Tajik married male migrants in Moscow (n=400), ethnographic interviews and observations of the Tajik migrants in Moscow (n=40), their wives/regular female partners in Tajikistan (n=40) and Moscow (n=~30), sex workers in Moscow (n=30), and service providers (n=40) in organizations that are involved with migrants in Tajikistan and Moscow."
The study is being conducted by Dr. Stevan Merrill Weine, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The study, which is not scheduled to conclude until July of 2013, is being funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development, a subdivision of the NIH. It received $479,394 in fiscal 2008, $450,102 in fiscal 2009, and $460,256 in fiscal 2010.
Weine did not grant CNSNews.com an interview.
The National Institutes of Health, however, did answer this question from CNSNews.com: “The Census Bureau says the median household income in the United States is $52,000. How would you explain to the average American mom and dad--who make $52,000 per year--that taxing them to pay for this grant was justified?”
In an e-mail statement, NIH said:
“The goal of such research is to understand the behaviors that contribute to increased health risks, as well as how these behaviors can be changed in real-world settings.”
The statement continued:
“In the case of HIV prevention, more than 20 million people worldwide have died from AIDS-related illnesses. Unsafe sex and substance abuse are contributing factors to contracting these diseases. Whether HIV research occurs in the United States or in an international setting, what we learn from these scientific studies often benefits Americans.”
According to the CIA factbook, as of 2007 only 0.3 percent of the 7 million people in Tajikistan--a predominantly Muslim nation in Cetral Asia near Afghanistan and Pakistan--had contracted HIV/AIDS, compared with 0.6 percent of the population of the United States.
It is estimated that nearly 1 million Tajiks are labor migrants and nearly half of those migrants work in either Russia or Kazakhstan.
Here are a couple of key points:
“In the case of HIV prevention, more than 20 million people worldwide have died from AIDS-related illnesses. Unsafe sex and substance abuse are contributing factors to contracting these diseases. Whether HIV research occurs in the United States or in an international setting, what we learn from these scientific studies often benefits Americans.”
Well, then, the opposite should be true. Do the studies in the US, where it's got to be cheaper, and share that info to benefit people in other countries.
And
The study, which is not scheduled to conclude until July of 2013, is being funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development, a subdivision of the NIH. It received $479,394 in fiscal 2008, $450,102 in fiscal 2009, and $460,256 in fiscal 2010.
Well, this raises a point. Is the Eunice Kennedy Institute of Child Health funded by the Kennedys, donations, or private tax payers?
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