When we first saw Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim back in December
Source: http://gizmodo.com/pacific-rims-latest-trailer-is-even-better-than-the-fi-484612299
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SAVAR, Bangladesh (AP) ? The heat in the rubble was sweltering. It closed in on his body like the darkness around him, making it hard to breathe. Working by the faint glow of a flashlight, he slithered through the broken concrete and spotted a beautiful young woman, her crushed arm pinned beneath a pillar. She was dying, and the only way to get her out was to amputate.
But Saiful Islam Nasar had no training, and almost no equipment. He's a mechanical engineer who just days earlier rushed hundreds kilometers from his hometown in southern Bangladesh when he heard the Rana Plaza factory building had collapsed and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of garment workers were trapped.
He also understood that maimed women can be cast from their homes.
"I asked her, 'Sister, are you married?' She said 'Yes.' I asked her, 'If I cut off your arm, will your husband take you again?' She said, 'My husband loves me very much.' And then I started to cut," he said.
He had brought a syringe loaded with pain-killer ? his father was a village medic, and had taught him how to give injections ? and he cut through her arm with a small surgical blade. It was easier than he expected because the arm had already been so badly damaged.
He pointed at fading specks of blood staining his vest and pants. He began to cry.
"There was no alternative," he said.
Bangladesh is well-versed in tragedy, a country where floods, ferry sinkings, fires and cyclones strike with cruel regularity. But with state services riven by dysfunction and corruption, often the only hope is the person beside you.
It is a country that makes heroes out of everyday citizens.
Many of the first responders at Rana Plaza were men like Nasar ? neighborhood residents, fellow garment workers, relatives of the missing and charity workers ? and they repeatedly took some of the most dangerous work. Using little more than hammers, hacksaws and their bare hands, they crawled into tiny holes in the wreckage, breaking through concrete and steel bars and working around the clock to drag out the victims.
They knew they were risking their lives.
Hemaet Ali, a 50-year-old construction worker who came to volunteer, told the people around him that his identity card, with his home address, was in his shirt pocket.
"If I die inside, please make sure that my body reaches my family," he told them.
Nasar came to Savar with 50 other men from the small volunteer organization he runs, Sunte Ki Pao. Normally, they assist people who have been in traffic accidents, offering basic first aid, securing valuables and contacting relatives. During seasonal floods, they help however they can when the waters rush into town. Nothing had prepared them to work the front line of their country's largest industrial accident.
"It was beyond imagination," he said Monday, six days after the collapse, when the search for survivors had given way to the search for bodies, and heavy equipment had replaced the rescuers.
Thin and lanky, the 24-year-old was well-suited for crawling through the tight tunnels he cut. At first, he had only his mobile phone to light the tiny spaces. He could see shattered chairs and tables. Sewing machines and fabric. And the battered bodies of the men and women who were crushed when the walls and ceilings came crashing down.
"I could just fit my shoulders in," he said. "I often felt like I would die and I would call out to my God."
The rescues, each of which could take many hours, were exhausting, both physically and emotionally.
"We would shout 'Is there anybody here? Please make a sound.' Sometimes you would hear an 'Oooh, oooh' and you knew someone was there," he said.
Over six days, he pulled six people out alive, and removed dozens of bodies. He would work until exhaustion set in and then attempt to sleep ? the first night on the roof of the collapsed building, the next two in a nearby field. Even now that he has moved into a tent, rest does not come easy.
"The images of the bodies flash in my mind," he said.
Eating also has been a problem.
"I have lost my taste," he explained. "I just keep smelling the smell of dead bodies."
The sickly sweet waft of rot from the building was ever present, and rescuers routinely sprayed cheap floral air freshener around the site in a futile attempt to control it.
Not all of the rescue workers at Rana Plaza were untrained. The government sent some 1,000 soldiers and firefighters to the site. But from all appearances, the majority of the rescuers who went into the rubble were volunteers. Altogether, some 2,500 people were brought out alive from the wreckage. The death toll stands at 386, but will surely climb as the largest pieces of rubble are moved.
The military, which oversaw much of the rescue efforts, dismisses the notion that they let volunteers take the lead.
"I have not heard of rescuing so many people in recent history anywhere in the world in case of such disaster," said Maj. Gen. Chowdhury Hasan Suhrawardy, a top military officer in the Savar area. "What we have done is excellent."
But it is clear that volunteers once again carried more than their share of the country's burden.
Sayed Shohel Harman, an unpaid community volunteer for the fire department, found a survivor whose arm was pinned under a concrete slab. The man begged Harman to give him a knife so he could cut off his own arm and free himself. Harman refused, saying he would go and get help.
"The doctors said it was too risky for them to go inside," Harman said. "They told me to go back and try to drag him out."
When he returned, the man was there, but his arm was gone. Another volunteer had given the man a knife and he had cut through his own flesh and crushed bones.
"I just sat down after seeing that," Harman said. "It was horrible."
Nasar said he will soon return to his hometown, where he will comfort his worried mother and look for a new job. He was forced to resign from his to join in the rescue. But most of all, he will think of the beautiful young woman whose name he never heard and whose fate he never learned.
"I pray to Allah that she has been saved, is alive and can return to her husband."
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/bangladeshis-turn-rescuers-building-collapse-134825872.html
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In August of 2012 I left my job at a startup in New York City. I was 24.
I enrolled in a graduate program at NYU, wanting to study Computer Science and Biology. Two weeks in, one of my professors assigned a homework project that would rapidly turn into a profitable business.
The goal of the homework assignment was to design a system that would create a behavior change in a group of test subjects. The behavior change that I picked was getting people to follow me on Twitter.
I guessed that if I programatically favorited people's tweets, they would get a notification about it, and might decide to follow me. It worked, and it worked well.
Without a thought to Twitter's terms of service, one weekend I created a simple website to sell the homework project as a service. People bought it.
I added the ability for people to target the type of audience they wanted to build, and I added charts so that people could see how many new followers they were gaining each day. I started renting a large cluster of virtual machines to scale the service while staying within Twitter's 'per IP address' rate limits.
When Twitter released its Ads API, I had an epiphany. My company was a Twitter Ads product! Rather than serving promoted tweets, or promoted accounts as impressions, I was serving targeted favorites. I'd re-invented the impression as a one-to-one social action. I built a campaign dashboard to reflect this new perspective, and the product started doing better than ever.
At this point the average value of a customer was $50 a month, and customers were in the hundreds. The margins were phenomenal.
My data showed that the cost of a real, targeted follower on my platform was about 12 cents, versus $2.50 on Twitter Ads. According to my customers (a mix of brands and individuals) the targeting and analytics was better too. I built an API, and then a white-label version of the product, forming partnerships with other businesses.
After returning from a holiday in Australia (my home), I didn't sign up for any classes in my second semester of NYU. I turned down my invitation to Hacker School to work full-time on my company. I was convinced that it was an opportunity that deserved 100% of my attention.
The elephant in the room, whose deafening footsteps I'd been trying to ignore, was my relationship with Twitter and its revenue model. Surely, I was in violation of the terms of service. I noticed new customers sending me messages like "this is so much better than Twitter Ads". Gulp.
The tech news has been awash with Twitter shut-downs lately. I'm sure that my company makes more revenue than some of those whose API access has been shut off to the outraged fanfare of onlooking technorati. Unlike those other companies, I don't have a leg to stand on. I'm directly cannibalizing Twitter's Ads revenue model and doing so on their very own platform.
I've tried to get in contact with Twitter. My hope is to get access to their Ads API, and start making money for both of us. I fully expect that they will shut me down, but I just can't get a meeting. It's ironic that when you want to get caught, you can't.
Republished with kind permission from Myles Recny, the founder of Followgen. You can keep up with what Myles is doing on Twitter.
Source: http://gizmodo.com/twitter-should-shut-me-down-484175370
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(Reuters) - Tens of millions of U.S. dollars in cash were delivered by the CIA in suitcases, backpacks and plastic shopping bags to the office of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai for more than a decade, according to the New York Times, citing current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.
The so-called "ghost money" was meant to buy influence for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) but instead fuelled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington's exit strategy from Afghanistan, the newspaper quoted U.S. officials as saying.
"The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan", one American official said, "was the United States."
The CIA declined to comment on the report and the U.S. State Department did not immediately comment. The New York Times did not publish any comment from Karzai or his office.
"We called it ?ghost money'," Khalil Roman, who served as Karzai's chief of staff from 2002 until 2005, told the New York Times. "It came in secret and it left in secret."
For more than a decade the cash was dropped off every month or so at the Afghan president's office, the newspaper said.
Handing out cash has been standard procedure for the CIA in Afghanistan since the start of the war.
The cash payments to the president's office do not appear to be subject to oversight and restrictions placed on official American aid to the country or the CIA's formal assistance programs, like financing Afghan intelligence agencies, and do not appear to violate U.S. laws, said the New York Times.
There was no evidence that Karzai personally received any of the money, Afghan officials told the newspaper. The cash was handled by his National Security Council, it added.
U.S. and Afghan officials familiar with the payments were quoted as saying that the main goal in providing the cash was to maintain access to Karzai and his inner circle and to guarantee the CIA's influence at the presidential palace, which wields tremendous power in Afghanistan's highly centralized government.
Much of the money went to warlords and politicians, many with ties to the drug trade and in some cases the Taliban, the New York Times said. U.S. and Afghan officials were quoted as saying the CIA supported the same patronage networks that U.S. diplomats and law enforcement agents struggled to dismantle, leaving the government in the grip of organized crime.
In 2010, Karzai said his office received cash in bags from Iran, but that it was a transparent form of aid that helped cover expenses at the presidential palace. He said at the time that the United States made similar payments.
The latest New York Times report said much of the Iranian cash, like the CIA money, went to pay warlords and politicians.
For most of Karzai's 11-year reign, there has been little interest in anti-corruption in the army or police. The country's two most powerful institutions receive billions of dollars from donors annually but struggle just to recruit and maintain a force bled by high rates of desertion.
(Additional reporting by Alistair Bell and Sarah Lynch in Washington; Writing by Michael Perry; Editing by Mark Bendeich)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/millions-cia-ghost-money-paid-afghan-presidents-office-020006835.html
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Free Self Improvement ebook ?Time Management Tools? includes material on The Basics On Time Management Tools, PC Tools For Time Tracking, Cloud Tools For Productivity, List Tools, Multitasking Tools, Organization Tools, Email Tools, Time Management Phone Apps, Goal Setting Tools and The Benefits Of Time Management Tools. Personal Use. Click ?Time Management Tools? to download (1.1 MB pdf) or view this free Time Management ebook.
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From Battle To Birds: Drones Get Second Life Counting Critters
Source: NPR
Posted on:
Friday, Apr 26, 2013, 8:42am
Views: 11
Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127939/From_Battle_To_Birds__Drones_Get_Second_Life_Counting_Critters
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Even if you bypass Windows 8's "modern" UI entirely using a tool like Start8 or Classic Shell, there are some great apps available for it. Thanks to ModernMix, an app that lets you run full-screen Windows apps in regular windows, you can get the best of both worlds: useful applications in normal desktop windows.
When Windows 8 came out, a lot of great apps also landed. However, most of you say you don't run full-screen apps in Windows 8 , and go right to the desktop instead. Well, love it or hate it, Windows 8 and its "modern UI" is here to stay (at least until Microsoft brings back the start button), and since ModernMix makes it easy to run those full-screen apps in Windows on the desktop, it's time to take another look at some great, unique Windows 8 apps that you should try.
Groove Music PlayerGroove Music Player is great on iOS, and when it launched for Windows 8, we were thrilled. Its predictive mixes and automatic tagging and organization of your music collection makes it a must-have app, but if you're no fan of Windows 8's modern UI, we can understand why you would have passed it over. With ModernMix, you can run Groove in a window like any other music player, and take advantage of all of its features. It'll still set you back a few bucks ($4), but we think that's a decent price to pay for an attentive developer, an app that automatically downloads album artwork, lyrics, Last.fm data, and auto-tags your tracks for later. Plus, Groove's automatically generated mixes are so good, you'll wonder how you lived without them.
NetflixModernMix isn't just great for taking good-looking music players and putting them into a window?you can do the same with video players as well. The Netflix app for Windows 8 is especially good looking, and if you've ever wanted a stand-alone Netflix player for Windows, this is about as close as you're going to get. For those of us with multi-monitor displays, this makes it easy to completely navigate and watch Netflix streaming in one window and work or game in the other. It's free (of course), and on top of it all it's much lighter on system resources than a browser streaming video is. Similarly, if you want to enjoy Hulu Plus outside of a browser on your Windows 8 machine but you don't want to go to the start screen, grab the Hulu Plus app and run it in ModernMix too.
PlexIf you'd rather watch your own video rather than streaming from Netflix, the Plex app for Windows 8 is extremely well built and designed, and it runs perfectly even in a window. You could download the standard Plex Media Center app for Windows instead, but the Windows 8 app really does look nice, even when compared to the full Media Center app. Plus, if you can run it in Windowed mode and not turn your entire system into a media center every time you want to use it, why wouldn't you? This way you can stream music while minimized or put the Plex app on a different display and watch video (and still use your primary display for something else) without interrupting your flow.
TrackageTrackage, as the name implies, is a package tracking utility that supports UPS, FedEx, USPS, and LaserShip. Just paste in your tracking number and the app will keep an eye on your item, even syncing its status to multiple Windows 8 devices if you have more than one. You can name your packages for easy tracking, and the app will keep your shipments organized by processing, en-route, out for delivery, and completed for you. If you do use the Start Screen, you can pin packages to the start screen and use live tiles to stay up to date on its progress, but if you don't, running the app in ModernMix gives you a one-click tool to check on all of your packages without signing up for a webapp or extra service.
TuneIn RadioAnother app for Windows 8 that doesn't have a desktop component, Tune In Radio allows you to listen to terrestrial and internet streaming radio stations from around the globe. The service recently updated and is one of your favorite internet radio services, so bringing it out of the browser and into a desktop app is a no brainer, especially when you get the benefit of the UI built into the Windows 8 app. Your preset stations, recently listened to stations, and local radio streams are all right there, no clicking around or browsing through categories. If you prefer, you can still search by genre, category, location, or language, all in an interface that's far superior to the web.
Xbox SmartGlassIf you have an Xbox 360 in your home, the Xbox SmartGlass app is a must-download if you're running Windows 8 on your desktop. It gives you complete control over your Xbox 360 from your computer, lets you browse the web, play videos and music, and even use your Windows machine as a second-screen to get useful information about the movies, TV shows, or music you're enjoying on the big screen. If you're the type who loves using their laptop while they watch TV, SmartGlass running in ModernMix gives you all the benefits without all of the full-screen-can't-do-anything-but-this annoyances.
The great thing about ModernMix is that it opens the door to so many of the awesome Windows 8 apps that are lurking in the WIndows Store to those who prefer using the desktop over the Start Screen. It's ideal for those services that are willing to make apps available for Windows tablets and phones but not for the desktop, but also for any well-designed app that you really wish you could use without having to go back to the Start Screen to get to it.
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WATERTOWN, Mass. (AP) ? Hundreds of rounds were exchanged in a deadly gun battle, a suspected terrorist's body was dragged under a stolen SUV and a bomb blast rattled residents.
"Now I know what it must be like to be in a war zone like Iraq or Afghanistan. When my house shook, I said 'I better get in.' We never went to sleep all night," said resident Anna Lanzo.
Watertown, a usually placid middle-class suburb where joggers and bikers share a path along the Charles River, children sell lemonade outside and residents meet for eggs at a classic chrome diner, was turned into a combat zone this week.
Relief was palpable here Saturday, a day after 19-year-old Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev surrendered from his hiding place in a covered boat in a Watertown backyard. Authorities said Tsarnaev and his alleged conspirator and older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, killed an MIT police officer Thursday night, then carjacked an SUV before heading to Watertown.
Officers knew the stolen car was coming to Watertown because they were tracking its movement through the victim's cellphone. The suspects took $800 from an ATM in Watertown Square from the victim's account before an officer spotted the car. The brothers ? one in the stolen car, the other in a second car ? jumped out of the cars and started shooting at the lone officer even as backup rushed to the scene, said Watertown Police Chief Edward Deveau.
"We're in a gunfight, a serious gunfight. Rounds are going and then all of the sudden they see something being thrown at them and there's a huge explosion," Deveau said. "I'm told it's exactly the same type of explosive that we'd seen ... at the Boston Marathon. The pressure cooker lid was found embedded in a car down the street."
The suspects tossed grenades. Tamerlan Tsarnaev got within 10 feet of officers involved in the shootout before he ran out of ammunition and was tackled. Police put him down and began to handcuff him when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev drove the stolen car at them.
"They dove out of the way at the last second and he ran over his brother, dragged him down the street and then fled," Deveau said.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev died. Though bleeding, his younger brother fled the car and eluded the officers. Police locked down the region and searched house to house in Watertown.
Christie Majocha described heavily armed police and helicopters with M16s circling her neighborhood. "Everybody saw them on TV, but as I saw them on TV, they were driving on my street. As we heard the helicopters on TV, they were over our heads," she said.
Lauren Kelleher said she saw State Police with massive automatic weapons in her backyard, walking past her children's swing set and a plastic silver castle.
"The troopers went through. They looked in our yard, they looked in our garage," she said.
"It was crazy," said her husband, Tim Kelleher. "We had SWAT teams, ATF on our lawn."
Deveau said a resident was checking his boat after the lockdown was lifted Friday evening and noticed the straps weren't the way he left them. He looked in the boat, saw blood and someone huddled in a corner and quickly called police. The discovery set up the final confrontation and capture with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Officials used Dumitru Ciuc's home as a staging area, taking out the windows and ripping down curtains and window blinds to monitor the boat.
"They didn't say nothing," about why they were there. "They just said leave the house and go up the street."
On Saturday, Ciuc's home was cordoned off by police tape, and his Nissan Xterra remained underneath a tarp. The street where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found was still closed down and roped off by police tape. An agent typing on a computer sat on the steps of the home where the owner of the boat lived, and authorities erected a white tent in the middle of the street.
Nearby at the Watertown police station, a stream of grateful residents dropped off more cookies, cupcakes, pizzas and chicken than the small force could eat. Children dropped off handmade cards, which were quickly pinned up. On Saturday evening, at least 250 people gathered at the town's Victory Field to pay tribute to victims of the Boston Marathon bombers and to thank law enforcement and emergency workers.
"These policemen, the FBI, everyone who's been involved, they deserve our support. They deserve our applause," Majocha said. "We can't thank them enough for what they've done."
___
Associated Press writers Carla K. Johnson, Bridget Murphy and Rodrique Ngowi contributed to this report.
Follow Zezima at www.twitter.com /katiezez
Follow Hill at www.twitter.com/michaelthill
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/suburb-becomes-war-zone-days-bombings-021315038.html
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Media images of nursing home residents being evacuated after an explosion this week at a nearby fertility plant in West, Texas, raise an important issue. That is, if your loved one is, or may some day be, in a nursing home, do you know what its evacuation and emergency plans are?
According to the?Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), in 2012 on any day, more than 1.4 million Americans live in 15,800 nursing homes; more than 3 million have used nursing home services some time during the year.
You may not be able to control an explosion, earthquake, hurricane, power outage, terrorist attack or other catastrophic natural or human-created events. But, you can make sure you know what will happen to your parent or someone else dear to you should there be one.
Some past disaster plans have been . . . a disaster. In 2005, 70 nursing home residents lost their lives when Hurricane Katrina?and Rita barreled through New Orleans and the Gulf Coast area. The federal government?s General Accountability Office (GAO), the independent investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, studied why there were so many lives lost and has brought?awareness for the need for more stringent policies.
Related: A Caregiver?s Hurricane Prep List
In 2006, Louisiana passed a law requiring its nursing homes to have a more detailed evacuation plan. It calls for updating their evacuation and disaster preparedness plan once a year and having state officials sign off on their transportation plans.
Last fall, Superstorm Sandy also posed evacuation difficulties in the New York City area. Because of these continuing disasters, the federal government?s CMS, which helps improve nursing home care, expects to? issue new disaster planning requirements some time this year.
In some circumstances, residents cannot be evacuated immediately and are ordered to stay where they are (?shelter in place?). There must be plans for this as well.
In the meantime, here are nine questions to ask nursing home administrators:
New York State also has a sheet to better understand evacuation plans.
Photo by SusanNYC courtesy of Creative Commons
Follow Sally Abrahms at www.sallyabrahms.com?or?on twitter.
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Also of Interest
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See the?AARP home page?for deals, savings tips, trivia and more
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Source: http://blog.aarp.org/2013/04/19/nursing-home-evacuation-plan-caring-for-older-parents-caregiving/
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9:00 PM: Olympic hurdler Lolo Jones tweets that she is working with a new sports psychologist. When asked why, Jones responded: "Oh merely the fetal position I collapse into every time someone mentions Olympics."
8:45 PM: A judge has scheduled a May 1 hearing for Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett's lawsuit against the NCAA. Corbett wants the sanctions handed down to Penn State over the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal to be thrown out.
8:30 PM: Paul Kevin Curtis, who is suspected of sending ricin-poisoned letters to Mississippi U.S. Senator Roger Wicker & President Obama, was once hired by Wicker as an Elvis Presley impersonator for a party.
8:15 PM: The NFL has released its 2013 regular season schedule, with the first game on Thursday, Sept. 5 featuring the Baltimore Ravens visiting the Denver Broncos.
8:00 PM: Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam released a statement reacting to court documents alleging his Pilot Flying J company engaged in fraud: "I maintain that the foundation of this company is built on its integrity and that any willful wrongdoing by any employee of this company at any time is intolerable."
7:45 PM: Former NBA player & current TNT analyst Steve Kerr tweets that the Golden State Warriors' Stephen Curry will "one day go down as the greatest shooter of all time. Incredible stroke, confidence and the ability to create his own shot."
7:30 PM: KCBS-TV reports a two-year-old gray cat was found in an abandoned box in an L.A. animal care center parking lot with its face, nose and feet wrapped in duct tape. The cat was "gasping for air" but officials were able to remove all the tape.
7:15 PM: WNDU-TV obtained audio tape of the air traffic control conversations with the pilot of a small plane that crashed near South Bend airport last month, killing former Oklahoma QB Steve Davis and one other person.
7:00 PM: NFL.com reports that the two players who reportedly trashed a hotel room during the Scouting Combine were Clemson WR DeAndre Hopkins & Rutgers WR Mark Harrison. But Hopkins tweeted in response: "Left hours b4 this incident leaving it at that."
6:45 PM: A Trenton, New Jersey woman arrested on domestic violence charges Thursday was found to have been reportedly living in a self-storage unit with her two young sons.
6:30 PM: Documents filed in federal court Thursday claim that Pilot Flying J, the truck stop company owned by Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam, had defrauded customers out of gas rebates & discounts for "many years", and that Haslam knew of the fraud.
6:15 PM: FIFA said Thursday that Libya is safe enough to host World Cup qualifying matches. Libya is scheduled to face The Congo in Tripoli on June 7 & then Togo in Benina on June 14.
6:00 PM: After Trey Burke & Tim Hardaway Jr. announced they were leaving for the NBA Draft, Michigan freshman basketball players Mitch McGary & Glenn Robinson III announced Thursday that they will be returning for their sophomore season.
5:45 PM: The FBI has released surveillance video & photo captures of two suspects wanted in the Boston Marathon explosions.
5:30 PM: The Tennessee Titans announce there is still time to sign up for cheerleader auditions being held this Saturday at Baptist Sports Park. There is a $20 audition fee for pre-registered participants & a $25 fee for walk-ups at the door.
Source: http://www.sportsbybrooks.com/sbblive?eid=50485
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A state lawmaker in New Jersey is planning to introduce legislation that would prohibit public spaces such as amusement parks, movie theaters, bowling allies, or restaurants from making video games rated ?mature? or ?adults only? available to play.
Under the proposed legislation, business owners could face fines of up to $10,000 for the first offense and $20,000 for repeated offenses.
In a statement introducing the proposed legislation, state Assembly woman Linda Stender (D-Union) said that while violent video games don?t necessarily cause violent behavior, ?they can play a role.?
Like many politicians searching for a response to last year's Steuvenville shooting, Stender is targeting violent video games as an threatening part of American popular culture. But her proposed legislation could face legal problems not only because video games are considered a form of speech protected under the first amendent, but also because the "mature" ratings she is appealing to have not historically been applied to the arcade games she is specifically targeting.
?Children today are exposed to violent images more than ever. Violent video games can desensitize children to violence and give them a warped version of reality where violence and death have no consequences outside their TV screens,? Stender said in a press release.
The problem that Stender?s proposed legislation faces, however, is twofold. First, any legislation seeking to prohibit either the sale or production of video games (however violent they may be) would run up against the legal precedent set by the 2011 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA), which found in a 7-2 decision that games, like other forms of media, were protected speech under the First Amendment.
This landmark legal decision alone would challenge Stender?s proposal, as well as a recommendation put forward just a day earlier by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie?s task force recommendation to require parents to accompany minors when they purchase video games rated ?mature.?
The unique problem that Stender?s proposal faces, however, is that the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) has never rated coin-operated arcade games, which are typically the only kind of video games made available in the public places she mentioned in her statement.
?It?s the typical waste of taxpayer money and effort that capitalizes on a national tragedy to support a culture war agenda,? Christopher Ferguson, a professor of psychology at Texas A&M who has researched and written extensively about the impact of violent video games on their players, said of Stender?s plan in an email to NBC News. ?I think it?s simply an effort to make a public show of ?doing something,? skirting Brown v. EMA by focusing on publicly owned outlets as opposed to private businesses.?
Ferguson was dismissive of the idea that Stender?s plan to regulate violent video games could have the backing of any new scientific data, saying that ?the research really hasn?t changed much over the last few months,? and ?the evidence still can?t be used to support the kinds of sweeping conclusions the assemblywoman puts forward.? But he did acknowledge that while these kinds of arcade games haven?t exactly been sanctioned by the ESRB in the past, that leaves them open to renewed inquiry by state legislators such as Stender.
?I suspect the issue with the ?public accommodation? is one of public spaces being directly under the control of the state ? as opposed to the local Best Buy or Gamestop ? and thus the state may be given more leeway to control what is on its own property than what is being sold in private businesses,? Ferguson added. ?This, I think, is a riff off of the various Supreme Court cases, where in Brown v EMA video games were afforded First Amendment protections, but in Fox v FCC, the court kinda wiffed, and said maybe the government could regulate it?s own broadcast airwaves. That?s why explicit sex, nudity and profanity is a ?no go? on broadcast ? that is, publicly ? owned airwaves, but anything goes on privately owned cable channels.?
Still, arcade games are widely seen by gamers and their critics alike as an outdated form of entertainment that has been all but eclipsed by console and mobile games alike. Any effort to regulate a dying part of the industry, Ferguson suggested, could seem redundant as well as unconstitutional
?My first thought was: ?People still go to arcades??? Ferguson joked.
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Take a peek inside a close run-through of the big musical number in advance of Sunday's show.
By Kevin P. Sullivan, with reporting by Matt Harper
The cast of "Pitch Perfect" rehearses for MTV Movie Awards 2013
Photo: MTV News
Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1705582/pitch-perfect-mtv-movie-awards.jhtml
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Sergio Garcia poses for a portrait in Chico, Calif., on April 2. Though he earned a law degree and has passed the state bar exam, Garcia, an undocumented immigrant, is not allowed by the state to practice law. He's spent most of his life trying to gain citizenship.
By Miranda Leitsinger, Staff Writer, NBC News
This article, the third in a series on the paths to citizenship, is part of?NBC News? special report ?Immigration Nation,? an in-depth examination of immigration in America.?
For Sergio Garcia, the magic number is 25. That's how many years he will have waited for his green card if, as he estimates, he gets it in 2019.
Garcia, 36, is one of millions of immigrants seeking a green card, or legal permanent residency in the U.S., which he has called home for most of his life. His dad, a naturalized citizen from Mexico, sponsored him, and he was approved to begin the naturalization process in 1995 at age 17.
But like many other applicants, Garcia has to wait for a green card to become available since quotas limit the number given out annually. Authorities first told him it would take three to five years to reach his ?priority date? ? when he could start the five-year process of getting a green card.
?I was crying about that. I?m like ? how am I going to survive five years without my documents?? he recalled recently from Durham, a community outside Chico, Calif. ?Little did I know that almost 19 years later I would still be in the same shape. ? You?re approved but just wait around ? half of your life.?
Aspiring citizens like Garcia face decades-long waits, ever-changing laws and an unwieldy bureaucracy that leads applicants on an epic odyssey to the ?American dream.?
As Congress prepares to unveil its long-awaited immigration reform, many would-be immigrants are hoping it provides a viable legal way for them to join their families in the U.S., with reasonable wait times they feel will discourage unlawful immigration.
Why is it so important to become a U.S. citizen? At recent swearing in ceremonies in Los Angeles, we asked our newest citizens that question.
The U.S. immigration system was refashioned in the mid-1960s to focus on family unification, though critics say it has hardly lived up to that ideal.
Now, applications for?family-sponsored green cards represent the vast majority of requests for legal permanent U.S. residency: 4.3 million of the roughly 4.4 million applications on the waiting list as of November came from parents, adult/minor children, adult siblings or married couples, according to the State Department.
The previous national-origins-based system? was ?very discriminatory? in prioritizing Europeans over Asians and Latin Americans, said Doris Meissner, commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service from 1993 to 2000.
NBCLatino.com
In a bid to provide an even-handed approach, limits were placed on how many family-sponsored and employment-based visas could be issued to immigrants from a single country. Today, that ceiling stands at 7 percent of the total. (There is an exception for spouses, minor children and parents of U.S. citizens, who go to the head of the line.)
But lengthy lines built up for countries with high numbers of applicants, such as Mexico, the Philippines, India and China, said Meissner, now head of the Migration Policy Institute?s U.S. immigration policy program.
?It?s become increasingly clear that this is just really a perverse set of outcomes that the people who thought about the ?65 act and passed it ? wouldn?t have contemplated,? Meissner said. ?To make family reunification be meaningful and make it be real, you just can?t have people waiting 20 years. I mean you shouldn?t even have spouses and children waiting two or three years.?
'Overpromising and under-delivering'
Some advocates of stricter immigration controls think these lines shouldn?t exist at all, saying family-sponsored green cards should only go to the minor children and spouses of U.S. citizens.
The waiting list ?creates a political pressure for advocacy groups to demand higher caps,? said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington, D.C. ?? They point to it and they say, ?Look, this is unjust and we have to speed family immigration.? It?s become a talking point.?
There is ?no good answer? to cases like Garcia?s, he added.
?That?s the kind of thing that happens when you have a bad immigration policy that is jury-rigged and complicated and opaque,? he said. ?The goal needs to be to define as clearly as possibly who gets in and then let everybody who qualifies in every year ? and make clear that if you are the brother of a U.S. citizen there is no category for you, there is no line, so don?t get in it. The problem is overpromising and under-delivering.?
Garcia's story is in many ways typical of undocumented immigrant residents treading the family path to a green card, lawyers and experts say. His father had a green card but was not yet a U.S. citizen when he applied for his son, putting Garcia in a lower-priority category even though he was under 21 ? the age when minor children become adults under U.S. immigration rules.
His dad became a citizen in 1999, which would have put Garcia on the fast track as the child of a U.S. citizen had he not turned 21 the previous year. Instead, he entered another line: unmarried adult children of U.S. citizens. Immigration is today handling those cases from Mexico dating to Aug. 1, 1993.
NBCLatino.com
That may appear close to Garcia?s priority date of Nov. 18, 1994, but don?t be fooled, he said. The line crawls forward about one week a month, he said, ?and sometimes it jumps back real fast and by a lot.?
In the meantime, Garcia said, he has lost college financial aid and job offers because he is undocumented. He said he would have probably returned to Mexico if he had known it would take so long.
?It?s probably been a month or two since I last ended up crying because sometimes this life does get to you,? he said. ?It?s not living, it?s just surviving.?
Even for those on a seemingly smoother path, such as a foreigner marrying a U.S. citizen, the family route still can take years.
Married ... with complications
Jeanette Smith, a former immigration lawyer in Miami who once guided couples through the system, is at the next step in the process as she tries to win citizenship for her husband, Agustin Gonzalez, a Panamanian national: providing documentation and going through interviews with immigration officials.
Applicants have to provide a dossier that includes the results of a medical exam, an affidavit of support from the relative sponsor saying the applicant has sufficient means of financial support and is unlikely to become a public charge, and any military, court and prison records, plus original documents establishing family ties between the sponsor and the applicant.
Many applicants must do interviews with U.S. consular or embassy officials in their home country.
Married in 2009, Smith and Gonzalez, 41, have had two interviews with immigration officials and have submitted documents such as wills, powers of attorney and three years of joint tax returns.
John Moore / Getty Images
After migrating to the U.S. as minors, children take their oath of allegiance to become citizens.
The couple provided a wedding album, and affidavits from friends and co-workers attesting to their relationship, too.
But Gonzalez, who first came to the U.S. on a guest worker visa that expired, remains undocumented. Since the couple was married less than two years during their first immigration interview in 2009, he could only get a conditional green card that expired in January while they were awaiting the second interview, said Smith, 47, executive director of South Florida Interfaith Worker Justice.
It leaves Smith feeling scared that her husband could be deported, although judges can exercise discretion.
The immigration officer ?has the ability to make a decision on whether my marriage is valid or not,? Smith said. ?Who else in this world has the ability to do that other than the couple themselves??
Though Smith knows she has more experience that helps her navigate the system, she said: ?It?s difficult, I don?t think people realize it ?? ?People think that it?s some automatic process, and all your problems are solved. And it?s not.?
Some who make it through the process can still in the end be denied a green card for dozens of different reasons, said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute's office at New York University School of Law.
?This is an amazing story in people?s resilience at some level and it continues to show you how much appeal the U.S. green card still holds, that people are willing to put their lives on hold for prolonged periods of time,? he said.
Max Whittaker / Prime for NBC News
Sergio Garcia helps Alma Garcia obtain a legal work permit at his office in Chico, Calif., on April 2.
Garcia has forged ahead despite the barriers. He graduated college and law school, and is leading a landmark case in California that could set a national precedent on whether undocumented immigrants can receive law licenses. In the meantime, he works as an independent legal aide.
He ultimately believes the wait will have been worth it.
?I still think this country is a great country and I think it will give me, in the end, a better future than I could have had in Mexico,? he said. ?? I tell people my purpose in life at this point is to prove that the American dream is still alive and well.?
Follow Miranda Leitsinger on Twitter and Facebook.?
More in the 'Immigration Nation' series
Through the obstacle course of immigration, many paths to citizenship
To get green cards, these immigrants must prove they are extraordinary
By the numbers: How America tallies its 11.1 million undocumented immigrants
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The "morning-after" pill, also known as Plan B, could land on drugstore shelves right next to the condoms and cough drops as early as May.
A federal judge today ordered the Food and Drug Administration to allow emergency contraception, such as Plan B, to be sold over-the-counter. In his ruling, Judge Edward Korman repeatedly referred to the "bad faith" that resulted in restricted access to the drug in the past.
Currently, women under 17 need a prescription to purchase emergency contraception. Although women 17 and older don't need a prescription, the morning after pill is available only behind the pharmacy counter and an ID is required.
The FDA can appeal the ruling.
"Today science has finally prevailed over politics," said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which first petitioned the FDA to make the emergency contraceptive available over the counter in 2001. "Women all over the country will no longer face arbitrary delays and barriers just to get emergency contraception."
RELATED: Poor Teens Lack Access to Emergency Contraception
The ruling comes after Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled the FDA when it recommended that emergency contraception be sold over the counter in December 2011. The FDA spent 10 months reviewing scientific data before making its decision, but Sebelius said there wasn't enough data to declare the product safe.
Teva Women's Health/AP Photo
Misinformation On Plan B Is Widespread, Doctor Watch Video"Indeed, it is hardly clear that the secretary had the power to issue the order, and if she did have that authority, her decision was arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable," Korman, who presides over the District Court of Eastern New York, wrote in his ruling.
RELATED: Pregnancy Prevention or Abortion? New Emergency Contraception Pill Walks the Line
The morning after pill is intended to be used when other contraception fails, such as when a condom breaks. Containing the synthetic hormone levonorgestrel, the pill works by preventing a fertilized egg from attaching itself to the uterine wall. But it must be taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex. It cannot terminate an existing pregnancy.
Speaking at a news conference, Dr. Cora Collette Breuner, a pediatrician at Seattle Children's Hospital, said the ruling made her proud "as a woman and as a doctor and as a mother of three children.
"This statement and this ruling are long overdue and especially welcome by all of us at the American Academy of Pediatrics," Breuner said.
However, she said more needed to be done to be sure the pill was affordable to all women, regardless of their finances. It should be priced so that sexually active women 14, 15 and 16 years old can afford it, Breuner said.
Plan B's manufacturer first filed an application to make the emergency contraceptive available without a prescription in 2003, after a group of 70 medical and public health organizations petitioned for this in 2001. The FDA allowed Plan B to become available without a prescription to women 18 and over in 2006. In 2009, a judge forced the FDA to lower that age to 17.
Dr. Jennifer Ashton, a senior medical contributor for ABC News, said women should remember that an emergency contraceptive is not 100 percent effective, and that it carries a risk for irregular bleeding.
"Ideally, plan B should be used in consultation with a health care provider so these other issues can be addressed," she said. "Plan B is also not intended to serve as a primary means of contraception."
Plan B has been sold over-the-counter in China since 1998, and a study published in 2011 in the journal Human Reproduction involving 2,521 women found no adverse side effects. The most common side effects were vaginal bleeding and headaches.
Source: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/morning-pill-sold-counter/story?id=18889946
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This image provided by KFC shows the company's new boneless chicken. KFC will offer new boneless pieces of chicken as an alternative to its traditional breast, thigh and drumstick pieces. The chain says the offering reflects the growing popularity of easier-to-eat chicken strips and nuggets. (AP Photo/KFC)
This image provided by KFC shows the company's new boneless chicken. KFC will offer new boneless pieces of chicken as an alternative to its traditional breast, thigh and drumstick pieces. The chain says the offering reflects the growing popularity of easier-to-eat chicken strips and nuggets. (AP Photo/KFC)
This image provided by KFC shows the company's new boneless chicken. KFC will offer new boneless pieces of chicken as an alternative to its traditional breast, thigh and drumstick pieces. The chain says the offering reflects the growing popularity of easier-to-eat chicken strips and nuggets. (AP Photo/KFC)
NEW YORK (AP) ? In case Americans want to scarf down their fast-food even faster, KFC is stripping the bones out of its chicken.
The fast-food chain says it's introducing deep-fried boneless chicken pieces on April 14 as an alternative to its traditional breast, thigh and drumstick pieces.
The new offering reflects the growing popularity of nuggets and strips that are easier to eat on the go, as well as Americans' seemingly endless desire for more convenient foods. KFC says nearly four out of five servings of chicken sold in the U.S. are now boneless.
Based on customer trends, the chain says bones could eventually disappear from its menu.
"Younger people don't tend to be fans of bones ? they've grown up with nuggets," said KFC spokesman Rick Maynard, referring to people in their 20s and 30s.
Although KFC has more than 18,000 locations worldwide, the boneless chicken will only be offered in its 4,500 U.S. locations.
The new chicken, which is skinless and comes in white or dark meat, are whole muscle pieces fileted off the bone and are about twice the size of KFC's crispy strips. Customers will be able to order them for the chain's meal deals, which include two pieces of chicken, a side, a biscuit and a drink for $4.99.
They also come in buckets, which include four pieces of boneless chicken and six pieces of breasts, thighs and drumsticks for $14.99. The boneless chicken option costs the same as the regular fried chicken.
A piece of the boneless white meat has 200 calories and 8 grams of fat. A dark meat piece has 250 calories.
Even before the latest launch, KFC had already been shifting its menu to more boneless offerings. It rolled out smaller chicken "Bites" last year, as well as "Dip'ems," which are strips of chicken with a variety of sauces.
The chain had also been offering the chicken filets used in its sandwiches as a stand-alone, handheld option. The chain says those will be phased out and that the new boneless pieces will be used in sandwiches.
KFC says it took two to three years to develop its version of boneless chicken, which performed strongly in test markets including Oklahoma City and Omaha last year.
Like McDonald's and Burger King, chicken chain Chick-Fil-A offers nuggets, strips and sandwiches but doesn't list any chicken pieces with bones on its menu. Although McDonald's recently tested chicken wings at select locations, the world's biggest hamburger chain has also focused on convenient options such as its new chicken McWraps and chicken McBites that come in portable cartons.
Howard Penney, a food industry analyst for Hedgeye Risk Management, noted that KFC has been struggling in the U.S. and that it has nothing to lose with the latest move. Even in the wings category, Penney noted that boneless varieties have been growing in popularity.
"People don't want to have to deal with the bones," Penney said.
KFC is owned by Yum Brands Inc., which also operates Taco Bell and Pizza Hut.
Despite its choppy performance in the U.S., Yum has enjoyed a streak of growth for the past several years as a result of its growing presence in China. Yum is the largest Western fast-food operator in the country with about 5,300 locations, most of them KFC restaurants.
But since late last year, Yum has been working to overcome a scare over its chicken supply that has hammered sales in China. Yum, based in Louisville, Ky., has warned that it expects its profit in 2013 to decline, snapping an 11-year streak of double-digit growth.
Shares of Yum Brands fell $2.17, or 3.2 percent, to $65.58 in morning trading as broad market indicators sagged on weaker than expected U.S. job growth in March.
___
Follow Candice Choi at www.twitter.com/candicechoi
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Apr 4 2013
Barack Obama's first visit to Israel as President last month has been widely analysed in the context of the Israel-Palestinian peace process and in terms of other regional security concerns, with a particular focus on the sometimes rocky relationship he shares with Israeli PM Benyamin Netanyahu. However, both Obama and some of Australia's less-informed commentators chose to emphasise what the visit tells us about the overall Israel-US relationship, above and beyond any personal issues between individuals.
Obama's address to an audience of 600 students in Jerusalem on March 21 made it clear that the connection between Israel and the US goes far beyond democratic, security or economic interests and pre-dates the current political leadership, back to the creation of the State.
"Those ties began only 11 minutes after Israeli independence, when the United States was the first nation to recognize the State of Israel. As President Truman said in explaining his decision to recognize Israel, he said, "I believe it has a glorious future before it not just as another sovereign nation, but as an embodiment of the great ideals of our civilization." And since then, we've built a friendship that advances our shared interests," he said.
In his wide-ranging speech, which was well received by both commentators and the students who attended, Obama went into detail about the US/Israel alliance:
But the source of our friendship extends beyond mere interests, just as it has transcended political parties and individual leaders. America is a nation of immigrants. America is strengthened by diversity. America is enriched by faith. We are governed not simply by men and women, but by laws. We're fueled by entrepreneurship and innovation, and we are defined by a democratic discourse that allows each generation to reimagine and renew our union once more. So in Israel, we see values that we share, even as we recognize what makes us different. That is an essential part of our bond.
But despite the President's eloquence, some media commentators and pundits outdid themselves in attempting to use the visit to push the ugly but increasing well-worn argument that it is only because of the undue and often insidious impact of the "Israel Lobby" (or more crudely the "Jewish Lobby") that the US has the policy positions that it does on Israel, and the US-Israel alliance endures. Some go as far as to suggest that Israel somehow has direct control over the American government.
Paul McGeough, for example, in his March 17 Canberra Times article covering Obama's first visit to Israel simply assumed that the US was stupidly failing to follow its own interests by not ditching Israel and ending all aid. Instead, he presented a diatribe about the "Pussyfoot President", who he classed as "manager-in-chief of the Israeli Occupation" and "passive aggressive." McGeough implied the President was weak and subservient to Israel in failing to end the "madness" of US support.
Bizarrely, according to McGeough's warped sensibilities, joint Israel-US investment in an air force security facility was nothing more than a ruse to deny beleaguered Palestinians working permits on the secure site.
It's part of a deal in the so called peace process, by which Israel got about $500 million for new bases to make up for those it would give up in the Occupied Territories. Nice, eh? They're still occupying; Washington's still paying.
To keep writing blank cheques on a cash-strapped US Treasury to cover ballooning costs, and at the same time do nothing to bring about, or impose, a peace that might reduce that cost is, well, it's madness.
His thesis, that the US is unable to extricate itself from its "mad" relationship with Israel, seemed utterly ignorant and uninterested in the shared interests, ideas, innovations and industries that Israel and the US enjoy (for more on this see my previous post on the subject of the shared interests underpinning the US-Israel partnership.)
Similarly, Michael Brissendon's reportage for the ABC during the 2012 US Presidential election campaign presented Israel's foreign policy interests, and the lobby that represents them in Washington, as the fulcrum upon which the election hinged.
Brissendon began his 7.30 news story on March 21 with news of Iran's rapid movement towards weapons grade fuel production and the increasing calls for a military strike. He then moved on to suggest that Israel and "the most powerful Jewish lobby group in the United States: the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee" was the cause for the increasingly enthusiastic "chest thumping" about Iran, saying "the factors driving the hawkish rhetoric have as much to do with the politics in Washington as anything else."
In this country the depth of a presidential candidate's support for Israel is often seen as a guide to their overall policy strength. But some have interpreted support for Israel as support for AIPAC, even if strangely enough sometimes the policy positions are at odds with the vast majority of American Jewish voters.
Interviewed by Annabelle Quince for ABC Radio National "Rear View" program in March 2012, US academic and "Israel Lobby" conspiracy theorist John Mearsheimer also made the case that the Israel Lobby (Mearsheimer is careful to avoid the crude "Jewish Lobby" language of Brissendon) drives US foreign policy towards a pro-Israel stance via money, as well as votes and control over the media.
[To] be even more specific, a lot of the lobby's power comes from money. Everybody in this country who runs for congress or runs for the president understands full well that it would be a huge mistake to cross the lobby, because not only would you not get any money from organisations in the lobby, but your opponent would get lots of money, and that would not be good. So money is a very important source of power.
Votes also matter. American Jews are probably about two per cent of the population, but their turnout on Election Day is very high and they're located in a number of very important states. Just take Florida, for example. In the 2000 presidential election, it all came down to a handful of votes in Florida. Well, Florida has a large number of Jews ...
It's also important to recognise that supporters of Israel have great influence in the American media: The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, The Washington Post, these are media outlets that are effectively in a position where they defend Israel at almost every turn. And that coupled with all those factors allows the lobby to be very powerful."
Likewise, several letters to the editor by Chris Williams, published in the Canberra Times, have presented theories about a Mossad controlled US government, about infiltration by Israeli intelligence officers into high ranking positions in the US and Australian governments, and general conspiracy related to foreign policy decision making.
This individual, and anyone who thinks like him or feels he may have a point, needs to read the recent discussion of the American "Israel Lobby" by top American writer, academic and pundit on US foreign policy Walter Russell Mead.
Mead accurately describes where these people are coming from according to a mindset he encountered in many of the countries to which he travels:
Why, people ask, does the United States incur such risks and costs for the sake of this small country? Why does the United States direct so much foreign aid to it? Why does the United States take its part at the United Nations at such diplomatic cost?
The answer most people around the world give is a very simple one: America takes the positions it takes on Israel because of the power of "the Jews." By their campaign contributions, by their (alleged) control of the media, by their (alleged) single-minded focus on Israeli interests, America's supposedly well-organized, well-funded, and very determined Jews succeed in controlling American opinion and American policy. The Jewish tail wags the American dog.
In much of the world this kind of "analysis" sounds like the most banal conventional wisdom. It is so widely accepted, even by many people who think of themselves as seasoned and sophisticated observers of the international scene, that it is hardly worth discussing.
Mead notes that the power of pro-Israel interest groups is predicated on how that bond is expressed in a policy sense - but only when the goal is being pursued with the support of the general public.
"The Jews" do not run America, and they do not run American foreign policy in the Middle East. Recent Pew polls found that Americans sympathize more with the Israeli cause than with the Palestinian one by a margin of 49 percent to 12 percent, and they have consistently favored a "pro-Israel" foreign policy. When the House and the Senate overwhelming endorse pro-Israel resolutions, and when they tell presidents that they can't cut Israel's aid, those politicians are responding to the will of their constituents. Over time, and especially since 9/11, American public opinion has become significantly more pro-Israel....
The reality is that the "Israel lobby" is extremely powerful when its goals accord with non-Jewish American public opinion, but it runs out of steam when it goes against that opinion. It is irresistible when its demands accord with the general disposition of non-Jewish Americans to support the Jewish state; it immediately becomes feeble if it takes up an issue (like a pardon for Pollard) that this public opinion dislikes.
If American Jews actually controlled American policy in the Middle East, it's likely that our policies would be much more dovish and much more nuanced. American Jews by and large are more liberal than the general public on almost every issue, and that emphatically includes the Middle East. While there are some prominent Jewish hawks, there are many more prominent Jewish doves. Barack Obama received far more electoral and financial support from Jewish donors than Mitt Romney in 2012, just as he received far more financial and electoral support than John McCain in 2008.
The American public has demonstrated their preference for the policy positions of their leaders, including Obama, through democratic elections. And in the US, as in Australia, democratic government that does not reflect the will of its electorate is summarily voted out of office.
Mead then takes on the fallback position of the "lobby" conspiracy theorists - that the American public may back Israel, but that is only because the "lobby" controls the media:
Some are ready to concede this point but think they can still attribute American policy to those cunning and all-powerful Jews. Their answer is "the media." American public opinion supports Israel because the clueless and idiotic Americans-so much less sophisticated, so much more poorly educated, so much less rational in their thinking than the enlightened publics of Egypt, Pakistan, Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and Argentina, where a vigilant populace is alert to the insidious plots of the Jews-are fooled by the "Jewish media" into backing the Jewish state.
Once again, this approach betrays a weird combination of anti-Semitic assumptions about Jewish power and cohesion with profound ignorance about American life. The producers of mainstream media coverage in the United States are much closer in their editorial view to what we might call the conventional European vision of the conflict than to the right-wing Israeli view. Ask most correspondents and editors in the media for their private views of the conflict, and they will tell you pretty much what their colleagues in European media would say. That isn't just true of the working stiffs; generally speaking (with some exceptions at Fox), the upper management of these media outlets is closer to the European than to the Likud view.
But news outlets need eyeballs, and the American public doesn't want to watch harrowing stories of Palestinian suffering, and it tunes out the ?blame Israel' narrative. The public likes Israel, thinks it is a good thing, and rejoices when it does well.
Mead argues that an antisemitic outlook, that does not even remotely reflect reality, warps the perception of who controls the political leadership. And he sets the record straight. The "Jewish lobby" and "Jewish media" do not control the government (though the latter has been pointed to in the US and across the pond as the scapegoat for all misfortunes by Israel's detractors). It may not be as sexy as conspiracy and intrigue, but the truth is that the American public votes with their feet, and their television remotes, and largely gets the policies and media coverage they want.
According to McGeough and his contemporaries, the strings of world super power the US are being pulled by the small regional power Israel, through its lobby in Washington, through the media and through accruing Jewish votes for pro-Israel candidates. It is the sort of rhetoric that might be expected from Press TV, or al Jazeera, but it does not belong in mainstream media organisations like Fairfax and the ABC.
The reality of US/Israel relations is far more collaborative and interactive. As Obama noted last week, "innovation is just as important to the relationship between the U.S. and Israel as our security cooperation."
In the Wall Street Journal, Eisenstadt and Pollock agreed that Israeli researchers, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and others are helping create US sustainability and security at home and abroad:
"Why did President Obama visit Israel this week, on the first foreign trip of his second term? The U.S. and Israel share democratic values, of course, and there were pressing issues to discuss publicly and privately, including peace with the Palestinians, the civil war in Syria, and Iran's march to nuclear-weapons capability. But there is an additional consideration that is too rarely emphasized: Israel is helping the U.S. meet the economic, environmental and non-military security challenges of the future," they wrote.
The U.S.-Israel relationship isn't symmetrical, as the U.S. provides Israel with indispensable diplomatic and military assistance. But it is a two-way street.
The concerning element of the Israel-as-puppet-master argument is that while it may serve the narrow world view of those like McGeough, it requires a deliberate and willful ignorance of the wide-ranging interactive relationship enjoyed by Israel and the United States, which is clear to see.
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Source: http://www.rslissak.com/content/obama-israel-and-jewish-lobby-talia-katz
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