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OHIO OFF TO BEST MAC START: After the first weekend of MAC play, Ohio finds itself in rare territory -- in first place in the East Division. The Bobcats, who picked up wins over Kent State and Eastern Michigan, are 2-0 in conference matches for the first time in school history. Ohio battles two unbeaten teams on the road this weekend, Toledo and Northern Illinois.
CMUS YOUNG RACKS UP KILLS: Central Michigans Jenny Young posted the match-high kill total in both of CMUs matches with 18 kills against Buffalo and 20 versus Kent State. She averaged 6.3 kills per game while hitting .345. The outside hitter posted a double-double with 20 kills and 10 digs against Kent State. She also had 12 digs and two block assists on the week.
THE TRIPLE THREAT IS IN EFFECT: Akron sophomore Katie Kuzior had her second triple-double of the season in as many weeks in a loss to Northern Illinois. Kuzior, a member of last years All-MAC Freshman team, had 23 kills, 14 total blocks and 10 digs versus the Huskies, then followed with 25 kills, 10 digs and five blocks the next evening in a win over Bowling Green. For the week, Kuzior averaged 5.33 kills, 2.22 digs and 2.11 blocks per game.
BGSU MIDDLE TIES SCHOOL MARK: Bowling Greens JoAnna Papageorgiou tied a school record in the Ball State match. With 10 block assists, she matched the BGSU record for block assists in a five-game match. That record was set by Nicky Mudrak (vs. Central Michigan, Nov. 21, 1993) and matched by redshirt freshman Laura Twyman in the Cincinnati match earlier this season (Sept. 2). The senior also registered her first-ever triple-double in the match, adding 15 kills and 18 digs.
SALLEE MOVES UP CHART: Ball State senior setter Emily Sallee set a career high with 84 assists in the Cardinals win over Bowling Green on Friday, breaking her old mark of 80 set against Alaska-Fairbanks last season. Her assist total is the highest total to date this year in the MAC, and is the most in the league since Marshalls Nicole Frizzo passed out 87 in a match in 1998. The 84 assists is also tied for the sixth most in MAC history. Sallee, who has 5,446 career helpers, is 173 assists short of moving up to second all-time in MAC annals. Up next for Sallee is Akrons Kim Schaper, who passed out 5,619 assists and is third all-time.
MAC Career Assists 1. 5,794 - Jessica Stout, Miami (1994-97) 2. 5,619 - Kim Schaper, UA (1996-99) 3. 5,446 - Emily Sallee, BSU (1997-pr.)
CHALLENGING ROAD TRIP FOR WMU: In addition to racking up some miles on its current four-match road trip, Western Michigan should also get a good idea of how the division races will shape up. Three of the Broncos first four MAC opponents in the contests were picked to finish either first (Ball State, Miami) or second (Akron) in their respective divisions in the 2000 MAC Preseason Coaches Poll. Last season BSU and Akron won the MAC West and East Division titles, respectively. Eastern Michigan placed third in the West last season and battled the Broncos in the 1999 MAC tourney before falling 3-1.
FRESHMEN IN THE MIDDLE: Miamis freshmen middle hitters, Jessica Rayburg and Susan Poll, put up some nice numbers last week. Poll led the team with a .295 hitting percentage and averaged 2.38 kills per game. Rayburg notched 10 blocks in two matches last week, including three solo blocks, averaging 1.25 per game.
ITS TIME TO SERVE IT UP: The meeting on Friday between Toledo and Ohio will match the top two serving teams in the MAC. Ohio leads the MAC with 2.20 aces per game, while UT is at 1.91. Two of the top three individual servers also will be featured with Ohios Kris Whitfield (0.51/game) and UTs Becky Radomski (0.46/game). The match will also serve as the home opener for the Rockets.
WMU SETTER CLIMBS UP CHART: Western Michigan setter Jen Nowak is just 27 assists shy of totaling 3,000 for her collegiate career. Nowak would be just the third Bronco to total 3,000 or more assists, joining Heather Sawyer (3,455) and all-time leader Kris Penza (4,082) in that elite club. Nowak is the all-time leader in career assists-per-game average (11.89 apg.)
BSUS HOME STREAK TO BE TESTED: Ball States 22-match winning streak will again be on the line this weekend as the Cardinals host Central Michigan on Saturday, then battle Northern Illinois, Kent State and Buffalo next week. BSU ended the 1999 season with 17 straight wins at home.
WILLIAMS NEARING MILESTONE: Marshalls Wendy Williams is closing in on a major milestone for the Thundering Herd. Williams, who eclipsed the 1,000 dig plateau for her career earlier in the season (now has 1,158), is 98 kills short of the century mark. She would become the third player in school history to accomplish the feat. Williams had 26 digs and 17 kills against Eastern Michigan on Friday, then followed with 19 digs and 10 kills versus Toledo.
SCHAUB SHINES FOR EMU: Eastern Michigans Sara Schaub had her league-leading second 20-kill, 20-digs match in the Eagles MAC win over Marshall. Schaub had 25 kills and 20 digs against the Thundering Herd. The senior is second in digs per game (4.16) in the MAC and seventh in kills (4.02).
MESHBERGER CONTINUES TO SIZZLE: Susie Meshberger, who was selected as the MAC Offensive Player of the Week in each of the last two weeks, remained on fire for the Cardinals in their league opening weekend. Meshberger averaged 5.75 kills per game and hit .407. The junior had 22 kills in a 3-0 win over Western Michigan.
SETTING THE STANDARD AT KSU: Kent State junior setter Stephanie Doran had 91 assists in the Flashes two MAC matches last weekend. Doran has had 50 or more assists in a match 29 times in her career including six times this season. Doran raised her season total in assists to 500 (10.64 apg). Overall, she ranks second all-time at Kent State with her 2,846 career assists.
TOUGH MAC OPENER FOR BUFFALO: Buffalo opened MAC play with a tough three-game loss at home against Central Michigan. Two of the games were 15-12 decisions, while the middle game was 15-10. The Bulls were paced by junior Keri Shiels 14 kills and .324 hitting percentage. Freshman Lindsay Matikosh added a match-high 18 digs in the loss.
DELIVERING ON A CONSISTENT BASIS: Toledo sophomore Bitsy Mayhle has registered double digits in kills in all but one match this year. Mayhle leads the Rockets in kills (128) and is 10th in the MAC in kills per game (3.66).
CAREER DAYS FOR PAIR OF HUSKIES: Last Fridays five-game win at Akron was a career-day for a pair of Northern Illinois Huskies. Sophomore Tenisha Wilkins had a career-high 35 kills, while junior defensive specialist Jen Scarpino added a career-best 31 digs. Both student-athletes were honored as MAC Players of the Week for offense and defense, respectively.


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Cowboy 10 Commandments Tin SignCode: RE1529
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The Timberwolves started their 2012-2013 season with an impressive 84-70 win over the Indiana Pacers in front of 9,163 fans at the Fargodome. The Wolves held the Pacers to 34.8 percent from the floor and had four players score double figures led by Chase Budinger and Kevin Love with 14 points each.
Rick Adelman talked in the pregame media session about needing his team to play better defensively, and the Wolves didn't let him down. They forced 24 turnovers and picked up 13 steals all while playing a gritty brand of defensive basketball.
With Ricky Rubio out until December at the earliest, and Luke Ridnour injured, J.J. Barea played solid at the point scoring nine points and dishing four assists in the win.
Brandon Roy and Andrei Kirilenko made their NBA returns with Roy playing over 23 minutes and Kirilenko 27 minutes. Roy shot five of nine from the field, scoring nine points and pulling down four rebounds showing no ill effects of the knee injuries that forced him to retire following the 2009-2010 season.
Kirilenko did his damage on the defensive end of the floor. He picked up six rebounds, had three steals and blocked one shot in his first game back after playing in Russia last year.
Love picked up where he left off leading the team in scoring with 14 points, grabbing eight rebounds, dishing two assists and picking off three steals.
The Wolves jumped out to a 22-19 lead after the first quarter and extended the lead to 46-36 at half due in most part to the second unit of Alexi Shved, Chase Budinger, Greg Stemsma and Derrick Williams.
SCORE BY PERIODS | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Final |
Pacers | 19 | 17 | 15 | 19 | 70 |
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Karanka ready for United test
UEFA Champions League - 1 year ago
Watching: Real Madrid assistant manager Aitor Karanka believes his side took risks in Saturday's Clasico, but hopes his squad will be rested enough for Tuesday's encounter with Manchester United.
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Nominate Your Leaders
It's time to send us your nominations for our Ground Support Worldwide Leaders of the Year Awards. We've narrowed the awards down to three:
Lifetime Achievement Award: This award will go to a person who has demonstrated commitment to the industry through numerous years of dedicated service.
Team Leader Award: This award will go to an individual who has taken a leadership role with personnel.
Product/Service Award: New this year, this award celebrates the products, services and manufacturers making a difference in the industry.
The awards will be presented to the winners during a Network Reception, which will also feature our popular truck giveaway, Thursday night, March 8, during next year's Cygnus Aviation Expo in Las Vegas.
Send your nominations to: Missy Zingsheim at firstname.lastname@example.com
Please tell us which award you are choosing and include the name of the person, product, service and/or manufacturer you are nominating, as well as your award-winning reasons.
Do you recommend this Article?
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Nominate Your Winners
It's time to send us your nominations for our Ground Support Worldwide Leaders of the Year Awards. We've narrowed the awards down to three.
Competition At 540 MPH
Given all this turmoil, what attracted you to the ground support industry? What makes you persevere in such tough times?
Ground Support Leaders of the Year
We won't keep you in suspense this year. Here are our three Ground Support Leaders of the Year. But plan on coming to the Cygnus Aviation Expo's Attendee and Exhibitor Networking Party to celebrate...
The Best And Brightest
We have wrapped up our 40 under 40 nominations and the winners have been chosen — we will be announcing all forty of the award recipients in the cover story of the August/September issue of airport...


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Bobby Nourmand – February Podcast
Bleed House is proud to present Bobby Nourmand's February Podcast. An up-and-coming name in the EDM industry, currently a resident DJ in both New York and Los Angeles Nourmand is slowly but surely expanding his artistry and beginning to produce his own original tracks. This mix has been loaded with trap music per our request, so a big thank you to Bobby for accommodating us. Recently Bobby has been spending time on the west coast, working on an album which will be released sometime this summer, check back for news on his upcoming releases.
One Love


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See "Why ELS" is your perfect choice for international study!
March 5, 2014
Get the big picture quickly and easily!
We are happy to share with you these two new videos that will help you understand what ELS is all about:
March 5, 2014
Get the big picture quickly and easily!
We are happy to share with you these two new videos that will help you understand what ELS is all about:
February 20, 2014
Opening August 25, 2014, this new ELS Center in the Atlantic City area (Galloway Township), offers a pathway into a distinguished college of arts, sciences and professional studies – Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.
February 12, 2014
ELS/Hawaii is pleased to be represented at Study Hawaii Day, which celebrates international university students studying in Hawaii and provides a wide-ranging look the educational opportunities available to them.
January 27, 2014
Creating your personal pathway to achieving your academic, career and life experience goals starts with the powerful new search features at University Guide Online.
January 21, 2014
Start your pathway to global citizenship with the ELS Summer in New York City program at the prestigious Juilliard School!
January 16, 2014
Click to see why more than one million students have chosen to study English with ELS and go on to University.
To learn more about ELS, please visit our website: www.els.edu
January 9, 2014
Submit your essay in an official language of the United Nations (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish) that is not your first language or language of instruction in your primary or secondary education. The deadline to get involved is February 21, 2014!
Click here for full competition details, including entry forms.
December 17, 2013
Click here to learn more about the hundreds of ELS partner universities offering scholarships to international students! See scholarships from universities in Australia, Canada, Europe and the United States!
December 3, 2013
Consider the benefits of the community college option... admission to nationally ranked public and private universities via guaranteed 2+2 pathways.
November 25, 2013
ELS is proud to be honored by The Association of International Education Counselors in Turkey as the best English language school in the USA and Australia.
November 15, 2013
ELS/Brisbane, located on the campus of the Metropolitan South Institute of TAFE offers students the chance to visit one of Australia's most exciting cities and immerse themselves in a multicultural population unlike any other.
October 25, 2013
The new ELS/Chicago – Romeoville Language Center will open on October 13, 2014 on the campus of one of the finest comprehensive Catholic universities in the country: Lewis University.
October 18, 2013
ELS happily announces the sponsorship of an essay contest where university students from around the world will be chosen for a five day, all expenses paid trip to the United Nations in New York City.
October 9, 2013
ELS has a few questions – and you have all the answers! Share your thoughts with ELS, please take 10 minutes to fill out this survey.
October 3, 2013
ELS celebrates the many contributions of our teachers and staff, as they positively impact the lives of our students every day. World Teachers' Day is a UNESCO holiday observed this year on October 5, that globally recognizes teachers around the world.
Uscendo, tutti i dati saranno salvati e tornerai alla homepage.


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Roberta Gibson picked a winning design in their book cover contest
For just $400, they received 191 designs from 43 designers.
From logos and business cards to websites and stationery, you can get anything designed by running your own design contest on 99designs.
Create the next book or magazine cover for Roberta Gibson
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Roberta Gibson
I'm a writer.
Entertainment & The Arts
I want an e-book cover designed for my novel, The Applegate Garden. I am represented by Erica Silverman at Trident Media Group and your company was recommended by her for their new e-book division.
Here is a brief synopsis of the novel.
A young woman, Dawn Applegate puts her hectic but happy Manhattan lifestyle on hold to pay her estranged father an unexpected visit in Druwick, Massachusetts.
It's Halloween and the annual reenactment of its only witch trial dating back to 1678 is about to begin. Two years earlier, Dawn had portrayed Prudence Dale, the fifteen-year-old, who'd been burned alive by the villagers for supposedly calling forth Satan.
To Dawn's sorow, on the eve of her return, all hopes of unraveling her father's bizarre behavior over the past two years, ends when she witnesses his death by snake bite in the apple orchard, a section of the vast Applegate garden.
She extends her stay to handle the funeral and to arrange for the sale of the ancestral home, a large English Tudor, which according to her father's will, she is forbidden to ever live in, and it must be sold to someone not related to the Applegate's.
Her best friend, Becky Muldoon arrives to help. With the funeral now behind her and the house up for sale, Dawn is eager to return to Manhattan and her fiance who, due to a strange accident, was unable to make the funeral. But before Becky and Dawn can leave Druwick, they're involved in an automobile accident. Becky isn't hurt, but Danw suffers a blow to the head and is in a coma for three days.
When she awakens, she is unexplainably determined to remain in Druwick, and wrangles a way to move back into her childhood home where she's eager to tend the garden and eat of its food. With her memory strangely vanishing, Dawn hastily marries the tacit, stranger Nick Adams and, in due time, gives birth to twin sons. Becky Muldoon moves in to help and becomes a permanent fixture. We soon realize that Becky and Nick are not who they claim to be. Is the food grown in the Applegate garden and prepared by Becky the cause of Dawn's drastic change? Are Becky and Nick scheming to kill Dawn so that he can inherit the Applegate's considerable fortune. Or do Becky and Nick have darker plans for Dawn as the garden becomes the central focus of her life?
The Applegate Garden, is a modern day reversal of biblical "Creationism." Satan truly was conjured up in 1678, but forced back into Hell when Prudence Dale, who truly was a witch, was burned alive. Satan has been biding his time. When Dawn Applegate recreates the role of Prudence, she innocently brings him up from the bowels of Hell. The Applegate garden becomes his version of the garden of Eden. Satan then creates a demon, Nick Adams. Dawn is the unwitting victim of their scheme. Just as Adam and Eve, in biblical belief, created the beginning of the human race, Dawn has created the beginning of the Satanic race.
I ask you to use your imagination, but in no way do I want a snake on the cover or the naked man and woman and the apple tree.
It's Halloween. It's autum in Masachusetts. The village was settled by Puritan and these people are their descendants. They have only one old custom, the Prudence Dale witch trial reenactment. Druwick, Mass. is a small off-the-beaten-path, bucolic paradise where evil is woven into the innocent fabric of everyday life.
The Applegate garden is beautiful. It has a massive vegetable patch and there's a meadow where sheep graze, but this is Satan's domain and here, evil thrives.
I see a harvested autumn garden, dead stalks of corn, dark rich earch plowed over and all that remains are a few squash and pumpkins. Some pumpkins are beginning to rot. I think a pitchfok somewhere in this field could work. I also see a black wagon - the type used to pull children in. Perhaps it's sitting in the spent garden. A hawk, which is a central ploy in the novel, could be soaring overhead.
This is merely a suggestion. Please use you imagination.
Perhaps this cover should be simple. One that has with the impact of Dan Brown's cover on, The Da Vinci Code. I do think autumn colors would be an enhancement, but let us avoid anything that smacks of a Romance novel. This is a spine chilling novel . Dawn's terryifying change and desperate struggle to escape, forms the core of this darkly, clever story.
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Econo Lodge Sharonville
Travel Blogs from Sharonville
We're working on it, really we are!
We are home now (midnight last night) from our grand, and I do mean GRAND Alaskan adventure. I'm sorry we didn't blog much while we were gone. When we weren't having a TON of fun, we were exhausted and sleeping or we didn't have Internet access! The weather was (unusual ...
The Airport
... until Cozart doubled up with Jay Bruce on third base. He shut his computer down and we read and tried to catch a little sleep. The Reds ended up losing 6 - 1. We left LA on time and it was a 14 hour flight to Guangzhou, China. We had a 4 hour layover until our next flight to Liuzhou, our destination, which took 1 hour. In all it took us 32 hours to get to Liuzhou, China, 19 hours ...
Joan's China Blog
Hello everyone, Gene and I are getting ready to embark on an exciting adventure in the city of Liuzhou, China. We will be teaching English to high school students at Liu Gao School. We will teach 2-3 classes a day, using keynote/powerpoint presentations. The objective is to engage students in conversational English. Since the presentations are about Cincinnati, Ohio and America the students ...
One more week to go!
This time next week we'll be at the airport ready to begin our "Great Alaskan Adventure". We are packin', packin' and packin' & trying to figure out what to take on the land tour and what to take on the ship tour. But we are so excited we can hardly see straight! Be talkin' to you soon.
Bev, Nay & Jan
GAME 21 - Cincinnati Reds vs Oakland A's
The Great American Ball Park. Isn't that a great name for a ball yard? Today's ball clubs so often sell the naming rights for their parks to huge corporate interests, and I was so relieved to go to a park that just had a great name. Imagine my disappointment when I learned that this one was named for the Great American Insurance corporation. The towering skyscraper that dominates the skyline right next to the ...


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Salem Celebrates the Fourth
Thu, Jul 4, 2013
Times: 4:00 pm Kids Activities, 7:00 pm Pop's Concert, 9:15 pm Fireworks
Venue: Derby Wharf at Salem Maritime National Historic Site
160 Derby Street, Salem, MA 01970
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Join the City of Salem for its 13th Annual Celebration of Independence Day. The Hillyer Festival Orchestra will play a Pops! Concert, with opening acts, kids' events, and a fantastic fireworks show over Derby Wharf, Salem Harbor and the tall ship Friendship.
Celebrate March Maple Days at Old Sturbridge Village
Old Sturbridge Village, a quaint, 1830s living history museum nestled in Central Mass, appeals to...
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Suspect of in the July 2007 home invasion killings of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her two daughters, Hayley Petit, 17, and Michaela Petit, 11, in Cheshire, Conn.
Suspect of in the July 2007 home invasion killings of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her two daughters, Hayley Petit, 17, and Michaela Petit, 11, in Cheshire, Conn.
Top Steven Hayes Articles
Displaying items 56-66
Suspect Was 'Depressed'
Story | Jul 28, 2007In the days before being charged with committing a brutal triple murder in Cheshire, Joshua Komisarjevsky was depressed over the loss of his teenage girlfriend and struggling financially because of mounting costs related to his 5-year-old child, a close... -
Love And Pain
Story | Jul 29, 2007He wasn't listed in the program, but he was first on everybody's minds. As William Petit's wife and daughters were tinted with the sainthood of tragedy at this Saturday service, he sat and watched. The survivor. Central Connecticut State University's 1,... -
2 Men Mixed Drugs, Parole
Story | Aug 3, 2007Career criminal Steven Hayes, one of two men charged with killing three members of a Cheshire family during a home invasion last week, had a long history of failure in parole and community release programs. He also was a crack addict, a fact that... -
Special Report: Prelude To Horror
Story | Oct 28, 2007As a small circle of friends celebrated his freedom at a barbecue in July, Joshua Komisarjevsky brooded, burying himself in a bottle of whiskey. State probation officers had removed an electronic monitoring bracelet less than 24 hours earlier, bringing... -
Cheshire Dispatch Log Released
Story | Jan 22, 2008Newly released dispatch records show a nearly five-minute gap between the time Cheshire police received an initial 911 call last July about an "incident" at the home of Dr. William Petit and the time officers were dispatched to the scene. It took seven... -
Request For Separate Juries Dropped In Petit Slaying Trial
Petit Seeks No-Contact Order Against Murder Suspects, Defense Team
Story | Jul 18, 2009Defense attorneys for one of the suspects in a 2007 deadly home invasion robbery in Cheshire want to reach out to family members of the victims, but Dr. William Petit and his family have refused the offer and are asking a judge to block such contact.... -
After Tragic Loss, A Soft Voice Speaks Up
Story | Oct 26, 2008He never returned to the practice of medicine, not after a home invasion took his wife and daughters, leaving him a survivor and a symbol. Dr. William A. Petit Jr. is an activist now, willing to stand with any candidate who pledges to support a mandatory... -
Dr. Petit Tells Lawmakers Death Penalty Should Be Repaired, Not Scrapped
Story | Mar 5, 2009For nearly eight hours Wednesday, lawmakers pondered the fate of Connecticut's death penalty. Then Dr. William Petit Jr. approached the microphone and explained why he believes a just and fair society sometimes has to inflict the ultimate punishment. His... -
Cheshire Suspects Fight For Their Lives
Story | Jul 21, 2009 | 4:41 PMAlmost exactly two years since the deadly Cheshire home invasion the two suspects are trying to save their own lives. Details of a proposed plea deal came out in a heated court hearing Tuesday, with both sides arguing over who's holding up a trial.... -
Steven Hayes, A Suspect In Cheshire Home Invasions, Apparently Overdosed On Drugs


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(We apologize for any confusion around the changes of venues)
We'll discuss numerous topics including Big Data, Programmatic, Native Advertising, and Sponsorships, just to name a few. Terry Griffin (Senior Marketing Officer, Personal Information Solutions at Equifax), Jeff Hanson (VP of eCommerce, Floor and Decor) and Kimberly Beaudin (VP of Marketing for Arrow Exterminators) will be among our esteemed panelists sharing their insights with us.
Featured Speakers
Ken Bernhardt, Moderator
Terry Griffin, EquifaxJeff Hanson, Floor and DecorKimberly Beaudin, Arrow Exterminators
Special thanks to our sponsor AOL for their support in making this event possible!


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Detectives try to figure out why a mother would try to kill her eight-year-old daughter, as the girl fights for her life in a Queens hospital."Right now, I'm so, like in shock," said Aliyah Grannum, the aunt of Brianna Davis, hours after learning that Brianna's mother and Grannum's sister, Ann Carimbocas Davis, stabbed the girl in the head, back and in one of her shoulders just before 10:30 Tuesday morning.
"They brought the mother out, she looked so emotionless," neighbor Lindsay Fortune told PIX11 News. He was an eyewitness to the scene immediately after the stabbing.
"One of the EMTs came out and said, 'Hurry up, it's a baby," Fortune said in describing the scene when medics rushed the girl out of the rear apartment of the duplex home at 144-67 176th Street on a stretcher. "There was blood on the sheets, she was incoherent, arms just wobbly like noodles."
Another eyewitness, neighbor Hyacinth Coombs, is also an emergency room technician, and based on her medical experience, the outlook was not positive. "If she's going to make it," Coombs told PIX11 News, "I don't know."
However, by midafternoon, the girl whose mother stabbed her twice in the head and twice in her upper body improved, going from what Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly described as "not likely to survive" to critical but stable condition.
Clearly, she still has a long way to go, but her relatives and people who saw her transported from the scene are praying in the midst of their shock.
"I don't understand how much rage you can have in your mind and body to do that to your own child," Fortune said.
Police also said that the son of the woman Brianna and her mother was visiting, Colleen George, was instrumental in subduing the mother and keeping her from doing further harm until medics and police could arrive. They did not identify Colleen George's son other than to say that he is in his twenties.
He is one of two reasons the near-fatal attack did not turn fatal, according to investigators. The other reason, according to Brianna Davis's family, is her strength and will to live.
Family members also told PIX11 News that Ann Carimbocas Davis has a history of mental illness, and was hospitalized three years ago on Long Island for treatment of a mental condition.
Police also said that Davis was incoherent when detectives tried to interview her at the 105th precinct, which was handling the stabbing investigation. Sources close to the investigation told PIX11 News that Davis tried use a pen to attack a police employee at the precinct. Medics had to transport her out of the precinct, strapped to a stretcher, screaming, to a mental health facility for further evaluation.


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Just one day after an RT anchor spoke out against Russia's invasion of Crimea, a second anchor closed her show Wednesday by denouncing the same aggression, among other actions, and quitting right on the air. Then both of them appeared on CNN to explain and defend their moves.
RT, formerly Russia Today, is widely available on cable in the United States and in 100 countries abroad. It's funded by the Russian government and rarely strays from the official line.
Probably by now you've read and heard a good deal about the first anchor, Abby Martin, and if not, you can catch up here. In short order, after her critique, RT said it would send her to Crimea to maybe learn more about what the troops from the home country were doing there, a kind offer she immediately refused. Then many media outlets, including The New York Times, published pieces on Martin's history as a 9/11 "truther." In any case, she was back on the air the next day.
Then the second anchor/reporter, Liz Wahl, dropped her bombshell, and went further (see video below). She said she can't work for a TV network that "whitewashes the actions of Putin." Many in the US applauded, while some pointed out that she had to know where the RT funding was coming from all this time.
Wahl, interviewed by The Daily Beast, claimed she'd been "disgusted" by what she had to report. While trying to stay "objective" she's often been overruled by superiors. "It actually makes me feel sick that I worked there," Wahl said. "It's not a sound news organization, not when your agenda is making America look bad."
She then went on CNN's Anderson Cooper show (watch) and detailed pressure from management—and just today she had part of her interview with Ron Paul cut. As a reporter you need to "seek the truth," she said, but RT is "not out for the truth" (though she knew that when she signed on) and merely "Putinist."
Asked how RT will likely respond, she said she hadn't seen an "official response."
Well, she didn't have to wait long. RT responded to Anderson Cooper's people, who posted it on his site. Excerpt: "When a journalist disagrees with the editorial position of his or her organization, the usual course of action is to address those grievances with the editor, and, if they cannot be resolved, to quit like a professional. But when someone makes a big public show of a personal decision, it is nothing more than a self-promotional stunt."
Wahl then went on on Piers Morgan's CNN show and again accused RT of presenting "Putinist propaganda." Piers asked why she went to work for RT to begin with. She replied, "That's a very good question." (No kidding.) She said she didn't think there would be that much "propaganda" and "pressure." Asked if she thinks Abby Martin should quit, she demured, saying Martin is allowed to speak out—because her "line" in her show is one RT likes (and can count on her backing).
Then Abby Martin went on Piers's show and said she backs whatever Wahl chooses to do but she is not tempted to quit. Claiming she has full "independence," she accused all of the TV networks in the US of being just as compliant with US policy and officials. "Corporate media" in US is no different than government-funded network, she claimed. Piers pushed back just a bit, suggesting that he spoke out often against US policy.
Well, Abby Martin has a point, to be sure, but apparently did not watch MSNBC in the final years of the Bush reign or Fox News every night of Obama's two terms. Roll the video tape: Let's see a few examples of more than a sliver of Putin criticism on RT (before this week).
The better point is how the American networks have gone along with so many US official lies and other nonsense—when, unlike RT, they didn't really have to.
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UPDATE Lengthy, and angry, response posted at RT.com by the network's editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan. After hitting the US media reaction, it concludes:
I can see very clearly why I continue to work for a channel that stands alone (!) face-to-face with thousands and tens of thousands of Western news outlets, showing everybody the other side of the story, under daily attacks from the media against which it can hardly fight back. It's my country. There is no other choice for me. But the foreign journalists who work for RT across the globe do have a choice. Some of them might be asking themselves, "Why would I have to defend Russia at the expense of my career, my future, my reputation, why would I tolerate humiliation by my fellow journalists?" Few can say "Because I'm telling the truth, and there's no one else to tell it." Some will fail to find the answer and quietly resign. Others will perform their resignation on air in a self-promotional stunt, perhaps securing fantastic career prospects they wouldn't have dreamt of before.
By the way, CNN is now covering the leaked phone call on speculation about the deadly snipers in Kiev mentioned in the post.
Read Next: Stephen Cohen on how the American media misrepresent Putin, Sochi and Ukraine
The US and Russia have been locked in a rhetorical tennis match since President Vladimir Putin sent Russian troops into Ukraine's Crimea region late last week. Calling for "some sober perspective" from politicians in all three countries, Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel appeared on CNN's Amanpour to discuss the recent upheaval in Ukraine. According to vanden Heuvel, reasoned diplomacy will be critical for securing the territorial integrity of Ukraine, stabilizing the country's faltering economy, and organizing free and fair elections. For more of vanden Heuvel's thoughts on what must be done in Ukraine, listen to her interview with Uprising Radio's Sonali Kolhatkar.
—Allegra Kirkland
This was originally published as an op-ed in the Tufts Daily and is reprinted here with permission.
"This is the year to take action on climate change. There are no more excuses," proclaimed Jim Yong Kim, current president of the World Bank, at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos. "We can divest [from carbon-intensive assets]," he continued, saying that investing in the fossil fuel industry betrays investors' "responsibility to future pension holders who will be affected by decisions made today."
Less than three weeks later, Tufts University's Board of Trustees voted to not divest from fossil fuels, citing "significant anticipated negative impact on Tufts' endowment."
As members of President Monaco's Tufts Divestment Working Group, it quickly became clear to us that the group hadn't been created for "open discussion" about the possibility of divestment from fossil fuels, as Monaco claimed. Instead, it existed to generate financial models supporting the administration's expectation that it was financially impossible.
In one of our committee meetings, Patricia Campbell, the executive vice president of our university, admitted that divestment could indeed be feasible—but it was clear to us that the administration wasn't willing to consider the changes to Tufts' investment strategy that divestment would entail. It was this lack of consideration given to fossil fuel divestment that colored the working group process and left us disappointed by our administration's utter lack of good faith in its approach to the issue. In his Davos address, Kim said, "Corporate leaders should not wait to act until market signals are right and national investment policies are in place," yet our administration continues to claim that Tufts should wait for the carbon bubble to burst before taking action.
Meanwhile, many corporate and institutional leaders are already taking leadership. Mayors of cities including Seattle, Madison and our own Somerville are pursuing divestment. Norwegian financial services firm Storebrand, which controls more than $60 billion in assets, has announced its intention to pull its investments out of coal and tar sands companies to ensure "long-term stable returns" because they know that those stocks will be "financially worthless" in the future. In January, the CEO of Google joined sixteen other managers of charitable foundations in divesting their assets from the fossil fuel industry. The list goes on.
Our administration and trustees declined to join these other institutions not because they are unintelligent or misinformed but because they are afraid. Perhaps some of our trustees are afraid to consider that the profits they have gained from their investments in fossil fuel companies have accumulated at the cost of a stable climate and human lives. We have heard both President Monaco and trustee Laurie Gabriel admit that divestment is the moral choice, but they are afraid to challenge one of the largest, most powerful industries in the history of the world. They are afraid to take leadership.
We, like so many of our fellow students, chose Tufts because we believed it was a place that valued ambitious leadership, bold innovation and active global citizenship. These are the values that Tufts promotes to us throughout its admissions process, in the classroom and ultimately, in the paths we take after graduation. We are expected to lead, make moral choices and improve our society. But the recent announcement that Tufts will not divest showed that our administration is failing to live up to its own values.
In his letter to the Tufts community, President Monaco wrote: "We are committed to meeting ambitious sustainability goals for Tufts' operations," and cited new projects in building energy metering and cogeneration. These are important steps, but compared to the scale and urgency of combating climate change, Tufts' "sustainability goals" are not in any way "ambitious."
We have seen this lack of ambition from our institution many times before. It took forty years for Tufts to create an Africana studies department. It took more than a decade to divest from apartheid South Africa. We don't have a decade now. We do not have the luxury to be anything short of ambitious. Not when too many communities are already fighting for their lives, for clean air to breathe, clean water to drink and food to eat. Not when the fossil fuel industry imperils our generation's ability to live, work and raise children in a stable and just world.
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The student body showed its support for divestment last semester in a referendum. We know that we, the student body, have the moral clarity and ambition that our administration has failed to show. Tufts will not change unless we fight for that change. So we ask that as this campaign moves forward, you stand with us to make Tufts a place that we can be proud of, for the sake of our future.
Read Next: Will Yale make the same decision on fossil fuel divestment as Tufts?
Federal prosecutors moved to dismiss charges against a journalist and Internet activist who faced decades in prison for publishing a hyperlink containing hacked information, The Guardian reports.
A US attorney for the Northern District of Texas filed a motion Wednesday to dismiss eleven of twelve charges against Barrett Brown in a case accusing him of trafficking data and credit card information stolen from private intelligence firm Stratfor. The hack was carried out by members of the Internet collective Anonymous. Brown, who was not found to be involved with the hack himself, allegedly republished a hyperlink to the Stratfor file in a chatroom.
The government's motion for dismissal comes a day after Brown's attorneys formally requested the link-sharing charges be dropped. In a forty-eight page memo, Brown's attorneys argued that their client did not make the Stratfor file "available to other persons online" because it was already publicly available at the time. They also argued that charging Brown for merely sharing a link violated his free speech rights, calling the indictment "unconstitutionally overbroad" and warning that the case could "chill speech in violation of the First Amendment."
Brown's case galvanized lawyers, Internet activists and free speech advocates who feared that convictions on his link-sharing charges could set a dangerous precedent for journalists that source from hacked data.
"By the US, government's theory, journalists can be held criminally liable merely for linking to a publicly-available file that contains sensitive information, whether or not they had any part in actually obtaining the data in the first place," wrote Geoffrey King, Internet Advocacy Coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, before Brown's charges were dropped. "This theory threatens the nature of the Web, as well as the ethical duty of journalists to verify and report the truth."
Brown is still accused of access device fraud related to the Stratfor case. He also faces separate charges of obstruction of justice, threatening a federal agent and conspiracy to disclose information about a federal agent.
According to The Guardian's Ed Pilkington, the dismissals in Brown's case removed thirty-five years from a maximum prison sentence of 105 years.
Economic inequality—as a political cause, as an issue of social and moral concern, as a subject of academic research—is at long last, having its moment. World leaders from President Obama to Pope Francis are giving speeches and sermons about it. Political candidates like Bill de Blasio and Elizabeth Warren have scored upset victories with campaigns that emphasized themes of economic inequality. The Democratic Party, taking its cue, is adopting economic inequality as the theme of the 2014 midterm elections. Perhaps the most intriguing recent development is that economic elites are showing distinct symptoms of unease and even panic at the country's growing populist mood.
The timing could hardly be better for the publication this month of several important new books about economic inequality, which I plan to discuss in this space. But first, I want to write about another notable book on the subject that was published toward the tail end of 2013. The Killing Fields of Inequality (Polity) is by the eminent Swedish sociologist Göran Therborn (author of What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules? and other classic works). Comprising just 185 pages, it's a short book that packs a powerful punch.
Therborn's book is a panoramic survey of inequality across the globe in its various dimensions: theoretical, historical, empirical. Like other recent works, Killing Fields looks at the causes of the dizzying rise in economic inequality we've seen in recent decades in most of the developed world. But its greatest strength lies in the succinct but compelling answers it provides to three of the most important inequality-related questions. First: what, exactly, do we mean by "inequality"? Second, what is inequality doing to us? And finally, why should we care about it?
First, let's deal with the "what do we mean by inequality?" question. Therborn finds the definition of equality developed by economist Amartya Sen to be most helpful. Equality, according to Sen, is "equality of capability to function fully as a human being. Such a capability clearly entails survival, health (and aids for disability), freedom and knowledge (education) to choose one's life-path, and resources to pursue it."
Inequalities, then, are "multidimensional barriers to human functioning in the world" which are "violations of human rights." According to Therborn, there are three main types of inequality: vital inequality, which refers to inequalities regarding health outcomes and life expectancies; resource inequality, which refers to economic inequalities of various sorts; and a concept he calls he calls existential inequality, which he defines as "the unequal allocation of personhood, i.e., of autonomy, dignity, degrees of freedom, and of rights to respect and self-development."
The most eye-opening, and disturbing, passages of the book are those that concern "vital inequality," or the impact of inequality on life and health. This is where the "killing fields" of the title comes in. "Inequality kills," states Therborn in the book's first sentence. Consider these statistics:
§ Between 1990 and 2008, life expectancy of white American men declined by three years, and low-educated white American women saw their life expectancy decline by five years.
§ The life expectancy between the richest and poorest neighborhoods in Glasgow, a difference of twenty-eight years, is the same as that between the UK and Haiti.
§ The UK's famous Whitehall studies indicate that the odds of poor health and premature death increased as the employee's status in the civil service bureaucracy decreased—even controlling for use of alcohol, tobacco and other factors.
§ The restoration of capitalism to the former Soviet Union is associated with a stunning 4 million excess deaths there.
§ A number of studies show that unemployment is associated with a significant number of excess deaths, even when controlling for other health indicators.
Those examples and many others that Therborn cites, which make "the correlation between hierarchy and death" all too clear, are harrowing. (Therborn wields a masterful command of an array of fascinating statistcs). Yet high inequality societies are far from inevitable. Therborn argues that "capitalism and capitalists can, under certain circumstances, be taught how to behave." Income inequality in the Nordic countries in the early 1980s was about the same as it was in the Communist bloc. Egalitarianism, he claims, continues to hold a powerful appeal, and there are at least three major reasons why high levels of economic inequality tend to be deeply troubling to many people.
First, Therborn notes, there is the illegitimacy of today's rentier capitalism. Many among the one percent derive their wealth "not from hard productive work, thrift and honest exchange, but from connections—parental and/or political—from gambling and from sidestepping existing norms and regulations." Secondly, he says, the "positive lure" of egalitarian, enlightened societies "where nobody is outcast or humiliated, and where everybody has a chance to develop his/her capabilities." Finally, there is what he calls "the social cost of other people's misery":
Without support from any representative-sample surveys, I would venture the proposition that most middle-class Kolkatans, Cairenes, Kinois, Angelenos, or Paulistas would prefer to walk (or drive) the cities or, say, Paris or Stockholm, where they will not get confronted with abject misery, where streets and public spaces are clean—not because the miserable have been chased away, but because society itself is cleaned of abject misery. Most middle-class people are likely to be happier without walled-in seclusion, barbed wire and armed body guards, without whom the happy middle classes of Northwestern Europe are living.
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Therborn has a gift for crafting paragraphs like the one above, capable of awakening the reader like a jolt. And so, upon reading that passage, I reflected upon how much abject human misery I take for granted every time I step outside my apartment for a cup of coffee—the obstacle course of panhandlers I dodge, the dazed-looked homeless woman with the shopping cart whose gaze I avoid. Yet, just blocks away from this terrible human suffering loom the gleaming offices of the highest-paid university president in the land (the University of Chicago's Robert Zimmer pocketed $3.4 million in 2011, the year for which the most recent figures are available).
Therborn's elegant, eloquent book is perhaps most valuable in the way it forces us to take a fresh look at the social order around us and its mounting and appalling human costs. He closes the book with these sentences:
The battle is about to start. Nobody knows how it will end. Which side will you be on?
It's a very good question.
Read Next: Mary Bottari explains how pro-austerity groups lost the deficit wars.
This post was originally published at RepublicReport.com
David Jolly, the Republican congressional candidate vying for the special election in Florida next week, has not only made a career out of lobbying. Records reviewed by Republic Report show that Jolly's clients won millions of dollars in taxpayer earmarks from his old boss, the late Representative C.W. "Bill" Young (R-FL), an appropriator known for his lavish use of the earmarking process.
These earmarks contrast sharply with the claims made by Jolly that he did not build his business career through political connections to his former employer.
"I did not build my practice around Mr. Young, not in any stretch," Jolly told the Tampa Bay Times.
Two of the firms that hired Jolly as a lobbyist—BayCare Health Systems and Alakai Defense Systems—won lucrative earmarks from Young while paying Jolly to influence the committee where Young was a senior member.
In 2009, BayCare Health Systems retained Jolly and another former Young staffer named Douglas Gregory. Later that year, Young secured a $1 million earmark for BayCare Health Systems for "facilities and equipment."
From 2008 through the beginning of 2010, Alakai Defense Systems, a sensor technology company for the military, retained Jolly as a lobbyist. Records indicate that during this period, Young awarded Alakai with over $2 million worth of earmarks.
The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act prohibits certain former staffers in Congress from lobbying their former employers for a period of time. As The New York Times recently reported, many former staffers have flouted the "cooling off period" ban by taking advantage of an array of loopholes in the law.
Jolly, who left Young's staff to join the lobbying firm Van Scoyoc Associates in January of 2007, became a lobbyist just before the ban came into effect.
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"Yes, there are concerns raised when a former staffer appears to use his or her ties to his employer for personal gain," says Jessica Levinson, associate professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. "The cooling off period prohibition is designed to prevent people from using their connections in government to obtain unfair or preferential treatment or access for private clients."
"The idea," says Levinson, is that "everyone, regardless of whether or not they are represented by former staffers or officials, should get a fair shot to persuade their officials."
Read Next: Lee Fang writes that Obama's newest pick for TPP trade post is a former SOPA lobbyist.
It won't get as much notice as his budget proposal, but President Obama's "2014 Trade Policy Agenda," which was released this week, sends an exceptionally powerful signal regarding the administration's economic vision.
Unfortunately, it's the wrong signal.
While the president—in his public pronouncements and his budget—is saying a lot of the right things about income inequality and investment in infrastructure and job creation, the White House has yet to recognize the harm that is done to the American economy—and to prospects of economic renewal that the president envisions—by failed trade policies.
At a time when the United States continues to experience overwhelming trade deficits—$38.7 billion in December—there is little in the way of new thinking in the report. In fact, as Public Citizen's authoritative "Eyes on Trade" blog notes, "Much of the 2014 agenda is a copy and paste of the 2013 agenda, reiterating USTR's stock set of talking points, such as the tired, counterfactual promise that a more-of-the-same trade policy will boost exports."
The 2014 agenda statement outlines the efforts of the administration to advance new free-trade initiatives—the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership—that build on the approach of the North America Free Trade Agreement, the Central American Free Trade Agreement and the permanent normalization of trade relations with China.
The problem with the old way of doing things is that it has not worked. US Senator Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democrat who authored the book, The Myths of Free Trade (New Press, notes that "we've seen more than five million jobs lost to our 'trading partners,' in NAFTA, CAFTA, and China…"
Brown argues that, in an increasingly globalized economy, "we should export American products, not American jobs."
There are sections of the "2014 Trade Policy Agenda" that talk a good line in that regard. But the rhetoric is not matched by a shift in approach. The agenda contains nothing in the way of a vision for breaking the pattern described by the office of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders:
After the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Mexican agricultural sector has been decimated by cheap exports from American agribusiness. Poverty has increased, the middle class has declined and people are literally dying in the desert trying to flee Mexico for the US. It is not only Mexico and other developing countries that have been hurt by these unfettered pro-corporate free-trade agreements. It's also the working families in the US, who are now engaged in a horrendous "race to the bottom." Despite an explosion of technology and a huge increase in worker productivity, poverty in America is increasing, the middle class is shrinking and the gap between the rich and the poor is growing wider. In the past 6 years, millions of good-paying jobs in the US have been lost as companies continue to shut down here and move to China and other low-wage countries.
Just as it clings to a flawed vision regarding trade policies, the administration's agenda recycles a wrongheaded approach to negotiating international agreements. "To facilitate the conclusion, approval, and implementation of are market-opening negotiating initiatives (on TPP and T-TIP) negotiations," the administration's statement announces, "we are working with Congress to support broad bipartisan passage of Trade Promotion Authority (TPA)."
The broad bipartisan stance in Congress at this point is one of opposition to passage of TPA, a tool that diminishes the role of Congress in shaping agreements by "fast tracking" the process. More than 150 House Democrats have expressed their opposition to "Fast Track" Trade Promotion Authority. "Fast Track is simply not appropriate for 21st Century agreements and must be replaced," the Democrats wrote. "The United States cannot afford another trade agreement that replicates the mistakes of the past. We can and must do better."
Several dozen House Republicans have broken with their party's congressional leadership to express their opposition to Fast Track.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, says, "I am against Fast Track." He has urged the administration to back off on its request for Trade Promotion Authority. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, though she is less skeptical than Reid, has says the Fast Track proposal that is currently on the table—a measure sponsored by US Congressman David Camp, R-Michigan, and former Senator Max Baucus, D-Montana—is "unacceptable."
The Obama administration needs to rethink a trade agenda that is at odds with much of the rest of what the president is saying about job creation, renewal of manufacturing and the strengthening of the US economy.
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Instead of recycling failed approaches and flawed strategies, it should listen to Democrats like Congressman Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat who has been a frequent ally of the administration but says:
Given how previous trade agreements have devastated local manufacturing sectors and shipped American jobs overseas, it would be unwise for Congress to ram through new trade deals without offering proper oversight. Massive trade deals—such as the Trans Pacific Partnership—now affect everything from America's economy, to consumer and food safety, to labor standards and our environment. Blindly approving or disapproving agreements that have largely been negotiated in secret would represent a derelict of duty for Congress. If there is nothing to hide in these agreements, we should be allowed to debate and amend these deals in the open. I am committed to doing all that I can to prevent the inappropriate use of Fast Track in Congress.
Read Next: Lee Fang on Obama's nomination of a SOPA lobbyist for a key trade post.
This article is a joint publication of TheNation.com and Foreign Policy In Focus.
The Cold War is history. For those growing up today, it is as distant in time as World War II was for those who came of age in the 1970s. In both cases, empires collapsed and maps were redrawn. Repugnant ideologies were laid bare and then laid to rest, though patches of nostalgia persist.
Surely the Cold War has been consigned to the textbooks as irrevocably as the Battle of the Bulge. The Berlin Wall is in pieces. The US president speaks of the abolition of nuclear weapons. The "common European home" from the Atlantic to the Urals—a conceit embraced by such odd bedfellows as De Gaulle and Gorbachev—beckons on the horizon, with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in place and the European Union creeping ever eastward. Tensions inevitably crop up, but they're nothing worth exchanging ICBMs over.
What was once confrontation has turned into joint efforts to address global challenges: stabilizing the world economy, negotiating nuclear agreements with Iran, ending the war in Syria. A long article in The New Yorker on a multibillion-dollar nuclear fusion project being constructed in France reminds us that this quest for a sustainable replacement for fossil fuels began as a late Cold War agreement between Moscow and Washington. Impending environmental catastrophe is gradually uniting all sides in much the same way that Ronald Reagan once imagined that a Martian invasion would.
And then there's Ukraine.
Just when you thought it was safe to get back into geopolitics, the Cold War has reared its ugly head once again. All your favorite characters have returned to the footlights—the iron-fisted Russian leader, the thundering American secretary of state, troops of multiple nations on alert and lots of cloak-and-dagger intrigue behind the scenes. And starring in the role of Prague 1968 is that new and untested actor: Crimea 2014. We can only hope that history is repeating itself as farce, not as a tragic tale told twice.
But there are some crucial differences in this restaging of the Cold War classic. The West has not been practicing containment of Russia so much as rollback of its influence by expanding NATO and the EU up to the country's doorstep. And Moscow is not invoking some form of internationalism in support of ideological compatriots but nationalism pure and simple to safeguard its ethnic brethren. Moreover, this is a democratic age: Russian military intervention now comes with the Duma's imprimatur. From the West, so far, has come much sound and fury, including the threat of economic sanctions and other penalties, but a military response remains off the table. There is still time to find a diplomatic solution that can preserve Ukrainian sovereignty, address the concerns of Russians on both sides of the border and revive that old vision of a common European home that treats Russia as a member, not a mobster.
When people speak of "Russia's doorstep," they mean Ukraine. No one aspires to be a doorstep, because that's what people walk on with their muddy boots. As Timothy Snyder has detailed in his book Bloodlands, Ukraine has suffered incalculable losses because of its location, first as a locus of potential resistance to Soviet control and then as a battleground during World War II. War pushed the country's boundaries westward to incorporate what had once been parts of Poland. Changing the map only further emphasized Ukraine's centrality to the fate of Europe, particularly after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. The western sections have leaned Europe-ward, while large numbers of Russian speakers in the east feel some measure of allegiance to Moscow.
It's not just language that threatens to divide Ukraine like the poor baby in the parable about King Solomon. It's also a question of which collective entity to huddle in for shelter. Ukraine joined Russia and Belarus to create the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in December 1991 as the Soviet Union fell to pieces around them. But Ukraine was also the first CIS member to join NATO's Partnership for Peace program in 1994. Fifteen years later, Ukraine signed up for the European Union's Eastern Partnership. Russia has not been happy about either of these partnerships. Moscow put together its own partnership, the Eurasian Economic Community, more than a dozen years ago, but Ukraine is only an observer.
A clash of partnerships is now threatening to break out on the peninsula of Crimea. This semi-autonomous region is the only part of Ukraine with a majority of Russian speakers, and it also hosts Russia's Black Sea Fleet. In Crimea's 2010 parliamentary elections, Viktor Yanukovych's Russophone Party of Regions scored a huge victory. But a large population of Crimean Tatars—twelve to fifteen percent of the two million people who live on the peninsula—has rallied in support of the new government in Kiev. The sympathies of Crimeans are clearly divided.
And now, it seems, Crimea itself is divided. Armed men stormed the Crimean parliament last week and forced the appointment of Sergei Aksyonov as the new prime minister of the peninsula. Aksyonov immediately appealed to Russia for assistance and set a date for a referendum on Crimean independence. Russian troops have spread throughout the peninsula to secure both civilian and military installations. Russian guards are posted outside Ukrainian military bases. The peninsula is divided between pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian forces, with Aksyonov already declaring a new Crimean army that he insists Ukrainian soldiers must join. Russian troops conducting exercises at the border recently returned home, and Vladimir Putin has said that his country has no intention of swallowing Crimea. Indeed, absorption might not be his goal, for even the tastiest morsels have a habit of sticking in the throat.
Crimea is not the only challenge to Ukraine's unity. Kharkiv, located a scant forty kilometers from the border with Russia, is the country's second-largest city. Earlier in the week, a group of Cossacks seized control of the city hall and hoisted a Russian flag. But the new Ukrainian authorities eventually re-established control. Places like Crimea and Kharkiv could swing either way in their sympathies. Russian troops plus separatist sentiment could produce an Abkhazian or Transnistrian scenario: breakaway provinces recognized by only a handful of countries around the world. Only compromise—a free-and-fair referendum, the preservation of minority rights, a moratorium on NATO expansion—can prevent fracture.
The continuing crisis in Ukraine has generated its share of Cold War–style inanities. One favorite trope of that period was the "mote in your eye" accusation. Secretary of State John Kerry, who apparently only lives in the present, recently intoned that "you just don't invade another country on phony pretexts in order to assert your interests." Then there's the "if they only had nukes" argument. John Mearsheimer thinks Ukraine shouldn't have given up its nuclear arsenal back in 1994 because those weapons would have made Russia think twice about sending troops into Crimea. Will the MAD scientists never learn? The situation in Ukraine is bad enough without adding WMD to the mix, whether in the form of deliberate attack, accidental use or loose nukes.
But the chief inanity is the one that has governed Western policy since 1991—that there would be no costs to the expansion of NATO and the European Union. Leaders in Washington and Brussels have been repeatedly warned by those with just a passing familiarity with Russian history and culture that encroachment in Moscow's sphere of influence—its "near abroad"—is tantamount to poking the bear. Yes, it's true that both institutions are responding to genuine interests "on the ground." But the stakes here are very high. It's not just about "losing Ukraine." It would be an even greater catastrophe to "lose Russia." And here I mean not the Cold War game of winning and losing but the more universal struggle between a liberating order and a debilitating chaos.
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Indeed, with the rise of Putin and the freeze that has settled over freedom of expression and assembly, Russia is already being lost by degrees. It can't be allowed to drift further into the politics of reaction. But the traditional approach to "saving Russia" has been a dual strategy of rolling back its influence externally and funding democracy initiatives within the country. However much I would love to see Ukraine in the European Union one day and however much I support civil society initiatives inside Russia, enthusiasts for these projects must recognize that they strengthen the hands of those who argue the West is only interested in neutering Mother Russia. Backlash is almost inevitable.
Policymakers in Washington and Brussels should take a much longer view. Instead of concentrating on "partnerships" that put Russia beyond the pale, they have to revive a much more encompassing vision of European security. As long as we continue to shave away at the habitat where the bear lives, it will swipe at its encroachers and defend its ground. "Some days you'll eat the bear," goes the old Joan Armatrading song, while "some days the bear will eat you."
It might seem ridiculous to talk about grand partnerships with Russia at the very moment when the international community wants to put Putin in the penalty box. But Russia is much bigger than just Vladimir Putin, despite the man's penchant for self-aggrandizement. Making a place at the table for this vast country is a chief challenge for the twenty-first century. So, even as we condemn the introduction of Russian troops in Crimea and decry the narrowing of democratic freedoms in Moscow, we have to remember that the Cold War is over, it should never return and both sides must act that way.
Read Next: the editors urge realism and common sense on Ukraine.
Today, the US Senate voted 47-52 not to confirm Debo Adegbile to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Every Republican senator and seven Democrats voted against Adegbile's nomination.
Adegbile, the former director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, was superbly qualified for the position. He was endorsed by the American Bar Association and high-profile lawyers on both sides of the aisle, and presciently defended the Voting Rights Act before the Supreme Court last year. He would've made an excellent head of the Civil Rights Division.
But Adegbile was the victim of a vicious right-wing smear campaign, attacking him because LDF defended Mumia Abu Jamal's right to a fair trial. All across the right-wing media echo chamber, on Fox News and conservative blogs, the words Adegbile and "cop-killer" were plastered in the headlines. The Fraternal Order of Police came out against his nomination, even though a court agreed with LDF that Abu Jamal had not been granted a fair trial—a basic right in American society regardless of whether he did or did not commit the crime.
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In disqualifying Adegbile, senators are establishing a very dangerous precedent that attorneys are responsibile for all of the actions of their clients. "LDF's advocacy on behalf of Mr. Abu-Jamal does not disqualify Mr. Adegbile from leading the Civil Rights Division," prominent members of the Supreme Court bar wrote to the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this year. "To conclude otherwise would send the wrong message to any lawyer who is affiliated, or might be asked to become involved, with a difficult, unpopular case for the purpose of enforcing and preserving important constitutional principles."
It's understandable why every Republican senator lined up against Adegbile's nomination—the modern GOP has voted against civil rights time and time again. But the opposition of Democrats Casey, Coons, Donnelly, Heitkamp, Manchin, Pryor and Walsh is more shameful (Harry Reid voted no for procedural reasons, to keep the nomination alive). The idea that voting against the nomination of the head of the DOJ Civil Rights Division would swing a close race is laughable. Casey and Coons deserve particular scorn, since they represent safe blue states and both profess to be supporters of the causes Adegbile supports, like voting rights.
Today's vote shows that, twenty-six years after George Bush ran the infamous Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis, race-based gutter politics is still not a thing of the past. As the Los Angeles Times wrote, "Adegbile deserves better."
Read Next: Ari Berman on the Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2014.
Last week, the de Blasio administration declared war on charter schools, at least according to the New York Post. Governor Cuomo rushed to the barricades, telling a rally in Albany yesterday: "We are here today to tell you that we stand with you.… You are not alone. We will save charter schools." Families for Excellent Schools, who organized the rally, claimed the Mayor's decision was met with universal opposition and characterized the move as the back end of a quid pro quo with the teachers union for endorsing the mayor.
Wondering what actually happened? The de Blasio administration released a memo reviewing forty-nine co-location decisions made last fall by the lame-duck Bloomberg administration. A co-location is when two schools occupy the same building, and it's been a controversial aspect of the charter-school movement. Many charters, which usually serve fewer special ed or bilingual students than regular public schools, get free rent on space in the regular public schools that charter advocates so often disdain--often space that the regular school needs..
De Blasio's chancellor, Carmen Farina, set aside four of the decisions that won't take effect until the 2015–16 school year to give more time for study. It ordered thirty-five of the forty-five remaining plans implemented. It called for one to be revised. And it cancelled nine planned co-locations. Six concerned regular public schools, which also often co-locate. Three were for charters.
All three of those cancelled co-locations were for charters proposed by Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy network. Her defenders see that as proof that the mayor, a long-time critic of Moskowitz, was singling her out. But given the aggressive expansion plans of the Success network, it's not that surprising that she has a large presence on the list. Moskowitz will now need to find space for those students, including some already attending Success Academy's Harlem 4, which had outgrown the two other co-located sites it was using. Given that Success Academy is rolling in money—Moskowitz reportedly pulls down $475,000, more than the president of the United States—it seems likely she'll come up with something. Contrary to the shorthand way some have reported it, de Blasio didn't rescind the schools' charters—he couldn't—he just said they can't use public school space.
(And for the record, the teachers' union did not endorse de Blasio but his chief rival Bill Thompson in the Democratic primary. The UFT did back de Blasio in the general, along with the rest of the universe.)
Overall, fourteen charter-school co-locations—including five Success Academy ones—got the green light from Farina.
Full disclosure: I'm a charter-school parent. My elder son attends a K-5 school in the Bronx that has its own building and, like many of New York City's charter schools, has unionized. Despite misgivings about the charter movement, we sent him there because we hoped the school's progressive philosophy would help him avoid the drudgery of test prep. When I'd toured a regular public school in my district to see if it was right for us, I'd seen a bulletin board of student essays… about their test prep. One kid said he visualized tackling the test and kicking its teeth out. This wasn't what we were looking for. As it turns out, because our school performed poorly on its first round of standardized testing and had its charter threatened, test prep is now a pretty regular part of life there. But we still like it.
My big take-away from five years as a charter-school daddy, however, is that there's nothing magic about charter schools, which serve all of 6 percent of the city's students. Some are good, and some aren't. There is no "charter school model," because charters embrace a wide spectrum of educational philosophies. If a charter has a commitment to serving a diverse population and not suspending every kid who doesn't sit up straight, it's likely going to struggle on the tests just like regular schools. And the replicability of successful charter-school teaching strategies in regular schools—which I always thought was one of the reasons to permit charter schools—is uncertain not just because of the curriculum rules and union contracts that regular schools must obey, but also because many leading charters have far more resources than the typical public school.
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For my money, charters are neither a panacea nor a plague. But whatever they are, they aren't so extraordinary that they deserve to take space away from regular public schools that need it. Hence the logic behind the decisions rendered by de Blasio's DOE last week.
Permitting fourteen charters to co-locate while blocking three doesn't look much like a "war" on charter schools. At worst, it's a surgical strike. Perhaps the charter movement sees it as an opening salvo that it must resist or risk worse damage later. Or maybe it's a convenient rationale to ask for state funding to cover the expense of classroom space, which they currently don't receive; de Blasio has, after all, made clear that he is very unlikely to approve new co-locations in the future. And he did earlier in February cut $210 million in the budget for programs to help charter schools.
But mostly it seems like everyone is just playing to the script. Charter-school advocates have been waiting for de Blasio to drop a daisy cutter on them. And they're reacting as if he did, when in fact his administration rendered a pretty modest and narrow decision, especially given the sprawling ambition of the Bloomberg-authorized co-location wave it was reacting to. The de Blasio DOE's touch was so light, in fact, that Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and Public Advocate Letitia James have said they're going ahead with a lawsuit to challenge some of the co-locations the de Blasio administration approved.
Unfortunately, that will just perpetuate this unproductive argument about charter schools. It'd be better to move on, treat charters as the minor part of the system they are, and figure out what to do for the 94 percent of public school kids who don't attend charters. The lawsuit just gives the governor another opening to swoop in and "save" charter schools. Yawn.
Read Next: Joseph Featherstone reviews a new book by charter school advocate-turned-critic Diane Ravitch.


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Every article seems to bring out something new:CIA officers long had expressed concern about Broadwell´s unprecedented access to the director. She frequently visited the spy agency´s headquarters in Langley, Va., to meet Petraeus in his office, accompanied him on morning runs around the CIA grounds and often attended public functions as his guest, according to two former intelligence officials.Petraeus´ staff when he was overseeing the war in Afghanistan similarly had been concerned about the time she spent with their boss.It´s clear that he was oblivious to how his fascination with her was registering on others. And she is the kind of woman I describe as "obvious". Click Here if you Like this Comment
Just like they were going to get to the bottom of Benghazi -- yeah right.All this is just another giant smoke screen the republican are putting up cause they are never going to take on Obama Click Here if you Like this Comment
Of course many wondered about this woman who seemed to have insinuated herself into Petraeus´s life. Stuff like this wouldn´t have helped:Broadwell described Petraeus as a mentor, and said they went on "a lot of runs" in Kabul while she was researching her book. She said the general's nickname was "Peaches."http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-11-09/cia-director-petraeus-resigns-citing-extramarital-affairShe doesn´t say whose nickname for Petraeus that was. In Afghanistan he was referred to as "King David". Click Here if you Like this Comment
Anything to take Benghazi out of the news cycle. Most headlines you see now are about this. Four Americans dead, but this is so important that that´s what all the MSM are covering. Click Here if you Like this Comment
Bubba, as President of America could have Sex in the White House, (an lie too).but not for a future Politician, whom did he offend, The next Appointment might be....what a nightmare/ Click Here if you Like this Comment
Petraeus is now a private citizen. He can lawyer up if he wishes and take the Fifth. We may never know what is going on. One thing for sure, Obama will emerge unscathed for he is the real teflon president. Click Here if you Like this Comment
Has this become the distraction which takes us from the WH Benghazi betrayal? Click Here if you Like this Comment
yesterday on Fox, K.T.McFarlane stated that when she was in Iraq there were credible rumors swirling about Petraus´ affair. It appears to have been a fairly common assumption.Sen Feinstein says that she might compel Petraus to testify, but I´ve been hearing/reading that he will have already signed a very tight non-disclosure agreement. I always presumed that would mean to prevent interviews, books, whatever. Would it also cover a congressional hearing? Does anyone here know with certainty?? Click Here if you Like this Comment
Seek the truth and do not be distracted.The issue is Benghazi. Click Here if you Like this Comment