Read The Death Trust Online
Authors: David Rollins
Tags: #Suspense, #Fiction
The Death Trust (5 page)
BOOK: The Death Trust
"I'm going to get a cup of coffee down the road," said Masters. "Oh, before I forget, you'll need these." She handed me a large envelope. "Your common access card—your CAC—will get you in and out of Ramstein. You'll find a cell phone and pager in there, too, as well as a swipe card to get you into OSI on the base. See you in, say, twenty."
She turned and walked out before I could offer an alternate plan. The receptionist had slipped away too, gone back to her bratwurst. I was alone in the foyer with a bag that contained four pairs of underwear and socks, a spare shirt, and a toothbrush I was too afraid to use. To be honest, I don't like being told what to do, which might be an odd thing for someone in the military to say. But I especially don't like it when I'm being ordered around by an officer of the same rank. So I walked out.
Okay, I needed a shower, but what I needed more than anything else was that dentist, or at least some serious painkillers. Deodorant would've been good, too, and some mouthwash. I was thinking that maybe I could rinse my teeth clean. I also needed a car. It occurred to me that General Scott's second-in-command wasn't the person I should interview first. That honor went to the chief crash investigator. And I also wanted to talk to the person everyone seemed most concerned about, not, it seemed, because her husband had been killed, but because of who her father was.
I found a tourist office and took a map of K-town. I asked the woman behind the counter for the nearest tooth doctor and was told that he didn't open till 0900, confirming what Masters had said. That was still half an hour away. I found a pharmacy and bought the strongest analgesic available without a prescription.
Next stop, Hertz. I rented a Mercedes—what else?—and a map of the Rhineland-Palatinate, the province I found myself in. By the time I got back behind the wheel, the painkillers were working—mercifully—and I found myself able to at last concentrate on the job.
I drove back down the highway, retracing my steps to Ramstein, fumbling with Masters's report, holding it against the steering wheel as I read. Two miles beyond the Kaiserslautern city limit, the pager beeped.
? it said. I turned it off. A handful of seconds later, the cell began ringing. I was about to turn that off, too, but decided to see what was up.
"Major, what are you doing?" said the voice on the other end.
"Driving. Do they do it on the left side of the road here, or the right?"
"I'm on the road to Ramstein, which I know sounds like a song title or an old Bob Hope movie, but—"
"Special Agent Cooper, we agreed that you were going to meet me in the foyer."
agreed on that, but I'm not sure who with. Hey, I hired a Mercedes, like yours only newer. I think I prefer Chevrolet." I can be infuriating, especially when I want to be, and this was one of those times. It was obvious that Masters didn't want me here, probably because she thought she was more than capable. She was treating me like I was a pain in the ass, and I objected to that because she didn't even know me. And, apart from these interpersonal observations, as far as I could see from her report, her investigation had gotten precisely nowhere. It was all typed out neat and tidy and all her verbs were conjugated correctly, but the whole was utterly devoid of any imagination or intuition. She didn't get it. Scott had been killed, but the big question on everyone's lips was whether someone had helped him along, even though no one was prepared to even voice that option, except for Gruyere, and her only admission on that point was the fact that she'd sent me here. Masters had asked questions and people had answered them, but she didn't appear to have questioned the answers.
"You've got a meeting with Lieutenant General von Koeppen in fifteen minutes," Masters said.
"But I haven't had a shower or a shave and I'm still wearing yesterday's nonthermal underwear."
I wondered whether she was the type who uses silence as a weapon to keep her partner in line. Not my kind of woman. "Okay, then," I said, keeping it light and cheery. "I'll catch up with you later." I didn't wait for an answer. I ended the call and turned off the cell. That was against the rules, of course. In this business, people get nervous if they can't contact you 24/7. I opened the glove compartment and threw the phone in, closing the hatch after it.
A short time later, I turned off the highway and into the security post. The guard scanned my CAC card with a portable gizmo and checked that I looked as handsome in real life as I did in the photo. Satisfied, he then said, "Thank you, sir," and waved me through. Before moving off, I asked for directions to Hangar B3. Ramstein, as I said, is a huge facility, and the soldier had to go back inside and consult a map. He returned moments later with a photocopy of the base layout. A line drawn in blue ink meandered across the page to the hangar.
Ten minutes later, I pulled up outside my destination. B3 was at least the size of two, possibly three, football fields. It was
big, it was impossible to tell how big. I walked to a side door feeling dwarfed by the structure. Huge overhead lights illuminated the interior. There were several C-5 Galaxies parked inside—transport planes roughly the size of 747s. I stopped an airman and asked for further directions. He pointed down the far corner of the hangar.
I eventually found what I was looking for, an area sealed off by walls of plastic and tape. Signs warned that this was a restricted area and that access was for authorized personnel only. I did what any investigator worth his pay would do and figured the signs weren't talking to me. I parted the plastic and looked inside. On the floor were the remains of what I assumed was General Scott's glider—pretty much every little piece—laid out for examination. The plane had hit the ground with such force that it appeared to have literally exploded. At least a dozen personnel were picking through these remains, cataloguing them. It was a mammoth task. There weren't many whole sections left intact.
I made my way to what would have been the cockpit. There was a lot of dried blood on the pieces. That figured. The human body is really just a big bag of water. When it hits the ground at over one hundred and fifty miles per hour, it bursts.
"You right there, mate?" said a voice behind me. The man wore the uniform of a Royal Air Force squadron leader, except his accent was about as English as mine. Australian. I'd come to recognize the accent after a stint in Afghanistan, where Australia's Special Forces, the Special Air Service, were deployed. Those boys were smart and very tough. I owed my life to half a dozen of them.
"Special Agent Vin Cooper," I said, flashing him my OSI creds.
"Wayne Roach."
I recognized the name. Roach was heading the crash team investigating the wreckage. He was looking for cause. His was the signature on the report I'd read.
"OSI. Not the local branch, I take it?" he asked.
"Flew in this morning."
"You working with that Masters chick on this?"
"Lucky man. She's a spunkrat. Young to be a major, too. Rumor has it she can suck-start an F-16."
That gave me an interesting perspective on Masters. She had a reputation. Also, this guy thought her meteoric rise through the ranks had something to do with qualities other than those for which officers usually received promotion. I didn't add to the conversation, which might have made the squadron leader nervous. Parts of the services are, in some ways, even more PC than private enterprises.
He cleared his throat and said, "You read the preliminary?"
I nodded. "You've had a couple more days with this since you and your team did the initial write-up. Got anything to add?"
"Yeah, as a matter of fact."
I followed the squadron leader to a bench covered with various items of metal and fiberglass. Roach was short and bald, and the crotch of his pants appeared to get sucked up his butt as he walked, springing off his toes with each step. His uniform was a size too small for his frame, which didn't help. Maybe he was getting fat and didn't realize it. Or couldn't accept it.
Hanging on the wall behind the bench was a large photograph of the smiling, relaxed General Scott standing next to his sailplane. The aircraft's wingspan was a tad under sixty feet. The nose where the pilot sat was small and bulbous, with a large Perspex bubble canopy. Now, only shards of the glider remained—slightly more than what remained of the general, according to Masters's report. I ran my eyes over the individual pieces spread out across the floor and found it difficult to imagine that this was the aircraft in the picture. Roach picked up an aluminum bracket.
"I can tell you now that General Scott's plane was sabotaged." He held up a piece of metal. "Check this out."
Sabotage meant murder. I didn't bat an eyelid at the news, though once the folks Stateside heard it, the shit would definitely fly. "What is it?" I asked.
"The wings of the glider slide off and on to make transporting it from field to field possible. That makes this piece crucial. It's the bracket that clamps the main wing spar to the fuselage." Roach pulled the clamp apart and the top section split into two separate pieces across a fine, ragged crack. "That's not supposed to happen, by the way," he said. "This is seven-oh-seven-five—aircraft-grade aluminum alloy. It's light and, as you might expect, extremely strong. At least, it's supposed to be."
He passed me a black-and-white photo. "What's this?" I asked.
"A photo," he said, being a wiseass. "Well, actually, it's called a macrograph—makes it easy to see the metal's crystal structure. This is what seven-oh-seven-five should look like." He passed me another black-and-white print. "Compare them."
I put the two prints side by side. On one, the crystals were big; on the other, they were small. Easy to see the difference, sure, but I still didn't know squat.
"Basic metallurgy lesson number one: When the crystals are small, the metal is good and strong," Roach said. "The bigger those crystals get, the weaker the metal becomes. Milled nonferrous metals like aluminum don't take kindly to stress. They have almost zero elasticity. Put too much stress on them and they don't bend or deform, they just crack.
Pah-ting,"
he said, musically.
"Do you mind putting it together for me like I was a five-year-old, Squadron Leader?"
Roach swapped the photos for a couple of bits of aluminum he'd recovered from his bench. "We've duplicated what we believe happened to the failed clamp that held on the general's wings. We heated and cooled it rapidly a couple of dozen times. Doing that to a metal—just about any metal—changes its crystal structure, making it weaker. The seven-oh-seven-five in your left hand failed at one-tenth the load of the seven-oh-seven-five in your right. Take a closer look."
I did as I was asked and examined the metals. On the outside, they appeared identical. In cross-section where they'd cracked, though, one piece had broken clean while the other had a porous honeycomb appearance.
"Nothing like this could happen by accident?" I asked. I knew the answer to that before I asked the question, but I've found it sometimes pays to ask the obvious.
"No bloody way," the squadron leader said, shaking his head. "Someone got to the general's plane, removed the clamp, and then went to work on it, or exchanged it for this one, knowing full well what the consequences of that would be."
"Don't stop now, Squadron Leader. You've got a captive audience here. What happened when that clamp failed?"
"You read about it in the report," he said.
"I've read an eyewitness account. Tell me in your own words what you think happened."
He shrugged. "On the morning of the crash, the general and another pilot were chasing thermals, maybe ten miles from the base. The weather was good and the conditions were ideal for soaring. The general, like the pilot in the other plane, was climbing to around twelve thousand feet and then doing aerobatics—loops, rolls, and spins—down to around five thousand feet. They'd apparently done that twice—gone up and then come down—before the general's day flew into the crapper. When he reached altitude for the third time, he put the glider into a flat spin. I reckon the clamp was probably already broken by then, but it's impossible to say. According to the witness, the right-hand wing on the general's plane appeared to fold. The airflow ripped it clean away a second or two later as what was left of the aircraft began a spiral dive.
"It dove like that, spinning, for several thousand feet before the g-forces tore the other wing off. Within moments, gravity accelerated the wreckage to around two hundred and fifty miles per hour. General Scott would've had plenty of time to contemplate his end before it came. From the clamp letting go to impact took around thirty seconds. That's a lot of time for your life to flash before your eyes." Roach paused. Maybe he was picturing the man trapped inside his fiberglass coffin heading for the ground. I certainly could. Roach snapped out of it and cleared his throat. "The tail broke off at about two thousand feet of altitude. The nose of the aircraft hit a tree, which is why so little of it was left intact. Not much of the tree left, either. The general's remains—what they could find, at any rate—were scooped into buckets with a ladle. Shooting the bugger with a twelve-gauge at close range wouldn't have been nearly as effective, or messy. Not a great way to get your card punched." Roach paused for another moment of consideration before asking, "Anything else, Special Agent?"
"Yes," I managed to say. The saliva glands in my mouth were working overtime and my skin was clammy. I knew what was coming. I made it to a basin against the wall before my stomach let go. I'd be lying if I said my reaction to Roach's re-creation had nothing to do with my own experiences in the air. The Australian had just brought it all back—the fear, the helplessness, the feeling in your guts when the hard floor beneath drops away revealing an abyss. And you just…fall…My stomach heaved again.
"You okay, mate?"
"Yeah, I'm on one of those weird fad diets," I said. I cupped my hands under the water and splashed my face.
Skulk by Rosie Best
Wagonmaster by Nita Wick
Name of the Devil by Andrew Mayne
Enigma. De las pirámides de Egipto al asesinato de Kennedy by Bruno Cardeñosa Juan Antonio Cebrián
Capcir Spring by Jean de Beurre
Pride of Carthage by David Anthony Durham
English Lessons and Other Stories by Shauna Singh Baldwin
His Paradise Wife by Tina Martin
The Wizard And The Dragon by Joseph Anderson
Moonfeast by James Axler


Bipartistan Coulterism
Who's meaner, conservatives or liberals?
Cathy Young | From the October 2003 issue
Last June the Democratic National Committee sponsored an ad portraying the president as Frankenstein creating a monster for a federal judgeship. This, Fox News host Sean Hannity declared, was a typical example of Democratic demonization. "They're obviously being pretty mean-spirited here," he said, "as they usually are."
Confronted with this accusation, Democratic consultant Victor Kamber parried, "It's the Republicans that have been the hate mongers in the past campaigns." Hannity's mild-mannered liberal co-host Alan Colmes inquired of another guest, "You think Democrats are a lot meaner than Republicans?"
Actually, conservatives have been doing quite well in the meanness sweepstakes, thanks largely to the impressive efforts of Ann Coulter. The right-wing pundit's latest book, Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, attempts, among other things, to rehabilitate Sen. Joe McCarthy.
It opens with guns blazing: "Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason. You could be talking about Scrabble and they would instantly leap to the anti-American position. Everyone says liberals love America, too. No they don't. Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy. This is their essence." And so it goes, for nearly 300 more pages: "They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant. Fifty years of treason hasn't slowed them down."
Coulter's sweeping generalizations, which can't distinguish Democratic Cold Warriors from Democratic fellow travelers, have alienated even some of her usual supporters (though not Hannity). But none of the nastiness or hysteria in Treason is new. Coulter has, after all, jokingly wished assassination on Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta and not-so-jokingly accused Mineta of "burning with hatred for America" because he opposes racial profiling in airport screening. Her long rap sheet of hateful remarks includes this gem from a speech last year to the Conservative Political Action Committee: "We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals by making them realize that they could be killed, too."
I've long been baffled to see so many conservatives defend Coulter as a fiery and witty, if over-the-top, polemicist. Reviewing her previous book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, in The Weekly Standard, Christopher Caldwell lauded the "Menckenesque invective" of such aperçus as: "Even Islamic terrorists don't hate America like liberals do. They don't have the energy. If they had that much energy, they'd have indoor plumbing by now." There's no accounting for taste, I suppose; but even if you regard Coulter's rhetoric as funny, her consistent demonization of her opponents and her constant equation of dissent with treachery are not.
When Coulter appeared on Hannity and Colmes to discuss Treason, Colmes pressed her on the subject of which liberals alive today she would accuse of treason. "Keep talking," she replied. "I might be able to point the finger at you."
Just her twisted sense of humor? Coulter sounded entirely serious when she went on to query Colmes about his opposition to the war in Iraq and his concern that the war on terrorism may endanger civil liberties — or, as she put it, that "we're in the middle of a civil liberties emergency every time John Ashcroft talks to a Muslim."
Such rhetoric is not unique on the right. Last November, when Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle complained about being attacked by radio host Rush Limbaugh, he was widely ridiculed for "whining." But Limbaugh's denunciations of Daschle were in fact fairly extreme.
"What more do you want to do to destroy this country than what you've already tried?" he inquired after Daschle criticized the Bush administration's conduct of the war on terrorism. "It is unconscionable what this man has done! This stuff gets broadcast around the world, Senator. What do you want your nickname to be? Hanoi Tom? Tokyo Tom?"
This is nasty stuff, even if it's meant to be somewhat tongue in cheek, and it gives liberals cause to cry that conservatism has been taken over by shrill hate mongers. Sure, they'll admit, the left has its own nasties such as Michael Moore — but those, they insist, are few and far between, marginal figures well to the left of the liberal mainstream. Moore is not considered a liberal icon, is not invited to speak at conferences of liberal political action committees, and does not appear regularly on television as a serious political pundit.
True enough. But even in the liberal mainstream, a lot of left-leaning commentary has a streak of Coulteresque nastiness.
If the conservative paradigm is that liberals are unpatriotic, if not downright un-American (and possibly also godless and libertine), then the liberal paradigm is that conservatives are at best uncompassionate and at worst bigots and fascists. Hannity has a point when he says that people who are outraged by Coulter's crude stereotyping of Democrats often don't hesitate to suggest that "the Republicans want to poison the air, water, kill children and throw children on the streets." Not to mention abuse the elderly and burn down black churches.
Hyperbole? Not exactly. Think back to the infamous ad from the 2000 presidential campaign in which the daughter of James Byrd Jr., the black Texas man who was deliberately dragged to his death behind a car, said she felt as if her father was killed all over again when Gov. Bush refused to sign the state's hate crimes law. Or to the cartoon on the Web site of the Democratic National Committee showing Bush shoving a wheelchair-bound granny down the edge of a Social Security trust fund graph. Or to a cartoon in the New York Daily News that showed Gale Norton, Bush's nominee to be secretary of the interior, declaring, "Leave no child alive."
The rhetoric gets especially noxious on racial issues. Some years ago, Al Gore said this about critics of affirmative action: "I've heard those who say we have a colorblind society. They use their color blind the way duck hunters use a duck blind — they hide behind it and hope the ducks won't notice."
More recently, after the Supreme Court ruling upholding affirmative action, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said this about Clarence Thomas' dissenting opinion: "The dissent is a clinical study of a man who has been driven barking mad by the beneficial treatment he has received." Thomas, of course, has been the target of exceptionally nasty rhetoric from his critics; in 1994, on the PBS show To the Contrary, Julianne Malveaux remarked, "I hope that his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease."
When it comes to mean-spirited rhetoric, both left and right are better at seeing the speck in the other's eye than the log in their own. This sets off a vicious cycle, in which each side feels justified in hurling vicious slurs because the other camp is even worse.
In a recent, cautious critique of Coulter, conservative writer David Horowitz declared that he enjoyed her attacks on liberals because he felt they were well-deserved: "No one wields the verbal knife more ruthlessly than so-called liberal pundits like Joe Conason, to cite but one example….If people Joe Conason admired were the objects of acid Coulterisms, so much the better." A 2002 Wall Street Journal piece lauded Coulter as the right's answer to Lenny Bruce, Louis Farrakhan, and Angela Davis. Meanwhile, liberals talk about the need to develop programming to counter invective-filled right-wing talk radio.
This endless shouting match — "You're mean!" "No, you're mean! And since you're being mean we'll be even meaner!" — can be entertaining at times. But it drowns out serious arguments.
NEXT: Of Smears and Smeagol
Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason.
Russian Propaganda Has Succeeded in Persuading Credulous Americans That It Poses a Grave Threat to Democracy
Jacob Sullum | 2.1.2023 12:01 AM


Bob Dylan and Philosophy
It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Thinking)
Vernezze, Peter
The legions of Bob Dylan fans know that Dylan is not just a great composer, writer, and performer, but a great thinker as well. In Bob Dylan and Philosophy, eighteen philosophers analyze Dylan's ethical positions, political commitments, views on gender and sexuality, and his complicated and controversial attitudes toward religion. All phases of Dylan's output are covered, from his early acoustic folk ballads and anthem-like protest songs to his controversial switch to electric guitar to his sometimes puzzling, often profound music of the 1970s and beyond. The book examines different aspects of.
Publisher: New York : Open Court, 2011.
Characteristics: 1 online resource : photo
Additional Contributors: Porter, Carl J.
Irwin, William 1970-
Read more reviews of Bob Dylan and Philosophy at iDreamBooks.com
Dylan, Bob, 1941- — Philosophy.
Dylan, Bob, 1941- — Political and Social Views.
Music and Philosophy.
Rock Music. — History and Criticism.
Rock Musicians — United States. — Philosophy.


The Penguin History Of New Zealand
Author: Michael King
Publisher : Penguin Group New Zealand, Limited
Imprint : Penguin Books (NZ)
Author : Michael King
Edition : Reprint
Reading Level : good
Illustrations :
New Zealand was the last country in the world to be discovered and settled by humankind. It was also the first to introduce a full democracy. Between those events, and in the century that followed the franchise, the movements and the conflicts of human history have been played out more intensively and more rapidly in New Zealand than anywhere else on Earth. This title tells that story in all its colour and drama. The narrative that emerges is an inclusive one about men and women, Maori and Pakeha. It shows that British motives in colonizing New Zealand were essentially humane; and that Maori, far from being passive victims of a "fatal impact", coped heroically with colonization and survived by selectively accepting and adapting what Western technology and culture had to offer. The latter part of the book reveals how an insulated and dependent British colony transformed itself into an independent nation, open to and competing with technological and cultural influences sweeping the globe.
Winner of Montana New Zealand Book Awards: Readers' Choice Award 2004 and Nielsen BookData New Zealand Booksellers' Choice Award 2004.


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What Can You Do After Being Injured in a Rollover?
Victims of rollover crashes often suffer catastrophic injuries or death. Despite the dangers of SUVs and other large vehicles, manufacturers continue to produce and sell them to the public every year.
If you or a loved one has been the unfortunate victim of a rollover accident, you should get in touch with the experienced Seattle car accident attorneys at Hardwick & Pendergast, P.S. By establishing a strong claim, we may be able to hold the negligent driver and/or the automaker liable for the losses you have sustained. Contact us today at (888) 228-3860 to get started on the path to recovery.
In a recent one-year period studied by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), rollover accidents made up 3% of all vehicle collisions, but were involved in 33% of all fatalities. Rollover accidents, while not common, are tragically dangerous to the occupants of a vehicle. One way to help prevent rollover fatalities is to make sure everyone in the vehicle is wearing a seatbelt - 72% of the fatalities for that year involved a lack of safety belts. Almost two-thirds of these victims were completely thrown from the vehicle during the accident.
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$1,925,000 recovery in a wrongful death claim for a Federal Way family that was traveling to Los Angeles when they were cut off on the freeway, causing their car to rollover.
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The initial collision can be devastating, but occupants can also be crushed during the rollover, and some are ejected while the vehicle is still in motion. There are many reasons why rollovers are dangerous, and many types of injuries that Seattle motorists may suffer during one of these violent crashes:
During the roll, the occupants may be thrown around in the interior of the car. Even someone wearing a seatbelt can strike a side window, a seat, the dashboard, or the steering wheel. This impact can result in head trauma and brain damage. Anyone who has lost consciousness, or who feels nauseated or confused after an accident, should seek immediate medical attention. Traumatic brain injuries often have long-lasting or permanent symptoms, including significant changes to one's physical and mental abilities.
The sudden changes in directions that can occur during a rollover can result in devastating neck and back injuries. Even people who are wearing seatbelts can experience whiplash injuries, herniated disks, and other debilitating spinal cord injuries. Those who are not buckled up are more likely to be ejected or thrown about inside the rolling vehicle. In such cases, victims may lose feeling or sensation in their limbs, resulting in permanent disabilities such as paralysis.
Laceration Injuries
Even when a car has a solid frame and maintains its shape during a rollover, the windshield and side windows will likely shatter during the crash. Lacerations and amputations are possible in these accidents. Victims who do not receive immediate treatment may lose a significant amount of blood, or suffer permanent scarring and disfigurement.
The NHTSA reports that about 40 percent of all fatal rollover crashes involve excessive speeding.
Causes of Washington Vehicle Rollover Accidents
There are a number of contributing factors to rollovers. Some of the most common include:
Vehicle design: Many vehicles such as SUVs, pickup trucks, vans, and 15-passenger vans have a high center of gravity. A vehicle with a high center of gravity and narrower track width has a greater chance of tipping or rolling over.
Road conditions: The NHTSA reports that rollover accidents are most likely to occur on rural roads that do not have barriers.
Speed: The faster a vehicle is going, the more likely it is to rollover, especially when there is some type of impact. Additionally, most fatal rollover car accidents occur where the posted speed is over 55 mph.
Driver negligence: Most rollovers are single-vehicle crashes. Many of these accidents could have been prevented had the driver been more attentive or careful. Drivers who are fatigued, speeding, drunk, or distracted have a greater chance of being involved in a rollover crash in Washington.
Routine driving: It is a common misconception that rollovers have to involve a reckless driver or a dangerous condition. The NHTSA has stated that over 90% of fatal rollover accidents involve routine driving maneuvers such as negotiating a curve. Rollovers can also occur when the drivers attempt sudden action.
Dangerous roadway: If a driver has to veer suddenly to avoid a pothole, there is the risk of a rollover. Governing bodies in charge of the roadway have a legal obligation to keep it properly maintained.
Defective tires: When a tire goes out on the highway, there is a risk that the vehicle will veer out of control. In 2000, Bridgestone/Firestone had to recall millions of tires that had the potential to cause fatal SUV rollover accidents.
When sports utility vehicles (SUVs) gained prominence in the 1990s and early 2000s, they were touted as comfortable, luxurious, and safe vehicles. Although SUV sales dropped off during the economic crisis, the numbers have surged back up over recent years. The sturdy structure of the SUV can provide extra protection in the case of an accident; however, the same design factors that supposedly prevent injuries can also contribute to rollovers.
The key structural features that distinguish SUVs from more traditional motor vehicles and make them more susceptible to devastating accidents include the following:
Higher center of gravity: SUVs are typically taller than regular automobiles. This equates to a higher center of gravity, and consequently, a greater risk of rollover accidents. Rollovers have the potential for roof crush, which can cause severe head and spinal cord injuries and even death. According to the NHTSA, SUVs can have a 10% or higher chance of rollovers. Most SUV rollovers occur when the driver strikes a low object like a curve, or when the driver executes an emergency maneuver to avoid a road hazard.
Increased weight: SUVs can weigh up to four tons, much greater than the average automobile in the U.S. Due to their mass, SUVs can cause much more damage in a crash, not just to themselves, but to other smaller automobiles.
False sense of security: According to a report by the Opinion Research Corporation, 39% of Americans felt they were "much less vulnerable" when riding in an SUV. This false sense of security can encourage negligent or reckless behavior in SUV drivers, leading to a higher risk of an accident.
Victims of rollover accidents often need immediate medical attention. Emergency services, surgery, hospitalization, and rehabilitation services may be necessary, but extremely costly. If the rollover resulted from someone else's negligence, the victims are eligible for compensation. A skilled car accident attorney will work to determine who should be held liable, possibly:
The vehicle's driver: Did the driver cause the rollover because he or she was speeding, intoxicated, or distracted?
Driver of other vehicle: Did another negligent driver cause the rollover by making an unsafe lane change, by forcing the vehicle off the roadway, or through some other negligent or reckless act?
Manufacturer of the vehicle: In some cases, it is possible to recover financial support from the manufacturer of the vehicle if the car rolled as the result of faulty design.
Working with You Towards Recovery in Washington
The experienced Seattle car accident injury attorneys at Hardwick & Pendergast, P.S., know how to handle all types of injury cases. We work with accident investigators to determine the cause of the crash and liability. We are ready to provide you and your loved ones with a free and comprehensive case evaluation on your potential personal injury claim. Contact us today at (888) 228-3860 to find out how we can help.
Rollover Crashes Create a Higher Risk of Death
Study Finds Brain and Spine Injuries Common in Rollover Accidents
Rollover Accidents Explained
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As Bennett plants tree in Hebron, Lapid calls for 'separation from Palestinians'
Pro-peace-process activist took to streets to express support of Kerry, with Lapid joining them claiming it was time for Israel 'to separate from Palestinians.' Meanwhile, Bennett takes to Hebron to plant olive tree for future generations
Activists supporting peace talks took to the streets Thursday, holding demonstrations at 20 key junctions across the nation. Among those expressing their support for the peace process were Yesh Atid activists, who were surprised to receive a visit from Finance Minister Yair Lapid.
Lapid addressed the demonstrators and expressed optimism at the political process, saying: "A political process is under way; we are here because it is real." He added that "we will not miss this chance, it is time to separate from the Palestinians."
Lapid further stressed that it was important to show Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that there is support for a peace deal. "Yesh Atid will not allow this chance to be missed." The finance minister noted that the economic situation is improving and is inseparable from the political process. He further promised that his party activists will continue to demonstrate for peace both in Israel and with Palestinians.
Also on Thursday, Habayit Hayehudi Chairman Naftali Bennett came to Tu B'Shevat celebrations in Hebron where he planted an olive tree.
"We are planting an olive tree today, and those children planting it will enjoy its fruits, along with their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. We will be here forever."
He also mentioned US Secretary of State John Kerry's proposal to install plasma screens and other electronic devices as a substitute for armed forces in the Jordan Valley, and emphasized that "while conversations on plasmas are taking place, we are talking about real children and real people."
US consulate posts anti-settlement news report
The US Consulate General in Jerusalem on Thursday hinted at a second incident in days of Israeli criticism of US Secretary of State John Kerry.
On its Facebook account, the consulate linked to a story on an Israeli news site that refuted claims by Israeli Minister of Housing Uri Ariel that Kerry approved his plan to build 1,400 new settlement units in the West Bank.
The story quoted a US official as saying: "Our position on settlements has not changed, and we have consistently communicated our objection both publicly and directly to the Israelis on settlement announcements."
"In case you missed it on Monday, the U.S. official in this story got it right," the consulate noted.
Days earlier, after the Israeli defense minister undermined Kerry's efforts to finalize a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, the State Department asked Israel's prime minister to publicly express his disagreement.
Though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave no official comment, he seemed to exert pressure on the minister, Moshe Yaalon, whose office issued a statement of apology Wednesday.
Yaalon had described Kerry Tuesday as having an "obsession" with Middle East peace. In a private conversation with Israeli officials, Yaalon said Kerry's plan was "not worth the paper it was written on."
Netanyahu: Jew Free Palestinian State would be Ethnic Cleansing
A "Jew free" Palestinian state would be tantamount with ethnic cleansing said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an interview with Canada's CTV, reports the algemeiner.
"It's absurd that we're willing to recognize, that I'm willing to recognize the Palestinians, but in exchange, they're not willing to recognize the Jewish state, the nation state of the Jewish people. There's something wrong there", said Netanyahu, highlighting that, due to him, the crux of the disagreement in the negotiations is not about the settlement or about territories, but about the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.
In the interview Netanyahu also stated that the Palestinians living inside Israel have full civic rights and are not asked to leave.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that a "Jew-free" Palestinian state, now being contemplated in peace talks, would be tantamount to ethnic cleansing, in a trailer for an hour-long interview with Canada's CTV to be broadcast this week.
When the interviewer, CTV's Lisa LaFlamme, said that 1 in 5 Israelis are Arab, Netanyahu responded, "Sure. We're not asking them to change their religion, they have full civic rights. Now in the Palestinian state, the way its being contemplated, no Jew can live there, it has to be Jew free, ethnic cleansing. Well, what is that? There are Arabs who live here, but they can't contemplate Jews living there."
He said that rather than the issue of settlements, the crux of the disagreement is the Palestinian Authority's refusal to recognize a Jewish state.
"I think the issue of settlements will be resolved, the question of the territories, in general, will be resolved in the negotiations. I don't think it's the heart of the conflict, though I know people think of it that way, but it isn't, it isn't so," Netanyahu said.
"It's not about settlements, it's not about territory, and it's not even about a Palestinian state, which we agreed right from the start to recognize. It's about a Jewish state. It's about survival of the state of Israel. It's absurd that we're willing to recognize, that I'm willing to recognize the Palestinians, but in exchange, they're not willing to recognize the Jewish state, the nation state of the Jewish people. There's something wrong there."
With three more months before a U.S.-set deadline for the talks, Netanyahu said he was hopeful that the talks succeed.
"I hope they don't fail, and I hope we can do everything we can to have a successful outcome. We're ready to do it, i'm ready to do it," he said.
Jordan's King Abdullah meets Netanyahu in Amman for talks
Jordan's King Abdullah II held talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Amman on Thursday.
"King Abdullah and Netanyahu discussed peace process developments in light of the current US-sponsored Israeli-Palestinians peace negotiations," a palace statement said.
Last week, King Abdullah met with President Mahmoud Abbas to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
The king said at the time that it was a priority to protect Palestinian national interests, especially regarding a final status agreement.
US Secretary of State John Kerry coaxed the two sides back to the negotiating table in July after a three-year freeze, and they have agreed to keep talking for nine months.
Israel has issued plans for thousands of illegal settlements since talks began and insists on having a military and civilian presence in the Jordan Valley, a third of the occupied West Bank.
Abed Rabbo: "Palestinian Leadership Rejects Kerry's Plan"
Secretary-General of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasser Abed Rabbo, stated that the Palestinian leadership rejects the proposed agreement presented by U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry.
Abed Rabbo said that what Kerry is proposing is a Palestinian state that has no capital, no borders, and is trying to get the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
He added that Kerry agrees with the Israeli conditions that reject any eviction of settlement blocks, and many settlements, is adopting the Israeli stance that rejects any Palestinian control over borders, and is suggesting a "state" with no sovereignty.
In a press conference with political leaders of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), Abed-Rabbo said that the proposed agreement also demands the Palestinians to accept and recognize Israel's illegitimate settlements, mainly its settlement blocs, built in direct violation of International Law.
"The peace process is hitting large walls, walls of Israel's illegitimate settlements, Israel's rejection to recognize our internationally guaranteed rights. Tel Aviv is just placing more obstacles and preconditions", he said, "Israel wants to build a Wall in the Jordan Valley, similar to its apartheid wall west of the West Bank, so that it can keep its illegal settlements and military bases".
Abed-Rabbo further stated that even the American mediator does not know the exact size of Israel's settlements, especially since Israel keeps expanding them through its illegal confiscation, and theft of Palestinian lands.
"By demanding us to recognize it as a Jewish State, Tel Aviv is demanding us to drop our legitimate, historic rights, Kerry is demanding us to adopt Israel's version", the official said, "Jerusalem will face the same fate, what kind of a state they are talking about?, a state with no borders, no capital…".
He further stated that the Executive Committee of the PLO has granted a green light to the Political Committee to resume its efforts to join more international organizations, including UN institutions.
"The Palestinians must join international organizations", Abed-Rabbo added, "We need to search for an international mediator for peace talks, the U.S. has failed, and is just adopting Israel's demands and preconditions".
Furthermore, a senior Palestinian official told the Xinhua Chinese News Agency, that the Palestinian leadership would resume its international activities in April, once the nine months of direct talks, under American mediation, expire.
Member of the PLO Executive Committee, Taiseer Khaled, said that the United States and Israel have two main coherent positions rejecting the Right of Return of the Palestinian refugees, and demanding the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish State.
"They want us to drop the legitimate rights of the displaced Palestinians, they are proposing settling the refugees in countries they live in, or in a different state", Khaled said, "Israel does not admit to its responsibility for displacing the refugees, it does not recognize their rights, and wants the international community to deal with them".
The official said that what Kerry is asking the Palestinians now is partially based on proposals by former U.S president, Bill Clinton, who suggested the return of some externally displaced refugees to the Palestinian territories, and not back to their lands in historic Palestine.
Kerry also wants other countries, especially Arab states, to provide residency rights to the refugees.
Israel's Yaalon risks isolation after Kerry slur
Israel's defense minister may have apologized for his offensive comments about US Secretary of State John Kerry but his outburst could see him marginalized by Washington, commentators warned on Wednesday.
A furious diplomatic row erupted between Israel and its closest ally on Tuesday when Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon was quoted as saying Kerry had an "obsession" about the peace process and was working out of a "sense of messianism."
Washington immediately lashed out at the "offensive" remarks, demanding an apology, which was eventually published by Yaalon's office late on Tuesday, although it stopped short of denying the comments.
"The defense minister had no intention to cause any offense to the secretary, and he apologizes if the secretary was offended by words attributed to the minister," it said, expressing appreciation for Kerry's efforts to advance the ongoing peace talks.
His remarks also sparked a welter of criticism inside Israel, with several cabinet ministers and the opposition saying many officials saying his personal attack on Kerry was inappropriate.
Although the statement appeared to head off the crisis, commentators said Yaalon's dismissive comments could cost him dearly.
"The Americans have long marked Yaalon as a possible obstacle to reaching a peace agreement," wrote Nadav Eyal in Maariv newspaper.
"The problem isn't what Yaalon said about the peace talks. The problem is Yaalon's personal attack" on Kerry, he wrote, saying the minister had made a "beginner's error" which could cost him a seat at the table with the Americans.
"His opposition to the negotiations -- whether in principle or tactical -- may position him politically, but could also, if mishandled, make him irrelevant," Eyal concluded.
The left-leaning Haaretz newspaper took a similar line.
"It is still difficult to assess the damage caused by Defense Minister Yaalon's disgraceful, mocking and arrogant comments," diplomatic correspondent Barak Ravid wrote.
Yaalon, he said, appeared to have abandoned his role as a "responsible adult" in the previous government for one formerly played by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman: "that of the volatile minister who is boycotted in Washington."
Lieberman, a normally outspoken hardliner who has taken a more moderate stance since returning to office in November after being acquitted of corruption allegations, on Tuesday issued a rebuke directed at Yaalon, saying there was "no place for lashing out personally."
"Lieberman has learned his lesson. He understood that his crude style toward the Americans hurt him... so he made an effort to build good relations with Kerry despite their disagreements," Ravid wrote.
"Even after his apology, Yaalon still has to find a way to rehabilitate his relations with Washington. Otherwise he will see the inside of the White House and Pentagon only in photographs."
Since being appointed secretary of state in February 2013, Kerry has visited the region 10 times in a bid to push forward the peace process, recently outlining a detailed plan for security in a final deal - which was utterly dismissed by Yaalon.
But a senior official in the ruling right-wing Likud said the defense minister had merely vocalized what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was thinking.
"Boogie said out loud what Netanyahu would like to say," he told Yediot, using the defense minister's nickname.
"You hear his aides in the bureau and you understand the spirit of things. Kerry is a burden."
Opposition leader Isaac Herzog said the incident showed Netanyahu's ruling party had no interest in pursuing peace.
"The defense minister's insulting and offensive lashing out at Secretary of State Kerry exposes Likud's true face," he said late on Tuesday, accusing the government of having "no vision for peace."
But Shimon Shiffer, the Yediot correspondent who first reported Yaalon's remarks, said the problem lay predominantly in the way the US-led negotiations were being conducted, which had forced Israel into an impossible corner.
"The negotiations ... are being pursued at present with an insulting lack of transparency," he wrote.
"The parameters of the agreement that they are proposing could end in a security catastrophe for Israel, but if we insist on our vital security interests they will lay responsibility for the failure of the talks on us.
"And if that is the situation, it is no wonder that the defense minister is furious," he wrote, saying Yaalon's remarks were aimed at his own government.
"Essentially, Yaalon was urging Netanyahu and (chief negotiator Tzipi) Livni to stop being so terrified, to stop playing make-believe and to start sharing with the Israeli public the things that are happening behind the scenes in the negotiations," he said.
Recognition of Jewish State is Sticking Point in Peace Talks: Netanyahu
Prime Minister of Israeli occupation Benjamin Netanyahu provided the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state to reach a peace deal agreement with the Palestinian negotiators. Netanyahu has made such recognition the pillar of his public statements in the recent weeks, calling it "the real key to peace," "the minimal requirement" and "an essential condition." Israeli, American and Palestinian officials all say it has become a core issue in the negotiations that started last summer.
He previously dismissed Palestinian refugees right of return to their land claiming that " it is "not right, not justified, and not legitimate."
PLO official, Tayseer Khaled, said that the demand to recognize Israel as a Jewish state was "dangerous." He explained that such recognition would harm the issue of the refugees and their "right of return."
Resheq: Kerry's options represent conspiracy against the right of return
Ezzat Resheq, member of Hamas's political bureau, warned the Palestinian negotiator against responding to the options proposed by US secretary of state John Kerry concerning resolving the issue of refugees, which cancel the right of return. Resheq said in a press statement on Wednesday that Kerry's options represent a conspiracy against one of the Palestinian constants that is the right of return, and stressed that the Palestinians at home and abroad will not accept any option except the return to their homeland.
He emphasized that the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their towns and villages from which they have been forcibly displaced is a sacred inalienable right, and that any partial or interim solution that does not include recognizing the right of return of all refugees is unacceptable.
Resheq also called on all the Palestinian factions and forces to adopt a unified position against Kerry's plan that aims to liquidate the Palestinian cause.
Meanwhile, a number of Palestinian institutions in Europe that are active in the field of the right of return denounced the statements made by Mahmoud Abbas, in which he considered the right of return an individual right and alluded to the possibility of compensating the refugees in exchange for ceding their right to return to their homeland.
These institutions said in a statement that Abbas's remarks would pave the way for new concessions regarding the Palestinian rights, and stressed that the right of return is legally guaranteed as an inalienable, individual and collective right.
They also confirmed that no one has the right to dispose of the right of return, and called on the Palestinian leadership to adopt a national strategy that will end the suffering of the Palestinian refugees.
Peace Talks Move to Palestinian Refugee Issue
Although the United States has insisted to the Israelis and Palestinians that all five permanent-status issues are part of the US-brokered negotiations, it was only when an Israeli radio report mentioned the issue that the topic suddenly gained credibility in the eyes of many skeptics. The Palestine News Network (PNN) ran a short translation from Israeli radio, confirming that US Secretary of State John Kerry had made reference to the issue of Palestinian refugees and that he had put forward four locations for their absorption.
Kerry's suggestion no doubt reflects the various discussions, differences and understandings between Israel and the Palestinians. The Palestinians have repeatedly insisted that Israel acknowledge its historic and moral responsibility in creating the Palestinian refugee problem. Many expect that this issue, more than any actual agreement on numbers, could be the gateway to a breakthrough.
After the issue of who is responsible is resolved, it is understood that Palestinian refugees are to be given choices, including returning to their homeland in Palestine, staying where they are or going to certain third countries. The fourth option, which is highly contested, calls for some Palestinians to settle in Israel. The issue is finessed by having this small population absorbed over a number of years based on Israel approving it within the context of family reunification.
The Arab Peace Initiative dealt with the issue of refugees by citing UN Resolution 194, which calls for the right of return. The initiative perspective then added, however, that "an agreed" solution must be found. This key phrase gives the Israelis a virtual veto on any solution it does not consider acceptable.
The discussions on this issue over the years are best summarized in a Canadian effort referred to generally as the Ottawa Process, a mostly academic project led by Canadian academics and former diplomats connected to McGill University. The project's website, Palestinian Refugee ResearchNet, contains research and discussions on the history of Palestinian refugees and various proposals regarding them. This information is available to everyone.
Experts in refugee issues say that putting aside politics, polemics and narratives, the most efficient way to resolve the Palestinian refugee issue requires three basic steps: acceptance, choosing return options and implementation, including compensation. Refugees agreeing to resolve their status in this way would have to sign a document to that effect and would receive an immediate cash payment. This would also necessarily require them to sign off on which of four countries they would like to adopt as their permanent home.
Abbas Shiblaq, editor of the refugee newsletter Shaml, noted in 1996 the following in regard to implementation of the right of return: "It would be naive to assume that political considerations and developments of the last fifty years will not have an impact on the way that this right might be implemented." Shiblaq and other McGill University experts assert that not every single refugee will return. They base this conclusion on a number of surveys of refugees, including a comprehensive study by Khalili Shikaki of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. He found in 2003 that less than 10% of Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Jordan and Lebanon were willing to return to historic Palestine and become Israeli citizens.
At one time, it was argued that the refugee issue involved two groups: those (laji'in) who became refugees in 1948 and those (nazihin) displaced in 1967. The idea was that the Palestinians displaced from the West Bank in 1967 could be returned immediately, without waiting for resolution for the 1948 refugees. This idea was scrapped, however, after the eruption of the second intifada in 2000, and the idea prevailed for a resolution involving all registered refugees with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
The status of UNRWA, created in 1948, is itself also hotly debated. One suggestion put forward is to dissolve it within 10 years of any agreement. The Israelis insist that whatever agreement is reached, that will be considered the end of negotiations on it, closing the entire file forever.
While many worry that the refugee issue is a deal breaker, leading Palestinian thinkers such as Al-Quds University President Sari Nusseibeh feel that the disagreements over the right of return — while extremely personal and emotional — are less difficult to resolve than, say, issues of borders or Jerusalem. As with all the permanent-status issues, however, neither side will reveal its final position on any topic until there is a comprehensive agreement that can be sold to the public as a single, closed package that must be accepted or rejected in its entirety.
This article was first published on Al-Monitor
Palestinian consensus against negotiations
Hamas Movement renewed its rejection of talks resumption between Palestinian and occupation authorities in light of the imbalance of power in favor of the Israeli occupation. Member of Hamas' Political Bureau, Sami Khater, warned that US secretary of state John Kerry's framework agreement did not meet the minimum limits of Palestinian rights.
Khater expressed his movement's total rejection of the current negotiations in light of the imbalance of power in favor of Israeli occupation "especially that the results will certainly be at the expense of the weaker party".
No Palestinian can accept Kerry's plan that states the Jewishness of Israel, neutrality of Jerusalem, exchange of land, and liquidation of right of return, he said.
Khater said that Hamas had informed the PA negotiating team of its rejection of the negotiation process.
Meanwhile, a workshop has been organized by the Popular Assembly against Negotiations on Tuesday at Engineers Union headquarters in Gaza under the title "Palestinian factions' position towards Israeli-Palestinian negotiation."
During the workshop, Palestinian factions voiced their rejection to the current negotiation process, saying that it aims at liquidating the Palestinian cause and covering Israeli crimes.
Dr. Sami Abu Zuhri, spokesman for Hamas movement, pointed out that talks' resumption came at a time of weak regional and Arab situation.
He said that PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is not entitled to carry out the negotiation process amid a national consensus against peace talks, stressing the need to achieve reconcilation.
For his part, Dr. Ahmed al-Modalal, a leader in Islamic Jihad Movement, stated that the current round of negotiation came to liquidate the Palestine cause, saying that the Palestinian people will never give up their legitimate rights. He also called for re-activating the resistance option.
IOA planning hundreds of new agricultural projects in occupied Golan Heights
The Israeli occupation authority (IOA) is planning to establish hundreds of new agricultural projects in the occupied Syrian Golan heights, Hebrew press reported. The Walla Hebrew website said on Tuesday that the Israeli government had endorsed in its last Sunday meeting a five-year plan to develop new agricultural areas in the Golan to be used by Jewish farmers.
It said that the government would open 750 new agricultural projects in that period to the tune of 115 million dollars including the cost of removing mines and the establishment of water networks.
The website said that the plan envisages the reclamation of around 30,000 dunums near to the Jewish settlements to encourage tourism and farming and to create new work opportunities.
Israel's Ya'alon Apologizes to Kerry for Calling Him "Messianic and Obsessive"
The office of Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon issued a statment on Tuesday, saying: "Israel and the United states share a common goal to advance the peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians led by Secretary Kerry.
"We appreciate Secretary Kerry's many efforts towards that end. The defense minister had no intention to cause any offense to the secretary, and he apologizes if the secretary was offended by words attributed to the minister."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke by phone with a senior US official in a bid to smooth over a diplomatic controversy sparked by comments attributed to Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon, an Israeli official said on condition of anonymity. The official added that Ya'alon also discussed the matter with US Ambassador Dan Shapiro.
Earlier on Tuesday, Yedioth Ahronoth reported that the Israeli defense minister suggested that US Secretary of State John Kerry's quest for Israeli-Palestinian peace was messianic and obsessive.
"The remarks of the Defense Minister (Moshe Ya'alon), if accurate, are offensive and inappropriate especially given all that the United States is doing to support Israel's security needs," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a brief statement that constituted a rare rebuke to close ally Israel.
"To question Secretary Kerry's motives and distort his proposals is not something we would expect from the defense minister of a close ally," White House spokesman Jay Carney said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stressed that "The United States is our greatest ally," noting: "We are working in cooperation with the US president, the vice president... and the secretary of state. We are making efforts to promote peace, security, and stability in the region. We maintain our interest, while cultivating this important tie between the two nations. We strive to reach a true peace accord. We do not want a bi-national state but we also don't want an Iran-backed state that will try to annihilate the State of Israel.
Earlier Tuesday, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon made remarks about US Secretary of State John Kerry, calling his efforts "misplaced obsession and messianic fervor. His words sparked a rash of furious comments in the Knesset's hallways on Tuesday, with Israeli chief negotiator Tzipi Livni accusing him of damaging bilateral relations.
Ya'alon expressed his great skepticism of Kerry and the US's efforts, both in private conversations in Israel and in the US.
"The American security plan presented to us is not worth the paper it's written on," Ya'alon said. "It contains no peace and no security. Only our continued presence in Judea and Samaria and the Jordan River will endure that Ben-Gurion Airport and Netanya don't become targets for rockets from every direction. "
He called Kerry's passion out of place.
"American Secretary of State John Kerry, who turned up here determined and acting out of misplaced obsession and messianic fervor, cannot teach me anything about the conflict with the Palestinians."
US slams reported Israeli criticism of Kerry plan as 'offensive'
The US State Department on Tuesday condemned as "offensive and inappropriate" reported comments by Israel's defense minister criticizing a security plan put forward by US Secretary of State John Kerry.
"The remarks of the defense minister if accurate are offensive and inappropriate especially given all that the United States is doing to support Israel's security needs," spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki told reporters following a visit by Kerry to the Vatican.
Israeli Defense Minister Criticizes US Security Plan
The Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon has stated that the US Security
plan presented by US Secretary of State John Kerry, "is not worth the paper it's written on."
He goes on to state that, "The moment we leave Judea and Samaria he [Mahmoud Abbas] is finished. In reality, there have been no negotiations between us and the Palestinians for all these months – but rather between us and the Americans. The only thing that can 'save us' is for John Kerry to win a Nobel Prize and leave us in peace."
According to the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry-al-Youm, Kerry has asked the Arab League to push the Palestinians for some concessions so that he can push the Israelis for something similar, Ynet reports. The question of recognizing Israel as a Jewish state is however something that the Palestinians will never do.
Thabet condemns Abbas's remarks about the right of return
Thabet Organization for the Right of Return denounced Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's recent remarks in which he considered the right of return a personal and optional right that can be substituted. The organization said that Abbas's remarks are consistent with US secretary of state John Kerry's plan, which aims to liquidate the Palestinian cause and cancel the right of refugees to return to their homeland in 1948 Palestine.
It said in a statement that the right of return is inalienable and that no one has the right to relinquish it.
The statement also stressed that any agreement to cancel the right of return is legally void, according to the second article of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.
"The Palestinian refugees refuse all forms of resettlement, displacement or alternative homeland, and adhere to their right to return to their homeland Palestine. Their stay in the Diaspora is only temporary," Thabet organization added.
It called upon the PA leadership in Ramallah to back down from such remarks, put an end to the futile negotiations and adopt a national strategy that promotes Palestinian unity and protects the constants and rights, especially the right of return.
It also asked the PA to pay attention to the issue of the Palestinians in Syria, especially those besieged in the Yarmouk refugee camp and work on lifting the blockade on it and allowing the entry of humanitarian aid to the camp before it is too late.
For his part, the head of the Jordanian Society for the return and refugees Kazem Ayesh warned in a press statement of the ongoing negotiations, led by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, which would deprive the refugees from returning to Palestine.
Ayesh considered Abbas's comments an assault on the right of refugees to return to their homes from which they were forcibly displaced, stressing that the negotiating team does not have the right to waiver any Palestinian right or constant.
Israeli Minister: the publication of new homes tenders coordinated with Kerry
The Israeli Minister of Housing and Construction, Uri Ariel
"The publication of the latest tenders for new homes were coordinated with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and that he approved of them." the Israeli Minister of Housing and Construction, Uri Ariel , said.
"Even if the United States does not approve of the construction, it will continue," he added. "The United States is our greatest ally, but they also sometimes take actions we do not approve of."
The announcement was made Friday with the approval of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and came on the heels of the release of 26 Palestinian prisoners.
Last week, the Israel Land Authority and Ministry of Construction and Housing announced the publication of 1,400 new construction tenders east of Jerusalem, and several areas in the West Bank.
Seize the moment for peace, Biden tells Israel
Israeli President Shimon Peres welcomes US Vice President Joe Biden in Jerusalem for a meeting on January 13, 2014
US Vice President Joe Biden on Monday urged Israel to seize this moment in history to make peace with the Palestinians in talks with President Shimon Peres.
At a working meeting after the two leaders paid their last respects to former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, who was buried on Monday, the talk turned to the US-led direct peace talks.
"The one place (in the region) where there's a possibility for an island of stability ... is between the Palestinian people and the Israeli people, in two secure states respecting one another's sovereignty and security," Biden said in remarks relayed by the White House.
"And the president believes and I believe that this is one of those opportunities, one of those moments in history where it has to be seized."
At the end of July, US Secretary of State John Kerry coaxed Israel and the Palestinians into their first direct peace talks in nearly three years, with the parties agreeing to a nine-month timetable for reaching a deal.
So far, there has been little visible progress, and Biden admitted there were some "very difficult decisions" ahead.
But he expressed confidence that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was "up to" the task and expressed hope that the same was true of Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas.
"Israel's ultimate security rests in a genuine accommodation with the Palestinians that it is born out of secure borders that are peaceful," he said.
The US vice president arrived in Israel early on Monday to represent Washington at Sharon's funeral, with Peres hailing his timing.
"Your coming is timely, important and moving. You came not only on a sad day but during days that Israel has to take tough decisions," he said in remarks relayed by his office.
"All of us are aware that we have to take the decision now, that it's tough and difficult but we have an open window and God knows when it will happen again."
Biden then went for a dinner meeting at Netanyahu's Jerusalem residence, although there was no immediate word on the content of their talks.
The last time Biden visited Israel was in March 2010 on a visit which was overshadowed by an Israeli announcement of plans to build 1,600 new homes in annexed East Jerusalem as Washington was trying to revive peace talks.
The move infuriated the White House and deeply embarrassed Netanyahu.
Direct negotiations began in July between Israel and the Palestinians in a US-led attempt to restart the deadlocked peace process. Israel has announced plans to build thousands of homes in illegal settlements across the West Bank over the course of the talks, inhibiting US efforts.
The Palestinian negotiating team resigned in protest against continued Israeli settlement construction in mid-November, dealing a major blow to negotiations between Israel and the PLO that had already been stalled.
Negotiator Mohammed Shtayyeh told AFP at the time that they resigned in response to "increasing settlement building (by Israel) and the absence of any hope of achieving results," following Netanyahu's announcement that Israel would build 20,000 new settlement homes in the West Bank.
Former Israeli Generals: No Strategic Reason for Israel to Stay in the Jordan Valley
Three former Israeli generals says that Israel should gradually relinquish control of the Jordan Valley as part of a peace treaty, reports Jerusalem Post.
Maj.-Gen. (res.) Shlomo Brom, former director of the Strategic Planning Division of the General Staff and a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, told Jerusalem Post that there need to be a pure strategic discussion about the consequence of leaving the Jordan Valley, calling the politicians for "leaving the slogans behind".
According to Brom the Jordan Valley is a " artificial strategic asset", something he believs both Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ya'alon is aware of.
Brig.-Gen. (res.) Gadi Zohar, former head of the Terrorism Arena for Military Intelligence, and current president of the Council for Peace and Security, said to Jerusalem Post that he believes that the Israeli military forces should stay in the Jordan Valley during the initial stage and withdraw when they see that the agreement works. Zohar also said that there are no need for Israeli settlements in the Jordan Valley, stating that "these are a burden" from a military point of view.
The Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon has stated that the US Security plan presented by US Secretary of State John Kerry, "is not worth the paper it's written on."
According to the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry-al-Youm, Kerry has asked the Arab League to push the Palestinians for some concessions so that he can push the Israelis for something similar YnetNews report.
The question of recognizing Israel as a Jewish state is however something that the Palestinians will not do.
Netanyahu: Abbas's Statements a Sign He's Not Ready to Continue Talks with Israel
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's statements over the weekend show that he is not ready to make the decisions necessary to continue talks with Israel.
Netanyahu's statements came during his meeting with the US Vice President Joe Biden Monday night, where both of them discussed the Iranian nuclear file and the current Israel-Palestinain peace negotiations.
It's work mentioning that on Saturday, Abbas said that no peace agreement would be possible without East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital. He also refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish State, a principle endorsed by Arab foreign ministers on Sunday. Yet, the most important issue he insisted on during his statment was the refugee issue.
"Let me put it simply: the right of return is a personal decision. What does this mean? That neither the PA, nor the state, nor the PLO, nor any Palestinian or Arab leader has the right to deprive someone from his right to return," Abbas said.
Palestinian Authority FM meets Kerry in Paris
Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki met with US Secretary of State John Kerry on Sunday at the office of the US ambassador to Paris, a statement from the PA minister's office said.
Kerry was in Paris to attend a meeting with the "Friends of Syria" group of mainly Western and Gulf countries opposed to Syrian president Bashar Assad.
The US Secretary of State has also been holding shuttle meetings with Arab foreign ministers who are members of an Arab League committee to follow up on the Middle East peace process.
Al-Maliki reiterated that the Palestinians oppose recognizing Israel as a Jewish state and insist that East Jerusalem becomes the future Palestinian capital.
Arab diplomats support the Palestinian position on all major issues, al-Maliki added.
Kerry kick-started negotiations in July after a three-year hiatus.
Kerry: Time for Tough Decisions in the Peace Process
Us secretary of state John Kerry met with Arab leaders on Sunday to give an update on the latest developments in the peace talks. Kerry said that Washington is determined to bring Israelis and Palestinians together in a peace agreement and also emphasized that the peace process is in a very critical point right now.
"Through the course of the last five months, President Abbas and Prime Minister Netanyahu have both demonstrated courageous and determined leadership", Kerry said. "They've made tough choices, and they are contemplating even tougher choices in the weeks ahead."
John Kerry also said that the Arab foreign ministers support the Palestinian and Israeli leaders in their efforts to agree to a framework for permanent status negotiations.
Barhoum: Kerry exploiting Arab weakness to impose his "disastrous" scheme
Hamas movement warned any local or Arab party against supporting the US secretary of state John Kerry's so-called Framework Agreement. Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman, said in a statement on Sunday that the Palestinian people did not authorize anyone to negotiate on their behalf and would not allow surrendering any of their rights regardless of sacrifices.
Kerry is apparently determined on marketing his "disastrous" scheme as evident in his shuttle visits to the region and the meeting today in Paris with foreign ministers of the Arab follow-up committee, the spokesman said.
He said that Kerry was exploiting the current state of Arab weakness and all American pressure cards to impose his scheme that only benefits American and Israeli goals and projects in the region.
Barhoum said that Kerry wants to impose recognition of Israel as a "Jewish state" and to liquidate the Palestine cause.
The Arab countries should support and protect the Palestinian people and their rights, steadfastness and resistance and to confront the American-Israeli plots targeting the Palestinian people and peoples of region at large, the spokesman concluded.
Maariv: Settlement shall lose Israel its last stronghold in Europe
Chancellor Angela Merkel with Israel's Perez
Israeli daily Maariv said in its Sunday edition that Germany is seeking to get rid of the historical burden towards the Jews and to make normal relations with Israel.
The daily interpreted this as yet another deterioration in the relations with the Europe and a drop of the last pro-Israel European strongholds, given Germany's opposition to colonial settlement building in the occupied West Bank.
The relations started to deteriorate in September 2012, when Israel pinned hopes on Germany to thwart the Palestinian endeavor to gain membership in the UN.
However, Israel wasn't able to recruit the European countries to realize that objective, the daily said, which angered the Israeli state. It added that Germany has no trust in Netanyahu as one who believes in a two-state solution, arguing that he inherited his father's belief that Israel's land is undividable, which further adds to Israel's isolation.
That belief, according to the Maariv, heralds Israel's loss of Germany, its dearest ally in Europe.
Right of return is personal: Abbas
President Mahmoud Abbas stressed Saturday that there will be no peace agreement with Israel without an agreement over Jerusalem. "Without Jerusalem there will be no peace between us," Abbas told crowds from Jerusalem at his headquarters.
"Without Jerusalem written clearly and in bold, there will not be peace with them," he added.
Abbas said he heard Israelis say that Jerusalem will not be on the agenda of a final peace agreement.
However, he made it clear that the Palestinians are not going to give up on the fact that Jerusalem, occupied in 1967, is going to be the capital of their future independent state.
Abbas said he went to the United Nations to achieve certain goals, which he said he did achieve them.
"We went and we will continue on this path," he said.
Abbas stressed that the Palestinians have rights "and we will continue to demand our rights until in the end we get them."
Until then, he said, the Palestinians will remain steadfast in Jerusalem, in the West Bank, in the Gaza Strip and anywhere there are Palestinians.
"We are not going to kneel to anyone or anything," he stressed.
Mahmoud Abbas said that the Palestinian right of return to their occupied lands since1948 is like marriage.
He added, this right is personal and the Palestinians could choose and then decide what they want.
Abbas added, the authority, state, organization or he himself could not deprive anyone from his right of return.
"There may be several options, and the refugees are to choose. There are compensation and other choices,"." He said, pointing out that even the father cannot waive the right of his children, as a personal right.
Israel annexes Palestinian lands to expand industrial settlement of Ariel
Palestinian farmers said that the Israeli occupation authority uses nowadays heavy construction vehicles and explosives to level the Palestinian land around the illegal industrial settlement of Ariel in order to expand the settlement for the building of more factories. They added that these settlement expansion works are taking place on Palestinian annexed lands near the farms of Abu Kayed and Abu Basal, west of Salfit city, noting that the expansion of this settlement would reduce the green areas used for grazing cattle.
These annexed lands belong to Salfit city and the towns of Kifl Hares and Bruqin.
The Hebrew radio had quoted Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu as saying that everyone knows that the settlement blocs of Ariel, Gush Etzion and Ma'ale Adumim would always remain part of the Israeli state as it is the case with Jerusalem.
EU's Ashton 'deeply concerned' over Israel settlements
The European Union's foreign policy supremo said Saturday she was "deeply concerned" by what she said were "illegal" Israeli plans for more than 1,800 new settler homes.
"I was deeply concerned to hear the latest announcement by the Israeli authorities to advance settlement plans once more," Catherine Ashton said in a statement.
She added the settlements were "illegal under international law, constitute an obstacle to peace and threaten to make the two-state solution impossible."
She reiterated her call on Israel to cease its settlement building and said
current efforts at peace talks were a "unique opportunity" for both sides.
On Friday, Tel Aviv unveiled proposals for 1,076 units in annexed east Jerusalem and 801 in the occupied West Bank in a move the Palestinians said was aimed at forcing the United States to abandon its push towards Middle East peace.
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Nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region as a universal DNA barcode marker for Fungi
Conrad L. Schoch, Keith A. Seifert, Sabine Huhndorf, Vincent Robert, John L. Spouge, C. André Levesque, Wen Chen, and Fungal Barcoding Consortium
PNAS April 17, 2012 109 (16) 6241-6246; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1117018109
Conrad L. Schoch
For correspondence: schoch2@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov Keith.Seifert@AGR.GC.CA
Keith A. Seifert
Sabine Huhndorf
Vincent Robert
John L. Spouge
C. André Levesque
Wen Chen
Edited* by Daniel H. Janzen, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, and approved February 24, 2012 (received for review October 18, 2011)
Figures & SI
Six DNA regions were evaluated as potential DNA barcodes for Fungi, the second largest kingdom of eukaryotic life, by a multinational, multilaboratory consortium. The region of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 used as the animal barcode was excluded as a potential marker, because it is difficult to amplify in fungi, often includes large introns, and can be insufficiently variable. Three subunits from the nuclear ribosomal RNA cistron were compared together with regions of three representative protein-coding genes (largest subunit of RNA polymerase II, second largest subunit of RNA polymerase II, and minichromosome maintenance protein). Although the protein-coding gene regions often had a higher percent of correct identification compared with ribosomal markers, low PCR amplification and sequencing success eliminated them as candidates for a universal fungal barcode. Among the regions of the ribosomal cistron, the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region has the highest probability of successful identification for the broadest range of fungi, with the most clearly defined barcode gap between inter- and intraspecific variation. The nuclear ribosomal large subunit, a popular phylogenetic marker in certain groups, had superior species resolution in some taxonomic groups, such as the early diverging lineages and the ascomycete yeasts, but was otherwise slightly inferior to the ITS. The nuclear ribosomal small subunit has poor species-level resolution in fungi. ITS will be formally proposed for adoption as the primary fungal barcode marker to the Consortium for the Barcode of Life, with the possibility that supplementary barcodes may be developed for particular narrowly circumscribed taxonomic groups.
DNA barcoding
fungal biodiversity
↵1To whom correspondence may be addressed. E-mail: schoch2{at}ncbi.nlm.nih.gov or Keith.Seifert{at}AGR.GC.CA.
↵2A complete list of the Fungal Barcoding Consortium can be found in the SI Appendix.
Author contributions: C.L.S. and K.A.S. designed research; K.A.S., V.R., E.B., K.V., P.W.C., A.N.M., M.J.W., M.C.A., K.-D.A., F.-Y.B., R.W.B., D.B., M.-J.B., M. Blackwell, T.B., M. Bogale, N.B., A.R.B., B.B., L.C., Q.C., G.C., P. Chaverri, B.J.C., A.C., P. Cubas, C.C., U.D., Z.W.d.B., G.S.d.H., R.D.-P., B. Dentinger, J.D-U., P.K.D., B. Douglas, M.D., T.A.D., U.E., J.E.E., M.S.E., K.F., M.F., M.A.G., Z.-W.G., G.W.G., K.G., J.Z.G., M. Groenewald, M. Grube, M. Gryzenhout, L.-D.G., F. Hagen, S. Hambleton, R.C.H., K. Hansen, P.H., G.H., C.H., K. Hirayama, Y.H., H.-M.H., K. Hoffmann, V. Hofstetter, F. Högnabba, P.M.H., S.-B.H., K. Hosaka, J.H., K. Hughes, Huhtinen, K.D.H., T.J., E.M.J., J.E.J., P.R.J., E.B.G.J., L.J.K., P.M.K., D.G.K., U.K., G.M.K., C.P.K., S.L., S.D.L., A.S.L., K.L., L.L., J.J.L., H.T.L., H.M., S.S.N.M., M.P.M., T.W.M., A.R.M., A.S.M., W.M., J.-M.M., S.M., L.G.N., R.H.N., T.N., I.N., G.O., I. Okane, I. Olariaga, J.O., T. Papp, D.P., T. Petkovits, R.P.-B., W.Q., H.A.R., D.R., T.L.R., C.R., J.M.S.-R., I.S., A.S., C.S., K.S., F.O.P.S., S. Stenroos, B.S., H.S., S. Suetrong, S.-O.S., G.-H.S., M.S., K.T., L.T., M.T.T., E.T., W.A.U., H.U., C.V., A.V., T.D.V., G.W., Q.M.W., Y.W., B.S.W., M.W., M.M.W., J.X., R.Y., Z.-L.Y., A.Y., J.-C.Z., N.Z., W.-Y.Z., and D.S performed research; V.R., J.L.S., C.A.L., and W.C. analyzed data; C.L.S., K.A.S., and S.H. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
↵*This Direct Submission article had a prearranged editor.
Data deposition: The sequences reported in this paper have been deposited in GenBank. Sequences are listed in Dataset S1.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1117018109/-/DCSupplemental.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
You are going to email the following Nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region as a universal DNA barcode marker for Fungi
Conrad L. Schoch, Keith A. Seifert, Sabine Huhndorf, Vincent Robert, John L. Spouge, C. André Levesque, Wen Chen, Fungal Barcoding Consortium
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Apr 2012, 109 (16) 6241-6246; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1117018109
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(500) days of revenge
Filed under: Uncategorized — posted by Breakup Girl @ 12:18 pm
From Broadsheet:
Where would writers be without the people who've done them wrong? Without dysfunctional lovers, bad bosses and explosive partings of the ways, we wouldn't have "You're So Vain," "The Devil Wears Prada," "I Married a Communist," Dr. Evil or "The Starter Wife," to name but a few of a million examples. Nothing quite takes the sting out of heartache and humiliation like turning your tormentor into a thinly veiled antagonist. So it wasn't surprising when Scott Neustadter, co-writer of the twee anti-romance hit "(500) Days of Summer," fessed up this weekend in the U.K.'s Daily Mail that the movie's titular heartbreaker was based on a real woman. The movie does, after all, start with the warning that "any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental. Especially you, Jenny Beckman. Bitch." Not exactly the sort of thing people say when there are no hard feelings.
/snip/
But Neustadter admits that when the real Summer read his script, she told him she related to the Tom character, making her either acutely unself-aware or supremely adept at pushing his buttons. And if it's the latter, Neustadter may wish to further consider this. Six years ago Lauren Weisberger turned her stint as an assistant at Vogue into a bestselling roman à clef that became a hit movie, an act of payback right up there with Nora Ephron's scathing divorce saga "Heartburn."
This weekend, however, Weisberger's Devil herself, Anna Wintour, emerged as the sharp, tough-as-nails, and eminently fascinating hero of a critically acclaimed movie of her own, "The September Issue." It might not be revenge, but it's got to feel a little like vindication. So while Neustadter may be enjoying the box office fruit of his disastrous love affair, somewhere, Jenny Beckman may be quietly banging away on a screenplay called "Some Like It Scott."
Tags: Broadsheet, Mary Elizabeth Williams, movies, revenge | Comments (0)


Appellate court allows Thomas More Society case against Aurora, IL 'mega-abortion facility' to resume
By Calvin Freiburger | June 23, 2015 , 04:25pm
The Chicago-based pro-life legal group, Thomas More Society, reports its ongoing lawsuit against Planned Parenthood over its 21,000-square-foot "mega-abortion facility" in Aurora, Illinois will be able to continue, as the Illinois Appellate Court, Second Judicial District has reversed a lower court's decision to throw out the suit.
Thomas More is challenging the legality of Planned Parenthood having built the clinic in a business development district from which the law specifically bars ostensibly non-profit entities. The court ruled that litigation on this claim may resume, though it upheld the dismissal of "several secondary claims" against the abortion giant.
"Planned Parenthood built its abortion facility in Aurora under false pretenses and in blatant violation of the strictures of Aurora's zoning code, which require a tax-paying for-profit use on that site," Thomas More Special Counsel Peter Breen said in the press release. The statement goes on to accuse Planned Parenthood of acquiring construction permits for the facility via dummy "front" companies and of changing its tax status to avoid zoning requirements.
"Planned Parenthood boasted that it had been paying property taxes on the property from 2006 throughout the pendency of proceedings in the circuit court, and its attorneys argued that such payment of property taxes proved that it was lawfully operating as a for-profit entity," according to the press release. "However, within a few months after the suit was dismissed by the circuit court, Planned Parenthood applied for and was granted property tax exemptions and a rebate of taxes paid for the prior three years, arguing that its use of the property was strictly charitable and non-profit."
Live Action News previously reported in 2011 that Planned Parenthood had nearly a dozen such "abortion supercenters" either in operation or under construction.