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— America’s massive trade deficit with China, currency rates and human rights concerns will all be on the agenda when top officials from the United States and China sit down for high-level talks this week.
The annual meetings will bring together top officials from both countries representing dozens of government agencies in the areas of trade and finance, and foreign policy.
— Two earthquakes struck southeast Spain in quick succession Wednesday, killing at least seven people, injuring dozens and causing major damage to buildings, officials said.
The epicenter of the quakes — with magnitudes of 4.4 and 5.2 — was close to the town of Lorca, and the second came about two hours after the first, an official with the Murcia regional government said on condition of anonymity in line with department policy.
The Murcia regional government said a hospital in Lorca was being evacuated, dozens of injured people were being treated at the scene and a field hospital was being set up. It said the seven deaths included a minor and occurred with the second, stronger quake.
Large chunks of stone and brick fell from the facade of a church in Lorca as Spanish state TV was broadcasting live from the scene. A large church bell was also among the rubble. The broadcaster reported that schoolchildren usually gather at that spot around that time, and if it had happened 10 minutes later, a “tragedy” could have occurred.
Spanish TV showed images of cars that were partially crushed by falling rubble, and large cracks in buildings. Nervous groups of residents gathered in open public places, talking about what happened and calling relatives and friends on their cell phones. An elderly woman appeared to be in shock and was seated in a chair as people tried to calm her.
“I felt a tremendously strong movement, followed by a lot of noise, and I was really frightened,” the newspaper El Pas quoted another Lorca resident Juani Avellanada as saying. It did not give her age.
Another resident, Juana Ruiz, said her house split open with the quake and “all the furniture fell over,” according to El Pas.
John Bellini, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado, said the larger earthquake had a preliminary magnitude of 5.3 and struck 220 miles south-southeast of Madrid.
The quake was about 6 miles deep, and was preceded by the smaller one, Bellini said. He classified the bigger quake as moderate and said it could cause structural damage to older buildings and masonry.
The quakes occurred in a seismically active area near a large fault beneath the Mediterranean Sea where the European and African continents brush past each other, USGS seismologist Julie Dutton said.
The USGS said it has recorded hundreds of small quakes in the area since 1990.
Daniel Woolls contributed to this report.
— U.S. officials say that Osama bin Laden kept a hand-written journal filled with planning ideas and details of operations. The journal was seized in the dramatic US raid.
The journal was part of a huge cache of intelligence that included about 100 flash drives and five computers taken by U.S. Navy SEALs after they swept through the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
There’s a telling moment on the DVD tucked inside Loudon Wainwright III’s new box set, 40 Odd Years. Wainwright, the acerbic troubadour and patriarch, sits beside his teenage son, Rufus, who’s not yet the flamboyant pop semi-star he would become. An interviewer asks Rufus how he feels about the scabrous songs his father has written about his mother, fellow musician Kate McGarrigle. Rufus squirms and says, “It does cause a little anxiety sometimes.” His father erupts into laughter and adds, “And that’s why I do it, folks — punishment!”
It’s hard to conjure how challenging it must be to be a member of the Wainwright-McGarrigle clan, the first family of reality folk-pop. Imagine if every member of your household was a singer, songwriter and musician. Then picture something painful happening — say, a divorce — and everybody writing songs about its aftermath, then singing those songs for all the world to hear. For the last four decades, the Wainwrights and McGarrigles — Loudon, Kate, and their two children, Rufus and Martha—have been doing just that. They’re the modern dysfunctional family setting strife to music, as chronicled on 40 Odd Years and—arriving the same day—Tell My Sister, a three-disc set that collects the rueful, hearth-warm early work of McGarrigle and her older sister, Anna.
Leigh Ann Heinse can’t help but feel nervous right now. Two years ago, she and her husband purchased what they believed was their forever home, a four-bedroom fixer-upper in a kid-friendly subdivision in Baton Rouge, La., a half mile from the Mississippi River. Though the river levees are visible from the entrance to her neighborhood, Heinse says she and her husband did not buy flood insurance — it is, incredibly, not required — “because It was one more bill that we wouldn’t have to worry about.”
Now, as the Mississippi River rises one foot a day near Baton Rouge, Heinse, 34, is rethinking her decision. She and area residents are bracing for historic floodwaters by sandbagging levees, closing roads, rescheduling graduation ceremonies and, in some areas, simply preparing to evacuate. The river’s normal level at Baton Rouge is about 25 feet. As of Tuesday, May 10, it was 41 feet and was projected to reach 47 feet by May 23.
In a region where memories of Hurricane Katrina are still fresh, these threatening waters have opened old wounds. Since Katrina hit Louisiana in August 2005, flooding more than 80% of New Orleans with water and Baton Rouge to the north with evacuees, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has spent billions of dollars to repair and strengthen the region’s levee system. Although authorities have said levees will be able to hold up against the Mississippi’s surging waters, officials are still concerned because the swollen river is expected to tax the levees for the next week and a half.
For former New Orleans resident Burma Smith, the rising water is bringing on sinking feelings. Smith, 63, and her husband moved to Baton Rouge in 2007 after losing their home in Katrina and trying — but failing — to start over in the Big Easy. The home Smith found upriver was almost identical to the one she lost, she says, adding that she “needed a place like this in order to heal.” Still, with successive hurricanes that have hit the state and last year’s BP oil spill, Smith says she watches the news and wonders when Louisiana will ever get a reprieve from natural disasters. “Right when you think things are starting to feel normal, then there’s this water coming down from the upper Mississippi, just flowing down here, and it brings it all back,” says Smith. “Psychologically it’s another rollercoaster.”
Late last week Governor Bobby Jindal asked President Obama to declare a state of emergency in advance of possible flooding similar to what hit Memphis, Tenn., so badly this week. The Army Corps has attempted to decrease the river’s flow by opening part of the Bonnet Carr spillway, located some 30 miles upriver from New Orleans. The spillway relieves pressure on the levee system by diverting river water into the Gulf of Mexico via Lake Pontchartrain. Another spillway, the Morganza, may be opened by this weekend or early next week. But if it’s opened, it’s expected to unleash at least 12 feet of water in Morgan City, southwest of New Orleans.
Heinse says some of her neighbors have already noticed their yards are bubbling. Others have purchased flood insurance even though it won’t go into effect for another 30 days. Local energy companies are asking customers to conserve, since outages are possible with the floods and 90-degree Fahrenheit temperatures. Local governments in vulnerable communities are offering sandbags to protect homes. Thunderstorms are forecast for the end of this week.
Eight thousand acres of land have been flooded around the nation’s largest maximum security prison, Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, which is north of Baton Rouge and home to 5,200 inmates. On Monday morning, 192 prisoners with health problems were taken out and more than 1,000 will be evacuated throughout the remainder of the week, according to spokesperson Pam Laborde. Prisoners have spent the past week filling sandbags and tossing them on top of the 12 miles of levees surrounding the unflooded areas of the prison. Tents have been set up near the higher ground of the prison’s front gates in case remaining inmates are forced out. Buses are on standby if prisoners need to be sent to other facilities.
Downriver, Heinse, a real estate agent and mother of three, has her own evacuation worries. “This is about my kids and their sense of security,” she says. “I taught kindergarten during Katrina, and I remember how [evacuee] children were so distraught at the simple thought of coming into a new school, especially after having been rescued from their homes by a helicopter or boat. I don’t want my kids to experience that feeling.” Heinse says she’s “no stranger” to the region’s tragedies, “but I’ve never been faced with this much of a potential threat before.” For now all she can do is sit, wait and hope that the nearby levees protect her forever home.
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ALMOST every night in Washington seems to be Henry Kissinger night.
His presence enlivens any occasion. This season's social lion, Soviet
Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, asked for an invitation to a party that
Marion Javits was throwing for Kissinger. In the course of the evening,
Yevtushenko had a private conversation with Kissinger, then slipped off
his wristwatch and pressed it into Kissinger's hand—confirming who
knows what international arrangement. The Kissinger wit can always be counted on. As a guest speaker at the
Washington Press Club's annual congressional dinner last week,
Kissinger mocked his reputation as a secret swinger. Noting that Gloria
Steinem had said that she “is not now and never has been a girl friend”
of his, Kissinger declared that he was not discouraged. “After all, she
did not say that if nominated she would not accept, or if elected she
would not serve.” Power has made Kissinger blossom.
When he was a professor of government at Harvard, his colleagues
appreciated his wit, but they never considered him the life of any
party. When Kissinger first took his job under Nixon, he was tense and
brusque. Now that he is solidly established as undisputed boss of
foreign affairs, he is more relaxed than ever, and he is visibly—some
would say ostentatiously—enjoying himself. ∙ Topic No. 1 is the women he escorts on both coasts. His favorite is
Nancy Maginnes, a tall, blonde aide to Governor Rockefeller. But there
are a host of others, mostly actresses like Jill St. John, Mario Thomas
and Samantha Eggar, and little-known starlets whose famous date has
made them a lot better known. When he goes to San Clemente, Kissinger
often takes time off to drive to Hollywood—a place he never visited
before he joined the White House—and enjoy parties at the home of Los
Angeles Times Hollywood Columnist Joyce Haber and her TV producer
husband Douglas Cramer. “I go out with actresses,” he says, “because
I'm not very apt to marry one.” Once he even confided: “It's
astonishing, you know. These starlets I go out with aren't even sexy.”
In a burst of envious outrage, Manhattan's Village Voice accused
Kissinger of being a secret square posing as a swinger. But he is clearly comfortable ir his new role. Ever since he wrote his
Ph.D. thesis on Metternich, he has admired statesmen who combined a
cul tivated life-style with the shrewd exercise of diplomacy.
Kissinger is trying to revive some of the bygone elegance of public
life; grimness is for the ideologues and zealots who haven't made the
world such a troubled place to live in. He has personal knowledge of 20th century grimness. As a Jewish boy in
Nazi Germany, he knew persecution. After his family fled to New York in
1938, he kept to himself. Today a streak of suspicion seems to underlie
all that he does. His jokes about his paranoia have an uncomfortable
edge of truth; his genuinely humorous self deprecation often gets out
of hand. Ht admits he has a problem. “I have a first rate mind but a
third-rate intuition about people.”
IT was a year of visitations and bold ventures with Russia and China, of a uniquely personal triumph at the polls for the President, of hopes raised and lately dashed for peace in Viet Nam. Foreign policy reigned preeminent, and was in good part the base for the landslide election victory at home. And U.S. foreign policy, for good or ill, was undeniably the handiwork of two people: Richard Milhous Nixon and Henry Alfred Kissinger, the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs. For what they accomplished in the world, what was well begun—and inescapably, too, their prolonged and so far indecisive struggle with the Viet Nam tragedy—the two are Men of the Year. They constitute in many ways an odd couple, an improbable partnership. There is Nixon, 60, champion of Middle American virtues, a secretive, aloof yet old-fashioned politician given to oversimplified rhetoric, who founded his career on gut-fighting anti-Communism but has become in his maturity a surprisingly flexible, even unpredictable statesman. At his side is Kissinger, 49, a Bavarian-born Harvard professor of urbane and subtle intelligence, a creature of Cambridge and Georgetown who cherishes a never entirely convincing reputation as an international bon vivant and superstar. Yet together in their unique symbiosis—Nixon supplying power and will, Kissinger an intellectual framework and negotiating skills—they have been changing the shape of the world, accomplishing the most profound rearrangement of the earth’s political powers since the beginning of the cold war. The year contained vast promise, tidal changes, a movement from a quarter-century of great power confrontation toward an era of negotiations. But if Nixon and Kissinger succeeded in opening the gates to China, in urging a new détente with Russia, in pressing forward the SALT talks and a dozen other avenues of communication between East and West, it was also, in its final days, a year of devastating disappointment. In October, Kissinger euphorically reported to the world that “peace is at hand” in Viet Nam. Then, as it has so many times before in America’s longest and strangest war, the peace proved once again elusive. As the Paris negotiations dissolved in a fog of linguistic ambiguities and recriminations, Richard Nixon suddenly sent the bombers north again. All through the year, Nixon and Kissinger labored at a new global design, a multipolar world in which an equilibrium of power would ensure what Nixon called “a full generation of peace.” But at year’s end, the design remained dangerously flawed by the ugly war from which, once again, there seemed no early exit. Other themes and other figures, of course, also preoccupied the world in 1972. While Nixon and Kissinger projected their visions of order, political terrorists kept up a counterpoint. In May, three Japanese gunmen hired by Palestinian guerrillas opened fire at Tel Aviv’s crowded Lod airport, killing 26 travelers and wounding 72 others. Then in September eight Palestinians invaded the Israeli Olympic team’s dormitory in Munich. Twenty hours later, 17 men, including eleven Israeli athletes and coaches, were dead. The shadow of the gunman still hung over Northern Ireland. This year alone more than 450 people died in the terror. A bomb blast in downtown Dublin killed
On Nov. 27, 2005, a man in Faribault, Minn., received an e-mail with a subject line that read, “Melissa goodbye to Li Dao.” It was a suicide note, scribbled digitally, sent by a woman to her online pen pal who had actively encouraged her to embrace death. The only catch: Li Dao was not a real person, and, according to authorities, the virtual advice was not an act of empathy but an attempt to manipulate Melissa into taking her own life — all for what the man told the police was the “the thrill of the chase.”
Li Dao was one of the several aliases used by 48-year-old William Melchert-Dinkel, who would impersonate a female nurse and advise people on suicide methods in online chat rooms. Melissa was one of the dozens of victims he encouraged to commit suicide by feigning compassion. “Having your support is going to help me muster up the strength to go through with this,” Melissa wrote to him. Melchert-Dinkel then replied, advising Melissa to stay calm while she took her own life: “Just let yourself down on the rope and let go.”
Documents from the police investigation do not specify what ultimately happened to Melissa, nor what came of the handful of others who shared their suicidal thoughts with Melchert-Dinkel in online exchanges. When detectives interviewed Melchert-Dinkel at his house in January 2009, with his family members present, he openly admitted to asking 15 to 20 people if he could watch while they committed suicide and estimated that he assisted five or fewer people in following through with their plans. Police later collected evidence from his computer hard drive that pointed to Melchert-Dinkel’s direct involvement in the deaths of a Canadian woman in 2008 and an English man in 2005 — enough evidence, they believed, to bring a trial under Minnesota’s assisted-suicide statute. Rice County attorney Paul Beaumaster, who prosecuted the case, calls Melchert-Dinkel’s conduct egregious. “This was fraud,” he explains. “It was fraud to encourage them to take their own lives, and he did it for his own sport. To me that was an aggravating factor.”
The chilling case has fascinated legal experts, who say it poses a unique test of the criminal-justice system and of the First Amendment’s freedom-of-speech guarantees. Melchert-Dinkel’s attorney, Terry Watkins, maintains his client’s online interactions were protected under the First Amendment. “Someone has to make an inference whether those conversations, beyond a level of reasonable doubt, represent encouragement that in fact had a direct and imminent role in their decision to commit suicide,” he says. “Obviously the victims aren’t here to testify as to what, if any, point the conversations had to do with their eventual decision. So you’re speculating from square one all the way up.”
In a typical assisted-suicide conviction, an element of physical conduct exists — like Jack Kevorkian’s construction of a suicide machine. But Melchert-Dinkel wasn’t even in the same country as his targets in the two cases brought to trial, and the state’s evidence against him consists primarily of online exchanges — words, instant messages, etc. — that, by Watkins’ argument, would fall under protected speech. He’s not alone: Raleigh Levine, a constitutional-law professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minn., has been closely following the case and says that to start restricting speech because it might prompt listeners to kill or harm themselves is dangerous territory. Furthermore, Levine notes that in this case, the immediacy factor is missing: Melchert-Dinkel’s victims “didn’t instantly kill themselves,” she says. “You have to be advocating illegal activity and there has to be this nexus of activity.”
In March, Third District Court Judge Thomas Neuville found Melchert-Dinkel guilty on two counts of violating Minnesota’s assisted-suicide statute, labeling his communications “lethal advocacy,” which he said was analogous to a category of unprotected speech known as fighting words. “Encouraging and advising suicide through speech is the same as inciting a fight or an assault with words,” he ruled, specifying that it is in the government’s compelling interest to protect the lives of its citizens who are particularly vulnerable to suicidal tendencies.
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— President Barack Obama’s approval rating has hit its highest point in two years — 60 percent — and more than half of Americans now say he deserves to be re-elected, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll taken after U.S. forces killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
In worrisome signs for Republicans, the president’s standing improved not just on foreign policy but also on the economy, and independent Americans — a key voting bloc in the November 2012 presidential election — caused the overall uptick in support by sliding back to Obama after fleeing for much of the past two years.
The sexiest boobies have the bluest feet. If you had blue feet, you’d be a sexy booby too — at least if you were male. Moving on …
First of all, the boobies in question are birds . They’re known to ornithologists as Sula nebouxii and to nearly everyone else in the world as blue-footed boobies because they do have blue feet and because, well, could there possibly be a better name? Blue-footed boobies were first studied closely by Charles Darwin during his extended stay on the Galapagos Islands, but the birds are found in Peru and along the Pacific coast of Mexico as well.
Researchers have long believed that almost no wild animals — boobies included — live to old age, simply because parasites, predators or the elements get them first. This is bad news for the animals, but it isn’t great for the scientists either since it makes it hard to study the natural process of senescence. We do know that in people, aging has an impact on all bodily functions — including, of course, fertility. In females, the ability to procreate stops after menopause; males can conceive even into their dotage, but oxidative damage to the sperm of men above 50 can make their offspring more prone to genetic diseases. Now, a new paper published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology shows that the same can be true of male boobies.
The research, conducted by a joint Spanish-Mexican research team, focused on boobies because the still relatively isolated nature of their populations keeps them safe from at least some of the dangers that claim other animals in their prime. As male boobies age, the researchers found, their sperm suffers the same kinds of degeneration that human sperm does. At the same time, they change in more visible ways — including a fading of the distinctive blueness of their feet. Female boobies — no fools — generally give these seniors a pass, opting instead to mate with the boys who retain their blue hue.
It’s not news that color, plumage and a thousand other visual cues serve as mating attractants among animals. But it is a surprise that the decline of reproductive signaling so closely mirrors a humanlike decline in sperm quality.
“The study provides us with a new way of looking at what lies behind sexual signals,” says lead author Alberto Velando of the University of Vigo in Spain, “pointing to the importance of sexual selection in eliminating genetic mutations.” Human males, alas, can’t do much more about their sperm quality than boobies can. But unlike the boobies, we can at least buff up our blue suede shoes.
Read “Scientists Create Human Sperm from Stem Cells.”
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