Reporting: Romney campaign again puts Mormon faith in spotlight
Cross-posted from msnbc.com, where it originally appeared.
Infobox: Mormons and evangelicals
By Alex Johnson
msnbc.com
Four years ago, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney took time from his Republican presidential campaign to talk at length about the role of religion in America and in his life.
It is entirely appropriate to ask “questions about an aspiring candidate’s religion,” Romney, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said in a sober, here’s-what-I-believe address in College Station, Texas, in December 2007.
This time around, the same questions are being asked: Are Mormons really Christians? Should evangelical Christians refuse to even consider voting for them?
But this time, Romney’s response is very different.
Read the rest of this entry »
Boeing concerned about contaminated air as early as 1953
A quarter-million pages of Boeing Co. documents made public as part of a court settlement reveal that the company has had concerns about the safety of cabin air in commercial jetliners since 1953, my colleague Jim Gold reports today.
A former American Airlines flight attendant is believed to be the first person in the U.S. to settle a lawsuit against Boeing over what she claims is faulty aircraft design that allowed toxic fumes to reach the cabin.
Boeing acknowledged the settlement, the terms of which weren’t disclosed, saying it “still contends that cabin air is safe to breathe and studies by independent researchers have consistently shown that existing systems for providing cabin air to passengers and crew meet applicable health and safety standards.”
But stricken airline crews and their advocates say faulty “bleed-air” systems — which pump compressed air “bled” from the plane’s engine — have been causing health problems dating back to the takeoff of jet travel in the 1950s.
In severe cases, they say, exposure to the toxic fumes has cost afflicted pilots their jobs when they lost medical clearances and kept flight attendants from working. Moreover, passengers aren’t informed what they may have breathed, Gold reports.
Full story (Jim Gold/msnbc.com)
Live blog: Amanda Knox arrives home
Over on msnbc.com’s FieldNotes, fellow reporter Kari Huus and I are live-blogging Amanda Knox’s return home to Seattle. You can follow the story here.
DHS says don’t call us. Really.
The Department of Homeland Security has a reputation among journalists and other government officials for being hard to get a straight answer from. For instance, there was its highly publicized refusal, in the face of repeated attempts by reporters and state and local governments, to say one way or the other whether local authorities could opt out of an immigration program called Secure Communities.
Now, Federal Times, a newspaper and website devoted to covering the workings of the federal government, reports that DHS won’t even give it the work phone numbers and email addresses of its public affairs officers — the people it pays to deal with the press and the public.
The reason? In a response to a Freedom of Information request for public numbers and addresses, DHS said revealing the information — which would simply allow citizens and journalists to reach spokesmen for the government at their government offices — would be an invasion of privacy. Federal Times said DHS cited the provision of FOI law that is supposed to protect medical records.
Tales of a DHS FOIA (Federal Times)
Reporting: Majority of states line up to ditch No Child Left Behind
Since President Barack Obama announced last month that he would allow states to request waivers from mandatory participation in No Child Left Behind, at least 27 have already signaled that they will ask to opt out.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan — who had to follow No Child Left Behind when he was CEO of Chicago schools — isn’t just offering the waivers. He’s actively encouraging education officials to apply for them, he says, because it’s “fundamentally broken.”
What officials want to fix is the rigidity of the current law, which set standards so restrictive that entire schools are deemed to be failing if only a relatively few students don’t meet test standards.
Under current rules, a school’s success is based on a statewide test that assesses 40 categories. If just one subcategory — such as students with disabilities or those who are economically disadvantaged — doesn’t make its federal Adequate Yearly Progress benchmark, then the entire school fails.
What do you think? Who should measure how well our schools are doing?
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com-NBC News special report)
U.S. bars the public from seeing its data on doctors
Cross-posted from msnbc.com’s Open Channel investigative blog.
The Obama administration has closed public access to its database of disciplinary action against doctors and other medical professionals, basically because reporters were getting too good at using it.
The Department of Health and Human Services compiles a National Practitioner Data Bank to centralize reports on malpractice cases and licensing board actions against individual doctors and health care companies. The idea is to make it harder for practitioners who’ve been hit with disciplinary actions or malpractice judgments to move to other states and get new licenses.
Four times a year, HHS has published a version of the database to the public. Because the database is supposed to be confidential, it’s scrubbed of names, addresses and other information that patients, lawyers and reporters could use to identify who’s in it. Still, because it provides a wealth of aggregate information, the NPDB quarterly summary has been a regular source of medical stories for a quarter-century. (As recently as June, the database was generating stories like this one, reporting that half of U.S. malpractice payments involve patients seen outside a hospital.)
Or at least it did until this month, when HHS’ Health Resources and Services Administration added this sentence to the databank’s Web page:
The NPDB Public Use Data File is not available until further notice.
Police Blotter of the Day: Woman calls in bomb threat so relatives won’t fly before 9/11
Federal prosecutors have charged a Long Island woman for calling in a fake bomb threat to a Southwest Airlines flight because she didn’t want her mother and brother to fly close to the 10th anniversary of 9/11. …
Purcell was charged Tuesday in Central Islip with a federal offense of making a false bomb threat over the phone. She was released on $200,000 bond. Coincidentally, it was her mother and brother who signed the bond — the same family members she was allegedly trying to keep grounded in Arizona.
Full story (NBC New York)
Right: Mary Purcell (Chris Glorioso/NBC New York)
Update: Two terror threat subjects could be Americans
Updated at 6:40 p.m. ET: NBC’s Pete Williams reports that U.S. officials believe two of the three men mentioned by their intelligence source could be Americans who flew from Dubai.
Over at msnbc.com’s Open Channel investigative blog, I’ve rounded up what we’re hearing from intelligence sources on the terrorism threat against New York and Washington:
Senior officials told NBC’s Pentagon correspondent, Jim Miklaszewski, and terrorism analyst Roger Cressey that al-Zawahiri has had only limited involvement in al-Qaida operations, knowing he is the primary U.S. target after the killings of Osama bin Laden in May and top al-Qaida strategist Abu Abd al-Rahman Atiyyat Allah last month.
“Bin Laden was more involved in al-Qaida operations” than al-Zawahiri has been since he took over as al-Qaida’s No. 1, a senior official said. “He’s too busy trying to stay alive.”
Unfortunate Food Headline of the Day
Don’t think too hard about how that might be pronounced.
Why I Love Local News: Thousands of panties turn up along Ohio road
Berne Township officials were trying to figure out who abandoned about 3,000 pairs of panties along a road on Wednesday.
The panties were dumped near the intersection of Crawfis and Savage Hill roads, located southeast of Lancaster, 10TV’s Ashliegh Barry reported.
There were four dumping locations along a one mile stretch of Crawfis Road. …
“I came up and looked for myself and after I got here I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” said Jim Carmichael, Berne Township Trustee.
Full story (WBNS-TV of Columbus, Ohio)
Alex Johnson - Journalist at Large 