Posts Tagged ‘msnbc-com’
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.
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.
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.”
Reporting: U.S. aims to track ‘untraceable’ prepaid cash cards
Update: The Network Branded Prepaid Card Association responds here.
Cross-posted from msnbc.com’s Open Channel blog, where it originally appeared. To read it in context, click here.
Right: Steve Streit, chief executive of prepaid access card firm Green Dot, told CNBC last year how the cards work.
By M. Alex Johnson
msnbc.com reporter
As the federal government tells it, the money men behind the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers would never have been identified had they not been lousy bankers:
“The 9/11 hijackers opened U.S. bank accounts, had face-to-face dealings with bank employees, signed signature cards and received wire transfers, all of which left financial footprints. Law enforcement was able to follow the trail, identify the hijackers and trace them back to their terror cells and confederates abroad.”
That’s from a Treasury Department assessment of financial security threats in 2005. It went on to warn that the terrorists could have quietly moved large sums of money into or out of the U.S.:
“Had the 9/11 terrorists used prepaid … cards to cover their expenses, none of these financial footprints would have been available.”
Reporting: FAA dispute costing millions more than it would save
Did Congress really pass up more than a billion dollars in tax revenue just to save $16 million in subsidies for 13 rural airports?
The partial shutdown of operations at the Federal Aviation Administration has already cost the government far more in tax collections than what would be saved by passing the funding extension offered by House Republicans — $200 million a week and counting, potentially adding up to $1.2 billion by the time Congress can return to Washington and pass a funding bill in early September.
As with the larger deadline showdown over the debt ceiling, the reason for the standoff is more complicated than portrayed. And it may lie in Atlanta, home of Delta Air Lines, which Senate Democrats have singled out for criticism.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
Right: A flight takes off past a half-completed control tower at Oakland International Airport. Construction work on the tower and on hundreds of other FAA projects has been halted. (Getty Images file)
Reporting: Porn piracy wars get personal
Cross-posted from msnbc.com’s Technolog blog, where it originally appeared. To read it in context, with all information boxes and art, click here.
Ron Jeremy is one of more than a dozen adult video stars who talked about the damage piracy can cause in public service announcements published last year by the Free Speech Coalition, the industry’s trade association.
It’s not fun, but all things considered, John Steele is OK with being a villain.
In recent months, Steele’s Chicago law firm has filed almost 100 federal lawsuits seeking to identify thousands of “John Does” who downloaded pornographic videos in violation of their producers’ copyright. Federal court records indicate that none of Steele’s cases — in fact, no case of this type ever — has ended with a verdict at trial.
Sometimes, the cases run into roadblocks from skeptical judges over jurisdiction or whether the defendants have been appropriately identified. Others end in settlements for a few thousand dollars from defendants who are relieved that they get to remain anonymous.
Reporting: Murdoch’s ‘foggy’ performance may have served him well (updated)
(Cross-posted from msnbc.com, where it originally appeared. To read it in context, with all information boxes and art, click here. This is a complete writethrough that significantly updates an earlier version and corrects the spelling of Milly Dowler’s first name.)
Rupert Murdoch, for decades one of the most powerful and feared media figures in the English-speaking world, appeared to many who watched his grilling Tuesday to be a confused old man. And from his standpoint, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, professional crisis managers said.
During 40 years running News Corp., the dominant media company in Great Britain and owner of some of the most prominent media properties in the United States, the 80-year-old Murdoch has built a legend as a man able to decide elections, change the political agenda and severely punish anyone who gets in his way.
But appearing before a committee of the British Parliament on Tuesday, Murdoch claimed to have been out of the loop while reporters for his News of the World tabloid broke into the cell phone voicemail accounts of thousands of people to get scoops, and while his company paid off British police.
Alex Johnson - Journalist at Large 