Source:  http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/11/18/MNUTTEMT6.DTL

Obama accuses Clinton campaign of mud-slinging with Novak column

Carla Marinucci, Chronicle Political Writer

Sunday, November 18, 2007

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(11-18) 04:00 PST Las Vegas --

The Democratic presidential race burst into its angriest brawl yet Saturday when Barack Obama charged Hillary Rodham Clinton with mud-slinging "swift boat" politics and intimidation - an accusation the New York senator sharply denied and said dramatized Obama's unreadiness for the nation's top office.

The set-to kicked off after syndicated newspaper columnist Robert Novak, in an item to appear today, wrote that "agents of Sen. Hillary Clinton are spreading the word in Democratic circles that she has scandalous information about her principal opponent for the party's presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama, but has decided not to use it."

The columnist suggested that "this word-of-mouth among Democrats makes Obama look vulnerable and Clinton look prudent," and said that Clinton's strategy appeared to be aimed at wanting to "avoid a repetition of 2004, when attacks on each other by presidential candidates Howard Dean and Richard Gephardt were mutually destructive and facilitated John Kerry's nomination."

Reached on Saturday, Novak would not reveal the source of the item but said the information did not come directly from the Clinton camp. "(It) was said to Democratic sources ... by people inside the Clinton campaign," he said. "It was not specified what it was, and it was said to a Democratic source. Clinton would not reveal it because she is such a good person."

Still, the Novak piece prompted an aggressive response from Obama, who - in an unusual move - released a six-paragraph statement that flatly accused Clinton of political hypocrisy and dirty tactics.

Obama's statement said that during the Democratic debate here Thursday, even as Clinton railed against "the politics of throwing mud," her campaign appeared to be either digging for dirt on his personal life or working in conjunction with Novak to intimidate him.

"If the purpose of this shameless item was to daunt or discourage me or supporters of our campaign from challenging and changing the politics of Washington, it will fail. In fact, it will only serve to steel our resolve," the Illinois senator said. He urged Clinton to "either make public any and all information referred to in the item, or concede the truth: that there is none."

And in his toughest attack on her yet, Obama added that "the cause of change in this country will not be deterred or sidetracked by the old 'swift boat' politics. The cause of moving America forward demands that we defeat it."

"Swift boat" refers to the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," a group of veterans who disparaged the Vietnam War record of 2004 presidential candidate Kerry, D-Mass.

Clinton, who was campaigning for the support of union workers in Las Vegas on Saturday before heading to California, quickly refuted Obama's statement.

As the senator was about the accept the endorsement of the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers, Jay Carson, a spokesman for Clinton, said her campaign categorically denied the Obama statement and the suggestion in the Novak column.

"Do you really think Bob Novak will be the repository of information about the Clinton campaign?" he said. "We have no contact with Bob Novak; we don't have any idea what this column is based on. ... We have absolutely no idea what the reference is in this column. None," he said. "This column is wholly baseless."'

With less than two months before the crucial Jan. 3 Iowa caucus, Saturday's exchange reveals the escalating tensions between Clinton and Obama, who are virtually tied in Iowa.

Clinton didn't address Obama's statement in her Las Vegas appearances, but she did take some direct shots at her rival. "My health care plan covers every American," she said. "Sen. Obama's doesn't."

Clinton's campaign accused Obama of using Republican talking points with the Novak column.

"These are the kinds of attacks that Republicans engage in, and the kinds of traps they set for Democratic candidates," Carson said. "A Republican-leaning columnist puts out a statement, a baseless statement accusing Sen. Clinton of some sort of activity. ... What (Obama) is doing is parroting Republican talking points."

Carson suggested that the tactic - coming from a candidate who has trumpeted "the politics of hope" - was a symptom of Obama's inexperience, and he suggested Obama is untested for the tough road ahead.

"Democratic candidates who don't know how to avoid traps like this are not going to do very well in a general election against Republicans," Carson said, adding that Obama should "get back to issues."

That prompted Obama campaign manger David Plouffe to charge Clinton's campaign with "evasion and deflection," and he demanded an answer to "two simple direct questions: Are 'agents' of their campaign spreading these rumors? And do they have 'scandalous' information that they are not releasing? Yes or no."

Carson's response: "No and no. ... You have to seriously question the experience of a candidate who would fall into this Republican trap."

The Obama campaign appeared to back off late Saturday, saying of the Clinton camp, "we take them at their word."

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Emory Merryman
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Source:  http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/11/18/europe/climate.php

Alarming UN report on climate change is too rosy, many say

By Elisabeth Rosenthal and James Kanter

Published: November 18, 2007

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VALENCIA, Spain: The blunt and alarming final report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released here by UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, may well underplay the problem of climate change, many experts and even the report's authors admit.

The report describes the evidence for human-induced climate change as "unequivocal." The rise in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere thus far will result in an average rise in sea levels of up to 4.6 feet, or 1.4 meters, it concluded.

"Slowing - and reversing - these threats is the defining challenge of our age," Ban said upon the report's release Saturday.

Ban said he had just completed a whirlwind tour of some climate change hot spots, which he called as "frightening as a science-fiction movie."

He described ice sheets breaking up in Antarctica, the destruction of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, and children in Chile having to wear protective clothing because an ozone hole was letting in so much ultraviolet radiation.

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The panel's fourth and final report summarized and integrated the most significant findings of three sections of the panel's exhaustive climate-science review that were released from January through April, to create an official "pocket guide" to climate change for policy makers who must now decide how the world will respond.

The first covered climate trends; the second, the world's ability to adapt to a warming planet; the third, strategies for reducing carbon emissions. With their mission now concluded, the hundreds of IPCC scientists spoke more freely than they had previously.

"The sense of urgency when you put these pieces together is new and striking," said Martin Parry, a British climate expert who was co-chairman of the delegation that wrote the second report.

This report's summary was the first to acknowledge that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet could result in a substantive sea level rise over centuries rather than millennia.

"Many of my colleagues would consider that kind of melt a catastrophe" so rapid that mankind would not be able to adapt, said Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University who contributed to the IPCC.

Delegations from hundreds of nations will be meeting in Bali, Indonesia in two weeks to start hammering out a global climate agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, the current climate change treaty. The first phase of the Kyoto Treaty expires in 2012.

"It's extremely clear and is very explicit that the cost of inaction will be huge compared to the cost of action," said Jeffrey Sachs, head of Columbia University's Earth Institute. "We can't afford to wait for some perfect accord to replace Kyoto, for some grand agreement. We can't afford to spend years bickering about it. We need to start acting now."

He said that delegates in Bali should take action immediately where they do agree, for example, by public financing for demonstration projects on new technologies like "carbon capture," a "promising but not proved" system that pumps emissions underground instead of releasing them into the sky. He said the energy ministers should start a global fund to help poor countries avoid deforestation, which causes emissions to increase because growing plants absorb carbon in the atmosphere.

Although the scientific data is not new, this was the first time it had been looked at together in its entirety, leading the scientists to new emphasis and more sweeping conclusions.

But even as the IPCC was working toward its conclusions over the past several years, a steady stream of even more alarming data has come in.

"The IPCC is a five-year process and the IPCC is struggling to keep up with the data - we are all being inundated with new evidence and new science," said Hans Verolme, director of the Global Climate Change Program at the conservation organization WWF.

"And the new science is saying: 'You thought it was bad? No it's worse.' "

The IPCC chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, an engineer and economist from India, acknowledged the new trajectory. "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late," Pachauri said. "What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."

He said that since the IPCC began work on its current report five years ago, scientists have recorded "much stronger trends in climate change," like a recent melting of polar ice that had not been predicted. "That means you better start with intervention much earlier."

"If you look at the scientific knowledge things do seem to be getting progressively worse," Pachauri said later in an interview. "So you'd better start with the interventions even earlier. Now."

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Emory Merryman
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Another computer with veterans’ data stolen

Source:  http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/11/military_veterans_stolendata_071115w/

Another computer with veterans' data stolen

By Rick Maze - Staff writer
Posted : Thursday Nov 15, 2007 13:20:58 EST

In a déjà vu announcement, the Department of Veterans Affairs says a computer containing the names, Social Security numbers and birthdates of 12,000 veterans was taken over the Veterans' Day weekend from the VA medical center in Indianapolis.

Three computers were taken from an unlocked room at the Roudebush VA medical center in Indianapolis, and one computer contained records that could be used for identity theft. Federal, state and local law-enforcement agencies are investigating.

The records are of veterans who had been treated as patients at the hospital. They could include information about what medical examinations the veterans had received but not the results of the exams.

"I am upset that the VA repeatedly fails to comply with its own policy to safeguard veterans' personal information," said Rep. Steve Buyer, R-Ind., the former chairman of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, who has been pushing VA to improve computer security.

"The VA must give immediate assurance to over 12,000 veterans that it will provide full credit monitoring and protection of sensitive personal information," Buyer said.

VA officials had no immediate response to questions about the theft.

A policy established earlier this year calls for immediate notification of everyone whose information is missing and a review of the potential threat of identity theft in such situations. Buyer was the chief sponsor of the legislation that created the policy.

If there is a risk of identity theft, VA policy calls for the government to provide free credit monitoring to those affected.

The policy was created after the May 2006 theft from the home of a VA employee of a laptop and computer storage device with personal information on more than 26 million people.

VA also has been trying to make its computers and computerized records more secure, an effort that includes requiring personal data to be encrypted. It is not known if records taken in the Indianapolis theft were encrypted.

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Emory Merryman
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Source:  http://www.medpagetoday.com/Psychiatry/AnxietyStress/tb/7387

Mental Health Problems of Iraq Veterans May Be Delayed
	By Neil Osterweil, Senior Associate Editor, MedPage Today Reviewed by Zalman S. Agus, MD; Emeritus Professor University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. November 15, 2007 Add Your Knowledge™ Additional Anxiety & Stress Coverage Charles Milliken, M.D. Walter Reed Army Institute of Research SILVER SPRING, Md., Nov. 15 -- For soldiers returning from Iraq, the full extent of mental health problems may take six months or more to surface, Pentagon investigators reported. This could explain, in part, why the Department of Defense's mental health care system is overwhelmed, asserted Charles S. Milliken, M.D., and colleagues, of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research here, in the Nov. 14 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Action Points Explain to those who ask that this study suggests that mental health problems among returning veterans may be more pervasive than originally thought, and that reservists seem to be affected in larger numbers than active-duty soldiers. Among more than 88,000 U.S. soldiers back from Iraq who had an immediate post-deployment screening, a follow-up about six months later revealed a higher number of positives for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), interpersonal conflicts, and referrals for mental health problems, they found. In all, after the second screening, one-fifth of all active-duty soldiers back from Iraq and two-fifth of all reservists were found on screening to have a mental health concern requiring treatment. "Reserve and active soldiers reported similar rates of potentially traumatic combat experiences (69.6% versus 66.5%), hospitalization during deployment (6% versus 5.3%), and overall mental health concerns on the post-deployment health assessment (17.5% versus 17%)," the investigators wrote. "However, by the time of the post-deployment health reassessment, National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers reported substantially higher rates of interpersonal conflict, PTSD, depression, and overall mental health risk (35.5% versus 27.1%, odds ratio: 1.48; 95% CI: 1.44 to 1.53; P<0.001)." Although the Walter Reed group reported 20 months ago that 19% of returning Iraq veterans had mental health problems, the same authors now say they may have seriously underestimated the scope of the problem. The largest increase from one screening to the next was in concerns about interpersonal conflict, which went from 3.5% to 14% among active-duty personnel, and from 4.2% to 21.1% of reservists. Similarly, PTSD-positive screens increased from 11.8% to 16.7% among regular forces. Among reserves, the PTSD-positive increase jumped from 12.7% to 24.5%. Depression was seen in 4.7% of active-duty forces at the first assessment and 10.3% at the reassessment, with depression among reserves rising from 3.8% at screening 1 to 13% at screening 2. "A recent congressionally mandated task force found the existing Department of Defense mental health system to be overburdened, understaffed, and underresourced," the investigators wrote. "This study suggests that the mental health problems identified by VA clinicians in more than a quarter of recent combat veterans may have already been present within months of returning from war." Other investigators have found that a quarter of all veterans treated at VA hospitals after returning home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan brought mental health problems home. When psychosocial and behavioral problems were thrown into the mix, nearly a third of these veterans who sought care at aVA facility had a diagnosis of a mental health-related disorder. Additionally, more than half the returning vets who had a mental health diagnosis were found to have two or more mental health disorders, wrote Karen H. Seal, M.D., M.P.H., of the University of California at San Francisco and the San Francisco VA, and colleagues in the March 12 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine. Another study showed that only one in five veterans returning from combat duty in Iraq or Afghanistan with signs of posttraumatic stress disorder is actually screened for it, the Government Accountability Office reported in May of 2006. (See: A Quarter of Iraq and Afghanistan Vets Show Mental Health Problems) The Walter Reed investigators reported in JAMA in March of 2006 that 19.1% of soldiers and Marines who returned from Iraq met risk criteria for a mental health concern, compared with 11.3% for those deployed to Afghanistan and 8.5% for those sent to other locations. The adjusted odds ratio for service personnel sent to Iraq compared with other deployment locations was 2.72 (95% confidence interval: 2.63 to 2.80, P<0.001). Now, these authors say, they may have seriously underestimated the size of the problem. In the current study, the Walter Reed team reported on a population-based, longitudinal descriptive study of the initial large cohort of 8,235 U.S. soldiers returning from Iraq who completed both a Post-Deployment Health assessment and a Post-Deployment Health Reassessment, with a median of six months between the two. The main outcome measures were a positive screen for PTSD, major depression, alcohol abuse or misuse, or other mental health problems, as well as referrals for and use of mental health services. They found that at the second assessment soldiers reported more mental health concerns and were referred at significantly higher rates compared with their immediate post-deployment assessment. The authors found that soldiers indicated more mental health distress on the reassessment than on the first screening, and were referred at higher rates. National Guard and reserve soldiers were also more than three times as likely as active soldiers to be referred for mental health concerns at the second assessment, when referrals from employee-assistance programs were included (36.2% versus 14.7%, odds ratio for reservists: 3.29, 95% CI: 3.19 to 3.40, P<0.001). When the authors combined data from both and from employee assistance referrals, they found that clinicians had identified 20.3% of active soldiers and 42.4% of reservists as either needing referral or already being under care for mental health problems. They also found that although soldiers frequently reported alcohol concerns, few were referred to an alcohol treatment program, and that most soldiers who used mental health services did so on their own, without a referral, even though the majority sought care within 30 days of being screened. In addition, although soldiers were much more likely to report PTSD symptoms on the reassessment rather than on the initial screening, 49% to 59% of those who had PTSD symptoms identified on the first screening had improvement of symptoms by the second screening, and there was no direct relationship of referral or treatment with symptom improvement. "Rescreening soldiers several months after their return from Iraq identified a large cohort missed on initial screening," the investigators wrote. "The large clinical burden recently reported among veterans presenting to Veterans Affairs facilities seems to exist within months of returning home, highlighting the need to enhance military mental health care during this period." They noted that the reported increases in interpersonal conflict underline the lack of available services for the families of returning soldiers, and the higher rates of referral at second assessment for reservists may reflect concerns about their ongoing health coverage.

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Emory Merryman
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