Welcome! "What's Happenin'?" is a casual community diary (a daily series, 8:30 AM Eastern on weekdays, 10 AM on weekends and holidays) where we hang out and talk about the goings on here and everywhere.
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Longwood Gardens. (Photo by joanneleon. October 16, 2012)
“World peace must develop from inner peace. Peace is not just mere absence of violence. Peace is, I think, the manifestation of human compassion.”
― Dalai Lama XIV
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News and Opinion
The latest update from the NHC has this thing beelining right for southern NJ again so if I'm not around on Monday/Tuesday, possibly later than that, you'll know we've lost power around here. They shifted the landfall point a bit north again this morning, near Atlantic City, moving across the state to the Philadelphia area and Wilmington area. We'll have made arrangements for What's Happenin' to publish as usual.
Hurricane Sandy has the region bracing for the worst
The worst effects are expected Monday night and Tuesday, with the National Weather Service calling for more than 20 hours of continuous 35 to 40 m.p.h. winds in the immediate Philadelphia area, with gusts of 55 m.p.h.-plus.
[...]
Utilities, stung by complaints about their responses to the outages caused by Irene last summer and the freak derecho wind storm in June, advised customers throughout the region to anticipate widespread power outages that could last beyond Election Day.
Cape May County said it would order evacuations of barrier islands and towns along Delaware Bay on Sunday unless the storm changed course. At the Shore, the boards went up on beachfront homes and boardwalk businesses. Boats were pulled from the water or secured at docks in marinas from Sea Bright to Cape May.
MoD report says Afghanistan troop deaths not 'friendly fire' incident
Investigations continue into deaths of Channing Day, David O'Connor and Afghan man believed to be a police officer
Two British troops killed this week in Afghanistan were not killed by "friendly fire", the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has said following an initial investigation.
Corporal Channing Day, 25, who served with the 3 Medical Regiment, and Corporal David O'Connor, 27, of 40 Commando, were fatally injured while on patrol in the Nahr-e Saraj district of Helmand province on Wednesday.
An Afghan man, who is believed to have been a member of the Afghan uniformed police but who was not wearing uniform at the time, also died during the incident, an MoD spokesman confirmed. He said the UK patrol was not working with any Afghan partners at the time.
Taliban claims it launched apparent insider attack
The Taliban claimed responsibility Friday for killing two American service members in southern Uruzgan province, in what may have been the latest insider attack against Western troops.
In an emailed statement, Taliban spokesman Jusuf Ahmadi said a member of the Afghan security forces shot the two men the day before and then escaped to join the insurgents.
[...]
At least 53 foreign troops have been killed by Afghan forces already this year - 33 of them Americans. Thursday's was the first such attack on NATO forces since September and since the Afghan government launched a large-scale push to re-screen thousands of security forces, trying to identify infiltrators or those who might not be considered secure.
On Wednesday, two British service members and an Afghan police officer were killed in an "exchange of gunfire" in Helmand province, the British Ministry of Defense said in a statement. The Afghan officer was not wearing his uniform and the statement said it was not clear who started shooting first.
Iran military action not 'right course at this time', Downing Street says
Government reiterates its current opposition to military action against Iran after revelation US has requested use of UK bases
The UK government has reiterated that it does not believe military action against Iran would be appropriate at the moment, following the disclosure that Britain has rebuffed US requests to use UK military bases to support the buildup of forces in the Gulf.
Downing Street said: "We are working closely with the US with regard to UK bases" but "the government does not think military action is the right course at this point of time".
[...]
The Guardian has been told that US diplomats have also lobbied for the use of British bases in Cyprus, and for permission to fly from US bases on Ascension Island in the Atlantic and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, both of which are British territories.
The US approaches are part of contingency planning over the nuclear standoff with Tehran, but British ministers have so far reacted coolly. On Friday, Downing Street said such contingency planning was something that was done as a matter of routine.
[...]
It states that providing assistance to forces that could be involved in a pre-emptive strike would be a clear breach of international law on the basis that Iran, which has consistently denied it has plans to develop a nuclear weapon, does not currently represent "a clear and present threat".
America's Historical Amnesia Over Libya
When Ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed in Benghazi on September 11, he became the victim of a stray bullet from the past fired by an enemy the United States helped create. Today’s debate over what levels of security might have prevented the tragedy is a distraction from the real story of how American meddling in Libya set the stage for the assassination. This historical amnesia was on full display during the second presidential debate, in which the candidates clashed over a question even less relevant than the security issue: how many days it took Obama to label the attack an “act of terror.” Even by the low standards of America’s diminished political attention span, the controversy over the embassy attack playing out in the media is remarkable for its total lack of historical context.
To understand the roots of the crisis in Libya, after all, would mean examining how, for years, the United States helped Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and other Arab leaders hold on to power and terrorize their opponents anywhere in the world, in the name of the “war on terror.” It would mean exposing successive administrations’ rendition and torture policies, and their collusion with despotic Arab regimes to carry them out. Though many Arabs targeted by the United States remained focused exclusively on challenging the regimes in their home countries—and refused to harm civilians to achieve their aims—some came to regard the United States, its assets and civilians as legitimate targets in some circumstances.
Among these appear to be some members of the Benghazi-based group Ansar al-Sharia. A leading member, Ahmed Abu Khattala, was identified on October 17 as the prime suspect behind the killing of Ambassador Stevens. Khattala was imprisoned under Qaddafi at the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli, where a piece of the history linking the United States and Libya is visible as an observation scrawled on the wall of a ruined cell: “Life [imprisonment] in Guantánamo is not even a day in Abu Salim.” The comparison is apt. These two facilities—one run by the US military, the other by Qaddafi’s men—essentially became a part of the same network of secret prisons. The US rendition program that used these prisons grew out of long-term collaborations between the United States and its partners in ousted Arab regimes. It began under President Clinton as an arrangement with Egypt, whereby the CIA would capture exiled opponents of the Mubarak regime and render them back to Egypt for detention, torture and often death. After 9/11, the program was dramatically expanded by George W. Bush to include a network of extraterritorial US-run prisons and proxy detention sites around the world.
Remote U.S. base at core of secret operations
DJIBOUTI CITY, Djibouti — Around the clock, about 16 times a day, drones take off or land at a U.S. military base here, the combat hub for the Obama administration’s counterterrorism wars in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East.
Some of the unmanned aircraft are bound for Somalia, the collapsed state whose border lies just 10 miles to the southeast. Most of the armed drones, however, veer north across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen, another unstable country where they are being used in an increasingly deadly war with an al-Qaeda franchise that has targeted the United States.
Camp Lemonnier, a sun-baked Third World outpost established by the French Foreign Legion, began as a temporary staging ground for U.S. Marines looking for a foothold in the region a decade ago. Over the past two years, the U.S. military has clandestinely transformed it into the busiest Predator drone base outside the Afghan war zone, a model for fighting a new generation of terrorist groups.
The Obama administration has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal the legal and operational details of its targeted-killing program. Behind closed doors, painstaking debates precede each decision to place an individual in the cross hairs of the United States’ perpetual war against al-Qaeda and its allies.
WikiLeaks Reveals 'Systematized Human Rights Abuses' at US Detention Facilities
Whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks released a new series of secret files from the US government Wednesday pertaining to treatment of foreign prisoners at military prisons such as Guantánamo Bay, including guidelines for military officials that reveal vast institutionalized human rights abuses.
According to WikiLeaks, the documents, which include the 2002 manual for staff at Camp Delta at Guantánamo, reveal "a formal policy of terrorizing detainees during interrogations, combined with a policy of destroying interrogation recordings," which have "led to abuse and impunity" among US officials.
"The 'Detainee Policies' show the anatomy of the beast that is post-9/11 detention, the carving out of a dark space where law and rights do not apply, where persons can be detained without a trace at the convenience of the US Department of Defense," WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange stated.
"It shows the excesses of the early days of war against an unknown 'enemy' and how these policies matured and evolved, ultimately deriving into the permanent state of exception that the United States now finds itself in, a decade later."
Big Banks' Hold on Regulators Must Be Broken: Barofsky
Lawsuits against banks are flying, the presidential candidates are promising action – yet none of it will solve the lingering financial mess.
So says Neil Barofsky, the former special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. He was as critical as ever of policymakers and financial firms, and called for more independent regulation in a talk at the Museum of American Finance in New York on Thursday evening.
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He also holds little hope for a shake-up of the system regardless of who wins the presidential election next month.
“It’s really an election between bad and worse,” Barofsky said. “Obama wants to work within Dodd-Frank to make it a little more painful. Romney wants to repeal Dodd-Frank and replace it with we’re not sure what.”
Barofsky adds that if Obama loses the election it will be because the president failed to act more aggressively to aid struggling homeowners.
Book Excerpt: Neil Barofsky’s Bailout
In this excerpt, Barofsky explains the problems he saw with the Home Affordable Modification Program. HAMP — implemented in March 2009 as part of the Making Homes Affordable Program — was a loan modification program designed to reduce monthly payments for homeowners who were delinquent or at risk for delinquency in repaying their mortgages. Participants were required to remit the estimated new monthly payments during a “trial period” before the modifications would become permanent.
[...] The servicers’ performance was abysmal: they routinely “lost” or misplaced borrowers’ documents, with one servicer telling us that a subcontractor had lost an entire trove of HAMP materials. Borrowers routinely complained that they’d had to send their documents to their servicers multiple times — a survey by ProPublica found that borrowers had to submit documents on average six times — but the servicers would still claim that the documents had never been received and then foreclose. [...]
Aggravating the problem was that the design of the program potentially rewarded servicers who “lost” documents: It could be more profitable for a servicer to drag out trial modifications and eventually foreclose than to award the borrowers quick permanent modifications. Mortgage servicers earn profits from fees, particularly late fees, and under HAMP, Treasury allowed mortgage servicers to charge and accrue late fees for each month that borrowers were in trial modifications, even if the borrowers made every single payment under their trial plans. (The rationale was that by not making the full unmodified payment, the borrowers were technically “late” on each payment.) If the modifications were made permanent, Treasury required the servicer to waive the fees, but if the servicer canceled the modifications (say, for example, for the borrowers’ alleged failure to provide the necessary documents), the servicer could typically collect all of the accrued late fees once the homes were sold through foreclosure. In other words, servicers could rack up fees by putting home owners into late fee–generating trial modification purgatory and then pulling the rug out from under them by failing their modification for “incomplete documentation,” which they did in droves. Indeed, even though Treasury eventually changed its practice of allowing undocumented trial modifications, by early 2012 there were still more HAMP modification failures than successes.
Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
The Evening Blues - 10-26-12
Transman petitions WHO to delist transsexualism as a mental illness
Benghazi Blowback Confirmed: US Intel Confirms Attack Linked to Pipeline of Libyan Jihadis to Syria
Prepare ! Sandy's a killer-- Red Cross has free Hurricane App
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Come to where the debate is not constrained by oaths of fealty to persons or parties.
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