Tyler J. Doohan Protector of Life in New York

from cnn

Cellular life's imperative is to protect the young. In this case young Tyler J. Doohan, turned things around dramatically.  

8-year-old boy rescues 6 relatives from fire, dies trying to save more

from cnn

Boy dies after saving 6 from house fire

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Tyler Doohan, 8, alerts relatives to an early-morning fire, and 6 escape
• He returns to the mobile home to help his disabled grandfather but dies in effort
• The single-wide trailer had no working smoke detector, fire chief thinks

(CNN) -- An 8-year-old boy was killed in a mobile-home fire in upstate New York early Monday while attempting to rescue a disabled relative inside, according to authorities.

Tyler J. Doohan, of East Rochester, was staying at the home of relatives in the nearby town of Penfield on Sunday night when he noticed a fire in the single-wide trailer, said Penfield Fire Chief Chris Ebmeyer.

As firefighters and sheriff's deputies responded to an emergency call around 4:45 a.m., Tyler was able to wake six other people in the small trailer, including two more children, ages 4 and 6, Ebmeyer said.

Then Tyler went back into the blaze to help his grandfather, who was disabled and would have been unable to get out of the home on his own, Ebmeyer said.

"By that time, the fire had traveled to the back of the trailer," Ebmeyer said. "Unfortunately they both succumbed to heat and smoke."

Their bodies were found together in a back bedroom.

Tyler's uncle was also killed in the fire, his body found in a front room, Ebmeyer said.

Earlier, fire officials had released a mistaken version of the incident, where the grandfather and uncle's locations were switched, due to incorrect information provided by a family member.

"It makes me really proud, it really does, but I just want him back," Tyler's mother, Crystal Vrooman, told CNN affiliate WHAM.

The boy broke away from his aunt outside the burning trailer and ran back inside to try to save his grandfather, she said.

"All I could think about is how he couldn't breathe," she told WHAM.

The pair were found together on a bed in the back room. It appeared that the boy was trying to lift his grandfather from the bed when he was overcome by the smoke and fire, the fire chief said.

Tyler and his grandfather were like best friends, Vrooman said.

"I'm just so grateful that he went with people that he loved," she said. "He didn't go alone."

The cause of the blaze is still under investigation but believed to be accidental.

The conditions of the six survivors were not immediately available.

Ebmeyer said that he didn't think the trailer had a working smoke detector. He lamented that with so many people in one small mobile home, one alarm could have easily woken everyone in time to escape.

The Penfield Fire Company -- a volunteer unit -- intends to create a public service initiative to spread awareness and get smoke detectors out to the public, he said.

Meanwhile, Richard Stutzman Jr., interim superintendent of the East Rochester School District, where Tyler attended fourth grade, issued a statement:

"In bravely and selflessly giving his own life, he was able to save the lives of six others -- and he truly is a hero."

Teen dies stopping suicide bomber at school

Bill Gates Talks to TIME About the Three Myths of Global Aid

from time

The philanthropist explains why a reduction in child mortality hasn't led to an increase in population growth

By Jeffrey KlugerJan. 21, 2014

It’s easy to get fed up when you’re trying to save the world. Progress can be slow, setbacks are constant and few people appreciate exactly what you’re doing.Bill Gates understands that better than most. Having spent the past 13 years battling poverty, hunger and disease around the world through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he has a right good record of success to point to, but public misconceptions persist.

In their 2014 Foundation letter, both Gateses take on what they call the three great global aid myths: that poor countries will always be poor; that foreign aid  is a waste, with money inevitably vanishing into the pockets of corrupt officials or being misspent by inept bureaucracies; and that saving lives in the developing world will only lead to overpopulation.

The myths persist despite the fact that Africa is experiencing something of a boom time. Demographers document a paradoxical reduction in population in countries in which child mortality goes down. As families can be more confident their babies will survive, they will have fewer of them. And as for corruption: Yes it exists, but the incidence has plummeted—thanks in part to the results-based way the Gates Foundation and others administer their programs—and try to name a country in the world that doesn’t have at least a few corrupt officials.

“Four of the past seven governors of Illinois have gone to prison for corruption,” Gates wrote in his letter, “and to my knowledge, no one has demanded that Illinois schools be shut down or its highways be closed.”

Gates elaborated on these and other ideas in a conversation with TIME this morning. As his answers show, he remains both optimist and realist.

You seem hopeful about our ability to lift nations out of poverty permanently. That’s an awfully bold position given how intractable the problem has always been. What evidence do you have that we’re winning the war?

Look at the numbers. If you go back to 1800, everybody was poor. I mean everybody. The Industrial Revolution kicked in and a lot of countries benefited, but by no means everyone. Even in the 1950s and 1960s, most countries were very poor. India, China, Africa, everyone but the West was living on less than $2 a day per capita. But the curve is shifting and incomes are rising and now most of those countries have $5 to $10 a day type incomes. That doesn’t sound like much but it’s per person not per family and the key thing is purchasing power, which can be quite high on $10 per day in a country in which things cost much less. Living on $6 a day means you have a refrigerator, a TV, a cell phone, your children can go to school. That’s not possible on $1 a day.

How does the kind of global aid the Gates Foundation often provides—vaccine development and delivery, say—help countries get richer?

When you invent the vaccines that make kids healthy you remove a burden from the countries’ health care and social systems. Aid creates health and nutrition, and health and nutrition creates wealth. Healthy children can go to school and work and contribute to their country’s economy. Yes, it’s hard to see the benefits right away and that often misleads people. Health improvements pay off a generation down the line.

What about the dependency issue? Don’t recipient countries come to rely on aid?

Mexico was once a recipient country. So was Brazil and so was China and now they’re all donor countries. The key is the kind of aid you provide. When you invent seeds that produce heartier crops in diverse climates you help farmers become more productive, for example, and that has perhaps the biggest impact on a developing country. Clearly, having stability, having a capitalist economy helps too. China adopted a capitalist system in the 1980s and they went from a 60% poverty rate to 10%.

No one ever advocated simply letting countries with high infant mortality rates suffer, but most did believe that reducing deaths would mean exacerbating overpopulation. Now we’re finding the opposite is true. How did that happen?

Actually demographers were seeing drops in population rates as kids stopped dying some time ago. The people who did population projections went year after year tracking this and by the 1990s this idea was pretty well known but only in certain circles. It was only recently, as we started working with contraception, that I understood it myself. Families in wealthier, healthier countries have fewer children because the odds are better that the ones they have will survive infancy. Vietnam and Costa Rica really got their act together in this regard and built primary health care systems, which reduced mortality. More recently, Ethiopia and Rwanda have been doing the same. The Rwandan health minister put together 15,000 health centers staffed by two women each. Ghana, relative to its income, runs a pretty good health system, while Nigeria runs a poor one relative to its wealth. There’s quite a bit of variance in Africa.

Still, you say you’re optimistic about Africa overall.

Over the past half decade, seven out of the world’s 10 fastest growing economies are in Africa. By the 1990s, life span had doubled in Africa and child mortality has dropped by a third compared to just a few years ago. Globalization has made copper and other minerals more valuable and Ghana and Kenya have recently discovered mineral resources. The question is, does the wealth that’s generated get used the right way to fund infrastructure and schools? African nations are still poorer than us, yes. But improvements in the human condition have laid the foundation for improvements in their entire societies.

Obama says he wouldn’t let son play pro football

from washingtontimes.com

By Ben Wolfgang

-

The Washington Times

Sunday, January 19, 2014

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President Obama, a noted sports fan, says that if he had a son, he wouldn't let him play pro football.

But Mr. Obama also said that NFL players now are aware of the dangers associated with concussions and the long-term brain damage that can result.

---

SEE ALSO: Obama: Pot ‘not very different’ from cigarettes​, no more dangerous than booze

---

“I would not let my son play football,” the president said in a lengthy interview with The New Yorker. “At this point, there’s a little bit of caveat emptor. These guys, they know what they’re doing. They know what they’re buying into. It is no longer a secret. It’s sort of the feeling I have about smokers.”

Mr. Obama recently has made a habit of wading into NFL issues. In an interview with the Associated Press last year, he said the Washington Redskins should consider changing the team’s nickname if Native Americans are offended by it.

© Copyright 2014 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

Shirley MacLaine opens up on JFK, Rat Pack

from cnn

Net neutrality is dead. Bow to Comcast and Verizon, your overlords

from latimes

Net neutrality's last hope? FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg / January 14, 2014)

By Michael Hiltzik

January 14, 2014, 3:05 p.m.

Advocates of a free and open Internet could see this coming, but today's ruling from a Washington appeals court striking down the FCC's rules protecting the open net was worse than the most dire forecasts. It was "even more emphatic and disastrous than anyone expected," in the words of one veteran advocate for network neutrality.

The Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit thoroughly eviscerated the Federal Communications Commission's latest lame attempt to prevent Internet service providers from playing favorites among websites--awarding faster speeds to sites that pay a special fee, for example, or slowing or blocking sites and services that compete with favored affiliates.

Big cable operators like Comcast and telecommunications firms like Verizon, which brought the lawsuit on which the court ruled, will be free to pick winners and losers among websites and services. Their judgment will most likely be based on cold hard cash--Netflix wants to keep your Internet provider from slowing its data so its films look like hash? It will have to pay your provider the big bucks. But the governing factor need not be money. (Comcast remains committed to adhere to the net neutrality rules overturned today until January 2018, a condition placed on its 2011 merger with NBC Universal; after that, all bets are off.)

"AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast will be able to deliver some sites and services more quickly and reliably than others for any reason,"  telecommunications lawyer Marvin Ammori (he's the man quoted above) observed even before the ruling came down. "Whim. Envy. Ignorance. Competition. Vengeance. Whatever. Or, no reason at all."

The telecom companies claim their chief interest is in providing better service to all customers, but that's unadulterated flimflam. We know this because regulators already have had to make superhuman efforts to keep the big ISPs from degrading certain services for their own benefit--Comcast, for example, was caught in 2007  throttling traffic from BitTorrent, a video service that competed with its own on-demand video.

Amazingly, even after Comcast was found guilty of violating this basic standard of Internet  transmission, the FCC greenlighted its acquisition of NBC, which could only give the firm greater incentive to discriminate among the content being pipelined to its customers. 

ISPs like Comcast are only doing what comes naturally in an unregulated environment, the way a dog naturally scratches at fleas. "Cable and telephone companies are simply not competing for the right to provide unfettered, un-monetized internet access," wrote Susan Crawford, an expert on net neutrality, around the time of the Comcast case.

This wouldn't be as much of a threat to the open Internet if there were genuine competition among providers, so you could take your business elsewhere if your ISP was turning the public Web into its own private garden. In the U.S., there's no practical competition. The vast majority of households essentially have a single broadband option, their local cable provider. Verizon and AT&T provide Internet service, too, but for most customers they're slower than the cable service. Some neighborhoods get telephone fiber services, but Verizon and AT&T have ceased the rollout of their FiOs and U-verse services--if you don't have it now, you're not getting it.

Who deserves the blame for this wretched combination of monopolization and profiteering by ever-larger cable and phone companies? The FCC, that's who. The agency's dereliction dates back to 2002, when under Chairman Michael Powell it reclassified cable modem services as "information services" rather than "telecommunications services," eliminating its own authority to regulate them broadly. Powell, by the way, is now the chief lobbyist in Washington for the cable TV industry, so the payoff wasn't long in coming. 

President Obama's FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski, moved to shore up the agency's regulatory defense of net neutrality in 2010. But faced with the implacable opposition of the cable and telecommunications industry, he stopped short of reclassifying cable modems as telecommunications services. The result was the tatterdemalion policy that the court killed today. It was so ineptly crafted that almost no one in the telecom bar seemed to think it would survive; the only question was how dead would it be? The answer, spelled out in the ruling, is: totally.

The court did leave it up to the FCC or Congress to refashion a net neutrality regime. The new FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, has made noises favoring net neutrality, but he also sounds like someone who's not so committed to the principle. 

In an important speech in December and a long essay released at the same time, he's seemed to play on both sides. But that won't work. The only way to defend net neutrality, which prioritizes the interests of the customer and user over the provider, is to do so uncompromisingly. Net neutrality can't be made subject to the "marketplace," as Wheeler suggests, because the cable and telephone firms control that marketplace and their interests will prevail. Congress? Don't make me laugh--it's owned by the industry even more than the FCC.

The only course is for public pressure to overcome industry pressure. That's a tough road, but there's no alternative. Do you want your Internet to look like your cable TV service, where you have no control over what comes into your house or what you pay for it? Then stay silent. If not, start writing letters and emails to your elected representatives and the FCC now. It's the only hope to save the free, open Internet.

Reach me at @hiltzikm on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or by email.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-net-neutrality-20140114,0,522106.story#ixzz2qTelkbxa

Let's Have a Scandal: Christie Fate in Ten Acts

from opednews.com

By Robert S. Becker (about the author)  



(image by credit: Tracy Knauss)

What a shocker: our most pugnacious politician, who apes sneering TV tough guys, finds himself starring in his own reality-survivor drama. The only question remains: is he really a fool (the victimized micromanager who knows nothing) or a low-class knave (with an ex-prosecutor's bag of trick decoys)? Whatever the final evidence, this scandal will devolve from snarling bridge traffic to the trollish character of our pudgiest of pugs.

Tripped by a willful, smack-down staff, the image of the most electable party "moderate" lurched with ease from "straight-talking pragmatist" to rogue pettiness. But what exactly new does the Fort Lee fiasco say about the Christie chronicle? Whoever concocted the Great Bridge Blunder, are we surprised that vendetta stamps the bully who gloats over scorned rivals? My concern is whether Christie's hypnotic persona holds sway over a feisty state that just gave him keys to the kingdom. 

And yet, does not this clownish figure, taking bigger than life literally, spotlight a politics of devolution where the least morally-fit survive? For context, let us recount the roughly ten stages that mark the sameness of big-time scandals. Indeed, the audacity of the opening abuse is exceeded only by the predictability of the narrative. On the heels of banksters and fraudsters, why not over-reaching thugsters caught in self-made traffic jams? 

Behold today's model scandal in the works:

1)   Opening Gambit: Figure you can get away with murder, or the political equivalence. Imagine a ploy so devilish your own doting mother wouldn't go for it. Add invincibility to heightened entitlement and voila, the first stage for a rousing scandal: the impossibility of exposure. Then find a victim or circumstance that lets your inflated self-expression soar. 

2)   Target Your Victim or Heart's Desire:  Whether money or sex, dirty tricks or intimidation, scandals blossom from the moment you convince yourself you alone can game the system, riding your righteous self-interest over rules that restrain the timid. Ordained from birth to rule, indeed commandeer, are you not a breed apart, unshackled, a crusader on wheels?  

3)   Presume the Suckers (voters, regulators, prosecutors) are, well, Suckers. Because of your ploy's brilliance, secrecy, or novelty, only your inner sanctum will ever know or find out, right? After all, who'd imagine a governor's staff would torture thousands of bridge users (nearly all unrelated to Ft. Lee) and still fail at slapping down the local mayor? Who'd think this sequence wasn't a natural disaster? Boldness in roguery will often obscure detection. 

4)   Fortress Mentality, Shock & Awe, Total Denial/Ignorance: Okay, the stunt or crime is exposed, under a red glare of bombs bursting in air. Right off, deny anyone in their right mind would conceive, let alone dare commit this atrocity. Deny any personal knowledge or intimidation. If that fails, present only your best intentions (like helping the people) that mysteriously went wrong. Impatiently blame your enemies, forever jealous of your courageous, can-do, mavericky heroism.  

5)  Damage Control: Apologize, Pull Out Your Eyes: When your best, sculpted denials fail, when no one else can be blamed and bad news turns horror show, the only option is to admit nothing but apologize for everything. Fire any staff in the crossfire and cry for mercy. Rough-talking thugs do surprisingly well with abject apologies: the contrast speaks volumes. Concede everything: loose staff cannons, disloyal appointees, pollution, climate change, storms, unemployment -- everything. The more extended the apologies, the more your good faith surfaces. If there aren't clear enemies, blame obligations (campaign pressure, bad weather, or sudden illness, like the worst flu since Noah's Flood). Season your sorrow and distress (real enough) with silver linings, like this tragedy will bear fruits of teachable moments. Unending confession bespeaks good future behavior, even if at odds with your sordid career.

6)  Mission Successful, Time-out, Scandal Fades: If your vehemence and/or your mea culpa works (or as Jonathan Capehart quipped on Christie, his " Me-me-mea culpa") and outrage diminishes, then wait and pray something even worse comes along to distract from your scandal: a terrorism attack would be nice, a modest pandemic, maybe another catastrophic oil spill (know anyone at BP?). Instruct pundits on your payroll to float redemptive nuggets like "What a guy! Any politician who survives such onslaughts wins glory in the public eye."

7)  Second Stage, Fortress Mentality, Shock & Awe Forgiveness Withheld: If respite doesn't happen, return to siege mentality. Express puzzlement, even intone umbrage, that universal forgiveness is not forthcoming. Shift from being the innocent victim of staff villainy to  pathetic, unforgiven prey of dark intrigues or just bad fortune. Question the still disgruntled yahoos who judge your recitation "not plausible, even preposterous." Express sadness and profound disappointment that such open sincerity isn't rewarded. Considering "politics isn't bean bag," affirm you will never give up.

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The State of the State - Chris Christie Jan 14, 2014

Speech starts at 18 mins,