As relations between the US and Europe become increasingly strained because, uh, the NSA spied on 35 world leaders
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Friday, October 25, 2013
German Telecom Wants Germany-Only Internet Because of the NSA Debacle
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Conn.: Sandy's sometimes forgotten victim
MILFORD, Conn. — Houses ripped in half. Neighborhoods submerged in floodwaters. Power lines snapped like twigs. National Guard troops patrolling shore communities in Humvees. Residents kayaking flooded city streets to reach stores for supplies, only to find them closed. A half-million homes without power, some for weeks or more.
It didn't get as much media attention as New York and New Jersey, but Connecticut — those states' smaller New England neighbor — was pounded by Superstorm Sandy. State officials say the storm killed five people and damaged more than 38,000 homes.
A year later, some parts of Connecticut are still recovering. And many victims trying to rebuild are navigating an increasingly stressful entanglement of insurance forms, relief applications and bureaucratic red tape.
A home left leveled by Hurricane Sandy in Fairfield, Conn., in 2012. (Dylan Stableford/Yahoo News)
"It makes you want to give up — there's a lot of confusion and misguidance," said Paola Goren, a graphic designer who lives in Milford, on Long Island Sound. It's one of the Connecticut cities hit hardest by Sandy — and one still reeling from Tropical Storm Irene the year before.
Goren spent months without heat, hot water or electricity after Sandy's storm surge flooded her 1928 Point Beach home. Now, she says, she's been inundated with paperwork — from insurance to federal and state aid — while trying to cover the mounting costs of rebuilding. She is just one of more than 12,000 Connecticut residents to register with the Federal Emergency Management Agency for federal disaster assistance.
According to FEMA, more than $283 million on federal disaster assistance, loans and insurance claims were paid to Connecticut during the six months following Sandy. In August, Gov. Dannel Malloy announced an additional $71.8 million in aid from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development was on the way.
But some storm victims, like Joe Mirmina, say they've yet to see any of it.
Mirmina's three-story Milford home was flooded with five feet of water during Sandy. A city damage assessment concluded more than 50 percent of his home was damaged, triggering a federal requirement under the National Flood Insurance Program to elevate the house as part of the renovation. But Mirmina was denied bank and small-business loans, and FEMA aid has yet to materialize.
Mirmina, who paid $50,000 to rebuild after Irene, says he has enough in loans and savings to fix his home. But the cost of elevating it — at least $100,000, with federal guidelines limited to covering just $30,000 of that figure — is prohibitive.
"How is it that the government — whether it be city, state or federal — can force us to elevate our house at our expense to save the government money?" Mirmina asked.
Click image for RELATED SLIDESHOW: Hurricane Sandy Recovery from above. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
"We want to rebuild," said Mirmina, who's lived in his Milford home with his wife for 28 years. "But we can't afford to do it, and we can't walk away."
Displaced, Mirmina and his wife are now living in the home of his father, who had been ill and passed away after Sandy.
Laurie Robinson, a Milford Public Works employee who rode out the storm for two days in a second-floor addition on her 1953 cape-style home, is in a similar position. Waiting for financial assistance to rebuild, she's been living in a camper in the driveway of her home for the past year.
"I call it my studio apartment," Robinson said of the trailer, adding that she plans to use the aid she's received from the Salvation Army and Red Cross to winterize it.
Adding insult to injury, many of the same towns hit by Sandy were smacked anew in February by a blizzard that dumped more than three feet of snow in Connecticut, including 38 inches in Milford. Four Connecticut deaths were blamed on the winter storm.
In May, Goren launched a Facebook group — Storm Victims Unite — to organize and support fellow Sandy victims in Milford. It has about 100 members.
"The residents are really frustrated, and we can't blame them," Bill Richards, Milford's recovery coordinator, told the Wall Street Journal in July.
In Fairfield, another hard-hit coastal community, officials say about two dozen homes remain vacated. State Rep. Brenda Kupchick of Fairfield is fed up with the delays.
Click on image for RELATED SLIDESHOW: A ghost town on Staten Island. (Photo by Gordon Donovan/Yahoo News)
Kupchick says she has tried to get information for her constituents from federal officials, but to no avail.
"It's almost impossible to find out anything," Kupchick said.
Officials at FEMA and HUD did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Goren has had a similar experience at the city level.
"Every story they give us is different," she said. "It's basically a free-for-all."
"Ten months of frustration,” Milford Mayor Ben Blake said last month at a public forum on the recovery effort. “I understand the tensions."
Blake blamed, in part, "the alphabet soup that is the federal government assistance process."
And the frustration has reached Capitol Hill. "Many Irene and Sandy victims were, and are, out of their homes for over a year, which demonstrates the process is not fast enough," Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro said in an email to Yahoo News. "Connecticut residents are resilient, but no one should have to deal with this kind of uncertainty.”
Part of the reason Connecticut is often overlooked when it comes to Sandy might be because of the state's strong initial response.
"We didn't have sewage systems overrun, we didn't have subway systems overrun, we didn't have tunnels overrun, people drowning in their own homes," Malloy said in comparison to New York and New Jersey two weeks after the storm.
The other part might be the timing of the disaster. Two days after the nationally televised 12/12/12 concert benefiting Sandy victims, Connecticut became synonymous with an incomparable tragedy: the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.
- Nature & Environment
- Superstorm Sandy
- Connecticut
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Microsoft keeps the Azure hits coming
While most everyone this week has been yawning at the release of new Surface Pro tablets, over in another corner Microsoft has been hard at work on getting new Windows Azure features out the door.
The list of this week's updates to Azure is wide-ranging, although some of it will be familiar to anyone who's followed the news of what Redmond's been planning for Azure.
The general availability of Windows Azure Backup
As the name implies, this uses Azure's blob storage to provide cloud-based backup and restore for Windows Server or for System Center Data Protection Manager. In a nod to those uneasy about cloud storage, Microsoft has affirmed that not only is data encrypted before transmission, but the user -- not Microsoft -- keeps the encryption key.
Active Directory
Microsoft's plans for Active Directory in Azure have been getting more ambitious of late, with its latest big add being single sign-on for all the SaaS offerings integrated into Azure (as well as a single place to access those apps if you're an end user). Among the less-publicized additions this time around: auditing reports that include things like automatically flagging suspicious log-in behaviors (e.g., logging in from multiple locations at once) and sign-in integration within Visual Studio.
Windows Azure SDK 2.2
Speaking of Visual Studio, the 2013 version just got support for the new revision of the Windows Azure SDK, version 2.2. Also among the features in 2.2 is Remote Debugging Cloud Services, which lets you plug Visual Studio into a debugger running in Azure as if you were debugging an application locally. Many of the other additions to Azure's development features -- e.g., the PowerShell cmdlets -- have been in roughly the same vein, that of closing the gap between what's done in the cloud and what's done locally.
The public preview of Hyper-V Recovery Manager
This new feature allows System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1 and R2 private clouds to be replicated to and recovered from a secondary location. Again, in another nod to those paranoid about the cloud, application data is kept local and everything to, from, and in Azure is encrypted.
From the outside these may seem like little pieces, but they're adding up. InfoWorld's Eric Knorr has described Microsoft as "the sleeping giant of the cloud," with "the resources to crush it." Microsoft is in the middle of a difficult but fruitful transition away from the low-hanging fruit of commodity computing and toward the high-margin, far-reaching innovations possible as a services company.
Actually, Microsoft has had a decently large slice of its pie coming from most everything but the Windows division for some time now. Back in 2012, ZDNet's Ed Bott noted how large chunks of Microsoft's revenue were not from Windows at all, but from the company's business division, the entertainment and devices division (read Xbox), and the server division. It wouldn't be surprising at all if from now on the biggest news out of Redmond had nothing to do with Windows per se, and everything to do with Azure.
This story, "Microsoft keeps the Azure hits coming," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.
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FDA wants limits on most prescribed painkillers
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration is recommending new restrictions on prescription medicines containing hydrocodone, the highly addictive painkiller that has grown into the most widely prescribed drug in the U.S.
In a major policy shift, the agency said in an online notice Thursday that hydrocodone-containing drugs should be subject to the same restrictions as other narcotic drugs like oxycodone and morphine.
The move comes more than a decade after the Drug Enforcement Administration first asked the FDA to reclassify hydrocodone so that it would be subject to the same restrictions as other addictive painkilling drugs. The FDA did not issue a formal announcement about its decision, which has long been sought by many patient advocates, doctors and state and federal lawmakers.
For decades, hydrocodone has been easier to prescribe, in part because it is only sold in combination pills and formulas with other non-addictive ingredients like aspirin and acetaminophen.
That ease of access has made it many health care professionals' top choice for treating chronic pain, everything from back pain to arthritis to toothaches.
In 2011, U.S. doctors wrote more than 131 million prescriptions for hydrocodone, making it the most prescribed drug in the country, according to government figures. The ingredient is found in blockbusters drugs like Vicodin as well as dozens of other generic formulations.
It also consistently ranks as the first or second most-abused medicine in the U.S. each year, according to the DEA, alongside oxycodone. Both belong to a family of drugs known as opioids, which also includes heroin, codeine and methadone.
Earlier this year the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that prescription painkiller overdose deaths among women increased about fivefold between 1999 and 2010. Among men, such deaths rose about 3.5-fold. The rise in both death rates is closely tied to a boom in the overall use of prescribed painkillers.
The FDA has long supported the more lax prescribing classification for hydrocodone, which is also backed by professional societies like the American Medical Association.
But the agency's top drug regulator, Dr. Janet Woodcock, said in a statement Thursday: "The FDA has become increasingly concerned about the abuse and misuse of opioid products, which have sadly reached epidemic proportions in certain parts of the United States."
The FDA says it will formally request in early December that hydrocodone be rescheduled as a Schedule II drug, limiting which kinds of medical professionals can write a prescription and how many times it can be refilled.
The Controlled Substances Act, passed in 1970, put hydrocodone drugs in the Schedule III class, which is subject to fewer controls. Under that classification, a prescription for Vicodin can be refilled five times before the patient has to see a physician again. If the drug is reclassified to Schedule II, patients will only be able to receive one 90-day prescription, similar to drugs like OxyContin. The drug could also not be prescribed by nurses and physician assistants.
The FDA's request for reclassification must be approved by officials in other agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services.
News of the FDA decision was applauded by lawmakers from states that have been plagued by prescription drug abuse, many who have been prodding the agency to take action for months.
"Today was a tremendous step forward in fighting the prescription drug abuse epidemic that has ravaged West Virginia and our country," said Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, in a statement. "Rescheduling hydrocodone from a Schedule III to a Schedule II drug will help prevent these highly addictive drugs from getting into the wrong hands and devastating families and communities
Sen. Charles Schumer of New York noted that the FDA's own expert panel recommended the reclassification more than nine months ago.
"Each day that passes means rising abuse, and even death, at the hands of hydrocodone-based drugs," Schumer said in a statement.
Still, Thursday's action immediately sparked criticism from some professional groups that said that the tighter restrictions could have unintended consequences, such as burdening health care workers and patients.
"The FDA's reported decision will likely pose significant hardships for many patients and delay relief for vulnerable patients with legitimate chronic pain, especially those in nursing home and long-term care," said Kevin Schweers, a spokesman for the National Community Pharmacists Association.
- Health
- Pharmaceuticals & Drug Trials
- Food and Drug Administration
- prescription drug abuse
- hydrocodone
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Greek police arrest 2 suspected of buying baby
In this undated photo released by charity ''The Smile of the Child'' shows a 4-year-old girl at an unknown location. Greek authorities on Friday, Oct. 18, 2013 have requested international assistance to identify the four-year-old girl found living in a Gypsy camp with a couple arrested and charged with abducting her from her birth parents. A police statement says the child was located Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2013 near the town of Farsala, central Greece, during a nationwide crackdown on illegal activities in Gypsy camps. (AP Photo/The Smile of the Child)
In this undated photo released by charity ''The Smile of the Child'' shows a 4-year-old girl at an unknown location. Greek authorities on Friday, Oct. 18, 2013 have requested international assistance to identify the four-year-old girl found living in a Gypsy camp with a couple arrested and charged with abducting her from her birth parents. A police statement says the child was located Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2013 near the town of Farsala, central Greece, during a nationwide crackdown on illegal activities in Gypsy camps. (AP Photo/The Smile of the Child)
ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greek police said Friday they have arrested a childless couple in Athens on suspicion of buying an 8-month-old Roma girl and trying to register her as their own, amid international uproar over another little girl who was found living with unrelated Gypsies in Greece.
Bulgarian authorities are now trying to establish whether a local Roma woman is the mother of that child, a strikingly fair girl aged 5 or 6 known as Maria. The woman has been tested for a DNA match and served with preliminary charges of child selling, but has not been detained.
The case of Maria has drawn global attention, playing on the shocking possibility of children being stolen from their parents or sold buy them. But its handling by media and authorities has raised concerns of racism toward the European Union's estimated 6 million Gypsies — a minority long marginalized in most of the continent.
The couple arrested in Athens on Wednesday allegedly paid a Roma woman 4,000 euros ($5,500) for the baby, a Greek police statement said. Authorities are looking for the baby's birth parents and potential intermediaries in the alleged transaction.
The suspects, aged 53 and 48, were expected to be charged later Friday with child abduction, which under Greek law can include cases where a minor is voluntarily given away by its parents outside the legal adoption process.
The same charges were brought against the couple with whom Maria was found living in a Roma settlement outside Farsala, in central Greece, a week ago. They have been jailed pending trial, are also suspected of fraudulently obtaining birth certificates for a total 14 children.
Greek authorities are trying to work out whether the children all exist, or whether the alleged document fraud was part of a welfare scam — the couple allegedly received more than 2,500 euros a month in family benefits.
They insist they were looking after Maria with their own five children after an informally arranged adoption.
The girl was placed into the care of a children's charity and her DNA details were provided to Interpol which has so far failed to match her to any missing children declared in its records, from Poland to the U.S.
On Wednesday, another Roma couple was charged with child abduction on the eastern Greek island of Lesvos, after police found them with a baby boy that was not their own. The couple allegedly told authorities that they were childless and had been given the baby by a Roma woman in Athens who had five children of her own and took pity on them.
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-10-25-Greece-Mystery%20Girl/id-46f61d1564eb409ba94cf06fecd221bbTags: sam bradford pittsburgh pirates gravity Presidents Cup Sons Of Anarchy Season 6
Contractor says warned U.S. officials about healthcare website risks
By David Morgan and Susan Cornwell
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The troubled rollout of President Barack Obama's signature healthcare policy on Thursday undergoes its first full-length public airing in a crowded congressional hearing room, where lawmakers will question technology contractors about the government's crippled Healthcare.gov website.
In proceedings before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, lawmakers are trying to determine why the online portal for uninsured Americans in 36 states has malfunctioned since its October 1 start, the beginning of a six-month enrollment period that is expected to draw at least 7 million people to sign up for federally subsidized private insurance for 2014.
Republicans who control the panel criticized top administration officials and contractors for assuring lawmakers over the summer that the system would work, only to produce an enrollment characterized by crashes, glitches and system failures.
"This is not about blame - this is about accountability, transparency, and fairness for the American public. The broken promises are many," said Representative Fred Upton, the Michigan Republican who chairs the committee.
"We still don't know the real picture as the administration appears allergic to transparency and continues to withhold enrollment figures," he said.
The Department of Health and Human Services and the White House have largely declined to disclose information about the problems plaguing the system, which cost nearly $400 million to build, according to a report by the watchdog Government Accountability Office.
Representative Henry Waxman, the lead Democrat on the panel, said the focus should be on fixing the glitches.
"If we want this law to work, we've got to get it right, we've got to fix it, not as the Republicans are trying to do, nix it and repeal it," he said.
The hearing marks the start of a new chapter in the Republican Party's opposition to the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which has withstood more than three years of political and legal attacks as President Barack Obama's signature domestic policy.
Upton's committee is one of at least three House panels planning to conduct hearings on several areas of reform - from insurance costs to potential security problems - where Republicans hope to find problems that can lead to legislation to dismantle the law or aid their 2014 election goal to winning the Senate.
Some of the 14 U.S. states that have built their own online marketplaces have been able to set aside difficulties and enroll people in insurance. But the federal exchange and its Healthcare.gov website continue to experience problems more than three weeks after launch. The Obama administration has largely blamed unexpected high volumes of nearly 20 million visitors.
The administration has until mid-November to iron out the rollout problems or risk jeopardizing its enrollment goal, according to experts.
CGI Federal, the main contractor for the website, said in prepared testimony for the committee that the initial bottlenecks that paralyzed Healthcare.gov stemmed from another contractor's software tool for creating consumer accounts.
That other contractor, United Health Group unit Quality Software Services Inc (QSSI), said its software was overwhelmed by the unexpectedly high volume of visitors.
Both companies also pointed to the administration, which QSSI blamed for a "late decision" to require visitors to create accounts for problems. Written testimony from CGI described the administration as "the ultimate responsible party" because of its role as systems integrator.
The House oversight focus will switch next week to the administration as Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius appears before Upton's panel and her lieutenant, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner testifies before the House Ways and Means Committee.
(Editing by Fred Barbash and Grant McCool)
- Politics & Government
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A 'Not-Normal' Family That Knows How To Laugh At Itself
Rebecca Greenberg made her first visit to StoryCorps with her mother. This time, her father Carl joined them for some laughter and reminiscing.
StoryCorps
Rebecca Greenberg made her first visit to StoryCorps with her mother. This time, her father Carl joined them for some laughter and reminiscing.
StoryCorps
When we first heard from Laura Greenberg and her daughter, Rebecca, in 2011, Laura recounted what it was like to grow up in a family that was, as she explained it, "not normal."
"We're yelling and we're pinching and we're hugging and we're cursing and we peed with the door open," she said about her childhood in Queens, N.Y., in the 1950s. "I didn't know this was not normal behavior. I didn't know people had secrets, you didn't tell your mother everything."
Laura recalled how her father would conduct an imaginary orchestra in front of the stereo in his boxer shorts, and when she met Carl, Rebecca's father.
"He was cute, but very, very quiet and I scared the crap out of him. The first time he kissed me he had a nosebleed all over his face he was so nervous. It was terrible," she laughed — before adding that, 35 years later, they were still married.
Now, Laura and Rebecca are back in a StoryCorps booth in Atlanta. But this time, they're not alone — now it's Carl's turn to share his side of the family story.
"So your first kiss, we heard about how you bled all over Mom," Rebecca asks him. "Do you have any different take on that story?
"That's how it happened," Carl says. "But I do have some Laura stories. We were having people over. She was going to make spaghetti, didn't have enough. So she broke the package of spaghetti in half, so she figured she had twice as much."
Laura Greenberg, left, and her daughter Rebecca in 2011.
StoryCorps
Laura Greenberg, left, and her daughter Rebecca in 2011.
StoryCorps
"And Carl had to explain to me, a pound is a pound," Laura laughs.
"He's from a New England family and I remember we would sit at the dinner table at his house when we were dating, and no one would talk," Laura recalls. "And then I would start to giggle. I would get this psychotic hysterical laughter. So they already knew I was nuts.
"And I said, 'This is so refreshing.' They don't ask about when I'm getting my period, or how much money I make, or did I make a doody today. You know, my family was so intrusive."
Initially, quiet Carl wasn't such a hit with Laura's parents. Her mother called him by the wrong name for years, Carl laughs.
"It's so weird because our family now is the most functional of all our friends," Rebecca says. "I mean, all my friends, they would rather hang out at my house with my parents than hang out with me."
Doing a StoryCorps interview was Rebecca's idea. Laura says she thought their initial interview was too humorous to make it to air. "You know, when I listen on my way to work, I'm crying and my mascara's running," she says. "And they're very tender, you know, heart-felt stories. And I said, 'They're not ever going to play ours.'
"But we didn't do it for that," Laura adds. "We just did it to have that experience and share that moment. And have it forever."
Produced for Morning Edition by Michael Garofalo.
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