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Saturday, December 17, 2011
Former POW Jessica Lynch finishing degree
Bob Bird / AP
Jessica Lynch, who shot to fame as a POW during the Iraq war in 2003, is featured in the South Charleston, W.Va. Christmas Parade Saturday, Dec. 10.
By The Associated Press
MORGANTOWN, W.Va.-- Jessica Lynch was just 19 when the world first saw her ? a broken, blond soldier caught on combat video in Iraq, her face wearing something between a grimace and a grin.
The Army supply clerk was being carried on a stretcher after nine days as a prisoner of war. She had been captured along with five others after the 507th Maintenance Company took a wrong turn and came under attack in Nasiriyah on March 23, 2003. Eleven of her fellow soldiers died.
Lynch had joined the Army at 18 to earn money for college and become a school teacher. This Friday, at 28, she completes that mission.
She'll spend Thursday finishing her training as a student teacher at the same elementary school she attended in sparsely populated Wirt County. Then, on badly damaged legs and a right foot that still pains her, she'll walk across a stage Friday evening and get her education degree from West Virginia University at Parkersburg.
"It's tough to walk, but I look at it as, 'At least I'm walking,'" she says. "At least I have my legs. They may not work. I have no feeling in the left one. But it's attached, at least. ... At least I'm alive."
Nearly 4,500 Americans died and some 32,000 were wounded during the war in Iraq, winding down this month as the last American troops withdraw. The first woman lost was Lynch's friend and fellow soldier, 23-year-old Army Pfc. Lori Ann Piestewa of Arizona, killed in the convoy attack.
"Knowing she died right beside me and that could fairly well have been me brings a whole new perspective," Lynch said. "You're just thankful for what you've been given, even if it's not what you wanted."
Today, Lynch and longtime boyfriend Wes Robinson are parents to 5-year-old Dakota, whose name honors her fallen American Indian friend. Marriage, she says, is in the plan, but there's no rush. What matters is the comfort she finds in her family. They are there when she's overcome by stress or shaken by the nightmares that still sometimes come.
"By looking at me through a picture, you'd never know anything is wrong," she said. "I fake it. But my family, my friends ... they know when I'm really in pain."
When she was rescued, the U.S. government used footage of Lynch to spin a tale that exaggerated the truth. To make her seem more heroic and rally public support for the war, the military claimed she'd gone down firing ? when, in fact, her rifle had jammed. She wrote a book, "I Am A Soldier, Too," with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Rick Bragg, and has repeatedly worked to set the record straight.
"The bottom line is the American people are capable of determining their own ideals of heroes," she told Congress in 2007, "and they don't need to be told elaborate lies."
And the lies cost her. For a long time, she got hate mail. Some said she'd done nothing to deserve the attention or the title of hero. She once told Glamour magazine she felt like "the most hated person in America."
Every now and then, after a high-profile appearance, a hateful missive still arrives.
"They say things like, 'Who do you think you are? That was so eight years ago,'" Lynch said. "I just don't respond. It just doesn't bother me anymore. It used to, because I couldn't understand why people were hating me. I was just a soldier like the 100,000 others over there."
Literally and figuratively, she said, she now has a stronger backbone. "I just let things roll off."
Lynch said she'll take a semester off to travel and spend time with Dakota before the child starts school. Lynch hopes to start work soon on a master's degree in communications.
She'll also continue her speaking engagements with children and with veterans' groups. At those events, without fail, the most common question is whether she was shot.
"I can't answer because I don't even know myself," she says. "There's never been actual proof."
The crash of her Humvee is believed to have caused her injuries, which also included spinal fractures, nerve damage and a shattered right arm.
Sometimes Lynch is paid for her appearances. Often, she asks the audience to donate to Jessi's Pals, a venture she launched to provide blankets and stuffed animals to patients at WVU Children's Hospital.
Awkward questions aside, she thrives on the interaction of those three to five lectures a month. Four years ago, Lynch said she wanted to bow out of the spotlight and have a normal life. But now, attention is normal.
She is often recognized. Sometimes she's caught with a mouthful of food as people speak to her and try to touch her. She is no longer annoyed. She embraces it. She says hello and introduces herself to people who know her face but can't quite place it.
"Honestly, it does surprise me that so many people still are familiar with the story. I sometimes get taken aback when I hear people talking about it because it's like reading it in a book," Lynch said. "I forget, 'That's me.'"
If her fame has one benefit, it's the reminder that people are still thinking about U.S. troops, at home and overseas.
"And that's good," Lynch said, "because they still need our prayers just like they did nine or 10 years ago."
More content from msnbc.com and NBC News:
? 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Friday, December 16, 2011
Wacom Bamboo Capture CTH470
The Wacom Bamboo Capture is the sweet spot in the company's new lineup of drawing tablets. At $99.99, the Capture offers more pressure sensitivity than the prior Bamboo Pen & Touch CTH460 (4 stars), as well as a slimmer design and an impressive software bundle.?But in a?cynical move,?Wacom?removed the eraser, and is now saving it for the new Bamboo Create CTH470 ($199.99), which is twice the size and twice the price; just make sure your style of working doesn't require one in the usual spot before purchase.
Design, Product Line, and Setup
The Bamboo Capture measures 6.9 by 10.9 by 0.4 inches (HWD). Wacom streamlined the design, but only partially; while it's slimmer, and there are fewer cut lines and buttons than on the Pen and Touch CTH460, there's now an extra space on one side that contains the same four programmable buttons as before. Wacom spruced up the look by adding some extra geometric surfaces to the buttons.
The entire tablet is still made of plastic, with a glossy plastic bar next to the buttons, a blue LED light indicating a live connection, and a hard textured surface around the tablet's edges. The Bamboo Capture is mostly silver, with a black accent bar containing the buttons, a black plastic stylus, and a black nylon pen holder. The pleasantly tacky drawing surface measures 5.8 by 3.6 inches, which is the same as before. This time around, you can detach the USB cord, which helps if you need to move the tablet on your desk for some reason.
Speaking of which, Wacom broke the Bamboo line into three new tablets. The Bamboo Connect CTL470 costs $79.99; it's a basic model intended for collaborating, sketching out ideas, marking up documents, and taking notes. It includes Autodesk SketchBook Express 2011. The Bamboo Capture CTH470 ($99.99), the subject of this review, adds multi-touch, compatibility with the company's $39.99 Wireless Option, and full versions of Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 and Nik Color Efex Pro Filters 3.0, which is a good deal in and of itself. The Bamboo Create CTH670 ($199.99) is a larger version that doubles the size of the drawing area, in order to accommodate broader brush strokes. The Create also adds an eraser to the stylus, and you get a copy of Corel Painter Essentials 4.0, plus all of the above software (with Photoshop Elements bumped to version 9, presumably thanks to a licensing issue).
All three tablets are compatible with Windows 7, Vista, and XP, as well as Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or later. Installing the Bamboo Capture is very simple: with your PC booted on and at the Windows desktop, connect the USB cable, insert the bundled DVD, and follow the on-screen instructions; it takes longer to install than the Bamboo Connect, thanks to the Capture's much better software bundle. I had no problem installing the Bamboo Capture on a Lenovo ThinkPad L420 Core i3-powered laptop with 8GB RAM and Windows 7 Service Pack 1 installed.
Drawing, Multi-Touch, and Conclusions
Wacom has been producing drawing surfaces for the better part of two decades, so even the inexpensive Bamboo Capture works reliably. At 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity, the Bamboo Capture offers twice the precision as the Pen and Touch, at least in terms of how hard you press down the tip. Otherwise, position accuracy remains about the same as before, which is to say good, if not as crisp as the company's higher-priced Intuos and Cintiq lines.
If you've never used a drawing tablet before, be aware it takes some practice. When you bring the pen close to the surface, but don't actually press down, you'll see the cursor move on the screen. That lets you use the pen as a suspended mouse for selecting user interface elements on screen. It also lets you see where you are about to lay ink down. Once you begin pressing the pen tip down on the surface, it begins to draw on the screen. It's not like a mouse, in that it lays down the same length of ink no matter how fast or slow you move the pen. With a mouse, if you move it slowly, it will take more of your actual desk or table to bring the cursor from one side of the screen to the other. On the other hand, the pen's ability to control the cursor without touching the screen means that you need to expand the drawing surface window to cover the full desktop. Otherwise, you'll constantly select text or move icons around by accident.
Fortunately, the Capture still includes the same multi-touch as the Pen & Touch model. That means you can use the Capture as a genuine stand-in for a mouse or laptop trackpad, with its pinch zoom in and out, two-finger vertical scrolling for Web pages, select and drag (two taps plus a finger tip drag), and rotate (two wide fingers, twist). The four programmable buttons on the left work the same way as before: Navigate, left click, double-click, and right-click. I'd still prefer to see a pair of buttons along the bottom of the track pad; that would make the Capture an exact, giant replica of a laptop trackpad, with all the natural control that would entail.
Our favorite lower-cost drawing tablet remains the Wacom Intuos4 ($239 and up, 4 stars), which has still finer pressure sensitivity, an eraser, more programmable buttons, and a larger drawing surface. All told, the lack of an eraser is a big downside on both the Bamboo Capture and the $20 less expensive Bamboo Connect. It essentially removes the ability to work as a drawing tablet for many people, and you don't get a second programmable button on the pen that you can swap for the eraser function either. But the Bamboo Capture is a much better buy than the Connect, thanks to the Capture's excellent (if increasingly dated) software bundle, multi-touch capability, and four ExpressKeys. Here's hoping they bring back the eraser next time around.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/fsJ8n-Xeogg/0,2817,2397406,00.asp
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APNewsBreak: 2.5M young adults gain coverage (AP)
WASHINGTON ? The number of young adults lacking medical coverage has shrunk by 2.5 million since the new health care overhaul law took effect, according to a new analysis the Obama administration is to release Wednesday.
That drop is 2 1/2 times as large as the drop indicated by previous government and private estimates from earlier this year, which showed about 1 million Americans ages 19-25 had gained coverage.
Administration officials said they now have more data. They say they're also slicing the numbers more precisely than the government usually does, trying to pinpoint the impact of a popular provision in an otherwise politically divisive law.
Under the health overhaul, children can remain on their parents' health insurance plans until they turn 26, and families have flocked to sign up young adults making the transition to work in a challenging economic environment. But the fate of President Barack Obama's signature domestic accomplishment remains uncertain, with the Supreme Court scheduled to hear a constitutional challenge next year, and Republican presidential candidates vowing to repeal it.
"The increase in coverage among 19- to 25-year-olds can be directly attributed to the Affordable Care Act's new dependent coverage provision," said a draft report from the Health and Human Services Department. "Initial gains from this policy have continued to grow as ... students graduate from high school and college." A copy of the report was obtained by The Associated Press.
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is scheduled to release the findings Wednesday.
The health care law's main push to cover the uninsured doesn't come until 2014. But the young adults' provision took effect last fall. Most workplace health plans started carrying it out Jan. 1.
Using unpublished quarterly statistics from the government's ongoing National Health Interview Survey, analysts in Sebelius' policy office determined that nearly 36 percent of those age 19-25 were uninsured in the third calendar quarter of 2010, before the law's provision took effect.
That translates to more than 10.5 million people.
By the second calendar quarter of 2011, the proportion of uninsured young adults had dropped to a little over 27 percent, or about 8 million people.
The difference ? nearly 2.5 million getting coverage ? can only be the result of the health care law, administration officials said, because the number covered by public programs like Medicaid went down slightly.
Overall, nearly 30 million Americans are between the ages of 19 to 25. For those who are little older, ages 26-35, the uninsured rate went up during the same period.
"From September 2010 to June 2011, coverage rose only among those adults affect by the policy," said the HHS report.
The National Center for Health Statistics has documented a broadly similar trend in its official publications, only it's not nearly as dramatic.
Administration officials said those statistics do not focus on the change from calendar quarter to calendar quarter, as does the report by Sebelius' staff. Instead, they pool data over longer time periods. That has the effect of diluting the perceived impact of the law, administration officials said.
Traditionally, young adults were more likely to be uninsured than any other age group.
Some are making the switch from school to work. Others are holding down low-wage jobs that don't usually come with health care. And some ? termed the "invincibles" ? pass up job-based health insurance because they don't think they'll use it and would rather get extra money in their paychecks.
Other early coverage expansions in the health care law have not worked as well, including a special program for people with health problems who got turned away by private insurers. Many applicants found the premiums unaffordable.
Young adults are a less expensive group to cover than people who are middle-aged, and many companies have spread the extra premiums among their workers. Benefits consultant Delloite LLP has projected additional health plan costs in the range of 1 percent to 2 percent for covering young adults.
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Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
MF Global fallout delays U.S. farm seed, land deals (Reuters)
CHICAGO (Reuters) ? For the first time in 25 years, Minnesota farmer Dean Tofteland has missed his deadline to buy seed for next spring's corn and soybean crops.
With $200,000 of his money yet to be returned from the accounts of MF Global, his former broker, the 49-year-old farmer has missed a $5,000 discount for early buyers, and is watching friends and neighbors snap up the best varieties of seeds.
In the latest sign of how MF Global's failure is continuing to cascade across the commodity industry, Tofteland and other farmers who have yet to recover more than a third of their money from the bankrupt broker now find themselves in a cash crunch that risks rippling far beyond the futures market.
Some farmers have had to postpone purchases of land or equipment. Tofteland still expects to sow his 1,000 acres in the southwest corner of the state, but may have to borrow money to do so.
Still, the delay in returning billions of dollars in customer funds more than a month after MF Global filed for bankruptcy is starting to affect actual decisions on the farm. This threatens to cloud the outlook for U.S. crops, warn farmers who have been ratcheting up pressure on the bankruptcy trustee to move faster to disperse any cash he secures.
"That's pretty serious when you're raising food for the country and the world," Tofteland said.
For most farmers, the fact that their broker may have taken as much as $1.2 billion of customer money for its own use is bad enough. But the seasonal business of farming is now being disrupted since regulators still can't account for the missing funds, or even agree how big the hole is.
"The amount of money that we have tied up is significant," Tofteland said. "Because of this I've been delaying my seed purchase decisions."
Tofteland normally would have made his purchases at least two weeks ago to take advantage of discounts for farmers who buy early. He has avoided borrowing money in order to do so because he does not want to take on more debt but says he will consider a loan if the delay persists.
Tofteland worries his harvest next fall will suffer because the best-performing types of seeds will likely be sold out by the time he makes his purchases. He still plans to plant his crop in the spring.
DAWNING IMPACT
Farmers are among the thousands of former MF Global clients who are missing money from the brokerage. The firm run by former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine, an ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs, collapsed October 31 after making bad bets on European debt.
The bankruptcy had an immediate impact on farmers' abilities to hedge their crops at grain exchanges. Many had to liquidate positions or put up additional cash to meet margin calls after their accounts were transferred from MF Global to other brokerages.
Now, the collapse has begun to impact farm decisions that can directly affect output.
In Montana, Marty Klinker, who grows wheat and barley, is missing about $275,000 from his accounts at MF Global. He said the shortfall caused him to delay buying more than $500,000 worth of farm equipment, including a tractor and combine, from manufacturer Case IH.
Klinker didn't know whether he would eventually buy the equipment, which would replace older models on his farm. He said he has to make a decision by the end of the year to take advantage of prices he previously negotiated with the company.
Case is a brand of CNH, a majority-owned subsidiary of Fiat SpA. A Case spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
"We're right in the middle of year-end equipment decisions," Klinker said.
FARMERS CAUGHT OFF GUARD
MF Global's collapse has not completely halted farm purchases.
Stine Seed, which calls itself the largest independent U.S. seed company, has not seen a slowdown in sales, said Myron Stine, vice president of sales and marketing.
Yet, other agribusiness professionals confirm shockwaves from the bankruptcy have disrupted plans affecting crop production.
Diana Klemme, a broker for Midwest grain elevators and vice president of Grain Service Corp in Atlanta, said one of her clients was holding about $400,000 cash in a MF Global account at the time of its collapse. The client had to delay purchasing some land because the money had been frozen, she said.
Farmers were caught off guard by the disappearance of their money because it was held in segregated accounts considered to be immune from troubles at brokerages. Several farmers said they had felt it was safer to keep cash in the accounts than at local banks.
Farmers worry the cost of doing business could go up permanently due to the increased risk of keeping money in segregated accounts, making it more expensive to produce crops. For Klinker, whose oldest son is entering the family business, that could mean upgrading equipment less frequently than he has in the past.
"It impacts everything," he said.
(Reporting by Tom Polansek)
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Internal Affairs: San Jose police chief says there's a conflict of interest behind casino (San Jose Mercury News)
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