August 24, 2007

U.S. Bomb Kills 3 British Soldiers

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 9:57 a.m. ET

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) -- A bomb apparently dropped by an American fighter jet called in for air support killed three British soldiers in southern Afghanistan, officials said Friday. Two soldiers were gravely wounded.

The British unit was on patrol Thursday evening in Helmand province when it came under Taliban attack, the British Ministry of Defense said.

''During the intense engagement that ensued, close air support was called in from two U.S. F-15 aircraft to repel the enemy. One bomb was dropped and it is believed the explosion killed the three soldiers.''

They were the first British soldiers killed in friendly fire in Afghanistan, although joint operations between U.S. and British forces in Iraq have been marred by ''friendly fire'' deaths caused by the failure of equipment and personnel in correctly identifying allies.

Britain did not identify the soldiers, from 1st Battalion, The Royal Anglian Regiment. It said an investigation was planned.

British troops have been battling militants for months in Kajaki, where repairs are taking place on a hydroelectric dam that will be able to supply close to 2 million Afghans with electricity.

''There are a handful of different reasons why this tragic incident has happened and we are not in a position at the moment and I don't think we will be for some time to find out exactly what has happened,'' said a spokesman for British troops in Helmand, Lt. Colonel Charlie Mayo.

Mayo said both wounded soldiers were injured seriously.

The American embassy in London said ''the United States expresses its deep condolences to the families and loved ones of the soldiers who died, and we wish those who were injured a speedy recovery.''

After an inquest into the death of British soldier Lance Cpl. Matty Hull, 25, killed in a friendly fire attack by two American pilots in Iraq in 2003, opposition legislators in Britain called for improvements in joint identification systems.

Britain last year threatened to end cooperation with the U.S. on the new Joint Strike Fighter jet after 10 years of development, until the Pentagon resolved concerns it was not sharing enough information about the aircraft's sensitive software with London.

Earlier this year, Britain's Defense Secretary Des Browne said that since 1990 12 British personnel had died in friendly fire incidents involving U.S. forces in Iraq, but that there had been no such deaths in Afghanistan.

U.S. fire has mistakenly killed five Canadian soldiers -- one last September during intense airstrikes on Taliban strongholds near Kandahar, and four in April 2002 when an American pilot dropped a 500-pound bomb near where the troops were apparently conducting a live-fire exercise.

In August 2006, a bomb mistakenly dropped by coalition aircraft killed 10 Afghan police officers on a patrol in the country's southeast.

In the most famous friendly fire case of the Afghan conflict, Pat Tillman, the former NFL player who became an Army ranger, was killed in April 2004 by fellow troops near the Pakistani border.

Britain has about 7,000 troops in Afghanistan, most based around Helmand. The latest deaths bring to 73 the number of British personnel killed in the country since the U.S.-led invasion in November 2001.

Taliban insurgents in the east and south of the country have stepped up their attacks on Afghan and coalition forces over the last 18 months, seeking to overthrow the Western-backed government installed in 2001 after the ouster of the Taliban.

On Thursday, Afghan forces killed three insurgents, two of whom were Islamic militants from Chechnya, during a one-hour gunbattle in southern Zabul province, said local government head Fazal Bari. He gave no more details.

Meanwhile, U.S.-led coalition troops shot dead a suspected militant and detained 11 other people during a raid in eastern Afghanistan, the coalition said in a statement.

The militant was killed Friday while ''attempting to engage coalition and Afghan forces'' during a raid in Nangarhar province, the coalition statement said. Eleven other men detained will be questioned ''as to their involvement in militant activities,'' it said.

Troops recovered weapons and ammunition during the raid, the statement said.

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dear yahoo!:

Tuesday April 24, 2007

Previous | Next

Dear Yahoo!:

What's the ideal amount of sleep?

Kathy Dover, Delaware

Dear Kathy:

We love to give definitive answers to your questions. Unfortunately, for this one we're gonna have to fall back on that most annoying of caveats -- "It all depends." The National Sleep Foundation (NSF) writes that most healthy adults require seven to nine hours of sleep each night. Adolescents need a bit more -- about 8.5 to 9.5 hours. And infants are the "laziest" of all, needing around 14 to 15 hours of sleep each day (including naps). And speaking of naps, the NSF explains there are real benefits to catching some ZZZs during the day: "A short nap of 20-30 minutes can help to improve mood, alertness, and performance." In fact, a NASA study found that when tired military pilots and astronauts took 40-minute naps, their performance improved 34 percent. If you have trouble sleeping or feel you might be sleeping too much, the NSF offers tips to get you back on schedule. And even more importantly, if you want some advice on how to convince your boss that workplace naps are good for the company, Napping.com has you covered.

november 6th street in memphis, TN

The End of Dixon-Yates?

Monday, Jul. 11, 1955

In downtown Memphis, a dingy, narrow street bears a significant (to Memphians) name: November 6th Street. It commemorates the day in 1934 when Memphis, urged on by its utility-baiting political boss, the late Edward H. ("Mister") Crump, voted against private power and for the Tennessee Valley Authority power system (it was the first major city to enter TVA). Most Memphians have remained passionately loyal to TVA; they were outraged when the Eisenhower Administration, under the Dixon-Yates contract (TIME, June 28, 1954 et seq.) decided to bypass TVA in constructing a $107 million power installation in the Memphis area. In the mind of Memphis, the Dixon-Yates deal became a thing to be avoided at all cost.

The Dixon-Yates contract, complex though it was, grew out of a simple set of facts. Memphis urgently needed more power; it had long since outgrown TVA facilities. President Eisenhower was opposed to the continued expansion of TVA, which had already spread far beyond its originally conceived limits. Dixon-Yates was his answer—and it was consistent with his policy of local power development "with the cooperation of the Administration in Washington . . . devoted to the principle of decentralized government and the principle of states' rights."

The President did, however, tell Memphis officials that he would be more than happy if, as an alternative to Dixon-Yates, the city decided to build its own steam plant. He was told that Memphis could not finance such an operation. But as the emotional war against Dixon-Yates wore on, the idea of a Memphis-built plant began to seem more appealing.

Last week, in a brief special session, the Memphis city commission voted to construct a $100 million steam plant. TVA was notified that Memphis would not renew its contract in 1958. If it was a bluff, it was likely to be a costly one: President Eisenhower promptly ordered a review of Dixon-Yates that was seen as a first step toward terminating the contract.

March 31, 2007

Shortcuts

Too Busy to Notice You’re Too Busy

By ALINA TUGEND

RECENTLY I’ve found myself annoyed by how busy my friends seem. Putting aside the possibility that they are avoiding me, some are so on the go that they barely have time to tell me they do not have time to talk. Every phone call, no matter how short, seems to be interrupted by several others. That is, of course, if I actually get a live person on the other end of the phone.

I consider my life to be somewhat filled and fulfilling. I have a husband and two children, work part time, volunteer, exercise several times a week (well, usually) and socialize regularly. For the record, I do not have a baby sitter, but do have a house cleaner for about four hours every two weeks.

But, and I am almost embarrassed to admit this, I also have time to read novels, catch a movie or play once in a while and have the occasional long lunch with a friend.

In our busy, busy world, however, I sometimes feel as if I am the odd one out. Although those who are overworked and overwhelmed complain ceaselessly, it is often with an undertone of boastfulness; the hidden message is that I’m so busy because I’m so important.

Now I realize that busyness is not an absolute: everyone has a different threshold. I have one friend for whom more than one social engagement a weekend is just too much; others love to party, party, party. And most people would trade in bored and stagnant for a little stress if they were engaged in doing something they loved.

I am also aware that there are many who have no options; who must work exhausting hours simply to survive. But I am speaking about those who choose to keep up a frenetic pace that seems largely self-imposed, unnecessary — and unenjoyable.

Edward M. Hallowell, a psychiatrist and author of “CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked and About to Snap” (Ballantine Books, 2006) writes about how he knew he had crossed into the dark side from busy to crazy busy when he got mad at a rotary phone while staying at a vacation house.

Unable to use a cellphone, he was driven nuts waiting for the dial to return to start.

Then calming himself, he timed how long the dialing actually took: 11 seconds.

“What a fool I had become,” he writes. “I had become a man in a hurry even when I had no need to hurry.”

According to Dr. Hallowell, there are many (26 in his book) overlapping reasons we all fall into the trap of being overly busy. A few are:

¶It is so easy with cellphones and BlackBerrys a touch away.

¶It is a kind of high.

¶It is a status symbol.

¶We’re afraid we’ll be left out if we slow down.

¶We avoid dealing with life’s really big issues — death, global warming, AIDS, terrorism — by running from task to task.

¶We do not know how not to be busy.

Not only are we constantly occupied, but we, as Americans, are also famous for not knowing how to be unoccupied.

My husband and I would no more fail to use up vacation time than we would hand back our paycheck. But, according to a 2005 study, “Overwork in America,” released by the nonprofit group Families and Work Institute, 36 percent of 1,000 salaried employees surveyed by telephone said they did not plan to take their full vacation.

Of course, it is not just in the work force that people are madly busy. Many people I know, who might be able to enjoy some downtime because their children are in school and they do not have paying jobs, pile errands on top of volunteering on top of working out on top of, well, you name it. When the children get out of school, they race from one activity to another, and if at some point life seems to calm down, then it is time to take on a big construction project, get a dog or have another baby.

Paradoxically, Dr. Hallowell writes in “CrazyBusy,” it is in part the desire for control that has led people to lose it.

“You can feel like a tin can surrounded by a circle of a hundred powerful magnets,” he writes. “Many people are excessively busy because they allow themselves to respond to every magnet: tracking too much data, processing too much information, answering to too many people, taking on too many tasks — all in the sense that this is the way they must live in order to keep up and stay in control. But it’s the magnets that have the control.”

One way to wrestle back control is to take a hard look at our priorities, he said, “to decide what matters.” This does not necessarily mean big career changes or moving from Manhattan to rural Vermont. It can also be figuring out in small, but significant ways how to scale down frantic to manageable.

My friend Leah and her husband have three children and have tried many different permutations of the work/life balance over the years. She had the full-time job while he worked part time; he went back to a full-time career when she cut back to part time. Now, with a 14-year-old daughter coming up on college, they are both working full time.

“We’ve set up our lives, so we take turns doing the class trips for our kindergartner, so we can go to the field hockey games, but it’s really tough,” she said. “I work hard at making life less insane.”

On a day when she had to pick up her father from the airport, for example, she made the decision to bring work home so she wouldn’t race to her office, then rush to the airport, then hightail it back to her job.

“That’s a big thing,” she said. “There’s a conscious effort not to feel so chaotic, but I can’t say it’s always so successful.”

We can long for the days when parents at class events didn’t spend as much time tapping on their BlackBerrys as watching their children haltingly recite their poetry; when cellphones were not the background noise of daily life.

But instead of bemoaning technology, it is time to make it a tool of good rather than evil.

Often, small changes can be amazingly simple. For example, one woman took back some of her time, Dr. Hallowell said, by making a seemingly minor but crucial shift in her workplace: “She put her computer behind her instead of in front of her, so she had to swivel around to use it. To use the computer — to write, to do e-mail, go to Google, whatever — she had to make a conscious decision to do so. This is huge.”

Other times it can take a little training.

Answering and receiving e-mail messages can suck up enormous amounts of time during the workday, said Mike Song, a co-author of “The Hamster Revolution: How to Manage Your E-Mail Before It Manages You” (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2007).

Mr. Song, along with his co-authors, surveyed 8,000 employees working in major corporations over three years, and found that most say they spend about 40 percent of their workday on e-mail activity.

“E-mails put other people’s priorities in your lives,” he said. And although his emphasis is on work, to a lesser extent we all see it at home in the form of the friend who constantly sends out the group messages or passes on every joke.

With a few relatively simple tactics, that time can be cut way back, said Mr. Song, who used to be a money manager and now is a founding partner of Cohesive Knowledge Solutions, a firm that trains corporations on, yes, controlling e-mail.

For example, 75 percent of those surveyed said their colleagues used the “reply all” function far too often. Yet only 15 percent said they felt that they themselves did so.

So Mr. Song suggests largely eliminating the “reply all” and “cc” options.

I particularly like some of the codes you can use to avoid having to reply, such as NRN, for no reply needed, and NTN, for no thanks needed. I never thought I would accuse people of being overly polite, but perhaps we can cut a wee bit back on the e-mails that say “Thanks!”

The trouble with writing about busyness is that, like focusing on dieting or budgeting, I am now hyper-aware of how I spend each moment. It is exhausting. And if I didn’t need to rush off, I would lie down.

E-mail: shortcuts@nytimes.com

maintaining an industry

February 5, 2007

Spitzer Seeks Panel to Study Prison Closings

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

ALBANY, Feb. 2 — Moving to reverse decades of expansion, Gov. Eliot Spitzer is proposing a commission to study closing some of New York State’s dozens of prisons.

The effort would try to duplicate for the prison system the recent commission that studied closing hospitals around the state and issued a final report late last year. That report recommended shutting down at least 20 hospitals across New York and shrinking or merging dozens of others.

If the new commission is approved by the Legislature, New York may join the growing number of states that have sought to rein in high prison costs through closings or consolidations.

Behind Mr. Spitzer’s proposal lies a recognition that New York’s prison population, which peaked in 1999 at more than 71,000 inmates, has rapidly declined since.

Thanks to falling crime rates in New York City, fewer felony arrests and efforts by prison officials to move nonviolent offenders out of the system, the prison population has fallen by roughly 8,000 inmates since the peak, though it rose slightly last year.

Assistants to the governor said he would also create, through an executive order, a second commission to study changes to sentencing laws. Such measures have helped shrink inmate ranks in other states and could in New York, too.

But any effort to close state prisons will face formidable political obstacles. New York’s sprawling network of prisons has created thousands of jobs upstate, where manufacturing jobs have been slowly disappearing.

Much like New York’s vast array of state-supported hospitals — some of which lie more than half-empty for lack of demand — the $2.7 billion-a-year state prison system has become, in effect, an economic development program.

Mr. Spitzer hopes to replace the state-subsidized employment on which upstate New York depends with private-sector jobs and investment that could secure its future down the road.

But a powerful alliance of upstate lawmakers and correction officers’ unions guard their constituents’ and members’ state-financed jobs and are likely to resist any effort to downsize the system.

. . .

“We’re not open to any closures at this point,” said Lawrence Flanagan Jr., the president of the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, which has donated at least $1.8 million to state politicians in recent years.

He added: “If anything, the prison population has increased. It went up 500 this last year.”

Likewise, many Republican state senators say they are dismayed at the possibility of sacrificing constituents’ livelihoods in the short term to Mr. Spitzer’s agenda, regardless of the long-term benefits he anticipates.

“I’m very concerned about the commission,” said Senator Elizabeth O’C. Little, a Republican whose Adirondacks district includes 12 prisons and prison camps. Five of them are in Franklin County, which has roughly one inmate for every 10 residents, according to census figures, the highest concentration in the state.

“They have a tremendous economic impact,” Ms. Little said. “There are over 5,000 corrections officers living in my district. In most of these communities, the prisons are the biggest employer. It’s not just corrections officers, but secretaries and other staff, too.”

Indeed, between 1990 and 2006, according to research by the Public Policy Institute of New York State, two-thirds of the net new jobs upstate were paid for by taxpayers. That includes jobs in prisons, other government positions and some jobs in health care and social assistance.

“Up in the north country, you used to just think of hanging out a sign that says ‘Prisons-R-Us,’ ” said Kent Gardner, president of the Center for Governmental Research, based in Rochester. “Pretty much every rural town in the state was angling for these facilities.”

Little surprise, then, that some past efforts to close prisons have failed. Governor George E. Pataki tried repeatedly to include such closings in the state budget, only to have the Legislature reject those plans.

Mr. Flanagan of the corrections union said that his group had been “very, very forward and aggressive last year and in the year prior to that.”

Lawmakers have acted, too, approving several measures in recent years to protect the prison system against rapid shrinkage. Under current law, before the state can close a prison it must give a year’s notice to employees, and officials are required to explore options for converting prisons to other uses, such as low-cost housing.

“In response to lobbying from the local upstate towns and the correction officers’ union, the Legislature has made it much more difficult for the executive to close prisons, even after a time of significant decline in the population,” said Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, an advocacy group for inmates.

. . .

In an interview, Laura Anglin, the governor’s first deputy budget director, said a commission was the best way to reach a compromise on prisons with maximum public involvement.

“It’s always difficult to look at things like this,” she said. “That is why we thought we would go the commission route, so that there would be public involvement, it would require public hearings and that way get the issues out in the open instead of forcing something.”

Both Mr. Spitzer and his staff have also stressed that no closings are imminent and that the creation of the commission itself, which would be wrapped into the state budget, must still past muster with the Legislature.

“We don’t have any closures listed yet; we’ve only been here 31 days,” the governor said last week in his budget address. “I don’t want to suggest that it’s happening soon.”

The question is whether it will happen at all. Although Joseph L. Bruno, the Republican majority leader of the Senate, has said he is open to a prison commission, other Republicans suggested that closings might not be their first concern.

“We see that there is a growing need for more maximum-security cell space,” said Senator Michael F. Nozzolio, chairman of the Senate committee that has jurisdiction over prisons. Though there are fewer nonviolent offenders in prisons, he said, too many dangerous inmates are still being housed in inadequate facilities.

“We also believe that there needs to be a more planned approach to this entire correctional system,” Mr. Nozzolio said. “We’ve requested and demanded and have yet to see, really, a real plan for full utilization.”

Mr. Nozzolio also said that he planned to use upcoming confirmation hearings for Mr. Spitzer’s criminal-justice appointees “to gauge the administration’s positions on these issues.”

starfish

February 4, 2007

Thinks Big About the Little Guy

By MICHAEL FITZGERALD

IN 1990, Steven T. Bigari was running a string of McDonald’s franchises in Colorado Springs and spending most of his working hours thinking about the big bad wolf at his door, otherwise known as Taco Bell, which was killing his business with a promotional menu of items costing only 59 cents each.

One day, the restaurants’ owner, Brent Cameron, who was also his mentor and friend, sat down with him over breakfast at one of the franchises, just off Highway 83. “O.K., Steve, what’s your plan?” he asked.

Mr. Bigari outlined the situation, and it was dire: their operations were hemorrhaging cash. Then he presented a plan to cut costs by eliminating, among other things, paid vacations for crew members. What happened next would change Mr. Bigari’s life.

“Brent politely asked me to step into the vestibule and he stuck his finger in my face and used a foul word for one of the three times I ever heard one cross his lips,” Mr. Bigari said. “He said, ‘You can afford to give up your rizzing-razzing vacation, but they can’t, so I hope you have a better plan than that.’ ”

Mr. Bigari said he got the message: take care of your people. It was a message that stuck with him even after Mr. Cameron died and Mr. Bigari became a top McDonald’s franchisee himself — eventually owning 12 stores, three patents and a reputation for clever ideas, like letting customers pay with credit cards and outsourcing the drive-through. Even as his business grew, he kept Mr. Cameron’s crew benefits in place, and began adding to them.

Indeed, over time, he went much further. He created a system to help resolve the problems of the working poor who staffed his restaurants by pulling together or creating an array of services, from arranging day care to organizing transportation to making small emergency loans. The goal, he said, was to keep his employees on the job and focused on customers.

Now he is trying to persuade others to offer this kind of help to their workers, not as an act of kindness or charity but as a way to reduce employee turnover and increase profit — as, he said, it did for him.

This is a major challenge. After all, American business culture tends to focus on employees at the top, not at the bottom. And many don’t want to be told that they pay workers poverty-level wages. Mr. Bigari says he thinks that they will see the light when they see the return they can get from helping the working poor, both as employees and as customers.

MR. BIGARI, 47, is an unlikely candidate to save the working poor. He is a millionaire who lives in Colorado Springs, a politically conservative city that is far from the coastal enclaves of most social entrepreneurs, the catch phrase for people who come up with innovative, nongovernmental ways to address social problems. He has the no-nonsense short hair and straight back of a West Point graduate. (He was in the class of 1982.)

. . .

Mr. Bigari says he knows he is tackling a far bigger problem than a McDonald’s franchise has to face — a point he illustrates with a story about a beach strewn with starfish. A boy is throwing them back in the ocean, one by one, when a man comes by and says: “What are you doing? You can’t possibly make a difference here.”

Without looking up or pausing, the boy picks up another starfish, tosses it in the ocean and says, “Did for that one.”