War-related deaths near 500,000 in Iraq

Washington (AFP) - Nearly half a million people have died from war-related causes in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003, according to an academic study published in the United States on Tuesday.

That toll is far higher than the nearly 115,000 violent civilian deaths reported by the British-based group Iraq Body Count, which bases its tally on media reports, hospital and morgue records, and official and non-governmental accounts.

The latest estimate by university researchers in the United States, Canada and Baghdad in cooperation with the Iraqi Ministry of Health covers not only violent deaths but other avoidable deaths linked to the invasion, insurgencies and subsequent social breakdown.

It also differs from some previous counts by spanning a longer period of time and by using randomized surveys of households across Iraq to project a nationwide death toll from 2003 to mid 2011.

Violence caused most of the deaths, but about a third were indirectly linked to the war, and these deaths have been left out of previous counts, said lead author Amy Hagopian, a public health researcher at the University of Washington.

Those included situations when a pregnant woman encountered difficult labor but could not leave the house due to fighting, or when a person drank contaminated water, or when a patient could not get treated at a hospital because staff was overwhelmed with war casualties.

"These are all indirect deaths, and they are significant," Hagopian told AFP.

The aim of the study was to provide a truer picture of the suffering caused by war, and hopefully to make governments think twice about the harm that would come from an invasion, she said.

"I think it is important that people understand the consequences of launching wars on public health, on how people live. This country is forever changed."

The research team from the University of Washington, Johns Hopkins University, Simon Fraser University and Mustansiriya University conducted the work on a volunteer basis using pooled internal resources instead of seeking outside funds.

Their tally was compiled by asking adults living in 2,000 randomly selected households in 100 geographic clusters across Iraq if family members had died, when and why.

Researchers used the survey data, which was completed by 1,960 of those chosen, to calculate the death rate before the war and after. When multiplied by the whole population, they returned a number that represented "excess deaths."

Researchers estimated there were 405,000 excess Iraqi deaths attributable to the war through mid-2011.

They also attempted to account for deaths missed because families had fled the country, and estimated 55,805 total deaths, bringing the total to nearly 461,000.

About 70 percent of Iraq deaths from 2003-2011 were violent in nature, with most caused by gunshots, followed by car bombs and other explosions, said the study.

Coalition forces were blamed for 35 percent of violent deaths; militias were blamed for 32 percent. The rest were either unknown (21 percent), criminals (11 percent) or Iraqi forces (one percent).

Heart conditions were the most common cause of non-violent death from 2003-2011 -- indicating a key role of stress in war-related deaths -- followed by chronic illness and cancer.

In a perspective article accompanying the PLoS Medicine study, Salman Rawaf, director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center at Imperial College London, said the latest research would likely be called into question, as have other estimates before it, with most "perceived as being politically motivated, deliberately either over-reporting or suppressing the number of deaths."

"This estimate carries substantial uncertainty, and undoubtedly the methodology and findings of this latest study will be controversial and debated," he wrote.

However, the attempt to quantify the catastrophe created by war is "valuable" in the context of understanding the health consequences of war, he said.

"Living in Iraq today is no longer about how many have died, but how future deaths should be prevented."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/war-related-deaths-near-500-000-iraq-212646036.html
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'Captain Phillips' And The Terrible Excitement Of Real Action

Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdirahman share close quarters in Captain Phillips.

Columbia Pictures

Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdirahman share close quarters in Captain Phillips.

Columbia Pictures

Captain Phillips, Paul Greengrass' tense movie about the April 2009 hijacking of the freighter Maersk Alabama by four Somali pirates, is a love song to the patience-through-overwhelming-fire-superiority of the U.S. military.

Unless, of course, it's a Dog Day Afternoon-style chronicle of the final days of a few sympathetically inept criminals who want money, not blood, but who end up dead anyway. What's empirical is that the film spends more screen time on the hapless, teenage pirates than on any of its other characters, save for Richard Phillips himself — played by America's everydad, Tom Hanks, whose next role will be that of Walt Disney.

Like last year's Zero Dark Thirty, Greengrass' new movie is Based On A True Story and climaxes with a successful operation by Navy SEALs, those precision instruments that we rightly revere. And while Captain Phillips tells a far simpler story, covering days rather than years, both films strike me as Rorschach blots onto which anyone can project individual beliefs about how and when America swings its big stick.

Except­ — and I'll label this paragraph as a spoiler, mostly because Dana Stevens considered it as such in her Slate review — Captain Phillips doesn't quite end with the SEALs grimly/awesomely taking care of business. It takes an extra few minutes, after the Navy has rescued Phillips from his captors, to show us see how exhausted, frightened, and sickened he is by the ordeal — and no one is likely to mistake that response for ingratitude. Maybe those tears Jessica Chastain shed in the last shot of Zero Dark Thirty were for our national soul (I doubt it), but I don't think this pair of scenes, wherein Phillips is too drained to speak, walk unassisted or do anything other than howl and weep is intended as a metaphor for anything.

Unlike the concurrent Gravity, which brilliantly sustains tension by never cutting away from its protagonist, Captain Phillips lets us in on the turning of wheels to which neither Phillips nor his opponent/captor, the pirate leader Abdulwali Abdukhad Muse (Barkhad Abdi, giving a performance at least as persuasive as Hanks'), are privy. That lower left-hand corner of the screen keeps flashing datelines. Interchangeable Naval personnel give and receive orders via radio. We see the SEALs board their plane in Virginia to fly halfway around the world and skydive into the Indian Ocean, where three naval warships have converged to block the pirates from escaping to Somalia with Phillips as their hostage. (The SEAL team leader is played by Max Martini, whose freakishly right-angular jaw has damned him to be cast only as soldiers or cops. It's a weird problem for a guy whose name literally means "peak capacity fancy cocktails" to have.)

The SEALs' arrival by parachute is as it happened in real life. Still, it must be expensive to film a parachuting sequence, and this one is brief and unspectacular — so why is it in the movie? Is Greengrass trying to underline the vast expense the U.S. will accept to send the message that if you mess with one 55-year-old Merchant Marine seaman from Vermont, you mess with us all? Or, more likely, that disruption of the shipping lanes will not be tolerated? This incident was the first (briefly) successful hijacking of an American ship in 200 years. Few that get taken have the benefit of such a response, a fact the film seems to acknowledge with a single line, conveyed via radio from an Admiral whose face we never see.

When the eroding hostage negotiation is suddenly resolved by three snipers' bullets in three pirates' heads, Greengrass presents it as a moment of horror, not of triumph. It plays like a moral counterweight to news reports like this one, which celebrated the SEALs' marksmanship as a feat of athleticism — which, let's not kid ourselves, it was. (The lifeboat Phillips was taken captive in is on display at the Navy SEAL museum in Fort Pierce, Florida.)

Nothing about Captain Phillips smacks of exploitation. By casting Hanks as the curt but honorable captain, Greengrass has spared us any further intervention to make the "character" more "likeable." Still, I'm never sure how much I'm supposed to enjoy depictions of recent tragedies, even ones as seriously and well-made as this.

Greengrass has earned the freedom to do more or less what he wants, having made the second and third films in the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too Bourne series — high-end popcorn movies that at once condemn and delight in mayhem. (As the soulfully amnesiac super-assassin Jason Bourne, Matt Damon never looks like he's enjoying all that kneecap shattering and windpipe punching, which makes us feel better about enjoying it.) He started his career as a documentarian, and he continues to make documentary-ish films like this one.

I doubt this can be said of Greengrass' United 93 — despite its sterling critical reputation, I've never been able to bring myself to watch it — but Captain Phillips offers substantial entertainment value. I don't recall any jokes, but there are a couple of expertly staged action scenes. A sequence wherein the crew of the Maersk Alabama uses fire hoses and evasive maneuvers to try to prevent the pirates from affixing a ladder to the hull and climbing aboard, is, with apologies to John Woo and my beloved James Bond franchise, the only exciting boat chase in any movie, ever. Surely it's okay to feel caught up in moments like these.

Ridley Scott's film Black Hawk Down was the first film I can recall to trigger this queasiness. Based on Mark Bowden's superb nonfiction book about the a botched 1993 attempt to capture a Somali warlord—resulting in an all-night firefight that left 18 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of Somalis dead — the movie was made before, but released soon after, 9/11. Like the book, the film expresses awe at the talents of U.S. Special Forces operators (the Army's Delta Force in this case, not the SEALs), even as it depicts a failed mission. The film retains some of Bowden's observations about the workplace culture of the elite sections of the Army, and a little bit of his geopolitical analysis. But it's overwhelmingly a war movie, an action movie. In translating Bowden's 486-page prose account to the most visceral story medium, Scott can't help but trivialize the event somehow.

Captain Phillips doesn't do that. There's something appealingly 1970s-like in its refusal to editorialize. It can afford its humanism because Phillips lived to write a book. It has patience, albeit through overwhelming fire superiority.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2013/10/15/234676998/captain-phillips-and-the-terrible-excitement-of-real-action?ft=1&f=1008
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GOP mulls Trump as best to say 'You're fired!' to New York's Gov. Cuomo

Donald Trump for governor?

The New York Post is reporting that GOP bigwigs in the Empire State want the Donald to run against Gov. Andrew Cuomo in next year's New York state election.

Via the New York Post:

So far, Trump, who only recently learned of the effort, which is backed by state GOP Chairman Ed Cox and other party leaders, hasn’t said a flat “no.’’

Asked for comment by The Post, Trump left open the possibility of entering the race and blasted Cuomo, and even Cuomo’s dad, ex-Gov. Mario Cuomo, for their records in office.

The Post's article was apparently the first Trump heard of the GOP's desire to get him to mount an election campaign. The effort is being backed by state GOP Chairman Ed Cox and other party leaders.

Speaking on "Fox and Friends" on Monday, Trump said, "Well, I think my initial reaction is I haven't even thought about it. It's a first. It would be very interesting. I mean, New York has some very serious problems. We have taxes that are through the roof; we have energy sitting in our ground that we are not getting. We have a lot of problems, but it's not something that is of great interest to me."

News10NBC in Rochester spoke with Assemblyman Bill Nojay, whose memo about Trump's electability sparked the discussion.

Nojay said that while there are other Republicans who would make a great governor, Trump is "ready to go now. He'd be a great candidate in 2014."

Nojay also spoke to the Post about the possibility of getting the host of "The Apprentice" to run. "“If Donald Trump wants to be remembered as a successor to FDR and not Alex Trebek, he should run,” Nojay said.

Your move, Donald.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/gop-wants-trump-to-run-for-ny-governor-132303230.html
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Senate leads hunt for shutdown and debt limit deal

WASHINGTON (AP) — Racing the calendar and the financial markets, Senate leaders have taken the helm in the search for a deal to end the partial government shutdown and avert a federal default.

"This should be seen as something very positive, even though we don't have anything done yet, and long ways to go," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Saturday, describing his opening conversation hours earlier with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

"The real conversation that matters now is the one taking place between McConnell and Reid," said Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn.

Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., were also involved in the high-level bargaining.

Sunday marked the 13th day of a federal shutdown that has continued to idle 350,000 government workers, left hundreds of thousands of others working without pay and curtailed everything from veterans' services to environmental inspections.

More ominously, Thursday drew another day closer, the day the Obama administration has warned the U.S. will deplete its borrowing authority and risk an unprecedented federal default. Economists say that could send shockwaves throughout the U.S. and global economies.

The pressure was on both parties but seemed mostly on Republicans, who polls show are bearing the brunt of voters' wrath over the twin standoffs. And though the financial markets rebounded strongly late last week on word of movement in the talks, lawmakers of both parties were warily awaiting their reopening this week.

No. 2 Senate Democratic leader Dick Durbin of Illinois said the financial markets did better last week because they assumed that "eventually the damsel will be plucked from the tracks."

Referring to the approach of Thursday's deadline, he added: "As we start hearing the train whistle, I think that there may be a different view. I don't want to see it happen because it's going to hurt a lot of innocent people."

Republicans are demanding spending cuts and deficit reduction in exchange for reopening the government and extending its borrowing authority. President Barack Obama and other Democrats say they want both measures pushed through Congress without condition and would agree to deficit reduction talks afterward.

Out of play, for now, was the Republican-led House, where Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, told GOP lawmakers early Saturday that his talks with the president had ground to a halt.

Though the Senate was leading the search for a deal, the House and its fractious Republicans remained a possible headache in the coming week.

"At the end of the day, whatever they do still has to come through here," said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., who is close to House leaders.

Also sidelined, at least for now, was an effort by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, to assemble a bipartisan coalition for a plan to briefly fund the government and extend the $16.7 trillion debt limit, in exchange for steps like temporarily delaying the medical device tax that helps fund the health care law.

Democrats said Collins' plan curbed spending too tightly and Reid said it was going nowhere. Collins said she would continue seeking support for it.

Senate Republicans dealt Democrats an expected setback on Saturday by derailing a Democratic measure extending the debt limit through 2014 without any conditions. The vote was 53-45 to start debating the Democratic measure — seven short of the 60 votes needed to overcome GOP obstruction tactics.

___

AP Special Correspondent David Espo contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/senate-leads-hunt-shutdown-debt-limit-deal-084229391--politics.html
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A Company's Tweets Can Help Make It Creditworthy

Courtesy of Kabbage

Courtesy of Kabbage

For many online and other small businesses, getting a loan or a big cash advance is tough. Banks and other traditional lenders are often leery of those without years of financial statements and solid credit scores.

But some lenders and other financial services companies are beginning to assess credit risk differently — using criteria you might not expect.

Jeffrey Grossman is an acupuncturist in Bellingham, Wash. He's also a small businessman. He creates media marketing materials for other acupuncturists hoping to expand their practice.

Over the years, Grossman has borrowed money from family and from bank lines of credit, but recently, he needed a quick infusion of extra cash. He turned to a company called Kabbage, an online financing firm for small businesses.

He found the concept interesting, but the application also made him skeptical. "They wanted all this information about QuickBooks [accounting software] and UPS accounts and all this stuff," he says.

Such details, says Kathryn Petralia, a co-founder of Kabbage, allows the company to "effectively build a financial statement." The firm provides financing to small businesses — such as online merchants — that banks typically don't lend to. Petralia says Kabbage uses real-time and verifiable data from things like UPS shipments, eBay and PayPal accounts to assess creditworthiness.

"We can see historical data and current data, and we can see tomorrow's data. And we are looking at information that could be as detailed as what people are actually buying from you," Petralia says.

And she says that can be more useful than static financial documents that banks and other traditional lenders typically rely on.

“ Are customers saying that you are doing a good job? Are consumers complaining about you?

- Christine Pratt, financial services analyst

"If you see that the customer's business is changing over time — they're selling different products, they're changing their price points, transaction volume is going up or down — you get a lot more visibility and insight into that business than a pure financial statement's going to give you," Petralia says.

To be clear, small businesses that get money from Kabbage give the company permission to view their online accounts. Christine Pratt, a senior financial services analyst at Aite Group, says Kabbage's use of this real-time transaction data is smart. She also likes the fact that Kabbage looks at companies' social media pages.

"Are customers saying that you are doing a good job? Are consumers complaining about you?" Pratt says.

Kabbage looks at a small business' Twitter account and its Facebook page. The company knows the information there isn't foolproof but says it can add insight into how a company is relating to its customers — and at the margins it can be helpful.

"They use that information to be able to look ahead, to see whether or not your business not only is doing very well right now but can also sustain that business and grow," Pratt says.

She says the use of social and real-time data is growing. Some traditional lenders are starting to embrace it, and Amazon is quietly mining its own data to find retailers it wants to make loans to.

Back in Bellingham, Wash., Grossman, the small businessman, decided to take the plunge and gave Kabbage access to some of his online accounts.

"I think we were funded probably within like minutes," he says.

But he has words of caution to would-be borrowers: The company's fees can be steep.

"I don't want to say you're doing business with the devil, but sometimes when you're a small business, if the banks aren't able to give you the money and if you need some cash flow, you kind of have to bite the bullet and do it," he says.

Grossman was approved for up to $25,000 and says the funds he got have helped him grow his business and for that he remains grateful.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/10/14/234031395/a-companys-tweets-can-help-make-it-creditworthy?ft=1&f=
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Miner Gives $62M To West Australia Universities

PERTH, Australia (AP) — Mining magnate Andrew Forrest pledged on Tuesday to give 65 million Australian dollars ($62 million) to university education in his home state in one of Australia's largest philanthropic donations.

The chairman of iron ore miner Fortescue Metals Group said AU$50 million will be used to establish the Forrest Foundation to fund scholarships and postdoctoral fellowships at all five universities in Western Australia state.

Another AU$15 million will build a residence for rising star researchers called Forrest Hall at St. George's College at the University of Western Australia.

Forrest, a 52-year-old entrepreneur who graduated from the University of Western Australia in 1983 with an economics degree, said Australia needed to develop a higher-profile philanthropic culture.

"Let us all never forget that only education can be the final key to eliminate poverty in the world and raise the universal standard of living, ultimately to increase the nobility of the human cause," Forrest said in a statement.

Forrest and his wife Nicola are the first Australians to join "The Giving Pledge" movement founded by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett, the head of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. The pledge commits billionaires to donate most of their wealth to charity.

Anna Draffin, deputy chief executive officer of the charity umbrella group Philanthropy Australia, described the Forrest gift as the biggest ever philanthropic donation from an Australian.

Only Irish-American businessman and philanthropist Chuck Feeney has been more generous in Australia, donating AU$500 million toward mostly higher education and medical research projects.

Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=234468028&ft=1&f=
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SF Area transit strike averted _ at least for day

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A major San Francisco Bay area transit strike was averted for at least a day after two labor unions extended contract talks beyond a midnight deadline and agreed not to walk off the job Monday to allow more contract negotiations.

The deal announced late Sunday about an hour before Bay Area Rapid Transit workers were set to go on strike gives the two sides a chance to work out a labor contract and hundreds of thousands of commuters at least a temporary reprieve from scrambling to find alternative ways to get around.

But the unions warned that workers will go on strike at midnight Monday if an agreement isn't reached by then.

"We are not going to go on strike because the public deserves to have a riding system that works. We will give the (transit agency) one more day to get it together," said Antonette Bryant, leader of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555, one of the two unions in talks with BART.

The 11th hour announcement came after weekend-long talks to avert a second commute-crippling strike in less than three months.

BART workers went on strike for nearly five days in July and were set to do so again Friday when a cooling-off period ordered by Gov. Jerry Brown ended, but they agreed to negotiate through the weekend.

But the Bryant complained that BART presented a last, final offer Sunday afternoon just as the parties came close to reaching a full agreement.

The executive director of the other union involved in the talks, Service Employees International Union Local 1021, said the parties made progress on pay, pension and health care benefits but were still at odds on issues related to work rules.

BART General Manager Grace Crunican said the "last best and final offer" presented to the unions Sunday is $7 million higher than the one presented Friday and includes a raise of 3 percent a year. She said the unions have two weeks from Sunday to accept the deal before it is taken off the table.

"We are open to any ideas over those two weeks that they may have, we will try and keep that conversation open," she said in a statement. "It is time to bring this to a close. The Bay Area is tired of going to bed at night and not knowing if BART will be open or not."

Nearly 370,000 riders take BART every weekday, and its 104 miles of track make it the nation's fifth-largest commuter rail system.

In a sign of how seriously another shutdown is looming over the region, state lawmakers from the Bay Area and Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom dropped by the talks Sunday to encourage the two sides to reach a resolution.

Newsom, a former San Francisco mayor, told reporters he believed a deal was close.

"It would be preposterous for both sides at this stage when you're getting this close to put, at risk, your reputation and the economy of the entire region," he said.

Sticking points in the 6-month-old negotiations include salaries and workers' contributions to their health and pension plans. BART workers currently pay $92 a month for health care and contribute nothing toward their pensions — generous benefits BART management is seeking to curtail.

The unions, which represent 2,375 mechanics, custodians, station agents, train operators and clerical workers, want a raise of nearly 12 percent over three years, while BART has proposed a 10 percent increase over four years. Workers from the two unions now average about $71,000 in base salary and $11,000 in overtime annually, BART said.

Labor leaders were also pressing demands to make stations safer, such as better lighting in tunnels, bulletproof glass in agents' booths and improved restroom access.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/sf-area-transit-strike-averted-least-day-080017868--finance.html
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