Little League In Uganda

Little League says Ugandan team denied U.S. visas

(AP) A youth baseball team from Uganda that would have been the first squad from Africa to play at the Little League World Series has been denied visas to enter the United States.

The U.S. Department of State declined to give a reason for the decision, other than to say that the team's documentation "contained discrepancies," officials at Little League headquarters in South Williamsport, Pa., said Friday in a statement.

"It is unfortunate, as we were very much looking forward to welcoming the first African team to the Little League Baseball World Series," league president Stephen Keener said. "However, we have worked very closely with our State Department in recent years, and we very much appreciate their diligence in this matter."

Little League vice president Patrick Wilson said the State Department cited privacy concerns in declining to release more details.

"We knew their documents were under review … but it's been a couple days of back and forth" before the decision was confirmed Friday, Wilson told The Associated Press in a phone interview. Wilson said the decision was considered final.

The Rev. John Foundation Little League team from Kampala won the Middle East and Africa region tournament, which was played in Poland, with a 6-4 win July 16 over the Arabian American Little League team from Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

It was the first time in the 65-year history of the World Series that a team from Africa had advanced that far.

The World Series is for children ages 11 to 13. The Saudi Arabian team had been a mainstay, qualifying 17 times since 1991.

That squad was comprised primarily of children of U.S. citizens who worked overseas. In contrast, the Ugandan team was made up of children who lived in villages outside Kampala and attended the foundation-based school.

The first local Little League in Uganda was chartered in 2005, while the Rev. John Foundation team played its first regional tournament in 2008.

Little League now must now decide how to proceed with the World Series, which begins Aug. 18 in South Williamsport and ends Aug. 28.

Wilson said tournament organizers would meet in the next few days in hopes of making a decision within a week. Sixteen teams qualify for the World Series, eight in the U.S. bracket and eight from the international bracket.

"Ideally, we'd like to have a 16-team field," Wilson said.

According to Little League officials, the last time a team that qualified could not make the trip was 1959, when a squad from then-West Germany composed of dependents of U.S. Army personnel didn't have enough money to travel. At the time, just eight teams qualified for the tournament, and the 1959 series was played with just seven squads.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2011-07-29-uganda-little-league-world-series_n.htm

Hacked In Ohio

Forget Anonymous: Evidence Suggests GOP Hacked, Stole 2004 Election

By John Thorpe

Created 07/21/2011 - 1:07pm

Posted on 07/21/11 at 1:07pm by John Thorpe [1]

Three generations from now, when our great-grandchildren are sitting barefoot in their shanties and wondering how in the hell America turned from the high-point of civilization to a third-world banana republic, they will shake their fists and mutter one name: George Effin' Bush.

Ironically, it won't be for any of the things that liberals have been harping on the Bush Administration, either during or after his term in office. Sure, misguided tax cuts that destroyed the surplus, and lax regulations that doomed the economy, and two amazingly awful wars in deserts half a world away are all terrible, empire-sapping events. But they pale in comparison to what it appears the Republican Party did to get President Bush re-elected in 2004.

"A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush," according to Bob Fitrakis, columnist at http://www.freepress.org [2] and co-counsel in the litigation and investigation.

If you recall, Ohio was the battleground state that provided George Bush with the electoral votes needed to win re-election. Had Senator John Kerry won Ohio's electoral votes, he would have been elected instead.

Evidence from the filing suggests that Republican operatives — including the private computer firms hired to manage the electronic voting data — were compromised.

Fitrakis isn't the only attorney involved in pursuing the truth in this matter. Cliff Arnebeck, the lead attorney in the King Lincoln case, exchanged emails with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore. He asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the capability to "input data" and thus alter the results of Ohio's 2004 election. His response sent a chill up my spine.

"Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not," Spoonamore said. In case that seems a bit too technical and "big deal" for you, consider what he was saying. SmarTech, a private company, had the ability in the 2004 election to add or subtract votes without anyone knowing they did so.

The filing today shows how, detailing the computer network system's design structure, including a map of how the data moved from one unit to the next. Right smack in the middle of that structure? Inexplicably, it was SmarTech.

Spoonamore (keep in mind, he is the IT expert here) concluded from the architectural maps of the Ohio 2004 election reporting system that, "SmarTech was a man in the middle. In my opinion they were not designed as a mirror, they were designed specifically to be a man in the middle."

A "man in the middle" is not just an accidental happenstance of computing. It is a deliberate computer hacking setup, one where the hacker sits, literally, in the middle of the communication stream, intercepting and (when desired, as in this case) altering the data. It's how hackers swipe your credit card number or other banking information. This is bad.

A mirror site, which SmarTech was allegedly supposed to be, is simply a backup site on the chance that the main configuration crashes. Mirrors are a good thing.

Until now, the architectural maps and contracts from the Ohio 2004 election were never made public, which may indicate that the entire system was designed for fraud. In a previous sworn affidavit to the court, Spoonamore declared: "The SmarTech system was set up precisely as a King Pin computer used in criminal acts against banking or credit card processes and had the needed level of access to both county tabulators and Secretary of State computers to allow whoever was running SmarTech computers to decide the output of the county tabulators under its control."

Spoonamore also swore that "...the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen. The computer system and SmarTech had the correct placement, connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the election in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmarTech computers."

SmarTech was part of three computer companies brought in to manage the elections process for Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, a Republican. The other two were Triad and GovTech Solutions. All three companies have extensive ties to the Republican party and Republican causes.

In fact, GovTech was run by Mike Connell, who was a fiercely religious conservative who got involved in politics to push a right-wing social agenda. He was Karl Rove's IT go-to guy, and was alleged to be the IT brains behind the series of stolen elections between 2000 and 2004.

Connell was outed as the one who stole the 2004 election by Spoonamore, who, despite being a conservative Republican himself, came forward to blow the whistle on the stolen election scandal. Connell gave a deposition on the matter, but stonewalled. After the deposition, and fearing perjury/obstruction charges for withholding information, Connell expressed an interest in testifying further as to the extent of the scandal.

"He made it known to the lawyers, he made it known to reporter Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story, that he wanted to talk. He was scared. He wanted to talk. And I say that he had pretty good reason to be scared," said Mark Crispin Miller, who wrote a book on the scandal.

Connell was so scared for his security that he asked for protection from the attorney general, then Attorney General Michael Mukasey. Connell told close friends that he was expecting to get thrown under the bus by the Rove team, because Connell had evidence linking the GOP operative to the scandal and the stolen election, including knowledge of where Rove's missing emails disappeared to.

Before he could testify, Connell died in a plane crash.

Harvey Wasserman, who wrote a book on the stolen 2004 election, explained that the combination of computer hacking, ballot destruction, and the discrepancy between exit polling (which showed a big Kerry win in Ohio) and the "real" vote tabulation, all point to one answer: the Republicans stole the 2004 election.

"The 2004 election was stolen. There is absolutely no doubt about it. A 6.7% shift in exit polls does not happen by chance. And, you know, so finally, we have irrefutable confirmation that what we were saying was true and that every piece of the puzzle in the Ohio 2004 election was flawed," Wasserman said.

Mark Crispin Miller also wrote a book on the subject of stolen elections, and focused on the 2004 Ohio presidential election. Here is what he had to say about it.

There were three phases of chicanery. First, there was a pre-election period, during which the Secretary of State in Ohio, Ken Blackwell, was also co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio, which is in itself mind-boggling, engaged in all sorts of bureaucratic and legal tricks to cut down on the number of people who could register, to limit the usability of provisional ballots. It was really a kind of classic case of using the letter of the law or the seeming letter of the law just to disenfranchise as many people as possible.

On Election Day, there was clearly a systematic undersupply of working voting machines in Democratic areas, primarily inner city and student towns, you know, college towns. And the Conyers people found that in some of the most undersupplied places, there were scores of perfectly good voting machines held back and kept in warehouses, you know, and there are many similar stories to this. And other things happened that day.

After Election Day, there is explicit evidence that a company called Triad, which manufactures all of the tabulators, the vote-counting tabulators that were used in Ohio in the last election, was systematically going around from county to county in Ohio and subverting the recount, which was court ordered and which never did take place. The Republicans will say to this day, 'There was a recount in Ohio, and we won that.' That's a lie, one of many, many staggering lies. There was never a recount.

And now, it seems, there never will be.

For more information, see the second in our series of articles about elections and scandals, here. [3]

You can reach the author by email john@benzinga.com or on twitter @johndthorpe.

http://www.benzinga.com/news/11/07/1789905/forget-anonymous-evidence-suggests-gop-hacked-stole-2004-election

Lots Of Herb - More Than A Ton Load

Army finds Mexico's biggest marijuana plantation

By ADRIANA GOMEZ LICON - Associated Press | AP – 14 hrs ago

TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) — Mexican soldiers have found the largest marijuana plantation ever detected in Mexico, a huge field covering almost 300 acres (120 hectares), the Defense Department said Thursday.

The plantation is four times larger than the previous record discovery by authorities at a ranch in northern Chihuahua state in 1984.

The pot plants sheltered under black screen-cloth in a huge square on the floor of the Baja California desert, more than 150 miles (250 kilometers) south of Tijuana, across the border from San Diego.

Army Gen. Alfonso Duarte said the screening, which is often used by regular farmers to protect crops from too much sun or heat, made it difficult to detect from the air what was growing underneath.

It was only when soldiers on the ground reached the isolated area Tuesday that they found thousands of pot plants as high as 2.5 yards (meters) tall. The average height of the plants was about 1.5 yards (meters). Duarte said they were not yet ready for harvest.

"We estimate that in this area, approximately 60 people were working. When they saw the military personnel, they fled," Duarte told reporters. A few were later reportedly detained at a nearby roadblock, but Duarte said no arrests were made at the scene.

He said traffickers could have harvested about 120 tons of marijuana from the plantation, worth about 1.8 billion pesos (about $160 million).

Video of the plantation showed a sophisticated system of piped-in irrigation to support the plants, which Duarte said was fed by two wells. The plantation also included some wooden outbuildings, presumably for use by people caring for the plants.

Troops will destroy the fields by burning them, Duarte said.

The site is the near the coastal town of San Quintin. Journalists were en route there Thursday under army escort.

While it's unknown how much of Mexican drug cartels' income comes from marijuana, recent discoveries suggest it remains a large-scale trade.

Last October, Mexican authorities made their largest-ever seizure of marijuana packaged for sale, a record 148 tons (134 metric tons) found in a number of tractor trailers and houses in Tijuana. They appeared to make up a major distribution center traced directly to Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, Mexico's most-wanted fugitive, who has expanded the reach of his Sinaloa cartel along the U.S.-Mexico border since escaping from prison in 2001.

In November, U.S. and Mexican investigators found two long, sophisticated tunnels under the border between Baja California and California, along with more than 40 tons of marijuana in and around the tunnels.

The tunnels ran about 2,000 feet from Mexico to San Diego and were equipped with lighting, ventilation and a rail system for drugs to be carried on a small cart.

U.S. officials say they believe the tunnels also were the work of the Sinaloa cartel.

While the Arellano Felix or Tijuana cartel long dominated the drug trade in Baja California, the cartel has been greatly weakened by government hits on its leadership, and authorities say there are signs that the Sinaloa cartel now also operates in the area.

Duarte said he did not know which group operated the plantation found Tuesday.

___

Associated Press writers Mariana Martinez and Mark Stevenson contributed to this report

http://news.yahoo.com/army-finds-mexicos-biggest-marijuana-plantation-192837972.html

Music Heals

Music provides healing grace note for hospital patients

Updated 6/17/2008 2:09 PM

By Lisa Gill, Special for USA TODAY

Kristen Stewart holds a round, wooden instrument filled with small, metal beads that sounds like waves gently crashing upon a beach. As she rotates it back and forth, Angelina and Audrianna Liew yawn, flutter their eyes and occasionally drift off to sleep.

Any other musician might take offense, but this is exactly the reaction Stewart was hoping for.

Born seven weeks premature, the identical twins have spent 20 days in the neonatal intensive care unit at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York. Like most ICUs, with the racket of beeping monitors and buzzing devices, along with the chatter among visitors and staff, the room is anything but a sanctuary for rest.

But for these infants, sleep is crucial to their growth and development.

As a clinical director and music therapist at Beth Israel's Louis and Lucille Armstrong Music Therapy Program, Stewart specializes in working with premature babies, children and patients with trauma — in this case, showing parents Rick Mei and Shan Liew how to use instruments that mimic heartbeats and womb sounds, as well as their own voices, to comfort their newborns. The goal on this day: to encourage the babies to sleep, become calm and alert, and prepare for feeding.

The twins would go on to spend several more days in the ICU before heading home. Music therapy played a role in their recovery, their mother says.

Beth Israel's program is one of many efforts by hospitals around the country to use music as a way to ease patients' pain, lower blood pressure, reduce anxiety and depression and improve coping abilities to get patients well, faster.

In harmony with healing

"Often, music therapy is more cost-effective than administering medication, especially for patients with anxiety, sleep disturbances or pain," says Al Bumanis, spokesman for the American Music Therapy Association.

A 2007 survey of U.S. health facilities by the Society for the Arts in Healthcare, along with the Joint Commission and Americans for the Arts, found that of the 1,923 facilities, 35% offered some type of music to patients.

Besides promoting relaxation and reducing stress, music therapy has been shown to affect sleep patterns, improve stroke patients' memories and decrease the amount of sedation medication needed for some patients.

Claudius Conrad, senior surgical resident at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, led a study published in December in the journal Critical Care Medicine that attempted to identify changes the body undergoes while listening to music.

The study looked at patients in the ICU who were on mechanical breathing machines. The group that was exposed to Mozart piano sonatas experienced marked decreases in stress hormones and in cytokines — one of the chemicals responsible for regulating the body's response to trauma.

There was also a substantial increase in the production of growth hormones, which helps the body regulate metabolism, particularly during sleep. The result was a reduction in blood pressure, lowered heart rate and less need for medication to keep patients sedated, compared with the control group, Conrad says.

"If patients could be exposed to music in the ICU … they would survive more often, they would leave the ICU faster," he says. "This would also save costs."

From preemies to stroke victims

Other recent studies have further confirmed the benefits of music on healing.

• Patients admitted to a hospital in Helsinki, Finland, after a severe stroke listened to recorded music for at least an hour daily. Compared with those who either listened to audiobooks or nothing, music patients recovered their verbal memory faster, as well as experienced less depression, according to a study in the March issue of the journal Brain.

• Playing two hours of recorded Mozart each week to premature babies lowered their heart rate and helped induce sleep, according to researchers at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York. That study has not yet been submitted for publication in a medical journal.

• Terminally ill patients in Australia who had a single music therapy session were found to have less anxiety, pain and drowsiness compared with those who did not listen to music, according to a study published in the May Journal of Palliative Medicine.

Not all studies are in concert about music's therapeutic benefits. In a 2004 Cochrane Databaseof Systemic Reviews, researchers evaluating 51 studies found that while music reduced patients' perceptions of pain and the need for pain medication, the total benefit was minor.

But try telling that to Kim Febres, a music therapist at the Carol G. Simon Cancer Center at Morristown (N.J.) Memorial Hospital. As Febres strums and sings the first few notes of a popular tune about Naples, Rosa Dotro, 71, an Italian immigrant who has stomach cancer, pushes aside her dinner, wipes the tears streaking her cheeks and sings along in a high, clear voice along, "Saaaanta Lucia! Santa Lucia!"

When they finish, Dotro tells Febres she is worried about having surgery and asks to hear the song again.

"Sing!" Dotro orders. "You can do this all night if you want. I feel better already."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-06-16-music-healing_N.htm