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Hiển thị các bài đăng có nhãn Three. Hiển thị tất cả bài đăng

Thứ Tư, 1 tháng 5, 2013

Three suspects charged with helping marathon bomber hide tracks

Three new suspects have been charged in connection with the Boston Marathon bombing, two for conspiring to get rid of their friend's incriminating backpack filled with gutted fireworks after learning he was a suspect in the April 15 terror attack, and another for lying to investigators, according to an FBI affidavit released Wednesday.

Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakova both 19-year-old natives of Kazakhstan and friends of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev at UMass-Dartmouth, allegedly went to Tsarnaev's dorm and took a laptop, the backpack and some Vaseline that may have been used in making the deadly pressure cooker bombs that killed three and injured more than 200 at the race. Police believe the bombs were packed with shrapnel and gunpowder removed from fireworks.

Robel Phillipos, of Cambridge, Mass., also 19, was charged with willfully making materially false statements to federal law enforcement officials during a terrorism investigation.

The affidavit filed in support of a complaint said Kadyrbayev was the one who carried out the disposal of the backpack after the three saw the fireworks that had been hollowed out and emptied of gunpowder.

"Kadyrbayev knew when he saw the empty fireworks that Tsarnaev was involved in the Marathon bombing."

- FBI affidavit

"Kadyrbayev knew when he saw the empty fireworks that Tsarnaev was involved in the marathon bombing," the affidavit reads. "Kadyrbayev decided to remove the backpack from the room in order to help his friend Tsarnaev avoid trouble."

The three acted on April 18, three days after the bombing and hours after investigators aired surveillance footage identifying Tsarnaev and his older brother Tamerlan as the suspects in the bombing, though not by name, according to authorities. Phillipos first saw footage depicting Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the news Thursday, and told Kadyrbayev over the phone that he suspected their friend was the bomber. When Kadyrbayev later texted Tsarnaev and said he bore a resemblance to the subject of an intense manhunt, Tsarnaev allegedly sent back a chilling response: "Lol, You better not text me." He also texted Kadyrbayev to say, "Come to my room and take whatever you want," according to the affidavit.

The exchange came just before 9 p.m. on April 18, a few hours before the Tsarnaev brothers would carjack a Chinese immigrant, murder an MIT police officer and engage in a wild shootout with police through the streets of Cambridge and Watertown, police say. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died April 19, after a shootout hours after authorities showed the brothers on surveillance video and named them as suspects.

Although the three new suspects initially appear to have stonewalled authorities, Phillipos came clean in a fourth interview, conducted April 26. He confessed that the three took the backpack out of their friend's dorm room, according to the affidavit. Phillipos allegedly told investigators that the two others "started to freak out" after seeing Tsarnaev identified on television.

Robert Stahl, an attorney representing Kadyrbayev, said his client denies the allegations and added that Kadyrbayev assisted authorities in their investigation.

"He is just as shocked and horrified by the violence that took place in Boston as the rest of the community is," Stahl said. "He did not have anything to do with it."

Prior to the latest development, authorities had named only the brothers as suspects in the bombing at the finish line of the world-famous race.

Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov face maximum sentences of five years in prison and fines of $250,000. Phillipos, a U.S. citizen, faces a maximum sentence of eight years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Kadyrbayev's attorney, Robert Stahl, says his client will be transported to the federal courthouse later Wednesday to appear on new criminal charges. On Friday, Yerlan Kubashev with the Consulate General for Kazakhstan in New York confirmed in a statement to Fox News that the consulate is helping the young men with legal representation. Both Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov will plea not guilty, according to their attorneys. 

Kubashev said the two men are "shocked at the bombings," and "they express sorrow to the bombing victims and their families."

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, is in a prison hospital after being wounded in the shootout with police as he and his brother made their getaway attempt. He is charged with using a weapon of mass destruction to kill, a crime that carries a potential death sentence.

Authorities have searched the Rhode Island home of the parents of Katherine Russell, Tamerlan Tsarnaev's widow.

Click for more from MyFoxBoston.com

Fox News' Pamela Browne contributed to this report.


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Thứ Sáu, 22 tháng 3, 2013

ObamaCare turns three -- rhetoric vs. reality

Saturday marks ObamaCare’s third anniversary, and President Obama and Democrats across the country will surely celebrate its greatest achievement to date: survival.  The health care law narrowly survived a Supreme Court challenge, repeated attempts by House Republicans to repeal it and, with President Obama’s reelection, seems to be set for implementation next year.

But survival is a pretty low bar for the law, and far from the lofty claims made on its behalf.

In 2009, President Obama said that “it’s important for us to make sure that 46 million people who don’t have health insurance get it.  And I think it’s important for us to bend the curve, separate and apart from coverage issues, just because the system we have right now is unsustainable and hugely inefficient and uncompetitive.”  

On net, we found evidence that ObamaCare will do very little to slow U.S. health care spending, and may actually increase it.

The Obama administration’s claim that the law would rein in spending undoubtedly persuaded wavering Congressional Democrats to push it across the finish line.

In a new report from the Manhattan Institute, Rhetoric and Reality, my colleague Yevgeniy Feyman and I try to summarize the best evidence to date on the impact that the law is having on health care costs today – and whether or not it is likely to contain costs in the future.

Based on the best currently available data, we project that ObamaCare will increase, not decrease, U.S. health care spending.    

Certainly, the near term trends aren’t favorable for the law.  Since the passage of the law, household premiums for private insurance have increased by 11.3 percent, outpacing even the growth of medical inflation (6.8 percent). Last year, Congressional analysts also projected that employer-based family coverage will cost $20,000 by 2016, an increase of 27 percent over 2012 rates.  Looking a little further ahead, premiums are expected to rise steadily through 2021, except for a brief dip in 2014.

(The “dip” kicks in when ObamaCare’s exchange subsidies begin, transferring costs from individuals and families to taxpayers.  But shifting costs is not the same thing as containing costs.) 

In fact, a recent survey of insurance companies by the American Action Forum, a think tank, found that market reforms included in ObamaCare will spike health insurance premiums, particularly for younger and healthier people.  ObamaCare requires insurers to sell richer benefit packages, but the main cost increases come from new rules like rating bands, that limit the discounts insurers can offer to younger policyholders compared to older ones, and prohibit premium variations based on gender and health status. 

ObamaCare also includes new taxes on everything from insurance companies to prescription drugs, costs likely to be passed along to families and small businesses shopping for coverage.

ObamaCare didn’t invent America’s health care woes, and shouldn’t be blamed for the ones we already have. The U.S. already spends over $2 trillion on health care, approaching 18 percent of U.S. GDP.  And health care costs were rising much faster than income or GDP growth for decades before ObamaCare came along. 

But the point of the law was to fix the system – not add to its burdens.  The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) predicts that the law will add about $500 billion to U.S. spending between 2012 and 2021. 

To be fair, ObamaCare does contain several small pilot projects, all of them well meaning, designed to reform the supply or delivery of health care.  But existing pilot programs thus far have had mixed or disappointing results.  And some projects, like the widespread implementation of electronic health records, seem to have increased costs in some cases, by making it easier for providers to bill for additional services. 

Other experiments, like Medicare’s Accountable Care Organization (ACO) program, may also be cost increasing, by encouraging hospital consolidation that allows them to increase prices. 

One area where ObamaCare devotes far too little attention is reforming the demand for health care services.  For all of our talk about the crushing cost of American health care, on average, consumers only spend about 11 cents out of pocket for health care – the fifth lowest average among OECD countries.  And research suggests that when out of pocket spending is lower, health care spending increases because consumers are only paying a tiny fraction of the total bill.

By 2021, ObamaCare will push U.S. out of pocket spending even lower than it is today, to just over 9 percent. This may accelerate price increases by insulating the newly insured largely from the costs of the care they consume. 

Defenders of the law like to point out that CBO scores the law as reducing the deficit. But this is only because the law brings in more revenues (through taxes and penalties) than it spends over a ten year period. And recently, health care cost growth has slowed somewhat. But there is no reason to attribute the slowdown to ObamaCare, since its main provisions haven’t even kicked in.  And lower Medicare spending is largely (75 percent) attributable to lower drug spending in Medicare’s Part D benefit, which started in 2006.

On net, we found evidence that ObamaCare will do very little to slow U.S. health care spending, and may actually increase it.

While the Congressional debate has focused on repealing ObamaCare, a more politically palatable option may be reforming it by focusing on demand side reforms – like moving most non-poor Americans into higher deductible health plans paired with savings accounts and lowering subsidies on the exchanges (currently subsidies extend to families making up to $94,000 annually) to focus on low-income families, and building effective systems that allow consumers to easily compare the price and quality of health care options.

An anniversary is supposed to be the time for celebration. For ObamaCare, its third anniversary signifies how little the law has accomplished, and the enormous health care challenges still facing the country.

Paul Howard is Director and Senior Fellow at the Center for Medical Progress at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.


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Thứ Tư, 20 tháng 3, 2013

Three critical questions Obama needs to answer during his Israel trip

To say that the pundits have low expectations for President Obama’s trip to Israel and Jordan this week would be putting it mildly. Most expect a series of photo ops, but no serious progress on the three major issues: the Iran nuclear threat, the implosion of Syria, and the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

“It is hard for me to recall a less-anticipated trip to Israel by an American president,” noted Thomas L. Friedman in his recent column in the New York Times. “But there is a message in that empty bottle: Little is expected from this trip — not only because little is possible, but because, from a narrow U.S. point of view, little is necessary.”

The pundits are wrong. Much is at stake in the Mideast.

Actually, much is necessary. The president needs to “re-set” U.S.-Israeli relations in a positive way after a contentious relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the first term. But that is the just the beginning.

There are three critical questions the president needs to answer on this trip:

  1. Have diplomacy, sanctions and covert operations failed to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons?
  2. If so, will President Obama order airstrikes against Iran, or give Israel the “green light” to hit Iran’s nuclear sites since other measures have failed?
  3. If not, why not?

Unfortunately, the administration has sent mixed messages in recent days.

On March 4, Vice President Joe Biden told the AIPAC Policy Conference the president is committed to preventing Iran from getting the bomb, and pointedly noted that the “window is closing” for diplomacy and sanctions work.

“Let me make clear what that commitment is: It is to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon,” said Biden. “Period. End of discussion. Prevent — not contain —prevent….Big nations can’t bluff….And President Barack Obama is not bluffing.”

The next day, however, Secretary of State John Kerry sent different signals. He confirmed that Iran is getting closer to having nuclear weapons. He conceded that “lines have been drawn before and they've been passed. That's why the president has been so definitive this time.” But Kerry did not echo Biden’s hard line. Rather, he said the president wants to “avoid any consideration of any kind of military action.”

That same day, U.S. CENTCOM commander General James Mattis testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He was asked, “In your professional opinion, are the current diplomatic and economic efforts to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons capability -- are they working?” His answer was blunt. “No, sir.” Then he said he was working on “other options” for the President.

Last week, President Obama was interviewed by Israel’s Channel 2. He said there is still “a year or so” until Iran builds an operational nuclear bomb. 

That confused the picture even more. 

Was the president indicating time is running out and that military action might need to be taken soon, or that there is still plenty of time to keep trying diplomacy and sanctions?

Mr. Netanyahu famously told the U.N. General Assembly last fall that the “red line” – the point at which Israel would be forced to launch preemptive strikes or risk allowing Tehran to get The Bomb – would be reached by spring or summer 2014. Today, senior Israeli officials confirm the red line is approaching.

“Iran’s nuclear program is advancing slower then they planned, but it is moving,” says Major General Aviv Kochavi, director of Israeli military intelligence. “At their current pace of enrichment of 14 kilograms of uranium per month, Iran would be able to manufacture five to six nuclear bombs, if the order is given.”

The problem, noted Kochavi, is that the military option that world leaders say is “on the table” is not being taken seriously by Tehran. “Iran does not see a high likelihood of an attack on its nuclear facilities by the international community,” he noted at a recent security conference in Israel.

Netanyahu is ready to launch a massive preemptive military strike soon, and alone, if need be. His new government is now in place. This includes new Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, a former chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces. 

Neither man wants war. They are looking for peaceful paths, and they would prefer the U.S. lead decisively. But both are unsure if they can trust the American president, and both need clarity from Washington they have not yet received.

The pundits are wrong. Much is at stake in the Mideast. Thus, much is needed from President Obama on this week’s trip -- clear answers on three critical questions, most of all.

Joel C. Rosenberg, a former aide to Prime Minister Netanyahu, is the best-selling author of novels and non-fiction books about the Middle East. His latest thriller, Damascus Countdown, will debut at #7 on the New York Times best-seller list for hardcover fiction.


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