Category: O’ahu

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State, Military Investigate Freeway Crash

State, Military Investigate Freeway Crash

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by Minna Sugimoto

HONOLULU (KHNL) — Both the state and military are investigating the freeway crash, which severed the main traffic artery linking downtown Honolulu to Leeward and Central Oahu.

A freeway fiasco.

“It’s going to be a huge bill,” Scott Ishikawa, state Department of Transportation, said.

State officials expect the cost of the demolition alone to run into the tens of thousands of dollars.

“Usually where there’s an accident damaging state property, we do try to go after the person who was at fault,” Ishikawa said.

After crippling thousands of drivers, and leaving Aiea with half a bridge, the military says it’s sorry. In a written statement, an army spokesperson said, “We offer our regrets and apologies to all the residents of Oahu who were inconvenienced by this accident.”

That might not be enough. Witnesses reported seeing the Army excavator clipping other overhead signs and lighting fixtures before the final hit.

“We did take a look out there from the Pearl Harbor base out to Aiea,” Ishikawa said. “We did notice four overhead signs that were damaged.”

What’s more, it appears the military truck and excavator should never have been on the H-1 to begin with.

“We did check our permits record,” Ishikawa said. “We can not find a permit issued to them to haul that type of equipment.”

During the demolition, some frustrated west-bound drivers wondered why the wide-open east-bound side couldn’t spare a few lanes.

“To have a contra-flow on a freeway, you really need to put some kind of protective barrier like the zipper lane,” Ishikawa said. “You can not put orange cones and hope that people will not, you know, not get into head-on collisions. That’s just, that’s just an accident waiting to happen.”

Transportation officials say part of the permitting process involves recommending which route an oversized vehicle should take.

The state is still deciding whether to rebuild the Aiea walkway, or take it down completely.

Source: http://www.khnl.com/global/story.asp?S=5375559

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Military trailer rig smashes into overpass, snarls traffic for hours

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JAMM AQUINO / JAQUINO@STARBULLETIN.COM
Motorists were still snarled in heavy traffic late last night on the H-1 freeway near Middle Street in Kalihi.

STUCK

» A structural accident on an H-1 overpass snarls traffic for hours
» Officials are unsure if westbound lanes will reopen this afternoon

By Mary Adamski
madamski@starbulletin.com

Work at the site of a bizarre accident that reduced westbound H-1 freeway traffic to a crawl yesterday will affect eastbound freeway traffic today as crews work to demolish a damaged Aiea overpass.

Eastbound commuters will have five instead of six lanes through Pearl City because the Zipper Lane will not be activated.

State officials could not predict last night whether the westbound lanes would be reopened in time for afternoon commuters today.

State officials decided that it would be unsafe to allow the overpass to remain because the vertical support beam was damaged so severely in the 1:30 p.m. crash by a military vehicle.

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FL MORRIS / FMORRIS@STARBULLETIN.COM
Above, a military truck trailer rig, transporting a hydraulic excavator westbound on the H-1 freeway at Aiea, hit and damaged the Aiea Pedestrian Overpass. The westbound side of the freeway was closed causing rush-hour traffic to back up.

Motorists were stuck in stalled traffic for hours as westbound vehicles were diverted from Moanalua Freeway and the H-1 near Halawa.

Mililani resident Rob Green said people left their cars and walked on the freeway as traffic froze in a gridlock on the H-1 viaduct passing Honolulu Airport.

“I saw people walking across the Zipper Lane to get to Koko Head-bound lanes,” Green said.

Green boarded TheBus in Honolulu heading home to Mililani at 4:05 p.m. and reported arriving there just before 9 p.m.

He said the bus driver made a merciful pit stop when they finally reached Aiea after four hours on the H-1 viaduct.

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Most of the people on the packed bus went into the bushes in a grassy area near the Navy Personnel Support facility to relieve themselves.

“The people on the bus, we’re all old friends now,” said Green.

“Several of us finished our books. It’s good to get home.”

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FL MORRIS / FMORRIS@STARBULLETIN.COM
A military truck trailer rig, foreground, that was transporting a hydraulic excavator westbound on the H-1 Freeway hit and damaged the Aiea Pedestrian Overpass with state officials underneath assessing the damage. Work was continuing around the clock to remove the damaged section and reopen the freeway.

Motorists were channeled on a three-mile detour through Aiea on Kamehameha Highway and Moanalua Road before returning to the H-1 at Waiau onramp.

Police said the traffic backlog extended into town and continued late into the night.

Hawaiian Dredging Construction Co. crews worked overnight to bring down the mauka portion of the pedestrian overpass near Kaamilo Road.

State Department of Transportation spokesman Scott Ishikawa said engineers today will assess whether the makai portion over eastbound lanes will need to be brought down, too. It is a separate structure from the portion spanning six westbound lanes, he said.

The structure was severely damaged when it was struck by a hydraulic excavator being carried aboard a military truck. The excavator rode so high that it did not clear the 16-foot, 9-inch height.

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DAVID CROXFORD / SPECIAL TO THE STAR-BULLETIN
An Army mechanic inspected damage to the excavator being moved by an Army transporter that struck the pedestrian overpass and showered concrete onto the H-1 freeway.

“Not only the concrete was damaged, but some strands of cable within the concrete were snapped,” Ishikawa said. “The cable is the strength of the structure.” The overpass carried traffic from Olopana Street near Aiea High School.

Police and the Army are investigating the circumstances of the crash. A Schofield Barracks spokesman said last night that it was an Army vehicle but officials had not determined whether it was from the 25th Infantry Division, the Hawaii National Guard or some other unit.

A Pearl City police spokes-woman said uniformed officers were called in early and plainclothes officers were assigned to help keep traffic moving through intersections on Kamehameha Highway and Moanalua Road.

Source: http://archives.starbulletin.com/2006/09/06/news/story01.html

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Snakes on a Plane

Snakes on a plane

Frogs in your plants. Invasive species will find a way. But while Hawai’i bungles the job, New Zealand gets serious.

Joan Conrow
Aug 23, 2006

Hawai’i’s airports and harbors are ticking time bombs-and we’re not talking about the kind that do predictable stuff, like blow up, maim, destroy.

No, this catastrophe in the making is not so simple as that. For one thing, the threats are multi-faceted, and guaranteed to strike without warning, singly or en masse. The lethal agents are tiny-easily disguised and transported, but not so easily detected, hiding in seemingly innocuous places: the standing water on container ships and bilges of luxury liners; the potted plants and bareroot trees of the nursery trade; the landing gear of military planes and cabins of passenger jets; the pallets and parcels bearing everything from everyplace to this remotest spot on Earth.

Like the terrorists our government is constantly warning us about, and fighting in all manner of grisly, desperate ways, they lurk, waiting to invade, with dire consequences and no forewarning. It is these weird viruses, malarial mosquitoes, biting flies, fire ants, poisonous weeds, snakes, funguses, rusts, scales and molds that could quickly plunge this paradise of the Pacific into a living hell.

Welcome to the brave new world of biosecurity. It looks beyond the homeland to the far more critical biosphere, which does, after all, provide the services needed to support life on the planet.

Paula Warren is an expert on the subject, and when she’s not at her home in Wellington, on the South Island of New Zealand, she’s traveling the world advising countries on how they can do biosecurity better. She recently spent two weeks in Hawai’i, at the invitation of the Hawaii Conservation Alliance and met the folks charged with keeping the bio-baddies at bay.

‘The advantage of being an outsider is I can say things perhaps they would be reluctant to say,’ said Warren, principal policy analyst for New Zealand’s Dept. of Conservation, the central government agency responsible for protected areas and species. ‘But doing something about it, that has to come from inside. I struggle to understand American politics and bureaucracy.’

Although Warren is aware of the differences between the New Zealand biosecurity system, which is close to the ideal, and the American system, which is not, there’s no trace of smugness in her observations, which she offered in the cheerful, polite, understated Kiwi way.

‘There is room for improvement,’ she began.

How much room?

‘A lot of the elements of a good biosecurity system are here, but they’re fragmented across lots of different agencies.’

Well, Hawai’i catches about 1 percent of the stuff it’s trying to keep out. New Zealand, on the other hand, nails 95 percent. Even Chile and the Galapagos Islands are more vigilant than the Aloha State.

‘A lot of the elements of a good biosecurity system are here, but they’re fragmented across lots of different agencies,’ Warren explained. ‘Whether it’s fixable or not is another question. But I’m certainly not getting the sense that it’s hopeless.’

The problem isn’t lazy or uncaring workers. ‘What I’m finding among the people who work on this is a high desire to cooperate more effectively and a willingness to find ways to work outside their existing mandate,’ Warren said. ‘Within each agency, I found lots of enthusiastic people basically making the best of a bad situation, dealing with a lack of resources, legal authority, technology.’

Nor is it insufficient funding. ‘Overall, Hawai’i is probably spending enough on biosecurity,’ she said. ‘But it’s not being spent in the right places. It’s just being spent reactively.’

For instance, $50 million is spent each year on termite damage and control. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if that money was used on prevention or eradication?’ she asked. ‘Instead, it’s used on suffering the consequences.’

Warren also noticed a lot of no-brainer prevention measures are missing in the Islands, although she is far too professional to use such a term. Instead, she provided a compelling example: Because New Zealand wants to keep out malaria, which is carried by mosquitoes, ‘You can’t bring in wet things, like tires, and standing water can’t enter.’ Hawai’i, on the other hand, has no such rules.

Nor can you deliberately import anything into New Zealand that will displace native species. That’s a concept that has yet to take hold in Hawai’i, where many conservationists consider invasive species the number one environmental threat, contributing to the state’s dubious distinction as the world’s endangered species capitol. Apparently the Southern Hemisphere has affected the Kiwis’ way of doing things, which seems the exact opposite of the Northern Hemisphere American approach.

In New Zealand, conservation groups ‘are essentially piggybacking’ on strict environmental protection efforts driven by business, tourism and agricultural interests, as well as the health ministry, because they recognize that alien pests and diseases are a drain on the nation’s economy. ‘In the end, it’s the economic groups in New Zealand that have created the biosecurity system,’ she said.

By comparison-and these are not Warren’s observations-U.S. environmental policy is largely determined by special interest groups, enforced through lawsuits brought by conservationists, then undermined by anti-green political appointees in regulatory agencies.

‘Litigation is not a big part of the New Zealand mentality,’ Warren said. ‘What the public does is encourage the agencies to do something, pressure them to take steps to change or review the system. There’s very strong scrutiny of what the agencies are doing.’

The military, too, plays a very different role in New Zealand, where it assists with marine mammal surveys, fisheries enforcement and invasive weed control, rather than seeking exemptions to national environmental laws, as the U.S. military is wont to do.

‘That does seem to be an issue here,’ Warren observed. ‘Pearl Harbor is the dirtiest piece of water in the state when it comes to invasive species.’ New Zealand’s armed forces, on the other hand, are required to abide by all environmental laws.

‘The military can be a positive as well as a negative,’ she noted. ‘It’s a matter of accepting that biosecurity is as large an issue to public safety as terrorism, and I don’t think your government understands that.’

‘Overall, Hawai’i is probably spending enough on biosecurity. But it’s not being spent in the right places. It’s just being spent reactively.’

Personally, Warren doesn’t see much difference in dying from a suicide bomb blast or malarial mosquito bite. ‘In the end, if you’re dead, you’re dead.’

Warren was surprised to discover in Hawai’i ‘there’s no way to stop the military from transporting things across the state because they are bound by federal, not state, laws.’

Those turf battles aren’t waged in New Zealand, which has a central system of government. Its Biosecurity Ministry oversees everything related to health, conservation, agriculture and biological resources, Warren explained. ‘And then there are a number of coordinating mechanisms to make sure they’re acting on behalf of everyone.’

Salvinia molesta once filled Lake Wilson. In 2003, it took the state a month to remove the invasive plant from the body of water.

The next layer of authority lies at the regional level, which deals with localized pests, individual landowners and private farms. ‘Under our system, it’s quite clear to see who is accountable for what,’ she said.

Standing in stark contrast is Hawai’i’s system, which Warren characterized as ‘fragmented and poorly coordinated.’ She added, ‘Frequently, agencies aren’t able to easily get together and decide how to handle pests.’

In New Zealand, the course of action is clear. ‘We get something in, we eradicate it. If eradication is not feasible, we try to contain, then control it, to protect other parts of the system. ‘

And New Zealand workers have the authority to carry out their plan of attack, she said. They can confiscate goods, force persons to assist their efforts, prevent vehicle movement and go on private land to deal with a biosecurity threat.

‘We have our own frustrations, but the sense we’re moving forward is much stronger,’ Warren observed. ‘In New Zealand, the momentum is within the system. In Hawai’i, it’s mostly built by individuals working against the system to get around the problems. So you lose it if that person changes jobs, or retires.’

That’s a concern to Warren, who said, ‘A lot of the people I’ve been talking to in Hawai’i are not that young. It’s time to be identifying and mentoring the future leaders. It’s a risk that new enthusiastic people will give up because they get sick of dealing with the bureaucracy. And you can’t really afford to have that happen when [you] have a system that’s very dependent on people, rather than processes.’

While in the Islands, Warren met with more than a dozen groups and agencies involved in conservation, inspection and quarantine work-the federal and state departments of agriculture, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, state Department of Land and Natural Resources, Maui County environmental services office, The Nature Conservancy and Bishop Museum among them- and still barely scratched the surface.

‘There are so many issues that more people are getting involved, which in a way is good,’ Warren noted. ‘But the problem is, now there are more and more agencies working in this fragmented jigsaw model.

‘It’s a matter of accepting that biosecurity is as large an issue to public safety as terrorism, and I don’t think your government understands that.’

‘There doesn’t seem to be the ability to look at the big picture and see what needs to be done,’ which is where Warren, with her expertise and outsider status, comes in.

So what is Warren’s prescription for bringing Hawai’i’s ailing biosecurity system into some semblance of good health?

‘I’m going to be making some recommendations on improvement, but at a fairly general level because I don’t understand the finer points of your system,’ she said. ‘And I also think there’s some very good things here that need to be cherished and expanded on.’
Coqui frog

Warren gave high marks to the state’s invasive species committee program, which has task forces on each island coordinating with various groups and agencies to prioritize and then eradicate targeted invasive species.

‘And everyone recognizes interisland quarantine is needed,’ she added.

That leads to another sticky issue, the so-called Superferry, which is expected to increase the movement of goods and vehicles between islands. The company’s plan for handling inspections has not been fully disclosed, and Warren said it appears there’s inadequate space for an inspection system at the crowded harbors where the ferries will dock.

She also noted that New Zealand still has not resolved all the inspection and quarantine issues associated with its own rail ferry system, which allows railroad cars, as well as people and motor vehicles, to pass freely between the North and South Islands.

Still, Warren pointed out, Maui has done a good job of keeping out pests at its expanded airport, even though many people were worried that direct overseas flights would bring more alien species to the island. ‘The example at Maui shows you can do something if you put your mind to it.’

Overall, Warren said, ‘the basic elements of the system are sitting there, waiting to be plugged in, and there’s a lot of enthusiasm among individuals. I truly think the system will improve because people want it to.

‘But there’s a real risk of lots of serious losses in the meantime,’ she warned. ‘Often it’s the major losses that make people say, ‘oh my God, we’ve got to do something.’ But by that time, unfortunately, it’s often too late.’

Source: http://honoluluweekly.com/cover/2006/08/snakes-on-a-plane-2/

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Waianae compost plan hits turbulence

StarBulletin.com

Vol. 11, Issue 229 – Thursday, August 17, 2006

Waianae compost plan hits turbulence

The firm faces a chicken-and-egg dilemma

By Diana Leone
dleone@starbulletin.com

An Oahu company wants to turn household garbage into compost in Nanakuli but faces opposition from Waianae residents, skepticism from city officials and questions from state health officials.

Bedminster Oahu LLC says its proposed $20 million indoor facility would convert 100,000 tons a year of garbage into 58,000 tons of compost via its patented “mechanical biological treatment” without smelling up the rural neighborhood.

After recycling nonorganic materials, the venture would send about one-tenth of the original trash volume to a landfill, Bedminster International Vice President John Grondin said.

And it would charge trash haulers less than the $91 tipping fee at the city’s Waimanalo Gulch Landfill on the Waianae Coast, he said.

But area residents oppose increased truck traffic on Lualualei Naval Road and Farrington Highway, and worry that nearby farmers will not be able to sell their crops because of possible airborne contamination, said Cynthia Rezentes, a Waianae Neighborhood Board member and candidate for the state House.

Residents have protested that the city Department of Planning and Permitting improperly approved the facility as being an appropriate use of industrial-zoned land. That protest will be heard by the city Board of Zoning Appeals on Dec. 14.

“We’re questioning them using the agriculture definition of ‘major composting’ (to describe the Bedminster process) instead of waste disposal,” Rezentes said.

Bedminster Oahu is a joint venture between Georgette and Joaquin Silva, owners of the trucking company Pine Ridge Farms, and Bedminster International, which operates similar facilities on the mainland, in Australia and in Japan.

Pine Ridge Farms bought the former Hawaii and Kaiser cement plant on Lualualei Naval Road last year as a 25-acre base yard for its trucking company and a site for concrete and asphalt recycling, said Georgette Silva, Bedminster Oahu business manager.

There are 14 Bedminster plants in operation and six, including Honolulu, in planning or permitting stages, Grondin said.

Bedminster’s application for a solid-waste processing permit is under review by the state Health Department. If it gets an OK, then the company will have to persuade the city to let it have some garbage.

That is an iffy proposition any time before next May, said Eric Takamura, director of the city Department of Environmental Services. That is when a consultant is to hand over a 25-year solid-waste management plan that City Council has been requesting since the Harris administration.

Until then the city will not allow any trash haulers to commit to a private venture, because the city might need the “trash flow” to feed a waste-to-energy plant, Takamura said.

It is a chicken-and-egg scenario for Bedminster, which will not build the facility unless there is a guaranteed source of garbage, Silva said.

The city controls where all private waste haulers dump their loads. Currently, the two acceptable spots for municipal waste are Waimanalo Gulch Landfill, owned by the city and operated by Waste Management Inc., and the HPOWER plant operated by Covanta Energy Co.

Though Rezentes opposes putting a composting facility in Nanakuli, she said she would not be opposed to seeing Bedminster locate in a more industrial area. “From what I’ve seen and heard, the process is potentially viable,” she said.

THE BEDMINSTER PROCESS
Sources: Georgette Silva, business manager of Bedminster Oahu LLC; John Grondin, Bedminster International vice president; company documents filed with the Hawaii Health Department

» 1. Garbage trucks dump loads on cement floor of a 20,000-square-foot receiving building.

» 2. Large items such as tires and bicycles are removed for land-filling or recycling.

» 3. Trash goes on conveyor belt to three “digesters,” large metal tubes that turn continuously, moving the garbage about 160 feet in three days. Organic materials in the garbage are broken down by microorganisms.

» 4. Raw compost out of the digesters is tested to ensure that the 160-degree processing temperature — created by the microbe action — kills “a majority of pathogens.”

» 5. Aluminum, glass and tin are screened out of the raw compost and recycled in bulk. Nonrecyclable items are taken to the city’s Waimanalo Gulch Landfill or, if allowed, to a PVT Construction and Demolition Landfill.

» 6. Compost is seasoned for six weeks in windrows inside a 35,000-square-foot building.

» 7. The compost is sold in bulk as a soil amendment, probably for landscaping projects.
Article URL: http://archives.starbulletin.com/2006/08/17/news/story04.html

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Navy wife arrested over baby’s death in Hawai’i

http://www.kitv.com/news/6164302/detail.html

Woman Arrested In Ohio Over Baby’s Death In Hawaii

Authorities Say Mother Smothered Infant

POSTED: 5:22 pm HST January 16, 2006

HONOLULU — Authorities arrested a military wife in Ohio wanted for the murder of her baby in Hawaii.

It involves a cold case from a few years ago. Initially authorities didn’t have enough evidence to go forward with a murder charge, but new evidence has come to light and a federal grand jury indicted the woman last month, a source close to the investigation said.

Nina Manning, 25, was placed in custody at an Akron, Ohio, jail. Akron police arrested Manning Friday after U.S. marshals in Hawaii alerted Ohio authorities of the federal warrant for her arrest.

Manning is accused of smothering her infant child to death while living in Pearl Harbor Navy housing in 2002, then trying to cover it up.

From Hawaii, Manning and her family moved to Georgia. There, according to a source, her other children were taken into custody by state authorities.

Manning was living in Ohio with relatives when she was arrested Friday, sources said.

Domestic violence experts said many people find themselves overwhelmed when faced with parenthood, but they say there are community resources to help.

“It is hard to ask for help, but it could save a life. I think they can call anonymously to certain agencies,” said Nancy Kreidman, of the Domestic Violence Clearing House.

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Nonstop war duty tests Marines

Nonstop war duty tests Marines

By William Cole
Advertiser Military Writer
KANE’OHE BAY – Less than four months ago, Lt. Col. Norm Cooling and his 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines were getting ready to leave Afghanistan after a seven-month deployment.

Many of the 1,000 Hawai’i Marines humped heavy loads through remote mountain valleys, camping for days on patrols.

Parts of Paktia Province fell to 20 below zero, and one 3/3 company operated practically in arctic conditions at 11,000 feet.

Their reward should have been seven months’ “stabilization” in Hawai’i. Instead, they’re on a hectic and compressed training schedule for a return late this winter or early spring to combat – this time in Iraq.

It’s the same tempo for some other units at Kane’ohe Bay, and the same story across the Corps – Marines preparing for repeat deployments with minimal breaks in between, and families fretting anew at home.

Cooling, 41, will be on his third war deployment in three years – Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq.

The 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, which fought house-to-house through Fallujah last November and lost 46 Marines and sailors to the Iraq deployment, is in California receiving mountain warfare training for a deployment to Afghanistan in January or February.

The CH-53D Sea Stallion helicopter community, meanwhile, is preparing for squadron-sized rotations to Iraq, although a deployment order has not been received.

Sgt. Ted Ramos, 28, a 3/3 Marine, has a training schedule for Iraq that includes several days a week spent in the field; “fire and movement” range practice; road marches; trips to Pohakuloa Training Area on the Big Island, and a full month to be spent on desert training at Twentynine Palms in California between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Then the Afghanistan veteran goes to Iraq.

“At times it is stressful, and you almost want things to slow down to where you can catch your breath,” said Ramos, of San Antonio.

But the India Company Marine also says the high tempo is necessary to be prepared.

“It’s not just me that I’m worrying about. I have my Marines underneath me that I have to keep at the same pace,” Ramos said. “If we were to start to slack off, and slow the tempo down to where we’re not getting as much as we should out of training, I think it would really affect us when we got on the ground over there.”

In some respects, the Iraq deployment has been easier to prepare for than Afghanistan, Cooling said. Then, the battalion had only 3 1/2 months notice before heading to Afghanistan.

Still, Cooling describes the training regimen as “fast and furious.”

All companies stay in the field Tuesday through Thursday in the Kahuku training area, at the Kane’ohe Bay Marine Corps base, at Marine Corps Training Area Bellows, or at Dillingham Airfield.

The Marines practice live fire at Ulupau crater at the Marine Corps base, at Pu’uloa near ‘Ewa Beach, at the Army’s Schofield Barracks and, last year, at Makua Military Reservation – a use they hope to repeat.

There’s a lot of cooperation with Schofield – and some training schedule juggling. Because of Stryker Brigade projects at Schofield, some ranges are closed until 4:30 p.m., and the Army is using Marine Corps ranges, officials said.

Dan Geltmacher, the Marine Corps Base Hawai’i training area manager, said the Marines “are doing an awful lot of training in a short period of time.”

“There are challenges, just like any place,” he said. “But they are getting it done. They are doing their weapons qualifications here and they do maneuver training here. They do their basic annual qualifications that are required, combat or no, and then they go to California and get the final touches.”

Cooling said going to Twentynine Palms gives his battalion the opportunity to spend a full month in a desert training environment. There’s also a Military Operations on Urban Terrain site.

“The disadvantage is that’s another month of deployment away from our families,” he said. “It’s very hard on the families, but we’ve got to strike a balance between the training that’s necessary to get their husbands and fathers prepared for a combat zone and the time that they rightfully need to prepare their families (for a deployment).”

Approximately half the battalion that was in Afghanistan moved to different duty stations, 124 Marines extended to go to Iraq, and as much as 35 percent are new recruits.

Better training could come to O’ahu in the form of an “urban terrain” facility that would have mockups of European, Middle Eastern and Asian city blocks, an elevator shaft, a sewer system that could be navigated, and a prison.

A Military Operations on Urban Terrain site, planned for nearly 40 acres at Bellows, could cost up to $35 million but hasn’t been funded. It remains the Marines’ No. 1 priority for a training area improvement on O’ahu.

Ramos, who has a girlfriend in Texas who’s not at all happy he’s going on a second combat deployment, joined the Marines in 1996, got out in 2000, and re-enlisted in 2004 because he felt “it was a duty of mine to come back to the Marine Corps and do my part” for the country.

The two combat deployments and the intensive training in between haven’t been much of a problem for Ramos, but he isn’t pledging any longer term commitment to the Corps beyond this enlistment – at least for now.

“I look at it this way,” he said. “It all depends on how things are when I come back from Iraq. With the blessing of God I’ll come back with a good straight head and everything I left with, and then I’ll determine (my future) from that.”

Reach William Cole at wcole@honoluluadvertiser.com.

Source: http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2005/Sep/25/ln/FP509250341.html

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University vulnerable to pitfalls of secret experiments

http://archives.starbulletin.com/2005/03/27/editorial/special2.html

Sunday, March 27, 2005

University vulnerable to pitfalls of secret experiments

By Beverly Deepe Keever

Special to the Star-Bulletin

It was 37 years ago that James Oshita and William Fraticelli were regularly drenched with the cancer-causing Agent Orange on the Kauai Agriculture Research Station.

They performed the core part of the University of Hawaii’s contract with the U.S. Army to test the effectiveness of the herbicide laden with dioxin, one of deadliest of chemicals, that was then being sprayed in South Vietnam to defoliate its wartime jungles.

Their saga and the Agent Orange experiment are now being recounted amid the controversial question of whether Hawaii’s only public university should enter into a new kind of contract for military research, this time with the U.S. Navy, specifically to establish a University Affiliated Research Center, to which the Board of Regents has already given its preliminary approval. It’s a watershed, which-way question for UH — and, as UH goes, so goes the state.

Oshita and Fraticelli marked their bulldozers with flags to serve as targets and stayed there while the planes swooped down to spray the defoliants. “When the plane came to spray, someone had to guide him,” Oshita told a reporter in a Page 1 report in the campus newspaper, Ka Leo O Hawaii, on Feb. 3, 1986. “We were the ones.”

Testing was done without warning UH employees or the nearby Kapaa community even though in 1962, just months before being assassinated, President Kennedy was told that Agent Orange could cause adverse health effects, U.S. court documents show. And a 1968 test report written by four UH agronomists said that on Kauai Agent Orange, alone or combined with Agent Pink, Purple or Blue, was effective and “obviously may also be lethal.”

When the testing finished in 1968, five 55-gallon steel drums and a dozen gallon cans partially filled with the toxic chemicals were buried on a hilltop overlooking a reservoir. There they remained until the mid-1980s when the Ka Leo reporter’s questions led to their being excavated, supposedly for shipment to a licensed hazardous waste facility. They left behind levels of dioxin in some soil samples of more than five times normal cleanup standards.

The barrels were then placed in a Matson shipping container. There, instead of being shipped out of state as promised, they sat for another decade. Then, in 1997, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Health discovered that UH had failed to dispose properly of the hazardous materials and included this infraction along with a Big Island one in a $1.8 million fine against the institution. In April 2000, the barrels were finally shipped out of state.

Oshita and Fraticelli have since died. A year after his Agent Orange work, Oshita was diagnosed with liver dysfunction, bladder cancer, diabetes, chronic hepatitis and a severe skin disease called chloracne. Fraticelli died in April 1981 from lung and kidney cancer; he also had bladder cancer and a brain tumor, court documents indicate.

Since 1984, with the settlement of a $180 million class- action lawsuit, 10,000-plus Vietnam veterans receive disability benefits related to Agent Orange, which has been linked to various cancers, diabetes and birth defects. Earlier this month, a federal judge, citing insufficient research data, dismissed a case filed on behalf of 4 million-plus Vietnamese claiming that Agent Orange had caused their ailments.

The legacy of the Agent Orange experiment and its aftermath exemplifies how UH was duped into conducting military research that the U.S. government knew could create adverse health effects, how the costs and risks of such research were latent for years and how UH demonstrated decades-long disregard for environmental and health hazards.

UH’s Agent Orange experiment was not secret. The student journalist found a thick report about it in Hamilton Library. But some of the Navy’s research now being debated at UH would be secret, a condition that the Faculty Senate on the Manoa campus voted down in terms of withholding publication of scholarly discoveries.

But even the Navy’s unclassified, non-secret work within the UARC has raised two broad concerns among faculty: the anti-business restrictions governing privileged information accessible to researchers, and murky legal issues.

Those favoring the Navy contract note that it proposes a ceiling for UH-M over five years, the normal duration of a UARC, of a sum of up to $50 million. This amount of about $10 million annually is small compared to the $54 million received by UH this fiscal year alone from Pentagon research and is but a fraction of the $160 million the Penn State University UARC received in one year.

Another advantage cited on the Manoa chancellor’s Web site is “our faculty will not have to write specific proposals for funding.” Instead, faculty will pick and choose — or opt out of — work on “task orders” from the Navy or other Pentagon sponsors. Others argue, however, that working only on this military-initiated to-do list will squelch faculty initiative and innovation.

Several faculty have noted that the “research” performed by the UARC through Navy “task orders” is distinctly different from the faculty-directed research that UH researchers currently pursue in an open academic environment. UARC activities must be aligned with the Navy’s war-fighting mission through the approved core competencies, and because the UARC acts as a trusted agent of the government, are also subject to extremely restrictive regulations managing conflict of interest.

The UARC would give rise to a whole new bureaucracy, according to a posting on the Manoa chancellor’s Web site (see box on F5). The UARC would be an organized research unit that reported to the vice chancellor for research and graduate education and would be managed by an executive director to be selected from a national search. A director would head each of UH’s four research specialities in ocean science; astronomy; advanced electro-optics and sensing; and senors, communications and information technology. Another director of business and admini- stration would oversee UARC operations. These administrators would work in leased space at the Manoa Innovation Center.

Unclassified research would be conducted on the Manoa campus but classified research would be performed on military facilities in the state or on the mainland. More bureaucracy will be needed to screen personnel for security clearances required for classified research.

Instead of providing an economic stimulus for the state, some faculty delving into operations of the proposed UARC find a restrictive, anti-business environment.

In scanning conflict-of-interest and other regulations, they found in effect a firewall circumscribes the UARC. Those accepting UARC funding are barred from working with local industry in ventures outside the UARC or in licensing their intellectual property in work outside the UARC in areas in which they may have gained information giving them a competitive advantage, regardless of whether that information is classified.

Researchers accepting UARC funding also are barred from submitting new proposals, entering collaborative relationships, undertaking consult- ing work or continuing work outside the UARC in their specialties that might benefit from their access to information within the UARC that is generally unavailable to the public. Moreover, they found, these restrictions will continue for three years after they leave the UARC.

None of these restrictions is explained on the chancellor’s Web posting, although Vassilis Syrmos, technical officer for the UARC proposal, spoke at length in an interview published March 2 in Ka Leo that certain conflict-of-interest restrictions would apply to those who accept UARC funding.

“Trying to predict the effect of the UARC on potential licensing income is almost fruitless,” Richard F. Cox Jr. of UH’s Office of Technology Transfer and Economic Development said in an e-mail last week. He estimated UH would bring in about $900,000 in licensing income for the year ending June 30.

Others raise murky legal issues. Some question whether the Navy met the legal requirements of open announcement in approving the UARC at UH-M and thus in providing adequately fair competition to other qualified universities. For example, the Army, NASA and the Department of Homeland Security have all recently established new UARCs and federal research centers through open announcements and national competition. And the same statutory authority cited to establish UH-M’s UARC was found as insufficient justification for awarding a UARC contract to Johns Hopkins University by NASA without full and open competition, that agency’s inspector general found.

Such broad agency announcements serve not only a legal requirement. They also contain critical information on the purpose of the UARC, a description of the mission and type of research, the constraints and restrictions on qualified and successful applicants, and important evaluation and selection criteria to be included in the proposal. Thus, the UH-M UARC omitted critical information on the actual faculty and staff who would perform the research and important industrial affiliations that is normally required in such proposals. Without such a broad agency announcement for the Navy UARC, neither the public nor the UH faculty have the guidance needed to determine exactly what their participation would involve, what they will be asked to do for the Navy or what the Navy will be doing, perhaps near their own neighborhood.

In addition, the Navy is conducting a potentially criminal investigation into allegations of mismanagement of classified military contracts by UH and its affiliated Research Corporation, Ka Leo O Hawaii reported on March 2.

Mismanagement of federally funded research and misstatements in applying for that funding is viewed seriously. A federal judge took the unusual step of sentencing to three months in jail a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and fining him $10,000 for lying on a grant application he made to the National Science Foundation.

In handing down that sentence, as reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education on Jan. 25, 1999, U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker said, “Within the academic community, those who follow the rules must be assured they are not chumps, fools, or suckers.”

As important as these issues are, many faculty have expressed as their greatest concern the absence of a forum for the community and campus and the general lack of faculty consultation to examine these questions in detail. In a meeting with faculty on March 16, Chancellor Peter Englert apologized “for not having come forward or having made this particular presentation a little bit sooner.” But the stipulation that full consultation take place with concerned stakeholders was directed by the Board of Regents in its November 2004 meeting, and efforts to establish a UARC at UH-M date from September 2002. Given the history surrounding Agent Orange, many faculty feel that UH should be very careful to examine all such questions with complete openness and good faith.

Beverly Deepe Keever is a University of Hawaii-Manoa professor of journalism. She discusses federal information policies related to U.S. Pacific nuclear weapons tests (1946-62) in her newly published book, “News Zero: The New York Times and the Bomb.”

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National Guard Sgt. accused of terroristic threatening of wife

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Suspected infidelity led to alleged threats

A former police recruit is accused of threatening his wife with a handgun

By Debra Barayuga
dbarayuga@starbulletin.com

The wife of an ex-Honolulu police recruit said her husband threatened to put a bullet in her head, apparently because he believed she was fooling around.

Sherly Gomez, 24, a sergeant in the Hawaii National Guard, took the stand yesterday in the first day of her husband’s trial in Circuit Judge Michael Town’s courtroom.

Ernie Gomez, 27, also in the National Guard, is accused of two counts of first-degree terroristic threatening involving a knife and a semiautomatic handgun, two counts of abusing a household member and two counts of second-degree terroristic threatening. If convicted of first-degree terroristic threatening with the use of a semiautomatic, Gomez faces a mandatory minimum of five years’ imprisonment.

Gomez had completed nearly six weeks at the Honolulu Police Department’s recruit academy and was set to graduate that month when his wife reported the allegations. He has since resigned.

During questioning by Senior Deputy Prosecutor Maurice Arrisgado, Sherly Gomez denied that she was having a romantic or sexual relationship with a divorced co-worker and said that they were merely friends.

But on May 30, 2004, her husband showed up unexpectedly with a video camera at a basketball game that both she and the co-worker were invited to at the Pearl Harbor Bloch Arena. He confronted both of them in the parking lot and threatened to blow holes into their heads with a gun, she said. She recalled her husband yelling something to the effect of, “Do you know what happens to somebody who f—-s around with a cop’s wife?”

She had just given her co-worker a “friendly kiss” on the cheek because he had listened while she confided in him about problems with her 4-year marriage, she said.

After her co-worker fled, her husband yanked her head down by her hair and told her that the only way she would see their 2-1/2-year-old daughter again was if she went home.

When they arrived at their Ewa Beach townhouse, Gomez said her husband pulled out his gun, chambered a round and told her he was giving her one minute to “start talking” before he killed her.

Defense attorney Victor Bakke said the whole incident stemmed entirely from Sherly Gomez’s infidelity and lies. “He knew about it for a long time and was sick of it and already asked her to move out,” Bakke said during opening statements. Though he suspected his wife was having an affair, he was never able to prove it, he said.

Contrary to what Gomez claims happened that morning, Bakke said, she and her co-worker were “making out” in her car and her husband had gotten them on camera so he naturally was upset and yelled at them.

“But there’s no threat,” Bakke said.

Source: http://archives.starbulletin.com/2005/01/26/news/story14.html

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Winona LaDuke: More Land For The Military Than For Hawaiians

http://rense.com/general56/homesles.htm

From Indian Country Today and Rense.com:

Homeless In Hawaii

More Land For The Military Than For Hawaiians

Part One of Two

By Winona LaDuke, Guest Columnist

August 3, 2004

It’s summer in Hawaii, the state is considering another generous land donation to the military and has made homelessness a crime. Under the cover of the term “Military Transformation” and with the blanket of 9/11, the military is taking a wide berth in land stealing. And, recently enacted Act 50 makes criminals out of people who have been displaced by the military itself, many of them Native Hawaiian.

“They bombed the houses in the l940s and took over the entire valley,” explained Sparky Rodrigues, one of many Makua residents still waiting to move home. “The government moved all of the residents out and said after the war, you can move back – and then they used the houses for target practice. The families tell stories that the military came with guns and said, ‘Here’s $300, thank you,’ and ‘You’ve got to move.’ Those people remain without their houses, and for years, many lived on the beaches in beautiful Makua Valley, watching the bombing of their land.

“Tomorrow morning they’re going to detonate a 1,000 pounder, a 500 pounder and a 100 pound bomb,” Rodriques mused. Such detonations are part of the military cleanup of the site before, apparently, any new maneuvers. “We’ve gone in and observed them detonate those bombs,” said Rodriques. More than once, live ammunition has washed up on the beaches at Makua.

Malu Aina, a military watchdog group from Hawaii reported:

“Live military ordnance in large quantities has been found off Hapuna Beach and in Hilo Bay. Additional ordnance, including grenades, artillery shells, rockets, mortars, armor piercing ordnance, bazooka rounds, napalm bombs, and hedgehog missiles have been found at Hilo airport in Waimea town, Waikoloa Village, in North and South Kohala at Puako and Mahukona, in Kea’au and Maku ‘u farm lots in Puna, at South Point in Ka’u, and on residential and school grounds. At least nine people have been killed or injured by exploding ordnance. Some unexploded ordnance can be set off even by cell phones.”

Since the end of World War II, Hawaii has been the center of the United States military’s Pacific Command (PACOM), from which all U.S. forces in the region are directed. Hawaii serves as an outpost for Pacific expansionism, along with Guam, the Marshall Islands, Samoa and the Philippines. PACOM is the center of U.S. military activities over more than half the earth, from the west coast of the U.S. to Africa’s east coast, from the Arctic to Antarctica, covering 70 percent of the world’s oceans.

The military controls more of Hawaii than any other state, including some 25 percent of Oahu, valuable “submerged lands” (i.e. estuaries and bays), and until relatively recently, the island of Kaho’olawe. The island was the only National Historic Site also used as a bombing range. Finally, after years of litigation and negotiations, Congress placed a moratorium on the bombing, but after $400 million already spent in cleanup money, much remains to be completed.

The U.S. military controls 200,000 acres of Hawaii, with over 100 military installations and at least 150,000 personnel. Among the largest sites is the Pohakuloa Training Area (PTA), a 108,793-acre bombing range between the sacred mountains of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa in the center of the big island, Hawaii. At least seven million rounds of ammunition are fired annually at that base alone. The military proposes to expand the base by 23,000-acres under the “Military Transformation Proposal” and plans to bring in Stryker brigades to the area. The military is hoping for up to 79,000 additional acres in new land acquisition. Pohakuloa has the “highest concentration of endangered species of any Army installation in the world,” according to its former commander Lt. Col. Dennis Owen, with over 250 ancient Hawaiian archeological sites. Those species and archeological sites are pretty much “toast” under the expansion plans.

Hawaiian military bucks and the homeless

There are some benefits to being a senior senator like Daniel Inouye. The $l.5 billion dollar pork-barrel proposal to expand Hawaii’s military bases would include more than 400 Stryker vehicles (eight-wheeled, 19-ton, armored infantry carriers), new C-l7 transport planes and additional arsenal expansions.

Adding more military personnel and bases is always a good way to boost a state’s economy. After all, a recent Hawaii Advertiser article featured Pearl Harbor businessmen lamenting the number of troops “sent out” to Iraq, and the downswing in business at the barbershops and elsewhere. The message: “New troops needed to fill up those businesses!”

Inouye, who is the ranking member of the Defense Appropriations Committee has been a strong advocate for more military in Hawaii. Yet, in his vice chairmanship of the Indian Affairs Committee, he has been a stronger advocate for diminishing Native Hawaiian sovereignty, rights and land title. New proposals (the so-called Akaka Bill) would strip Hawaiians of long-term access to land, and follow the suit of the infamous Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act, barring future recourse for justice.

In the meantime, the 2 million acres of land originally earmarked for Native Hawaiians (under Hawaii’s statehood act) are being transferred to private interests and to the military. Some 22,000 Native Hawaiians remain on waiting lists for their homestead awards, and an estimated 30,000 have died while on the list awaiting their homesteads. The Hawaiian lands end up with the military or developers. “We can barely pay house rent, and they build apartments,” said one Hawaiian from the Wai’anae coast. “With inflation now, its hard to buy tomatoes, carrots … You cannot eat ’em, those buildings.”

Hawaii has now adopted one of the nation’s severest penalties to discourage individuals from living on public property. Act 50, a recently passed law, bans individuals for an entire year from the public areas where they are given a citation. The act stipulates that people found illegally occupying public property such as beaches and parks are subject to ejection, and if they return within a year they face arrest, a possible $1,000 fine and/or 30 days in jail. Many Hawaiian families live on the beaches and in public parks. The Beltran family, among others, has lived on the beach at Mokule’ia for 12 years, claiming the right to live there as ancestral, but each week they must get a permit to camp. “We have a right to be here, because our ancestors were from here,” Beltran explained to a reporter. “I cannot go to the mainland and say that’s my home. I cannot go to Japan and call that my home. This is my home, right here. I will never give this place up.”

+++

More land for the military than for Hawaiians (Part Two of Two)

Posted: August 03, 2004 – 8:24am EST by: Winona LaDuke / Guest Columnist

Special to Indian Country Today (Part Two of Two)

“Except as required for defense purposes in a time of national emergency, the government shall not deliberately destroy any object of antiquity, prehistoric ruin or monument …”

– Makua lease provision held by the U.S. Military

The new Stryker/Military Transformation proposal by Senator Inouye will exacerbate the already desperate situation of many Hawaiians, who comprise a good portion of those without permanent housing and at least half of the present prison population.

“All of the Hawaiian poor come to Wainaie, all of the homeless come to Waianae,” said Sparky Rodrigues. “If the military comes in here with their cost of living allowance with the Strykers’ new expansion, then rent will go up, and they’ll bring in 30,000 people. Property values will go up. More Hawaiians will be forced onto the beach as homeless, and they are going to be criminalized.”

The system is already poised to worsen the problem and serve as a drain on the state’s social services Rodrigues explained. “Child Protection Services is looking at homelessness as child abuse. So they’re not going to build schools, and there is an oppressive environment, they can’t get jobs, can’t pay for the house.”

Rodrigues and his wife, Leandra Wai Rodrigues, were arrested in l996 on Father’s Day at Makua. Their family and others were all evicted. “Everything that was left behind was bulldozed and destroyed. Actually they took all our good stuff, and gave it to other people,” Leandra lamented.

“It was a huge community of homeless, about 60 families and we ended up creating our own self governance,” explained Sparky. “The welfare office was sending families that couldn’t afford rent to Makua because it was a safe place. Our goal was to look for long-term solutions to homelessness. Our goal was to go there, and then go back into society. They [social service agencies] aren’t interested in a long term solution, their solution is to pass laws and arrest people.” He added, “calling the folks on the beach ‘squatters’ changes the whole way of looking at it. If they are traditional practitioners or want to live a traditional lifestyle, they are Hawaiians. The use of the word ‘squatters’ makes it okay for the government to bring in the bulldozers and arrest them.”

Clean up and the Range Readiness Proposal

Clean up is not the military’s strongest suit. Of the whopping federal defense budget of $265 billion, only a fraction will be spent on cleaning up exploded ordnance at test sites, let alone sites in the process of decommissioning, like Wisconsin’s Badger Munitions Plant, in which the Ho-Chunk Nation seeks some part in its recovery. An Associated Press news story of Jan. 16 stated that according to congressional auditors “removing unexploded munitions and hazardous waste found so far on 15 million acres of shutdown U.S. military ranges could take more than 300 years.” The clean up cost is now estimated at $35 billion and climbing rapidly from an estimate of $20 billion a year ago.

In the present environment and with leadership like Senator Inouye, it looks like the reverse: Build up, not clean up, is on the horizon. Under a bill called the “Readiness and Range Preservation Initiative”, the Department of Defense is pushing Congress to give more waivers to the military for clean up. Last year, the Defense Department succeeded in gaining exemptions for the U.S. military to the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammals Protection Act. The Defense Department now wants exemptions from the Clean Air Act, Superfund Laws and others, all under the premise of national security.

At hearings this spring on the Range Readiness proposals, U.S. Representative Edward Markey, D-Mass., said, “There is no reason to incur ‘collateral damage’ to our public health while meeting our military needs,” referring to the present problems with military contamination.

All told, the Department of Defense is the nation’s largest toxic polluter with over 11,000 toxic “hot spots” on 1,855 military facilities nationwide. If we are to look at Hawaii’s prospects as to what is in the pipeline, there may be some cause for concern. Sparky Rodrigues noted the irony. “They spend billions making Weapons of Mass Destruction but pennies on clean up.” In short, being homeless in Hawaii isn’t as glamorous as being sleepless in Seattle, and by the next millennium, and the next conflict, there may be more Hawaiians in prison than on the beaches.

Winona LaDuke, Ojibwe from the White Earth reservation, is program director of Honor the Earth, a national Native American environmental justice program. She served as the Green Party vice presidential candidate in the 1996 and 2000 elections. She can be reached at wlhonorearth@earthlink.net.

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Soldier with ‘perfect military record’ threatens wife with gun

Tuesday, June 8, 2004

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CRAIG T. KOJIMA / CKOJIMA@STARBULLETIN.COM
Former Honolulu Police Department recruit Ernie Gomez, right, headed into court yesterday with his attorney, Victor Bakke. Gomez will be arraigned June 21.

Ex-HPD recruit to be arraigned

His wife says that he put a gun to her head, threatening to kill her

By Debra Barayuga
dbarayuga@starbulletin.com

The wife of a former police recruit said her husband put a loaded gun to her forehead and threatened to kill her because he believed she was cheating on him.

Ernie Gomez, 26, was charged with first-degree terroristic threatening for the alleged incident at the couple’s Ewa Beach home on May 30.

Gomez confronted his wife and a male friend in the parking lot of the Bloch Arena that morning and threatened to “put a hole” in their heads, Sherly Gomez testified yesterday in District Court.

Sherly Gomez, 24, a sergeant in the Hawaii Army National Guard, said their four-year marriage had been in trouble. She said she had been confiding in her friend and had given him a “peck” on the cheek before her husband popped out holding a video camera.

Her husband ordered her to drive home if she wanted to see their 2-year-old daughter again, she said.

When they arrived home, she said, Gomez pulled out a gun and loaded it as their 2-year-old cried nearby. “He told me I had ‘one minute to start talking before I kill you,'” she testified.

Her husband allegedly punched her and slapped her repeatedly before forcing her head back with the barrel of the gun. “He was saying, ‘I’m gonna shoot you right now, but you’re not worth it so I’m going to shoot you in the knees,'” she said.

He called her friend on the phone and threatened to “hunt him down” and kill him, she testified.

Her husband also called a friend who lived nearby, asking him to come over before he killed her, Sherly Gomez said. The friend managed to take away the gun and persuade Gomez to put away a knife.

Gomez told her that if she ever reported what happened to the authorities, “he would hunt me down and kill me,” she testified.

Because he told her the only way he would spare her life was if she left, she packed her bags, booked a flight to the mainland and took a taxi to the airport, she said. But she changed her mind and delayed the flight because she did not want to leave without her daughter.

During questioning by defense attorney Victor Bakke, Sherly Gomez denied she was having an affair and said she did not immediately report what happened because she was concerned about seeing her daughter again.

She said she called police the next day because she was afraid something would happen to her.

District Judge Barbara Richardson found probable cause to believe Gomez committed the offenses and bound the case over to Circuit Court. He will be arraigned June 21.

Outside the courtroom, Bakke said Gomez claims his wife made up the story because of an ongoing custody battle over their daughter. “It’s all about custody and why she didn’t call the cops and why he showed up with a camera.”

Gomez had a “perfect military record” and was doing well at the police academy, Bakke said. Gomez resigned from the academy Wednesday, a police spokeswoman said.

Source: http://archives.starbulletin.com/2004/06/08/news/story7.html

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