July 30, 2006
Disowning Conservative Politics, Evangelical Pastor Rattles Flock
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
MAPLEWOOD, Minn. — Like most pastors who lead thriving evangelical megachurches, the Rev. Gregory A. Boyd was asked frequently to give his blessing — and the church’s — to conservative political candidates and causes.
The requests came from church members and visitors alike: Would he please announce a rally against gay marriage during services? Would he introduce a politician from the pulpit? Could members set up a table in the lobby promoting their anti-abortion work? Would the church distribute “voters’ guides” that all but endorsed Republican candidates? And with the country at war, please couldn’t the church hang an American flag in the sanctuary?
After refusing each time, Mr. Boyd finally became fed up, he said. Before the last presidential election, he preached six sermons called “The Cross and the Sword” in which he said the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a “Christian nation” and stop glorifying American military campaigns.
“When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses,” Mr. Boyd preached. “When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”
Mr. Boyd says he is no liberal. He is opposed to abortion and thinks homosexuality is not God’s ideal. The response from his congregation at Woodland Hills Church here in suburban St. Paul — packed mostly with politically and theologically conservative, middle-class evangelicals — was passionate. Some members walked out of a sermon and never returned. By the time the dust had settled, Woodland Hills, which Mr. Boyd founded in 1992, had lost about 1,000 of its 5,000 members.
But there were also congregants who thanked Mr. Boyd, telling him they were moved to tears to hear him voice concerns they had been too afraid to share.
“Most of my friends are believers,” said Shannon Staiger, a psychotherapist and church member, “and they think if you’re a believer, you’ll vote for Bush. And it’s scary to go against that.”
Sermons like Mr. Boyd’s are hardly typical in today’s evangelical churches. But the upheaval at Woodland Hills is an example of the internal debates now going on in some evangelical colleges, magazines and churches. A common concern is that the Christian message is being compromised by the tendency to tie evangelical Christianity to the Republican Party and American nationalism, especially through the war in Iraq.
At least six books on this theme have been published recently, some by Christian publishing houses. Randall Balmer, a religion professor at Barnard College and an evangelical, has written “Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America — an Evangelical’s Lament.”
And Mr. Boyd has a new book out, “The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church,” which is based on his sermons.
“There is a lot of discontent brewing,” said Brian D. McLaren, the founding pastor at Cedar Ridge Community Church in Gaithersburg, Md., and a leader in the evangelical movement known as the “emerging church,” which is at the forefront of challenging the more politicized evangelical establishment.
“More and more people are saying this has gone too far — the dominance of the evangelical identity by the religious right,” Mr. McLaren said. “You cannot say the word ‘Jesus’ in 2006 without having an awful lot of baggage going along with it. You can’t say the word ‘Christian,’ and you certainly can’t say the word ‘evangelical’ without it now raising connotations and a certain cringe factor in people.
“Because people think, ‘Oh no, what is going to come next is homosexual bashing, or pro-war rhetoric, or complaining about ‘activist judges.’ ”
Mr. Boyd said he had cleared his sermons with the church’s board, but his words left some in his congregation stunned. Some said that he was disrespecting President Bush and the military, that he was soft on abortion or telling them not to vote.
“When we joined years ago, Greg was a conservative speaker,” said William Berggren, a lawyer who joined the church with his wife six years ago. “But we totally disagreed with him on this. You can’t be a Christian and ignore actions that you feel are wrong. A case in point is the abortion issue. If the church were awake when abortion was passed in the 70’s, it wouldn’t have happened. But the church was asleep.”
Mr. Boyd, 49, who preaches in blue jeans and rumpled plaid shirts, leads a church that occupies a squat block-long building that was once a home improvement chain store.
The church grew from 40 members in 12 years, based in no small part on Mr. Boyd’s draw as an electrifying preacher who stuck closely to Scripture. He has degrees from Yale Divinity School and Princeton Theological Seminary, and he taught theology at Bethel College in St. Paul, where he created a controversy a few years ago by questioning whether God fully knew the future. Some pastors in his own denomination, the Baptist General Conference, mounted an effort to evict Mr. Boyd from the denomination and his teaching post, but he won that battle.
He is known among evangelicals for a bestselling book, “Letters From a Skeptic,” based on correspondence with his father, a leftist union organizer and a lifelong agnostic — an exchange that eventually persuaded his father to embrace Christianity.
Mr. Boyd said he never intended his sermons to be taken as merely a critique of the Republican Party or the religious right. He refuses to share his party affiliation, or whether he has one, for that reason. He said there were Christians on both the left and the right who had turned politics and patriotism into “idolatry.”
He said he first became alarmed while visiting another megachurch’s worship service on a Fourth of July years ago. The service finished with the chorus singing “God Bless America” and a video of fighter jets flying over a hill silhouetted with crosses.
“I thought to myself, ‘What just happened? Fighter jets mixed up with the cross?’ ” he said in an interview.
Patriotic displays are still a mainstay in some evangelical churches. Across town from Mr. Boyd’s church, the sanctuary of North Heights Lutheran Church was draped in bunting on the Sunday before the Fourth of July this year for a “freedom celebration.” Military veterans and flag twirlers paraded into the sanctuary, an enormous American flag rose slowly behind the stage, and a Marine major who had served in Afghanistan preached that the military was spending “your hard-earned money” on good causes.
In his six sermons, Mr. Boyd laid out a broad argument that the role of Christians was not to seek “power over” others — by controlling governments, passing legislation or fighting wars. Christians should instead seek to have “power under” others — “winning people’s hearts” by sacrificing for those in need, as Jesus did, Mr. Boyd said.
“America wasn’t founded as a theocracy,” he said. “America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn’t bloody and barbaric. That’s why our Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state.
“I am sorry to tell you,” he continued, “that America is not the light of the world and the hope of the world. The light of the world and the hope of the world is Jesus Christ.”
Mr. Boyd lambasted the “hypocrisy and pettiness” of Christians who focus on “sexual issues” like homosexuality, abortion or Janet Jackson’s breast-revealing performance at the Super Bowl halftime show. He said Christians these days were constantly outraged about sex and perceived violations of their rights to display their faith in public.
“Those are the two buttons to push if you want to get Christians to act,” he said. “And those are the two buttons Jesus never pushed.”
Some Woodland Hills members said they applauded the sermons because they had resolved their conflicted feelings. David Churchill, a truck driver for U.P.S. and a Teamster for 26 years, said he had been “raised in a religious-right home” but was torn between the Republican expectations of faith and family and the Democratic expectations of his union.
When Mr. Boyd preached his sermons, “it was liberating to me,” Mr. Churchill said.
Mr. Boyd gave his sermons while his church was in the midst of a $7 million fund-raising campaign. But only $4 million came in, and 7 of the more than 50 staff members were laid off, he said.
Mary Van Sickle, the family pastor at Woodland Hills, said she lost 20 volunteers who had been the backbone of the church’s Sunday school.
“They said, ‘You’re not doing what the church is supposed to be doing, which is supporting the Republican way,’ ” she said. “It was some of my best volunteers.”
The Rev. Paul Eddy, a theology professor at Bethel College and the teaching pastor at Woodland Hills, said: “Greg is an anomaly in the megachurch world. He didn’t give a whit about church leadership, never read a book about church growth. His biggest fear is that people will think that all church is is a weekend carnival, with people liking the worship, the music, his speaking, and that’s it.”
In the end, those who left tended to be white, middle-class suburbanites, church staff members said. In their place, the church has added more members who live in the surrounding community — African-Americans, Hispanics and Hmong immigrants from Laos.
This suits Mr. Boyd. His vision for his church is an ethnically and economically diverse congregation that exemplifies Jesus’ teachings by its members’ actions. He, his wife and three other families from the church moved from the suburbs three years ago to a predominantly black neighborhood in St. Paul.
Mr. Boyd now says of the upheaval: “I don’t regret any aspect of it at all. It was a defining moment for us. We let go of something we were never called to be. We just didn’t know the price we were going to pay for doing it.”
His congregation of about 4,000 is still digesting his message. Mr. Boyd arranged a forum on a recent Wednesday night to allow members to sound off on his new book. The reception was warm, but many of the 56 questions submitted in writing were pointed: Isn’t abortion an evil that Christians should prevent? Are you saying Christians should not join the military? How can Christians possibly have “power under” Osama bin Laden? Didn’t the church play an enormously positive role in the civil rights movement?
One woman asked: “So why NOT us? If we contain the wisdom and grace and love and creativity of Jesus, why shouldn’t we be the ones involved in politics and setting laws?”
Mr. Boyd responded: “I don’t think there’s a particular angle we have on society that others lack. All good, decent people want good and order and justice. Just don’t slap the label ‘Christian’ on it.”

Mel Gibson's Anti Semitic Tirade -- Alleged Cover Up
Posted Jul 28th 2006 9:15PM by TMZ StaffFiled under: Celebrity Justice
TMZ has learned that Mel Gibson went on a rampage when he was arrested Friday on suspicion of drunk driving, hurling religious epithets. TMZ has also learned that the Los Angeles County Sheriff's department had the initial report doctored to keep the real story under wraps.
TMZ has four pages of the original report prepared by the arresting officer in the case, L.A. County Sheriff's Deputy James Mee. According to the report, Gibson became agitated after he was stopped on Pacific Coast Highway and told he was to be detained for drunk driving Friday morning in Malibu. The actor began swearing uncontrollably. Gibson repeatedly said, "My life is f****d." Law enforcement sources say the deputy, worried that Gibson might become violent, told the actor that he was supposed to cuff him but would not, as long as Gibson cooperated. As the two stood next to the hood of the patrol car, the deputy asked Gibson to get inside. Deputy Mee then walked over to the passenger door and opened it. The report says Gibson then said, "I'm not going to get in your car," and bolted to his car. The deputy quickly subdued Gibson, cuffed him and put him inside the patrol car.
TMZ has learned that Deputy Mee audiotaped the entire exchange between himself and Gibson, from the time of the traffic stop to the time Gibson was put in the patrol car, and that the tape fully corroborates the written report.
Once inside the car, a source directly connected with the case says Gibson began banging himself against the seat. The report says Gibson told the deputy, "You mother f****r. I'm going to f*** you." The report also says "Gibson almost continually [sic] threatened me saying he 'owns Malibu' and will spend all of his money to 'get even' with me."
The report says Gibson then launched into a barrage of anti-Semitic statements: "F*****g Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." Gibson then asked the deputy, "Are you a Jew?"
The deputy became alarmed as Gibson's tirade escalated, and called ahead for a sergeant to meet them when they arrived at the station. When they arrived, a sergeant began videotaping Gibson, who noticed the camera and then said, "What the f*** do you think you're doing?"
A law enforcement source says Gibson then noticed another female sergeant and yelled, "What do you think you're looking at, sugar tits?"
We're told Gibson took two blood alcohol tests, which were videotaped, and continued saying how "f****d" he was and how he was going to "f***" Deputy Mee.
Gibson was put in a cell with handcuffs on. He said he needed to urinate, and after a few minutes tried manipulating his hands to unzip his pants. Sources say Deputy Mee thought Gibson was going to urinate on the floor of the booking cell and asked someone to take Gibson to the bathroom.
After leaving the bathroom, Gibson then demanded to make a phone call. He was taken to a pay phone and, when he didn't get a dial tone, we're told Gibson threw the receiver against the phone. Deputy Mee then warned Gibson that if he damaged the phone he could be charged with felony vandalism. We're told Gibson was then asked, and refused, to sign the necessary paperwork and was thrown in a detox cell.
Deputy Mee then wrote an eight-page report detailing Gibson's rampage and comments. Sources say the sergeant on duty felt it was too "inflammatory." A lieutenant and captain then got involved and calls were made to Sheriff's headquarters. Sources say Mee was told Gibson's comments would incite a lot of "Jewish hatred," that the situation in Israel was "way too inflammatory." It was mentioned several times that Gibson, who wrote, directed, and produced 2004's "The Passion of the Christ," had incited "anti-Jewish sentiment" and "For a drunk driving arrest, is this really worth all that?"
We're told Deputy Mee was then ordered to write another report, leaving out the incendiary comments and conduct. Sources say Deputy Mee was told the sanitized report would eventually end up in the media and that he could write a supplemental report that contained the redacted information -- a report that would be locked in the watch commander's safe.
Initially, a Sheriff's official told TMZ the arrest occurred "without incident." On Friday night, Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore told TMZ: "The L.A. County Sheriff's Department investigation into the arrest of Mr. Gibson on suspicion of driving under the influence will be complete and will contain every factual piece of evidence. Nothing will be sanitized. There was absolutely no favoritism shown to this suspect or any other. When this file is presented to the Los Angeles County District Attorney, it will contain everything. Nothing will be left out."
Gibson's rep Alan Nierob tells TMZ: "We are unaware of any of the information you mentioned in your email pertaining to a police report."
Click to see portions of the police report

A Time To Act
By Warren Christopher Friday, July 28, 2006; A25
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's just-concluded trip to Lebanon, Israel and Rome was an exercise in grace, bravery and, to my regret, wrongly focused diplomacy. Especially disappointing is the fact that she resisted all suggestions that the first order of business should be negotiation of an immediate cease-fire between the warring parties.
In the course of her trip, the secretary repeatedly insisted that any cease-fire be tied to a "permanent" and "sustainable" solution to the root causes of the conflict. Such a solution is achievable, if at all, only after protracted negotiations involving multiple parties. In the meantime, civilians will continue to die, precious infrastructure will continue to be destroyed and the fragile Lebanese democracy will continue to erode.
My own experience in the region underlies my belief that in the short term we should focus our efforts on stopping the killing. Twice during my four years as secretary of state we faced situations similar to the one that confronts us today. Twice, at the request of the Israelis, we helped bring the bloodshed to an end.
In June 1993, Israel responded to Hezbollah rocket attacks along its northern border by launching Operation Accountability, resulting in the expulsion of 250,000 civilians from the southern part of Lebanon.
After the Israeli bombardment had continued for several days, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin asked me to use my contacts in Syria to seek their help in containing the hostilities. I contacted Foreign Minister Farouk Shara, who, of course, consulted with Syrian President Hafez al-Assad. After several days of urgent negotiations, an agreement was reached committing the parties to stop targeting one another's civilian populations. We never knew exactly what the Syrians did, but clearly Hezbollah responded to their direction.
In April 1996, when Hezbollah again launched rocket attacks on Israel's northern border, the Israelis countered with Operation Grapes of Wrath, sending 400,000 Lebanese fleeing from southern Lebanon. Errant Israeli bombs hit a U.N. refugee camp at Cana in southern Lebanon, killing about 100 civilians and bringing the wrath of international public opinion down upon Israel.
This time Shimon Peres, who had become prime minister after the assassination of Rabin, sought our help. In response, we launched an eight-day shuttle to Damascus, Beirut and Jerusalem that produced a written agreement bringing the hostilities to an end. Weeks later, the parties agreed to a border monitoring group consisting of Israel, Syria, Lebanon, France and the United States. Until three weeks ago, that agreement had succeeded for 10 years in preventing a wholesale resumption of hostilities.
What do these episodes teach us?
First, as in 1996, an immediate cease-fire must take priority, with negotiations on longer-term arrangements to follow. Achieving a cease-fire will be difficult enough without overloading the initial negotiations with a search for permanent solutions.
Second, if a cease-fire is the goal, the United States has an indispensable role to play. A succession of Israeli leaders has turned to us, and only us, when they have concluded that retaliation for Hezbollah attacks has become counterproductive. Israel plainly trusts no one else to negotiate on its behalf and will accept no settlement in which we are not deeply involved. Further, based upon my experience in helping bring an end to the fighting in the Balkans, the Europeans are unlikely to participate in a multinational enforcement action until the United States commits to putting its own troops on the ground.
Finally, Syria may well be a critical participant in any cease-fire arrangement, just as it was in 1993 and 1996. Although Syria no longer has troops in Lebanon, Hezbollah's supply routes pass through the heart of Syria, and some Hezbollah leaders may reside in Damascus, giving the Syrians more leverage over Hezbollah's actions than any other country save Iran. Syria has invited a direct dialogue with the United States, and although our relations with Syria have seriously deteriorated in recent years (we have not had an ambassador in Damascus for more than a year), we do not have the luxury of continuing to treat it with diplomatic disdain. As the situations with North Korea and Iran confirm, refusing to speak with those we dislike is a recipe for frustration and failure.
Because Hezbollah has positioned itself as the "David" in this war, every day that the killing continues burnishes its reputation within the Arab world. Every day that more of the Lebanese infrastructure is turned to dust, Beirut's fragile democracy becomes weaker, both in its ability to function and in the eyes of its people.
The impact is not limited to Lebanon or Israel. Every day America gives the green light to further Israeli violence, our already tattered reputation sinks even lower. The reluctance of our closest allies in the Middle East even to receive Secretary Rice this week in their capitals attests to this fact.
It is time for the United States to step forward with the authority and balance that this moment requires.
The writer was secretary of state from 1993 to 1997.

A cautionary tale about specialization and "salvation" units of corperations. IBM fantasy of a "All in One" business faulters

Key IBM Growth Engine Appears to Sputter By BRIAN BERGSTEIN AP Technology Writer
A growth engine in IBM Corp. appears to be sputtering, illustrating the challenges with the company's broader strategy of enticing businesses to let Big Blue take over vital operations from designing products to handling payroll and customer service.
The unit in question is a research-and-design team for hire known as Engineering and Technology Services, or E&TS.
With 1,400 engineers, E&TS has an impressive client list. It customized the chips used in video game consoles made by Microsoft Corp., Nintendo Co. and Sony Corp. It has helped design components for the Pentagon and defense contractors. It built a portable MRI device for the Mayo Clinic and data-collecting 'black boxes' for cars in the United Arab Emirates.
IBM does not reveal precise figures for the group, but its revenue jumped 93 percent in 2004 and 39 percent last year, when it was expected to sign close to $1 billion in contracts. While that is a small slice of the company's $90 billion in revenue, IBM has said the unit has an outsized impact, partly because it can it help drive lucrative hardware deals - an important multiplier at a time when overall sales are virtually stagnant.
E&TS also gives IBM new ways to harvest its $6 billion-a-year research and development arm. And to cite IBM's annual report, 'E&TS is a key component' of Big Blue's plans to help customers tackle their biggest 'business performance transformation' problems. In IBM's view, just like other business processes can be outsourced, so can R&D.
E&TS 'represents a unique opportunity for the company,' said the report, filed Feb. 28. It called out the unit's 'strong revenue growth' and made no indication that expectations were for anything but more of the same.
And yet E&TS revenue dropped 15 percent in the first quarter. In a slide show for investors accompanying the earnings report, IBM blamed the decline on a particularly strong performance in the same quarter the previous year.
Then last week, IBM revealed that E&TS had seen an 8 percent revenue drop in the second quarter. The slide show cited a 'business realignment.'
E&TS did go through an internal shift this year, getting folded into the new 'technology collaboration solutions' group that combines several IBM efforts to help customers with hardware engineering and design.
IBM spokesman Ed Barbini said he could not explain how the reorganization hurt E&TS's revenue. Instead he said that E&TS's prior results were heavily boosted by big contracts with the small universe of video game makers, and so now the group is shifting its focus toward other fields, including aerospace, health care and telecommunications.
Forrester Research analyst Navi Radjou sees other factors at play. IBM is struggling to unify the sales strategies for the formerly disparate groups in technology collaboration solutions - and to tie them to the company's vast services and consulting arm, he said.
Radjou also blames the simple fact of competition, particularly from lower-cost service providers in India.
Even though those companies can't match IBM's vast in-house research and design prowess, they have enough resources to snare major accounts. For example, Radjou noted, the product-design services group at India-based Wipro Ltd. cites Boeing Co. and General Motors Corp. as customers.
Annex Research analyst Bob Djurdjevic said he suspects E&TS's problem is that it arose almost accidentally, when customers sought out IBM for help on design problems. Now it is shifting into a more traditional consulting business that finds it harder to sell itself rather than just fill orders.
IBM's claim of ''organizational reasons' is a euphemism for 'we took our eyes off the ball,'' he said.
'Sony came to IBM and Microsoft (did too) and lo and behold after six or seven spins of the wheel, they realized, 'There's a business here.' Now they're trying to drive the boat and they realize the boat doesn't go where they want it to go.'
Djurdjevic considers E&TS in an 'embryonic' stage and says it bears watching as an important opportunity for IBM. But he said the company would be wise to admit its inherent challenges.
'These ideas are not something you can pick up regularly every quarter, the black box for this or the game console,' he said. 'I'm not sure that will ever be a smooth business.'

Ceiling collapse tip of Big Dig problems

Joyce Howard PriceTHE WASHINGTON TIMES

So many setbacks have plagued Boston's Big Dig during its 15-year history that a more appropriate nickname for the $14.6 billion underground highway project might be the Big Debacle. Capping those problems, a concrete ceiling collapsed July 10 inside the new I-93 tunnel complex and killed a 38-year-old mother of three. The collapse prompted a shutdown of two of the project's tunnels for a safety inspection and a criminal investigation by state Attorney General Tom Reilly. On Thursday, Gov. Mitt Romney overruled an earlier finding by the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority (MTA) and temporarily shut down the eastbound Ted Williams Tunnel after it was discovered that two ceiling panel bolts inside that structure had shifted by as much as an inch. "It is perhaps an overreaction, but we want to err on the side of public safety," Mr. Romney said Thursday at a press conference. Tests conducted in 1999 reportedly showed that bolts holding the ceiling panel in the I-90 connector tunnel, where Milena Del Valle was killed, had a tendency to come loose, and inspections of the I-93 Big Dig tunnels early last year revealed 189 defective wall panels and more than 2,000 water leaks. "The Big Dig was billed as something far different from what it became," Mr. Romney told The Washington Times on Wednesday. "It's been a hugely expensive and wastefully mismanaged project, and no wonder a lot of motorists keep their fingers crossed as they go through it," he said of the most expensive highway project in American history. Troubles during the life of the project have included: •Hundreds of tunnel leaks and millions of gallons of groundwater flowing into the system because of defects in walls and waterproofing; •Weak, defective walls, which have been linked to the use of substandard concrete; •Criminal charges filed against some employees of a concrete supply firm, accused of concealing the poor quality of its product; •The collapse of a slurry wall and other problems of falling debris; •Chronic cost overruns and repeated attempts to hide them, which led to the resignation of the Big Dig's former chief in 1999; Since he has been in office, Mr. Romney has engaged in various efforts designed to strip oversight and management of the project from the MTA. "That is a rogue agency without accountability, and it is clear the jobs of oversight and management have not been effectively carried out," the governor -- who is considering running for president in 2008 -- told The Times. Mr. Romney said he wants the MTA to become part of the Massachusetts Department of Highways and the authority's current chairman, Michael J. Amorello, removed from office. Critics have accused Mr. Amorello of not being tough enough with the project's primary contractor, San Francisco-based Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff, and about 100 subcontractors. But until Mrs. Del Valle's death, Mr. Romney said, Massachusetts lawmakers were reluctant to interfere with the MTA's role in the Big Dig. "The turnpike authority has been a sacred cow, preserved for its largesse and patronage," he said. The goal of the Big Dig project was to demolish an old elevated freeway that ran through downtown Boston and cut off most of the city from its waterfront, and replace it with new underground tunnels. When Congress approved federal money for the project in April 1987, the Big Dig was projected to cost $2.5 billion. But the estimated price tag doubled by 1991 and reached $10.4 billion in mid-1998. It climbed to $13 billion two years later. When construction of the Big Dig started, federal tax dollars were to pay 90 percent of the total cost. However, by mid-2000, when the federal payout already had reached nearly $8.5 billion, Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, fed up with seemingly nonstop cost overruns, persuaded Massachusetts officials to accept that amount as the federal cap. The new dollar ceiling represented just 60 percent of the Big Dig's projected price tag. In fact, $14.6 billion already had been spent when the bulk of the project was completed three years ago.

REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT ON STEM CELL RESEARCH POLICY
The East Room 2:08 P.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon. Congress has just passed and sent to my desk two bills concerning the use of stem cells in biomedical research. These bills illustrate both the promise and perils we face in the age of biotechnology. In this new era, our challenge is to harness the power of science to ease human suffering without sanctioning the practices that violate the dignity of human life. (Applause.)
In 2001, I spoke to the American people and set forth a new policy on stem cell research that struck a balance between the needs of science and the demands of conscience. When I took office, there was no federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research. Under the policy I announced five years ago, my administration became the first to make federal funds available for this research, yet only on embryonic stem cell lines derived from embryos that had already been destroyed.
My administration has made available more than $90 million for research on these lines. This policy has allowed important research to go forward without using taxpayer funds to encourage the further deliberate destruction of human embryos.
One of the bills Congress has passed builds on the progress we have made over the last five years. So I signed it into law. (Applause.) Congress has also passed a second bill that attempts to overturn the balanced policy I set. This bill would support the taking of innocent human life in the hope of finding medical benefits for others. It crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect, so I vetoed it. (Applause.)
Like all Americans, I believe our nation must vigorously pursue the tremendous possibility that science offers to cure disease and improve the lives of millions. We have opportunities to discover cures and treatments that were unthinkable generations ago. Some scientists believe that one source of these cures might be embryonic stem cell research. Embryonic stem cells have the ability to grow into specialized adult tissues, and this may give them the potential to replace damaged or defective cells or body parts and treat a variety of diseases.
Yet we must also remember that embryonic stem cells come from human embryos that are destroyed for their cells. Each of these human embryos is a unique human life with inherent dignity and matchless value. We see that value in the children who are with us today. Each of these children began his or her life as a frozen embryo that was created for in vitro fertilization, but remained unused after the fertility treatments were complete. Each of these children was adopted while still an embryo, and has been blessed with the chance to grow up in a loving family.
These boys and girls are not spare parts. (Applause.) They remind us of what is lost when embryos are destroyed in the name of research. They remind us that we all begin our lives as a small collection of cells. And they remind us that in our zeal for new treatments and cures, America must never abandon our fundamental morals.
Some people argue that finding new cures for disease requires the destruction of human embryos like the ones that these families adopted. I disagree. I believe that with the right techniques and the right policies, we can achieve scientific progress while living up to our ethical responsibilities. That's what I sought in 2001, when I set forth my administration's policy allowing federal funding for research on embryonic stem cell lines where the life and death decision had already been made.
This balanced approach has worked. Under this policy, 21 human embryonic stem cell lines are currently in use in research that is eligible for federal funding. Each of these lines can be replicated many times. And as a result, the National Institutes of Health have helped make more than 700 shipments to researchers since 2001. There is no ban on embryonic stem cell research. To the contrary, even critics of my policy concede that these federally funded lines are being used in research every day by scientists around the world. My policy has allowed us to explore the potential of embryonic stem cells, and it has allowed America to continue to lead the world in this area.
Since I announced my policy in 2001, advances in scientific research have also shown the great potential of stem cells that are derived without harming human embryos. My administration has expanded the funding of research into stem cells that can be drawn from children, adults, and the blood in umbilical cords, with no harm to the donor. And these stem cells are already being used in medical treatments.
With us today are patients who have benefited from treatments with adult and umbilical-cord-blood stem cells. And I want to thank you all for coming. (Applause.)
They are living proof that effective medical science can also be ethical. Researchers are now also investigating new techniques that could allow doctors and scientists to produce stem cells just as versatile as those derived from human embryos. One technique scientists are exploring would involve reprogramming an adult cell. For example, a skin cell to function like an embryonic stem cell. Science offers the hope that we may one day enjoy the potential benefits of embryonic stem cells without destroying human life.
We must continue to explore these hopeful alternatives and advance the cause of scientific research while staying true to the ideals of a decent and humane society. The bill I sign today upholds these humane ideals and draws an important ethical line to guide our research. The Fetus Farming Prohibition Act was sponsored by Senators Santorum and Brownback -- both who are here. (Applause.) And by Congressman Dave Weldon, along with Nathan Deal. Thank you, Congressmen. (Applause.) This good law prohibits one of the most egregious abuses in biomedical research, the trafficking in human fetuses that are created with the sole intent of aborting them to harvest their parts. Human beings are not a raw material to be exploited, or a commodity to be bought or sold, and this bill will help ensure that we respect the fundamental ethical line.
I'm disappointed that Congress failed to pass another bill that would have promoted good research. This bill was sponsored by Senator Santorum and Senator Arlen Specter and Congressman Roscoe Bartlett. Thanks for coming, Roscoe. (Applause.) It would have authorized additional federal funding for promising new research that could produce cells with the abilities of embryonic cells, but without the destruction of human embryos. This is an important piece of legislation. This bill was unanimously approved by the Senate; it received 273 votes in the House of Representatives, but was blocked by a minority in the House using procedural maneuvers. I'm disappointed that the House failed to authorize funding for this vital and ethical research.
It makes no sense to say that you're in favor of finding cures for terrible diseases as quickly as possible, and then block a bill that would authorize funding for promising and ethical stem cell research. At a moment when ethical alternatives are becoming available, we cannot lose the opportunity to conduct research that would give hope to those suffering from terrible diseases, and help move our nation beyond the current controversies over embryonic stem cell research.
We must pursue this research. And so I direct the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Secretary Leavitt, and the Director of the National Institutes of Health to use all the tools at their disposal to aid the search for stem cell techniques that advance promising medical science in an ethical and morally responsible way. (Applause.)
Unfortunately, Congress has sent me a bill that fails to meet this ethical test. This legislation would overturn the balanced policy on embryonic stem cell research that my administration has followed for the past five years. This bill would also undermine the principle that Congress, itself, has followed for more than a decade, when it has prohibited federal funding for research that destroys human embryos.
If this bill would have become law, American taxpayers would, for the first time in our history, be compelled to fund the deliberate destruction of human embryos. And I'm not going to allow it. (Applause.)
I made it clear to the Congress that I will not allow our nation to cross this moral line. I felt like crossing this line would be a mistake, and once crossed, we would find it almost impossible to turn back. Crossing the line would needlessly encourage a conflict between science and ethics that can only do damage to both, and to our nation as a whole. If we're to find the right ways to advance ethical medical research, we must also be willing, when necessary, to reject the wrong ways. So today, I'm keeping the promise I made to the American people by returning this bill to Congress with my veto.
As science brings us ever closer to unlocking the secrets of human biology, it also offers temptations to manipulate human life and violate human dignity. Our conscience and history as a nation demand that we resist this temptation. America was founded on the principle that we are all created equal, and endowed by our Creator with the right to life. We can advance the cause of science while upholding this founding promise. We can harness the promise of technology without becoming slaves to technology. And we can ensure that science serves the cause of humanity instead of the other way around.
America pursues medical advances in the name of life, and we will achieve the great breakthroughs we all seek with reverence for the gift of life. I believe America's scientists have the ingenuity and skill to meet this challenge. And I look forward to working with Congress and the scientific community to achieve these great and noble goals in the years ahead.
Thank you all for coming and may God bless.

Cynical pandering to a declining religious minority. What political gain does the president think he will get? Arrogance before the fall!

A genuine predator has been defeated, the republic is safe, for now

Cagle tops Reed for GOP nomination
By JIM GALLOWAY Wednesday, July 19, 2006, 12:59 AM
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In the end, Ralph Reed couldn’t do for himself what he had helped Republicans do all the way up to the White House: Get elected.
Despite the backing of top conservatives including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Georgia Gov. Zell Miller, Reed failed to win Georgia’s GOP nomination for lieutenant governor Tuesday. He lost to little-known state Sen. Casey Cagle of Gainesville.
“I’m not focused on being a candidate in the future, but I’m glad I ran,” Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, told supporters in conceding to Cagle before all of the votes had been counted.
Cagle credited his Senate colleagues for helping him win the nomination. In February, 21 Republican state senators banded together to sign a petition declaring that Reed should drop out of the race — out of a concern, they said, that Reed would prove a drag on GOP Gov. Sonny Perdue’s re-election bid.
“My senators,” Cagle said. “I knew that by having these guys behind me that we could reach out into every community and have a base of support.”
Cagle will face either former state Sen. Greg Hecht of Jonesboro or former state Rep. Jim Martin of Atlanta in the November general election. The two Democratic candidates are headed to an Aug. 8 primary runoff.
Without a doubt, said state Sen. Cecil Staton (R-Macon), it was Cagle’s ability to tie Reed to convicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff that sealed Reed’s fate. In doing so, Cagle cracked Reed’s rock-hard base of Christian conservatives — whom Reed had led to the ballot box time and time again.
“The Cagle campaign was very successful at planting doubt among members of the faith-based community. They stayed home,” Staton said.
Star of religious right
With Reed as fuel, a normally dull, down-ticket race was transformed into a nearly national affair, fought out on Web sites and editorial pages across the country.
At the start of his 18-month campaign in 2005, Reed, 45, was considered a shoo-in, based on his national reputation with the Christian Coalition and his proven ability to churn out Republican votes — evangelical and otherwise — for two U.S. presidents, both named Bush.
After attending high school and college in Georgia, Reed in 1989 joined the Rev. Pat Robertson’s new organization, the Christian Coalition. As executive director, Reed applied a precinct-style organization that stressed grass-roots organizing.
It worked. With Reed at its head, the coalition was essential to the GOP’s 1994 takeover of the U.S. House, an effort led by Newt Gingrich. Months later, Reed made the cover of Time magazine as the boyish face of the religious right.
By 1997, Reed was back in Georgia. He had left the Christian Coalition to establish a private consulting firm — and to lay groundwork for his entry onto center stage in politics.
An early backer of George W. Bush in his 2000 presidential campaign, Reed parlayed those Bush contacts, and a reputation for grass-roots organization, into a successful bid for chairman of the state Republican Party in 2001. Republicans won the governorship and the state Senate the next year. Reed took an even larger role in Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign.
Telegenic, smooth and well-connected, Reed saw early money pour into his campaign for lieutenant governor at a record rate. One opponent, state Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine, withdrew early from the primary contest, leaving only Cagle, a 12-year veteran of the Legislature.
Reed pitched himself as the ideas candidate, with a 63-page, downloadable position paper that included his support for a state spending cap tied to population growth and inflation, and his call for a 20 percent across-the-board reduction in income taxes by 2011.
But while Reed was getting his campaign off the ground, a U.S. Senate committee and federal prosecutors were probing deeper into the affairs of Abramoff, a Reed associate who pleaded guilty in January to bilking his Indian tribe clients of tens of millions of dollars, and of bribery of a public official.
Reed has not been accused of any criminal wrongdoing.
But e-mails between Abramoff and Reed revealed that the longtime friends, who met as college Republicans, had developed a close business association, often sharing clients and trading favors.
Cagle used the Abramoff scandal to repeatedly accuse Reed of hypocrisy.
A Senate Indian Affairs Committee, chaired by U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), concluded that Reed had been paid $5.3 million by two casino-owning Indian tribes, both Abramoff clients, to rally Christian voters against attempts by other tribes to establish competing casinos.
Reed repeatedly denied that he knew the money that financed his anti-gambling campaigns came from gambling revenue, although several e-mails showed that Abramoff informed Reed of the money’s origins several times.
“The way he sold out our values? That’s wrong,” Cagle said in one of several TV ads that saturated Georgia’s airwaves in the final two weeks of the campaign.
In the last three months of the race, Cagle’s barrage against Reed began to pay off. Cagle rose in the polls and raised more than three times as much as Reed from contributors. Reed closed the financial gap with a $500,000 personal loan to his own campaign. By June 30, both men had raised roughly $2.5 million.
For the last six months of the campaign, Reed continually expressed regret for his association with Abramoff, and frustration that the media were not covering the important issues of the campaign.
Abramoff controversy
The lieutenant governor’s race in many ways became a measure of the continued influence of Reed and his Christian conservatives, nationally as well as within the state Republican Party.
Conservative radio-TV talk show host Sean Hannity and future presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani traveled to Georgia to help Reed build his war chest. Giuliani said it was “very important” that Reed get elected.
Bush, however, made only passing reference to Reed, and Cagle, when he visited in March for a fund-raiser for Perdue, which was attended by both lieutenant gubernatorial candidates.
“Two candidates running for lieutenant governor, Casey Cagle and Ralph Reed, we appreciate them both being here tonight,” Bush said.
The Abramoff controversy forced Reed to conduct a campaign that was usually out of the view of even journalists inside the state.
Cagle, meanwhile, built his campaign around a network of Republican public officials, most of them state lawmakers, who were worried about the impact that Reed’s candidacy could have on the re-election bid of Perdue. Perdue himself remained strictly neutral.
Reed often blamed “the liberal media” for focusing on the his dealings with Abramoff, but in fact many evangelical Christians were also disaffected.
Clint Austin of Marietta is a former Reed employee who ran Reed’s successful bid to become state Republican Party chairman in 2001. On Monday, Austin, now a state Capitol lobbyist, posted on the Internet an article in which he explained why he would not vote for Reed.
“My reason for abandoning my support of Ralph is simple: Ralph Reed’s words and actions do not match up,” Austin wrote.
Anecdotal evidence showed some attempts, including by gay and lesbian voters, to pull Democrats into the race against Reed, but their effectiveness couldn’t be measured by early returns. For more than a decade, Reed has served as a lightning rod for those critical of the expanding influence of evangelical Christians in national politics.
“Tomorrow morning, I’ll be voting Republican for the one and only time in my life, to stop Ralph Reed. If we let Reed win this election, we can kiss our freedoms good-bye,” said one automated phone message left anonymously on answering machines in white Democratic areas of Atlanta on Monday night.
A spokesman for the Cagle campaign denied authorship.
Reed’s defeat has set a limit on the influence of Christian conservatives in Georgia’s growing Republican Party, said Charles Bullock, a political scientist at the University of Georgia. “They may be the tail now, but they’re not the dog anymore,” he said.
As for Reed, Bullock said he didn’t see Reed coming back soon. “We’ve witnessed the final implosion of Ralph Reed,” he said. With initial expectations placed on his candidacy, it would be hard to reignite broad support, Bullock said.
Supporters in Reed’s emptying ballroom disagreed late Tuesday night.
“I’m obviously disappointed,” said a tearful Sadie Fields, head of the Georgia Christian Coalition. “The state lost an opportunity. But he will be back. He has far too much to offer.”

The Times (of London) July 19, 2006
Mickey SpillaneMarch 9, 1918 - July 17, 2006
Tough-guy novelist whose brutal but well-crafted fictions enraged postwar critical sensibilities — and sold in their millions
MICKEY SPILLANE was both the most popular and the most vilified American crime writer of the postwar period. If the luridly described violence and sex which drew so many readers but repelled the critics and his fellow authors appear less exceptional now, this is partly because he had an influence on the craft of the thriller in much the same way that “spaghetti” Westerns affected the traditional Western. Although refreshingly unpretentious whenever he talked about his work, he remained in person a somewhat enigmatic figure with a curiously sporadic career.
Frank Morrison Spillane was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1918, the only child of a Scottish mother and an Irish father, who was a bartender. He grew up in a tough area at a tough time, but found that he could usually talk himself out of trouble. He began writing at high school, but with no great success, and briefly attended Fort Hays State College, Kansas. In the winter he did odd jobs, including a spell as a trampoline artist for the Barnum and Bailey circus, while in the summer he was a lifeguard.
In the autumn of 1940, while working as a salesman in Gimbel’s basement, he met another Brooklyn boy, Joe Gill, who was selling ties. Gill sent Spillane to see his brother, Ray, who ran Funnies Inc, a firm that produced comic books for various publishers. Spillane proved able to turn out an eight-page story in a day, whereas most writers needed the best part of a week.
Immediately after Pearl Harbor he joined the US Army Air Corps in which he became a flying instructor, ending the war with the rank of captain. He and the Gill brothers then set up what was, in effect, a comic book factory. It prospered but left Spillane unsatisfied. Needing money to buy a house in the country for his wife, Mary Ann, whom he had married in 1945, he decided to write a novel. It took him just 19 days to complete the first Mike Hammer book, I, the Jury. At Ray Gill’s suggestion, he sent it to an old-established Manhattan publishing company, E. P. Dutton, which accepted the book on the chief editor’s advice that “it isn’t in the best of taste but will sell”.
Never was an editorial prediction more fully justified. I, the Jury (1947) sold six and a half million copies in the United States alone, and Mickey Spillane was, for several years, the best-selling fiction writer in America. His enthusiastic fans ranged from servicemen all around the world to the upper-class girls of Radcliffe College.
In I, the Jury’s characteristic climax Mike Hammer discovers that the woman psychiatrist with whom he has been having an affair was the murderer of his best friend; so he shoots her through the naked belly. “Mike, how c-could you?” she wails. “It was easy,” he replies.
Other books, featuring Mike Hammer and an equally high body-count, followed in rapid succession: My Gun is Quick, Vengeance is Mine (both 1950), The Big Kill, The Long Wait, One Lonely Night (all 1951), and Kiss Me Deadly (1952).
Spillane’s average writing time was three weeks. The vengeance or vigilante theme running through many of the stories foreshadowed the kind of thrillers in which Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood were to star a generation later. An enraged Mike Hammer is apt to go, in his own words, “kill crazy”. He tells a police captain: “You’re a cop. You’re tied down by rules and regulations. I’m alone. Some day, before long, I’m going to have my rod in my mitt and the killer in front of me. I’m going to plunk one right in his gut, and when he’s dying on the floor I may kick his teeth out. You couldn’t do that. You have to follow the book.”
The critics did not admire this sort of thing. “No nastier fragment of psychopathy is likely to be published this year,” wrote one. “Daydreams for the frustrated and the sick,” said another. Spillane was not worried. He despised “longhairs” and expressed alarm when one of his books was quite well reviewed in The New York Times. Then, without explanation, he suddenly stopped writing, possibly — though probably not — because, in 1953, he had become a Jehovah’s Witness.
Imitators, some who wrote better, some who wrote worse, began to exploit the market he had opened up. No less mysteriously, between 1961 and 1967 he showed another burst of creative activity, writing four novels about Mike Hammer, beginning with The Girl Hunters (1962) and four, beginning with Day of the Guns (1964), about a character called Tiger Mann, whose violent behaviour was much the same but who, in a conscious attempt to cash in on the James Bond boom, fought subversion as well as gangsters.
Mann works for an organisation, “financed to such an extent that there was nothing we couldn’t bust and nobody we couldn’t outbid”, which tries to ensure that the United States is not “bitten and chewed to death by the heavy handed slobs on the other side of the fence”. He brushes aside opposition from “the striped pants boys” who frequently “flush with anger” at his activities. Spillane had small regard for politicians of any kind, but admitted to being “so far to the Right that I make Barry Goldwater look like a Red”.
Then came another pause, which was nevertheless followed by another flurry of output, which included The Erection Set (1972), a thriller with which he hoped to rival the success of Jacqueline Susann by producing, as he put it, “an even dirtier book than these women writers”. Except for a virtually unnoticed children’s story, called The Day the Sea Rolled Back (1981) he paused again for almost another 20 years.
Earlier he had toyed with acting; a couple of small parts — in an episode of Columbo, for example — but, most notably, playing Mike Hammer in his own production of The Girl Hunters (1963), which was filmed in Britain and proved just as bad as everyone expected. Arthouse met pulp fiction in Robert Aldrich’s version of Kiss Me Deadly (1955). The Mike Hammer television series, starring Stacey Keach, was more straightforward and more lucrative.
Mickey Spillane’s first marriage produced four children, two boys and two girls, but was dissolved in 1962. Three years later he married Sherri Malinou, a nightclub singer half his age. He had met her when she came to model the jacket for one of his books. “I told them to send a good-looking leggy blonde,” he used to say, “and I didn’t send her back.” Although she travelled with him and he liked to buy things for her and show her off, for much of the time she pursued her own career in New York while he settled into a waterfront house at Murrell’s Inlet, South Carolina. This marriage also ended in divorce and a highly publicised lawsuit in which Sherri claimed a share of the money from the television series.
Spillane’s third wife, Jane, was an old friend from South Carolina, content to settle in Murrell’s Inlet. His first wife, with whom he remained on friendly terms, and his four children lived not far away, and the years passed in a kind of backwoods idyll, interrupted only by Hurricane Hugo, which struck in 1989, after which his characteristically unpretentious house had to be rebuilt almost entirely.
For a long while his only professional activity consisted of appearing, costumed in trenchcoat and fedora, in television commercials for Miller Lite Beer. Eventually, however, he felt the urge to write again, and, in 1989, after four weeks bashing away at his portable typewriter, produced The Killing Man, another Mike Hammer story, violent, badly reviewed and profitable as ever. It was followed by Black Alley (1996).
To interviewers Spillane presented an easy-going, suitably tough, facade matching his Brooklyn accent. “Nobody in my books drinks cognac,” he told them, “because I can’t spell the word.” He considered himself “the mediumest guy I know”. His favourite novel was Anthony Hope’s Ruritanian adventure The Prisoner of Zenda.
Spillane’s religious convictions seem to have been sincere and lasting. He was fond of animals and would permit no hunting on his land. His books, which, as Life magazine said, “no one likes except the public”, are now judged to have more merit than contemporary critics allowed.
Mickey Spillane, writer, was born on March 9, 1918. He died on July 17, 2006, aged 88.

Massachusetts AG Reilly says there was "substantial dispute" about tunnel design
By Andrew Ryan, Globe Correspondent
Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly said this afternoon that there was a “substantial dispute” dating back to 1999 about whether the Interstate 90 connector tunnel could hold the weight of the three-ton cement ceiling tiles that collapsed last week and killed a 38-year-old Jamaica Plain woman.
“What I am saying is that there were clearly questions about if the design was adequate to hold the weight,” Reilly said at press conference outside the closed tunnel.
The attorney general cited documents that investigators uncovered during a criminal probe into the partial collapse, which killed Milena Del Valle. While Reilly declined to discuss specifics of the dispute, he said it involved the tunnel’s designer, installer and Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff, the company that oversaw the construction of the $14.6 billion Big Dig.
Investigators are trying to determine why a lighter ceiling panel system was used in the Ted William Tunnel. Those tiles are a combination of porcelain and concrete and weigh about 700 pounds each, as opposed to the approximate 6,000 pounds slabs that fell in the connector.
The news came the day after Angel Del Valle arrived in San Jose, Costa Rica, to bury his body of his wife, the first person killed in the Big Dig who was not a construction worker. He wore a pin that bore a picture of Milena Del Valle, who died last week when the concrete ceiling panels crushed the couple’s car on their way to Logan International Airport.
Investigators are focusing on bolt-and-epoxy fasteners that helped support the three-ton concrete ceiling panels in the connector tunnel, which links Massachusetts Turnpike with the Ted Williams Tunnel. The connector has been closed since the accident.
On Sunday, officials shutdown another tube – the westbound I-90/Ted Williams ramp to I-93 in both directions at Exit 24 – after inspectors found 40 more potentially dangerous bolt fixtures.
The closure is forcing traffic onto surface streets in South Boston, a move traffic watchers fear could make tonight’s commute the worst since the connector tunnel partially collapsed.
Maria Cramer of the Globe Staff contributed to this report from San Jose, Costa Rica
Posted by the Boston Globe City & Region Desk

Massachusetts Governor Milt Romney Warns: All bolts unreliable in compromised tunnel,

Boston Herald: Joe DwinellMonday, July 17, 2006

All epoxy-anchored bolts in the compromised Big Dig connector tunnel are now considered unreliable and the tunnel will require a secondary support system, Governor Mitt Romney announced today.
Another set of hangers will be added to the 1,146 compromised ceiling bolts and 308 ‘items of concern’ keeping the cement ceiling panels secured in place, the governor said at a 4 p.m. press conference.
“The system is not working. We’re going to remediate them all,” he said, later adding he “wondered” why the ceiling bolt faults were not identified earlier.
The work, he warned, will take “a couple of months and potentially longer than that.’’
When asked if all the Big Dig ceiling panels had been inspected, the governor said he was told by associates the work is “99.9 percent” complete.
“This means (the number of faulty bolts) will go up a bit,” he quickly added.
Romney vowed the state is “blasting ahead” with the work to open up the I-90 connector and Ted Williams Tunnel system as soon as possible.
Romney stressed that the work will be done so the “incalculable loss of human life” never happens again. A week ago a ceiling panel in the I-90 Seaport connector tunnel killed 38-year-old Milena Del Valle as she and her husband, Angel, were heading to the airport.
In a press conference that lasted almost an hour, Romney repeated that he would not open up the tunnel system before he was assured of its safety.
He also said: I’d be embarrassed if I didn’t always ask for federal money.”
Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey has been assigned to work with the business and tourism industry to “get the news out” when roads are opened.
Logan Express buses from Framingham and Braintree can use the Ted Williams Tunnel, easing the nightmarish commute to Logan International Airport.

Another Big Dig Ramp Closed for Problems
By KEN MAGUIREThe Associated PressSunday, July 16, 2006; 3:26 PM
BOSTON -- A Big Dig tunnel used by motorists to get around a section of highway where a woman was killed by falling ceiling panels was ordered closed Sunday for repairs to the same type of panel.
The tunnel, a quarter-mile-long ramp, needs repairs to panel fixtures, officials said. The work was expected to last at least several days and comes nearly a week after a car carrying Milena Del Valle, 38, was crushed.
Since her death July 10, motorists have been using the now-closed ramp as a detour around the accident scene.
The ramp had been previously identified by Gov. Mitt Romney's inspection teams as a potential trouble spot, said Jon Carlisle, a state Highway Department spokesman.
"We're putting additional connections between the roof and the ceiling panels," he said, adding that the specific number of repair spots was unclear. "We're still working on the engineering."
The closure was expected to snarl traffic even worse, Carlisle said.
Del Valle was killed when 12 tons of falling ceiling panels crushed the passenger side of the car being driven by her husband, Angel Del Valle, as they headed to Logan International Airport.
Connector tunnels in both directions have been closed since then.
After the fatal accident, state and federal investigators have focused on bolts used to hold the drop-ceiling system in place. Each of the concrete slabs suspended above the roadway weighs three tons.
The $14.6 billion Big Dig buried the old elevated Central Artery that used to slice through the city, replacing it with a series of highway tunnels. Although it's been considered an engineering marvel, the most expensive highway project in U.S. history also has also been plagued by leaks, falling debris, cost overruns, delays and problems linked to faulty construction.

America's all time biggest scam! 14.2 Billion Dollars to build a 2 Bilion dollar tunnel!

Politics paved way for Big Dig -- and now underscores project
By Andrew Miga, Associated Press Writer July 15, 2006
WASHINGTON --It took a dose of political hardball in Congress nearly two decades ago to launch the Big Dig.
The Massachusetts congressional delegation intensely lobbied colleagues to overturn a presidential veto by a single vote in the Senate, prying open the federal money spigot for the project in 1987.
Ever since, political maneuvering by lawmakers, state officials and private contractors has kept the problem-plagued project awash in public money -- despite critics who brand the Big Dig a $14.6 billion boondoggle.
"Politics created the Big Dig," said Jeffrey Berry, a Tufts University political science professor. "It was a highly political project from the very beginning."
Every major politician in Massachusetts seems to have a connection to the colossal project, creating a tangle of odd alliances across party lines.
Now, the question remains: If so many political leaders have ties to the contractors and project manager Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff, how difficult will it be to hold someone accountable for the deadly collapse this past week of 12 tons of ceiling panels from one of the Big Dig tunnels?
"The issue of the Big Dig has become a huge political football and it seems to get bigger and bigger all the time," said Rep. Michael Capuano, D-Mass.
The Republican ties of San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp. -- the lead name in the joint venture formed to manage the project -- were well-known when it was tapped in 1985 for the Big Dig, formally known as the Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel project. Former President Reagan turned to Bechtel for two Cabinet picks, George P. Shultz and Caspar Weinberger.
Over the years, the company and its Big Dig partners have forged strong ties to top state officials and lawmakers in both parties. Former Gov. William Weld's top fundraiser, Peter Berlandi, was also a lobbyist for Bechtel, sparking complaints from Democrats about his dual roles. Weld's campaign account swelled with contributions from Bechtel officials.
Bechtel later hired people like attorney Cheryl Cronin, who had ties to then-acting Gov. Jane Swift, a Republican, and then-House Speaker Thomas Finneran, a Democrat. It hired O'Neill and Associates, one of the state's leading lobbying firms, that was headed by Thomas P. O'Neill III, the son of legendary former House Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill. Bechtel also turned to veteran Democratic operative Andrew Paven, who could maneuver on Beacon Hill as well as Capitol Hill.
"They're well-connected in Washington and on Beacon Hill," Berry said of Bechtel. "They've been blamed for lots of failures, but the repercussions have been fairly minimal."
The Big Dig highway project, which buried the old Central Artery that used to slice through the city, created a series of tunnels to bring traffic underground. Although it's been considered an engineering marvel, the most expensive highway project in U.S. history also has also been plagued by leaks, falling debris, delays and other problems linked to faulty construction.
The initial price tag for the project was $2.6 billion and it was supposed to be completed in seven years. Instead, it took nearly 15 years and repeated cost overruns until it had ballooned to $14.6 billion.
Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff, which has defended its work on the project, declined to comment for this article.
Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., thinks Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff has enjoyed a huge advantage over the state's overseers largely because of the Big Dig's sheer size and the firm's broad expertise.
"There was no one of comparable skill and ability on the other side to hold their feet to the fire and to make sure the state wasn't taken advantage of," Lynch said. "That's the fundamental problem."
The state's congressional delegation, all Democrats, has fought hard over the years to keep federal dollars flowing to the project, despite rising costs and scandals -- including a federal audit that found evidence officials had concealed $1.4 billion in cost overruns. Big Dig bucks kept their labor supporters in the construction trades, among others, happy.
Meanwhile, a succession of Republican governors, more closely aligned with business interests, has worked to keep the project moving forward as a boon to the state's economy.
In turn, Big Dig contractors have been a virtual ATM for Massachusetts politicians.
A review in the early 1990s by The Boston Globe found that 77 executives of firms with Big Dig contracts showered more than $100,000 to Weld and Cellucci, his lieutenant governor, during their days in power.
Sen. John Kerry's political action committee pocketed $25,000 checks from the founder and CEO of Modern Continental Construction, the late Lelio "Les" Marino, and another Big Dig contractor, Jay Cashman, as he was laying the groundwork in 2003 for his presidential run.
But controversy has often followed the cash.
Gov. Mitt Romney pulled the plug on one fundraising event involving Big Dig contractors as controversy over tunnel leaks flared. Capuano gave back $2,000 from two political action committees for Big Dig contractors during the leak controversy.
State Attorney General Tom Reilly, too, has taken heat for $35,000 in Big Dig-related contributions while pursuing project cost-recovery efforts.
Now, both Romney and Reilly -- two politicians with ambitions -- have taken central roles in the investigation into the collapse this past week of 12 tons of ceiling panels in one of the tunnels that killed 38-year-old Milena Del Valle of Boston as she and her husband, Angel, were driving through it late at night.
Inspectors looking for design or construction flaws have focused on bolts that hold the tunnel's ceiling panels in place.
The connector tunnel, a main route to Boston's Logan International Airport, remains closed. Romney, a Republican considering a run for president in 2008, has seized control over a massive inspection of the highway system and vows not to reopen it until he's assured it's safe to travel through it. Reilly, a Democrat running for governor this year, has launched a criminal investigation with an eye toward filing involuntary manslaughter charges.
Andrew Natsios, a Beacon Hill veteran who has trekked across the globe to oversee U.S. relief efforts for some of the world's most horrifying disasters, was called in several years ago to clean up a Big Dig accounting scandal. He was taken aback by the mess, the rampant profiteering, the endless politicking, the seeming lack of accountability.
"It was not a fun thing to do, believe me," he recalled in an interview earlier this year. "I had to fire a lot of contractors and I had to call the FBI once. I hired forensic auditors to come in. My heavens. Every week, something else we found."

Baghdad starts to collapse as its people flee a life of death

By James Hider, of The Times, from Baghdad
14/JULY/2006
As I hung up the phone, I wondered if I would ever see my friend Ali alive again. Ali, The Times translator for the past three years, lives in west Baghdad, an area that is now in meltdown as a bitter civil war rages between Sunni insurgents and Shia militias. It is, quite simply, out of control.
I returned to Baghdad on Monday after a break of several months, during which I too was guilty of glazing over every time I read another story of Iraqi violence. But two nights on the telephone, listening to my lost and frightened Iraqi staff facing death at any moment, persuaded me that Baghdad is now verging on total collapse.
Ali phoned me on Tuesday night, about 10.30pm. There were cars full of gunmen prowling his mixed neighbourhood, he said. He and his neighbours were frantically exchanging information, trying to identify the gunmen.
Were they the Mahdi Army, the Shia militia blamed for drilling holes in their victims’ eyes and limbs before executing them by the dozen? Or were they Sunni insurgents hunting down Shias to avenge last Sunday’s massacre, when Shia gunmen rampaged through an area called Jihad, pulling people from their cars and homes and shooting them in the streets?
Ali has a surname that could easily pass for Shia. His brother-in-law has an unmistakably Sunni name. They agreed that if they could determine that the gunmen were Shia, Ali would answer the door. If they were Sunnis, his brother-in-law would go.
Whoever didn’t answer the door would hide in the dog kennel on the roof.
Their Plan B was simpler: to dash 50 yards to their neighbours’ house — home to a dozen brothers. All Iraqi homes are awash with guns for self-defence in these merciless times. Together they would shoot it out with the gunmen — one of a dozen unsung Alamos now being fought nightly on Iraq’s blacked-out streets.
“We just have to wait and see what our fate is,” Ali told me. It was the first time in three years of bombs, battles and kidnappings that I had heard this stocky, very physical young man sounding scared, but there was nothing I could do to help.
The previous night I had had a similar conversation with my driver, a Shia who lives in another part of west Baghdad. He phoned at 11pm to say that there was a battle raging outside his house and that his family were sheltering in the windowless bathroom.
Marauding Mahdi gunmen, seeking to drive all Sunnis from the area, were fighting Sunni Mujahidin for control of a nearby strategic position. I could hear the gunfire blazing over the phone.
We phoned the US military trainer attached to Iraqi security forces in the area. He said there was nothing to be done: “There’s always shooting at night here. It’s like chasing ghosts.”
In fact the US military generally responds only to request for support from Iraqi security forces. But as many of those forces are at best turning a blind eye to the Shia death squads, and at worst colluding with them, calling the Americans is literally the last thing they do.
West Baghdad is no stranger to bombings and killings, but in the past few days all restraint has vanished in an orgy of ethnic cleansing.
Shia gunmen are seeking to drive out the once-dominant Sunni minority and the Sunnis are forming neighbourhood posses to retaliate. Mosques are being attacked. Scores of innocent civilians have been killed, their bodies left lying in the streets.
Hundreds — Sunni and Shia — are abandoning their homes. My driver said all his neighbours had now fled, their abandoned houses bullet-pocked and locked up. On a nearby mosque, competing Sunni and Shiite graffiti had been scrawled on the walls.
A senior nurse at Yarmouk hospital on the fringes of west Baghdad’s war zone said that he was close to being overwhelmed. “On Tuesday we received 35 bodies in one day, 16 from Al-Furat district alone. All of them were killed execution-style,” he said. “I thought it was the end of the city. I packed my bags at once and got ready to leave because they could storm the hospital at any moment.”
In just 24 hours before noon yesterday, as parliament convened for another emergency session, 87 bodies were brought to Baghdad city morgue, 63 of them unidentified. Since Sunday’s massacre in Jihad, more than 160 people have been killed, making a total of at least 1,600 since Iraq’s Government of national unity came to power six weeks ago. Another 2,500 have been wounded.
In early June, Nouri al-Maliki, the new Prime Minister, flooded Baghdad’s streets with tens of thousands of soldiers and police in an effort to restore order to the capital.
More recently, he announced a national reconciliation plan, which promised an amnesty to Sunni insurgents and the disbandment of Shia militias. Both initiatives are now in tatters.
“The country is sliding fast towards civil war,” Ali Adib, a Shia MP, told the Iraqi parliament this week. “Security has deteriorated in a serious and unprecedented way,” said Saadi Barzanji, a Kurdish MP.
Mr al-Maliki told parliament: “We all have a last chance to reconcile and agree among each other on avoiding conflict and blood. If we fail, God knows what the fate of Iraq will be.”
Joseph Biden, the senior Democrat on the US Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, described Baghdad after a recent visit as a city in the throes of “nascent civil war”.
Most Iraqis believe that it is already here. “There is a campaign to eradicate all Sunnis from Baghdad,” said Sheikh Omar al-Jebouri, of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni parliamentary group. He said that it was organised by the Shia-dominated Interior Ministry and its police special commandos, with Shia militias, and aimed to destroy Mr al-Maliki’s plans to rebuild Iraq’s security forces along national, rather than sectarian, lines.
Ahmed Abu Mustafa, a resident of the Sunni district of Amariyah in western Baghdad, was stunned to see two police car pick-ups speed up to his local mosque with cars full of gunmen on Tuesday evening and open fire on it with their government-issued machineguns.
Immediately, Sunni gunmen materialised from side streets and a battle started. “I’d heard about this happening but this was the first time I’d seen police shooting at a mosque,” he said. “I was amazed by how quickly the local gunmen deployed. I ran for my life.”
Yesterday, General George Casey, the most senior US commander in Iraq, said that the US might deploy more American troops in Baghdad. He said that al-Qaeda, to show that it was still relevant, had stepped up its attacks in Baghdad following the killing last month of its leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. “What we are seeing now as a counter to that is death squads, primarily from Shia extremist groups, that are retaliating against civilians.”
A local journalist told me bitterly this week that Iraqis find it ironic that Saddam Hussein is on trial for killing 148 people 24 years ago, while militias loyal to political parties now in government kill that many people every few days. But it is not an irony that anyone here has time to laugh about. They are too busy packing their bags and wondering how they can get out alive.
My driver and his extended family are now refugees living in The Times offices in central Baghdad.
Ali is also trying to persuade his stubborn family to leave home and move into our hotel.
Those that can are leaving the country. At Baghdad airport, throngs of Iraqis jostle for places on the flights out — testimony to the breakdown in Iraqi society.
One woman said that she and her three children were fleeing Mansour, once the most stylish part of the capital. “Every day there is fighting and killing,” she said as she boarded a plane for Damascus in Syria to sit out the horrors of Baghdad.
A neurologist, who was heading to Jordan with his wife, said that he would seek work abroad and hoped that he would never have to return. “We were so happy on April 9, 2003 when the Americans came. But I’ve given up. Iraq isn’t ready for democracy,” he said, sitting in a chair with a view of the airport runway.
Fares al-Mufti, an official with the Iraqi Airways booking office, told The Times that the national carrier had had to lay on an extra flight a day, all fully booked. Flights to Damascus have gone up from three a week to eight to cope with the panicked exodus.
Muhammad al-Ani, who runs fleets of Suburban cars to Jordan, said that the service to Amman was so oversubscribed that that prices had rocketed from $200 (£108) to $750 per trip in the past two weeks.
Despite the huge risks of driving through the Sunni Triangle, the number of buses to Jordan has mushroomed from 2 a day to as many as 40 or 50.
Abu Ahmed, a Sunni who was leaving Ghazaliya with his family and belongings, said that he was ready to pay the exorbitant prices being charged because his wife had received a death threat at the hospital in a Shia area where she worked.
“We can’t cope, we have to take the children out for a while,” he said.
In one of the few comprehensive surveys of how many Iraqis have fled their country since the US invasion, the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants said last month that there were 644,500 refugees in Syria and Jordan in 2005 — about 2.5 per cent of Iraq’s population. In total, 889,000 Iraqis had moved abroad, creating “the biggest new flow of refugees in the world”, according to Lavinia Limon, the committee’s president.
And the exodus may only just be starting.

Comedian Red Buttons Dies at 87
By MERVYN ROTHSTEIN
Red Buttons, the Borscht Belt comic who rose to instant television stardom on his own variety show in 1952, descended to obscurity three years later after his program was canceled and then rebounded to win an Academy Award for his dramatic performance in the 1957 film “Sayonara,” died yesterday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87.
The cause was vascular disease, his publicist, Warren Cowan, said.
To television watchers in the mid-1970’s, Mr. Buttons was perhaps best recognized as a witty regular and master of the gentle barb on the NBC comic tribute series “The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast.” But it was his Oscar, for best supporting actor, that brought him his greatest renown almost 20 years earlier.
The award was for his portrayal of Airman Joe Kelly, an American serviceman in Japan after World War II who is ostracized by the military for marrying a Japanese woman. Miyoshi Umeki, who played his wife, received the best supporting actress award. The movie starred Marlon Brando and was based on the James A. Michener novel.
Five years earlier, CBS executives, looking for a show to compete with Milton Berle’s “Texaco Star Theater” on NBC on Tuesdays at 8 P.M., turned to Mr. Buttons. At the time he was a 33-year-old comedian who had made guest appearances on the Berle show and won some acclaim for his acting in a 1951 episode of the “Suspense” television series.
CBS gave Mr. Buttons his own half-hour variety program, which began Oct. 14, 1952. Later that evening, switchboard operators at the network reported one of the biggest and most enthusiastic responses to a single program they had ever received. Audiences enjoyed his sketch comedy routines and his characters. He was Rocky Buttons, a punch-drunk prizefighter with a heart of gold; Muggsy Buttons, a juvenile delinquent with a core of kindness; Keeglefarven, a German military officer presented in dialect, and the Kupke Kid, a child laborer who aroused in others a compulsion to pick him up after first knocking him down.
“I’m a little guy, and that’s what I play — a little guy with a little guy’s troubles,” said Mr. Buttons, who stood 5-foot-6 and weighed 140 pounds in his prime.
Between bits this puckish, almost elflike comedian would cup his ears and sing, “Hey-hey, ho-ho, strange things are happening,” providing different strange things each week. Soon “Strange things are happening” became a catch phrase among the nation’s teenagers.
The success didn’t last. As the second season began, television audiences lost interest in Mr. Buttons, and his ratings dropped. Frantically seeking to rediscover a winning format, he hired and fired writers almost every week, among them Larry Gelbart and Neil Simon. The revolving door for writers — 163 of them over two years — became a standing joke in show business. Nothing helped. The ratings kept plummeting, and his CBS show was canceled.
NBC, however, picked him up, and in the third year a situation-comedy format was tried in a new time slot. But the ratings didn’t approach their first-year levels, and in May 1955, his sponsor, Pontiac, ended the show.
For the next two years, Mr. Buttons appeared mainly in nightclubs, although he made an occasional television guest appearance. He was 36 and rich, but newspaper articles at the time called him a has-been.
But then the director Joshua Logan, after some initial misgivings about using a comedian in a dramatic role, asked him to join the cast of “Sayonara.” An eager Mr. Buttons went off to Japan. While on location, he sent his agent a postcard of Kyoto’s snow-covered hills. On the front, harking back to his early stand-up days playing the Catskills, he wrote, “Hey, look, you’ve got me working in the mountains again.”
Red Buttons was born Aaron Chwatt on Feb. 5, 1919, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He was the son of Michael Chwatt, a millinery worker, and Sophie Chwatt, a housewife. Aaron and his family — there was an older brother, Joe, and a younger sister, Ida — lived in a tenement apartment on Third Street between Avenues A and B. It was a tough neighborhood. “On my block, you either grew up to be a judge or you went to the electric chair,” he often said.
He first attended P.S. 104 on East Fourth Street, but then his family moved to the Bronx, to 176th Street and Marmion Avenue. He made his first stage appearance at age 12 under the name Little Skippy, dressed in a sailor suit and singing “Sweet Jennie Lee” in an amateur contest at the Fox Corona Theater. He won.
While attending Evander Childs High School, Aaron got a job as a bellhop and singer at Ryan’s, a bar on City Island in the Bronx, where he got the name Red Buttons: since he wore a bellhop uniform, he was, naturally, called Buttons, and at the time his hair was red. The name stuck, even though his hair turned dark brown as he got older. (Mr. Logan had him dye it red for “Sayonara.”)
His first job in the Catskills was in the summer of 1935, as a singer at Greenfield Park. “My voice cracked, so they made me a comedian,” he recalled. He began working in burlesque, at Minsky’s, at the Gaiety on Broadway and 46th Street, and in Western Wheel, the Midwest burlesque circuit, doing comic numbers like “Sam, You Made the Pants Too Long.” In 1940 he married a stripper known as Roxanne, but the marriage was annulled two years later.
In 1941, José Ferrer discovered him and cast him in a Broadway-bound comedy called “The Admiral Takes a Wife.” The play received good out-of-town reviews, came into New York on a Sunday in December and was scheduled to open the following day. The comedy, however, was a satire on life at a naval base in Hawaii: Pearl Harbor. The Sunday it arrived was Dec. 7, 1941, and the show never opened.
Mr. Buttons joined the Army in 1943 and spent the rest of World War II in its entertainment unit, appearing in a hit show called “Winged Victory,” which was written and directed by Moss Hart. It was turned into a movie in 1944. Other future stars in the show included Mario Lanza, Karl Malden, Barry Nelson, Louis Nye, Peter Lind Hayes, John Forsythe and Gary Merrill. They were recruited by Irving Lazar, who would acquire the nickname “Swifty” and become one of Broadway and Hollywood’s leading agents.
After the war, Mr. Buttons returned to nightclubs and appeared in an occasional Broadway flop. Then came the “Suspense” episode, stardom, his descent and the Oscar.
In 1966, he starred on a short-lived television series, “The Double Life of Henry Phyfe,” as a meek accountant-turned-spy. His other movies included “Imitation General” (1958), “Hatari!” with John Wayne (1962), “The Longest Day” (1962), “A Ticklish Affair” (1963), “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1969), “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972), “Gable and Lombard” (1976) and “It Could Happen to You” (1994).
After his run with “Dean Martin’s Celebrity Roast” in the 1970’s, he landed other television roles, portraying the White Rabbit in the 1985 musical miniseries “Alice in Wonderland” and, in 1987, playing the recurring role of Al Baker on “Knots Landing.” He also made guest appearances on “Roseanne” and “E.R.”
In 1995, he celebrated his 60th year in show business by presenting a one-man show, “Buttons on Broadway,” at the Ambassador Theater. Writing in The New York Times, Ben Brantley said Mr. Buttons was “trim and agile at 76” and “able to command a stage for nearly two hours with a medley of Borscht Belt and burlesque shtick, songs and impersonations.”
In his later years he was a sought-after entertainer for Friars Roasts and other testimonial dinners with his “Never had a dinner” routine, identifying famous people who had never been so honored. Example: “Abe Lincoln, who said ‘A house divided is a condominium,’ never had a dinner.”
He also remained in the public eye as the spokesman in an advertising campaign for the Century Village retirement communities in Florida. Of his three marriages, two ended in divorce early in his career. His third wife, Alicia, died in 2001. They had a daughter, Amy Norgress, and a son, Adam, who survive him, as do his brother and sister.
“I’ve been a performer all my life,” Mr. Buttons once said. “It’s a very satisfactory profession. You get paid off on the spot. When they cheer, that’s payment.”

Two nabbed in eBay computer sales scam

BY DIANA MOSKOVITZdmoskovitz@MiamiHerald.com
Kevin Dunn kept calling computer company 3COM with the same problem -- the computer routers at his small business were broken.
3COM would send him new routers and wait for Dunn, 27, to send back the others.
But there were no broken routers. And Dunn's ''small business'' was ripping off 3COM, said the Broward Sheriff's Office in announcing his arrest Thursday.
According to BSO:
The Lauderhill man would take the company labels off with a blow dryer, add his own, then sell what he got from 3COM on eBay.
Then he would call 3COM complaining of another broken router.
Those calls added up to nearly $670,000 in computer equipment, mostly routers, kept in a North Lauderdale storage unit, BSO said. More routers had likely been sold.
Dunn also was among the main players in a network of similar scams across the country and overseas, adding up to more than $2 million, said Sgt. Jay Leiner with BSO's economic crime unit.
Arrests in those frauds are ongoing.
Because the case involved wire fraud, the United States Secret Service also helped with the investigation.
''This is bigger than just here in Broward,'' BSO spokesman Elliot Cohen said.
On Thursday, the warehouse's contents were displayed, mostly stacks of brown boxes wrapped in tape labeled EVIDENCE. Most of the goods were routers, which small businesses use to create computer networks, BSO's Cohen said.
The victims include several large computer companies, including 3COM and Nortel, Cohen said. 3COM estimates its losses at more than $1 million, according to the arrest documents.
CALL CENTER
Between Feb. 24 and March 23, Dunn called 3COM's Toronto call center five times. Each times he called with the same fake business name, InverraryCRPC1, asking for anywhere from three to eight new routers, according to the documents.
At least once, Dunn gave his home address, 3301 Spanish Moss Ter., a condo in Lauderhill's Inverrary community.
The name was one of several bogus business titles Dunn used for his orders, Cohen said.
Dunn also alternated where he had the routers shipped, varying between his address, vacant homes and other businesses that he would stake out to intercept the packages, Cohen said.
3COM noticed the ordering pattern and contacted law enforcement. Officers went on eBay in April and bought a 3COM router that typically sells for $2,500 for just $1,500, the documents stated.
The router was traced to Dunn's home, and a K. Dunn signed for the check.
On Monday, officers bought three more from the same eBay account for close to $5,000.
The next day, Dunn and his girlfriend, Tamar Richards, 26, went to a Federal Express office in Pompano Beach, packed three boxes labeled 3COM and handed them to a FedEx employee, according to documents.
When they walked outside, both were arrested.
Richards, who said she had been dating Dunn for about a year, then told authorities about the warehouse at Extra Space Storage, 2048 S. State Road 7.
A typed list of 23 product numbers for 3COM routers also was found inside one of Dunn's shirt pockets, the documents stated.
OWNS CONDO
Dunn owns his $100,000 condominium in a Lauderhill gated community, according to the Broward property appraiser's office. He also was the registered owner of a Ford F150 truck and a Suzuki motorcycle.
Richards, of Tamarac, told officers she had known Dunn for seven years.
Dunn and Richards were charged with organized scheme to defraud. Dunn also was charged with dealing in stolen property and grand theft, BSO said.
Both were out of jail on bond Thursday.
© 2006 MiamiHerald.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.