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4Dec/10Off

Military takes over air traffic control in Spain

MADRID -Spain's military took control of the nation's airspace Friday night after air traffic controllers staged a massive sickout that stranded hundreds of thousands of travelers on the eve of a long holiday weekend, forcing the government to shut down Madrid's big international hub and seven other airports.
About six hours after the sickout started, causing total travel chaos, Deputy Prime Minister Perez Rubalcaba announced that the Defense Ministry had "taken control of air traffic in all the national territory." He said the Army's chief of staff would make all decisions relating to the organization, planning, supervision and control of air traffic.
It was not immediately clear when airports would start operating again or whether military controllers would actually guide planes in and out of airports or oversee those controllers who did not take part in the sickout. Spanish flagship carrier Iberia SA said all of its flights in and out of Madrid were suspended until at least 11 a.m. Saturday.
The controllers abandoned their posts amid a lengthy dispute over working conditions and just hours after the administration of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero approved a package of austerity measures including a move to partially privatize airports and hand over management of Madrid and Barcelona airports to the private sector.
Spanish prosecutors said they were researching whether they could charge the controllers with crimes, and air traffic controllers meeting to plot strategy at a hotel near Madrid's airport were heckled and filmed by stranded passengers as they entered and left the building.
"To the unemployment line with you all!" one man yelled at the controllers.
Handfuls of passengers made it out of Madrid to destinations like Barcelona and Lisbon, Portugal, on buses provided by airlines. But the vast majority were forced to go home or to hotels with no information on when they might make their canceled flights.
"It's a disgrace, how can a group of people be so selfish as to wreck the plans of so many people?" said dentist Marcela Vega, 35, unable to travel to Chile with her husband, 5-year-old son and baby boy.
Spain's airport authority, known as Aena, said authorities were in contact with Europe's air traffic agency, Eurocontrol, and the United State's FAA about how best to deal with arriving international flights.
Aena chief Juan Ignacio Lema called the situation created by the sickout "intolerable" and warned controllers to return to work, or face disciplinary actions or criminal charges.
"We're asking the controllers to stop blackmailing the Spanish people," Lema said.
Spain's air traffic controllers have been involved for over a year in bitter negotiations with state-owned Aena over wages, working conditions and privileges.
The dispute intensified in February when the government restricted overtime and thus cut average pay of controllers from euro350,000 ($463,610) a year to around euro200,000 ($264,920).
The sickout also closed four airports in the Canary islands, a favorite winter destination in Europe, and airports in prime tourism locations of Ibiza, Palma de Mallorca and Menorca.
Spanish Development Minister Jose Blanco convened an emergency meeting and his ministry issued a terse statement, saying "controllers have begun to communicate their incapacity to continue offering their services, abandoning their places of work."
Blanco later told reporters that authorities were forced to close airspace around Madrid for safety reasons, but he gave no details on when the shuttered airports would reopen so flights can resume.
"We won't permit this blackmail that they are using to turn citizens into hostages," Blanco said
The controllers' union has been complaining for weeks that many members have already worked their maximum hours for all of 2010, and that all 2,000 are overworked and understaffed. Friday's sickout was not expected, but the union has warned it could mount a sickout over the Christmas holiday. Spanish air traffic controllers are prohibited by law from going on strike.
Aena said 90 percent of its controllers had left their workstations or never showed up, and that only 10 controllers remained on duty at in Madrid to handle emergencies.
Some controllers began to return to work late Friday, including about half of the normal staff in Barcelona, where three flights were able to take off during a 3-hour period before dawn Saturday.
But Madrid's sprawling Barajas airport was still shut down. It had 1,300 flights scheduled for Friday, but it wasn't clear how many had taken off and landed before the sickout.
More than 5,000 flights were scheduled for the nation Friday, and about 3,000 departed or landed before the sickout began in the late afternoon.
Monday in a national holiday marking the Day of the Spanish Constitution, and Wednesday is a religious holiday; many Spaniards take advantage of the holidays for a five-day weekend or a week of vacation. About 4 million people had flights booked for the period in the nation of 46 million.
Many weekend Spanish sporting events were likely to be affected by air travel problems, with players for football league leader Barcelona set to travel by road and rail, while Valencia players headed by train.
—
Jorge Sainz contributed from Madrid.

Military takes over air traffic control in Spain

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23Nov/10Off

Tensions high as North, South Korea trade shelling

INCHEON, South Korea -North and South Korea exchanged artillery fire Tuesday along their disputed frontier, raising tensions between the rivals to their highest level in more than a decade. The communist nation warned of more military strikes if the South encroaches on the maritime border by "even 0.001 millimeter."
Angry at South Korea's refusal to halt military drills near their sea border, North Korea shelled the island of Yeonpyeong, and Seoul responded by unleashing its own barrage from K-9 155mm self-propelled howitzers and scrambling fighter jets. Two South Korean marines were killed in the shelling that also injured 15 troops and three civilians.
Officials in Seoul said there could be considerable North Korean casualties.
The confrontation lasted about an hour and left the uneasiest of calms, with each side threatening further bombardments.
North Korea's apparent progress in its nuclear weapons program and its preparations for handing power to a new generation have plunged relations on the heavily militarized peninsula to new lows in recent weeks.
South Korea's military was put on high alert after the shelling — one of the rivals' most dramatic confrontations since an armistice halted the Korean War in 1953 and one of the few to put civilians at risk.
"I thought I would die," said Lee Chun-ok, 54, an islander who said she was watching TV in her home when the shelling began. Suddenly, a wall and door collapsed.
"I was really, really terrified," she told The Associated Press after being evacuated to the port city of Incheon, west of Seoul, "and I'm still terrified."
The attacks focused global attention on the tiny island and sent stock prices down worldwide. The dollar and gold rose as investors sought safe places to park money. Hong Kong's main stock index sank 2.7 percent, while European indexes fell between 1.7 and 2.5 percent. The Dow Jones industrial average lost 142 points, or 1.3 percent.
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, who convened an emergency security meeting shortly after the initial bombardment, said an "indiscriminate attack on civilians can never be tolerated."
"Enormous retaliation should be made to the extent that (North Korea) cannot make provocations again," he said.
The United States, which has more than 28,000 troops stationed in South Korea, condemned the attack. The White House said President Barack Obama was "outraged" by North Korea's actions.
Top national security aides planned to meet later Tuesday to discuss the situation. The White House said it would work with its international partners to determine the appropriate next steps.
Gen. Walter Sharp, commander of U.S. forces in South Korea and the U.S.-led U.N. Command, said in a Facebook posting that the U.S. military is "closely monitoring the situation and exchanging information with our (South Korean) allies as we always do."
China, the North's economic and political benefactor, which also maintains close commercial ties to the South, appealed for both sides to remain calm and "to do more to contribute to peace and stability on the peninsula," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned North Korea's artillery attack, calling it "one of the gravest incidents since the end of the Korean War," his spokesman Martin Nesirky said. Ban called for "immediate restraint" and insisted "any differences should be resolved by peaceful means and dialogue," the spokesman said.
The clash "brings us one step closer to the brink of war," said Peter Beck, a research fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, "because I don't think the North would seek war by intention, but war by accident, something spiraling out of control has always been my fear."
South Korea holds military exercises like Tuesday's off the west coast about every three months, and they typically provoke an angry response from North Korea, but Tuesday's confrontation was far from typical.
Skirmishes flare up along the disputed border from time to time, but this clash follows months in which tensions have steadily risen to their worst levels since the late 1980s, when a confessed agent for North Korea bombed a South Korean jetliner, killing all 115 people aboard.
The communist regime in Pyongyang has sought to consolidate power at home ahead of a leadership transition and hopes to gain leverage abroad before re-entering international talks aimed at ending its nuclear weapons programs.
In March, North Korea was blamed for launching a torpedo that sank the South Korean warship Cheonan while on routine patrol, killing 46 sailors. South Korea called it the worst military attack on the country since the war. Pyongyang denied responsibility. South Korea did not retaliate for the sinking of the Cheonan.
Six weeks ago, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il anointed his youngest son, Kim Jong Un, heir apparent. This week, Pyongyang claimed it has a new uranium enrichment facility, raising concerns about its pursuit of atomic weapons.
South Korea faces an uphill struggle if it wants the U.N. Security Council to condemn North Korea for the attack or to impose a third round of sanctions.
While Seoul can count on strong support from the U.S. and other Western powers on the council, it is likely to face opposition from China, a veto-wielding member.
China agreed to two rounds of sanctions against Pyongyang after its nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009, and Seoul wanted the U.N.'s most powerful body to condemn North Korea for the Cheonan sinking. But North Korea warned that its military forces would respond if the council questioned or condemned the country over the sinking, and China opposed direct condemnation or a third round of sanctions.
Yeonpyeong lies a mere seven miles (11 kilometers) from — and within sight of — the North Korean mainland. Famous for its crabbing industry, it is home to about 1,700 civilians as well as South Korean military installations. There are about 30 other small islands nearby.
North Korea fired dozens of rounds of artillery in three separate barrages that began in midafternoon, while South Korea returned fire with about 80 rounds, South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said. Naval operations had been reinforced in the area, the military said early Wednesday, declining to elaborate.
Columns of thick black smoke rose from homes on the island, video from YTN cable TV showed. Screams and shouts filled the air as shells rained down on the island just south of the disputed sea border.
Island residents fled to some 20 shelters on the island and sporadic shelling ended after about an hour, according to the military.
A North Korean statement said it was merely "reacting to the military provocation of the puppet group with a prompt powerful physical strike," and accused Seoul of starting the skirmish with its "reckless military provocation as firing dozens of shells inside the territorial waters of the" North.
The supreme military command in Pyongyang threatened more strikes if the South crossed their maritime border by "even 0.001 millimeter," according to the North's official Korean Central News Agency.
Government officials in Seoul called North Korea's bombardments "inhumane atrocities" that violated the 1953 armistice halting the Korean War. The two sides technically remain at war because a peace treaty was never signed, and nearly 2 million troops — including tens of thousands from the U.S. — are positioned on both sides of the world's most heavily militarized border.
North Korea does not recognize the western maritime border drawn unilaterally by the U.N. at the close of the conflict, and the Koreas have fought three bloody skirmishes there in recent years.
—
Kwang-Tae Kim reported from Seoul. AP writers Seulki Kim, Kelly Olsen and Foster Klug in Seoul and Anita Snow and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.

Tensions high as North, South Korea trade shelling

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23Oct/10Off

Files: Iraqi deaths higher than US count

WASHINGTON -Military documents laid bare in the biggest leak of secret information in U.S. history suggest that far more Iraqis died than previously acknowledged during the years of sectarian bloodletting and criminal violence unleashed by the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
The accounts of civilian deaths among nearly 400,000 purported Iraq war logs released Friday by the WikiLeaks website include deaths unknown or unreported before now — as many as 15,000 by the count of one independent research group.
The field reports from U.S. forces and intelligence officers also indicate U.S. forces often failed to follow up on credible evidence that Iraqi forces mistreated, tortured and killed their captives as they battled a violent insurgency.
The war logs were made public in defiance of Pentagon insistence that the action puts the lives of U.S. troops and their military partners at risk.
Although the documents appear to be authentic, their origin could not be independently confirmed, and WikiLeaks declined to offer any details about them.
The 391,831 documents date from the start of 2004 to Jan. 1, 2010, providing a ground-level view of the war written mostly by low-ranking officers in the field. The dry reports, full of military jargon and acronyms, were meant to catalog "significant actions" over six years of heavy U.S. and allied military presence in Iraq.
The Pentagon has previously declined to confirm the authenticity of WikiLeaks-released records, but it has employed more than 100 U.S. analysts to review what was previously released and has never indicated that any past WikiLeaks releases were inaccurate.
Casualty figures in the U.S.-led war in Iraq have been hotly disputed because of the high political stakes in a conflict opposed by many countries and a large portion of the American public. Critics on each side of the divide accuse the other of manipulating the death toll to sway opinion.
Iraq Body Count, a private British-based group that has tracked the number of Iraqi civilians killed since the war began, said it had analyzed the information and found 15,000 previously unreported deaths, which would raise its total from as many as 107,369 civilians to more than 122,000 civilians.
It said most of the newly disclosed deaths included targeted assassinations, drive-by shootings, torture, executions and checkpoint killings.
Al-Jazeera, one of several news organizations provided advance access to the WikiLeaks trove, reported the documents show 285,000 recorded casualties, including at least 109,000 deaths. Of those who died 66,000, nearly two-thirds of the total, were civilians.
The Iraqi government has issued a tally claiming at least 85,694 deaths of civilians and security officials were killed between January 2004 and Oct. 31, 2008.
In July of this year, the U.S. military quietly released its most detailed tally to date of the deaths of Iraqi civilians and security forces in the bloodiest years of the war.
That U.S. body count, reported by The Associated Press this month, tallied deaths of almost 77,000 Iraqis between January 2004 and August 2008 — the darkest chapter of Iraq's sectarian warfare and the U.S. troop surge to quell it. The new data was posted on the U.S. Central Command website without explanation.
In August 2008, the Congressional Research Service said the U.S. military was withholding statistics on Iraqi civilian deaths. The Pentagon did publish in June 2008 a chart on civilian death trends by month that showed it peaking at between 3,500 and 4,000 in December 2006. But it did not release the data used to create the chart.
In 2006 and 2007, the Bush administration and military commanders often played down the extent of civilian killings from revenge killings, blood feuds and mob-style violence in Iraq, much of which had no direct effect on U.S. forces.
Administration figures repeatedly denied Iraq was sliding into civil war. The war did not begin to turn around in a lasting way until the 2007 "surge" of U.S. troops and the decision of key Sunni leaders to cut ties with the foreign-led al-Qaida terror group.
Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell called the release of the Iraq war material by WikiLeaks "shameful" and said it "could potentially undermine our nation's security."
"The biggest potential damage here, we think, could be to our forces," he said, "because there are now potentially 400,000 documents in the public domain for our enemies to mine, look for vulnerabilities, patterns of behavior, things they could exploit to wage attacks against us in the future."
He said that about 300 Iraqis mentioned in the documents are "particularly vulnerable to reprisal attacks" because of the documents' release and that U.S. forces in Iraq are trying to protect them.
The deputy minister for the Iraqi justice ministry, Busho Ibrahim, said he hadn't read the WikiLeaks documents but denied any abuse had taken place in Iraqi-run prisons.
WikiLeaks gave the AP a censored version of the files, with some names of people, countries and groups redacted. Fuller versions were offered to other news outlets ahead of time, according to a WikiLeaks member at London's Frontline Club, where a handful of journalists was given last-minute access before the war logs were released more widely.
WikiLeaks declined to make the less-redacted files available to the AP, saying journalists wanting such a copy would have to lodge a request with the organization, which would respond within a "couple of days." Asked why, a spokesman for the group who identified himself only as "Joseph" hung up the phone. Asked again when he appeared at the Frontline Club, he said: "I just can't answer any more questions."
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange did not return an e-mail seeking comment.
It was not immediately clear whether WikiLeaks released all the military records in its possession. In some cases, names and other pieces of identifying information appeared to have been redacted but it was unclear to what extent WikiLeaks withheld names in response to Pentagon concerns that people could become targets of retribution.
Allegations of torture and brutality by Shiite-dominated security forces — mostly against Sunni prisoners — were widely reported during the most violent years of the war, when the rival Islamic sects turned on one another in Baghdad and other cities. The leaked documents provide a ground's-eye view of abuses as reported by U.S. military personnel to their superiors and appear to corroborate much of the past reporting on such incidents.
—
Associated Press writers Raphael G. Satter and Michael Weissenstein in London, Kim Gamel in Cairo, Lynn Dombek in New York and Bushra Juhi in Baghdad contributed to this report.

Files: Iraqi deaths higher than US count

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22Oct/10Off

Jobless Rate In Alabama Slowly Improving

Huntsville- There's some good news to report about unemployment in Alabama. The State Department of Industrial Relations is reporting that

Alabama's September unemployment rate fell to 8.9 percent. Over the past five months the jobless figure has been slowly but steadily going in the right direction.

Chris McLemore is employed again working a full time job. He lost his job with NASA last year but now works for Mosley Technical Services Incorporated in

Huntsville. McLemore says its encouraging that the unemployment rate seems to be slowly improving in Alabama. He says being out of work nearly a year was difficult, but he says folks in that situation have to stay focused. "You just pick up the pieces and go on, you could easily stare into the abyss and get depressed. But that's not going to help so the best thing to do is to dust yourself off and get back on the horse" McLemore said.

Mosley Technical Services provides support for the military. McLemore also works for the Huntsville Space Professionals helping others who lost jobs in the space industry.

"There is hope and there is support, there are other people going through the same things your going through so keep the faith" Mclemore said. The HSP group has held several job fairs including one last July at UA-Huntsville where McLemore got a lead that helped him land his job.

Reporter: Tim Reid treid@waaytv.com

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28Jul/10Off

Phenix City Marine injured by IED, celebrated at home

27Jul/10Off

US braces for blowback over Afghan war disclosures

WASHINGTON -Operatives inside Afghanistan and Pakistan who have worked for the U.S. against the Taliban or al-Qaida may be at risk following the disclosure of thousands of once-secret U.S. military documents, former and current officials said.
As the Obama administration scrambles to repair any political damage to the war effort in Congress and among the American public by the WikiLeaks revelations, there are also growing concerns that some U.S. allies abroad may ask whether they can trust America to keep secrets, officials said.
Speaking in the Rose Garden Tuesday, President Barack Obama said he was concerned about the massive leak of sensitive documents about the Afghanistan war, but that the papers did not reveal any concerns that were not already part of the debate.
In his first public comments on the matter, Obama said the disclosure of classified information from the battlefield "could potentially jeopardize individuals or operations."
The president spoke in the Rose Garden following a meeting with House and Senate leaders of both parties.
In Baghdad, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters he was "appalled" by the leak. He said "there is a real potential threat there to put American lives at risk."
The Army is leading the Pentagon's inquiry into the source of the leak. A federal law enforcement official said the Justice Department is assisting in the probe. The law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity about the ongoing probe says the Justice Department does not have its own separate investigation into the leak, but rather is acting in a support role to the Pentagon.
Col. Dave Lapan said the Army criminal probe launched Tuesday is aimed at finding the source of secret documents published Sunday by WikiLeaks, an online site. The Army's criminal investigative division led the investigation into Bradley Manning, an Army intelligence specialist charged with leaking other material to WikiLeaks. Lapan said it's not clear whether the latest material came from Manning or someone else.
The WikiLeaks material, which ranges from files documenting Afghan civilian deaths to evidence of U.S.-Pakistani distrust, could reinforce war opponents in Congress who aim to rein in the war effort. But the leaks are not expected to dim the passage of a looming $60 billion war funding bill.
Congress has backed the war so far, and an early test of that continued support came when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., opened a hearing on the Afghan war.
At the hearing, few members mentioned the leak of documents but several expressed frustration at the lack of progress in improving Afghan governance and in drawing more ordinary Afghans away from the Taliban. In a tone of exasperation, Kerry questioned why the Taliban, with fewer resources, is able to field fighters who are more committed than Afghan soldiers.
"What's going on here?" Kerry asked.
In his only reference to the leak, Kerry called the new material "overhyped," said that it was released in violation of the law and that it largely involves raw intelligence reports from the field. He said he thought the document release could jeopardize the U.S. mission there.
Despite strong opposition among liberals who see Afghanistan as an unwinnable quagmire, House Democrats must either approve the funding bill before leaving at the end of this week for a six-week vacation, or commit political suicide by leaving troops in the lurch in war zones overseas.
Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday he worries that the leaks won't stop "until we see someone in an orange jump suit."
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said the military doesn't know who was behind the leaks, although it has launched "a very robust investigation."
Morrell complained that too much was being made of the documents. Referring to files that detailed American suspicions that some Pakistani intelligence officials were aiding insurgents, Morrell insisted those concerns have abated in recent years and the relationship has improved.
The disclosures, he said, are "clearly out of step with where this relationship is now, and has been heading for some time."
Morrell was interviewed on CBS's "The Early Show" and Bond appeared on NBC's "Today" show.
Even as the administration dismissed the WikiLeaks material as outdated, U.S. military and intelligence analysts were caught up in a speed-reading battle to limit the damage contained in the once-secret files now scattered across the Internet.
The officials are concerned about the impact on the military's human intelligence network built up over the past eight years inside Afghanistan and Pakistan. Such figures range from Afghan village elders who have worked behind the scenes with U.S. troops to militants working as double agents.
Col. Dave Lapan, a Defense Department spokesman, said the military may need weeks to review all the records to determine "the potential damage to the lives of our service members and coalition partners."
WikiLeaks said it has behaved responsibly, even withholding some 15,000 records that are believed to include names of specific Afghans or Pakistanis who helped U.S. troops on the ground.
But former CIA director Michael Hayden denounced the leak Monday as a gift to America's enemies.
"If I had gotten this trove on the Taliban or al-Qaida, I would have called it priceless," he said. "I would love to know what al-Qaida or the Taliban was thinking about a specific subject in 2007, for instance, because I could say they got that right and they got that wrong."
Hayden predicted the Taliban would take anything that described a U.S. strike and the intelligence behind it "and figure out who was in the room when that particular operation, say in 2008, was planned, and in whose home." Then the militants would probably punish the traitor who'd worked with the Americans, he said.
Another casualty of the disclosures may be American efforts to forge cooperation with Pakistan's secretive intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence.
Multiple U.S. military cables posted by WikiLeaks complain about ISI complicity with the Taliban. And they also tell the Pakistanis "how much we know about them," said Robert Riegle, a former senior intelligence officer who now runs Mission Concepts Inc., a private intelligence firm.
"You're not going to see any cooperation," he said. "People are going to freeze."
The raw data released Sunday may also prove useful in a wider way to America's "frenemies" — the intelligence services of countries like China and Russia, who have the resources to process and make sense of such vast vaults of data, said Ellen McCarthy, former intelligence officer and president of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance.
Former CIA chief Hayden added: "If I'm head of the Russian intelligence, I'm getting my best English speakers and saying: 'Read every document, and I want you to tell me, how good are these guys? What are their approaches, their strengths, their weaknesses and their blind spots?'"
—
Associated Press writer Pete Yost contributed to this report.

US braces for blowback over Afghan war disclosures

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1Jul/10Off

AP IMPACT: Millions of vaccine doses to be burned

ATLANTA -About a quarter of the swine flu vaccine produced for the U.S. public has expired — meaning that a whopping 40 million doses worth about $260 million is being written off as trash.
"It's a lot, by historical standards," said Jerry Weir, who oversees vaccine research and review for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The outdated vaccine, some of which expired Wednesday, will be incinerated. The amount, more than twice the usual leftovers, likely sets a record. And that's not even all of it.
About 30 million more doses will expire later and may go unused, according to one government estimate. If all that vaccine expires, more than 43 percent of the supply for the U.S. public will have gone to waste.
Federal officials defended the huge purchase as a necessary risk in the face of a never-before-seen virus. Many health experts had feared the new flu could be the deadly global epidemic they had long warned about, but it ended up killing fewer people than seasonal flu.
"Although there were many doses of vaccine that went unused, it was much more appropriate to have been prepared for the worst case scenario than to have had too few doses," said Bill Hall, spokesman for U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Most leading health experts generally agree with that.
Millions of doses of flu vaccine generally go unused every year and are marked for burning, but in recent years the leftovers amounted to closer to 10 percent of the supply, rather than the 25 percent expiring now. Government flu experts couldn't recall throwing away anything close to 40 million doses before.
The new H1N1 swine flu emerged in April last year, hitting children and young adults particularly hard. It was difficult to predict how deadly it might be or how easily it might spread. Federal health officials pushed five vaccine manufacturers to produce a vaccine as quickly as possible. What's more, they wanted a lot of it — many experts thought most people would need two doses for it to work.
The government placed three orders last year for a combined total of nearly 200 million doses — an unprecedented amount and almost double the amount of vaccine produced in recent years for seasonal flu.
About 162 million doses were meant for the general public. Another 36 million included doses for the military and other countries.
But demand never took off, for several reasons:
_Tests of the vaccine soon showed only one dose was enough to protect most people.
_Much of the vaccine was not ready until late 2009, after the largest wave of swine flu illnesses passed.
_Swine flu turned out not to be as deadly as was first feared. About 12,000 deaths have been attributed to it — or roughly a third of the estimated annual deaths from seasonal flu.
So while people were waiting hours for swine flu vaccinations in some cities in October and November, by January local health departments were trying gimmicks to get anyone at all to come in for a shot.
Government officials have known for months that they were looking at a huge surplus. According to an Associated Press calculation based on federal purchasing information, the dollar value of the 40 million expired doses is about $261 million. The government didn't release an official figure, but Hall said the AP estimate was approximately correct.
In Europe, where nations also found themselves with millions of unused doses, some commentators have attacked the World Health Organization, which declared swine flu a global epidemic, or pandemic. The critics have questioned the motivation of some WHO advisers who had links to the pharmaceutical industry.
Some critics have simply lamented that a lot of anxiety was raised and money wasted, not just during the swine flu scare but also in government responses to bird flu and SARS, a respiratory virus that swept parts of Asia in 2003.
"Each time the so-called experts told us that millions of people would be killed worldwide by the respective viruses. We have learned that the experts were utterly wrong," said Dr. Ulrich Keil, a professor at Germany's prestigious University of Muenster and a WHO adviser.
"This behavior is irresponsible because the angst campaigns ... confuse the priority setting in public health," he said. The death toll from influenza epidemics is much smaller than the number killed annually by chronic illnesses like heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes, he added, in an e-mail.
Unused flu vaccine is a common problem. The June 30 expiration date is set by the FDA and has less to do with the vaccine's shelf life than the desire to tweak the recipe each year to protect against the three flu strains expected to cause the most illness.
"It's not necessarily because it's degraded or not potent," said Dr. Mark Mulligan, an Emory University vaccine researcher.
In the past year, about 114 million doses of seasonal flu vaccine were distributed. The government thinks most of that was used — demand was unusually high because of fears about swine flu.
In the flu vaccination campaign for this coming fall, swine flu vaccine is being combined with two seasonal strains in single doses. Manufacturers have told the government they expect to make about 170 million doses.
An influential government advisory panel this year recommended that virtually all Americans get flu shots each year. Still, that doesn't mean it will all get used.
"No doubt there will be unused doses. This happens every time," said Dr. John Treanor, an immunology specialist at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

AP IMPACT: Millions of vaccine doses to be burned

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29Jun/10Off

Kagan insists she didn’t block military at Harvard

WASHINGTON -Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan clashed Tuesday with a Republican senator over the limits she ordered on military recruiters while dean of Harvard Law School, repeatedly denying she blocked them as she sought to deflect foes' efforts to slow her apparently smooth road to confirmation.
Despite a testy exchange with the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, President Barack Obama's nominee soldiered through her second day of public testimony on Capitol Hill apparently in good shape to win Senate approval — barring a major gaffe — in time to take her seat before the court opens a new term in October. If confirmed, Kagan, 50, would succeed retiring Justice John Paul Stevens
Republican foes weren't giving up quietly. Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama said he emerged from the long day of questioning more "troubled" about Kagan's nomination than he had been previously. During his sometimes heated back-and-forth with Kagan, Sessions said her decision to bar recruiters from the law school's career services office over the Pentagon's prohibition on openly gay soldiers was "punishing" the military at Harvard, treating them in a "second-class way" and creating a hostile environment for the military on campus.
Kagan said she was trying to balance Harvard's nondiscrimination policy, which she believed "don't ask, don't tell" violated, with a federal law that required schools to give military recruiters equal access as a condition of eligibility for federal funds. She said she welcomed the military, and believed her policy of requiring recruiters to work through a student veterans group — first set by a predecessor — was a valid compromise.
"We were trying to make sure that military recruiters had full and complete access to our students, but we were also trying to protect our own antidiscrimination policy and to protect the students whom it is ... supposed to protect, which in this case were our gay and lesbian students," Kagan said.
Sessions rejected her version of events and accused Kagan of defying federal law because of her strong opposition to the military's treatment of homosexuals.
"I know what happened at Harvard. I know you were an outspoken leader against the military policy," Sessions said "I know you acted without legal authority to reverse Harvard's policy and deny those military equal access to campus until you were threatened by the United States government of loss of federal funds."
Kagan was less willing to mix it up with Republicans who closely questioned her on controversial legal topics.
The nominee, who once wrote a strongly worded article denouncing Supreme Court nominees for dodging questions at confirmation hearings, herself refused repeatedly to be pinned down on specific legal issues, her political views or even the passions that animate her to seek a place on the court.
She did call recent Supreme Court rulings upholding gun rights "binding precedent," and she said the court's rulings mandate that in any law regulating abortion "the woman's life and the woman's health have to be protected." She said a 5-4 decision this year that said corporations and unions were free to spend their own funds on political activity was "settled law."
But she was less forthcoming when asked whether she thought that campaign finance case, which she argued for the Obama administration and lost, had been wrongly decided.
"I did believe we had a strong case to make. I tried to make it to the best of my ability," she told Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who questioned her in detail about Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
She also said none of her work arguing the government's cases before the Supreme Court — she was Obama's solicitor general until last month — should be interpreted as reflecting her own positions.
"I want to make a clear distinction between my views as an advocate and any views I might have as a judge," Kagan said.
Across hours of testimony before the committee, Kagan declined to weigh in on virtually any substantive question posed to her, eluding GOP efforts to label her ideology as well as one Democrat's seemingly friendly bid to get her to open up about why she wants to be a justice.
"What motivates me is the opportunity to safeguard the rule of law," Kagan said under questioning by a visibly frustrated Sen. Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, who asked her about her passions. "I think I will take this one case at a time if I'm a judge. It would not be right for a judge to come in and say, 'I have a passion for this or that. ...' This isn't a job, I think, where somebody should come in with a substantive agenda."
Later, asked to talk about the justices she most admires, Kagan again dodged, saying it would be a "bad idea" to talk about those currently on the bench. "My oh my oh my," Kohl said, deprived again of an answer as the hearing room erupted in laughter.
Kagan did, however, express admiration for the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, the court's first African-American, whom Republicans have held up as a prime example of a judicial activist.
"I love Justice Marshall. He did an enormous amount for me," Kagan said of the man for whom she once clerked. "But if you confirm me to this position, you will get Justice Kagan. You won't get Justice Marshall, and that's an important thing."
Kohl also failed to persuade Kagan to say whether she agreed with Justice Antonin Scalia's view that the Constitution should be interpreted solely based on its text or with former Justice David Souter's contention that it should be viewed in terms of its words' "meaning for living people."
"I don't really think that this is an either-or choice," Kagan responded.
Asked by Sessions whether she considered herself "a progressive in the mold of" Obama or a "legal progressive," as one of his top aides has called her, Kagan said she'd rather choose her own labels, but declined to give herself one.
"I'm not quite sure how I would characterize my politics, but one thing I know is that my politics would be, must be, have to be separate from my judging," Kagan said. "I've served in two Democratic administrations. You can tell something about me and my political views from that."
Kagan stayed mostly calm throughout hours at a witness table, showing glimmers of humor but hardly ever veering off-script as she fielded questions on sometimes uncomfortable topics.
"You're doing well," Hatch assured her after her intense debate with Sessions on military recruitment. "Relax as much as you can."
Asked by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., for a "heart-to-heart talk," Kagan gamely replied, "Just you and me," to laughter from a hearing room filled with spectators, reporters and news cameras.
Kagan, the former law school dean, sometimes seemed to be teaching an introductory course in constitutional law.
She called the Constitution an "enduring document."
It has some "very specific provisions — it just says what you're supposed to do and how things are supposed to work," she said. But she added that other provisions "were meant to be interpreted over time to be applied to new situations and new contexts."

Kagan insists she didn't block military at Harvard

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