AP CEO: Press freedom v. security a 'false choice'

DENVER — Governments that try to force citizens to decide between a free press and national security create a "false choice" that weakens democracy, and journalists must fight increasing government overreach that has had a chilling effect on efforts to hold leaders accountable, the president and CEO of The Associated Press said Saturday.

Gary Pruitt told the 69th General Assembly of the Inter American Press Association that the U.S. Justice Department's secret seizure of records of thousands of telephone calls to and from AP reporters in 2012 is one of the most blatant violations of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution the 167-year-old news cooperative has ever encountered.

The Justice Department action involving the AP resonated far beyond the U.S., including Latin America, where journalists for decades have fought to exercise press freedoms under authoritarian regimes, Pruitt said.

"The actions by the Department of Justice could not have been more tailor-made to comfort authoritarian regimes who want to suppress the news media. 'The United States does it too,' they can say," Pruitt said.

A free and independent press "differentiates democracy from dictatorship; separates a free society from tyranny," he said.

"Governments who try to set up a situation where citizens think they must choose between a free press and security are making a mistake that will ultimately weaken them, not strengthen them. It's not a real choice. It is a false choice."

Pruitt said he was encouraged by proposed Justice Department guidelines, introduced after the records seizure, that would give news media advance notice of subpoenas so the press can challenge those actions in court; protect not just phone records but reporters' email, text messages and other forms of electronic communication; and guarantee that journalists won't be prosecuted for doing their jobs.

"But you can bet that we will be watching closely to make sure they are implemented and enforced," Pruitt said.

In 2012, the Justice Department secretly obtained records of work, cell and home numbers of AP journalists, as well as AP bureau numbers in New York, Washington, D.C., Hartford, Conn., and the AP number in the U.S. House of Representatives press gallery. It did so after an Associated Press story revealed the foiling of a plot in Yemen to bomb a U.S.-bound airliner at a time the Barack Obama administration was insisting publicly that it had no information about terrorist organizations plotting attacks on the United States in that period.

The Justice Department was trying to identify who leaked information for the AP story — but it didn't tell the AP about its phone records seizure until a year after the story ran.

The seizure was "hardly a surgical strike on a few carefully chosen targets. It was overbroad, sloppy and a fishing expedition into a wide spectrum of AP news journalism and journalists — most of whom had nothing to do with the issues in question here," Pruitt said.

It also differed from the National Security Agency's broad monitoring of global communications because it was specifically directed at locating the source of AP's reporting.

Just as alarming, the seizure has intimidated both official and nonofficial sources from speaking to the AP and numerous other news organizations, even about stories not related to national security, Pruitt said.

"Now, the government may love this. I think they do. But beware a government that loves secrecy too much," he said.

And the challenge isn't going away, Pruitt said.

"The attack on journalism — here in the United States and throughout the rest of the world — is not going to cease any time soon. In fact, I think it will become even more difficult to counter as technology gives governments very powerful tools to monitor the actions and communications of citizens and journalists," he said.

The Miami-based Inter American Press Association has about 1,400 member news organizations and promotes press freedoms throughout the Americas.

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English URL: www.ap.org/content/press-release/2013/the-free-press-vs-national-security-a-false-choice

Spanish URL: www.ap.org/content/press-release/2013/libertad-de-prensa-vs-seguridad-nacional-un-falso-dilema

Portuguese URL: www.ap.org/content/press-release/2013/imprensa-livre-vs-seguranca-nacional-a-falsa-escolha

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British judge clears Madoff sons of wrongdoing

LONDON — A British judge has cleared Bernard Madoff's sons of wrongdoing in a case brought against them by the liquidator of his estate in Britain, saying in a written ruling that the pair's honesty was not in doubt.

Judge Andrew Popplewell said Friday that the brothers, Mark and Andrew, were among several U.K. directors of Bernard Madoff's London-based securities firm whose reputations had been tainted by association with the elder Madoff's multibillion-dollar fraud. In dismissing the civil case against them all, the judge delivered a glowing endorsement of their character.

"Their honesty and integrity has been vindicated," he said.

Mark and Andrew Madoff long played a lead role in the drama surrounding their disgraced financier father. They first alerted authorities in 2008 after the elder Madoff confessed that his highly regarded investment business was nothing more than a Ponzi scheme.

The pair held their silence as the details of the breathtaking fraud spilled out into the public domain, but following Mark's suicide in 2010 — and ahead of the release of a book telling the Madoff family's side of the story — Andrew spoke to the press, saying the Madoff family had been completely hoodwinked by his father.

"What he did to me, to my brother, and to my family is unforgivable," Andrew Madoff said at the time.

Nevertheless, suspicion has lingered, and a lawsuit filed in London's High Court against the Madoff brothers and various company directors alleged that they subverted the company's finances by approving $27 million in payments, more than 5 million euros ($6.8 million) in perks, and millions more in interest parceled out to well-connected Austrian businesswoman Sonja Kohn, who had helped the elder Madoff win billions in new business.

Judge Popplewell ruled that the Madoff brothers and another director, Philip Toop, "were in breach of their duty to exercise reasonable skill and care" by failing to investigate whether the payments were in the company's best interests. But Popplewell said that the payments would most likely have been made in any case, and in general his judgment was a big win for the defense.

"The resolute and temperate way they have conducted themselves in these proceedings does them great credit," he said.

Other legal actions — including a criminal trial in New York involving a different set of defendants — are ongoing.

The judge said Andrew Madoff was "seriously ill with cancer" and so sick he had been unable to give evidence, even via videolink.

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Growing Cape OysterFest charges fee for first time

WELLFLEET, Mass — The Wellfleet OysterFest has a new feature this year that might be unwelcome: People have to pay to get in.

The Cape Cod Times reports (http://bit.ly/1atTl36) that for the first time ever people will be charged to get into the festival Saturday and Sunday. The cost for anyone over 12 is $5 or $8 for a two-day pass.

The festival manager says the money will help improve safety and support future festivals.

The Wellfleet OysterFest started as a small hometown event in 2002, but it's grown over the years, along with the costs for sanitation, insurance and paid staff. Attendance recently reached 25,000 over its two-day span, a size that the Times reports has turned off some locals.

The event is sponsored by the Shellfish Promotion and Tasting nonprofit in Wellfleet.

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Calif. finds more instances of offshore fracking

LONG BEACH, Calif. — The oil production technique known as fracking has been occurring on offshore platforms and man-made islands off some of Southern California's most populous coastal communities.

Interviews and drilling records obtained by The Associated Press show fracking has occurred at least 200 times over the past two decades in waters off Long Beach, Seal Beach and Huntington Beach.

Though there is no evidence offshore hydraulic fracturing has led to any spills or chemical leaks, the practice occurs with little state or federal oversight of the operations

The state agency that leases lands and waters to oil companies says officials found new instances of fracking after searching records as part of a review after the AP reported this summer about fracking in federal waters of California.

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Shutdown coverage benefits cable news networks

NEW YORK — The federal government shutdown damaged the reputations of Washington politicians but proved good business for the cable television news networks — and taught some reporters new benefits of virtually instant communications.

CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC saw their viewership increase during the 16-day partial shutdown, peaking at more than five million Wednesday evening when Congress passed a compromise bill to put the government back online.

"It was a drama," said CNN congressional correspondent Dana Bash, who logged many hours of airtime along with Kelly O'Donnell of NBC News and Mike Emanuel of Fox. "Whenever there's a drama, people are interested."

MSNBC, which has struggled in this post-election year, saw its average prime-time viewership jump 35 percent to 978,000 this month through Wednesday, compared to the first nine months of the year, the Nielsen company said. Fox, which chose not to make any of its reporters available for this story, was up 9 percent to 2.22 million in the same period (although the network also benefited from a prime-time schedule change this month). CNN improved by 11 percent to 721,000.

The news networks brought their traditional hallmarks of crisis coverage to the political machinations, including "countdown clocks" that marked each second closer to a debt limit deadline. The story meant brutal hours: O'Donnell, who filed for MSNBC, CNBC and NBC News, was at work past 3 a.m. Eastern the first night of the shutdown, then back at 6 a.m. for "Morning Joe."

There were many strong points to the coverage, particularly when reporters didn't fall back on cliches like declaring winners and losers for an event that did few people proud, said Jane Hall, a journalism professor at American University.

"It certainly gave voice to the American people disgusted over this and there were a number of good stories about the impact of the shutdown on government workers," Hall said.

Social media was a big help, O'Donnell said. She would hear from people outside the Capitol cocoon through Twitter and email, with many raising questions she used in her reporting. She was asked how the shutdown would affect Social Security or back pay for government workers. NBC used a "dearcongress" hashtag on Twitter to encourage questions.

Sometimes the concerns were very specific, like when shrimp fishermen asked about access to launches on federal land, which she took to an individual congressman in the affected area.

"That was a real-time experience of the shutdown that did not compare to anything in a crisis that we had covered before," O'Donnell said.

In the past, Bash said she'd often need to plead with producers for time off the air to report. In this case, it wasn't really necessary: Her sources would text, tweet or email information while she was on the air. When President Barack Obama spoke to the nation on Thursday, Bash had instant reaction from several Republicans minutes after he left the podium.

When Republicans and Democrats weren't talking to each other, Bash found that they would talk through her.

"I'll report something or I'll tweet something and I'll get a call from a source pushing back or trying to shape it — not because it's a message to the world, but because it's a message to the other side," she said.

Bash would set up live shots in the hallway between Speaker John Boehner's office and the floor of the House of Representatives, a passageway teeming with sources.

Even though TV reporters love few things more than airtime, by the end even that was wearing off.

"There's always a rush in covering a big story," Bash said. "But at a certain point, you want your government to work a little better, regardless of what you do for a living."

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EDITOR'S NOTE — David Bauder can be reached at dbauder@ap.org or on Twitter@dbauder. His work can be found at http://bigstory.ap.org/content/david-bauder.

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Startup has skin in the game

A Colombian company offering new hope to burn victims and other patients who suffer skin tissue loss is one of the 26 MassChallenge top finalists who'll compete on Oct. 30 for a piece of the start-up accelerator's $1.5 million in cash prizes.

Keraderm was founded in Bogota in 2010 by a group of plastic surgeons, who set out to find an affordable, painless way of treating tissue loss resulting from burns, ulcers, tumors and trauma.

The typical treatment calls for a graft to be taken from a patient's healthy skin and meshed to cover a large wound — a surgical procedure that often results in severe pain, significant scarring and, sometimes, rejection by the patient's body.

But Keraderm's team found that by taking a sample of healthy skin less than one centimeter in diameter from behind a patient's ear, within five to seven days they could reproduce the skin cells and plant them on a collagen sheet four times the size of a business card to cover the wound, said Jorge Soto, the company's chief financial officer.

"It starts to heal the injury by accelerating the growth of healthy skin cells," Soto said. "In 20 to 40 days, the wound is completely healed."

The patent-pending procedure, which eliminates the need for an operating room and anesthesia as well as the possibility of rejection, has been successfully done on more than 100 patients so far in 11 different hospitals in Colombia and entails no pain or scarring, he said.

A 10-by-10-centimeter sheet of skin also costs $550, significantly less than a skin graft operation does.

"There are other variations of what we're doing," Soto said, "but we haven't been able to find anyone doing the same thing."

Keraderm hopes to expand the procedure in Latin America before bringing it to the United States, where it would need to be tested in a clinical trial to gain regulatory approval.

That's a process that would take the kind of money the company, which has only eight employees including Soto, does not yet have, he said.

The team bootstrapped the start-up with $50,000 and in 2012 raised an additional $300,000 from angel investors, allowing it to open a lab in Bogota that June, Soto said.

But even if Keraderm doesn't win any money in MassChallenge, he said, the four-month accelerator, for which they were selected out of a field of nearly 1,200 applicants, has been worth it.

"I never even thought I was going to be here," Soto said. "It's going to help me a lot to show we have a product that is working."

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Massport to hit up pols

Massachusetts Port Authority officials — already facing a ticking clock to grab vital federal funding — are prepping to start a Beacon Hill blitz this week to pitch a $300 million plan to dredge Boston Harbor, hoping to convince lawmakers to bankroll nearly a quarter of it.

The four-year project to deepen the Hub's vital maritime channels could double the amount of cargo containers that pass through Boston Harbor — a 
$42.5 million business for Massport last year — and will help it vie for the bigger cargo ships primed to hit East Coast ports starting in 2015, officials say.

But they admit they're already playing catch-up to other ports' dredging projects, making lobbying efforts — both federally and at the state level — crucial to keeping them competitive.

"We want to make sure we're putting our best foot forward and make the case for federal funding, and make the case for state funding. But it's kind of a chicken-and-egg process," Massport CEO Thomas Glynn said, noting the board has yet to vote on the project but could within four months. "We have to tell the board, then we have to go to the State House, so we kind of go back and forth."

Their first targets are East Boston lawmakers, whose sometimes prickly history with the agency mean Massport pitches always require a grain of salt, said Eastie state Rep. Carlo Basile.

"I just don't take their word for it. I do my own due diligence," said Basile, who plans to meet with Massport officials Tuesday. He admitted he's aware of little to no complaints from past dredging projects rolled out in 2001, 2005 and 2008, but warned, "that's not to say it can't happen this time."

"It's a much bigger project," Basile said. "I'm still waiting to hear a lot of details."

Massport spokesman Matthew Brelis, said, "We talk with legislators all the time on a host of things," but noted for the dredging project officials are starting with lawmakers from "impacted communities" before moving on to others.

Massport officials are counting on as much as 
$170 million in federal money for the project, with $65 million each coming from the agency and the state.

Secretary of Transportation Richard Davey, who chairs the Massport board, implored members that "we shouldn't do anything right now that would preclude us from the $170 million," likening the shot at the federal funds to waiting for Halley's Comet.

"You can call it Davey's Comet," he told the board during a Thursday meeting.

When Congress will act to award the money, however, is unclear, especially in the wake of the government shutdown, Glynn said.

"Everything is up for grabs down there until it's final," he said. "(Other ports) are a little bit ahead of us in terms of making their request ... but we have enough time. It's a question of it's a moving target."

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What to do when battery is on its last legs

I have a 2005 Hyundai Tucson with 90,000 miles on it. I've never had a problem since I purchased the vehicle, but I'm worried the battery will fail sometime soon because of its age. I'm planning to change the battery myself but I'm concerned about the computer and electronics due to the temporary loss of power during the replacement process. What should I do before and after changing the battery?

Just drive the car. Replacing the battery, which of course requires disconnecting the vehicle's electrical system from the original battery, will do no harm to the vehicle's electronics. You'll likely have to reset the radio station pre-sets and the engine management system will take a few miles of driving to "re-learn" your driving characteristics, but you probably will not notice anything.

Perhaps the more relevant question at this point is: Should you replace the battery now or wait until it fails? Being a founding member of the "Snug America" club and not wanting to part with any more of my hard-earned dollars than absolutely necessary, I lean toward the latter. Most batteries will develop symptoms of impending failure such as slow engine cranking speeds, giving you a heads-up that it's time for a new one. But batteries can and do fail suddenly and completely without warning.

So when I suspect a battery might be on its last legs, I carry a portable battery booster in the vehicle. Then, if the battery does fail, — at any time and for any reason — I can jump-start the vehicle to complete my trip.

This, by definition, is the Murphy's Law of automobiles — if you have a spare part with you, you'll probably never need to use it!

And finally, to put your mind at ease, have the original battery tested at a local parts store. A load test or electronic test will give you an idea of how much life your battery still has.

I have a '93 Buick Riviera with the 3800 V6 engine and 182,000 miles. When I start the engine it makes a "thudding" noise four to five times. It has done this intermittently for the past three years. One mechanic told me it could be a cracked flywheel. Can you help?

Does this noise primarily occur on a cold start after the car's been sitting for at least several hours? Also, watch the oil pressure warning light carefully as you start the engine — do the "thuds" last precisely until the warning light goes out? If so, the noise may be due to worn main or rod bearings. Once oil pressure is up, the excess clearance is buffered by the oil film and the noise stops.

A cracked flex plate/flywheel or loose torque converter mounting bolts could cause a similar noise, but for three years without some type of failure? Other possibilities include a broken or failed engine/drivetrain mount or an engine startup misfire.

Regardless of the cause, at 20 years old and nearing 200,000 miles, I'm not sure I'd be willing to spend much on repairs. If the vehicle is still nice, keep an eye out for a used or rebuilt engine. Remember the automotive version of Murphy's Law.

We have a 2008 Buick Lucerne. This fall we will be leaving the state for about seven months. Should we disconnect the battery? Will this mess up the computers? Also, should I use a trickle charger or a float charger? What's the difference?

I recommend disconnecting the battery — it is safer and will cause no harm as described above — and connect a float charger or battery maintainer like Battery Tender to keep the battery safely charged while you're away.

A trickle charger continuously charges the battery at a low amperage rate, which can lead to overcharging and battery failure. A battery maintainer charges and holds the battery at its optimum voltage safely for an indefinite period.

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Kennedy's vision for mental health never realized

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — The last piece of legislation President John F. Kennedy signed turns 50 this month: the Community Mental Health Act, which helped transform the way people with mental illness are treated and cared for in the United States.

Signed on Oct. 31, 1963, weeks before Kennedy was assassinated, the legislation aimed to build mental health centers accessible to all Americans so that those with mental illnesses could be treated while working and living at home, rather than being kept in neglectful and often abusive state institutions, sometimes for years on end.

Kennedy said when he signed the bill that the legislation to build 1,500 centers would mean the population of those living in state mental hospitals — at that time more than 500,000 people — could be cut in half. In a special message to Congress earlier that year, he said the idea was to successfully and quickly treat patients in their own communities and then return them to "a useful place in society."

Recent deadly mass shootings, including at the Washington Navy Yard and a Colorado movie theater, have been perpetrated by men who were apparently not being adequately treated for serious mental illnesses. Those tragedies have focused public attention on the mental health system and made clear that Kennedy's vision was never fully realized.

The legislation did help to usher in positive life-altering changes for people with serious illnesses such as schizophrenia, many of whom now live normal, productive lives with jobs and families. In 1963, the average stay in a state institution for someone with schizophrenia was 11 years. But only half of the proposed centers were ever built, and those were never fully funded.

Meanwhile, about 90 percent of beds have been cut at state hospitals, according to Paul Appelbaum, a Columbia University psychiatry professor and expert in how the law affects the practice of medicine. In many cases, several mental health experts said, that has left nowhere for the sickest people to turn, so they end up homeless, abusing substances or in prison. The three largest mental health providers in the nation today are jails: Cook County in Illinois, Los Angeles County and Rikers Island in New York.

"The rhetoric was very highfalutin. The reality was a little more complicated, and the funds that were provided were not adequate to the task," said Steven Sharfstein, president and CEO of Sheppard Pratt Health System, a nonprofit behavioral health organization in Baltimore.

"The goals of deinstitutionalization were perverted. People who did need institutional care got thrown out, and there weren't the programs in place to keep them supported," said former U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy, the president's nephew. "We don't have an alternate policy to address the needs of the severely mentally ill."

He is gathering advocates in Boston this week for the Kennedy Forum, a meeting to mark the 50th anniversary of his uncle's legislation and an attempt to come up with an agenda for improving mental health care.

The 1963 legislation came amid other changes in treatments for the mentally ill and health care policy in general, Appelbaum said. Chlorpromazine or Thorazine, the first effective antipsychotic medicine, was released in the 1950s. That allowed many people who were mentally ill to leave institutions and live at home.

In 1964, with the adoption of Medicaid, deinstitutionalization accelerated, experts said, because states now had an incentive to move patients out of state hospitals, where they shouldered the entire cost of their care, and into communities where the federal government would pick up part of the tab.

Later, a movement grew to guarantee rights to people with mental illness. Laws were changed in every state to limit involuntary hospitalization so people can't be committed without their consent, unless there is a danger of hurting themselves or others.

Kennedy's legislation provided for $329 million to build mental health centers that were supposed to provide services to people who had formerly been in institutions, as well as to reach into communities to try to prevent the occurrence of new mental disorders. Had the act been fully implemented, there would have been a single place in every community for people to go for mental health services.

But one problem with the legislation was that it didn't provide money to operate the centers long-term.

"Having gotten them off the ground, the federal government left it to states and localities to support," Appelbaum said. "That support by and large never came through."

Later, during the Reagan administration, the remaining funding for the act was converted into a mental health block grant for states, allowing them to spend it however they chose. Appelbaum called it a death knell because it left the community health centers that did exist on their own for funding.

Robert Drake, a professor of psychiatry and community and family medicine at Dartmouth College, said some states have tried to provide good community mental health care.

"But it's been very hard for them to sustain that because when state budget crunches come, it's always easiest to defund mental health programs because the state legislature gets relatively little pushback," he said. "Services are at a very low level right now. It's really kind of a disaster situation in most states."

Sharfstein points out that most mentally ill people are at a very low risk of becoming violent. He said it's unthinkable we would go back to the era when people were housed in "nightmare" conditions at overcrowded, understaffed and sometimes dangerous state hospitals.

"The opportunity to recover is much greater now than it was in 1963," he said.

But for those who do not take their medication, don't recover from their first episode of illness and don't seek treatment and support from professionals, they are vulnerable to homelessness, incarceration and death, he said.

Linda Rosenberg, president and CEO of the National Council for Behavioral Health, counts among its 2,100 member organizations many of the original community mental health centers that were built under the 1963 legislation.

"Whenever you pass a piece of legislation, people would like to think that you've solved the problem," she said. "It did some very important things. It laid some ground work. It's up to us now to move forward."

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Associated Press news researcher Judith Ausuebel in New York contributed to this report.

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Politicians' take on rollout of Obama's health law

The new online health insurance markets, the portals to coverage for most of the nation's nearly 50 million uninsured people, have gotten off to a rocky start since their Oct. 1 launch. The law was also central to the budget fight that led to a 16-day partial government shutdown. Politicians had these comments on the Sunday talk shows about the state of President Barack Obama's health care law:

"A visit to the website is kind of like a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles in your state. ... We're going to do everything we can in the future to try to repeal it. But that requires a Republican Senate and a different president." — Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, on CBS' "Face the Nation."

"The test is going to be in January, how many people are enrolled and what the quality of service that they're getting. I think that if we get that right, everyone will regret that the early weeks were choppy on the website. But the test is, 'Are people getting coverage and are they getting the care that they need?' And we're confident we're going to be on track to do that." — Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"I think the best way to repeal Obamacare is to have an alternative. We never hear the alternative. We could do this in a much lower cost with improved quality based on our principles, free-market principles. And two, show how Obamacare, flawed to its core, doesn't work. So have a little bit of self-restraint. It might actually be a politically — a better approach to see the massive dysfunction. But we don't even hear about that because we've stepped on that message." — Former Gov. Jeb Bush, R-Fla., on ABC's "This Week."

"This has to be fixed, but what doesn't have to be fixed is the fact that tens of millions more people will have access to affordable, quality health care, that no longer having a pre-existing medical condition will bar you from getting affordable care, that all of the initiatives that are going to be positive for a healthier life, liberty to pursue your happiness, not chained to a policy but following your passion — all of that is in place." — House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California, on ABC.

"Setting up — in the 21st century — setting up a website where people can go on and buy something is not that complicated. People do this every single day. The inability of the federal government to set up a website where people can go on and buy something like health insurance does not bode well for the much more complicated elements of this law that are yet to be rolled out." — Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., on "Fox News Sunday."

"There is no perfect law. As I said before, the only perfect law was brought down on clay tablets by Senator Moses off a mountain. So we should sit down and look at constructive ways to make Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, work better." — Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., on Fox.

"It's been a fiasco. Send Air Force One out to Silicon Valley, load it up with some smart people, bring them back to Washington and fix this problem. It's ridiculous, and everybody knows that." — Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on CNN's "State of the Union."

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