Monday, October 6, 2014

sadness


U.S.

Suffolk Downs Is Put Out to Pasture

By
Slide Show

The Final Stretch for Suffolk Downs

Jared Wickerham for The New York Times
EAST BOSTON, Mass. — When the track here opened in 1935, it boasted the first concrete grandstand in the country, and a throng of 35,000 gleefully cheered thoroughbred racing to Puritan Massachusetts. It drew legends — like Seabiscuit, who ran here in 1937, and the Beatles, who played here in 1966 — as well as scores of horse trainers, clerks and gamblers who, over time, came to know this place, Suffolk Downs, better than an old pair of slippers.
“It’s been every day here for the last 40 years,” said Bernard Bramante, 74, a former commercial fisherman who owns and trains horses that ran here. With a white knitted cap perched atop his head, Mr. Bramante tied a saddle to a horse named Dancing Buki, merrily predicting success for his final race here.
The concrete looks dated now, and the expansive dining areas are, more often than not, desolate. But on Saturday, as fog enveloped the track and white slips of paper recalling doomed wagers flitted through the air, some 9,100 people gathered for what was most likely the last day of live racing at Suffolk Downs.
Play Video|1:45

Last Day at the Races

Last Day at the Races

Suffolk Downs, New England’s last thoroughbred racetrack, is closing down after 79 years of service.
Video by Jess Bidgood on October 5, 2014.
The expansion of casino gambling in the United States has made life harder for racetracks that, like this one, lack their own casinos, big purses or the glamour of places like Churchill Downs, in Kentucky, and the Saratoga Race Course, in New York.
“As a sporting product, horse racing still does very well on its biggest days, but as a day-to-day gambling product, it has not measured up with the expansion of casino gaming,” said Chip Tuttle, the chief operations officer of Suffolk Downs, who said the track has not been profitable for nearly a decade.
Mr. Tuttle hoped the track’s lifeline would come in the form of Massachusetts’ own expanded gambling law, which allowed for three resort-style casinos in the state, one of which will be in the Boston area. Mohegan Sun, the behemoth casino in Connecticut, offered a proposal on the Suffolk Downs grounds that would keep the track in business, but state officials passed it over in favor of a bid by Wynn Resorts in nearby Everett.
“We just don’t see any way we can continue to operate,” said Mr. Tuttle.
There is a horseman’s group that hopes to race here next year, but their proposal is widely viewed as a long shot. So Saturday was marked as the day to say goodbye.
The rows of barns were quiet on Saturday morning, since many horses that were not racing had already left. Ambrose Pascucci, an owner and trainer, had come to pay a visit to his last horse here, Ginger. Mr. Pascucci, 61, looked dejectedly at his empty stalls. He has given decades of his life to this place, and even lost half of his left pinkie finger to a horse’s hoof before a race.
“Best that can happen now, drive to Miami, check out what’s going on, and restart,” Mr. Pascucci said.
But for now, he said, “I’m going to go up to the races, see if I can bet some winners.”
He found many others doing the same. They came in honor of dead relatives who loved this track. Others came for the first time out of curiosity, having realized only because of its impending closure that this time capsule was still open. Some came for a last hurrah with dear friends, and others for a last chance to gaze at hot-blooded horses in the flesh.
Saturday was a time to say goodbye to Suffolk Downs, as 9,100 people gathered for what was most likely the last day of live racing. Jared Wickerham for The New York Times
“It’s kind of really sad,” said Dylana Barilone, 20, a college student in Salem, Mass., who aspires to be a mounted policewoman. “There are over 700 horses here, and this is their job, this is their life, this is what they love to do.”
The employees here say the same thing about themselves. The track says there are 325 employees here, and hundreds more contractors who work with thoroughbreds in the state, who will struggle.
“Once it gets in your blood, it kind of stays in your blood,” said Paul Ferrari, of Malden, a mutuel clerk who has taken bets here for more than 30 years. On Saturday, he sat upright in the first open window in an endless-looking row, clacking plastic keys on his register and sorting crisp bills into an upright metal shelf.
“This is great,” Mr. Ferrari said, looking at the betting lines stretching far beyond his window. “Where you been for the last 20 years?”
Heather Gallo, of Sagamore, strode up to the window, clad in a denim jacket from the Breeders’ Cup that had belonged to her father, who died last year.
“I just thought I’d come because I can’t believe it’s the last day here,” Ms. Gallo said. “He would have been here — we would have been here together.”
Willie Thornton was here to bet, as he has for years, clad in a suit and a waistcoat. “Suffolk Downs has been my mistress,” said Mr. Thornton, 74, a retired member of the military from Dorchester. “I can’t tell you how much I’ve spent,” he added. “It’s astronomical.”
And, of course, the horses ran, race after race, nine in all, on the muddy track that left dismounting jockeys looking like they had just been splattered with cement. Horses with names like Queen of Heat, Bo Badger and Restless Rebel claimed their place in Suffolk Downs history in mist so thick that, from the grandstand, it was sometimes difficult to see the racers on the far side of the track. (Mr. Bramante’s horse, Dancing Buki, finished last in his race.)
Rain pounded the track after the last race, and Justin Stygles, of Norway, Me., looked at the empty stretch with a tear in his eye. Thoroughbred racing in New England was probably over.
He wondered if the region was simply too puritanical to support gambling, or if the success, in recent years, of major sports teams like the Patriots and the Red Sox had diminished interest here.
“The sport is changing” said Mr. Stygles, 37, a teacher. “You’re not going back home.”
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Sunday, October 5, 2014

eugene j ratner's daughters

for the defendant nursing home and eugene j ratner's patients for the plaintiff

The Bronx

details and highly rated nursing home to follow
highly rated
highly rated
highly rated

the phrase that pays for the daughters' of Eugene J. Ratner





U.S. News

Lawsuits Rattle Nursing-Home Chains

Allegations of Harmful Treatment Win Big Jury Awards, Spurring Operators to Flee Certain States

By connect
Updated Oct. 3, 2014 4:56 p.m. ET
Lawyer Brian Reddick says he has amassed more than $100 million from jury awards in nursing-home suits. Karen E. Segrave for The Wall Street Journal
Arkansas lawyer Brian Reddick has found a lucrative niche as America ages: suing big nursing-home chains.
Mr. Reddick and other alumni of a Florida law firm that pioneered the approach have taken those tactics on the road. They are filing neglect and abuse cases in places like Pennsylvania, where the country’s fourth-largest concentration of residents aged 85 and older has spurred a litigation boom aimed largely at for-profit nursing-home operators.

More

The lawsuits typically allege that patients were harmed not just by neglect or medical errors but because the corporate owners skimp on patient care to boost profits—what Mr. Reddick, a former litigator for a large nursing-home chain, calls “putting revenue over residents.”
Two decades after its start in Florida, the legal strategy has moved into tort-friendly states and receded from others as patient care improves or lawmakers institute caps on noneconomic damages in court decisions.
Major nursing-home operators and industry groups say many of the lawsuits line attorneys’ pockets while doing little to improve the quality of care. They cite aggressive tactics by some law firms, such as drumming up clients by blanketing areas with ads citing health violations at individual nursing homes, and say a handful of recent landmark verdicts are driving up the cost of settling other suits that may have little merit.
The push—coming as nursing-home operators grapple with falling reimbursement rates from the government—has prompted some chains to abandon certain states.
In August, Canadian-owned Extendicare Health ServicesInc. said it would lease its 22 skilled-nursing homes in Pennsylvania, Delaware and West Virginia to a third-party operator. It cited a fourfold increase in liability claims in those states in recent years “despite a strong and improving quality record.” The company similarly pulled out of Kentucky in 2012. A company spokeswoman declined to comment further.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys say they want to help patients who are victims of care facilities that make billions of dollars by allegedly cutting corners, most notably on staff. “I think we have made a noticeable difference,” said Mr. Reddick, who by his count has amassed more than $100 million in jury awards.
More than 1.4 million people live in U.S. nursing homes, 69% of which are run by for-profit entities.The stakes are rising as the pool of older Americans expands. By 2030 nearly one of every five Americans, or 72.1 million people, will be 65 or older, according to U.S. Census Bureau projections. Many will end up with chronic diseases and conditions that require the kind of help nursing homes provide.
Lawyers for nursing-home operators say the concentration of cases filed in states with limited or nonexistent curbs on noneconomic damages means lawsuits that elsewhere might be settled for $50,000 can generate much larger settlements or verdicts.
Lawsuits alleging abuse and neglect may be driving up insurance costs, but they haven’t driven any big chains out of business, nor have they demonstrably diminished the supply of nursing home beds, which dipped less than 3% between 1995 and 2012, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And industry groups say that some of the suits have merit.
But the aggressive litigation, they say, is putting the screws to an industry already bedeviled by slim margins. Some states have frozen or slashed Medicaid payments to nursing homes. In 2011, the federal government announced an 11.1% cut in Medicare reimbursements, which then saw an additional 2% decrease in 2013 under mandated budget cuts known as the sequester.
“This is a sector that is 80% reliant on state and federal payments,” said Greg Crist, a spokesman for the American Health Care Association, which represents both for-profit and nonprofit nursing homes. “Our members are looking around, saying we need to survive.”
In West Virginia, operators of a Charleston nursing home fought for years to overturn a $91.5 million verdict that came down in 2011. The suit was filed by McHugh Fuller Law Group, another spinoff of the same Florida law firm where Mr. Reddick once worked, Wilkes & McHugh P.A.
The case involved Dorothy Douglas, an 87-year-old patient with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. She died after a short stay at the Heartland Nursing Home during which, according to court filings, she “become dehydrated, malnourished, bedridden and barely responsive.”
This past summer, the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia cut the award to about $36.5 million, but said the penalty was warranted. “Heartland Nursing Home was chronically understaffed to the point that it was not able to provide even a life-sustaining amount of water to Ms. Douglas during the 19 days she resided in that facility,” the court ruled.
The home has since been sold. Its former owner, HCR ManorCare Inc., which operates 283 nursing homes, said its employees “are victim to the disheartening growth of advertisement-driven lawsuits…in states with a friendly environment for trial lawyers.”
McHugh Fuller didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Much of the payout from nursing-home litigation goes to lawyers, who take the cases on a contingency basis, paying the upfront costs in exchange for a cut of any settlement or award—generally 30% to 45%—plus expenses. Taking a case to trial could cost anywhere from $100,000 to $150,000, Mr. Reddick said.
While large nursing-home operators have beefed up staffing and made other improvements, for-profit facilities are still more likely to be cited for severe health deficiencies than other types, according to survey data compiled by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In the government’s fiscal 2013, 19% of for-profit homes had a health deficiency of actual harm or immediate jeopardy to residents, compared with 15% of nonprofit homes and 17.7% of government-run ones. The national rate is 18.1%.
Their patients also get less time with caregivers. Total nursing staff at for-profit homes spend about four hours each day tending to the needs of a patient—about half an hour less than at nonprofit facilities, according to an analysis of federal data by the American Health Care Association. Registered nurses at for-profit homes spend around 38 minutes per patient, while those at nonprofits spend an hour; the national average is 49 minutes per patient.
There didn’t used to be much money in suing nursing homes. Residents were typically at their end of their lives, with their prime earning years behind them, limiting plaintiffs’ ability to identify economic damages.
That changed in the 1990s, when a pair of lawyers, James Wilkes and Tim McHugh, pioneered a strategy that involved a largely overlooked Florida law that set standards for nursing-home care and allowed plaintiffs to sue for legal fees. Nursing-home operators began to settle, and the firm expanded operations, hiring more lawyers and pursuing cases across the country.
Nursing-home litigation has contracted somewhat since Wilkes & McHugh’s peak years, attorneys said, but suits continue because they often succeed.
Right now ground zero for the continuing tussle appears to be Northern Appalachia: Kentucky, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Mr. Reddick’s firm is staffing up in Philadelphia, as well as pursuing matters in Colorado and Arkansas.
“Just about any state is good for nursing-home litigation if you have a good case,” said Mr. Reddick. “Jurors are very sympathetic.”
Write to Jennifer Smith at jennifer.smith@wsj.com
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Thursday, October 2, 2014

from sea to shining sea CA=NY


Restructuring & Bankruptcy

Bankruptcy Judge in California Challenges Sanctity of Pensions

By
Stockton, Calif., faced a $1.6 billion termination fee from Calpers if it dropped out of the state pension system. Max Whittaker/Reuters
A federal bankruptcy judge on Wednesday upended the widely held belief that public workers’ pensions have a special status in California that makes them impossible to cut, further chipping away at the idea that pensions are sacrosanct in a municipal bankruptcy.
The ruling, which came during a hearing on a plan by the City of Stockton to exit bankruptcy, did not order the city to cut its pension plan or take any specific action. The judge said that he needed more time to reflect on Stockton’s situation and that he would decide Oct. 30 whether the city could emerge from its two-year bankruptcy or whether it still had more work to do.
But the decision, by Judge Christopher M. Klein of the Eastern District of California, dealt a blow to California’s giant state-led pension system, known as Calpers, which has been leading efforts to preserve defined-benefit pensions nationwide.
California City’s Return to Solvency, With Pension Problem Unsolved

California City’s Return to Solvency, With Pension Problem Unsolved

By RICK LYMAN and MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
Stockton has gone through what Detroit faces and hopes to emerge from bankruptcy protection in the spring. But its biggest problem, pension payments, still looms.
It echoed a decision made last year by Detroit’s bankruptcy judge, but went even further. While Detroit’s pension system was a struggling local entity with few friends in the state capital, Calpers is a powerful arm of the state, with statutory powers that include liens allowing it to foreclose on the assets of a city that fails to pay its pension bills.
Calpers had argued that if Stockton stopped making payments and dropped out of the state pension system, the lien would let it claim $1.6 billion of its assets. But Judge Klein said those statutory powers were suspended once a California city received federal bankruptcy protection.
“Why should I take that lien seriously?” he asked a lawyer for Calpers, Michael Gearin. “I may avoid it as a black-letter matter of bankruptcy law,” he said, referring to well-established legal principles.
He did not dispute that Stockton would be billed $1.6 billion to leave Calpers and said such a termination fee “can be seen as a golden handcuff.” But in bankruptcy, he said, Stockton could legally refuse to pay the bill because it arose from the city’s contract with Calpers, and contracts are broken routinely in bankruptcy.
“The bankruptcy code provides that the lien can be avoided and be treated as an unsecured claim,” Judge Klein said.
Judge Klein also said that Stockton had many options other than Calpers for retirement benefits: a private provider, like an insurance company; a multiemployer pension plan affiliated with a union; one of California’s county-run pension plans; or it could even offer no pensions at all.
“There are lots of permutations and combinations out there with respect to the art of the possible,” he said, adding that nothing in the law required any city to give its business to Calpers. “The whole world is out there.”
Judge Klein’s ruling went beyond anything that Stockton was seeking.
In oral arguments on Wednesday, Stockton’s lawyer, Marc A. Levinson, said that for Stockton to switch to another retirement plan administered by a different entity would probably take two years, and in the meantime all the city’s workers were likely to quit. Their first choice would be to seek similar jobs in cities that were still part of Calpers, he said, adding that he thought Calpers was a more efficient plan administrator than any other entity Stockton might try.
Mr. Levinson said Stockton wanted to use its “business judgment” to keep its existing relationship with Calpers, something bankruptcy law permits.
The issue of cutting pensions was raised by a holdout creditor, Franklin Templeton Investments, a mutual fund company that had previously bought about $36 million of Stockton’s debt. In mediation, the city had initially proposed to settle the entire debt for less than a penny on the dollar, but Franklin managed to improve its position somewhat by showing that about $4 million of the debt was secured and had to be paid. That helped, but the city was still offering less than a penny on the dollar for the unsecured portion.
That left Franklin to argue that Stockton’s exit strategy could not be approved by the court because it unfairly discriminated among creditors because Calpers was not going to lose a penny and Franklin would receive so little. A bankruptcy plan of debt adjustment is supposed to treat similar creditors more or less the same; it allows for some discrimination as long as there is a reason for the different treatment. Stockton said its treatment of Franklin Templeton constituted “fair discrimination.”
Stockton, Calif., filed for bankruptcy in 2012. Kevin Bartram/Reuters
In court proceedings in July, Judge Klein said it was not clear to him that Calpers was even a creditor. He adjourned the hearings until the city and other parties could brief him on Stockton’s relationship with Calpers.
Calpers responded by saying it was part of “a triangular relationship,” in which the city, its past and present workers and Calpers worked together, with some interactions governed by contract but the most important activities governed by statute.
But Judge Klein said that he had been studying the state law that governs public retirement benefits in California, which he said was “like a jigsaw puzzle.” Once he put the pieces together, he said, he realized that what he saw in the statute was different from what had been described to him.
Much of Judge Klein’s analysis revolved around subtle federalist issues like whether an arm of the state could still enforce the laws of that state once a city has taken shelter in federal bankruptcy court. California’s public pension law has a provision that anticipated these issues and specifically says that the contract a city enters into with Calpers cannot be impaired, no matter what other laws might say.
Judge Klein said legislative history showed that California lawmakers were responding to the increased possibility of a municipal bankruptcy that grew out of New York City’s bankruptcy near miss in 1975.
He said that California’s lawmakers had also enacted laws that specified exactly the steps cities had to take to obtain authorization from the state to file for federal bankruptcy protection. He said that when the legislature enacted that law, it tacitly agreed that if the city earned the authorization for bankruptcy, it would be governed by the federal bankruptcy code.
“Those conditions are the opening of the gate,” he said. “Once the city passes through the gate, it’s what’s specified in the United States Bankruptcy Code. Otherwise, you come to the conclusion that the California Legislature can edit the federal law.”
In a statement, Calpers said: “We disagree with the judge’s opinion on the issue of pension impairment. This ruling is not legally binding on any of the parties in the Stockton case or as precedent in any other bankruptcy proceeding and is unnecessary to the decision on confirmation of the city of Stockton’s plan of adjus
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Wednesday, October 1, 2014

NY even wilder than the US?

fired for not ringing the door bells for Thomas Suozzi, Teresa Butler sues and collects and buries the...under a protective order in. OTB employees and the citizens of NY deserve better?

unseal this Owsley?

 

Butler v. Nassau Regional Off-Track Betting ... - Justia

dockets.justia.com › ... › New York › New York Eastern District Court
Apr 9, 2007 - Plaintiff: Teresa Butler. Defendant: Nassau Regional Off-Track Betting Corporation, Board of Trustees of Nassau Regional Off-Track Betting .


 

Long-Term Secrecy Surrounds Electronic Monitoring

Recent Unsealing Shows How Applications Are Kept Hidden Long After Cases Are Closed



By
Updated Sept. 30, 2014 7:17 p.m. ET


As more people use cellphones and email, prosecutors increasingly are using tools for monitoring those communications in criminal investigations. Associated Press
A federal judge's recent unsealing of a secret government request for electronic monitoring shines a light on how such applications are kept hidden from the public long after criminal cases that result from them are closed.
The Sept. 2 order, by U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos, came after Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, filed motions in a Texas federal court to unseal 14 cases as part of an investigation into the confidentiality of such surveillance applications.
The unsealed request for monitoring, involving a drug-trafficking case, was filed on Oct. 30, 2007. It sought approval for a "pen register," a common surveillance tool that records dialed phone numbers and Internet addresses. The subject named in the application pleaded guilty to conspiracy to engage in money laundering and was sentenced in 2012 to two years, nine months in prison.
As more people use cellphones and email, prosecutors increasingly are using tools for monitoring those communications in criminal investigations. Federal courts allowed a pen register 18,760 times in 2012, more than triple that in 2003, Justice Department data show.
The government also routinely asks that the applications for such matters be sealed, a move that ends up keeping documents permanently secret in courts across America. Though judges have long kept matters from the public in national-security cases and continuing probes, the spreading move to permanent secrecy of more commonplace criminal cases contradicts a long U.S. tradition of open courts, according to some legal specialists.
"The broader message here is that the government is keeping stuff sealed too long even if it had a basis for sealing stuff initially," said Brian Owsley, a former magistrate judge who initially sealed the Texas case at issue and now is an assistant law professor at Indiana Tech Law School.
The U.S. maintains that long-term secrecy surrounding electronic-surveillance matters is paramount, even if the criminal cases that stem from it are resolved or closed. Without explanation, the government didn't oppose the application recently unsealed. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on the case but said as a general matter that sealing requests is "an individualized process."
A June page-one article in the Journal detailed Mr. Owsley's unsuccessful efforts to unseal 146 of his own orders that had approved government requests for secret electronic surveillance in criminal probes.
Dow Jones continues to seek to unseal 13 other electronic-surveillance orders handled by Mr. Owsley in the same court, an effort the government is fighting.
"This pervasive secrecy is particularly troubling given the widespread public interest in issues relating to government surveillance and the privacy of electronic communications," Dow Jones said in a legal filing.
In legal papers objecting to the Dow Jones effort, the government said such electronic surveillance orders "should be kept secret because they reveal targets of the investigation, identify potential witnesses and victims, and could allow subjects of the investigation to frustrate the aims of the order by destroying evidence."
The U.S. argued that secrecy is important even after any subsequent criminal investigations are closed. "These matters are reviewed on a case by case basis and decisions are made individually based on a variety of factors," a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's office for the southern district of Texas said in a statement.
Another Texas federal judge, Hayden Head, had blocked Judge Owsley's initial attempt to unseal his orders. Judge Head, since retired, didn't return calls seeking comment. Earlier this year, he told the Journal that the only proper way to unseal the orders would be after careful review on a "case-by-case basis."
Write to Michael Siconolfi at michael.siconolfi@wsj.com




Brian Owsley

owsley
 Contact Info
Room 339
Indiana Tech Law School
260.422.5561, ext. 3457
blowsley@indianatech.edu

Assistant Professor of Law

Brian Owsley graduated from the University of Notre Dame with Honors. He attended Columbia University where he received a joint degree in law and a master in international affairs. While at Columbia Law School, he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and earned a Certificate with Honors from the Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law. He served as the Executive Editor of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review and was also a staff member of the Columbia Journal of Gender and the Law. He was a member of the Black Law Students Association and the Columbia Society of International Law.
After leaving Columbia University, he clerked for the Honorable Martha Craig Daughtrey of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and for the Honorable Janis Graham Jack of the Southern District of Texas. He served as the Leonard H. Sandler Fellow at Human Rights Watch where he worked on matters involving the Middle East, particularly Iraq. He also served as a Law Fellow for the Southern Poverty Law Center. He drafted appellate briefs and argued appeals on behalf of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in United States Courts of Appeals around the country.
He also served as a civil trial lawyer for the United States Department of Justice defending the Government in complex commercial litigation. As lead counsel in Columbia First Bank, FSB v. United States, he argued and was granted the first directed verdict in favor of the Government in a Winstar-related litigation case saving the taxpayers millions of dollars. While at the Department of Justice, he earned a Special Commendation for Outstanding Service awarded by the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division.
Most recently, he served as a United States Magistrate Judge for the Southern District of Texas where he presided over numerous civil and criminal bench and jury trials. He took pleas and sentenced criminal defendants in misdemeanor cases and issue countless opinions as well memoranda and recommendations on various dispositive motions. At the conclusion of his term, the Senate of the State of Texas issued a Commendation in a Senate Resolution recognizing his service as a magistrate judge.
He has published several law review articles on a range of topics. His article entitled The Fourth Amendment Implications of the Government’s Use of Cell Tower Dumps in Its Electronic Surveillance, was published last year in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, addressing novel issues about electronic surveillance using cell tower dumps. Moreover, his article entitled The Supreme Court Goes to the Dogs: Reconciling Florida v. Harris and Florida v. Jardines, which was published this year in the Albany Law Review, analyzes two recent Supreme Court decisions regarding drug-detection dogs. He has also recently published essays in the California Law Review Circuit and the University of Pennsylvania Law Review Online. He has forthcoming articles on electronic surveillance issues in the Hastings Law Journal and the Akron Law Review.
 
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OTB the breakfast of champions

Add comment

3 former officials to be jailed in New Cassel bribery, conspiracy case

Updated September 30, 2014 10:56 PM
By WILLIAM MURPHY AND BRIDGET MURPHY  william.murphy@newsday.com,bridget.murphy@newsday.com
Former Nassau County legislators Patrick Williams and Roger
Former Nassau County legislators Patrick Williams and Roger Corbin, and former head of the North Hempstead Community Development Agency Neville Mullings were sentenced to jail time for their roles in a failed $80 million redevelopment project in New Cassel more than a decade ago. (Credit: Howard Schnapp)
Saying power and greed corrupted them, a Nassau judge Tuesday sentenced three former government officials to time behind bars for their roles in a failed $80 million redevelopment project in New Cassel more than a decade ago.
"Each of you have betrayed the public's trust," Judge Alan Honorof told former Democratic Nassau County Legis. Roger Corbin and Patrick Williams, along with Neville Mullings, who headed the North Hempstead Community Development Agency.
"As you look back on your lives in months and years to come, I think that the worst punishment that you will suffer is the disappointment that you will have in yourselves," Honorof said as he imposed the terms in Nassau County Court in Mineola.
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Corbin, 68, of Westbury, was sentenced to 2 to 6 years in prison for accepting more than $200,000 in bribes and official misconduct.
Williams, 66, of Uniondale, was sentenced to 1 year in jail for conspiracy.
Mullings, 73, of Westbury, was sentenced to 9 months in jail for conspiracy and official misconduct.
One of the defense lawyers, Frederick Brewington of Hempstead, said all three men immediately filed appeals.
The judge ordered the defendants to surrender in court Thursday. They will be incarcerated at that point if the Appellate Division does not issue a stay of the sentences during the appeals.
The charges stemmed from an indictment in 2010 charging they steered the project to a specific developer, sold false exclusivity rights to a bank and stole $150,000 in public money.
They were convicted in 2012 by a jury that was deadlocked on several other charges, which were dismissed by the judge Tuesday at the request of prosecutors.
Corbin faced up to 15 years in prison, and Williams and Mullings each faced up to 4 years in prison. Assistant District Attorney Jason Herman urged the judge to impose the maximum term on each defendant.
The three had the power to create a project that would benefit New Cassel, but instead they succumbed to "greed, power and political influence," Herman said.
Corbin declined to speak during Tuesday's proceedings.
But both Williams and Mullings made impassioned speeches in which they insisted on their innocence, praised the judge for his fairness and called prosecution witnesses liars.
"I respect the process," Mullings told the judge, adding it had been painful for him to sit through a seven-month trial and "listen to the lies" from the witness stand.
Williams said that while he was contrite, "I want to say to you . . . and the whole world . . . that I am not guilty."
Corbin's attorney, Kenneth St. Bernard of Mineola, pointed out to the judge that the jury failed to convict the men on more serious grand larceny charges.
The attorney said outside court that Corbin's sentence was "extremely harsh."
The judge said he believed that each of the men went into public service to do good, but added: "Your legacy will be anything but one of altruism."
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Monday, September 29, 2014

Your child is precious?

and  you are  ignorant or stupid?

faustmanlab.org  and pubmed.org faustman dl and pubmed.org ristori + BCG

Bostonians should consider the work of Dr. Denise L Faustman  et al before and/or in addition to what the  WSJ reports below.

I will let anyone shoot me with BCG anytime, anywhere and observe the results and publish same on You Tube et al. Preliminary indications show activity to mitigate plaque psoriasis.

The US and people such as those mentioned below do little or nothing to mitigate the destruction caused by autoimmune diseases. There own children may suffer as a result of the inability of their parents to distinguish gadgets and gizmos from art and science.

The only gizmo that has stood the test of time and human nature is Hiram Maxim's automatic weapon, the machine gun.


 






Citizen Hackers Tinker With Medical Devices

Diabetes Patients, Family Members Try to Make Glucose Monitors More Useful


By
Updated Sept. 26, 2014 6:25 p.m. ET
A group of tech-savvy parents have built NightScout, a remote-monitoring system that gives young diabetics and their families more flexibility in managing the disease.
Jason Adams, a business-development executive by day and a molecular biologist by training, had never considered himself a hacker. That changed when he discovered an off-label way to monitor his 8-year-old daughter's blood-sugar levels from afar.
His daughter Ella has Type 1 diabetes and wears a glucose monitor made by Dexcom Inc. DXCM +0.95% The device measures her blood sugar every five minutes and displays it on a nearby receiver the size of a pager, a huge advantage in helping monitor her blood sugar for spikes and potentially fatal drops. But it can't transmit the data to the Internet, which meant Mr. Adams never sent Ella to sleepovers for fear she could slip into a coma during the night.
Then Mr. Adams found NightScout, a system cobbled together by a constellation of software engineers, many with diabetic children, who were frustrated by the limitations of current technology. The open-source system they developed essentially hacks the Dexcom device and uploads its data to the Internet, which lets Mr. Adams see Ella's blood-sugar levels on his Pebble smartwatch wherever she is. It isn't perfect. It drains cellphone batteries, can cut out at times and hasn't been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. But for many, it has filled a gap.
Ella Adams, 8, who has Type 1 diabetes, with her father, Jason, who can monitor her blood-sugar levels throughout the day via a display on his watch. Sam Hodgson for The Wall Street Journal
The home-built setup is part of a shift in the way Americans relate to the medical industry and their own health care. Technologically savvy patients are starting to tinker under the hoods of medical contraptions, seeking more influence over devices like blood-sugar monitors, insulin pumps and defibrillators that record and control bodily functions. Their goal is greater access to data and faster invention than is possible under the formal regulatory process.
Patients have been tweaking hearing aids so they play music, using 3-D printers to make their own prosthetics and fiddling with a device used to measure acidity levels in the esophagus. The Massachusetts Institute of Technologyhas been hosting "hackathons" where engineers and students try to improve medical products and work out new solutions to common diseases. The latest one, held last weekend, was aimed at improving breast pumps.
"I have a huge bet on there being many other diseases that can be helped by these new forces in medicine," said Joyce Lee, a diabetes specialist and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan who researches design as it relates to health care. "It is not the new blockbuster drug. It's not the newest FDA-approved device. But it's the free hack that the patient came up with."
The tinkering is raising concern at the FDA, medical-device companies and among some academics and clinicians that modifications are being used before they are fully tested and safe for a broad audience. Continuous glucose monitors such as the one Ella Adams uses are Class III medical devices, meaning they get the highest level of regulatory scrutiny, and even new support software must clear a battery of approvals.
The rigorous approval process is there for a reason. A diabetes patient can come to rely on an alarm that prompts him or her to address dangerously high or low blood sugar, so devices need to work predictably and be comprehensible to patients who aren't schooled in technology.
Dexcom, the maker of the glucose monitor, is aware of NightScout, as is the FDA, and neither is taking issue with it for now. While not completely comfortable with the software, the FDA takes a risk-based approach to enforcement and is concerned about its distribution and how it affects patient safety.
After Evan Costik, 6, was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, his father, a software engineer, began working on a system to monitor his son's blood-sugar levels from afar. Mike Bradley for The Wall Street Journal
"These parents are clearly crying out for ways to access their children's devices in a way that isn't available," said Courtney Lias, an official from the agency's Center for Devices and Radiological Health.
Representatives of the FDA have encouraged NightScout's backers to consult formally with the agency. The NightScout team said it filed an application in August, and a formal meeting has been scheduled for next month.
Benjamin West, a choral singer and software engineer with Type 1 who uses a Dexcom device and is leading the meeting with the FDA, said the agency has expressed concerns about how users can get support if they run into problems, how software updates are distributed and whether there is any consideration of steps to prevent unauthorized access to the data.
Other do-it-yourself developments in diabetes control—in particular efforts to come up with software to govern dosages of insulin, where errors could be fatal—have prompted more serious concerns.
Such efforts are spreading anyway. At a recent diabetes conference, Mr. West was showing how he had devised a way to control his Medtronic Inc. MDT -1.26% insulin pump with his laptop. A nonprofit group started by a former Amazon.com Inc. AMZN -0.43% engineer, called Tidepool, is teaming up with makers of diabetes devices to create better data displays for patients and their doctors.
The homegrown efforts are springing up, in part, because approvals through formal channels can take a long time. A new Medtronic pump that communicates with a glucose monitor and suspends insulin delivery when blood sugars are low wasn't approved in the U.S. until 2013, after being used in Europe since 2009. Johnson & Johnson JNJ -0.52% submitted a new version of its Animas insulin pump that uses the Dexcom monitor in April 2013 and is still waiting for approval. The device was approved in Europe in 2011.
The FDA acknowledges the frustration and doesn't want to be seen as standing in the way of innovation, the FDA's Ms. Lias said. The FDA notes there are different requirements in Europe for device approvals and that approvals depend on when manufacturers submit their applications to U.S. regulators.
Dexcom plans to seek FDA approval for a software system similar to NightScout by early next year with hopes of getting it on the market by year-end.
"We are working proactively with the FDA to bring similar features and functionality to market," said Steve Pacelli, Dexcom's executive vice president for strategy.
Chronic diseases such as diabetes, asthma and heart conditions—where cross referencing data can help improve health—have been an early focus of hacking.
Between 1.5 million and three million Americans have Type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune condition that destroys insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. Managing it requires carefully matching injections of insulin to the consumption of carbohydrates, while taking into account factors like exercise and illness. The better the match, the lower the risk of complications. Blood sugar that gets too high can cause severe dehydration and other life-threatening conditions. Too low, and a person could have seizures or slip into a coma.
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NightScout got its start in the Livonia, N.Y., home of John Costik, a software engineer at the Wegmans supermarket chain. In 2012, his son Evan was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at the age of four. The father of two bought a Dexcom continuous glucose monitoring system, which uses a hair's width sensor under the skin to measure blood-sugar levels. He was frustrated that he couldn't see Evan's numbers when he was at work. So he started fiddling around.
On May 14 last year, he tweeted a picture of his solution: a way to upload the Dexcom receiver's data to the Internet using his software, a $4 cable and an Android phone.
That tweet caught the eye of other engineers across the country.
One was Lane Desborough, an engineer with a background in control systems for oil refineries and chemical plants whose son, 15, has diabetes. Mr. Desborough had designed a home-display system for glucose-monitor data and called it NightScout. But his system couldn't connect to the Internet, so it was merged with Mr. Costik's software to create the system used today.
Mr. Adams also saw the tweet. After the code became public, the San Diego father of three stayed up until three in the morning trying to make it work before giving up and hiring a freelance computer-science student in India, who solved his problem in 20 minutes. Two weeks later, Ella had her first sleepover.
The experience hasn't been seamless. The Android phone Mr. Adams uses to upload Dexcom data to the Internet has inexplicably frozen twice. His daughter was fine both times, but the outages were a warning that the system isn't fail-safe. Mr. Adams and his wife still get up twice a night—at midnight and 3 a.m.—to check Ella's blood sugar with a finger prick.
NightScout relies on outside sites to receive the data and display glucose levels. On a recent night, two of the online hosting sites had an outage that shut down NightScout for about three hours for some users.
The code also tends to drain the batteries of phones used to upload the data. As yet, there are no security settings.
The system does, however, give users a monitoring option that hadn't existed. Kristin Andrews Derichsweiler, a California nurse and single mother of four, got the Dexcom glucose monitor to help her 15-year-old son manage his diabetes.
Two weeks after setting it up, she says she noticed her son's blood-sugar levels were dropping while he was alone at home. When he didn't answer the phone, she rushed back from work and found him unresponsive in bed. His blood sugar level was dangerously low—28 milligrams per deciliter, well below a normal level of 80. She got him to drink two boxes of juice and he recovered.
Users stay in touch with each other and the developers via a Facebook group set up by Mr. Adams. It now has more than 6,800 members. The developers are making fixes as bugs arise and adding functions such as text-message alarms and access controls via updates.
The release-and-repair approach is typical of Silicon Valley, where speed is at a premium, but alien to the medical business, where liability and regulators are major concerns. Some experts welcome the speed and inventiveness, but worry the ad hoc developers could fail to build in the necessary safeguards such as alerts for when the system goes down.
"This grass-roots initiative and drive is very important in accelerating the development of these technologies," said Howard Wolpert, who runs a technology institute at the Harvard-affiliated Joslin Diabetes Center. "It is also important that the processes for approval can be accelerated so that this can be done in a way that there is an element of regulatory oversight." The institute has received funding from Dexcom.
John Costik with son Evan and wife Laura at their home in Livonia, N.Y. His remote-monitoring system uses software he wrote, along with a $4 cable and an Android phone. Mike Bradley for The Wall Street Journal
Medical do-it-yourselfers—including some of the people behind NightScout—are now pushing to develop systems that combine the blood-sugar data from glucose monitors with insulin dosing to even out spikes and troughs in blood sugar.
Twitter engineer Scott Leibrand and his fiancée, Dana Lewis, who has Type 1 diabetes, have come up with a software program they call the "do-it-yourself pancreas." It calculates insulin doses with data from the Dexcom monitor, details of Ms. Lewis's meals and estimates of the length of time insulin remains active in body. The system then sends notifications to her phone and Pebble watch with suggested insulin doses to level out her blood sugar.
In June, after watching Ms. Lewis's average blood-glucose levels improve, the couple set up a table at a diabetes meeting to talk about their findings. Stayce Beck, an FDA staff member in the diabetes-device branch, asked Ms. Lewis for a demonstration.
After asking some questions, Ms. Beck cautioned that because the system generates insulin recommendations based on the Dexcom monitor, which isn't authorized for that use, it looked to her that the FDA would consider the system a Class III medical device.
"They really recommended that we wouldn't distribute the thing as is," said Mr. Leibrand, who said that isn't their intention. He also recognizes that if his model were able to control insulin delivery, "it would be a lot more dangerous."
A number of researchers at medical-device makers are working on similar systems that would actually inject insulin. The automated devices have shown promise in clinical trials, but none have been submitted for approval, a process that could take years.
Some do-it-yourselfers are taking steps to commercialize their inventions. Former Wall Street trader Bryan Mazlish has launched a startup—Smartloop LLC—that has filed patents on computer-assisted technology to help manage blood-sugar levels. Mr. Mazlish, whose son and wife have Type 1 diabetes, has built a smartphone app that runs an algorithm to optimize blood-glucose levels by advising on insulin dosing using data from glucose monitors.


Joyce Lee

Joyce Lee, M.D., M.P.H.

Associate Professor, Department of Pediatrics and Communicable Diseases

Associate Professor, Environmental Health Sciences
300 NIB, Room 6E18      Vcard icon
Campus Box 5456
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109
Tel: 734-936-9360; Fax: 734-764-2599
E-mail: joyclee@umich.edu
Website(s): University of Michigan Health System Profile; http://joycelee.me/; Joyce Lee on LinkedIn; Joyce Lee on Twitter

Professional Summary

Joyce Lee is a pediatrician, diabetes specialist, and clinical and health services researcher. She is very interested in the notion that human centered design and design thinking combined with emerging technologies such as mobile technology, data visualization, and social media can transform the research enterprise and the delivery of clinical care.
She attended Brown University for her undergraduate education, the University of Pennsylvania for her medical degree, where she was elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha Honors Society, and she completed her internship and residency in General Pediatrics at the Boston Combined Residency Program (Children's Hospital, Boston, and Boston Medical Center). She is one of few individuals across the country who has completed dual training in Pediatric Endocrinology and Pediatric Health Services Research. In addition, she received her Master in Public Health degree from the Department of Health Management and Policy at the University of Michigan.
Lee is the principal investigator on several NIH-funded studies focusing on childhood obesity, and on type 2 diabetes risk. To study obesity and diabetes, she incorporates a variety of methodologies, including cross-sectional and longitudinal epidemiologic analyses, transition state modeling techniques, agent based modeling techniques, applied clinical research, and cost-effectiveness analysis.
She co-directs the Program in Mobile Technology for Enhancing Child Health, which has the goal of creating mobile technology systems that can enhance chronic disease adherence in children, with a specific focus on adolescents with type 1 diabetes. In addition, in June 2013, she was appointed as the first Social Media Editor for JAMA Pediatrics.

Education

M.P.H., University of Michigan, 2006
M.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2000

Research Interests & Projects

Dr. Lee's research focuses on the epidemiology of diabetes (type 1 and type 2) and obesity in children, health outcomes and quality of life for children with diabetes, and the link between childhood obesity and its long-term endocrine consequences, including pubertal maturation and development of diabetes over the life
Mr. Mazlish said he thinks the current system for developing new medical devices could be improved upon, but figures he can have the most impact going the commercial route.
"I've decided to play within the current system," he said.
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