An Irish trading company and three of its officers have been charged with sending helicopter engines and other aircraft parts to Iran as part of Hossein Ali Khoshnevisrad's alleged weapons-smuggling ring.
The 25-count indictment unsealed in federal court in Washington Tuesday charges the Mac Aviation Group and the three men of buying goods from U.S. companies and sending them to Iran using front companies in Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates.
As reported first by the Center for Investigative Reporting and The Washington Post, Khoshnevisrad was charged March 16 with multiple export-related crimes for allegedly running a major procurement scheme to acquire millions of dollars worth of U.S. parts for military helicopters and jet fighters for use by Iran's military. He was arrested March 14 after arriving at San Francisco International Airport on a flight from Europe.
Mac Aviation is the unidentified Irish trading company mentioned in the criminal complaint against Khoshnevisrad that allegedly helped him procure the U.S.-made goods that ultimately ended up in Iran, including 17 Rolls Royce helicopter engines.
The Justice Department is seeking the arrest and deportation of the company's three Irish officers—owner Thomas McGuinn, 72; his son Sean McGuinn, 40, who is the sales director; and commercial manager Sean Byrne.
In 1996 Thomas McGuinn pleaded guilty to violating the Arms Export Control Act. He has since been barred by the State Department from engaging in any U.S. export-related activity involving defense goods or services. Exports of the helicopter engines and aircraft parts in the Khoshnevisrad case are regulated by the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, which regulates exports of so-called dual-use items—goods that can be used both for civilian and military purposes.
Calls to the Bureau of Industry and Security and Rolls Royce, the maker of the helicopter engines, were not returned.
DOCUMENTS:
DOJ release on Khoshnevisrad (March 16, 2009) DOJ release on announcement (March 24, 2009)
The federal judge in the Heston case has ordered Taser International to pay $1.4 million to the plaintiffs' attorneys.
In a decision posted last Friday Judge James Ware awarded Peter Williamson and John Burton $1.4 million in fees. Referring to Heston as "an extraordinary case," Judge Ware said the attorneys have provided "a significant benefit to the public" in securing a jury verdict against Taser.
In December 2008, CIR and California Lawyer magazine profiled Heston, a lawsuit brought by the family of Robert C. Heston, a Salinas, Calif. man who died after multiple Taser shocks by police. The jury found Taser International partly responsible for his death and initially awarded the family $6.2 million in damages (the amount was eventually reduced to $153,000). It's the only time Taser International has been found legally liable for a death.
Here's part of Judge Ware's explanation for awarding attorneys fees:
The use of Tasers by police departments has become increasingly widespread. Their growing prevalence as a law enforcement weapon makes the warnings given about their use an issue of significant societal importance. Thus, the issue of whether Defendant TASER owes a duty to warn police about the risks of cardiac arrest under certain circumstances concerns an important right affecting the public interest. Here, Plaintiffs directly affected a public interest because their lawsuit alleged that Defendant TASER breached a duty to warn police departments about certain risks associated with metabolic acidosis and prolonged exposure to electric shock from Tasers. Ultimately, Plaintiffs were successful in proving that Defendant TASER's negligent failure to warn Salinas police officers that prolonged application of electric current from Tasers increased the risk of death from metabolic acidosis, in part, resulting in the unintended death of Robert C. Heston.
Here, as discussed at trial, Defendant TASER markets its products as an effective non-lethal tool for law enforcement. Indeed, Defendant TASER highlights the non-lethal nature of its Tasers when used under a variety of circumstances, including multiple or prolonged deployments. From the evidence in this case, the jury found that TASER's [stun gun] is likely to be dangerous where "prolonged exposure to electric shock from the device potentially causes acidosis to a degree which poses a risk of cardiac arrest in a person against whom the device is deployed," and that Defendant TASER's failure to warn of such a risk "was a substantial factor in causing the officers to use the device in such a way." In support of their motion, Plaintiffs provide evidence that, as a result of this verdict, law enforcement officials all over the world are re-considering and potentially reforming their usage and training policies for Tasers.
The notoriety of Plaintiffs' first-of-its-kind verdict, in some circumstances, has prompted a number of TASER customers and prospective customers to consider the risk of repeated and prolonged Taser electric charges on individuals in an excited or delirious state. Additionally, while Defendant TASER has yet to adopt a warning addressing the risks of metabolic acidosis, Plaintiffs insist that it will eventually address the risk of acidosis in its training policies and warnings. Defendant TASER contends that Plaintiffs have not caused any changes to its policies because it adopted warnings concerning prolonged exposure to TASER electrical charges before the initiation of Plaintiffs' suit. However, the warnings provided by Defendant TASER concern "strong muscle contractions that may impair breathing and respiration," and recommend avoiding prolonged or extensive multiple discharges "to minimize the potential for over-exertion of the subject or potential impairment of full ability to breathe over a protracted time period." Such warnings do not address the obligation Defendant TASER owed Robert C. Heston to warn police about the risk of causing metabolic acidosis to the point of cardiac arrest.
Burton and Williamson originally requested $1.6 million, plus up to an additional $2.8 million in consideration of their unprecedented win against the stun-gun maker.
At least 50 deaths in the U.S. since 2001 are linked to Taser stun guns, according to autopsy reports and research compiled by Amnesty International.
Tuesday's report generated headlines from Britain to Iran. Though it's not the first time deaths have been reported following police Taser strikes (Amnesty now counts 334 in the U.S.; the Arizona Republic counts 400+ in the U.S. and Canada), it is the first time an organization has reported that there are at least 50 deaths in which coroners and medical examiners have cited the Taser as a factor.
It was just one nugget in the 130-page report. There were recommendations regarding Tasers (suspend use or limit them to life-threatening situations); chilling examples of misuse; and other noteworthy statistics—for example, of the 334 people who have died nationwide since 2001 following police Taser strikes (Amnesty's count), 90 percent were unarmed. Newspapers from Boston to Las Vegas jumped on the report.
But Wall Street didn't care.
A quick primer: Government agencies are the biggest purchasers of Tasers (thus comprising a huge chunk of Taser International's revenue). Those agencies are ultimately responsive to voters and taxpayers. Negative headlines can sway public opinion, which in turn affect decisions made by policymakers (e.g. equipping the local police department with Tasers). So when cities decide not to buy Tasers it impacts the company's sales, thus Taser's stock price. (Taser CEO Rick Smith has talked about this, and we detailed it in "Gannett Papers Shocked by Taser's Claims.")
In this case, however, Amnesty's critical report didn't impact investors. Between Monday—the day before Amnesty released its report—to Wednesday's close, Taser's stock price jumped 15 percent. By comparison, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index and the Nasdaq—the market Taser shares trade on—were up about four percent.
This isn't the first time investors didn't punish Taser because of a negative Amnesty report. In November 2004 Amnesty released its first full report on Taser-related deaths, also on a Tuesday. Between the previous day's close (Monday) to the following day's close (Wednesday) Taser's stock price went up 11 percent. During that same period the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq barely moved—both markets crawled about one percent higher.
Amnesty International, it seems, doesn't carry much weight on Wall Street.
We'd be remiss if we didn't single out other great investigations into Taser, like this one from CBC News and Radio-Canada. The two news organizations teamed up to produce an amazing piece that aired Thursday night in Canada. The Arizona Republic, Taser International's hometown paper, published a piece on the findings in Friday's paper. Here's their lede:
A new study has found that the type of Taser stun gun used most by police officers can fire more electricity than the company says is possible, which the study's authors say raises the risk of cardiac arrest as much as 50 percent in some people.
The study, led by a Montreal biomedical engineer and a U.S. defense contractor at the request of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., also concluded that even stun guns firing at expected electrical levels carry some risk of inducing a heart attack, depending on the circumstances.
The researchers' analysis contradicts Taser's position that electric shocks from the weapons cannot kill. The study said the results raise questions about quality control in the stun gun's manufacturing and decline in performance over time.
The CBC News/Radio-Canada investigation is accessible online, as are the accompanying stories and source documents. A portion:
Pierre Savard, a biomedical engineer at the University of Montreal, designed the technical procedure for the CBC's testing based on Taser International's specifications.
Savard told CBC News it is scientifically significant that about nine percent of the Tasers fired in the tests delivered more current than they are supposed to do, especially since he believes no one is verifying the company's claims.
"I think it's important because Taser is not subjected to international standards," Savard said. "When you use a cellphone, well, cellphones have to respect a set of standards … for the electric magnetic field that it emits. The Taser, well, nobody knows except Taser International."
Savard said the cause of the increased current could be either due to faulty quality control during the stun guns' manufacturing or electrical components that deteriorate with age.
The findings are troubling, since police officers are trained to aim a Taser at the chest, said Savard, who studies heart rhythms and how they are affected by electrical stimulation.
"When you combine an increased current intensity with a dart that falls right over the heart for somebody who has cardiovascular disease or other conditions such as using drugs, for example, it can all add up to a fatal issue," Savard said.
The piece is the CBC's latest in their ongoing investigation into Tasers, which really took off after the October 2007 death of Robert Dziekanski, a Polish man who died after being shocked by police Tasers at Vancouver International Airport.
Canada's press has been leading the way in Taser coverage over the past year as interest in the U.S. has waned. This piece is the latest example of that.
The pharmaceutical industry spent $168 million lobbying Capitol Hill last year, reports the Center for Public Integrity.
That's a 32 percent increase from 2006, making it Washington's largest lobby. Big Pharma and other health-product manufacturers spent a combined $189 million on lobbying in 2007, nearly three times the $67 million they spent in 1998. Drug interests have spent more than $1 billion on federal lobbying efforts in the past decade.
The spending binge helped fuel some big wins for the pharmaceutical industry, CPI reports. Some of their biggest wins include blocking inexpensive drug imports, patent protection, and securing greater market access in international free trade agreements.
The intense lobbying effort wasn't the only weapon in their arsenal. In the current election cycle, the industry has given more than $14 million to candidates—half to Democrats, half to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The biggest recipients? Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and his vanquished opponent, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY).
Since the 1990 election cycle, the pharmaceutical and health-products industry has contributed more than $154 million to campaign coffers, nearly twice as much to Republicans than Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
About $23 billion may have been lost, stolen or not properly accounted for in Iraq, reports the BBC's news magazine show, Panorama.
It's not the first investigative report detailing lost billions in Iraq. Back in February 2006, 60 Minutes reported that the Coalition Provisional Authority couldn't account for nearly $9 billion. And late last month, a congressional oversight committee held a hearing saying much the same thing: billions of American taxpayer funds were not properly accounted for in Iraq.
But $23 billion is a staggering amount, nearly three times the amount the Pentagon's Inspector General reported in last month's House hearing. To put $23 billion in perspective: more than 100 nations produced less than that in 2006, says the World Bank (countries like Kenya, Costa Rica, Iceland, Uruguay and Lebanon all reported lower GDPs in 2006 than the U.S. government has potentially lost in Iraq since the war began in 2003); the U.S. Department of Justice spent about $23 billion in the 2007 fiscal year; and it's a few billion more than Coca-Cola and McDonald's reported in total revenue last year.
The program originally aired across the pond on BBC One on Tuesday. Americans hoping to catch it on BBC America will have to wait; Panorama isn't part of the broadcaster's slate of shows. It will, however, be posted to the BBC's website soon.
A few months ago, the forward-thinking British weekly The Economist put today's global food crisis in perspective by declaring on their cover: "The End of Cheap Food." The message—that food prices are rising like never before, threatening to destabilize much of the world—was accompanied by hope: The world has a tremendous opportunity to address decades of misguided government policies and management, resulting in a higher standard of living for all of us.
The Washington Post began publishing a series Sunday to educate its readers. The series, entitled "Global Food Crisis: The New World of Soaring Food Prices," began with a look at how we got to this point: "The food price shock now roiling world markets is destabilizing governments, igniting street riots and threatening to send a new wave of hunger rippling through the world's poorest nations."
The series's second day tells the story of a family in Mauritania struggling to make ends meet. Mauritania has been particularly hurt by the food crisis. The Post reports that the African nation produces just 30% of what its people eat and imports the rest—a recipe for disaster when food prices are rocketing to new levels, exporting countries are raising export taxes or halting foreign sales altogether, and rich countries are hoarding food. Worse, Mauritania doesn't have the agricultural means to feed itself:
U.N. experts, World Bank officials and aid groups fear it marks the onset of the worst food crisis in [Africa] in decades; officials are calling for $755 million in fresh emergency food assistance from rich countries. Aid groups are already falling behind in their efforts to provide food across the continent, leaving even the poorest communities increasingly dependent on the market.
This is the new face of hunger.
The third day examines wheat prices in America and begins with an anecdote of a Maryland bagel store owner who resists raising the price of his bagels to past the dollar mark:
I've never seen anything like this in 20 years," he said. "It's a nightmare."
Fleishman and his customers are hardly alone. Across America, turmoil in the world wheat markets has sent prices of bread, pasta, noodles, pizza, pastry and bagels skittering upward, bringing protests from consumers.
Of course, for those readers aged 34 and up this isn't the first global food crisis of their lifetime. In 1974, Time magazine began a report about the global food shortage with a Bible verse:
For nation shall rise against nation ... and there shall be famines and troubles; these are the beginnings of sorrows. —Mark 13:8
Nothing is older to man than his struggle for food. From the time the early hunters stalked the mammoths and the first sedentary "farmers" scratched the soil to coax scrawny grain to grow, man has battled hunger. History is replete with his failures. The Bible chronicles one famine after an other; food was in such short supply in ancient Athens that visiting ships had to share their stores with the city; Romans prayed at the threshold of Olympus for food.
Every generation in medieval Europe suffered famine. The poor ate cats, dogs and the droppings of birds; some starving mothers ate their children. In the 20th century, periods of extreme hunger drove Soviet citizens to cannibalism, and as late as 1943, floods destroyed so much of Bengal's crops that deaths from starvation reached the millions.
After World War II, however, it seemed that man at long last was winning the battle against hunger … experts now question whether man can prevent widespread starvation … Against this gloomy backdrop, about 1,000 delegates from some 100 nations and a dozen international organizations are gathering in Rome this week for the World Food Conference, sponsored by the United Nations. It will be the first concerted global effort in history to confront the problem of hunger … This is urgently needed to avoid fulfilling the nightmare of Parson Thomas Malthus, the English economist who predicted nearly two centuries ago that population would outrun man's capacity to produce food.
Pioneering investigative journalist Bob Greene, who twice helped Newsday win the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and led reporters to uncover everything from corruption in Arizona to how heroin made its way from Turkey to Long Island, died Thursday after a long illness. He was 78.
In 1975, Greene helped form Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. (IRE), and a year later, after the murder of one of its founding reporters in Phoenix, who was investigating organized crime and public corruption, Greene led a team of reporters from across the country dedicated to completing the slain reporter's work. Dubbed "The Arizona Project," the resulting 23-part series won numerous accolades.
His teams at Newsday won the 1970 Public Service Pulitzer for exposing scandal in Long Island land deals and four years later for tracking heroin from Turkish poppy fields to Long Island neighborhoods.
"He was clearly a pioneer in modern investigative team reporting in the newspaper business," former Newsday associate editor Les Payne wrote of Greene in a staff tribute. "He founded it almost singlehandedly."
Before embarking on his journalism career, Greene worked as a staff investigator for the New York City Anti-Crime Committee. At Newsday, he once took a year off at the behest of Robert Kennedy to work as an investigator for the U.S. Senate Rackets Committee.
Greene is survived by his wife and son.
For more information:
Newsday obituary, editorial, opinion column, staff memo, and staff tributes.
Police in Santa Barbara, California, have reopened an investigation into the unsolved 1968 shooting deaths of a couple linked to the late founder of Your Black Muslim Bakery.
The couple were members of the same Santa Barbara mosque as the Oakland bakery's founder, Yusuf Ali Bey. Bey died in 2003; his brother, who was the focus of the original police investigation into the killings, now lives in Oakland, California.
Police reopened the case after inquiries by The Chauncey Bailey Project, a coalition of Bay Area journalists investigating the assassination of slain Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey. Bailey was killed August 2 while investigating Your Black Muslim Bakery's finances and internal disputes.
Police are looking for connections between the 1968 slayings and Bailey's case.
>> Read the full article on the Chauncey Bailey Project's website.