Britain to ban smoking in prisons

LONDON: Britain said Friday it was looking at banning smoking in prisons, despite fears of a backlash from prisoners who claim a cigarette is one of the few joys of life behind bars.

Smoking was banned in communal areas in British jails in 2007 as part of a national ban on smoking in public places.

But prisoners are still allowed to smoke in their cells and 80 percent of inmates indulge in the habit across England and Wales, according to the National Health Service (NHS).

Now ministers are looking at banning smoking altogether amid concerns about the health impact of the smoke on non-smoking staff and inmates.

A pilot scheme is being launched early next year in a number of jails in southwest England, with a full ban likely to be rolled out within 12 months, the Times newspaper reported.

"We are considering banning smoking across the prison estate and as part of this are looking at possible sites as early adopters," a spokesman for the Ministry of Justice confirmed.

Steve Gillan, general secretary of the Prison Officers' Association, welcomed the move, which prison staff have campaigned for. He said it was necessary to avoid compensation claims for passive smoking.

But he admitted that implementing the ban could cause problems, telling the Times: "There is no pretending otherwise.

"It could cause disturbances but they have done it successfully in Canada and in young offender institutions in England and Wales.

"We will work with the ministry to make sure it works effectively."

Prisoners will be offered nicotine patches as a way of dealing with withdrawal symptoms, which it is feared may lead some inmates to violence, the Times said.

ObamaCare May Be a Dud, but Democrats Will Win

I would like to share Daniel Henninger's confidence that ObamaCare is a doomed entitlement that will collapse under its own weight ("Let ObamaCare Collapse," Wonder Land, Sept. 26), but historical precedents for an orderly dismantling of welfare-state benefit programs are very hard to find. Mr. Henninger's forecast of ObamaCare's demise hinges on public abandonment of the entitlement as its catastrophic effects unfold. Public disgust is destined to rise, according to Mr. Henninger, because the technological core of a centrally managed health system will be overloaded by a mind-boggling array of parties involved (i.e., federal agencies, state and local governments, employers, insurers, health-care providers and patients).
Many of us might agree that ObamaCare's overreach will force change but question whether dysfunction was baked into a plan to blame greedy insurers and push for a single-payer solution or if the number of voters who have ObamaCare buyer's remorse will exceed the number who are partially or fully dependent on government benefits.
Many U.S. companies have been rushing to drop bare-bones health plans and to steer employees, particularly part-timers, into insurance exchanges. An employer stampede out of health-care administration means that far more Americans will be dependent on government-sponsored plans in the next year or two. Once dependence and entitlement settle into a nation's psyche, abandonment of social progress is unheard of, absent impending financial collapse.
As a general rule, progressive steps forward into entitlement minefields are usually followed by stubborn and expensive stomps to the finish line, not by retreats or surrender.
John Gardner
Austin, Texas
Allowing ObamaCare to simply collapse won't discredit the Democrats. Instead, it will provide an opening to increase government intrusion into the private economy, enable the Democrats to look bipartisan, and blame conservatives, while ushering in a single-payer system. When ObamaCare collapses Democrats will argue that the plan was based on the Heritage Foundation's ideas from years gone by and the experiment of a Republican governor of Massachusetts. Despite their belief in single payer during 2010, Democrats took the unprecedented step of offering a conservative, market-based solution instead. But alas, they will argue that the market has failed us yet again, and the American people are left with only one option to achieve the goal of caring for all Americans.
The argument continues; we are compelled to offer the solution that we believed appropriate in 2010. Our attempt at bipartisanship was a mistake. Single payer will ensure that all Americans have their fundamental right to health care met. This is the endgame, a new behemoth entitlement, and the biggest expansion of government in our history will be accomplished. What is frightening is that if this argument is packaged correctly, Democrats in their failure will have won their ultimate prize and ensured Democrat voters for generations to come.
Republicans must band together now, and make an unyielding argument that ObamaCare was doomed from the start, placing the blame firmly and squarely at the Democrats feet. We must present a viable, true free-market alternative to ObamaCare, which should be boldly and loudly announced on Oct. 1, and never speak of ObamaCare again.
James R. Oppenhuizen
Grand Rapids, Mich.
ObamaCare was carefully crafted to deliver its goodies upfront, while delaying its more painful mandates and taxes until after the presidential election. Recently, the president unexpectedly, but shrewdly, delayed the employer mandate until after the next election cycle, once he grasped the potential fallout from its negative impact on job creation.
As we now begin to digest the price increases inherent in the health exchanges, I suspect that Mr. Obama will soon be quite willing to agree to delay the individual mandate too (perhaps in return for a debt-ceiling increase), thus appearing reasonable while also postponing the mandate's financial pain until after the midterms. All Republicans accomplish from this is to unwittingly provide political cover that will help the Democrats hold power in the Senate, while another year of "free" goodies further entrenches the law.
Mr. Henninger gets it exactly right. The sooner this stinker is completely unwrapped, the better chance we have of getting rid of it.

Terrorists used new tactic to spare some Muslims

• View GalleryKenya mall attack

The turbaned gunmen who infiltrated Nairobi's Westgate mall arrived with a set of religious trivia questions: As terrified civilians hid in toilet stalls, behind mannequins, in ventilation shafts and underneath food court tables, the assailants began a high-stakes game of 20 Questions to separate Muslims from those they consider infidels.

A 14-year-old boy saved himself by jumping off the mall's roof, after learning from friends inside that they were quizzed on names of the Prophet Muhammad's relatives. A Jewish man scribbled a Quranic scripture on his hand to memorize, after hearing the terrorists were asking captives to recite specific verses. Numerous survivors described how the attackers from al-Shabab, a Somali cell which recently joined al-Qaida, shot people who failed to provide the correct answers.
Their chilling accounts, combined with internal al-Shabab documents discovered earlier this year by The Associated Press, mark the final notch in a transformation within the global terror network, which began to rethink its approach after its setbacks in Iraq. Al-Qaida has since realized that the indiscriminate killing of Muslims is a strategic liability, and hopes instead to create a schism between Muslims and everyone else, whom they consider "kuffar," or apostates.
"What this shows is al-Qaida's acknowledgment that the huge masses of Muslims they have killed is an enormous PR problem within the audience they are trying to reach," said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization. "This is a problem they had documented and noticed going back to at least Iraq. And now we see al-Qaida groups are really taking efforts to address it."
The evolution of al-Shabab is reflected in a set of three documents believed to be written by the terrorist group, and found by the AP in northern Mali earlier this year. They include the minutes of a conference of 85 Islamic scholars, held in December 2011 in Somalia, as well as a summary of fatwas they issued last year after acceptance into the al-Qaida fold.
Baptized with the name al-Shabab, meaning The Youth, in 2006, the group began as an extremist militia, fighting the government of Somalia. As early as 2009, it began courting al-Qaida, issuing recordings with titles like, "At Your Service Osama."
Until the Westgate attack, the group made no effort to spare Muslim civilians, hitting packed restaurants, bus stations and a government building where hundreds of students were awaiting test results. And until his death in 2011, Osama bin Laden refused to allow Shabab into the al-Qaida network, according to letters retrieved from his safehouse in Pakistan. The letters show that the terror leader was increasingly troubled by regional jihadi operations killing Muslim civilians.
In a letter to Shabab in 2010, bin Laden politely advised the Somali-based fighters to review their operations "in order to minimize the toll to Muslims." Shabab did not get the green light to join al-Qaida until February 2012, almost a year after bin Laden's death.
In an email exchange this week with The Associated Press, it made its intentions clear: "The Mujahideen carried out a meticulous vetting process at the mall and have taken every possible precaution to separate the Muslims from the Kuffar before carrying out their attack." However, even at Westgate, al-Shabab still killed Muslims, who were among the more than 60 civilians gunned down inside.
Their attack was timed to coincide with the highest traffic at the upscale mall after 12:30 p.m. on Sept. 21, a Saturday. More than 1,000 people, including diplomats, pregnant women with strollers and foreign couples, were inside when the fighters armed with grenades and AK-47s burst in and opened fire. At first the attack had the indiscriminate character of all of Shabab's previous assaults.
Rutvik Patel, 14, was in the aisles at Nakumatt, the mall's supermarket which sells everything from plasma TVs to imported kiwis, when he heard the first explosion. "They started shooting continuously, and whoever died, died," he said. "Then it became calm and they came up to people and began asking them some questions. If you knew the answer, they let you go," he said. "They asked the name of the Prophet's mom. They asked them to sing a religious verse."
Just across from the Nakumatt supermarket, a 31-year-old Jewish businessman was cashing a check inside the local Barclays branch when he, too, heard the shooting. The people there ran to the back and shut themselves in the room with the safe, switching off the lights. They learned, via text messages, that the extremists were asking people to recite an Arabic prayer called the Shahada.
"One of the women who was with us got a text from her husband saying, they're asking people to say the Islamic oath, and if you don't know it, they kill you," said the businessman, who insisted on anonymity out of fear for his safety.
He threw away his passport. Then he downloaded the Arabic prayer and wrote it on his palm.
Al-Shabab's attempts to identify Muslims are clear in the 16-page transcript from the conference of Islamic scholars held in the Somali town of Baidoa, an area known to be under Shabab control in 2011, according to Somalia specialist Kenneth Menkhaus, a political science professor at Davidson College in North Carolina. The scholars issued several fatwas defining exactly who was a Muslim and who was an apostate.
The document states it is halal, or lawful, to kill and rob those who commit crimes against Islam: "The French and the English are to be treated equally: Their blood and their money are halal wherever they may be. No Muslim in any part of the world may cooperate with them in any way. ... It leads to apostasy and expulsion from Islam," it says. Further on it adds: "Accordingly, Ethiopians, Kenyans, Ugandans and Burundians are just like the English and the French because they have invaded the Islamic country of Somalia."
Former FBI supervisory special agent Ali Soufan, who investigated the bombing of the United States embassies in East Africa as well as the attack on the USS Cole, said that the gathering of dozens of religious scholars in an area under Shabab control harkens back to an al-Qaida conference in Afghanistan around 1997. That conference defined America as a target, Soufan said, leading to the bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
"You see something very similar here," said Soufan. "It's the same playbook."
In a second document dated Feb. 29, 2012 — just two weeks after al-Shabab joins al-Qaida — the organization warns Muslims to stay away from buildings occupied by non-Muslims, chillingly predicting and justifying the death of Muslims at Westgate.
"And so all Muslims must stay far away from the enemy and their installations so as not to become human shields for them, and so as not to be hurt by the blows of the mujahedeen directed at the Crusader enemies," it says. "There is no excuse for those who live or mingle with the enemies in their locations."
Yet at the same time it says: "The mujahideen are sincere in wanting to spare the blood of their brother Muslims, and they don't want a Muslim to die from the bullets directed at the enemies of God."
This is a concession for an organization that since its inception had killed people constantly, said Rudolph Atallah, who tracked Shabab as Africa counterterrorism director in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 2003 to 2007.
"They would just go and mow people down," Atallah said. "They are now sending a clear message that, 'Look, we're different ... We're no longer indiscriminately killing. We're protecting innocent Muslims and we are trying to kill quote-unquote 'infidels,' nonbelievers."
A similar tactic paid off in January after al-Qaida-linked terrorist Moktar Belmoktar attacked a gas installation in Algeria, Atallah said. When his fighters freed hundreds of Muslim employees, a Facebook page dedicated to him exploded with "Likes."
Several hours after the gunshots at Westgate Mall, the people cowering inside the Barclays bank heard a commotion. As the attackers approached, the Jewish businessman spit on his hand to erase the words he had by then committed to memory.

Small jet hits hangar at Santa Monica Airport

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A small jet that took off from Idaho ran off the runway and into a storage hangar at a Southern California airport on Sunday night, causing the hangar to collapse in flames around it, officials said.

Firefighters were still contending hours later with the smoldering ruins of the building and the plane at Santa Monica Municipal Airport, and had yet to determine how many people were inside the jet that can hold eight passengers and two crew members, but it was unlikely anyone was alive inside.

"This was an unsurvivable crash," Santa Monica Fire Department Capt. John Nevandro said at a media briefing at the airport.

The twin-engine Cessna Citation that had taken off from Hailey, Idaho, went off the right side of the runway at about 6:20 p.m. and struck the hangar, Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor said.

The blaze did minor damage to two other buildings and destroyed the hangar.

"It was a total loss," Fire Department spokeswoman Bridgett Lewis said.

News helicopter footage showed all but the tail of the plane trapped under a collapsed section of the small hangar.
Neither aviation nor rescue officials were yet able to say how many people were aboard the plane, nor whether anyone was inside the hangar.
A crane would be required to remove the remains of the hangar, and investigators were unlikely to be able to get to the plane until Monday, Gregor said.
A plume of smoke rising above the airport could be seen in the twilight sky over the populous neighborhoods surrounding the airport in the hours after the crash.
After hearing a loud boom, several neighbors ran toward the airport and saw the fire.
"It was very, very terrifying, it was sad to see just so much smoke, and the building collapse and the loud boom, you just put it all together and it's scary," witness Alyssa Lang told KABC-TV.
Witness Charles Thomson told the TV station the plane appeared to make a "perfectly normal landing" before veering off course.
The jet, a Cessna 525A manufactured in 2003, is registered to a Malibu, Calif. address and its corporate owner, Creative Real Estate Exchange, is based in Birmingham, Ala., and Atlanta, according to FAA public records.
Phone messages left after hours at the real estate company's two offices were not immediately returned.
The National Transportation Safety Board would take over the investigation as is routine in such crashes.

Santa Monica Airport, located in the coastal tourist destination known for its trendy bars, restaurants and wooden-pier carnival, is home to many private jets, many of them used by wealthy Southern Californians from the entertainment industry.

The airport in Hailey serves Idaho's Sun Valley resort area, which is a frequent destination for many celebrities, and the rich and powerful alike.

Flesh-Eating Street Drug from Russia Hits the US

(Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center)

A flesh-eating drug has appeared in the United States after first being discovered in Russia a decade ago.

Krokodil, Russian for “crocodile,” is a street drug used as a cheap substitute for heroin. The drug is referred to as “krokodil” because it causes sores, tissue damage and rough, scale-like appearance on the skin.

Two cases involving the drug that surfaced at the Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center in Phoenix are alarming anti-drug advocates and medical personnel who fear use of krokodil might spread.

When the facility warned other poison centers around the country about krokodil, some revealed they also had patients suffering from its apparent use, according to Dr. Frank LoVecchio, co-medical director at Banner Poison, Drug and Information Center.

“This is up there as one of the craziest new trends I’ve seen,” he said. “We’ve known about it in Russia, and we’ve known what it has done there. It’s really decimated whole cities there.”

Krokodil is made up of several ingredients easily accessed at home improvement stores and pharmacies. The base of the drug is usually codeine. Pure codeine is extracted from its pill form and adulterated with chemicals to create a liquid substance that is later injected into the veins.  The types of chemicals used by manufacturers vary.

“Some of the chemicals they’ve used are very dangerous,” LoVecchio said. “They’ve used things like hydrochloric acid. Some have used paint thinners, gasoline and other stuff that includes phosphorous.”

The acidity of the chemicals causes the body’s fat and skin to “burn off and die,” LoVecchio said.

The presence of chemicals also makes the body more prone to infection. Immediate effects include visible scarring on the skin. Long-term effects are much worse.

“Once you start using this drug on a daily basis, you could die within two years,” he said. “Other reports are that death is probably due to overwhelming infection. Your body can’t fight the infection.”

Leslie Bloom, CEO of DrugFreeAZ.org, said that despite the drug’s dire consequences, krokodil use is not an outbreak to be fearful of.

“We don’t want the public to be alarmed,” she said. “What we want them to be is aware that this is a trend. There are other drug trends, too, that we see from time to time, especially with the synthetic drugs. This is a good reminder and a teaching moment.”

According to Tommy Thompson, public information officer for the Phoenix Police Department, there are currently no existing arrests or law enforcement cases involving krokodil.