no more anti-personnel landmines

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States announced on Friday that it will no longer produce or seek to acquire anti-personnel landmines, deadly weapons that the United Nations says results in many civilian casualties.

A White House statement said the United States will not seek to replace expiring stockpiles of landmines. The announcement was made in Maputo, Mozambique, by the U.S. delegation attending a conference to review compliance with the Ottawa Convention, a global Mine Ban Treaty which became international law in 1999.

A 2008 United Nations report said each year landmines kill 15,000 to 20,000 people, and that most of them are children, women and the elderly.

still talking about rail

Karl Kim's list of top ten fixes
Kirk Caldwell writes to residents of Honolulu in 2039
Dan Grabauskas: you can judge us in 25 years
Ben Cayetano: the future doesn't look bright

see also Oahu Rail Transit?

Et tu Glenn Beck?

NEW YORK, June 18 (UPI) --Glenn Beck was speaking on military intervention in Iraq when he admitted that liberals "were right" about staying out of Iraq and Republicans should agree with them.

"In spite of the things I felt at the time we went into war, liberals said we shouldn't get involved. They said we shouldn't get mired in another foreign mess. We shouldn't nation build and besides there was no indication that the people of Iraq had the will to be free -- I thought that was insulting at the time," Beck said on his radio show Tuesday. "Let me lead with my mistakes. You were right. Liberals, you were right."

He went on to encourage Democrats and Republicans to come together in opposition to military intervention in the country.

"Not one more life. Not one more life. Not one more dollar, not one more airplane, not one more bullet, not one more Marine, not one more arm or leg or eye. Not one more. This must end now. Now can't we come together on that?" he said.

Fox News grills Cheney?

Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly is being applauded for grilling Dick Cheney over an op-ed in which the former vice president and his daughter harshly — and some say hypocritically — criticized President Barack Obama's handling of the crisis in Iraq.

In the op-ed, published by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, Cheney writes, "Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many."

During her interview with Cheney and his daughter Liz on Wednesday night, Kelly introduced him as "the man who helped lead us into Iraq in the first place."

She read the quote back to the former vice president and then said, "But time and time again, history has proven that you got it wrong in Iraq as well, sir."

"You said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction," Kelly told Cheney. "You said we would be greeted as liberators. You said the insurgency was in the last throes, back in 2005. And you said after our intervention that extremists would have to 'rethink their strategy of jihad.' Now with almost $1 trillion spent there, with 4,500 American lives lost there, what do you say to those who say, 'You were so wrong about so much at the expense of so many'?"

"Well, I just fundamentally disagree, Reagan — uh, Megyn," Cheney replied. "You've got to go back and look at the track record. We inherited a situation where there was no doubt in anybody's mind about the extent of Saddam's involvement in weapons of mass destruction. We had a situation where, after 9/11, we were concerned about a follow-up attack. It would involve not just airline tickets and box cutters as the weapons, but rather something far deadlier, perhaps even a nuclear weapon."

It would've been "irresponsible for us not to act," Cheney said.

The interview surprised plenty of Twitter users, many of whom praised Kelly for her tough questioning that the Cheneys, perhaps, didn't see coming. Fox News is generally criticized for catering to conservatives.

Fox News and the Wall Street Journal are owned by News Corp.

***

In the op-ed published Tuesday, the Cheneys wrote that President Barack Obama “seems determined to leave office ensuring he has taken America down a notch” with his foreign policy. The article has drawn scathing criticism, as people have labeled Cheney, which Kelly referred to, as “the man who helped lead us into Iraq in the first place.”

Referencing one of these harsh responses, Kelly quoted The Washington Post, which wrote “There is not a single person in America … who has been more wrong and shamelessly dishonest on the topic of Iraq than Dick Cheney.”

“The suggestion is that you caused this mess,” Kelly said. “What say you?”

“There’s no surprise, frankly, that there are a lot of people now that want to blame the Bush/Cheney administration for what happened, that’s a pretty routine thing we hear from this administration,” Liz Cheney said.

[6/22/14] Rand Paul too

[6/26/14]  The Cheney polemic would be outrageous even if our former vice president’s record on Iraq had been one of absolute clairvoyance.  -- E.J. Dionne, Midweek

As it happens, he was wrong in almost every prediction he made about the war.

Thanks to the Cheney op-ed, we can see how Obama’s hawkish critics are out to create a double standard. Whenever they are called out for how mistaken they were about Iraq in the first place, they piously lecture against “relitigating the past” and say we must instead look forward. At the same time, many of them feel perfectly free to trash the president in extreme and even vile terms.

[6/26/14] I believe the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. Bush, Congress and most Western world leaders were convinced WMDs existed in Iraq, so that’s not the argument. Faulty intelligence isn’t either. It’s that Bush provided no long-term plan to win the peace — no Marshall Plan to integrate democracy incrementally into a country that had been under a tyrant’s rule for 30 years. No patience for a long-term troop commitment, as in post-war Korea, Japan and Germany. Regarding the chaos in the streets of Baghdad after the end of fighting, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld arrogantly said: “Democracy is messy.”

But for five-and-a-half years it’s been Obama’s Iraq, and it could soon be his defeat. Iraqi cities are being consumed by an army of terrorists beheading their way to Baghdad and undoing everything America’s brave troops fought and died to secure for the Iraqi people. Meanwhile, disengaged and indecisive, Obama continues to lead from behind, still blaming Bush, Iraq’s incompetent and sectarian Prime Minister Maliki and, well, anyone. Meanwhile, in this leadership vacuum, our enemies make deadly mischief.

The second battle of Fallujah in November 2004, the 2007 surge and American troops afforded Iraq relative security. But despite military leaders’ advice to leave troops in Iraq, Obama withdrew them in 2011, helping set the stage for today’s invading ISIS terrorists. Once troops are withdrawn from Afghanistan, a similar result is predictable.

Last week commentator and author Charles Krautheimer stated, “What Obama has never understood is that the stability of the world hinges on American deterrence.”  -- Susan Page, MidWeek,

[7/2/14] Megyn Kelly shoots up in the ratings

Liliha Kapuna Village

St. Francis Healthcare System of Hawaii is poised to reopen in the next few months a skilled-nursing facility at its former hospital in Liliha, which closed more than two years ago.

The 119-bed facility will be the cornerstone of an envisioned long-term care campus, estimated to cost roughly $80 million over the next five years.

Gradually, St. Francis is planning to add more services to what it has dubbed the Liliha Kupuna Village, including a senior community center, assisted living, adult day care and independent-living townhomes — all services that are needed in the growing senior community, said Jerry Correa, St. Francis' president and chief executive officer.

"We're repositioning this campus to what is the right fit for the campus in the community," Correa said. "We're targeting the population post-acute care. We met with caregivers, geriatricians and patients and clients in the neighborhood. We said, 'This is what we're going to build. ... What do you think?' Overwhelmingly what we got was, 'When? Hurry up.'"

St. Francis said it plans to place a senior community center next to a redeveloped courtyard to transform the aging campus into a welcoming neighborhoodlike town center where healthy seniors can have a social environment and then eventually transition to other services on campus. Services will focus on dementia, a growing disease among seniors, and also address respite services for caregivers.

One in 5 Hawaii residents will be 65 years or older by 2030, and 247,000 households have family caregivers, according to St. Francis' research.

"We're going to teach seniors about healthy living at the senior center. They can come to the campus when they're healthy and be familiar with the services on campus," he said. "We wanted to make sure they become familiar with the campus and have a place to go (when they're sick)."

The health care provider, which opened St. Francis hospital in Liliha in 1927, also hopes to include complementary services on campus, including a rejuvenation spa, bistro cafe and concierge services for seniors, as well as access to a number of geriatric specialists.

"We're open to partnerships, collaborating with organizations or providers that a lot of times, this is their core business," Correa said.

The company is already recruiting specialty providers. Hawaii Pacific Neuroscience, a multispecialty practice focusing on dementia, Alzheimer's disease, headaches and strokes, signed a contract with St. Francis this week to open an office on the 8-acre Liliha campus, which already has dialysis services, a cancer center, pharmacy, laboratory, radiology and endoscopy and about 30 private physician offices.

"As Hawaii ages, access and affordability of long-term care services become increasingly important," said AARP Hawaii spokesman Bruce Bottorff. "Most Hawaii residents tell us they want to stay in their homes for as long as possible, but when the preferred option of remaining independent at home is no longer practical, it can be daunting for families to find the living environment that best meets the needs of an aging loved one. We welcome the development of affordable options that deliver the high quality of care our seniors deserve."

Despite ambitious redevelopment plans, St. Francis is closing its inpatient hospice unit in Ewa and its more than 50-year-old home health programs on Oahu and Kauai because of financial pressures.

"(It) was more financially driven than anything; the model is just not there,"

Correa said, adding that the Catholic religious order is looking for service partners to complete the Liliha campus. "Medicare reimbursements for it was just not covering the cost of operations. We've got to make sure it's sustainable. That's what is going to set us apart."

The organization began reducing services when it exited the acute-care business in January 2007, selling the financially troubled St. Francis Medical Centers in Ewa and Liliha for $68 million to HMC LLC, then a for-profit joint venture between Hawaii Physician Group LLC and Kansas-based Cardiovascular Hospitals of America.

St. Francis, which provided the bulk of the financing for the sale and was HMC's largest creditor, regained control of the hospitals after a lengthy bankruptcy that led to the closure of the facilities in 2011 and 2012. The Queen's Health Systems acquired the Ewa hospital from St. Francis in December 2012 and reopened the facility May 20.

Correa hopes that St. Francis' future services will help alleviate a growing waitlist problem at Oahu's acute-care hospitals by offering long-term care options. Hawaii's healthcare providers are losing $62.7 million a year to care for patients who remain in a hospital even though they no longer need acute-care services, according to the Hawaii Health Information Corp.

"One of the values the Franciscans have is when the time is right you let go," said Correa, the first layman to hold the top post of St. Francis. "And when there's an opportunity or need, the sisters aren't afraid to dive into it."