- Associated Press - Wednesday, February 19, 2014

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - The Daily Gazette of Schenectady on transporting oil by train through New York and the environment.

Feb. 18

If, as it seems, the state Department of Environmental Conservation is backpedaling on a pair of decisions involving controversial oil train shipments at the Port of Albany, that would be good news.

In 2012, DEC passed on the need for strict environmental review of plans by Massachusetts-based Global Companies LLC to double the quantity of so-called Bakken crude it was bringing into the port via rail from the upper Midwest. That was before a trainload of the stuff derailed and exploded in Quebec last July, killing 47 people.

And last November, DEC didn’t think Global’s plan to build an oil-heating operation in Albany that would make it easier to pump the increased crude shipments from the trains to Hudson River tankers and trucks warranted comprehensive environmental review. That was before similarly tragic derailments took place in North Dakota and Alabama late last year and early this year.

It’s been hard not to notice the oil trains - some carrying as many as 100 cars - lined up along I-787 in downtown Albany, waiting to get into the Albany port. A few weeks ago, increased local concern for the situation even captured the attention of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who simultaneously called on several state agencies to review safety procedures and emergency response preparedness in the event of an accident with the highly volatile crude.

Obviously, the governor’s order cast fresh doubt on DEC’s previous opinions that the increased shipments and handling of the unusually volatile oil are environmentally benign. So the agency is reportedly reconsidering: It has already agreed to make Global show that its plan does not violate the environmental justice of poor and minority communities (i.e. people in Albany’s South End) in accordance with one of its own policies; and according to a Times Union report, is reviewing its decisions on the wisdom of increased oil shipments and large-scale crude-heating operation.

Global should at least be required to show, at more than cursory length, that its operations are not going to jeopardize the safety of New York residents, or the quality or their air and water.

___

Online:

https://goo.gl/VOJWUG

The New York Times on Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s plan to expand college education opportunities for state prison inmates.

Feb. 17

One of the biggest obstacles to reducing America’s enormous prison population is the stubbornly high rates of recidivism. Nationwide, as many as half of those released end up back in prison within three years.

There are many reasons for this, and not many simple answers, but one solution has long proved to be both reliable and cost-effective: education behind bars.

People who go to prison are already among the least educated members of society. While about 20 percent of the general public doesn’t have a high school diploma, that number rises to nearly 40 percent among prisoners.

Yet the same political and social forces that have driven the country’s prison boom over four decades have also worked to eliminate most government support for inmate education, including Congress’s irrational and counterproductive decision in 1994 to deny federal Pell grants to people in prison. In the aftermath, the number of college degree programs for prisoners around the country dropped from 350 to about a dozen.

On Sunday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York took a bold step to restore some common sense to this contorted debate, announcing new financing for college classes in 10 state prisons. The initiative will offer inmates the opportunity to earn either an associate’s or a bachelor’s degree over the course of two to three years.

Mr. Cuomo was quick to point out that the cost - $5,000 per inmate per year - is a fraction of the $60,000 New York spends annually to house a prisoner. But even more compelling is the weight of decades of data: According to a RAND study released last summer reviewing 30 years of research, inmates who participated in educational programs had a substantially reduced risk of reoffending within three years than those who did not.

That’s partly because of higher rates of post-release employment for those who got an education while in prison. A job means more stability and more money - which translates into less crime, fewer inmates, and more savings for taxpayers. Every dollar spent on inmate education, the study calculated, meant $4 to $5 not spent on reincarceration down the road.

For the past two decades, prisoner education money has been scrounged up by private groups working to fill in the gaps left by the government. The Vera Institute of Justice recently received financing for a five-year project to educate prisoners in Michigan, New Jersey and North Carolina. And, in New York, the Bard Prison Initiative, directed by Bard College, has enrolled more than 500 students since 2001 and handed out more than 250 college degrees. While the state struggles with an overall recidivism rate of 40 percent, only 4 percent of prisoners enrolled in the Bard program and 2.5 percent of those who completed a degree returned to prison.

Results like these would seem hard to dispute, but several Republican legislators are opposing Mr. Cuomo’s plan, calling it a “slap in the face” to law-abiding New Yorkers.

This argument makes no more sense than it did in 1994, when less than 1 percent of all Pell grants went to prisoners. In both cases, education isn’t an either-or proposition. More than 700,000 inmates walk out of state and federal prisons across the country every year, and it is in everyone’s interest to make sure they stay out.

___

Online:

https://goo.gl/gsOmC5

The Buffalo New on air travel safety five years after the Flight 3407 crash.

Feb. 16

The success of the families of the victims of the 2009 crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407 in Clarence Center has, predictably, caused stresses for the airline industry. Pilots now need more training than before. They must be given longer periods of rest than before.

The consequence, especially for regional airlines whose pilots had less training than those of the big carriers, has been difficulty in having enough trained pilots to meet the demand for service. Indeed, the head of the Regional Airline Association, Roger Cohen, says the problem could cause a loss of service. “Every community, large and small, if you’re not concerned about losing some or all of your air service, you should be.”

Fortunately, there is a solution for this problem: Cope. Early stresses were inevitable but the fact is, if there is a demand for pilots, it will eventually be met.

Indeed, the Air Line Pilots Association, which has 1,154 members on layoff, says there is no pilot shortage. There seems to be a shortage of trained pilots willing to work for the relative pittance - the co-pilot of Flight 3407 was earning $16,000 - paid by regional airlines. If part of the solution is that airfares have to rise a little to cover increased costs, that is far better than the terrible alternative.

Flight 3407 crashed into a house in Clarence Center because the pilot was poorly trained, taking the exact wrong action when the plane went into a stall. Contributing to that was the lack of rest, the co-pilot’s illness and failure by both to obey cockpit rules prohibiting talking about non-flight issues. The cost was 50 lives: everyone on board the plane was killed, as was a man in the house that it demolished.

What is more, Colgan Air, operator of Flight 3407, had been warned about a lax safety culture six months before the crash. Does the airline industry really think that nothing should be done about this? Did it really expect that Congress wouldn’t respond not just to the pain and outrage of bereaved families, but to the facts? Of course better training is needed. Of course pilots need sufficient rest so that, contrary to what occurred on Flight 3407, deceased pilots aren’t found in the aftermath to have been repeatedly yawning before a crash.

There are consequences, intended and unintended, to virtually every action. There are those who will insist that nothing can ever be done on any issue because of those ramifications. But inaction also has consequences, intended and unintended. There have been enough of those already to overcome the industry’s disgraceful reluctance to embrace these changes and figure out how best to make them work.

That’s not happening. Some politicians, whose constituents are feeling the brunt of the changes, are demanding accommodations. The industry is agitating, dangling the threat of loss of service, but saying nothing, of course, about the promise of saved lives.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., was one of the leading advocates for increased training requirements and he is rejecting the idea of weakening the new rules. He should stand firm. There may be some difficulties in adjusting to this change, but the difficulties of lost parents and children are far worse. This pain will be temporary; the other is forever.

___

Online:

https://goo.gl/52KEpA

The Daily News of New York on efforts to introduce high-tech gadgets in schools.

Feb. 18

The drive is on to bring whiz-bang gadgetry to schools as the next big thing in education. There are smart ways to harness electronic learning, and there are dumb ways.

Dumb: The Los Angeles public schools’ headlong, $1 billion, belly-flop leap last year into putting an iPad in the hands of every student, much as proposed by former City Council Speaker and mayoral candidate Christine Quinn.

Educators in L.A. were seduced by the shiny devices. But software wasn’t ready. Wireless connectivity, which is a must, was spotty at best. After a backlash, the L.A. board was forced to slow the rollout to get it right.

With Gov. Cuomo pledging to offer $2 billion in technology upgrades for schools if they deliver thought-through plans, and with President Obama looking at a similar $3 billion national program, the lesson is that the gizmos are secondary to the educational material they can provide.

There’s great stuff out there if teachers know where to look. To cite one example, American history nerd Ken Burns is out with an iPad app that organizes bite-size sections of his 40 years’ worth of documentaries for easy absorption.

Users can delve into major events along a time line that stretches from the country’s founding to the modern stories of baseball and jazz. Or they can explore the sweep of the American story by theme: race, innovation, politics, hard times, etc.

Similarly, the Khan Academy is reshaping how kids and adults can learn with an exhaustive library of amazing animated content.

The point is that, as Cuomo follows through on his $2 billion promise, school districts will have no excuse for falling short of excellence if they apply for money.

___

Online:

https://nydn.us/1jCTKqs

The Press-Republican of Plattsburgh on nightly network news coverage of the Winter Olympics.

Feb. 16

Viewers of nightly network news telecasts can hardly avoid noticing the overwhelming percentage of coverage NBC devotes to the Olympic Games going on in Sochi, Russia.

It has to compel anyone to wonder whether the news is being used simply to boost ratings for the rest of the day and night.

It’s not that “NBC Nightly News” with Brian Williams has forsaken big stories in the sole interest of building an audience for its very costly and undeniably popular broadcast of the Olympics. (NBC spent $775 million for exclusive broadcast rights, plus another $225 million to pay for the coverage, so $1 billion is at stake.)

But, on Tuesday night, for example, roughly half the 30-minute news broadcast was devoted to what was going on in the Olympics. Two of the segments were about specific athletes and their travails as they prepared for the competition. Another was a feature on Russian President Putin and his commitment to the Games.

Meanwhile, “CBS Evening News” with Scott Pelley spent less than 30 seconds reporting on the Olympics, mentioning only that U.S. Olympic icon Shaun White failed in his bid to win a third gold medal in a row in the halfpipe event.

Obviously, CBS has no stake in the Olympics - in fact, just the opposite: That network is competing for viewers against NBC’s non-stop coverage.

But, when assessing news value, those two broadcasts represent extremes of Olympic coverage, meaning that the most useful share for viewers would probably fall somewhere in between.

There were other big stories going on that day, though no real blockbusters. NBC did cover an expected weather disaster in Atlanta and up the East Coast, a visit to the White House by the French president, an arrest of a key al-Qaida operative, a change in the manufacture of Kraft Singles cheese product, potentially embarrassing revelations in papers kept by a late friend of Hillary Clinton, the death of child actress and adult diplomat Shirley Temple Black and the fact that retired NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw has cancer.

Williams also took a couple of minutes to explain that network sports reporter Bob Costas would be replaced for a day or so because of an eye infection. “The Today Show’s” Matt Lauer would be filling in.

CBS covered many of those, plus a few others, but in greater detail.

Every news-gathering organization has to make money - that is beyond dispute. In a capitalist society, profit is a requirement of operation.

But the best situation is one in which a clear separation between news and business is respected. Possibly NBC could offer plausible explanations for how it is choosing its news content during the biggest economic event of its year.

But the sad fact is it is not doing a good job of making viewers believe news judgment is guiding its coverage.

___

Online:

https://bit.ly/1j8RnvY

Copyright © 2024 The Washington Times, LLC.

Please read our comment policy before commenting.

Click to Read More and View Comments

Click to Hide