Could it be just a case of climate change coincidence?
Maybe it was just a case of cosmic karma…
Climate skeptics around Washington wondered whether it was really a coincidence that the EPA announced its long-awaited “endangerment finding” — which clears the way for the agency to regulate greenhouse gases as a harmful pollutant – on the same day that a big international climate change meeting opened in Copenhagen.
It looked like suspicious timing to some in Congress, and in the media. Why now? Could it be that the Obama team wanted to curry favor with the climate crowd a week before the president heads for the big conference in Denmark? Or was it really just one of those things?
At the daily White House press briefing spokesman Robert Gibbs was peppered with questions about the strangely timely timing of the EPA ruling ahead of President Barack Obama’s trip to the climate conference next week.
Reporter: “So you’re telling us that it was just a coincidence, then, that it happened today…”
Gibbs repeated that the EPA announcement was simply “part of a process that started more than two years ago with a Supreme Court finding that the EPA should regulate greenhouse gases that threaten the public health because it’s a pollutant.”
Reporter: ”And it all came down, just coincidentally, a week before he’s going to Copenhagen?”
FBI translation troubles appear in Danish terrorism case
It was just yesterday that the Justice Department’s Inspector General Glenn Fine issued a scathing report about how the Federal Bureau of Investigation was behind in its efforts to translate foreign language documents and audio recordings in terrorism and criminal investigations.
And now a day later, it became public that an ongoing investigation apparently has been impacted by those troubles — a plot by two men to attack a newspaper in Denmark over its publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed including one in which he is wearing a turban with a bomb in it.
U.S. authorities arrested the two Chicago area men earlier this month and unsealed the complaints against them on Tuesday that detailed how they communicated over email and by telephone to develop the plot.
In those documents, however, an FBI agent acknowledged that the translations from Urdu to English had not yet been finalized (and some of them dated back to late 2008).
“While translators have attempted to transcribe the foreign language conversations accurately, to the extent that quotations from these communications are included, these are preliminary, not final translations,” the affidavits said.
The Justice Department inspector general report said that the FBI had lost 3 percent of its translators since 2005, falling to 1,298, and it was taking an average of 19 months to hire new ones. Additionally, millions of foreign language electronic files have gone unread and scores of hours of recorded conversations had not been heard, including some involving top priority terrorism cases.
While the authorities stressed that an attack was not imminent in the Danish case, it provided a glimpse into the real-time challenges the FBI is facing when suspects speak a foreign language.
We are many translators living in the US that would be happy to translate for the US government, but the problem is you have to be a US citizen. It is not enough to be a Resident Alien.
I have lived in the US for 15 years, worked as a translator for 20 years and I would be happy to translate for the government, but I can’t, because I am not a US citizen. My native country is fighting side-by-side with the Americans and I care about the US as much as my own country.
