Month: September 2022

A San Diego federal jury on Tuesday convicted a man of selling fentanyl-laced pills that caused the death of an active-duty Marine.

In April and May 2020, Nameer Mohammad Atta, 22, sold pills to a Marine identified in court documents only as 26-year-old C.M.R.. Atta told the lance corporal that the pills were Percocet, a prescription opioid. But they were really counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl, prosecutors said in court documents and a Justice Department news release Wednesday.

On the evening of May 22, 2020, Military Police officers at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar found the lance corporal in his barracks room in the midst of an overdose, according to court documents. The officers and emergency responders tried to revive the Marine, but he died that evening.

A medical examination found fentanyl in C.M.R.’s system. The Marine had a history of health issues for which he had previously been prescribed opioids, prosecutors said in court documents, but he had never been prescribed fentanyl.

In April 2021, a grand jury in the Southern District of California indicted Atta for distributing fentanyl that resulted in someone’s death.

The trial lasted from Monday to Tuesday. The jury deliberated for a little more than two hours before delivering a guilty verdict on Tuesday afternoon.

“This verdict again demonstrates the resolve of this office to hold to account those whose callous actions result in overdose deaths,” U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California Randy Grossman said in the Justice Department release. “Fentanyl kills indiscriminately and, tragically, here it took the life of a Marine. We will continue to seek justice on behalf of victims.”

When an overdose is involved, a drug-dealing conviction can carry a higher sentence. As a result, Atta faces a maximum of life in federal prison and a minimum of 20 years, according to the Justice Department release.

Atta is scheduled to be sentenced Feb. 10, 2023, by U.S. District Court Judge Todd W. Robinson.

Ezekiel Cortez, a lawyer for Atta, did not respond within several hours to a Marine Corps Times request for comment.

A similar case ended in May in a guilty plea: A California man admitted to having sold the fentanyl-laced oxycodone pills that caused a Camp Pendleton Marine to overdose in 2020.

Deaths from fentanyl, an extremely potent synthetic opioid, have been on the rise since the mid-2010s. Fentanyl appears to be the main driver of the uptick in drug overdoses in recent years, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

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A male driver survived a 300-foot fall over a cliff on Highway 1 south of San Francisco on Friday morning, officials said.

Cal Fire responded to the incident at 8:30 a.m. and firefighters found the driver inside the car in a “very serious condition,” Cecile Narboni, a spokesperson for the agency, told SFGATE on the phone. Narboni said he was air lifted to a local hospital. 

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Surround Yourself with Good People

September 30, 2022 Andrew Russell

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Teach

September 29, 2022 Andrew Russell

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There were 25 state beaches this summer where swimming was not advised at least one week because of elevated levels of bacteria or toxins or both, according to the Iowa Environmental Council.

The Iowa Department of Natural Resources samples water at the beaches weekly from late May until early September, when people are most likely to come in contact with the water. The department tests for concentrations of E. coli bacteria and blue-green algae toxins, which can cause skin irritations, illnesses and infections.

The 25 beaches with swim warnings this year represent about two-thirds of the total beaches at state parks and was a comparable number to last summer, when 24 beaches had the advisories.

The IEC has been monitoring the state testing program for nearly 20 years but has not been able to identify a definitive trend in the bacteria and toxin levels, said Alicia Vasto, the group’s water program director.

“Overall, what we understand is that we consistently have beach advisories in the state,” she said. “We consistently see contamination from E. coli.”

The toxins are produced by cyanobacteria that can proliferate — or “bloom” — when lake water is hot and calm and rich in nutrients, often from farm fertilizer runoff. The blooms turn blue as food wanes and the bacteria perish.

This summer, there were 12 weekly advisories for the toxins, according to the IEC data. That was about half of last year’s number.

But this summer there were 107 advisories for elevated E. coli concentrations, a 22% increase from last year.

Spikes in the bacteria’s presence often follows rainfall that washes it into the lakes, perhaps from the feces of geese and livestock, for example. E. coli bacteria also feed on the remains of cyanobacteria blooms.

The water of Lake Darling in southeast Iowa most consistently had elevated levels of bacteria this year, the IEC reported. There was only one week when Darling didn’t have a swim advisory in effect. The lake had a total of 14 E. coli advisories and two for toxins.

Bacteria levels can change considerably over the span of days. An example: The concentrations of E. coli at Crandall’s Beach at Spirit Lake was so high in August it was immeasurable by the DNR’s tests, which can detect up to 24,000 viable bacteria per 100 milliliters of water — or less than a half cup of water.

That concentration is more than 100 times the amount that can trigger swim warnings. But the week after that test, the beach water’s test showed just 52 bacteria per 100 milliliters, which was less than the safety threshold of 235.

The DNR has worked to limit watershed pollution — including bacteria, nutrients from farm fertilizers and manure, and eroded soil — from reaching the state’s lakes, but Vasto said more needs to be done.

“It’s really concerning because we have so few public places in our state — we have so few public lands,” she said. “And so the public beaches and parks that we have, we really need to protect them and do more to address this issue.”

In a December overview of major lake restoration projects, the DNR reported it had completed 29 projects, 21 were in progress and 14 were being planned.

Sometimes the projects do not fix the water-quality issues, though. A $12 million restoration of Lake Darling was completed in 2014, yet it frequently has elevated levels of bacteria.

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Hallelujah

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.—United Press Syndicate—11/10/1989

When the news came in, President Bush sat quietly in his large chair in the Oval Office and said in grave tones that we must not overreact. He is absolutely right about this. Jingle Bells! Jingle Bells! Jingle at the Waaaay! It is proper to deem it a historical development, but its significance must not affect our judgment. Oh what a beau-ti-ful morn-ing! Oh what a beau-ti-ful day!!! After all, there is tomorrow to think about in Germany. Germany?!?! What do you mean, “Germany”? You mean West Germany or you mean East Germany?—and the score allows for many variations. Calmness is in order.

I remember the day in 1973 when, as a delegate to the General Assembly of the United Nations, occupying the chair, I had to sit there and listen to the ambassador from the German Democratic Republic lecturing to the Third Committee (Human Rights Committee) on the differences between life in his own country, where the pastures of the people were evergreen and life was pleasant, just and equable, in contrast to “elsewhere” in Europe, dominated by strife, competition and all the vexations of bourgeois life. I interrupted the speaker to make some reference or another to the Wall that obscured the view of the Communists’ green pastures, but all the professional diplomats of course knew all about the wall and about communist rhetoric—I learned early during my brief service at the United Nations that the thing to remember is that nobody pays any attention whatever to anything anybody says at the United Nations, which is one up for sanity. But as a freshman diplomat, who never graduated, the insolence of the East German diplomat stayed with me.

And so I wrote a book about the United Nations, and made reference to the special hypocrisies of totalitarian states, which, instead of isolating in such secrecy as is possible what goes on there, actually go about the world boasting about their civil depravity. But the wall and what it represented stuck in the mind, as it did with so many people—the antipodes of the Statue of Liberty; the great symbol of Gulag life. A few years later I wrote a novel based on a young idealist’s determination in 1952 to attempt to reunite Germany, a political effort finally frustrated by the assassination of the young, upward-bound idealist. By the KGB? No, by my hero, Blackford Oakes, under orders from Washington, because Stalin had said the alternative was a Third World War. I dramatized that novel (Stained Glass) and in March of this year, on Good Friday, it was splendidly produced by the Actors Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky.

Still, the ugliness of divided Germany hadn’t left me, and in 1978 I went to Berlin actually to look. It is hard to describe the impacted loathsomeness of it. Every season, the communists added one more obstacle to stand in the way of the occasional Houdini who managed to get through. That was the winter they added the dogs. It had begun with a concrete wall. Then barbed wire. Then watchtowers with machine-gunners. Then huge spotlights. Then land mines. Then mountains of shards of glass. It is a comment on the limited resources of the communist imagination that they forgot to plant poison ivy alongside the wall.

And so I wrote a novel based on another young German idealist, determined to prevent the construction of the wall when on Aug. 13, 1961, all of a sudden it began to materialize. My young German, who as a Jewish child had been secreted to England for safety, his parents being left to die in a Nazi camp, had his contact in East Berlin, a secretary to the monster Ulbricht. And the word from the secretary was that if three NATO tanks charged through the wall that first day during its flimsy stage, the East Germans, backed by the Russians, would make a great show of opposition, but actually they would yield, as Khrushchev did not want a showdown with the West—not in August 1961, a full year before the missile crisis in Cuba. But the U.S. military, under orders, seized the little column of tanks that had been secretly pulled out from the U.S. armory by young, trained resistance Germans—and so we never knew what would have happened if we had asserted our rights to co-governing East Berlin. My young German hero, Henri Tod, did not live to see the sun set on the growing wall.

It was a great day, Nov. 9, 1989, and one day must be nominated for international celebration. Joshua fit the Battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho! Joshua fit the Battle of Jericho! and the walls came tumblin’ Down!

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For more than 20 years, Half Moon Bay surfer Jeff Clark has kicked off the start of big-wave season each fall by leading an annual paddle-out of dozens of surfers into the waters where the famous Mavericks waves break.

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