Aaron Swartz, Internet Activist, Dies at 26

Michael Francis McElroy for The New York Times

Aaron Swartz in 2009.

Aaron Swartz, a wizardly programmer who as a teenager helped develop code that delivered ever-changing Web content to users and later became a steadfast crusader to make that information freely available, was found dead on Friday in his New York apartment.

He was 26.

 An uncle, Michael Wolf, said that Mr. Swartz had apparently hanged himself, and that Mr. Swartz’s girlfriend had discovered the body.

At 14, Mr. Swartz helped create RSS, the nearly ubiquitous tool that allows users to subscribe to online information. He later became an Internet folk hero, pushing to make many Web files free and open to the public. But in July 2011, he was indicted on federal charges of gaining illegal access to JSTOR, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals, and downloading 4.8 million articles and documents, nearly the entire library.

Charges in the case, including wire fraud and computer fraud, were pending at the time of Mr. Swartz’s death, carrying potential penalties of up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines.

“Aaron built surprising new things that changed the flow of information around the world,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York who served in the Obama administration as a technology adviser. She called Mr. Swartz “a complicated prodigy” and said “graybeards approached him with awe.”

Mr. Wolf said he would remember his nephew as a young man who “looked at the world, and had a certain logic in his brain, and the world didn’t necessarily fit in with that logic, and that was sometimes difficult.”

The Tech, a newspaper of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported Mr. Swartz’s death early Saturday.

Mr. Swartz led an often itinerant life that included dropping out of Stanford, forming companies and organizations, and becoming a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

He formed a company that merged with Reddit, the popular news and information site. He also co-founded Demand Progress, a group that promotes online campaigns on social justice issues — including a successful effort, with other groups, to oppose a Hollywood-backed Internet piracy bill.

But he also found trouble when he took part in efforts to release information to the public that he felt should be freely available. In 2008, he took on PACER, or Public Access to Court Electronic Records, the repository for federal judicial documents.

The database charges 10 cents a page for documents; activists like Carl Malamud, the founder of public.resource.org, have long argued that such documents should be free because they are produced at public expense. Joining Mr. Malamud’s efforts to make the documents public by posting legally obtained files to the Internet for free access, Mr. Swartz wrote an elegant little program to download 20 million pages of documents from free library accounts, or roughly 20 percent of the enormous database.

 The government abruptly shut down the free library program, and Mr. Malamud feared that legal trouble might follow even though he felt they had violated no laws. As he recalled in a newspaper account of the events, “I immediately saw the potential for overreaction by the courts.” He recalled telling Mr. Swartz: “You need to talk to a lawyer. I need to talk to a lawyer.”

 Mr. Swartz recalled in a 2009 interview, “I had this vision of the feds crashing down the door, taking everything away.” He said he locked the deadbolt on his door, lay down on the bed for a while and then called his mother.

 

When an article about his Pacer exploit was published in The New York Times, Mr. Swartz responded in a blog post in a typically puckish manner, announcing the story in the form of a personal ad: “Attention attractive people: Are you looking for someone respectable enough that they’ve been personally vetted by The New York Times, but has enough of a bad-boy streak that the vetting was because they ‘liberated’ millions of dollars of government documents? If so, look no further than page A14 of today’s New York Times.

The federal government investigated but decided not to prosecute.

In 2011, however, Mr. Swartz went beyond that, according to a federal indictment. In an effort to provide free public access to JSTOR, he broke into computer networks at M.I.T. by means that included gaining entry to a utility closet on campus and leaving a laptop that signed into the university network under a false account, federal officials said.

Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 12, 2013

An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the police who arrested Mr. Swartz, and when they did so. The police were from Cambridge, Mass., not the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus force, and the arrest occurred two years before Mr. Swartz’s suicide, but not two years to the day.

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Judge delays arraignment of theater shooting suspect James Holmes

CENTENNIAL, Colo. — A judge Friday delayed the arraignment of theater shooting suspect James E. Holmes on 166 counts of murder, attempted murder and weapons charges until March 12, granting a defense request for more time to "research the appropriate plea."

Holmes is accused of unleashing a massacre on July 20 in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater that killed 12 and injured at least 70 others. Holmes has not yet entered a plea and has been held without bail since his arrest moments after the shooting.

Late Thursday, Judge William B. Sylvester of Colorado's 18th Judicial District ruled that the prosecution had established probable cause on all counts and ordered an arraignment Friday. But he also noted that he expected the defense to ask for a delay.

Earlier in the week, the prosecution offered detailed and often graphic evidence at a preliminary hearing that Holmes plotted for months to kill as many people as possible in a place where escape would be difficult. Prosecutors also presented testimony that Holmes was the person who opened fire on the crowd at a 12:05 a.m. showing of the Batman movie "The Dark Knight Rises."

During the 15-minute hearing Friday, Sylvester said that although he was "empathetic" with the wishes of victims' family members who wanted to see Holmes tried quickly, he wanted to be careful that "this matter is done correctly" to limit the chance of a possible appeal later.

The delay angered some family members. As Sylvester recessed the hearing, Steve Hernandez, the father of Rebecca Wingo, who was killed in the theater, blurted, "Rot in hell, Holmes."

Minutes later, Sylvester reconvened the court and told Hernandez, "I'm terribly sorry for your loss. I can't begin to imagine the emotions that are raging." But he added that he would not tolerate further outbursts.

Hernandez apologized and said he meant no disrespect.

Defense attorneys have indicated Holmes, a former neuroscience student, is mentally ill. It is widely thought the defense could offer a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. Colorado is one of only nine states where the burden to disprove insanity falls on the prosecution.

Though the prosecution has worked to show that Holmes plotted the shooting for months, that is not the same as being sane, said Rick Kornfeld, a Denver lawyer who has worked as a federal prosecutor and a defense attorney.

The issue will be "what was going on in his head at the time of the shooting," Kornfeld said.

It is not yet known whether George Brauchler, the newly elected Arapahoe County district attorney, will seek the death penalty. He has 63 days after arraignment to decide. Capital punishment is rare in Colorado.

nation@latimes.com

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French Troops Target Terrorists in Mali as Newest Shadow War Begins

The newest shadow war pitting western troops against Islamic radicals has begun. Except this one doesn’t feature any American forces, robots or warplanes. At least, not right this second.

France has sent an as-yet-undisclosed number of troops to Mali, the beleaguered northwest African country whose northern section has been overrun by Islamist guerillas. “This operation will last as long as necessary,” French President Francois Hollande announced Friday.

The goal of the campaign is to restore government control over a portion of Mali The New York Times describes as twice the size of Germany. French media reported that Malian troops re-invaded the north thanks to French military transport. It’s a dramatic break from earlier French and U.S. efforts to get African forces to support a revived Malian military, apparently prompted by an Islamist campaign southward that seized the central town of Konna. And it makes Mali at least the fifth major undeclared battlefield in a global campaign between western forces and jihadi militants that stretches from Pakistan to Libya to Yemen to Somalia.

American and United Nations officials have been sounding the alarm about Mali for months. U.S. forces trained the Malian army for years — a Special Forces detachment joined in a military exercise in Mali as recently as February — but a coup in March left the U.S. legally unable to provide any additional training. Throughout 2012, the U.S. watched as al-Qaida’s north African affiliate, known as al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, set up training camps and provided cash and weaponry to the Islamist militia forces that came to control the north.

The U.S. military commander for Africa, Army Gen. Carter Ham, warned in December that “al-Qaida and other organizations are strengthening their hold in northern Mali.” United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon feared a “permanent haven for terrorists” was coalescing. “We cannot allow al-Qaida to sit in an ungoverned space and have a sanctuary and impunity,” Michael Sheehan, the Defense Department’s assistant secretary for special operations, told the Aspen Security Forum over the summer. ”What we will do with Mali, I can’t speculate, but I think you can look at the whole range of things that have been successful in partnership with (other) governments, and perhaps operating in ungoverned space.”

In a November speech about the evolution of the war on terrorism, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called the Malian safe havens an “emerging threat,” raising the possibility of U.S. commando forces and drones turning their attention to yet another far-off battlefield.

France has much more familiarity. It used to be Mali’s colonial overlord, and the French have a lengthy history of intervention in the region. The new Mali intervention provides something of a reversal from the past decade’s worth of Western wars on terrorism, in which an aggressive America occasionally enlists reluctant support from the French. It should be noted, however, that the French played a leading diplomatic role in fanning the flames for NATO’s 2011 intervention to oust Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, ultimately bringing along a sometimes-reluctant President Obama.

And while France’s intervention appears to be unilateral, Ham looks eager to get the U.S. Africa Command involved. The New York Times cited him saying the U.S. was exploring its options to assist the French intervention, including “repositioning satellites or sending in surveillance drones.” The U.S. doesn’t tend to sit shadow wars out completely.

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TV anchorman Gregory won’t face charges over gun clip

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The District of Columbia has declined to prosecute NBC News anchor David Gregory for displaying an illegal high-capacity gun clip on a broadcast, a prosecutor said on Friday.

District of Columbia Attorney General Irvin Nathan said his office would not seek to charge Gregory for showing the 30-round magazine on the December 23 broadcast of “Meet the Press” in part because it was an element of the renewed debate about firearms.

His office “has determined to exercise its prosecutorial discretion to decline to bring criminal charges against Mr. Gregory, who has no criminal record, or any other NBC employee based on the events associated with the December 23, 2012, broadcast,” Nathan said in a letter to NBC’s lawyers.

He called the decision “very close.”

Gregory held up the magazine while hosting an interview with National Rifle Association Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre at NBC’s studios in the District. Law in the U.S. capital bars possession of high-capacity magazines whether or not they are attached to a weapon or loaded.

The “Meet the Press” show on firearms was part of a galvanized public debate on guns after the December 14 massacre of 20 schoolchildren and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut.

Nathan said the clip was returned to its owner outside the District after the show. It then was turned over to District police with NBC’s help.

He added that Gregory had displayed the magazine even though city police had told NBC that possession was illegal.

“We note that NBC has now acknowledged that its interpretation of the information it received was incorrect,” Nathan said.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Eric Walsh)

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The New Old Age Blog: As Flu Rages, Caregiving Suffers

The flu started in the personal care center at Masonic Village in Elizabethtown, Pa., then moved to the nursing home. Within a few days, seven older adults had taken ill.

Administrators moved quickly: they shut down two floors of the buildings and told all visitors to stay away. All social activities stopped, and residents were asked to stay in their rooms.

The phones began to ring. “How is my wife doing?” an older spouse would ask. “What’s Mom eating?” a concerned daughter would inquire.

As the flu sweeps across the country, all kinds of issues are arising as institutions serving the elderly cope with outbreaks and nurses, home health aides and family members fall ill and can’t attend to the older people under their care.

One of the residents of Masonic Village was the mother-in-law of Joyce Heisey, director of nursing at this continuing care retirement community. She had come to the nursing home after a nasty fall and a subsequent hospitalization for rehabilitation.

“It was hard for her because she wasn’t accustomed to being in this kind of setting, and my father-in-law couldn’t visit,” said Ms. Heisey, who talked to her in-laws about their experiences. They declined to speak directly to a reporter.

Worried about isolation, the home sent recreation therapists into residents’ rooms for a few minutes each day and directed physical therapists to continue working with those undergoing rehabilitation, again in their rooms when possible.

In Collinsville, Ill., a city of about 42,000 that is 23 miles east of St. Louis, 20 percent of the staff at Home Instead Senior Care have called in sick, either struck by the flu themselves or at home taking care of a sick child.

“We’ve never seen it as bad as it is this year,” said Skip Brown, the agency’s owner. In previous years, about 5 percent of the staff have taken ill during flu season.

“It’s really hard for our clients, most of whom are elderly,” Mr. Brown said. “All of a sudden you have another person coming in to your home that you’re not familiar with. That’s really hard for seniors, and we have to make sure they’re comfortable.”

One client, a 92-year-old woman with diabetes, was insistent that a stranger not come to help when her usual caregiver became sick and stayed home.

“The problem that we’re always concerned with is, what if an older person doesn’t eat and what if they don’t take their medication?” Mr. Brown said. Concerned, he called his client’s out-of-town daughter, who called an elderly neighbor, who agreed to accompany someone from the agency to make sure the older woman was all right.

As it turned out, she hadn’t taken insulin for a full day and was at risk of a diabetic crisis, which was averted when the agency worker intervened.

Things got bad so fast that after the second week of December, Mr. Brown required all staff members to get flu shots – and still they became ill. This year, the flu shot is effective about 62 percent of the time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday.

Nationally, about 60 percent of health care workers get flu vaccines, which are voluntary in most hospitals, nursing homes and assisted-living facilities, according to Dr. Gregory Poland, director of the Mayo Clinic Vaccine Research Group. And when workers are struck by the flu, infections among residents can follow.

“The disruptions, the costs, the complications from this virus, no one should confuse it with a minor illness,” said Dr. Poland, who has advocated for mandatory immunizations for health care workers.

According to New York’s statewide influenza report for the week ended Jan. 5, 179 outbreaks have hit nursing homes this flu season — 57 of them during the week covered by the report alone. The state health department defines an outbreak as one confirmed case or two suspected cases of flu that are contracted in a nursing home.

Allison Chisholm, a nurse with Partners in Care, a home care agency operated by the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, had a flu shot on Dec. 27 and a week later took to bed with a fever and chills.

“It was so bad, my toenails were hurting. I had no appetite. I couldn’t move, I was so sore,” she said. “I knew it was the flu because I’m not a sickly person. I’ve never felt like that for 30 years.”

Ms. Chisholm had been seeing a woman in her 70s every day since October to treat a bone infection with intravenous antibiotics. “When I called her she could hear immediately that something was wrong,” Ms. Chisholm said. “She was concerned and said, ‘If you’re sick like that, don’t come – I don’t want to get what you have.’ ” A week later, the nurse said she got a phone call from the older woman checking in to see if she was better.

In this case, the client was due to end treatment the day after Ms. Chisholm fell ill, and she agreed to have a worker from the company that supplied her intravenous supplies administer her last IV therapy.

At the Martha Stewart Living Center, an outpatient center for older patients at Mount Sinai Medical Center, Dr. Audrey Chun, medical director, has been telling caregivers and other people who have any kind of upper respiratory problems — a cough, constant sniffles – to stay away from older people’s homes because of the risk of passing on an infection.

But do be sure to call in regularly to ask how your older relative or friend is feeling and whether they have unusual lethargy, breathing problems or disabling fatigue, said Jennifer Leeflang, senior director of private care services for Partners in Care. The agency has been getting about 10 requests a week for flu shots for homebound elderly ($100 for the visit and the shot). Other hospitals, like Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, are providing a similar service for home care agency patients.

New data released Friday by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention underscores how vulnerable older adults are to flu and how many are being affected by the current outbreak. In the week ended Jan. 5, the rate of flu-related hospitalizations for people 65 and older was 53.4 per 100,000, more than twice that of another vulnerable group, newborns and children up to 4 years old. Hospitalizations are an indicator of the most serious flu cases.

That’s a big jump from the week before, when the rate of flu-related hospitalizations for people 65 and older stood at 29.3 per 100,000.

How has flu season affected your ability to provide — or get care — for your elderly relative? Share your experiences and advice here.

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DealBook: Possible Client Redemptions Weigh on SAC Capital

The hedge fund giant SAC Capital Advisors is steeling itself for a possible wave of withdrawal requests from clients amid the government’s intensifying scrutiny of its trading practices.

Investors have about a month to decide whether to pull money from SAC, the $14 billion fund owned by the billionaire investor Steven A. Cohen.

While posting one of the best investment track records on Wall Street across two decades, SAC has attracted billions of dollars from pension funds, wealthy families and other money management firms. But since late November, when federal prosecutors brought their latest criminal insider trading charge against a former SAC employee — a case they call the most lucrative insider trading scheme ever uncovered — those clients have been weighing whether continuing their relationship with the fund is worth the reputational risk.

The fund has a standard quarterly redemption deadline, and the next one will fall on Feb. 15. Already, several of SAC’s clients, including Lyxor Asset Management and Titan Advisors, have notified the fund that they intend to withdraw their money. Others, like Skybridge Capital, have told SAC they will continue to invest in the fund.

Questions remain about the intentions of several of SAC’s well-known clients, including the Blackstone Group, one of the world’s largest and most influential allocators to hedge funds. Blackstone has about $550 million invested in SAC, making it one of the fund’s largest outside investors. A Blackstone spokesman declined to comment.

The fund has told its employees that it could face at least $1 billion of withdrawals, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal on Friday. A spokesman for SAC said it was “far too early to speculate about redemptions, and we do not expect redemptions to have a significant impact on our funds.”

Any withdrawals from clients would come after a year of decent performance for SAC. In 2012 the firm returned about 13 percent net of fees, which, while slightly underperforming the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, was superior to the results of the average hedge fund.

While a spate of redemptions can have a crippling effect on a hedge fund by forcing it to sell its holdings at unfavorable prices, SAC is more insulated than most of its competitors from the ill effects of client withdrawals. That is because only about 40 percent of the $14 billion that SAC manages comes from outside clients. The rest — a fortune of about $8 billion — belongs to Mr. Cohen and his employees.

Also, SAC has protected itself with a stringent redemption policy. Its clients can redeem only 25 percent of their investment each quarter. So, for example, if a client had $200 million invested with SAC and asked for its money back by the Feb. 15 deadline, SAC would return $50 million every three months beginning in March. That way, SAC is protected from a forced liquidation of its investment portfolio.

Still, an investor exodus can cause a hedge fund to shut down. Last month, Diamondback Capital Management, another hedge fund that became ensnared in the government’s insider trading investigation, closed after its investors sought to pull out roughly one-quarter of the fund’s assets.

Diamondback’s management decided that the most prudent course of action was to wind down rather than to reorganize the firm to manage the reduced amount of money.

Like Diamondback, SAC has become embroiled in the government’s broad crackdown on insider trading at hedge funds. At least seven former SAC traders and analysts have been tied to illegal trading while at the fund, and the Securities and Exchange Commission has warned SAC that it might file a civil action against the fund for failing to properly supervise its employees.

Mr. Cohen has told his employees that he believes he and the fund have at all times acted appropriately, and that the fund has fully cooperated with the government’s investigation.

In recent weeks, SAC has gone on a charm offensive in an effort to hold on to clients. It has told its investors that they will not be responsible for any penalties incurred as a result of any of the government’s legal inquiries. Instead, SAC has said, Mr. Cohen and his management company will pick up any costs.

There have also been changes at the fund. SAC told its staff last week that it was closing its office in Chicago, which is home to about a dozen employees. Such a move is not unusual, as the fund has closed offices before, like one in San Francisco, where it saw limited opportunities.

A spokesman said it did not make sense to have an office in Chicago. SAC has more than 1,000 employees — portfolio managers, analysts, traders and support staff — in five offices around the globe, with its headquarters in Stamford, Conn.

Though Mr. Cohen has told his friends and employees that he remains committed to managing money for outside clients, he could decide to follow in the footsteps of several fellow billionaire hedge fund managers.

A number of star investors, having already amassed billions in personal wealth, have decided to get out of the business of managing other people’s money. In recent years, for example, both George Soros and his onetime protégé, Stanley Druckenmiller, returned money to clients and set up so-called family offices to manage their own fortunes.

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Irvine City Council overhauls oversight, spending on Great Park

Capping a raucous eight-hour-plus meeting, the Irvine City Council early Wednesday voted to overhaul the oversight and spending on the beleaguered Orange County Great Park while authorizing an audit of the more than $220 million that so far has been spent on the ambitious project.

A newly elected City Council majority voted 3 to 2 to terminate contracts with two firms that had been paid a combined $1.1 million a year for consulting, lobbying, marketing and public relations. One of those firms — Forde & Mollrich public relations — has been paid $12.4 million since county voters approved the Great Park plan in 2002.

"We need to stop talking about building a Great Park and actually start building a Great Park," council member Jeff Lalloway said.

The council, by the same split vote, also changed the composition of the Great Park's board of directors, shedding four non-elected members and handing control to Irvine's five council members.

The actions mark a significant turning point in the decade-long effort to turn the former El Toro Marine base into a 1,447-acre municipal park with man-made canyons, rivers, forests and gardens that planners hoped would rival New York's Central Park.

The city hoped to finish and maintain the park for years to come with $1.4 billion in state redevelopment funds. But that money vanished last year as part of the cutbacks to deal with California's massive budget deficit.

"We've gone through $220 million, but where has it gone?" council member Christina Shea said of the project's initial funding from developers in exchange for the right to build around the site. "The fact of the matter is the money is almost gone. It can't be business as usual."

The council majority said the changes will bring accountability and efficiencies to a project that critics say has been larded with wasteful spending and no-bid contracts. For all that has been spent, only about 200 acres of the park has been developed and half of that is leased to farmers.

But council members Larry Agran and Beth Krom, who have steered the course of the project since its inception, voted against reconfiguring the Great Park's board of directors and canceling the contracts with the two firms.

Krom has called the move a "witch hunt" against her and Agran. Feuding between liberal and conservative factions on the council has long shaped Irvine politics.

"This is a power play," she said. "There's a new sheriff in town."

The council meeting stretched long into the night, with the final vote coming Wednesday at 1:34 a.m. Tensions were high in the packed chambers with cheering, clapping and heckling coming from the crowd.

At one point council member Lalloway lamented that he "couldn't hear himself think."

During public comments, newly elected Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer chastised the council for "fighting like schoolchildren." Earlier this week he said that if the Irvine's new council majority can't make progress on the Great Park, he would seek a ballot initiative to have the county take over.

And Spitzer angrily told Agran that his stewardship of the project had been a failure.

"You know what?" he said. "It's their vision now. You're in the minority."

mike.anton@latimes.com

rhea.mahbubani@latimes.com

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Top U.S. General Says Stopping a Syrian Chemical Attack Is 'Almost Unachievable'

If Syrian dictator Bashar Assad decides to use his chemical weapons, there won’t be a thing the U.S. military can do to stop him, America’s top military officer conceded on Thursday. Nor will the U.S. step into a “hostile” atmosphere, with or without Assad, to keep those chemicals under control.

It’s been a month since U.S. intelligence learned that Assad’s forces were mixing some of their precursor chemicals for sarin gas, as Danger Room first reported. The Syrian military even loaded aerial bombs with the deadly agent. Assad hasn’t used the weapons — yet. Should he change his mind, there’s little chance the U.S. would know it before it’s too late to stop the first chemical attack in the Mideast in over 20 years.

“The act of preventing the use of chemical weapons would be almost unachievable,” Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon. “You would have to have such clarity of intelligence, persistent surveillance, you’d have to actually see it before it happened. And that’s unlikely, to be sure.”

That explains the emphasis the Obama administration has given, from President Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on down, to publicly warning Assad that using his chemical weapons would cross a “red line.” Dempsey said that “messaging” seeks to establish a deterrent, since Assad might think it would prompt outright U.S. or international intervention leading to his downfall. But that’s different from preemption.

American officials began strategizing months ago for how it should operate in a post-Assad Syria. And that includes scoping out plans for disposing of Assad’s stockpiles of nerve and mustard agents.

Today, however, Panetta shot down a related preventive step: sending U.S. troops into the chaos of the Syrian civil war to secure the chemical stocks.

U.S. military officials have previously speculated that an intervention to take hold of an estimated 500 tons of chemical precursors would require 75,000 troops, a force larger than the one currently in Afghanistan. Panetta said the international community needs to establish a “process and procedure” for keeping the stockpiles under control — but only after Assad falls, which is an uncertain proposition. U.S. intervention to lock down the chemicals, Panetta said, would depend on the establishment of new regime willing to invite the U.S. military in — another uncertain proposition.

“We’re not working on options that involve boots on the ground,” Panetta said. If there’s a “peaceful transition,” then the U.S. might consider a request that a friendly successor government might make to secure the chemical stocks. “But in a hostile situation, we’re not planning for that.” It’s looking likely that the 400 U.S. soldiers sent to Turkey to man Patriot missile batteries could be the only uniformed troops that the Pentagon openly sends to handle the Syrian crisis.

The U.S. public has little appetite for throwing exhausted U.S. soldiers and marines into yet another bloody Mideastern conflict. But Panetta and Dempsey’s concession underscores the massive risks that the Syrian civil war poses for either the use or black market proliferation of chemical weapons. The revolution has  already claimed the lives of 60,000 Syrians. The longer it goes on, the greater the pressure Assad may feel to unleash his unconventional arms. Alternatively, various Syrian factions might be either unwilling or unable to secure the stocks, should they prevail, nor is there any guarantee they will give up the chemical weapons once victorious.

There is confusion about how long the sarin gas will remain usable once its precursors combine. Nerve agents are inherently unstable, but U.S. government sources have told Danger Room that Syrian sophistication with chemical weaponry may leave the combined, weaponized sarin deadly for up to a year. Dempsey and Panetta, however, believe that they’ll break down after 60 days. “That’s what the scientists tell us,” Dempsey said. “I’d still be reluctant to handle it myself.”

Disposing of (or “demilitarizing”) chemical weapons is extraordinarily difficult under any circumstances; Iraq’s former chemical bunkers are still toxic nearly  than a decade after Saddam’s overthrow, and the U.S. recently said it won’t be done disposing of its Cold War chemical weapon arsenal until 2023. Assad’s nerve agents will be no exception.

One of sarin’s main precursors – methylphosphonyl difluoride, or DF – can be turned into a somewhat non-toxic slurry, if combined properly with lye and water. The problem is that when DF reacts with water, it generates heat. And since DF has an extremely low boiling point — just 55.4 degrees Celsius — it means that the chances of accidentally releasing toxic gases are really high. “You could easily kill yourself during the demil,” one observer told Danger Room during the fall. That would explain Dempsey’s reluctance to touch it.

Naturally, this process could only begin once the DF and the rubbing alcohol (sarin’s other main precursor) was gathered up from Assad’s couple dozen storage locations. Then, they’d have to be carted far, far out into the desert — to make sure no bystanders could be hurt — along with the enormous stirred-tank reactors needed to conduct the dangerous chemistry experiments. And when it was all done, there would the result would be a whole lot of hydrofluoric acid, which is itself a poison.

It’s an operation that will take many months, many men, and many millions of dollars. No wonder the leaders of America’s overtaxed military won’t commit to the job until the Syrian civil war is done.

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Kimmel’s pot jokes earn invite from Calif. college

ARCATA, Calif. (AP) — Humboldt State University in California has invited Jimmy Kimmel to deliver the school’s commencement address after he joked about its marijuana research program.

The host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” devoted three minutes of his late-night show in November to poking fun at the new program.

Kimmel’s faux recruiting commercial said students could look forward to low-pressure careers such as dog walking, organizing drum circles and occupying Wall Street.

University spokesman Jarad Petroske said Thursday the school has not heard from Kimmel. The comedian’s publicist Alyssa Wilkins did not reply to an email from The Associated Press seeking a response.

Humboldt State President Rollin Richmond and student body president Ellyn Henderson revealed they sent Kimmel a letter last month saying they found parts of the skit funny but thought it unfairly portrayed the campus community as a bunch of pot-obsessed slackers.

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Children’s Flu Medicine in Short Supply

As influenza cases surge around the country, health officials say they are trying to stem a shortage of treatments for children.

Pharmacies around the country have reported dwindling supplies of liquid Tamiflu, a prescription flu medicine that can ease symptoms if taken within 48 hours of their onset. The drug is available in capsules for adults and a liquid suspension for children and infants.

“There are intermittent shortages of the liquid version (but not the capsule version) due to the supplier’s challenges to meet the current demand,” Carolyn Castel, a spokeswomen for CVS Caremark, said in an e-mail.

Pharmacies around the country are experiencing shortages of the liquid suspension “due to recent increased demand,” Sarah Clark-Lynn, a spokeswoman for the Food and Drug Administration, said on Thursday.

Ms. Clark-Lynn said the F.D.A. was working with the company that markets Tamiflu, Genentech, to increase supplies. The agency is also letting pharmacists know that in emergencies they can compound the adult Tamiflu capsules to make liquid versions for children.

A similar shortage of Tamiflu has hit Canada, which has also been gripped by widespread flu outbreaks, prompting the government there to tap into a national stockpile of the drug.

“That really unexpected increase in demand — far above other influenza seasons — has really depleted the usual stocks which in any other season would have been more than sufficient,” Dr. Barbara Raymond, director of pandemic preparedness for the Public Health Agency of Canada, told The Ottawa Citizen.

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