OPINION

Wake up, flight crews!

Airlines are increasingly pushing pilots and flight attendants into longer hours and less sleep.

by Tiffany Hawk

December 21, 2009

As we cram into airplanes this holiday season, there is an aspect of air travel that we're likely to be putting out of our minds -- pilots asleep at the yoke and flight attendants so tired their mental states can be likened to a drunken stupor.

Most Americans are protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act, which since 1938 has limited the workday to eight hours and the workweek to 40 hours. Airlines, which are governed by the Federal Aviation Administration, are exempt. They can push their workers up to 20 hours per day, without bearing the cost of overtime pay, which discourages such practice.

The toll this can take on pilots has been in the news since a Northwest Airlines flight overshot its destination two months ago. But the rest of the flight crew is also suffering.

As a former flight attendant, I fought two in-flight fires, calmed thousands of passengers through mechanical failures and assisted in more medical emergencies than I can recall. I have also fallen asleep standing up. I've snuck naps in the lavatory, sitting on the toilet with a dirty airline pillow wedged between my shoulder and the sink. I've been outright incapable of figuring the simple arithmetic required for liquor accounting. I have asked a passenger what he wanted to drink and then stuck a bag of pretzels into a cup before handing it to him.

This level of exhaustion is dangerous. Several sleep studies have shown that 17 hours of wakefulness is equivalent to a blood-alcohol level of 0.05%. Between 19 and 24 hours of wakefulness, that number goes up to 0.10% -- over the legal limit for driving in every U.S. state and considerably over the FAA restriction of 0.04%. Chronically sleeping only four to six hours per night is as harmful to cognitive performance as missing two entire nights of sleep.

For crew and passenger safety, the FAA mandates that flight attendants work a maximum of 14 hours, extendable to 20 hours, with minimum rest periods of nine hours, reducible to eight hours. Pilots have slightly different restrictions -- 16 hours maximum and up to 18 hours if necessary.

These guidelines were intended as extreme outer limits, and it was expected that they'd be reined in by collective bargaining agreements. But after years of losses, cutbacks and contract renegotiations have made long shifts and short recoveries standard operating procedure at too many airlines, from national and international carriers to regional companies.

For flight crews, an eight-hour rest period begins 15 minutes after "door open" on landing to the next day's push-back from the gate. It's ludicrous: Flight crews must be at the airport an hour before flight time -- to check in, go through a security screening, get briefed, board the plane and even pass out pre-departure beverages to first-class passengers. But all of that work is counted as "rest." When you take into account transportation to and from a hotel, which could be 30 or more minutes away, or finding something to eat at the end of a "day," crew members may only have an opportunity for four or five hours' sleep.

Contrast that with the Air Force, which, despite being at war, must give its air crews (including flight attendants and those performing flight attendant duties) a minimum of 12 hours' rest.

Of course, not all airlines push their crews to the limit. For example, Southwest Airlines, year after year the most profitable carrier, has the highest-paid flight attendants and pilots in the industry. For flight attendants, it offers a reasonable 10.5 hour maximum "duty day," which can be pushed to 12.5 hours; pilots' maximum "duty day" is 13 hours, which can be pushed to 15 hours.

Why don't flight crew members simply migrate to the best airlines? I can answer that for flight attendants: Partly, it's an issue of seniority. If someone leaves one airline after, say, 15 years, they will lose that seniority at a new airline, which not only means a pay cut but also several years of being on call 24 hours a day. But mostly it's because they dream of the good old days, which in the airline industry means pre-9/11, when the industry was in better shape and such brutal schedules were the exception not the rule. Like anyone in an abusive relationship, they are living in denial. And a bit of fear. If they demand more, managers threaten, the airline will go under.

If an airline worries it can't afford to hire more flight attendants should schedules require safe doses of sleep, we should remind its shareholders that the company could get hundreds of them for the price of one chief executive officer. Though rested, the CEO won't be much help when your Airbus dives into the Hudson.

Tiffany Hawk spent five years as a flight attendant at United Airlines and Virgin America before becoming a travel writer. Her monthly travel column appears in Coast magazine.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-hawk21-2009dec21,0,2628480,print.story

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OPINION

Steps to create an Israel-Palestine

A one-state solution in the area is not as farfetched as it might seem.

by Jonathan Kuttab

December 20, 2009

For a while, it seemed that a two-state solution might actually be achievable and that a sovereign Palestinian state would be created in the West Bank and Gaza, allowing Jews and Palestinians at last to go their separate ways. But these days, that looks less and less likely.

With Israel in total control of the territory from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River and unwilling to relinquish a significant part of the land, it's time to consider the possibility that the current situation -- one state, in effect -- will continue. And although Jewish Israelis may control it now, birthrates suggest that, sooner or later, Jews will again be a minority in the territory.

What happens at that point is unclear, but unless continued military occupation and all-out apartheid is the desired path, now may be the time for Israelis to start putting in place the kinds of legal and constitutional safeguards that will protect all minorities, now and in the future, in a single democratic state of Israel-Palestine. This is both the right thing and the smart thing to do.

In recent years the idea of a one-state solution has been anathema to Israelis and their supporters worldwide. This has been fueled by the fear of the "demographic threat" posed by the high Palestinian birthrate. Indeed, many Israeli supporters of a two-state solution came to that position out of fear of this demographic threat rather than sympathy with Palestinian national aspirations.

At the root of their fear was the belief that despite Israel's best efforts to push Palestinians from land and property and to import Jewish settlers in their stead, the Arab population would keep climbing. And that, when the Arabs reached the 51% mark, the state of Israel would collapse, its Jewish character would disappear and its population would dwindle into obscurity.

Yet that scenario is not necessarily the inevitable result of either demography or democracy. Religious and ethnic minorities have successfully thrived in many countries and managed to retain their distinctive culture and identity, and succeeded in being effective and sometimes even dominant influences in those countries. Those who believe in coexistence must begin to seriously think of the legal and constitutional mechanisms needed to safeguard the rights of a Jewish minority in Israel-Palestine.

It is true that the experience of Israel with its Palestinian minority does not offer a comforting prospect. The behavior of the Jewish majority toward the Palestinian citizens of Israel has not been magnanimous or tolerant. Where ethnic cleansing was insufficient, military rule, land confiscation and systemic discrimination have all been employed. The relationship was not helped by the actions of Palestinians outside Israel who resented losing their homeland or by the behavior of some Arab countries, neither of which accepted the imposed Jewish character of Israel.

Yet it is possible, especially during this period when Jews are still the majority in power in Israel, to begin to envision the type of guarantees they may require in the future. Other countries have wrestled with this problem, and while each situation is different, the problem is by no means unprecedented.

Zionism will ultimately need to redefine its goals and aspirations, this time without ignoring or seeking to dispossess the indigenous Palestinian population. Palestinians will also have to deal with this reality, and accept -- even enthusiastically endorse -- the elements required to make Jews truly feel at peace in the single new state that will be the home of both people.

Strong, institutionalized mechanisms will be needed to prevent the "tyranny of 51%." A bicameral legislature, for example, should be installed, in which the lower house is elected by proportional representation but the upper house has a composition that safeguards both peoples equally, regardless of their numbers in the population. A rotating presidency may be preferable to designating certain positions for each minority (as in Lebanon). And constitutional provisions that safeguard the rights of minorities should be enshrined in a constitution that can only be amended or altered by both houses of parliament with a large (80%) majority.

Both Hebrew and Arabic will be designated as official languages, and governmental offices will be closed for Jewish, Muslim and Christian holidays. New laws will be enacted that strengthen the secular civil courts in personal status matters, while leaving some leeway for all religious communities to have a say in lawmaking, including Reform and Conservative Jews who currently chafe under the Orthodox monopoly over Jewish personal status matters in Israel. Educational systems that honor and cater to the different communities will give each a measure of control over the education of its children within a national system that maintains professional standards for all publicly-funded schools. Strong constitutional provisions will be enacted to prohibit discrimination in all spheres of life, while independent courts will be enabled to enforce such provisions.

Many on both sides, Israeli and Palestinian, will reject this line of thinking, and in all cases, it is clear that a lot of goodwill and much careful thinking is necessary. But as the options keep narrowing for all participants, we need to start thinking of how we can live together, rather than insist on dying apart.

Jonathan Kuttab is a Palestinian attorney and human rights activist. He is a co-founder of Al Haq and the Mandela Institute for Political Prisoners.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-kuttab20-2009dec20,0,3392028,print.story

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From the Washington Times

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Obama to clear secret records

by Pete Yost

ASSOCIATED PRESS

President Obama plans to deal with a Dec. 31 deadline that automatically would declassify secrets in more than 400 million pages of Cold War-era documents by ordering governmentwide changes that could sharply curb the number of new and old government records hidden from the public.

In an executive order that the president is likely to sign before year's end, Mr. Obama will create a National Declassification Center to clear up the backlog of Cold War documents. But the order also will give everyone more time to process the 400 million pages, rather than flinging them open at year's end without a second glance.

The order aimed at eliminating unnecessary secrecy also is expected to direct all agencies to revise their classification guides -- the more than 2,000 manuals used by federal agencies to determine what information should be classified and what no longer needs that protection. The manuals form the foundation of the government's classification system.

Two of every three such guides haven't been updated within the past five years, according to the 2008 annual report of the Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees the government's security classification.

The still-classified Cold War records would provide a wealth of data on U.S.-Soviet relations, including the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin Wall, diplomacy and espionage.

It took 19 years and a lawsuit for the National Security Archive, a private group that obtains and analyzes once-secret government records, to get documents on the crisis in the late 1950s when the United States and the Soviet Union faced off over control of West Berlin. For nearly two decades, the contested documents were shuttled among various offices in the Defense Department, then on to the State Department and an unnamed intelligence agency, each conducting a separate declassification review, before the government finally release some of them.

Mr. Obama's executive order will follow up on his Inauguration Day initiatives on open government. On his first day in office, Mr. Obama instructed federal agencies to be more responsive to requests for records under the Freedom of Information Act and overturned an order by President George W. Bush that would have enabled former presidents and vice presidents to block the release of sensitive records of their time in the White House.

Mr. Obama's executive order "is an experiment, but it just might work," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. "By changing the rules about what gets classified, this could lead to a dramatic reduction in secrecy throughout the government." Mr. Aftergood obtained a leaked copy of an early draft of the executive order last summer.

The problem is not much closer to being solved than it was in the 1990s. Under the terms of Mr. Bush's extension, sensitive information in hundreds of millions of pages of historical documents will be declassified automatically on Dec. 31 unless Mr. Obama acts.

"If the agencies haven't found the sensitive old documents after nine years, that's some indication those records don't deserve being secret anymore," said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/21/obama-to-clear-secret-records//print/

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Judge weighs pivotal issue in doctor's slaying

ASSOCIATED PRESS

WICHITA, Kan. | A judge is weighing a critical legal question in the case of a man who confessed to killing one of the nation's few doctors who perform late-term abortions: Can the 51-year-old man claim at his trial that the slaying was justified to save the lives of unborn children?

Scott Roeder, of Kansas City, Mo., is charged with one count of premeditated, first-degree murder in Dr. George Tiller's death and two counts of aggravated assault over purported threats to two ushers during the May 31 melee in the foyer of the doctor's Wichita church.

District Judge Warren Wilbert has yet to rule on a bevy of court filings that will set the course for the Jan. 11 trial but will consider some of them in court Tuesday. The documents offer a glimpse at the unfolding legal strategies in a case played out amid the rancorous debate over abortion.

Since the killing, Mr. Roeder has confessed to reporters that he shot Dr. Tiller, while his few allies in the pro-life movement have urged him to present a "necessity defense" in hopes that an acquittal could turn the larger debate over abortion in their favor.

"I choose this action I am accused of because of the necessity defense," Mr. Roeder told the Associated Press in November. "I want to make sure that the focus is, of course, obviously on the preborn children and the necessity to defend them."

Similar efforts to use such a strategy in cases involving abortion-related violence have generally been banned - perhaps most relevantly at the 1993 trial of an Oregon woman accused of shooting and wounding Dr. Tiller.

Mr. Roeder, who has pleaded not guilty, admitted the shooting to the AP, saying he has no regrets for killing Dr. Tiller and suggesting the necessity defense should be the only contested issue of his trial. Mr. Roeder declined to say when asked whether he would kill another abortion doctor if he were acquitted.

The so-called "necessity defense" has rarely been successfully used in abortion cases. Mr. Roeder's attorneys - while arguing that their client has a right to present his theory of defense - have so far kept their own strategy secret.

Legal experts and others close to the case have suggested that his public defenders may actually be aiming at a conviction on a lesser offense such as voluntary manslaughter - defined in Kansas as "an unreasonable but honest belief that circumstances existed that justified deadly force."

That would be an easier argument to make to jurors than a necessity defense, which is unlikely to win, said Melanie Wilson, a University of Kansas law professor. A necessity defense, also known as the "choice of evils defense," requires proof that the defendant reacted to an immediate danger, an argument that is undermined by abortion's legality.

"The defense would rather have it be a trial of abortion - particularly late-term abortion - and not a trial of the killing of Dr. Tiller," said Richard Levy, a law professor at the University of Kansas. "It is often a sound defense strategy to go after the victim."

A wild card is Mr. Roeder's close relationship with Iowa pro-life activist Dave Leach, who has been separately crafting a necessity defense for Mr. Roeder - including writing motions that could be used if Mr. Roeder were to represent himself. Mr. Leach said the goal is to encourage states to criminalize abortion again, or at least bolster a defense that would allow activists to block clinic entrances without fear of arrest.

"My strong conviction is that this case presents an opportunity, through education of both the public and the courts, to end abortion," Mr. Leach said.

If convicted of first-degree murder, Mr. Roeder faces a life sentence with the possibility of parole after 25 years. A conviction for voluntary manslaughter for someone with as little criminal history as Mr. Roeder could bring a sentence closer to five years if the judge follows state sentencing guidelines.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/21/murder-defense-eyes-justification//print/

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