Neha Jain: http://philippinesaviationnews.blogspot.com/18

1. Ex-fire Captain Pleads Guilty To Fatal Boat Crash Charges

United States (Virginia) - A holiday boat outing that turned into a late-night disaster fueled by alcohol and high speed resulted in multiple guilty pleas Thursday morning from a former Richmond Fire Department captain who was at the vessel's helm. Steven W. Nixon, 39, of Montpelier entered guilty pleas to six felonies and a single misdemeanor in a case that had been described as perhaps the worst boating accident ever encountered in Virginia by rescue workers and the U.S. Coast Guard.

Nixon, 39, will be sentenced May 3 and faces up to 66 years in prison.

Nixon's bond was revoked and he was led from the courtroom through a side door to jail as more than 40 family members and supporters were on hand. He had been free on bond since his arrest.

Lancaster Circuit Judge Harry T. Taliaferro said he was revoking bond because of the seriousness of the charges and the time that Nixon faces. The action came despite pleas from Nixon's lawyers that he needed time to prepare his family for his absence.

Nixon resigned his position with the Richmond Fire Department earlier this week, according to a spokesman. He had been a decorated firefighter with 19 years of service.

Lancaster County Commonwealth's Attorney C. Jeffers "Jeff" Schmidt Jr. detailed the horrific July 5 boating crash as one that left eight passengers injured and one dead, 25-year-old Amanda Brady. The fiancee of Nixon's brother, Brady was a teacher at Henrico's Longan Elementary School. Her last words were, "Watch Out!"

She was discovered the next morning by divers, drowned.

Injured passengers other than Nixon included Nixon's wife, a brother, a sister, and a cousin, as well as four children.

Nixon, his blood alcohol level nearly twice the legal limit from a day of drinking and partying with family members, steered his 23-foot Chaparral bow-rider into a concrete-based channel marker topped by a blinking red light visible from four miles away. The collision occurred a half mile offshore from Morattico.

Rescuers arrived at the Rappahannock River crash site shortly after 11 p.m. that Monday night, finding some 27 empty or filled beer cans aboard.

Nixon this morning pleaded guilty to six felonies: aggravated involuntary manslaughter, four counts of felony child abuse, and one count of maiming while intoxicated. He also was convicted of operating a boat while intoxicated.

Written by Richmond Times-Dispatch

2. Wolfram: Captain Snyder leads

Captain Snyder has charted the right course in his first budget. There's finally leadership at the helm and Michigan has the opportunity to right its financial ship before it topples over into the depths of Lake Superior.

In order to do so programs will have to be shrunk and eliminated and those who are employed by the state will have to take a reduced compensation package. The governor is clearly aware that attempting to balance the budget through tax increases will only lead to less economic activity, less employment, more foreclosed homes, lower property values, and worsening living conditions.

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The state cannot force businesses to expand in Michigan or to come here from other states. It cannot force entrepreneurs to risk their life savings in a place where the tax and regulatory burdens are high and uncertain. The economic reality is that keeping our children in Michigan once they have graduated requires us to make the state a hotbed for producers and employers.

In any budget of $19 billion (total budget of $46 billion) there will be plenty of elements for people to complain about.

There are some in this budget that have attracted a good deal of media attention. One is the assumption of $180 million in public employee concessions. The issue is not really whether public employees have sacrificed in the past or whether public employees have a larger compensation package than their private sector counterparts. The issue is that there is only so much revenue available in the short term and the state cannot pay the compensation packages that the public employee unions have come to expect.

Another hot button issue is the elimination of the Earned Income Tax Credit and the taxation of pensions under the state income tax.

As I have dealt with the EITC in an earlier column, let us focus on taxing pension benefits. The first question to ask is why should a single mother with two children be taxed on the income she earns as a school bus driver, while a married retired couple with the same income derived from pensions not be taxed?

The retired couple's Social Security benefits are not taxed, so the retired couple could have more total income than the mom and not have to pay any tax. Or two retired couples could have equal retirement income, but the first couple's retirement is made up of income from their 401k plan because their employer had a defined contribution plan and the other couple has a pension because their employer had a defined benefit plan.

Why should the first couple be taxed and not the second? The proper way to treat income is to tax it the same regardless of source, as most every public finance text will point out.

Cutting aid to K-12 schools is both a necessary and proper proposal. First, K-12 spending is a large item in the budget and if you are going to save real money it will have to include education. Second, the economics literature is uncontroversial that increased spending on public K-12 schools does not translate into higher school performance.

Unfortunately, the governor did not address the structural problem in K-12. As I noted often in my tenure on Michigan's State Board of Education, the incentive structure of public education is flawed. Removing the cap on charter schools would go a long way to both reducing spending on K-12 and improving education.

Corrections is another area that deserves reductions in spending. And again there are structural problems in the system. First, we need to look at the marginal benefits and marginal costs of putting people in prison. There are a number of crimes where the costs of imprisoning people far exceed the benefits. We can close prisons but if we don't reduce the inflow then the costs to society may well increase. The governor does well to propose privatization of prison services, but why not go further and allow companies to open up inside the prison?

Companies could be charged a fee to set up operations inside the prison and employ prisoners. This would not only generate revenue for the prison system, but it would allow prisoners to gain employment experience and give them a much better chance of remaining outside the criminal justice system as a productive member of society once they are released.

There are some places that I would prefer to see cuts that were not made, such as the Michigan Economic Development Corporation. To be consistent with a philosophy of allowing the market rather than central planners to determine who will be the producers in Michigan, the budget would zero out the credits that are granted by government bureaucrats to firms that gain favor in one way or another.

But on the whole, the governor's budget is a sign of leadership that has been lacking over the last eight years. And leadership is a welcome change.

3. Day of High Drama in LAFD Captain's Murder Trial

California Evidence Code Section 402 requires jurors to depart to the jury room while a judge determines whether an admission or confession made by a defendant is admissible as evidence. When the motion is used in trials on the verge of conclusion, it usually comes as a surprise. Sometimes high drama follows.

The case of People vs. David Del Toro had a such a moment Thursday that was clearly the highlight of the trial’s proceedings since opening statements began Jan. 20. The moment came in the midst of a cross examination of a defense witness, psychiatrist Gordon Plotkin, who told the jury that he believed former LAFD Captain Del Toro had suffered an alcohol-induced blackout—or loss of memory—on Aug. 16, 2006, when police found the nearly naked and mangled body of Jennifer Flores, a 42-year-old acquaintance of the firefighter, about two blocks away from his Eagle Rock home on Vincent Street.

Del Toro, 54, has been charged with strangling Flores to death and is being tried for first-degree murder, based on a large body of incriminating evidence that investigators found on the crime scene as well as in his home. Del Toro has pleaded not guilty and has been in jail without bail since November 2006. He faces 25 years to life in state prison if found guilty.

“I’ve interviewed many defendants who say they can’t remember a crime—almost every defendant says they can’t remember a crime,” Plotkin told the jury in response to a question from Deputy District Attorney Robert Grace about Del Toro’s ability to make sophisticated decisions around the time of Flores' murder despite the fact that two breathalyzer tests on the morning of his arrest on Aug. 16, 2006, revealed a blood alcohol level of 0.12—four decimal points higher than the legal limit for driving. The defense has been trying to build a case around Del Toro's heavy drinking and the physical and mental fatigue he is said to have suffered while working as many as three consecutive 24-hour shifts as a firefighter in Lincoln Heights. (As Plotkin put it to the jury to illustrate Del Toro's drinking history: "He recalls frequent blackouts drinking 10 drinks fast.")

The full impact of the "402 moment" in today’s trial didn’t come, however, until Plotkin admitted that he believed Del Toro told him during a 2008 interview that “there was blood on his tennis shoes.” Prosecutor Grace asked Judge Lance Ito for permission to admit as evidence a portion from a two-hour audio interview that the LAPD conducted with Del Toro following his arrest, and that contains comments that the firefighter made to himself while LAPD detectives interviewing him had left the interrogation room. Because, Ito said, he had not reviewed the interview for a year or more, he needed to assess it once again before allowing it as evidence.

That’s when the drama exploded. The judge had barely instructed the jury about what was going to happen next when a PowerPoint screen facing them flickered and a three-paragraph typed transcript from the audio tape flashed before the jurors’ eyes. In an apparent fit of absentmindedness, one of Grace’s assistants had activated the PowerPoint demonstration. By the time Judge Ito ordered the transcript taken down, at least five seconds had passed and anyone in the courtroom with reasonable reflexes had probably noted some of the transcript's riveting highlights, especially these words, displayed in red:

“I killed her. F-----g killed her.”

The full transcript read:

“Oh s--t. Got me into trouble—Oh man, oh man, I should have known Jennifer. F--k. I f----d up. Yes—oh God. Got me for murder. Oh, I’m done—some girl I don’t know—Oh, they f-----g got me man. Yes. She tried to rip me off. Oh man. I don’t have time to—oh, I got to call work.

“Yeah, she left her s--t there. So no. I killed her. F-----g killed her. Plus, everybody—I’m going to need an attorney, man. Man, my career is over. She was murdered in my house, man. F--k—it’s on my shoes. She wanted to rip me off. Oh (unintelligible).

“Oh f--k, I can’t believe it, man—It wasn’t intentional. Yeah. There was a history of violence, it was verbal abuse more than anything else. It was—yeah. Been drinking and I f-----g popped her.”

Three of Del Toro’s brothers and three sisters—all in their middle ages or more—sat next to each other in court, directly in front of Jennifer Flores' brother Richard and his wife, looking grim and a bit dazed. Defense attorney Joseph Gutierrez wasted little time in asking for a mistrial on the grounds that the jurors, even though they were asked to leave after the transcript was swiftly removed from the screen, had doubtless seen the prominently highlighted words in red, “I killed her.” The entire episode, Gutierrez said, was "outrageous" and amounted to "misconduct."

Judge Ito denied the motion for mistrial, saying that the transcript was only up momentarily and the “font is not easily readable.” Besides, said Ito, the phrase, “I killed her, f-----g killed her,” would be presented to the jury at some point. He added, however: “Interesting chess game going on here.”

Gutierrez said that the LAPD detectives who interviewed Del Toro “used every trick and ruse in the book to manipulate him and tell him that he is guilty of murder,” even though he told the police “he didn’t kill Jennifer Flores, he didn’t have sex with Jennifer Flores." Yet the detectives "repeatedly told him that he killed her—how a woman can push your buttons," said Gutierrez. "They ended up taking this statement out of context—‘Oh s--t, I killed her’—because they kept repeating this to him.”

The defense attorney also argued that the contents of the audiotape were rhetorical and that they referred to Melissa Dale, Del Toro’s wife for two years, with whom he has long been divorced. “At no point does he refer to Jennifer Flores.” Responded Ito: “I’ll ask Mr. Grace to remove the last paragraph because it’s ambiguous. However, the first two [paragraphs] clearly refer to Jennifer Flores.”

An amended version of the transcript was eventually displayed before the jury as evidence, along with a roughly eight-minute audiotaped extract that, Ito noted, “was intended for Mr. Plotkin” because the content of the audiotape “tends to indicate a memory, not a blackout, and it is inconsistent with Dr. Plotkin’s theory.” Further, added Ito, the words, “Ya, I killed her” and “it’s on my shoes” appear to be “inconsistent with a state of blackout.” As a result, the prosecution is "entitled to cross examine [Plotkin] on a detail that’s inconsistent with [his] statement.”

Further details of the LAPD's audiotaped interview with Del Tores will become known on Tuesday, Feb. 22, when Plotkin's cross examination will resume. The trial, on the ninth floor, department 110, of the Civic Center on 210 W. Temple St., is expected to continue until the end of next week and a verdict isn't likely before Feb. 25.

4. EVE Online Developer Diary Talks Captain`s Quarters and Incarna Expansion

CCP has started a series of developer diaries talking about the upcoming features for EVE Online and the Incarna Expansion set for later this year as another staged release (a bit at a time in other words). One of the major new features will be the Captain’s Quarters, which also happens to be the focus of the first developer diary. Here’s a bit of info from it:

This dev blog is specifically about Captain’s Quarters. It’s coming to Singularity test server beforeFanfest and hitting Tranquility and your computers this summer. We’ll be talking about design details and technical aspects in later dev blogs and Fanfest is where we’ll uncover what will happen after this feature. As CCP Zulu mentioned in his last dev blog, Incarna will follow a similar staged deployment strategy as EVE Online: Incursion is currently using—namely more frequent, smaller deployments of polished features rather than having you wait for the big expansions.

Captain’s Quarters are your place of power, center of your control, operational nucleus, living room and home office. They are the dusty motel room for the vagabond capsuleer. Whether docking your ship to a station or entering EVE for the first time through the character creation, you will enter the Captain’s Quarters as the living, breathing EVE You. It’s a new dimension of immersion. For all players ( the future newbies/future points on your killboard), it finally gives EVE a human face, a sense of familiarity to "real life" and other games.

Check out the first bit of concept art that’s come out of the developers below and head to the dev blog to read the whole post by CCP Chilliad.

NEHA JAIN