County settles with Kenyan family after botched SWAT raid

 

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Struggling to find enough doctors, nurses and linguists for the war effort, the Pentagon will temporarily recruit foreigners who have been living in the United States on student and work visas, or with refugee or political asylum status.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has authorized the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps to recruit certain legal residents whose critical medical and language skills are “vital to the national interest,” officials said, using for the first time a law passed three years ago.

Though the military previously has taken recruits with green cards seeking permanent residency, Gates’ action enables the services to start a one-year pilot program to find up to 1,000 foreigners who have lived in the states legally for at least two years on certain types of temporary visas.

The new recruits into the armed forces would get accelerated treatment in the process toward becoming U.S. citizens in return for serving in the wartime military in the United States or abroad.

“The services are doing a tremendous job of recruiting quality personnel to meet our various missions,” sometimes with bonus pay and tuition for medical school, said Bill Carr, deputy undersecretary of defense for military personnel policy. But they haven’t been able to fill their need for 24,000 doctors, dentists and nurses in the Defense Department.

The Pentagon’s doctor and nurse corps remain 1,000 short of the numbers needed to treat patients, and Carr said he hoped the program would fill the gaps.

The military’s most pressing need is for neurosurgeons and dermatologists to treat troops coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan with brain and burn injuries caused by insurgents’ wide use of roadside bombs and suicide bombs.

The force also lacks nurses with a broad range of specialties, Carr said.

It also needs people with special language and cultural skills for a war on terrorism that has taken the armed forces across the globe.

Though the military has been looking for more Arabic speakers and others to help with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the new program looks to recruit speakers of some three dozen languages, including Albanian, Korean, Punjabi, Somali and Turkish.

The effort to find the recruits begins early next year. If there is a need for more recruits in the future, it would take a new authorization, Carr said.

Of the 1,000 new people, at least a third must be medical professionals, Carr said.

“It is exceptional, limited, vital,” he said of the effort.

The linguists are to be used in a broad range of military jobs — as infantrymen, seamen and military police. Those with the best language skills would be used in intelligence fields.

The armed forces have used foreigners since the War of 1812 — over the years some 700,000 have served.

But because of the counterterrorism war begun after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America, President George W. Bush signed an executive order in 2002 making foreigners who join the military eligible to apply immediately for citizenship.

They essentially go to the head of the line among citizenship applicants, having their cases processed in about three years as opposed to the five years it takes others, Carr said.

There are now 29,000 non-citizens in uniform today, Carr said, with about 8,000 more enlisting every year.

He expects that among those who will be interested in the new effort are doctors with work visas who are working at hospitals around the country, a program aimed at tackling shortages among U.S. medical professionals.

The military has never recruited non-green card holders, but a law passed three years ago lets them do so when it is determined to be vital to the national interest.

On Nov. 25, Gates declared that to be the case for the purpose of getting more doctors, nurses and linguists.

Carr stressed that recruits will have to pass the same physical, mental and aptitude tests required of all who join the armed forces.

Health care workers also will have to meet all medical professional criteria to practice, be proficient in English, and agree to enlist either for three years on active duty or six years as reservists.

The linguists/culture experts will have to enlist for four years of active duty service.

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London, Monday 27th October, 2008. Police will now use new device to take fingerprints in street. Every police force in the UK is to be equipped with mobile fingerprint scanners – handheld devices that allow police to carry out identity checks on people in the street. The new technology, which ultimately may be able to receive pictures of suspects, is likely to be in widespread use within 18 months. Tens of thousands of sets – as compact as BlackBerry smartphones – are expected to be distributed. The police claim the scheme, called Project Midas, will transform the speed of criminal investigations. A similar, heavier machine has been tested during limited trials with motorway patrols. To address fears about mass surveillance and random searches, the police insist fingerprints taken by the scanners will not be stored or added to databases. Liberty, the civil rights group, cautioned that the law required fingerprints taken in such circumstances to be deleted after use. Gareth Crossman, Liberty’s policy director, said: “Saving time with new technology could help police performance but officers must make absolutely certain that they take fingerprints only when they suspect an individual of an offence and can’t establish his identity.” Details of the type of equipment and the scope of its use have been revealed in a presentation by the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA). The initial phase of the Mobile Identification At Scene (Midas) project, costed at £30m-£40m, will enable officers to perform rapid checks on the fingerprints of people arrested or detained. The marks will be compared against records on Ident1, the national police database which holds information on 7.5 million individuals. Geoff Whitaker, a senior technology officer with the NPIA, told the Biometrics 2008 conference that Project Midas would save enormous amounts of police time and reduce the number of wrongful arrests. At present, officers have to take suspects to custody suites if they need to check fingerprints. On average, the agency’s research shows, the procedure takes 67 minutes. “If we scaled this [saving] up to the national level that would equate to 366 additional police officers on the beat,” Whitaker said. “One of the benefits is that it will reduce the number of errors – and we can reduce the number of arrests significantly.

“There’s a huge range of opportunities [for] mobile ID. It could be used on the deceased at the scene of a crime, on suspects for intelligence in the early part of an investigation, [or even] in a mortuary.” Policing of big public occasions, sporting events, festivals, political conferences – as a well as immigration and border controls – could benefit from the equipment, he suggested. “Another use is for prisoners in transit; it’s not uncommon for prisoners to swap identities on the way to prison,” he said. Project Midas, he said, would give the police “a full, mobile national capability” to check identities. The system is being designed to have the capacity to beam images of suspects back to officers on the streets to help confirm identifications. Some US police forces are already using the technology. “The return of mugshots [to officers],” Whitaker added, “is something we would like to do.” The tender document for Midas states: “Bidders’ solutions … should include, but may not be limited to, fingerprint identification capability.” Plans for a police Facial Images National Database (Find) were suspended last year but are being reviewed. One of the companies bidding for the Midas contract, Northrop Grumman, told the Guardian: “A lot of the hand-held [devices] we are considering have cameras so they can support fingerprint and facial images”. A limited trial of mobile police fingerprint devices, called Project Lantern, started in 2006. About 200 have been distributed and 30,000 checks performed. They were deployed in police cars using automatic number plate recognition technology – stopping vehicles that were logged as stolen, having no insurance, no MOT or simply unknown. “The aim was to deny criminals the use of the roads,” said Whitaker. “Around 60% of drivers stopped gave false identification details.” Fingerprint checks often showed they were carrying falsified documents. The electronic searches, encrypted and sent over public networks, were usually returned to the mobile devices within two minutes; 97% of searches were completed in five minutes. Responses are graded as “high” or “medium”. If high, it shows the system is confident of a match; if medium, it could display up to three potential identities. The returned data includes the name, age and gender of the suspect if there is a match. A spokeswoman for the NPIA added: “It will be up to each police authority to assess the benefits and see how many they want. Early indications are that the benefits will be huge.” Thomas Smith, an officer from the Los Angeles police department, also briefed the Biometrics 2008 conference on the success of his force’s mobile ID devices which send images and fingerprint matches back to officers on the street. He said they had become so powerful that once the machines were produced some suspects admitted they were lying about their identity. “Our next thing will be facial recognition [computerised matching of suspects from their faces] in the field,” he said.

Source-The guardian

 

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