The airwaves are filled with blame for Republicans for not passing the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Bill, yet that is the short-sighted view of a very long and unnecessarily drawn out issue. Blame is across the board for the last 9 years of delays.
After a wrenching seven-year battle, more than 10,000 workers who sued New York City over health damages they claimed after the 9/11 recovery efforts have approved a settlement, clearing the way for payouts totaling at least $625 million, lawyers said Friday.
Their responses, delivered to a federal judge in Manhattan, ended months of wrangling over whether the city and its contractors were shortchanging the workers for the respiratory and other illnesses they developed after toiling in the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center.
Nine hundred 9/11 heroes have died since the 2001 terrorist attacks. Thousands of others are suffering from various cancers believed to have been caused by toxins at Ground Zero. The US federal government has failed, thus far, to pass 9/11 health legislation that would assist 9/11 responders with medical care.
The sound of muffled drums echoed along New York Avenue in Huntington Station, as a fire truck carrying the casket of Vincent Albanese headed toward St. Hugh of Lincoln Church.
“It’s a shame it happened like this,” said one mourner.
Albanese, 63, died this past weekend after a battle with cancer. He had served the FDNY for close to 38 years; all in Ladder 38 in the Bronx.
Albanese was, mourners believed, the latest victim of 9/11.
In addition to the emotional trauma they faced after the World Trade Center attacks, students who went to schools in Lower Manhattan say they are also facing respiratory problems, and now they also want the federal government’s help.
Current and former students were told it was safe to return to class after September 11th, and they did, exposing themselves to the same toxic air inhaled by first responders.
“They were minors during 9/11; they had no options. They were ordered back to school because the EPA said that the air was safe, and they had no ability to say yes or no,” said Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer. “And now we’re finding out that it may be that some of these children are going to come down with very serious illnesses.”
The judge who approved the settlement for thousands of 9/11 first responders exposed to toxic World Trade Center dust wants other defendants to join it.
U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein released a statement Friday urging hundreds of other defendants to consider participating in the settlement. They include workers involved in the extensive cleanup of buildings surrounding ground zero.
A U.S. district judge in New York approved a settlement Wednesday that could pay more than $700 million to thousands of 9/11 first responders exposed to toxic dust at ground zero.
Before approving the settlement Judge Alvin Hellerstein listened to testimony from a sampling of some of the 10,000 plaintiffs at Wednesday’s hearing about the health battles that have plagued them since working at the World Trade Center site.
“I intend to approve this settlement, and I now do so as a fair, adequate and reasonable settlement reflecting hard work and a concern for fairness by all parties,” said Hellerstein.
Many remember the stories of phone calls on 9/11 allegedly made from victims on-board the planes. Many people know suspect that they could not have been made from cell phones for different reasons. Some reasons for not using cells in-flight are technologically inspired, some are more from a physical possibilities perspective.
The Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Aviation Administration have each recommended that airlines not allow passengers to use cell phones during commercial flights. The FAA fears that the RF signal emitted by devices using the 800MHz spectrum band might interfere with the navigation systems of the plane, specifically GPS instrumentation. Yet there is no documented case of an air accident or serious malfunction caused by a cell phone’s interfering with a plane’s navigation system.
The FCC’s concern is that wireless networks on the ground might be disrupted by the cell phones flying overhead. As a plane flies over a wireless cell tower on the ground, the FCC believes, the cell site will detect all the cell phones operating inside the plane and go to work registering those devices to operate on the network. But by the time the tower registers and connects all those mobile phones passing overhead, the plane will have passed into the range of the next cell tower on its route. This uses up system resources and could hurt network performance for connected phones on the ground.
But some experts believe that this worry is outdated. “Color me highly skeptical that this is a real problem with modern systems,” says Ken Biba, CTO of Novarum, a wireless consulting and engineering group. “Modern digital phones actually use lower power, and, further, the cell towers have very directional antennas designed for covering the surface of the earth [not the air above].”
The 9/11 attacks have had myriad long-term consequences for Americans across the country. But the aftermath of the 2001 tragedy took a surprising toll on pregnant women — by causing them to miscarry a disproportionate number of male fetuses.
That’s the conclusion of researchers at the University of California, Irvine, who have been studying the impact of 9/11 on male babies since 2005.
In a smaller study published that year, they found that women in California miscarried more male babies in the year after 9/11 than they did in other years from 1995 to 2002.
This time, the team tracked all fetal miscarriages in the country, using data from the National Vital Statistics System collected between 1996 and 2002.
In the scriptures are the words: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
The words have special resonance when you consider the results of a study just published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
This study found that of 11,000 firefighters who were at ground zero in the two weeks after 9/11, when the dust cloud was thickest, most are not improving. Their lungs were heavily damaged by pulverized masonry and glass from the World Trade Cemter attacks.And they have not recovered.
The latest scientifically established facts about the harms suffered by 9/11 rescue and recovery workers scream out for action.
A study of 13,000 firefighters and Emergency Medical Service workers revealed in 2006 that about one-fifth had lost the equivalent of 12 years worth of lung functioning.
Now, a followup in the New England Journal of Medicine reports that the damage appears to be permanent in most of those rescuers.
The judge who scuttled a controversial deal for sick Ground Zero workers chided the lawyers Monday for not keeping him in the loop about new negotiations.
Hellerstein last month scuttled a proposed agreement saying it gave too much to the lawyers and too little to rescue and cleanup workers sickened by toxins after 9/11.
Most of the New York City firefighters and medics whose lungs were damaged by pulverized masonry and glass from the World Trade Center attacks are not improving as time goes by, according to a new study.
The results are based on breathing tests from nearly 11,000 firefighters who were at ground zero in first two weeks when the dust cloud was thickest. Of the firefighters who didn’t smoke, 13 percent were still scoring below normal up to seven years later, the study found.
That number was down from 18 percent who initially tested below normal after the attacks, according to researchers at the New York City Fire Department and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Iran is to test a new anti-aircraft defense system during a five-day aerial maneuver, the Iranian defense minister has said.
The large-scale maneuver, which was launched on Sunday, is mainly aimed at developing the country’s aerial defenses against any potential attack on the country’s nuclear plants. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Brian 
