Word: homeland
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...fell in love (through e-mail) and married in 2005 (in person), celebrating in four cities with friends and family. Are they happy? Yes. Are they together? Not exactly. Minikel, 37, remains in California to practice obstetrics and gynecology, while Balle, 44, an electronics technician, still lives in his homeland 5,500 miles away. She gets to work herculean hours at a job she loves; he gets to help raise his two teenage kids...
...ambassador, Ryan Crocker, sent a harsh cable to the State Department on Sept. 7, titled "Iraqi refugee processing: Can we speed it up?" He complained of the endless "bottlenecks" delaying entry even for those Iraqis who had risked their lives working for U.S. forces. Crocker pleaded with immigration and Homeland Security officials to fast-track the screening process so the State Department's recommended 7,000 asylum slots could be filled...
Over the summer, Congress passed and the President signed a new homeland-security law called "Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act." Finally, homeland security has been rationalized, we were told. The new law would fix the way money gets distributed so that the states at a greater risk of terrorism received a larger proportion of money, just as the 9/11 Commission had wisely recommended. After the bill was passed, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi bragged that a Democratic Congress had done what the Republicans could...
...formula, every state was guaranteed at least .75% of the state-grant program - a very high minimum compared to other federal programs, which made sure that even less populous states with a relatively small risk of terrorism received a sizable chunk of cash. Since 9/11, billions of dollars in homeland-security grants have gone out under this bizarre and nonsensical formula, which TIME investigated in-depth in 2004. In the new law, however, Congress cut the minimum to .375%, and set the percentage to decline a little bit more each additional year...
...truth is, if homeland security money were truly distributed based on risk, there would be no guaranteed minimum at all. Guaranteed minimums are useful only for getting states up to speed - or for pork-barrel indulgences. At this point, all states have received enough money to set up a basic emergency infrastructure. So the rational thing to do would be to focus our limited resources on high-density, high-risk locations. But Congress is not rational. The Senate gives disproportionate power to small states, and those states do not want to lose their homeland-security entitlements. So the result...