Word: mda
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Arab ambulance drivers, like Arab zookeepers, have learned how to navigate Jerusalem's many borderlines. "I'm suspicious-looking in so many ways," laughs Nasser Izhiman, a volunteer driver and medic for the Magen David Adom (MDA) ambulance service. "An Arab guy wearing the Star of David on my jacket? Nobody knows what to think." In fact, Arab medics--MDA has 75 Arabs among its 1,500 Jerusalem volunteers but is trying to recruit more--are invaluable. Not only can they help serve East Jerusalem, with its maze of unnamed streets, but they are also indispensable for the city...
Arab drivers won trust from their own community several years ago after they saved the life of an elderly Arab chieftain whose family members were Old City militants. In East Jerusalem, Arabs no longer hurl stones at MDA ambulances, once seen as symbols of the Israeli oppressor. Yet still, the divisions of the city leave their scars. The ambulances are allowed to enter Eastern neighborhoods only with a police escort. Waiting for police cars often wastes precious seconds during an emergency call, so Izhiman and his colleague Morad Alian will often collect the patient in their own cars and drive...
...Whether or not such an exquisite piece of intelligence equipment should be on the open ocean is another question. The upside is mobility; the downside is salt water, wind and waves. Shortly after arriving in Hawaii, the MDA ordered an assessment of the radar's rig, which resulted in a $27-million to-do list before it could be declared operational. Improvements include everything from rethinking the platform's ballast system to installing anti-slip surfaces on its decks. In short, at the time when it was originally supposed to be in service, the vessel...
...kinks. "When you go out and shoot a rifle, you have to go out and calibrate it to make sure its tuned and performing how you want it to," says Fellows. "Is it perfect yet? No. That's why we continue to work with it." As far as the MDA is concerned, SBX is an evolving layer in a work in progress, better to have deployed in an emergency than sitting in a Texas shipyard. "We have a system in place for the first time in our nation that will defend against simple threats from rogue nations. We continue...
...Coyle and others argue that the MDA's work-in-progress attitude towards its systems is a sign that the program is in over its head. "With massive projects you're always going to have something not quite right," acknowledges Victoria Samson, a research analyst at CDI. But, she says, the extent of the upgrades and repairs that SBX and a few other MDA systems have required are signs of an agency that is buying time to deliver weapons that the White House has asked for but may not yet be realistic. "It's giving [the program] a blank check...