Word: petros
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...former Secret Service agent Joseph Petro thinks his former employer may be trying to put the best face on a bad situation. "The Secret Service is very concerned about this," says Petro, who spent 23 years as an agent, including four guarding President Reagan and his family. "It's hard enough to protect the President, and this is not helpful." He pauses. "We are not a Third World country." (Read "A Brief History of the Secret Service...
While protesters in certain states may have the right to carry weapons to spots near presidential visits - and the Secret Service may blanket the President with protection - Petro says the guns' presence changes the atmosphere surrounding such events. "They're intimidating people like it's a western saloon," he says. And the weapons could turn a verbal clash between demonstrators into a shoot-out. "In a heated atmosphere," Petro argues, "it's a recipe for disaster." Most critical, according to Petro, author of Standing Next to History: An Agent's Life Inside the Secret Service, is the message the guns...
...legal to carry visible weapons in public. But every gun-bearing protester requires the attention of the Secret Service and the local and state police who reinforce their efforts. "If the local police are drawn away to deal with these fools, then there's a vacuum somewhere," Petro says. "Perhaps one of those cops was supposed to be in a critical place where he or she could have stopped someone from doing something to the President. That's a real problem...
Everyone knows we use too much energy. Our addiction to fossil fuels is torching the planet, empowering hostile petro-states and straining our wallets. Meanwhile, studies by scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and elsewhere suggest that more than half of our energy is lost through inefficiencies, calculations that don't even include the energy we fritter away through wasteful behavior like leaving lights on or idling cars. We're on course to increase electricity usage an extra 30% by 2030, which could require trillions of dollars' worth of new emissions-belching power plants, so it would be much...
Hugo Chávez owned the last Summit of the Americas, in 2005. Thanks to rising oil prices, the Venezuelan President, who controls the hemisphere's largest crude reserves, suddenly had the petro-wherewithal to spread his gospel of a more socialist Latin America free of Washington's imperialist interference. At that summit, in Mar del Plata, Argentina, Chávez led large and raucous demonstrations against President George W. Bush and U.S. plans for a hemispheric free-trade pact, which effectively died at the gathering...