Royal Society warns climate engineering could result in mass starvation

Artificial trees that suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere are one of the plans that need further research, according to the Royal Society. (Institution of Mechanical Engineers)

London Times | Sep 2, 2009

Royal Society warns climate engineering ‘could cause disaster’

by Ben Webster

Giant engineering schemes to reflect sunlight or suck carbon dioxide from the air could be the only way to save the Earth from runaway global warming, according to a group of leading scientists. But they say that these schemes could have their own catastrophic consequences, such as disrupting rainfall patterns, and should be deployed only as a last resort if attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions fail.

The Royal Society, a fellowship of 1,400 of the world’s most eminent scientists, published a report yesterday on the feasibility and possible dangers of technologies for cooling down the Earth, known as geoengineering. The ideas include artificial trees that draw CO2 from the air and mimicking volcanoes by spraying sulphate particles a few miles above the Earth to deflect the Sun’s rays. The most far-fetched would would be to launch trillions of small mirrors into space to act as a sunshield.

A far cheaper solution would be a fleet of 1,500 ships that would suck up seawater and spray it out of tall funnels to create sun-reflecting clouds. However, the report said that these clouds could disrupt rainfall patterns and result in mass starvation in countries dependent on the monsoon.

The panel of 12 scientists who produced the report concluded that all these approaches were theoretically possible and, despite the potential side-effects, should be explored with a view to holding trials.

They called for a £100 million annual global research fund to study geoengineering technologies and said that Britain should contribute £10 million a year, ten times the amount being spent now on such research.

Professor John Shepherd, who chaired the panel, said: “It is an unpalatable truth that unless we can succeed in greatly reducing carbon dioxide emissions we are heading for a very uncomfortable and challenging climate future, and geoengineering will be the only option left to limit further temperature increases.

“Our research found that some geoengineering techniques could have serious unintended and detrimental effects on many people and eco-systems — yet we are still failing to take the only action that will prevent us from having to rely on them. Geo- engineering and its consequences are the price we have to pay for failure to act on climate change.”

Professor Shepherd, Fellow in Earth System Science at the University of Southampton, admitted that there was a risk that the report would be exploited by fossil fuel companies, which might use it to argue that there was an alternative to cutting CO2 emissions.

But he said that it was better to start a thorough research programme now rather than wait until the start of rapid climate change, when the world would have no time to test solutions before deploying them.

Professor Shepherd added that he had no firm opinion on how likely it was that the world would need some form of geoengineering. “My opinion ranges from maybe to possibly to probably, depending on what I had for breakfast.”

Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution in the United States and a member of the panel, said: “We should spend 99 per cent of our effort on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and 1 per cent on this insurance policy \. We need to understand what our options are.”

The report said that an international body, possibly the United Nations, would need to oversee geoengineering projects because they would have impacts far beyond national boundaries. An international compensation scheme would also be needed to help those adversely affected by any project.

Professor John Beddington, the Government’s chief scientific adviser, endorsed the report’s call for more research into geoengineering. He said: “These are part of the armoury of dealing with what is an enormously difficult global problem.” But he added that it was “too early to say” whether trials should be approved.

Wildlife Group Condemns a 9/11-Tsunami Ad

An ad proposed by a Brazilian advertising agency, which shows dozens of planes heading for Lower Manhattan, was rejected by the World Wildlife Fund.

cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com | Sep 1, 2009

By Jennifer  Lee

An ad proposed by a Brazilian advertising agency, which shows dozens of planes heading for Lower Manhattan, was rejected by the World Wildlife Fund. An ad proposed by a Brazilian advertising agency, which shows dozens of planes heading for Lower Manhattan, was rejected by the World Wildlife Fund.

The World Wildlife Fund on Tuesday condemned an unauthorized advertisement that depicted dozens of planes heading into Lower Manhattan, with a tag line reading, “The Tsunami Killed 100 Times More People Than 9/11.”

The ad had been pitched to the Brazilian branch of the World Wildlife Fund by an advertising agency and rejected, said Steve Ertel, a spokesman for the group. “It was a concept to our office in Brazil and it was rejected. From that point, we have not been able to get a hold of the agency to find out how it got out.”

A statement released by the group on Tuesday afternoon said:

“The concept was summarily rejected by W.W.F. and should never have seen the light of day. It is an unauthorized use of our logo and we are aggressively pursuing action to have it removed from Web sites where it is being currently featured.”

Beneath the text comparing 9/11 with the tsunami, the ad reads: “The planet is brutally powerful. Respect it. Preserve it.” The text stands next to the group’s familiar black and white giant panda logo.

Mr. Ertel said the World Wildlife Fund had never seen the ad before Tuesday, when his phone started ringing and people began forwarding various blog posts about the ad. It was a scramble to figure out where the ad had come from, he said.

“There were a number of calls to a number of people,” he said.

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Can Bill Gates stop hurricanes? Scientists doubt it

Hurricane experts doubt feasibility of Bill Gates-backed weather-control idea

CNN | Aug 28, 2009

By Ayesha Tejpar

(CNN) — Hurricane experts are throwing cold water on an idea backed by billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates aimed at controlling the weather.

Gates and a dozen other scientists have raised eyebrows by submitting patent applications for a technology to reduce the danger of approaching hurricanes by cooling ocean temperatures.

It’s a noble idea, given the horrible memories from Hurricane Katrina, which slammed into the Gulf Coast four years ago this week.

The storm, which rated a frightening Category 3 when it made landfall in Louisiana, was blamed for $81 billion in damaged and destroyed property and the deaths of more than 1,800 men, women and children.

Skeptics applaud the motive of the concept but question its feasibility.

“The enormity of it, in order to do something effective, we’d have to do something at a scale that humans have never really done before,” said Gabriel Vecchi, a research scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Hurricanes are fueled by warm water, and cooling the waters surrounding a storm would slow a storm’s momentum.

According to the patents, many tub-like barges would be placed directly in the path of an oncoming storm. Each barge would have two conduits, each 500 feet long.

One conduit would push the warm water from the ocean’s surface down. The other would bring up cold water where it lies deep undersea.

World reknowned hurricane expert William Gray, who’s been studying and predicting the storms for a half-century, also doubts whether the proposal would work.

“The problem is the storms come up so rapidly,” said Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University. “You only get two to three days warning. It’s very difficult to bring up enough cold water in two to three days to have much effect.”

The idea itself isn’t groundbreaking, according to Gray, who said it could only be feasible if the barges were put into place at the beginning of hurricane season with the idea that storms will come.

“But you might do all that, and perhaps no storms would come. That’s an economic problem,” Gray said.

Even if the technology does work, Gray said it won’t completely halt a hurricane.

“There is no way to stop it. The storm might weaken in the center, but the outer areas wouldn’t be affected much.”

And flooding and storm surges are determined by these outer winds, Gray said.

When word of Gates’ five patent applications first made headlines in July, alarmed bloggers lit up the Internet, expressing fears that playing with ocean temperatures could lead to catastrophe, possibly forcing a storm in a different direction.

That’s not likely, said Kerry Emanuel, a professor in atmospheric sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“You’re doing something to the ocean that the hurricane would have done anyway,” Emanuel said.

Cold water that churns up during a storm slows down a hurricane naturally. But the coldest water is usually at the rear of the storm, so sometimes it’s too late to weaken [the storm], Emanuel said.

“The key is doing it a little sooner than the storm itself does it and make [the hurricane] weaker than it would have been,” he said. “There are enough experiments to find out whether hurricanes’ natural cooling could steer the storm in a different location, and the answer is no, or it’s a very small chance.”

While Emanuel believes the physics are conceivable, he says the cost of implementing the system shouldn’t outweigh the benefit.

“This would only be practical if the amount [of money] you spend doing this would be less than the damage caused by the hurricane,” Emanuel said.

Gates and scientist Ken Caldeira, both listed as inventors on the patents, did not respond to CNN’s requests to comment about their venture.

The patents, which were only made public last month by the U.S. Patent and Trade Office, were filed in January by Searete LLC. The company is a subsidiary of Intellectual Ventures, an invention firm run by Microsoft’s former chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold.

A spokeswoman for Intellectual Ventures, which holds about 27,000 technology patents, didn’t elaborate on the cost associated with the patent.

“At this point, there are no plans for deployment, so there is no talk of funding,” she said, adding that it could take up to 18 months for the patent application to be approved.

Regardless, inventors say that this technology is not something they’ll be rushing to use anytime soon.

“This type of technology is not something humankind would use as a ‘Plan A’ or ‘Plan B,’” Paul “Pablos” Holman, an inventor in the Intellectual Ventures laboratory, wrote on the company blog.

“These inventions are a ‘Plan C,’ where humans decide that we’ve exhausted all our behavior changing and alternative energy options and need to rely on mitigation technologies. If our planet is in this severe situation, then our belief is that we should not be starting from scratch at investigating mitigation options.”

Hurricane expert Gray agrees.

“I don’t think this is anything that’s going to be done in the next few decades in a practical sense, but maybe further down the line,” Gray said. “I would love to see Bill Gates, with all his money, use some of it to experiment.”

The Secret History of Hurricane Katrina

Blackwater mercenaries stride through New Orleans

There was nothing natural about the disaster that befell New Orleans in Katrina’s aftermath.

Mother Jones | Aug 28, 2009

By James Ridgeway

Confronted with images of corpses floating in the blackened floodwaters or baking in the sun on abandoned highways, there aren’t too many people left who see what happened following Hurricane Katrina as a purely “natural” disaster. The dominant narratives that have emerged, in the four years since the storm, are of a gross human tragedy, compounded by social inequities and government ineptitude—a crisis subsequently exploited in every way possible for political and financial gain.

But there’s an even harsher truth, one some New Orleans residents learned in the very first days but which is only beginning to become clear to the rest of us: What took place in this devastated American city was no less than a war, in which victims whose only crimes were poverty and blackness were treated as enemies of the state.

It started immediately after the storm and flood hit, when civilian aid was scarce—but private security forces already had boots on the ground. Some, like Blackwater (which has since redubbed itself Xe), were under federal contract, while a host of others answered to wealthy residents and businessmen who had departed well before Katrina and needed help protecting their property from the suffering masses left behind. According Jeremy Scahill’s reporting in The Nation, Blackwater set up an HQ in downtown New Orleans. Armed as they would be in Iraq, with automatic rifles, guns strapped to legs, and pockets overflowing with ammo, Blackwater contractors drove around in SUVs and unmarked cars with no license plates.

“When asked what authority they were operating under,” Scahill reported, “one guy said, ‘We’re on contract with the Department of Homeland Security.’ Then, pointing to one of his comrades, he said, ‘He was even deputized by the governor of the state of Louisiana. We can make arrests and use lethal force if we deem it necessary.’ The man then held up the gold Louisiana law enforcement badge he wore around his neck.”

The Blackwater operators described their mission in New Orleans as “securing neighborhoods,” as if they were talking about Sadr City. When National Guard troops descended on the city, the Army Times described their role as fighting “the insurgency in the city.” Brigadier Gen. Gary Jones, who commanded the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force, told the paper, “This place is going to look like Little Somalia. We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.”

Ten days after the storm, the New York Times reported that although the city was calm with no signs of looting (though it acknowledged this had taken place previously), “New Orleans has turned into an armed camp, patrolled by thousands of local, state, and federal law enforcement officers, as well as National Guard troops and active-duty soldiers.” The local police superintendent ordered all weapons, including legally registered firearms, confiscated from civilians. But as the Times noted, that order didn’t “apply to hundreds of security guards hired by businesses and some wealthy individuals to protect property…[who] openly carry M-16’s and other assault rifles.” Scahill spoke to Michael Montgomery, the chief of security for one wealthy businessman who said his men came under fire from “black gangbangers” near the Ninth Ward. Armed with AR-15s and Glocks, Montgomery and his men “unleashed a barrage of bullets in the general direction of the alleged shooters on the overpass. ‘After that, all I heard was moaning and screaming, and the shooting stopped. That was it. Enough said.’”

Malik Rahim, a Vietnam veteran and longtime community activist, was one of the organizers of the Common Ground Collective, which quickly began dispensing basic aid and medical care in the first days after the hurricane. But far from aiding the relief workers, Rahim told me this week, the police and troops who began patrolling the streets treated them as criminals or “insurgents.” African American men caught outside also ran the risk of crossing paths with roving vigilante patrols who shot at will, he says. In this dangerous environment, Common Ground began to rely on white volunteers to move through a city that had simply become too perilous for blacks.

Full Story

VeriChip sells 1,000 implantable RFID microchips to Kentucky health department for disaster preparedness and emergency management

VeriChip sells VeriTrace system to health department in Kentucky

tradingmarkets.com | Aug 11, 2009

VeriChip Corporation (Nasdaq:CHIP), a provider of radio frequency identification (RFID) systems for healthcare and patient-related needs, has sold the VeriTrace system, including 1,000 RFID microchips, for disaster preparedness and emergency management needs, for an undisclosed sum to Kentucky’s Green River District Health Department, the company said on Monday.

This is reportedly the second VeriTrace system sale by the company in last 30 days.

VeriTrace was designed to assist in the management of emergency situations and disaster recovery using implantable RFID technology.

The VeriTrace system includes a unique implantable RFID microchip, a VeriTrace Bluetooth handheld reader, a customised Ricoh 500SE Digital Camera capable of receiving both RFID scanned data and GPS data wirelessly, and a Web-enabled database for gathering and storing information and images captured during emergency response operations.

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History Channel: Weather warfare, chemtrails, tectonic weaponry and “plausible deniability”

“Technology will make available to the leaders of major nations, techniques for conducting secret warfare, of which only a bare minimum of the security forces need be appraised…..techniques of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm.”

- Former National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, in  Between Two Ages,  1970

“Others are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.”

- United States Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, April, 1997

Full Documentary – Weather warfare, chemtrails, on the History Channel

Posted by The Liberty Channel

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Experts Claim Dome Over Entire City of Houston May Help Environment

The science of mega engineering says we can save Houston with a Dome. Imagine building a huge Dome that covers the entire city, that is higher than Houston’s skyscrapers.  (Image: Discovery)

One solution to counter the almost overwhelming environmental challenges facing Houston is to cover it with a giant geodesic dome. You can watch the video at the Discovery channel and explore how a giant geodesic dome may save the city from a grim environmental future.

Huliq | Jun 16, 2009

Houston is in peril. The country’s fourth most populous city faces heat, hurricanes and other natural disasters. Houston has always been vulnerable to hurricanes and severe weather.

Houston city center shut down for nearly a week from last year’s hurricane. It caused the city a 10 billion dollar damage. It’s not only the hurricanes, but also heat and humidity that keep oppressing this great city. On nearly 100 days each year the temperature climbs above 90 degrees.

Air conditioning helps, but it comes at a very high cost. Houston is using more electricity than Los Angeles.

This is why some scientists think the only way to save the city is to move it indoors, in other words to build a huge dome for Houston. Houston dome area will stretch over 21 Million square feet, making it the biggest structure with the largest roof in the world.

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Explore The Houston Dome

Houston Dome’s broadest panels will be 15 feet across. It will take 147,000 panels to cover the city of Houston. Glass will not work for Houston Dome. It will be so heavy that it can’t hold. Houston Dome will require a much lighter material. It may come from the German city of Bremen, from a factory of Vector Foil Company.

Vector Foiltec invented the use of Texlon® ETFE, the climatic envelope, over twenty five years ago and has successfully developed and promoted the use of this innovative technology worldwide. This is light polymer and is the future of glass.

This material, called ETFE is the only material that will make a fuller city-size dome possible, even for a city like Houston. At just one percent of glass, ETFE is described as 99 percent nothing. Without ETF the Houston dome can never become reality. It is so light that 99 percent lighter than glass is tremendous change.

Since it’s not possible to stop the life in Houston to build the Dome and army of dirigibles will be used to complete the construction.

Houston Dome will take years of construction and billions of dollars. The Dome is designed to protect a city from a category-5 hurricane. The ETFEpanels and the space-frame steel structure that supports them are the key. ETFE can withstand winds of 180 miles per hour. This is higher velocity than the strongest category 5 hurricane.

Houston Dome idea is very intriguing. But I am just left with one idea. Will Houston ever see rain? If no, is it possible to sustain an ecosystem of such a size without rain?

Parents of children killed in China earthquake routinely arrested and harassed

MIANYANG, CHINA – MAY 12: Tens of thousands of people mourn their relatives in the ruins of earthquake-hit Beichuan county during the one year anniversary of the Wenchuan Earthquake on May 12, 2009 in Mianyang of Sichuan Province, China. Many commemoration activities are held to mark the first anniversary of the devastating earthquake which struck Sichuan Province on May 12, 2008 and claimed nearly 90,000 lives. Getty Images

Parents of children killed in China earthquake of May 12 arrested

London Times | May 4, 2009

Jane Macartney in Hong Kong

The parents of children killed in last May’s earthquake in China have been routinely detained and harassed when attempting to investigate suspicions of shoddy building standards, according to a new report from Amnesty International.

Many of the parents who lost their only child, crushed to death when more than 7,000 classrooms collapsed in the 7.9 magnitude tremor on May 12, have abandoned hope of redress. Last month a 33-year-old Communist Party official in Beichuan county, which was razed by the earthquake, hanged himself out of grief for the loss of his eight-year-old son.

Other parents have struggled to be heard and to find out whether the schools that crumbled were constructed with sub-standard materials or by authorities that cut costs to skim off funds for their own benefit.

The Amnesty report says that some parents and relatives have been detained for as long as 21 days for trying to seek answers from officials about why their children died. Some have been held repeatedly and the youngest relative was only 8 years old.

Officials have provided a variety of accounts, some saying that schools appeared to have been built with shoddy materials and others saying that the only reason for their collapse was the might of the earthquake. This has failed to satisfy parents who saw other buildings left standing while schoolrooms were flattened.

The report says: “Many of these parents’ lives were devastated when they lost their children in the Sichuan earthquake. It’s completely understandable that they would want to know why their children died and who was responsible. For the Chinese authorities to react by locking up parents, whose only crime was to demand some answers, is beyond belief.”

The report issues an appeal: “The Government of China must stop harassing earthquake survivors, and allow lawyers and civil society to hold those responsible to account.”

China has yet to reveal how many children were among the 69,227 killed and nearly 18,000 missing in the earthquake. It has said that it will publicise a list of the dead and missing by 2010 to show respect to the victims.

Toxic Chinese drywall ends up in Katrina survivor homes

St. Bernard Parish Fire Chief Thomas Stone talks with reporters in the den of his home which is being tested for the effects of suspected sulfur-emitting Chinese drywall in in Chalmette, Friday, April 3, 2009. (AP Photo/Bill Haber)

Associated Press | Apr 12, 2009

By CAIN BURDEAU

CHALMETTE, La. (AP) — Thomas Stone and his wife rebuilt after their home was flooded by six feet of water during Hurricane Katrina, never dreaming they would face the agony of tearing it apart all over again.

They tapped Lauren Stone’s 401(k) retirement savings and saved $1,000 by installing Chinese-made drywall throughout their two-story home. Now the Stones are among hundreds of Katrina victims facing another, this time unnatural, disaster

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Sulfur-emitting wallboard from China is wreaking havoc in homes, charring electrical wires, eating away at jewelry, silverware and other valuables, and possibly even sickening families.

“The bathroom upstairs has a corroded shower-head, the door hinges are rusting out,” said 50-year-old Thomas Stone, the longtime fire chief of St. Bernard Parish, outside New Orleans. And then there’s the stench, like rotten eggs, that seems to get worse with the heat and humidity.

“It makes me wish there would be another flood to wash it out,” said his wife Lauren, 49.

Chinese manufacturers flooded the U.S. market with more than 500 million pounds of drywall around the same time Katrina was flooding New Orleans, an Associated Press review of shipping records has found.

The boom in imported China-made building materials peaked in 2006, driven by domestic shortages created by the nationwide construction boom, as well as a series of Gulf Coast hurricanes.

That year, enough wallboard was imported from China to build some 34,000 homes of roughly 2,000 square feet each, according to the AP’s analysis and estimates supplied by the nationwide drywall supplier United States Gypsum. But experts and advocates say many homes may have been built with a mixture of Chinese and domestic drywall — which could push the number of affected homes to 100,000 or more, by some estimates.

The drywall apparently causes a chemical reaction that gives off the rotten-egg stench and corrodes metal. Researchers do not know yet what causes it, but possible culprits include fumigants sprayed on the drywall and material inside it. The Chinese drywall is also made with a coal byproduct called fly ash that is less refined than the form used by U.S. drywall makers.

The U.S. Product Consumer Safety Commission and a number of states are investigating the extent of the problem, what’s causing it, and whether it poses serious health risks. But it could be years before the full extent of the problem is known.

Meanwhile, the moist climate of the South has meant the impact is being felt here first — at least 350 people in Louisiana have already complained to the state health department in yet another unexpected twist for hurricane victims who have lived through more than three years of hardship.

“We’ve been through the storms, we heard about the formaldehyde,” Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals spokesman Renne Milligan said, referring to a previous housing nightmare in which tests showed elevated levels of formaldehyde in hundreds of FEMA-issued trailers.

“Some of our residents are still living through that, and now we’re talking about this drywall,” Milligan said.

Governors in Louisiana and Florida are asking for federal assistance, and members of Congress are calling for a recall and a ban on future imports.

Like hundreds of other homeowners from Florida to Texas, the Stones have signed on to a class-action lawsuit directed against the manufacturers, suppliers and builders of the drywall. The defendants in the Louisiana cases include Knauf Gips KG, Knauf Plasterboard Tianjin Co., Taishan Gypsum Co., L&W Supply Corp. and USG Corp., a major U.S. drywall supplier.

“What we’re trying to do is get to the bottom of what is precisely going on,” said Ken Haldin, a spokesman for Knauf Plasterboard Tianjin.

The lawsuits contend the Chinese drywall is emitting sulfur, methane and other volatile organic chemical compounds that are ruining plaintiffs’ homes and harming their health.

Some of the companies told AP they are looking into the complaints, but downplayed the possibility of health risks.

The Chinese ministries of commerce, construction and industry and the Administration of Quality Supervision Inspection and Quarantine did not respond to repeated requests for comment from the AP, although Chinese media have reported that AQSIQ, which enforces product quality standards, was investigating.

No U.S. agency regulates the chemical compounds used in imported drywall.

Attorney Daniel Becnel has filed about 15 lawsuits in federal court in New Orleans on behalf of hundreds of homeowners.

“And we’re getting more in every single day,” he said. “People are just distraught.”

Mississippi attorney Steve Mullins has also joined the cadre of court actions.

“Bloody noses, headaches, respiratory infections,” Mullins said, ticking off the list of health problems reported by his clients. “Over and over like a broken record.”

“But let’s ignore the personal injury aspect for a moment,” he added. “You know what, this stuff’s got to come out anyway.”

He said his research indicates the problem could exist in hundreds of thousands of homes nationwide, a conclusion echoed by other experts.

“I smell a government bailout,” he said.

David Sides, manager of River City Materials, a drywall supplier based in Jefferson, La., remembers when the Chinese product began saturating the U.S. market.

“Florida got hit with four hurricanes and that’s what started the importing from overseas,” said Sides, who says his company did not sell the tainted drywall. “So many people purchased board from overseas. So many people tried to cash in on shortages here.”

Mary Haindel’s home near Lake Pontchartrain was destroyed by Katrina’s floodwaters, so she bought a new, $320,000 town-home in an area known as the North Shore, where many hurricane victims relocated. Soon, the coils on her air conditioning system went out, and copper slowly turned black — telltale signs that the tainted wallboard was used.

Her neighbors noticed similar problems and many of them are now suing.

Haindel, a 45-year-old real estate agent and jewelry appraiser, moved out. She is now renting a condominium and says it will be difficult to sell the home.

“As I was leaving, I noticed downstairs that a stainless-steel chandelier I have is turning black,” she said. “You can’t live in it. Your lungs get congested. Would you stay in a house eating pipes?”

The town home’s builder, Leroy Laporte of Southern Star Construction Inc., declined to comment.

“It’s Katrina all over again,” Haindel said. “It was an immediate: You got to go, you pick up, and you leave.”

And like Katrina, she feels the government has been too slow to respond.

“I don’t see them protecting us at all,” she said. “I don’t know what’s right or wrong anymore.”

Associated Press Writers Brian Skoloff in West Palm Beach, Fla., and Joe MCDonald in Beijing contributed to this report.

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