[Mil.Com] A former Air Force officer has been sentenced to two years behind bars for her role in a nationwide scheme to defraud the military's health program, Tricare, of billions of dollars.
Maj. Romeatrius Moss, 40, pleaded guilty Oct. 15, 2019, to accepting kickbacks for referring patients at Vance Air Force Base, Oklahoma, to civilian pharmacies that specialized in compounded medications; she faced up to five years in prison.
Read Next: Service Chiefs to SecDef: Stop the Handover of Military Hospitals to the Defense Health Agency
Moss admitted to giving service members and other patients at the base medical clinic pre-printed prescription pads and encouraging them to ask their doctors for specialty medications -- compounded personalized prescriptions for pain and other ailments.
She then sent the prescriptions to specific pharmacies and received a portion of the Tricare reimbursement paid to the pharmacies for those scripts.
Moss was sentenced Monday to 24 months in prison and three years of supervised release; she was also ordered to pay $622,459 -- the amount she made in the scheme -- in restitution, according to the Justice Department.
As part of her plea agreement, she also must give up her $750,000 house in Enid, Oklahoma; a 2016 Porsche Cayenne; and a 2000 Fleetwood Pace Arrow recreational vehicle.
[WGN9] CHICAGO — Hundreds of looters targeted businesses in the Mag Mile and River North areas late Sunday into early Monday, clearing out stores as 100 people were arrested and 13 police officers injured during skirmishes throughout the night.
SWAT team members with rifles descended on Garfield Park near Madison and Karlov Monday afternoon after more reports of looting, and an officer was injured.
CPD Superintendent David Brown said social media posts following a police-involved shooting in Englewood Sunday afternoon sowed the seeds of chaos.[WGN
#5
You do get good cement but you have to collect it from fast moving mudflows called lahars. Imagine trying to stand in 3+ feet of flowing concrete at 60+ mph.
[FoxNews] As the U.S. surpasses 5 million coronavirus cases, awaits a vaccine and debates sending kids back to schools, Texas emergency room physician Dr. Natasha Kathuria told "Fox & Friends" her state might see another surge in cases.
With the Lone Star State recording its highest seven-day positivity rate since the pandemic began, the Austin-based doctor says hospitals are at about 80 percent capacity in the big cities as Texas surpasses 500,000 positive cases and more than 8,800 deaths, the Houston Chronicle reports.
"We've seen this wave hit Texas pretty hard, and we're holding steady right now. We've seen a slow decrease in hospitalizations, but our death counts are still up there," Kathuria, Global Outreach Doctors board member, told co-host Ainsley Earhardt.
Earhardt asked about reopening schools in the fall as a new report found more than 97,000 children tested positive for COVID-19 in the last two weeks of July.
"I can guarantee that number is actually much higher," Kathuria said of cases in youth. "We don't really test kids that often. They're usually asymptomatic, they have very mild symptoms, but they're still shedding this virus, so that is going to artificially be low no matter how good we are about testing right now."
But the doctor is worried that sending kids to schools and sending them home could affect parents and grandparents who go to work and travel, which could worsen the spread.
As health officials prepare for a vaccine, Kathuria said, "our biggest concern is 'are people actually going to get the vaccine?'"
Instead of just focusing on a vaccine, she believes the focus should be on prevention.
"We have the PCR test,
...the slow but accurate one...
we have the antibody test,
...fast, but high false positives and false negatives...
but we need better rapid, at-home testing available where someone can just take it like a pregnancy test and we have the technology for it," Kathuria said. "We just need to push for it and lower our restrictions on different testing methods and not set the bar so high so that we can really control this. Our best armor for this is prevention right now."
#5
For the last 84 days, new cases per Worldometer average 42k, or 3.56 million new cases. In that same period, the number of "serious/critical' runs between 16k and 18k - virtually flat.
A little less than 1,000 per day (average) expire. I didn't track the 'recovered', which I suppose is those discharged from the hospital.
So I conclude that of the new cases each day, about 1-2,000 got into 'serious/critical' and about 1,000 of the serious/critical' expire, and the other thousand or so - recover.
Or - of the 42,000 new cases per day, around 40,000 do not go to the hospital. That's 95%, which is consistent with other reports from more learned folks.
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/11/2020 14:51 Comments ||
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#6
Infection 'Hot Spots' centered on the protest sites, ya reckon?
CHAD is in my box of secondary evidence. So far, there isn't a mass exodus from a plague ward.
#7
Check along the border areas of Texas , large numbers colonizers with various disease coming across. Time of the twin fences with mine fields inbetween.
[FoxNews] Disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong's bike shop in Austin, Texas, is cutting ties with local police.
Mellow Johnny's Bike Shop will no longer purchase, re-sell or service police-issued Trek bikes, even though the City of Austin had already greenlighted the request, due to "the current evaluation of community policing in Austin."
"Businesses can no longer be non-participants in the communities they serve," Mellow Johnny's in Austin said in a statement. "We chose what we think will do the most to suture these divides and place our community on the right side of history. We have had to make these choices before when we felt companies whose products we sold put kids at schools at risk of violence. We lost sales due to this choice."
The store had previously cut ties with Vista Outdoor over its connection to the National Rifle Association.
Despite its latest decision, Mellow Johnny's said its shop is not "anti-police."
"We do believe our local police force will protect us from the very threats we are receiving right now," Mellow Johnny's said in the statement.
Mellow Johnny's opened in Austin in 2008. There is another Mellow Johnny's in Fort Worth, Texas, under different management, the Fort Worth Star Telegram reported
#2
Despite its latest decision, Mellow Johnny's said its shop is not "anti-police."
"We do believe our local police force will protect us from the very threats we are receiving right now," Mellow Johnny's said in the statement.
Wonderful logic.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/11/2020 3:47 Comments ||
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#3
Anathema! But... can it be,
When I've snubbed to the umpteenth degree,
Adding nails to the coffin,
As happens so often...
That someone gets deader to me?
The exception is the description of Kurtz: "Mistah Kurtz. Him dead. Him gah damn dead..."
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/11/2020 4:43 Comments ||
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#5
...Fortunately, I don't look to confessed liars, cheats, and con men for moral lessons.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
08/11/2020 5:23 Comments ||
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#6
Not to worry. Lance will soon issue a statement that "management of the shop is completely autonomous."
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/11/2020 5:39 Comments ||
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#7
apparently, Lance lost his remaining testicle. Snark O'The Day
Posted by: Frank G ||
08/11/2020 7:14 Comments ||
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#8
Surely this shop can do what it wants, but I would like to tune back in in about a year to see how the shop is performing. A mistake, IMO, but we will see.
#11
I ride a 40 year old Specialized StumpJumper, the original mountain bike. It's too heavy and only 18 speed. Still, If they came out all Woke today, the bike is long paid for an still works. If I had to replace it I mint have to hunt around.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/11/2020 9:15 Comments ||
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#12
Dammit, Frank G, ya beat me to it! I gotta get up earlier!
Video of the family reunion in the airport can be seen at the link.
[IsraelTimes] ’My soul felt reborn,’ one relative says at Abu Dhabi airport ceremony; tweeting about reunion, Emirati FM Abdullah bin Zayed hails his country as ’homeland of coexistence’.
In a further sign of the United Arab Emirates’s effort to position itself as a regional center of religious tolerance, the country’s government organized the reunion last week of a Jewish Yemen ...an area of the Arabian Peninsula sometimes mistaken for a country. It is populated by more antagonistic tribes and factions than you can keep track of... ite family that had been separated for 15 years.
Continued on Page 49
[NYPOST] The opposition leader in Belarus said Tuesday that she has fled to Lithuania following widespread protests against the contested re-election of strongman President Alexander Lukashenko.Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, a 37-year-old former English teacher who took over her husband’s campaign after he was tossed in the calaboose You have the right to remain silent... , told supporters that the decision to leave the country was her choice and made to protect her children.
"It was a very hard decision to make," she said. "I know that many of you will understand me, many others will condemn me and some will even hate me. But God forbid you ever face the choice that I faced."
"So, people, take care please — no life is worth what is happening now. Children are the most important thing in our lives," she said.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/11/2020 11:51 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11127 views]
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[Washington Examiner] A protester in Belarus died after an unidentified explosive device blew up in his hands.
The incident occurred on Monday, marking a bloody turn to the second night of protests in the country over the nation's recent presidential election, which opposition leaders see as a sham.
Police have attempted to disperse protesters with flash-bang grenades and rubber bullets.
On Sunday, it was announced that President Alexander Lukashenko won 80% of the vote, but because of a lack of poll oversight, many have been left to question the legitimacy of the result. Lukashenko has been president since 1994.
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, Lukashenko's main rival, has yet to concede the race.
[Zero] Chinese Vice Premier Hu Chunhua recently asked the governors of each province in China to make sure the sown areas of agricultural crops would not shrink and crop yield won’t be reduced this year. At a food security meeting held in Beijing on July 27, he warned that governors would be punished if they failed to uphold the promise, including with dismissals.
And when Chinese leader Xi Jinping visited northeastern Jilin Province on July 22, he told the local government to treat grain production as a priority task. The top officials’ emphasis on food supplies raised questions about whether China is facing a severe food shortage this year.
In early July, the government organ China National Grain and Oils Information Center released its estimates that the corn supply gap in the 2020-2021 fiscal year would be 25 million metric tons—more than double the previous estimated 12 million metric tons.
On Aug. 5, the Center estimated that China would import six million metric tons of wheat in the 12 months from June 2020 to May 2021, which would be the highest amount in the past seven years. The Center said the wheat would likely come from France, Russia, Lithuania, and Kazakhstan.
#8
Not only that, food warehouses destroyed in Beirut and other places in the ME. Been drought as well with crop failures and Africa has had problems as well.
[Jpost] Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai has been arrested for suspected collusion with foreign forces under the national security law Beijing imposed on the global financial hub in June, his top aide said on Twitter.
"Jimmy Lai is being arrested for collusion with foreign powers at this time," Mark Simon, a senior executive at Lai's media company Next Digital, which publishes local tabloid Apple Daily, said early on Monday.
[Jpost] PHOENIX - Former lawman Joe Arpaio, the nationally known Arizona sheriff who found common cause with President Donald Trump ...dictatorial for repealing some (but not all) of the diktats of his predecessor, misogynistic because he likes pretty girls, homophobic because he doesn't think gender bending should be mandatory, truly a man for all seasons...... on a hard-line stance against illegal immigration, narrowly lost his bid to regain his old job, vote tallies showed on Friday.
Arpaio, 88, who billed himself as "America's toughest sheriff," trailed his former chief deputy, Jerry Sheridan, by 6,280 votes out of 443,056 ballots cast in Tuesday's four-way Republican primary, according to the county elections department.
Hopefully Sheriff Arpaio’s former deputy learned all his master had to teach, and so electing him is like getting a younger Arpaio. Because 88 is a tad long in the tooth to be saddling up and chasing after bad guys.
The latest results showed Sheridan with 156,396 votes, compared with 150,116 for Arpaio, leaving the former long-time sheriff of Maricopa County no chance of closing the gap with just 2,385 ballots still to be counted.
In the November general election, Sheridan will face incumbent Democrat Paul Penzone, who ousted Arpaio from office in a 2016 landslide victory.
Arpaio, damaged by a series of court judgments that cost local taxpayers more than $178 million to date, went on to lose a race two years later to fill the seat of the late Republican U.S. Senator John Maverick McCain ... the Senator-for-Life from Arizona, former presidential candidate and even more former foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution. As an ordinary citizen he greased the infamous hookers peeing on the Obamabed in Moscow dossier in an attempt to smear President Trump... A federal judge in 2017 found Arpaio guilty of criminal contempt of court, ruling that the sheriff had willfully violated a 2011 injunction barring his officers from stopping and detaining Latino motorists solely on suspicion that they were in the country illegally.
Trump granted Arpaio clemency before he was to be sentenced, marking the first pardon of his presidency. Sheridan also was cited for contempt by the same judge, but was not prosecuted.
In his comeback bid this year, Arpaio vowed to renew controversial policing tactics he which includes Phoenix. Those policies included housing county jail inmates in tents and regular immigration enforcement sweeps that landed Arpaio in hot water with the federal courts.
Political strategists were watching the Arpaio race for signs of how receptive his get-tough messaging on immigration and law and order - echoing Trump’s - would be to voters in a crucial swing state for the Nov. 3 national elections.
Trump carried Arizona by 5 percentage points in 2016.
[Ynet] - About 100 employees of Israel's cultural institutions - including artists, actors, musicians, dancers, and behind-the-scenes workers - are demonstrating in front of the Prime Minister's House on Balfour Street in Jerusalem. According to the protesters, they are demonstrating against the incompetence of the government and what they call the destruction of the culture industry in Israel. But no seamstress. Why no seamstress? I feels for them, I does.
[JPost] - New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced on Tuesday that four new cases of coronavirus had been confirmed in the country, 1 NEWS reported.
All of the cases are from community transmission and are in South Auckland, the site added. They are also all members of the same family.
It has been 102 days since the country's last case of community transmission.
According to Health Director-General Dr. Ashley Bloomfield, the first family member to be diagnosed was a person in their 50s from South Auckland, who had no history of overseas travel. Following that diagnosis, three of the other six people living in the home were diagnosed with the disease. "Curiouser and curiouser" said Alice
[Mayo Clinic News Network] - Acute symptoms of COVID-19, such as cough, fever and shortness of breath, are now widely known. What is not known, however, is what symptoms and complications may linger long after an initial COVID-19 infection. Early research shows the disease attacks more than just the respiratory system, affecting multiple organs with blood clots and inflammation.
"This is a disease that has a number of mysteries involved, compared to the usual respiratory virus," says Dr. Gregory Poland, a COVID-19 expert at Mayo Clinic. Because it didn't evolve but was created as biological weapon in a lab, Doc.
...What's just starting to emerge, according to Dr. Poland, is this idea of COVID-19 "long-haulers," which is a term used to describe people who develop long-term and ongoing complications.
"We're really seeing a number of reports of people who report long-term fatigue, headaches, vertigo (and), interestingly enough, difficulties with cognition, hair loss, cardiac issues, and diminished cardiorespiratory fitness. And I think what we're going to find out is that a large portion—not all, but a large portion of that—is likely to relate to the significant cellular-level damage that this virus can cause," says Dr. Poland. A friendly advice to all you "covid-skeptics". Exercise some care where you express your, deeply held, beliefs about "unnecessary lockdowns" & "totalitarian, useless, masks". A woman losing hair to Covid 19, just might kill you - I ain't kidding.
Some of the possible long-term effects can affect even patients who are asymptomatic or have mild cases of COVID-19."I think it's an argument for why we take this disease so seriously," says Dr. Poland. "People who are thinking, especially young people: '(It's a) mild disease, you know. I might not even have any symptoms, and I'm over it.' Whoa. The data is suggesting otherwise. There's evidence of myocardial damage, cardiomyopathy, arrhythmias, decreased ejection fractions, pulmonary scarring and strokes. In fact, I'm beginning to think that the documented lethality of Covid 19 is due to its premature escape. Further engineering was supposed to tone it down - so the virus (posing as an ordinary cold) could infect most of the population before its long term effects were discovered.
..."We're going to see more and more of the longer-term consequences come out, and we're going to need to study those as vigorously as we did the acute symptoms. Catalog them, understand them and then do clinical trials to figure out how best to treat them," says Dr. Poland.
#3
Men die younger, because women make us want to.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/11/2020 4:54 Comments ||
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#4
The worst long-term symptoms of COVID are CDC, NIH, WHO, Fauxi and Birx. Or is it Brix? The media changes it's "mind" hourly. They could just settle on "scarf woman."
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/11/2020 5:42 Comments ||
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#5
Married men die later, cause she won't let him get away without more suffering?
You understand a 100 years ago women had about the same life expectancy as men. Needing children for your family social security (cause the state didn't offer it), child mortality rates meaning more tries to secure that old age protection, and birth complications all had major impacts upon that calculation. Then the oppressive patriarchal medical establishment reduced the mortality rate of the latter two factors. With the vote, the ladies addressed the first factor. Then they opted out of doing the dirty and dangerous jobs of the society to insure the death rate calculations would always skew in their favor.
#6
I'm not unrealistic enough to expect to even die happy.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/11/2020 6:53 Comments ||
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#7
Then they opted out of doing the dirty
And here we are...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/11/2020 6:54 Comments ||
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#8
Other than hair loss the list of lingering side effects was exactly what I experienced after having double pneumonia. It took a long time to very gradually rehabilitate myself with sad and pathetic weights and even sadder walks since running was then far in the future.
I couldn't have even begun any of that without supplementing my diet with zinc, selenium, magnesium and potassium daily. My hair did go from black to grey in a relatively short time. I am a limited sample to be sure, but I know what happened.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/11/2020 10:05 Comments ||
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#11
Any studies comparing the long-term effects of the COVID compared to the Asian/Hong Kong/seasonal flu effects?
Any older studies on the long-term effects of the 1957 Asian flu, the 1968 Hong Kong flu or any subsequent seasonal flu pandemics?
I bet not. Not enough researchers to do the work 50 years ago or media panic to drive the interest. So we really have nothing with which to compare COVID-19.
Except carefully tabulated COVID death rates compared to CDC estimates.
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/11/2020 11:43 Comments ||
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#12
The lung damage is real. I've seen the images on a relative. It will have a longer lasting effect, unlike flu.
Posted by: Marilyn Tojo7566 ||
08/11/2020 13:50 Comments ||
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#16
For now, we have no reason to trust researchers and their opinions. Not enough time has passed for long term studies. Not that they have any credibility anyway.
[Military.com] The Air Force One of the future might be getting a major speed boost.
An aerospace company called Hermeus on Thursday announced a contract with the US Air Force and the Presidential and Executive Airlift Directorate to develop a hypersonic aircraft for the presidential fleet.
While the next Air Force One, a modified 747-8, is due to be delivered by Boeing next year, the Hermeus contract looks toward its eventual replacement.
Hermeus said it won the contract after designing, building, and successfully testing a prototype of an engine capable of propelling an airplane to Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound — about 3,300 mph. Mach 5 represents the delineation between supersonic and hypersonic speeds.
The company completed those tests in March, Aviation Week reported.
Hermeus plans to build a demonstrator vehicle over the next five years, with commercial aircraft envisioned in about a decade, Skyler Shuford, its cofounder and chief operating officer, said in 2019. A press release announcing the Air Force contract said part of the project would focus on integrating Air Force requirements into the airplane's designs. I suspect it will be prototyped as Air Force Two...maybe Three...
[Jpost] Many foreign workers and truck drivers are missing and assumed to be among the casualties of the Beirut port warehouse blast, complicating efforts to identity the victims, the city's governor said on Sunday.
"There are a lot missing whom we cannot identify. They are truck drivers and foreign workers," Marwan Abboud told the Al Jadeed television channel. "No one is identifying them -- this is a difficult task that takes time."
Syria's government has said that around 45 of the more than 158 people confirmed killed in the blast were Syrian nationals. Syrians comprise the biggest foreign labor force in Leb ...an Iranian colony situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozeen flavors of Christians. It is the home of Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers... , working in construction, agriculture and transport.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Mil.Com] A former Air Force officer has been sentenced to two years behind bars for her role in a nationwide scheme to defraud the military's health program, Tricare, of billions of dollars./arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-mco.s3.amazonaws.com/public/GSXU2O5UE5H5BG7BPPS3JO5NYM.JPG)
[Washington Examiner] A protester in Belarus died after an unidentified explosive device blew up in his hands.
...dictatorial for repealing some (but not all) of the diktats of his predecessor, misogynistic because he likes pretty girls, homophobic because he doesn't think gender bending should be mandatory, truly a man for all seasons......
John 
...an Iranian colony situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozeen flavors of Christians. It is the home of Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers...
