Current Events in June 2006

With summer approaching and the school year coming to a close, thousands of kids across the country will take on a familiar chore -- mowing the lawn.

Whether it's to help their parents mow the backyard or a summer job to earn money, this routine task can be dangerous for children and adults alike if proper safety precautions are not taken.

In fact, more than 230,500 people -- approximately 20,000 of them children under age 19 -- were treated in doctors' offices, clinics and emergency rooms for lawn mower-related injuries in 2004, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission reports.

To help prevent injures, the American Society for Reconstructive Microsurgery (ASRM), the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) have teamed up to educate parents, adults and children about the importance of lawn mower safety during National Safety Month, June 2006.

"The power lawn mower is one of the most dangerous tools around the home, but many children view it as a potential toy -- resulting in thousands of debilitating injures every year," said ASRM President L. Scott Levin, MD, FACS.

"Lawn mower injuries often include deep cuts, loss of fingers and toes, limb amputations, broken and dislocated bones, burns, and eye injuries. Most of these injuries can be prevented by following a few simple safety tips," Levin added

The ASRM, ASPS, AAP and AAOS offer the following tips to help prevent lawn mower-related injuries:

• Children should be at least 12 years old before they operate any lawn mower, and at least 16 years old for a ride-on mower.

• Children should never be passengers on ride-on mowers.

• Always wear sturdy shoes while mowing -- not sandals.

• Young children should be a safe distance from the area you are mowing.

• Before mowing, pick up stones, toys and debris from the lawn to prevent injuries from flying objects.

• Always wear eye and hearing protection.

• Use a mower with a control that stops it from moving forward if the handle is released.

• Never pull backward or mow in reverse unless absolutely necessary carefully look for others behind you when you do.

• Start and refuel mowers outdoors -- not in a garage. Refuel with the motor turned off and cool.

• Blade settings should be made only by an adult .

• Wait for blades to stop completely before removing the grass catcher, unclogging the discharge chute, or crossing gravel roads.

"Though mowing the lawn can be a great form of physical activity, it can also cause harm if the proper precautions are not taken," explained Richard F. Kyle, MD, orthopaedic surgeon and AAOS President. "It's important that people take their time when mowing the lawn, and teach kids at an early age to stay clear of these machines when they are running."

Many lawn mower-related injuries require a team of physicians from various specialties to properly repair them. Often, patients must endure painful reconstructive operations to restore form and function.

"Physicians in plastic surgery, microsurgery, pediatric surgery, and orthopaedics are at the forefront in repairing these injuries and see, firsthand, how devastating they can be for children and their families," said ASPS President Bruce Cunningham, MD. "It is equally important for us to aid in the prevention of these injuries as it is to repair them."

"The sad thing is that so many of these tragic injuries are avoidable," said Eileen M. Ouellette, MD, JD, FAAP, President of the American Academy of Pediatrics. "A few simple precautions can protect thousands of children."

It's tough enough to be a college student these days, with skyrocketing tuition costs, higher loan borrowing rates, and the peril of credit card debt just for living expenses.

Now 1.3 million borrowers from Texas Guaranteed Student Loan Corporation have a new problem -- their personal data was compromised, leaving them vulnerable to identity theft.

The Round Rock, TX-based lender said files on 10 percent of its borrowers were downloaded to an unidentified piece of equipment belonging to an employee of Hummingbird, a third-party contractor Texas Guaranteed had hired to provide a document management system.

The files had been securely encrypted for transmission, but once the unidentified employee decrypted the files and downloaded them onto the device, he or she lost it.

The device itself was password-protected, according to a statement by Hummingbird president Barry Litwin.

It would be "extremely unlikely" that the data would be misused, he said. "The privacy of customer data is of utmost importance to us and we take our responsibility to safeguard it very seriously. We deeply regret that this incident has occurred."

The missing data included names and Social Security numbers only, according to Texas Guaranteed. No other information was lost.

TG has set up a special Web site and toll-free phone number to address concerns from potentially affected individuals.

The disappearance was first reported by the Hummingbird employee on May 24th, but according to Texas Guaranteed's press statement, Hummingbird did not inform Texas Guaranteed of the loss until May 26th.

Hummingbird announced on May 27th that it was selling itself to a conglomeration of U.S.-based private equity firms, in response to sluggish stock performance and competitive woes.

The move drew criticism from investors who felt that the $465 million deal was too low of an offer, and that the company should have engaged in more competitive bidding.

The Texas Guaranteed data loss comes at a time of rising concern about identity theft and data breaches, following the loss of records for 26.5 million veterans from the Veterans Administration (VA).

The news that the VA knew about the data theft for three weeks before informing the public has led to the resignation of Michael H. McLendon, the deputy assistant policy secretary who supervised the unidentified data analyst responsible for the loss.

The Texas Guaranteed data loss also points up the danger of employees taking home sensitive data on laptops, CD-roms, and USB drives. Not counting the VA incident, the number of Americans at risk of fraud or identity theft due to the loss of devices containing personal data exceeds half a million.

MSNBC reporter Bob Sullivan, commenting on the repeated incidents of laptop and USB drive thefts, made a "modest proposal" on his blog that "workers should leave the work, at work," and not risk security and privacy by taking their work home with them.

African-Americans and Latinos, government figures show, get high-interest sub-prime mortgages far more often than whites. Now researchers at the Center for Responsible Lending find those disparities persist even when the borrowers have the same qualifications as whites.

Lenders say they charge more because African-Americans and Latinos tend to have shakier credit histories, which makes lending to them riskier.

But that explanation is simply wrong, the Center found in its new research.

The most extensive study of its kind shows that even after controlling for differences such as credit scores and the amount of the down payment, African-Americans and Latinos still wind up with a disproportionate share of expensive loans.

Examining 50,000 subprime loans, the Center's researchers found these groups were almost a third more likely to get a high-priced loan than white borrowers with the same credit profile.

The findings show that decades of work by the civil rights movement to bring fairness and opportunity to all homebuyers is still unfinished.

"This report sheds new light on the challenges Latinos face when attempting to buy a home," said Janis Bowdler, housing policy analyst at the National Council of La Raza, the Latino civil rights group. "It is critical to the well-being of the homeownership market that all families have fair and equal access to credit."

The disparities are not only unfair, they have serious economic repercussions: Higher loan costs discourage minority families from buying a home; and higher costs increase the risk of foreclosure for those who do buy homes, threatening working-class neighborhoods and the U.S. economy as a whole.

"When African-American and Latino families are steered into higher-cost loans, this path to security is made steeper," said Hilary Shelton, director of the Washington bureau of the NAACP, the lobbying and public policy branch of the civil rights group. "That means that it's even harder for families of color to build equity for their future; it's even harder to send their children to college; and it's even harder to build wealth for the next generation."

And while the study's results are disturbing for African-Americans and Latinos, all borrowers may be at risk from some of the sub-prime market's common practices.

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is trying to get banks in his state to disclose more about their lending practices, but the banks and even federal regulators are fighting him in court.

"We sincerely hope that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency investigates loan pricing disparities at the banks it regulates with the same vigor with which it sought to stop our inquiries," said Natalie Williams, chief of the attorney general's civil rights bureau. "The center's report, and the troubling racial disparities it reveals, deserve nothing less."

And on Capitol Hill a House subcommittee is debating whether a bill should include weak provisions favored by industry or stronger protections for borrowers in the vast sub-prime mortgage market, where people with blemished credit borrow and most mortgage abuses occur. The lending industry is lobbying subcommittee members heavily.

In light of our findings, the Center urges the subcommittee to:

• Put controls on the pervasive practice of yield spread premiums, the fees lenders pay to brokers and that rise with the interest rate of the mortgage. Often these fees are nothing more than a polite name for a kickback from a lender to a mortgage broker for steering unsophisticated borrowers into higher-interest-rate loans. These kickbacks, many experts say, are a big reason why the statistics the federal government gathers each year under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, or HMDA, show that African-Americans and Latinos wind up in higher-interest-rate loans far out of proportion to their share of the population.

• The federal government should require mortgage brokers to act in the best interests of their customers, which the government does not now do.

• Make brokers and lenders disclose clearly that borrowers are being charged a higher interest rate than they qualify for - and how much the broker is being paid for this.

• Give the government the laws and the money to enforce these rules effectively.

"With release of our research today, we've advanced the debate over racial disparities by showing that the industry's usual explanation is wrong," said Debbie Gruenstein Bocian, the study's author. "The debate now needs to move on to what Congress and the states must do to prevent these disparities."

A copy of the report is available at www.responsiblelending.org.

Blacks and Latinos, government figures show, get high-interest sub-prime mortgages far more often than whites. Now researchers at the Center for Responsible Lending find those disparities persist even when the borrowers have the same qualifications as whites.

Lenders say they charge more because black Americans and Latinos tend to have shakier credit histories, which makes lending to them riskier. But, according to the Center, that explanation is simply wrong.

The study shows that even after controlling for differences such as credit scores and the amount of the down payment, blacks and Latinos still wind up with a disproportionate share of expensive loans.

In its examination of 50,000 subprime loans, the Center's researchers found these groups were almost a third more likely to get a high-priced loan than white borrowers with the same credit profile.

"This report sheds new light on the challenges Latinos face when attempting to buy a home," said Janis Bowdler, housing policy analyst at the National Council of La Raza, the Latino civil rights group. "It is critical to the well-being of the homeownership market that all families have fair and equal access to credit."

The Center says that the disparities are not only unfair, they have serious economic repercussions: Higher loan costs discourage minority families from buying a home; and higher costs increase the risk of foreclosure for those who do buy homes, threatening working-class neighborhoods and the U.S. economy as a whole.

"When African-American and Latino families are steered into higher-cost loans, this path to security is made steeper," said Hilary Shelton, director of the Washington bureau of the NAACP, the lobbying and public policy branch of the civil rights group.

"That means that it's even harder for families of color to build equity for their future; it's even harder to send their children to college; and it's even harder to build wealth for the next generation."